The Spread

Tight blue carpeting, smooth slates at the split level entry, plastic laminates adorning the kitchen, light Scandinavian woods accenting white walls, and a colossal stone fireplace at the center stretching up to the two story high ceiling.

A thin cotton bedspread, a primary blue. Flat glass panel windows, spare elegance, marred only by the dead and dying flies. A solid wood door easily latched. The blond down dappling his ass, almost white with wonder.

Showering together, toweling off turning to jerking off, buckets of come and laughter. His lips pressing to mine. Awkward kisses. More giggles. Hard again, an attempt at penetration. Ouch. It hurts. Stop he says. But then he pulls me back to try again, until it's a perfect fit. My dick in his ass and he loves it, begs me for it. Tiny tins of Vaseline in every pocket, a dab will do you. Dry lips the ready response.

We don't talk about it, just do it every chance we get, in his room, in his father's study, even in the locker room at the club. We are wild, reckless and careful all the same, ready to pull out, zip up and compose ourselves in an instant. Boyfriends forever at fourteen, with acres of woods and secret places to play and hide. My parents glad to have me somewhere else. His father, never home, at work or off rebuilding another Porsche. His mother, happy to let us play outside while she plays rubber after rubber of Bridge.

Out of touch in the decade and more I have been in California living my gay life, my world and his collide again -- and he is there in a shelter magazine -- one of hundreds piled high on our San Francisco living room waiting to be dissected for useful art, helpful hints, design suggestions -- guides to renovation and restoration.

For years, my boyfriend of a dozen years has burned to restore his family's summer cottage in Connecticut. Over those years we've collected magazines with articles that might relate to the project. When we finally began designing the renovation, we had already become experts on all things construction. Still we bought shelter magazine after shelter magazine until we could only manage the magazines and continue to use our living room by cutting them up and keeping just the articles we thought we might use. Even that was a struggle to keep up with. The pile of magazines to be trimmed and sorted into folders always growing.

The issue of Dwell sat on top of the pile with a picture of a dock floating out on a lake that looked remarkably like our little dock.

I flipped through the magazine casually wondering what in this bastion of the modern could have anything to do with our historically sensitive restoration of an 1820ish Connecticut Cape, when I saw the spread.

At first I thought it was just a house like his, an architect's split level my mother called them. Very modern and expensive, she would say with obvious disdain. Self righteously rigid in her aesthetics, my mother has little patience for anything new and no patience for the modern at all. Colonial and traditional are her design mantras. The house I grew up in, a 1973 Garrison Style Colonial Revival, was her happy compromise. Traditional colonial lines with modern conveniences and, most important of all, enough square footage to give the children their own quarters.

As I turned page after page, I knew it was the house -- his house. The trees were older -- a few missing, the pond more of a swamp, not dredged in years but there still.

The house, opened up and spread wide, the pictures of our pleasure palace, the fort of our childhood, our sanctuary on the mountain, nestled amidst the old orchard, unfolding in a pornographic portrait of understated elegance.

Page after page of pictures. Each room exactly as I remember it and not at all the same. The style, high modern, late mid-century, a style I couldn't name then, only intuit, is undiminished in its simple beauty. The rooms are fresh, clean. Restored? It must be, though to me it is as though time has stopped and it is now then again, when we were fourteen.

But familiars are missing. The burn in the kitchen carpet from when we tried to make a romantic dinner while his parents were out. The sagging wood panel not quite covering the secret stereo. The smoke stains on the white fireplace stones. The cum stains on his sheets.

I turn back the pages to the article and read in earnest. The spread is half a dozen pages, filling the heart of the magazine, but is not an ode to young love or the perennial story of 'partners' renovating a house in Connecticut carefully encoded so as to not actually say gay. Called "Next Generation Modern," the story is about him growing up and reclaiming his family home. Bought back from the bank after his mother's death, brought back from years of deferred maintenance, rescued and restored, the house is testament to a new tradition of preservation focusing on twentieth century architecture. The love of the modern nurtured by those who grew up in its bounty.

I smile thinking, well done, and then, on the last page, mentioned in passing in the text but filling the final picture, they are there. A woman and two blond boys looking just like their father posed in front of the great white stone fireplace, a perfect portrait of suburban surrender.

What had made him change from the frisky fourteen year old rebel who would never join his father's firm, to the successful executive in the story? What had happened to the light lean blond boy who was going to be an artist and move to the city? Had he even gone to RISD?

I put away the magazine. The careful description of the ideal suburban home, decorated with simple modern elegance by the young blonde and beautiful wife of the handsome young executive are a false freeze, an ice storm overpowering the warmth of my memory.

So much time has passed that I'd almost forgotten us. But now, we're rewritten and undone. You forever fixed on those pages, in that new old house. Those pictures and those people more real than the night under the blanket in the back of your Dad's not quite restored Targa (just the top to go) when you whispered under the engine's rumble, "I love you."