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Ari's long overdue epiphany came when Ari found his Aunt Ophelia’s letters to his mom again. He had first read them when he was seventeen, that summer when Aunt Ophelia died and he kissed Dante for the first time. Then the letters had been a window into his mother’s soul, a glimpse of the person Lilliana Mendoza was other than Ari’s mom and his dad’s wife. Ari had pored over them voraciously, eager for every bit of knowledge about his parents, looking for and finding bits of himself in his mother’s words.
But now, twenty-some years later when Ari unearthed them in a box that had stayed packed through ten years and three moves, they became something else entirely. Ari had been looking for a book, chasing down a half-remembered quote that would have been perfect for the article he was working on, when he had found the bundle of letters again. He hadn’t read them since a particularly fierce bout of homesickness his sophomore year of undergrad. He wasn’t feeling homesick at the moment, but he found himself curious about what he would see in the letters now that he was as old as his mother had been when she had written them. And the letters held significantly more allure than the paper on Chicano literature in translation that he’d been chipping away at for weeks.
So he made himself a cup of tea, sat down at the kitchen table in the house in Los Angeles that he and Dante had shared for ten years now, and read his mother and aunt’s faded yellow letters again. This time, all Ari saw was Ophelia and her partner Franny. He dimly remembered Franny as a pair of kind green eyes, and he remembered how much Ophelia had loved him. But now, removed from the self-centeredness of youth, he saw the shape of what Ophelia and Franny had been to each other. He saw the rage and despair and heartbreaking love in Franny’s struggle with cancer. He saw how it had been Ophelia’s fight too, and just how much of a fight it had been. A fight with doctors and friends and family, a fight every step of the way to stay at Franny’s side. It broke something open in Ari.
When Dante padded into the room, splattered in greens and blues from his latest painting and already chattering about his plans for the next one, it was all Ari could do to stand up, take Dante’s face in his hands, and kiss him.
That night, Ari dreamed of the accident again. By this point, it was an unwelcome but entirely familiar visitor. It always had something to say to him. After so many years though, the dream had attained an almost cinematic languor, as if his subconscious, aware of the fact that there was no new physical or emotional detail left to mine, felt free to focus on the sheer look and feel of it. Ari barely felt afraid any more, always caught up instead in the feel of the wet sidewalk, the broken bird in the road, the grey of the sky. The beauty of Dante in love with the world’s beauty. But this time, as the car reached Ari, there was no expected impact.
With an abrupt shift that was not unlike how he had experienced the aftermath of the accident in the waking world, Ari dreamed of the hospital in El Paso. All he could feel was a need to see Dante. He asked the vague figures who moved in and out of the hospital room where Dante was, but there was no answer. Again and again, he screamed for Dante, but no one answered.
Ari woke up gasping and disoriented, and frantic with the dream’s desperation for Dante. But there Dante was, asleep beside him, and drooling rather unattractively into his pillow.
In the wake of the dream, Ari found himself unable to tear his thoughts from Ophelia and Franny. He couldn’t stop thinking about how Ophelia wasn’t always allowed to be with Franny in the hospital during her cancer treatments. Ari couldn’t help but remember that his father had told him he had asked for Dante at the hospital after the accident and surgery. Sixteen and unable to comprehend what he felt for Dante, Ari had asked for him.
Ari thought too about how back then, no one had called Ophelia a widow after Franny died. He wondered if they would now. Even today, Ophelia and Franny wouldn’t be able to get married, not in Tucson. But at least now people would call them partners. No uncomfortable “Ophelia’s friend Franny” or “Franny’s roommate Ophelia.” Ari called Dante his partner, had done so for years, and had long since stopped feeling awkward about it. Though there had been plenty of times when he had accompanied such admissions with squared shoulders and a flat, “you better not have a problem with that,” look. Dante had always cheerfully called Ari his boyfriend, his partner, his high school sweetheart, and, on a few memorable and intensely embarrassing occasions, his lover. Never his husband though.
The thing is, Ari had always been shitty at being a gay man. He had never really had a coming out moment, a moment where he realized, “I’m gay, and I’m into guys.” Ari had instead had more of an “I’m in love with Dante” moment, and finding other guys attractive was mostly an exercise in theory: a distant appreciation of a grocery clerk’s hands, a vague pleasure at the sight of a jogger’s lean chest, the occasional acknowledgment of another man’s interested glance. It never went much further than that. Dante and Ari had been each other’s firsts for just about everything, and Ari had found that he didn’t want anything more.
Once, when he and Dante had been on a break after a particularly vicious series of arguments made worse by attempting a long distance relationship while Dante was away on a year-long fellowship, he had had a thing with another grad student from the French lit department. Ari couldn’t even call it a relationship. It had lasted through a couple of dates and one night of mediocre sex. It had ended when the guy idly traced the scars on Ari’s legs after said mediocre sex, and asked him, “What’s the story with these?”
The memories of Dante had hit harder than the car that broke his legs, and the instinct that had made him push Dante out of the way that summer roared through him with a ferocity that took his breath away. He had stumbled out of the guy’s apartment muttering vague excuses. When he got home, he had called Dante and let that instinct, that unknowing, automatic thing that could only ever love Dante, take over as a torrent of words rushed out of him. Dante had cried and said, “I have to—I have to see you, I’m coming back, just—” Dante had driven through the night to get back to their place in LA, and when they came together the next day, every kiss and touch said, “I love you, I’m not leaving, I love you.”
After that, none of their arguments (and there had been plenty of them) ever led to anything worse than bouts of the silent treatment or a retreat back to their parents to lick their wounds. After that, it was implicit: this was going to be forever.
Still, Ari was astonishingly bad at being a gay man for someone who had been in a long-term gay relationship for over twenty years. He had never felt comfortable in the gay community like Dante did. Dante could go to Pride, could attend and lead meetings for gay rights and fit in effortlessly. Ari generally ended up hovering around in the background looking like Dante’s awkward straight friend. Loving Dante? That was easy. Or at least, as necessary and automatic to him as breathing. Being Dante’s gay life partner? That came with an identity and a culture Ari had never fully understood how to navigate.
Dante was mostly okay with it by now, in the same way that Ari was mostly okay with Dante’s persistent belief that he was bad at being Mexican. Ari and Dante had neatly apportioned the territories of their two identities to each other: Ari was in charge of all things Mexican, and Dante handled all things gay. It probably wasn’t healthy, strictly speaking, but it had worked over the years. Now Ari was beginning to feel some doubts about this arrangement.
The day after his dream, Ari returned to Ophelia’s letters. He was about to pore over them again, when he saw that packed in the same dusty box were the letters he and Dante had exchanged the year Dante lived in Chicago. There were far more from Dante than from Ari. Ari had been unable to summon the same courage Dante had in baring himself in those letters.
Ari remembered that at the time, he had felt lost and miserable and angry, and Dante had later admitted to feeling the same. But hindsight and age had turned the letters’ teenage angst into something precious and almost sweet. Things hadn’t been easy for them, but there was an innocence in these letters that adulthood couldn’t match.
His pleasant haze of nostalgia dissipated abruptly when he reached the letter where Dante agonized over how to come out to his parents. One line sliced straight through him:
“And I keep wondering what they’re going to say when I tell them that someday I want to marry a boy.”
Fuck, thought Ari.
That admission hadn’t made much of an impact on Ari as a teenager. Being able to marry a man was way past incomprehensible at a time when he couldn’t even reconcile himself to loving a boy. To him, Dante’s words had been a shorthand meant to convey that he planned on having the same kind of relationship their parents had, just with a man, and Ari and Dante had definitely had that. It’s just that they weren’t, officially, married.
Ari frantically scoured his memories for conversations about marriage or formalizing their relationship. Sure, they’d been to lawyers and accountants to handle the practical parts of entwining their lives together, but they’d handled that the same way they handled buying a new car or their house in LA. These things were just part of managing their adult lives. And there had been plenty of times over the years when both of them had made it clear that they were partners for life.
But why hadn’t Dante mentioned marriage? Ari knew that Dante avidly followed the news about same-sex marriage laws, and they talked about it while watching the news, didn’t they? Ari tried to remember the conversations they’d had about all of the laws and amendments over the years. His recollections were...not encouraging. The Greatest Hits of Ari’s Gay Rights Opinions went something like this:
“Christ, we should focus on the important shit like making sure assholes can’t kill kids for being gay.”
“The religious nutcases and rednecks will never vote for this, and there are just way too many of them.”
“This is gonna be just like that two-second window when people could get married at San Francisco city hall.”
“The Church sure won’t ever be okay with gay people getting married.”
With a sinking feeling, Ari realized he had been relentlessly negative about the prospects for gay marriage throughout their entire relationship. Dante had challenged him on it sometimes, but in the same way they good-naturedly argued about books and movies and music: with no particular intent to change each other’s minds. But now gay marriage was legal in California, and not likely to be overturned, and Dante had apparently written it off because Ari was a miserable, pessimistic asshole. Even their families had apparently written it off because Ari was a miserable, pessimistic asshole. Ari couldn’t remember the last time his mother had suggested he and Dante get married.
His pessimism was crumbling in the face of Dante and Ophelia’s letters. Dante had wanted to get married to a man at seventeen, and Ophelia would have married Franny the moment she could. So why haven’t he and Dante gotten married? Why shouldn’t they get married? Seventeen year old Ari had been brave enough to acknowledge his love for Dante in El Paso, Texas. Surely forty-one year old Ari could be brave enough to propose to his partner of twenty-five years.
The next morning, Ari walked into the kitchen where Dante was hunched over his sketchbook at the kitchen table, taking advantage of the good morning light.
“Hey.”
Dante looked up with a quick smile. “Morning! Just a sec, I want to get this one bit right…” Dante paused to add some final, meticulous detail to his sketch, then gave Ari his full attention. “So what’s up? You’ve been all shifty and weird for days.”
Ari sat down at the table and gave Dante the letter he hadn’t been able to stop thinking about. “I found this earlier this week, when I was looking for that book and going through my mom and Aunt Ophelia’s letters. Remember all those letters you wrote me that year you were in Chicago?”
Dante held the letter tenderly, as if it was an injured bird. “Yeah, and I remember how few you wrote back, you repressed weirdo.”
Ari pulled one of the pages from Dante’s hands. “Do you remember writing this?”
Dante skimmed the page, a wry smile growing on his face. “Oh yeah, my year of adolescent gay panic. Good times. Struck with nostalgia for our young and stupid days? Missing El Paso?”
This was not going as smoothly as Ari had hoped. He leaned across the table to take Dante’s hand and point at one specific sentence:
“And I keep wondering what they’re going to say when I tell them that someday I want to marry a boy.”
Ari could feel Dante inhale sharply and go still.
“Do you still want to? Marry a boy, that is. Me, specifically.”
This was the most inept proposal ever, Ari thought, but he had always been better at actions than words when it came to Dante. It didn’t seem like Dante minded though. He lifted his face to look at Ari, and as always, it was a map of the world without darkness, and the light of his joy was almost unbearable. Dante laughed helplessly and clutched at his hand.
“Yes.”