My friend Lauren says that people who are emotionally reserved—frigid and icy, I believe she is implying—often lavish their feelings on dogs. She cites the English, well-known canine enthusiasts, and points out my English heritage. I feel like Camilla Parker-Bowles. “Charles, don’t worry about making it back tonight. Mummy’s having gin fizzes with the corgis.”
I want to hug my dog, but suddenly I am angry, so mad at him, and want to get out of here. Nothing upsets me more than feeling myself lacking. “Shut up,” I yell. “Shut up, shut up, shut up.” As he looks at me, astonished, I stomp back to the car with my bags of animal products and my bunny. I do not say good-bye. I cannot keep a dog.
As far as relationships go, I have a small, checkered past that began in college when I tried and failed to do what people do: come together in harmony and then learn gradually to ignore each other.
. . .
Senior year in college, I moved into a small apartment with my first real boyfriend, Steven, who trimmed his beard meticulously each morning, listening to the Evita sound track and pretending to address the people of Argentina from a balcony. He cooked all the time, fed me like a mother. Sourdough bread was his specialty. He gave loaves to everyone. He was so giving. It made me sick sometimes. “Enough with the bread,” I thought. It embarrassed me. Nobody else seemed to care, though Betty winced at his neatly wrapped loaves, handled them as if they might explode. She always thanked him politely, but there was a hint of something else. “It’s sour dough, you say?”
“It’s one word, Mother.”
Steven seemed oblivious. He never bowed down to win over my mother. He never appeared to care so much what others thought.
“Try some of this,” the person doling out samples at the supermarket asked Steven, innocently holding out a plate of something, sausages or couscous. Whatever.
“George would never eat that. George is finicky,” Steven would respond as, a few feet away, I braced myself for what was coming.
“Who’s George?”
“George is my LOVERRRRRRRR!”
They could have heard him in Cleveland.
. . .
But no. That wasn’t really how it was. He was warm; he was friendly. He was proud to be with me. And no one looked up, or noticed, or really cared what we were doing together. It just felt like that to me. Because when you have a secret, you think the world is watching your every move, trying to discover it, and that changes everything—the way you think, and look at people, the things you are willing to do, the places you can go, the reactions you expect. You aren’t quite there. Hiding the secret is what is always on your mind, somewhere. You feel better alone.
I felt better alone, but I was with him, and that made everything complicated. There was too much going on inside for me to really be with anyone. Always something ticking, ticking, ticking inside me, almost drowning out everything else.
The little stuffed bunny, perched on the dashboard of my car, has turned malevolent, like a toy in a Twilight Zone episode. It eyes me. “Take the fucking dog,” he seems to say as I roar away from the pound in a cloud of dust.
. . .
I wasn’t ready to be so public. Steven was. Approximately twenty thousand hearings of a double-disc soundtrack featuring Patti LuPone does not lead to diffidence. It seemed to me that he told everyone everything. The mailman knew if we were fighting. The landlord got an earful. Thinking himself in store for a pleasant morning of toilet repair, the unsuspecting man was showered with details of our meeting, our backgrounds, the fact that we were both Aquarians.
And then he got a loaf.
Every time my mother came, I fell into a state of anxiety, just waiting for him to blurt out something to Betty. Probably about my troubles with sex. I was nervous. I was messy. If I managed to successfully uncap a tube of lubricant, the entire household was ready for penetration in about five minutes.
Steven was concerned that I wasn’t out to my parents. It was an affront to him, to truth and honesty, to “the movement.”
“Shut up about the movement,” I told him. “Be still. Listen to Evita. Argentina is crying.”
He was loving and sweet, giving and generous, but it always felt like he was pressing against me, too close. He wanted me to tell him I loved him; every day he needed it, sometimes more than once or even twice. I saw the statement as more of a specialty item to be bestowed a few times yearly, perhaps at birthday time or during the excited unpacking of a Christmas stocking.
I felt bad most of the time, cold and heartless. What I really wanted, I told myself, was out of the relationship. But I knew that word he made me say, the one that began with L and ended with me feeling hemmed in and embarrassed, was not just something I was dredging up to please him.