Sunday, July 30, 2006

COMING OUT THE FAMILY III:
A DINNER INVITATION and A PHONE CALL...

So the letters went out, and there have been a few responses. One of my younger brothers called and asked to talk to my wife, my cousin who works for the local college sent a valentine of a note offering a spontaneous evening out, a friend in Massachusetts called – in fact was the only call I have ever received while actually IN the apartment – only to have the answering machine AND fax both chime in while he was trying to talk. And I got a call from my local sister inviting me to a late dinner last night. I gratefully accepted.

When I arrived, she was whipping together something bright orange in the kitchen, and offered me a beer. Things went “well enough”, I suppose, but somehow we segued from concern for the changes I would be facing to the remarkable statement: “you certainly managed to fake it for long enough.” That was unpleasant, but worse [maybe] was that along the way she casually admitted that the summer before we got married, she had called my oldest brother and sister to get their help persuading me to call it off. Because, apparently, we weren’t overtly physical enough with each other.

It is to be expected, I suppose, that when you set off a stink bomb in people’s lives, they will return the favor by making you similar offerings in turn. As I lay in bed afterwards, I wondered why I hadn’t gone after her for the “faking it” remark instead of merely politely explaining that there had been particular reasons why we were holding ourselves back while traveling in Europe with the entire family. Because in retrospect, I wanted to tell her [a] what a ghastly thing that was to say, and [b] how hurtful it was, both in no uncertain terms. Maybe verging on “drop dead” or “and what the @#$%& do YOU know?” Because I was not faking it, and never have faked it. There were times when I didn’t feel that our relationship had a future, but what there was, which only two of us can know, was real. But my protestation only brought me the remark that if I was bi, she didn’t see how I was ever going to find one person to satisfy me. Thank you so much.

But it is still curious, how many women now claim to “have seen it all” at the time. My mother worried because my oldest sister and her fiancé let me hang out with them so much the summer they were married, and in fact he DID turn out to be gay. So some women have as much “gaydar” as gay men. And maybe some straight men do as well: my grandfather used to say he could “smell it.” I would still prefer not to hear how many other people knew it would never work, or couldn’t believe it would last as long as it did, or whatever they have kept under their hats for a quarter of a century. There is a grisly joy in the way they unpack it all now.

Well, it wasn’t all bad. We talked and joked and she talked about her three conversational topics: her business, opera, and chocolate. My brother-in-law, who stopped his car in the street to give me a hug when he first saw me after hearing that we were separating, was his usual genial self, though still an engineer with the breed’s somewhat mechanistic view of life. It was an honest attempt to reach out and let me know things were unchanged between us [i.e., no better, but no worse] and that is something to be grateful for.

Here’s the thing. People mean well, they just don’t think about how what they say sounds like to other people. I know they just don’t think. Because I don’t, either.

My eldest sister called in this morning, and reminded me of something that I had completely forgotten about. I went to visit her my senior year in college; she had just moved off a rock-band commune in the North Carolina woods into the worn-down city nearby, where she got a job on the local newspaper. She was living in a second-floor apartment with a rather off-putting cat named Ralph. I remember the visit well. What I had [conveniently?] forgotten, or she has since [conveniently?] invented, was that I had come all the way south to ask her advice about coming out to my parents. She claims to have advised me against it. I certainly don’t remember doing so, but I definitely remembering outing myself to all sorts of other people the summer after my senior year. Like so many things in my life, it seems I have to do this twice to get it right...

Well, it gets weirder. My mother now claims that I spoke to my father then or around then about it, because years later, probably [SURPRISE!] around the time of our wedding, he told her that I had mentioned to him that I wasn’t really sure about myself. Now it seems like the big deal is that I spoke to him and not to her. But as my sister said, she probably couldn’t have dealt with it then. Now she can, in so far as anybody can. Most people seem more upset about the end of our marriage than they are about the reason, which I think shows an unusual degree of sense in the family. OK, aside from a couple of people who are not exhibiting much grace. But then, they never have.

And on the whole, I think we are doing OK. If I can just remember to roll with the punches when they come, and not break down and cry when I find out what people have been saying behind my back for so long, or just saying to me now.

On a more cheerful note:

A couple of months back I decided that my license plate was so close to illegible that I should have it replaced. I had made a special application to have the plates moved to the new car last year, so it seemed sad to give up the plate. So I sent the state $20 and got two brand new plates for it. And I immediately started thinking of them as the “gay” plates, even though the letters and numbers were the same, and had no particular value in and of themselves. I mean, it’s not like they said “GBLT” or “666” or “ANTCHRST” or anything.

And now I have my cropped hair, which everyone seems to recognize as a gay hairdo. Even though it looks more like I had a dog chew it off than some fabulous pair of hands sculpt it into the perfect crewcut. The question is, what’s next? Maybe the fact that I find Augusten Burroughs’ books impossibly romantic. That has to be gay, and I don’t care that my writing buddy Mary is the one who told me how much she loved him.

Anyway, I guess this is the place for a shameless plug for:

RUNNING WITH SCISSORS and

DRY and


Whatever comes next, but stay away from MAGICAL THINKING unless you like recycled magazine pieces.

He's funny. I would like to be able to write like that. No, that’s not quite right; I know I could write like that. I wish I could write with that kind of facility, but without the glistening surface of self-deprecating sarcasm. That seems somehow to mark it as “gay” for all its heart-felt humanity.

Well, I’d really just like to write better than I do... and be able to keep at it better.

2 comments:

  1. What do the new license plates say? In any event, I think you are moving forward in a perfectly good way and things will only continue to get better. Keep blogging. Cariños, Ernesto.

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  2. Because I was not faking it, and never have faked it. There were times when I didn’t feel that our relationship had a future, but what there was, which only two of us can know, was real.

    I hear you.

    And this is what makes ending the marriage and moving on so painful sometimes. It was real. And it's easy for me to kick myself for not being able to keep it real.

    Keep you chin up, brother.

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