Chapter Text
1980-1986
New Rochelle, NY
Young Kevin was careful, and studious, and not a freaking idiot.
He knew that in his all-boys prep school, there were bulky idiots, like Cliff, for whom it didn’t matter how many boys they kissed, because everybody was afraid of Cliff and also nobody believed it. He also knew there were skinny twerps, like him, who would never, ever get away with it.
Kevin blended in. He could not do otherwise. Thankfully, where he went to high school, being buttoned-up and clean-cut was normal. He knew how to walk that line without raising any flags for being too effeminate. Every student wore button-downs and v-neck sweaters. Kevin played tennis, knew how to maneuver a sailboat, and was formidable at chess. He knew going out for the wrestling team would have been an act of pure insanity. Swimming would also have been a problem.
Once, in a literature class, the instructor asked a question about the roles of Achilles and Patroclus. “It’s a love story,” Kevin blurted out, barely aware that he had spoken. The class had laughed, and the instructor scoffed and assumed he hadn’t actually been paying attention. No, these are male characters. Someone didn’t do the reading.
Kevin vowed never to allow himself another moment like that. But he absolutely had done the reading. He suspected he was right, so he went and did more. It turned out Aeschylus clearly depicted Achilles and Patroclus as lovers. Plato had too. Shakespeare had taken the male pairing and run with it.
And it wasn’t just them. Sure, there were many allusions to male-male romance in antiquity, but there was plenty of it in modern literature as well, especially in poetry. This wasn’t a shock, more of an uncovering of a truth Kevin had long suspected. And it was romance that drew him in, even more than the dirty parts. Especially doomed romance. It seemed realistic.
(That wasn’t to say he didn’t appreciate the dirty parts. He knew some words for sex in Latin, but given the nature of his schooling, every other teenage boy he knew also knew some words for sex in Latin. Kevin probably had a deeper appreciation than his classmates for how specific the terminology could be.)
Kevin followed the threads, and uncovered scholarship. It taught him how to do his own research. He cross-checked his references and hunted down rare books. Before he knew it, he had an extensive bibliography.
Kevin met Vicky when he almost tripped over her in a used book store. She was sitting cross-legged on the floor, reading a Virginia Woolf anthology. Kevin was holding a copy of No Exit in French, because that suited his mood these days.
“Sartre sucks,” Vicky said, judging him through her coke-bottle glasses. She expected that he would either snap at her (the most likely), or be startled and start apologizing.
Kevin did neither. Like he would do many, many times more in his life, he displayed what looked like friendly interest and calmly approached an argument he fully intended to win. He joined her on the floor. “Why, what are you reading?”
It was a genuine question. They talked for hours, wandering around a town that wasn’t designed for wandering. At the end of it, Kevin couldn’t say for sure whether he had won. But they kept talking, for more afternoons, about how the other kids in their respective schools were dinks, how they understood literature better than anybody (even though they disagreed), and how they were both going to be genius writers someday.
Vicky showed up at tennis practice, leaning on the fence like someone who believed in deliberately disregarding manners, and called Kevin over.
“Kevin? Really?” said Chad, Brad, Riley, and Chet. Cliff looked away.
Vicky told Kevin to walk her home, so he did. She said one of the guys from her school had been hanging around too closely. It boggled Kevin’s mind that all he needed to do was show up, stand next to her, and the guy was nowhere to be found, but it worked.
Kevin figured she had some idea that she was helping him out too, that it was helpful for him to be seen with a girl and let people assume. They could protect each other. His parents seemed relieved, and largely left him alone about it.
Kevin’s little brother, Marty, heckled him for spending all his time in the library (nerd) and then for spending all his time with Vicky (kissy noises). This was fine. Little brothers were notoriously useless.
Kevin started hanging around at Vicky’s house. She tried to get him to listen to art rock records, but Kevin said he had never really cared about music. (That was a bit of a fib; he had quite a bit of knowledge about classical music -- his father studied it -- but it had a tendency to feel like homework. This did too.) For his birthday, Vicky gave him a volume of Proust, in French, which he was later immensely grateful for.
They almost kissed, once. When their faces were about an inch apart, Vicky stopped.
“Hey. Do you actually want to do this?”
“Not really,” Kevin admitted.
“Cool,” Vicky said, visibly relieved. “Me neither.”
The small prestigious liberal arts college Kevin attended upstate was full of Kevins and Vickys and good friends who wanted to talk about philosophy until 3 am and not date anyone at all. Kevin wound up mentioning his old research on Greco-Roman sexuality to Christopher, a graduate student in art history, who seemed quite a bit more interested than Kevin thought he would be.
Which was fine, except that Christopher was a teaching assistant and Kevin was in his class, so what they wound up doing was definitely against the school’s honor code. But Christopher had a knack for finding secluded places around campus, and Kevin rationalized that this course wasn’t even in his area of concentration.
They couldn’t be seen, of course, even by roommates who might get the implications of what they were doing. Christopher took him to a quiet corner of the rare book stacks of the old library, where they muffled their mouths with one hand, and put the other hand down each other’s pants. It made Kevin’s heart beat very fast for a very short amount of time. He knew it was stupid. He kept coming back. He did not like how alone he felt afterward. At the end of the semester, when their relationship was no longer explicitly forbidden, Christopher suddenly lost interest.
Kevin presented at a conference his senior year, and met a very drunk history major, Gary, who hit on him with a desperation that was almost sweet. They took advantage of an unexpected hotel room vacancy. Gary was a loud, needy little muppet of a man, who was deeply mistaken about the exile of Ovid, but who made soft noises in bed. After the conference, Gary wrote him increasingly unhinged letters that he wasn’t sure what to make of, until Gary revealed that he was engaged, to a woman, and had been for a while, and Kevin said: Gary. Listen. You’re cut off.
Kevin was a little bit of an idiot. Gary was definitely the bigger idiot.
Kevin spent the year after undergrad as an intern for the New Yorker, largely fact-checking, and worked his way up to writing the occasional feature. He became very well acquainted with the arts and culture pages, and the people who wrote them, and some of the people in them. When he filled out his graduate applications he gave preference to schools which would let him stay in the city, with its arts-and-culture people and the vague sense of a future for himself somewhere.
Gary called him, muttering something about him and Teresa having problems, he was in the city, he needed a place to stay for a bit. Kevin rolled his eyes and invited him in. Gary was still wrong about Ovid, and also about whether it was okay to eat crackers on the couch, use up all the hot water, and whine until Kevin, in Gary’s words, “gave him a dick massage.” Kevin kicked him out after a week.
Kevin was accepted to a Masters program at Columbia, which was the best thing he could have hoped for. He believed in the preservation of knowledge which unearthed universal truths. He was fine with teaching writing to undergraduates who didn’t want to be writers. He could continue to freelance on the side.
Kevin mailed his New Yorker clips to Vicky. One he was particularly proud of made reference to the Proust volume she had given him years ago. Vicky wrote back: See, I told you we were geniuses.
September, 1987
Manhattan
The Columbia English department adjunct office had three desks, and one phone. Kevin tapped his pen against a pile of papers he didn’t want to grade while he waited for it to ring.
“Cozner? No way,” said a voice outside the door.
Kevin looked up, and then sat bolt upright. It was Gary. “What are you doing here?”
“Um, a visiting fellowship in Medieval History? What are you doing here?”
“Working as an adjunct for the English department. As it says on the door.” Kevin did not want to react with suspicion, but this was not quite all right. “Gary. Did you follow me here?”
“What? No. Dude. I had no idea you were here.”
Kevin put his fingers to his brow at being called dude. He sighed. “How is your fiancee, Gary?”
“Wife, actually.”
Kevin rolled his eyes so hard it was almost physically painful. “Gary. I would love to stay and chat -- that’s a lie, I wouldn’t at all -- but I’m waiting on a call from my editor.”
Gary scoffed. “Sure you are.”
The phone on the desk rang, as if on cue. Kevin made a face that barely pretended to be an apology, and picked it up as Gary wandered off.
“Sorry, one moment,” Kevin said into the phone, fumbling for a spare piece of paper to write on. “Let me make sure I have this straight. You’d like me to find a source from inside the NYPD?”