Boy Erased (27 page)

“My brilliant idea,” she said, draping the words between us for a few dramatic beats: “
Preachers' Wives Gone Wild
.”

“Like
Girls Gone Wild
?” I pictured dozens of middle-aged women slipping blouses over their heads, perms tangled in fabric, their pale breasts shaking for the camera.

“Wouldn't it be great?” she said. “Your dad would completely lose it.”

“That's crazy.”

“I don't see why I can't make a little money out of God's work.”

This was my mother, the woman who was supposed to support my father in everything he did. What was she thinking? “But that's blasphemy.”

“Is it? Sometimes I can't tell the difference between blasphemy and fun.”

“Oh my God.”

“I guess you can be a little blasphemous, too.”

The waiter came to take our order, and we picked the first items we saw, not even bothering to listen to the evening specials, happy with anything they might bring us. For a moment, my mother's eyes lost their playfulness as she examined my face for the amount of interest I paid to our handsome waiter. I tried not to look at him, even as I felt his warm smile beside me. I knew she would be watching for signs.

After the waiter left, we both leaned in closer to the middle of the table.

“Your dad and I have been married too long for him to think I'll just turn into one of those old preachers' wives,” she said. “The kind that wears ugly denim skirts and smiles at everyone and bats her eyelashes at all the other ladies.” Lit by imitation Old World lighting, my mother was beautiful again. Her blond
hair took on a gold sheen, and the red veins threading her blue eyes receded behind a warmer exterior glow.

I hadn't seen her this passionate in a long time. She looked more like herself, and I was beginning to feel more like myself. I wanted to hold on to this moment: the secular glamour, the gleam in our eyes. LIA was telling me on a daily basis that a loss of self meant a gain in virtue, and a gain in virtue meant I was drawing closer to God and therefore closer to my true heavenly self. But the means to that end—self-loathing, suicidal ideation, years of false starts—could make you feel lonelier, and less like yourself, than you'd ever felt in your life. In the process of purification, you risked erasing every minor detail you'd ever cared about. You became all telling with no showing: not the extraordinary extra, but the stock player in a harp-and-halo bit. I came to therapy thinking that my sexuality didn't matter, but it turned out that every part of my personality was intimately connected. Cutting one piece damaged the rest. I had prayed for purification, but the minute I felt its icy baptismal waters burning away everything I'd ever loved, I'd begun to open myself up, instead, to a former possibility: unconditional love, the original flame that had drawn me closer to God and my family and the rest of the world. I counted, and I didn't count; I was part of a much larger mystery—and my mother had given me all of this the minute I was born.

“Oh, look!” my mother said. She slapped the table with one hand and pointed to the lobby with the other.

Someone dimmed the restaurant lights, and the Peabody
mallards began their waddle from the hotel lobby to the roof, leaving behind puddles of chlorinated fountain water in their wake. Their quacking reverberated along the marble hallway through the quiet restaurant to our booth.

“They've been doing that ever since I was a little girl,” she said, her voice thick with the past.

Those ducks, part of a family line with origins somewhere in the forests of Arkansas. Someone had converted them. Somewhere over the years, those ducks had forgotten the feel of unchlorinated
water.

I
t's almost like having a death in the family,” Barbara Johnson writes in her book
Where Does a Mother Go to Resign?
“But, when someone dies, you can bury that person and move on with your life. With homosexuality, the pain seems never-ending.”

My mother and I had both started reading Johnson's book just after Thanksgiving break, around the time when we'd also started reading
The Picture of
Dorian Gray
together, and we hadn't finished either book. It was March now, only two months before I would attend LIA, and it seemed as though nothing in our lives would ever be complete again until we knew for sure if ex-gay therapy would truly change me. We were putting the world on hold, leaving things half-finished, until the summer.

Johnson's book was being passed around ex-gay circles, mainly to fundamentalist Christian families who had just
discovered that they had a gay child, and it was touted as a healing story. Johnson had heroically met her son's affliction head-on, refused to back down until he admitted it was a sin. No mother should ever have to go through this, her book suggested. No mother should have to feel the pain she'd felt.

“I couldn't get very far,” my mother admitted over the phone. I walked to the couch in the corner of the empty dorm lounge and sat, stared up at the flaking white wall. I was talking on the dorm's landline, the yellow phone tucked between my knees. As usual, I was ignoring homework. What was the use in studying if I couldn't even imagine how my life would turn out? It was possible I wouldn't even have a career if I couldn't change who I was. My parents certainly wouldn't pay for my education and, for all I knew, employers didn't hire gay people.

“Yeah,” I said. “Me neither.”

There was a long pause. A static-filled breeze passed through the line. As often happened, I imagined the virtual space between us as a desert landscape, a single black wire curling in a long S through the glittering sand. It was a mental tick of mine, one of dozens I resorted to in moments when I wanted a situation to seem less frightening. Sometimes, in order to calm my mind at night, I would imagine my mattress falling rapidly down an endless elevator shaft, protected even as I fell.

“We have to answer a few more questions,” my mother finally said. Since I was supposed to submit my supplemental essays electronically, she had decided to complete the primary LIA application for me rather than mail it to me. I had stopped
going home as often in the past few months, claiming that I had way too much homework, though the real reason had to do with the fact that, with LIA approaching, there was very little our family could talk about that didn't feel awkward. The whole process would be quicker if my mother helped me fill out the forms. She'd received some extra questions in the mail, so we were now on the last leg of the application. The process seemed endless; we were now required to attach a recent photo of me to the application, along with an eighty-dollar fee.

I tucked the yellow receiver into my neck. My mother inhaled sharply. “It's asking if you've ever had any physical involvement with other people.”

“No,” I said quickly. There was Brad, of course, the boy on all the sports teams who I'd fooled around with in junior high, but I wasn't about to utter the words “mutual masturbation” to my mother, and the therapist I'd spoken to over Thanksgiving and Christmas breaks had hardly ever taken notes during my sessions, so I thought there was a good chance LIA wouldn't know about Brad. I thought of Chloe. We'd barely kissed, and even when we had, there'd been too much awkwardness to sustain contact for very long. I remembered the overly sweet taste of her mouth, the Doublemint sugar pocketed away in the folds of her tongue, the shudder of fear that passed through my chest each time my tongue met the band of her braces. Why wasn't it considered a sin to treat a nice girl like her so horribly?

I was glad my mother hadn't asked about
wanting
to have physical involvement with other people. I'd recently attended
an art exhibition for a senior art student named Caleb, a tall, broody type in paint-splattered jeans that sculpted his ass so perfectly I couldn't help but pay attention. I'd watched him circle the gallery, illegal glass of champagne in my hand, thinking of the things I wanted to do with him. I'd stepped close to one of his paintings and imagined the brush moving with his deft fingers, those fingers wiping excess paint off with a palette knife and smearing it into ripped jeans, those jeans lying in a pile next to his bed as he slipped into paint-stained sheets. When he circled around to me, I'd said something stupid about all the lush colors he'd used.

“Thanks,” he said, smiling. “You need another glass of champagne.”

“I'm fine.” We were standing in front of a painting entitled
Oedipal Jesus
. Like all of his paintings, this one was a dramatic self-portrait, with Caleb as a crucified Jesus and Mary as a Tori Amos look-alike who held a knife up to Jesus's already bleeding side. I had no idea what any of his paintings were really about, but they all felt highly blasphemous, as if just looking at them might set you on fire.

“I have a private bottle of champagne in my room,” Caleb said. “We can go get it if you want.”

I hadn't answered him, had simply walked over to his next painting and pretended to be overly interested, but I'd thought about what he'd really meant by the offer.

“About how often do you or did you engage in sexual sin with another person?” my mother said.

When I didn't answer immediately, she added, “It has these little boxes I'm supposed to tick. Daily, weekly, monthly, less often. If less often, please explain.”

“Less often,” I said. I tried to find a pattern in the flaking dorm wall, but all I could see were random flakes with no meaning. “As in never.”

“Okay,” my mother said, the tension in her voice leaving for a moment.

Why couldn't they at least paint the walls? It seemed like a huge oversight, leaving the walls so ugly. It made you think ugly thoughts, and those ugly thoughts would inevitably seep into whatever you might do in this lounge.

“It says, ‘I have been involved in the following activities,'” she continued, “and then it has more of these little boxes. Do you want me to read them all?”

“Go ahead.” The receiver felt hot against my ear. I held it away from me as she recited the list, but I could hear the words, tinny as they were, words I had never heard my mother say before and have never heard her say since: “Pornography, compulsive masturbation, voyeurism, mutual masturbation, heterosexual sex, homosexual sex”—each syllable declaring itself in that small room, so that after a few words I began to cup the speaker with my palm, afraid Charles or Dominique, both currently in my dorm room, might hear—“exhibitionism, sadomasochism, bestiality, prostitution, pedophilia, mannish or boyish attire, drag or cross-dressing, telephone sex, anonymous sex, or other.”

So there it was, proof that I was just as bad as David, that I might as well molest a child or start having sex with animals. To hear my mother say these words all together and all at once, to hear the fear and expectation in her voice as she said them, her anticipation of some horrible revelation—it was too much. And though some part of us must have known that this list was bullshit, that there was something terribly wrong with grouping all of these acts under one common denominator, we couldn't battle against it. We didn't know the first thing about untangling this mess of sin.

•   •   •

A
PRIL
PASSED
, I'd had a quiet nineteenth birthday party at a Mexican restaurant with Charles and Dominique and a few other friends, and now it was May, the school year was ending, and we had less than a month to go before I was scheduled to attend Love in Action.

“Why did Dorian treat Sibyl that way?” my mother said one night over the phone, her voice distant. “I don't understand.”

I held the yellow phone in one hand and stood at the dorm lounge window, watching for Caleb's light, the cord draped across the room. My copy of
The Picture of
Dorian Gray
lay on the couch behind me. My mother and I had already given up trying to read the rest of Barbara Johnson's
Where Does a Mother Go to Resign?
The preliminary application had been filed, I had been accepted, and all that was left were a few more
surveys. My mother and I did everything we could to avoid talking about it.

“Dorian cared only about her art,” I said. “She wasn't interesting to him as a person.”

“But she was so nice.”

“Yeah, I guess so. I can see how she might have been a little boring though.”

“That doesn't matter. Being a good person is all that matters.”

For the moment, it seemed like the two of us could go on this way forever, living only for literature and each other. For a moment, it seemed like being a good person was all it took. But love was always moving, always pushing us forward—always in action—and we often had no choice but to submit to where it lead us.

•   •   •

I
SPENT
several weeks as far away from Caleb as possible, taking the long way around the quad to and from classes, though I occasionally passed him in the hallways, and every time this happened, he would send a flirty wink my way. Then, one night in early May, for reasons I can't remember, something drew me to his dorm. It could have been the crushing loneliness I often felt during that period of my life. It could have been the accumulation of all those late nights walking aimlessly up and down Walmart aisles simply because the store was the only place
open twenty-four hours and nobody in there asked too many questions. Feeling too restless to return to my dorm and sleep, I had tried collecting my thoughts out of the hundreds of products shining around me, tried to make sense out of what my life had become. Whatever finally sent me to him, the fact remained: I was now standing in Caleb's room, looking at God.

“This is just a sketch,” Caleb said. “I plan on doing a whole series.”

God was a string of red and pink dots on white canvas. Caleb planned to glue six large canvases together to form a God cube.

“The all-seeing Eye of Providence,” I said.

“What?”

“Every step that you take this great Eye is awake,” I said, reciting the lines to a church hymn I used to sing in our family church. “Every day mind the course you pursue.”

“That's some creepy shit.” Caleb headed toward a cot in the corner of the room. He picked up a small marbled glass pipe and scattered some ashes on the floor.
Drugs
, I realized, a thrill shooting down my spine. This was just what my Sunday school teachers warned me about. But as Caleb placed the pipe on a nearby table, the whole thing felt so much smaller than I'd imagined: a little pipe laid gingerly on a pile of wrinkled papers, set aside for what must be the greater sin I would soon be tempted to commit on the cot. Caleb patted a space beside him on the mattress, and I joined him. I reminded myself that all sins were equal in the eyes of God.

“They really fucked you up, didn't they?” Caleb said. He could see I was shaking. My skin was going to split open.
So here it is
, I thought. Here was the skin I so wanted to shed, vibrating with anticipation. One swift movement from Caleb, and the surface might break, reveal a version of me that had lain dormant beneath my church self so many years. Nothing could have prepared me for this. Not Chloe, not David, not any of the books I'd read.

“Did they tell you this is wrong?” Caleb said, leaning in. I couldn't respond. How could I even begin to explain just how wrong my friends and family back home thought this truly was. His eyes were close now, a flickering blue. The small dorm room contracted to the space between us, and I was watching him through a narrow tunnel, and outside also, watching us lean closer to each other. God was watching, too, and for once I didn't care.

•   •   •

C
A
LEB
AND
I kissed that night, but we didn't make out. We didn't travel any farther than the surface of our lips. Instead, we lay on his cot in the darkness of his room and listened to hours of Björk's “Pagan Poetry” on repeat, our fingers interlocked. The quad lights filtered through his metal blinds, igniting our cheeks, our lips, and then an orange sunrise worked its way through, sliding up the wall opposite the cot, tracing a series of ladders that led nowhere more interesting than where we lay. We had already climbed as far as we wanted to go. By
the morning, I knew every inch of that room, every wadded sheet of drawing paper, every stray piece of charcoal, every wavering brushstroke on the canvas of God. The whole room seemed to have waited for me to join it, to see it for what it truly was: a work of art.

“I've never paid that much attention,” Caleb said, after I'd closed my eyes and recited a list of the objects in the room from memory. “You should be a poet.”

“I don't want to be a poet,” I said. I wanted to be a short-story writer. I wanted stories that sprawled, took on lives of their own. Still, I had chosen to enroll in the only creative writing class of the semester, a poetry workshop. The weekly assignments had proved difficult, usually with me sitting in front of my computer monitor for hours, staring at the blank screen until a rush of frustration produced the thirteen lines my professor required.

“Seriously,” Caleb said. He turned on his side to face me. At some point in the night he had kicked off his paint-splattered jeans, and the white sheet fell from his hip to reveal a smooth patch of skin, the tight V of his pelvis leading to a darkness untouched by the morning sun. I was going to be late for class if I didn't turn away.

“You've got a poetic mind,” he said. It felt like his words were entering me, taking up residence on little hooks I hadn't known were hidden somewhere in my head. My skull was throbbing with the weight of them. It seemed no one had ever
said anything so kind, so true. We were inventing a language for each other, and it was better than any I'd ever tried to use in my Moleskine stories. For a brief moment, I remembered the frustration I'd experienced so many times in my dorm room, moments when words had failed to capture the essence of an idea. I wondered if Caleb had felt the same, mixing his oils night after night, adding circle after circle to his portrait of God. You reached after a perfection that couldn't exist beyond the moment, and when you failed at it—as you inevitably would—you moved on to the next piece of art, the next phase.