My Own Devices

by Dessa

  * * *

  —

  Seven or eight years ago, X and I tried couples counseling—our second shot at it. We weren’t even dating, we were just thinking about dating again and we set up the appointment as an exploratory mission. Maybe if we were more careful and deliberate than we’d been on previous attempts, this one would take.

  For all the turmoil in our history, a strange calm always came over me when I knew for sure that X still loved me and that we might still have a chance together. It was like boarding a ship in rough weather, in wind and rain and lightning, but at the same time also feeling the undertow go still—the sensation that far below the surface something was settled. Maybe that’s just the nature of strong love: it provides an elemental security, even if it jeopardizes almost everything else.

  X arrived late to the counseling appointment. I was counting the minutes of this lateness so I could use them later as evidence of his noncommittal attitude, maybe even make a case for general unreliability depending on how long I sat alone. When he walked in, he apologized, then handed me a book titled The Ethical Slut.

  The Ethical Slut is the What to Expect When You’re Expecting of the polyamory scene. It’s the go-to text for tactical advice on how to date more than one person at the same time. This gift was not on my wish list.

  We were called to meet our counselor: a young, fair-skinned brunette with a good listening face. I alternated between contained hysteria, uncontained hysteria, and reasoned appeals that I directed exclusively at the counselor, who I considered the only other rational entity in the room. What in the holy fuck was he thinking? I struggled to keep my voice at a speaking volume, but managed to retain the weird formal tone that I revert to when I’m cornered—some animals, when threatened, squirt ink or break off their own tails; I go into a blend of Siri and Nathaniel Hawthorne.

  X, I explained, had been unfaithful during our first relationship. And we’re just barely starting to entertain the possibility of restoring that broken bond of trust. And the first thing he does is hand me a book about sleeping with other people. She gently reminded me that this meeting was just an informational consultation.

  X and I didn’t schedule a follow-up appointment. It was a long time before we considered getting back together again.

  Years later, though, I had friends who were polyamorous. They were successful, married friends with home loans and full dental. Although it was still unusual, it didn’t seem like the bit of fringe insanity it had been at first. I discovered so many of my peers were privately poly, in fact, that I started to wonder if I was the last artsy kid to believe in pair bonding. I felt like a stork, blinking stupidly beneath the brim of her cap at a party full of Playboy bunnies.

  I read a few chapters of The Ethical Slut. I didn’t like it. The metered, condescending tone of self-help books grates on me. The introduction implied that I was a square about to be freaked out for her own good. On a site called Reddit, however, I came across what felt like a very different conversation about polyamory between the musician Amanda Palmer and her writer husband, Neil Gaiman. They had an open relationship and they discussed it frankly, answering questions from their fans.

  I am intrigued and impressed and a little intimidated by Amanda Palmer. I don’t know her well, but I got to open for her once, at a stop on her book tour. Backstage I mentioned that I was planning to travel to New York and she arranged for me to stay in her Manhattan apartment for a few days. She didn’t ask for references or a security deposit. She didn’t even ask for my last name. And I thought to myself, I want to be more like that, to take the risk on kindness. Sure, you’ll get burned sometimes, but think of all the life you miss by playing it safe.

  Online, when fans asked about the mechanics of the relationship between Amanda and Neil, he responded: “It works okay currently because we have people we can kiss all over the world. If we both lived in a small town and never left, we might decide it was easier to have a closed relationship. Or we might not. . . . We talk. And talk. And talk. And hug a lot. And talk some more. And then do whatever needs to be done in the real world.”

  That all sounded so reasonable and compassionate—not at all like the powder-headed love junkies in my imagination. Was this sort of polyamory something I could or should consider if it might allow me to have a lasting relationship with X? It seemed like either the most pathetic, or the most woke, course of action a woman could entertain. Alright, use your brain, I thought. I took inventory: I had five big reservations about polyamory. I wrote them down and then tried to counter each one.

  My gut says monogamy has moral virtue—that’s just how love is best done.

  Well, guts say a lot of things. And throughout the course of human history, guts have been epically, disastrously wrong. Particularly when they’re aligned with prevalent cultural attitudes that have outlasted their utility.

  Maybe this monogamy thing is just the vestige of a medieval Judeo-Christian moral code, more concerned with property rights than romantic intimacy. Even if monogamy was somehow “natural” to us, that still wouldn’t make it morally right. Among a lot of primates, cannibalism is natural too.

  If my dude loved someone else, there’d be less left for me.

  If love were a Snickers bar, this would be true. But when a mother has a second child, we don’t presume that she can only love her first kid half as much. It’s not necessarily a zero-sum game; love wells up new when you meet someone who’s precious to you.

  However, I love milk chocolate and salmon nigiri. But I can’t love them very well at the same time. Also, everybody who’s rebounded with a fling knows how well new love can spackle over the old.

  Polyamory is terrifying.

  What if he meets someone he likes more and leaves me for her?

  Totally possible. But if a partner genuinely stands a better chance at a real, lasting happiness with someone else, wouldn’t the loving thing be to let them go? Polyamory or not, the idea of chasing smart, funny, attractive women out of the yard—lest they make my guy happy—sounds like a lousy way to live.

  Being someone’s sole romantic partner makes me feel special.

  That’s true. But also lame—why should my happiness hinge on feelings my partner doesn’t have?

  On the other hand, maybe monogamy is just a baked-in, inherited preference. Like, hello, I have brown eyes and type O blood and I want to form a life bond with only one dude who wants a life bond with only one me.

  On the other, other hand, maybe it’s just one of many possible learned modes of expression, like English. If so, is it something that I could unlearn for a fuller experience? It’s hard to tell what’s native and what’s socialized—like trying to taste your own tongue.

  I am totally unwilling to define polyamory to my dad at Thanksgiving.

  I’m entirely too square to go around telling people I’m sleeping with a bunch of dudes at the same time. A lot of people are privately poly, but I don’t have the wherewithal for a double life. And although I admire the zero-fucks-given attitude of my radical friends, I give plenty of fucks. I hand them out like perfume samples at the mall, in fact. I care what my family thinks, what colleagues think, what passing strangers and the children in their strollers think.

  Telling my parents that I was seeing more than one guy would be excruciatingly uncomfortable. And it would be almost unimaginable to explain that my boyfriend was seeing other women. I can picture my father’s face, hurt by and for me, questions sinking through him like arrows fired from all directions.

  My family members have undermined the institution of marriage through the conventional channels—separation and divorce. Although both of my parents are unusual people, they have pretty traditional family values. My dad says that when he was a little boy he had two big dreams: he wanted to fly airplanes and get married. Dad won on both counts: he’s now an accomplished
glider pilot and married to a very smart woman named Leslie. He’d been married twice before, however: first to my mother and then to Linda, a lady I still consider family although we don’t have a word for our relationship. (Introducing someone as my ex-stepmother sounds about as intimate as my dentist-in-law.) The experience of divorce not only broke my dad’s heart, but, I think, rattled the foundations of his self-concept. Being gentlemanly and loyal is enormously important to him—if my dad likes an actress or singer on TV, the raciest thing he’s likely to say is, “She’s got class.” A few times a year he finds reason to proudly announce, “I’m a one-woman man” to whoever’s in the living room. His brand of moralism doesn’t involve too many shades of grey. My brother and I have both inherited this system of thinking; I overpay my taxes every year, terrified of taking an unearned deduction.

  My mom, meanwhile, has become very religious since her remarriage to David, a chiropractor with whom she lives in rural Wisconsin. If she were to run across a flock of sluts, it’s unlikely she’d be interested in sorting them into ethical and unethical varietals.

  My five-point list served to clarify my intellectual position on polyamory, but was it worth trying with X? I still wasn’t sure.

  * * *

  —

  Chuck Klosterman is a good formulator of would-you-rathers. He wrote a deck of them called HYPERtheticals that kept Doomtree occupied between the load-ins and the hangovers of a trip to South by Southwest. One of the cards asked whether or not readers would attempt to kick a healthy, but immobilized, Clydesdale to death, if success would trigger the release of every political prisoner on earth. The kicker would be permitted steel-toe boots and twenty minutes to get the job done. My crewmate Mike Mictlan and I sat on opposite benches in the tour bus and opposite sides of the issue. Mike has impeccable dramatic timing, a tattoo on his left temple, and a sweet tooth to rival mine—a rarity. He waxed eloquently about moral obligation, hope, and duty. I drunkenly image searched Budweiser Horse, unable to spell Clydesdale, but confident Mike couldn’t possibly realize how big the motherfuckers were.

  Undiscouraged by the picture of the beast I showed him, Mike held firm. He insisted that with so much at stake, you have to try—you just have to try.

  High stakes and long odds make for especially unpleasant deliberation. If I remember correctly, something like four thousand bands performed at South by Southwest that year. We all pressed together on Sixth Street in Austin, Texas, wearing the same black jeans and combat boots, trying to find the loading door or the free booze or a missing guitarist. SXSW can feel like a festival of lines—people waiting to get into the secret show, the best taco place, the bathroom. Promotional teams on every corner hand out sunglasses, flyers, energy drinks. And all of us thousands of musicians hope to somehow rise above the din, to impress the right reporter or shake the right hand that could warrant this incredible spend of time and money. (Modest hotel rooms can be five hundred dollars a night during the festival. All seven members of Doomtree once slept in a rented camper van parked on an incline.) Every year there are a few bands who manage to win SXSW; they emerge as buzzy media darlings with enough magic on them to really catalyze a career.

  All of us understood the chances were slim; we’d probably just return home sunburnt, spent, and in the red. But most years, we still go to Austin. To kick the damn horse.

  * * *

  —

  A couple of summers ago, X and I took a walk through a downtown park, having one of our should-we-give-this-another-go conversations. With the city rising on all sides, we took laps around the manicured trails on a tiny hike through the little simulated wilderness.

  He hadn’t been in a monogamous relationship for years, but it was something he’d be willing to consider with me, he said. He asked gentle questions to see how I really felt about the prospect of polyamory. Think of your trip to Turkey, he said. I’d recently returned from Istanbul, where I’d traveled with my best friend, Jaclyn, for a while, then gone solo to try to sort out my head. If you wanted to, you could make out with someone while you’re there—and I would know that doesn’t affect how you feel about me. We could design it so that we only dated people who lived in different cities—maybe those secondary relationships wouldn’t even involve intercourse. There were no rules, he said. We could invent anything we wanted together.

  Even though I could imagine female friends rolling their eyes (Of course men want to have sex with every woman they meet, all the time!), I knew this conversation wasn’t just about sex. X was a charming, talented rapper—he could have all the sex he wanted without all these gutting conversations and teary good-byes with me. He was a man who’d struggled with standard models of intimacy, and he learned about an unconventional way of living that felt well suited to him. And he was trying to decide how much he was willing to give up to be with a woman he loved, but feared hurting, having done so before.

  I told X that I’d started to wonder if polyamory might be an orientation, not a lifestyle. When I first had that idea, it kicked back like a shotgun I hadn’t known I was holding. Trying to change someone’s orientation was unthinkable—only closeted evangelists did that. And it never worked anyway.

  So, if I were a native monogamist and he weren’t, would it even be hypothetically possible for people of different orientations to mate for life?

  Would you rather have a spectacular love with an unusual man and share him with other people or wait for an ordinary love that you got to keep all to yourself?

  People change religions for one another; they renounce citizenships, adopt children, they lose weight, take new names.

  Almost anything about a person can change.

  For 5K there’s a company that will laser the brown out of your eyes, revealing the blue iris beneath.

  The blood type of a little girl with rubella changed from A to O.

  Meadow voles are naturally promiscuous, but if you juice up their little vole brains with high levels of a protein called the vasopressin receptor, they’ll begin to behave like prairie voles—monogamists that pair for life.

  But even presuming I could go poly, was I even allowed to make a compromise of that magnitude for a man? Which feminist street gang would jump me for my membership card first: the one that’s mad I conceded so much for a man or the one that’s mad I’m not sex-positive enough to be out there balling other dudes already?

  Walking through the park, X and I made compelling cases on both sides of the argument for reconciliation. If we failed, we might lose our friendship—and subject ourselves to even more pain. But the stakes seemed too high not to try—think of all we’d miss by playing it safe.

  No matter how we maneuvered the question, the scales held perfectly level. It was impossible to decide. We punted. We wouldn’t try now, but in the future—maybe.

  Maybe when we’re forty, he said. Maybe he’ll like white wine by then, and we’ll live together, and we’ll have sorted all this out. Part of me wanted him to insist we just jump in headlong. But no part of me was willing to instigate that sort of headlong jumping myself. We left the park, had a sad hug, and walked to our stupid cars.

  Camped out on our fulcrum, we lived undecided for a long time.

  * * *

  —

  At family holidays, when my dad and his brothers are running down the Greatest Hits of their boyhood anecdotes, I often request somebody tell the one about the salamander and the milk.

  When my dad was a boy, he caught a salamander. He took it home and set it up in a little terrarium with leaves and twigs to simulate the whole of nature. He promptly fell in love with it in the way kids love to play house with wild things. That night, when his mother served dinner for him and his brothers, he pushed away from the table and ran to the terrarium. What about Sal? I bet he’s hungry too! He went to the refrigerator to find something to serve for dinner. He pulled a carton out of the fridge, then went back to the salamand
er’s cage and gently picked him up by the hinge of his jaw. The salamander hung like a test tube: body slack, mouth open.

  My dad was so sure of the answer that he hadn’t realized there was a question. With a steady hand, total concentration, and the blunt tool of his own tenderness, he carefully filled his salamander with milk. He then took his place at the table, smiling and self-satisfied. Because that is how love is done.

  Lights from Above

  —

  At takeoff I can feel my organs press backward. I shut my paperback, freezing its assorted characters mid-dilemma. Soon the pockets of air in my sinuses will bloom in my head, and the nail polish in my carry-on will begin to seep, perfuming my underthings with acetate. The Wi-Fi icon will turn on and the signal will pass through all of us, searching for antennae in our purses and our pockets. The seatbelt light will turn off, and some of us in coach will head toward the back lavatory, shuffling through the aisle at approximately 2 miles an hour, which brings the forward rate of travel down to 598 miles per hour. There is an armed plainclothes air marshal on board to keep the peace. Or maybe he is on the flight behind us.

  Usually the shadow of a plane grows larger and fainter as it ascends. But planes in flight can also create something like the opposite of a shadow—when sunlight refracts around the fuselage just so, it focuses into a bright spot below. My dad has explained the science to me several times, but I can never quite remember how it works. Still, whenever I’ve got a window seat, I try to look for it: a bright spot tracking over fields below. I don’t know if these beams of light can be seen by people on the ground—I’ve never felt one pass over: a spotlight sweeping across the highway, or a surge of white light bursting through the kitchen window.