My father died a broken man not long after my mother divorced him. For several years after that I lived with her and a sister who was a few years younger than I was, and who was, in everything about her, a stranger to me. We forged no bonds beneath the ritually prescribed family behavior and socially constructed emotions imposed upon us. When our family configuration exploded, those bonds shattered, too.
Once a willingly obedient son who sought beforehand to fulfill my mother's wishes ere she spoke them, by my eighteenth year I had become a problem to her, always arguing with her and bitter in my resentment of the way she had begun to live after my father's death. A new man stayed over at our house each weekend until a steady one insinuated himself and was all too frequently bedded down with her on the fold-out couch in the living room, the room I had to pass through in order to reach my room. To see her in bra and panties, her body no longer young and firm, and sitting on his lap at five on a Saturday afternoon, as they held their drinks and caressed, made inside of me an agony of writhing.
It was not loyalty to my father that impelled my disgust at her behavior but a squeamish jealousy. She was betraying not him with her drunken parties with this rough and pasty man, but me.
I was not the son she wanted. I did not take the initiative she wished I would. She said she had no one to help her bear her burden, financially or emotionally, and she was afraid of the power she knew she had over me. She tried to restrain it, to redirect it.
It was a power that she had used for years to bend me willingly to her will. It had begun to prove treacherous. Instead of giving her hegemony over me, it was turning her into someone upon whom unwanted demands were placed.
She was angry at me for not showing the kind of independence, the kind of capabilities by which she would know I had been released from her grip (and she from mine, too, although she did not say it). And it would help her, too, to ease her burden. But no! She was annoyed that I wanted her to cling to, seeing it as a weakness and a fault. She was angry that I had not let her go. She could not live like that, with that kind of burden.
She meant me.
She reproached me for my sullenness and wept in anger, resentful that I had so little concern for her happiness and would begrudge her what little she managed to get.
But what about mine? the silent scream erupted in its cage inside me, and did not break loose from within me.
I was ashamed to say it, but I meant it anyhow.
I felt it again in the face of Daniel's silence. He was blocking me out. Without a sense of his perceiving and receiving me, I had no existence of my own.
It was already a week things had been like this. That's a long time. I was feeling bewildered and betrayed, angry and guilty.
It had begun with that question that always went along with a sudden transformation of his disposition. What was I going to do now? How was I going to change my life? I could not wait for the world to change, when, all together, we would create the social equivalent of manna from the sky to live on. I had to do something now, discover who I really was, what I wanted to do, and how I would go about doing it and becoming somebody.
I don't know, I said.
Not knowing is not an option, Daniel said.
Can we talk about it in the morning? I said, circling his bare nipple with the tip of a finger and pouting seductively.
That was something that usually drew him to me. Now it did not. He frowned and shook me off.
Are you angry? I asked.
No, he said.
But you are not happy with me.
No, he said. Go to sleep.
With a heavy heart I lay beside him feeling the emptiness of the space between us as he turned from me.
In the morning, with a hang-dog look, with sad cow eyes, I looked at him imploringly and knew by nothing more than how he did not yield that he had hardened his heart to me, against me.
Something cold began to spread inside me.
You ask too much of me, I said.
Those are the conditions, he said.
In the panic of isolation nothing came to me that might free me from the incapacity that was like the embrace of paralysis.
You are asking too much of me.
But what about mine?
I repeated the words to myself regretfully.
I was not surprised when he did not come home that evening without even having called to tell me he would not.
I was unable to eat or concentrate on anything. Nor was I able, when I lay down still clothed, to sink into a sleep.
I rose and went down into the street.
It was a hot night and I was dizzy and depressed. I threw on a pair of short cut jeans, a floppy sleeveless thing, and a pair of water buffalo sandals.
The street lights glared -- amber, sulfur, green, blue, and red. Reality was elsewhere. I had smoked before I went down, and I was riding on it now as I made my way slowly through the crowd of guys displaying themselves. The Zen paradox was that I was magnetic because I was too low to be part of it. I did not care. I was not looking for anything. Quite the opposite.
You look lost.
It was a guy a little taller than me. He wore a tight, sleeveless, black tank top with thin string straps and old jeans that were tight fitting, too. They were worn, and faded -- decorated with rips and raggedy blue white threads.
He was strong with gracefully prominent but hardly bulging muscles.
No, I said. I'm not. I just don't like where I am.
Maybe we can fix that? He smiled.
It was a cheesy come-on.
But it got the point across.
I shouldn't, I said.
He embraced me and cupped me in a strong hand without hurting me at all and looked into my eyes.
I exhaled.
But you will.
Yes, I said.
He took me with a kiss there in the street.
I had pleased him by making him feel his power.
Power. I had none.
Bullshit, Daniel had said when I said that to him. You don't want to harness it.
This is about power, Daniel said that night. That's what love is. Love is an active creation of an interdependent mutual power.
So? I said, feeling intimidated, knowing what he was going to say next and that it was true.
Until you bring something, I'm withholding, too.
That's spiteful, I thought, but kept it to myself. Then the thought metamorphosed into its opposite.
I want him to nourish me, I thought, but I refuse to nourish him -- by not nourishing myself. What do I give to him besides taking from him? Need is an offering that demands. It is not a gift.
Michael, that was the name of the guy I went home with the night Daniel did not come home, snapped his fingers.
You went away.
I had. At the first, when he entered me, it was pain, and I thought of how it was with Daniel now. And pain made me think of power and the excitement of surrender when I am overtaken by someone whom I cannot resist.
I'm here, I said.
You better be, he said, because I'm going to take you where you've never been before.
He caressed my throat. I threw open my mouth and I swallowed him the way the waters of a lake swallow the rocks that describe its shore line.
He held me and drew me around him. I took him in and he withdrew from me and I thrust to meet him and bring him back into me with the frenzied gyrations that had seized me.
I was back home and in bed before Daniel got home, if he was coming home. It was later than that that I heard Daniel. He was with someone. I could tell because there was whispering. Not whispering to keep their presence secret but whispering because it was something like three in the morning and the apartment was dark and their eyes had become reluctant to be in the light and the mood was to keep your voice soft.
I lay awake and heard their ecstasy. They were drunk. I pictured them gazing into each other's eyes and exchanging adoration.
In the morning, they ignored me. The feeling was strong enough for me not to intrude but to stay out of the way.
Doesn't he speak? Daniel's guest said as I prepared the sandwich Daniel would take with him to the construction site he was checking on at lunchtime.
It made me angry. It made me feel like I was being treated like a girl. I don't mean that there is anything wrong with being a girl. It's the way that girls are treated that I don't like.
Technically, he does, Daniel said, but when you don't have any self-respect it is difficult really to have anything to say.
You didn't have to do that, I said when he came back alone that evening.
Why not?
Because it feels demeaning.
You'd rather have me nourish a false pride?
I did not say that.
He did not respond and I dropped it.
We did not say anything about how he had slept with somebody else last night, and I did not say anything about Michael.
We both went out separately quite a few times. I don't know how active Daniel was, but I had become insatiable and available, as I've already said, magnetic. A loadstone, I was drawing lovers like flies and I buzzed with the bunch of `em.
Then I found myself depleted, emotionally more than physically. I had never realized how important feeling possessed was to me. Now, even though I had plenty of bodies to press my own against or take to myself, I was continuously aware that they were not Daniel. That feeling was about something intangible, not only physical. Like the explosion that ends reverie, the response to your partner is the result of an intangible.
I began to cry one night when Daniel touched me and tenderly, it seemed, called me a poor bastard. But he ignored it and went to bed. Without discussing it, we established that we were sleeping in separate bedrooms.
It was the oddest thing that exactly at this time I saw Emily when I was wandering around the borders of Central Park late on a Friday afternoon when I knew that Daniel had made a date that night to go to the opera with a guy he met at a photo shoot for model apartments.
I was cheerful with her and secretly enjoyed that my apparent disinterest in her brought out her friendliness to me. When ever I saw her or thought of her, I wanted to possess her. But that was impossible. She had no desire for me to possess her. And she had no desire to possess me. Perhaps that was because she already had, did, and found I was no bargain.
I knew it, she said when I told her, without going into it, about my troubles with Daniel.
Knew what? I said.
That you liked guys the way a girl does. You got really angry when I said that.
I was trying to be...
...the person you weren't.
She kissed me on the lips and said Good-by.
I thought of just getting a menial job again and going back to some little one room in Brooklyn.
But I was spoiled. I wanted to be in the center of things, the way the moon is at night, irresponsible, not relying on itself for its own lumination but fascinating every eye simply by reflecting whatever energy the sun bestows upon it.
Why are you doing this? Finally one night I cried and took hold of the two sides of Daniel's jacket.
With a sharp jerk of his elbows he pulled the cloth out of my hand.
You can leave if you don't like it, he said quietly and with hardly any expression in his voice.
I don't understand how you can be both this person and the person you used to be.
That's not my problem, he said.
I hated when anybody said that about anything, but when he said it about me, it cut to the quick. I had to make believe I was not bleeding. I had already seen that blood was nothing to him, nor the wound from which it flows.
I rang Michael's bell. He was in. He remembered me. He was alone. He was surprised.
I asked if it was ok if I came in.
He invited me in, and I got to the point. Can I crash here tonight?
Michael was a teaching assistant at NYU getting a doctorate in filmmaking there. He agreed to let me stay in his place for a couple of weeks, but I had to make myself small because he was finishing his thesis and he had to have the room to write. So no drama.
That did not mean no sex.
I understood that Daniel had been right about me. I did not pull my weight in the relationship. It was an old story.
But giving me the cold shoulder and freezing me out was not going to help.
Michael was not Daniel. He was a nice guy, good-looking, intelligent, sometimes funny, a hard worker whose doctorate would be well-earned, and he would be a good teacher. His students would like him, and he had a tenure track appointment at CUNY lined up for the fall. But he lacked Daniel's intensity, electricity, charisma, star power. You could feel it. I could. I liked when he fucked me, but it did not turn me inside out and blow me away the way Daniel had.
It doesn't matter, he said after I told him for the sake of honesty how I felt. I'm not in love with you.
It hurt when he said that.
I had taken a job as a waiter in a club where it was chaos every night, but the money was good and I was able to pay my share. Michael had no problem with me staying on. It was not as it had been with Daniel. How strange the difference! I was ok with Michael because he really did not care about me, and I had lived in torment with Daniel because he did.
That summer was hot in New York and I was quite torpid until about three in the afternoon most days. I ought to have been doing something during each day before my regular night shift, but I usually did not get to bed before dawn or rise before noon, and I never knew where the day had gone by the time I had to catch the cross town bus for the club.
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