Once Trevor broke it off between us, I often thought about that riddle of whether a falling tree makes a sound if there is no ear to hear it. If nobody knew of the relationship, if the two involved parties themselves had never acknowledged it in so many words, had it ever existed in the first place? And, if not, why was I feeling such a deep sense of loss? After all, I'd never expected anything more. Until almost the last moment, no promises or requests had been made or even been hinted at. From either side.
*******************
I met Trevor in March of 2002; we were both newly promoted and attending a week-long orientation course for executives at our corporate headquarters. We were playing in the big leagues now and were expected to build networks across the various corporate functions; the orientation course was our CEO's way of kick-starting the process. There were about twenty of us sitting in the high-tech conference room in Detroit that year, coming from all parts of the world. It was the first time most of us had met, and already during the round of introductions I could start to tell which ones were willing to trample over dead bodies on their way to the top, and which ones were still a little bemused at having been promoted to executive level in the first place. I belonged to the second group. I thought Trevor did, as well.
The course was fairly demanding, with a series of team-building exercises and projects that were meant to carry over after we returned to our jobs. Trevor and I were assigned to the same team and over the period of the five days, I grew to both like and respect him. In theory, we were all good leaders, that's why we were there in the first place, yet in Trevor leadership seemed like an innate talent rather than something he'd had to painfully learn along the way like some of us (me for instance). There was no question of how intelligent and capable he was; yet, he also appeared laid back, with an irreverent and slightly snarky sense of humor that was aimed at himself as often as at others. He spoke of his wife and two daughters with great affection and mentioned how he'd passed up a promotion that would have required his moving to Germany a couple of years earlier, because his wife's father was in poor health and she needed to stay in the US. My impression of him was that this was a man who was ambitious, but who also had his priorities straight.
He wasn't classically handsome, but he took care of himself, exercising faithfully three to four times a week, and he chose his clothes carefully, making the most of his 6'4" height and athletic build. Much later he confided to me that he had a personal 'styling consultant' and that he traveled to Milan once a year. He admitted it was an investment that had stretched him to almost breaking point in the beginning, but that was steadily becoming a smaller and smaller percentage of his disposable income.
"Don't ever kid yourself, Marcus. Image is extremely important. You've got to sell yourself every minute of every hour of every day," he advised me, despite the fact that he was eight years younger than me, and he was right. I knew for a fact that he consistently scored slightly lower than me in almost every single one of our bi-annual 360-degree evaluations, because he wasn't bashful about sharing the results, yet he was the one on the fast track, getting assigned to the plum positions, while I languished in the relative backwaters of smaller operations, where we worked just as hard but were lucky if we were ever singled out for a special mention in an annual statement or in our CEO's quarterly state-of-the-business communications.
From 2002 to 2005 Trevor and I met at a number of corporate events and became pretty good friends. If he noticed that I only spoke of my personal life in vague generalities, he never mentioned it. Our company was predominantly male, as were our clients, and I always followed a strict don't-ask-don't-tell policy, especially where Trevor was concerned. In the first place, he liked to gossip -- as did I, it was one of the foundations of our friendship -- and secondly, I was concerned that if he knew I was gay, he'd also guess I'd developed a crush on him.
Which isn't to say that I pined away for him or was consumed by my feelings for him or anything like that. In a lot of ways what I felt resembled the crushes I'd had on actors or baseball players, when I was a teenager; comfortable and safe, because there wasn't a chance of my ever meeting them, simply a nice fantasy to occasionally jerk off to. Uncomplicated. A little harmless escapism, essential in keeping my spirits up, as I fruitlessly tried to figure out the intricacies of the gay scene in Kiev, where I was posted.
In October of 2005, the company held its annual international leadership conference in Berlin. As with every conference, the days were packed with events up to and including dinner. After dinner, people always drifted back to the hotel bar for drinks; I belonged, along with Trevor, to a hardcore group that took pride in outdrinking and outlasting the rest and still being able to show up on time and attentive the following morning. Much as I liked my colleagues, I didn't intend to pass up on my chance to party in Berlin, and I arrived faking the flu, which would not only serve as an excuse not to hang out with the others, but would explain how wrecked I might look in the mornings. And if things went my way, I intended to look plenty wrecked. Not the most professional of attitudes, but I was on the verge of burning out, and I needed a break.
The first night worked out exactly as planned. Within five minutes of arriving at the dance club the discreet hotel concierge had recommended, I hooked up with a guy, whose name I no longer remember, assuming he even gave me his real name, and we had a fun time until after five a.m.
"You look like hell," Trevor told me during the morning coffee break. "If I were you, I'd have stayed in bed." I couldn't help gloating a little at the memories he'd stirred up -- if I'd stayed in bed, it would have been for reasons other than to rest -- and hoped he'd interpret my smile as courage in the face of suffering. He didn't look too good himself, his normally olive skin almost gray, his blue eyes spectacularly bloodshot.
"What time did you guys finally shut the bar down?"
"I'm not really sure. Late. Early," he mumbled vaguely. "I need another cup of coffee."
He wandered off towards the coffee table. I followed him and, in keeping with my alibi, opted for an herbal tea rather than my usual triple-shot espresso, so he had to elbow me awake twice during the endless power point presentation on business resumption planning that followed the break. During lunch I went up to my room and snuck a nap and two cups of coffee, and made it all the way through dinner.
Like the previous night, I went back to my room directly afterwards, and changed into a T-shirt, jeans and boots, which was about as dressed up as I ever get. If I ran into a colleague as I left the hotel, I could always pretend to be looking for a late-night pharmacy. I had a quick consultation with the trusty concierge, and set off on foot. Berlin never truly sleeps, but it had been cold, gray and drizzling all day, and the broad sidewalks near Potsdamer Platz were almost deserted.
In preparation for another late night, I'd opted to wear my glasses instead of contact lenses. The prescription wasn't exactly up to date, and the lenses were misted by the rain, so it took me a couple of blocks to realize that the tall, broad-shouldered guy in the leather jacket ambling along about sixty meters ahead of me didn't just look like Trevor. Intrigued, I trailed behind him as he walked along the same route that the concierge had instructed me to follow.
I didn't know quite what to think when I saw Trevor enter the club. It never once crossed my mind that he might simply have been curious or experimenting, or that it was the first time he'd ever done something similar. Over the years I'd seen Trevor nervous and I knew the signs; nothing in his relaxed body language displayed anything other than an almost bored self-confidence as he tipped the bouncer and walked through the door. It wasn't only the idea that he might be, at the very least, bi that left me almost dazed with disbelief; it was the fact that straight-arrow Trevor, a man whose integrity I'd never doubted, a man who maintained an ever-updated collection of photos of his wife and daughters, when other colleagues would pull out worn baby pictures and have to explain that their children were actually teenagers, would cheat on his marriage. I'd have been as shocked if I'd seen him picking up a woman for a one-night stand.
I briefly considered returning to the hotel, or hailing a taxi and going to the club I'd been to the night before, if only I could remember its name. In many ways I didn't welcome knowing this facet of Trevor. But... I did know. And I'd had to have been a saint to resist the temptation of pursuing the realization of some of my fondest jerk-off fantasies, if only for one night.
Even though it was a Tuesday night, the club was packed. The music was so loud, it seemed to throb in my chest and up through the floor and the soles of my boots, and the air was humid with the sweat of so many bodies dancing -- or some writhing approximation thereof -- on the floor. Trevor stood almost a head and a half over the rest of the crowd, and he was easy to track as he made his way towards the bar. I forced a path through the crowd, not even bothering to take off my jacket, despite the heat that was already making me perspire. For a few seconds I lost sight of him, but once I finally reached the bar, I realized that he'd perched on one of the stools, which had had the effect of lowering him to my own 5'10".
