I Loved You More

by Tom Spanbauer

  Fucking fear, man.

  Outside, I walk fast through the tourists. There’s a Christian gathering of some kind. Heterosexual Christians and their wailing children. Strollers as wide as the sidewalk. The world that day is eating sugar. Saltwater taffy, hotdogs, candy apples, cupcakes, doughnuts, ice cream. Everybody’s fat. I’m down the cement steps and on the sand I take off my shoes and socks and put them in my backpack.

  Cannon Beach is hard to beat for Pacific Ocean beauty. Those big old dark rocks sticking up out of the gray blue, crystal blue. Seagulls squawking. Thank God there’s sun. Everyone on the beach seems to be screaming it out loud. Thank God for the sun. It’s too cool to swim but the beach is full of little kids in the water. Goose flesh head to toe. Old folks barefoot in parkas and beat up sun hats. Sandcastles. Blue plastic buckets and little yellow shovels. Everybody’s smiling. One old woman I walk by is slumped against a tree root, her butt dug into the sand. She’s covered by a bright yellow African cloth, her bare feet out in the sun. A pink long-billed ballcap. She’s reading Proust. Sodom and Gomorrah.

  I’m totally fucking jealous. Of everything. Of the life that’s going on that I can’t feel. My body wants to throw itself into a big baby torpor. For missing out. For being outside of. The sensuality. The beauty.

  But because it’s not mine to have, because it is the sunlight and not my sunlight, and because I can’t feel it, the ocean is just the ocean, I figure at least I can be aware that it is beautiful. Maybe because it isn’t mine to feel, by default, I make it mine. By not feeling, I am hyperaware. The idea of beauty, even though the beauty cannot touch me.

  My head likes these thoughts a lot. But my heart is sore.

  Far away down on the beach, I’m hunkered into some deep hole somebody’s dug. Almost like a grave. In an hour the tide will be in and my hole in the ground will be gone. Across the hole, above me, a lattice work of driftwood. The sand is wet. The shadows and sun of the driftwood. How it all looks when I squint my eyes. The ocean waves. Finally, I can’t hear my ringing ears. The wind. The shifting sand. Distant voices. Seagulls. My deep deep breath. Ah.

  THAT’S WHEN THE third thing happens. At first all I’m aware of is that something is blocking my sun.

  “I thought maybe you forgot your sardines,” Ruth says.

  She jumps inside my hole, my solitary grave, lays her body against me. Smacks my ear with her elbow. She puts the can of Bumble Bee sardines, a stack of sesame seed crackers in a Ziploc bag, a white plastic fork, and a napkin on my lap.

  “It’s cool in here,” she says. “Way cool. Are you sure you’re warm enough?”

  ON OUR DRIVE back to Portland, the clouds roll in. Big dramatic thunderheads. Sometimes Oregon is only about the sky. Ruth’s crazy old car. Feathers and pieces of paper, flower petals and shit fly around inside because our windows are open. I haven’t said anything, because I’m afraid if I say anything all I’ll do is curse. The CD of my favorite songs is playing loud. It’s when Bonnie Raitt starts singing “I Can’t Make You Love Me” that I turn the damn thing off.

  “You need to get laid,” I say. “I mean a proper lay. What you need is a good old-fashioned fuck.”

  I know. I know. Telling the woman you’re angry at what she needs is not a good start. You’re supposed to start with I sentences like: I feel angry, or I feel like I’m not being heard. But hell fuck, the truth of it is I was spoiling for a fight.

  Ruth puts in the clutch, shifts from fourth to fifth gear.

  “What do you mean?” Ruth says. “Sex isn’t just about dick. We’ve talked about this a thousand times.”

  “No, no,” I say. “For you it’s about dick. A good stuffing would do you wonders.”

  Ruth’s white skin is so pale it’s blue. Some part of her wants to fight back. The way she holds her jaw. But she doesn’t. Maybe it’s because she’s afraid she’ll lose me. Maybe because bottom line I’m her teacher and you don’t fuck with your teacher. Maybe I’m her perfect older brother Phillip she never stood up to. Maybe I’m just fucking Ben Grunewald, published author and popular writing teacher, the reason why she doesn’t fight back. Love? Fuck if I know.

  “You need to start seeing other men,” I say. “If for no other reason, I need some space of my own.”

  “Ben,” Ruth says. “Why are you doing this?”

  Boom. Fucking anger, man. My fist hits her dashboard so hard the dust rises up. The rocks tumble. The Wonder Woman action figures go tits up. Just like that I’m all New York on her ass.

  “Because!” I yell. “Yesterday during class I couldn’t speak because you wouldn’t shut up. And the five fucking minutes I wanted to be alone, Ruth Fucking Dearden plops her bones onto my precious solitary silence and smacks me in the ear. Because a young man back there was telling me he loved me and you blundered right in. That’s why.”

  “You mean Andy?” Ruth says.

  “Just like some clueless motherfucker,” I say.

  “Andy Gronik!” Ruth says.

  “Just some time alone,” I say. “That’s all I ask.”

  “He’s so young, those pimples,” Ruth says. “And a terrible poet.”

  “Maybe we shouldn’t see each other for a while,” I say.

  “But if you’d like, we could invite him over to the house,” Ruth says. “We could cook. Get to know him a little better.”

  “You’re a beautiful young woman,” I say. “You’re smart. You could get any man you wanted.”

  “Really all he needs is to get rid of his sentimental language,” Ruth says.

  “Maybe clear away the rocks and leaves and stuff on the dining room table,” I say. “So I can start writing in my journal again.”

  “I’m sure he’d spend the night if you asked him,” Ruth says.

  “Who?” I say.

  “Andy Gronik!”

  “What the fuck you talking about?” I say, “He’s a child!”

  In Portland, when we pull up to my house, it’s my turn to slam the door.

  THAT NEXT WEEK I don’t see Ruth until our Thursday night class. I wasn’t sure I would see her at all. I told myself I didn’t care if she showed up for class or not, but the truth is, I was afraid she wouldn’t show. But bless her heart, there’s Ruth pulling up in her Honda Civic, there’s Ruth with her notebook covering her hair, and she runs toward the house through the rain, there’s Ruth in the kitchen shaking off the rain. That night we’re a little shy with each other. Overly polite. Ruth doesn’t say much in class. Which isn’t a surprise. I mean when you tell someone their mouth’s too big what do you expect? Fuck, some of the things I said. The students all know something’s up.

  After class, Ruth asks if she can spend the night. I have to take a deep breath. I tell her no, but I’ll take a rain check. That’s when it starts, that night. All the many long nights that are to come with Ruth and me talking talking. Hashing it out. Running things through again and again and again. Trying to figure it all out.

  What Ruth talks about is what it is she needs to do, what’s wrong with her. Why she isn’t enough. I don’t know what to tell Ruth. It really isn’t even about sex. I just know I’ve promised to tell the truth. Whatever that is. The darkness around me is deep.

  Another week goes by and I don’t see Ruth until Thursday class. Then that weekend she drops by on Saturday with a big bunch of yellow flowers to see how I’ve slept. Sunday night we watch The Sopranos.

  I have to say, time away from Ruth felt good. I figured all I needed was room to breathe. After two weeks, then three, one morning when Ruth walked in the kitchen door, I don’t know what she did, in fact she didn’t do anything, she was just Ruth standing there talking, and the moment opened up as if it was an eternal moment, and I was laughing, the way I always used to laugh with Ruth, and believe me, it was a huge fucking relief because Big Ben, man, sometimes, when he decides some shit, there’s no going back.

  For Thanksgiving, I cook. A big old pot roast and quinoa and winter vegetables. We watch Ruth’s favori
te movie, Living Out Loud, and then my favorite movie, Bertolucci’s Besieged. Ruth has baked a pumpkin pie and brought over one thin slice for me to try. With a tiny dollop of whipped cream. Man, I love eating that piece of pumpkin pie, could have eaten an entire fucking pumpkin pie, but even with that tiny slice, I pay for it. Hardly sleep at all that night.

  Too many Brandy Alexanders back in the day.

  But everybody I know from back in the day, everybody who didn’t get AIDS, that is, are all still drinking their Brandy Alexanders.

  Fucking AIDS, man.

  Ruth doesn’t want to talk that night. I’m surprised. She goes out dancing with her girlfriend, Lucy. I feel like an old man on the porch that night when Ruth leaves, kissing his daughter goodnight, telling her, be careful. Take care of yourself. Call, if you have any problems.

  ABOUT A MONTH later, it’s around New Year’s Eve and Ruth invites me to a party. Her yoga teacher is back from India. As you may know by now, I’m no longer the kind of guy who just goes out to a party. Let alone a New Year’s Eve party. But Ruth is excited for me to meet this yoga guru guy. He’s supposed to know everything about health and eating and exercise. Ruth thought maybe he could tell me how to start sleeping again.

  So we get to this party and it’s in this huge McMansion in the West Hills and there are only men, Indian men, boys really, dot not feather, at this party, and they are all tiny and skinny. Five foot two, these guys. And haute couture. Dressed to the nines in Ralph Lauren, Gucci, and Tommy Hilfiger. Their straight black hair cut short and spiked with lots of hair product. The perfume in that room is heavy. There’s twenty or so of these men and they’re speaking Hindi or whatever language they speak and they’re drinking alcohol, and talking loud and laughing. The sitar music, mixed with a heavy drumming dance rhythm, is loud. For some reason, the yoga guru isn’t there. He couldn’t make it, or he arrived later, I never found out. Ruth and I are the only white people and Ruth is the only woman there. She’s wearing the dress she bought at Buffalo Exchange, a red satin strapless evening gown.

  It takes me a while to figure out that these men are all gay men. But a specific kind of gay man. These boys are all girls. I mean they aren’t trannies. They’re young men who are feminine. With attitude.

  I have to be careful because it’s easy for my own homophobia to step up here when it comes to describing these men, because men, or as in this case, these boys, who are acting like I think girls would act, can set something off in me. I mean my daddy was a cowboy and when I look for a man I usually find some guy like Hank Christian or Tony Escobar. So right off these young girlish fashion victims are pushing my buttons.

  A guy who’s spent most of his life trying to have a cock can easily be confused by a man who seems proud to act as if he doesn’t even have one.

  And what does acting like you have a cock actually look like? Fuck.

  It’s times like these, at least back when I was healthy, that I love the most. Something that’s tripping shit off in me that I don’t understand and I want to understand. Racism, sexism, homophobia, man. We’re all guilty.

  So I’m talking to these men, or trying to talk to them. One in particular. His name is Aadya. He’s drinking a purple drink in a dramatic up glass and he smells like a gardenia. I’m drinking Perrier with lime. His dark eyes are lined with kohl. I think he’s wearing lipstick. Stressed denim pants way too tight. A black shiny shirt with the tails out. Some kind of Oxford Italian boots. Aadya and I are sitting on the top steps of a circular stairway. He sits on the step with his legs curled under him. Whenever Aadya moves his hand, limp wrist, are the words that go off in my mind.

  Across from us is a ridiculously huge chandelier and below us on the ground floor a kind of crimson ballroom. The music is loud and down there it’s a big white Ruth, shoulders and décolletage, long white arms, in a gown that’s just a shade brighter than the walls, with twenty tiny Indian men dancing around her.

  Aadya has been studying yoga with the yoga guru guy for ten years. At one point I ask Aadya why everyone is drinking alcohol.

  “Because we’re young and have the chance,” he says.

  “What if your guru finds out?”

  “He probably already knows.”

  That’s when Aadya asks me a question that makes my breath go away.

  “Why are you so tired?”

  I almost cry that he isn’t afraid to ask.

  That’s when we really get into it. In order to talk about how tired I am we have to talk about depression. Is it chemical? What is chemical? Stopping the mind. How to do that. What is there when you stop the mind. Pretty soon, Aadya’s and my knees are touching, and it’s not sex, it’s intimacy that’s going on. We’re talking about everything. Life, love, death.

  What’s most interesting about this night, though, is what happens next. Aadya has just given me his Hermès handkerchief. I’m worried about getting snot on it. In a moment, I look down through the banisters at the dancers below. Something about what I see below me makes me a little crazy.

  It’s Marilyn Monroe and Diamonds Are a Girl’s Best Friend, this scene. Against a crimson background, a red-haired Ruth, startling white shoulders and cleavage and arms, surrounded by men. But there’s something about the way the young men are looking at her. Maybe it’s just me. Like she’s a doll or something that isn’t real. I mean something that’s not to honor. What I see them doing is making fun of the big tall white girl and her large breasts. I don’t know how innocent this is, or if they are intentionally mean. Or if they are mean at all and I only interpreted it as meanness. Maybe she seems artificial to them and it’s campy and they’re simply enjoying her. And if they are making fun, so what, it feels harmless enough. Anyone could see the oddly stark juxtaposition. We humans all make fun of each other when there’s a big difference and you’re right up next to it.

  The trouble, though, isn’t the young men. It’s Ruth. How Ruth, among these tiny brown-skinned skinny men, makes her body go clumsy and goofy. The way Ruth first did with me a blue moon ago when I first asked her to dance.

  Ruth’s no Shingli-shoozi.

  Instead of Marilyn Monroe, Ruth’s a clown.

  AT THIS POINT, I’d like to step up and say I saw the humanity of it all. Saw in Ruth the buffoon I was and my own ridiculous quest to embody my sex. But I didn’t. Something fried behind my eyes. And I didn’t understand what it was. Not yet.

  A WEEK LATER, I wake up with a name that keeps running around my head. Buster Bangs. Buster’s a former student. Big Ben goes through my papers, finds his phone number. Buster’s a massage therapist, but really he’s a sex worker. I’m surprised when he answers. At first Buster thinks I want to talk about writing. Fuck, I talk so much about writing, but I let Buster talk for a while about his novel and what he’s been doing since he left class. I don’t know how else to say it, so I just say it. I tell Buster I want to pay for a massage, maybe the kind of massage with a special ending. We’ll just have to see.

  It’s quiet for a moment on the other end of the line. Then:

  “For how long, Mr. Grunewald?”

  “Call me Ben,” I say.

  Then: “No,” I say, “call me Gruney.”

  “Gruney,” Buster says.

  “Two hours,” I say.

  “That’s two hundred dollars,” he says. “But for you I’ll make it one fifty.”

  BUSTER’S RED, TOO, like Ruth, only he’s rust-red and freckles all over. Short and stocky, he’s an imp, this guy. The way he moves, he moves quick, then stops, then moves quick again. Like a stop-action camera. A red beard with braids in his beard and sometimes beads in the braids. Rust-red hair that sticks up in clumps all over his head. Hair you’d think could only look like that with lots of product. But Buster’s not a product kind of guy.

  As it turns out, Buster has that afternoon free. It’s a Wednesday, Ruth’s night of teaching class. One of those cold, gray, rainy January afternoons. Buster shows up just after sardines at four at the back door in a
n orange windbreaker with a beaded leather bag over his shoulder. He’s wearing sandals and carrying a massage table. When he first looks at me, there’s a way he has to stop and take a breath. I don’t look at all the way I used to look.

  Then Buster’s big smile. One tooth missing, same one as Silvio’s.

  “Beautiful day, ain’t it, Mr. Grunewald?”

  “It is, Buster,” I say. “Come in! Come in!”

  THE FURNACE IS on and I’m lying face down on Buster’s massage table on top of a purple paisley sheet. The way my face lies in the headrest for a moment I don’t think I can breathe, so I sit up quick. Buster is naked, too. That rust-red hair across his chest. The carpet matches the drapes with Buster, too. Thick arms and legs. The nub of his cock sticking out the hair that’s darker between his legs.

  Buster’s lighting a stick of incense. He puts the incense stick into a gold chalice he’s brought that’s full of sand.

  “Hey, Mr. Grunewald, man,” Buster says, “it’s cool.”

  “Gruney,” I say.

  “Mr. Gruney,” he says.

  Buster lays his hand on my shoulder. The pad of his hand is thick and his hand is especially warm. It’s the first hand that’s touched me besides Ruth’s since I’ve been home from the hospital.

  “I’m sorry,” I say. “I have this thing about breathing. The cover on the headrest, there isn’t much room for air.”

  Buster’s over at the headrest in a quick flash, fiddling with the cover. Then that quick he’s back looking at me. Strange blue eyes a little off kilter, as if he is looking just over my shoulder.

  “Breath is important,” Buster says. “Why don’t you try it again.”