We Had No Rules

by Corinne Manning

  So Meredeth and I went online. We stared at the photo of the group leader. He exuded a physical masculinity that was much more rugged than my academic sweaters and oversized glasses.

  “Yes, do it,” Meredeth said, leaning over my shoulder. “I did a similar trip once. This is a beautiful time of year.”

  She found her old pack in the garage. We checked the tent for holes, the sleeping bag for animal nests.

  “You just need some independence,” she said.

  So I bought a flight to Los Angeles without a companion ticket. I even took a cab to the airport.

  —

  On the second-to-last day of the trip we hiked fifteen miles, and our bodies were feeling tired and wild and we made it to this lake and it was warm and it didn’t look nasty and we stripped off our clothes and jumped in. The sweat had dried to me—my pubic hair was crusty and matted—so it felt amazing to leap around in that water with everyone, and to see all of these variant bodies in all of their different expressions. It didn’t feel shocking when we were sunning ourselves on the rocks and two people started hooking up, and then another two. And it didn’t feel like the pairing off that happens at spin the bottle parties. This was like rubbing on suntan lotion. This was like we were all included. So when this person pressed his mouth to my thigh, and then to my clit, I just stretched back and felt the rush of how beautiful this all was, how this is what things should be like, all of us here, together, enjoying each other with ease. I felt alive in the same way I had the first time I had sober sex.

  “What a goddamn gift,” I said out loud, and everyone around me murmured or chuckled.

  Guilt didn’t set in after I came. Or at the airport. It didn’t set in when Meredeth picked me up and I held her close to me in the car. The world, I thought, is so beautiful and capable and full of illusion. So the first thing I told her about, once I was home, before I even showered, was what had happened on the beach. And still, no guilt, even when she looked at me like I was insane, her delicate mouth gaping open. Though I did stutter when she leaned against the wall for support, I was still talking when she came at me, punched me in the shoulder, and then cried out, “Is this true? You’re talking like you’re in a fucking cult.”

  That was when I started to feel whatever stability or bliss I had slip away, just as night terrors do when one wakes suddenly and the conviction that the monster is in the kitchen dissolves. I was left with this fractured certainty. I rubbed my shoulder.

  “I didn’t think that—”

  “Who are you?” she asked.

  She fell to the ground and started to sob, and I felt everything I’d ever wanted zip out past me—one, two, three—towards the window, but I couldn’t grab any of it because this person I loved was now so far away from me.

  “You don’t even feel bad!” she cried.

  She barely made it to the bathroom, where I held her hair while she vomited and the last of the euphoria, and the last of my safety, escaped out the window.

  —

  The rules of heterosexuality draped over us like a shroud, and in the dark, everything happened quickly: splitting our bank account, giving notice to our landlord. She changed her relationship status on Facebook to single and we started getting wall posts and phone calls. We were still living in the same house when she unfriended me.

  “At night, I can’t sleep and I obsessively search through your friends to see if any of those people have been added, and I just can’t put myself in that position anymore.”

  “I haven’t added any friends. I’m not ready for this to be over,” I pleaded.

  “I can’t believe you’re doing this,” she said.

  “I’m not doing anything. I want to be with you.”

  I knelt down in front of her and there was this moment when it felt like everything would soften, everything would be okay. She ran her fingers over my head. I always kept the back clipped close to the neck but let the top grow full, and sometimes she would laugh and gel it into Italian gangster hairdos. The first time she did this was for a costume party, and I thought we were going to end up doing something very butch-femme: she Bonnie, me Clyde. Instead, she showed up in a gigantic Chewbacca costume, which took the power away from mine (suddenly, I was just a 1930s-era butch with a gun). I was certain there would never be anyone else for me.

  I watched her as she stroked my hair and I saw the Chewbacca within her. I wanted so badly to just be Clyde and Chewbacca, because I knew they would not have this problem. Clyde and Chewbacca, if they were together in this apartment, would have let it all go.

  “Let’s try something,” I said.

  “I don’t want to try anything.”

  I grabbed her hand and pulled her towards the bedroom. I was so excited, so desperate. There was no doubt in my mind that this would work.

  She snapped her hand away. “I will not have sex with you.”

  “That’s not what I’m trying to do.”

  I pulled out a box of costumes and the Chewbacca one was near the bottom, squished to the side, looking a little bald in places, as if the costume had aged like we had. I unfolded the Clyde outfit, but I couldn’t find the gun.

  “Here,” I said, throwing the costume at her. “Put this on.”

  “No.”

  “Please, just do this so that we can at least say we tried.”

  While she struggled into the Chewbacca suit, I pulled on my pants and snapped the suspenders. I grabbed some pomade out of the bathroom cabinet and came back to the bedroom to do my hair in front of our mirror. I didn’t want to leave her alone. Already I could sense her slipping away; her physical body was the only thing that hadn’t gone.

  “You’ll need to zip me,” she said, holding a mass of fluff together at the back.

  There was something reptilian about the knots in her spine within the folds of all that fur, and I tried not to make it obvious how slowly I was going. I wanted to remember the disappearance of each vertebra.

  “It smells in here,” she said, her voice amplified by the plastic around the mouth.

  “Here, let’s stand in front of the mirror.”

  My hand was sticky with gel and I felt it catch on her paw. She pulled away and adjusted the Chewbacca head, which kept dipping down so that the eye holes fell at her cheeks.

  “Here we are,” I said.

  We stood staring at ourselves.

  “You don’t look like anything,” she said. “You just look like a dyke.” She clutched at the back of her costume. “Can you unzip me? I feel like I’m going to pass out.”

  “I want to say something first, while we’re like this.”

  “But I’m seriously going to pass out.”

  “We didn’t have any rules.”

  “Get me out of this,” she said.

  “We didn’t have any rules,” I repeated. “And what would have happened if we did?”

  She brought her hands to the mouth to pry the jaws open and the plastic snapped. I quickly reached behind her, but a quarter of the way down, the zipper got caught on the fur.

  “Hurry up!” she shouted.

  “I’m trying not to rip it.”

  “Rip it. I’m not going to wear this fucking thing again.”

  “Yes, you are.”

  She pushed me away and pulled her arms out of Chewbacca’s arms, back into herself, and then in some sort of gymnastic feat, she tore the costume at the zipper enough to get her head out. She looked new and sweaty, and I could tell that she’d been crying, but I didn’t think it was over me or our costumes. She shimmied out and kicked the fur in my direction.

  “Maybe I would have tried harder to get over it,” she said. “But maybe you wouldn’t have thought it was okay to fuck around.”

  “But we still don’t have any rules. We don’t have to break up. We can get through this, because there’s nothing telling us that this has to end us.”

  “Maybe I just don’t want to try,” she said. She began to put on her normal clothes. Her flesh disappeared,
like a quarter found, then lost again behind an ear. “If you could have just said that you felt bad, or guilty—maybe. But this is just, you know, too little.”

  I mussed my hair and it stuck straight up. I slid my suspenders down my arms. “If you had been there, you would understand why it didn’t feel wrong.”

  “So I’m not queer enough?” she asked, and I could feel it starting again. We would never stop doing this until one of us was gone.

  “I wish we could fix this with a baby or something.”

  Maybe one day, I could tell the kid about what I had done and show them there is another way to feel about things. And for a second I saw us, with a child that looked like someone else, a photo of a person whose face we’d forgotten. Our arms around each other, and the baby, with little Chewbacca slippers and suspenders, holding a water pistol shaped like a dolphin because we wouldn’t want the baby to play with anything that looked like a gun.

  the appropriate

  weight

  My daughter fell apart while reading a poem. I sat in the back of the church because I didn’t want anyone to see me walk in, but at the moment she began crying I felt the strangeness of it, that if she were a little girl, I would be running to her side and catching her as she left the altar. But there was no way I was going to run up the long aisle now, letting shame trail behind me (which I wore out of habit for those present). This was different from your kids growing up. There are things you lose the right to do when you are no longer the one married to the deceased.

  My ex-wife Miriam’s current husband replaced my daughter at the pulpit. He was barrel-chested, wore a diamond ring on his pinky that caught the afternoon light and flashed at us like a satellite at night. He looked more con man than journalist. I didn’t know that was something my ex-wife would like: Neil Diamond tapes ringing through his Ford Taurus, gin and tonics and playing cards, and her legs straight up in the air as they fucked. That is one of the rights I’ve lost—thinking about my ex-wife in that way. We mostly had sex missionary, but then, we were so young. I hadn’t had sex with anyone before, and neither had Miriam. No one told us much about what to do, so it felt lucky that we were able to figure it out and have orgasms. She orgasmed throughout our marriage, which, if I could give a eulogy, I would say. But that wouldn’t be for her benefit; it would be for mine. When her friends and family see me, they think about a life of not being loved, a life without any passion. They imagine me lying on top of her, my muscles tensed, unable to stay hard. It was never like that, but I realized in a bar bathroom late one night, in the final months of our marriage, that there was an opportunity for a very different kind of passion.

  Oh, you’re thinking, I get it now. Like her family members did. My inability to carve a turkey made sense to them, and my irritability with their boring stories, and my nice shoes, and her nice shoes, and our clean house, and our dachshund, Murray, who loved me best, and our one gay child, who I’m not certain thinks of me at all.

  Miriam’s husband bowed his head, restrained a sob, and though I hoped to leave before he was done speaking, the church was so quiet that even the shifting of seats would be a disturbance. There was no movement, just the sniffs of those around us, which sounded eerily like shutter clicks. Imagine our grief as photo ops. For a brief period, that’s what it is, until a few weeks go by and we are still grieving, but there’s no place for it anymore. The sob escaped and Miriam was supposed to run up and hold him, but that wasn’t going to happen, which sent another sob through him. He stepped away from the podium, looking lost and small, like a child bobbing in the ocean. And though we were all grateful when a young man (maybe his brother or son) stepped forward and caught him in a hug, I knew that he was feeling only weight—too heavy because it wasn’t Miriam’s weight—and that this man who hugged him was lacking some dip that existed only on her lower back—not the masculine centre of the back—where he would prefer to put his hand. Thus, it was no comfort at all.

  I stayed for the recessional. I recognized Miriam’s brother as the head pallbearer and saw him look at me, then look away. A few friends acknowledged me grimly. Miriam’s husband didn’t see me, but my daughter did, and hers was the only face that looked grateful. She might not love me the way Murray does, but she loves me in some deep and tragic way, which doesn’t necessarily mean she wants to talk to me.

  —

  “Sal’s a cunt man, and he wants it all over him,” Miriam said to me on the phone soon after she started dating the journalist/gangster, while we were finalizing some logistics around the divorce.

  I imagined him slick like a seal, their bodies slipping off of each other—joyous in all their fluids—and the bed a mess. I, too, was learning that the best sex was not tidy: the shit and cum and odour were part of what felt so good—to be an animal, to be loved as an animal, to the full extent of your body, thus reaching your soul. The filth meant fucking on an energetic level. It’s because Miriam said things like “Sal is a cunt man” that her family thinks I was an icy ruiner. But she hadn’t awoken me either.

  “I got a question for you, if I may,” she said.

  I heard her take a long drag from her cigarette while I deliberated. Technically, we weren’t supposed to be talking to each other—our lawyers had suggested that all correspondence go through them—but we had been together for nearly thirty years and we couldn’t help it, like her fingers sliding to the pack for a cigarette before the current one was finished.

  “Are you … I’m not sure of the term … Are you the man or the woman?”

  I groaned, and she started to laugh.

  “Don’t be so PC. Do you take it or do you give it?”

  I hadn’t agreed to be asked the question yet, so I bought time by clearing my throat and taking a long drink of water.

  “Don’t tell me you’re too shy to answer this.”

  “Don’t tell me,” I said, “that a few fucks from a meathead made you a bigot.”

  “Make me less of one,” she said. “C’mon, you know I mean well. I don’t know the terms.”

  “The term’s ‘bottom,’” I said, “but it’s not always about penetration.”

  I wanted to say more about what it meant to be opened like that, the vulnerability and the weight and the pain—at the beginning and sometimes still—and the sheer disbelief that I was a space for claiming and fitting. She would have understood, but I was never that blunt with her. It was always this way—her expressiveness with me, and my restraint. Why change it now?

  I will recognize the sound of her inhale from a new cigarette when her spirit hovers over me on the day I die (unless the right of a final visitation has also been stripped from ex-husbands; I’m not certain of the rules).

  She laughed and I heard the smoke hiss out of her lungs. “I know what you mean. It’s that way with us, too.”

  —

  I waited in my car in front of the restaurant where the backroom was reserved for the reception. It didn’t seem right that I should be the first one there, but neither did I want to enter a crowded room. I wanted to hug my daughter, shake hands with a few old friends, and then escape out the back, my mouth tasting of salami and olives. Boredom finally sent me out of my car and into the backroom, where the wait staff were just putting out the first finger foods. They are invisible in much the same way I was invisible in the church. It’s the term “wait staff” that does it, kind of like “ex” in my case. They bustled around and pretended not to see me. I hovered behind them and made myself a plate of provolone and salami and artichoke hearts. I placed my little plate on a table when a few people started to filter in, including two old friends, a couple we used to have over for dinner. The husband, who was the Latin teacher at the school where Miriam taught language arts, had aged in the ten years since I’d seen him. His fit body (yes, I noticed back then) had given way to something pouchy and loose. His wife kissed both my cheeks and the husband took both my hands in his.

  “We were hoping we’d see you today, but we weren’t sur
e.” The sound of his voice was like that inhale of Miriam’s cigarette. Standing with these two old friends in this new setting, with these new lives—I wasn’t sure what to say.

  “Is your friend here?” the wife asked, and her husband gave her a look, which I didn’t know how to interpret: We don’t know whether they are still together or It’s not appropriate for him to bring him? I had thought the latter and told Dale it would be best if he stayed home.

  “Dale stayed back in New Hope,” I said, feeling like the place where I lived was a cliché of rainbow flags and late-in-life come-outs and bi-curious teenagers—which it was.

  His wife gave me a look of pity. “It would have been okay to bring him.”

  “I didn’t think it would be appropriate. Besides, he had to work.” The former a truth, the latter a lie.

  They nodded and the talk was forced for a time, until either the husband or I said something that made us all laugh and we were great friends, minus one, and in the wrong setting.

  Others arrived, including my daughter, who approached the three of us immediately. She looked like her mother had at her father’s funeral—her hair thin and pulled back tight, her face pale without makeup. The girls she dated always looked just like her—femme but in a softball-tour-bus kind of way.

  Once, while she was in college, not long after she came out, she asked, in the blunt manner of her mother: “Do you identify more with being gay or queer?”

  A younger boyfriend had explained his version of the difference to me, after I told him that my attraction had less to do with genitals and more to do with the way I was handled and what he called my expansive desire, and that I listened to Democracy Now! So I didn’t have to think about my answer to this question for very long.