The Interview

THE INTERVIEW

I went to my third-grader's room and knocked on the doorjamb. "Hey, bud. Mom tells me you and Chris got into an argument at school. Feel like telling me about it?"

Eric continued putting Legos together for a few moments and then looked up. "Chris said his mom had a new boyfriend, and he doesn't like him at all. I told him that I was sorry and that you had a boyfriend who I liked."

"Ah, I see. What did Chris say to that?"

"He said you couldn't have a boyfriend because you were married to Mom and you were my daddy. He said his mommy's boyfriend might be his new dad. I told him that Eli was your boyfriend."

"Well, Eli is my best friend, but what makes you think he's my boyfriend?"

Eric was looking for a particular Lego piece. "You hug him, and I've seen you kiss him and hold hands."

"Is that all?"

He found the piece he wanted and proudly fit it onto the airplane he was making. He handed the plane to me. "Brian told me that his dad and you were boyfriends. You are, aren’t you?" Brian’s father was Eli, who was a special person to me.

"Well, Eric, we're certainly best friends, but Chris is right in a way. Eli and I will never be married, and Eli will never be your parent. I won't be Brian's father, either."

"I know Eli's not my daddy, but I love him, and so do you."

"Yes, I do, buddy. It's probably not a good idea to use the word boyfriend when you tell people about Eli. Maybe you could just call him my best friend." Eric was bright, and although he wasn't buying my explanation, he knew further discussion was pointless.

I hugged him. "You know that you will always be the most important man in my life." He smiled as if to tell me I was silly.

These things went badly more often than not. It was several years earlier, and Ann and I were sitting in the upper room of a little restaurant serving Austrian-Northern Italian cuisine run by a chef/owner from Hungary. We had a regular table on Saturday nights and often conducted interviews here. The owner's wife was used to showing men up the staircase, never giving our meetings a thought. Tonight, we weren't meeting a stranger; we were meeting my new friend and his wife. Neither Ann nor I could remember a meeting involving a prospect’s wife.

Usually "Bisexual married man out to his wife" in an ad turned out to be either a gay married man deep in the closet and looking to hook up or a bisexual married man not really out to his wife and needing something on the side. My wife and I had long ago agreed that if I was going to have sex or friendship or any combination thereof with a man, he should meet her so that he would learn that we were honest about our relationships outside marriage. Furthermore, I wasn't going into machinations to protect him from his wife, especially a naïve wife. The interview was to find a stable third for our intimate life, and the success rate for our candidates hovered around five percent.

Over a lifetime, Ann and I have met only one other couple whose agreements and desires perfectly matched our own. Eli and Justine were that couple. I had met with Eli in Bradenton, halfway between his home and mine. Eli and I had discovered each other on a forum for bi married men. Neither of us wanted to invest a lot of time in each other if we weren't compatible or if we had no chemistry.

We walked on the beach the day of our first meeting, confirming face to face what we had told each other online. By the time we had talked two hours, we were holding hands and committed to seeing what we could do. We wouldn't go any further until Ann met Eli and his Justine met me. What we were trying to create would eventually mean that we'd be in each other's homes and know each other's children. Eric's and Brian's takes on the other's father were as important as any other angle of a potential relationship.

Eli had come out to his wife only two years before, and he and Justine had just completed the first negotiation of what would probably be many about what their marriage meant and what form Eli's outside activity would take. They had arrived at the same place that Ann and I had occupied for many years: one outside partner and the recognition that the wife is the primary partner in the relationship.

Early in our marriage, we had started out with slightly looser rules. Ann played with some of my partners and me, and we didn't always aim for deep friendship. Now, we wanted a relationship that involved more than rolling in the hay.

Five minutes after the agreed meeting time, our hostess escorted Eli and Justine to the upper room, where we sat to talk. Eli and I were decided, and Ann was decided based on my talks with her, so the decision belonged mainly to Justine.

When Eli and Justine arrived and were seated, Eli and I conversed as if we were dear old friends. For Ann and especially for Justine, the situation was initially tense. The two women were meeting for the first time — Ann the veteran and Justine trying the situation on as she might a style that looked good in a catalog but felt strange when donned in reality.

Ann tried to ease Justine's mind a little. "I always feel awkward at these meetings."

Of course, Ann never felt a bit awkward in any situation, but she knew that this was probably Justine's first time meeting a woman whose husband was going to sleep with her husband. Justine seemed reticent, as if she might say or do the wrong thing or might spoil something she wanted very much for her husband.

"I don't have a frame of reference for doing this."

"Why don't you two take a walk after we order? We'll let you know when the food arrives." Ann suggested, looking at Eli and me.

Eli and I shrugged. "Sure," I said for both of us.

The server took out orders, and Eli and I, only a little disgruntled at missing the appetizers for at least a few minutes, strolled downstairs and out onto Main St.

"Justine is going to like Ann, I know," Eli said.

"I'd like to be a fly on one of those walls," I replied.

Ann later described the conversation to me.

"Justine, I'm cutting to the chase. If you're not 100% committed to this arrangement, it will fail and will probably injure most of us when it does."

"What you can't change, you control. I'm tired of seeing Eli patiently pining for something I can't give him. It would be different if he was panting after another woman."

"Among the men I've known, Richard is the most imperfect and the most interesting. He once asked me what I thought someone like him should do? I told him to grow up, and that then we could build something, but whatever we made was going to be made on my terms as well as his."

"What surprises me is how little objection I find in myself to his wanting sex with a man. This is embarrassing to ask, but does the thought of Richard having gay sex turn you on? Imagining Eli with a man makes me horny big time."

"When Richard and I are having sex, we have frequent fantasy partners, all of them male. We also enjoy watching gay porn together."

"Eli's never suggested that, but I think I'll ask."

"I have a couple of lesbian friends that will admit to no one but me, their straight friend, that they like gay male porn."

"At least neither of has an 'eeww' factor where gay sex is concerned. Eli is so exceptional, but I know I wouldn't do either of us a favor by agreeing to him being with Richard or any other man just to hang on to him. I know he loves me, and I can tell he enjoys sex with me — he's really quite enthusiastic. I'm at the point where I recognize his orientation as central to the person I love. I've known for a while that I want this for him. We've just been waiting for the right person."

"The pickin's are pretty slim, aren't they?"

"A lot of women would say that you and I are mentally ill, but I'm pretty sure that that at least I’m sane. How has Eric related to Richard's other partners?"

"Before he was born, we were a little less conservative about our rules. After Eric, we pulled in our horns quite a bit. What we're suggesting to you is to honor the kind of partnership we defined then. I imagine that Eric and Brian will figure out the arrangement, and I don't think it works to try to hide anything from them."

"I think you're right. I see interesting father-son conversations ahead."

"Our experience is that both of us need to talk with Eric so he sees that we both are happy with what's happening."

"I may need some coaching," Justine said.

"I can tell you that Richard is happiest when he has the balance of a relationship with another man. As long as we all understand what the primary relationships among us are and agree to a set of guidelines, this can work."

"You've never had any issues since you and Richard started these kinds of relationships?"

"Oh, in the beginning I had plenty of trouble — most of it because initially we weren't very clear on the guidelines. Now, we are very clear, and I don't have issues because I trust Richard and I have a history on which to base that trust. You're just beginning."

"I'm willing to give it a go, but I wish I had your experience already."

The server brought the food, including the appetizers that Justine and I had agreed to save so that Eli and Richard could have them with us. Justine went down to fetch the boys.

Eli and I had both told our wives that we might have sex on our second meeting. We knew our meeting would become one subject of the preliminary interview. The motel we chose in Bradenton wasn't a dump, but it wasn't a high-end chain, either. We had both suffered through a lot of awkward first times with other men. What followed wasn't one more of those. Some people you feel you've known well from the first meeting, and Eli and I were like that.

Our first time was relaxed, unhurried, and fun. His equipment was slender, like he was, and long. I wish I could adequately explain the spiritual dimension of going down on another man. I felt as if I had inserted the last piece of an unfinished puzzle. The joy was dizzying. His mouth was entirely different from Ann's, more insistent and more capacious.

Our second time was a play-fight between alpha dogs, after which we both retired in diaphoretic fatigue, a no-decision without fatal wounds. By the advent of evening, we knew that we were going to try to make a stable relationship between us work.

Eli and I agreed that the only male sexual relations would be with each other and that we wouldn't have sex with each other's wives.

Between bouts we talked about our life journeys, which were remarkably similar, including our dawning sense of difference in early adolescence. We had both found ourselves in love with women before we might have found male loves. We each had a son and no other children.

We both refused to build a life with our wives based on lying and cheating, and early on I had been out to Ann where Eli took a little longer in their marriage to come out to Justine. Justine was comfortable with being married to a bisexual but didn't have any desire to have threesomes; she was fine, though, with Eli finding another guy to bond with. Ann found watching me as well as occasionally playing with me and another man exciting and fun, but since our son had been born 13 years ago, she had been less active.

Much later in life, before Eric went to Alaska for college, he recounted a conversation with Brian when Brian was in middle school and Eric was in high school.

"You doing okay, Brian?"

"Do any of your friends know about your dad and mine?"

"Yeah, a few of the more liberated ones."

"Liberated ones?"

"I mean my friends who aren't freaked by gay people."

"Richard isn't gay."

"No, silly. Like your dad, he's attracted to both women and men."

"That's what I thought. Are you ever jealous because I love your father?"

"Brian, I've known you for six years now. You're practically my little brother, so I'm fine with you loving my father. You know, I love your dad, too. We have it pretty good, don't we?"

"Sometimes when I get mad at my dad, I talk to Richard. Dad says that's a good thing."

"I agree. Your dad's a great sounding board for me. I can talk to him about anything, and if I ask him not to tell my dad about our talks, he'll keep our conversations confidential," Eric added.

"So, do you like girls and boys, too?"

"Not so far. Just girls."

"How do you know if you are going to be like your dad?"

"Brian, your dad has had the talk with you, right?"

"The sex talk? Yep. He and Mom both talked to me. I want to know how you know."

"Well, when I imagine having sex, I'm always with a girl."

"I don't imagine having sex very often."

"Just wait, it's all you'll think of soon enough."

"No, I won't! I mean I get hard and jerk off, but I'm not obsessed."

Eric laughed and play-punched Brian on the arm. "I'm not obsessed either, but I do think about sex a lot. How about you? When you do think about it, are you with girls or boys?"

"Girls."

"When I asked my father about who he imagined when he was my age, he said both."

"Don't you think it's strange that our moms are okay with our dads being...together?"

"I used to worry about Mom, but when I talked to her, she told me that she thought people could love more than one person at a time and that she knew that she was always first in Dad's heart."

"For a while, I worried that my dad would leave us and move in with you."

"Brian, as far as I can tell, your father would never leave you or your mother. You're not worried about that now, are you?"

"No, not really."

"If you are, you should talk with your mom and dad."

"Well, I know Dad seems happier since he's seeing your father."

"Yeah, I think it's hard for them, being sort of split down the middle like they are. I'm happy for them that they've worked it out."

"I love you, Eric. Thanks."

"Eli, over here!"

Eric ran to the corner of the back yard to wait for a pass. Eli let fly, and the ball floated into Eric's outstretched hands as he curled back to the center of the yard. Chris and David, two neighbor kids, and I were defending. Brian had taken me out near the line of scrimmage so that I wouldn't be able to tag his father, and Chris and David couldn't catch Eric once he had the ball. David and Chris were in seventh grade now, like Brian, and both of them were becoming athletes. As far as I knew, Eric and Chris hadn't discussed Eli's status in my life since the third grade, but then I hadn't asked Eric.

Brian ran out to join the other boys as Eli and I looked on. Brian was a couple of years younger than Eric and already well into adolescent mania. He was as striking-looking as his father, tall and slender with a quick wit and the same open playfulness I had come to love in Eli. He gently tackled Eric, and the other two kids piled on. We had a pile of puppies playing in the yard.

I put my arm around Eli's waist. We were past the point of trying to conceal anything from David and Chris. Their parents probably didn't give the boys' all-too-correct assumptions about us any credence, if they mentioned their assumptions at all. Ann and I were clearly happy in our marriage, and to David’s and Chris’s parents, Eli and Justine were likely seen as just good friends of ours.

Eli observed, "They're doing well."

After the game ended and Chris and David had gone home, Brian and Eric sat together under the big oak tree in our front yard. Eric was sitting with his back against the trunk, and Brian was leaning against Eric's side facing away from him.

"Does Jenny know about your dad and mine?" Brian knew that Jennifer and Eric had been going with each other most of the year.

"No."

"You going to tell her?"

"We're not serious enough yet."

"So, I shouldn't worry about telling a girl I like about Dad?"

"Brian, you're thirteen. You're not old enough to worry about telling a girl you like. Like we've always said, if someone asks, be honest; if not, keep quiet."

"Have you thought about what you'll say if you keep seeing Jennifer?"

"No, not really. She might think it's cool."

Mark was in Eric's PE class, and Eric had known him since grade school. Eric thought of him as a friend. Eric told me about his confrontation with Mark because he didn't want me hearing about it from the school.

"I'm telling you, Mark, lay off him."

"Ooh, you going to do some karate shit on me if I don't, or are you a faggot, too?"

"You're a congenital idiot, Mark. I get more pussy now than you'll ever hope to get, but that's not the point. The point really is your obsessive interest in other people's sex lives. It's fucking unnatural. Do your parents know how interested you are in the subject of gay sex?"

"You asshole. You're lucky I don't shut your mouth for you." Mark was trying not to lose any more of his very red face.

"Anytime you feel the need to be a big man by beating someone up, feel free to look me up. Look at the crowd, Mark. They know exactly what you are. Every time you pick on him, you tell us all what you are."

"You can't protect him forever."

"There is no forever, Mark. I'm here now. If you want to give me a try, bring it. But today – now – you are not going to hurt him. It's enough for now. But you should always look over your shoulder, because if I'm not there, someone else like me may be, someone a lot angrier than I am."

I went to my 17-year-old's room and knocked on the doorjamb. "Eric, I just wanted to see how you're doing. I know this is hard for you."

The child I had known as an infant, a toddler, and a school child was now six-feet-four-inches tall. I'm not sure where those genes originated. He came over to hug me. "How about you? This has to be killing you."

"Moving is one of the hardest decisions your mom and I have ever had to make. Not to shock you, but your mom is the most important person in my life. Mind you, you're a close second. She feels she has to take the promotion."

"I remember when I cursed at her and slammed my door in her face. I thought you were going to flatten me."

"I was close to doing just that. But you were a good kid having a bad day. Brian seems really upset. He'll miss you."

"We'll see them, just not as much as we do now. I'm not happy about that, but for you I think it's a real problem. Oregon is about as far as we can get away from Florida."

"Eric, I really appreciate you thinking about me. I'll be fine. Life is all about finding and losing. Eli and I will get together when we can, probably in the middle of the country."

Eric walked over and hugged me. I think remembering the question so many years ago from his friend Chris, he asked, "So, Dad, is Eli your boyfriend?"

I whispered, "Yeah, Eric, he is."