“And you liked it?” I asked. This was the question I always asked, as if I could glean more information from the retelling than I already had.
“You know, thinking back on it now, I don’t know how much I did. I felt really excited that I was doing it, but I felt really scared afterwards that I would get sick or something.”
“What do you mean, ‘thinking back on it now’?” I asked.
He rolled to face me and pulled my body against his. “I think it was a phase or something. The longer I’m with you, the less I think I’m actually gay. Do you ever just like the idea of something? I think I really like the idea of gay men, but I don’t think I’d want to be in a relationship with a guy. I’d miss how soft girls are.” He jostled my breasts in his hands like they were some other thing. “I’d miss these ladies,” he said, and then put one in his mouth.
When Ron left me, not too long after that night, I cried. It was like some lever got pulled, and I wondered if the lesbian and her dog hadn’t rewired something in him, too. He realized that he didn’t want to marry me, and he couldn’t get the thought out of his head. He’d once told me that he didn’t believe in marriage. “I’m not going to get married until it’s legal for all people to get married,” he’d said. I was suddenly a waste of time, like I was this dead-end retail job he’d been working for seven years.
Right before he got into the moving truck, his body jolted with sobs, and I held him and told him he was going to be okay and “Go get ’em,” though I didn’t know who “’em” were. I was grateful he was crying and I wasn’t.
That night, I walked along the water and saw Sam-the-Lesbian sitting next to a woman who was thinner and prettier than me but in a way that was hard to trust, that suggested she had been a slut in high school, a magnet for all bad things. Sam didn’t notice me as I walked by, even though I slowed down, hoping they’d see me as one of them. The dog, Jasper, sniffed and lifted his head. He stood and I saw his testicles were gone. I covered my mouth and my body convulsed in preparation for a sob, and then it passed.
—
I started spending my evenings at the Sphinx, the one gay bar in town, and paced the floors drinking cup after cup of water. What I gathered was that if I kept moving the whole time, no one would see me—the opposite strategy of avoiding a T. Rex. One floor of the club was decorated like a jungle, another like a desert, and I would run my hands through the ferns and along murals of sand dunes. On the top floor was a sauna that reeked of genital varieties, and at least once a night I’d pass through, feeling my T-shirt stick to my back and watching the sweating doors.
Then one night, after making my first round, I went to the cooler to refill my water and the cup slipped from my hand and fell to the floor in an explosion of liquid. I bent to pick it up, and paused for a second to look at the coloured glass that was embedded in the floor, when I saw the beginning of ankles and then shins and then knees. I looked up and up, at this very thin person with a crisp ironed dress shirt and a shaved head.
“I’m Rachel,” she said. I just looked at her and squeezed the plastic cup and imagined the cracking sound I would have heard if the music wasn’t so loud.
“Are you lost?” she asked.
“What?”
“Are you lost?”
One of my contact lenses went dry and stabbed my eye. I blinked rapidly a few times, watching her all the while.
“I’ve been telling my friends I think that girl took a wrong turn and can’t figure out how to get out of this place.”
“I’m not sure if I want you in this story,” I said. “Because once you’re here, they’re going to expect me to go home with you.”
“Isn’t that how that goes? Do you want to disappoint them?”
“But they’ll stop reading.” I accepted the hand she offered and stood, and felt a little disappointed that I was a few inches taller than her.
“All the queers are reading, worried that you’re going to end the story getting back with a man. My friends told me not to come over and talk to you because you’re probably bi, but I have nothing against that.”
Rachel’s features were so delicate, like she was made out of unfired clay. I reached out and touched the tip of her nose with my finger, surprised that it was warm and didn’t crumble off and fall to the floor.
“Well?” she asked. “I can hear my friends—chirp-chirp-chirp—in my ear.”
“I didn’t realize they’d keep reading if I ended up with a guy again.”
“A return to the world of men. But even that’s risky. You don’t seem straight enough to pull it off.”
“I don’t know what you should tell your friends,” I said. I felt like one of those sexy tall women next to her, and I rested my elbow on her shoulder and looked down at her face. Her eyes were so light I couldn’t tell what colour they were. She put her arm around my waist.
“I don’t think you want my friends in this story, so let’s not go over there. I don’t think you want a dance scene, do you? Unless you want to write that I moved my body ‘wildly like a rag doll’ or that you ‘felt the litheness of your own.’”
“I don’t really like to dance,” I said.
“You like to walk, though.” She smiled a very pleased smile, then asked, “Would you take a walk with me outside? I know this place is endlessly fascinating, but I think we might see more variety if we head towards the water.”
It wasn’t a cold night, but I shivered from the drop in temperature and felt more exposed with the sudden absence of sound and pounding bass. Rachel looked even tinier outside. She started to put her arm around my waist again, but I stepped away. A group of boys in baseball hats were making their way dizzily to a car.
“We may be in a Southern town, but this is the Common Era,” she said, and offered me her arm.
“I’m shy with public stuff,” I said.
She rolled her eyes and started walking, and I could hear what she was saying in her brain: My friends were right. So I hurried alongside her and grabbed her hand. We both stopped walking for a moment. The space between us was a packed mass of wires, and I felt them weaving in and out of us. I opened and closed my free hand over the plastic cup and let the cracking sound serenade whatever was happening.
“Homos!” a voice called from the group of boys, and Rachel and I both doubled over laughing, only her laughter was real. I took the moment to slip my hand out of hers.
“It’s true,” she called out to them. “You found two!”
We kept walking towards the water, only now the wires, not our bodies, were holding us together. I looked at the cup in my hand and imagined I could turn myself into water and pour into it, away from Rachel, out of everyone’s sight.
“You okay?” she asked. “Was that your first one?”
I was afraid I might cry if I said yes. My throat felt like cheap thread was twined around it. “That really happened,” I said. I paused to toss the cup in the trash.
A couple walked by, wrapped around each other. The girl was practically leaning all of her weight on the guy, and it appeared that at some point in the night she had misplaced her shoes. They looked us over, and then looked politely away.
“They’re thinking of us having sex,” I said.
“Who?”
“They’re trying to picture it. I saw her look at my jaw, and I could tell she was thinking something like: That’s been in a cunt.”
“The readers, or those people?”
“Now the readers are,” I said.
“They aren’t. They can’t picture you.”
We stepped onto the boardwalk and climbed down onto one of the docks. A famous TV show used to film here, and I pictured the episode where the girl next door sat next to her childhood best friend, whom she now loved. I pulled my knees to my chest like she did.
“You stop thinking things like that after a while,” Rachel said. “Once you feel normal to yourself again, you forget that other people don’t see it that way. Sort of forget. It doesn’t
become about sex anymore, I guess is what I’m trying to say.”
“What does it become about?”
Rachel gave a half shrug that was vaguely feminine and vaguely masculine. In a different outfit it would have seemed like a Marilyn Monroe move, but I was not in the mood to try it out.
“Stupidity, I think. Like annoyance over the presence of stupidity. You get to see more, which is a different kind of pain. But good, I think.”
I watched a rowboat cut through the darkness. Someone held a flashlight and shone it on us, then quickly pulled it away. There were other docks for them to pull in at.
“The queers want you to be wary of me,” I said.
“I know. I’m supposed to be afraid of getting involved with you because you’re going to freak out at some point and break up with me. But right now, I’m finding your lack of history and baggage refreshing. I’m so glad that you don’t have a coming out story yet, that you don’t have some kind of weird ongoing situation with your family.”
“You have those things?” I asked.
“Let’s pretend we’re like that couple we passed on the road.
Let’s not learn much about each other until after we’ve spent a month fucking, and let’s not admit we’re in love until about three months in, and let’s not even consider moving in together.”
Rachel leaned over and took off her boots and then her socks. She stood and stripped down to her underwear and T-shirt. Small breasts. No testicles. She dove into the water and I held tight to the dock that swayed in her wake.
I eased my body into the water and paddled out after her. She swam in long sure strokes, sometimes disappearing under water, and then re-emerging many feet away like a smooth-skinned sea creature. I panted in my doggy paddle, and she took pity on me and floated on her back, waiting. A larger boat was docked a bit away, but I could hear their music and the rumble of men’s voices. I considered veering off and swimming towards that boat, but I couldn’t imagine letting their voices get louder and gain definition.
I doubted I would return to the world of men, but I knew I would end this story before the sex scene. My arms were exhausted. I coughed, and paused. Rachel took one large stroke to meet me.
Professor M
The dog wasn’t mine anymore. It belonged to her, and so did the house, and the sixties-style turquoise bookshelf that we purchased together, the pots and pans, the soap dish in the bathroom. They were her idea.
“Intellectual property,” she shouted at me during a fight in which we were both sobbing.
“That’s for articles and screenplays, not Boris.” I pressed my face into the dog’s neck and gave a deep moan that came from somewhere untouched, like the socket of my hip. It startled all of us. Boris turned and licked at my face. “I can’t be without this dog.”
“Well, I don’t know what to do.” Julia bit her lip. She watched me from across the room and tore at this one sad piece of her hair that took the brunt of all her stress. Back when we weren’t in the process of breaking up I would have pulled her hand away. Sometimes I would kiss it. But now it made an awful snapping sound, and I could picture the day when, without my intervention, that patch of hair would wilt and crumple to the floor, leaving a quarter-sized bald spot. I tugged between the satisfaction of that image and the dwindling part of me that wanted only sweet, good things for her.
“We would have to see each other pretty regularly, and I just don’t think I could handle that after what you’ve done,” she said.
These words worked like a spell. I kissed Boris’s neck and smelled pine and shit and some chemical from the dog’s shampoo. I rubbed between her eyes, and then stood with my duffle bag.
“I’ll come by next weekend to pick up my books.”
When Boris was a puppy, she sat in my lap and I held her, totally enamoured by her softness, her buttery bones and joints, how she seemed ready to spill out into my hands.
“This is why people have babies,” I’d said to Julia. “When they’re soft like this, I bet you can really feel their souls.”
Of course, I can’t imagine what it would feel like to hold a human soul in my hands, but holding Boris, her soul available and pliable like paraffin, was one of the greatest things I’d ever done. I felt like I was connected to her soul in this very pure way, so even after she became muscled and fully formed, with the proud broad chest of a bulldog, I could stare into her eyes and still feel the—how else can I say it?—availability of her spirit.
—
There is a trauma to making a mistake and not being forgiven. To being held so accountable that your life is stripped from you. That act itself is unforgivable. Though I know I should feel guilty, and I do, though I know I caused Julia pain, nothing I did warrants her reaction.
I’m embarrassed that I could live out such a predictable storyline. As a professor of queer theory, or as my university prefers, women and gender studies, I feel it is important to demonstrate to my students other modes of possibility and living. My young queer students always fall in love with me. They love my well-fitting slacks, my bow ties. They swoon when I ask them to just call me Professor, in lieu of gender pronouns. I’ve watched them follow the line of my waist to my jaw as I speak. While they work in small groups I can feel their eyes on me as I sit, stoic, fucking their essays. I’m a scholar who prefers to be a teacher, and it doesn’t matter that most of my students are bad lays. I get a queer, aching joy from their misfired connections, their wimpy arguments, my red pen circling a clause like a tongue.
“I want you to stun me,” I told this group at the beginning of the semester. “Give me a reason to hold my pen up but not actually put it down.”
I watched them all scribble this into their notebooks, except for one student, Taylor, who watched me as acutely as I liked to watch them. In my first few years of teaching, this would have really thrown me off. I would have looked down, messed with my papers, glanced at the clock, coughed. Now, I’m a professional. They only need to share their names once at the beginning of the first class and I already have them memorized.
“Is there a problem, Taylor? Something you want to question?”
“I’m good. Just watching.”
“It might serve you to write some of this information down.”
“Don’t need to. It’s in the syllabus.”
The other students popped their heads up at me. This was the opportunity to get my class size down. Taylor had served me for a spike.
“If you are someone who does very well in all your other classes, I guarantee you’ll do poorly in this class.”
Taylor revealed the briefest twitch, and it satisfied me deeply, like scratching an itch in my lungs. It never took very much. Twenty-year-olds are still children.
I continued my rant. “I can spot a complacent intellect as quickly as I can determine a weak argument—by the end of the first sentence. So make your intentions clear. Life is too short, and this tuition too expensive, to waste anyone’s time.”
Taylor was still too prideful then to start writing, but she did pick up her pen. Everyone stared, rapt, including me. What other way can I say this? The picking up of her pen stirred me.
Taylor, with her long, swept bangs and hair cut short at the back, her rainbow earring and oversized boy’s jeans, didn’t continue to challenge me. In fact, she worked so hard that I would read her papers and feel on the brink of orgasm. The thesis was well thought through; the arguments, though sometimes faulty, were cited with precision and taken as far as they could go. To read her essays was to have someone kneeling before me, undoing my zipper.
Then came the paper on the photographer Catherine Opie and I couldn’t take it anymore. I had to email her.
Taylor,
Your paper “Queer Eye of Opie” is an above satisfactory achievement. We’ll discuss more in conference, but I wanted to commend you on taking such an overused topic and turning it into something much deeper. There may be a possibility of publishing this. Let’s talk.
&n
bsp; —Professor M
The idea of publishing her paper came out in a flurry of passion, and even though it felt good to type it, afterwards I felt a kind of remorse. In the time it took me to stand, assemble my papers, and get my bag, my inbox chimed. Her response was there, like she had been expecting my email with her reply already written, waiting in her Drafts. I pictured her sitting at the computer, ready to send it, finger poised on the mouse, and I started to sweat. I read it, smiling like a goofball.
Dear Prof M, (Prof! So sweet I could hardly stand it.)
I am literally sitting here giddy. I’m looking forward to our conference. I just read Van der Meer’s “Tribades on Trial” for Professor Leon’s history of sexuality class, and I found our discussion of it pretty boring and am hoping I could start a discourse with you. Let me know if you need it. I can attach it as a pdf.
T.
Here was the moment when I was guilty, the moment when I knew what I was doing. When I knew that my response would make her shift and buckle over her hand.
Taylor,
No need to send. I think I have the text on my shelf.
—Professor M
—
That night, when Julia and I had sex, I tried not to think about this exchange, but I felt cold and disconnected, so finally, I pictured the T. at the end of her email, her offer to attach the article as a pdf. I came loudly, holding Julia’s head in my hands as I pictured the textbook, edited by John C. Fout, glowing on my shelf, like it had always been waiting for Taylor.
“You’re something else tonight,” Julia said.
Her hand was inside of me, well past the knuckles, and I twitched, I buckled, like Taylor did over my email. I suppose I could have told Julia then, because then she would have known that what I was doing with Taylor was helping both of us.
—
We sat across from each other awkwardly. She looked at all of the items on my desk: the books I was reading or blurbing, the tchotchkes that Julia had given me, a picture of the two of us on a hike somewhere. I was sweaty and tanned in that photo, wearing a tank top. Julia’s long curly hair was pulled over one shoulder. She was the only person in the world who could go on a ten-mile hike and look refreshed, like she’d just showered. Taylor’s eyes settled on this photo. I used my finger to direct the angle of the picture a little more towards me.
We Had No Rules Page 3