He was going to show me his hometown, site of his sorry elfin boyhood. I’d met Andy’s folks before, of course, but this was first time I was going to be a guest in their home. I would get to spend a week with my quasi-in-laws as well as with Andy! They were going to buy me many expensive meals; and Andy and I had also arranged to watch The Who’s Tommy on DVD together, my friend’s favorite movie, about a boy who was as deaf, dumb, and blind as we two were with each other.
(Andy’s father, Midwestern and portly, disrupted my wedding cloud by sharing some gossipy remarks about Andy’s romantic life. “I really thought he was gonna marry Ned,” Mr. Lionheart whispered conspiratorially, “but I guess that’s not in the cards. We’ll have to find some other great boy for him!”)
Andy had also decided to use this visit to help me improve my skills with the ladies. Reader, I’ve told you already about my problems in this area. Now I must inform you that Andrew Lionheart had always been a much, much better flirt than I was, with men, women, or children, animals or vegetables. (Minerals were beneath his notice.) We were always having to pause in the middle of an intense, personal discussion over dinner so that he could flirt with the waiter. When we were walking together, Andy and I would always stop in midsentence so he could look back or forward to scan the area for appropriate male faces.
My friend proposed that I go out with him one night to a St. Louis gay bar. Now, gay bars in New York scared me silly—because in our city lesbians and gay men had almost entirely separate bars, so if I wanted to go out I would have to contend with a 100 percent concentration of lesbians on the prowl, which was so alluring and terrifying that my golem body nearly fell apart. It was hard for me to speak to anyone, especially women I found attractive. But out of the city, especially in smaller urbs like St. Louis, gay men and women tended to congregate in the same bars, which was much less frightening because the women were diluted by the men.
So I said yes to Andy’s bar run. I did not know that he was going to invite several cute St. Louis lesbians he had recently met so that, he thought, I could improve my abysmal stats with women, start a long-distance relationship or even take a few of them to bed! (Proving that I was, just a little bit, fun.) When Andy invited one woman in my presence, I told him afterwards that I would be more comfortable with the two of us going alone. My friend was unwilling to endure the social awkwardness of breaking his invitation to this woman or the other two he had invited: “What do you think they’ll think of me?”
So I went. The ill-fated outing was scheduled for a few days later. Thankfully, only one of the babes Andy had procured for me showed up. I dutifully flirted with her for twenty minutes while Andy discreetly stepped away. She wasn’t very enticing, also thankfully, reader. Because only one of the lesbians showed, the bar outing wasn’t worse than death, but I still hated it. Andy had insisted on advising me on what to wear, and he forced me to abandon my regular shorts for the holey ones I wore only to sleep.
The next day, however, my friend wanted to find out why getting to know girls scared me so much. I did not want to talk about it right then. He pressed me further: why did I hate flirting with women? We’d talked about my mother and father for years, but never directly about why flirting scared me. I hadn’t discussed it because I was afraid of talking about what I saw as my outstanding inabilities in that area, which came indeed from the fear of being a deficient sex-toy, an appalling romance-toy, an insufficiently-entertaining robot dildo for these women.
The fear was much too raw for me to want to talk about it with Andy then. So I said, diplomatically as I thought, in our pidgin, “That threatens to put me in a dark corner.”
— Suddenly, Andy was on me. Not physically, thank God, but with his voice—he was yelling at me louder than I’d ever been yelled at in my life.
“You’re saying that I’m threatening you?!”
“No, I was saying that that — —what we were talking about—was threatening to put me in a dark corner.”
“That means you’re saying that I’m threatening to put you in a dark corner!” He was livid. “You’re saying I’m a threat to you!”
“No,” I said, “you just misunderstood me. I’m not accusing you of threatening me at all.”
“But you did!” he said. “And you said that I’m threatening to put you in a dark corner, which is a really bad place to be!”
“No —” I said. “You misunderstood —”
“Now you’re doing it again! When you say that someone misunderstood, you’re saying that someone else did something wrong. You’re making a judgment. You should say that you failed to express yourself correctly.”
“I didn’t say you did anything wrong. Nothing wrong at all. But it’s just literally true—you misunderstood me.”
“There! You’re doing it again!”
“Look, let’s get beyond this misunderstood question. Let’s simply say that what you heard is not what I intended.”
“But you said it! Can’t you take responsibility for it? And you said that I was threatening to put you in a dark corner, which like I said is a very very bad place to be—”
So it went on, for three hours. I should say that our argument began in the car—I don’t know where we’d been driving—and that Andy soon pulled over to a secluded, leafy parking lot so he could scream at me in earnest.
I was paralyzed, as usual when attacked. At intervals I did try to get through to my friend (“Come on, Andy—this is me. Don’t you remember me?”) but I got nowhere.
At one point he deserted me so he could stand alone in the leafy roadside greenery and commune more deeply with his anger, stranding me in the car for forty minutes. (Like most golems, I don’t drive, of course, reader.)
Afterwards, Andy was openly contemptuous of me (“You don’t deserve for me to talk to you.”)
When we returned to Andy’s suburban manse, we spent four more hours arguing, all of them within earshot of Andy’s nice dad, a retired executive at Honeywell. Although we soon shut ourselves in a study so we could close the door, I was very embarrassed because I knew we were yelling so loud that he could hear us anyway.
Yes, yes, I was yelling, too. Something I may have kept from you, reader, is that I was indeed capable of screaming in a fierce way that people occasionally found frightening. My inbred golem capacity for violence manifested itself not in blows—not in blows, ever—but in a brutal and foul quality in how I talked to people when I myself felt profoundly threatened. At those (unpredictable) times, it would be as though I had channeled my two parents, and the battering edge of their voices had entered me.
I don’t know if this is how I yelled at Andy then—perhaps I yelled more timorously, because I was frightened that Andy and I were over. Or maybe my fear made me yell louder.
In any case, by the next day I was already hiding my feelings. Both of us were polite and very distant as Andy took me to a special local fried-chicken joint, a petting zoo for steers, a puppet museum. It was quite clear that he was not going to explain his screaming or apologize. He was certainly not going to exculpate me from the absolutely hellish thing he thought I had done, call him a violator. For that was surely the reason for his persecution of me the previous day. Andy and I—he even more than me, I think—were terrified of someday being violators ourselves, as most of the golems had eventually become, and it was not surprising, perhaps, that Andy could be driven insane by his imaginative fear that someone had said he had become one.
I hid my fury and hurt and alarm from him until a few weeks after I got home, reader. I decided that I needed to so I could get back to New York without incurring higher airplane costs by breaking the requirements of a Saturday night stay, or having to pay for a hotel. It meant that I had to hang out and pretend to be friendly with Andy for three more days, but because of my mother, I was used to lying about how friendly I felt towards people.
I interacted with him like a hostage, till I got on that plane. Once I’d been home safely for three weeks, I did c
all my friend and tell him I’d been scared by his behavior.
Andy refused to talk about it. But being dumped by Edna the therapist—just a few months previous—had given me a profound new sense of freedom and possibility, because it was actually so much better to be without Edna than it had been to be with her. Apparently, I did not need to stay with people forever.
Reader, I divorced him (although I did it in an unfortunately golem-like way). I returned few of his calls and barely spoke to him until we arranged for a dinner tete a tete when Andy would next come into the city in October. I took him to a beautiful and overpriced allegedly “natural” restaurant, Friend of a Farmer, for a sweet coming-together that he did not know was his farewell dinner.
It was harvesttime. And we had harvest-like food, squashes stuffed with meat, fulsome salads, bright-green artichoke lasagna. I was sweet to Andy, maybe the most loving I’ve ever been in my life, because I knew what I was giving up shortly. There were tears underneath my sweetness. “This has been so wonderful,” he said at the end of the evening. “You’ve been so loving.” And then I stopped speaking to him.
Andy—if you are reading this, please forgive me. I did not know any other way to do it. Of all the skills little golems are not provided with when they emerge for the first time from their dank riverbeds, perhaps the most sorely lacking are ways to extricate themselves from other people (and ways to truly join them.)
I’m very sorry. But I could not stay married to you, little elf friend.
After Andy, I believed that I had nothing left to lose. I thought that I was going straight to hell, where Edna and my mom had always told me I would wind up. Disobedient golems always end up there, along with superfluous children and toys that can’t play well with others. I had always straightened up and flown right; now it was time to get curvy, and fly badly. Which was great! I didn’t care that I would burn up, because I was ready to stop obeying.
That is when I got involved with Gemma, and my arms broke.
Chapter 8
My life is swirling. I can do anything I want because I no longer have anything. I’m having sex with someone’s mom and my hands, arms, shoulders, back and neck are in pain all the time, not from the sex—that only causes pain to my clitoris and vagina—but because something has happened to the parts of me that write.
There is pain and unbearable delight everywhere. I don’t have to be nice to anyone, or work to become healthier, more moral, stronger, better. I don’t have to pretend to like anything other than the things I do. What happens when I let Gemma into my house, each time, is exactly, exactly, exactly what I’ve always wanted.
Blonde Gemma wears butch clothes, but she’s like an even more feminine James Dean, soulful and sad and full of empathy. Yet she is more like an overt gay man than Jimmy Dean ever was, with a touch of evil mischief to her the way some gay men put on eye shadow, or paint their nails dark blue. She’s just as crazy as Dean.
She slaps my clit hard, gazing down at me with great intensity. Then in joyfultriumph. Then: tight power. She laughs. I feel love in her touch and even in her gaze. She’s strange. “I’m so crazy about you. I want to torture you,” she says.
Like I mentioned, Gemma is in an “open relationship” with the woman she is married to, and—can I say that the following relationship is open, too?—their four- and one-and-a-half-year-old daughters. The family “openness” to all sorts of behaviors does not extend to Gemma’s being allowed to tell Partner Ann about our relationship, ormy being allowed to touch her in public, come to the house, or make any sort of emotional claim. Gemma and Ann have an agreement to be “discreet,” though they consider themselves revolutionaries because they fuck folk like me whenever they want to. “We model ourselves on European men,” Gemma tells me. “Do what you want, but never say a word.” Although she hasn’t told the Partner, Ann knows anyway, Gemma whispers in my ear, two fingers deep inside me.
In my mind, Ann knows anyway because what we have in my bedroom is a burning sun enclosed in that tight space. Gemma says that I have a tight space.
I’ve never been with anyone married before. It violates my standards for acceptable lovers. But—I’ve always believed that I should fuck married people. I’ve thought I ought to fuck everyone, anyone, twenty-four hours a day, in all possible combinations, whether I’m horny or not. I’ve never, ever been the sexual madwoman my mother wanted me to be. Now life is mad, and I am a woman, finally, finally.
Gemma touches me like flame. I do feel loved.
Her touches are so soft and so fleeting that I do feel like I’m being tortured. There are very many of them, but they make me into starving, thirsty Tantalus bound just out of reach of the wet fruit tree. (Tantalus was the scariest image out of Greek mythology for me as a little girl, scarier than the guy who got his liver eaten every day.)—Until she turns and slaps me, which is comfort and a tense frustration all at once. She teases me, and provokes me, and bothers me for hours, but to me the perpetual inconclusive stimulation feels like love, feels like I’m being babied. As though a mother were someone who kept her baby up through the night, tickled it whenever it got sleepy. Pulled on its toes.
She’s the first mother I have been with. When I suck on her breast the first time, she asks snidely, “Are you trying to get milk from it?”
“I’d like that, actually,” I say, forthright.
She hesitates, bemused. “So would I.”
(She’s not nursing anymore, but she was barely six months ago. If she gave milk now, she would torment me with begging for tiny tastes, wouldn’t let me feed until I shrieked.)
I am snotty now when I go to see my real mother. It’s amazing what can happen when you learn you can do what you want to. On the express bus home from my mother’s “exclusive” senior enclave in Queens, where I have not censored my back talk, I write in my notebook things for Gemma. “You make my pussy feel alive.”
My Repetitive Strain arm injury— that's what it's called—hasn’t exactly happened yet. Or in retrospect, it’s probably ripening, deep in my red tendons, glowing, but I don’t know it yet. My pussy suddenly is alive though, inflamed just like my arms. I am in a bright and wicked zone where I eat luxury meals without feeling guilty, don’t always return my family’s phone calls, don’t spend weeks wondering if I’ve hurt a stranger’s feelings. I feel beautiful for the first time.
Gemma is the first woman I’ve been with, after some thirty others, who I was actually attracted to. I have steered clear of beautiful, sexy, even cute people all my life; they’re frightening. In twenty years of dating life, I have dated only the homely. The only reason I said yes to coffee with Gemma in the first place is I thought she was unavailable. Up to this point, if I’ve seen someone sexy, I’ve turned and run the other way.
Even seeing one of them briefly makes me seethe with seduction and shame. It is ugly to want them, as ugly as I surely am standing next to them. Every sexy person sticks a knife in me, simply by existing. When I walk by them, I am wrong, criminal for wanting someone who could never reciprocate, and about to be punished for it.
Gemma is beautiful. That’s the first thing I thought when she came up and introduced herself in the Park Slope Food Coop, where I was shopping for my tofu franks and organic buns. It turned out I’d met her on the street before with Ann and the babies and forgotten her. Partner Ann knows me slightly from the Queer Jews Happy in Struggle consortium; both Gemma and Ann are big fans of my writing.
“Why don’t you and Ann come to my New Year’s Eve party?” I said to Gemma in the Coop. I am a sucker for big fans, anytime, anyplace.
She said she and Ann were committed elsewhere, but that she would love to have coffee with me. I glowed with being liked. Now, I had no reason to fear Gemma at this point; she was partnered. And, she apparently wanted to drink a warm beverage with me, which diminished her sex appeal even further. Plus, Ann was hideous-looking and they had little kids, how sexy could Gemma be?
At the Community Bookstore and Cafe,
her voice was high but quiet, rhythmic. She was a professor of history of science at Rutgers, with a focus on queer theory. I could immediately see that Gemma was sexy, of course, hauntingly so. Her butch blondeness was delicate and unusual, face and body. Though her lissome slenderness edged her slightly towards the feminine, she had quite hard muscles, too, and a pacific confidence. But despite her sexiness, she was nice, even sweet. She ordered tea, universal drink of unthreatening wusses, and we discussed the socialist dream—“the only problem with communism is I think I would be required to give up my beach house,” Gemma said—and the problems with people’s assumptions about the sexlessness of children.
I was nervous— it was hard to look at her she was so bright—but she very gratifyingly praised my book, and even asked me to autograph it.
I was aware that Gemma was cooler than me, too, and not just because of her looks. I knew from Ann’s constant contributions to the Queer Jews Happy in Struggle e-list that Gemma and she did S/M with the real kind of whips used on bulls, which was more than I had done even in my S/M days. And many lesbian twenty-year-olds of a certain class drooled over Gemma, because she was a hot, hot starlet of queer theory. But she emailed me the very next day after our coffee date, which made me feel absolutely attractive as a friend. Her subject line was innocuous, dorky even—“Tea and Tropes.” I felt cooler than her, and therefore cooler than cool, a heady feeling.
Actually I was lucky she showed up right around then, because I needed friends. I had just dumped two more of them, besides Andy. I’d decided Edna had trained me to stay with people far too long, just like I’d stayed too long with her.I was almost sure that Gemma could be a great replacement for Andy—they were both blond. (I hadn’t turned blonde yet myself, best beloved.) The fact that I couldn’t have sex with either of them (despite really wanting to) seemed like a sign that Gemma was supposed to be my friend. She began emailing me every day, each day’s email friendlier and more intimate.
Growing Up Golem Page 10