Girls Who Like Boys Who Like Boys Page 23

  “Oh, probably, who remembers?” I could never manage to get through the whole interview without joking. The boy didn’t look at me. “I suppose so. You want to know how many insertions?” I asked pointedly.

  “Yes.”

  “Damn, I just lost the key to my Betty and Veronica diary. I guess now we’ll never know for sure.” I grinned, but my interviewer, a dark and not altogether unattractive Semitic lad in his midtwenties, never glanced up from the answer sheet.

  “Would you say more than twenty times?”

  “Yes.”

  “And was this person your primary partner?”

  “Yes.”

  “And did he use a condom?”

  “No, we don’t. We’re monogamous—six years.”

  “Okay. On to the next category.” The boy flipped the page again, bent it back and ran his thumb down the center to flatten the seam. He poised his number two pencil over the tiny bubbles, ready to smudge in my replies.

  Jim and I had been coming to the Men’s Study since it had begun five years earlier. At the start, we were two of two thousand supposedly healthy gay men who were being followed as part of the Natural History of AIDS study sponsored by the N.I.H. Every six months we went through a battery of blood tests and interviews, which tried to link behavior to the appearance and progression of the virus. Since 1984, one half of the participants had sero-converted and almost half of those had died.

  “In the last six months, did you place your penis in anyone’s vagina?”

  “Yes.”

  He glanced up at me. “Perhaps you didn’t understand the question. Let me repeat it.”

  “I heard the question. The answer is yes.”

  “Let me reread to you the definition.” The boy fumbled back to the preceding pages. “‘Placing one’s penis into a vagina means’…”

  “I know what it means. The answer is yes.”

  “Okay, fine. So, how many times did you place your penis, uh, you know…”

  “Well, that I can tell you exactly,” I said. “Three times in October, three times in November. No insertions, per se, in December. Two in January. Hmm. That makes eight. Eight times.”

  “Are you sure you don’t want me to reread the definition?” the boy asked.

  “Yes, I’m sure.”

  The interviewers were an odd lot—a cadre of unkempt psych students with white lab coats and earrings—all of whom struggled valiantly to contain their curiosities toward the study participants. My lover, Jim, had described them once as “perfectly cute queer robots—with cowlicks.” They were well trained to conceal any hint of exuberance, with painted-on poker faces and flattened monotones, and usually they tore through the twenty-minute interrogations without ever glancing up from the computer sheets in front of them. It was as if any eye contact might make them burst out of their professional personas into full-tilt versions of “The Man That Got Away.”

  This particular boy seemed especially on edge. I had never met him before, so I surmised he had just recently been hired—probably a U.C.L.A. psych major. He had black, thick eyebrows on a ridged forehead that had reminded me, at first glance, of a sexy young Omar Sharif. At present, he had succeeded in furrowing himself into a veritable Neanderthal.

  “And did you use a condom?” he asked.

  “No.”

  “No?” he challenged.

  “No, it wouldn’t have made sense,” I said. “See, we were trying to make a baby.”

  The boy suddenly brightened and looked up. With his features relaxed, he looked like Yuri Zhivago, which made me happy.

  “Oh. That’s cool,” the boy said, dropping all professional protocol. “Whaddayaknow? Well, now I feel better.”

  “Well, I’m glad you do. I do, too,” I responded.

  “Can you tell me a little bit more?” the boy asked.

  I filled him in on the baby-making trials. We were at the fifth attempt, and Cathy was on her way out to L.A. next week to try again. We had started off doing it the natural way, and when that proved unsuccessful, we moved on to inseminations. I would make deposits into a bank in Westwood and those carefully labeled vials would be sent to Cathy, who lived back East on Cape Cod. The specimens arrived via UPS in giant tanks of frozen nitrogen, and their removal required delicate handling with rubber gloves. Although Cathy proclaimed herself an expert at it, after two expensive experiments, we had determined that shipping frozen spunk back East was a waste of time and money. Apparently, unless you could centrifuge it upon thawing, you were stuck with a lot of useless drowned spermatozoa. Old-fashioned fucking was determined to be the most effective.

  “I wish someone at the sperm bank could have filled me in on that one,” I had whined to Jim at the time.

  “Well, we’re learning as we go along,” he replied.

  “Yeah, well, I waste hours jerking off in some cubicle for nothing.”

  “Oh, stop complaining. There’s no one in the world who loves jerking off more than you do. This is the one time in your life you have a decent excuse.”

  “So we scheduled real-time inseminations, with fresh sperm, as soon as we could and complemented those with actual lovemaking,” I explained to the interviewer boy, who was looking less like Julie Christie’s paramour and more like Nicky Arnstein by the minute. “It turns out that the greatest chances of fertilization occur when you do it the old-fashioned way, and after that, on-site inseminations are the best bet. And that’s where we’re at,” I concluded.

  The boy nodded his head and stood, gesturing for me to follow him out the door to the blood draw room. “Well, I think it’s great. And who is the surrogate?” he asked.

  The word stung me. “She’s not a surrogate,” I told him. “She’s the mom. She’ll always be the mom.”

  1968. Suburban Connecticut. The hallways of Hamden High were filled with dark-haired girls in angora the color of gelato who prayed their rosary for admittance to cheerleading club and packs of boys with big white teeth who slapped each other hard, laughed at stupid jokes, and delighted in slamming themselves against metal lockers.

  It was a world of black eyeliner and linebackers, of letter sweaters and tiny gold crucifixes, and I was unceremoniously dropped there at the threshold of puberty like a cactus plant at the North Pole. Not that being outside the group was something new for me. I had been banished from the inner circle of boyhood at twelve, when I willingly replaced the burdens of Cub Scout merit badges for my bar mitzvah lessons. Back in elementary school, my best friends had all been girls. I had played “house” with Lisa Diamond up the street and “Broadway musical” with anyone who was kind enough to sit on my mother’s couch and pull open the bay window curtain—“Slowly, and in time to the music, please!”—as I danced back and forth to the strains of “The Carousel Waltz.” By age fifteen, I had grown about as far from the social inner circle of the neighborhood gang as I could get. Of more urgent concern was not my self-defined spirit of artistic nonconformity, but a dark, peculiar tugging. Sex with myself was focused not on women, but on a long and varied fantasy parade of odd characters: Salvatore, the school bus driver; Monsieur Boisvert, our suave French professor who wore Canoe and sported a perpetual five o’clock shadow; and even certain unlikely boys in the locker room. The cast changed weekly, but the gender did not. In terms of real contact, I had experienced something barely approaching sex with my friend Bobby a couple of years earlier, at our pool club, huddled under towels. But that was short-lived and he was now dating girls.

  Swimming against this dark current, I chose to hide out as the high school drama freak, a gawky spire with wire glasses, beret, and London policeman’s cape that hung down to my knees. It was in this masquerade that I wandered the cream-and-brown-tiled hallways, half-obscured in yards of wool, waving those bolts of fabric like a signal to like-minded souls. I didn’t know my fluttering would catch the unlikely eye of Cathy Smith.

  Cathy, with long, thin, sandy-colored hair parted to one side, was as round and solid as I was thin. S
he told me she had suffered the pain of being the heaviest girl in her class through most of her elementary and junior high school life. But unlike other haunted, heavyset girls who mastered only the art of hiding, Cathy made up for her size by being one of the smartest and best read. Inspired by the voices of Tolstoy and Flaubert, Anne Sexton and James Dickey, she developed an impassioned sense of the theatrical as well as a love of the stage. In junior high she spent many an afternoon constructing lavish collages out of magazine pictures, giving them names like, “My Darling, My Hamburger” and “Butterflies Are Free.”

  One November night, Cathy kissed me in the front seat of her father’s purple Toronado, parked in her driveway. I remember that I got scared when her lips parted because she was soft, too soft, not like the kisses I had imagined with the men in my fantasy life. Their mouths would have been closed, a pressing together of lips, a scraping of beards. When Cathy’s tongue left my mouth, I tried placing mine in hers, but she had already pulled away. I looked at her, in the pale green glow of the dashboard lights, touched her on her cheek, and felt a surge of emotion that was decidedly unfamiliar. “I love you,” I blurted out. I had never said it before. I felt like a grown-up character from a wide-screen movie, replete with a lush soundtrack.

  After our kiss and my declaration, Cathy and I were inseparable—between classes, after school, on weekends, the two of us let loose in whatever vehicle Cathy’s father happened to have on loan from the car dealership where he was head salesman. I told her I loved her again and again. We sent poems back and forth. In a yellow Thunderbird we parked alongside autumn fields and discussed Bob Dylan and Dylan Thomas. We sang Simon & Garfunkel and James Taylor and the Fifth Dimension, our blue Coupe de Ville swerving lanes in a frenzy to acknowledge the first few bars of “Up-Up and Away” on the car radio.

  Some months later, we both got jobs at the Cinemart, a fancy neighborhood movie theater that still sold assigned seats. I was a true usher, tuxedo and all. Cathy was the candy girl, in a dirndl skirt. We mischievously stole candy and made out in the storeroom behind huge plastic bags of popcorn. Cathy and I foiled our boss’s ability to prove inventory shrinkage by removing one solitary Junior Mint from each tiny box, slowly amassing little mountains of the chocolate candy, which we consumed in peals of laughter on our way home.

  On two occasions, we told our parents we were shopping at the mall on a Saturday, then drove 180 miles round-trip to New York to see Broadway shows with Lauren Bacall and Katharine Hepburn, lunching at Sardi’s, praying no one would think to investigate the odometer.

  And so it went, this madcap teen romance, all impulse and indulgence until a voice intervened and my old fear crept up my back like a poison vine. No matter how I tried, I couldn’t force a sexual interest in my new best friend. All I was able to write in my journal about it was “I hope something changes soon,” as if this predicament I had been in for years was now like a stubborn winter freeze that had held on into May. I blamed my dilemma on the lack of a soundtrack. “If only there was music,” I wrote, with a slow pen, darkening the letters over. Cathy was attentive, her kisses ardent, but my eyes unquestionably burned with visions of men.

  As winter settled in during my final year of high school, and the anniversary of Cathy’s and my first kiss came and went, I panicked and pulled away. The more she sensed a retreat, the more Cathy would accommodate. She showed me her diary, which contained, in tiny, delicate scrawls, a listing of what she had eaten each day, what movie, if any, we had seen, and if I had kissed her. Day after day, the litany ran on: shrimp cocktail, Butch Cassidy, baked potato, lobster bisque, Midnight Cowboy, kissed behind the school, at my locker, rhubarb pie, The Royal Hunt of the Sun, fried chicken, The Sterile Cuckoo, in the car, True Grit, behind the ear, Bonnie and Clyde.

  I came to realize that while telling Cathy I loved her and that she and I would always be together was the greatest mistake of all, it had become unavoidable. What choice did I have after the day she bought me tickets to Hair, plus seven Streisand albums, including Simply Streisand and Je m’appelle Barbra, thereby completing my collection? At Christmas she had presented me with a storybook of our romance, complete with poetry and collages. I knew that I loved Cathy as a friend, but not like in the movies. Whether it was the absence of a film score or Panavision, I decided I had to say something.

  On Valentine’s Day, the air rife with expectation, I took Cathy aside by the lockers, handed her a bouquet of tiny pink roses and told her that I couldn’t go on bearing the responsibility of a boyfriend-girlfriend relationship.

  “But do you still love me?” she asked.

  “Not in that way,” I stammered. “Just as a friend, I guess.”

  Her eyes welled up but not a tear escaped. Though I had never seen her cry before, I saw now that she wore her grief in fathoms and leagues, that her eyes had stockpiled years of disappointment, of rejection, but that she had, until now, refused to let them break. When enough silence had passed, I couldn’t bear it anymore and simply walked away.

  We spoke the next day over the telephone while I was on a break from work on her day off. I imagined her eyes, wet and dark. I saw her room, the closet packed with lacy floral skirts. I heard Laura Nyro in the background singing “New York Tendaberry.” Cathy’s voice, normally gentle and even, was pinched along the edges.

  “What did I do?” she asked me.

  I looked outside the phone booth where snowflakes as big as quarters and as wet as her kisses were turning to giant droplets as they hit the glass wall and struggled for just the right word, as if the wrong one would annihilate us both. Anything not to hurt her, anything to remove from her more burden, more doubt, to quell my ever-mounting guilt.

  “It’s me, not you,” I replied. “It’s all me.”

  Of course she didn’t get it. “But I must have done something!” she insisted, unwilling to let me go. “What can I do?” Her voice became whiny. “It’s because I’m fat, right?”

  “You’re not fat,” I countered quickly. “Don’t do this to yourself.”

  After the matinee that day she appeared, even though I had begged her not to. She stood in the parking lot, under the glare of orange lights, a half-sculpted clay figure in a camel coat. By now the sky had darkened and the snow landed on her head and shoulders, staying there in perfect formation. Her long thin hair was parted in the middle and covered with icy frost.

  I approached her because there was nothing else I could do, hugged her awkwardly, and she lay her lips against my collar. In our bulky overcoats, we couldn’t even feel each other. When we pulled away, I watched her eyes fill. I walked her back to her car. Neither of us spoke.

  She drove off, a translucent figure behind fogged windows, and I began to cry, thinking of her, tucked behind the wheel, and about her diary of kisses and films and food. I sat myself down on a concrete parking-lot divider when my sobs choked me, twisted in my cape. From my woolen confines, I made a solemn promise. No matter how I felt, and no matter what I thought, I would never say “I love you” to another girl.

  High school ended. We went our separate ways, but remained constant friends through letters and occasional phone calls. I found that life did, in fact, supply a kind of soundtrack. I fell in love with a boy named Michael. And then another named Nick. And later a significantly older man named Bob. I learned that sex and love could be mutually inclusive, and I learned that while love could hurt, it was always worth the experience. I also experimented with a few girls along the way—it was the seventies, after all.

  When I told Cathy I was sleeping with boys, I sensed her relief through the telephone wires, as though the one missing chip of a jigsaw puzzle had finally found its home. She passed no judgment. She said she still loved who I was. In this, she was constant.

  We saw each other through the revolving door of each other’s love lives, confiding back and forth the titillation of new affairs, the tribulations as they arose in longer-term relationships, the eventual heartbreaks and oftentimes complica
ted denouements and disengagements. After college, Cathy lived in England, and years later met Greg, a warm and sweet-natured hippy who stuck around long enough to teach her vegetarian cooking and the joys of tantric sex, but not long enough to help her raise their son, Hanlon.

  Labor Day, 1989. A white-hot Los Angeles morning. Even in our Santa Monica apartment five blocks from the Pacific, Jim and I could feel the baking Santa Ana heat battering at the blinds. We were lying back on our bed, after some enjoyable sweaty lovemaking. The phone rang.

  “Get it,” Jim said, nudging my thigh.

  “You get it.”

  “No.”

  “Well, then let the machine get it.”

  “I hate that. Go get it.”

  “I’m covered with sticky you,” I whined.

  “So here’s a towel.”

  “No, I like sticky you. I don’t want to get up.” I rubbed my stomach.

  The machine clicked on: You have reached Philip and Jim. We can’t come to the phone right now. Please leave a message after the beep…

  The voice at the other end was sweet, quiet. Perhaps a tad breathless and hesitant: Hi, guys, listen. I don’t know how to say this but I’ve thought and thought about it. I know I couldn’t do this for anyone else, but I really think if you want, I mean, I think I would be able to be the biological mother for you guys. I mean, if you really want to raise a kid. One of your own, you know. I know it sounds crazy, but if you are into it, call me. Let’s talk.

  We froze, and then in one move, both of us bounded to the phone, but by the time we had disentangled ourselves from the bedclothes, the caller had hung up.

  “Who was that?” Jim asked, knowing full well, but seeking confirmation anyhow.

  “It was Cathy,” I replied, in a half voice. I grabbed for the receiver with a gummy hand and dialed madly. “It was Cathy.”

  “So…whose jism?” Jim asked me as we were brushing our teeth after returning Cathy’s phone call. We had been discussing adoption for nearly a year. Now, Cathy’s shocking offer was forcing us into an entirely new arena of conversation. Basking in the fantasy of having a biological child, something I had not seriously considered before, I simply assumed Jim would take it for granted we would use my sperm. Cathy was my friend first and since she and I had briefly even been actual lovers, after high school had ended—fleeting though those encounters had been—it made sense that I would supply the requisite X or Y chromosome. I sensed us heading for a Really Serious Talk.