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  We made our way through the city and began to grow up—quitting our wild nightclubbing ways along with the coke and Ecstasy binges once we became junior professionals—coming home to a shared apartment where I would cook inedible meals that we would wash down with liters of vodka and 7UP.

  We even fought like lovers, with me crying and saying I didn’t think he loved me the way I loved him (as a best-best-best-friend), and I needed him to treat me better, while he, remote and aloof, arched his eyebrow and remained silent, causing me to cry even harder. Neither of us were dating at this point; our world was still so small that there was only room for the two of us, as if we were living in a hermetically sealed bubble.

  Like an old married couple, we knew how to get under each other’s skin.

  “Those chairs you bought from IKEA which you think are so stylish are nothing but cheap cafeteria trash!” he would taunt, knowing I was ultra-sensitive about my interior-decorating aspirations, while I would counter with insults about his once-glorious crown of hair.

  “Thinning, isn’t it?” I would sneer.

  I like to think these gruesome fights were a consequence of trying to make sense of what and who we were to each other, now that he had come out of the closet and we could never have a romantic relationship. Could we simply be friends? Somehow, we understood that our relationship had become suffocating in its intensity, and we pushed and pulled on each other, alternately encouraging the other to Date! Date! Forgodssakes, date! or to meet new friends to widen our social horizons. Yet each new friend or potential boyfriend only brought a gnashing of teeth and a feeling of abandonment and jealousy.

  As the years went by, Morgan remained the most significant man in my life. Now that I had finally lost my virginity, I would sleep with the guy-of-the-moment at night but look forward to brunch with Morgan in the morning, brunch being a more important meal than dinner. I had a succession of loser boyfriends. There was the failed forty-year-old playwright from Queens whose latest work was a series of technical manuals; the racist investment banker who dumped me due to a misplaced sense of political correctness (his last girlfriend was Asian, and he didn’t want to seem like he had an “Asian fetish,” so he would have to dump me, because I was unfortunately, um, Asian); the handsome lawyer with an annoyingly high-pitched, whiny laugh. But it was still Morgan whom I spoke to every night before I went to bed, his clipped, cultivated accent as soothing as a bedtime story. He was my security blanket, my other half, my conscience.

  Our relationship never progressed to the physical, except for one drunken semi-orgy with two of our close friends during a dinner party in the dead of winter. It was January, and we were huddled in an East Village tenement walk-up. After we had consumed several bottles of wine and moved on to vodka, Morgan cheekily suggested we take our clothes off, so we did. As we danced to Abba, naked and giggling at our daring in Lauren’s living room, as free as wood nymphs, I thought the impromptu nudie show would be as far as it would go. Then I ended up on Leo’s lap, Leo being the ex-boyfriend of my best girlfriend and a boy I’d had a passing crush on for years, and suddenly it wasn’t so innocent anymore. When Leo moved on to Lauren, I found myself on Morgan’s lap, and we grappled tongues and touched, my hand stroking his upright member. I still remember how hard and thick it was—and how odd that after all these years, I was finally getting to touch it. But I knew Morgan’s excitement didn’t come from kissing me, but from seeing Leo naked. We were comfortable with each other and laughed at how absurd it all was. I was surprised to find that fooling around with Morgan felt obligatory, while I was more turned on by being with Leo. It was probably safe to say that everyone in the room was.

  Then one night, four years after Morgan first came out to me, and eight years after we had first met, he stopped returning my calls.

  The night it happened was the week I had gotten my first article published ever, and my close friends, all twenty of them (by then, I had successfully expanded my social circle), were taking me out to celebrate. I called Morgan to let him know what time to meet us at the bar, but he never called me back. I kept calling and calling, and finally, he took his phone off the hook. I was aghast. What was going on?

  The article we were celebrating was a personal essay published in The New York Press. It was an incendiary article, written in the in-your-face-antiestablishment voice of the paper. It was called “I Hate White Women: A Second Banana Speaks” and detailed my anger at how society depicted women of color as secondary sidekicks to the (tongue-firmly-in-cheek here) “Caucasian master race.” I cited the movie Clueless, in which black Dionne sucks up to white Cher. It was meant to be satirical and ironic because of course, I didn’t really hate white women. Several of them, in fact, were taking me out for drinks that evening. I had shown it to Morgan before I had submitted it, and he had pronounced it “genius.”

  I assumed that whatever it was that was keeping him from being at my side that night had something to do with my finding a small footing in the literary world. We had each harbored dreams of making it big in the city. For years, Morgan had been supportive as I tried, and failed, to get a succession of novels published while working a day job as a computer programmer. He was trying to crack the film and television industry but was stuck working in marketing and finance for a cable network.

  A level of competition had always existed in our relationship—in college, we were anal grade-grubbers, keeping a scorecard of who had gotten a better mark in the classes we took together. For me, it was partly an economic convenience. If we took the same classes, I could borrow his books and spend my parents’ money on shoes. Later, we would compete over salaries, even though we loathed our jobs.

  I assumed in my vanity that his absence that night meant it had been too painful for him to realize I had finally received professional validation for my writing skills. It was an explanation I clung to because I would have no other way of knowing why he acted as he did.

  You see, Morgan dumped me that night.

  He never called me back, not that night, not a week later, not ever.

  I called his apartment repeatedly for weeks and left tearful, angry messages. But nothing happened. Finally I gave up.

  His betrayal felt like being blindsided by a cab—I was hurt, dazed, vulnerable, weightless. I didn’t realize until then how much Morgan grounded me, how much having him in my corner meant that I could face the world confidently. Morgan’s love was like armor—he told me repeatedly that he thought I was beautiful, and more fabulous than Madonna (oh c’mon! I would say, thrilled to my bones).

  More than anything, I didn’t want to be alone in the world.

  But most of all, I was furious. In a rage one evening, I went through all my photo albums and tore up all the pictures of the two of us, taking out my anger on the Polaroids. How could he do this? How could he throw away eight years of friendship? Hadn’t we always said “I love you” to each other in cabs after parties? Didn’t that mean anything?

  I was stunned. It was as if Morgan had died. I had just started dating my now-husband at the time, and all of a sudden, Mike had to be everything to me, just as we were getting to know each other. But my husband was a practical man; he admitted that he was intimidated by Morgan’s hold on me and relieved that he was no longer a factor. Mike knew Morgan was the first man I had ever loved, and was worried that this meant I could never love him because he was so different from Morgan. (For the record, my husband is sophisticated, charming, erudite, and has good hair, but is from Ohio, not Australia, and so secure in his heterosexuality that he is not at all threatened by our large coterie of gay friends.) He was threatened by Morgan as a romantic rival for my affections, not because Morgan was gay.

  From our mutual friends—a gang of gay men who took my side after the “divorce”—I learned that Morgan was explaining his actions by painting me as a psycho-bitch-controlling-harridan. That he had felt trapped in our friendship and felt like he couldn’t get his life on track if I was always around, trying
to one-up him. At the time, I was still so angry that I didn’t process any of this information in any rational way. I just saw it as name-calling and did my fair share of splattering mud on his reputation. Morgan, calling me “controlling”? When he was so jealous of every new friend or boyfriend of mine that he came up with nasty nicknames for all of them?

  In the end, I won custody of the friends. Okay, so maybe they didn’t have much of a choice, since Morgan dumped them a few months after dumping me. I suppose he didn’t quite feel comfortable sharing, since our friends were determined to remain neutral for as long as possible. But I like to think that he saw the writing on the wall, figured out which way popular opinion was beginning to sway, and ceded them to me. To the fag hag go the gays.

  About six years after he dumped me, I bumped into Morgan at New York Fashion Week. I was a full-time journalist by then, and he had landed at job in production at MTV. I went up to him with no hesitation. “Morgan!” I said, my voice breaking. The emotions that washed over me were complicated and strong. Joy. Relief. Pain. It was so good to see him again.

  “We need to get a drink,” he said, in his cool, ironic tone. But his eyes were twinkling.

  The two of us jumped into another cab and repaired to the nearest hotel bar, the Algonquin, which seemed appropriate since we had always idolized the Round Table wits. Dorothy Parker’s and Robert Benchley’s ghosts hung over us as we hashed out the remains of our friendship.

  It was so easy to go back to the way we were—as if the six years of no contact had all but disappeared, we joked and laughed and drank vodka cocktails and caught up with each other’s lives. He had actually met Madonna! (Through work. The bastard. And the one thought he’d had was, I wish I could tell Mel.) I told him about covering Fashion Week and of now being privy to all those red-carpet, velvet-rope events we had always dreamed of attending, while he regaled me with stories about music industry mayhem—all the rock stars he’d had to fish out of limousines and babysit backstage at TRL.

  Finally I asked him the question that had been lingering in my mind for six years: “Why?”

  “Couldn’t you guess?” he asked.

  The article?

  The article was an excuse. Yes, it had been hard for him to see me finally published. But it was more than that. It was that I had finally landed a good boyfriend in Mike. “You said he was your best friend, after two months!” Morgan said. “So where did that leave me?”

  I’d said that? And suddenly I remembered. Morgan and I were having our usual Saturday brunch (Mike was home in Ohio visiting family over Thanksgiving) when I nonchalantly told Morgan I thought of Mike as my best friend, and that I was sorry, but I couldn’t go see The People vs. Larry Flynt with him because Mike had asked me to wait and see it with him when he got back. Morgan had given me an odd, angry look. We always saw movies together—at least, before I met Mike. And what I’d said was true. I did consider Mike my best friend. Even then, I knew he was the real partner I had been waiting for in life. But what I’d said to Morgan had been deliberately unkind, although I had tried to pass it off as a casual comment at the time.

  Morgan took a sip of his cosmopolitan and handed me a Camel Light, just as before, and told me he had left for my own good, since if he had stayed, he would have tried to poison my new relationship.

  “It wouldn’t have lasted, if I had still been in the picture,” he said.

  I didn’t think he should give himself that much credit, but I saw his point. It would have been too difficult to balance Mike and Morgan—already Mike had chafed at having to spend so much time in Morgan’s company. Ultimately I would have had to choose between them, and I wasn’t about to lose Mike. So Morgan’s pre-emptive disappearance was an answer to the question he and I had been struggling with for years: who and what were we to each other, now that he had come out of the closet and I wasn’t romantically interested in him anymore.

  Could we be friends someday? I still hope so.

  When we lived together in a low-income apartment (we didn’t know it was low-income at the time), on Friday nights Morgan and I would come home from our dreadful jobs, turn up the air-conditioning in his room, sit on his unmade bed, and drink homemade, heavily spiked piña coladas. We called it going on vacation because the air-conditioning was such a luxury for two people who had weathered several New York City summers without one, it reminded us of being in a four-star hotel.

  We would dance around the room to whatever new house music CD he’d bought off the street, and his large conch-shell ashtray would accumulate a mountain of cigarette butts. Most nights we would hardly even bother to leave the apartment, let alone his room. We were young and frustrated, stalled in love and our careers. But looking back, those nights when we did nothing at all were some of the happiest and most carefree times of my life. Who needed St. Barth’s? We had each other.

  In my mind, even today, Morgan will forever be the continental sophisticate who introduced me to a world beyond the college gates, to a city where yellow taxicabs spell promise and glamour and the VIP list always has our names on it.

  SUPER COUPLE

  Sarah Kate Levy

  One night in a crowded bar in West Hollywood, my dear friend Ed, the great unrequited love of my life, bought me an appletini and smiled like he was glad to see me. It had been more than a year since I’d been graced with that smile, so I imagined it meant Ed actually was glad to see me. This was big news in my personal universe, because I’d been moping after him since we were teens. Ed had come up to L.A. from his home in San Diego to attend his brother’s birthday party, and since it was the first time in ten years that he’d invited me anywhere without my asking, I let myself pretend it was a date.

  At the time, I was a champion pretender. My robust fantasy life had sustained our relationship through high school (Someday he’ll realize he’s just fooling himself with those other girls—he really loves me), college (Just because Ed never calls me doesn’t mean he’s not thinking about me), and my recent decision to move all the way from New York to Los Angeles in large part to be closer to him (Okay, so he still never calls me—but it has to mean something that I’ve come all the way out here and it hasn’t made him freak out and move!).

  That night I was sure there had to be a special reason Ed had asked me out. I was twenty-four years old, and lately it had seemed to me as if I’d aged past the realm of casual dating. When I met men now, I looked past the one-night stand to the long-term possibilities—after all, my mother had been married at twenty-five. So I couldn’t help wondering if Ed’s asking me there didn’t presage something greater, if maybe the power of nostalgia might not nudge us toward a shared future. I enjoyed the free drinks and got a little high off his smile. When he leaned across the table to whisper in my ear, I went warm imagining what he was going to say to me. I even unbuttoned another button on my shirt.

  “Do you think my brother’s gay?” Ed said.

  Those six little words changed my life.

  Ed had pointed out his brother Moises when I arrived at the bar, but for most of the evening, Moises had registered as little more than a face in the center of a loud and happy crowd, a flicker in my peripheral vision while my gaze stayed locked on Ed. But I had reason to search him out now, and I easily picked him out among the mass of bodies on the dance floor. I say “easily” because Moises looked so much like Ed they might have been twins. They shared the same compact build, the same golden skin, the same short, short curly hair, the same mischievous smile and sparkling eyes. I watched Moi dance, and I watched the way he looked at the tall brunet man he was dancing with, and I knew that look cold. That look was the same look I’d seen Ed give every girl I’d ever brought him. It was the look I’d waited more than a decade for Ed to shine on me.

  But I didn’t tell Ed that. What I said was, “Do I think he’s gay? Ed honey, this place is packed wall-to-wall with dancing men.”

  I’m still not sure why Ed couldn’t see what I saw. In fact, I should have known ri
ght then that if Ed could be so clueless about someone so close to him, so completely oblivious to the obvious, then the chances were pretty slim he’d ever really come to understand me. But if Ed was suffering his own case of massive self-denial, then, man, did I have him beat: There I stood at the end of the evening, waiting for the valet, popping Altoids like they were candy, because Ed had suggested he come back to my place to crash.

  Ed was inside, talking with his brother, but I wasn’t the only one in the valet line. Bryan, the man Ed knew as Moises’ roommate, was out there, too. I thanked him for the party, he thanked me for coming, and then he asked me how I knew Moi.

  “I don’t,” I said. “I’m a friend of Ed’s. I’ve been in love with him since I was fourteen.”

  Bryan did not give any indication that this was an odd thing to tell a stranger. “You know the secret is getting in with his mother,” he said. “All she wants on earth is for Ed to end up with a nice Jewish girl.”

  “I’ve tried that, but she never seems to remember me.”

  “Try her again. Call her over Thanksgiving. She won’t be there—you’ll get her machine—but then she’ll have to call you back, and the two of you can chat.”

  “You’re not a Jewish girl. Does she like you?” I asked.

  “She has to,” Bryan said, “because I’m not going anywhere.”