A Dance to Remember

Act 3

"A Dance to Remember"Act 3

I sit in the park with dusk approaching, facing a small, candle-lit vigil. A world cast in pink and yellow. A cool zephyr bites my face and I watch the candles dance to the music of the wind. Today they're the only ones dancing. Tomorrow the rest of the world will move on and no one will speak her name. Her picture is there, several of them lifted from her social media and printed out, laminated.

"Did you know her?" they ask me. Did I know her.

Did I fucking know her.

I was gay. Today I laugh. It all seemed so important, then.

Gay.

The word stung me the first time it came from Rachel's lips. Her plush, sweet, appetizing lips. Her venomous lips.

"He's gay."

The thing is, I wasn't mad at her. I was at first, but that soon changed. There was that initial moment when you hear something like that from a girl you're massively attracted to and your spirit just breaks. She might as well have said:

"This guy is so utterly repugnant and useless that I shouldn't imagine any female wanting him. He's beyond hope. He's dead to me, as he ought to be dead to all of you. Give up."

So if you look at a pretty girl you're a sinner but if you don't you're gay.

I got into my mom's car and rode home. She asked me how it went and I told her it was fine. To be sure, I'd already resolved to never go back there again. I'd sooner limit my options to the girls I watched from a distance at school and never again daydream about dancing a pas de deux with such a female.

"When you're ready to talk about it, let me know. Okay sweetie?"

"OK, mom. Thanks."

But somewhere on that ride home, past the gas stations and mini malls and the endless store lights and street lights and car lights blurred into a palette of reds, whites and blues where everyone obeyed the traffic laws in their neutral-colored, shiny SUVs that you can have when you pry them from their cold, dead hands, it dawned upon me just how kind Rachel had been not only for bringing me to the land of milk and honey but with that assessment of my sexuality.

I was gay.

Think about it.

All that time it had been my principal concern to not be labeled a pervert. A stalker. A creep. Never once did it occur to me that I could have received the polar opposite. And the thing was, like my dad said, this ain't the fifties. Back in the fifties, you could smoke on an airplane, lynch a black man and stack the jury with the people who helped you do it, fire your secretary for not sleeping with you, make racist caricatures of anybody who isn't white, global warming didn't exist, mass murder with nuclear weapons was a good idea, sugar was healthy, LSD was medicinal, tapeworms helped you lose weight, a woman couldn't get birth control without her husband's permission, a priest could safely rape a boy in silence, and if anybody disagreed they were a communist. And, you were expected to ogle pretty girls. When you saw one, you hollered and whistled and to be gay was a capital offense. Quite frankly, being gay isn't what it used to be, as evidenced by the fact that Rachel felt comfortable stripping down to her skivvies right in front of me.

And why did she feel this way?

Because she accepted that I wasn't some pervert thinking perverted thoughts about the delicate crease in the center of that mound between her legs or the tantalizing patch of dark hair peeking through the white lace of her underwear.