I Loved You More (12 page)

Then that looked-at look, I let it come out of me. Let my own beauty gaze back straight into hers.

Olga. Maybe it's because it's the first time I've seen Hank make his nod to hard liquor. Maybe it's because Hank's told me about Olga's Santeria, maybe it's because she'd asked to read my cards, maybe she is a witch, her beauty, maybe it's her black eyes that make Hank's look brown, maybe it's the gold, all the gold on her. The sound of gold. Maybe it's the three of us in a dark place hand in hand in hand around a flame. What scares me most is the secret I couldn't speak in Jeske's class. Can she see my shame? I watch Olga's red lips, ready for the brutal truth, but then she speaks.

“You've been with many women also,” Olga says.

Maybe Olga's been talking to
Hank
. Thing is though, I've only told Hank about Evie, my ex-wife.

Maybe it's simply women's intuition. Or maybe what happens isn't because of anything other than it is. Hank scoots in closer, his hand a big bear paw around mine. Olga leans in too. Her hand in mine is like she's hanging onto a cliff.

The fact is Olga can see. In that moment, in that place, I
have no doubt. She can see inside me. All of my whole long history. And as she's looking, it makes me look too.

Many women also
.

That look of Olga's. There's the
okay, he's gay look
, but then there's the other look –
he sleeps with women too
. That look. Women and men both, when they find that out, there's usually a long long look like they're trying to figure out how somebody – a
guy
– if a woman walks on both sides of the street that's somehow not surprising – but
a guy
, a man sleeping with women and sleeping with men too –
that
look is:
how can he switch gears like that
. And more specifically:
how can his cock switch gears like that
.

It's simple. Survival. For me it's been survival. The generous vascular congestion filling my cock with life while I'm touching, holding another human being, for most men an act as natural as blood flowing in and out of their hearts, for me, has always been elusive. A mystery. And by that point in my life, nonexistent.

No, there were no accidents as a child, no blows to the groin, no slip of a blade to the penis. But there was a wound. Most definitely there was a wound.

MY MOTHER, MY SISTER.

The Paradoxes.

There's one day that sticks out in my mind. My sister, Margaret, and I are going to 4-H camp. I'm maybe seven, Sis is ten. I'm excited to leave home, to go to some new exotic place. My sister and I hug mom and we get into our blue and white '57 Buick. My sister in front next to dad. Me in the back seat.

As my father drives out the driveway, I turn and look out the back window. My mother is standing alone at the back door of our skinny white house. She's in her red housedress and she's holding the iron frying pan. She's just scraped the food scraps out for the dogs. My mother looks up. That far away I can see it. Inside her almond-shaped hazel eyes, the deep loneliness she usually keeps so well hidden.

From the beginning, I was the one responsible for her sadness. I mean it was my job to stop it. Nobody told me to save her, nobody made me. I just knew. It was simple. My mother's sadness was something that happened inside my own body. How my mother was, was how I was. I had no choice. A pain too much to bear. And even if I wanted it to stop, my mother was what made life, life. I only kept her happy so I could survive.

Looking out the back window of the Buick that day, when I see my mother's eyes, I start crying. Really crying. My father hates that I'm crying. He thinks I'm crying because I miss my mommy. He doesn't know that I'm crying for her. That she is alone. That now that I'm gone she'll be alone with
him
. The man who doesn't see her.

My father's big arm, his hairy hand comes through the slot between the front seats. Knocks me across the back seat.

“Stop crying!” my father yells. “You damn crybaby.”

Later, on the bus on our way to 4-H Camp, when I'm alone with my sis, Margaret makes sure that she and I sit in the same seat next to each other. Me inside by the window, her on the aisle. She has my lunch. She holds my hand safely in hers.

When the bus takes off, she whispers only so I can hear:
you damn crybaby
.

Margaret says it as if she's victorious, like she's the Grand Chooser and the only one who knows the truth. She whispers:
you need to grow up and start acting like a man. So your father can be proud of you
.

My sister, the paradox, who's bigger than me, who's always in control, who's the only one around to play with. The one who protects me from
them
: my mother, my father.

My crazy depressed mother and her mood swings, her insane rages, her migraine headaches. Her obsession with hell and damnation and fire and praying the rosary, praying the rosary.
Pray for us. Have mercy on us. Lord I am not worthy. I who am the most miserable of all
.

We hide under the bed when mother goes crazy. Margaret
lies down in front of me, makes a sandwich of me between her and the wall. She tells me to close my eyes tight. She pulls my arm around her and holds on tight. And we sing real soft our favorite song. “Over the Rainbow.”

More than anyone, though, who my sister protects me from is my father. My sister Margaret is the only one who knows my terrible secret. Except my mother, and only she knows some of the time. But really, it's my sister, and only my sister, Margaret, who holds the key.

If my father catches me playing dress up, the wide world will open up a huge crack and I will fall in alone. Banished from the world of men.

My sister, Margaret, is the only one standing between me and that hell.

Yet when my father isn't around, and mother isn't watching, it's Margaret who puts dresses on me, curls my hair, colors my lips cherry red, hangs earrings on my ears.

If Margaret tells Ben to jump
, my father always said,
Ben will ask how high
.

And something else that day on the bus. My sister Margaret does the thing she knows will hurt me the worst. She leans over, whispers in my ear:
Benjamina
. The girl name she knows I hate.

And all the while, as my sister whispers her betrayals, calls me the girl name, she unfolds my sandwich for me, she opens up my juice, she holds on tight to my hand. In my sister's eyes, so much like my mother's eyes, the way she looks at me happens inside my body too.

I'm protecting him because he's mine
.

But what can I do.

The paradox.

I'm the only one she has.

Years later, when I'm twelve, maybe thirteen, the paradox of mother, the paradox of sister has only deepened. It's a fact. I am powerless. I am their slave.

In the sixth grade, during religion class, for the first time I
really look at a drawing in my Baltimore Catechism. It's of a naked man at the very bottom of hell. He's in the deepest, hottest place in hell,
the most miserable of all
.

He has no cock hanging down there between his legs.

That's all the proof I need.

If I sin, if my cock gets hard, if my sister finds out, it's only a matter of time before she'll tell my mother. When my crazy mother finds out, she'll cut off my cock at the base, throw it in an unmarked grave.

My mother, my sister.

Fascists in the night come to kill my Lorca.

If the dictatorship is a success, I'll never get to say I miss it.

My mother, my sister.

Women I have loved.

And Olga sees it.

MY WIFE, EVELYN.
Seven years of trying to make my Catholic promise work.

Idaho State University, 1967. Evelyn Marie Firth, Evie, is eighteen years old, blonde and tall and standing between the wall mirror and the staircase of my fraternity house holding a plastic cup of foamy Coors. She's so unlike the other helmet-haired sorority girls at the kegger. She looks like Twiggy.

'67 in Idaho, the year the Sixties really hit. On the front porch, I'm surprised when she accepts the cigarette. A Gamma Phi smoking a cigarette. So easy sitting next to her on the steps. Hazel green eyes under all that makeup. Short, dark pleated skirt and white polka dot pantyhose. Mary Janes. Her long legs press together and poke up from the second step. May in Idaho, one of those first hot days when everybody's been outside in the sun trying to get a tan. On the steps, my tanned feet next to hers in penny loafers, no socks. Duct tape holding the sole onto the left shoe. We'd mown the lawn that day and the smell of the evening was cut grass, the Marlboros, and her. Something clean and French. It isn't long and we are shoulder to shoulder.

“What are you doing this summer?” she asks.

“Going to San Francisco,” I say. “Want to see what the hippies are all about.”

I think that was it. Why she fell for me. An older guy, almost twenty years old, going to where it was really cool. Haight-Ashbury. Most guys back then, in Idaho, for my brothers at the fraternity, hippies were the last fucking place they wanted to go.

That's the first time I feel it with Evie. After I say
San Francisco
: the silence. Her faraway silence. Like suddenly the person who'd been sitting next to me just up and disappeared. I remember turning my head to see if she was still there.

“You'll never come back,” she says.

I knew I'd be back. San Francisco. I was scared stupid.

“You never know,” I say.

I come back. With hair over my ears and a mustache. A peace symbol around my neck. There's a big hullabaloo fraternity meeting. My acid trips and marijuana parties are a bad influence.
Hippy fag
is stuck onto my door every morning.
Commie queer. Phi Sigma Delta Love It Or Leave It
. I move out, find my own house to rent.

I've never taken acid. Smoked dope twice.

Idaho.

The fraternity formal we go to, Winter Carnival, our last attempt at status quo, Evie so bold as to wear a shiny silver blue bellbottom pants suit, her hair dyed pink, cut in an extreme angle across her face, huge silver earrings. Painted eyes you can see across the room. Me and my mustache, hair going down and down, in a vintage double breasted suit and a porkpie hat. Everybody else at the ball, some version of 1958.

Fucking scandalous, Evie and I. There are no limits.

A year later, Evie, in overall jeans without a bra, putting a torn bit of blotter acid onto her tongue. “All I want,” Evie says, “is to take acid and sit in a blue room and listen to the Moody Blues.”

Why she loves me. I don't know. She says it's Jimmy Webb.
I'm a sensitive man like the songwriter Jimmy Webb. That whole first year, the way she holds my hand, as if every moment is a perfect moment, and the moment is passing too fast.

Awkward Catholic-boy sex.
Working on mysteries without any clue
. Despite the fact that Lorca has long been murdered, I have my youth. And my youth has a cock. It's a faraway squirm of petulant flesh. Poetry bound inside a medieval contraption.

One day I stand in the shower, my cock in my hand, and hold it, look at my cock. Really look. I can't run away any longer. Something is definitely wrong down there. It's the first time I can admit there is a wound. I go to a psychiatrist and tell him I think I'm homosexual. He is Mormon and tells me I can't be. Homosexuals have their sex organs in their mouths.

Idaho. Not only is it the Middle Ages. It's Idaho.

There is a day in the kitchen in my rented house – a railroad they call this kind of house – a string of one rooms connected to one another, four rooms long. Each room an exterior door. That kind of siding that looks like fake brick. Gray. Evie and I have painted the kitchen yellow. On the kitchen exterior door, Evie's bought white curtains. The kitchen table is pushed up against the door. It's a glass topped table and there's a huge bouquet of bursting orange gladiolas in a mason jar from across the street in the cemetery. The sun that morning through the curtains. It's a Sunday and Evie and I have made pancakes and eggs. Our friends John and Maggie are over. The sunlight, the steaming food on our plates, four friends around a table, Peter, Paul and Mary on the stereo,
Late Again
. Percolator coffee and Marlboros. We're laughing because the day before our landlord had come over and was so shocked and obviously in awe of this new kind of young people, men and women living together so open and so casually, that he forgot to turn off the water supply before he changed the faucet. Water blew out a geyser. Pandemonium.

Laughing there, a part of me opens up and is aware. I am in a yellow kitchen with Evie and my friends and there's good food and we're laughing. And especially: I am wearing a yellow
T-shirt and blue-lensed John Lennon glasses that Evie's bought me. For no reason, she's just bought me these gifts. Things I love that she knew I'd love and she bought them for me. Under the table, Evie's knee is pressed against mine. She's doing her impersonation of her French teacher,
Monsieur Faggot
. In that moment, Evelyn Firth looks like everything I'd ever been waiting for.