Homer's Odyssey

21 • None So Blind

I shall never all my days be as good a man as he was.

—HOMER, The Odyssey

MY FRIENDS IN MIAMI WERE UNITED IN THEIR OPINION THAT I SHOULD move back in the wake of September 11. There was no question that life in New York became as hard as I could have anticipated back before I’d moved, when I’d posed myself worst-case hypotheticals. The stench of smoke and ruin from Ground Zero lingered for months; to this day, I associate the smell of things burning with my first autumn in New York. It bothered Homer especially, and it was months before he stopped wandering around the apartment, complaining fretfully about something he couldn’t quite identify but that created a constant, low-level anxiety. The clamor of dump trucks and helicopters was constant, and this made Homer jumpy as well. The high point of Homer’s day had always been the early part of the evening, when I would return from work. Now he was so ecstatic every time I reentered the apartment—even if I’d gone no farther than the grocery store across the street—that it was several minutes before I could detach him from me long enough to put down my purse and hang up my coat.

I would have considered moving to a different neighborhood, but within two months of September 11 I lost my job. My company had primarily serviced the large financial firms that had been decimated near Ground Zero, and was struggling for bare survival. Good luck finding an apartment in Manhattan without a letter from an employer—even if I’d had the lump sum necessary to pay first, last, and security (plus moving expenses) at a new building.

The entire economy had tilted into recession, and it took me eight months to find another job. I was as relentless in chasing down freelance work as I’d been a few years earlier, when I was first trying to gain a foothold in the marketing industry. When I did finally find a job, it was a permanent freelance position in the online marketing department of AOL Time Warner, one where I worked full-time fifty hours a week but received no benefits or guarantee of long-term employment. I went one terrifying year without health insurance. There were days when, as my grandmother used to put it, I lived on mustard sandwiches without the mustard. Somehow or other, though, I always paid the vet bills and rent.

Curiously, it was my parents who were the most supportive of my decision to remain in New York, alive though they were to the dangers that a life in Manhattan now seemed to present. They knew how important the move had been to me, how personally and professionally dead-ended I’d come to find my life in Miami. They were proud of the fact that, no matter how rough the going got, I didn’t creep back home with my tail between my legs.

If I had learned one thing from Homer over the years, it was that just because you couldn’t quite see your way out of a difficulty, that didn’t mean a way out didn’t exist. I’d also learned the value of persistence. The two of us—Homer and I—weren’t quitters. And as the months rolled by, I found another reason for refusing to leave New York if it was at all possible to remain.

New York was the city where Laurence Lerman lived.

I FIRST MET LAURENCE A MONTH BEFORE SEPTEMBER 11. HE WAS A close friend of Andrea’s fiancé, Steve—Steve’s “big brother” from college fraternity days and one of the groomsmen in their upcoming wedding.

That August before September 11 was probably the most comfortable I had felt in New York since I’d moved. Work was still good, I finally felt confident in my ability to navigate the streets of Manhattan on my own, and my cats seemed to have completely reconciled themselves to this major life change I had subjected us all to. Homer had formed a particularly strong attachment to the pizza deliveryman, who was at our door at least twice a month. Just that afternoon, he had presented Homer with a can of tuna when delivering my small pie with light cheese and extra sauce, which pretty much endeared him to Homer for life.

So I was in an expansive mood that night when I arrived at the party where I met Laurence—ready to add more people to my growing network of New York friends.

The occasion was the birthday party of a mutual friend, held on a tar-covered rooftop under the warm skies of Manhattan in summer. I remember perfectly the first time I saw Laurence. He was standing next to Steve, and the two of them were engaged in what appeared, from a distance, to be a lively discussion. Laurence wore a white buttondown shirt with the sleeves rolled up, blue jeans, a black belt, and black loafers. He gestured emphatically to Steve as he spoke, using his entire forearm, and leaned in intently. You might have thought the two of them were having an argument, except that Steve was laughing and the look on Laurence’s face was one of twinkly-eyed humor. “You remember who Laurence is,” Andrea said, and I dredged up some faint recollection of outrageously funny comments—or comments that Andrea had insisted were outrageously funny as she’d repeated them to me, laughing so hard she could barely breathe, before conceding that they probably lost something if Laurence wasn’t telling the story himself.

Several of Laurence’s close friends were there, two of whom were professional comedians and one of whom, within the next few years, would go on to become quite famous. There was certainly no shortage of humor, or funny stories, or hilarious insights that evening. I can remember word for word some of the jokes and stories that other people told, but I can’t remember a single word that Laurence said, not even whether he shook my hand when we were introduced or merely waved at me in a friendly fashion.

But I do remember thinking that Laurence was the funniest person there—probably the funniest person I had ever met. People came and went, small conversational circles formed and re-formed, but I didn’t move an inch from Laurence’s vicinity all night.

It wasn’t just that Laurence was funny, though; some of the funniest people you meet are performers by nature and, entertaining as they are, you get the feeling in talking to them that you’re simply an audience, that the things they’re saying to you are essentially the same things they’ve said to countless other people, and in that sense your presence makes very little difference to the flow of their thoughts. But Laurence liked to listen at least as much as he liked to talk. He would ask you questions and make you talk about yourself, and you would begin to think, in talking to him, that you were a more entertaining person than you’d ever suspected. Laurence liked to talk fast; he was quickwitted, and the speed at which his mind and mouth worked was a thing to be marveled at. Yet he never once talked over you, never cut you off in his haste to give voice to whatever was going on in his head. You would be the sole focus of his attention when he talked to you, yet suddenly you’d look around and realize that a small crowd had gathered to listen in on your conversation. You could never exactly say that Laurence had been the center of attention of any group he was a part of. But he was always the one who had made that group interesting.

And then there was Laurence’s voice, which was one of his great charms all on its own. It was a deep, rich voice with a booming resonance, as if his chest contained its own echo chamber. There was a raspy, smoky undertone to it, and when he was being funny it seemed to contain all the laughter in the world. It was a voice that could roar out at you like a lion, then suddenly drop to a murmuring intimacy that created instant in-jokes just between you and him. Much later, Laurence would tell me about the year in his twenties when he’d lived in Sweden, where he was a DJ for Stockholm’s first rock-and-roll station after the government deregulated radio. Everywhere he’d gone, even if it was just to a McDonald’s for an order of fries, people would excitedly say, “You are the Laurence from the radio!” It was a telling detail in Laurence’s personal history; his was a voice that, once heard, was never forgotten.

At one point, Andrea indicated Laurence’s girlfriend, who sat a few yards away on the bench of a chip-and-dip-laden picnic table that had been set up on the rooftop. It was a sultry night, and I wore one of those strappy tops that bare a great deal of cleavage. I remember thinking that if I had been Laurence’s girlfriend, and had observed him cracking up for hours with some cleavage-y, unattached girl nobody had ever seen before, I would have put a stop to it with a quickness.

I CAN HONESTLY say, however—at least so far as my own intentions went—that I was no threat to Laurence’s girlfriend that evening. Simply learning that he had a girlfriend, and that they had been together for over four years, would have tamped out any thoughts I had in that direction. I never was interested in unavailable men. I always found the quality of being interested in me one of the most interesting qualities a man could possess—and you can call that egotistical if you want, but it was a quirk that had painlessly extricated me from more than a few deadend relationships.

I was still fairly new in New York, and it would have felt almost incestuous to immediately begin dating one of my best friend’s fiancé’s best friends. Who knew how such a relationship would turn out, and Andrea and Steve’s wedding didn’t need to be about my relationship dramas. Surely, in a city of eight million, I could find other options. And then there was the question of age difference. Laurence was nearly nine years older than I was—which, in the general sense of things, hardly qualified as an age difference at all, but I didn’t need to consult books like The Rules to realize that a man approaching forty who’d never been married might be someone who wasn’t too keen on the institution to begin with. The only thing I found less appealing in the abstract than a man who was unavailable was a man who, while technically available, would someday have to be talked into making a lifetime commitment.

I had never thought of myself as a person who was attracted to a set physical type. Looking back, though, I realize that most of the boyfriends I had—the ones I would have called serious—more or less conformed to a particular physical template. They tended to be tall and skinny, underfed looking, with dark hair and eyes, large noses, and ears that stuck out farther than they probably should. These men were literary or artistic—or, at least, frustrated artistic or literary types—and we would have long, intricate discussions about books and politics. They were shy and a bit awkward, and were always surprised that somebody as outgoing as I was was also as interested in books and politics as they were.

Laurence was barrel-chested, with short, stocky legs that looked so strong, it was as if they had been cast in iron. Wrestler’s legs, I would have called them. His eyes were blue, and sometimes, if he wore a shirt of a particular light blue shade, you’d swear that you’d never seen anything bluer. You couldn’t say if his features were large or small because they were so elastic. Look through my own photo albums and what you’ll see is a series of identical smiles aging as the years progress. I’ve seen hundreds of photos of Laurence, and I have yet to see any two in which he wears the exact same expression. I always, from the first time I met him, loved to look at his face, but for a long while the symmetry of it—the reduction of it to a simple collection of features—was too elusive for me to get a fix on. Laurence’s mind and his face together moved so rapidly, I had a sense that they presented a challenge I might not be up to.

It wasn’t as if I sat down and drew up this list of reasons why Laurence and I couldn’t be a couple. I’m just trying to explain why Laurence, despite the strong first impression he’d made, was immediately and almost irretrievably slotted into the category of Boys Who Are Friends But Not Boyfriends. My reasons for thus categorizing him were largely unconscious. As our friendship grew and people occasionally asked why we weren’t a couple—and they did—I always felt a vague surprise. It seemed so obvious that the two of us were destined to be the best of friends.

IT WAS A friendship that was initially slow to develop. I knew, the first night we met, that he was somebody I wanted to be close friends with—talk-every-day, see-each-other-constantly kind of friends. But that wasn’t something that happened right away.

For one thing, Laurence was the kind of person who’d retained just about every friend he’d made since nursery school; arguably he didn’t need another one. And then, of course, there was his girlfriend. Benign as my intentions may have been, I wasn’t naïve enough to think that a close and hasty friendship with a single woman he’d met five minutes ago, as it were, might not cause some friction. You don’t live with three cats without learning something about respect for territory. Laurence and I met from time to time at group dinners or special occasions—engaging in the kind of energetic, laughter-filled conversations that always left me with a lingering regret that I didn’t see more of him—but that was all. Andrea and Steve were married in May 2002, and as we posed for formal photographs Laurence told me I looked beautiful in my bridesmaid’s dress, and that was the last I saw of him all night.

A few weeks later, Laurence and his girlfriend broke up. I was giving Homer his monthly nail trimming (which was always an ordeal, Homer being fiercely resistant—far more than my other cats—when it came to anybody touching his claws) when Laurence called with the suggestion that the two of us go to some independent film he particularly wanted to see. Laurence was passionate on the subject of film—his knowledge was encyclopedic, but he wasn’t a guy who did nothing more than spit out dry statistics about who had directed or written or starred in every movie ever made. Laurence had a keen eye for camera angles, narrative arcs, character development. He could find beauty in something as minor as the specific pattern in which a director had chosen to shoot glass falling from a broken window. And he loved it all—even the silly stuff, the ridiculous comedies or shoot-’em-up action films that self-conscious intellectuals often eschewed. I loved that Laurence was “geeky” about something; I was geeky about things, too. And I liked that he knew so much about something that I knew very little about. I learned things from him.

Laurence was a writer and editor for a well-known film industry trade publication. Part of his job was interviewing actors and directors, many of whom were living legends who had shelves filled with every award under the sun. In listening to tape recordings of these interviews, you could tell how much they loved speaking with Laurence about film. You could hear it in their frequent laughter, or constant noting of, “Wow … that’s a good question. Nobody’s ever asked me that before.” Interviews that were scheduled to last fifteen minutes typically stretched to an hour and a half or longer.

I was overjoyed when Laurence called and asked me to see a movie with him, and I phoned Andrea to tell her of this development. It wasn’t until after the movie, when we were seated in a Moroccan restaurant in the East Village and Laurence asked about my family, that it occurred to me that perhaps he’d meant this to be a date? But he didn’t try to kiss me, or hold my hand, or make any other overtures toward physical intimacy, and I brushed the idea from my mind. I think I was able to do it so easily because I wanted to; I thought of Laurence as a potential friend, not as a potential boyfriend, and I was too eager to establish our friendship to allow it to disintegrate before it even began for that most banal of reasons—that we’d tried dating each other and found it didn’t work.

That it wouldn’t work was something I was so sure I knew, I didn’t even bother asking myself the question. Neither one of us was exactly a kid anymore, and how many successful relationships did we have between us? It was a risk I wasn’t willing to take—not with Laurence.

OUR FRIENDSHIP PROGRESSED over the next three years, and eventually came to be as close as I ever could have wished for. We talked on the phone several times a day, every day, and saw each other at least once a week—which, given how frenetic life in New York could be, was saying something. There was nobody, not even Andrea, whom I saw or spoke with as frequently as I did Laurence. When, early in 2003, I finally landed a permanent position in the marketing department of the company that published Rolling Stone and Us Weekly magazines, it was Laurence, and not Andrea, who got the first phone call.

Laurence was probably the first person to become important in my life without meeting Homer. This was not a conscious plan on my part and had more to do with the realities of life in New York. South Beach was a small town (consisting of only one square mile), and was the kind of place where friends dropped in on you at odd hours just to hang out. Manhattan was enormous, a town that encouraged efficiency and forethought plans. It was a city where you met people at the place you would be going to, rather than meeting first at somebody’s home and then proceeding out. People did occasionally come by my apartment just to kill time or watch a movie, but those were friends whose apartments were smaller and less comfortable than my own. Laurence—with all the luxury of a huge living space—had the most comfortable apartment by far of anyone I knew. On those occasions when we got together to relax on a couch over a pizza or a bottle of wine, it was always at his place.

Not that it was crucial for Laurence to meet Homer—it wasn’t as if I planned on marrying him or anything.

Besides, the two of us spent most of our time together out and about. Laurence had been born in Brooklyn, raised in New Jersey, and moved to Manhattan almost as soon as he’d graduated college. He was deeply in love with all things New York and, consequently, was the one I roped into all the touristy New York things I was dying to do. We went to Ellis Island, where I found the official record of my great-grandparents’ arrival in the United States, and to the Statue of Liberty. We went to the top of the Empire State Building and to the West Village dive bars and subterranean restaurants where, a hundred years earlier, some of our favorite writers had caroused and drunk themselves to death. At the Museum of Modern Art, I was surprised to learn the depth of Laurence’s knowledge of modern art—far deeper than my own. Laurence was also a theater buff and procured tickets for everything from Henry V at Lincoln Center to Sock Puppet Showgirls downtown, which was—as its name would imply—a live-action take on the film Showgirls as acted by an all-sock-puppet cast. (Word to the wise: You haven’t experienced the true glory of live theater until you’ve seen sock puppets pole dance.)

By now, you’re probably saying, Okay … surely this paragon of male virtue had at least a few flaws. It couldn’t all have been this idyllic, could it?

Well, it is my sad and solemn duty to inform you that Laurence Lerman was a hoarder. He lived by himself in a rent-controlled, three-bedroom apartment that he’d occupied for nearly twenty years, and it was packed to the rafters with … junk. He had stacks of newspapers, magazines, comic books, and action figures. He had the Playbill for every play he’d seen since moving to New York, the ticket stub from every concert he’d attended since middle school, and a matchbook from every restaurant he’d dined in over the past two decades. Once, on a lark, I weighed his matchbook collection. It weighed over seventeen pounds. “That’s probably a fire hazard, you know,” I told him, and it was shortly thereafter that I began referring to him as Templeton, after the pack rat in Charlotte’s Web.

I should hasten to add that, given how much space Laurence had, the vast bulk of these things were neatly stored in closets and drawers; he wasn’t one of those crazy people you read about who lives their everyday lives amid towering piles of discarded stuff. Laurence’s apartment was invariably tidy, and you wouldn’t have known all that stuff was there unless he made a point of showing it to you.

Still, I was a reader and apt to think in metaphors. It struck me that Laurence wasn’t leaving any room in his inner life—literally or figuratively—for the addition of another person.

Laurence also had a fearsome temper, one thing even the people who knew him best would never deny. It wasn’t frequent, but it was deadly. His anger came from some deep, physical source, and he would seem to come at you like a bull. Laurence wasn’t a person who you normally thought of as physically intimidating, and to my knowledge he never struck another person in his life, but I’ve seen people twice his size back up when Laurence was angry, instinctively fearful for their safety. His deep, booming voice, which I loved so much, became a brutal weapon when Laurence was angered. It roared at ear-shattering volume, and—if he was especially enraged—he was capable of saying very cruel things. The unfailing brilliance Laurence had in knowing exactly what questions to ask you, the questions you would be most interested in answering, let him know intuitively what things it would be most painful for you to hear—and he would say them.

I had found it easier to stand up to the burglar in my apartment than I did to stand up to Laurence when he was in a temper. I had a deep-seated dislike of loud “scenes,” and my response, on the few occasions when we were really furious with each other, was to coldly withdraw. “Clearly,” I would tell him in an even voice—a voice that was deliberately many decibels lower than his—”you are not capable of discussing this rationally right now.” Then I would leave.

I would have said that I was merely trying to have a “productive” argument, as opposed to an illogical and unfocused one. Laurence would have said, sighing in mock dismay, that I was simply no fun to fight with. What was less fun, when you felt like screaming, than somebody who wouldn’t scream back?

But when we had calmed down, we were both anxiously willing to listen to what the other one had to say. It was more painful for me to be at odds with Laurence, to feel that I had somehow compromised his good opinion of me, than it was with any other person I knew.

And to his credit, Laurence never had to be told when he had gone too far, never had to be bullied into making an apology. If Laurence was sure he was right, you’d never get him to apologize simply for the sake of making you like him again—but if he knew he was wrong, his remorse was instantaneous and no false sense of pride kept him from expressing it. Yet he was never one to plead for forgiveness. Laurence was precisely aware—without, as far as I could tell, ever having to consciously weigh the matter—of the extent to which he was wrong and how much restitution he owed. Beyond that, you could take it or leave it.

I think it was that utter lack of affectation—that core inability to do or say anything, or to refrain from doing or saying anything, merely so you would like him, or forgive him, or think of him a certain way—that ultimately made Laurence who and what he was. It was the thing that made him not a guy, but a man. One of my favorite novelists, Anthony Trollope, once wrote: “The first requirement of [manliness] must be described by a negative: Manliness is not compatible with affectation.”

Laurence was innately incapable of doing that which was essentially wrong or unmanly. It was the quality that all his other good qualities stemmed from—how he could be funny without ever being obnoxious; how he could talk without trying to dominate a conversation, and listen without being impatient. He was never remotely envious of the success or attainments of those around him. He would share his time, money, and possessions with lavish generosity, but nobody was ever foolish enough to make the mistake of trying to take advantage of him.

I had to think about the balance of things like this all the time. I would never be as instinctively close to getting it all right as Laurence was. And as the years of our friendship passed, it was what I came to respect and admire most about him.

I had never known anybody quite like him.

OBVIOUSLY, I WAS in love with him. Just as obviously, I was the last one to know it. By the time we were close friends of some three years’ standing, it seemed as if somebody asked me every day why the two of us weren’t a couple. I always demurred when this question was asked, although not from coyness or any attempt to deny the obvious. My experience with falling in love was that you met someone, were attracted to him right away, and then, as you got to know him, figured out if that attraction was substantive or merely the delusion of a few weeks. I had never experienced love the other way around—where first you got to know somebody and then realized your interest was deeper than friendship. Having never experienced it, I didn’t recognize the thing when it happened to me.

Truly, there are none so blind as those who will not see.

Then one late-summer Sunday afternoon, as Laurence and I shared hot dogs and piña coladas at a beachy, outdoor grill at Chelsea Piers, he told me that he was dating someone, and my world fell apart.

It wasn’t as if Laurence and I had passed the three years we’d spent not-dating each other also not-dating anybody else. Various boyfriends and near misses had come and gone, and I had shared with Laurence the details of all of them. Now that I thought about it, though, I realized Laurence had never discussed with me the women he’d been involved with. It wasn’t that I’d assumed he’d remained celibate all this time. Truth be told, I hadn’t thought about it much at all. I had taken it for granted that a man like Laurence would have a hard time finding a woman who could capture his serious interest, but that when that woman came along, he would tell me about it.

Well, now she had. And he did.

My first thought was that Laurence’s and my days as friends were numbered. It was hard to imagine that any girlfriend would tolerate his close friendship with the likes of me. Then I immediately hated myself for thinking of me, rather than being happy for my friend’s happiness. But as soon as the word happiness crossed my mind in relation to Laurence and some woman who wasn’t me, my head shut down and my body went numb. I felt as if I were in shock, like somebody who’d walked away from a car accident.

I tried to conceal all this from Laurence, to act as if everything were normal, but I don’t think I did a very good job because he kissed me on the cheek more gently than usual as he put me into a cab bound for home.

The insomnia set in that night, and it went on for weeks. Poor Homer, who slept when I slept and—so it would seem—didn’t sleep if I didn’t, got very little rest himself. I took to pacing the floors, and Homer dutifully followed me step-by-step in slow circles around our one-room apartment. I felt bad for depriving him of a full night’s rest, but I had a lot to think about, and there was no point in wasting eight perfectly good hours sleeping.

I tried to reason myself out of my funk, to convince myself that I only thought I wanted Laurence now because he wanted somebody else. I was the worst kind of cliché and, more than that, I was selfish. I was spoiled and selfish and used to having all of Laurence’s attention to myself, and it was clearly the attention—and not the man—that I was suddenly so covetous of.

But then, as the sleepless nights rolled by, I understood—in a way that was so clear, it was shocking I’d never seen it before—that I had compared every man I’d dated over the past three years with Laurence, and they’d all come up short. They were never as funny as Laurence, never as smart as Laurence, never as manly or strong of character as Laurence was.

Anybody with two eyes in her head would have seen, long before this, that the essential complaint I’d had about all these men was that … they weren’t Laurence. I thought I’d been evaluating them on their own merits, but really all I’d done was reject them for committing the unpardonable sin of not being the one man I was already in love with.

Perhaps it had taken me so long to recognize that I loved him because he didn’t look the way I’d always thought the man I would end up with would look—he had none of the skinny, bookish appearance of the men I customarily dated. Then I thought about Homer. Homer lived in a world where vision didn’t exist, where the way things and people looked wasn’t only an irrelevant consideration, it was no consideration at all.

I could wrap things up with a nice neat bow right now if I said that I learned from Homer that love is blind, that it doesn’t always grow in a straight line from the way somebody looks.

But that wasn’t true—looks did matter. No matter how much of a life I’d been able to give Homer, no matter how much happiness he’d been able to carve out for himself, the one thing I could never give him was the specific joys that vision could bring. It was the easiest thing to take for granted, how looking upon a well-loved face could lift your spirits in a way that nothing else could.

So it wasn’t that I realized looks were irrelevant—it was that I realized that nothing in life made me as happy as seeing Laurence’s face. Sometimes, if I was meeting Laurence somewhere, I would pick him out from a crowd while he was still yards away. When I saw his face, even at a great distance, I would laugh—not because he looked funny or was doing anything particularly humorous, but because seeing his face made me so happy that some of my happiness had to spill out in the form of laughter, or else it would make me too giddy to stand.

I had been given a gift. There was something I could see with my eyes that filled me with joy every time I saw it. Not everybody was as lucky as I was.

Still, I had no more reason for supposing now than I’d had when I met him that Laurence would ever be interested in fully committing to someone. I had even less reason for thinking that “someone” might be me. Now there was this other woman—Jeannie or Jeanette, or whatever Laurence had said her name was. For all I knew, Laurence, like me, had never thought of the two of us as anything more than friends. Or maybe he’d thought about it, I was pretty sure he’d thought about it, but that had been three years ago. How could I know what he thought about me now?

What scared me the most was the prospect of losing our friendship. I didn’t know what I would do if I tried to be Laurence’s girlfriend and wound up losing him altogether. And yet, I’d barely been able to speak with him since he’d told me about the woman he was dating. I might be terrified of moving forward, but moving backward was impossible and even standing still was rapidly becoming an unrealistic option.

That was something else I’d learned from Homer—sometimes, to get the things that were good in life, you had to make a blind leap.

It was Homer, I realized, who had brought me most of the insights I’d acquired about relationships over the past few years. It was Homer who had taught me that the love of one person who believed in you—and who you believed in—could inspire you to attempt even the most improbable things. Somewhere along the way, I had decided that because Laurence and I had yet to find a lasting love with another person, we were somehow fated to be unable to do so—at least not with each other. But where was that carved in stone? If anything, Homer was living proof that dark predictions about potential happiness were nothing more than an opportunity to prove all conventional wisdom wrong. Wasn’t Homer someone who was supposed to have been timid and fearful, someone who might go on to live a life but who would never have an exceptional one? Yet who had I ever seen find as much to celebrate in the midst of the everyday than Homer?

Actually, I had found one person like that—and that person was Laurence. Like Homer, Laurence had that within him which was incorruptible, and which could find something to rejoice in among even the most grindingly mundane aspects of day-today life. Not only was it a quality I respected, it was something I aspired to. Perhaps that was why Laurence and Homer had become the most important fixtures in my life.

I had nothing but logical reasons why Laurence and I shouldn’t try to be a couple, just like I’d had nothing but logical reasons why I couldn’t possibly adopt a blind kitten—which only went to show that, sometimes, the thing you were looking for could only be found in the very last place you would have expected. It was Homer who had, from the first time I saw him, begun to change the ways I evaluated my relationships. When I’d met him, and recognized his innate courage and capacity for happiness, I’d understood that when you see something so fundamentally worthwhile in somebody else, you don’t look for all the reasons that might keep it out of your life. You commit to being strong enough to build your life around it, no matter what.

In doing so, you begin to become the thing you admire.

Above all things, Homer had taught me that there was great joy to be found in great risks. I had been dating since I was fifteen years old, and in that entire time I had never once made anything like a declaration of love unless and until someone else made it first. The potential reward had never seemed to be worth the risk. Laurence had begun dating somebody else, and I had less reason now for thinking that risk might lead to an eventual reward than I ever had. I think, though, that I was almost more afraid of success than failure. The prospect of picking up the phone and making a single call that would, if it went the way I hoped, change the entire course of my life was terrifying. But if you were never willing to be fearless, you would never achieve anything worth having.

Homer had shown me that, too.

So, one Sunday morning in early October, I closed my eyes and leapt. That is to say, I called Laurence to tell him how I felt.

“Listen,” I said, “I have to tell you something, and it’s okay if you don’t feel the same way, but …” I paused, finding it difficult to know how to continue. Suddenly, I was too far in to back out, but I still had no idea where I’d land. “I think … I think I have feelings for you that are more than friendship. And I understand,” I rushed on, “if you don’t—”

“Yes,” Laurence interrupted. “I do. I always have.”

We talked for a long time—more laughing than talking, and saying very little that was coherent. It was a conversation that, now that we were having it, seemed inevitable. Yet it was equally hard to believe it was really happening.

“You know,” I said, “it could be really awkward if things don’t work out for us. Because of Andrea and Steve, I mean.”

“I’ve thought about that,” Laurence replied gravely. “There’s only one solution.”

“What’s that?” I asked.

“We’ll have to be madly in love with each other for the rest of our lives.”

Laurence and I hung up an hour or so later, having made a plan to see each other the following night right after work. I made a mental note to carefully review my wardrobe options. And I would have to call Andrea. Andrea had to know about this new and startling turn of events (although probably not so startling from her perspective) as soon as possible.

But all of a sudden, I found that I was too exhausted to think about any of that. Homer and I got into bed, and the two of us slept straight through until Monday morning.