I was talking with Henny after work one day, as the summer days grew milder and one could still stay outside in the daylight and she did not want to go directly home, after instructions from Ali that she was to come directly home from work, since he knew she was probably hanging out with me. Even her mother in law had pleaded with her over the phone, “please just stop spending so much time with the homosexual,” Henny told me, which kind of made me feel bad and I suppose it registered on my face, because at that point she quickly asked if we could change the subject and if the topic could be about anything except her home life.

What else was there to say? It was a quiet summer, I was slowly preparing myself for her leaving and for my life to get even quieter. The country was sleepy. The city was getting spruced up for the September first independence day celebrations and they were taking out some of the trolleybus lanes and expanding the streets. When you turned on CNN it was only talk about a possible war in Iraq. Neighboring Afghanistan and Uzbekistan’s small moment in the public eye had quickly become eclipsed by this.

And there was little in the local news. Nightclubs now closed after 12:00, except for the ones owned by the president’s daughters and the Che Guevara, which was protected by one of the big mob bosses. Billiards were now banned. The president’s older daughter had moved back to town since she now found herself on an Interpol list because she took her children back to Uzbekistan from her estranged husband in New Jersey without showing up to the custody hearing, and had since opened up a pop-music radio station, a fashion magazine, a nightclub, and a beauty salon, and probably many other things. And behind every story there were plenty of fantastic theories and rumours, which we’d talked all through so that there was little left of them to talk about. They were what they were, incomprehensible, immaterial, trivial.

“So tell me about you,” she said.

So I decided to tell her, to speak out loud about the thing that I had mulled over so many times in my head, this summer. I told her about Jason. I said that I thought that I might be in love with him. But I knew I could never have him. He wasn’t interested in me. And yet, he calls me all the time to spend time together. I even thought of telling him how I felt.

Henny said that I should do it. “Tell him how you feel,” she said, just like that. “What’s the worst that could happen?”

“Everything,” I said. “Everything will suddenly be awkward, since he probably doesn’t feel the same way at all. And he’ll probably stop calling me and that will be the end of it. I’ll never see him again.”

I decided I wouldn’t say anything.

Labels: Thinking Out Loud

  ¶ 7:50 AM 1 Comments

  So, I liked Jason, I'd grown to admit to myself. More than just like, perhaps a crush. Evan after listening patiently through his stories of hand-holding with his boxer friend, loaning money to him, carefully masking my feelings and an urge to tell him, why do you look there, when everything you really want is right here?

And I suffered through hearing about his heartaches and mistakes, sometimes living through them with him, like the time he'd picked up some rough and sexy guy off a construction lot near a swimming pool we had just left. The guy looked like the kind of guys that Uzbeks called a "horib," a hick, a bumpkin, and could barely string together an intelligible sentence in Russian. Not that Jason could notice this with his bad Russian. But as always, I served as the interpreter, the mediator, the fixer, brokering their meeting, on the street. Guys always liked to look at Jason, because he was big and tall, and Jason prompted me to approach the gawking shirtless young man, baring his muscled physique, and ask him to sit with us for a drink at one of the makeshift cafes on the street, at which there was little to talk about except prompt him to come home with us, to Jason's house.

I thought it was a bad idea, i whispered to English to Jason in front of the guy. "I think this guy is not safe," I said, thinking that perhaps he might be a bit crazy. But I could not deny his raw attractiveness. Regardless, we took him in a taxi to Jason's where I sat sentinel in the living room, watching the football game while they had sex in the bedroom, occasionally rapping on the door and reminding Jason that we were going to be late for the farewell party at the house of the U.S. Embassy's Deputy Chief of Mission because I needed to go home and change my clothes. At one point Jason walked out wrapped in the fitted sheet off his bed, hurrying to the bathroom and in horror, whispering to me that the guy had shit in his bed, and he had to strip the bed and shower himself off, furiously tossing the sheet into a washing machine in the kitchen on the way, and into a shower. The boy came out with a wild look in his eye after him demanding money.

I only tolerated this in the name of unrequited feelings, just to be near him and expect nothing more, watching him go through mistake after mistake that summer as the days grew shorter, the swimming pools began to close for the season, the sun gentler, and the desert streets of the city grew ever so slightly more populous as the residents of Tashkent returned from their summer holidays.  ¶ 5:03 AM 0 Comments