Last Summer

by Michael Thomas Ford

Genres: Family Life; LGBT Gay

Synopsis

Michael Thomas Ford delivers a triumphant first novel about a group of gay men looking for love, losing the past, and finding themselves in the bars and on the beaches of Provincetown. Josh Felling has always been a romantic--up until the moment his lover Doug announced that he'd had an affair with a guy from their gym. Now, with his life playing out like a very bad movie of the week, Josh impulsively heads to the Cape for a few days--long enough to figure out where his relationship--what's left of it--might be going. But the summer has other plans for Josh, and his trip to P-town will bring bigger changes than he ever imagined. With its windswept dunes, lazy summer days, and starry nights filled with possibilities, Provincetown holds special appeal for those who call it home. . .and for those who come seeking its open welcome. People like Reilly Brennan, son of an old P-town family, whose days are caught up in wedding plans, even as his nights are increasingly taken over by heated fantasies about other men. . .Wide-eyed, blond-haired, All-American Toby Evans, an escapee from the Midwest ready to spend the summer in the equivalent of gay boot camp for anyone who will tutor him. . .Elegant Emmeline, age unknown, a southern belle straight out of Faulkner, with a mean drag act and almost enough money for her permanent gender transformation. . .Ty Rusk, one of Hollywood's hottest new stars hiding an ages-old secrets about to explode. Weaving in and out of these and other lives like the concierge of a Grand Hotel, Josh is in for the summer of his life, a time of turning points and bridges burned, of second chances and new beginnings, of renewal and hope that will bring him closer to becoming the man he needs to be. "This is a cut above more mainstream gay fiction offerings, thanks to Ford's crisp prose and snappy, contemporary dialogue. . ..the sandy, barefoot-friendly setting morphs all the melodrama into a satisfying beach book--and a pleasant fiction debut for Ford."--Publishers Weekly

Release date: December 10, 2012

Publisher: Kensington Books

Print pages: 352

Sample

I could just go back.

Josh stared out at the passing landscape, trying to distract himself from the thought that had been buzzing around his head like a persistent bee for the past hour and a half. He concentrated instead on the scenery around him. The grass on either side of the highway was rich with the promise of the approaching summer, the expanse of green broken here and there with bright flashes of color where some of the hardier flowers had already opened their faces to the light. The sun itself, growing stronger with every passing day, rewarded their enthusiasm by covering everything with the hazy golden blanket of early afternoon.

I could just go back.

Josh sighed. Lovely as it was, the view wasn’t going to keep his mind off of where he was going, or why. Ever since leaving he had been playing a game with himself. He’d pretended that he was simply going to the store, perhaps to pick up dinner or a couple of movies. It was, after all, Friday. Those were the things he would normally be doing on a Friday afternoon, gathering up the ingredients for a quiet evening at home: a chicken to roast or steaks to grill, some wine to celebrate the end of the workweek, a copy of a recently released video, or if he was feeling romantic, an old standby like It Happened One Night or Barefoot in the Park.

But that would be a normal Friday, and this was not a normal Friday. It was anything but a normal Friday.

I could just go back.

Simultaneous with the recurrence of the nagging thought was the appearance of the sign announcing the upcoming exit for U.S. 6 East. He had three miles or, at his current speed, about two and a half minutes, to decide what he was going to do. Once he was on Route 6 he knew he wouldn’t be going back.

It seemed to Josh as if time stood still while he weighed what lay behind him against what lay ahead of him. If he got on U.S. 6 East, where would it take him? Not in the geographic sense—he knew where the road went—but on a grander scale. What kind of change would he be making in his life if he turned the wheel slightly to the right and took the exit? When he thought about it that way, the off-ramp became much more than just a twist in the asphalt, a sudden diversion from the gray-black ribbon of Massachusetts Highway 3 South.

Fifty miles behind him was Boston. And in Boston was his comfortable apartment, with its familiar furnishings, its view of Fenway Park, and its proximity to the people and places that over the past seven years had become his world. There, too, as comfortable and familiar as the furniture, the view, and the neighborhood, was Doug, his lover of more than eight years. But it was Doug he was driving away from now.

The change in Josh’s world had come that morning, shortly after ten o’clock. Returning from his regular morning run, he had found Doug waiting for him on the living room couch, the couch on which Josh had taken so many Saturday afternoon naps, on which the two of them had sat together so often, fingers entwined, watching TV or reading the Sunday Herald. They’d bought it together, shortly after moving in to the apartment. It had been their first major purchase as a couple, and even though its covering was faded and starting to wear thin in the places where their bodies most often rested against it, they had never been able to part with the memories it held.

But that morning Doug had looked up at Josh from his seat on the couch they had bought together and said, “There’s something I need to tell you.”

The “something” had turned out to be a man from their gym. Josh couldn’t remember his name now—Stephen or Peter or Roger. It didn’t matter. What mattered was that Doug had slept with this man.

“It didn’t mean anything,” Doug had said afterward.

Josh had laughed, despite being in shock. Isn’t that what they always say? he’d thought to himself as he’d stared at the face of the man he’d come to think he knew so well, the man he’d believed would never hurt him. It was as if the two of them were suddenly thrust into the worst kind of movie of the week, and for a moment Josh couldn’t help but wonder which washed-up former star would play him. Matthew Perry, perhaps, if his movie career was fading. Or maybe they could get George Clooney, he’d thought as Doug had waited for him to respond. George Clooney would be good.

When he’d finally accepted what Doug had said to him, Josh had replied with the line he’d always wanted the wounded party in such movies to use. “If it didn’t mean anything, then why did you have to do it?”

Doug had answered him with the usual repertoire of answers. It had only happened one time. He wasn’t really sure why he’d done it. No, they weren’t going to see each other again. Josh had listened impatiently, equally as irritated with the predictability of his lover’s responses as he was with the revelation of his infidelity. The fact that Doug had engaged in the most common of indiscretions—and that he didn’t even know why he’d done it—made everything even worse. At least if he’d had some reason, if it had meant something, then Josh would have something to focus on, to blame, to try and understand even while he was reeling from the initial blow. As it was, there was nothing but questions.

“I think I just needed some excitement,” Doug had said finally, sounding relieved to have come up with some way of breaking the silence that had settled between them while Josh frantically searched for something that would help him remember that it was Doug he was talking to, and not some stranger. “You know, after eight years things do get a little predictable.”

That, more than anything else, was what had caused Josh to leave. The predictability of their relationship, the comfortableness of it, was what he loved most about being with Doug. He liked coming home to the same man every day, and sleeping in the same bed with him night after night. He liked knowing that when they went to their favorite Chinese restaurant Doug would always order the General Chow’s chicken. He liked knowing that if he heard Tom Petty coming from the stereo it meant Doug was in a good mood or, if it was instead the Cowboy Junkies, that he should give his lover some space. He liked knowing that if Doug asked him to rub his back it meant they would soon be making love.

Wasn’t that what being with the same man for eight years was supposed to mean? Wasn’t that why you stayed with someone that long? After the initial rush of falling in love, wasn’t it the gradual accumulation of shared moments, the daily interactions that revealed the totality of the person you chose to share your life with, that made getting together in the first place worthwhile? Josh had asked Doug these questions, more or less without yelling. However, when all of Doug’s replies had begun with “yes, but,” Josh had felt himself beginning to lose control.

That’s when the clothes had gone into the suitcase. Josh had been surprised at how quickly it was all over. It had really only taken him about twenty minutes to gather up what he needed. Doug had followed him around the entire time, trying to calm him down. But that had only made Josh angrier, and finally he’d stopped speaking altogether, cramming his socks and T-shirts and underwear into his bag without even looking at his lover.

“Where are you going?” Doug had asked him as Josh had snatched up his laptop and carried it, along with his bag, down the two flights of stairs to the street.

“Away,” Josh had answered tersely as he’d gotten into his car and pulled away, leaving Doug standing on the street.

The truth was, at the time he really hadn’t known where he was going to go. All he knew was that he wanted to be wherever Doug wasn’t. So at first he’d just driven around with no particular direction in mind, trying not to think. He’d hoped that if he didn’t play the scene over and over in his head, maybe it would turn out not to have happened. Maybe, if he tried hard enough to suppress it, time would somehow be miraculously reversed and Doug’s infidelity would never have happened.

After about an hour, though, he’d pulled the car onto a relatively deserted side street and cried. Then he’d used his cell phone to call Ryan at work. His friendship with Ryan went back further even than his relationship with Doug, beginning when both were newly out of college and newly out in Boston. Over the years they’d seen each other through the usual romantic highs and lows, somehow miraculously managing to be on opposite ends of the dating-breakup continuum most of the time, so that whenever one of them was in need of comfort the other was in a position to remind him that true love was still out there somewhere. As Josh dialed Ryan’s number he couldn’t help but reflect that, true to form, Ryan had recently started dating what appeared to be a great guy after years of suffering through inappropriate and frequently unfaithful boyfriends. It should, he thought bitterly, have been a sign.

When Ryan picked up, the story had spilled out of Josh in a series of tearful bursts interrupted by Ryan having to put him on hold every couple of minutes to take a call from one of the clients whose stock portfolios he tended in hopes of growing their small fortunes into large ones. Each time Josh had been forced to sit and listen to the overly cheerful hold music, he had started crying all over again. It hadn’t seemed fair that while his life was falling apart, somewhere in the world Celine Dion was being allowed to record new love songs.

It was Ryan who, after dutifully siding with Josh in declaring Doug the biggest jerk to ever live, had suggested Provincetown. He had, he told Josh, a couple of clients there who owned a guest house. They had frequently extended an invitation for him to come visit them, and he was sure they would let Josh stay for a few days. With Memorial Day more than a week away, the season hadn’t yet begun, and the town was still relatively deserted. “Just let me give them a call,” he’d told Josh, putting him on hold once again.

The clients, a couple named Ben and Ted, had indeed been more than willing to let Josh stay at their place. Less than ten minutes after hanging up with Josh, Ryan had called back with directions to the house.

“They don’t have any guests coming until the holiday weekend,” Ryan had told him. “You’ll have the place to yourself.”

After thanking Ryan and promising to call him later that evening, Josh had hung up and sat in the car, thinking of every reason why he shouldn’t go. He didn’t know Ted and Ben. He was embarrassed that he was running away. But the truth was that he didn’t really have any legitimate reasons for not accepting their offer. His job as a freelance copywriter for various ad agencies meant that he could basically take time off whenever he wanted to. Besides, he told himself, it was only for the weekend. He just needed a few days away from Doug to process what had happened and decide what his next move would be. And if it made Doug feel bad, all the better.

Before he could change his mind he’d started driving. Now, an hour later, he was having second thoughts. Maybe he should have stayed and talked things out with Doug. After all, wasn’t he the one who was always stressing the importance of communication in a relationship? He did it so often his lover had taken to calling him Oprah whenever he went into another one of his lectures on the subject, usually to some friend who was having relationship difficulties. Perhaps it was time to take his own advice and find out what exactly had made Doug feel he had to go to someone else for something he clearly wasn’t getting from Josh.

But if Doug was so interested in talking things out, why hadn’t he even tried once to call? Josh had set the cell phone on the seat next to him, fully expecting it to ring. Surely Doug was wondering where he was, and when he was coming back. Surely he wouldn’t let Josh just leave. Despite the way he’d fled the apartment, Josh had truly believed that Doug would try to get him to return after giving him an appropriate amount of time to be furious.

Or would he? Maybe, Josh thought, Doug was glad he was gone. Maybe he wanted the apartment to himself to, like Josh, think things over.

Or maybe he’s with Whatshisname, Josh thought grimly.

He wondered what this other guy looked like. Probably a lot like himself, he though miserably. Shortly after he and Doug had started dating, they’d run into Doug’s most recent ex at a party. Josh had been a bit taken aback to see that he and the ex resembled each other: tall, medium builds, short dark hair, and green eyes.

He and Doug had laughed about it later, in bed. “What can I say?” Doug had told him. “I have a thing for you dark-haired boys. Especially when you have hairy chests,” he’d added, starting to run his tongue down Josh’s stomach. He’d kept going, and moments later any jealousy Josh had been feeling about seeing the ex had vanished as the warmth of Doug’s mouth had surrounded him.

The memory of that evening eight years earlier almost made him forget about the ugliness of the morning. Then he pictured Doug in bed not with him but with this new man, someone who resembled him visually but wasn’t him at all. It would be easier if the guy was his physical opposite: blond, perhaps, and short. Maybe some bulked-up gym queen with bleached teeth and steroid pockmarks on his shoulders. At least if he was physically different from Josh there could be some kind of physical element to blame Doug’s behavior on, a momentary yearning for something different, some new taste, touch, or smell that he’d been unable to resist. But if the man looked like him, that meant there was something more substantial at play, something that couldn’t be explained away by Doug wanting to feel a more muscular body or smoother skin beneath his fingers.

How had it happened the first time, Josh wondered. Had they exchanged glances in the showers after their workouts, each sizing up the other while caressing themselves suggestively with soapy hands? Had one of them helpfully offered to spot the other during a routine, being sure to position himself so as to display his jockstrapped crotch to full advantage? Josh knew there had to have been at least minimal courtship, a casual compliment on the shape of a biceps or the strength of a calf that led to something more. After all, you didn’t just go from exchanging pleasantries in the locker room to rolling around naked in some man’s bed. How had the first suggestion of sex come up? Who had made the first move?

No, he decided suddenly, he wasn’t ready to talk it through. A few days away from Doug was exactly what he needed right now. A few days to think—or preferably not think—about what was happening in their relationship. All he wanted to do was sit on the beach and look at the ocean, far away from the distractions of the city, his friends, and the man he was no longer sure he knew at all.

The exit, and the moment of decision, had arrived. Without hesitating, Josh took it.

“Jerry, please tell me you’re going to have these walls painted and my place put back together in the next week.”

Jackie Stavers stood in the doorway of her restaurant, looking at the two men standing on ladders, paint rollers in their hands.

“Sure, sure, Jacks,” Jerry replied, deftly making a blue streak across the wall he was working on. “No problem.”

Jackie groaned. “That’s what you told me last week, Jerry,” she said irritably.

Jerry grinned. “But this time I mean it,” he said.

Jackie shot him a look and retreated through a doorway to the relative safety of the bar area. Back in the main dining room the two men resumed their banter, their voices a muffled reminder of the chaos that had consumed the club for the past month. Jackie opened a bottle of aspirin and popped two into her mouth, following them with a swig from her water glass.

“Tell me again why I agreed to do this?” she said to the bar’s lone patron.

Emmeline laughed. “Because you’re not having sex with your girlfriend,” she said, lifting a perfectly drawn eyebrow and smiling sweetly.

Jackie sighed. “Can we not talk about that?” she said.

Emmeline lifted both of her hands in a gesture of defeat. Her fingers, the long nails recently painted a deep red, fluttered briefly around her face before returning to rest on the bar. “Then what should we talk about?” she asked, the soft drawl of her voice simultaneously teasing and pacifying her friend.

“How about your new act?” suggested Jackie as she began to rearrange the glassware beneath the counter. “What have you come up with?”

“Only the most magnificent evening of illusion and magic you’ve ever seen,” Emmeline purred.

Jackie rolled her eyes. “Sweetie, your entire life is magic and illusion. Could you be more specific? I need to know what to put on the posters.”

Emmeline laughed. “I can see you’re not in the mood for flattering a girl today,” she said. “Fine, I’ll tell you. I’m going to do an evening of standards. Ella. Billie. Etta. Sarah. Dinah. All the old greats. And there will be no lip-synching. It’s all live. Just me and a piano player.”

Jackie, genuinely surprised, stopped what she was doing. “Live?” she said. “And real music? No disco? No drag queen can-can lines? No camp?”

“Well, when you have a boy dressed up as a girl it’s always camp, isn’t it?” answered Emmeline, brushing some of her luxuriously red hair away from her face. For a moment she seemed tired, sad. Then, as if a light switch had been flipped on, the usual smile returned and she looked up at her friend with a mischievous expression. “I thought this dump could use a little class this season,” she said.

Jackie snorted. “Why not?” she said. “It can be part of this makeover I’ve so stupidly attempted.”

Emmeline stood up. Taking her purse from the bar she patted Jackie’s hand. “I’ve got an appointment I have to get to,” she said. “Let’s talk more about the show tonight, shall we?”

Jackie nodded. “Whenever you want to,” she replied.

Emmeline turned to leave, adding as she departed, “And then we’ll talk about the sex you’re not having with your girlfriend.”

When Emmeline was gone Jackie leaned against the wall and rubbed her temples, trying to erase the dull throb that had settled there that morning and refused to leave. The aspirin had done nothing to improve either the headache or her foul mood. What was she doing? The summer season was almost upon her, the place was a wreck, and who knew what was happening between her and Karla?

This wasn’t how the summer was supposed to go. On top of everything else, she was going to be turning forty in August. In her daydreams she’d pictured the summer of her fortieth year as being filled with friends, laughter, and a lover. Her goal had always been to have a home, a successful business, and a fulfilling relationship by the time she reached the milestone that forty represented to her.

She had the home, the business, and the relationship. But of the three, only her home was currently in the state that she wanted it to be. Her relationship—which she really didn’t want to think about—was somewhere between ending and over. As for her business, it would be fine. She knew that. But at the moment it was driving her crazy, and the cumulative effect of the upheaval was becoming unbearable.

For the first time in twenty years she had started thinking about moving away from Provincetown. She had come there fresh out of college, her degree in business administration clutched tightly in her hand. It was supposed to be a two-week summer vacation, a celebration after four years of hard work. As it turned out, she’d never left. During those two weeks she’d fallen in love with the sand and sea, so different from the asphalt landscape of Detroit, where she’d grown up, and when the time had come to leave she just hadn’t gone. That was one of the things she missed most about being twenty, the ability to be irresponsibly impulsive. Now, with two mortgages, a staff depending on her for their income, and roots that went deep into the rock P-Town was built upon, she felt more like a fixture: dependable, stable, and dull.

She thought back to that first year, filled with so much promise. After the raucous party that was summer in P-Town had ended, the quiet of fall had been a welcome respite. She’d gloried in walking on Herring Cove Beach in the early mornings, and in the beauty of the sun on the water. But the bleakness of winter on the cape had almost done her in, and when spring had come she’d been ready to leave. Then summer had wrapped her in its golden arms once more and she’d stayed.

Since then she’d come to love the fall and winter, seeing in them faces of Provincetown that remained hidden to the summer visitors. Plus, she’d become one of the Rounders, the name she’d coined for the community of people who lived in the town all year long. They were diehards who welcomed the tourists with open arms each summer, if only because they provided the Rounders with the financial means to live there during the months when the only faces they saw were each other’s. They were the caretakers of the town, watching over it as it slept, preparing to meet its visitors when the days again grew longer.

The first two years she lived in Provincetown, Jackie worked at Franny’s, a restaurant popular with the lesbian and gay crowds that comprised the majority of the town’s summer residents. Franny herself was a loud, brassy old school butch who refused to reveal her age but who often regaled her enthusiastic listeners from her position behind the bar with tales of how she and her friends had been jailed during the Stonewall riots for breaking New York’s laws against women dressing as men. Later, in the few hours that the restaurant was silent between its closing at two-thirty in the morning and its reopening at six for breakfast, she would sometimes tell Jackie other stories, stories about being beaten up by men who saw something in her appearance that angered them, stories about falling in love with married femmes who always broke her heart, stories about loneliness and despair tempered with defiance and the determination to find or forge a community of her own. Often these stories were accompanied by glass after glass of whiskey or gin and tonics, and it was in those late night, early morning talks that Jackie had begun both to find her own identity and to develop a relationship with alcohol that, several years later, would force her to find herself all over again.

Franny had seen in Jackie a younger version of herself. Despite the differences in their ages, colors, and backgrounds, Franny saw herself as something of a mother figure to the young woman, although, Jackie thought, she would have bristled at being thought of as anything other than a daddy. “You may be a young black butch and I may be an old white one,” Jackie remembered Franny saying one night after her sixth scotch, “but we understand each other, you and I.”

Jackie worked for Franny for three years, first as a waitress and eventually as a manager. During that time she put her business degree to work, encouraging Franny to expand the place and add entertainment. The popularity of the restaurant—and its profits—grew with each successive summer, until Franny’s became the hottest spot in town for vacationers and locals alike. Even in winter they remained open, scaling back the operation to accommodate the tastes and schedules of the Rounders, who used it as a gathering place on cold, dark nights when they didn’t want to be alone.

Then, one March night, Jackie had received a phone call. It had been the police, telling her that Franny had been found on the beach. She’d drunk an entire bottle of whiskey and collapsed on the sand, facedown. Unable to breathe, she’d quickly suffocated.

If Franny’s death was a shock, Jackie received an even larger one a week later when she got another call. This one was from a lawyer, informing her that she was the sole beneficiary of Franny’s will. While the money left to her was by no means a fortune, Jackie had also been left full ownership of the restaurant.

For a month she’d kept the place closed, unable to even think about it operating under the directorship of anyone but Franny, let alone under her sole control. Whenever she’d attempted to stand behind the bar, she’d felt sick to her stomach, as if she were playing in her mother’s closet and would be caught at any moment. Instead, each night she’d drowned the pain in glass after glass of whiskey. She’d told herself that the drinks were a celebration of Franny’s spirit, but even as she sank deeper and deeper into the comfortable haze of the alcohol she knew that celebrating a person’s life with the same thing that had killed her was no kind of memorial.

Finally she’d decided that the only way to truly keep Franny’s spirit alive was to keep alive the place that had housed it. The restaurant had been Franny’s temple, and Jackie was determined that it remain open for business. So come Memorial Day, Franny’s welcomed its patrons back with fluttering rainbow flags and a two-for-one happy hour to celebrate the life of its namesake. News of Franny’s death had spread quickly among the summer people, and the place was packed night after night as people gathered to talk about her and share stories.

That summer had made Jackie even more determined to remain in Provincetown. With the money left to her by Franny, she bought a small house and began fixing it up. She poured herself into the club, and became even more firmly entrenched in the community, both that of the gay summer trade and that of the Rounders. Both welcomed her, and by the time fall had come again she’d known that she would never leave.

Now, though, she wasn’t so sure. The seventeen years that had gone by since Franny’s death had brought many changes to Jackie’s life. The most significant, to her, was the sobriety she’d begun almost fifteen years earlier. In the two years after Franny’s death and her inheritance of the business, Jackie had drunk more and more. The turning point had come on the morning following the celebration of her twenty-fifth birthday, when she’d woken up in bed with not one but two women whose names and faces she couldn’t recall. After getting them up and out of her house, she’d looked in the paper for the listings of local AA meetings and had gone to the first available one.

Getting sober brought other changes as well. For one, she’d renamed the restaurant. In her third year as owner, Franny’s became Jackie’s, and while there was a bit of grumbling from some patrons who found the move insulting to the previous owner’s memory, Jackie herself saw it as a symbol of both her newfound freedom and her mentor’s own decision to call the restaurant after herself. “After all,” Jackie had told her friends, “the boat should be named after the captain.”

Although initially she’d feared working in a place whose very existence depended on the sale and consumption of the one product now forbidden to her, Jackie had found staying away from alcohol relatively easy. It was as if in changing the name of the club, she’d banished the one aspect of Franny’s spirit that didn’t wish her well. Secretly she also suspected that Franny would have been proud of her for doing the one thing that she herself hadn’t been able to. Whenever Jackie looked at the framed photo of Franny hanging behind the bar, she imagined the old dyke giving her a wink and saying, “Good for you, kid. You made it.”

The changes since then had been less dramatic, but no less important. Chief among them was Jackie’s introduction to Karla. Like herself, Karla had initially been a summer person, an academic with a passion for Virginia Woolf and a month-long share in one of the town’s many guest houses. Jackie had seen her one night, sitting at a table in the restaurant with friends, and had fallen in love immediately, enchanted by her blue eyes, short blond hair, and wild laugh. When she’d gone over to ask the group how everything was, Karla’s coy smile in response had done her in completely.

Their courtship had been relatively slow, at least in summer romance terms. Jackie had waited another week before asking Karla out, and another before taking her to bed. Then Karla had returned to Seattle, where she had a job as an assistant professor, and things had continued by telephone and letter. But when Karla’s second summer in P-Town had been even more memorable than the first, Jackie had upped the ante by suggesting that living in closer proximity would not be unwelcome.

The opportunity presented itself when, toward the end of her planned vacation, Karla received word that she would not be offered the professorship she’d assumed would be hers in the fall. With no reason to return, she’d agreed to Jackie’s plan to move in together.

That had been ten years ago. During that time, their relationship had settled into a comfortable pattern. After a year of unemployment, during which she’d worked for Jackie at the restaurant, Karla had found a teaching job in Providence. It meant she had to spend three nights a week away from Jackie, but they’d adjusted and things had worked out just fine.

At least until Karla had begun to tire first of the winters in Provincetown and then of Jackie’s attentions in bed. At