Darling (13 page)

I meant what I said to the nun: I will stay as long as she does. I may even stay longer. The Church and I have the same dilemma, really. To wit: “Tradition has always declared that ‘homosexual acts are intrinsically disordered.' [CDF,
Persona humana
8.] They are contrary to the natural law. They close the sexual act to the gift of life. They do not proceed from a genuine affective and sexual complementarity. Under no circumstances can they be approved.” (
Catechism of the Catholic Church,
second edition, copyright 2001. United States Conference of Catholic Bishops. Libreria Editrice Vaticana.)

I can walk away from the bishops' formulation of my “intrinsic” disorder, but the Church cannot walk away from the bishops' formulation, even though some within the Church may be sympathetic toward homosexuals. I know this is supremely boring to non-queers and non-Catholics and readers of Faulkner, but stay a moment and then we will go to Costco. Sexual complementarity is not, obviously, insurmountable, or there would be no problem. I will object with my last breath, however, to anyone denying “genuine affective complementarity” to queers. I would not deny “genuine affective complementarity” to a dog. Or a cat. Or a parakeet. (My aunt had a parakeet named Sanchez. They were devoted to each other.) Or to an apostle.

At the time I write this, the only institution on earth that recognizes my ability to love is Costco. On the Costco registry, I have a spouse.

What I will not countenance is that the Church denies me the ability to love. That is what “affective complementarity” is: It is
love. If that is the Church's position, the Church is in error. Keep the word “marriage.” Let marriage mean one man and one woman. (Sanchez died a week after my aunt died.) But I want a word. How about “love”?

We are gathered here, in the sight of the security cameras at Costco, to witness . . .

What are you smiling at, Darling?

9. An Angel Hovers over the Garden of Eden

Can we do something on Sunday? A movie? A walk?

If not each other's walkers, we were certainly each other's talkers. A professor of mine remarked a good many years ago that the vocal cords are the most reliable, longest-enduring sexual organs. It was the exercise of vocal cords that led us to step over the bodies of our sleeping lovers to drive twenty miles north, to slide into the banquette of the Garden of Eden. A brilliant February morning. A foggy July evening. Your skirt hiked up for driving; your yearly new car.

And you were right, Darling. Going through to the bar was a betrayal, a sudden disinclination for intimacy; boredom with your melancholy; the hope of an early evening. Let's make this an early evening. Darling. Because all of a sudden you were going to say—you did say—that I was pretending to be someone I am not. In fact, Darling, I was pretending to be someone I am. Despite my many sins and shortcuts, I have always been a player—on my mother's side.

A player recognizes other players. I once met a German shepherd who was a player. And so was his dog. Oh, come on, what's wrong now? What should I call you, then? Sweetie? Dulcinea?

I had studied so diligently to become a serious man. I stood in awe of serious, competent men—scholars, janitors, fathers.
But I had as well, at the time of the Garden of Eden, an adolescent anxiety about Chekhovian Sunday evenings, about melancholy, about sex. I had endeavored to suggest to you, Darling, without resorting to scarves or cigarette holders—you just never cared to notice—that I had some interest in the casbah, in people you wouldn't approve of. Obviously I had a fear of the casbah, as well. One foot in. “Darling” seemed to fit the bill.

•   •   •

Exhibit A: I wore a suit and tie; Helen carried a purse—teenage brother and sister standing on the sidewalk in front of the Curran Theatre in San Francisco. We had lunched at Normandy Lane in the basement of the City of Paris. We had used the restrooms at the St. Francis. The future was years ahead of us. We were still an hour early for the Saturday matinee. We looked at the photographs of the cast. A Yellow Cab pulled up to the curb. The back door opened. Cary Grant got out of the cab. I nudged Helen. Cary Grant extended his arm into the cab and handed out Dyan Cannon, whose portrait we had just examined. (Dyan Cannon was playing the female lead in the national company of
How to Succeed in Business Without Really Trying
.) Cary Grant drew Dyan Cannon into an embrace. Dyan Cannon melted somewhat. Cary Grant kissed Dyan Cannon on her lips. We watched. Cary Grant got back into the cab; he rolled down the window. “Bye-bye, darling,” he called as the cab sped away.

•   •   •

I have found that “darling” serves as a signal to women that one's relationship to them is going to be a comic pas, an operetta, a tease. (If that's the signal you caught, Darling, you were not wrong.)

If a woman returns the serve—if she is a willing player—then you've got her where you want her; “darling” is understood: One
is not a sexual player. One is Cary Grant. One has Randolph Scott sewing curtains back at the ranch. “Darling” is the net, not the birdie.

You were not going to join my menagerie of darlings, though, were you, Darling? Just trying you out. Sorry.

Elizabeth Taylor, toward the end of her life, when she could (I imagine) have summoned anyone in the world to dine, spent many evenings at a gay club in West Hollywood, just to be a darling among darlings. She was too fond of life, too fond of people, too shrewd to be shrewd, to retire into mystery.

A favorite darling-ist of mine is Harold Bloom. He's not gay, is he? And yet he darlings like a champ.

But the all-time was Bunny Breckinridge. “Hell-o, darling,” Bunny would purr, straightening the lapels of his silk suit, composing his hands (diamond ring) as if he were leaning forward upon a walking stick—a top-hatted chorister's stance, a top-hatted chorister's patience. Bunny could sit without moving for long periods of time, like someone on stage, which, of course, he had been—he had been on the stage. Every thirty minutes he would sigh a two-tone sigh like an ormolu clock to let you know that he was still there, that he would wait you out. Bunny's mannerisms were as those described in some bad translation of a Russian masterpiece. He giggled suggestively. He squeaked with pleasure. He winked salaciously. Face powder dusted his collar; his rinsed white hair was swept back to a meringue peak at the North Pole, like the hair of one of those puff-cheeked Aeolian figures in the corners of antique maps.

And Bunny could soliloquize. Picture Edith Evans, seated on a stone bench in a painted garden in some Restoration comedy. Dirtier, of course. He once recounted, for reasons that had to do with a diamond cross he wore at his throat, the Passion and Death
of Our Lord Jesus Christ. At the completion of the narrative, huge tears, clotted with powder, rolled down his cheeks. Bunny is the only human being I have ever met for whom the death of Christ had the immediacy of personal tragedy. “He died for our sins, darling,” Bunny confided piteously.

Then you said:
Why are you telling me all this? If men would only listen to themselves sometimes.

I said:
Men? I'm demonstrating the rhetorical uses of “darling”—as if you were my Orals Examiner.

You:
Then as your Orals Examiner, Darling,
I feel I should tell you something important. “Darling” should be intimate; “darling” should be understood, not flung about the room like a stripper's garter. If you feel you really must darling someone in public, and karaoke is not readily available, scribble your sonnet on a napkin and pass it under the table when no one is looking. Don't toss “darlings” around like you are feeding the seals. It is no way to treat a woman.
(Tears.)

•   •   •

Later that same evening . . .

You:
Should we get a room?

I:
What? (Punctuation cannot convey.)

You:
It's late. We could watch a movie.

I:
I think I've seen this movie.

You:
. . . ?
(Judy Garland.)

I:
. . . ? (Houdini.)

You:
You're not interested in women. Say it.

Zorba the Greek:
“God has a very big heart, but there is one sin He will not forgive. If a woman calls a man to her bed and he will not go.”

I:
I am not interested in sleeping with a woman, if that's what you mean. Isn't it odd we say “sleep” when what we mean . . .

You:
Thank you. That is what I mean. Was that so hard?

I:
Yes.

So, just like that, we were over the rainbow. You would continue to explore the pleasures of the natural law. There was a young one, a rich one, a dumb one, a tan—probably gay, we both agreed. And I was free to darling up a storm—a neutered noun twirling about a neon palm tree.

When the time came, I wasn't sure how I should introduce you. . . .

Darling, this is Jimmy, I said.

(Your braceleted arm extended.)

•   •   •

Over time, you stopped making faces; over time, my theatrical affectation became the emblem of our true affection.

You even returned the herring in kind. In a small white bed, in a curtained cubicle, the prongs of the slipped oxygen tube hissing about your throat, you endeavored to show you understood who was holding your hand. With your eyes closed, you raised one finger and whispered:
Darling.

10. The Maternity Ward

The maternity wards of Tel Aviv are in a contest with the maternity wards of Ramallah. Might the future depend—as in the Old Testament—on the number of children your tribe produces? If Ramallah wins, there will be a Palestinian state. Babies are a political force in the world.

For several years, we, in the West, have talked about the future
as a “clash of civilizations,” by which we meant primarily a clash between fundamentalists and secular society. The attacks of September 11 seemed to many Americans to join that clash.

September 11 has prompted me to consider the future in terms of a growing, worldwide female argument with the “natural” male doctorate of the beard—a coming battle between men and women.

In China, men outnumber women. That might be the statistic to think about. One outcome of the one-child policy was that many couples contrived to make their one child a son. The result of the policy—the contrivance, the forced abortions, etcetera—is that China prepares for economic, technological, and military preeminence in the twenty-first century, the rare-earth century, the expanding desert century, the starving century, while sustaining a fundamental biological imbalance: There are too few women.

Such an imbalance might seem to favor a patriarchal order by force of number. But because reproduction is such a profound human balance, the rare-woman century may give humans of female gender the opportunity to control, to seize control of, reproduction. If the female gender were ever to control reproduction, then the female gender would control what?

Point of view.

If menses were the parable, not seed—if sea, not ships; if sky, not missiles? If protective imagination were the parable, not domination, not conflict, then . . . ?

If
Silent Night
were the prologue, and not
Sing, Goddess, the anger of Peleus's son.

Then?

I asked the question of a priest-scholar: If women were to control reproduction, what would women control? The priest paused for a moment before answering efficiently: “Evolution. Who controls the zygote controls the zeitgeist.”

It is only after shopping my question around the boys' club that I bring it at last to the banquette of the Garden of Eden.

Here is my question, Darling: Say there is a battle forming between men and women. I do not mean for equality, but for primacy—for who will ultimately control reproduction . . . What are you doing?

Looking for my pills.

What's wrong?

Nothing's wrong. I'm looking for my pills.

So here's my question. What would a woman control if a woman controlled . . . ?

A schoolboy's question. Why must it be a question of
“
control
”
?

You haven't even heard the question.

I heard the frame. It's a riddle, isn't it? No doubt there is a correct answer. Tickle me. Amuse me.

I asked Father Rafferty the same question. If women control reproduction, what will women control? You know what his answer was?

I cannot imagine.

No. His answer was evolution. That's good, isn't it?

Are there bones in skate?

So . . . ?

Look, Richard, a woman . . . No I can't speak for Women. I cannot consider your question abstractly. Your question presses against me like an exploded safety bag. Back up! Or should I say pull out?
(Once more to the handbag.)
There you are!
(She aligns the arrows on the safety cap.)
Pregnancy is never a hypothetical for a woman. Never. Not even for me. Not even at my age. Cheers.
(Prednisone.)
It is a condition of our existence.

Your answer is you cannot conceive the question?

No, my dear. My observation is that you cannot conceive! That
freedom alone allows you to conceive of conception as a power. Whereas a woman might argue that a refusal to conceive is the only power.

Are you sure you're not just pulling a hetero on me?

Women and men will never be equal. Women will always be superior in knowledge and irony because men will never have a clue what it feels like to have the entire dangerous future of the planet crammed up their twats. I'm not pulling a hetero. I'm pulling a utero.