I always find twilight magical. The sky shades from the orange of sunset through to a deep, dark blue, and you can see the first stars. Drivers are just beginning to put their headlights on, and the neon on storefronts still looks clean and inviting. The streets of Waikiki are filled with well-dressed tourists on their way to dinner, as the last surfers wash up on the beach and drag their boards home through the growing darkness. The evening is still full of possibility.
As Tim and I drove out toward Diamond Head, the electric current running between us made me excited and nervous. I kept up a steady patter about the fancy residential neighborhoods, things Harry and I had done as kids, crimes I’d investigated, landmarks along the way.
We stopped for dinner at a little restaurant on a bluff overlooking the ocean. We caught the last glimpse of the sunset, and then a tangible darkness settled over the water, broken only by the running lights of a small cruise ship heading toward Moloka‘i.
“So what brought you to Hawai’i?” I asked, after we’d ordered, when we were sitting back with beers against the walls of the booth.
“It’s about as far away from my family as I can get,” he said, smiling a little. “I come from a pretty severe Irish Catholic family in western Massachusetts. College at Amherst, law school at U. Mass. Then I got a job with a firm in Boston, and after a couple of trips to the Combat Zone I realized there was no getting around the fact that I was gay. I mean, I’d done the dating thing, high school, college, the whole nine yards. I didn’t really understand what I felt, and I couldn’t talk about it with anybody, so I just hoped it would go away.”
He took a long draw on his beer. “I have three sisters and two brothers, and they all live somewhere around Boston. My sister-in-law’s cousin worked at the same firm I did, and my brother’s best friend lived in the same apartment building. I knew that if I wanted any kind of life I’d have to get out.”
“You didn’t want to come out to them?”
“My brothers make fag jokes and my mother knows the Bible by heart. I will never come out to them.”
I took a deep breath. “Okay.”
“Last year I started looking at ads in bar journals. I finagled my way onto an international trade case with a Japanese client and did a Berlitz class in Japanese. I thought about San Francisco, but it’s too much of a cliche. I had a couple of nibbles from firms in LA, but the market there is so cutthroat. Then I saw an ad from Hollings and Arakawa, that they needed an attorney with international background, trial experience and some Japanese, and faxed my resume within half an hour. They had me come out for an interview, they liked me, and voila, I’m here.”
“I’m glad,” I said, and we smiled at each other.
He took another sip of beer and said, “How about you? You always lived here?”
“College on the mainland,” I said. “UC San Diego. Most of a year on the North Shore, trying to be surfing champion of the world. Then back here.”
“What made you give up trying to be the world champion?”
I thought about it. I could give him the speech I knew by heart, about realizing I didn’t want it hard enough. But for the first time, I felt like I could be honest, that I could tell Tim anything. “A guy sucked my dick, and I found I liked it, and it scared the hell out of me, and I ran.”
When I went to pick up my beer glass, my hand was shaking. “It’s all right,” Tim said. “You want to tell me about it?”
I wanted to. I started with surfing with Harry in high school, and went on, as our salads arrived, to tell him about college in San Diego, and then living on the North Shore. By the time the waiter took the salad plates away, I had told him about Dario and his little shack on the beach.
“Must have hurt like hell,” Tim said. “Giving up all that stuff. Your dreams.”
“It did. And I could never tell anyone my real reason.”
It was easy to talk to him. I had been pretty honest in every facet of my life, except when it came to my sexuality, and I found that when I finally could talk about it, the honesty came easily.
Over dessert and coffee we laid out our love lives for each other. He’d done a couple of foolish things in Boston, bookstore blow jobs and such, but he’d been lucky, he hadn’t caught anything, and he’d been careful for the last two years or so. One very discreet affair with a guy he’d met at the health club, just before he left Boston. “It wasn’t really what you’d call a relationship,” he said. “I mean, we never dated or anything. It’s just sometimes after we worked out we’d go over to his place and have sex. Safe sex, you know, no exchange of bodily fluids. But we never went to dinner or the movies or held hands walking down the street.”
I told him about the string of short-term flings I’d had, picking up tourist women at beachfront bars, romancing and bedding them, always hoping the next one would be the one who could change me. “I was as safe as I could be,” I said. “Always condoms, and I get tested every six months.”
“Are you out to your family?”
“Not yet. But I think I will be eventually. In a way, that’s what’s scariest to me. I mean, I’m the kind of person, I’m like a dog with a bone. I can’t stop worrying it. That’s the kind of detective I am-I can’t give up on a case until I finish it. I still have open cases from years ago, and every now and then when things get slow I go back to them. There’s one missing girl, a teenager. She disappeared two years ago, right after I became a detective. I still have her picture in my wallet, and I take it around sometimes, to shelters for runaways and out on the street. I know she didn’t get off the island, so she’s got to be here somewhere. I can’t stop looking for her. It’s the same way with this, with coming out. Once I’m started I know I can’t stop until I see it through.”
“You can stop,” he said. “It’s allowed. You can come to a place you feel comfortable, and then just stop.”
“Maybe you can,” I said. “Maybe lots of people can. I can’t.” I paused. “Unfortunately, it seems to be the way I’m made. I can’t stop something once I start it.”
“We’ll see about that later,” Tim said, smiling.
After a long romantic walk on the beach, I drove us back to Waikiki. “You want me to drop you off?” I asked. “Or you want to come up to my place, I don’t know, maybe have a nightcap or something?”
“Let’s take it slow, okay? I can walk home from your place.”
I pulled into a space in the lot behind my building and killed the engine. “So tell me,” I said, struggling to keep the tremor out of my voice. “How do you feel about kissing on the first date?”
In response he simply turned to me, and we kissed. There was a scent of plumeria in the air, a distant whir of traffic in the background. We kissed a couple of times, and he reached inside my shirt and played with my nipples, which hardened at his touch. I kissed his chin and his cheek and blew in his ear, and he shivered. “You like that,” I said.
He put his hand on my crotch, where I was hard, and said, “You seem to like it, too,” and laughed.
We kissed again, and I ran my fingers through his hair. It was so short, and wiry. I had to laugh.
“What’s so funny?”
“I’ve never kissed anyone with such short hair.” I kissed him again. “Or with a mustache, either.”
He leaned over and kissed me, deep, tongue to tongue. “So how is it, kissing a man?” he asked.
I didn’t know what else to say besides, “I like it.”
We made out for a while longer. One part of me couldn’t believe what I was doing, and another part didn’t want to stop. Finally he pulled back and said, “Let’s save some mystery for a second date, okay?”
“So there’s going to be a second date?”
“I’d say we could do that. And actually you promised me a surfing lesson.”
He had business dinners scheduled for Thursday and Friday, so we agreed to meet at my apartment Saturday around three and go surfing. Though we didn’t say anything about the evening I assumed we’d spend it together.
He got out of the truck then. “’Til Saturday,” he said. “Aloha.”
“Aloha.” I sat there for a few minutes, watching him walk through the parking lot and turn onto Lili’uokalani. Then I got out and went upstairs to bed.