Every Kind of Wanting

by Gina Frangello

  When Nick reappears, Emily booms, “Oh, you’re back—great job!” Gretchen recognizes this, too: the voice of a woman who talks to children all day. Who has forgotten that saying “great job!” isn’t the best response to male ejaculation—even fake ejaculation.

  “Yep,” Nick says nonchalantly. “I’m nearly forty. I’ve got this skill in the bag.”

  The receptionist laughs, then averts her eyes.

  They are already out of the office, out to the car where Chad and Miguel are waiting, before it occurs to Gretchen to wonder why she came. The guys and Emily high-five each other across the front and back seats like a sports team, whooping, “Operation Switcheroo complete!” and, “Mission accomplished!” Chad says the word champagne. They all holler things at once. Nick says, “What’s a little syphilis between friends?” and even Miguel seems almost mirthful, chortling with the rest of them, Chad throwing out names of suburban restaurants where mimosas and bloody marys might be procured before licensing hours in exchange for a fat tip.

  “You can drop me on the way,” Gretchen says, and she regrets it even as she’s saying it, but she can’t stop herself. “I have a lot of work to do. I can’t go drinking before 8:00 a.m.”

  “Party pooper!” Chad boos and hisses. They seem drunk already. The merriment is oppressive.

  “No, really,” Gretchen says. “Sorry. I’m on a deadline.”

  Chad takes a turn that indicates he’s heading back to her house. They all sit quietly for a while. Chad’s Sirius radio is blasting ABBA, and Gretchen would bet her ass the hippies aren’t happy about it, but they’re both too polite to say anything. She’s not wild about ABBA, either—really, just because they’re gay? Is it absolutely imperative that everybody drink the goddamn Kool-Aid about goddamn everything? Gretchen is already thinking about the Ketel in her freezer—better than mimosas anyway—when she hears Emily murmur “yikes” under her breath. When Gretchen looks, Nick has the fouled syringe in his hand, Miguel’s seed still clinging to its plastic sides like residual salad dressing in a bowl. “Hey,” he says, “can I throw this out now, or did you guys want to keep it as a souvenir?”

  LINA

  The evening after your wife first hears my brother’s baby’s heartbeat, Bebe and I are sitting at another overpriced restaurant, pushing the only vegetarian entrees on the menu around on our plates. Since I’ve stopped stripping, we are at a lack for things to do socially. We aren’t foodies. She doesn’t like movies or TV. I’ve been reading more or less continually for the past five years, but when we try to talk about books, it doesn’t go well. It turns out there is a lot we don’t agree on, in the texts on our bookshelves, in the text of our lives. Bebe was all for it when I left the testosterone-laden club I’d danced at for years—we didn’t need the money, she said; she was fine with supporting us—but when I stopped performing even on lesbian nights, on BDSM night at our own favorite bar, something shifted. It was, in a sense I’m not quite sure I can convey, almost as though she were Simone de Beauvoir, and had written a book—a treatise on our own lives—and I were Nelson Algren, and had publicly trashed her in a scathing review. I have undermined something carefully and artfully constructed between us, and in its wake is a tension neither of us dare acknowledge, a hole in the shape of my previous sexuality, conspicuous in its blankness.

  I’m no longer what she signed up for. When we got together, I was a twenty-four-year-old tough-girl stripper who had never read anything, who approached middle class and intellectual culture as though I were an alien who required an earthling guide to help decipher the simplest customs. Somehow I have turned into a well-read thirty-year-old skeptic of our shared manifesto; I’ve become some twisted version of a frustrated housewife, full of disgruntlement and thrashing-but-diffuse want. Sex hasn’t been that great lately. I would say Bebe’s losing interest in me, but I know I lost interest first in being the person in whom she was interested. I’ve shed my skin again, but what’s underneath the sloughed-off epidermis is raw and unformed still.

  “Miguel and Chad want us to go to Mami’s for dinner tomorrow,” I say. “I think they’re going to announce the pregnancy, but they don’t know we know, so act surprised.”

  “But we’re already going there for Thanksgiving!” Bebe drains her wine in alarm. “I am going to poke my eye out with a fork if I have to hear anything more about that fucking baby. Why do I give a fuck about its every development?”

  “Apparently you don’t,” I say. “Whatever, never mind.”

  “What? You want to go?”

  “I don’t care about going.”

  “You just want to go in case Nick is invited, too,” she informs me. “Because he has such an obvious crush on you. You miss stripping—you miss being the object of the male gaze, so now you’re looking for it in individual men. Which, I hope you realize, means now those men have power over you. If you need them to want you for you to feel good about yourself, then they hold the cards. When you had their desire collectively, in an environment you controlled, you were in power, but now it’s the opposite.”

  I mean . . . what does a person possibly respond to something like this?

  “I wasn’t thinking in terms of power,” I try. “Nick is kind of my friend. Emily’s a cool person. She’s having my brother’s baby. I like my brother. I’d like to give him the chance to actually tell me he’s having a kid—I’m not sure that correlates to my addiction to the male gaze, or whatever, Bebe, but fine, if you want to frame it that way, I don’t think I was in control at the club, either. I think it just turns you on to think I was. But whatever.”

  “You’ve just said whatever about eight times,” she says, sighing with impatience because I believe myself to be intelligent, when that was never what she wanted from me.

  When I was dancing, Bebe liked to come into the club with her friends from the English Department. Most of our lesbian friends never dug the club—some came in once or twice for the novelty, but that was years ago. I remember the first time a few of them showed up, they looked like either the bachelorette party for a dyke wedding, or like they might be planning to stage a half-assed political protest in the middle of my set. Bebe’s colleagues, though, are a nerdy, bookish lot, and going to the club made them feel cool and subversive. They believed my working there meant I was a sexual outlaw, like someone Kathy Acker would write about, or at least like Madonna, exploiting myself before the patriarchy could and turning a profit at its expense. Maybe it sounds like I’m mocking it now, but the truth is that after all I had been through by the time I met Bebe, being seen through this flattering lens was like salve on a burn. America, the land of reinvention. I was a feminist heroine; I was subverting the patriarchy; yeah, that’s the ticket. “Look at these poor men with their throbbing hard-ons and open wallets,” Bebe would scoff into her bourbon. “They think they’re the spectators in the zoo, but who’s really inside the cage? They’re helpless before the primal female energy here. They worship and fear the cunt.” Here I should stipulate that English Department men adore it when women talk that way. They love to use the word cunt in group discourse. They read books published by FC2; they read feminist theory; they talk about “the hysterics” as though they were a radical activist collective. They all have hip glasses, wimpy or doughy physiques, and are at least ten years older than I am. Bebe’s academic friends always acted stupidly excited to see me and disproportionately fond of me, though none of the women ever engaged me in an actual conversation even when my clothes were on, and the men who did seemed to forget that Bebe’s words about the zoo applied to them, too.

  My zucchini florets look, in fact, like some abstract sculpture of a cunt. I sever one with my fork. “If strippers have so much power, you’d have been one yourself. You’re the one who wants to rule the world, not me.”

  I expect Bebe to tell me that I’m acting like a twelve-year-old, pitching a tantrum. I half expect, even, for her to tell me that I’m getting a caning to remind me of my place, which honestly woul
d be a relief, since even though it would be humiliating it would give us something to do. I used to beg her to settle any dispute that way—I even wanted to sign a contract to that effect—but she found the plan impractical. She never struck me in anger. “I’m only turned on when I’m happy,” she explained patiently. “I don’t want you when you’ve pissed me off.” Now she sighs contemplatively. “I don’t know, Lina, I guess you can’t be empowered by something you yourself don’t find empowering. If you want to see yourself as a pawn, then you’ll always be one. I’m not trying to say I’d rather be a stripper than a professor. But I don’t see how it’s any more demeaning than having to ask every customer if they’d like apple pie with that, wearing a paper hat. All unskilled labor is run by someone else’s rules. The patriarchy runs McDonald’s, too. At least you were affirming a sex-positive politics—maybe it was activism on a small scale, but you weren’t just sitting around the apartment not stripping. Now you just seem like you’re slut-shaming yourself all of a sudden, for no apparent reason.”

  Stripping, or wearing a paper hat. These are what my lover thinks my options are.

  But a contrarian even to my thoughts, Bebe ventures helpfully, “Why don’t you go to grad school?”

  She’s right, but instead of admitting it I say, “Most occupations are only based on some illusion of bullshit need—they just require still more occupations to keep bolstering that false economy of needs. Grad school is the absolute perfect illustration of that.”

  She stares back at me, looking dismal.

  “And by the way, ‘the patriarchy’ just means life.” I turn away, watching a black woman in a slithery green dress stride toward the restrooms, which of course in a place like this are single occupancy, hence meaning I am trapped at the table with Bebe and my own petulance. I hear her mutter, “Jesus.”

  I guess this is what people call “growing apart.”

  It seems to be what couples do. This is a developmental stage, like recognizing yourself in a mirror or the ability to think critically. Usually, this seems to be the stage when couples decide to have a baby, which renews their common ground on a lease of eighteen years, prolonged if they have more than one, guaranteeing them something to talk about for perpetuity. They may not always agree on parenting issues any more than Bebe and I always agree on books we read, but unlike the case with a book, the two people in question are the only people on the planet who will ever be as interested or invested in that particular baby as the other one is, which is, I suppose, what is called “incentive” to stay together.

  But you would know more about this than I do.

  All at once, an existence that revolves around being “transgressive” and making some kind of political statement with my life feels to me like living nonstop at a cocktail party or an activists’ rally, at which people happen not to be wearing clothes. I am bored out of my mind. I am sick of rhetoric and dogma. I’m not sure what intimacy is, exactly—it wasn’t my house growing up; it sure as hell wasn’t either of my husbands—but I am getting the feeling this is not it, either.

  For the moment, I don’t move out because I have no money, and if I moved out I’d have to go back to stripping, since it’s the only gainful employment I have ever actually held.

  Why Bebe doesn’t ditch my ass, on the other hand, is beyond me. Perhaps she thinks I am just going through a phase. Perhaps she feels sorry for me. Perhaps she is just waiting to find someone better. Perhaps, even though I am annoying her within an inch of her life, she really believes she is in love.

  As we say in the Program: you always go out before you go out.

  MIGUEL

  Miguel summons what is left of his family for dinner, so that he and Chad can make their grand announcement. Isabel, her husband, and their grown daughter have all fled the state of Illinois, so Miguel and Lina are all Mami and her American husband, Carlos, have left. Essentially, the Christian, married, normally procreating Guerra child gathered up her family and abandoned Mami with the two queers. It could not possibly be funnier, with the drawback that Mami does not possess much of a sense of humor about anything, especially this.

  It’s been decades since Miguel has stepped into his mother’s home without Fox News blaring. Carlos is so perpetually engaged in some manner of home renovation that, in the rules of any logical universe, he and Mami should be living in the Taj Mahal by now, and yet every time Miguel comes over, the ramshackle little A-frame, with its aluminum siding and tiny cement steps, always looks the same.

  “A celebratory dinner,” Miguel said when he called his mother. Then, as if this clarified things: “We’re celebrating.”

  Lina must have forced Bebe to attend. Miguel came out a decade and a half before Lina took up with a woman, which should have paved the way, but in fact Bebe has had a much rockier road with Mami than Chad ever suffered. Even Carlos loves Chad. When Chad enters the house, hugs and exclamations of delight fly. Mami has a tendency to look at Bebe as though her hair is on fire.

  The smell of rice and beans permeates the walls so thoroughly that it would take a gut rehab to remove it.

  In the silence, Bebe’s leather pants crackle and stick and make wild suction noises against the plastic sofa covering. Bebe crosses and uncrosses her legs, provoking the noise. The pants are brown and loose, not really Whore of Babylon at all . . . Bebe wears them with a plain black T-shirt and a pair of Chuck Taylors. There is something Euro about Bebe, although she was raised in St. Louis. She exudes sex and arrogance in proportions normally reserved for the French. Every time her leather rubs the plastic, Mami flinches.

  “So!” Lina hurls her body forward toward Miguel, violently enough that her small breasts brush her thighs. “What are we celebrating?”

  “Oh,” Miguel says, alarmed. “I was going to announce it at dinner.”

  Carlos is in the yard grilling burgers. It’s almost Thanksgiving, and forty degrees outside.

  “The last time I tried to use the grill,” Mami tells them, “I opened the lid and there was a rat inside.”

  “Jesus!” Lina says. “I hope you bought a new grill. I hope you’re not grilling the burgers on top of rat feces.”

  “Oh, the rat was dead,” Mami says, as though this explains everything.

  “You don’t eat meat anyway,” Miguel says. “Carlos could have stuck the rat carcass into the food processer and be serving it to us as burgers tonight and all you’re going to have is the salad, so what do you care?”

  “I washed the grill with bleach,” Mami says, frowning. “I wore gloves—aye, Miguel, your sister’s right, if you breathe in the . . . the rodent’s poop, you know? You can die from that, they say.” She fusses with the ends of her orangutan-colored hair, which loans her dark skin a vicariously orange hue. “Your body shuts down and they can’t save you, once it’s in your lungs.”

  “That’s an old wives’ tale,” Miguel says. “That doesn’t happen.”

  “Yes it does.” Bebe, of course. “Your mother means the hantavirus. It’s rare in the United States, but there have actually been a couple cases in Illinois. They can save you if they catch it early, but it’s usually fatal because early symptoms are like the flu and people don’t get treatment.” Good Christ. How does Bebe know this? How exactly does the hantavirus relate to Derrida? She stops talking, but none of them have wine glasses to busy themselves with, so after a moment, Bebe seems unable to resist and blurts, “I don’t know why you’d assume it was an old wives’ tale, Miguel, whatever that’s supposed to mean anyway.”

  “Sexist pig,” Lina says. Then, in the deadpan of a radio announcer: “Miguel—he’s part of the problem, not the solution.”

  Chad, Miguel, Lina, and even Bebe laugh. Mami stares, which makes Miguel and Lina laugh harder.

  Carlos comes in with a steaming plate of burgers and a giant, Jimmy Carter grin. This puts Lina straight onto the floor, convulsing with mirth. Carlos and Mami exchange terrified glances.

  At the kitchen table, Chad hits his fork against
his water glass as though inviting a bride and groom to kiss. “Well,” he says loudly despite no need for this ceremony, the six of them knee-to-knee under the small table—“We have a big announcement to make. Honey, do you want to tell them?”

  Miguel takes a giant bite of his bleach burger—the hantavirus would be a welcome distraction right now. “Go ahead,” he says with his mouth full.

  “Go ahead, Chad,” Lina concurs; she has Miguel’s back, or she’s just impatient for the news, who knows? “You don’t need to defer to Miguel—he can’t tell a story anyway—you’re part of the family. Isn’t he, Mami?”

  “Of course!” Mami booms without irony, which Miguel can’t help but think isn’t exactly the reaction Lina wanted, though she’d deny it.

  “So! Okay! Well!” Chad spreads his arms, though he has to do this carefully to keep from knocking food out of Bebe’s and Carlos’s hands. “The thing is . . . Miguel and I are going to be parents. My sister donated the egg, and we’ve been working with a gestational surrogate to carry the pregnancy to term. The procedure was a success . . . the in vitro fertilization, I mean, straight out of the gate, the first time, which is . . . isn’t that rare, Miguel?” When Miguel responds by chewing, Chad forges on, “They told us it was lucky, but Emily, she’s had two other children and loves being pregnant—they say the previous pregnancies of the surrogate don’t matter, but how can that possibly be true, I think it has to have helped. Anyway, we kept quiet about it at first, which wasn’t easy. In case, you know, just in case. But she went in for her first ultrasound and everything looks perfect . . . we’re at five weeks now . . . she’s five weeks pregnant.” He pauses, looking at Lina for help. “With our baby!”