“Disgusting,” says Christina. “Daddy peed his pants!”
“Shut up Christina!” says Joey. He is looking at me with those same green eyes of mine, and I know exactly what he is thinking. I see the disappointment.
Anne leads me to the bathroom. She splashes my face with water. “You need to be awake,” she tells me. “I need to know what you’ve done. Tell me what you’ve taken.”
I am so glad that Anne is here. Maybe she will help me clean up this mess. There will be so much laundry to do today. Sluggishly, I point to the table by the side of my bed. There, my fingers tell her, those are the pills.
What happened next I either don’t remember or I have already told you. Anne left me alone for the day, confident that I would not die, or confident that she would check on me later and that she would straighten it all out. Faucci would have her head on a platter if she missed today’s meetings. That I remember. The head on the platter.
The kids left, but I don’t remember that part. I have only fading memories of what happened that day.
I remember that I tried to commit suicide again that day, but only half heartedly, out of a sense obligation to complete what I had started, but not really wanting to succeed. Have you ever had one of those days when you would rather commit suicide than get out of bed? I dragged myself to the kitchen, and I put my head in the oven. I’ve seen this form of suicide in at least thirty movies from the 1950’s. I had a slim chance of causing any harm, however. The oven is electric (not gas), and I did not even turn it on. At most I would get a headache from the pressure of the cookie rack against my temples. I put my head in the oven and a pillow at my feet, and fell asleep again. Sweat and shit stains all over my body, as I never did get around to taking a shower. I fell asleep in the kitchen, and the dream resumed.
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“Welcome back,” says God. He is such a greedy bastard. He is counting the money I paid him for the last visit, and he is making out my bill for the next visit. Insurance doesn’t cover any of this, so I’m completely out of pocket for these visits. They are not cheap either. God is the best psychoanalyst there is; but he won’t prescribe drugs. For that I have to see my internist.
“Tell me about the doctors,” says God. “How did they get involved.”
It’s ironic, God, because the first one of us to have a breakdown, the first one who needed to get on drugs and stabilize her mood swings, was Anne. Once we left North Carolina, moved to Washington DC so that she could start a new job with the NIH, once we established ourselves into a crummy little house and I took that job as in-house counsel for a real estate company, once we moved away from all our pasts and brought Jack with us, once we knew we were no longer young and that if we did not have children now we never would, once Anne realized that she was close to forty and it was now or never, once it all sank in and we tried to have children --- once all that happened, at last, we discovered that Anne was infertile.
“The plight of the modern couple,” says God, all knowing, all causing. I can’t help but think that he is playing with me, that I am his Job, his plaything.
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I pull my head out of the oven. I would like to say that reason overcame me, but it was no more than a doorbell. Lisa across the street was at the front door. “Are you there?” she hollered. I banged my head against the oven rack as I pulled out. “Hold on!” I yelled out to her, although I don’t know how I found lucidity so quickly. I wrapped a blanket around my ass (I was still naked), and hesitantly opened the door a crack so that I could see Lisa’s face. It is red, and pimply, and she has long stringy blonde hair that has never been properly washed or cut.
“Are you alright?” she asks, breathlessly. She must have run from her house. “I just got home and saw your car in the driveway. Did you not go to work today?”
I have never found Lisa to be so inquisitive; nosey yes, but inquisitive about my needs and cares, no. I hardly believe she is hoping I am doing well; in fact I suspect she would have much preferred if the opposite was the case. She would love to be able to tell the neighborhood that she found me dead as leaves in winter, with my dodo head inside the oven.
“I’m fine, Lisa. Thank you.”
“I saw your ex-wife and the kids very early this morning. They all seemed quite agitated. Everything ok?” Now the truth comes out; she’s been wondering since this morning about the going-ons at my house. She must have heard Anne speaking with the children; perhaps Anne dropped the words “Daddy is sick,” or “Daddy needs help,” or even worse (or better, depending who’s side you are looking at it from) “Daddy might be dead.”
“I’m fine Lisa.”
“Well that’s what I figured all along. I told Timothy that everything is ‘OK.’ You know what a sensitive child he is, and he was so worried when he saw yours kids knocking at your front door this morning as if they were lunatics, and you not coming down to let them in, and your ex-wife rummaging through her purse looking for her keys to let herself in. . . Well, I said to Timothy: I said to him, “No, Timothy, the neighbor across the street is doing fine; nothing has happened to him. I’m sure he’s not dead. In fact I saw him cutting the grass just yesterday afternoon!”
I excuse myself. I politely but firmly close the door on Lisa’s face while muttering something about “a business telephone call I have to attend to.”
Slowly it is dawning on me that if I have not successfully committed suicide, that I need to start attending to the rituals and obligations of my daily life, like calling in to the office and letting them know that I will not be coming in today. I quickly dial Susana’s number. She is concerned that I had not called in earlier, but assumed that I would do so any moment.
“So you are coming into the office in a little while? We really need you today, you know.”
I feel no need to explain to Susana my predicament; I am undressed, stinky of vomit and poop, incapable of thinking straight, hallucinating. There is no way I’m going to get dressed or organized today “I’m in no shape for that today,” I tell Susana. “I’m really a very sick person. I’ll see you on Monday.”
I hang up and take the phone off the hook. I turn the laundry, put in more clothes to wash, some of which I must have washed two or three times that day. The water bill came later that month for over ten times what I normally consumed. Immediately after folding the laundry, I feel another wave of sleep kicking in, and I don’t want to be disturbed. I lay down in my bed, and resume the dreams.
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"Why are you here?” asks God this time. He is standing by the window and blocking my view of dirty hairy Harry across the street. He pulls the curtains again, and this time he means business. I hate God when he acts this way, when he calls me to the carpet. “Why are you truly here?” asks God again as he sits in his chair and crosses his legs. “Tell me what doctors you have seen before.” They always want to know about your prior history, your prior medicines, illness, weaknesses and frustrations. They are awful tricky those medical providers.
It’s not me who should be here, I tell God. It should be her. She’s the one who was infertile, not me. She’s the one who wept every night because we could not have children. She’s the one that wanted to talk about it, to resolve our infertility through chatter, reasoning, planning. But I had no time for it. I could not give her the attention she wanted; I could not devote my energies to planning a child. I was obsessed by my own thoughts.
“What thoughts were those?"
I could only think of men in general, and Reggie in particular. We had moved away from North Carolina, and settled in Washington DC, but I was still obsessed with Reggie’s hairy forearms. I saw them everywhere, on the subway, in the supermarket, in other men with rolled up sleeves exposing their gloriously hairy arms. I melted at the sight of so much hair against manly flesh. My own arms are hirsute, but I was unaware in myself how attractive this is. I noticed it and admired it only on others. It was of course a subject I could discuss with no one.
I internalized my obsession, shared it with not a soul, not even you God, and I held Anne all night long as she bereaved the death of our unborn child, our never conceived progenies. Although I held her so tenderly during the nights, during the days we had nothing to say to each other. I was silent, morose, a dead stone that sat in the living room and had nothing to share. I took my obsession out on Jack, and cooed him during the day incessantly. Anne in turn moved out to the garden, where she tended her tomatoes as a lover tends to the object of his desire. Sometimes she would pop her head through the door, her head covered by an oversize sun hat, her hands in gardening gloves, her pale skin and vivid green eyes damp with garden sweat. “What’s the matter, darling?” she would ask. “Nothing,” I replied as I pet my Jack. “Nothing.”
“Don’t you think she knew? asks God. “Don’t you think that your infidelity and distance were obvious to her, that she knew she had lost you?”
I don’t know what she knew. I cannot read her mind, and she did not tell me (or if she did, I do not remember). What I remember is the coldness of our DC house. Compared to the insufferable heat of North Carolina, that first winter we arrived in DC was bitterly cold. A freakish ice storm kept both of us from being able to go to work for five straight days. Those fives days, those five nights, and every night after that, she and I sat in the living room together, lights dimmed. We did not talk. We contemplated the stillness of the furniture, the coldness of the room, the emptiness of our lives. The silence of the winter storms was inside our house. It grew louder, deafening, obsessive.
At night, Anne would cry, lamenting our infertility, and I would hold her in bed. This much I could do for her; I could hold her in my arms all night long so that perhaps she could close her eyes; but it felt passionless and routine.
In the mornings I would drive to work, and I would take my turn crying.
“And why were you crying?”
I don’t know. I could never figure that out. A burly man like me, masculine, respectable, married, aggressive job. Why did I cry? What could possible cause a normal grown man to shed tears? At first it would simply get weepy eyed over a human interest news story I would hear on the news. You know how public radio is; they always have a sad story to tell, and I was more than ready to listen and to cry with the narrator. In a few months, the morning-news tears made way for real torrents of emotion, leaving wet marks in my face. I had to wipe my cheeks with a towel before I could go into the office from the car. After a few months I would find myself every morning engaging unabashed wailing, incoherent, with no thoughts behind it. I would drive my car, shed my tears, and chant like a lunatic while holding the steering wheel: “I hate my life. I hate my life. Oh God, I hate my life.”
I lost weight.
I grew quieter.
Anne and I continued our methodical sex, every night, aided by fertility drugs. We were determined in having children, in giving evidence of our partnership, the fruit of our love that did not exist.
“It was then that you started seeing a therapist,” adds God.
Yes, at Anne’s insistence and at long last I started seeing a much needed therapist. She found the very best therapist for me (of course), or so she said. He was not as clinically proven and all-knowing as you God, but he was supposedly a good therapist all the same.
The first day of therapy, I walked into his office we talked about nothing, and I said almost nothing. I resented being there; being ordered by my wife to see a loony doctor as if there were something wrong with me. I drank a Starbucks coffee while the therapist read a newspaper. “I’m here whenever you want to talk,” is what he said. I chose not to talk. Before I left the session, the therapist took down some notes and filled out an appointment card for me. “You are a very sick man,” he informed me. “We will need lots of therapy.” He signed me up for five consecutive sessions.
The second day of therapy I decided I would fast track the process; air out all my childhood dirty laundry; have the therapist make his snap decision, and then be done with it. I told him about the beating my parents had given me when they had caught me playing with a boy. I was twelve years old. They left me black and blue and I had to go to school wearing long sleeves, even though it was almost summer and all the other kids wore short sleeve shirts. “Is that why you cry in the mornings, at age 40, driving to work? Is it the beating you received when you were 12 years old.” They left almost dead, but no, that’s not why I cry. The therapist seemed very attentive, took down a lot of notes (as usual), and commented that “this process might take longer than we anticipated.”
The third day of therapy I told him about rolled up sleeves in adult men and their wonderfully hairy forearms; my pronounced obsession with the subject, my unnatural desire to rub my hands through each man’s body hair. This time the therapist seemed to take some interest in the matter. “Very interesting,” he said. “Now we are getting to the heart of the matter.” He rolled up his own sleeves, and exposed his hairless arms. “Does this cause you to stir?” he asked. I was unmoved. Sorry, I told him, not my type. He took some notes, rolled his sleeves back down, and asked again, “And your father? Did he have hairy arms?” Let’s not talk about my father, I asked. He’s got enough on his plate these days, and I don’t want to add burden by designating him the cause of my melt down. Mr. Take Notes wrote something on his pad, and shook his head. It seems that listening to my stories was a big emotional burden to him. I could almost hug him for his dignified, quiet sympathizing. No one had shown that much interest in my little foibles before.
The fourth day of therapy I was comfortable with Mr. Take Notes. I liked his style. He reminded me of my father; he didn’t say much, reflected a lot, expressed much through his eyes. The quiet, silent and yet sensitive type. I believe that the technical term for this is transferring, when you start falling for your therapist. Normally this doesn’t happen until the fourth or fifth month of therapy, but I don’t believe in long standing traditions. I like to do thinks fast, very fast. Perhaps there was more to this than met the eye. Perhaps Mr. Take Notes was another Reggie in disguise and I was not reading the message right. I needed to let him know where I stood. I admitted to him freely that I was attracted to men, and that it was ruining my marriage. “Not unusual,” he said. “Given all your fertility problems and your wife’s depression, I can see why you might go there.” Mr. Take Notes didn’t unzip his pants, didn’t welcome me into his arms, didn’t make a pass at me. He just took down a few more notes, made out my receipt, and told me I should come see him the following week. It was fine; I was not attracted to him anyway.
I drink from the cup that God has placed in front of me. We both know the rest of the story, as we have spoken about it many times before, relived and retold it, reconstructed and analyzed, revisited and rethought it, and yet always the same ending. “What then,” asks Go., “What happened then?”
I believed him. I believed Mr. Take Notes. I felt he was the first person who had brought some clarity to my confusion. My attraction to men was normal. Mr. Take Notes had said so. He told me that it was not “unnatural” for me to be having such thoughts. I left his office at two in the afternoon, and even though my cell phone had five messages waiting for me, all of them from my office, I decided not go back to work that day. Instead, I drove back home. I called Anne and told her to put on her party dress, I would be taking her out to dinner. She was surprised by the invitation. She and I had not shared a conversation in over a month, and we were not accustomed to going out together. She sounded cheerful. “Chinese food,” she said. “Let’s go to Joe’s Noodle House on Rockville Pike. You know they always have good food.” She giggled, and I felt embarrassed for her. She had misunderstood my invitation, she had imagined that I had had a good therapy session. She concocted in her mind that perhaps the therapist and I sorted everything out, and that I was coming home early to celebrate. She made a big deal out of my invitation to take her to dinner. I said nothing.
The food was tolerable. Joe’s Noodle House is full of Chinese people, and the staff has no interest in catering to white couples. The menus are in Chinese, and English speakers are relegated to pointing out their dishes by using the pictures on the wall. The service is not surly, but surely efficient and certainly not warm. They plop the food on your table, and never come back to ask if you want more or if the food is satisfactory. It’s a take it and leave it sort of service. If the white customer is not satisfied, there’s plenty of other Asian customers happy to take their place. The line to get into the restaurant goes all the way into the parking lot. The food is fast, cheap, and tasty. But today it was merely tolerable. I had no appetite, and no patience for the inpatient service. I rushed Anne along, and made her order quickly, eat quickly, get out of the restaurant quickly. We talked about nothing, and all the things I though I would tell her during dinner were left unsaid. I acted grumpy, snapped at her when she dallied too long in putting on her coat as we were getting ready to leave. Let’s go! – I shouted. She smiled, idiotically. I had no idea why she was in such a good mood. “Coming darling. That was truly a fabulous dinner.”
After dinner, I walked Jack around the block. He is getting older, and although he still barks and growls at anything that moves, he does it with less gusto. I picked him up and smooched him on the lips. He licked my face, and took a nip at my nose for good measure. When I returned to the house, Anne was sitting in the living room, with her sexy night gown on and a comfortable pair of slippers. She was sipping sherry. “Put him in his cage, would you please?” I bundled Jack up for the night, slipped a doggy sweater on him, and snuggled him into his kennel.
I walked slowly, hesitantly, back to the living room. I dreaded having to talk with Anne. I knew that if we spoke, I would tell, I would admit to her that I am gay.
Ann was waiting for me on the couch, with the lights on low dim, watching a chimney fire she had carefully constructed. She still sipped her sherry. I could hear Jack whimpering in his cage, as he always does when I put him away. He wants me. The night’s chores had been taken care of, dinner, the doggie walk, putting Jack away. Now Anne and I had nothing left to do but face each other. “Tiring day she said,” as she passed me a glass of sherry.
I took a seat on the other side of the couch, away from her, and said nothing. She sighed as she often does when she is tired but complacent; it sounds like a small pebble dropped into a lake. She laid on the couch, feet up, and sighed again. She sipped her sherry. I recognized the sigh. It is not a sad sigh, it is a satisfied sigh. I looked down, ready for another night of silence.
“Why are you being so quiet?”, she asked, cheerfully, as if this silence that we had lived for the past six months were something new, as if she expected that tonight I would turn the silence around and share something novel with her, something that would change our lives and repair them, make it all good again, if it ever had been good again.
I could not bear to tell her what I had told my therapist, and that he had given me permission to believe that it was all “natural.”
“Why the silence?” she repeated, this time not quite as cheerfully, this time demanding and answer, an explanation. Jack whimpered from his cage. “I wish that dog would shut up,” said Anne.
I went into the bedroom to check up on Jack. “Quiet,” I told him, and whispered to him what I could not tell Ann, whispered to him that I had at last confessed to at least one person in the whole wide world that I loved men. Jack quieted down, nuzzled his brown- black nose against the pillow in his cage, the pillow that had once been mine and that I put in his cage to comfort him. I went back into the living.
“Why the silence?” she repeated. I did not know why she is so insistent in knowing this tonight. “Why the silence” she reputed, this time definitely not so cheerful, but still hopeful.
She sipped on her glass, then put it down on the coffee table; too close to the edge. I was afraid the glass would drop and the sherry would ruin our expensive oriental carpet. I fidgeted. I dared suspect that perhaps she knew. I gave myself the luxury of confirming that she had to know. She had to be aware of the torment my mind was going through.
“I’m attracted to men,” I blurted out. “I’m gay.”
She stared at me in silent anger. She reached out to pick up her glass, the one that hade been precariously left too close to the edge of the table. She dropped it. It shattered.
It is amazing how many fragments a shattered glass can leave. The sherry spilled over the oriental rug, the glass bounced and hit the floor, shards spewing underneath the couch and into every corner of the room. Anne worried out loud about the glass, lest someone should get cut. She stood up quickly, got the vacuum cleaner out, and started sweeping. I worried about the oriental rug. I ran to get a towel, wet with cold water, and a bucket to squeeze into. I dabbed the towel against the sherry stains. Many times I had heard my mother’s advise on this subject. Dad, dab, never rub against the stain or it will stick. Every few minutes I ran the towel through cold water to freshen it up, and then continued dabbing against the stain. And so, incredibly, after confessing to Anne, to my wife, that I was gay, I found myself on my knees cleaning an oriental rug.
Anne knelt next to me. She held her stomach in a way that I had never seen before, in the way that mothers do when they are expecting. She put her hand over mine. She spoke slowly, clearly, and without passion. “The doctor thinks I’ll give birth to multiple children. The sonogram shows eight heartbeats, but many of them are too slow or too fast. There’s two of them however that have a good heartbeat, just as you want them to be at this stage. The have a good chance.”
I was shocked. While I was stupidly in therapy, Anne was secretly seeing her fertility specialist. I felt betrayed, stripped down, reduced to a sperm donor. What did I think would happen when she took fertility drugs? Why had I continued to have sex with her, methodical, passionless, obedient and routine? Why had she convinced me that we had to try, that we had to have children now or we would never be able to do so? This is what I felt when she told me she was pregnant.
“And how did she feel?” asks God. He taps his finger against his glass tumbler. God is a heavy drinker and a heavy smoker. He blows the smoke in my face again. “What about her,” he adds for emphasis. I won’t answer him.
Those two fetuses she mentioned, the ones in her stomach with the strong heartbeats, the ones that helped clean the carpet with us, they would survive (but the other fetuses in her would die), and they would become Joey and Christina. I had fulfilled her dream, performed my services. Our twin children; the evidence of our pretend love.
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The dream is interrupted here again. I wake with my head near the toilet. I must have been throwing up, but this time I have no recollection of it. The children are at the door again, clambering for me. Anne has picked them up from school, and as promised she has come back to check on me. I am undressed, still, with the dirty blanket wrapped around me, the one that has kept me company all night and all day long, this day after the suicide. The kids are scared, wanting to know why Daddy is not dressed yet, wanting to know what is wrong with Dad. Anne is gentle with them, as always, and sits them in the living room, in front of the TV so that they can watch some cartoons while Daddy gets cleaned up.
“Have you eaten?” she asks me.
No – I tell her --Not today, not yesterday, not the day before yesterday. I have lost my appetite.
“You have to eat,” she says. “You will eat. You go upstairs and get changed while I cook something. What do you have in the refrigerator?”
And so as she occupies herself in her element, the kitchen, I go upstairs to the bathroom. I step into the shower, and let the water wash away the thoughts of the day, I let the water run on top of me interminably, and I continue my dream with God. I think of him again.
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“Reggie,” says God, the loudness of his voice clear on my brain as the shower pounds my head.
I saw Reggie’s arms again, once, in the subway -- I tell God in the shower. It was of course not Reggie, but someone equally masculine, equally older than me and exceedingly confident. This time, for reasons I do not yet fully understand, I did not avert his eyes. They were not blue, not Reggie’s piercing glare, but equally attractive. He recognized me for what I was immediately, and he advanced quickly to pound on his fresh prey. He knew that I had no experience, but was more than lustfully curious. I have since learned to recognize that look in others, in men who wonder the streets of Dupont Circle in the city, in business suits and wedding bands, often more handsome than a heterosexual man has any right to be, looking to see what trouble they can get into. I recognize the look. And back then, back when I met the second Reggie in the subway, back when my masculine deflowering mentor would have me, I gave the look. The look gave me away, and I have been away ever since.
“You slept with him? Even after Anne told you she was pregnant?.” God clears his throat.
From the second pair of hairy arms, many followed. I bedded men, almost indiscriminately. I met them through sex chat lines, or ads in the back of the Washington Blade. I led a double life, lurching myself into what I thought was passionate sex, with men I hardly knew and rarely met again. At home, Anne and I stopped having sex. There was no need for it; she was pregnant; she had everything she ever desired and never wanted.
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I get out of the shower; wrap a green towel that looks strikingly bright against my hirsute naked body. I wipe the steam from against the glass, and stare at my equally green eyes, lost somewhere in the mirror. The drugs from the night before are finally wearing away, and I am commencing to realize the monstrosity of the act I tried to commit. The children (Joey and Christina, ages 6 and 6) are downstairs with Anne, helping her make dinner for me. I can hear her tell them that it is important that we all stick together right now. Did I think of them when I took those pills?
Did I think of them when I left her mother, even though they were still in her womb and not quite yet of this world?
I dreamt, and thought and imagined of Jack all day. Absurd that such a small creature should take up so much of my time when these could easily have been the last breaths I took, the last moments of my miserable life.
I wipe the bathroom counter dry; no sense in letting mildew grow; not if I’m going to live after all and be responsible from the upkeep of this place.
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I hear Ann calling me from the bottom of the stairs. “Come and eat, I’ve made your favorite.” I don’t know what my favorite is, neither does she. She is trying to trick me, get me to eat, make me think I like it. She will try to nurse me back to health, even though we are divorced, even though I left her for Reggie, for so many Reggies. She will make me well again. I am her vegetated patient, I am the person you should let die if he comes to your hospital emergency room. But she won’t; she won’t be asking me to sign any living wills; she will simply ask me to live.
I call out from the bathroom, my ears still wet, my reasoning still murky. “I’m coming,” I tell her. I run into my bedroom, step over all the dirty sheets, the still dirty remnants of last night’s suicide attempt.
I’m a heel; I left her when she was pregnant with kids. And even though I love them; even though they are now my life, they will always know that I’m the father who left them.
As I come down the stairs, to resume life, to pretend together with Anne and the kids as if nothing happens (for we will not talk about this again, we will not admit that I killed myself and survived like Lazarus), as I stumble on one more step (Dad careful, says Joey, don’t hurt yourself), as I live and descend down the steps I permit myself the luxury of one final memory, one final thought about Jack.
Before the kids were born, Jack bit two of Anne’s nieces. His behavior became more erratic, aggressive, dangerously so. Once he even tried to maul me.
Anne and Celeste convinced me that Jack had to be put down. “If it were you, would you like to live like that?” said Anne (Oh Anne. Don’t use your old living will techniques on me. I know you too well.)
Celeste took the situation in hand, much as she did when she picked out my wedding suit. She sat me down, looked straight into my eyes, and told me point blank, “Jack has to go. Anne has more than she can handle right now.”
Celeste was compassionate, however, and arranged for all of us to drive out together to a veterinarian in Northern Virginia who would put Jack to sleep efficiently and economically.
I cried like a baby as I held Jack in my hands. After the doctor injected the dog, he asked if we wanted a few more minutes with him.
“Yes,” I said.
I held Jack in my hands and he looked up at me, at his God, and I swear I saw a tear in his eyes. Why – he seemed to ask.
“Why,” I asked Celeste, with tears in my own eyes. “Why does a dog have to die because of my sexuality?”
Celeste put her hands across my shoulders.
“Everything will be alright,” she assured me.
* * *
I still have Jacks’ ashes at the bottom of my closet.
* * *
The dream ends here.
