“How ironic is it that a community necessarily composed of outsiders would fault you for varying their norm?” I asked rhetorically, eyes falling on a row of monstrous bongs for sale.
“Psychologically, physically, I don’t think people can help reacting negatively when a member of a group of which they are a part indicates a lack of agreement with the group philosophy,” Jackson proposed. Jackson had a warehouse of science in his head, too.
“Did you all move here for the gay scene?” Isis asked suddenly.
Various ironic chuckles sprung up from the group as we approached a head shop’s stand with a quirky attendant, laden with tattoos of flowery colorful patterns and pierced through the nose, eyebrow, and lip. She made eye contact with me, the lesbian vibe plain in her stare, and then turned to look at Aaliyah, who must have held the gaze more effectively, because the girl broke into a smile and started describing her pipe offerings to Aaliyah, whom I knew was too straight-edge to be truly interested in any little glass pipes. Aaliyah was quickly smiling as well, and though I did not hear the words she spoke it was clear from her body language that she had begun flirting.
To answer Isis, the remaining members of our group explained that, no, we hadn’t come for the gay. We had all moved to the Bay Area for some sort of school, initially, but had stayed as much for our respective careers as for the welcoming social environment. When they’d finished, I noted to Isis that I loved San Francisco because it was like Rome in this way – a hotseat of innovation and engineering that drew talent from all over the globe because of its cultural open-mindedness, its acceptance of essentially any idea or any personality.
“But Romans didn’t totally lack norms, I assume?” she asked, I thought astutely.
“No,” I replied, “their norms were just of a type that anyone could suit, or at least any family could suit, with the work of sufficient generations. The point is just that a place can become more intelligent, more creative, by aggregating the ideas of people who feel unable to express them elsewhere for whatever reason.”
“Well that’s certainly what brought me here,” she said.
“Really?”
“Well it’s not like Oklahoma has a huge research community. This is where the science happens. But I think the social conservatism in other places causes discomfort that I find distasteful, that did bug me. One of Deb’s high school friends was actually institutionalized because her father decided her sexual attraction to girls was a sickness to be cured. The officer who was supposed to do the intake was an obviously gay man, and he asked her father, ‘why, sir, would you lock your daughter up for being gay?’ The father tried to get the cop fired, and institutionalized his daughter nonetheless. That seems criminal to me. Justified by religion, on some level of societal memory, but, well, gross. I don’t know any stories like that from my town, but I would assume they exist.” When she stopped talking she directed me with her gaze to the adjacent beer line.
I looked through a passing girl’s cowboy hat at Jackson to find he and Ben standing next to each other, Ben’s right arm resting against Jackson’s left. Their faces leaned toward one another, sort of silhouetted by the sunlight falling straight downward upon them. They were both smiling. I pulled out my phone and snapped a photo. I thought it might come in handy later. Isis just smiled at me, though I was encouraged by what I saw as intimacy in that smile, and I smiled back at her.
“Yeah, so, there are very few places I can do my job and none of them are rural,” I continued.
“Exactly,” she said, “and it’s worse for research – like if I wanted to live in a relatively urban area I had very few qualified programs to join to do my research. None of them were even in Oklahoma.”
“I’m baffled when anyone argues that a restrictive environment during one’s upbringing wouldn’t fundamentally effect the expression of their sexuality,” I said to Isis.
I was pleased to see her nod even as she replied, “Yeah, but it’s hard to blame people for buying into the only thing they have been told was true from the time they were children.” Then, I was pleased to think to myself that she was totally right.
Beside us, Aaliyah leaned into her tattooed conquest, and Clint leaned over to me, noticing her too, and said, “I guess the previous straight girl is not much of a loss?”
“It doesn’t appear that she was,” I said. Jackson and Ben had returned giggling from the beer line, but we were all forced to linger at this particular head shop so that Aaliyah could lay game on this curious stoner chick. The girl was grinning broadly now, slapping Aaliyah’s gesticulating arm in response to some comment about the use of Pyrex glass like the pipes’ for strap-ons.
“Okay, time for a little game,” I said, hoping I’d be well-received given that we had some time to kill. “If you had a choice of a very feminine body with a penis or a very masculine body with a vagina, which would you pick to sleep with?” This “game” (test) had a very specific design. Bisexuals almost always picked the opposite-sex organ, while the Jackson’s of the world almost always picked the same-sex organ. A girl of questionable sexuality standing near us perked up at the question, and I smiled.
Jackson: “Female body with penis.” Predictable. Jackson was presently disgusted by vaginas, having seen hundreds in the course of his medical training, most of which were afflicted. I remembered a story about another friend’s OBGYN rotation, and how he’d had to see long lines of poor women with STDs, how he’d been able to tell after a month by the smell when they opened their legs precisely what was ailing them. I suppose that could put anyone off of vagina.
Ben: “Female body with penis for me too. Cock is too enticing to pass up, even for muscles.”
Clint: “Male body with vagina.” Consistent.
Isis: “Male body with vagina.” I stifled a hiccup of surprise. And interest. It took me a moment to offer my own answer.
“I think for me it’s a male body with a vagina, but that’s only if I have to pick one because I made you guys pick one. I’d say they’re both equally enticing… or equally off-putting. I’m generally for very masculine men or very feminine women,” and I failed to suppress a glance at her, her eyes dancing, hair shining, ass lifting.
We stood there for maybe fifteen more minutes, watching the passing neon skirts and tattoos and sipping at beers, before it became clear that Aaliyah’s little courtship would not be ending in the near future – the girl had apparently taken a break to stand alongside her stool smoking a cigarette and chatting with Aaliyah – and the rest of us started shooting impatient looks amongst us and trying to coordinate a departure without interrupting her or leaving her wondering when we disappeared. Finally she turned to glance back at us, and I told her with my eyes, a smile, and a nod of my head that we were leaving her to her business. She nodded immeasurably and turned back around. But, when we’d started to walk again the conversation dwindled, and I soon felt I’d observed enough of the hipsters and miscreants filling this fair. If Isis had been particularly flirty with me, I would have dragged the day on, but I was discouraged by what seemed platonic affection on her part, and I felt like calling it a day.
“Guys, I think I have to bug out. Exhausted,” I said.
“Yeah, I think I’m gonna bounce as well,” Isis said. My neck jerked sideways clumsily as I let the surprise of her timing wash over me, and she was throwing me a look that said “thanks.”
I offered to walk her route back, as it was not hugely out of my way, to steal a few extra minutes of her conversation, and she accepted.
We turned uphill on Ashbury, and she opened a surprising topic for us: “It’s crazy that Clint wants to experiment with chicks. He does represent as very gay… but, well, I suppose it would be hard not to think that since I thought he was gay when I met him.” I nodded, and as I turned to navigate my steps my eyes fell upon a familiar dirty figure, strung with bright colored clothing, smoking a cigarette. The breeze carried the muted sound of his wheezing breath, suffering in and out of his
sickly lungs in long, slow intervals. He smiled a knowing smile at me, and I returned it, but I walked on without pointing him out to Isis.
“In most cases I fear appearances are wholly meaningless,” I said.
“Then again, what else is there to go on? Memories?” she smirked.
“Have you ever tried it?” I asked suddenly.
“Tried what?”
“Girls.”
“Oh… I have kissed a girl, if you mean that.”
“Really?”
“Yes. I had a friend in college – not one of my roommates – and we had a short drunken kissing phase.”
“Never more than that?” I knew I was prying, but perhaps the mystical cupcakish houses’ along the street steeled me with their whimsy.
“No.”
I thought suddenly that I wasn’t giving her enough credit. I had been phrasing my questions as though I were addressing the most conservative Southern Baptists I knew. Nothing about her struck me as juvenile, nor did she seem entranced by tradition. Why not be blunt? “So it was not your bag, I take it?”
“No.” She was closed now, looking straight ahead as she stepped over the curb, embarking on a new block.
I felt bold in my mild intoxication, and tapped her arm as I said, “What, girls are gross?”
Now she smiled. “Just not for me.” Her voice was quiet and sort of sullen.
We walked silently for a while, steps synced and quickened, until suddenly she said, “I’ll see you for Tchaikovsky and Haydn next week?”
“Sounds great. Ironic, but great.” She smiled, coy, and I thought she’d actually understood my obscure and pretentious reference, the pretentiousness of which struck me too late to do anything about it and had, for an instant, threatened to embarrass me gravely.
Then she began chatting idly about Dan, his childishness. I engaged her, but we were soon at our parting corner and she stopped and turned to me.
“See you soon,” she said, and she reached out to hug me. I thought briefly of what it would be like to take her up strongly, pressing her chest into mine, breathing in the smell of her hair, the apricots, holding her still for a long time. I make perhaps too much of all this hugging. But, immediately, I forgot the thought as we hugged.
I reached out, pulled her in, patted her back as our chests touched, and pulled away. “Have a good week,” I said simply.
“You too.”
And I walked away home, and dreamt again that night of vaulted ceilings and mosaic floors where I stared with curiosity at two women on an ancient bed. I woke the next morning thinking that she and I had, like the cults of Isis and Bacchus in Rome, traveled to a place where a common context would allow us to meld different modern worldviews together in a triumph of pun. But that was really only what I wanted to be true. The dream still haunted me.
All good things, O Clea, it behooves persons that have sense to solicit from the gods. But more especially now that we are in quest of the knowledge of themselves (so far as such knowledge is attainable by man), do we pray to obtain the same from them with their own consent: inasmuch as there is nothing more important for a man to receive, or more noble for a god to grant, than Truth.
Plutarch, Of Isis and Osiris
Symphonic
The symphony was to play a taste of Tchaikovsky’s Violin Concerto and Haydn’s “Creation,” a rather lengthy concert packed with classical celebrities.
I sat staring at my phone the Tuesday before the concert, sinking into my office chair, agonizing over the composition of a text message as though it were my greatest opus. She’d invited me out, that was something, and I knew academically it was not unacceptable to confirm, but I also felt unendingly nervous that the slightest misstep in diction would throw off the masterpiece of seduction I was struggling to compose.
I mustn’t seem overeager, or overtly sexual, or bossy. But then I must leave open a door of interpretation leading down a hallway of lust. If there were, in fact, something there, I’d be damned if I were going to snuff it out by giving the impression lust was off the table. My obsession with the possibility of her was perhaps the reason that I had not dated – had not mentioned dating, hadn’t even tried to Sauce – anyone else since I’d come to really know her at Blackbird.
Eventually I grunted at myself, enraged by my fruitless, counterproductive anxiety, and typed the simplest of confirmations into my phone. I didn’t bother with fancy verbs or really anything that could be read as more than bare curiosity, which meant, of course, that I had failed at romanticism in the interest of avoiding conflict.
To my delight, she confirmed within a few minutes. I beamed again, anxiety rapidly dissolving, elated at the sheer dumb luck I’d had meeting a strikingly beautiful genius with a penchant for San Francisco’s most pretentious cultural exploits. I offered to pick her up.
Two nights later, as I watched her sleek frame swathed in simple black silk cascade down an entry staircase, I permitted myself a moment of fantasy wherein I was instead waiting outside the car to receive a warm kiss upon the landing, where I slid my hand around the small of her back and propped my fingertips upon the curve of her ass, curling nimbly into its firm mass.
In reality, I sat in the car. She stepped in with a warm but distinctly platonic greeting. I asked innocuously how her work was progressing, to which she replied with equal blandness that all was going according to schedule, but no breakthrough points in development had been reached.
When a silence pierced us, I started: “I’m thrilled to have someone excited about this to join me. I think Jackson, Wes, and Ben all enjoy it every now and then, but none of them would go so far as to buy tickets themselves.”
“It’s my pleasure.”
“You do realize that we’ll be one of three sets of attendees there under seventy, don’t you?”
“I know! I don’t understand it,” she retorted, chipper. “I swear I don’t see that many people walking with canes in this city in two months, and suddenly at the symphony it seems they’ve all gathered for some kind of elderparty that one can’t attend without an AARP card… there may be bingo after the concert that we’re unaware of…”
“Put on your orthopedic shoes, Edna, it’s time to get down with some Bach!” I joked.
“You were destined for this from birth, I suppose,” she said, laughter and chiding in her voice, the conversation sweeping us up so wholly that our replies seemed to spring forth from one another, no silent pauses left to interrupt. “You were named for it.” I caught my breath in my throat. I calculated that there was no way to escape this particular embarrassment. I could hardly hope to secure a partnership with her, which of course implied that she must go so far as to abandon her chosen orientation, without some commensurate measure of dissonance in myself. I reminded myself of Jackson’s consistent advice to open myself up.
“Actually, I wasn’t.”
“What?”
“I wasn’t born with this name.”
“What?” I couldn’t see her face – I was staring forward through the windshield so I wouldn’t have to, but I could feel her eyes burning on my cheek, and I swallowed to ready myself for whatever judgment was to come.
“When I was born my name was Sarah. I know this is going to sound ridiculous,” I inhaled, “but the name I have now is an unfortunate consequence of my own stubbornness mixed in with misguided ego. I…”
“Your real name is Sarah?” Incredulity, perhaps a little disdain.
“No, my legal name is Bacchus. Since I was seventeen.”
“You changed your name to Bacchus?”
“No, my mother did.”
“Why would she do that to you? I mean,” and now embarrassment saturated her voice, “not that it’s an awful name, it’s interesting but… I just don’t get it…”
“I wouldn’t expect you would. I barely get it myself. The best explanation I have is to say that the most powerful force in the universe is inertia.” I paused for a moment, inhaling in preparation.
> “From when I was about 15, I started bitching at my mother that my name was boring and I hated sharing a name with three other girls at school all the time. After two years she was pretty sick of hearing about it, I suppose. She’d been given a fairly uncommon name and had always hated having it mispronounced and all that. She thought she was doing me a favor by giving me one of the three most common names in the year I was born. Lo and behold, I was an ungrateful little shit and I gave her hell for it, just sort of always nagging about it. It became like a comfort thing for me – some kind of release valve – because it was something I could bitch about but never change – or so I thought – and I got into what, in hindsight, looks like a neurotic pattern of whining about it whenever I felt annoyed with anything in my life.
“One day when I was seventeen she finally snapped and said, ‘Fine, Sarah, if you want a new name, we’ll get you whatever name you want. Just pick a fucking name.’ Being hormonal and indignant all at once, I didn’t take the obvious path to happiness wherein I would choose some reasonable name that I enjoyed and suggest that. I hadn’t really studied the ancient world at that point, but I was obsessed with mythology, well just really foundational stories in general, but that’s another conversation. I was also considerably more of a tomboy then. So I told her in terms I now can’t recall accurately that I didn’t care, as long as it was different from everyone else’s name. Then I sort of continued, just ranting, that she should name me after a Roman god, and hell, make it a male one, because I may as well be from an entirely different world than the Hades (I remember specifically referring to Hades) I was in, and I was no goddess, so yeah, fine, name me after some dude in the Roman pantheon. I was just whining again, still expecting that nothing would really change, ever, that I would be trapped in a tarpit of Southern boredom for the rest of my life, and I didn’t consider that that wasn’t a consequence of being named ‘Sarah.’ But, the next Monday, she came home and handed me a piece of paper that said my name was ‘Bacchus Paine’ now.
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