by Lee Gutkind
Within weeks, I stop caring if Chris dates other girls; I’ve fallen in love with a girl of my own. A woman actually, my Major advisor, someone who is not technically even gay.
It happens so fast, there isn’t time to pray.
Here is a memory, a terrible one: I am standing with Chris in my childhood bedroom. It is December 1987, the first few minutes of Christmas break, our senior year. We have just driven home from school, and I am telling him that I can no longer be his girlfriend.
“See this other thing through,” I am saying.
I’ve been telling Chris all about my theoretical sexuality since Thanksgiving. He wants to marry me anyway.
There is a look in his eye, alternating between fierce and defeated. He listens hard, as if I am speaking a new language.
Then suddenly, like a shade snapping, he understands. He knows not only what I’m saying, but what I mean.
I am no longer his.
It’s surprising to watch his knees buckle, the way he falls silently to the pink shag rug of my youth, like a grown man taken down by a gun. He is 22, 6′4″, nearly 200 pounds. He lands just a few inches from the canopy bed where we sometimes secretly make love. He doesn’t utter a sound, just looks out the window for a moment, as if there might be a message etched there in the dark pane.
I try to decipher it myself.
I am so young, so optimistic. How can I know that he will never speak to me again? That who I am inside will somehow destroy the people I love?
Like a Muslim deep in prayer, my boyfriend rests his forehead against the carpet, surrendering. Then he stands up and leaves.
Something New
The next time true love makes an appearance in my life, it’s late one night in 1999, while I’m watching a rerun of Oprah. I’m visiting friends in Berkeley after a harrowing year-long break-up with a woman who has broken my heart and stolen my money. My adult life has been characterized by a series of bad romantic choices. Perhaps I’ve just been unlucky, though I sometimes wonder if I am subconsciously punishing myself.
This particular night, I lie sprawled out across a strange futon in a spare apartment reserved for married graduate students. It is a few days before Christmas, the last Noel before the year 2000, and I am 33 years old, depressed, and jet-lagged. In an overcrowded world of 5.8 billion people, I feel utterly, hopelessly alone.
Flipping the channels, I happen upon one TV talk show after another. The topic on Oprah is etiquette, but I stay tuned anyway, because her theme song cheers me up. “O” is for openness. Optimism! All I really have to do, I realize, is get through the holidays: another hour, this evening, the rest of my life. How hard could it be with Oprah always there to rely upon at 3 A.M., ready with her pragmatic advice? I watch commercials for mascara, feminine pads, rejuvenating shampoo.
When the show returns, I find myself suddenly staring into my future.
I sit up, pointing. “Hey!” I tell the scraggly house plants that are my only company. “There she is!” She is Meryl Cohn, a writer I’ve met on several occasions.
I’ve sat across from her—Thanksgiving, Fourth of July, New Year’s—at tables of fellow writers. Still, I’ve never actually looked at her before. Now, on TV, she exudes sex appeal and confidence. Even Oprah seems won over by her charm: green eyes, auburn hair, the cheekbones of a 1940s movie star.
During a brief Q& A, edited to one Q (Should straight people ever ask gay people if they are gay?) Meryl chats easily, explaining to the studio audience how to know when something is offensive. She offers a quick rundown on the dos and don’ts of queer etiquette. Joking about the age-old question, “What do women like in bed?” Meryl says wryly, “Other women, of course.”
Oprah, lovely and velvety, responds with a deep-throated laugh.
Then, in a flash, the moment (and magic) passes: she is just someone I’ve met, friend of a friend, on Lifetime Television for Women: only Meryl Cohn, writer of the tongue-in-cheek advice column known widely in the gay and lesbian community as “Ms. Behavior.” It’s just as well. I’m not looking for thunderbolts and romance. I can barely manage a change of clothes.
Closing my eyes, I sink back into my familiar funk. My life is a troubled narrative, but at least I know what to expect: bad choices, difficult women, anxiety, despair. I fall asleep to the sound of the TV, cozy in my misery, unaware that somewhere not far away, a perfect stranger is taking my life into her hands.
Messages are being received—and some of them, it turns out, are about me.
Back in New York in February, I seek out Meryl’s advice about a woman I’m casually dating. (Meryl is an advice columnist, after all, and it’s obvious I could use some help.) It turns out she is in town for a few weeks, so we arrange to meet at a gay bookstore in lower Manhattan, which is now sadly defunct. I launch into my problem without prelude.
“Dump her,” Meryl says.
She brings up a little story of her own, how her good friend Linda Brown has been receiving messages about her from someone in California. “My friend Psychic Mary wants me to tell you that you’ve already met your new girlfriend,” Linda tells her. “Psychic Mary sees books.”
Meryl doesn’t know the woman making these predictions about her future. “I have a girlfriend, thank you very much.” Her relationship is troubled, but she’s loyal nonetheless.
Linda claims she is only passing messages. “Psychic Mary hears voices. Are you going to argue with voices?”
We laugh off the prediction over tea.
Linda has said something else that Meryl won’t tell me until months later: a prediction about Meryl getting married and Linda making the wedding cake.
It’s the turn of the new century, but, even so, a prediction of marriage seems absurdly far from reality. The world is hardly our oyster. Even if it were, Meryl is not exactly the blushing bride type, which is part of her allure.
That day in February, Meryl strikes me as definitely attractive, but I fancy myself too short for her. I am 5′3″, a good 7″ shy of matching her height. Even so, after that meeting, I invite her to lunch, the movies, dinner. Each time I share my latest adventure: a blind date who is actually blind, a woman who wants to take me camping after one cup of coffee, a trainer who asks me out for kick-boxing. I’m trying to renew my childhood faith in love; also, I’m lonely. My stories make Meryl laugh.
Between us we have two Seven Sisters degrees, two Masters’ degrees, a couple of literary grants, one very successful advice column, two published books, and four books-in-progress. We’re not exactly dumb. It’s just we’re unaccustomed to living out someone else’s narrative, a psychic’s no less. Who believes in voices, anyway—coming from where, the great beyond?
In my life so far, all predictions have turned out wrong; love has been a disaster. My only good relationship happened in puberty.
With tickets I can’t get rid of, I take Meryl to Puccini’s Butterfly—by chance, on Valentine’s Day. And despite the fact that there is nothing like Italian opera to spur on romance, we manage to maintain our ignorance.
To reciprocate, she invites me to Eve Ensler’s Vagina Monologues.
“Are you kidding?” I say, the guise of friendship beginning to wear.
We spend the entire following Sunday together. After the Monologues, we walk downtown in the rain, eat Mexican, cruise a bookstore. Sitting in the self-help aisle, we diagram each other’s personalities, confess our biggest flaws. At a coffee shop around the corner, I grill her about her talk show tour. Flashing back to that lonely California night on a borrowed futon, I can’t bring myself to mention Oprah.
Walking down the street, I am suddenly aware of how tall Meryl is; how wide the world, how mysterious. For the first time since junior high, I am truly afraid. But here it is: late and chilly on a dark street corner in Chelsea, my future unraveling before me.
Wary, I look into Meryl’s eyes, and suddenly understand how Anna Karenina ended up under that train.
Something Borrowed
I
go for long stretches without hearing from Meryl. It turns out Ms. Behavior practices what she preaches: no hint of a new relationship will be permitted until her current one comes to its natural conclusion.
Not to worry, my shrink reassures me: “There’s no cure for love.” House with a swing, Psychic Mary continues her predictions. Little girl in the swing. A life together, growing old.
May 17, 2004, 8:30 A.M., a raw morning in Cape Cod, Massachusetts. Meryl and I stand waiting to fill out some paperwork. It is the first day gays can legally be married, and we have the first appointment. A line is already forming, couples standing shoulder to shoulder on the steps of town hall.
By 9, the streets are filled. Hundreds of onlookers watch and wait, cheering. People throw confetti, take photographs. Some carry signs; others hand out roses to every bride, male or female. Volunteers from the Human Rights Campaign cut wedding cake for any two waving a license to marry. The festive atmosphere harkens back to earlier days: the first Gay Pride parades in New York City, the Marches on Washington, the 1980s, the 1990s. Though now we are decades from our youth. Our friends are no longer dying in droves.
“This one’s pretty,” my mother has said about Meryl. She liked her on first sight, because Meryl is good looking and my mother is vain. Still, she has come a long way since the days of hysterical crying, breastbeating, throwing herself at me; my mother hasn’t cornered me in a kitchen or attacked my short haircut in years. We are in easy daily contact, thanks to the computer we gave her for her seventieth birthday, and while she may say a secret novena now and then, petitioning the Virgin on my behalf, she seems okay with my current situation.
Handing over our paperwork, we race up the Cape to Orleans District Court, where we pay for our waiver of the three-day waiting period, an arcane holdover from the days of syphilis and shotgun weddings, when a few days of clarity might have made a difference. (Formerly $65, this waiver now costs $195, the special homosexual rate.) Greeting us in chambers is Judge Welch, a small, worn New Englander in formal robes, whose father, like his father before him, was the sitting judge.
His office is dark and smells of cherry tobacco. “I’m pleased to take part in this special day.” His eyes twinkle. He presses our hands into his small but binding grip. “You love each other a lot.”
We hold our breaths. Here we are: among the first gay people to marry in the United States of America, in the first state to go legal, on the fiftieth anniversary of Brown v. the Board of Education.
“A fine day for civil rights!” the judge says, breaking into a smile.
Returning to Provincetown for our final license, we are greeted by an army of television cameras. Over the past few weeks we’ve turned down media requests from Newsday to TV Japan, politely declining reporters who want to follow us around to document our wedding day. We are camera shy. Still, the local news catches our happy moment. (The reel later runs in a continuous loop on the New York Times website.) We head for home.
At four o’clock, we are married in our living room by someone we have only just met. After angry Republican Governor Mitt Romney has made sure that friends of gay people are not swiftly deputized and pressed into service, we hire a lovely, elderly, gay African-American minister who walks with a cane. She speaks solemnly of candles and circles and unions. It feels suddenly meaningful to participate in an institution designed for our exclusion, more meaningful than expected. It’s funny how one can be unaware of one’s oppression until the instant it is lifted.
We read our vows.
Flown in from New York, Meryl’s brother is our witness, ring bearer, flower boy. Her sister calls a few moments after we’ve taken our vows; my father-in-law and his wife phone that evening. Meryl’s mother sends flowers.
From my family, there is only eerie silence. On May 17th, well through the following Sunday, when our marriage is announced in the New York Times, I hear nothing.
I can feel my mother’s grief, but I fight it.
All my life, I’ve struggled against absorbing her quiet devastation over who I am. Surrounded by my dearest and queerest friends, I feel happy, lucky, proud. I wish I could somehow show my mother that I am not so different from who I used to be.
If there were queerleaders, I’d still be captain. My life is a testament to this fact. At Vassar, for instance, I helped start a lesbian and gay alumni group; in New York, I was in the vanguard, working at Gay Men’s Health Crisis, marching with ACT UP and The Lesbian Avengers. I helped some friends to die and others to live. I was quoted about things homosexual in the Wall Street Journal and Newsweek. I even published a collection of short stories, changed from the original title of Nuclear Family and Other Fictions to Lucy on the West Coast and Other Lesbian Short Fiction by a publisher keen to expand the market.
Yet I feel bad about my family. I imagine them opening the paper to our smiling newsprint faces, cringing each time the word lesbian appears in the inky text.
Later, a college professor and former colleague will express her disapproval over our little miraculous publication. “I expected to find your name in the Book Review section,” she says, “not in Styles.” My parents make their embarrassment at being outed known. When I probe for details, they offer terseness: “Yeah, we saw it.” Everyone else seems puzzled and wants to know how we pulled it off, as if Meryl and I have somehow managed to fool the press. “How’d you get in the Times?” people want to know.
When the moment arrives, of course, none of it matters. Not even my mother.
“Do you take this woman?” the minister asks.
And I do. Completely and happily, I do.
Something Blue
Italians may not be big fans of the lesbian, but they love a good party. Hence my mother’s dilemma: I can practically feel her blanch at the thought of her relatives crossing state lines to dance the tarantella at my queer wedding.
Since Meryl and I don’t want (and can’t afford) a traditional wedding reception, we decide to have two small parties: one in New York in June and one on Cape Cod in September.
My mother comes to both.
In New York, the party is at our best friends Kenny and David’s apartment on Central Park South, overlooking the park. Meryl’s friend Linda makes an amazing wedding cake from scratch, towering layers with four fillings and a cascade of purple orchids. (Somewhere in California a psychic is smiling.)
Accompanying my mother are my two least homophobic brothers, one with his girlfriend, the other with his wife. My father neither comes to the wedding nor acknowledges it. I try to prepare my mother as much as I can, telling her that Meryl’s family is happy for us, that she should be happy too.
With lingering trepidation, I prepare myself as well.
My family arrives late. My brothers stand around in the corner drinking beer, one of them in a baseball cap and sneakers. (“Kind of hot!” Kenny says of him, trying to put a good spin on the situation.)
My brothers can’t seem to stop gawking at our forty dearest friends, though they manage to refrain from making ugly jokes. As I catch them passing shocked glances twice during the toast, I realize that they have never been in a room with so many gay people. To them, this party—my life—is a spectacle.
My mother is more at ease; she receives daily e-mails about my queer life. She circulates, chatting with everyone, recognizing names and details.
Only when Debbie, my college roommate, arrives with her husband do my brothers and my mother truly come to life. They pump her husband’s hand, questioning her about her kids, the suburbs. For a happy moment, they locate me in Debbie, the me with Chris, with the future they could understand.
Later, in a corner while talking to Meryl’s father, my mother cries. She tells him how disappointed she is at my father’s lack of interest, at the fact that her only daughter, her baby, is gay. Several friends overhear her admit that her own 92-year-old mother is more accepting of my lesbianism than she is.
I know it’s true; from the haze of her nursing home decline, my N
onnie has repeatedly told my mother she should be happy I’ve found someone to love.
Even so, at the end of the evening, my mother looks around at my friends and says, “I didn’t know you had so many people.” For Italians this is a high compliment, meaning people who love you. It’s almost as good as praising the food at a wedding. Which she also does.
Despite her public tears, I am proud of my mother for her struggle. I take it as a sign that our relationship is alive and well.
Our second wedding party is also magical, despite a September hurricane on the Cape: Ivan the Terrible. My mother attends, this time with my sister-in-law Helen and her alcoholic best friend. (My brothers have apparently had enough of my gay friends to last a lifetime.) During the speeches and readings, my mother sits across the room like an outsider; she seems smaller than before, vulnerable. Several of my chivalrous lesbian friends from Brooklyn attend to her every need, refilling her drink, chatting with her about the weather.
We take photographs.
After the party, my sister-in-law’s best friend, completely hammered, hits on me. My sister-in-law, herself a little tipsy, gets behind the wheel to drive my mother back to their hotel. It brings back memories of my drunken father driving us home late at night after weddings, my mother quiet in the passenger’s seat.
The next morning at brunch, my mother and my sister-in-law stay only a few minutes, eager to get started on the ten-hour drive ahead. My mother gives Meryl and me a gift: her mother’s china. “Nonnie always wanted you to have it,” she says, not looking at me.
I try to imagine how it would have felt to have those old women, my grandmother and her sisters, dancing at my wedding.
As I walk my mother down to the car, a terrible thing happens. The hem of her denim skirt gets caught on her rubber sandal and she takes a nasty spill down a long, narrow set of wooden stairs off the back deck.
My mouth goes dry. I’m standing on the top step, looking down at her sprawled across the landing, and my heart lurches. This is my 72-year-old Italian mother, a woman I have loved and disappointed all my life. Irrationally, I feel I am to blame for this fall.