Remembrance part 2

Rod was gay. I knew it before I even met him. He was best friends with my across-the-hall neighbor, Therese. One summer evening I was on my way home from work and I saw this man walking toward my apartment building. He looked like a young Jeremy Irons and he moved with undeniable grace.

I have always had a thing for graceful men. My first crush in grade school was on the most effiminate boy in class, a dancer who was, if anything, more feminine than I was. I suppose this made Rod and I inevitable but we never notice these patterns in our youth and I was very young.

It was a perfect August day and something about this young man made me want to meet him. He was well dressed and looked happy somehow - there were no shadows around him and that was unusual for anyone of my acquaintence at the time. I picked up the pace and rounded the corner, tripped up the steps and made it into the hallway just in time to see him disappear into Therese's apartment.

I changed my clothes and contrived some reason to knock on the door and that's where it started.

Rod and I hit it off immediately. We laughed and talked as though we had always known each other. Soon the three of us were inseperable. The fact of his sexual preference didn't prevent us from becoming a kind of a couple. We went to gallery openings together, he met my parents. We went dancing and to parties and within months people just assumed we were on track to a permanent committment.

He was dark-haired, slender and elegant but beyond that he was funny and he saw me as something more than a girl he might be able to get into bed. We waded in the legislature fountain at midnight, took long walks on the beach, drove to the country in his erratic pick-up truck that would only reliably start for me - I named it Hank - end eventually we got an apartment together and became roomates but never lovers.

One one particular night we were listening to music and the sexual tension in the air did begin to mount. I can remember looking at him and noticing his breathing was becoming heavy, his cheeks flushing - and so were mine. At the very moment something might have happened, the buzzer for the door rang. It was Therese, it was karma.

Rod eventually moved to England with my father and his partner. I was supposed to go but somehow everything went wrong at the last minute. He came back years later but I don't think he ever forgave me. I realize now that I did love him, I realize now that sexual orientation is not fixed on one side of the divide or the other. I realize a lot of things now but I never did then and I suppose I did make a mess of things between us.

I will always remember one other summer afternoon. Rod and I were living together and we were very happy. He was meeting me for dinner at a restaurant after work. I came out of the dress shop where I worked in time to see him striding down the street toward me. He was wearing a white shirt I had stolen from my Grandfather's closet shortly after his death. It fit him perfectly. His shoulders were back and he walked with a long, relaxed stride that made him look like a movie star. As he saw me, he smiled and opened his arms, I went to him and he held me very close. In that embrace, my lips pressed against his arm. The imprint of my lips stained the shirt for months and he wore it until it finally faded.

I understand Rod works in the health field now - I always saw him as an artist, in every way that matters I'm sure he still is. I saw a reference to him sitting on a panel on intersexuality. doesn't surprise me a bit.

In my heart Rod is captured in that sunny afternoon, on the cusp of an embrace with not a shadow in sight.