Sideways

“Sit sideways,” the photographer says, “or you won’t fit.” Obediently, they turn, bare flesh sliding smoothly against the porcelain, and dangle foolish coltish legs over the side of the bath.

“Look at me, not each other. Hats off your faces. Scoot closer. That’s right -” and then the flash and the laughter, and they’re caught forever; two young men, confident in their skins despite the prevailing legal climate, cigarettes dangling from James Dean smiles, and afterwards they unwind their limbs so they can kiss. The photographer withdraws, leaving them to revel in the freedom of their glossy hair, their nectarine flesh, their tobacco mouths, their fine Athenian bodies. The devices of youth.

All of this is a reconstruction. She has no idea what really happened. Here is an alternate version:

“Sit sideways,” the photographer says, “or you won’t fit.” So they turn, flesh sliding smoothly, legs over the side, and then “Look – hats – closer -” and flash and laughter, all the same, except without the kiss, without the aftermath, without the defiant nascent pride in who they were. Football players do it, after all, piling into the giant communal whirlpool with buttocks exposed and genitals dangling, and who could be more aggressively heterosexual than they?

Perhaps it was a one-off, a wartime experiment.

Perhaps the other man was the love of his life.

Or perhaps they were short of hot water.

She finds the photograph of her great-uncle’s time in the Navy while helping clear out his house. It’s in the act of disappearing into the back of his desk. If she’d been a little more impatient as she scrabbled papers out for shredding, it might have vanished for decades, perhaps forever. Was it hidden, or forgotten? Sometimes, she thinks one, sometimes the other.

Here is the evidence she’s assembled:

• He was never married, occasionally murmuring of a wartime sweetheart who threw him over for another man
• – But after the war, there were significantly more women than men. He should have easily been able to find another sweetheart
• (- On the other hand, perhaps he genuinely loved the first sweetheart)
• (- Or perhaps the sweetheart was a man; did he ever actually specify -? Anyway, onwards)
• – He lived alone, or at least he appeared to
• – In later life, when her existence overlapped his, he had a friend called Mr Wilson, whom he liked to play chess with and occasionally meet for dinner
• – Mr. Wilson was invited to her cousin Maisie’s wedding, and they sat alongside each other in the church
• (- Then again, Maisie’s parents are three steps from full-blown Westboro Baptist. The chances of them knowingly inviting someone’s same-sex partner are correspondingly limited)
• (- And besides, Mr Wilson was a family friend, receiving an invitation in his own right. He was definitely not a Plus One)
• – He kept his politics private. When family meals boiled over into fractious debate, he simply sat back and vanished into the wallpaper
• – In fact, thinking about it, this was his approach to all confrontation. She never heard him express a strong view about anything, from the way he liked his coffee to the apparent future direction of the country
• – He expressed neither support nor objection towards the LGBT Rights movement, merely shaking his head and observing that things were certainly changing
• – On the occasion of her own coming out, he took her hand and held it gently for a moment, then touched her face with his fingertips and said, blinking kindly, “Honey, whatever you want to do with your life is fine with me.” A response both unimpeachable and infuriating – as if she’d chosen this blaze of unsuspected need that had razed her life to the ground, forcing her to build anew.

This last point gnaws her bones the hardest. If her battle had been also his own, why didn’t he speak?

Instead, he was all dust and tedium, human furniture. He lived, and she lived, their orbits occasionally intersecting, and while she showed her whole bright self to him that afternoon on her parents’ lawn, he himself remained doll-like, somnolent, one-dimensional. He willingly met Jane, then Tamara, then Annie, welcoming them with the vague benignity he bestowed on everyone until his death. It was the war, his older sister Joan used to say, in that Great-Auntie-Joanish way she had of bundling up her relatives’ entire selves into a single magisterial anecdote. It changed him. He never really got over it.

Or perhaps it was the loss of that unnamed man-boy, the two of them sitting sideways in the bathtub, legs hanging over the side.

“Sit sideways,” the photographer said, “or you won’t fit.” Without the photograph, he would have faded for her entirely by now, resurrected only in rambling family reminiscences. Oh yes, and your great-uncle Edwin was there too, and Joan, my gosh, couldn’t she talk? Hey, did you hear Maisie’s getting divorced now? Was this the true explanation for his sidling, sideways life – treading softly, sliding and out of rooms, dissolving away when disagreement threatened?

For years, she was maddened, thinking of what they might have been to each other. Was there ever a moment when Honey, whatever you want might have become Well honey, d’you know…? Was he angry because she would have what he never could? Did that bland, gentle face conceal sour resentment? Or was there simply no secret to find?

These days, growing towards a confident middle age, the picture’s slippery resistance to explanation becomes a curious comfort. She carries it in her wallet, alongside one of Annie and the kids, tucked away behind her driver’s license.  When faced with hard choices, she takes it out to look at, hearing again the voice of the photographer. Sit sideways, he commands (the voice remains he), and she’s reminded that sometimes the correct answer remains stubbornly unknowable, and in the end, all the consequences of the paths we take or do not take will fade into the long, unanswerable stillness.