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“Ed,” Yusuf cries, “you look so sexy!” Ed looks up without bothering to act surprised. Won’t he resent this obvious lie when he sees himself in the mirror? He tips forward without changing his expression and the tears flow. Yusuf says with complete conviction, as though he hadn’t said it before: “Ed, you look so sexy!” He says it with joy: “Ed, you look so sexy!” Ed wears a questioning expression, and I can see that maybe he doesn’t look so bad. Yusuf says, “You look so sexy,” and I wonder if he is becoming demented. He says, “Ed, you look so sexy,” and Ed brightens a little. Ed does not look so bad, the shape of his head is fine, his features sculptural. His ears protrude, but that’s okay. Yusuf speaks with wonder and Ed begins to smile. “Ed, you look so sexy.”
Later that day we see animated dinosaurs, scaly and reptilian, on TV, and Yusuf says they look sexy. I wonder if Ed notices, but Yusuf’s credibility stays high.
Life is an intolerable burden if you have no idea what to do with it. I was a writer, but not the writer I needed to be. For that I had to become a different person. I thought the answer was Ed and maybe it was. He and I belonged together: the pressure of a more coherent self would have been intolerable. My loneliness had the taint of corruption. Was it part of an act? Displaying my deformity like a beggar in order to gain a penny? Ed’s seemed to me pure, stark, without context, without audience, as though pain were certainty—as though having pain were the same as having certainty. What is the right question to ask about a life? Ed exploded in rages he did not understand. His fury struck like dangerous weather. War in all directions, all against all. Our dog, Lily, crawled onto my lap and trembled as he stormed above, his features distorted or perhaps revealed.
On June 21, 1975, he found his first glory hole: “Hanging by my hands from the top of the stall, my legs rattled, I came hard in quick explosions. Bob, I collapsed inside from excitement.” Has anybody adequately described the sheer boredom of promiscuity? I did not have Ed’s patience, although I admired it. He waited in bars, waited at the baths, waited in sex clubs, waited in parks, waited at parties, waited for the orgy to begin. Someone’s outraged boyfriend burst through the door: the swarming limbs absorbed him but then the bed collapsed. He had an affair with a whole family. He had a fling with the Macy’s Persian-rug buyer on a stack of rugs in the storeroom, and with an obese man—it tickled him to agitate so much flesh with so small a button. “He came one little squirt, it sat on his belly, so little and innocent.” Where was I? Walking Lily perhaps. Her piss glimmered under the streetlights and raced down the sidewalk, a glittering stream. The streetlights exercised a principle of order, gathering buildings and trees flatly out of the darkness and into the inky, stately night. I passed a house where a stereo played a love song I knew, conventional lyrics, obvious, a melody climbing predictable changes, and it flooded me with longing.
By 1978, our marriage was so open it no longer included me. We broke up in November. Was my reason Ed’s reason? Neither of us wanted to relinquish the bedroom, so Ed made a pallet on the floor. There we were, sharing our unconscious hours yet too angry to speak or touch, except once—as if we had just made the jolting discovery of the other’s body. Ed whispered in a rush of caresses, “It’s a body to fuck and suck.” Then we lay together, drifting into bitter thoughts, the connection becoming arbitrary that overwhelmed us minutes before. I moved out for a few months to give Ed time to organize his departure and stayed with my friend Denise. It rained constantly. Somehow rain leaked down the electrical cord, over the bare light bulb, and trickled to the floor of my cold horrid room.
[feel like it would be funnier if it was like, so open i fell out of it ... better bridging]
Ed seemed to take for granted that we had not loved each other passionately. In the park in 1979, he told me that Skip, my replacement, was the first person he ever loved. Ed was moved to tears by his own feelings. To my expression, he replied, “You loved me that way?” I was not sure I did. With Skip, Ed began to laugh with his hand in front of his mouth like a Japanese woman. His life then was as harsh as any obsession with any jerk, and now Skip is dead and Ed is destroyed and here I am growing angry next to his corpse because he is leaving me yet again.
Ed’s cock does not look so different from the one he wore when we were together. In 1974 or so, we hitchhiked to Cortes Island in Canada. We slept in an old turkey shed one night. I went inside myself and inside Ed’s tender flesh, I sank my face into it, held him with joyful reverence, the fresh and musty scents—here’s luxury, here’s surfeit. There was straw on the floor, dead weeds poked through the cracks, and old calendars and newspapers from the Depression were pasted to the gray barn-wood planks. The mountain in the window had the same weak texture as the grain in the wood. Ed went into a trance. He luxuriated on his back, occasionally cooing, while my hand grew numb and my arm grew sore performing their seemingly hopeless task. Ed was going through a period of not wanting to come when we had sex in the morning. He liked to be held in my mouth for as long as possible. All my inner necessity drained into boredom and exasperation. I wanted to cry to heaven at the injustice, to lift my tired hands and face to the highest court: Where is my union contract, my forty-hour week, my coffee break? My tongue moved slightly or just pressed. It was like praying. He did not want to go beyond his self-control. After he finally came—an orgasm I knew almost as well as my own—and the jolts of pleasure subsided, he asked, round-eyed, “Are there still turkeys here?”
lol
We ate in silence in the glass-walled café right on the ocean and I felt estranged from Ed, bored by him, moved by him. I thought understanding did not exist between Ed and me, but now I wonder what understanding means. By now I mean this minute. Did it mean safety, like an insurance policy that covered the unreality in me? I was looking for intensity, wonder—but as places to arrive, not points of departure. I was a dead end to myself, banished from the present, and I wanted to find in Ed something to latch on to that was outside my egotism and fear, my threadbare relation to the world—a leap through Ed into lyric time. There were many things to wish for so the world felt huge. The beach was as boring as a hallway in an office complex. I walked behind Ed at my slower pace, testing and questioning my tenderness for his body and life.
I was absolutely serious about ballet but only for a short time when I was in high school. I fell in love with ballet when I saw still photographs of dancers in Look magazine, and I decided to take classes. I loved the purity of it, the simplicity: these are the steps, this is how you do them. And I loved the discipline. The students were so young, just kids, and they would work and work and work without knowing whether they were ever going to make it. I can get very bitchy when I have grad students who seem completely relaxed about their writing, this thing they supposedly care about and hope to make a career of. I say, I’ve known twelve-year-olds who put more into a ballet class than you’ve put into this story.
heh
As Joan Didion and Janet Malcolm and many others have suggested, what writers do when they write about other people is often unconscionable. People normally don’t want you to write about them, and if you decide you’re going to do it anyway, the important thing is not to lie about it, to yourself or anyone else. At one point I was planning to write about a relationship I’d had with someone many years before. This person had been my shrink, and we ended up together. But I found out that he’d since married and had children. Knowing this changed my mind. I couldn’t be sure how what I wrote might affect his family, and that was important to me. As Elizabeth Bishop said to Lowell after she read drafts of the poems in which he included quotes from Hardwick’s letters to him, “Art just isn’t worth that much.”
my gender-essentialist theory!!
People often ask me how I could have lived all those years as I did, so precariously. Meaning putting all my hopes in a literary career, never having a job to fall back on, and not having a family. If writing didn’t work out, what kind of life would I have? I sometimes think about how my father had a gambling problem—thankfully it was not out of control, but it was real—and I wonder whether I inherited that. Because it really was a big gamble I was taking, and I suppose losing would have been terrible. Some people might call it optimism, but I’ve never been an optimistic person. I just refused to give up because I really, really wanted to write. One thing about gamblers is that they do not need to have confidence in order to keep going. They get off on thinking, I’m going to win this. And denial was also a part of it. As that shrink I was with used to say, denial is very useful. Without denial, you’d never be able to keep your head down and do the work.