I sit on the couch in Nikolai's apartment. Our apartment. The couch where his arm goes around me and the Bulgakov sits on the side table and the reading glasses are somewhere (counter, pocket, nightstand, the glasses migrate now, the glasses nolonger have a fixed position because the fixed position was the discipline and the discipline is loosening).
"Are you okay with it?" I ask. The question is quieter now. The question is the son asking the mother. The question is the fourteen-year-old who lay in bed in Tampa and didn't have the word yet but had the feeling and the feeling was a secret and the secret lived in the same house as the rosary beads and the crucifixes.
"Mijo." My mother's voice is the mother-voice. The voice that transcends the rosary and the crucifix and the Sunday mass and Father Dominguez. The voice that says: I am your mother before I am anything else, and the before means always, and the always means this.
"You are my son. I love you. The love does not have conditions. Your tía was right and I should have said something sooner but I did not know how to say it and the not-knowing was my failure, not yours. You hear me? The not-knowing was mine."
The tears arrive. Silent, the way Mercer tears work (we cry inward, we cry quiet, we learned it from Dave, who cries at commercials and pretends he doesn't). The tears are not about the pain. The tears are about the absence of pain. The absence of the thing I was afraid of. The thing I prepared for and rehearsed and built walls against and the thing did not arrive because my mother is my mother and my mother loves me and the love does not have conditions.
"Dave!" my mother calls. "Your son has a boyfriend. His name is Nikolai. He is Russian. He cooks pasta."
My father's voice, from the adjacent room: "That's great, buddy."
He says it the way some men say "I love you" when the real sentence feels too large to hold in one mouth. The response is Dave, fully Dave, and I love him for it.
"Your father will need time," my mother says, lower now, private. "He loves you. The love is immediate. The understanding takes longer because your father processes the way he watches football: slowly, with replays."
"Ava said the same thing. She said he needs a pamphlet."
"Ava is not wrong. I will make him a pamphlet. I will include diagrams."
"Please do not make my father a pamphlet about bisexuality with diagrams."
"Too late. I am already planning the diagrams."
We talk for another twenty minutes. She asks about my eating (again). She asks about my sleeping. She asks whether Nikolai's apartment is warm enough because "Russian men come from cold places and cold places produce cold apartments and cold apartments produce illness." I assure her the apartment is warm. I do not tell her the apartment is warm because Eli Mercer is in it and Eli Mercer generates warmth the way the sun generates light.
After we hang up, I sit on the couch. The apartment is quiet. Nikolai is at the facility doing extra film work. The quiet is not the empty quiet from before. The quiet is the full quiet, the quiet that contains the residue of my mother's voice and the sizzling and the salsa and the word "mijo" and the sentence about stains that never come out.
The rice and beans arrive four days later. The package is a flat-rate USPS box, taped with the thoroughness of a woman who does not trust the postal service, containing two large Tupperware containers, a bottle of homemade sofrito, and a note in my mother's handwriting:
For both of you. Your father says hi. Your tía says she was right.
Nikolai tastes the rice and beans and is quiet for three seconds, which is the Nikolai version of a standing ovation.
"Your mother," he says, "is a better cook than I am."
"I know."
"This is not a compliment I give."
"I know."
He eats a second serving. I watch him eat my mother's food in our kitchen and the watching is the warmest thing I have felt since the Beltline doorway. My mother's food in Nikolai's hands. The Cuban in the Russian. The Tampa in the Atlanta. The crossing of every line that the performance was designed to prevent.
The sofrito goes in the cabinet next to the pasta.
The cabinet holds both.
NIKOLAI
The apartment is not immaculate.
This is a statement that, three months ago, would have constituted a crisis. Three months ago, a coffee mug left on the counter would have been corrected within minutes. A shoe out of alignment would have been repositioned. A book left face-down (spine cracking, page edges bending, the physical mistreatment of a bound object) would have been closed, bookmarked, and returned to the shelf.
The apartment is not immaculate and I am sitting on the couch looking at the not-immaculate and feeling nothing resembling crisis.
Eli's sneakers are by the door. The left sneaker is upright. The right sneaker is on its side. The asymmetry is permanent. I have tried to correct the right sneaker. The right sneaker resists correction the way Eli resists correction: by reverting to its natural state within hours, as if the correcting never happened.
