In Spite of Everything

by Susan Gregory Thomas

  I had no idea how to operate in such entropic circumstances. What was I supposed to do? No parental figure engaged me in one-on-one chitchat; no one wanted the abstract of my curriculum vitae; no one was interested in my opinion of lobbyists or right-wing media. Didn’t Cal’s family want to get to know me? If nothing else, my ability to sustain polite conversation was, I felt, one of my assets. If they didn’t ask me questions, how would I be able to charm them—to win them over? “That’s just not how they are,” shrugged Cal. “Don’t take it personally.” But I did take it personally.

  Cal’s mother and I struggled in particular. I thought she was sexist, ostentatious, and anti-intellectual, and I’m pretty sure that she thought I was a slut, a dangerous liberal (a “women’s libber,” she spat), and a smart-ass. But after about five years or so of Cal’s and my being together, a turning point materialized at one of these giant, jolly family get-togethers. As I squished in at the edge of the crowded piano stool munching lumpia and warbling “Love Me Tender” in between bites, I realized that I loved pretty much everyone there. I had taken a particular shine to Cal’s youngest cousin, a troubled, sickly little boy who was so bright and ridiculously sweet that I couldn’t help eating him up. Two of Cal’s other cousins, a seriously smart and exceptionally kind pair of high school sisters, were dazzling: It never occurred to me that teenagers could be so uncloyingly cooperative and well-adjusted. To me, these girls were flat-out perfect, the kind of kids everyone hopes to have; I invented internships for them at the magazine for which I worked so that they could beef up their résumés for college admissions, and they were nothing but a pleasure. I loved all these children’s mothers. And, it struck me, I loved Cal’s mother.

  First, we had discovered a passion in common: clothes and bargain shopping. That broke the ice. But once we discovered our mutual respect for hard work and self-determination, our suspicion of each other began to melt away. I learned that as new émigrés to the United States, Cal’s mother had worked the night shift as a nurse to support the family while his father studied for the foreign medical exams. Exhausted but practical, she had trained Cal, from age six, to vacuum, sort laundry, and cook for the family. Everyone had done what needed to be done—that’s what family does, di ba? When she learned that I’d had to sue my wealthy father to go to college, she hooted in disbelief: Who ever heard of such a thing? His own flesh and blood! And I still talked to him? Ano, it was that woman, that wife—she was greedy, she had poisoned his mind. Your father does not appreciate what a good daughter he has! But don’t worry, darling, what comes around goes around—believe me. You work hard, and God will provide for you. My eyes would well up in astonishment at her heart for me. How could I not love her?

  There was something else that I realized, too. Cal’s family never really cared much about my, or anyone’s, pedigree, level of achievement, or personal appeal, unless such things had a practical application, such as drawing a higher salary than one would have been able to command otherwise. What mattered to them was: Do you love this family? Are you willing to help its members? If you proved that your answer was “Yes,” that’s all they cared about. You could be a gas station attendant or a drug addict, and though they’d push you to better yourself if you were, there was no question that you’d have the unqualified support of this enormous, tight network at your back. If you failed to appear at a gathering, family would phone you relentlessly or come in person to fetch you. If you became ill, family would be at your bedside, feeding you, keeping you company. If you needed money, family would loan you what they had, put in calls to find you a job. No one ever used a babysitter. You would never, ever be alone. It took the wind right out of me when this dawned on me. Imagine: never alone.

  But in truth, the family togetherness trait had never truly meshed with Cal’s own temperament. Even as a little boy, while the whole tribe was in peak festive mode, Cal would duck into his room or, if they were at a relative’s home, under a table, and burrow into a book. His mother would rattle his cage in frustration and insist that he join the party, but Cal didn’t want to; he preferred his own cerebral solitude. “He was always reading, reading, reading!” his mother would tell me, as if this were a sign of some shocking character defect. “He never wanted to be with his family—my son is a loner!” There was not a single other person like this, not in the hundreds of family members. Cal also did not dance, another anathema in his family and, one could fairly assert, in Filipino culture at large. Let me tell you something: You may think that you have danced and that you’re maybe pretty good at it, but that is probably because you have never been to a real Filipino wedding. Everybody dances, and everybody rocks it like you would not believe—from eighteen months to ninety-six years, it doesn’t matter. Not Cal. So even though he was accepted, Cal was also regarded as something of a mutant. In addition, however, as the firstborn of his generation and the first to have truly grown up as an American, he was regarded as a special authority, an envoy. So even as he was browbeaten by his mother into family togetherness, and ordered in no uncertain terms to be a doctor when he grew up, he was also invariably consulted in all official family matters involving transactions with the outside world. Cal rather liked this position, especially since it gave him the appearance of being involved and, moreover, deflected attention from his retreats to be alone.

  Even with his hermetic inclinations, however, Cal clearly radiated the confidence that comes only with a sense of belonging; it was central to his ease in the world. But so was his parents’ marriage. Unlike mine and most of our friends’, Cal’s parents not only were still together but were a unified, happy couple. The secret to this, I think, is that they didn’t see themselves as being in a relationship; they saw themselves as husband and wife. This still strikes me as a revolutionary notion, having been raised, like most people my age, alongside the Boomerish zeitgeist that marital cohesion is reliant on individual fulfillment. It is tempting to chalk this up to a Filipino family ethos, but that would be cheap and false: There was always a lot of conjugal drama gusting about the family, including children born out of wedlock and rampant cheating. But not Cal’s parents. They genuinely loved each other and were always together; they genuinely loved Cal, and Cal loved them. Although he had rebelled against the family business by not becoming a doctor, and against the family culture by not becoming a confirmed Catholic, Cal had never been one of those teenagers who, like me and my type, shunned their parents at puberty’s onset, leaning on their friends, boyfriends, or girlfriends to fill the gaps. He hadn’t needed to.

  Perhaps that’s why, to this day, no one has ever heard him make anything resembling a degrading remark about a woman or about women in general. Maybe this doesn’t sound like a big deal, and it never seemed like such a big deal to me in all the years that we were together. But I have since learned how surprisingly disgusting a great many men are when they think that women aren’t listening—or even sometimes in their presence. Cal was never this way. It just wasn’t in him.

  There is a story that underscores that point, a story that endeared him to me in a way he never could have guessed when he related it years ago. After graduating from college, Cal had gone on one of those epic backpacking trips across Europe, the kind in which you stay in hostels, ride the EuroRail, and meet all kinds of other people in their early twenties from different countries who are doing the same thing. One of the main purposes of these trips, aside from becoming a cultured person who has visited Europe, is to hook up.

  So there he was in Florence. He toured the Duomo, the Uffizi, and the Medici chapels, and he met an attractive, interesting, smart young woman whose next stop was Athens. But Cal’s plan was to go to Venice. “Come with me to Athens!” urged the young woman. “We’ll take the train together—it’ll be fun!” It sounded like fun. It probably would have been fun. But his plan was to go to Venice. “So, change your plans—come on!” she prodded. Knowing him as I do, I can visualize this scene perfectly. He is standing there, itinerary clu
tched tightly, staring at her, vibrating with inner conflict. He knows exactly what this invitation means, knows that he will be an errant idiot not to take her up on it, that his friends will ridicule him into a sliver of a man, that he will come to regret it in middle age. But he has made a plan to go to Venice. And that plan is fixed as deeply in his psyche as the Duomo is in the piazza. “I’m sorry,” he said, “but I planned to go to Venice.” When he told me this story, I knew that I would never meet a better man than this.

  But in terms of our particular relations, this story came to illustrate two things as time went on. First, sex would never be a major point of connection. Even in the beginning, when people are supposed to be having sex in all manner of unhygienic places, we were more into cuddling, talking, and hanging out than getting it on. Was it a warning sign? At the time, I told myself it was the hallmark of a secure, mature relationship. For one thing, I had already had my share of having sex in bathrooms, stairwells, cars, and barns with Jai. People in adult relationships, I told myself, did not have that kind of sex. Their lives were not about the kind of world in which sex like that thrives. People in stable, mature relationships had careers to construct, process, and endure. They had ideas that they felt were important enough to make real. They had an interesting, vital circle of friends with whom they went out drinking and to late dinners. They had eclectic, even pedantic, music collections; favorite contemporary writers; good parties in walk-up apartments. This was the stuff of real relationships. Id-crazy, soul-gluing sex didn’t seem to be a part of this mix.

  That’s what I told myself at the time. What was closer to the truth was that sex had become in my mind synonymous with giving myself away completely. It was my ultimate trading card: You can have me, if you can protect and envelop me. And by the time I met Cal, I never wanted to sacrifice myself again: I wanted to work, to make something more of myself than a patched-up rag doll. I had the feeling, from the outset, that this would be a possibility with him, that he would not make soul-sapping demands of me, that I would not have to sacrifice myself to be a real, self-determining entity. I was right. I did not see then that this is what he had always wanted, too, nor did I understand the loneliness inherent in such a bargain.

  The second, and ultimately the most important, point of the Venice story was this: It simply never occurred to Cal to allow his moral compass to be pulled in any direction other than his own. Me, I would have given anything to have a moral compass, my sentient planet’s missing piece of equipment. My center, to the extent that I had one, had never held. It was more like a hazmat container for high-pressure gas. Reading Heart of Darkness in my junior year of high school, I’d felt an instant, horrible sense of kinship with Kurtz. The wilderness had found me out early, too—and it echoed loudly within because I, too, was hollow at the core. The major difference between Kurtz and me was that I was too afraid to allow the horrifying nihilism that lived inside me to penetrate the membrane of my persona, which talked all the time and liked clothes. A line from a Billy Bragg song sums it up: “a little black cloud in a dress.” Though I was nothing but dark wind, I was desperate to feel something of solidity, to feel that there was somehow real ore embedded in my heart’s gusty caves. I wanted that moral compass. I didn’t have the first idea of how to get one. In hindsight, I simply allowed myself to be drawn to his. He did not seem to mind. Without him, I was gas; without me, he was rock. Together, we were a world.

  There were fissures from the start. But they were the kind that might have mended themselves had the pieces been broken in the right places to begin with. If you buy Plato’s take on soulmates—that they are two halves of a whole, split before birth and searching for their mate to fit back together—then you might reason that, perhaps in our case, the severing of our particular pieces was never in our own control. The Greeks, it seems, get you coming or going.

  At the end of our first year together, I had moved away from him, from New York to Washington, D.C. It was 1992, and I said that I wanted to see if I couldn’t capitalize on some of that Clintonian “youthquake” energy and muscle my way into writing for The Washington Post. I honestly hated my job at PC Magazine, and though I tried to piggyback on Cal’s workplace detachment—as well as his (correct) long view that by working at the magazine of record for the industry that was going to dominate for the next decade, we would cement our stature in it—I could not drum up an enthusiastic rhythm in my everyday process. This wasn’t a problem for Cal: He was okay with going to work, doing the work, then either going out with friends or going home, kicking back, and watching TV. I envied him this. I wanted to be able to kick back, needed to kick back, and Cal’s congenital ability to do it was one of the reasons that I was drawn to him.

  But I couldn’t do it. For one thing, I hated how much TV he watched. I hated that it was virtually impossible to get away from it in that small apartment. It’s not that I’m one of those people who think that television is the devil. Actually, that’s a lie: I do think it is the devil. With a few programming exceptions, I have always been deeply unsettled by this eerie sensation I have in front of the TV—that my life force is being siphoned off and replaced with a pornified marinade of human drama, history, current events, the natural world. Furthermore, I’m a spaz. While I am a standard-issue Generation X person in many ways (and like all Generation X people, I am ashamed of that), I have never been big on inertia. While we all know by now that, yes, X was never actually apathetic but just inconsolably disappointed, most of us at least had the appearance, the gestalt, of slackerishness. I’m way too antsy for that. If I don’t like something, it’s very hard for me to sit still and be quiet. I have to do something about it. Right now. So, one weekday evening as we lay on his couch watching something on TV, I had the premonition that I would lie on this couch, night after night, looking away every so often and becoming instantly dreadstruck by the void of my life, and then being pulled back into that numbing, low-level seizure induced by whatever happened to be blipping on the screen, and the exact words flashed into my mind: When I am dead, I won’t have to make decisions. That was it. I bolted to D.C. within the month.

  But I did not see this as a breakup. Cal, though hurt by my rash decision, did not, either. We would simply stay together at a distance. At the time, I didn’t know what it was that kept a couple together, but it is fair to say that some degree of thermodynamics is necessary to inspire, and certainly to sustain, mutual pull. Cal and I didn’t have it. In hindsight, I might have been instinctively trying to generate some by putting space between us. Certainly, our physical separation did nothing to unravel our attachment. During the two years that I lived in Washington, we talked on the phone at least three times a day and spent at least two weekends each month together. I never even considered cheating. Neither did he. But the absence of heat persisted.

  It’s not as though it never came up. On the rare occasions that we discussed it, we did so gingerly. I would not push, because I could not lose him. He was afraid to push because he did not want to rip apart any delicate stitching that our relationship had lent to my open, raw psyche. He had not known that it was possible to come from the kind of world from which I came; learning of it made him protective, but it also scared him. On my twenty-second birthday, Cal had gifted me with Laughable Loves by Milan Kundera. He told me that I reminded him of the main female character in The Unbearable Lightness of Being. “Who?” I wanted to know, already knowing that it would be Sabina, Tomas’s mistress, the boho artist, the one with the hat. Actually, no, he said. I reminded him of Tereza. Oh. The heavy-hearted innocent, the “child put in a basket and sent downstream” for Tomas to find—the one who hated anything to do with bodies, who cleaved to absolutism, who was crushed by the demolition of her values. The only one Tomas truly loved in spite of her asexuality, the one who ballasted his lightness with her heaviness. I nodded. He wasn’t far off. But he was also miles away.

  I wouldn’t have known how to say this at the time, but I now know that it is possib
le for someone to be damaged without being breakable. Heat can cauterize: It can keep two people soldered together when forces on all sides are pulling them apart. Sex is soul-gluing in a loving relationship, it is essential. It is what separates friends from mates. It populates empty planets.

  But I didn’t really get that at the time. I just knew something was wrong, and I would flailingly try to fix it every so often during the two years we were living apart. Sometimes during our bimonthly visits I would, in drunken states, hurl myself at him, and while the velocity of it would simulate ardor, it was never long before it was exposed as a simile, leaving both of us sad, confused, and embarrassed. My response was to whip myself up into a state of constant kinetic energy. I wrote for The Washington Post, for Time-Life Books, for Glamour, for every publication that would have me. I jammed every potentially vacant moment with work or social connection that was related to lining up more work. I made hundreds of genial, interesting acquaintances during that period in D.C. but no durable friendships. I lived in a house with five other people, but I essentially lived by myself. I slept in winks. I might have heaved myself into his outermost orbit by moving to D.C., but Cal was still my center of gravity. I had to move back to New York, I came to realize, or I would be forever lost.