It was about a month after we started dating that I decided my boyfriend was gay.
"I'm not gay," he told me, resting his hands on one knee in a way that looked both professorial and (was it just me?) kind of gay.
I had arrived at his Dallas apartment after a three-and-a-half-hour drive from my place in Austin. It was a trip spent singing out loud to the Xanadu soundtrack, blotting lipstick only to reapply it, and letting my mind gallop ahead into paranoid, no-win corners. What if I get there, and he hates how I look? What if I hate how he looks? It was still early in our relationship, that uncertain window of time when the possibility for something terrible and amazing
exists in equal measure. We might get married and have kids! He might harvest my kidneys! As I drove along, tapping out a drum beat on my steering wheel, I would cook up some airbrushed cinematic fantasy — his tongue tracing the soft curves of my inner thigh — only to watch the frame blister up and be replaced by him listening to the Goo Goo Dolls, reading kiddie porn and wearing the world's most asinine Hawaiian shirt. I hate to brag, but I have a special gift for worst-case scenarios. Eventually my boyfriend came up with a word for this. He called me the catastrophist.
"So why do you think I'm gay?" he asked, rolling up a sleeve of his tasteful button-down.
Argh. It involved his neighbor passing me in the hall on the way up the stairs, giving me a funny look. It involved his fine taste in furnishings. It involved a personal history of falling for gay men. It involved the nagging disappointment I felt every time I arrived at his door, and he kissed me politely, and failed to throw me belly-down on the bed, rip off my panties and trace his tongue along the soft curves of my inner thigh. It involved him offering me a glass of red wine. It involved the wine having a nice label.
Okay, I didn't think he was gay, exactly. But I had this queasy, extrasensory feeling that something was wrong, and the gayness bubbled up into my head. It's like when I'm getting on an airplane, and I have to call my mom and tell her that if the plane crashes, someone needs to feed the cat. It's like when I drove to Alaska, and I told my best friend how to handle my funeral.
"I can't have this conversation with you," she would tell me.
"Okay, that's fine. Just bottom line? No open casket."
These miserable scenarios are like a ticking time bomb in my back pocket, and passing them off to someone else relieves the anxiety. Of course, very few people want to be gifted with a time bomb.
My boyfriend laughed. He swirled his Cabernet so that it streaked a purple halo onto his glass. "I'm not gay," he said. "But I think you're possibly a little bit crazy."
At least we could agree on one thing.
I've written before in this column about the agony of breaking up, of the ways love can disappoint when it runs out of breath. But sometimes just as agonizing is falling in love. There is a temporary insanity induced by the nerves, the distraction, the hoping and not-knowing and fearing. Months later, spooning on the couch during a Grey's Anatomy marathon, all of it may seem so quaint and funny. But falling in love is scary and bewildering. It's like hoping for a kiss and bracing for a slap, puckering up even as you wince.
A month earlier, I had started dating Lindsay. We'll call him Lindsay, because that's his real name. I met him at my high-school reunion in Dallas, and somewhere between the smoke breaks we kept sneaking and the wine we kept knocking back we wound up groping each other near an outdoor water fountain. The next day I was surprised to discover the blouse I had worn was ripped. And also, that I wanted to see him again. For six months, until I finally moved in with him, we took turns on the monotonous 180-mile stretch of asphalt that separated our apartments. Sometimes I gave him updates from the road, just to have something to keep me awake. "I've passed the giant turkey billboard but I haven't seen the dancing frogs, so I should be there in, like, forty-five minutes."
Lindsay and I knew each other in high school, but we weren't friends. There's a funny story about how he was my English-class rival. There's another funny story about how he had braces until senior year, and how I once absently thought about deflowering him. I told those stories at cocktail parties, and it made our relationship seem fated, blessed with a dash of determinism, when in fact, it was unexpected and random and not entirely convenient. I had planned to move to New York. I was applying to grad schools in faraway places. I wanted to fall in love with some dangerous, East Coast artist type, whereas Lindsay was a business-systems analyst who drove a Passat. Even when things went well — and they often went very well — it was hard to trade in what I had imagined for myself for the soft comfort of his cozy apartment, a rented video and a bottle of wine, him snoring lightly beside me. Was it enough? Would anything ever be?
The moment I accused him of being gay became a joke between us. Afterward, we went to some fancy restaurant, and laughed about it over a bottle of wine and few overpriced delicacies. This was our response to most arguments, as it turned out. To boredom and excitement. Our wallets were stuffed with yellow credit-card receipts for amounts we'd rather not think about, the car littered with matches from some new restaurant, some old restaurant, some restaurant we'd been to and forgotten we hated.
We were at our favorite Greek place the first time I remember crying in a restaurant with him. This was months later, and I had just returned from a trip in San Francisco, nose still dappled with sun and starting to flake. I had been kicking hard to get out of Texas in those days, and the trip to San Francisco had reignited my wanderlust. As we nibbled on the last few remaining olives, I blathered on about blue skies and mountains and the crashing Pacific Ocean and he would love it, I said, I just knew he would have to love it.
He sighed. "Can we talk about something else?"
Before the first drop even hit the china, his face had registered my tears. I was actually still thinking that perhaps the dim amber lighting hid my glassy eyes, but then his brow knitted, and he stuck out his lip a bit in sympathy, and the tears really started flowing, even as I tried to choke them back like hiccups, chased with a forkful of Greek salad.
It seemed silly to cry at that moment, at that restaurant, just like it would seem silly every time I found myself crying in restaurants. He was never mean to me. He never said rude, abusive things. But what I heard in his voice, what I felt and
I couldn't date him because he held his taco wrong.
couldn't articulate, what came spilling down my face was this: He would never leave Dallas. We would never stop having this conversation. We would never stop wanting the other to change. We would spend our weekends in these restaurants, holding hands across a table or then sometimes, not holding hands, fiddling with a napkin, scraping a fork across an empty plate.
As it turns out, I was right. But at the time, I thought maybe I was just catastrophizing.
The truth is that I'm not terribly good at falling in love. I'm like one of those people who stands at the top of an amusement-park ride, letting everyone in line go ahead of them, staring down the terrifying precipice and dragging out the painful moments as long as possible. From the moment I started seeing Lindsay, I started hunting around for an escape hatch: I couldn't date him because he lived in another city; I couldn't date him because he wanted to go into advertising; I couldn't date him because he drove a Passat, or held his taco wrong. But I also knew that most of this hysterical flinching was just my way of avoiding the ugly, messy business of falling in love with someone.
Two years later, Lindsay would ask me to move out, and I would come very close to breaking every dish in our house, and I would move to New York, and he would fall in love with someone else. But I didn't know that was going to happen. Well, even if I did know, I was still a little curious how it might unfold.
The waitress picked up our empty plates, careful to avoid my wet eyes. "Can I get you two anything else?"
Lindsay gave me a nervous glance. "I think we'll just take the check," he said, grabbing the tips of my fingers underneath the table.
"Actually, you know what?" I smiled and looked up at her. "Why don't we have another round?"
