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“No!” Bron squealed, but Darcy allowed him to wiggle free with relative ease. Their laughter permeated the breeze.
“So I wear my disguise well, then?”
“Very well.” He giggled, still leaning away from him. “So well, indeed, that I can say with the utmost confidence that you pass for …”
Darcy narrowed his eyes.
“… a genteel man of the highest arrogance.”
“I do, do I?”
“Yes, one hundred percent.”
Darcy took this assessment of his character gracefully, even declared he liked the sound of it all the more when coming from Bron’s lips. “But suppose my arrogance were a ruse, a facade? An attempt to make one look elsewhere?”
Bron had his response at the ready, could be quick to retort that perhaps he shouldn’t be so good at playing the part of such an arrogant and temperamental character. But Darcy’s tone had resumed a lilt of seriousness, so he stayed quiet. “Going about hiding … it got a bit much, for everyone. Especially for Giovanni. He wanted more, hated the sneaking around. Demanded we tell everyone we were together, and slowly we became less cautious, relaxed in each other’s company. We almost got caught a few times too. And then, partway through our third and final year at the university, he started telling people—random classmates to begin with, then my friend Magda. But I couldn’t face it.”
Bron soothed him, sympathetic. “So what did you do?”
“I told him to stop. That I wasn’t ready. But he couldn’t understand it. He said that I was ashamed of him and that if I didn’t come out now, then I never would. Of course that wasn’t true, I just needed time. But he said my time was up and continued to tell more of our cohort despite my begging him not to. So I broke it off. Quickly. Skipped classes to avoid seeing him, banned him from coming to the house. My work suffered, and friends called me up, asking if the rumors were true. I denied them. Claimed Giovanni had mistaken our friendship for something more and that he was bitter when I didn’t share in his feelings. That really riled him up.”
Bron hooked onto each word with great sympathy. He, of all people, understood what it was like to navigate people’s opinions. What they had to say of him. He had never had a coming-out moment himself. Not really.They’dtoldhimwho he was, what he was, before he’d truly vocalized it himself, and then he’d simply slipped into that identity already hailed as his, and from there crafted it into his own. For Darcy, the world had come to know his secret before he’d accepted it himself. Before he understood it. The burden of it all.
Maybe they had more in common than Bron had once thought. He said what he believed Darcy needed him to say. Acknowledged his feelings. Said that what Giovanni did to him was wrong. “So Giovanni went behind your back and outed you? You know that was wrong, no matter how he felt.”
“I just wanted things to stay as they were, hated everyone prying into my life. Turning into gossip. To do that, I needed him out of my life. But then I … I started seeing someone—to prove to myself that I could be different, straight, which just made everything worse. Gio told my father everything that happened. And Father, he saw me as the bad guy. The one messing with people’s lives. Giovanni told him I’d broken his heart. And I guess I had.”
Bron knew how it felt to be wronged by someone one had trusted with all their being. Darcy may have broken Giovanni’s heart, but Giovanni had broken Darcy’s trust beyond repair. What had been his motivation for outing Darcy? As an attempt to … what? Claim him? Hurt someone closeted for validation that what Giovanni felt was true? Not just a fantasy or a nothing cloaked in empty promises.
“You cannot take back what you did to one another; you can only move on. Giovanni crossed the line. Nobody should be forced into doing anything they aren’t ready to do.”
“What it did was force me into a marriage I didn’t want. Father couldn’t understand the situation at all. I insisted Gio was lying, but Father considered my sexuality something I could justturn on and off. And if I could be with a woman, then it was all the more important I do right by her, what was right for the family.”
“Right by her?” Bron repeated, confused. “How is marrying a woman as a gay man doing right by anyone?”
Darcy shifted in discomfort, his demeanor making it clear to Bron that this was a question he wasn’t ready to answer. He asserted: “I needed to prove to myself and those around me that I was straight, that I was not who he said I was. But then …” Darcy stopped, wouldn’t look at him. “I just had to get away. I’d done so much wrong, and there was a whole world out there full of possibilities. I was stuck here, hating the person I’d become. So I left.”
“And where did you go?”
Darcy described places Bron had only dreamed of, and it exhilarated him in a way nothing had before. He told him of the pilgrimages he’d taken in Morocco; the alcohol and drugs he’d done in Berlin; the provincial villages in the south of France, where he’d swum in lakes frequented only by locals; and finally, his excursion across North America. He spoke of the great California hills, and when doing so, re-created the slopes in the air with his hands: “They were gold, tinged red and brown,” he said. “One color and three all at once.” He spoke of the vastness of Virginia, the sprawling landscape of New York City.
“When I close my eyes, I imagine I’m still there. I can see the stretch of Los Angeles as I stand atop the Griffith, the city and stars just there at my fingertips. I can smell the air wafting off the New York’s East River, or still feel as though I’m at the edge of a broken world when standing beneath the Brooklyn Bridge and looking over at Manhattan. Such places that made me feel finally alive. Free.”
Bron talked comparatively little, just shut his own eyes and tried to imagine himself to be there with him. But he couldn’t. Darcy and America—the two entities didn’t fit. He belongedhere in England, walking along the cobbled streets and medieval colleges of the city. Darcy in jodhpurs and a hat atop his head, in cricket whites leaning against the column of a pavilion, or chasing dogs along the Cornwall coasts in muddy boots.
“England can be such a suffocating place,” Darcy continued, gesturing to the dark fields beyond. “The longer I stay here, the closer I am to accepting this life, this false promise. The most successful and ugliest lie told in all of history. Although given the view of the English green, you wouldn’t think so, would you? Such things that appear one way aren’t always so.”
“Things appear as one intends them to appear,” Bron countered. “There’s always so much more below the surface, and a facade is never there by chance. It’s crafted and calculated, as you know.”
“We both wear our fair share of masks.”
“But if our insides were to overshadow our disguises, the world would be a more honest place.”
Darcy was enlivened by this; he reached out to him and spoke with a subdued earnestness. “Bron, the way you speak. It’s like you’ve experience of the world.”
“Don’t I have experience of the world? I speak from a place of pain. I speak like somebody who has been hurt, just as you have.”
“But you’ve still so much to the learn,” Darcy said, his hand brushing the top of Bron’s shoulders, the sensation lingering moments after he’d snatched it away. “So much to see. I’ll take you to these places one day, if you’d like.” Darcy searched his eyes for an answer, tilted his head in anticipation of his response.
