by Ariel Levy
I had planned to stay for two weeks at a monastery in southern Thailand that hosted a silent meditation retreat for novices. The night I arrived, it was too late to go to the huts with the other foreigners; the monk who met me at the gate brought me to what had once been a stable. Lying on my sleeping bag on the straw floor, I could see the moon in the dark, shining sky out the open window. I heard animals, small and busy, moving up in the rafters. I did not feel frightened or alone.
The next morning the monk came back and took me in his truck up the road to a place where strange young white people with dreadlocks went about their chores, stone-faced. In addition to being silent, we were not supposed to read or write while we there. I lasted three days.
That trip was like all my life, distilled: a compulsion to thrust myself toward adventure, offset by a longing to crawl into the pouch of some benevolent kangaroo who would take me bounding, protected, through life. Lucy said she had gone backpacking once in Kanchenjunga. “At the end of the trek, the Sherpas told me they had given me a nickname,” she said. “ ‘Boy Scout Lady.’ ”
—
A WILD FLOCK OF green parrots had migrated to Telegraph Hill at the turn of the millennium, and I could hear them, flutelike, in the sky when we drove back to the city in Lucy’s red convertible. She took me to the Zuni Café, where there was a long copper bar and the air smelled like wood smoke and rosemary, and a dazzlingly butch woman made us tequila gimlets. It was clear that I needed to move to San Francisco, immediately. Once we lived together, I figured, Lucy and I would go for drinks at that bar at least once a week—it would be one of our things.
When it started getting dark outside, she had to go. She kissed me goodbye on the corner of Gough Street and Market, and I drifted off down the hill feeling molten and golden and saved.
She came to New York often for work. I had just moved into a cacophonous apartment on Fourteenth Street—when ambulances went screeching past every fifteen minutes on their way to Beth Israel, it felt like they were plowing directly through the living room. I scheduled a housewarming party when I knew Lucy would be in town, but pretended it was an accident. The night before, she stayed up late with me making deviled eggs. Lucy told me about wandering her small town with her brothers as a child, plucking apples and plums from the neighbors’ trees: “The fruit tour,” she called it. With this person, I could be normal, content, blessed. Cleaned by her goodness.
A more-or-less-married forty-one-year-old who is secretly renting convertibles and flying to New York City to see her twenty-eight-year-old mistress might not sound like someone with a contagious case of virtuousness. But Lucy’s relationship was over. After a very short time, it seemed more like she was cheating on me when she went home to her girlfriend than the other way around. Not that the thought of them together made me jealous or angry: It made me sad. It pained me to think of Lucy feeling lonely, out of place, in her own house.
I didn’t want her girlfriend to suffer. But I didn’t feel particularly guilty, either. They seemed so far from love, I even thought (stupidly) that the girlfriend might be happy to have Lucy taken off her hands.
They had become strangers. Maybe they always had been. And we were magic.
6
We wrote our vows in California, the summer before I turned thirty. Lucy was getting her house ready for sale, renovating the only bathroom with the help of a friend, so we peed in the backyard and took showers with the garden hose. At dusk, we sat on the deck with Paolo, her irate gray cat, and drank vodka sodas with Meyer lemon juice—West Coast Sparklers, we named them. “I promise to take care of you even if you get sick or less attractive” was one vow. “I promise not to be too controlling in the garden” was another. And our favorite: “I promise to make life a party.”
And we did. On the weekends, we drove to Bolinas for oysters, or we went swimming at the nude beach in Marin. We went hiking and looked for eagles. We went for Mexican food in Oakland and Japanese food in Berkeley and back to the Zuni Café, where we always ordered the roast chicken for two. And everywhere we went, we drank: margaritas, gimlets, Prosecco, Manhattans. There was so much to celebrate.
We shared an explosive enthusiasm that we blasted out of our bodies with alcohol. It was almost a sport. We tore through sobriety together, drink by drink, until we occupied a separate reality from the rest of the world. Late at night we’d go reeling into the Lexington, a lesbian bar in the Mission, to watch the girls with mullets and pierced noses and tattoos playing pool and hooking up, being defiant in a way that neither of us ever would. (We liked being wild, but not nearly as much as we liked being acceptable.) We had brutal hangovers, but we had them together. They were, in their own excruciating way, almost as much fun as the inebriation that preceded them. We would wake up bleary, still drunk, unified in our desperation for water, Alka-Seltzer, and ginger ale, laughing at our pain, at the things we’d said the night before and the people we’d encountered. We would cling to each other on the couch, while Paolo went about his business, humping the fur off of his stuffed bunny.
I had the worst hangover of my life on a road trip we took along the Oregon coast that summer, when we stayed at the motel in Cannon Beach where Lucy had gone on family vacations growing up. We went to her favorite restaurant, which looked like a log cabin, and ate lasagna and meatloaf and drank a bottle of Oregon pinot noir. For dessert we bought a flask of bourbon to drink on the balcony of our motel room. Sitting on plastic lawn chairs with the green polyester bedspread over our laps, we tried to figure out which of the dark figures in the sea were pelicans and which were just rocks. At first we had giddy but clear vision, but then we passed the bottle back and forth until the stars and the sand and the water blurred together.
In the morning the tide had come in and the waves crawled right up to the sliding glass doors of our room. I felt like I had been beaten up in my sleep and left with a head full of shrapnel. My mouth watered until I retched in the toilet, and then I lay on the bathroom floor sweating and hating myself until I was able to throw up again. I wondered why I had done this again, poisoned myself, what crime I was punishing. This continued for hours, and then Lucy went into town and came back with Tylenol and a vanilla milkshake. “Drink this,” she said. “No more white devil’s firewater for you.” I sucked it through a straw and the sea air blew in through the sliding glass door, cleaning me, while she held me on the bed. I felt better, and then I felt blessed.
—
IT WAS 2004. THAT WINTER, President George W. Bush had announced his support for a constitutional amendment banning same-sex marriage in his State of the Union address. In defiance, the newly elected mayor of San Francisco, Gavin Newsom, had directed his clerks to start issuing marriage licenses to gay couples. In May, Massachusetts became the first state in America to legalize same-sex civil marriages. There were photographs in the newspaper of couples kissing on the front steps of City Hall in Boston, in San Francisco. At that particular time, it seemed like there was something more than just romantic about getting married. It seemed almost righteous.
But I was reluctant to appear greedy for arriviste credibility. I was newly (and not entirely) gay; Lucy was only my second real girlfriend. I had tried to slide casually in a dyke-ward direction without attracting too much attention from my skeptical friends. (In college, when I was having my first fling with another girl, Emma and I went shopping one afternoon with Matt, my closest friend from Larchmont, at a vintage clothing store. I tried on a pair of men’s pants that I thought would impress my new lesbian posse, and when I looked in the mirror, I saw Matt and Emma behind me rolling their eyes.) My parents were a non-issue. “Are you impressed by how cool with this I’ve been?” my father had asked me when I brought my first girlfriend to his house for a weekend. I thought about it for a minute and answered, earnestly, “Not really.”
Getting married to a woman seemed like an act of solidarity with a movement that I was not really entitled to be part of. “Oh give me a break!” said Lucy (a r
eal lesbian with impeccable credentials and decades of experience in the field). “The whole point is that everybody gets to marry the person they love.”
—
“I PROMISE TO TREAT your family as my family” was another vow we came up with. But it was tricky. My family was so boundary-averse, so unabashedly forward, and Lucy was so reserved. She closed in like a sea anemone when they poked at her with questions.
I didn’t know how to act around her mother. She was eighty-two when we met, a Minnesotan who never said anything harsher than “Oh, honestly.” It was best to talk about the garden, I learned, her towering rhododendrons and perfectly pruned roses. Or fashion: We would look at women’s magazines together in the evenings while Lucy and her father watched sports on television. If it was winter, we’d flip through the thick Nordstrom holiday catalog, and her mother would say, “That’s a darling heel,” or, “That looks like a toasty coat.” We avoided all discussion of politics, sexuality, ethnicity, and religion (except once, when I let loose an “Oy vey,” and Lucy’s mother said, “What?” And I said, “That’s what my people say when we mean ‘Oh, honestly’ ”).
They still lived in the house where Lucy grew up. There was still wallpaper printed with cars and trucks in the “boys’ room.” One of the boys was an Evangelical minister in his fifties; another had become an anesthesiologist; the youngest worked in marketing for the creationist movement. When Lucy came out in college, her parents did not speak to her for months. She had finally done a single thing wrong.
—
“WHAT ABOUT FIDELITY?” Lucy said that evening on the back deck, with the vows and the West Coast Sparklers, while the cool California dusk settled on the yard.
I said, “I don’t think I can promise that for an entire lifetime.” I said, “Is that really even important?”
I sort of hoped that once you’d made a declaration of commitment to someone you truly loved you would stop feeling sodden with lust for relative strangers. But also, I sort of thought, Who cares? Who cares if sometimes you bring out your seduction skill set—briefly!—for a person other than your spouse and you have a little adventure with your body? Why did that have to be at your spouse’s expense? Couldn’t you promise your deepest love, your first allegiance, to your favorite person without locking yourself in a chastity belt and presenting her with the key?
Gay marriage wasn’t even legal—we were making it up! Couldn’t we invent something truer, deeper, finer than an institution devised to consolidate property and bloodlines? We have our freedom, we can make our own rules. Why not?
For years, I would resent that Lucy had chosen not to hear me when I told her—from the very beginning!—that I did not really value monogamy. Eventually, it would occur to me that I had chosen not to hear that it was important to her.
—
NEITHER OF OUR MOTHERS was particularly thrilled when we said we’d decided to have a wedding. Lucy’s mother shuddered when we told her—it may have been the most heartfelt “Oh, honestly” of her life. And I could sort of see her point. She was mortified by the notion of a lesbian wedding, worried we were making a mockery of a traditional institution and therefore rejecting her values. When I asked her to help me pick the flowers for the occasion, she said tightly, “I’m sure you’ll figure something out.”
My own mother’s contention that weddings were mainstream, commercial hoo-ha—and that marriage was no great shakes, either—seemed equally persuasive. She was as mortified as Lucy’s mother by what we were suggesting, worried we were embracing a traditional institution and therefore rejecting her values. “How can you justify spending so much money on a single day?” she wanted to know. “What do you care about society’s approval?” Wasn’t it enough just to love each other?
It was not. I wanted more than love; I wanted marriage. Or at least that’s what I thought.
—
OUR WEDDING, AT MY father and stepmother’s house in Virginia, on the wet grass, with the sunflowers strung to the fence posts, and the last-minute decision by Lucy’s parents to get up out of their seats with the help of their walkers and canes to accompany their only daughter down the aisle, was one of the great days of my life—one of the perfect, shining days. There were pink margaritas and paper lanterns floating in all the trees. There was Jesse, my oldest friend, who grew up around the corner from my house in Larchmont, playing “Crimson and Clover” on his guitar to start the ceremony. There was Emma, in a pink dress, standing behind me with Matt, but this time they weren’t rolling their eyes. All of Lucy’s brothers came, even the creationist. My mother wore high heels and makeup for the first time I can remember. Lucy’s mother presented her with the navy handkerchief that her own mother had given to her on her wedding day in 1948.
“Something blue,” she said.
—
I HAD WORRIED ABOUT many things in relation to marriage during the preposterously intense and consuming period of shoe shopping and ruthless guest-list pruning and tent stress leading up to that day in Virginia when we walked down the mountain in front of all of our friends and family, and decided that we were married. (Gay married, that is, fake married, because you could only really do it legally at the time in Canada, San Francisco, or Massachusetts, and what was the use of being legally married exclusively when you were in Canada, San Francisco, or Massachusetts?) I worried, for example, about being “heteronormative”—which is something I would say as a joke because it’s a made-up word from the land of academic absurdity—but I didn’t really care about marriage being too straight, at least not in the sense of too heterosexual. I cared about marriage being too normal, too American, too confining for my fantasy of a life.
It had not occurred to me, however, to worry about something that started happening almost immediately after our wedding: “How’s your wife?” Your wife. People did not ask me that with a sneer. They used that word to be respectful, politically correct, and, to the best of their abilities, accurate. But it was all wrong. I am the wife, I wanted to tell them. I am the girl.
Years later, I wrote a profile of Edith Windsor, the eighty-four-year-old plaintiff in the Supreme Court case that would strike down the Defense of Marriage Act and effectively legalize same-sex marriage in America. Edie wore pearls and satin shirts and a bob she kept platinum-blond with Clairol No. 103. One night, when I was staying over at her house on Long Island and she was puttering around in a pair of leopard-print underpants, she told me of her late partner, “Every time someone calls her my wife, I am furious!” They had been together for more than forty years. “You can say she’s my spouse or you can say she’s my butch. But you cannot say she’s my wife—it’s a fucking insult!”
That was how I felt. It was not incidental to me—to either of us—that Lucy was butch. Lucy did the driving. She brought our suitcases in from the car. She raked the leaves in the fall; she got up on the roof and cleaned the gutters. She decided how we invested our retirement accounts and ultimately it was our understanding that she would be the one who made the money, who had the real responsibility for our security. I never once took out the trash unless Lucy was out of town or sick in bed.
I was our social secretary. I made our dinner plans and scheduled our dentist appointments. If there was a problem between us, it was my job to bring it up and to shepherd us to some kind of resolution. I put our pictures in photo albums and decorated our home and made my mother’s chicken cutlets for dinner. “Have you ever seen Lucy in a dress?” Emma asked me once. Don’t be ridiculous! Lucy in a dress would look like she was in drag.
I am the wife. Lucy is my husband.
There was never any question that if we had a child, I would bear it, and not because I was younger.
7
One afternoon, Lucy and I sat on the living room floor in the house we’d bought on Shelter Island, and made a Plan. We unrolled a piece of butcher paper on the coffee table and wrote a time line of things that we wanted to have happen: SunUp, the solar panel design and installati
on company that Lucy had just started, would open an office in Los Angeles in 2009. I would become a foreign correspondent in 2010. We ate popcorn out of an orange enamel pot and we drew illustrations—a palm tree next to Lucy’s company, a passport and a pen next to my expanded career. In the space between 2011 and 2012 I tried to draw a picture of a baby, but he came out looking like a smiling tooth. Lucy was able to fix him up, and she added a talk bubble emerging from his mouth in which she wrote, “Do I even exist?”
It was summer and we lived with all the windows and doors open; Paolo would come in and out and glare at us. With the money from the sale of Lucy’s place in Oakland, we’d bought the cottage from a Vietnam vet who loved daylilies; he told us how he’d tried to grow them in the front yard. He had sprayed the flowers with the dried coyote blood you can buy from garden centers to scare off deer, but the smell took him back to the battlefield, corpses rotting in the grass. By the time we moved in, there were no flowers.
We put in a ton of them. My mother had taught me about plants, about digging up the dirt and feeling the damp, grainy earth under your fingernails. When I was young she had showed me to make a hole big enough to hold the root ball of a new plant with lots of good, loose soil all around it, so the plant could stretch out without having to fight the compacted ground. My father loved to garden, too, especially in the damp places where moss spread and ferns multiplied. My parents had been happy in the backyard, adding more daffodils every fall, planting more small, hopeful trees. Whatever disappointments and cruelties they exchanged, they were unified in their love for growing things.
Lucy built raised beds out of cedar planks behind our house, where we put tomatoes, tufts of catmint for Paolo, and tulips that the deer ate before they bloomed. I dug giant holes behind the back deck for hulking wisteria, and over the years, the vines swallowed up the tacky railing just as I’d hoped they would: By late May, if you looked out the kitchen window, all you saw was a tangle of electric-green foliage floating above the deck. We never hung curtains on the windows in front of the house; we planted a wall of oak-leaf hydrangeas that screened the front bedroom with brown stalks and white blossoms. You could walk around that room naked in the summer under the ceiling fan and feel the whirring, wet air on your skin and nobody would see you but the sparrows.