I.
I answered the email on the tenth day.
Not how he asked it. He had asked about money and I answered about Dave, three paragraphs at the counter at half past ten at night with the store’s listings open in the other window, and I read it over four times the way I read a listing before it goes live, for the one word that gets the thing returned. Then I sent it. Then I shut the laptop and went to bed with the feeling I get when a wire has gone through, which is that it is somebody else’s now.
The phone went at ten past four. I had it face down on the nightstand and got it on the second ring, on my back, in the dark, without putting the lamp on. Ten past six in the evening there, which is after the weights and before the stage, and he had read it at one end of that or the other.
“I tink Dave better for you.”
No hello. A motorbike going past close behind him, then a bus, the flat open-air hollowness of a man standing in a street.
“You might be right,” I said. “But I love you.”
I heard it go down the line and could not tell what it weighed when it arrived.
“I lie Dave.”
“I know. He’s a good man.”
A silence with traffic in it. I could hear him deciding whether to say the next thing, or I could hear the traffic, and after three years I cannot always tell those two apart.
“How you mom?”
And that closed it. Four months of not telling him a thing, and I told him, and he asked after my mother. She was fine. Good. Then “You come wit Dave,” which was not a question, and my yes, and his “Okay,” and the sound a phone makes when it has already gone into a pocket.
Three weeks between that call and the flight. In them I got the word okay by text eleven times and nothing else. I counted.
II.
Dave had been to Thailand once before: a two-day layover on his way to the Philippines, a decade ago, back when he did not know what he was and had no vocabulary for the not-knowing. He’d stayed at a chain hotel near the airport, eaten room service pad thai, and left without having seen anything that couldn’t have been seen in a Holiday Inn in Tulsa. That was his baseline. That was the surface he was building on when he boarded the 777 at LAX and settled into the business-class seat I’d paid for, because sixteen hours in economy produces a version of Dave that is unfit for anything. Two months ago Gop offered to buy me that exact seat, out of his own savings, on the theory that I had run out of money. I did not take it. I bought this one for somebody else and have not mentioned either transaction to either man.
What awaited him was Gop.
I’d debated telling Dave more, and told him nothing, because everything I could have said would have arrived as a translation. He could meet the original.
“Is he going to hate me?” Dave asked, somewhere over the Pacific, four Johnnie Walkers in, his voice studiously casual, the question clearly rehearsed for fourteen time zones.
“Gop doesn’t hate anyone.”
“He hates the guys who only want sex.”
“That’s not hate. That’s professionalism.”
“I’m not a customer.”
“No. You’re worse. You’re competition.”
He went quiet. Dave stared at the seatback screen, which was showing a movie he wasn’t watching, and I stared at Dave, who was processing the word competition the way a man processes the word tumor, with the understanding that the next several sentences will determine whether it’s benign or not.
“He told me you should stay with me,” I offered. “On the phone. He said, ‘I tink Dave better for you.’”
“Better how?”
“Better as in he’s done the math. Same country. Same language. Thirty years.”
Dave waited.
“Against a bar boy eight thousand miles away who communicates primarily through emoji.”
“That’s generous.”
“That’s Gop.”
III.
Suvarnabhumi at ten in the evening. The heat hitting you like a wall you walk through rather than into, the wall dissolving as you pass and reforming behind you, trapping you in the Bangkok envelope: that humid, fragrant, diesel-and-plumeria compression that is either the best or worst air you’ve ever breathed depending on what you’re here for. Dave smelled it and went still, a dog catching a scent it couldn’t categorize. I watched him process: the taxis, the heat, the language, the bodies. Not California bodies. Smaller, darker, moving with a fluidity ours don’t have, built to flow around space instead of claiming it.
I’d told Gop we’d meet him at the hotel. Check-in, a shower, a drink at the bar, thirty minutes before the main event. Gop had agreed, which meant he’d be in the lobby when we arrived, because Gop’s agreement to wait operates on the same principle as a child’s agreement to stay in bed on Christmas Eve: the intention is real, the execution is impossible.
He was in the lobby. Sitting on one of the rattan chairs near the elevator bank with a bottle of Coke, his face holding at exactly the point of impatience that hadn’t yet tipped into leaving. He was wearing the Adidas shirt, the black lycra one with the yellow swoops that I’d bought him at Central World years ago, the shirt that confirmed, wordlessly, everything you’d already suspected about that body. He’d come dressed to win.
He saw me first. The grin. His face reorganizing itself around the act of being happy to see me, the grin starting in his eyes and working downward until his whole body was participating, even the feet, which started moving before the rest of him had committed to standing. He was across the lobby in four strides, the Coke abandoned, his arms around me before I’d finished setting down my bag. The hug was full-bodied, an arm that weighed eight pounds across my back, pulling me into him, the press of muscle against my chest, the warm exhalation against my neck that carried the Coke and the cigarette and the heat of a body running a degree hotter than average, hotter still after the wait.
Eight hundred baht a month of whey isolate and thirty thousand a year of coaching, and he had stood in that lobby for three hours smoking through the results of it. I have never mentioned it. Mentioning it would make it a line item, and I have quite enough of those, and there is also the fact that I like it. Three weeks of one-word answers had ended somewhere between the rattan chair and my shoulder, and none of it appeared on any invoice.
“I miss you,” he said into my shoulder.
“I miss you too.”
He released me and turned to Dave.
Gop and Dave sized each other up in that lobby with a precision and a courtesy that were exactly simultaneous. It lasted perhaps three seconds. Gop took Dave’s height, taller than me and shorter, I suspect, than whatever he had pictured, and the solid Filipino-American bulk maintained by stubbornness instead of vanity, and the spine drilled straight since age six, and a face trying for friendly while bracing to be tested. Dave took the Adidas shirt, which left nothing to assess and simply presented, and a face younger than he’d pictured, warmer than expected, more male than any of it had prepared him for. Dave had been imagining, I think, someone more delicate.
Gop extended his hand. Dave took it.
“I lie Dave,” Gop said.
Dave, who had been briefed on the pronunciation but not on hearing it from a body still warm from hugging his boyfriend, managed: “I like you too, Gop.”
Gop turned to me. The quick scan, the eyes going over my face with the speed I give an exchange-rate board. He saw something. Whatever he saw, it satisfied him. He picked up his abandoned Coke, took Dave’s bag, not mine, Dave’s, and headed for the elevator.
“We go.”
IV.
The room was a double in a business tower off Silom, the kind of place that lists the joiner fee on a laminated card at reception. I’d booked it specifically: two beds, a concession to the triangle that I’d spent the whole silence working out. Whoever I climbed in with on the first night would establish the hierarchy for the trip.
Gop walked in and gave the place the rapid-fire once-over of a thousand-hotel-room veteran, pricing the thread count of the sheets on his way past, put Dave’s bag down at the foot of the bed nearer the window, and began stripping off the Adidas shirt. The two-handed crossed-arms grab, the torso revealed in one motion. It is not for anybody. It is how he takes off a shirt behind a shut door, and I have watched him do it two hundred times, and it has never once failed to stop whatever I was doing. My own bag went down at the foot of the other bed without my thinking about it. I was holding a room key I had no further use for and I went on holding it.
Dave, standing by the door with nothing left to carry, watched. I watched Dave watch.
“Shower,” Gop announced, and disappeared into the bathroom. The door closed. It was Gop’s privacy line, inviolable, the one space even I don’t enter uninvited.
Dave counted the beds. He looked at me.
“Which one’s mine?” he asked. Neutral tone. A man asking about furniture and meaning something else entirely.
“Whichever one you want.”
“That’s not an answer.”
“No. It’s an option.”
He chose the window bed, which was where Gop had already put the bag for him. He sat on its edge. He didn’t unpack. He waited for the shower to stop, and when it did, Gop emerged in a towel, the towel low on his hips, water still standing on his shoulders. Then Dave stood up, said “My turn,” went into the bathroom, and closed the door.
Gop turned to me. He was standing between the two beds in his towel, his hair wet.
“He shy,” Gop observed.
“He’s nervous.”
“Why?”
“Because he thinks you’re going to hate him.”
Gop considered this. He looked at the wall above my shoulder while he did it, which is what he does when the English is not the hard part.
“I no hate. He your friend.” A pause. “He your Dave.”
He had been saying the name that way for a year, long before it belonged to anybody.
“He’s my Dave,” I confirmed. “But you’re my Gop.”
He smiled, a smaller smile than the grin, more private, one that had heard what it needed to hear and was still deciding how much to believe.
“I know,” he said. And dropped his towel to get dressed.
Six feet away, in the light from the window, with the water going in the bathroom and another man’s bag at the foot of the window bed. He bent for his shorts, one hand on the bed frame, and the light came off the flat of his back where the water had not quite dried, and he took his time about the leg holes and said something about the air conditioning. He was not doing anything. A man getting dressed in front of you in a room you paid for, unhurried, entirely unaware of being an event, while you stand there and are one.
V.
We went to Soi Twilight. Of course we went to Soi Twilight. The newly gay man, on his first night in the gay capital of the world: you take him to the place that will blow every circuit he has. You take him to the neon.
Gop walked between us. He did not drift there and he did not ask. He got between us at the mouth of the soi and stayed between us the whole length of it, and I spent the walk failing to decide what that was.
We ended up at Gop’s bar, where he is known, where the boys called out his name and the mamasan waved and the regulars nodded, having seen me a hundred times and my plus-one never.
The door gave us the usual wall of cold and gave it up inside of a minute. Dave’s shirt went through in ninety seconds, dark at the spine and under both arms, and he kept touching it like it had betrayed him. The bass came up through the bench and sat in my sternum where it always sits. Talc and cigarette smoke and the sweet chemical of whatever they mop with, and every so often a boy coming off the stage passed our table at eye level and you got the oil off his shoulder in the air a half-second after he’d gone. My Singha sweated a puddle wide enough to soak the edge of the bar napkin, and I moved it, and it made another one.
And I watched the room do arithmetic on me. The regulars in that soi have priced me identically every time I have walked in: alone, known, spending, uncomplicated. Tonight there was a second man at my table and the eyes went from me to Dave and back to me. Nobody said anything. Nobody would. But I sat there with the bass in my chest and understood that my standing in that room, which I have never once in twenty-six years had to think about, had just been repriced by a committee I did not know was sitting.
Then the show began. Not the stage show. The other show. The one where Gop plays host, facilitator and social lubricant, which he does better than anything he has ever done on a platform, because on a platform he only has to be looked at.
Dave had been steered to a seat before he knew he was choosing one. A Singha had arrived that Dave had not ordered and would have ordered. Two of the boys were brought over, and Gop put a flat hand on the back of Dave’s neck while he named him, which in that room means treat this one as mine. One of them looked at Dave, then at me, then back at Dave, and said something to Gop in Thai that made the other one laugh. Gop did not translate it. He did all of this without once letting go of me, a hand on my knee, a shoulder against mine, the claim kept up under the table where the room could not see it and I could not forget it.
Dave, to his credit, handled it. He drank his beer and watched the boys on stage. Laughed at the right moments. Tipped when Gop nodded. Met the mamasan’s questions with a vagueness he had no way of knowing was the correct answer.
But I saw his hands. Dave’s hands, on the beer bottle, on the edge of the bar, on his own thigh, were the hands of a man in a room where everything is new and nothing is safe and the rules he spent his first fifty-four years learning have just been invalidated by a neon sign and a Thai boy in a speedo.
“He okay,” Gop said, his gaze following Dave’s toward the stage.
“He’s okay.”
“He come back?”
“To the bar?”
“To Bangkok.”
I checked on Dave. Dave was looking at a boy on stage. Really looking, with the focused attention of someone who had just discovered that a thing he’d been imagining for decades had a physical form, and the physical form was more beautiful and more terrifying than the imagination had ever managed.
“Yeah,” I said. “He’ll come back.”
VI.
The sleeping arrangement resolved itself at three in the morning. Dave and I were drunk, the specific drunk that comes from navigating a social obstacle course half the night and getting to a room where nobody has to keep performing. Gop had been on Coke since eight and was the only clear head in the room.
Gop stripped. The routine, and this time all the way, with both of us standing there. Off came the shirt, then the pants, then the underwear, and he stood a second in the middle of the carpet working a thumb into the muscle above his hip where the waistband had been, taking no more notice of the two of us than of the furniture. I had got as far as my own belt buckle and stopped there and stayed stopped. Then the towel, and the underwear scooped up off the carpet, and the bathroom, and the door shut on the rest.
Gop came out wearing it again. Dave had seen a shirt come off and a man cross the room in a towel. He had not seen this. He watched all of it and his face did very little.
I stood between the beds. Gop was in one. Dave was sitting on the edge of the other, his shoes on, his shirt buttoned.
“You sleep wit Dave,” Gop said. Simple. A pronoun, a verb, a preposition, a name. Deployed flatly, already decided. He spread a flat hand on the mattress under him and rolled to face the wall.
There was the shape of him under the sheet, the shoulder going up and down already, and that was my bed he was in, with no room made in it, and me standing between them in my shoes.
Dave did not move.
“Is he serious?” Dave whispered.
“He’s always serious.”
I have paid for that room and that carpet and both of those mattresses and the laminated card at reception and the joiner fee it lists, and I stood there for longer than a man should need to and could not find the sentence that would have put me in the other bed. Not a refusal. I was not being refused anything. There was simply no version of no that did not require saying it to a shoulder.
I climbed into bed with Dave. Fully clothed, because of the room, because of the three feet of carpet, because of the man on the other side of it who was either asleep or doing sleep with the same total conviction he brings to everything.
Dave’s arm found mine in the dark. His hand closed around my wrist loosely, not a grip but a tether, wanting only to confirm I was there.
At some point Dave got his shoes off, one heel against the other toe, quietly, not making an event of it. Mine stayed on. I lay there in them with my collar wet and Dave’s hand around my wrist, and I did not take them off, because taking them off would have been settling in, and settling in was an answer.
Dave had won nothing. Dave had been assigned.
Gop’s breathing slowed. The AC hummed. The city outside conducted its business. Taxis, motorbikes, the distant bass from a bar that hadn’t closed.
He never asked. I had wanted to be asked. That is as far as I got.
Underneath the drink: being put somewhere by him did not feel like losing.
From the Blog, posted two weeks before Dave’s flight
I Fell In Love With A Bar Boy: Just the Three of Us
In Which the Author Confesses by Email Like a Coward, a Bar Boy Rules Against Himself, a Texan Concurs, Hawaii Turns Out to Have Known All Along, and Nobody Has Yet Discussed the Sleeping Arrangements
Gop is not speaking to me. Or rather, he is speaking to me in that particular register of Thai displeasure that involves responding to every question with a monosyllable and following every monosyllable with a silence calibrated to induce maximum guilt. He has elevated passive-aggression to a performing art, and the production currently running is shaping up to be his most ambitious to date. [no photo, obviously. picture a farang turning a phone over to find the word okay on it again.]
I told him about Dave.
Not in person, which would have been the decent thing. Not even by phone, which would have been the adequate thing. By email. Because I am, fundamentally, a coward who has spent his entire adult life deploying eloquence as a substitute for courage, and an email allowed me to construct the kind of careful, paragraph-by-paragraph explanation that a phone call (with its interruptions, its silences, its requirement that you hear the other person breathing while you dismantle their assumptions) does not.
Friends have opinions. I asked for them, which was the first mistake, and some of you have been writing to give me yours unasked, which I am counting as the second. The consensus among those who know both men tilts toward Dave, because Dave is American and present and employed in a profession that doesn’t require nudity, and these factors apparently outweigh the minor detail that Gop has loved me longer, more consistently, and with fewer conditions. Ann, whose counsel I generally trust because she is sharp and because I am afraid of her, came down for Dave, and not out of any warmth toward him. She has been irritated with him for a decade for staying closeted when, as she put it, the brass ring was right there the whole time, and she wants him to have to live with getting it. She is from Texas. Texans process heartbreak as a species of warfare.
Gop’s own verdict arrived by phone and took one sentence. I read it as him closing the subject and not settling it, and there is a difference, and I know there is, and I have been living in the monosyllables ever since and have decided to call it forgiveness because the alternative reading is available and I do not want it.
Dave and I just returned from Hawaii. The trip was supposed to be his coming-out tour of the islands. Not that he was obligated to announce anything, but the proximity of old friends and warm weather seemed to create a natural opening. He needn’t have worried. It took his friend Rick about five seconds. “About time you two figured it out,” he said, and that was roughly the universal response. Dave had spent weeks rehearsing a disclosure that turned out to be redundant. His friend Manny offered the definitive summary: “Bra, all we been hearing for years is your buddy this, your buddy that. At least now we don’t have to listen to you acting like a schoolboy with a crush.”
The real test is in two weeks. Bangkok. The three of us. In whatever sleeping arrangement I have not yet had the courage to discuss with either of them.
