Free You Can Say You Knew Me When by K. M. Soehnlein

his impossibly good-looking friend. Two boys with nothing but adventure ahead. I heard the click of the ignition, the roar from under the hood, a doo-wop song on the radio.
    And that head shot: Dean Foster’s eyes beckoning, his lips drawing sensuous curves into his skin. Eyes and lips working in tandem, conspiring to ignite desire. My reporter’s instinct felt it as a dare: the primal male friendship of my father’s life, covered in secrecy, a forty-year silence so total there had to be a good reason for it. How to reconcile this discovery with the memory of my father as he’d lived, a man I’d never known to have close friendships with other men, who had failed to find any connection with his only son, who’d always been, to use Woody’s words, emotionally unavailable? A shiver skipped down my spine, like a stone disturbing the surface of deep water, and in the second it took to shake off the sensation, I knew what I would do: I’d look for Danny Ficchino. If he was still alive, I’d find him. I’d find out why he had been erased from our family’s history.
    I found myself wishing I had tried harder to interest Deirdre in this. Her curiosity would make things easier; she could go through the rest of Dad’s belongings in the attic. Plus, we’d have something new in common, a project to get excited about together. This wish—that his death might afford us common ground again—flared at the edge of my thoughts like a shard of glass catching a beam of light. Flared, then dimmed. My sister’s needs, I knew, were more practical right now. She had a husband, a child, a house to manage; she had our grandmother’s future to consider; she had Carly Fazio in human resources ready to sign her up. If I truly wanted to be closer to her, I would have come home last year, not last week. If I wanted to delve into an obscure year from our father’s past, I would have to go it alone.

ANTISOCIAL
     

4
     
    I was so excited to see Woody again, to get away from New Jersey and that house crammed full of the past, the money talk and the old arguments. Riding to the airport I was giddy with anticipation, not to mention making choices based on my impending inheritance—springing for a seventy-dollar car service rather than a thirteen-dollar bus ride to Newark.
    The flight was delayed because of winter weather. I called Woody to break the news, and then I did what I always did when stranded in airports: I cruised the restrooms. It’s an old habit left over from when I lived in Jersey City with my boyfriend Nathan. Back then—this was 1990 or ’91, and I was only a year out of college—I used to lurk in the men’s room in the underground transit station at the World Trade Center. The World of Trade Center, Nathan dubbed it, because of all the white businessmen in suits sucking off rough-trade Latinos wearing wife-beater tank tops. Nathan and I were nearly obsessed with one another, a love marked by demonstrative gestures (he was once arrested for spray painting NO ONE LOVES JAMIE MORE THAN NATHAN on a subway-platform billboard) and public displays of drama (the spray paint was to mark the spot where we’d had a screaming match a week earlier). But we were in our early twenties, so naturally we were always itching for sex with other people, too. Sometimes we granted each other permission slips for a night or a weekend. Young and queer, why should we limit ourselves? But inevitably one of us got jealous—usually Nathan, a brooding, wild-haired, motorcycle-riding college dropout with a Slavic gloominess—and we’d argue for a day, or two, or seven. I was proficient in foot-stomping retreats and door-slamming exits. He called me the Red Tornado. Détente would come in the form of sweaty makeup sex. Permission slips were revoked, new limitations imposed. Having strayed and reunited, fought and fucked, we’d sing our own praises, young enough to see our love as different than, better than, all other love. Nathan would write me