Girls Who Like Boys Who Like Boys Page 17

  Also, we’d had a version of closure. At one point, when his parents were having a hard time accepting the idea that their son was gay, that it was something he was born with, they cut him off financially. He was in med school at the time and rather strapped for cash, and the one thing he really wanted was to buy a house. So I decided to help him with the down payment by giving him back the extravagant emerald-cut engagement ring that he, out of guilt, had told me to keep. I had stored it in a safe deposit box, not wanting to wear it, not ready to sell or reset it. I would occasionally visit my ring, visit my old married self, but even with nobody present to witness it, I was aware how pathetic I looked sitting in a bank cubicle modeling my wedding ring. So when I had the opportunity to return it to its rightful owner in the spirit of forgiveness and friendship, I jumped at the chance. I said, “With this ring, will you not marry me?” And we had a little moment, and he bought a little house, and that was that. Until now.

  In order to get a get, I would need to get back in touch with my ex-husband and persuade him to go before a panel of three rabbis and officially “release me.” The process is actually more offensive than I am making it sound. The tradition is based on a completely sexist biblical verse (Deuteronomy 24:1), which states: “A man takes a wife and possesses her. If she fails to please him because he finds something obnoxious about her, he writes her a bill of divorcement, hands it to her, and sends her away from his house.”

  First of all, I do not think my ex-husband found me obnoxious. He might have wished I had a penis, but if anything, I was the one who had grounds for “sending him away from my house.” However, with my Great Wedding less than three months away and the hope of legitimate children on the horizon, I decided this was not the time to go Gloria Steinem on the Old Testament.

  When I called my ex-husband in Los Angeles (I was living in New York at the time), he was surprised to hear from me, happy to hear I was getting married, and a little dubious about what I was asking him to do. I assured him I would pay the fee and do all the homework; his only responsibility would be to show up. We decided that although it was possible to get a get without being in the same place, we would try to get ours the next time I was in Los Angeles. He even suggested we have a “get-together” afterward so I could meet his kids. I started to like the idea of a get. It sounded like it might actually be good closure after all.

  Our awkward reunion took place outside a barely marked industrial building that served as an office for the Orthodox rabbi whose name I got through an online organization that facilitates gets. (Yes, there is such an organization, it’s based in Brooklyn, and operators are standing by.) We made small talk while I pressed the buzzer. (You look good. You, too. How are your parents? How’s New York?) It slowly became clear, as we ran out of small talk, that nobody was responding to the buzzing. We called the rabbi’s number, which was his home number, and unfortunately he answered, and that’s when we learned that there was confusion about the time, and we’d have to reschedule. We explained that we couldn’t reschedule. It had taken us over ten years to make this appointment. The rabbi said he would try to locate two witnesses, and we should give him an hour.

  That’s how it came to pass that we had an hour to kill, and my ex-husband said his partner and kids were nearby shopping, so maybe we should have our get-together now. It was too late for lunch and too early for dinner, which seemed appropriately symbolic of our relationship, but we found a faux-French café nearby that would take us.

  It’s not often a girl gets to sit down with the man she thought she would have kids with and the man he had kids with, but the truth is, they were a pretty perfect family without me. I had met my ex-husband’s partner at a Christmas party years earlier, and I liked him immediately. He was handsome and smart and kind and funny, and whether it was accurate or not, I found it flattering and comforting to imagine that he was the male version of me. Now they’d adopted two beautiful boys who looked like they crawled out of a Baby Gap ad. As I watched my ex-husband juggle juice boxes and crayons and children’s menus, he smiled at me and warned: “Get ready.”

  Finally the rabbi called and said he could see us. When we arrived, all of us, he explained the process might take another hour, so my ex-husband told his family he would call them when we were done.

  The rabbi was old, and his two witnesses were even older. They sat on one side of a table and we sat on the other. We had to say our names in Hebrew, which already was a problem because mine was supposedly Ariel, but I was told in Sunday School that the female version of Ariel is Ariella. Feeling strongly that somebody should be the female version of me in this process, I went with Ariella. We also had to state that we had come freely without coercion, and then we watched in respectful silence as the rabbi, who was also officially a scribe, wrote our divorce document by hand, with pen and ink, in Hebrew.

  After what seemed like an eternity, the document was half-finished. When my ex-husband left to feed the meter, the rabbi fixed me with a stare and asked the question that had clearly been bothering him since we arrived: “Who was that other man who came with you?” Since I wasn’t sure what the official Orthodox stance was on homosexuality, I said it was my ex-husband’s friend. “And whose children were those?” he asked. I didn’t like where this was going. I asked if this would affect the get process, because we had been there a long time as it was. He assured me it would not, so I admitted that my ex-husband was gay, and that the other man was his partner, and those were their kids. The two ancient witnesses looked at each other, which was the first and only indication that they spoke English. “I think that’s sick,” the rabbi said flatly.

  “It’s not sick,” I said. “They’re very happy.”

  Then, in a terribly unoriginal attempt at a joke, the rabbi said, “Which one is the man?”

  “They’re both men,” I said. “They’re both very good men.”

  When my ex-husband came back into the room, I felt ill. I had flown cross-country and paid five hundred dollars in cash so three old holy men could sit in judgment of him for an hour. And the irony was, he was much more Jewish than me! I barely remembered when Passover was every year, while his partner had converted so they could raise their children as Jews. I was fuming, wondering if we should forget the get, get out, get while the gettin’ was good. I was composing an angry letter in my head, venting to the hot rabbi, praying this wasn’t representative of my faith, when we were informed that our document was complete. Then we were asked to stand. And face each other. And then my ex-husband was asked to look into my eyes and repeat some phrases that meant basically: “With this document, I release you.”

  And as we stood there, just as we had on our wedding day, he looked even more handsome. And grown-up. And happy. And I thought about why he had married me in the first place. Yes, he loved me, but also, he was probably afraid he would never be able to have a family if he didn’t marry a woman. And now he had that family without having to compromise any part of who he was. And I thought about what he gave me all those years ago when he had unofficially released me. He gave me my single life back. And as much as I hated the heartbreak and longing, it became the basis of my writing career, which led me to a job on Sex and the City, which led me to New York, which led me to my bad-boy motorcycle-riding tattooed lawyer-poet-chef.

  And then I thought about how this tribunal, this ridiculous judgmental tribunal, is what my ex-husband faces every day, sometimes when he least expects it, sometimes from family, sometimes from within, and how hard it must have been to overcome that judgment in order to be honest with me and with himself. So as he dropped the get into my open palms, which made it legally binding, I felt proud of him, and proud of us, for releasing each other to our proper destinies.

  “I’m happy you’re getting married,” he said. “Now I can finally stop feeling guilty.” I told him he had no reason to feel guilty. But he said he couldn’t help it. Some things, I guess, we’re just born with.

  IV

  Grow
ing Up, Coming Out

  “Every straight girl in high school needs a boyfriend—to ogle the baseball team with.”

  —from “Life Before Gays,” by Elizabeth Spiers

  THE GOOD GIRLS

  David Levithan

  In high school, I was one of the good girls.

  My parents didn’t know what to think. Every night, there would be the parade of phone calls, me slipping out of the room and going behind closed doors, to talk about friends and homework and relationships and, every now and then, the meaning of life. My parents didn’t know all these girls’ voices like I did, so they were never really certain who was calling, or why. Either I had dozens of girlfriends or I didn’t have any at all.

  The truth was that most of my friends were girls. Groups upon groups of girls. Mayling, Elana, Joanna, Carolyn, Lauren, and Marcie were the good girls. Lynda, Dvora, Rebecca, Susannah, Dina, Meg, and Jinny were the good girls who drifted into the boy thing when we got to high school. Eliza, Jodi, Jordana, Jeannie, and Mariam were the good girls one grade below us. Jennifer and Sami and Tracey were the good girls who didn’t do the group thing as much. There were boys, too—but there weren’t that many of them. The girls were the nucleus of my social life.

  We didn’t talk about sex; we talked about love. We never, ever used party as a verb. Awkwardly mixed drinks and the occasional beer or wine cooler were as alcoholic as we got. Pot was a big step. Cocaine was unimaginable. We were the kids for whom VCRs had been invented. We watched When Harry Met Sally… over and over again and pondered its lessons like it had been filmed in Aramaic. The central question, of course, was: Can guys and girls really be friends? I liked to think I was the proof positive, because even though I fell for one of my female friends every now and then, friendship always managed to win out in the end.

  It hadn’t yet occurred to me to like boys.

  We good girls coveted our clever turns of phrase like they were SAT flash cards. We honed our wits like Dorothy Parker at the Algonquin lunch table. We were smart and we knew it. We were dorks and we knew it. Instead of hiding both things, we embraced them. We created our own form of popularity. In our town of Millburn, New Jersey, where the football team never won, this was surprisingly easy to do.

  Many of the girls were in the Millburnettes, the girls’ singing group. If they dated, odds were that they’d be dating one of the Millburnaires. I myself had auditioned for the Millburnaires in falsetto, because I’d been obsessed with the song “Bring Him Home” from Les Miserables and thought I could pretend my way through “Impossible Dream.” Mr. Deal, our fussy, testy diva of a chorus director, was half appalled and half amused. He gave me another chance, but I decided not to take it. I hadn’t wanted to wear the ultrablue polyester Millburnaire outfit, anyway.

  Instead I became a Millburnette groupie. And a school musical groupie (memorably playing the one-lined doorman in Kiss Me, Kate). And I joined the fencing team—because all my friends were there, because I needed a sport for my college applications, and because at practices the girls and I talked much more than we thrusted foils at one another.

  I have learned over the years that it’s decidedly uncool to say I enjoyed high school—many people were lucky to have survived it, while others who didn’t have as bad a time like to say they did. Since I was one of the good girls, I found life in high school to be, well, good. It wasn’t always easy, and it wasn’t always nice. But through it all, I felt a passive happiness that would break out sometimes into an intensely active happiness. This could happen in the most random of ways: Mayling pulling her long sleeve to her nose and proclaiming “I am an elephant!” with the rest of us following suit; Lynda and I holding up signs to each other in the middle of the Metropolitan Opera House, since I was in the balcony and she was in the orchestra, and we couldn’t go the length of an opera without passing some word to each other; Jennifer and I leaving lunch early and sitting on the fenced-off stairway that led to the auditorium, remarking on the people who passed us and, when the hallway traffic was slow, talking about books. If we never felt the full swoon of romance, we often felt the giddy buoyancy of friendship. It was a counterbalance against all the tests we faced—tests in the classrooms, tests in the hallways, tests in what we wore and what we said and who we were.

  The good girls were a sisterhood, and I was the brother. There were some conversations I wasn’t a part of; you would think that hanging out with so many girls would open my eyes to their side of the sex thing, but with a few exceptions, this rarely came up when I was around. Instead I was exposed to the girls’ emotional landscapes and, even more important, I was allowed to have one of my own. We wore our feelings so openly, whether it was annoyance or distress or delight or anger or affection we felt. I would never have learned such openness from the boys. There were certainly times when everything seemed like a big traumedy, but I learned to deal with that. By talking it through. By talking it out. And, if none of those things worked, my friend Lynda always advised a haircut. When you wanted to change your life, she said, a haircut was often the easiest way to start.

  The good girls—the ones who hadn’t split off in tenth grade—didn’t date much, for the same reason that I didn’t clue in to the boy thing as fast as I might have: In our not particularly large high school, there weren’t that many bookish, articulate, cute, sensitive, clever, crush-worthy boys. In retrospect, I can see a couple of crushes I had without labeling them as such—tangential boys, nobody that close to me. They were usually a year or two older than I was and talked about philosophers and writers like other boys talked about sports or computers. It’s not like I dreamed of kissing them or dating them—I was just fascinated by them, mostly from afar, with occasional glimpses up close. I was looking for River Phoenix in a Tom Cruise world.

  I also had friendship crushes—on boys and girls—but those were different; those friends I liked because of what I knew about them, not because of their mystery. I didn’t want to be their boyfriend. I wanted to be their best friend. I learned early, and learned well, that the person you talk to about the crush is much more important than the crush itself.

  Instead of dating, the good girls and I were one big date-substitute. We played a lot of Pictionary. Sober Pictionary. We ruled the school newspaper and the lit mag. B. Dalton’s was our favorite store in the mall, although we were never above dancing around the aisles of KBtoys. We went into the city on weekends and waited in the half-price ticket line for Broadway shows, or went into the Village to shop for secondhand clothes. We went to museums. Once we got our licenses and could drive around town, we rotated our evenings among Bennigan’s, TGI Friday’s, Chili’s, and La Strada, the local pizzeria. When we weren’t at the Morristown multiplex, we were at the Lost Picture Show in Union, which showed art films and looked like someone’s garage on the inside and had a roof that leaked. We read Margaret Atwood and J. D. Salinger and Kurt Vonnegut. (Some of the girls even read Ayn Rand, but I could never get into it.) We talked about art without realizing we could treat it as Art. The more theatrical of us signed our yearbooks with Sondheim lyrics.

  So many gay boys—whether they know they’re gay yet or not—go through high school feeling like they’re the only ones. They think they’re the only ones who will never find love, the only ones who don’t really fit in, the only ones who aren’t coupled off. With the good girls, I was never the only one. Not in that way. I was sometimes the only boy. And I’m sure there were times when I thought it was ridiculous that the “dates” I had were fleeting at best. But because so many of my female friends were in the same boat, I didn’t really feel alone. There were no long, dark nights of the soul, because my soul was keeping pretty good company.

  The girls and I flirted and bantered. Nonstop. We passed notes. Lord, we passed notes. String these notes together and you’d get the full symphony of my high school years, an almost minute-by-minute re-creation. Constant observation, reflection, honing life into prose.

  Everything remained peaceful until t
he senior prom came along. It wasn’t a particularly big deal to me—I had already gone my junior year, the date of a girl I barely knew, who clearly had gotten to the bottom of her draft list before asking me. I’d had fun, but I’d also figured that it wasn’t a night that would change my life forever. Going into prom season, I was, as always, unattached, and while the question of who I would ask was hotly debated when I wasn’t in the room (or so I was later told), when I returned to the room, I was left to my own obliviousness.

  I decided to ask Jordana, a member of the junior posse of good girls. Bizarrely I decided to ask her while watching her play Mother Superior in our high school’s production of The Sound of Music. Seriously. While she was busy exhorting Maria to climb ev’ry mountain, I was thinking, It would be fun to go to the prom with Jordana. Not as a date-date. But in lieu of a date-date.

  I knew another boy, Josh, probably wanted to ask her, too. But I figured, hey, I’d give Jordana the option and see what she wanted to do. We went on a nondate to Bennigan’s, and I stalled. I pondered. I worked myself up into an existential crisis while I ate mozzarella sticks and debated whether or not to ask her.

  Which is when Roxette came into the picture.

  I almost didn’t ask Jordana to be my prom date. But then a Roxette song came wafting down from the Bennigan’s speakers, and it told me to listen to my heart. I figured this was a sign. My heart at that moment said to ask her, so I did. I even told her I wouldn’t mind if she wanted to go with Josh. And she said she wanted to go with me.

  I was relieved to have it over with.

  I was unprepared, however, for the fact that I had just created more problems than I’d ever intended. By choosing a prom date, I was the one who had stopped the music and sent all of my female friends flying toward the musical chairs. Many, it seemed, had thought it at least a possibility that I would ask them. I had, to put it indelicately, fucked everything up. Now the good girls had to grab hold of the nearest boy and hope it would work out. By and large, it didn’t work out well, even for me, since Jordana ended up wanting to go with Josh after all, causing awkwardness all around. Still, we look happy enough in the prom photos—the front row of good-girl friends, and then the back row assortment of random boys tuxed up to squire them for the evening. All dressed up, we thought we looked so old. Now I look at the picture and think how young we really were. We get younger every year, as 1990 gets farther and farther away.