Monday, March 10, 2003

Falling in love with a poor man

Excerpts from the semi-autobiographical novel by an anonymous author, as performed at Fray Café 3 at South by Southwest Interactive, Austin, Texas, yesterday:

From the Prologue:

I've stopped going to therapy.

I joke sometimes that the only reason I started seeing a shrink in the first place was so that I would finally have something in common with most of the people I meet at parties. But that's not true.

I started going to therapy because I honestly believed that I needed help sorting out my life. I honestly believe I still do, but I've stopped going to therapy.

Finding a suitable therapist was a chore in the first place. I've dated so many social workers and psychologists, and been friend to so many more, that managing to ferret out the last remaining mental health professional in the tri-state area who wasn't already intimately familiar with at least some aspect of my life was a major coup.

As a testament to their usefulness, I will cheerfully disclose that I found my prize in the Yellow Pages, "therapy" conveniently situated just a few pages south of "tanning." I had consulted the latter category first, having reached the conclusions that my pallid face needed color and that my addled mind needed professional psychiatric help almost simultaneously. The teeny-tiny part of me that is anal-retentive insisted on satisfying these needs alphabetically.

Besides, tanning is cheaper and requires somewhat less introspection.

I selected Dr. Linda Voller to be my guide back to Well-Adjusted Land on the basis of a time-tested criterion: she had the most tasteful and attractive advertisement in the directory. It was on this single qualification that I had chosen my last mechanic, barber and florist and I had been pleased with the results in all three instances. I was therefore not adequately prepared for Linda.

She greeted me at the door of her office wearing a pant suit that was impossibly pink, a shade of the color just this side of radioactive that left such an impression on my retinas that when I recovered sufficiently to examine my new doctor more completely, everything from her hair to her high heels (both of which were, I noticed, bright white) was bathed in a sort of rosy glow, an effect that was, at once, both comforting and disquieting.

* * * *

Anyway, I've stopped going to therapy. The cessation of treatment has nothing (well, little) to do with Dr. Linda's dress sense. I've stopped going to therapy because Dr. Linda Voller has succeeded, if not in leading me to the Promised Land of Mental Well-Being then at least putting my feet on the correct path toward it and giving me a swift kick in the seat to send me on my way.

It took only two sessions.

Dr. Linda listened attentively to two fifty-minute monologues as I recited my litany of woes, took (as near as I could tell) only a page and half of notes, and then, at the end of our second meeting told me something so patently obvious that in retrospect, it was easy for me to miss.

All of my problems, on some level, have to do with either clothing or music.

I could have saved myself hundreds of dollars, and the health of my retinas, by simply asking any random gay man who happened by. The diagnosis would have been the same.

* * * *

I am essentially an optimist and a romantic, and I am gay. It therefore probably goes without saying that my record collection is heavily weighted with original Broadway cast albums, collections of torchy ballads and the obligatory chart hits and disco. It is music predisposed toward cheerfulness, sunny attitudes about love, moon, June and boys with bodacious pecs. But I also own a small assortment of compact discs which I loosely categorize as "Music I Play to Torture Myself."

You probably know the sort of song I'm talking about. You may have a similar shelf next to your stereo. It is likely only a matter of time before this genre joins album rock and adult contemporary as a hot radio format.

It is the music I play when an affair reaches its inevitable end, and I find myself burrowed beneath the bed sheets, a variety of comfort food and tissue boxes arrayed at my side. It is my-man-done-done-me-wrong ditties. It is here-I-go-making-the-same-mistake-again harmony. It is music to mope by.

The Man Who Got Away. The Man I Love. In the Wee Small Hours of the Morning. "I thought I'd found the man of my dreams, now it seems this is how the story ends, he's gonna turn me down and say 'can't we be friends?'."

But when it comes to love, and love unrequited, and love-just-not-quite-quited, nobody but nobody beats Rodgers and Hart:

If they asked me, I could write a book
About the way you walk and whisper and look.
I could write a preface on how we met
So the world would never forget.
And the simple secret of the plot
Is just to tell you that I love you a lot.
And the world discovers, as my book ends,
How to make two lovers of friends.

Well. Nobody asked me, but this is the book I wrote.

* * * *

From chapter eight: "Love in the Time of College"

It was beginning to put on its fall finery, little bits and bangles of amber and orange mixed in amid its leafy greenness. It was certainly there in May when I moved into this room, but I hadn't taken note of it then, or appreciated how perfect it was. It was a perfect little tree, its perfect branches reaching just high enough to still allow me a view of the circle drive, the library beyond and the grassy expanse that separated them.

"Perfect," I thought. Maybe this year wouldn't be so bad after all.

I returned to school that fall hoping to put the preceding two terms far behind me. Academics aside, I had spent my sophomore year growing a beard and sleeping my way though the performing arts department. Neither endeavor had proven very satisfying. This year, I had promised myself, would be different. Better, I hoped.

I considered my newly discovered perfect tree to be a good omen. I had the tree and I had Eric Kendall. I thought Eric was perfect too.

Eric and I had met and become fast friends over the summer break because of a common past: we had both dated Michael briefly, and we had both — at different times and for different reasons — come to the conclusion that briefly was the best way to date Michael. For his part, Michael agreed with both of us.

* * * *

For the first part of the semester, Eric and I were inseparable — where's Brad? He's with Eric. Where's Eric? He's with Brad. We were quickly becoming not just friends, but best friends and it was quickly becoming the worst kept secret on campus that I was falling in love with Eric. Everyone knew it. Everyone but me and, I thought, Eric.

When I finally figured it out myself, I took, as usual, my own good time deciding how to proceed. Eric had gone home to Dallas for the midterm break and I resolved when he returned to put my cards on the table. I suggested lunch at a downtown restaurant, he accepted and I was mere moments from putting our friendship to the test with a profession of my love when Eric beat me to the punch, professing his instead. But not for me.

I switched gears from doting suitor to enthusiastically supportive friend with astonishing, if not convincing, speed. "That's wonderful," I lied, smiling wanly.

The next few weeks were as predictable as the last. Where's Eric? He's with James. Where's Brad? He's in his room, listening to Rodgers and Hart.

* * * *

We met walking along separate paths, me from my office in the BT after a marathon writing session and a budget meeting that had revealed more holes in our rundown than copy, Eric from a rehearsal at the arts complex.

The snow from the past week's unexpected storm was nearly gone and the wind had left with it. We talked for a while in the brisk winter air about our respective "days from hell" — small talk that revealed nothing. Then we hugged. We hugged for a long time and I, feeling awkward, pulled away, intending to mumble something about an exam to study for and then head back to the dorm. But something in Eric's eyes stopped me. Well, something in his eyes and something in my mind.

I pulled away. It was me. It was the first time. It was the first time I had stopped hugging Eric before he stopped hugging me. It was a little thing. It said a lot.

"We should talk," he said.

"I guess we should."

We walked to the Brown, took a table by the fire and over countless rounds of beer, we talked for three hours. And said absolutely nothing.

* * * *

When Eric knocked and swung open the door, it shattered finally and mercifully the bare concentration I'd been able to muster for the presentation. He threw his jacket casually over the chair by the closet and jumped up on my bed. "What are you working on?" he asked.

"Nothing," I said, quickly saving my work and switching off the computer monitor. I pushed my chair back from the desk and tilted it to recline with my feet propped up beside him.

We made small talk about one-acts and the weather and his new apartment and then allowed the silence to grow around us. Eric took off his glasses and placed them on my desk, shifting to prop himself on a pillow and meet my eyes.

"I'm staying," he said. "Is that OK?"

The thirty-six conversations I'd rehearsed in my head for this moment when it arrived were no longer available to me. I switched off the desk lamp and joined him on the bed.

* * * *

That night, for all of its awkwardness and questions raised in my mind that I was convinced would be answered in good time, was wonderful. So wonderful, in fact, that in the time distant from it, I have elevated and expanded that single night to represent an entire relationship, a template to which I made the next six weeks adhere. So wonderful that I have spent the rest of my life contriving to find ways and to create situations that would again make a man say to me, "I'm staying. Is that OK?"

* * * *

I arranged to arrive back from Christmas break a full two days early. There was work to be done on the paper, and if I rearranged the furniture in my tiny room four times in those days, I can excuse it for wanting everything to be perfect when Eric returned from Texas.

Everything was perfect, precisely the same as it had been four months ago when I first took note of the tree outside my window, now bare of leaves and — had I bothered to think about it — just as much an omen now as then.

Something had happened over the Christmas break. That much was clear the moment he walked through the door. One of us had come to his senses. The other one was me.

Eric said it with a finality that implied he thought it was exactly what I wanted, a belief that we had the tacit understanding that this had all been well and good and great fun but well, heck, gosh and shucks, now it was time to get serious and get back to the business of being such good friends.

"It was just a moment in the woods," he said, pulling me close and hugging me tightly. "Our moment," he whispered in my ear. I wanted to say something to him, the drama queen in me frantically racing ahead in the script to find the proper response that would make him take his jacket off again and stay with me, for that day and the day after that and the day after that and so on.

But there was nothing else to say, no coda, no counterpoint. The handsome prince doesn't stay in the woods with the baker's wife, not for long. They both have lives in the real world to which they must return. In the real world, the baker's wife and the handsome prince are just very good friends.

I held on tight, but I knew how the scene was supposed to end. This time, Eric stopped hugging first, as it was and as it should be. He flashed me a toothy grin, said "I'll see ya later," and walked out the door.

For the next two weeks, I moped. I felt like the subject of an Oliver Sacks study: The Boy Who Mistook Abiding Affection for Love. How could I have so badly misread Eric's intentions, or my own? I had played both basketball and life long enough to understand what a rebound was, and yet when this man caromed off the glass and landed in my arms, I was naive enough to believe that I wouldn't have to pass him eventually, credited only with an assist in his life and a foul in mine.

But sports metaphors weren't my style and neither were they Eric's. We were show queens. It was a moment in the woods, he'd said. Our moment.

The problem, I eventually figured out, was that Eric and I had too much in common.

Relationships wear out and people break up all the time for that reason, but it slips by them. "I don't know why," they'll say. "It just wasn't right." That isn't the problem. The problem is that it's too right. In divorce papers, quarreling couples cite "irreconcilable differences" to justify their parting. Eric and I had, as near as we could discover, almost exactly the same likes and dislikes, friends and enemies, sense of dress and sense of humor. Our intimate relationship ground to a screeching halt not for irreconcilable differences. It was our irreconcilable sameness that got in the way.

Love — passion — requires just that: an unquenchable passion to discover the other person, to delight in a newfound curve to the back as he lies sleeping with the glee of giddy exploration, to let oneself be introduced to new ideas, challenges, pastimes and pleasures that are foreign to you but old hat to him. And vice versa.

Eric and I had virtually nothing of our own that was terra incognita to the other. As we discovered, or rather rediscovered, as lovers we lacked the diversity to make the exploration sustainably interesting.

As friends, however, we were perfectly qualified.

Perfect.

Just like that stupid little tree.