Dear John, I Love Jane: Women Write About Leaving Men for Women (6 page)

Watershed

Veronica Masen

I
t was dark in the kitchen; the party was loud on the other side of the closed door. We leaned toward each other and I slid my hands up the nape of her neck, into her hair, holding the back of her head, this woman I had known only a short while but with whom I had been flirting shamelessly all night. Our eyes locked, her lips parted and tipped toward mine, and my knees literally went weak. There was a full two- or three-second pause (which feels like forever when you’re about to kiss a girl for the very first time, and you’re thirty-seven years old, and you have wanted this your whole life, and here she is
right here in your hands,
and it’s really going to happen, it’s not a dream this time) during which I just let myself revel in the delicious thought of
you’re about to do it.
Finally. After all this time, all those men, all that longing, all that want and curiosity and fantasy and imagining:
here she is
. Now. Feel it? Feel your heart slamming against your chest? Feel her breath, slow and shuddery? Feel her cheek brush yours? A little closer. There. Closer. Her lips, on yours; yours, on hers. So soft—a mouth like velvet. The tongue—delicate, polite. Her skin—no stubble, no roughness. My hand slid down her body, her waist, her curves, and came to rest on her hip—no roughness anywhere, no hard, no angles. All soft.

I’m home.

I almost fainted.

That was a year ago.

A year of therapy and tears and sex and kisses and books and arguments and sleepless nights and angst and long phone calls and more passion than I ever knew existed. A year of falling down a rabbit hole, of peeling off my skin, of being thrown off my axis, or any one of a dozen other phrases that would still never come close to describing what it’s like to have your whole existence shaken upside down and called into question. It’s been a year of wondering and discovering and poking and prodding at my soul, my belief system, my fear, my desires, my identity. I have laughed harder, loved deeper, and cried more this year than any other time in my life. I have wondered if I have finally discovered my true sexuality, or am simply going through my own late-bloomer experimentation phase that everyone else went through in college while I was dutifully studying and living off-campus. I have asked myself the following questions a million times a day, every day: Am I gay? Or is it just her? What should I do? What now? What next? What if? What if I stay married, and stifle my inner lesbian (who, now that I have let her come out and play, might not want to go back inside)? My husband is the greatest guy in the world—what if I break up our family over a temporary sexual revolution and regret it forever? My commitment to our marriage is strong; my desire to provide security, consistency, and dependability to our children is even stronger. How would I feel about myself if I threw all that away for a kiss? But what if it’s the most incredible kiss in the whole world? What if it’s a kiss that woke up my whole being, made me believe in all the sappy love songs and fireworks and fairy tales? What if I can no longer even contemplate kissing my husband, let alone allow our naked bodies to entangle the way hers and mine have? What if now that seems so wrong, so icky, so intrusive?

Then what?

It really was something I had wanted to do my whole life. Some girls dream of big frothy wedding dresses, traveling the world, skydiving, or having babies. Me? I wanted to kiss a girl.

And by “wanted to kiss,” I mean that when I was with boys, I thought of girls. Always have. When I had sex for the first time at sixteen, I closed my eyes to block out the six-pack abs, broad shoulders, and chiseled jaw of the boy on top of me. The drunken escapades and one-night stands of my youth? There was never any desire for the person himself. There was the thrill of being a little trashy and a little rebellious, of racking up a reputation, of throwing it back at them, of letting them know we can be just as crude and uncaring as they can—but there was never the lust that I would hear my friends talk about. When they were oohing and aahing over the volleyball scene in
Top Gun,
I was thinking of Kelly McGillis with her pencil-skirt and clipboard and tousled bedhead hair. (I know. That plus the fact that I later drove a Subaru and listened to the Indigo Girls should have tipped me off.) I have
always
thought the female body was much more beautiful than the male; I have
always
been far more turned on by our magical, slippery little orchid than by their—what
is
that? A puppet? Some sort of sea creature? I have never had an orgasm with a male without thinking of a female. I have never had an orgasm from intercourse. I have faked orgasms to make it be over. When I have had an orgasm with a man, it’s usually because I’ve taken over and done it myself. And it’s always easier with my eyes closed, when I can pretend his fingers or mouth are a woman’s. I am not turned on by looking at them, their hairy chests, their shape, their size. And don’t get me started on testicles—are we really supposed to find those attractive?

You’d think I would have put these pieces together and found me a woman. It’s not like I lived in some uptight part of the country. It was Greenwich Village. In the ’80s. Everyone was doing everyone and everything, and there was no judgment and much freedom. I had always been a part of the performing arts culture, a world peppered with experimentation and avant-garde practices of all kinds—I may have even been among the minority in the circles in which I traveled: a mousy little hetero pixie surrounded by big Cuban bulldykes and smooth-waxed pretty boys. But I thought that since I lacked the sort of brazen knowledge about my sexuality that they possessed, since I wasn’t
sure
, that I must, by default, be straight. That if I
knew
, I would
know
. And since I didn’t
know
, I must not be. I didn’t have any internalized homophobia, I wasn’t worried about what others would think, I just didn’t want to be an imposter. I didn’t want to take something so real and so personal and trivialize it by trying it on like a costume. I didn’t want to use another person as a science experiment or a sex object. I didn’t want to take it lightly. I heard the way recreational fence-jumpers were talked about, and it wasn’t always pleasant. “Gay” was something you knew in your heart and felt in your bones and would fight to the death for. Something you earned, something you
were
, not something you did, or claimed to be just because you wonder sometimes, just because you find women aesthetically beautiful, just because you feel so much more yourself when you’re hanging around with lesbians than with straight women.

I thought sexual orientation was hardwired. Honestly. I didn’t get that it could change. Of course I was aware of places, families, or religions where homosexuality was not tolerated (or worse), so I understood why some people stay closeted—but I truly believed that coming out later in life was more a choice to reveal something known, not the unexpected appearance of something new. Most of my gay friends had always known they were gay whether they had spent any time in the closet or not; hence my assumption that people who came out after leading a heterosexual life always
knew
they were gay but denied it (either to themselves or others). Somehow I made it to adulthood without understanding that one could
not know,
that one could speculate and ponder but not conclude, or that one could find one’s self all grown up and suddenly in love—or lust, or some combination of the two—with someone of the same sex, and be just as surprised as everybody else that they are, now, as gay as the day is long.

I remember, when I was about twenty years old, telling a lesbian friend of mine that I didn’t want to “try it” because I might “like it too much.” She gave me The Look (if she had worn reading glasses she would have peered over the top of them) and said, “Honey, it’s sex. I think we’re
supposed
to like it too much.” We had a brief conversation about self-deprivation, self-worth, and why I would deny myself unbearable pleasure. I didn’t have any answers then, but now I can see how deep the “I don’t deserve happiness” groove is carved into my heart. And that’s where the work is now—it’s not about sex, it’s about love; and it’s not about loving
her
or
him
, it’s about
me
.

But back to the sex.

If that first kiss almost made me faint, you can imagine what happened the first time I touched her. Or she me. Our first several weeks can only be described as “furtive”: there were lots of stolen moments, lots of groping and grinding and grabbing that took place in stairwells and bathrooms and movie theaters, and it was a full two months of these clandestine trysts before we spent our first night together, before we were able to lie naked together, to shower together, to wake up together, to take our time, to slow down and breathe each other in. Everything about her delighted me, and vice-versa. We played with each other’s long hair, we traced the lines in our palms, we massaged feet and legs and backs, we made love quickly and slowly and roughly and gently, over and over and over, and I knew I would never tire of it. Though it embarrassed her at first, I loved to lie on my tummy between her legs, open her a little and gaze; alternately licking and looking, entranced by the beauty, amazed by the power and the ache of the desire I felt.

She was so . . . womanly. An hourglass figure, a way of putting on lipstick, lace-trimmed underthings, quick to laugh, quick to cry. I watched as she did her hair and makeup the morning after that first night, and felt like those old photos of the little boys backstage watching the women in the dressing room roll their stockings on. She pointed out that I had the same big-eyed look as them, and asked if I felt about twelve. I said that I did. She nodded, knowingly. She was a couple years older than I was and had been out for quite some time, and while we tried to avoid the teacher-student dynamic, sometimes it appeared in the form of a nod or a look that said she knew what I was feeling, how exhilarating it was to finally be setting that part of me free, what she meant to me.

However, just because she was older and wiser and had been the “top” in her past relationships, didn’t mean that I became meek or subservient in ours. We vied for top, and she got to discover the pleasure of yielding, submitting, surrendering. She allowed me to flip her over, to get her on her knees, to let me wear the strap-on in the family—all new things for her. We became sexual playgrounds for one another, exploring, discovering, coloring so far out of the lines that we were making whole new pictures. We gave each other the gift of complete trust, and not just sexually: our hearts, our little spirits, fell in love mind-body-soul. She was a best friend, a confidant, a partner. We could speak volumes just by silently staring into each other’s eyes. Hot bubble baths, handheld walks through the park at night in the snow, dessert dates. Private jokes were endless. Orgasms came fast and furious for both of us. “Intense” is an understatement. We were on fire. It was like we were the only two people in the world when we were together; nothing else mattered, nothing else existed.