Cutback

iv

Brussels, Fall 2014

Errol and I might never have become more than just superficial friends if it weren't for theater class. Taking the same class gave us a reason to talk to each other the first few days and a reason to spend time together walking to campus every Tuesday and Thursday at ten o'clock. It was the highlight of my week.

Our college was one of the only ones in the city that taught in English, which is why exchange programs like it so much. The exchange program was based in the states and worked with lots of different schools in the U.S., coordinating students who study abroad and getting them apartments near campus. From what I gather, they try to put people together who they think would get along, and part of that has to do with the classes you take. Since Errol and I both signed up for Elizabethan Theater, they put us together.

Basically, someone in an office in Pennsylvania pulled up a spreadsheet and decided I should live with a future celebrity. That's how fate works. Destiny by way of bureaucracy.

Errol and I were both trying to improve our French too. We were supposed to "immerse" ourselves but we cheated all the time. He had the bright idea that we would watch French TV, like the news or dubbed shows from back home, but we never lasted very long. We'd start trying to translate an episode of Family Guy or make fun of Friends but we'd always give up and just start talking in English.

It's how I got to know Errol, the youngest of three children, with a brother named Wyatt and a sister called Stacey; the son of a dentist and the creative director for a New York theater, who grew up on Long Island, took acting classes during the summer and secretly wanted to be famous. Who played tennis of all things and once dreamed about going pro. Who missed his dog more than his family and appreciated theater in ways I had never considered.

In class we sat together and I watched Errol hold court. I don't know how else to describe it. First the British and American girls came, lured by his looks. Then the Russians and Germans leaned over their chairs to listen to him talk about soccer or music or the absurdity of speculoos, this weird cookie spread that Belgians love.

"They put it on everything," he told them to peals of laughter, because everything Errol said was somehow funny to other people. "They put the cookie spread on the cookies themselves. Seriously, who does that? It's the same thing. Just eat the cookies."

To be fair, I was always in on the conversation, though it made me want to squirm out my own skin. For me, making friends is a chore and often a disappointment. For Errol, friends are everywhere if you just stand still long enough. I was the original, though, his first real friend in Brussels, and besides, I was the roommate. Which meant I was the one who got to be his partner for the final project. I wasn't above competing for his attention or pulling rank but I resented having to do it. Three other people had asked to work with him.

The final basically revolved around a scene from a play meant for two. We had to write a paper about it, give a PowerPoint and act out a piece of it in pairs. It had Errol written all over it: intellectual but artistically demanding. Of course, all the best duets are made for couples, traditional ones, so we had to find something else. Everyone wanted to do Shakespeare and I thought it was too cliché so I started flipping through the textbook. I wanted something with two strong male leads so I picked Marlowe's Edward II.

In a nutshell, the play is about the king and his maybe-lover Galveston, whose exile and death ignites a civil war. It's brimming with juicy homoerotic subtext, which I thought would be an amusing counterbalance to plays like Romeo and Juliet. Errol indulged me after some initial hesitation, probably because I said he'd make, oh my god, such a good king and it gratified him, even though he knew the king was a weak character. Sometimes actors aren't too complex.

Here's the thing: I never told Errol that I was gay exactly. The words wouldn't have formed in my mouth even if I had wanted to. I would have likely died halfway through some mix of shame and fear that he would distance himself or things would get weird. A few weeks into the term, we were at a monthly pub crawl with a bunch of other exchange students when he jerked his head over to a German guy, Jonas, we barely knew and said, "I think he's checking you out, man."

My cheeks started burning and my heart sped up and I just about choked out an, "Oh yeah?" before almost passing out. Errol said totally, and then told me to "go for it" or something just as irritating and pretended to push me in his direction. (Seriously, who does that?)

I shrugged and nodded like I was flattered and then he just knew, and couldn't have cared less, of course. It was always going to be an excruciating conversation but I was always kind of glad it had happened like that.

For the final, I chose the scene where the king informs me of my exile and we basically cry it out. It was great because it had lots of dramatic tension that we could mine for symbolism in the paper, but also because I worked a hug into the performance and Errol would have to say, "My love shall never decline" to me in front of the whole class. We worked on it for weeks and every time we rehearsed it, I let him draw me in and pressed my nose against his clean cotton button downs that smelled like European detergent.

We read our lines from our phones, though Errol had his mostly memorized, and during the final performance, when we got to the part where we had to "exchange" photos of each other, he pressed his phone into my hands and closed my fingers around it—something we'd never practiced. For the rest of the scene, I swiped through my lines on his phone, which felt somehow forbidden, smudging my own oily white fingerprints into his.

When we finished the class broke out into a thunder of spontaneous applause. At our next class, everyone told him how amazing he was, intense and focused and natural, while looking through me like a ghost. The Germans clapped him on his back and the Americans told him it was lit or boss or whatever. And this green-eyed British girl, Jess, who weeks ago had installed herself on the other side of Errol, even brought him a small package of speculoos and they laughed like it was the funniest thing.

Now seriously. Who does that?