Girls Who Like Boys Who Like Boys Page 13

  I listened sympathetically as I poured him more wine. “My God,” I said, feeling as I imagined Freud must have when he first coined the word hysteria, “You’re not gay—it’s just that a traumatic event made you think you were gay.”

  Brian shrugged, and I leaned in so that our faces were inches away from each other. “Maybe I’m bisexual,” he said.

  I was willing to accept that for the moment. After all, this transition back to straightness might be slow for my new boyfriend.

  I nodded and he kissed me—a real, passionate, entirely straight kiss.

  After dinner, we went to a bar across the street and though it wasn’t a gay bar, the minute we walked in, we ran into two gay guys we both knew. One of them, Matt, was decidedly hostile to me, even though he’d been quite friendly when I’d met him a few months earlier and he’d been hitting on one of my gay male friends. When Brian went to the bathroom, Matt turned to me. “What the hell do you think you’re doing?” he asked.

  “What are you talking about? You mean, with Brian?”

  “Of course I mean with Brian. What kind of game do you think you’re playing?” With that, Matt got up in my face (though he was a few inches shorter than me, so he was really more up in my neck).

  “We’re just hanging out, nothing to get worked up about,” I said. Even though in my heart I imagined that Brian and I were setting new standards of what love could be, I knew Matt wouldn’t make an appropriate confidant. Actually I felt angry over his attitude. Shouldn’t I be the one concerned with whether or not Brian was playing games with me? I was doing what I’d always done: going out with a man. Brian was the one betraying his group, and while I was personally thrilled with Brian’s decision, I didn’t appreciate Matt treating me like I was some wanton woman out to trap gay guys in my tangled web of heterosexuality.

  When Brian came back from the bathroom and Matt went off to smoke, I told him what had happened. He shook his head. “We used to date,” he said of Matt. I should have figured; Matt probably wouldn’t be the last of Brian’s exes to have a problem with us.

  Brian and I went back to my apartment, where I opened a bottle of wine and we both lit cigarettes. After we were done smoking, we started kissing. As we kissed, I started to move Brian toward my bedroom, but when we got to the door, he suddenly stiffened. “I don’t feel comfortable doing anything more,” he said.

  While this was the first time I’d heard a guy say anything remotely like this, I was even less prepared for my reaction. “Why?” I asked, feeling like he was suddenly backing out on the courageous and important journey we were taking together.

  “Look,” he snapped, showing me for the first time shades of a less-than-perfect personality, “that’s all I want to do. If you have a problem with it, I suggest you go to the bathroom and masturbate.”

  “Stop,” I said, kissing his neck. “No pressure.” Brian calmed down, and after kissing for a while, we cuddled and I was able to erase from my mind the notion of my being someone who puts pressure on men in bed. After a while, we just lay there trading cigarettes and sad stories about our respective dysfunctional families and the times we’d been in love or thought we’d been in love, doing the postcoital thing without any coitus. When he described his utter confusion in the face of romantic relationships, it seemed like he was stealing dialogue from my own inner script, and the conversation felt more intimate than anything that had transpired thus far.

  I fell asleep with Brian spooning me and dreamt about being in Washington, D.C. I couldn’t remember any of the specifics in the morning—just that it somehow felt, as dreams sometimes can, deeply meaningful. When Brian woke up, I told him I’d dreamt about our nation’s capital, and he mentioned that he’d been born there. That’s when I came to the conclusion that I’d been working toward since the moment Brian had first caught my eye in the bar two nights earlier: We were soul mates and had been together in previous lifetimes. Given my fondness for storybook love and my well-established history of spontaneous passion—my third date with an ex was, essentially, a move from San Francisco to Los Angeles to live with him—this seemed the only possible explanation for our unlikely and illogical connection. When I shared these thoughts with Brian, though, he only smiled warily.

  Over breakfast at the café across the street, Brian took a deep breath and gave me the apologetic look I realized I’d been dreading from the beginning. “I think you’re fantastic,” he said, his eyes intensely fixated on his over-easy eggs. “But I have to tell you: I really think I’m gay.”

  “But…but…,” I sputtered, unwilling to give up on this fantasy so quickly. “What about what you were saying about being bisexual?”

  “I know I said that,” he said, smiling his perfect pearly whites, his beautiful mouth making this rejection that much harder to take. “But after last night, I think I realized that it’s not true. I’m just gay.”

  “But you’re attracted to me—you said it! A few times!” Horrifyingly, I found myself on the verge of tears.

  “I know,” he said, sipping his latte. “And I think you’re very attractive. But I just can’t do this.”

  That’s when I realized that there wasn’t a whole hell of a lot I could do. While I felt positive that what he was saying couldn’t possibly be true, a part of me also knew this was not a battle worth fighting. How could I accuse someone of being wrong about how he felt when our individual feelings, by their very definition, have to be correct?

  Later that day, I stopped at a spiritual bookstore in West Hollywood that I’d passed many times and barely noticed. They sold the usual collection of crystals, affirmations for inner children, and books about creating your own destiny. I was looking for some comfort, some explanation, some confirmation that what I’d experienced with Brian was as real and important as I thought it was. I saw the book I’d subconsciously been seeking: Only Love Is Real: A Story of Soulmates Reunited by Brian Weiss, M.D. That the author’s first name was the same as my potential soul mate’s was all the impetus I needed to buy the book.

  It had been a crazy few days and I’d slept probably a total of about seven hours over the past couple of nights. But I stayed wide awake that day, riveted by every word of my new book, even though I’d never been one for self-help or spiritual books of any kind before. It explained that not everyone was comfortable with the notion of previous lifetimes, let alone the concept of meeting and falling in love with the same person over and over again. Brian will come around, I thought, as I underlined and dog-eared passages and pages that I found significant. I brought the book along to dinner that night with Bonnie, certain she would support my exciting new discoveries.

  But she, as logical and wise about love as I was dramatic and superficial, just shook her head. “Anna, you’re going on no sleep, ranting about how you’ve fallen in love with a gay guy, clutching this crazy book. I’m worried about you.”

  I wanted to shake my head right back at her, but hearing her summarize my behavior brought just the tiniest bit of perspective back. I put the book back in my purse and willed myself to talk about something besides Brian over dinner.

  I wish I could tell you that Brian came around and we were able to go on our journey hand in hand, while teaching the world not to be so hung up on labels like gay and straight. It would be wonderful to report that the other Brian was right and my Brian and I had ended up as together in this lifetime as we had been in the previous few. But the truth is that Brian and I didn’t speak again until we ran into each other a few months later, when he glanced at me with embarrassment—the kind of look I’d imagine a straight guy might give a gay guy he accidentally ended up in bed with one night when he was feeling experimental. “I’m so sorry for getting you all mixed up in my confusion,” he said. “I was going through a rough time then.”

  A rough time? His confusion? I had so many questions I wanted to ask, but my ego and pride—not to mention my suspicion that Brian probably wouldn’t have any answers—kept me from doing anything bu
t smiling kindly. “It’s okay,” I said. “I understand.”

  That night, I tossed Only Love Is Real in the trash, letting go of both Brians at once as a sign of my commitment to finding a love beyond the dramatic, you-must-be-my-soul-mate kind. The real story, after all, begins only after the credits roll.

  FUTURE PERFECT

  Tom Dolby

  There is a woman in Florida who will be very upset if she ever reads this. Of course, she probably already knows I am working on it. Right now. Even though there is no way anyone could have told her.

  You see, she is a psychic.

  In November of 2004, I was extremely depressed. My mood was so low, I wouldn’t answer the phone, was sleeping twelve hours at a time, couldn’t imagine leaving my boyfriend’s apartment.

  It was right after the election, and though that would have been reason enough, there were other factors. I’ve experienced depressions since I was fifteen years old and I take medication for it, but sometimes those magical pills don’t work, no matter what fancy new combination is added to the regimen.

  This was one of those times, and I didn’t know what to do.

  I was coming down from the high of having my first novel published the previous spring; now I was struggling with my second, unsure whether I could tackle the broader canvas I had committed myself to. I was also in a relationship that, while stable, I didn’t find emotionally or intellectually fulfilling. I would go to bed at night feeling lonely in my boyfriend’s expensive sheets, even though he was lying six inches away from me.

  I would also be turning thirty in two months, which terrified me—in retrospect, a triviality, but no less dire a situation at the time. When the darkness is closing in on the mind of a depressed person, when everything seems bleak, when there is a gray, mushy tint clouding his vision, he will do anything to fix the problem.

  I did something most would consider crazy, though I did it to get out of the crazy. I booked myself on a flight to Boca Raton to see a psychic healer who was renowned for shifting people’s energy around and getting them out of all sorts of maladies. I was, and am, aware that this puts me in a small fraction of the population that has believed in such mystical dogma. But I figured no harm could be done; all I had to lose was money and time.

  Or so I thought.

  Sondra had come highly recommended by some family friends on the West Coast; she had reportedly cured their infant daughter of a life-threatening illness. Surely a garden-variety depression would be easy. After speaking to her on the phone for about fifteen minutes, I scheduled myself, with incredible blind faith, for three days of sessions, which was the amount of time she recommended.

  I imagined my little trip to Florida as an esoteric rest cure, a departure from my life in the West Village.

  Traveling alone isn’t easy when you’re despondent. But once on the plane, I started feeling hopeful; I pictured myself journeying to an exotic healing mecca, like Lourdes or Bath or Rajasthan.

  The only people who knew where I was going were my boyfriend and my mother. For anyone else who asked, I was in Florida on business. Because it was terribly likely that a novelist working on a book set in New England would be doing research in Boca Raton.

  I arrived on a Sunday evening at a grand, palatial hotel that wasn’t too far from being a Floridian version of the Taj Mahal. It had a pink exterior, with magnificent 1920s architecture and a lobby decorated with palm trees and monkeys. Except for the staff, everyone else was at least thirty years older than I was.

  The next morning, I met Sondra at her home office a few miles away, where she lived and worked in a condominium complex. While clean, it was extremely modest, a far cry from the waterfront luxury of the resort. The room where she practiced was decorated with stuffed animals, images of angels, and the other types of new age paraphernalia that tend to offend me more on an aesthetic than a spiritual level.

  I sensed, though, that she was a good person. She was a slight, wiry woman in her early sixties, with curly brown hair. She gave me a hug upon meeting me, and I felt her bony spine. She might have weighed ninety-five pounds. Her accent was Florida by way of south Jersey; while her message could have come out of a holistic wellness center in Santa Monica, her delivery was that of a sassy Brooklyn diner waitress.

  Some would be put off, but I found it charming.

  We sat down, and she explained her philosophy. Most of it—apart from the hands-on healing part—didn’t seem terribly different from concepts I had encountered in various self-help books over the years. She had healed people all over the world; articles had been written about her and her work.

  “Do I believe in this?” she said to me. “I know it works. We need to keep your energy field as clear as we possibly can, because that’s what we’re in charge of.”

  When I asked her about her use of the royal “we,” she said she was referring to herself and her spirit guides. I dismissed it as a quirk of the profession, in the same way that I would ignore an auto mechanic’s or manicurist’s improper grammar.

  We did two healing sessions a day, lasting about thirty minutes each; I lay on a massage table, clothes on, eyes shut. The basic concept was that we all have an energy field that extends eighteen inches in every direction; some people, like her, have the power to move this energy around, unblocking it, refocusing it. As she moved her hands over me, I could actually hear a crackling in the air. I would feel alternating sensations of heat and cold over my body; I could hear her murmuring as she did her work, as if she were communicating with some higher power.

  I was exhausted after the first day, though I also felt as if a tremendous weight had been lifted. Still, I had my doubts. During the drive back to the hotel, I stopped at an intersection of strip malls and fast food restaurants; I was behind a truck with a bumper sticker that read, “Welcome To Florida. Now Go Home.”

  Maybe I should have.

  “I don’t think you should write this essay,” my mother tells me on the phone, calling from San Francisco. I have asked her to verify some of the chronology of it, which has unfortunately necessitated telling her what it’s about.

  “Why not?”

  “Because people might think you’re crazy. And do you really want everyone to know you were that depressed?”

  “What does it matter? Most writers are a little bit crazy. It’s about having interesting experiences; that’s part of why I did it. And I’m not depressed anymore. Besides, if you’re going to talk about depressed writers, I think I’m in pretty good company. Most of the writers I respect have been at one point or another.”

  “It just seems ungrateful, after everything she did for you. She helped you.” Though I would hardly describe my mother as new age, to her, if something works, who cares how it works?

  “I’m not being ungrateful. I paid her. I don’t owe her anything. I’m telling my side of things. I’m not writing anything that isn’t my truth.”

  “Okay,” she says, in a voice that tells me she’s not convinced. And then, more quietly: “I just don’t want you to get hurt.”

  “I’m not going to get hurt,” I say. “Trust me.”

  The healing sessions were one thing, but what I wasn’t prepared for were Sondra’s psychic abilities. If I encountered a psychic on the street, on television, or on a hotline I was supposed to call, I would be suspect. But there in Florida, away from my everyday life, and after paying a considerable amount of money, I wanted to believe.

  We had long, intense discussions when we weren’t doing the healing sessions, in the morning and afternoon, breaking only for lunch, when I would go back to the hotel. They were very much like therapy, except that they incorporated Sondra’s psychic talents. Whenever I asked her a question that had to do with the future—and she made it clear that I shouldn’t ask her anything I wasn’t prepared to hear the answer to—her eyes went to my left side, her pupils skittering off to some other, unworldly place. She started by talking about a lot of stuff that had happened to me in the past, all eve
nts she had no way of knowing about. As I feasted on these little crumbs of truth, she began telling me about my future. When I would break up with my boyfriend, whom she said was not right for me (I already knew that, thanks). How many books I would publish. And when I would meet the next guy, who was going to be the love of my life, a man with whom I would truly connect.

  She told me many things during those three days, some of them nutty, some of them sane, many of them prophetic, and quite a few that turned out to be dead-on accurate.

  Of course, I focused on the guy.

  She was quite specific: I would meet him in September of the following year. We would be at a dinner party, and he would be wearing a white shirt. Or giving off some kind of white glow. She couldn’t be sure. Given my growing faith in Sondra and the absolute despair from which I was emerging, I believed her.

  I finished up the three days in Florida feeling tired, but hopeful and relieved. She instructed me was that I wasn’t to go to the gym for seventy-two hours after the last session, and I wasn’t allowed to have sex, either. The former was no problem; as for the latter, I think I lasted two and a half days.

  The real proof was in the coming weeks and months. I got through the rest of the fall, the holiday season, and my thirtieth birthday with relative happiness. My dark mood, seemingly without fanfare, had lifted. I finished a first draft of the new novel. By the end of winter, I was strong enough, sad as it was, to break up with the boyfriend. I thought, somehow, that Sondra had made it all happen, that she had banished the negative energy that was keeping me down. I went into spring feeling free.

  My regular therapist, a woman named Molly who is the exact opposite of Sondra—blond, robust, fair-skinned, and from the heartland—was not happy about any of this. She didn’t say it outright, but I knew. It wasn’t so much that she was threatened by my seeing another therapist; I think she didn’t trust Sondra’s methods. But I had become a believer. And when you are a believer, every bit of evidence serves as proof of your faith while you ignore anything that might sway you to the contrary side.