6
AS IF THE whole romance were an extended metaphor that got less and less tenable as the story dragged on for three whole years. As if love and sex were a matter of suspending disbelief. As if purely physical sensation were enough. As if I don’t miss that sensation. As if I could have continued the experiment indefinitely. As if I could ever forget her. As if I could place myself squarely at a single point on some “sexual preference” continuum. As if the blurry, indistinct facts weren’t still facts. As if she were my mother asking me to forget my father and take care of her. As if all the love between us meant nothing compared to my attraction to men. As if the snow and the cold outside her window were sent to make the warmth of her bed seem even more delicious. As if the newness of cold and snow could make me a new person. As if my childhood sensation of doom could ever become a comfy homey glow. As if my cock inside her were all of me inside her. As if my whole body and maybe even my soul had entered paradise. As if our laughter afterwards were the chirping of paradisiacal birds in a winter of fire escapes and smudged windows overlooking airshafts. As if playfulness alone could sustain us. As if I could distance myself from her now by placing her in some realm apart from every relationship since. As if she were indeed a bird I had bedded in some fable set in a city of castles. As if that trapped feeling I had were simply “normal.” As if lying to myself and to her were harmless. As if I could keep these memories at bay by getting metaphoric. As if I could begin to sum up what she meant or means to me. As if at last I were finally getting my mother’s complete devotion. As if at last I were getting all the happy romance I’d envied throughout my crimped homo youth. As if she were the open backdoor to my closet, onto another world, surreal and magical, where time stops or at least slows and we wander naked and “free” on the grassy hillsides of fiction. As if her reminding me of my mother were “normal.” As if I could ever know what her own myths and lies were. As if her having her own reasons could absolve mine. As if she had only crazy reasons. As if by not thinking about her all these years I was building up antibodies to the pained confusion that permeates these memories, a feeling that still arises in dreams about her. As if I could ever reconcile the good and the bad in our romance, both of which were extreme as well as firsts in my life. As if you could ever get to the bottom of desire. As if I could ever lay to rest the mystery of any two people in love. As if with the words “doomed nature” I could explain our love to myself. As if all these “as if’s” could explain it.
7
ON THE PHONE E. told me I was judgmental and that I had “no interest in her life,” both of which were true.
She also said she had indigestion, she’d stayed home from work and spent the day crying.
I lay in bed with a low-grade fever.
I wrote, “She’ll never be happy until I say, ‘I love you.’”
I speculated that my feelings toward men might be “an effort to get my father back,” though I speculated further that this theory might be completely wrong.
E. sent me a short story about picking a favorite stuffed animal, “always with plastic moving eyes,” to join her in her card-table fort, then feeling sorry for the others she hadn’t picked.
“But when I begin to feel like I should call it off,” I wrote, “E. seems such a lost precious thing to me, such a lovely, wonderful thing.”
She came to New York and we had a “surprisingly good” weekend together.
A few days later I wrote, “I can’t deal with her crying.”
A straight friend called to tell me she had run into my ex-boyfriend in Seattle; she described him as “a narcissistic jerk” and “really faggy.”
I wrote, “I act a little faggy sometimes and I hate fearing judgment for it.”
In the short story I was writing, I compared visiting E. to riding my bicycle to see a girlfriend in junior high: “… pedaling in the heat—the body growing shaky and sweaty—past long rows of spinach in spreading fields, old silos, unidentifiable orchards: something like country lay between his house and hers.”
I had a nightmare about a little girl who either was, or thought she was, the reincarnation of her grandfather; various cracked interpretations of the dream, including “I’m deeply afraid of genuinely looking forward to seeing E.”
“… wildly attracted to men all week.”
My office at the magazine was on the very top floor of the building, under a peaked roof, with a view down Madison Avenue—slot canyon in summer haze.
I wrote: “Chris looked up from the plain white surface of his desk and saw his boss standing there, towering over him, a big blue suit wanting something … His boss nodded toward the empty desktop, smiling aggressively. ‘Bored, huh?’”
One Friday when E. was visiting, this same boss came in to find her sitting in my guest chair, near tears, in her dowdy library school clothes; I blushed deeply.
I was ashamed of not just that moment but all of it—the whole damn three years.
As I waited with her at Grand Central for her train back to Boston, I sat reading an article titled “AIDS Victims at Greater Risk from Cancer, Doctors Report.”
Following her visit: “Every time I heard a song that E. and I heard over the weekend, or every time anything reminded me of E., I would feel like I had just banged a leg on the same bruise.”
Even now I can’t listen to “Purple Rain.”
David Byrne made “flippy floppy,” and the electric violin moaned like a whale.
“Elaine just put her arms around him limply and said he didn’t look real. He supposed this was true,” I wrote. “Later she began to cry while they were making love, and Chris felt ashamed as he held her shaking ribs in his hands: again he had said maybe they should stop seeing each other.”
Gabby said, “You’re not going to marry her, are you?”
Cathy visited over Labor Day and I slept with her.
I informed E. of this and, predictably, she was angry.
In a letter she described seeing “white flashes every few seconds” when she thought of me with Cathy.
The letter went on to fantasize about our having a child together. The child comes into the living room and asks us to turn the music down so she can finish her homework.
This enraged me.
Phone conversation: “I meant …,” E. began. “What?” I shouted; “What? What? WHAT?”
Gabby said to me, wisely, “Ambivalence takes the greatest offense.”
Up at school, Elizabeth Hardwick declared that one must foster an “almost demonic” self-criticism.
At the pasta store I watched the ancient machine chop the flat, green dough into linguini.
Journal: “A leaf fell and hit me in the face as I was explaining to Gabby how much I hated fall.”
The podiatrist was baffled by the painful red spot on my right heel. He poked at it. “It’s hot!” he said.
I wrote: “Chris explained that normally it was his other foot that hurt, almost all the time. The doctor poked around that foot for a while in various ways. Holding the foot tenderly, he looked up at Chris and said, ‘Does this remind you of anything?’”
Eventually I was diagnosed with “reactive arthritis,” for which I’ve taken medication ever since.
On the phone I told E. she was full of shit.
“You go from one trail of tears to the next,” I said.
“Mental block,” I wrote: “I don’t understand her missing me so.”
Gabby suggested I needed either to “go for it” with E. or break up and see someone new.
Dream: my friend Mike lifted me up and carried me as he flew.
Dream: I was “frenching” my old dog Sam.
My apartment: “My sweaters are heaped in the chair on the rumpled quilt, on the edge of this unmade bed. A mess on my desk, of papers and bug husks.”
Dream that I had sex, at last, with a junior high crush: “I took his slender, bare, firm shoulders in my hands and we showered together.”
I seemed to be w
illing each moment of the dream.
8
WRITING ABOUT E. is like revisiting the Old Country.
Examining all I had to leave behind in order to move forward, and fearing I’ll get mired in it again.
On the train to Boston: “Stray landmarks go by in the darkness: a neon sign, block letters arranged vertically. New England depresses me.”
On the Cape: “She just kept talking and talking and saying, ‘I can’t take it in. I can’t take it in.’”
It’s as if I had to complete all the required coursework in math before I could be sure I didn’t want to major in math.
In Truro I turned our rented Chevy directly in front of another car, and we nearly collided. E. and I continued on to the youth hostel, stopping at some point to walk through a forest of stunted pines. We lay down on the needles and fucked. When I came, she burst into tears. I pulled up my pants feeling like a rapist, and just then a pack of motocross riders sped past on either side of us and disappeared into the woods again, engines revving. We went on to the dilapidated youth hostel, which as it turned out was closed for the season, but the handsome proprietor relented and let us stay. E. and I lay together in the lower cot of a rough bunk bed, shivering.
But my last night in Boston, we had “the most amazing sex I’ve ever had,” I wrote. “We had had a bad day … We lay talking for an hour or more. Then suddenly I rolled over on my back and she climbed on top of me—and never has her skin felt so smooth. We both felt smooth instead of nervous and sticky. We kissed and when I began touching her clitoris I felt some new desire to be inside her—she seemed so wet and so desirable. After a while she put in her diaphragm and it was actually frustrating that she decided to go down on me. Finally she climbed on top of me again and I entered her. Never has her vagina felt that way. So smooth and soft and fine … Afterwards E. told me she had hallucinated butterflies.”
I added that “my belief that I’m ‘really’ this or that”—homo or hetero—was “ridiculous.”
Underneath it all, the mucky conviction that any price I had to pay for such sweetness was well worth it.
Similarly, the doom of trying to love my mother through her elusiveness—her resentments and frustrations, her airs and insecurities, her frosted wig and her violin, her playfulness and delight, her short temper, and the tender way she called me “Sweetie.”
Yet also not wanting it at any cost.
That fundamental loneliness in me, and how it played out with E.
Recent memory of Mom’s playfulness: she looks at me gingerly and quickly pops a cracker in her mouth, as if sneaking it.
It’s like I could find the whole world of her love in that moment.
Thinking about E., I feel beaten down all over again.
Thinking about E., I want to run away from my life now, in case I’m still that mistaken.
Climbing back inside my “misspent youth.”
Inside these stanzas of delusion.
Inside her.
Pure sensation, an iridescent texture, purple-green, like the neck of a mallard, glossy and firm, halted there just for you, gliding and turning slowly so you can observe each shifting color, though not merely a surface but dense, both delicate and dense, as if I were burrowing through a mound of pure pigment—
It’s possible that my profound unhappiness with her even heightened the pleasure.
At such times I was like a cell accepting her, another cell, right into my protoplasm.
9
OVER BRUNCH, GABBY said I’d never opened up, as far as she knew, “for more than twenty minutes at a time.”
After brunch: “It began to rain in heavy splashes and spurts as we left [the restaurant]. I wanted to preserve the moment … The sky was patchy and ragged with waves of clouds; we kept stopping in doorways to avoid a downpour—huge drops here, then there, across the street, suddenly the sky full of light, then dark again … By the time we got to her place we were soaked; we changed, read the paper, drank soda, listened to a tape, and the intensity of the afternoon drained away.”
Yet another phone argument with E.: “She began to cry. She said if she opens up, just as things are going well I’ll end it, out of some idea that ending it is an act of strength … She said I treat her like an ‘experiment.’”
Indeed maybe I was trying to prove to myself over and over that I could leave her, even as I was trying to prove to myself that I couldn’t.
My relationship with her was a kind of contraption or incantation, a cracked sense of cause and effect as in a dream.
“She said she ‘can’t read me,’” I wrote, “that I just say ‘uh-huh’ when she says things like ‘I feel like you don’t want me to move to New York.’”
The card I sent her that bore no message, only a burst of cartoon rays, emanating from a blank.
“Outside, that bright gray light just before a rain. The feeling that even in New York one can be at peace with the seasons. A horn, a truck motor down the street. The sky growing darker and duller. I lay on my bed—I sit here now—with a pain or pressure in my chest, the expectation of some doom. Rain, will you?”
Letter from E. consisting almost solely of instructions for cooking our Thanksgiving dinner.
Elizabeth Hardwick sat beside me in her office and together we read through my new short story.
“Chris was sitting with a book in the sun in the living room. And I am telling you, he said to himself, desire is a burden. It is a burden, an arduous journey through spinach fields on a bicycle in the hazy heat of summer. I’m telling you and don’t you forget it.”
Elizabeth suggested only minor changes. Later she told my friend Erin, “Cliff Chase is a survivor.”
Since then I’ve often thought about that statement.
Thanksgiving morning, before E.’s arrival, a vivid dream of kissing my mother’s cheek, her face described in my journal as “overly palpable.”
I cooked the Cornish hens as directed, she arrived from Boston, and we ate them. At some point we had sex. We went to a movie, sat together in various restaurants and coffee shops. We talked endlessly about the relationship. I continued feeling miserably trapped.
The strange rightness of feeling obliterated.
The weird pleasure of fooling yourself, like performing a magic trick in private, over and over—as if you could be surprised by your own sleight of hand.
William James: “There is no more miserable human being than one in whom nothing is habitual but indecision.”
She missed her flight home Monday morning and returned to my apartment. I had already gone to work. She sat in her coat watching TV with Owen for an hour, hesitating to call me to say she had fucked up getting to the airport on time. We met for lunch. She was looking more and more bedraggled. In the diner she began to cry as she talked of hating library school, where she felt unappreciated. She said, “No one wants what I have to give.” She cried again when she left for the airport. That night when she called from Boston, I broke up with her.
To call this decision “coming out” doesn’t begin to describe it—though that’s how I would simplify it later.
For months I agonized over whether we should get back together, and our discussions continued until April, when E. sent all my letters back to me.
Perhaps wisely, perhaps selfishly, I did not reply.
I sought the lugubrious advice of Tears for Fears.
Journal: “I want a record of it—of the texture of her vagina; of the play of our hips against each other; of my finger running over her clitoris under the little wet hood …”
I hadn’t left E. because of some greater understanding of myself, but rather because I needed to do something.
Even now, some part of me believes I turned away love forever.
My mother was a frugal woman, and similarly I try not to discard any sort of affection that comes my way.
All the hilarious things E. said.
The way she looked in her white shawl, that night she was late to the mo
vie.
“What we have is beautiful,” she said to me, crying, on the phone. “Why do you want to kill it?”
EGYPT, IN ONE SENSE
1
SOLDIERS WITH MACHINE guns surrounded the plane as we filed down the tarmac in the balmy floodlit night.
Vast old terrazzo floor of the terminal; find the line for currency, then visas; guidebook warnings of graft; my fear of error; the brusque yet unhurried little clerk carefully making tiny marks on his forms, as if Arabic were a dream language; released at last into the balmy night air again and the new perils of dishonest taxi drivers.
For sometime I had been harboring panicky thoughts about John, such as, “We’ve been together four years and I still don’t have a key to his apartment!”
As the reader may have noticed, I like to mingle love with panic, self-doubt, and conjecture.
Coming out hadn’t solved everything.
The taxi sped noisily along the elevated highway wedged between plaster orange-lit buildings, and though the road was certainly no worse than, say, the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway, it all felt utterly makeshift, about to collapse, yet not collapsing, maybe suspended mid-collapse, and every window and roof and dark alley appeared in some fundamental way different from anything I’d ever seen before, and my capacity for astonishment awakened.
The first time John had ever spoken to me was in astonishment—we were standing next to a small pond in early spring listening to weird-sounding frogs—“Wow,” he said, and I knew I wanted to know him.
The Tooth Fairy Page 8
