The Unspeakable (11 page)

Now that I am almost never the youngest person in any room I realize that what I miss most about those times is the very thing that drove me so mad back when I was living in them. What I miss is the feeling that nothing has started yet, that the future towers over the past, that the present is merely a planning phase for the gleaming architecture that will make up the skyline of the rest of my life. But what I forget is the loneliness of all that. If everything is ahead then nothing is behind. You have no ballast. You have no tailwinds either. You hardly ever know what to do, because you've hardly done anything. I guess this is why wisdom is supposed to be the consolation prize of aging. It's supposed to give us better things to do than stand around and watch in disbelief as the past casts long shadows over the future.

The problem, I now know, is that no one ever really feels wise, least of all those who actually have it in themselves to be so. The Older Self of our imagination never quite folds itself into the older self we actually become. Instead, it hovers in the perpetual distance like a highway mirage. It's the destination that never gets any closer even as our life histories pile up behind us in the rearview mirror. It is the reason that I got to forty-something without ever feeling thirty-something. It is why I hope that if I make it to eighty-something I have the good sense not to pull out those old CDs. My heart, by then, surely would not be able to keep from imploding. My heart, back then, stayed in one piece only because, as bursting with anticipation as it was, it had not yet been strained by nostalgia. It had not yet figured out that life is mostly an exercise in being something other than what we used to be while remaining fundamentally—and sometimes maddeningly—who we are.

 

HONORARY DYKE

There was a period in my life, roughly between the ages of thirty-two and thirty-five, when pretty much anyone who saw me would have assumed I was a lesbian. I had very short, almost spiky hair, owned three pairs of Chuck Taylor tennis shoes, and wore lots of cargo pants with tank tops and silver jewelry. (That was my casual wear; for dressier occasions I'd taken to almost exclusively wearing cheongsams with ballet flats.) I had a toe ring. I drove a Subaru station wagon—mint green, manual transmission, metal dog gate behind the backseat. (That's not to imply that there's anything especially lesbionic about mint green, though stick shifts and dog gates do emit a certain undeniable Sapphic energy.) As for the dog himself, I took him to coffee shops with outdoor seating and to independent bookstores, which always seem to allow dogs. At night, he slept in my bed, his 85 pounds of fur and flesh and drool crowding me to the edge. He was effectively my boyfriend, but I probably would have been better off with a real boyfriend. For instance, someone who would take me out to dinner and do boyfriendy things like tell me that my car needed a new timing belt. But I attracted no suitable candidates. I was essentially a soft butch. The only man likely to approach me would have been one who needed directions to the Dinah Shore Weekend in Palm Springs.

The weird part was that I knew what I was doing. I had a distinct look in mind. My desired vibe was androgynous yet enticing; earthy yet sporty with a hint of punk rock; Smith College meets East Village circa 1985. I was going for a chick singer-songwriter kind of thing. I wanted the sharp, angular haircut of Shawn Colvin on the cover of her 1989 debut album,
Steady On
. I wanted to look like one of my all-time musical heroes, the gifted and underrecognized Jonatha Brooke, who had supershort hair for much of her career but managed to offset any overtly butch undertones by wearing things like velvet pants and halter tops with about five different necklaces.

The problem was that I didn't really have the raw materials. Lacking a guitar and sufficiently chiseled bone structure, I looked more like Watts, the blond, drum-playing tomboy (not a lesbian) played by Mary Stuart Masterson in the 1987 teen angst drama
Some Kind of Wonderful
. As a fan of Mary Stuart Masterson, I will emphasize that this is not in and of itself a bad thing. But I had just moved to a new town and just about everyone who met me was meeting me for the first time and had little else to go on. Moreover, that town was Los Angeles, a place with major holdings in the business of exaggerated femininity. If I'd been in a city with a more unisex fashion sensibility, if I'd been in some flannel-shirted, polar-fleeced place like Missoula or Portland or Boulder, my habiliment might have coded entirely differently. But as it was, my all-wheel-drive sport-utility wagon, Tweety Bird hair, and makeup arsenal composed of tinted sunscreen and eight different flavors of Chapstick drew little in the way of male attention. I did, however, catch women checking me out all the time. Instead of taking this as constructive feedback, I felt flattered and triumphant.

I was flattered in the way a famous or otherwise accomplished person is flattered when he receives an honorary degree from a university that would never have let him in if he'd actually applied. I was flattered because I believed I belonged to a special category of women for whom many of the conventional rules of hotness (long hair, long fingernails, a skilled and thought-out approach to cosmetics) are rendered irrelevant. This is to say I counted myself among the ranks of straight woman who are ever-so-slightly unstraight. I'm not talking about being bisexual. I mean something more like “biologically straight, culturally lesbian.” Think of it as another version of the gentile who has no interest in converting to Judaism but nonetheless celebrates most Jewish holidays and occasionally uses Yiddish expressions (as it happens, I am in this category as well). The writer and scholar Terry Castle coined the term “apparitional lesbian,” which she described as the ghostlike presence of love between women throughout much of history and literature. In homage to Castle (of whom I am a fan, unsurprisingly), I have dabbled with my own coinage, the “aspirational lesbian,” otherwise known as the basically hetero broad for whom the more glamorous expressions of dykery hold a distinct if perpetually enigmatic allure.

Ever the striver, I approach lesbians as though I've been preapproved for their company. I approach them as though I'm their future best friend, the one person at the party they're really going to be glad they met. Walking into a room of strangers, I'll make a beeline for the women with the smart haircuts and “statement” eyewear, and if they seem less than interested in talking to me I'll be hurt and slightly taken aback. I am, after all, one of them—or as close as I can get without actually being
one of them
. My hairdresser of the last ten years is a lesbian, as was the one for five years before that. When I feel low I watch YouTube videos of Fran Lebowitz holding forth on topics like Jane Austen and the irrelevance of algebra and I feel instantly better. My preferred scent for soaps and lotions is—you guessed it—lavender. I'm an honest-to-goodness fan of Willa Cather. As a kid, I worshipped the child movie actress Jodie Foster and the teen television actress Kristy McNichol. At twenty-nine, I decided to move from New York City to Nebraska in part because I'd met a couple of middle-aged lesbians who lived on a farm, and somehow their existence signified a rightness with the world that I had never encountered elsewhere. At fifteen, I turned on the television and stumbled on Oprah Winfrey interviewing members of a lesbian sorority (a revolutionary enterprise at the time) and thought these were the coolest, most impressive, articulate, and poised women I'd ever seen. They wore businesslike blazers and spoke in precise, unapologetic tones that defied everything I'd ever associated with sororities. They were the kind of women I wanted to be. Even if I didn't want to be in their beds, I wanted to be in their club.

Over the years, I believe I've gotten as close to the lesbian inner sanctum as a straight girl can get. Even if I don't officially belong to the club, I am a de facto member. I am an honorary dyke. (I am so thoroughly one that I'm allowed to use the word
dyke
in the transgressive, reappropriative manner that real lesbians often do.)

Still, the getup of my early thirties pushed the boundaries of de facto. I was not shaving my legs with regularity. I once, in what I now realize was a cruel, self-serving gesture that I'd construed as hospitality, asked a stone butch out on a date. (“Stone butch” being the official term for lesbians on the most masculine end of the spectrum.) I did not admit it was a date, of course. The woman was an author visiting from out of town. I'd recorded a radio interview with her about her latest book and, after doing so, asked if she knew anyone in Los Angeles. When she said no, I invited her to dinner. I told myself I did this out of empathy for the loneliness of being in a strange city with nothing to do. But this was more than a little disingenuous. I encountered out-of-towners all the time and almost never worried about their loneliness. I also knew from firsthand experience that there's nothing most traveling authors would rather do than order hotel room service, watch crappy TV for a few hours, and fall asleep by nine.

The truth was I wanted this woman to like me. More precisely, I wanted my honors to be recognized. I fetched her at her hotel in the Subaru and took her to a cozy spot in Laurel Canyon. We split a bottle of wine and ordered lavishly on her publisher's (also at the time technically my publisher's) dime. About halfway through the meal I got nervous and let it drop that I was straight. I made reference to an old boyfriend. Fearing that wasn't enough, I made reference to the challenges of finding a new boyfriend. She gave me a look that suggested she could see not only right through me but also through the insulting fraud of all honorary distinctions everywhere. Shame radiated off my body like a sunburn. The author's hotel was in West Hollywood. That is to say, it was within walking distance of any number of bars where she could have picked up any number of women who wouldn't have wasted her time with this pitiful sport fishing. (“Sport fishing,” according to the gay lexicon, is when a straight girl flirts with a lesbian but has no intention of following through. This fishing is just for “sport” because no one eats any fish. Get it?)

Not that my gun shyness didn't belie some measure of sincere interest. For as long as I can remember, females held infinitely more fascination than males. Not in a sexual way but in a visceral way, in an
existential
way. This is common, of course, in young girls and even in adult women. Women are more colorful, more layered, more interesting to watch. But as a child I felt a need to study them almost like textbooks. Having no older sister (or younger one, for that matter), I looked to outside peers for clues on how to be female. Just about every year I made a point of picking out some other girl, usually a slightly older girl with whom I'd never exchanged a word, and labeling her “the mystery girl.” I would then proceed to observe her in a manner you might call opportunistic stalking. This did not mean approaching her or seeking any direct interaction but, rather, watching her intensely when I happened to spot her in the schoolyard or at the local pool. I would note the make and color of her bicycle, the type of book bag she carried, whether or not she wore socks with her tennis shoes.

The mystery girls were never girly girls. They were almost always quietly tomboyish, or at least marked by a degree of gravitas and self-possession that separated them from the great, giggling masses. There was something to learn from all of them. From Gretchen, my first mystery girl, who was in fourth grade when I was in second, I got the idea of coveting a blue Raleigh three-speed and wearing tennis socks with pompoms on the backs. From Dawn, a delicate-featured flutist I targeted in junior high school, I learned that boat-neck shirts were ideal for showing off prominent collarbones, which I could see were very good things to have. In high school and even college, I kept multiple mystery girls in a steady rotation, though with the bulk of my observational energy now focused on males, I tended to appreciate these girls mostly in fleeting moments. There was the violinist Elizabeth and the beguiling manner in which she lifted her expensive instrument from its case and, as she arranged her music on the stand, held it casually in her left hand as though it were any old thing. There was the track star Julie with her tanned, coltish legs. In college there was Victoria, who mounted futuristic productions of Ibsen plays, wasn't afraid to eat alone in the dining hall, and drove an old Peugeot with plates from a southern state (it was rumored that her mother was a United Daughter of the Confederacy; it was also rumored that Victoria was either bisexual or a lesbian).

Though I had a friendly acquaintanceship with Victoria, the rest of the mystery girls were almost complete mysteries—people I barely knew. They weren't major preoccupations, more like miniature hobbies, objects of passing intrigue that appeared in my line of vision from time to time. It's probably worth mentioning that my mother was an early proponent of the mystery-girl concept. When, as an impressionable seven-year-old, I told her about Gretchen, whose name I didn't even know at the time and who I must have brought up by way of expressing my desire to copy her in some fashion (via pompom socks or a Raleigh bike), my mother said I was too young for a three-speed but that I could instead amuse myself by thinking about “this person you so admire” and trying to learn more about her. I'm inclined to say my mother suggested we find out where Gretchen lived by following her home from the pool (an activity on which my mother would have had to accompany me, since I wasn't allowed to cavort around the neighborhood alone), but that sounds crazy now. It sounds genuinely stalkerish, though some version of stalking was not necessarily out of my mother's character. (She sometimes followed me to school for fear I'd be abducted; she took walks at night so she could see into neighbors' lit windows.)

Yet stalking had no place in the equation. It wasn't that I wanted to get to know these girls. It wasn't that I'd necessarily even have liked them if I had. It was that I wanted to
be
them. Blond, pale-skinned, seemingly comfortable in her own skin, Gretchen was essentially a better version of blond, pale-skinned, hyper-self-conscious me. As with the girls that followed, Gretchen was apt to be spotted alone. She came across to me as a free agent, a doer of her own thing. Never lodged in a bramble of tittering, whispering, terrifying girls, never wearing a uniform of any kind, never with her parents (and now that I think of it, I suspect I unconsciously assumed that Gretchen, like a Peanuts comic strip character, had no parents, that they were irrelevant to her existence), Gretchen was a series of portraits: girl with bicycle, girl with schoolbooks, girl with tanned legs and white pompom socks. Like Elizabeth and Julie and probably even Victoria, she was almost certainly less autonomous than I imagined her to be. Almost certainly she was just as social and cliquish as the girls I had deemed unworthy of mystery. Almost certainly this was true of all my mystery girls. For all I know, Gretchen went to college and joined an old-fashioned sorority and never ate a meal alone for the rest of her life. For all I know, Victoria placed her tray on the conveyor belt after those solitary dinners, reported directly to the nearest keg party, and spent the remainder of the evening doing beer bongs with the lacrosse team—though perhaps not the men's lacrosse team.