Kate Christie (20 page)

The tea made me sleepy. When I’d finished my cup, I looked across the table at her. “I think I’m too tired to drive. Mind if I crash on your couch?”

She glanced from me to her living room. “Of course not.”

Was that relief in her eyes? Apparently she didn’t want to think of herself alone in this big old house tonight, either.

We got ready for bed as soon as we’d rinsed out our tea mugs, even though it wasn’t quite eleven, still early by college student standards. She loaned me a T-shirt and boxers, a spare contact case. I used the bathroom before she did, washing my face and brushing my teeth with a toothpaste-smeared finger.

I also opened the mirrored medicine chest and examined its contents. Advil, dental floss, contact solution, moisturizer, a box of Tampax, zit cream and Band-Aids. Feeling slightly Beautiful Game 145

guilty, I closed the mirror, wincing as the hinges squealed. No medications, no questionable drugs and no condoms. Or dental dams, for that matter.

In the living room, Jess had set out a pillow and some bedding.

“Are you sure you’ll be okay out here?” she asked, watching me tuck the sheet and blanket under an end cushion.

“I’ll be fine. It’s not like I haven’t fallen asleep out here before,” I assured her.

We had each dozed off more than once watching football, especially back in October when we’d been in-season and exhausted all the time.

“Well, if you need anything,” she waved at her room, “just let me know.”

“I will.” I stood looking at her in the lamplit living room. Her hair hung loose about her shoulders, and she was dressed like me in boxers and a T-shirt. She looked beautiful. And nervous. But why?

“Thanks for letting me stay,” I said.

Her eyes rested on mine. “Thanks for staying.”

“De nada.” I smiled and turned away. “Wake me up when you get up, okay?” We both had a ten o’clock class in the morning.

“I will.”

She left the bathroom light on so that I could find my way if I needed to, her door partially open. I lay on the couch listening to her move around her room. Pretty soon she turned off the light and settled into bed. Duncan gave me a kiss and headed into the bedroom, where I heard the springs squeak as he jumped up on the bed. Jess’s voice sounded through the wall soft and affectionate, and for just a minute, I envied Sidney and Claire’s dog.The grumbling of the old house kept me awake for a little while. Wood shifting, floorboards creaking, window panes rattling. And then those same noises grew familiar and lulled me, put me at ease. Until finally, there on the lumpy brown couch in Jess Maxwell’s third-floor apartment, I slept.

Freshman year at SDU, I took a sociology class that required us to spend a day asking strangers their opinion on the meaning of life. “To be happy” was the most common answer I heard the afternoon I wandered La Jolla trying to get up my nerve to approach perfect strangers. When I would ask for an explanation of “happiness,” most people’s eyes glazed over and they would shrug, get defensive, walk away.

Only an older woman I met in a park feeding pigeons gave me more than a pat answer. I sat down beside her, told her I was a college student conducting sociological research, and popped the question: “What do you believe is the meaning of life?”

She looked over at me, brown eyes watery with age, and said,

“That’s easy: love. When we can love everyone and everything around us equally, then we’ve achieved a life of value.”

Beautiful Game 147

“Everything?” I repeated, wondering if she was about to get all Christian on me as she scattered bread crumbs for the softly mewling birds.

She nodded. “Everyone needs to be loved.”

As I rode my bike back to campus at the end of the experiment, I wondered if I would ever achieve such a state of unconditional love. It was hard to love strangers when so many claimed to hate me. Men in passing cars had yelled profanities at me more than once as I walked down a city sidewalk hand-in-hand with another woman. Male students from other schools routinely called me “dyke” from the soccer sidelines because they thought their yelled slurs would throw me off my game. Sophomore year a woman on another team had even called me a “fucking dyke”

to my face when we were jostling for a ball deep in the corner of the field. I cleared the ball toward the half, then glared at her, momentarily speechless. After the game she’d tracked me down to apologize, but I’d ignored her and turned away. I wasn’t sure how to handle these strangers who hated me because I wasn’t like them. I certainly didn’t think I would ever love any of them.

When you’re gay, sometimes you wonder not only why you love a particular person, but why you love a person of a particular gender. Why her and not him? But it’s not like it’s a choice, no matter what Fox News and the Catholic Church—both such reliable sources of information about the modern world and human nature—say.

There’s a Bonnie Raitt song I like, “You,” that asks if it isn’t love that we’re sent here for. In “Mystery,” the Indigo Girls wonder whether love is dictated or chosen. And in “Circle,” Sarah McLachlan ponders the value of a love that keeps her hanging on despite the fact it isn’t good for her. All good questions. Ones, in fact, that I found myself coming back to again and again in the weeks that followed Jess’s Super Bowl party.

That semester, alone at night in my white-walled dorm room, I lay awake for hours, illicit candles flickering on the bedside table, red power light glowing on my stereo. I should have been studying but instead I was listening to sappy, romantic music and trying to figure out what to do about Jess. I knew I loved her. I knew it when I woke up on her couch in the middle of the night 14 Kate Christie

after the Super Bowl party and listened for her breathing on the other side of the wall. It was a truth I could no longer ignore.

Once I acknowledged that truth, though, I was in a quandary.

What to do? Should I tell her and risk driving her away? Should I pretend nothing had changed, that I was still happy just being friends? Alone in my room on Valentine’s Day, I wrote down a list of pros and cons for either action. For telling her, of course, there were more cons than pros. She might never talk to me again, which would ruin everything because I felt happiest when I was with her. Or thinking about her. Or talking about her.

None of which I could do happily if she were no longer speaking to me. The pros side of the list was measly: Resolution. And who really wanted resolution if it turned out to be the opposite of what you wanted most in life?

The cons had it, I decided that night. I would say nothing and seek solace in the notion that the feeling of love alone was enough. Jess didn’t have to return my sentiment or even know that I felt it. Love was good, wasn’t it? And this love would remain pure.

I soon learned that I wasn’t the only one suffering from unrequited love at SDU. A couple of weeks after Valentine’s Day, Alicia Ramirez sat down next to me in Philosophy and Women.

I’d noticed her before. I noticed all of the attractive women in my classes, more out of habit than anything else.

“Hi,” Alicia said as she slid into the empty seat beside me.

Holly was skipping class that morning. I’d promised to take copious notes, as was our arrangement.

“Hi,” I returned, waking up more fully as I noticed Alicia’s smile, her long dark hair, her warm brown eyes. Superficially, she reminded me of Jess. But the fleeting impression passed as she regarded me with a forthright smile. Jess’s smiles usually had a sideways quality, as if she’d rather not look at you straight on.

“You’re on the soccer team, aren’t you?” Alicia asked.

I refrained from glancing down at the “SDU Soccer” emblem on my T-shirt. “I am.”

“I was just wondering, do you have a partner for the essay yet?”Our professor had assigned a collaborative essay—very Beautiful Game 14

Women’s Studies of her, Holly and I had agreed—due just before spring break. The idea was that each pair of students would choose one of the philosophers we’d been studying to write a paper about. While one student researched the philosopher’s life, the other would analyze the subject’s body of work. Then together the students would take what they’d found and shape it into a cohesive essay. Or at least, that was the theory.

“I’m actually paired up already,” I admitted.

Holly would kill me if I dumped her for a cute girl. Besides, while Alicia was indeed attractive, I wasn’t looking. That was one of the cons of being in love with Jess—I couldn’t seem to generate an interest in other women. Not for lack of trying, either.

“I thought you probably would be.” Alicia paused as our professor strode into the classroom juggling a leather bag and travel mug. “Well, do you maybe want to go for coffee sometime?”

I looked down at her hand lying on top of her notebook. A silver ring with a women’s symbol adorned one of her fingers.

“Um,” I hedged.

“Don’t worry,” she said, “I’m not hitting on you.”

And why exactly was that? But even going out for coffee with someone who announced up front they weren’t interested in me was preferable to moping around by myself yet another night listening to songs about lost love.

“Coffee sounds like fun. I’m Cam,” I added, extending my hand.

“Alicia,” she said, her ring cool against my palm.

The very next night we walked off-campus to a coffee shop on Main for cappuccinos and dessert. It didn’t take long for Alicia to get to the point: “Are you friends with Anna Sampson?”

Anna, the bold baby dyke backup goalkeeper? This was definitely a first. “Yeah, I know Anna.
She’s
the reason you asked me to hang out?”

“Maybe,” Alicia said, ducking her head over her mug.

“You know she’s dating someone, don’t you?”

“She is?” Her face fell almost comically.

“She’s been seeing this girl on her floor for a couple of weeks 150 Kate Christie

now.” Which was completely against my rules of same-sex dating, I only just refrained from pointing out.

“On her floor?” Alicia repeated. “But that’s just stupid. What was she thinking?”

“I know, right?”

Alicia, I decided that night, was pretty cool in spite of her questionable taste in women. We lingered over coffee, procrastinating from the homework that beckoned us both, talking about race and gender and class, philosophy and education and sociology, her major. We described our families and our histories and what we hoped would be our futures, and I watched her smile and laugh at the things I said, noticed how easily she answered even when I asked her a personal question, and all at once I wished that I could put Jess out of my mind and fall instead for someone like Alicia. Someone who didn’t flinch away whenever I got too close.

And yet…

And yet, I also found myself remembering the first time I’d gotten coffee with Jess in the fall. I found myself missing her as I sat with Alicia drinking coffee at the small ceramic table, chatting about our older siblings. And that night, back in my dorm room, I lay in bed alone thinking of Jess, who was probably at that moment on a bus home from a match up in Fresno. The next morning, Jess was still the first thing I thought of when I woke up, even before I tugged on the window shade to see what kind of day waited.

The worst thing was knowing I was hopelessly in love for the first time as a reasonably mature adult but unable to admit that love to anyone. Literally the love that dare not speak its name, damn it. And yet, it was also the best thing to wake in the morning thinking of her, to feel my heart literally, physically leap at the sight of her across the cafeteria or the tennis courts. The best thing of all to watch Sunday afternoon NBA double-headers with Jess and Holly at Jess’s apartment, the three of us sprawled across the couch, our books stacked on the coffee table.

A few days after our coffee date, I ran into Alicia outside the cafeteria. No heart leap, but a pleasant surprise nonetheless.

“
Hola
,” she said, smiling. “Want to grab lunch?”

Beautiful Game 151

“Sure,” I said, surreptitiously checking the vicinity as I followed her inside. Jess usually ate lunch on campus on Fridays after her ten o’clock studio art class, and I was hoping to run into her. We had been playing phone tag all week, and the tennis team was due to leave that afternoon for a weekend tournament in San Francisco. They wouldn’t be back on campus until Sunday night.

Alicia and I took our food out onto the patio. Almost March, the day was warm enough for shorts.

“What a perfect soccer day,” Alicia said, sighing wistfully.

Was she thinking about Anna? “Do you play?”

“A little. My high school didn’t have a girls’ varsity team until I was a junior, though, and anyway, my parents didn’t exactly encourage me to play sports. Not the thing in our culture.”

Her parents had immigrated to the United States from Mexico in the seventies, Alicia had told me during our coffee date. They were progressive in a lot of ways, but old school in others. She wasn’t out to them, wasn’t sure if or when she would be. Definitely not until after college—she’d had friends whose parents had withdrawn financial support when they found out their kids were queer.

“That’s too bad,” I said. “But you’re a fan of the beautiful game?”

“I love soccer. My brothers all grew up playing, and my entire family always gets together to watch the World Cup on the Mexican TV stations.”

“No way! Mine, too.”

“You get Mexican TV up in Oregon?”

“Dude, everyone gets Mexican TV.”

“We are everywhere, kind of like the gays. Though admittedly less reproductively challenged.”

I didn’t think I knew her well enough yet to rip on the Catholic drive for procreation, considered among the Protestant Wallaces to be a blatant, cynical attempt to spread their religion.