Clemens hated doctors. When he came of age in the late ‘80s, they invariably made him feel worse—even the ones whose off-the-cuff diagnoses and hair-trigger antibiotic prescriptions made him, physically, better. They’d ugly-eye his hacking coughs and splotchy complexion before assuring him, almost begrudgingly, that it was merely seasonal allergies. They’d lecture him when drawing blood, and flat-out condescend to him when delivering the results, always negative, because he, without fail, used protection and scrutinized the arms of potential lovers for needle marks with the tenacity he exhibited in boyhood when scouring the creek near his home for arrowheads. From his late teens all the way to his late forties, he departed doctors’ offices fogged in self-loathing, as if he were Patient Zero of the plague that was mercilessly picking off his friends and antagonizing the world. 

It didn’t matter that twenty years had elapsed since he attended one of those funerals. It didn’t matter that today’s prophylactic drugs were the godsend he and so many of his lost friends had prayed for. It didn’t matter that today’s doctors grew up binging Will & Grace and Modern Family, understood “fag” to be derogatory, Ronald Reagan to be a heartless bastard. Clemens still resented the profession, which was why he ignored his back until the excruciating pain rang through his body, nearly sending him veering off the road when en route to meet his boyfriend Vincenzo at the newly listed French Victorian on which they were considering making an offer. 

The intake doctor, whose name was Chad (Just call me Doctor Chad, it’s cool), inquired for how long he’d been experiencing the blood-curdling discomfort. 

Certain that, were he to admit his discomfort, really, its germinal inkling (which couldn’t be characterized as “discomfort” so much as a “hey-that’s-a-funny-feeling” feeling), occurred three months earlier, when Clemens and Vincenzo scouted potential neighborhoods in which to potentially purchase a home, he would be judged. Grossly and unfairly. Charting the sensation’s evolution—from funny feeling to not-so-funny tingle to trenchant clawing like a subcutaneous pack of wolverines gorging on a caribou—would inexorably compromise the doctor’s opinion of him, possibly jeopardizing Clemens’ medical care.  

“Couple of days.” He flinched at the doctor’s touch. 

Doctor Chad ceased palpating Clemens’ doughy midsection and proffered a buy-one-get-one-free smile. It soon became clear what he was selling: Tests. Blood panels, MRI, CAT scan, drive-by consults conducted by specialists who pawed Clemens with the brute force generally reserved for CPR dummies and expected him to produce a buffet of fluid samples on command. When next Doctor Chad graced Clemens curtained stall, he was no longer smiling. 

A tumor, he explained. Namely, a lipoma. Just over six centimeters in diameter. No doubt it had been growing for years, indiscernible until it glanced the sciatic nerve.  

Clemens sat nonplussed. He thought about Vincenzo, gleefully roaming the French Victorian, mentally renovating each square foot. Clemens hadn’t wanted to worry him and so, clutching his side and hobbling through the emergency room doors, had fired off a nebulous but adamant text about a screwup at the office that required his immediate attention. 

Dr. Chad’s expression had altered from doleful to impatient, as if he were waiting on Clemens. Was Clemens supposed to sob? Bellow? Rend a garment as he marched outside to fashion his mouth around a German-engineered tailpipe in the hospital parking lot? Surely there was a proper, even noble, response to news of your impending demise. Which meant there was an ignoble response. However, Clemens found himself at a loss as to what distinguished the former from the latter. He considered if reactions like this were not binary but spectral. Like the Mohs scale for mineral hardness—his countenance graded between talc and diamond. Still, was it preferable to come off as keen and vulnerable, like talc, or severe and resilient, like diamond? To be that which is smattered on a newborn’s ass or that which fuels the pernicious enslavement of children in Sierra Leone?

“How long do I have?” The phlegmy underbelly of Clemens’ voice belied his poise.

Dr. Chad, dumbstruck, issued a honking laugh. “Oh, my bad. You’re not dying. Yeah, the diagnosis is a downer, but the prognosis is A-okay. Heck, if you’ve got time, I can remove it right now.” Dr. Chad patted Clemens’ shoulder. “No muss, no fuss.”

Soon, Clemens was prone on a surgical table, a scalpel floating above his back. His thoughts were squarely post-surgery, specifically how he’d explain the procedure and months of concealed pain to Vincenzo without panicking him or triggering an intractable argument. He was role playing a promising scenario when Dr. Chad began narrating the procedure. “I’m making three incisions directly above the mass,” he said, and then asked if Clemens had any questions. 

“Do patients normally ask you questions when you operate?” 

“Some patients like to know everything,” Dr. Chad said, which made Clemens feel stupid and ungrateful. “Some bring in a friend to film it, but you don’t seem like the type. Anyway,” he continued, “now I’m applying pressure to the skin around the mass. Questions?” Clemens, biting his lip, groaned in the negative. “Wowzer, that’s a big one. Okay, now I’m removing the lipoma. Do you have any—” 

“Just shut the fuck up and take it out.” 

Clemens was jolted by the sound of his own voice. His skin, every inch that wasn’t anesthetized, prickled. He bit his lip even harder, and then realized he’d been biting it all along. 

“What questions could I possibly have at this point that would matter?” said a voice identical to Clemens’ voice but distinctly separate. “It’s not like I’m auditioning you to read the audiobook of this surgery.”

Clemens wrenched his neck around. “What the hell is that?” he asked.

“Oh, so you do have a question?” Dr. Chad said. “It appears to be your lipoma.”

“It…it can talk?”

“Bingo.” 

“Is that normal?”

“Normal is a problematic word,” Dr. Chad said. “Normalcy can be misleading.” 

“Does this worry you?” Clemens asked.

“If it did, I wouldn’t tell you. I don’t want to say anything that might affect your vitals.”

“Is that supposed to make me feel better?” 

Dr. Chad sighed. “Only if it does make you feel better. If not, then it wasn’t intended to. And if it makes you feel worse, best you forget I said it.”

“You quack stoner motherfucker…” The lipoma cursed a blue streak, the eerily familiar voice amplifying as Dr. Chad sheared away the connective tissue and plopped it into a surgical basin. The mass resembled a raw chicken breast marinated in oyster sauce. Doctor Chad carved off a fragment. The lipoma went silent. “For the biopsy,” he said, and then began suturing the incision. 
“What about the rest of it?” Clemens asked.

“It’ll be destroyed.”

Clemens was stunned. “My lipoma can speak. Don’t you think we should tell someone?”

Dr. Chad looked askance. “I’m bound by doctor-patient privilege. HIPPA’s a bitch.”

“But doesn’t it belong to me? I mean, technically, isn’t it my property?”

Dr. Chad shrugged. “If you really want it…” He grabbed a specimen container. “This quack stoner motherfucker doesn’t want to disappoint you.”

Clemens called Vincenzo from the car and divulged his true whereabouts, reiterating Dr. Chad’s A-okay prognosis as if it were the snappy chorus to a Billboard-topping pop ballad. The rhythm wasn’t catchy enough to hearten Vincenzo, who was brooding on Clemens’ porch with a nuclear bunker’s worth of groceries when Clemens pulled up. 

“Hope you weren’t waiting long.” Clemens unlocked the front door. 

Resentment carved through Vincenzo’s tawny brow. He looked five years older than usual, which was still ten years younger than Clemens. He adjusted the groceries in his arms. A glossy pamphlet ornamented with the realtor’s logo jutted over the bag lip. “Not nearly as long as I would have been waiting if you’d died on the operating table.”

“If I had died, at least you know I’m well insured.” 

Among the gamut of how-we-met stories, theirs was more charming than most. A fellow executive at Clemens’ consulting firm had drowned while scuba diving in Aruba, leaving behind a wife and three teenagers. His widow called about his company life insurance policy, only to learn that Clemens’ firm, unlike its competitors, did not offer executive life insurance policies. A collection was taken up, grievances filed, rumors of mutiny and defection circulated, until the board of directors agreed to invest in the “financial security and peace of mind of those most valuable to those most valuable to the firm,” or so the company-wide email proclaimed. Clemens had never considered life insurance, nor had he cared much for the deceased coworker, but he valued corporate perks. 

“I met with the insurance broker and fell in love” was how he phrased it when anyone pressed for the couple’s story. And people pressed. Hard and often, the way they might if Clemens had resculpted his physique from morbidly obese to Ironman triathlete. “He came in for life insurance and I sold him a brand-new life” was Vincenzo’s go-to witticism to cap off the tale of their courtship. Without exception, his version was deemed more credible than Clemens’. Never mind that it was the exact same story of Vincenzo flirting with Clemens, concocting excuses for them to rendezvous after hours under the guise of due diligence, until Clemens finally(!) grasped he was being pursued.   

Vincenzo’s upper lip quivered, the groceries quaking in his arms. “I’ll have to check that there’s no lying, selfish asshole exception in your policy.”

There are unique complications to dating a person considerably younger than oneself. Clemens had surmised as much before he became the Father Christmas of his own May-December romance. For one, the seemingly endless opportunities to feel the gap between your respective umbilical bungee jumps. Be it offhand remarks about TV shows Clemens had once committed to cultishly and Vincenzo had never heard of, or Jeopardy clues about world events Clemens had lived through and Vincenzo had perused on Wikipedia. For three years he had been sleeping with a man who was oblivious to the Raggedy Ann doll Clemens’ mother smacked him for wanting, and this rattled him more than anything. There were objects he had once coveted with every fiber of his being—objects that were meaningless to the man he now coveted with those selfsame fibers.

Though other challenges he had not anticipated. Most notable among these were the disparate approaches to conflict. Each generation cultivating and abiding its own rules of engagement. Before Vincenzo, sarcasm was a fighting style Clemens would tolerate only in his dearest friends and most indispensable colleagues, reckoning it wholly unsuitable in lovers. The bait-and-switch of meaning that plunged fraught dialogues into a crypt of subtext. The reverence for irreverence that struck Clemens as insurmountable detachment. For him, there was nothing more unsavory than feeling estranged from the person he was inside of. But Vincenzo’s weaponized irony was different. Less a degenerate habit than a congenital defect, like dyslexia or being born with a third nipple. And like a third nipple, the trick to getting past it was to pretend it wasn’t there. 

Vincenzo shouldered inside the condo and commandeered the kitchen. Before he turned on the stove, his cell phone rang. “Mom, he’s fine. I will tell him. I will tell him that, too. No, don’t come over. Mom, do not. We are fine. We are handling this. I will call you after dinner. Love you.” Vincenzo’s expression grew stern. “Howard and Gia were freaking out. They send their love and want to know if there’s anything you need.” 

Vincenzo’s parents were thoughtful and doting in a way previously unimaginable to Clemens. He realized this before meeting them, just months into dating Vincenzo, when they sent Clemens a birthday card. Can’t wait to meet you! We know you’re a special guy!, the glittering card read. When they finally met, Clemens was greeted with suffocating hugs and brazen gushing. The familiarity was off-putting. Gia and Howard made a point to trot out Clemens’ biography with the smug glee of a pendant. By the evening’s close, it had felt less like meeting his boyfriend’s parents than coming face-to-face with his spy’s handlers. Sometimes he just wanted to tell them it was enough, to chill out and take a breath. But really, he knew his resentment owed to embarrassment. Their parental affection like a foreign language that made him feel like an immigrant in the land of familial acceptance. 

“I’ll call them tomorrow. Thank them for their concern.”

“And apologize for worrying them,” Vincenzo said over the sizzle of olive oil and garlic cloves.

“Apologize? I don’t think I—” Clemens caught himself. He didn’t want to fight, and maybe he did owe them an apology by proxy. He felt a rumble in his pocket and remembered the lipoma. As much as he wanted to show off his loquacious medical marvel he accepted that such a bizarre revelation might further strain an already tense evening. In the privacy of his bedroom, Clemens brought out the lipoma. The mass appeared larger, squishing against the container wall. He hoisted it toward the lamp light, rotating the container like a globe and studying the mass’ lardaceous geography. How such an evolutionary anomaly was possible suddenly seemed irrelevant. How fell under the jurisdiction of scientists and academics, those who pursued how in a Marco Polo-esque crusade for certainty. Clemens was fixated on the when—as in when did the lipoma begin growing, eavesdropping on his life? 

“How long were you inside me?” he asked the lipoma. There was no reply. “Speak,” Clemens demanded, and felt at once foolish and discourteous. “Please. I just want to understand.” The lipoma remained mum. Clemens resigned himself to wait it out, like a detective weakening a suspect’s resolve by leaving him to baste in solitude. 

He heard the cutting board bear the brunt of Vincenzo’s ire, the earthy tang of puttanesca wafting through the house. An hour later, Clemens ambled downstairs to a sumptuous dinner and a markedly calmer chef. 

He drew Vincenzo close. “I didn’t want you to freak out. I was sure it was nothing and I was right.” 

“Surgery isn’t nothing.” Vincenzo, somber, nestled his head atop Clemens’ shoulder.  

“The bunion you had lasered off, that was surgery. Neither of us lost sleep over it. We can talk about my back, or you can tell me about the house. Your choice.” 

From the initial helping of spaghetti to the last acidic residue of puttanesca spooned of their plates, Vincenzo detailed the French Victorian room by room, decoding the realtor’s buzzy adjectives like “cozy” and “serene” and “elegantly functional,” footnoting necessary renovations and prophesizing the saturnalias they’d cohost. Clemens took it in stride, allowing himself to be transported by the cozy serenity of elegant functionality. 

He’d been caught off-guard when Vincenzo originally brought up purchasing a home together. All these months later, he wasn’t entirely clear on what had transpired. An innocuous observation about historically low mortgage rates on Clemens’ part prompting Vincenzo to inquire if Clemens had ever considered finding a bigger home, to which Clemens, obtuse, replied that the thought had never crossed his mind. This sparked in Vincenzo an existential crisis, Clemens hastily talking him down from activating the ejection seat on their relationship. The next level, Vincenzo had howled, when are we taking this to the next level? 

Another generational difference: Metrics. Clemens grew up in a world devoid of levels, longitude without latitude. You were either in the closet or out. Or, of course, you were in and deluded yourself into believing you were out. Frequenting secluded bars four counties from home, nightfall Duran Duran first names only. Bathhouse trysts, steam cloaking flesh, the act recorded to memory as a mosaic of haze and murmuration. Envelopes stuffed with money you couldn’t afford to give away, mailed to the headquarters for gay advocacy, to hospices caring for AIDS victims, to needle exchange programs. Clemens belonged to this third station from the time he was fourteen—when he found his diary splayed on his freshly sheeted bed, opened to the page where he’d come out to himself weeks earlier, the entry appended with his mother’s handwriting: You aren’t one and better not let Erskine think so!!!—until he was forty-two. His mother dead five years. His boss catering lunch to celebrate his daughter’s nuptials to another woman. Congratulations and deli meat all around, a conference room full of unfazed, sandwich-devouring coworkers, and for the first time in his life Clemens felt as if he could breathe in the light of day.   

“And the backyard, absolutely to die for,” Vincenzo said. “Lush and sprawling. Even has one of those old-timey stone wishing wells.”

“Make a wish?” Clemens asked.

“That you bend me over it the minute the closing papers are signed—right before we bulldoze the fucker and fill the hole with cement. It’s a liability nightmare, and a touch maudlin. I don’t want to feel like we’re living in a Thomas Kinkade wet dream.” He grinned at Clemens. “What would you have wished for?”

“Take a guess,” Clemens said.

Upstairs, Vincenzo’s hand migrated to Clemens’ belt buckle. In seconds, Clemens was naked from the waist down. Vincenzo breathily kissed his neck while tugging his flaccid penis with a saliva-lubed, albeit unyielding, grip. Clemens closed his eyes, fantasizing about being touched by the man who was in fact touching him, exploiting memories of past erections like mental Viagra. The blood was starting to circulate when he heard “Go easy on it!”

Vincenzo looked to Clemens. “What did you say?”

“Nothing.” Clemens remembered they weren’t alone and scanned the living room for something to muffle the lipoma.  

“It’s my cock, not Excalibur,” the lipoma said. “You don’t become king by prying it from my balls.”

Releasing Clemens’ penis, Vincenzo’s attention fixed on the lipoma, which had fattened to the point the specimen jar lid had popped loose. Clemens explained the situation as best he could. Vincenzo seemed less mystified than he did insulted. 

“What did you tell it about our sex life?” he asked.

“It doesn’t know what it’s saying.” Though it did know what it was saying, the insight piercing and acute. Even as an adult, Clemens struggled to voice his sexual desires, never having completely shirked youth-born apprehensions that his brand of desire was perverse and that he should simply accept what was given without question or critique. “It just talks.” Clemens rubbed Vincenzo’s arm. 

“That thing can’t be normal,” Vincenzo said.

“Normalcy can be misleading,” Clemens said.

“Less focus on the shaft, more on the tip,” the lipoma added. “Circle it with your finger.”

“It sounds exactly like you.” Vincenzo went flush. “Why did you bring it home?” 

“I couldn’t let the doctor destroy it. It’s…special.”

Chastened and brooding, Vincenzo rose to his feet and buttoned his shirt. “Fine, if it’s so special, it can get you off. Seems to know what you like.” He fled the condo.

Clemens incessantly called and texted. He didn’t hear another word from Vincenzo, or the lipoma, for the rest of the night. In bed, he touched himself. When he felt on the verge of coming, he circled the tip with his finger, soliciting a torrential orgasm that rendered him divinely numb and delivered him into a bottomless slumber. He slept through his alarm, and awoke to a text from Vincenzo: Sorry, needed some me-time. I realize it wasn’t you saying that stuff, but it still hurt my feelings. See you later. Love you. ♥ ♥ ♥

*

The next morning, Clemens woke up sore. He bumped his meetings to the following week, including his monthly dinner with his stepfather Erskine. He left Erskine a message explaining he didn’t feel well and would call next week to reschedule, though he had no intention of doing so, figuring he could balk and delay until the following month’s dinner. 

Between emails, he checked on the lipoma. Mute and gloppy, it was twice the size as when Dr. Chad had evicted it from Clemens lumbar region. “Do you need anything?” he asked it, wondering if it, like he, habitually skipped breakfast and was prone to late-night emotional eating. The lipoma did not respond. Clemens was undeterred. He brought it to his desk, certain that if he wrote enough fawning emails to his superiors and coddling emails to direct reports the lipoma would speak up.  

Late in the afternoon, the condo monistically quiet, he received a text from Vincenzo that his “work-wife” Corrine was going through a break-up. Corrine’s girlfriend, who also worked at their company, cheated on her. Corrine is in pieces. Everyone’s talking about it. It’s like some bad Bravo reality show, Vincenzo texted. I mean, none of my U-Haul jokes are making a dent. Is it okay if I take her out tonight?  

No problem! Clemens replied, muttering the words as he typed. Tell her I’m sorry.

“But you’re not sorry,” the lipoma said. “You don’t give a fuck. You think Corrine is a drama-craving, status-climbing, weekend lesbian who started dating a coworker because it was the only way anyone at work would notice her.”

Clemens was stunned. “I never said that!”  

“Of course you never said it. But you hate Corrine and you hate that Vincenzo doesn’t see her for the fraud she is.”

Clemens struggled to collect his thoughts. “Please don’t repeat any of this to Vincenzo. He’d be devastated.”

The lipoma was silent, which Clemens chose to interpret as acquiescence. He worked for another hour and was about to settle onto his couch to watch a marathon of Grey’s Anatomy when there was a sturdy knock on his door. He knew who it was—the only person in his life who thought doorbells were a liberal conspiracy to castrate the American male. Sure enough, Clemens answered the door to find his stepfather wearing a russet button-down that perfectly matched his dyed combover, and carrying two bags of Chinese takeout. 

“We rescheduled,” Clemens said.

“Actually, you cancelled on me. But then Vin called to tell me he can’t make dinner and asked me to pick up ibuprofen. Said you’re in pain after your surgery, as if I had a clue what he was going on about.”

Stepfathers and younger lovers are similar in two regards: a) you don’t look like you belong to either; b) you’re always a little surprised to see them. 

In the months after Clemens’ mother passed away, he expected his relationship with Erskine to decompose much like the body that brought them together. But Erskine phoned weekly. Expected invitations to holiday dinners. Sent corny birthday cards in which he penned Dear Clemens and All the best, Erskine, leaving the heavy lift of sentiment to a Hallmark pun. Coming out to him, on their weekly call not long after the engagement lunch at work, was remarkably unremarkable. Explains why you weren’t interested being set up with Tim Axley’s daughter, Erskine had said with a chortle. My friend Wilson, his kid is too. And remember Darren McGinty? Both his nephews. Talk about rolling snake eyes…Good boys though. Since that call, Erskine made a concerted effort to be accepting. Always asked after “Vin.” Prolonged handshakes. Declared his affinity for Ellen DeGeneres and Elton John. But it was not the acceptance Clemens took away from those exchanges so much as the effort fortifying it. 

“The surgery was nothing,” Clemens’ said.

“I can pick up groceries for you tomorrow.”

“Like I said, it’s nothing.”

“Heard you the first time.”

Clemens guzzled down two ibuprofen and then sat for dinner, which was a characteristically taciturn affair. Forty years Clemens had known the man, he and Clemens’ mother getting hitched when Clemens was 10, and Erskine still lacked the aptitude for small talk. The kindest thing Clemens could say about growing up with Erskine was that it wasn’t obtrusively different than growing up without Erskine had been. He was a reserved electrician who liked his steak medium-well, his beer domestic, his favorite sports teams in playoff contention, and his home quiet. Neither dragon nor dragon slayer. More watchman than patriarch. 

Staring at Erskine across the table, Clemens was relieved that Vincenzo was consoling the most irritating pseudo-lesbian on the planet. He always wondered what Vincenzo thought of Erskine, if he could glean Clemens’ childhood from his stepfather’s workaday visage. Though Vincenzo probably never gave Clemens’ childhood any thought, unlike Clemens when they visited Howard and Gia, their Tudor-style home like a photographic shrine to Vincenzo’s life, from his dance recitals to being president of his high school’s Gender & Sexuality Alliance to being named Prom King alongside his chiseled-jawed high school boyfriend.

“Something’s been on my mind,” Erskine said, talking into his spareribs. “I know you and Vin are looking to get a place, and I wanted to make sure you’ve thought everything through.”

“We’ve talked about it a lot.”

Erskine set down his half-gnawed rib. “All I’m saying, sharing a home is no small step. Owning a home with someone, well that’s a whole ‘nother no small step. You fellas thought about renting first?”

“Of course.” At least Clemens had talked about it. After Vincenzo waylaid him with The Next Level discussion, Clemens suggested Vincenzo move in. Vincenzo, aghast, insisted that cohabitating in Clemens’ condo was, if anything, a descent in levels. They wouldn’t be living together, Vincenzo had groused. He would simply be living with Clemens in a place that would never truly be theirs. 

Erskine’s sigh was glottal and turbulent. “You two are at different places in life.”

“What’s that supposed to mean?”  

“People change. Especially when they’re younger. Vin’s a nice boy. I’m not saying otherwise.” 

“He’s not a boy!” the lipoma shouted from across the room. “He’s my boyfriend, but he’s a fucking man. A fucking man who I fuck. A lot. Think about that the next time you slide a dipstick into the truck’s oil tank.”

Erskine was agog. “What the hell has gotten into you?”

“It’s not me. It’s my lipoma. The thing I had surgically removed,” Clemens clarified. “It talks. Bluntly.”

“Who are you to dole out relationship advice?” the lipoma continued. “Like you wouldn’t sell your soul and Harley for a hot piece of young ass.”

Erskine’s temples flared. “Boy, I don’t know what you’re pulling right now but I am not amused.”

“It has a mind of its own,” Clemens said. “I think you should go.”

“I got a question for you,” the lipoma said, “when was the last time you called someone a fag? What about cocksucker? Fruit? Homo? Was it in the last year? Last five years? How long have you been in okay with gay people?”

“Shut that thing up or I will stomp it dead!” Erskine’s forehead pulsed red, his eyes steely and unblinking. “I want an apology. I demand one.”

Clemens eyed the lipoma, knowing full well no apology was forthcoming. It would be so easy for him to provide one on the mass’ behalf, and yet he could not summon the words, could not undermine an inquiry that was still resonating through him. “You should go. We’ll all calm down and talk later this week.”

But in the hours after Erskine’s indignant departure, Clemens did not calm down. He was not angry but hyped up. Relieved of a previously unknown pressure, and also compunction at claiming this relief that he did feel entitled to. The lipoma had outgrown its specimen vial and was now in a piece of Tupperware reserved for dinner party guest leftovers. 

In his youth, Clemens heard Erskine say “fag” and “homo” with moderate frequency. Usually, it had nothing to do with actual gay people but rather politicians he distrusted or athletes he thought were soft and overpaid. Clemens could not remember when last he heard his stepfather use those slurs, and was fairly certain Erskine didn’t use them anymore; for one, who would he say them to? The few friends he maintained were all fellow lapsed homophobes. In some respect this irked Clemens. Not that these men were no longer bigots (at least not proud anti-gay bigots), but that their conversion was collectively induced. Clemens imagined how easily they’d reassume their prior ideologies if the winds of progress shifted.

Getting into bed, he received a text from Vincenzo. It was a video of him and a wobbly Corrine at a downtown drag show. They were singing along to Queen’s We are the Champions as a fishy queen in military boots and a blond beehive wig commanded the stage with mesmerizing confidence.  A sense of wonderment, vivid and humbling, washed over Clemens. The chorus reverberating through his head long after he turned off the video. 

*

The next day he kept the lipoma beside him at his kitchen workspace. Each time he thought to call Erskine to offer another apology, his eyes gravitated to the slick pink mass, now large enough to fill the popcorn bowl he and Vincenzo used on movie nights. He had questions but wasn’t sure he wanted the answers. He hated being lectured, least of all by a piece of himself. He was debating how to most civilly and effectively engage with the lipoma when an email pinged his inbox. 

It was a newsletter from a newish local gay rights nonprofit. The subject line read The Battle Is On. Clemens’ adrenaline spiked, and then quickly plummeted when he realized that the “battle” in question related to challenges securing Pride parade permits in light of the city’s current construction projects undertaken as part of a capital improvement plan—a plan that this very nonprofit had urged the community to support. The email’s language, aggrieved and histrionic, implied that the city’s refusal to grant the permit was the first step in an anti-gay agenda that sought to force everyone back into the closet. Clemens was embarrassed for the organization, until he went on social media and encountered its battalion of support. Clicking on the supporters’ profiles, he saw the vast majority were in their twenties and thirties. 

Clemens took a deep breath. He reminded himself that ignorance is often well-meaning and deleted the email.

“I knew you were going to do that,” the lipoma said.

“Do what?”

“Nothing. Absolutely nothing.”

“What am I supposed to do?”

“Tell them they’re full of shit. Tell these little fucks that they can’t be afraid of a going back into a closet they were never in in the first place. Parade permits? That’s what they think we were marching and dying for?”

“Why are you talking to me now?” Clemens asked.

“Because now you’re part of our problem?” The lipoma sounded snide.

“What’s our problem?”

“Oh, wake the fuck up!”

Footfalls at the front door jarred Clemens. He answered it to find a titanic, ziggurat-shaped gift basket brimming with cans of chicken soup, European throat lozenges, two bottles of Italian wine, cured salami, vacuum-sealed cheeses, and a plush teddy bear emblazoned with a Red Cross logo and donning an old-fashioned head mirror. Dear Clemens, A little something to speed up your recovery. We look forward to toasting your and Vincenzo’s health and happiness in your new home. Love, Gia and Howard.

He called Vincenzo’s parents to thank them, hoping the call would go to voicemail. Gia answered and bombarded him with sympathy and inquiry. First, about his health, and then about the French Victorian. Vincenzo had emailed her photographs, Clemens learned. “It’s magnificent, and I have the name of a fantastic contractor,” she said, at which points Clemens initiated the black-ops mission of extracting himself from the conversation. “By the way,” she continued, “I read about the city refusing to issue parade permits. We wrote to the mayor and city council.  In this day, it’s outrageous that people are still pulling this anti-LGBTQIA nonsense.” 

The “IA” still threw Clemens for a loop. In truth, most of his life he’d been unaware intersexuality and asexuality existed. While he took no issue with expanding the goal posts on the field of identity, he couldn’t help being suspicious of people like Gia who indulged in a director’s-cut enunciation of acronyms—LGBTQ-I-A—as if flaunting a fifth-degree black belt in progressivism. “Howard and I will not sit idly by while bigots discriminate against our boys.”

“I’m sure Harvey Milk is resting peacefully knowing you and Howard have taken up his mantle.” The lipoma’s voice thundered through the condo.

“I didn’t…” Gia’s voice cracked. “I just meant…” 

“You meant to tell me that you’re okay with fags and not okay with people who aren’t okay with fags. Got it. I’m not the terms and conditions page for iTunes. You don’t need to check the ‘accept’ box with every new download.”

Gia was sobbing, and Clemens couldn’t talk fast enough. He tried to explain it wasn’t him who shouted those awful things, that he was profoundly grateful she and Howard were “allies,” as they incessantly referred to themselves. And it was true, even if at times their bombast vitiated acceptance into sanctimony, their moral superiority a benevolent reminder of the otherness Clemens had harbored since before they brought Vincenzo into the world. 

“Please, believe me,” Clemens said.

“Okay, dear. Feel better.” Gia hung up before Clemens said goodbye. 

“Why would you say that!?” he shouted at the lipoma. “She means well.”

“What would she have meant thirty years ago?” the lipoma asked. “Forty years ago? Don’t pretend you don’t think about it.”

He thought about it all the time, who among his beatified allies were once rank-and-file homophobes. Which of his allies were another gay kid’s enemy. 

The lipoma was spilling out of the popcorn bowl. Clemens scoured the condo for a bigger container, locating a beach cooler in the garage. It took all his upper-body strength to heave it into the cooler. He hadn’t caught his breath (or washed his hands) before his phone relentlessly beeped and vibrated, a grand mal seizure of text messages: Did you tell my mother that she’s fake?! She wants to know what she did to make you hate her! She asked if that’s why we haven’t moved in together, because you HATE her! What the fuck is going on?!?!?!?!

Clemens began typing. Though, as his thumbs danced across the touch screen, puzzling out an adequate justification and corresponding emoji, he felt a twinge of consternation. Neither he nor the lipoma had called Gia fake. Even if they had, to then extrapolate that her perceived character flaw influenced the trajectory of his and Vincenzo’s relationship required a messianic level of self-importance. Huge misunderstanding, he texted back, I love your mom. You know that. Will call her later and clear up everything.

Digital ellipses indicated Vincenzo was composing a text, but the image abruptly disappeared. A minute later it returned, blinking across the screen, and again dissolved. This vanishing act repeated several times over the next hour, a depraved inversion by which Clemens could observe Vincenzo formulating a thought and yet remained ignorant of the finished product.  Are you mad?, he texted Vincenzo. Three nerve-rattling hours later the reply spurted in: Not mad…Confused…At dinner with coworkers. Talk later. 

The message nettled Clemens. In matters of love, no one who says they are confused is confused. Generally, they are the opposite. A claim of confusion, an admission of clarity. Clemens felt ill. He pictured Vincenzo surrounded by coworkers, bemoaning his and Clemens’ relationship. The abject horror molding all those wrinkleless faces at hearing the vitriol Clemens unleashed on Gia. 

Clemens was seething. His gut instinct was to reach out to Vincenzo, prostrate himself and dispel any and all “confusion.” But he resisted. Flummoxed and unmoored, his instinct felt anything but instinctual. More like protocol, the implementation of measures designed, first and foremost, to absolve Clemens in the eyes of Vincenzo and Vincenzo’s coworkers and anyone else in the whole wide judgmental, Johnny-come-lately world who might impugn Clemens’ character. 

Instead, he called Erskine. He had mentally rehearsed the apology over the last two days. The computerized voice of Erskine’s answering machine compounded his dismay. “It’s me,” Clemens said. “Hope we can talk soon.” He then texted Vincenzo: See you tomorrow night!!! XOXOXO. Standing over the cooler, he wanted to ask the lipoma what its first grievance was. He worried it would remind him of something he long ago survived and forgotten, that one sentence would usher in a cold front he had successfully evaded all these years. 

The next morning Clemens couldn’t wait to leave the house. He texted Vincenzo at a stoplight. How about we meet for dinner? 

All morning the simplest of tasks became intractable, Clemens unable to concentrate longer than three minutes without eyeing his phone, the subsequent disappointment at Vincenzo’s lack of response managing to ambush him each time. At noon, he reluctantly set the phone on airplane mode and entered a gauntlet of meetings. Four dreary, spreadsheet-infested hours later he was liberated. He checked his phone. Vincenzo had finally replied: It’s better if I come over. We need to talk.  

The nausea hit in waves. Clemens locked his office door and reread the text. Of all phrases in the English language, had any transcended the vicissitudes of time and culture with the grace and inviolability of “We need to talk”? The last rites performed on terminal relationships since the dawn of heartbreak. About what, he typed and then deleted. I guess we do, he typed and then deleted. Why waste our time? Have a nice life!!! he typed, drafting off a gale of righteous indignation that was all too fleeting. Because he wasn’t righteous. Because, as felt truer now than ever, his dignity had been kidnapped so long ago he wouldn’t recognize it if it was wrested from his innards, blistering anyone who undermined it in a voice identical to Clemens’. 

He left Vincenzo’s message unanswered and white-knuckled through the afternoon. Clemens left work at five on the dot. Speeding home, he mulled over the best places to jettison the lipoma. The county dump? An unaccredited medical school? Doctor Chad’s front door? Clemens pulled up to the condo and bulleted inside. He made it halfway upstairs when the toothsome scent of rosemary and béchamel lassoed him. All four stovetop flames were kindled. The sink brimmed with dishes. And there, in the midst of the culinary hullabaloo, was Vincenzo, headphones in and knife wielded, bopping and chopping to the same rhythm. 

Rearing his head from the cutting board, Vincenzo startled, and then appeared utterly crestfallen. “Damn it. Since when do you get home this early? I wanted to surprise you.”

The kitchen was uncomfortably hot, the light smoke-tinged and gauzy. Clemens’ eyes stung. “You said we need to talk?”

“We do, but that conversation can wait.” Vincenzo beamed. “On my way over, the realtor called. The sellers dropped their asking price by fifty grand.” He wiped his hands on a dish towel. “One catch: they need to close in thirty days, so we’ll have to get everything in order pronto.” Vincenzo wrapped his arms around Clemens, kissing him repeatedly.

He guided Clemens to the bedroom. Navigating the stairs, Clemens felt unsteady. Vincenzo began undressing him.

“Thirty days?” Clemens said.  

Vincenzo paused on the last shirt button. “I know, packing will be a pain in the ass. But if we have a garage sale you can get rid of a lot of this crap.” 

“It’s just…we might be happier with a smaller house.”

“You’re worried about the money, but once we’re married we’ll have all those tax write-offs. At this price, we can’t afford not to buy.”

“It’s not the money.” Clemens eyed the cooler. He could feel the lipoma swelling, braced for its mighty harangue. 

“Think about it, this is the perfect house for raising children.”

“I don’t want to get married!” The voice echoed through the bedroom. “I don’t want children! None of that is for me. It’s not something I ever dreamed of. Why can’t you see that?” 

The room felt cavernous. Clemens sprang for the cooler, raring to punt the lipoma off the roof, and was jerked back by Vincenzo’s ironclad grip. Glossy-eyed and pinched-lipped, his gorgeous face sagged like wet cardboard.  “That was you,” he said.

“I told you,” Clemens said, “it sounds like me, but it’s some freak mutation. I’m getting rid of it. Right now. Fuck science.”

Vincenzo squeezed shut his eyes and shook his head. “Your lips were moving. I saw them. That thing didn’t say a word.”
“That’s crazy. I know when I’m talking.” Clemens extended his hand toward Vincenzo’s smooth cheek. Vincenzo shrank away.

“I should’ve listened to my mother. She said you weren’t serious about me. That I’ve been wasting my time.” His voice was jagged, tremulous. “I told her that you can be old-fashioned and get stuck in your head, and sometimes it’s hard for you to be comfortable. But my mom was right; you’re not in this like I am.” 

Clemens nearly laughed. Picturing Vincenzo soliciting relationship advice from Gia was hilariously absurd. How that conversation would have played out between Clemens and his mother. She would have disowned him—and not because she was a bigot but because she was common. A product of her time, and it’s time—not people—that change. Because everyone accepts something only after everyone else accepts it first. Because nothing in life is more fickle than a populist. 

The stark injustice of that reality dizzied Clemens, a hybrid of radiant gratitude and zealous antipathy almost dragging him to his knees. What a miracle Vincenzo had never experienced the shame of being his own biggest secret. What a perversity to believe he could empathize with such shame. Thank God damn him.

“What is your problem?” Vincenzo yelled.

His problem, Clemens realized, was acceptance. That everyone’s acceptance of him mandated his acceptance of them, and he didn’t want to accept these people. Not when he was certain so many belonged to the faceless mass that shunned him when he most needed to be embraced. Who were they to fly rainbow flags and attend Pride parades and take selfies at The Stonewall Inn? Yes, so much progress had been made, and while he never wanted to return to those miserable days, never wanted anyone visited by that unique isolation, he would not pretend as if it never happened and that most people weren’t complicit. 

“You don’t get it,” Clemens said, not because he couldn’t say more but because he didn’t see the good in it. “You don’t get any of it.”

Vincenzo’s eyes reddened. An outlandish smile marred his face. “No, clearly, it all belongs to you.” 

Slumped against the window, Clemens watched Vincenzo drive off. For some time, his gaze remained on the Prius-shaped void along the curb. The sky darkened, and he strained to preserve the image of that negative space. The street went black, and he retreated from the window. Kneeling beside the cooler he clasped the lid with both hands, unable to bring himself to open it. Bent low, he tried to lift it, huffing and grunting, to no avail. 

Clemens reached for the phone. Erskine picked up on the first ring.  “Would you mind coming over?” Clemens said. “I need help.”

Erskine’s truck rolled up to the condo within the hour. Together they transported the cooler onto the flatbed. Soon they were on the road. Clemens navigated, surveying well paved, oak and poplar-lined streets. The lawns trim and verdant, two sensible cars in every driveway. 

“On the left.” Clemens pointed. “The one with the ‘For Sale’ sign.” 

“Pretty,” Erskine said. 

The French Victorian was pretty. Even more so in person. Hooded windows with ironwork dormers. Recessed entry. A yard made for neighborhood barbecues. The perfect home in which to raise a family. They hauled the cooler into the backyard, wending side-to-side until Clemens found the wishing well. They balanced it on the stone. 

“You sure?” Erskine said.

Clemens hesitated, waiting to hear his own voice, wanting to be bowled over by everything he’d always wanted to say and didn’t even know anymore. Then he gave the final push. A grisly noise pierced the night, less reminiscent of a fall than a high-speed crash. Clemens examined the darkness. Again, he listened for himself. Again, he heard nothing. He leaned in farther, the air dank and fetid, and the enduring silence felt incomplete.

“Shit.” Erskine motioned to a second-floor window. A light flashed on. Clemens spotted one silhouette, then a second. Both fluttered to and fro like shadow puppets. He wondered where the couple would go from here, wondered if they would go there together. If they ever imagined life another way. 

“Best we get moving,” Erskine said, double-timing it back to his truck. 

Clemens followed, never losing sight of the light radiating from the window. The diesel engine sputtered, finally turning over, and they took off. Clemens’ fastened his eyes on the rearview mirror, listened intently for some nameless sound that might complete itself. For several blocks he could still make out the window’s flagging glow in the reflection. The house that much more beautiful because he would never again have to face it. 

 

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