making too much noise down the halls when we’re alone in my room. You give most excellent bitch tirade, and now all those guys only envy me more. I love you for that.” Whatever.
Levels 4–9: Expressions of passion for the great loves of my life, like disco music, Snickers bars, the Cloisters, the NBA, stairwell games, the luck to have a life lived with Ely.
Here’s where the game gets trickiest.
Level 10 (but on a whole other plane, where maybe numbers can’t even exist): When I tell Ely “I love you,” but I’m not lying to him. I’m lying to myself. He absorbs my words as if they’re natural, coming from his best friend / almost-a-sister. And Player One: Naomi does mean it that way. Genuinely. But maybe other ways, too. The confusing and impossible ways.
Game stalled.
Truth intrudes.
Lies are easier to process.
I lied to Ely that I’m okay with gay. I am. Just not for Ely. He was supposed to belong to me in the Happily Ever After. Manifest destiny.
I lied to Ely that of course I recognized his true manifest destiny was the queendom of queerdom and hadn’t that been obvious all along? Right! And great! Except not! We’ve practically been promised to each other from childhood, grew up side by side, his family in 15J, mine in 15K. Naomi & Ely. Ely & Naomi. Never one without the other. Just ask anyone within a ten-block radius of the Fourteenth Street Whole Foods, where the entire Indian hot-bar section witnessed the disaster fallout between our two sets of parents. Naomi & Ely: played doctor (
When Ely finally finds me at Starbucks, he’s breathless and red-cheeked from running in the winter cold. He collapses into the chair I’ve reserved for him.
I hand Ely the hot chocolate the Starbucks manager comped me. “Get up,” I tell him. “We gotta go.”
“Why, Naomi?” he pleads. “Why? I only just got here.”
I grab his free hand and we’re off, right back outside onto the cold, hard pavement, where we immediately fall into the typical Naomi & Ely routine of hand-and-cup-holding, hurried-walking-and-talking-while-maneuvering-through-sidewalk-people lockstep.
“Trust me,” I say.
He doesn’t ask where I’m leading him. “Was it so necessary to make me miss the MacDougal Street café study session with the cute T.A. from my econ class to discuss your latest misdiagnosis? You don’t have cancer, Naomi. And in case you didn’t notice, it’s like thirty degrees outside and there are ways I’d rather be spending my time than freezing my ass off walking down this sidewalk. For instance, making eyes at the cute T.A. – in a heated café, by the way.” Ely extracts his one hand from mine, gives his hot chocolate over to me to hold with his other hand, and then places both his hands together at his mouth, to warm them. I want to do the breathing for him.
It would not be a lie to say I like cold. It’s what I yearn for most. To shiver.
“How can you not be concerned that I might have cancer?” I ask. “I found a lump on my breast.” Touch it, Ely. Touch it.
“Lie. Not only are you biting your lip, which you always do when you lie, but your mom told me about the alleged lump in the elevator this morning. The doctor said it was an overgrown pimple.”
Monkeys!
I must distract Ely from my lie. I stop us at a fence in front of a schoolyard playground. The school building behind it is massive, dank and dirty, graffiti-covered, with bars on the windows. The playground is all blacktop surrounded by dilapidated fence grating.
“I think we should get married here,” I tell Ely.
“Oh, my darling Naomi, you’re making me swoon from the gritty romance of it all. What happened to the Temple of Dendur inside the Met? I agreed to that one just so I can see you wearing the Nefertiti ivory gown, with Cleopatra kohl-eyes. You’re one girl who could totally pull off the ancient Egyptian goddess look.”
“What will the groom wear?”
“The same.”
Wrong wrong wrong. I must correct him.
“Not you and me get married here, Ely. Me and he.” I point to the hoops player on the blacktop who’s just landed an amazing three-pointer in the netless basketball rim. The player reaches his arms up and out in a V pose, causing the hoodie over his head to fall to his shoulders and present his beautiful face for our full viewing pleasure.
Ely’s eyes meet mine. “So worth missing a study session for,” he says, smiling.
He should know to trust me. Even when I’m lying.
We admire. Gabriel is not only the hottest guy on the court, he’s also the star player. Run. Pass. Jump. Dunk. WOW. Graveyard-shift doorman by night, superstar pickup b-ball player by day.
When the game ends, the players leave the court, sprinting off toward warm homes, I hope. Ely and I duck our heads low as they pass our salivating-at-the-fence, la-di-da, nothing-to-notice-here stance.
Once they’re gone, Ely bows down to me, as I’m owed. Discovering the early-evening hangout place of the new night doorman at our building, whom everyone in our building wants to know more about – but no one really knows anything about him other than how gorgeous he is, and whatever more there is to know, Gabriel’s not telling – that’s some prime sleuthing on my part.
When he raises himself from his bow, Ely turns around and slumps his back against the fence. He lets out an infatuated sigh. “I can’t believe we haven’t done this earlier, but clearly Gabriel belongs on the No Kiss List. Let’s put him at the bottom, since he’s new. He should work his way up.”
Ely and I created the No Kiss List™ in the aftermath of a long-ago Spin the Bottle party, still sometimes referred to as the You-Made-Out-With-Me-To-Make-Donnie-Weisberg-Jealous!
If our parents had created a No Kiss List™, they could have saved us all a lot of grief. The next generation won’t make that mistake.
I tell Ely, “Okay to adding Gabriel to this list, but I disagree
