Footy

DINNER FOR TWO (7)

Before he went home, Adam went to Target and bought himself three pairs of thong undies, one each of white, grey and black, from the men’s underwear department. Wearing them out to a date with a man who wore women’s g-strings seemed appropriate. And perhaps, just maybe, Tom would get to see them.

He showered and dressed with care, glad that he’d been doing the extra working out. Wearing only the black thong, he inspected himself with attention in the mirror, turning himself from side to side so that he could see his pectorals, and, less pleasing, his love handles. The thong made his butt look first-rate. He admired it, pleased. Maybe a bit less than four inches too much round the gut – the extra hours at the gym had made a difference. And his face was good. Hazel eyes, curly dark brown hair, a shapely chin, especially if he turned it so, decent lips. He smiled smuttily at himself. Then he grew depressed, because he knew that he was wasting his time. Tom was irredeemably straight. Sighing a little, he pulled on his jeans over his new thong, put on his battered Blundstone boots and a very old t-shirt worn thin with washing, with a strategic hole over his right nipple. Then he took it off, and put on new one, a straight-guy t-shirt, with no holes.

****

Tom had felt so bad about the way he’d behaved on Saturday night that he’d spent the whole of Sunday wondering how to make amends. On Monday, when Adam hadn’t been at the gym, he had assumed that he had a meeting, or was too busy to make it. But when he wasn’t there again on Tuesday, he began to suspect that Adam was avoiding him. When Adam had so pointedly frozen him out at Wednesday’s session, he’d had to screw up his courage to ask him to coffee. He hadn’t expected him to agree, and made bold by delight, he’d asked him to dinner on the spur of the moment.

He booked a table at ‘La Perla’. He was well known there, and the management would give him any table he asked for. He asked for one in the quietest corner, planning to sit with his back to the room, so that he would be unnoticed by any footy fans.

He parked the car in the visitor’s space at Adam’s block of flats, and raced up the stairs, not wondering why he was so happy, so excited. Adam’s flat was on the third floor, at the end, and as he walked down the access balcony that ran the full length of the building, he could hear a clarinet playing a jazz number he knew but couldn’t name. The music was coming from Adam’s flat. Tom stopped for a moment, taken back to the innocence of school, when he had enjoyed the simple but profound pleasures of creating things. He and his friends had had dreams of starting a band. His voice had been passable, his musicality good (he was a dancer, after all). The hopes and the optimism of that time – was it only ten years ago? – had been ground away by life, and the treasures had been discarded by the side of the road.

He knocked, and the music stopped.

Adam had decided to play on purpose, knowing that Tom would be arriving soon, a childish attempt to show off. He was humiliated to realize how much technique he’d lost, however. He made yet another vow to start practising again.

“G’day,” said Tom as the door opened. “Nice playing.”

Adam was embarrassed – suspecting irony, and betrayed by his own motives.

“I’ve lost technique,” he admitted.

“Practise!” Tom was brisk.

“Do you play an instrument?” Adam asked, subtly reminding Tom that he was the intellectual here, the musician. For a moment, he forgot that he wasn’t supposed to know that Tom was a footy hero.

Tom’s answer surprised Adam. “Not for years. I used to sing, and play the guitar. I still have the music somewhere. You know, I should start playing again. It was fun.” Tom decided that the last ten years had been a dead-end, a road he’d gone down which led nowhere. It was time to rebuild his life, to start enriching it again so that he wasn’t just a one-dimensional fake-values PR and advertising man, a forgotten football has-been.

Adam watched the emotions on his face, and cursed the empathy that always developed between him and the guys he loved. Now he felt bad that he had tried to put Tom down. To show he was sorry, he said, “Perhaps we could play together sometime,” and found to his surprise not only that he meant it, but that he was looking forward to it. Tom wasn’t the only one who had put aside youthful enthusiasms in pursuit of career and money.

“You ready to go?” Though superficially like a date, Adam noticed that Tom hadn’t even looked at his clothes, hadn’t noticed the improvements in his body. Yet he seemed to be happy, a little excited. There was an odd tension in the air.

The maître d’hôtel of ‘La Perla’ unctuously showed Tom and Adam to their table, in a quiet corner.

“Never been here before,” commented Adam. He had often dined with clients at absurdly expensive restaurants on expense accounts, but they were usually downtown. He had a couple of small institutions and charities in his accounts, and the firm expected him to entertain their trustees and investment people royally. This restaurant was in Carlton, once a suburb, but now very densely populated, very urban. Adam actually thought pricey restaurants were a waste of money. He found that the food was often better, and certainly much cheaper, at tens of ordinary eateries that he’d sampled, and there was the added bonus that there were fewer pseuds around.

“Wine?” asked Tom. He gave Adam a smile which was completely genuine. Adam’s heart flipped over. Once again he cursed the fate that had made such an attractive package, delivered it into his hands, and then ruined it all by making Tom straight.

“Yeah, that’ll be good.” Might as well get pissed as a newt. Tom would be driving.

The waiter brought the bottle with quiet efficiency. He didn’t gawp at Tom or slaver or ask for an autograph. Adam thought that was probably just as well. One person drooling at the table was probably enough. Tom looked stunning, his hair gleaming gold, his eyes darker than normal in the fashionable dimness of the restaurant, his shoulders large, his chest broad enough to rest your head on. He looked like every gay man’s wet dream. Adam couldn’t believe he was sitting opposite one of the most glamorous and famous men in Melbourne, where nine tenths of the rest of the population would have made any sacrifice to have been.

“You haven’t told me what you do.” Tom was being deliberately charming. Either that, or he just was a really nice bloke. He was asking as if he cared.

“I manage money. I’m with Sehnburgs.” Adam hoped that would be enough. He hated this kind of mindless small talk.

“Oh, right. They manage some of my money.”

“And what do you do?” Adam felt he had to ask, even though he knew. He was beginning to rue the day he started pretending that he didn’t know who Tom was.

Tom looked at him for a minute, suspecting irony. “I work for Smith and Henquist, the PR and advertising firm.”

They stared at each other for a moment, and then Tom asked, “How did you get into stockbroking?”

“By accident. I needed a vac job. My family was really poor, and they couldn’t help me with any extra cash.” Adam has casually mentioned his need to his economics professor. Ironically, Adam was doing an arts degree, in music, with maths for fun, and had only chosen economics because it fitted in with his time-table and he thought it would be relatively easy. What he hadn’t expected was that he had become fascinated by the intricate complexities of feedback, instability, the interaction between politics, history, sociology and prosperity. “My economics prof knew the head of research at Sehnburgs, and so I got a job there over the summer vacation. Afterwards they offered me an internship, and then when I graduated, a job. So I got into stockbroking quite by chance.”

“Must be brainy, though.” Tom was genuinely interested. It was part of his charm that he made you feel important and out of the ordinary.

“Not really, no.” Adam was embarrassed. This was one of the reasons he hated talking about his job. He had taken the job because he had become bitterly aware that he would never make the grade as a professional clarinettist or saxophonist. He was very, very good. But that wasn’t enough. To be a concert performer, with record contracts or a position in a professional orchestra, you have to be the best. And he wasn’t. But there was no way he was going to admit that to this shining, successful, beautiful man.

“Is Sehnburgs just an Aussie broker?” Tom asked as if he really cared, though Adam wondered why anybody who wasn’t in the business would be interested.

“No. Their head office is in London. It’s actually a merchant bank. Two Jewish émigré brothers from Nazi Germany founded it in London in the thirties. It’s got major branch offices all round the world – New York, Tokyo, Zurich, Paris, and so on.” The Melbourne office was a lesser branch, without the cachet of London or New York, or even of Sydney. Adam liked Melbourne and resolutely refused transfers to Sydney which he detested, even though (perhaps because) it was the gay capital of Australia.

Though the Melbourne office was one of the smaller branches of Sehnburgs, that didn’t spare it the usual contingent of cretinous upper-class Englishmen, bent on showing the colonials their place, their own intellects sadly depleted by inbreeding and unwholesome boarding-school food.

“They send out upper-class Brits to run the local show. My new boss is one of them.” Adam’s new boss was a scion of a second-rate noble family, rich and though not dim-witted, barely above average, and like so many products of the British public school system, at once arrogant and profoundly amoral. Adam had known from the first day, when the Honorable Harry FitzHoward had greeted them with his Oxford bray, assuring them that he would be relying on their teamwork to make a success of things, that his own days in the job were numbered. It was something to do with Harry’s unctuous sincerity. Adam wasn’t unduly worried. He knew that he would take most of his clients with him, wherever he went. Funny how fond the old ladies were of single men of a certain type, though neither side would ever mention the word ‘gay’. The old ladies probably didn’t know it in its modern meaning.

Bitterly, Adam thought about how even though he earned a lot, and was in a fair way of getting rich one day, he was still single, still an outsider, still alone and lonely. And now he had fallen in love with a straight bloke. A top bloke – charming, caring, with a sense of humor. Why was he so unlucky?

“Earth to moon. Earth to moon. Anybody home?”

Adam forced himself to smile. “Sorry. My thoughts were a hundred miles away!”

On principle, Adam never asked what other people did. He didn’t believe that what you did at work defined who you were. And anyway, when you told strangers you worked for a merchant bank and stockbroker, they at once started asking for tips on the stock market.

He wanted to know about Tom, the person, the real Tom, not his job. Nevertheless, he was forced to admit to himself that his curiosity was in fact driven by the glossy image purveyed by the ‘goss and glam’ pages in the newspapers.

“Why did you give up guitar and singing?” he inquired.

“Oh, I drifted away.” Tom had no intention of admitting that he was a footy player. It had become a point of honor now.

“Why?”

“I dunno. You know how it is.”

“Yeah. Actually, I hadn’t played the clarinet for six months till tonight. I was just showing off.”

Tom looked at him for a moment then burst out laughing. “OK. Then if we really do get together to play, we’ll be on an equal footing, because I am going to practise like a demon before we do. Because even after six months without practice, you still play very well.”

“Thank you. I don’t play enough. I should practise more.” Adam’s knees went weak at the thought that Tom wanted to do this again, that he wanted to come round, that they would spend time together, just the two of them. He knew he was deluding himself, but it didn’t matter any more. It was too late.

Tom was glad that he’d asked Adam to dinner. It felt good not to talk about footy or women or love or jobs. Adam seemed to like him for himself, faults and all. That was a good feeling. He’d forgotten what it was like to be friends, to be liked in this simple uncomplicated way. He was totally blind to Adam’s real feelings. But then Adam had become adept over the years at concealing them. Adam was always falling for incorruptible straight guys, becoming bosom buddies, then suffering the agonies and frustrations of unrequited love.

When they got back to Adam’s flat, Adam invited Tom up. “I have a bottle of very nice red.” Adam would probably not have offered if he hadn’t drunk most of the bottle at dinner and in consequence felt both guilty and rash.

“I’ve got to drive.”

“There’s always the sofa.” Tom pulled a face. But Adam was not going to offer to share his bed. He was struggling to maintain self-control already, and anyway he didn’t want Tom to think that he was coming on to him.

“You have a proper double bed, big enough for two.” Tom would never have suggested it if he had not been so unwilling to go back to the mansion with its ghosts, its memories of Anita and lost innocence everywhere. Adam raised his eyebrows. Tom colored. “Sorry,” he muttered, looking away.

“Oh, piss off, Tom. Of course you can sleep with me.” Adam was amused at the double entendre, and was enjoying being a little cruel to Tom. It pleased him that the great Thomas Siedentrop could be embarrassed.

“Thank you. It’s just that I don’t want to go back to the house. It’s so... empty.”

Adam opened the bottle, and fetched two glasses. “Do you want to talk about it?” he asked, sighing again at the confidant rôle he’d slipped into, but also interested. As far as he knew, the glamorous model was still Tom’s wife, and was waiting at home for him.

“I used to... have a... I was married, and... well... the marriage has ended. And I miss... I hate going back to the house.”

“No shit,” said Adam sympathetically. How many times had straight guys wept on his shoulders about their girlfriends or wives? But the model – what was her name? – had been beautiful. Obviously – the beautiful married the beautiful, or the rich. What chance did a plain, overweight guy like him have? Even if he was starting to move up the wealth ladder. Just a long sequence of one night stands, joyless and unsatisfying. Maybe not even that. When last had he caught someone’s eye and seen that unmistakable look?

Tom was still talking. Adam forced himself to pay attention, to stop this pathetic and unattractive self-pity. “She had a breakdown. She was schizophrenic, and all the drugs she took made it worse, and she kept on having attacks, and then she tried to kill herself, a couple of times.” Tom stopped, looked down at his glass and swirled the rich purple in it from side to side.

Adam waited, wondering whether he should hug Tom if he burst into tears, or just offer him a clean hanky. Clean hanky, he decided.

“She had been, um, having it off with... ,” Tom stopped himself just in time from saying ‘other members of the team’, “ ...a colleague. Everyone knew about it except me.”

“Isn’t that always the way?” murmured Adam, marvelling at his own ability to dredge up clichés, and wondering what Tom had been about to say. “So you’re unattached at the moment.”

“Yes. It’s hard for me to find anyone.”

“Excuse me? Handsome hunk, beaut body, BM convertible? And diddums can’t find a root?”

“Yeah, course I can find a root, you dill!” Tom gave him a lopsided grin. Then his face grew more solemn. “But I want more than that.”

Adam poured him some more wine. He topped up his own glass. He was starting to feel reckless. “Well, and what’s stopping you?”

“No one sees me as myself. Everybody sees Thomas Milton Siedentrop, footy hero.” Oh fuck! Did I just say that out loud? Tom colored deeply, from embarrassment that Adam would think he was blowing his own trumpet, from anger at his own gabbing.

Adam smiled lazily at him, and took another sip of the wine before he spoke.

“What’s ‘footy’?”

They stared at each other then began to laugh, simultaneously.

“You knew all along,” said Tom wryly, surprised that he wasn’t angry.

“Yeah. But I hate footy. I can’t stand all that rah-rah, all the adulation, all the worship of youth and youthful prowess. As far as I was concerned, you were just a guy in the gym. I don’t give a fuck what you did or what you do. Or whom you root,” he added, boldly.

“What do you give a fuck about, then?” Tom was smiling at him, his face open and guileless, friendly and warm, his charm natural, unpractised.

Adam wouldn’t answer. This was getting too intimate, too dangerous. “So you are too famous to find anyone. But you work for that PR firm, something and something. Won’t you soon be forgotten, now that you don’t play any more?”

“Not that soon. Maybe not for years. I’m part of that cocktail-circuit crowd.”

“Drop them,” advised Adam. “You’ll make new friends.”

“Yeah, I know.” Tom’s mouth was quirked up in a tiny smile, and he was looking directly into Adam’s eyes.

Adam looked down, hoping his hard-on wasn’t obvious, thankful he was wearing a thong. “Maybe if you could forget this stuff about being the great footy hero, and just be Tom, maybe you would find someone.” Me, for example! he thought. But he knew that would never happen. What a dill he was! He was hopelessly, futilely in love with Thomas Milton Siedentrop, and he had no hope that the love would ever be returned. Tom might one day be his best friend, although he doubted even that. But he would never be able to love Adam in every way, because he was wired differently. Suddenly feeling sad and weary, and not a little bitter, he said, in a tone which brooked no opposition, “Bed.”

They undressed in silence. To Adam’s relief, Tom was wearing boxers. His own thong seemed over the top now, rather pathetic really, on a par with the rest of his life, and he slipped it off unnoticed with his jeans, his back to Tom, and grabbed some trunks from the underwear drawer.

“Night, Tom.”

“G’night, Adam. And thank you.”

“No worries, mate.”

They went to sleep on the outer edges of the bed, facing away from each other, but in the night when Adam had to get up to wee, Tom had turned over and was facing inwards, and his arm was resting casually on Adam’s waist. For a long time after he’d gotten back into bed, Adam lay facing Tom, studying his face in the dim luminous orange glow cast by the streetlamp, pondering the events of the last few days, and wondering what it would be like to kiss those fabulous lips, to wake up every night next to this guy. Then he turned over to face the other way, and felt the air from Tom’s sigh as he drifted briefly up out of sleep flow across his neck and shoulders.

<<Chapter 6

© 2009 Nigel Puerasch. All rights reserved.
Romantic m2m novels and short stories