The first time I kissed D he was single and it was a perfectly acceptable thing to do; a couple of months later he got back together with an ex-girlfriend and we couldn’t quite stop kissing, spending long afternoons and late evenings together, texting “I’ll miss you” when faced with separations of more than a few days. To say we had an affair makes it sound like we planned it out, or at least admitted to what we were doing. In fact we very carefully didn’t talk about it and pretended that we were just trying to salvage our friendship and that nothing was going to happen, until we were too tired or too drunk to pretend anymore, and then it did. “I like being her boyfriend,” he said to me at one point, “I like that that’s who I am. But then when I’m with you, I just want to stay with you. I never get enough of you.” How could I say no to that?
This was in September of our junior year of college. At some point soon after I went to hear Henri Cole read poetry and scribbled down a line of his that has haunted me ever since: how can I defend myself against what I want? That was my credo, then, my sole rationale for my behavior and my misery and the things I put everyone around me through. How could I defend myself against him, so earnest and tender and confused?
I’m not trying to exculpate myself or my sins; what I did was nasty and destructive, ill-considered, selfish: fucked up. I’m only pointing out that I had to live with myself during and afterwards, and that it was fit punishment. Because that’s not a situation you get yourself into if you like yourself very much at all, and once you’re in it things don’t tend to improve. It’s a very precarious tightrope, the logic of cheating, a wire-thin noose you wrap right around your own neck day in and day out. This person who loved me enough to risk his relationship to be with me didn’t love me enough to destroy that relationship outright, to admit to me publicly. I was addicted to his approval because without it I had to face the fact that I was a low, mean person, hellbent on her own pleasure and willing to disregard others’ pain in order to achieve it.
I thought if he left her that would solve everything and of course when he did it only made it worse, cast light upon the fundamental distrust between us, my deep anger and hurt that he hadn’t been able to do it before. By the time he was ready to love me our relationship was too damaged to survive, in large part because I needed something impossible from him: I needed him to love me enough that I could forget how much I hated myself. When it worked it was narcotic but that metaphor cuts both ways, and the eventual withdrawal was a shattering experience.
Any relationship that ends acrimoniously has its own harrowing emotional trajectory, its own bad echoes and bad patterns. A therapist I saw for a while after graduating compared it to a trauma, which I revisited intently, minutely, a genuine obsessive. If the relationship itself had been a twisted cycle of affection and its withdrawal, classically abusive in form if not detail, then I was determined to carry on that abuse in his absence, making sure that I suffered for hurting his now ex-girlfriend, suffered for not having been able to keep him, suffered because I was so sure I deserved it. “You aren’t a masochist,” the therapist said at one point, “but you are absolutely obsessed with causing yourself pain over this.”
How can I defend myself against what I want. If I had been just slightly more unstable (or hadn’t grown up with my father’s two ill-advised tattoos) I probably would have inked it somewhere. It became my mantra, a fixed point of study, ringing in my ears, white noise against which the rest of the day went on. Because I had wanted him so badly, to distraction, to the exclusion of everything else in my life. It made desire seem terrifying, certainly not to be trusted. It meant that wanting was what was wrong with me. It meant that everything bad that had happened was, in fact, my fault. I couldn’t defend myself against all of that love so freely offered; the only thing was to have not wanted it in the first place.
In the spring after graduation I was living at home in Los Angeles. My parents had a big Passover seder and asked all of the guests to bring readings, something appropriate to the season. Passover is one of the few Jewish holidays that requires abstention to observe; we are not, as a rule, a self-sacrificing people. But I thought that the poem might suit, and looked it up to see. I had not seen it in its entirety since that reading, already several years ago, and it turned out that I had misunderstood the context of the line entirely. The poem is like this:
“I love the iridescent tricolor slime
that squirts all over my Honda in random
yet purposeful patterns as I sit in the semi-
dark of the “touch-free” carwash with you.
Listening to the undercarriage blast, I think,
“Love changes and will not be commanded.”
I smile at the long flesh-colored tentacles waving
at us like passengers waving good-bye.
Water isn’t shaped like a river or ocean;
it mists invisibly against metal and glass.
In the corridor of green unnatural lights
recalling the lunatic asylum, how can I
defend myself against what I want?
Lay your head in my lap. Touch me.”
What I had taken for self-abnegation, a wounded and terrified cry, was in fact part of a lovely acquiescence, an opening and a beginning. Cole writes often about his experience as a gay man and the complicated business of sorting shame from desire, especially around sex; this was not about wanting wrong but about defending yourself against that want, and being wrong to do it. What was wrong with me wasn’t that I had wanted but that I had lied about it, and let others lie to me about what they wanted in return. What had ruined us was deception, not desire; what I lacked was courage and nothing else.
It’s easy to trust abstinence because it feels like the hard thing to do, a task set before us: it provides a rule against which to measure our progress. Desire is a big open space and there is no telling where it takes us, where it ends. Love changes and will not be commanded. It’s no use wishing I had known that then, but I am trying very hard to know it now, to carry it into this season of Passover and Lent, of fasting and prayer. Not how can I defend myself against what I want. Now I think: lay your head in my lap. Touch me.
In high school, AK would sometimes find me in the hallways and give me things: mix cds, printouts of poems or stories he thought I’d like. Once, memorably, a chocolate ganache cake with how strange it is to be anything at all written across the top in pink frosting. At some point he gave me a burned copy of In the Aeroplane Over the Sea, the title written on in blue Sharpie, his cramped handwriting looping and dipping. We spent a lot of time getting stoned and dancing to Holland, 1945 in the living rooms of everyone we knew; my first night at Yale that song came on in some smoke-filled room and I was relieved to learn that I was well-prepared for college, after all.
-
For a while that year I thought I was in love with a different A. On the last night before Thanksgiving break we met up in a friend’s dorm room; I was wearing my favorite kind of impractical outfit, cutoffs over tights, red thrift store heels, a long white down coat with a fox-trimmed hood, the fur fallen back around my shoulders, meant to mix in with my own glossy pelt. Everyone else drank whiskey out of the bottle and danced to The Smiths while he and I argued carefully on the couch: I think you like me, I said, and he told me that he did, but that he didn’t want to date me, and that he was sorry about it. I don’t really care if you’re sorry, I said, and then he left so I left too. It had rained and frozen over while we talked: I walked outside into a world slicked over with a quarter inch of ice: steps, sidewalk, railings and gates glassy black. I almost broke my neck walking home in those heels.
The next morning he texted to ask if I’d come over and help him pack: it was sunny and warm and the world was in a melt. I sat on the floor of his spare, quiet room— I’d never been there before— and we didn’t talk at all while he played I Love How You Love Me from Live at Jittery Joe’s and I wondered whether he was going to kiss me goodbye.
(He didn’t; I downloaded the album, which I’d never heard before, and listened to it at the airport and on the the plane, the whole way home.)
-
A year later P found out how much I liked Jeff Mangum and promised to burn me a copy of When It All Caved In; it took him something like a year to do it, and he handed it off with a note and a drawing acknowledging how long it’d been. I don’t listen to it very often; I couldn’t tell you why.
-
Last night I sat in the dark next to AK, the two of us thrilled, absolutely rigid with joy, while Jeff Mangum sat on a chair and played song after song, each one rippling and resonant. “I didn’t realize how well I knew those songs,” he said afterwards, and it was true: the tunes meander and the lyrics are knotty and surreal but we could chant right along with him, and water rolls on off the round captain’s belly who’s talking to tigers with his cafeteria tray.
It didn’t occur to me then how much of it had been given to me, all these boys saying here, take this, and my own unquestioning acceptance. M & I talked recently about remaking yourself in the image of the man you love, or hope to love, adopting his tastes and attitudes; certainly there’s a little bit of that in this. But mostly it’s that I got lucky: that what they handed me was so good, and that I love it so fiercely as my own, now.
My parents always forget their anniversary.
It’s sort of their fault for getting married in late December, after Hannukah but before Christmas, New Year’s, and my birthday, all of which arrive in startlingly rapid succession and don’t exactly leave us looking for reasons to celebrate. I have seen them forget the day entirely; once a friend tried to remind them over dinner, hinting at this special day in history, only to have my mother take up the thread of the story and start talking about how my dad and this friend had run away from Chicago when they were teenagers, making their way west. “It’s very possible that was years ago today,” he said, when she’d finished “but actually, Darcy, I was talking about your wedding.”
Since then, we’ve all tried; it’s become a family joke, the watchful countdown and the inevitable lapse. Once, on their 25th, we drank champagne together in a hotel room in Arizona. Or maybe that wasn’t the 25th but the 24th and I remember it that way because it is the only proper celebration I have ever seen them manage. This last year we might have raised a toast over dinner, my brother & I both home for the holidays; again, they blur. Much, I imagine, like lots of things do, 25 or 26, maybe even 27 years in.
The idea of counting the days of a relationship horrifies me, honestly: if it’s serious enough, how can the piece you’ve managed to get through stand up against the staggering total of the whole rest of your life? There’s no such thing as done, and relationships don’t mature necessarily with time. Nice work getting through the first thirty, kids, but you probably have that much again ahead of you.
So I find it comforting that they aren’t counting, and that there’s enough to celebrate in the season that we never need to look for the excuse. February, however, is a cold and lonely month, and my dad is good at surprises, good at the giving as well as the gift. He found this photo, him and my mom in a photobooth who knows how long ago, and scanned it and cleaned it up and asked me & my brother to post it on our blogs, because we live on opposite sides of the country, but the goddamn internet is everywhere. Happy Valentine’s Day, family. Miss you guys, you know?
