well, that happened
Wednesday 10 March 2004 | I like a cookie
[Warning: adult content, though possibly not nearly as racy as Gay Vampire Porn.]
So after about two and a half hours of flagrant, torrid necking &c., the Film Critic and I, who both needed to pee, clambered into the front seat of the Honda. The moon was as bright as the sun, and all the windows were fogged. We looked at each other, buttoning up our jeans and repairing various damages to our hair. “Well,” I said with mock aplomb, “that happened!”
Since then, everything has had this edge of surreality, of the “the moving walkway is now ending” variety. For instance, we had a stand-up comedienne of a stewardess on the flight to Kansas City, who rewrote the boring “now we give you a bunch of pointless things to do as you hurtle screaming toward your certain doom” speech, in part as follows: “Please place the mask over your large nose and mouth, and breathe like you’ve never breathed before. Though the plastic bag will not inflate, be assured that you are receiving nitrogen. Um, I mean oxygen. If you are seated with a child or a person acting like one, we ask you to secure the mask for yourself first, and then help your husband.” And so forth.
On the left window of the airplane were northern lights, bluegreen and evanescent, stretching the length of the journey from Chicago to Hartford. In my head was the Film Critic making paisley verbal love to me in French, but with difficulty, because my index finger was stroking the roof of his mouth, the entree to his brainstem and the place where the words live.
And even before flying thousands of miles above the glimmering cities of North America in a thinly disguised sardine tin, there is a pleasant but bizarre hour or two spent in the Albuquerque INS office. CNN and US News (”the colored paper”) are inescapable, as are giant framed photographs of Ashcroft and Dubya, and I learn, among other things: that they fished Spaulding Gray out of the East River, dead at 62 [no!]; that Martha Stewart is about to be burnt as a witch; that Kerry is at present ahead of Bush, unbelievably, but don’t worry Nader will soon take care of that; and that I can still smell the lingering fragrance of the Film Critic on my hands, to my mingled horror and lust. When I go into the loo to take care of this, albeit with some regret, a tiny unchaperoned girl of maybe 5 or 6 greets me brightly: “Hi!!” I love it when kids are still at this age where they don’t realize it’s not necessary or perhaps even advisable to introduce yourself to strangers in public restrooms. “Um, hi!” I reply with as much returning cheer as possible, and close the bathroom stall door, and collapse briefly against it.
Out in the waiting area M. wears a nerdy dark blue sweater vest and a white shirt, and I tease him, saying he looks like he’s dressed for a spelling bee. He laughs nervously and we watch CNN as a young political commentator, an adolescent version of Stephanopolous in a bowtie, gives his baby-faced, clean-cut, right-wing opinion of the election campaign. M. stares at him and then says, You just know he was up all night snorting coke. In a hotel room with teenaged hookers, I add helpfully. We immediately slide into dramatization, one of the few things we do effortlessly: “Get out! Just get the fuck out!” hisses M., scrambling for his imaginary bowtie, late for his CNN interview. “But mister, you ain’t paid us yet,” I whine. M. looks tall and dark and thin and devastatingly beautiful, like an Indian Fiennes; and I sit next to him breathing shallowly, a public smile affixed to my face, my pubic, pelvic mind full of dark flickering slices or stills, the Film Critic’s face in the moonlight, knowing and yet still inconnu, his tongue indecent in my ear, him leaning me up against the Honda and, with a single swift vehement movement, yanking my hips up to fit tightly against his.
M. was asked repeatedly if he lived with me at the address given, and he said yes, yes, yes. Neither of us is dwelling upon this blood-chilling fact. Among others.
A shred of memory suddenly surfaces, of the Film Critic saying hoarsely something like, I want to do terrible things to you. What did you have in mind, I manage to get out in between amphibian pulsings. Oh, something to make you arch your back and scream at the top of your lungs, he replies, slavering on my neck. After a long pause, he adds: And then to do it again. Which he then goes on to repeat thrice more (oh believe me I was counting), each pause becoming more redolent than the last.
So how it did all get so out of control so fast, like the sexual equivalent of Reservoir Dogs? How did all these shocking lascivious things manage to happen, carnally parallel to Tim Roth sobbing in Harvey Keitel’s arms, both of them lying on the garage floor in an ever-widening scarlet pool of their own blood? How did I, in a matter of mere weeks if not days, go from Oh yeah I sorta like the Simpsons too, to Oh God take me now? I keep trying to tell myself sternly how Stupid we both just were; and then that groin-matching slam comes to mind unbidden, and him saying I just need to know what you smell like, and how it all went Andromeda from there. The slow buttery metallic galvanizing of his hand on my inner thigh. Ah, so now I know how to make you forget what you were saying, he breathed. The befuddled henid trying to become a thought in my brain was something like, Yes, but is that a good thing? As he once wrote, who am I, who would I be without my constant background Hans-Zimmer-chorus of compulsive verbalization? And another thing he said which I now can’t remember, only the implication that it could take a really long time, hours and hours possibly, to accomplish our objectives properly, and stating his apparent willingness to make the investment necessary to achieve this, eventually, but not yet. Because I am MARRIED. Oh creamed chipped Christ on toast.
So I return to what I know, which is writing. And renumerate to myself the few tattered things of which I still feel certain: he’s deeply sane, he’s funny as hell, and he’s not afraid to push me around a little, both verbally and physically. He understands why I can’t do anything without narrating it, and he narrates too, so what if he has small eyes (and small other things) and is maybe a half-inch shorter than I am and doesn’t inhabit his body in the same way that even M. does. It occurs to me that I’ve been having sex for seven years with a totally gorgeous, washboard-stomached, semi-anorexic, body-fascist gay guy, and it’s probably going to be a severe reality check to be with an average, half-in-shape, not perfectly proportioned dude again.
Which brings us back to M. My imploring struggling suffering semi-spouse, who wandered Central Avenue briefly with me (a perfect sunny 80 degrees, during which I had to keep my uncomfortably warm scarf on because I wasn’t sure what kind of shape the skin of my neck was in) visiting used bookstores, in one of which I bought a copy of Me Talk Pretty One Day, which is actually for the FC before he goes to Paris, but I’m currently laughing myself sick over it:
There are, I have noticed, two basic types of French spoken by Americans vacationing in Paris: the Hard Kind and the Easy Kind. The Hard Kind involves the conjugation of wily verbs and the science of placing them alongside various other words in order to form such sentences as “I go him say good afternoon” and “No, not to him I no go it him say now.” The second, less complicated kind of French amounts to screaming English at the top of your lungs, much the same way you’d shout at a deaf person or the dog you thought you could train to stay of the sofa. Doubt and hesitation are completely unnecessary, as Easy French is rooted in the premise that, if properly packed, the rest of the world could fit within the confines of Reno, Nevada.
Hoping I might learn through repetition, I tried using gender in my everyday English. “Hi guys,” I’d say, opening a new box of paper clips, or “Hey, Hugh, have you seen my belt? I can’t find her anywhere.” I invented personalities for the objects on my dresser and set them up on blind dates. When things didn’t work out with my wallet, my watch drove a wedge between my hairbrush and my lighter.
And M. trailing me, asking helplessly, I don’t want to lose you, is there anything I can do to get you back. I left him as gently as I could, standing tearfully on the concourse, and went through security, numb and exhausted and relieved and incarnadine. The Professor talks about doing things in the right order, and I don’t think this is it. I was so late to the gate they were calling my name over the loudspeakers. “You just wanted to feel popular,” the ticket lady teased me. “So did it work?” I looked at her in one of those suddenly-human spasms of honesty. “No, I don’t feel very popular.” But everyone on the plane laughed and greeted me by name, in unison, when I boarded. So maybe I’m more popular than I realize.
I should mention that Maman’s situation is still uncertain and the bloodwork is not yet back, but she has begun a six-day-long pre-surgery cleansing diet and maybe the surgery will now be as late as the beginning or middle of next week. Mandarin’s words on beauty and sexuality are wiser than anything my besotted brain has managed to think yet. At one point the Film Critic trapped my face in his hands and scrutinized it in the moonlight. My God, he breathed, you’re beautiful. My inner smile was probably wan. He is not beautiful—but he is wild and alive and engaged with this world—and this is worth a great deal to me right now.
And now it is dark and I must stagger back up to Granby (a walk I made with Mandarin on one unforgettable, unseasonably warm January night) and feed salmon to Pippa.
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