Given Up for You

by Erin O. White

  The next morning I called the friend who had referred me to Hector. I packed while we talked: I was moving to Colorado, where I planned to spend the next three months writing in my parents’ empty house (they were on a cross-country bicycle trip) and traveling the Southwest. I no longer worked for the Kensington community organization, and the downtown nonprofit that I now worked for was willing to pay my health insurance while I was gone and give me a raise and a promotion when I returned—money that would pay for my months of not working. I would sublet my apartment, put my possessions in storage, and be free. This plan had seemed inspired a few weeks ago and now seemed exhaustingly impossible to execute.

  “My god,” my friend said when I finished telling her about my last session with Hector. “You know, he can’t say those things to you.”

  “I know, I know,” I said, although I didn’t really know at all.

  “Therapists have a lot of power, and it can be extremely difficult for a patient to discern when the advice isn’t good. He’s really, really homophobic.”

  I knew that Hector was homophobic, and I knew his views on same-sex relationships were wrong. This was one point on which he could not sway me. But the trouble was I couldn’t see that this profound rift was an irreconcilable difference of belief, that the psychosocial legitimacy of same-sex relationships was not something on which we could agree to disagree. I couldn’t admit that Hector had wronged me, terribly, by saying those things, and there was no going back.

  “He is,” I said, “but there’s so much more to my relationship with him.”

  “Not now there’s not,” she said. “This changes everything.”

  After my friend and I hung up, I walked to a diner around the block for a good-bye lunch with my uncle, who was also a psychologist. When our food arrived I asked him if he had ever told a patient that he wouldn’t see her if she didn’t end a relationship. He thought for a moment before speaking. “Well,” he said, putting down his sandwich, “I’ve had patients who were having affairs tell me they wanted to work on their marriages without ending their affairs.” He smiled and rolled his eyes good-naturedly. “So then I’ve had to say, ‘Well, then I really can’t help you.’”

  I heard Hector’s voice inside my head say that’s exactly what you are doing, metaphorically speaking. For how much longer, I wondered, would I hear Hector’s voice inside my head?

  I told my uncle about Chris and about Hector, about what he had said to me. When I began to cry my uncle reached across the table for my hand and smiled at me in the way he had been smiling at me since I was a young girl, a smile of affection and reassurance, a smile that I had known long enough to know that soon he would be laughing. “Oh, Hector Cruz,” he said with an air of exaggerated, satirical prestige. He shook his head and laughed then, and I did too. It was the first time I laughed about Hector, and I would not laugh about him again for more than a decade.

  After lunch I went back to my apartment to finish packing. The phone rang as I walked in the door. It was my uncle. “You know,” he said, “therapists are wrong sometimes. What Hector did, what he said, was wrong.”

  Later that afternoon I saw Chris and told her what had happened. She thought it was absurd, that Hector was unconscionable, unprofessional, fucked-up. Her dismissal, unlike my uncle’s, was no solace. It was, in fact, the opposite. We rarely spoke of him again.

  I called Hector the first day I was in Colorado. He didn’t pick up the phone, and I didn’t leave a message. I didn’t call him again.

  5

  Ordinary Beds

  I think we should go to Paris.”

  Chris and I were lying in bed on the morning of my twenty-fifth birthday. I had just finished opening presents from her: a Mont Blanc pen, an annotated edition of Walden, and a pair of small gold earrings. We were in Colorado and I was barely a month into my ill-conceived travel and writing sabbatical. So far I had spent most of my days crying and hiking on trails no more than ten miles from my parents’ house. Before I left Philadelphia I told Chris that I wanted this time to be a break, and she said sure, we’ll take a break. But she flew to Colorado almost every weekend. When she came we walked downtown together and browsed bookstores and ate Mexican food. We went to the movies and napped in the sun. And now she wanted to take me to Paris.

  “Oh, I don’t know,” I said.

  “Well, I’m going,” she said. “I’m going for New Year’s, and I would love for you to come with me.”

  “I’ll think about it,” I told her. But I didn’t really need to think about it. I knew that I would go to Paris with Chris that winter. I had made my choice; I had chosen her. And while I still had no idea if it was the right choice, I didn’t regret it.

  Chris and I landed in Paris at dawn and went straight to the hotel. “My god, I’m exhausted,” Chris said as she walked into the hotel room. She dropped her bag and started to undress. She pulled the duvet back from the bed. “Let’s sleep.”

  “We can’t sleep,” I said. “We have to get ourselves on Paris time.” I walked over to the double windows, which I realized were actually the doors to a small balcony from which I could see the Tuileries and its Ferris wheel, unlit and still. I turned back to look at Chris, who was now in bed, and at the room, which was green and gold and smelled like wealth. It smelled like nowhere I had ever been before. “We should walk,” I insisted. “Or eat some breakfast.”

  Chris beat the pillow to fluff it, then flipped it over and lay her head down. She lifted the covers in invitation. “We’re here for a week,” she said. “There’s no harm in a nap.”

  Chris did everything her own way, which was the most exciting thing about her. I crawled into bed with her that morning, and we slept until afternoon. We went out into the falling dusk and stopped at a café for omelets and wine, and when we had finished, the time on the clock no longer mattered. We weren’t tired and there was plenty to do. And when we did tire, we pulled the heavy silk drapes over the balcony doors and slept. It was winter, and so the sun rose late and set in the midafternoon, and for the brief time it was in the sky it barely shone. Paris in December was cold and damp and gray. It was the most beautiful place in the world.

  And it was so far from home. In Paris, Chris did not hesitate when I reached for her hand, did not pull back when I leaned across the café table to kiss her. And when, late one night we stood kissing against a building near the hotel and someone honked and called out a car window at us, she pulled away only to laugh. This was not the Chris I knew. A few weeks before, when we were still in Philly, we had run into a managing partner of Chris’s law firm at a small neighborhood restaurant. “There’s Henry,” Chris whispered, straightening in her chair. When he came over to say hello, Chris introduced me as her friend. Henry insisted we join him and his son, which we did. And when dinner was over, Chris and I rose from the table, put on our jackets, and walked out the door. That dinner was the longest she had ever gone without touching me.

  I, on the other hand, told everyone at my office about Chris. When she called me at work (this was before cell phones, before texting), she had a terrible of habit saying, “Erin White, please,” when the receptionist answered the phone, as though I worked at the next law firm over instead of a community education project. “That was my girlfriend,” I told the secretary the first time Chris called. “Sorry about her greeting.” And then, by way of explaining, I told her that Chris was a commercial litigator, which was, in my world, more scandalous than her gender.

  In truth, I preferred Chris’s caution. In Philly, when we said good-bye without touching on the crowded train platform, we were the only two people in all the world who could imagine how our morning had begun. Our sex was a deep and arousing secret, a secret that had eased my inhibitions and cleaved me to her far sooner, far more deeply than I had been joined to anyone else.

  When I think of my penchant for secrecy—as though it were a preference, a chosen pleasure—I am discomfited by how little I understood of what was really at stak
e. Chris had a job that, for many reasons, could not be jeopardized, one of the reasons being she had a family who had not entirely accepted her gayness. She was on her own, and had been for a long time. She hadn’t lived at home since she was eighteen. She put herself through law school and when, at twenty-five, she graduated, she moved to New York City and began working the fifteen-hour days she was still working when I met her. She was always afraid of losing her job, despite the fact that she was a star.

  Later, much later, when it would become essential for us not to keep secrets, for us to be clear about who we were to each other at all times for the sake of our children, I would see how our honesty lightened every last bit of Chris. How it would change her life.

  During those days in Paris, Chris and I didn’t want to see or do many of the same things. At the Louvre I wanted to see The Lacemaker; she wanted to see The Coronation of Napoleon. She wanted to find an Alsatian restaurant she had read about in a Hemingway novel; I wanted to find a crepe stand I had read about in a travel magazine. She wanted to read the plaque at the Place Vendôme; I wanted to walk the labyrinth at Chartes Cathedral. But even if we could not understand each other’s desires, we were enchanted by them, because we were enchanted by each other. Chris walked miles through the Louvre to find that tiny Vermeer of my dreams; I ate blood sausage and sauerkraut for lunch and sat on a bench reading a novel while Chris deciphered Napoleon’s worn invocation. And on a rainy afternoon that Chris surely would have rather spent in a dark bar drinking Cognac and daring me to smoke one more Gauloise Blonde, we took the high-speed train out of Paris to Chartres.

  When we got to Chartres we found the labyrinth covered by row after row of chairs so that you could see its faded outline on the stone floor, but you could not walk the circling maze to the four-petaled bloom at its center. I was disappointed. I had secretly hoped that going to Chartres and walking the labyrinth would prove I could have this wild and improbable life, prove that I could rise from a hotel bed, naked and flushed from sex like I had never known with a woman—a woman!—whom I loved as I had loved no one else, and then, a few hours later, walk toward God on a meandering but certain path in one of the oldest Catholic churches in the world. I wanted to stand at the center of that maze and believe in every pleasure, every beauty, every possible union. But now it seemed that Chartes would not grant me this wish; now it seemed absurd that I had even hoped such a thing would be possible.

  “Let’s stay anyway,” I said to Chris.

  “Sure,” she said. “Let’s go in.”

  I wanted to be alone, and so when Chris stopped to look at the paintings in the first alcove, I kept moving into the cathedral, further and further from the light of its enormous doors, its rose window. I spent the afternoon in the cathedral close, walking from one nave, one chapel to the next. As I moved further I was surrounded by what appeared to me as artifacts of seeking, stone and glass and plated gold, all of it arranged to bid miracles. And they buoyed me. As I studied the statues of the saints, their stone faces impossibly expressive, I thought of the men who made them, their rough hands and patience, their tempers and mistakes. Did they pare these saints for love of God or money? For love of God, I decided. And this was the solace of Chartres: that once ordinary men rose from ordinary beds to cut glass and stone into the shape of devotion. Ordinary men who then turned back to the world, happy to see beloved faces around the table, happy to stretch their legs on gray stone streets.

  “Are you ready?” Chris asked when I approached her in the narthex, where she had been waiting for me.

  I nodded. “Let’s go back,” I said with a smile whose meaning Chris, by now, understood perfectly.

  When I returned home from Paris, I told my parents about Chris. They were cautious and kind. My mother asked me if I thought this was a one-time affair, or more of a shift in identity. She was asking me if I was a lesbian now. I told her I hadn’t really thought about it that way, by which I meant I hadn’t thought of how to classify or explain myself, or how she might explain me to her friends and our family.

  I hadn’t thought about my relationship with Chris this way because I didn’t want to. I wasn’t interested in a new identity. I didn’t want to be anyone but the girl I had always been, certain of her place in the world and in the culture, which is to say certain of her privilege, her wide range of access. I was blind to the reality that this wasn’t a decision I could make, that no outsider, no matter her race, her money, or her education, could remain inside a culture that didn’t see her as fully human. It would take me years to understand that I sought an impossible and shifting stance: I wanted to move between insider and outsider—straight and gay—as it suited, as I wished.

  I wanted everything: to love a woman yet avail myself of the opportunities and status of straight culture; to break the rules of the Church but still feel myself beloved by it. My mother had asked me a simple question. And while I didn’t know it at the time, a decade would pass before I could answer it with any honesty at all.

  6

  Wake

  How are you going to introduce me?” I asked Chris.

  We were sitting in the car outside a funeral home in Worcester, Massachusetts. Chris’s grandmother’s wake was going on inside. There were so many cars turning into the parking lot that a police officer was directing traffic. Chris had waved to the officer when she pulled in. “That’s Robbie Donahue,” she said, and then added, “My father directed funeral traffic to pay for Catholic school.” Chris’s father was a vice cop. Before graduating from the police academy at twenty-five, he was a helicopter mechanic and door gunner in Vietnam. Chris was born while he was at basic training; she learned to walk and talk while he was in Vietnam. According to family legend, Chris’s younger sister was conceived in the taxi their parents took home from the airport the night he returned for good. Her father was near sixty now, and nowhere close to retiring. For years he had refused one promotion after another. Why, he asked, would he want to spend his life behind a desk? “I like the chase,” he said.

  “How should I introduce you?” Chris asked. She wasn’t looking at me. I knew she didn’t really want to deal with this. Not today.

  “Just use my name,” I said. “And leave it at that.” I was putting on lipstick in the car mirror. Yesterday I had gone to Eileen Fisher, the only clothing store in the Massachusetts college town where we now lived, and tried to find something appropriate for a wake. I had been to only one wake before this, my own grandfather’s, but that had been in Pittsburgh in March, at a time when I still had a real job and lived in a real city, and so I wore a brown suit and brown pumps and kept an extra pair of stockings in my purse in case I got a run. Now it was late June in Worcester, and I was a graduate student. I was wearing a black pencil skirt with a lime-green, sleeveless sweater, which was, I realized as I watched all the women walking into the funeral home in pale suits, a terrible choice. My hair was expanding in the humidity and I was starting to sweat.

  “Why don’t you go in first,” I said. I didn’t want to pressure Chris, not now. She missed her grandmother terribly. For the past three months she had spent every Saturday in Worcester with her grandmother, watching Red Sox games, doing crossword puzzles, eating the Ritz crackers and sliced cucumbers of her childhood. On those Saturday mornings Chris would get dressed early, fill her coffee cup for the car, and pack her bag for the day I had hoped we would spend together, now that we had made a home for ourselves in an old parsonage on the Main Street of a tiny Massachusetts town. On those Saturdays Chris would come home late, her eyes red from crying in the car. That spring I learned Chris was not as estranged from her family as she had once suggested.

  Eventually I got out of the car and went into the funeral home. The reception room was filled with people and the thrum of conversation. I saw the casket, saw the long line of people waiting to kneel, make a rapid-fire sign of the cross, and then lay their hand for an instant on the glossy wood. I did not make an approach.

  Instead I gave
my condolences to Chris’s parents, whom I had met once before, and they accepted them kindly but were quickly distracted. The line of people needing to speak to them was long. I was only relieved. I didn’t have much to say to them. After a few minutes, Chris’s sister Lynne found me in the lobby. “Tennis, anyone?” she asked with a laugh, nodding to the sweater I had tied over my shoulders in an attempt to dim the lime green without adding to the sweating problem. I had known Lynne for a few years by now. She was a wise-cracking and lively person, and I liked her. And while I was certain she had no problem with the idea of me, I couldn’t tell if she liked the actual me.

  Lynne opened her arms and gave me a hug. She always smelled the way I had, as a child, assumed I would smell someday, a floriated mix of perfume and makeup and hair product that did not overwhelm but still left no room for other, more animal smells.

  “I’m so sorry about your nana,” I said.

  “Thank you,” Lynne said. “I can’t believe she’s gone!” This is what everyone in the family had said when I offered my condolences. Their nana was eighty-five and had been in a state of decline for years. Still, it seemed no one could imagine life without her.

  “Oh, and congratulations too,” I said, looking down at her stomach.

  “I heard the heartbeat today,” Lynne said, giving her belly a pat, as though to praise what swam in there. “So I’m telling everyone.” She laughed, swung her hand toward the crowd, and flipped her long, blonde hair over her shoulder. Lynne was a second-grade teacher at a local parish school, and she lived a block from the house where she was born. These were her people, and it was clear—and enviable, to me—that she would spend the wake offering the seed of hope that was her growing baby; she would walk among everyone as an antidote to death. It’s not often these things line up this way, that you are the one bearing a new soul as an old one rushes out. I could see that she felt a lesser loss because of it, that she felt a bit invincible.