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Things are different now. He envies the ease with which today’s boys can go around flaunting their rainbow buttons and NOH8 t-shirts and do all the things that would have been a statement in the 80s, a game of roulette where the risk of telling the world just exactly what you were could have cost you everything.
Now they even have a company “society” for goodness sake, albeit one set up corporate-side to meet their Equality and Diversity Policy. Hooli makes loud noises about its affiliations with HRC and GLAAD, and of having had an Out and Equal volunteer come and give a spiel to the unengaged and the socially awkward.
If he says something publicly now he would be seen as some kind of belated pioneer, a champion amongst global leaders for rights he wants to have but doesn’t want to fight for. But he’s too old to change, to not stay discreet and quiet and keep his activities in the shadows. No he will not fucking “come out”, it’s nobody’s damn business. Why should he risk everything just so other people can freely enjoy what he was never allowed to openly acknowledge?
So he keeps turning the cogs on the Enigma machine, feeding the myth of the private, eccentric billionaire whose gates and curtains are closed off to the outside world. Let them speculate, it only makes his spin-doctored persona more interesting.
He wishes he could once more go out to the bars and the clubs that people used to whisper about only in code, under the liberating cloak of being no-one in particular. To be gazed at lustfully and touched by someone who doesn’t require cash upfront. He remembers when he was still in college and nervous and uncertain, his first ever kiss from a beautiful man whom he immediately fell in love with and never saw again.
He’s tired of having to rely on in-calls to scratch his burning itch, arranged by agencies who take one fee for the service and another for total, guaranteed discretion. They’re only tied into the silence because of the illicitness of their trade, and If they tried selling his purchase history to the press it would amount to Mutually Assured Destruction.
Sometimes when he looks down at the Hooli factory floor a boy will catch his eye. They’re all so young, he reflects, thinking of his aging blood. He doesn’t shit where he eats, so he never entertains the thought of actually doing anything, though he knows he has the power to get away with it. Still, he often feels like a priest in a whorehouse, the hungriest of cats amongst the fattest of pigeons.
Anyway, it’s too late for all of that now. He can’t go in any direction other than the one that’s in front of him. He won’t be opening the blinds on his life to the Board, to Congress, to the Major Shareholders who don’t exactly hold San Franciscan, No-to-Prop-8 values.
He sometimes wonders that if things had been different - if he had been born into this age where he can live openly, a wedding ring on his finger and a white picket fence - if all the energy and passion he’s put into building this company would have just been sunk into another person, into a fleeting and fragile relationship which could never have a legacy beyond his death. If he’d had been free to love would he have just been endlessly distracted by the minutiae of marriage? Of buying groceries, of making holiday plans, of fraught petty arguments that take countless hours to never-quite resolve. Would love have quashed his capacity for power? Would a husband have been a distraction from building all of this?
He still misses Peter, and still knows it didn’t have to end how it did. He looks down at his HooliPhone and contemplates. Maybe he should…
No. No fucking way. He considers the elephant, which never forgets.
Whatever. Retrospection is not for the visionary. Not for the game changers, the world shapers, those who will be remembered in textbooks and biographical movies. Nobody goes down in history for being a loving husband who always took the trash out without being asked to.
He fingers the beads on his wrist and accepts the intercom call.
“Mister Hendricks to see you, Mr. Belson” his secretary informs him.
“Make him wait. 15 minutes at least.” He responds. He glances at the Jared boy in front of him sorting out papers, and puts all thoughts of love at first site and unshakable loyalty away. Who buys that fairytale shit anyway? Where does such self-sacrifice get you? Who on earth would throw everything away for a belief in someone else’s being and dreams, for the fleeting possibility of not dying alone?
He’s going to tear this algorithm from the hands of this Richard idiot for next to nothing and see how Peter fucking likes it.
He checks his watch.
“Jared, get the door.”
“Yes Mr. Belson Sir.” And Jared opens the door to Richard Hendricks.