The Overthinkers Page 11

  “You know I don’t go out in Sydney,” he said flatly, looking back at that fucking phone.

  Yeah, I knew, all too well.

  “So, when’s the separation final?” I continued pestering. Suddenly, it occurred to me he might not want to be seen out just because of the wife ... maybe there were other reasons. Maybe he just didn’t want to be seen with me.

  He didn’t respond. Had he even talked to her about it? Did she have any idea?

  He changed the subject. “Why don’t we go on a trip together? I’ve got heaps of frequent flyer points. I was thinking of using them for your birthday.”

  “Excuse me?”

  “I wanted to take you on a trip ... not Sydney. Just think, you and me ... sipping bubbles, out and about. We wouldn’t have to worry about being seen. Just us two.”

  You, me and the guys on Grindr.

  What an unholy trinity. A gorgeous throuple.

  He continued: “It’ll be fun. We could go somewhere like Thailand and go to the Circuit Parties. Hotels, dancing, hot boys.”

  Oh I see ... this was literally my worst nightmare.

  “That doesn’t sound like the two of us. It sounds like you, me and 10,000 thirsty gays.”

  I’d heard of those parties. The Mardi Gras of Asia: 10,000 Asian guys vying for 1,000 white guys. Sounded like my version of hell.

  “You just want to find yourself a new gaysian twink,” I said, hiding my despair in a joke. Standard.

  “You’ll be hot property over there Leo! All the guys there definitely love Asians, you’ll have guys all over you.”

  Like I had to go to another country to find someone interested in Asians.

  Something in me just broke.

  “I thought we were exclusive?”

  He knew he had struck a nerve, his smile drooped slightly. He wasn’t accustomed to my censure.

  “Of course we are. I just thought you’d like going to a place where you’d feel better about yourself.”

  “What’s that supposed to mean?”

  Clearly, I was unlovable in Australia.

  “You think I can only feel good about myself in a room full of rice queens?” I continued.

  I hated how he knew my insecurities. I wish I’d never been so vulnerable with him. There was just something about Luca ... you could tell he didn’t have your back completely. Exposed, I felt ashamed.

  “Are you saying that I can’t get guys anywhere else?” It was all just tumbling out.

  “That’s not what I meant, I ...” he trailed off, smile completely gone now.

  I didn’t know what hurt more for him. The fact that I was being hostile and obnoxious, or the fact that the power balance had shifted. He was the one that was always in charge. He was the one that could hurt me. Destroy me.

  He knew that I never felt comfortable. He knew I was so desperate for love. That despite the fact he was with someone else, that he would check out other guys, I would never leave. He knew.

  I didn’t know if it was loyalty or something altogether more gruesome.

  “Sounds like you want to fly overseas and fuck half of Asia.”

  I was angry now. I knew what he was trying to get me to agree to. He was trying to manipulate me into doing something he clearly wanted. He didn’t want to take me on some romantic get-away. No, that wasn’t it. He wanted something else altogether.

  “Have you been organising some pre-fucks on Grindr?” I demanded.

  He looked kind of desperate, but he covered it quickly, and went on the front foot.

  “You went through my phone?”

  I just love how he didn’t try to deny it.

  “I didn’t have to! You had a thousand Grindr notifications pop-up on your phone last night. I saw them when I was trying to shut your goddamn phone up!”

  He was caught off guard. Silent for once.

  “I was just having a look.”

  Oh, please?! Who just has a look?

  “You said no one else. That it was just us.”

  And the wife of course.

  “It is.”

  And the wife of course.

  “So why are you chatting to guys on Grindr? Why are you seeing me, while you’re still with your wife? You’re just so completely dishonest to everyone around you. At first, I just thought it was to her. But now I know it’s to me too.”

  He looked away and clenched his jaw. Yeah, it was true.

  What type of person lied like this? For once my inner voice had a different target.

  Over the last year he had consistently promised more but never followed through. The fantasy he had sold to me, the one about never feeling alone because he was there, came with a massive disclaimer. It would all be on his terms.

  Maybe it was unreasonable for me to expect us to have a monogamous relationship. That was for the straights right? That neatly tied up package that I could never get access to. Maybe it didn’t exist in my world.

  But I was pretty sure relationships were built on trust. There was no trust between us. Only the pretend kind.

  “Luca, be honest – have you been speaking to other guys?”

  He exhaled, sitting up, his big brown eyes fixed on mine. He fidgeted with his hands. Guilty, clearly.

  “I was just looking. I wasn’t serious.”

  “Did you sleep with any of them?”

  A long pause. Too long. Way, way too long.

  Finally: “You’re not my partner Leo.”

  I exploded.

  “Well, what the fuck! You’ve told me so many times that I was! And you told me that we wouldn’t sleep with anyone else because of that.”

  “You’re such a control freak. Just like Jay ...”

  Jayde – that’s what he was going to say. Just like Jayde. Just like his wife. We had clearly asked for too much. His loyalty. His fidelity. Even just simply, the truth.

  This is how Jayde must feel – all the time. Yeah, I knew who she was. I had seen her name pop up on his mobile phone a couple of times, and after I’d asked about it, he’d changed it to ‘office’ ... I’d looked her up on Instagram, but her account was private. I searched for images of her online: I knew exactly what she looked like. Pretty, petite, big smile ... Sometimes I imagined what her voice sounded like. And now I knew that we were no different at all. The irony. We were just two people who wanted to be loved.

  I knew what I was doing was wrong. But I’d been selfish. I’d felt the warmth of his affection, of his imagined love, and I hadn’t wanted to step out of that sunshine. Couldn’t I just wait here a bit longer? Why did I have to go back to the cold? So, I’d just accepted him. I’d locked out the concept of Jayde, and I’d pretended that she didn’t exist. I was a good actor. It came with the gay territory. You were always pretending to be someone else.

  But like they said, Karma was a bitch. And here I was on the receiving end now. We’d gone full circle. He had gone from Jayde to me, and from me to someone else.

  My stomach was in knots. I could feel my heart beating furiously in my chest. I should go, before I completely unravelled.

  “I need to go,” I said as I reached for my clothes and started to dress clumsily. I caught a glimpse of his scowl over my shoulder. This is not how he had planned things would go down.

  “I’m sorry, I shouldn’t have lied to you,” he was mumbling in the background. Oh please, he so wasn’t. He was just sorry I wasn’t willing to go along with it. That I actually had the smallest amount of self-esteem and could actually say no.

  That was unexpected, wasn’t it?

  “No shit,” I responded.

  He stood up and blocked the door.

  “Don’t leave. Let’s just talk. You’re being erratic.”

  “Move Luca. Now!” I added. If I had to move him forcibly, I would. I was done with this.

  He stood to the side and I slipped through, furious.

  “Don’t be stupid, Leo.”

  Of course, because it was stupid for me to leave him, wasn’t it? He was such a c
atch – what with his wife and all ... and I was, well, I was an Asian.

  “Fuck off ... and just to let you know, I fucked someone else this week. Jimmy, Jamie ... I don’t even know his name. And he was pretty hot too. Not some old douche with a gut.”

  See you later, mate.

  “... And don’t call or text me.” I threw over my shoulder.

  All bravado and fierceness. That’s until I got out on the street.

  That’s when I felt like my skin was suddenly too tight. Like I’d been stapled into this sausage casing and it was two sizes too small, and my innards were going to explode out. I struggled to breathe.

  I needed help.

  I plucked out my phone and dialled Benji.

  “What is wrong with you?” Mum looked at me from across the island bench. My glumness had clearly pushed her to the limit. She’d stopped chopping the coriander, and put one hand on her hip, and leant the other one against the bench. As though she needed to stop everything she was doing, and put on a power pose, to observe this phenomena. Or judge me with a greater level of focus.

  Not ideal. I was a twenty-one-year-old man-child and I still didn’t want to be in her direct line of attention. I could do without the lecture on heteronormativity, or internalisation of the patriarchy, or post-human materialism, or whatever tangent she was banking towards today. I could really do without.

  But her green eyes were fixed on me. Laser focussed. And those two hard lines in between her eyebrows were particularly pronounced. Like when she was really unimpressed by something. Clearly, something about my generally sullen demeanour had given her the shits. Maybe if I perked up the tiniest of bits I could continue sailing under the radar. I really didn’t want to discuss my current predicament with Mum, or Dad even, who was sitting at the table reading the Saturday paper, just waiting to join the drama. I could sense it. He was itching for some story he could seize on.

  I was the only child of an Associate Professor in sociology, and an investigative journalist. They didn’t really understand boundaries. They liked to be up in my grill all the time, even when they were trying to give me space, to reflect, or grieve, or whatever the newest, du jour, word of the month, they’d adopted like a furry pet.

  Yes, I was pseudo-woke, because my parents were the wokest people around.

  ... and they loved to pick at stuff. Really grind into it, and get to the bottom of it all, the very pip, the very kernel of truth, stuck deep within the person, or the story, or the thing. Usually, that person in question was me. That story, also mine. That thing? You guessed it, pertaining to me.

  I didn’t have the energy for it today. I really could not deal with deconstructionist theory at midday on a Saturday, after having been ghosted by a girl who I’d kind of been obsessed with, and arguably still was.

  “Benji!” Mum snapped at me. “You’re doing it again. Just staring.

  You really need to get out of your head.”

  She shook her head towards my dad. I didn’t need to turn in his direction. I didn’t need to look back at him to visualise the expression he’d be wearing. He’d have his glasses poised mid-way between newspaper and face, and he'd be wearing a discerning look. As though he’d removed them to consider Mum’s statement in more depth.

  Dad was by no means as smart as Mum. He was punching way above his weight when it came to academic points. He’d only landed Anjanette Petersen because of his suave, left-wing journalist cache. Let’s be honest. The radio voice, and soulful expressions made up ground for him, but just marginally.

  I put a smile on my face. Tight-lipped. But still a smile. Maybe that would fool her.

  I hadn’t smiled in days. The entire week to be exact. It felt like my face was about to crack. Like the previous expression, dire and disturbed, had been etched in cement.

  Mum’s eyes widened. She wasn’t buying it. But she did go back to chopping the coriander.

  “Honestly Benji,” I steadied myself for the diatribe. “You’re so privileged. You have everything going for you. You’re young, smart, able-bodied ... you live with a mate. It’s the dream twenty-one-year-old life. Shouldn’t you be out there living it? Having a great time?”

  “So, you don’t want me to come for lunch on the weekend?” I knew I was dodging the actual point of her soliloquy, but I was scrambling. I knew Anjanette too well, she was hot on my heels, so I had to throw back some hurdles to slow her pace.

  “You know what I mean.” She widened her eyes. Two iterations of that look, again not ideal. “I want you to come to lunch. What I don’t want is you sitting over there like a sulky teenager. Like honestly Benji, what is actually the problem?”

  Mum wasn’t a fan of people who didn’t seize the moment. She had a rather beige carpe diem tattoo on her right wrist. Something she had gotten in the late nineties, probably after she’d watched Dead Poets Society one too many times. She was all about mobilising, summoning energy, planning the day ... she was intense. Incredibly intense.

  “There is no problem Mum. I just don’t feel the need to be consistently happy. There’s nothing wrong with being sad. Like how else would we know if we were happy or sad? You have to experience all the emotions, right?” I didn’t buy it myself, but my high-school councillor had been big on that sort of thing.

  I heard Dad grunt in the background. He hadn’t purchased it either.

  “Oh please – don’t even try the positive psychology crap on me.” Mum’s response. She cinched the coriander up in her hand roughly and turned towards the pan in the background where she was preparing curry. And dumped it in unceremoniously. Her movements were all like that, short and sharp. Productive. Anjanette Petersen was productive.

  Unlike her son, and husband.

  I sighed.

  “Can I set the table?” I said instead, sliding off the stool I’d been sitting on.

  “It goes without saying,” she muttered stirring away.

  Another dejected breath escaped me.

  I pulled out the peach embroidered placemats they had purchased on a recent trip to India, the mystery plates (none of which matched, and all of which had some sort of chip), forks and knives, and endeavoured to carry the entire thing to the table where Dad was still seated.

  In the same position. Watching me. Those glasses were still poised mid-way between newspaper and face. He hadn’t been reading a thing. Just skimming the articles, so he could gather up a sentence here or there which he could throw into a discussion to charm the crowd.

  Maybe I was being too harsh on the old man. But truly, he did indulge in the smoke and mirrors.

  I liked him still. He was a likeable character.

  I started to set the table, while he watched me. I could sense there was an observation coming my way.

  I had no idea why people only chose to have one child.

  “Why don’t you ever bring someone around Benji?” he began, all radio voice, and swagger. Oh Christ, here we go. I focussed on placing everything down just so, like Mum liked it. Neat and tidy. Nothing flung at an odd angle, or placed haphazardly.

  “Like a girlfriend ... or a boyfriend. You know, we don’t mind. Love is love.”

  There it was ... and I had heard this before. It was by no means ground-breaking stuff. I knew my mum and dad would have loved a queer son. It would have been something to set them apart. I mean, their diversity rating was virtually zero. They were white, straight and privileged. Having a queer son would have given them something to cling to.

  “Dad, I’m not gay. It’s not going to happen, no matter how hard you two wish for it.”

  I rolled my eyes, and went to collect the glasses from the kitchen.

  How at home they would have been adorning their house with rainbow coloured flags, and attending queer weddings. I could see them being a constant fixture at the Sydney Gay and Lesbian Mardi Gras, the types that leant into a float every year, and came to be queer icons ... even though they weren’t queer themselves.

  Fucking painful.


  “I don’t know why you keep asking me if I am.”

  Like, truly?

  “Well ... you do have a kind of pretty face.” My dad!

  “That’s fucking heteronormative!” Are you even serious? So, I have cheekbones ... chill, people.

  “And you have that special relationship with Leo,” he continued. “Don’t swear at me.” As an after thought.

  “He’s my friend, Dad. Like really, get a grip. It’s 2020, yeah? I can be friends with someone gay without being gay myself.”

  Even though it would have been their fucking dream.

  “Mum ... what was that even?”

  “Dad didn’t mean it that way ... he means, we don’t care. That we’re non-judgmental.”

  “But you’re judging me right now,” I moaned. “On not being glib enough, or productive enough ... or whatever you’re after.”

  I was sailing close to the edge. Adjacent really.

  “Benji, you just spent twenty minutes going on about courses that you wanted to transfer into ... which kind of sounded exactly like the course you are currently in, and the next twenty scrolling on your phone looking like you’d been punched in the stomach. I don’t know, but I’m getting a vibe here!”

  She said as she carried a bowl of curry across to the table. She even had a speedy walk to her for tasks like that.

  “Benji, you need to get off that mobile, and look up. Just look up, mate. Have a look at that sky. Reflect on how beautiful it is.” My dad. He was looking up too, as he said the words, like he himself was regarding that immense sky he was describing. I found myself looking up too, at the ceiling, and hoping that a deity of some sort would intervene.

  Not even close.

  “So, what is it then, is it the course?” Mum persevered, as she multitasked, serving up curry and maintaining her interrogation.

  Dad shuffled down a seat, and sat right up close to me. His eyes were fixed on me, his glasses still hovered mid-air. It was like he was studying me. Capturing subtle prompts which might assist in his assessment.

  “You don’t have to go into journalism, you know,” Dad said. “We’re not about that, you know, following in your father’s footsteps, or whatever. How patriarchal, right Anjanette? We want you to find your own path Benji.”