“Because he didn’t want a gay guy in his house?”
Olga nodded. “More or less. I let my temper get the best of me and I just outed him. It got ugly. But here’s the thing, it struck me as out of character for Prieto, but somehow it also felt familiar. Suddenly, I remember being at the hospital with my father, feeling pissed at my brother for not showing up and seeing all the lonely people there, dying. And it was all so clear to me that my brother was afraid. Scared that if we saw him there, near all these gay guys, we’d recognize something about him in them. Which is irrational and crazy, I know, but I’ve always thought that’s really why he never came.”
“Not that crazy,” Matteo offered. “How many Christian fundamentalist homophobes who won’t even buy a wedding cake from someone gay end up being outed? Fear, self-loathing. All of it.”
“Right. So, the question I’m now asking is, if my brother’s need to protect this secret is so intense he’d turn his back on his own dying father, what else would he do? I’d always thought my brother’s goodness defined him, but what if it’s actually his fear? If protecting his image eclipses his impulse to do good? What would that mean about who my brother is?”
“What it would mean, Olga,” and this Matteo said with a wry smile, “is that your brother is just like every other politician.”
“Well … fuck,” Olga said, and swigged her beer.
BE KIND, REWIND
“I need to pee,” Olga declared after a couple more beers. “Show me where your bathroom is.”
Matteo straightened up. Olga started towards the front door and Matteo rushed to block her.
“Let’s go out and eat,” he offered. “There’s a great Peruvian spot literally around the corner. You can use the bathroom there.”
Olga looked at him quizzically for a moment. His eyes, round and brown, were glistening and wide and she saw in them his fear. The hoarding. He made it so easy to forget. It had been a long day and she collapsed her body against the doorframe.
“Matteo, I know, intellectually, that we should probably have a formal conversation about your … issue, but the truth of the matter is, I’m too damn tired and need to pee too badly to do that right now. Please, just let me in.”
Matteo looked straight at her, somewhat imploringly. He turned and rested his head on the door, slowly removing a set of keys from his pocket, then opening one side of the heavy oak and glass double doors.
“Wait here for a second,” he said, with more force than she expected. He grabbed the six-pack and the speaker, walked inside, and Olga could see several lights flicker on, a warm glow emerging from the foyer. Olga closed her eyes, her stomach suddenly sinking in the way stomachs do when one dreads the arrival of bad news. She understood the fright in Matteo’s eyes and felt it now, too. How long had it been since she felt so comfortable around someone she wasn’t related to? When, if ever, had she spoken so openly about herself with anyone, let alone someone she was sleeping with? It should feel uncomfortable, even terrifying, but with Matteo, it felt like relief. In his presence she felt the coil of herself unwind, physically and mentally. The human equivalent of the wonderful rum they had sipped together at Sylvia’s. Olga was not one to deprive herself sensory pleasure—sex, food, drink, travel. Emotionally, however, she had long been malnourished. Time with Matteo felt wildly indulgent. Six-course-meal-at-Le-Bernardin indulgent. But now practicalities inserted themselves. Practicalities, even as mundane as relieving one’s bladder, have a way of upending indulgences carried on for too long. A threshold stood between her belief that nothing this nice could ever last and her hope that maybe she was wrong.
“Okay,” Matteo said, poking his head out the door. “Come on in.”
The warm light, Olga realized, was the result of the four to five light fixtures Matteo had hanging over the space: one a crystal chandelier, the others a hodgepodge from various eras that he had clearly jury-rigged. The light reflected off a collection of mirrors and picture frames of various sizes, most empty, some not, that lined the entryway on one side and continued up the wall along a flight of steps to the second floor. To her other side, the walls opened into pocket doors, to what would normally be, in a house like this, the living room. Here, Matteo had arranged, as best as she could tell at her quick glance, a makeshift furniture museum. The walls were flanked, from floor to thirteen-foot-high ceiling, with distinct side chairs and dining chairs hung neatly on wall hooks, ranging in style from Victorian to Bauhaus. She stole a glance at two or three furniture vignettes featuring sofas and side tables but could hardly make out more before Matteo called out to her, directing her to a small half bath under the stairway. It was preserved from another era, an addition or redecoration from the late ’70s, with its bright yellow porcelain sink and matching toilet. A light plaid wallpaper peeled slightly at the edges, she noticed as she peed. Here, the walls were surprisingly bare. A large stack of New Yorker magazines sat in a corner, though, Olga noted, hardly more than any normal subscriber had in their home. She flushed and washed her hands and made a note that the hand towels were clean. When she didn’t find Matteo waiting outside the door, she took her chances and wandered across the hall to where, traditionally, a dining room would be. This, Matteo had repurposed into a music room, of sorts. The largest wall—the one that connected to the parlor space—was lined with shelf after shelf of records, even the fireplace repurposed for record storage. Against the windows, which she knew likely looked out into the backyard, was, of course, a record player, as well as any number of nearly extinct mechanisms for playing recorded music. An eight-track player, CD players, cassette decks, and, of course, speakers of various shapes and sizes. Olga had just turned to take in the rest of the room—rack storage for said eight-track tapes, CDs, and cassettes—when Matteo appeared, two beers in hand. She startled.