That is, until something royally fucks up.
I would continue to seek Sondra’s advice over the next year, twice when she made visits to New York, and during several phone sessions. She assured me that the psychic line was even better over the phone. There were fewer distractions than in a face-to-face meeting. The phone line was pure electrical energy. Logical, right?
I thought so at the time.
She became my fast-talking Florida guru, the woman I turned to—more than my friends, parents, or therapist—when I needed advice at a critical juncture. I grew addicted to finding out what she thought about people or situations or business dealings. I started feeling guilty, in fact, that I had an inside line, though she assured me she would never reveal information that would hurt anyone. Sondra, after all, could tell me things about people I knew! I learned about their sex lives, their family troubles, their shady transactions. What could be better than that? It was like overhearing gossip without any of the drawbacks. And at only $150 an hour!
I didn’t always take her advice; when making decisions, I relied on intuition, friends, and the powers of Google as well. But more than anything, I wanted to believe what Sondra said was true, because it would validate that one event I was holding on to: the guy I would meet in the fall.
Those summer months were happy and productive, if only a bit lonely. I dated some, but eventually decided there was no point. After all, it was in September when I would meet him, not earlier. And my God, if I got serious with anyone much sooner than that, I might jinx the whole thing!
So when I did meet a young man whom I liked very much, and though it was not in September, but at the very end of August, and he was wearing not a white shirt but a yellow one, and we were not at a dinner party, but on a first date at an Italian restaurant on Hudson Street that admittedly did have a long line of tables close to each other along a window banquette that was almost like a dinner party, I fell for him.
Over the next two months, I stopped seeing my friends as often, spent nearly every moment with him, sent and received gifts, went out to long dinners, even took a trip to Los Angeles where we vacationed at the Chateau Marmont.
He told me he loved me, gave me silly nicknames, said he could imagine never dating anyone else again.
He suggested things that meant real commitment in my mind, like getting a couples membership at an independent film society or taking a weekend road trip to the Berkshires. When I came back from eight days in San Francisco celebrating my parents’ wedding anniversary, he said he never wanted to be apart from me for that long again.
My confidence about my new boyfriend was so high that I let myself plunge headfirst into those murky, deceptive waters of early-stage love. I paid no attention to contradictory signs: the fact that he’d never had a relationship lasting more than four months; that though he was enormously talented, he had no steady employment and was bouncing from one friend’s couch to another; that he had an annoying fag hag who constantly hung around and openly admitted her jealousy of us. I ignored it all, because I was convinced we could overcome these problems.
What I also ignored was the lingering thought that I should call Sondra to ask if he was the right person.
I was afraid what she might say.
All I knew was that he made me happy, happier than I’d been in a long time, and I didn’t want anything, or anyone, to ruin that.
So when this young man turned out not to be the love of my life, but rather a bit of a creep, when he left my apartment one night after slamming the keys I had given him down on the kitchen table, when he told me he wasn’t cut out for relationships, that there had never really been anything between us, that I was too difficult, too much of a perfectionist, too high maintenance, I was not so much sad as I was angry. A very expensive psychic, after all, one whom I had flown down to Florida to see, had told me he would be the one! The one is not supposed to slam keys down on the kitchen table. The one is not supposed to walk out of your life two months after you start dating him.
The next evening was Halloween. I felt pathetic as I walked home through the cacophonous, revelry-laden streets of the Village. I had left my friends behind for this guy, and though they would all eventually be there for me, I wasn’t ready to go crawling back. I was still in too much shock.
A month later, after a bleak November, it occurred to me to call Sondra.
“He looks like the one, feels like the one,” she told me. “But you went too fast. You changed the script. You expect everything at once. You want it all. The romance is the icing on the cake. You have to build a strong foundation first.”
Good advice, I thought. Maybe he had been the one. Maybe I had gone too fast. (Yes, I had definitely gone too fast. That much, even without a psychic, was obvious to me.)
“I see the number seven,” she said. “It’s not seven days, but it might be seven weeks, or seven months.”
He would be coming back, she said.
Seven weeks seemed preferable, but I would have settled for seven months.
I held on to that damned seven, keeping it in the back of my mind as seven weeks and then seventy days passed, with no word from him. My mood became even more despondent than it had been a year ago. I stopped going out, stopped dating, was writing less than I would have liked.
I was also intensely angry at the young man and at Sondra. But mostly, I was angry at myself for screwing up so completely, for ignoring all the conventional wisdom about relationships I usually try to follow: Go slow. Weigh out your options. Don’t expect too much, too soon. Don’t try to change him. And for God’s sake, don’t give him the keys to your apartment three weeks after the first date!
Then, in March, the young man did come back.
Aha! I thought. Sondra was right. This is it. He’s changed.
No, he had not.
He wanted to be friends. He was sorry for hurting me; he wrote me several long, sweet, romantic e-mails talking about what a good time we had had together. But long, sweet, romantic e-mails are not the same as getting back together.
I was convinced, though, that if we saw each other in person, all the feelings would return. We had an awkward dinner during which I had nothing to say until I finally let loose everything I had been feeling for the past five months. What makes you so fucking special that you don’t do relationships? And what makes you think you can treat someone this way and then just walk out of his life?
He had no good answers for these questions. He was rude, defensive. Though I was still physically attracted to him, I was sad to realize he was a person I no longer wanted to know.
At the end of our nondate together, I ran into a friend who was out with a girlfriend of his. “Save me,” I whispered to them. “Don’t ask questions—we’re going out for drinks now.”
I turned back to the young man, gave him a big hug, lied that it was great to see him, and said good-bye. It was the last time I spoke to him.
When Sondra sent a postcard and left me two voice mails telling me she would be seeing clients in Manhattan in June, I didn’t respond. She sent an e-mail a week later—“a loving reminder,” she called it—asking me again if I would like to make an appointment. I wrote her back, saying I wished her the best on her trip, but I would not be booking a session.
I wondered, if she could see the whole story, why she didn’t sense my unhappiness with her advice. I wondered why she had needed to contact me four times. And I wondered, after more than a year of knowing her, if she was so psychic, why didn’t her number accept blocked caller IDs?
When I asked my mother these questions, I could almost hear her shrugging over the phone. “Well,” she said, “maybe she’s not psychic about everything.”
Friends who’ve heard this story always ask me whether I thought Sondra was an elaborate faker. I don’t think so. She did get me out of my depression. Perhaps it was by unblocking some of the negative energy in which I was mired—I’ll never know for sure—but mostly I believe it was by giving me
hope. By telling me that I would meet someone new, that my career prospects were bright, that my family loved me, she helped make lucid my perception of the future.
She went wrong, of course, in her specificity. Thanks to her, I focused on a man in the fall who may never have existed. That fantasy got me through the year, but I shouldn’t have relied on it once September came.
I decided, after the actual young man left for good, that life was best lived moment by moment, that I was the only one who could give order to it.
Still, I am reminded of those three days in Boca Raton: the balmy weather, the pink hotel, the strip malls, the apartment complex, the departure from my everyday life. The fact that so few people knew where I was, I could have disappeared entirely. The idea that I was leaving a piece of myself behind and returning a new person.
And I admit, despite everything, that a part of me still holds on to that narrative, the one all single people have in some form or another, the one Sondra gave me, of meeting that knight in white-shirted armor.
I know he’s out there.
It doesn’t have to be in September.
Really, any month would be fine.
A MANHATTAN LOVE STORY
Melissa de la Cruz
“I love you.”
I tell this to Morgan in a cab as we zoom up the West Side Highway after a night spent at the Sound Factory, the illegal after-hours gay dance club where vogueing was invented and where we have spent the last six hours high on Ecstasy, our arms and legs wrapped around each other while a drag queen circled us and pretended to take photographs with an imaginary camera: “Click! Oh, yes, gorrrrgeous!”
Now, it is eleven o’clock in the morning, and the bright, flat sunlight makes a mockery of our garish outfits—my fishnet stockings, his shiny Dolce & Gabbana shirt.
“I love you, too,” Morgan replies, squeezing my hand. I feel tears in my eyes, because I do love Morgan—so fiercely and passionately that it sometimes borders on hysteria.
We are both twenty-two and Morgan is gay, but that is completely irrelevant.
Morgan and I met during our freshman year at Columbia, instantly bonding over our mutual appreciation for Madonna. At that point, having gone to an all-girls high school, I had little experience with boys; I was also awkward and shy. My strict Filipino Catholic background had drilled into my head the importance of remaining a virgin until marriage, which resulted in a twisted obsession and repulsion toward sex.
I wanted nothing more than to be with a boy, but I also wanted nothing more than to have him never touch me.
So when my roommate told me she thought Morgan might be gay, I didn’t believe her. Nor did it seem an obstacle—if anything, it was a plus! Morgan was everything I wanted a boyfriend to be—sophisticated, erudite, charming, with good hair (a caramel swoop over a tanned forehead), and about as sexually dangerous as a potted plant. He was Australian, had lived all over the world (Singapore, Paris), spoke fluent French, and yet was still refreshingly down-to-earth. He liked Star Wars and fatty mustard-laden pastrami sandwiches, as well as Alabama slammers, having spent his last two years of high school in that great Southern state.
Also, Morgan taught me how to smoke. His long, thin fingers handed me one Camel Light after another. I was a sheltered girl from the northern California suburbs who wanted to reinvent myself as a jaded city girl. Peer pressure? Is there such a thing when one is so eager to be corrupted? Morgan was a mentor and ally, and we were terrible influences on each other. Together we ran up thousands of dollars on our parents’ credit cards—charging exorbitant restaurant meals (opting for sushi and sake rather than the plebian offerings at the college cafeteria) and weekly shopping sprees at Charivari as we amassed avant-garde designer wardrobes. Issey Miyake. Claude Montana. Christian Lacroix. It was the late eighties, early nineties. Fashion was not yet the mass-market reality television phenomenon that it is now; it was the province of the design elite, the aesthete, and we wanted to be part of it.
Precisely because I was a financial aid student with hard-working immigrant parents, I wanted to shed every bit of my image as the underprivileged, earnest striver in twenty-dollar cotton sweaters from The Limited. Upon meeting my prep-school roommate, with her casual attitude toward Bergdorf cashmeres and offhand invitations to fly to London or the Caribbean on a whim, I had intimated very early on that there was absolutely nothing sexy about being poor.
My family was once financially and socially prominent in Manila but had suffered from the economic bust that affected the country in the mid-eighties. We had been forced to start anew in America. The downturn in our fortune was something I was deeply embarrassed about, and one night found myself telling a bald-faced lie to kids on my floor that none other than Corazon Aquino, the then-president of the Philippines, was my aunt (she was not blood-related but a close friend of my family’s; to me, that was close enough). I was careful to project a confident, popular persona, even going so far as to invent a devoted boyfriend at home, concocted from a senior-prom-date picture with a cute guy I was set up with by the popular girls in my class.
Only to Morgan did I confess the unglamorous truths about my life—that my family ran an employee cafeteria at Sears in San Bruno, that we rented and did not own our house, that I had absolutely no friends from high school. The photo that adorned my college pin-board of a group of attractive kids with me in the middle? Taken during the one party I had ever attended, after graduation, when sentiment overcame snobbery, and for once, every girl in our forty-person class was welcome to a beach bash in San Rafael.
With Morgan I felt safe enough to be myself because he had secrets of his own. His aunt had committed suicide. His parents didn’t get along. He wasn’t happy, but he wasn’t unhappy, either. He never thought my not having money was a barrier to living the high life. In his mind, we were young, smart, and attractive, and should have New York at our feet. Morgan always figured out a way to get on exclusive nightclub VIP lists, or invited to cocktail parties at swanky penthouse apartments on Park Avenue, or asked to art exhibits in vast Tribeca lofts. We ogled celebrities together (Isaac Mizrahi! Christy Turlington!) and availed ourselves of numerous open bars. When we weren’t out, one of our favorite pastimes was to talk on the phone for hours and eviscerate everyone we knew in common—catty character assassination that only two people who weren’t getting any action could excel at.
He was my very best friend and the most important person in my life. By junior year, I had accepted his avowed asexuality. Part of me knew Morgan was gay, but another part didn’t accept it. I was still holding out for the day when he would realize we could be everything to each other. In the meantime, I began dating a sweet boy, a year younger than me and as inexperienced as I was. Next to Morgan, my feelings for Kevin seemed wan and puppyish, though it was nice to have someone to kiss. We would be fooling around in my stuffy dormitory room, the two of us half-naked and sweaty, and I would find myself wishing I was watching Beverly Hills, 90210 with Morgan instead.
Did I wish I were kissing Morgan? I’m not sure. In the fantasies I spun in bed at night, we were entangled in the most romantic and erotic of love affairs; yet when I saw him in the morning, reality would blow those gauzy images from my mind. Morgan was a good-looking guy, but there was no sexual tension between us. If any did exist, it was a one-sided projection of mine. Still, I persisted in the illusion that I was Morgan’s quasi girlfriend. I even got him to admit that if he ever felt like dating a girl, the only girl he would date would be me. He had a series of complicated excuses to explain his monklike behavior: wanting to focus on school, not feeling ready for the next step, cherishing his independence. It was such a shame, since we made a good-looking couple. Everyone said so, and even if our so-called romance was as fabricated as the air-brushed images in the glossy magazine pages I modeled my life after, it was enough to sustain me.
It never occurred to me to raise the issue of his sexuality, not even when we spent every weekend checking coats at the Lesbian-Bi
sexual-Gay Coalition dances together our senior year (yes, he was literally still in the closet). Nor did I find it odd that our circle of friends grew to include several flamboyantly gay men, all of whom told me in no uncertain terms that they believed Morgan was gay. They could see I was hopelessly in love with him, and nothing good could come of the situation. I was blithe, blind, and refused to listen. I convinced myself that Morgan was simply an open-minded straight man, a quality I cherished in him, albeit mistakenly.
When Morgan came out to me the night before commencement, I crumpled to my knees and cried. (Later he would tell me my reaction was worse than his mother’s.) I was shattered and in my grief proposed a Bloomsbury-type union: We would marry each other but allow ourselves lovers (although we were still both virgins at the time). He happily agreed, and the thought of such a European-style arrangement made us feel very worldly indeed. That evening, it even briefly occurred to me that I might be a lesbian. What could explain my complete and total denial? Was I so repulsed by the idea of sex with men that I was hiding a nascent homosexuality that I subsumed in an attraction to a man who had no sexual feelings for me?
Yet the next day, during the graduation lunch attended by both of our families, when we exchanged presents—gold cufflinks for him, Tiffany earrings for me—I understood that it could no longer be the two of us against the world. The look on our mothers’ faces said it all. They were already planning the wedding, and I couldn’t be part of such a farce. I didn’t want to play Dora Carrington to his Lytton Strachey. I was a bourgeois girl from San Francisco. I would have to make new friends, get myself a real boyfriend, and leave the cozy cocoon of glamour and gossip that we had built for each other.
But to my surprise, our friendship didn’t change all that much after Morgan came out. If anything, we clung even more tightly to each other. We continued to share and dissect each other’s every perverse secret, poisonous thought, or insecure assessment of our looks and personalities, and indulged in books and movies of questionable origin. The Danish art film For A Lost Soldier, a movie that celebrates the sacred love between a nineteen-year-old Canadian serviceman and the eleven-year-old Danish boy who becomes his lover and helpmeet? One of our favorites. We saw it in a darkened theater in the Village with what looked like grizzled escapees from a NAMBLA convention.
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