Running in Bed by Jeffrey Sharlach

Author:Jeffrey Sharlach
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Two Harbors Press

Thanksgiving 1979, I went to Scarsdale alone. My parents seemed to have made great progress over the past year since the visit with David led to our conversation. We still spoke most Sundays by phone and, like before, the talk had gone back to being more routine, revolving around the health of various relatives, my job, and the news.

"We saw the pictures on TV of the memorial services for Harvey Milk," Herb told me. I had been out gallivanting around town and hadn't even realized a year had passed since the gay councilman had been assassinated in San Francisco.

Herb would often mention something he'd seen in the media recently about gay issues and was careful to tell me that "Mom and I both watched it." I was glad that they were more accepting in an intellectual sense, but they didn't seem to want to know any details— and that was okay with me, too.

Christmas seemed to creep up before I was ready. Thanksgiving had fallen late in the month and when I went back to work the Monday after, it was already December. Jim called to invite me again for the Christmas cocktail party, and as much as I tried, I couldn't resist asking whether he'd heard from Tommy.

"Not a word," Jim said. "I thought you might be in touch with him."

"No," I told him, and actually, I felt relieved, knowing Tommy wasn't around. It was a lot easier to be free of him, knowing he was God-knows-where, instead of a subway ride away.

There were a lot of parties those three weeks between Thanksgiving and Christmas, and I ended up spending a lot of time with David. I went alone to the CBA Christmas party, which was at the Cloud Club, a private club on the top floor of the Chrysler building, where the ceiling was painted light blue with puffy white clouds. Randy came but left early, and I ended up spending much of the night with Carole, looking out through the little triangular windows at the sparkling city, seventy-seven floors below. And, yes, even though I didn't know where in the universe he might be, it was hard not to think about waking up last Christmas morning with Tommy's arms around me in bed.

Alan Nesoir invited David and Russell to sit at his table at the annual Costume Institute dinner, a Who's Who of the fashion world held at the Metropolitan Museum of Art as a fund-raiser for the museum's Costume Institute on the first Monday night in December. But Russell had to be away for work, and David had asked Alan if I could come along in his place. We rented tuxedos for the occasion, and it was a memorable night, starting with cocktails in the glassed-in atrium housing the Temple of Dendur, recently transported from the banks of the Nile to the Upper East Side of Manhattan.

That was followed by dinner in the Met cafeteria, which was upgraded considerably for the evening, decorated in the style of a Parisian bistro.

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