During part of my time with Steven, I was employed on campus at the career counseling center, where my boss, Mary (aka Pinky), was completing a doctorate in psychology. “Do you have an issue with this?” she kept asking me. “Do you have an issue with that?” Narrow-shouldered and small-breasted, Pinky tried so hard to get next to me. “I just want to feel you out on this,” she would say. “I just want to feel you out!” I often felt violated.
The center was staffed by psych majors and other kinds of counselors who wanted us to learn to communicate effectively with the clients and one another. At retreats, we talked things out with empty chairs as our colleagues listened. Even my chair wanted more from me than I could give. Folding chairs: They had some nerve. I could have taken criticism better from a recliner, even an ottoman.
It was a touchy-feely place, but I was only touchy. I failed to mention to Pinky that I was gay, though of course she knew. It wasn’t that I thought her unsympathetic. I just didn’t want to talk about it. Our absence of meaningful communication was working beautifully until the day Steven bounded through the doors, looking for a résumé critique. He spotted me, gave me a hug.
Pinky’s head, small in size to fit with the rest of her upper body, popped up as if from a burrow. She spotted Steven. Like Evita and Juan or Masters and Johnson, they came together as I saw the future and cringed.
Pinky said she found their chat “illuminating.” Steve began to ask about how I felt about everything. “What does everyone expect of me?” I asked over and over. Finally, I just asked Steve, “Why do you care about me? What do I give you?”
“You always make me laugh,” he said. “You even make the bed funny. I come home and see the way you’ve tried to push the sheets up under the mattress and, I don’t know, I want to hug you.”
Wait, I thought, until you see the ironing.
. . .
He was so good. I was so hard. I vowed to try. I talked to Pinky and to almost all her office furniture. The couch and I got down to brass tacks.
But Steve began sleeping around. Monogamy was for heteros. It was 1980. The gays in San Francisco were getting it on in supermarkets. Steve wasn’t going to be left out. I knew that I was. People approached Steven; men were drawn to him. I was harder to approach and wasn’t good at instigating a pickup.
Pinky called me into her office one day and closed the door. I thought I was being fired. “Are we going to do the chair thing?” I asked. “No,” she said. “Honey, I want to go personal.” She reached out and put her hand over mine. “I think,” she said, “that you have some self-esteem issues. I don’t think you like yourself so much.” From here on out, through decades, from the lips of many well-intentioned others, these words would come back and back and back.
“I didn’t know I was supposed to like me. Isn’t that like being arrogant?”
She stared at me.
“I’m sorry,” I told her.
. . .
I have worked myself into a state about the dog. I need a brownie. Last night I made a panful, but they are all gone. Every one. Betty has given them to Earleen, she tells me with a glint in her eye. She is afraid I’m getting fat. The brownies have joined the ranks of The Disappeared. It started with the clipping. What will come next?
I retaliate. When Betty goes to the bathroom, I grab a spoon and last night’s chocolate pie from the refrigerator, go into my room, shut the door, and lock it. She may magically materialize. Sometimes I think she can walk through walls.
I eat the pie like someone is going to yank it away, straight from the dish, wiping the last bits of chocolate from the dish with my fingers. She has eaten the lion’s share already, but my taking the rest will be seen as a serious offense. All her life, Betty was a fashionably slender woman. For decades she held back, didn’t touch a dessert or a slice of bread. Now she eats ravenously, especially sweets, which she craves like an addict.
Midmornings, I catch her standing at the window in front of the sink, gobbling up whatever she can find. If someone mentions food, she wants some. If I get something from the refrigerator, she wants some too. “What are you eating?” she asks repeatedly. “What did you have to eat?” She must know. We are ravenous here.
I am gaining weight. This morning I awoke with a bee in my bonnet over the bare torso selfies the gays post on Facebook. In my opinion, if you post more than three photos a week of your naked chest, you had better be part of some emergency rash-alert squad.
My new girth angers Betty. It reminds her of my father, who got heavy. I’ve started drinking some powdered greenish stuff that you mix in water, which Carol sells. Called moringa oleifera, it is supposed to suppress appetite and provide super-duper nutrition. African villages apparently swear by it. Today, so far, I have had four packets and six cups of coffee. I am in the mood to build some huts, or perhaps shoot a wildebeest. Later I may barbecue a missionary or two for the tribal elders.
I can’t stop thinking about the dog. I am tired of having nothing.
. . .