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Later, he looked back on this time as if he had caught a severe illness which left its mark on him for the rest of his life. —TOVE DITLEVSEN, “THE UMBRELLA”
Thor seemed eternally annoyed. He could rest several boxes on his gut and called everything, from a person he didn’t like to a difficult stain, a faggot. This was how he talked, though I also sensed it was his way of letting me know he was onto me. Each time he said that word, I picked up more boxes than was comfortable or deepened my voice. My attempts at passing only made it worse.
At home that night, I was unsure if I wanted to jerk off or cry. I did both, half-heartedly, waking up hours later to a shivering light.
that I wondered if I’d been talking for longer. For the rest of the ride I gorged myself on the self-pity I’d grown up with, one I’d first mimicked, then made my own. “It was my special skill,” I told a boyfriend years later. He’d smiled with polite embarrassment, then changed the subject.
“You okay?” he asked, a question so kind I felt myself tearing up, wishing I didn’t cry so easily, wondering if there would ever be a time when the biggest thing in my life wasn’t difficulty. My self-pity was large then, though maybe it was fear, the call and response of those two feelings so seamless it was difficult to distinguish follower and leader.
When I find someone interesting, I spend a lot of time collecting the vocabulary and rhythm of their gestures. This looking has gotten me into trouble. Once, in fourth grade, the closest thing I’d understood about my interest in men and boys being a special attention I paid them, one of the Mikes in my class slammed me against a wall before I realized I’d been staring.
the utilitarian raunchiness of my exploits in the park.
the few semesters of college I’d muddled through before money and men and boredom got in the way. I talked about meeting Alan at a party, the comfortable rhythm we’d found, the ending I hadn’t seen coming.
“I don’t know about that,” she said. “But when we’re walking you always look at the ground or above people’s heads. When men look at you, you need to look back.”
Something in their creaky abandonment gave me an end-of-the-world calm.
“You’ve met a Philip before, I imagine,” Nicola said. “I think so,” I said. “Definitely a Phil.” “Well, this is definitely not a Phil.”
It was strange to see what age had taken from them, what it would steal from me someday, too.
Philip sorted through leftovers. He seemed to do everything in their house—organizing, managing logistics, constructing complicated meals—Nicola’s sole role to charm.
I smiled, then wondered if my smile was part of the problem, that I wanted roughness but was also afraid of it, that I needed to tell people about this man who’d been terrible to me, not mentioning that terrible was what I’d asked for.
learned early how loving someone meant to also see the ways they were pathetic and small.
“Nicola is late as a general rule. Thinks it shows insouciance.”
I hadn’t been interested in him, but with the enthusiasm of his kiss, my interest materialized.
she’d married Dad for a sturdiness she’d expected him to offer. But he’d looked to her for that same thing, and when neither of them had it, disappointment became their shared language, and they held fast to what didn’t work rather than hold on to nothing at all.
When he dropped me off later, I leaned in to hug him. I felt his rabbity pulse, the damp heat from under his arms. I squeezed him hard until he pushed me away and said, “What we think we want isn’t always good for us.” I stood on the curb as he drove away.
I knew that when I’d been the toy, the person playing had the power to make a day perfect or wretched with a gesture or a few careless words.
“You need to fight it,” he said. “Fighting doesn’t win,” I answered. He looked disgusted and terrified before he gathered himself. “Thinking that way leads you down paths you don’t even see.”
I pictured Brian in that tiny shower with me, our feet entwined as if dancing, shoulders knocking shampoo bottles to the floor, and tried to believe that once he let himself do what he wanted, he wouldn’t feel wicked or afraid but surprised at having waited so long.
I hear you have a fancy job and are traveling, he continued. I always knew you would do bigger things. Even when you were young the world we lived in was small for you. I admire that about you Gordon. The way you push.
“I find it hard to tell when you’re joking.” “I usually am.”
“Knowing and experiencing aren’t the same.”
“Nicola isn’t a planner unless he’s trying to avoid being alone,” Philip said. “Then he plans like mad.”
“I like it when you look at me. Like how Pavel did when he was painting. Trying to catch every delicate detail.”
My next thought: Get over yourself. I wanted to do that, but wasn’t sure I ever would.
I wanted to ask more questions—though they’d break whatever wobbly spell held us—
amenable could have been carved onto my tombstone rather than my name.
and tried to understand the itch that invaded me whenever I was alone.
When people fell to their knees in praise, I saw that you were afraid. I kept telling you what was happening, but still you looked fearful. I hope you don’t feel afraid like that anymore. That you see new things and look at them with wonder.
There are times I lull myself with hope even when the evidence points in failure’s direction.
I sometimes went to gay bars, but, like in my first New York months, banter escaped me, so I returned to the woods, the wordless interactions there a relief.
I remembered my mother telling me that she also didn’t know how to be with people.
I wondered if there was a way out of selfishness, or if turning that idea over and over was just another way to keep staring at my own reflection.
I shook my head, hoping to ward off the sense that he was right, that despite hardly knowing me he’d been able to spot the thoughtlessness I brandished like a polished diamond.
Back at Pavel’s apartment, I smoked more cigarettes on the balcony, my stomach riled up with hunger and nicotine, and tried to remind myself that this corseting loneliness was temporary, that I’d look back at me on this balcony from some future place and remember it as terrible, beautiful, too, the trees outside with their round, hard leaves and the men who stood close when I lit their cigarettes so I could see the flame reflected in their eyes. But as I looked around the apartment I’d have to leave soon, with no plan as to where I’d go next, the idea of some future ease kept losing out to the
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I wanted to sleep with one of them, though I knew better than to try. That felt like growth to me.
While people talk about this job as a calling, for me it’s truer to say that it fulfills a need I have for motion, a satisfaction in tackling tasks that matter, with a clear beginning and end.
I had a boyfriend for a time, smart and funny though I always worried he was one step away from leaving. We got as far as moving in together. But in the end, he told me something was missing, though he couldn’t or didn’t explain just what, which broke my heart, turned work into a necessary narcotic, a break from thinking of the mistakes I had made and would keep making without meaning to.
Me
It was nice until it wasn’t.” “A thing to put on a tombstone,” he said.
The heaviness I hadn’t felt for some time returned, though I knew it would pass. One of the benefits of aging, I suppose, is to know that most feelings aren’t permanent fixtures.
