Apple Tree

Boy Meets Boy "Apple Tree"
By Wayne Hoffman

From Boy Meets Boy

It was strange for an atheist to be quoting the Bible, but love tends to muddle the mind. Mark had me so starry-eyed, so goofy with love, that I was reciting poetry, talking baby talk, planing "a ceremony" at age nineteen.

It's enough to give a park-cruising, trick-turning gutter slut like me a reputation.

But I had a real live valentine for the first time, so I poured on the schmaltz. A love note. A selection from e.e. cummings. A verse from Song of Songs. In English and Hebrew.

Like an apple tree among the trees of the forest, so is my beloved among men.

Mark still has that valentine (possibly for future blackmail purposes) tucked away somewhere. It's been eight years since I answered his personal ad -- something about a sense of humor 'so dry it could blow away' -- with an awkwardly self-revelatory (but apparently effective) note. And though we've certainly had our ups and downs, he still brings out the romantic in me.

It's hard to believe we broke up in 1991.

I thought nothing of it when he excused himself to use the bathroom on our first date. Little did I know he was secretly calling his best friend.

"But what will we talk about?" he asked. "He's so young!"

Mark had little to worry about; as I recall, I carried that conversation clear through lunch, several hours of walking around Washington, and all the way back to his Capitol Hill apartment. I hadn't yet learned that his genteel Southern ways made him reluctant to interrupt a Northeastern chatterbox like me. I figured it out at his place, as I sat on the couch waiting for him to stick something in my mouth and shut me up.

"You lure me back to your apartment, you're seven years older than I am, and you're going to wait for me to make the first move?" I asked impatiently, only half-joking.

(Well, it worked.)

We had a few good years as lovers. Really good years. Intimate dinners, cheap vacations, effortless conversations, family gatherings. And great sex, monumental sex that never wavered even in our worst moment. (We had our share of those, too.)

But our best years, many of our best times together, still lay over the mountains.

There was a gap after the breakup, nearly a year when we barely spoke. But, hard as it was to admit that I missed him, it was sillier to pretend that I didn't. We walked a precarious line for some time, unsure of our destination, until we realized that being a pair didn't mean we had to be a couple.

Our first trip together after we split up was to a writers' conference in Boston, when we were still negotiating exactly what our relationship would comprise. We could just be colleagues, two conference attendees who happened to know each other Or we could be cruising pals, free to prowl the South End for a few days. Or we could be divorces, some old gay Odd Couple stewing and rehashing old arguments that we'd had years earlier on the same Boston streets.

Fortunately, we were both a bit bored by the conference, afraid we'd be forced to sit through some poetry slam or other, so we decided to skip the last day altogether. We borrowed a car and headed north; Mark had never seen Vermont, and foliage was at its autumn peak. As we spun around the mountain roads, stopping only for some clam chowder and to buy maple candies, we witnessed the first snow of the season.

It was pure New England kitsch, a moment at once hackneyed and new. But it was kitsch we shared, half-longing, half-laughing. And though it's only apparent in retrospect, that was the day we relaxed into our new relationship, comfortable and loving and just slightly postmodern.

If romance is nostalgia, we've got plenty of that: standing-room-only photo albums and hidden love notes. (I've got a few, too; I wasn't the only one writing earnest letters -- although as I recall, Mark never got biblical on me.) I still pull them out occasionally, bringing back that old tingling buzz I remember so well. If romance is union, we've got that, too; we still finish each other's sentences, anticipate each other's calls, and speak paragraphs in total silence. (Baby talk, however, even unspoken, is a thing of the past.) And if romance is communication, we still confide more in each other than in anyone else (I've got the long-distance bills to prove it) -- and our respective new boyfriends have simply come to understand.

He's still part of my family, although there's no ceremony where we can proclaim it; sometimes he's my parents' favorite child. When my mother recently drove up with him to visit me in New York, she found she preferred him as a traveling companion. "We sang show tunes the whole way up," she told me. "He didn't play any of that noise that you listen to." (I guess she quickly forgave him for breaking her little boy's heart; Fiddler on the Roof always did soften her up.)

Words, however, have finally failed me after eight years. I don't know what to call him. Soul mate is accurate but sounds too New Age -- or too seventies, I can't decide. Friend seems inadequate, a term too generic to support our very specific baggage. Ex-lover is technically correct, but makes us sound like bitter, chain-smoking queens. And buddy is just too G.I. Joe for either of us.

In private -- strictly in private -- I call him Pooky (my reputation now utterly destroyed), although I never did when we were dating. It's a postdivorce pet name.

But he'll always be my apple tree: fruity, strong, and just a bit shady.

WAYNE HOFFMAN is a widely published journalist whose work has appeared in The Advocate, XY, Torso, and other national and regional magazines. He is co-editor of the anthology Policing Public Sex: Queer Politics and the Future of AIDS Activism and is currently arts editor for The New York Blade News. He lives in New York City.