by Joel Derfner
I began to fantasize about selling the television on Craigslist one day while he was at work. “Perfect for single man or woman,” I would write in the ad, leaving out “pernicious and destructive for couples.” Mike would be beyond furious when he got home to find it gone, but at least I would have gotten rid of that bitch. I actually sat down one day and started drafting a post, but then I realized that, since the only thing Mike liked more than watching his goddamn home and garden shows was looking on Craigslist for furniture we couldn’t afford to buy, he was almost certain to come across the ad and foil my plan before I could execute it. I considered charging like ten dollars for the TV, so that somebody would snap it up right away, but then I saw that I had ninety-three cents in my checking account, so I thought better of it.
I tried to find solutions. We went to a couples therapist, but our session didn’t get off to a great start.
“I’m furious,” said Mike when the therapist asked him how he was feeling. “Joel sprang this appointment on me yesterday.”
“But, Joel, you made this appointment with me three weeks ago,” said the therapist.
“And your point would be?” I said. I’d waited so long to tell Mike because, though he’d agreed in principle to the idea of couples therapy, that had been months ago. If I asked him about it now, I knew he’d say it wasn’t a good time, so I figured that, rather than having a fight, it would be easier not to give him a choice in the matter.
I thought the therapist was lame and Mike liked her, which I put down to his having spent much less time than me on the couch, but in the end he said he was simply too busy to do couples therapy. (Mike swears up and down that he never said this, and that the reason we didn’t continue couples therapy was that I failed to fulfill my promise to look around for other therapists I liked better. I had made such a promise, it’s true, but only before Mike said he was too busy to do couples therapy at all. Mike is crazy.)
One evening I said to him, “Look, could you just turn off the fucking television for five minutes and talk to me?”
Jaw clenched, he answered, “Joel, I just spent ten months watching my father die. Has it not occurred to you that I might need a little bit of time to be alone with my thoughts and feelings and not make entertaining you my highest priority for every minute of every day?”
“I watched my mother die for twelve years,” I said, “and you know what? I didn’t have to become a cloistered monk; I just lived my goddamn life, because there was nothing else I could do, so why can’t you just fucking grow a pair and deal with it?” I stormed downstairs to ask Mrs. Combs whether I could come into my her kitchen to pour myself a glass of Diet Mountain Dew but then I heard her sobbing, presumably about her dead husband (God, what was wrong with these people?) so I went to the corner store, invincible in my lack of compassion, and bought half a dozen candy bars and came back and ate them in the living room my office while I read The Count of Monte Cristo, a 1,100-page novel about revenge.
The next day, I ransacked Mike’s office until I found the transcripts of 28’s conversations with his parents; if Mike and I couldn’t even talk to each other about the fact that we couldn’t talk to each other, I thought, maybe 28 would have some advice.
The transcripts, I saw when I found them, covered the period of time from November of 1977, when the Combses first made contact, through August of the following year, just before Mike’s tenth birthday. The conversations were fascinating.
28 had been born in England in 1053, it turned out, and had been murdered at nineteen, though the transcripts also contained conversations with other entities, mostly other students of 28: Yaew (communicating from the future, in the year 4276), Norm (a really obnoxious six-year-old), Baird (a Prussian who died in 1865), Pistils (a trucker), Jacob (from Lubbock, Texas), and so on.
28’s advice was usually metaphysical in nature and, in some cases, surprisingly consistent with the most advanced science of the day, science Mr. and Mrs. Combs could have known nothing about (the many-worlds interpretation of quantum mechanics, for example), but just as often he gave them personal advice:
28: Ken [Mr. Combs] is angry at himself for not doing those things that he often thinks or wishes he would do. He knows he should drink less. He tells himself he will, but doesn’t, then feels as a failure to himself. He gives himself headaches and colds. If he stopped feeling that he has failed, he would not have these things. If he did as he believes he should, he would also not have these things. He can trust himself and his world.
He shared his thoughts on their marriage:
28: You celebrate eleven time years but you feel the 11,000 other time years it is especial [28 had apologized early on for a slight lack of facility in English]. You have gone here in love and are having a triumph. Marriages are made in heaven. They are pre-planned, as are all relationships. Yours is one of breathtaking expansion.
He offered his insights about their children:
28: Mike must know that there is plenty for all. He need not be pushy or be afraid of not getting his share.
which Mike had apparently found comforting and which I thought was particularly penetrating, though now whenever I remind Mike that 28 says he need not be pushy he gets really annoyed, which upsets me; how else can it be felt but as a blow to one’s self-esteem to be trusted less than the product of 7 and 4?
I discovered early in the transcripts that 28’s advice did not confine itself to the emotional.
28: In other times and places you will not have physical existence. Use it now, now. Find joy in what you are experiencing now. Have fun, have fun. Do it. Yes.
MR. COMBS: Let’s take a break.
28: No. Go to bed now. You have physical bodies. Use them.
MRS. COMBS: Go to bed?
28: Yes. Have, if I may intrude, sex. You have a body. Use it for experience and for joy.
MR. COMBS: Good night.
28: Bye, luv. Bye bye.
(Throughout the transcripts there were many, many occasions on which 28 suggested that Mr. and Mrs. Combs use their bodies for experience and for joy.)
After I finished all the transcripts, I really didn’t know what to make of them. Mike’s childhood was so dysfunctional that at one point he stopped speaking to his parents for a year. After Mr. Combs died, Mrs. Combs seemed absolutely, utterly incapable of action without him. “We always worked as a team,” she said to Mike when she asked him to make the funeral arrangements. “I don’t know how to do anything on my own.” What that meant, as far as I could tell, after Mike spent half an hour explaining on the phone to the funeral parlor whatever she could not explain because she could not pick up the phone, was that her husband had been happy to make all the decisions and she had been happy to disclaim responsibility for any of them.
How reliable could a spirit guide be who called this marriage one of breathtaking expansion?
At the same time, what wouldn’t I give to find out, via independent verification—even by my subconscious, if that’s what 28 is—that Mike and I have gone there (wherever there is) and are having a triumph? I don’t know the answers to anything, and I don’t think Mike does either, but if somebody else claims to, what would be the point in stopping our ears?
I think the idea of True Love is one of the most insidious inventions ever to issue from the demonic forges of the human mind. As far back as Plato with his sphere-people who got broken in half and spent their lives seeking the half-sphere-people from whom they’d been separated, the thought has existed that if we could just find the right person, the person whose edges protruded where ours receded, the person with whom we fit perfectly, we would be whole. We would no longer suffer the agony of being alone.
The problem is that this is bullshit.
The agony of being alone isn’t situational, it’s existential; it’s an agony that comes as a free gift with being alive. True, having a boyfriend or a husband or (one presumes) a wife means that you have somebody to talk to about that agony when it gets too awful to bear
. It also means, however, that, if your fiancé gets into a snit because you ate the last of the chocolate ice cream or were late for dinner or forgot to put the recycling out and stops speaking to you, you have nobody to talk to and as far as things stand at that moment you never will. If the two of you kiss and make up, then you’re back to having somebody to share the agony with; great, except that it’s horribly easy to miss something when you kiss and make up, horribly easy to be so relieved that he’s speaking to you again that you ignore the twinge of resentment you feel that you’re always the one who has to take the recycling out and why can’t he take the recycling out every once in a while and then he gets mad about it on top of everything, Jesus Christ, and then you forget that you ignored the twinge of resentment but it’s still there and then the next time you fight there’s another one and you start to build up emotional plaque and if you’re not careful then you’re trapped in that opaque shell you’ve created, just as surely as Madeleine Usher buried alive in the sepulcher. You’re in just as much pain as everybody else but forced to pretend you’re not, because otherwise you’d have to admit that your marriage is a failure and that you’re not worth loving, so you go on day by day, with no hope of ever sharing the unbearable burden of being alive, because if you don’t talk about it with anybody then at least you’re the only one who knows that your marriage is a failure and that you’re not worth loving. And you start daydreaming, and you think, well, what if he had an epiphany and renounced all fleshly connections to become a priest, I couldn’t very well be expected to stay in this marriage then, could I? and when you see inspirational pamphlets on the sidewalk you consider picking them up and leaving them strewn about your house, as subconscious advertising. Or you think, what if I could provoke him into hitting me? Not hard at all, but just enough that I could immediately leave him and everybody would be on my side and I would be single and full of hope again?
Of course, it’s entirely possible that I’m just a bitter, cynical man who wants everybody else to be as frightened of life as I am. I mean, I am a bitter, cynical man who wants everybody else to be as frightened of life as I am, but it’s possible that my attitude toward True Love comes not from any insight on my part but from an unconscious effort to spread my misery as far and wide as I can.
Yet I don’t think so.
Mike’s mother finally moved upstairs, and we took back our kitchen and regained much of our equilibrium, but when we get into fights with each other—usually because Mike is being completely unreasonable—I find myself back in that lonely, lonely place. In fact, I don’t know any couples in whose relationship this dynamic doesn’t operate at least occasionally. The sphere-people were a myth. I don’t think the mystery of human character can be contained in three dimensions; each of us protrudes and recedes in directions physicists have yet to imagine.
Or what if this is just what marriage is?
Mrs. Combs lived upstairs for a year and a half or so, joining the block association and having dinner with us once or twice a week, but she never really seemed to be at home in the neighborhood and finally she moved to New Jersey. I observed to Mike not long afterward that it had been largely his enthusiasm for the idea that had led her to move upstairs. “I think if she’d been left to her own devices she would have just moved out to Jersey pretty soon after your dad died.”
“You’re probably right,” said Mike.
“Why was it so important to you that she live with us?”
“I don’t know.” He paused for a long time. “I guess I thought she might become the mother I always wanted her to be.”
“And how did that work out?”
“Look,” he said, hearing resentment that hadn’t been in my voice except that it totally had, “I’m still really upset about how unsupportive you were that whole time.”
“Well, I’m still really upset about how you let your parents take away our kitchen for nine months.”
“Joel, what was I supposed to do?” His voice was getting heated. “My father needed that door open.”
“Oh, grow up,” I said. “Your mother needed that door open.”
He was silent for a few moments. “You’re right.”
“She needed a sense of control over her situation.”
“You’re right.”
“You knew this!” I shouted. “You knew this! You asked me to let your dying father move into our house and I said he could on one condition, that you put me first, and you promised you would, and you broke your promise the very first day! And you wonder why I wasn’t more supportive when he died.”
“Yes, I do, because I needed you and you weren’t there.”
We sat, staring at each other in silence.
4
Dealing with the Legal Business
The first same-sexers to wed in California after the state Supreme Court’s decision in favor of marriage equality, I understand, were Del Martin and Phyllis Lyon, activists who had been together since 1952—fifty-six years—and the mayor of San Francisco himself performed the ceremony. I spent a lot of time crying that day too, not because I felt a further shift in civil rights but because the sight of two ancient lesbians getting hitched made me almost unbearably happy.
I don’t know what it is about old people that I find so compelling, but put one onscreen and I’m mesmerized. Be one and say something moderately wise-sounding and I’m eating out of your hand. Maybe it’s aspirational. Since my thirties have been so much better than my twenties, maybe I’m hoping that my life will get better and better, decade by decade, until I’m so far from the man who used to ask his psychiatrist boyfriend about overdose effects of different prescription drugs so he’d know what to use when the time came to kill himself that I won’t even recognize him. Or maybe it’s the other way around; maybe I feel somehow that a face filled with lines and wrinkles is, ultimately, the result of Michelangelo chipping away at the marble, trying to get rid of anything that doesn’t look like a horse, and who we are at seventy or eighty, battered by the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune, is as close to our true selves as we’re going to get. And the idea of being in that position with Mike at my side makes me think that someday I might not be afraid of anything.
In any case, Martin and Lyon weren’t the only same-sex couple to marry that day; hundreds of others married with them, and hundreds the next day, and the next. My family in Los Angeles had not forgiven me—this was before Mike’s parents moved in with us—so I couldn’t join them yet, but the day was coming soon, I knew, when I would.
And then Mike’s parents moved in with us and things started winding up for the 2008 election and all of a sudden everyone was talking about Proposition 8, the ballot initiative put forward by ProtectMarriage.com to amend the California state constitution with the addition of the phrase, “Only marriage between a man and a woman shall be valid or recognized in California.” But I wasn’t worried. “This is never going to pass,” I told Mike.
“Why?”
“Because it’s so badly written as to be virtually meaningless.”
“It’s so cute that you think people are going to notice.”
Let’s say we analyze the structure of the sentence “Only marriage between a man and a woman shall be valid or recognized in California” as “Only [[noun] [prepositional phrase]] [predicate] [predicate adjective] [prepositional phrase].” We could then create an analogous sentence that read, for example, “Only Sam over there is good in bed.” It’s perverse to read this as indicating that Sam is good in bed when he is over there but not when he is anywhere else; the reading of this sentence must be therefore that Sam, who is over there, is good in bed, but that nobody else is. (Note that such an assertion, were I actually to make it, would be libelous; I happen to know from personal experience that, while Sam certainly is a sexual dynamo, he is by no means the only one in the world. Or the only one in New York. Or in his immediate family.) If we apply this structural understanding to our original sentence, we see that the only possible readin
g of Proposition 8 is therefore that a marriage between a man and a woman is valid or recognized in California, but that nothing else is. Not a marriage between two women or two men, of course, but also not felony statutes, not stop signs, not the law of gravity.
Actually, it’s a little more complicated than that, because in addition to the “only” problem we also have the issue of “or” (valid or recognized) and whether it’s exclusive or inclusive, as well as the issue of whether “in California” applies to “valid or recognized” or only to “recognized,” and when it all adds up the thing ramifies so many times that I don’t have the heart to continue this, because no matter how you interpreted it Proposition 8 didn’t mean what its proponents said it meant.
To do that, the law would have had to read something like, “In California, a marriage is valid only if it is between a man and a woman.” But it didn’t. So instead, it meant that, within the state borders, all felony statues were unconstitutional and one could go on a killing spree without fear of any consequences.
After the election one had half a mind to do so, though it might have been difficult given that by then the law of gravity was neither valid nor recognized in the state.
But, as I say, the wretched grammar wasn’t the only reason for my lack of concern about the upcoming vote on Proposition 8. The No on 8 folks were raising tens of millions of dollars to spend on publicity, and besides, thousands of same-sex couples had already gotten married, and thousands more would get married before the election. The citizens of California were not going to unmake what turned out by November 4 to be 18,000 marriages. No way.