My Heart Is a Drunken Compass (30 page)

That was Sarah's house, back then, when I began visiting her, started making excuses to come by, excuses suggesting the innocuous and platonic and transparently friendly because, well, they were. Or we were, rather, every one of those things—platonic and friendly and transparent. So much so that the purpose of my first visit was to bring Brenda Brown some lesbian porn magazines I'd found under Steph's bed.

Brenda Brown, our karate instructor, lived in Sarah's basement and brought a real sense of color to the house, which would otherwise have passed for a stuffy, upper-middle-class house with doilies and a pervading smell of some grandmother's bad German candies. Instead, Sarah's house was lined with books, philosophy texts and women's literature, a triptych of iconic images of the nourishing cycle of femininity. There was power here, and I was drawn to it.

So when I found all the porno magazines, instead of being concerned or curious about Steph's choices in buying them, I thought I knew just the person who would like them, if Steph had indeed lost interest in their draw, as she was claiming. I'd been fascinated with them at first, from the position of a printer (saddle-stitched, gloss cover, 12 × 18 with a bleed and face trim, with a sixty-page newsprint black-and-white interior, printed in California—who was producing this? Was it self-sustaining? Certainly a niche audience. How were they keeping themselves afloat? Not by advertising, by the looks of it. Definitely not a Larry Flynt product, too homemade, too ... unheteronormative. Much less gynecology in this magazine, for instance, and ironically. And these models—this is what Steph was into? Did I really look like a butch lesbian now? I mean, I know I gained some weight, but REALLY, I don't own anything flannel....).

Steph had more than a year's subscription under her bed, and not a single penis to be found in all twelve or fourteen issues. Call me phallocentric, but I was much more intrigued by the cultural significance and production dilemma of a printed lesbian periodical than the idea of it being pornography. After all, I was most certainly not the target audience; it made sense that the eroticism was lost on me, and not because most of the models looked like a plurality of modern-day Venus de Willendorfs, in mullets.

Steph never felt compelled to explain why she had the collection, and I never pressed her for an answer. Interestingly, she often felt contentious about and diminished by the pornographic trails left on my web browser, and curiously, I thought she and I had been above such a discussion anyway—especially since she had had a much more, let's say, adventurous sex life than I would ever consider.

So when I came up with the idea to give the magazine collection to my new friend, Brenda, who I thought would appreciate it, Steph had agreed, and a bit too sheepishly and coy, I had felt at the time.

Brenda lived in the basement with her three dogs, in probably the only place in the city that living arrangement could have been possible. Sarah had her own dog, an aging and elegant English Lab named Genevieve who kept order as the alpha bitch. Brenda had a gorgeous pit bull puppy named Betty Brown that she had rescued from a future of being a bait dog, plucked right from the trunk of a drug dealer's car, and they were inseparable. And she had a lanky Irish wolfhound named Jack County, also a rescue, also relieved of ownership from a drug manufacturer, some guy with the last name of “County” who cooked meth in a trailer park and had left Jack chained to a tree with no care or water. Brenda saved the dog, brought him back from the brink of death to a life of health and sanitation, gave him the best years of his life. Jack County looked like the canine version of Tom Selleck and would follow me around, find me in the house when he heard my voice, then curl up at my feet or near me with a paw placed reassuringly on me to convince me to stay still and keep him company while he napped. He had this wonderfully demure manner of curling up his long tail and tucking it under his nether bits while he slept, which looked like a merkin. “Remember this is all gravy, Jack,” Sarah would say when Jack would enter a room.

Finally, Brenda had Bill Brown, a dog that had moved far past his dog years and into archival history, had dementia and doggie Alzheimer's, would sometimes find himself trapped in a corner of the house and incapable of remembering that to get out of the corner, all he had to do was either turn to a side or back up. Instead, he'd stare at the corner and become confused, begin barking and growling until someone came by and pointed him in another direction. It would have been funny if it hadn't been so sad.

Brenda accepted the paper bag full of lesbian pornography in the manner intended: It was a fun gift—enjoy it. But the more I learned about Brenda, the more I realized that she didn't need pornography; Brenda was a magnetic draw of vitality. She didn't date other lesbians; she dated straight girls who suddenly realized how fantastic and sexy Brenda was. We called these women “brendasexuals,” because after a brief fling, they'd eventually end up dating men again, and Brenda would be the only same-sex experience they likely would have in their lives. But that was Brenda: She was mesmerizing.

She was even more mesmerizing on the karate mat, so much so that I hadn't seen that Steph had developed her own fascination with Brenda, oddly enough. Which, at this point, just makes me sort of laugh, thinking back to when I tried to introduce them one afternoon at the karate school, and I said, “Oh, hold on just a second; I'll get Brenda and you can meet her,” and when I turned around again, I saw Steph actually running out of the school. If this had been a cartoon, and sometimes later it felt like one, I would have turned around to a floating, spinning hat, suspended in midair with a word bubble that read “Whoosh!” floating beneath it.

Instead of feeling any sort of jealousy, from this distance, I think my only real envy is that I wished I could have met someone back then who would frighten me with similar feelings felt at that level. The only comparable intensity would eventually come with my feelings for Sarah, but that's not for a few chapters at least. Right now, we were still frightened of the torrid affair we'd had, and rather publicly, in front of most of the karate school people who had been at her house that night.

And as much as I really missed my friendship with Sarah as we adjusted to the new reality, I have to say that I really missed her house, really missed the sanctuary and safety of being in a clean, sunlit place full of dog energy and Brenda Brown in the basement, the house itself as a destination, a place to go and sit with coffee and talk about everything and nothing, feeling a sense of safety that you couldn't say anything wrong, and neither would she, because we were both very clever, and very raunchy in private, and then very polite in public, for the most part. I could get away with saying almost anything that popped into my mind, and Sarah would look at me like, “Did you just really say that?” and then giggle, and I'd respond the same, when she would lob a particularly astute or sordid bon mot, and we'd have a wonderful time because there was nothing in the balance, nothing either of us demanded of one another. We had nothing to lose in the exchange.

But that had shifted immediately the morning she woke up and I had disappeared, and she had to face her household alone, with a headache, and I had crawled back into my apartment on the other side of the hill, in the rental area, and sulked, and quietly waited for the rest of the storm to settle in for good.

Morning arrived with something like an ice pick of awkwardness and fear of the consequences of what Sarah and I had both willingly allowed to combust between us the night before. In the months that followed, I tried to convince myself that I'd been a passive passenger in that evening's fevered affair, but this wasn't true. By this age, I'd come to accept that I would often give off an “I fancy you” vibe when all I really wanted to say was, “I want to know more about you.”

With Sarah, it was much more the former rather than the latter, and she'd simply responded in kind.

That morning, I had managed to slip out when she was still asleep, and I drove back to my apartment thinking I'd allowed the friendship to ruin itself because friendships do not come back from fucking, I've learned. But this morning, I felt at once exhilarated and deeply ashamed, a cognitive dissonance, then finally conflicted because I felt almost as if I'd cheated on Stephanie, even though we weren't together. I couldn't imagine what Sarah was thinking.

Nevertheless, I walked around in a state of bewildered completion the weekend after Sarah and I had locked in spontaneous ignition. It was something like I had never before experienced in my life, and I was staggered at every level, wondering if it had meant and functioned and fulfilled her in the same way, but I had no vocabulary to ask her, and things had become stressed between us.

Two days later, Steph returned from her second and most recent emergency trip to the East Coast looking worn down and spent. It had not developed into the mercy mission she had imagined. She had instead overstayed her welcome, and much of the old scar tissue in her relationships surfaced and needed a good scrubbing with a psychiatric loofah. When she disembarked from her plane, claimed her luggage, and then lodged herself in my passenger seat, once again safely in the fold of the cold, hanging Seattle rain, she began rattling off and apart on the details of the trip, why her relationship with her mother was once again in a standoff when it seemed to have swung around during the first trip, when everyone was helping her dad. Her mother, she said, seemed annoyed and weary of her presence, while Steph was only trying to get things done around the house as her mother adjusted to her newly developed monoculism.

I was nervous the whole time, my sense of guilt telegraphed on my features as I drove her home, calculating with a due sense of dread how I could disentangle myself from this situation before Steph found out I'd slept with someone else, though it was entirely within the bounds of acceptability. I simply couldn't withstand the impending sense of betrayal in which she'd view it. Steph's exhaustion was catching, and worse still, it seemed like she was convinced we had a fighting chance of reparations.

I was in a bit of a pickle, once again, because of my passivity and cowardice.

Back home now, Steph surprised me with an invitation to a beachside stay in Oregon for the long Thanksgiving weekend. I expressed my concern at her taking the time off, after missing three concurrent weeks of work during her busy time of year. “Not a problem,” she said. “I'm catching up. We should take Cleo and drive your car down to Oregon. It'll be fun.”

Meanwhile, my interactions with Sarah had become awkward and cold, distant, as I had dreaded. We had been building what was, for me, a deep and sincere lifetime friendship that I feared lost now because of that epic, drunken fumbling in her guest bedroom, wrestling like naked teenagers, fueled by pent-up sexual sublimation and vodka. Sarah, in the wake of her divorce, had realized she had subdued her sexual identity for many years as she played the good mother and wife, and had found in me a willing, if entirely confused, partner to apply a defibrillator on her libido. And I had, with Stephanie, questioned whether being miserable and sexless in a relationship might be more important than fanning the spark of human combustion between two people who deeply, passionately wanted to fuck one another's hearts out, as I had now realized I wanted with Sarah.

And yet, still, I drove on that trip with Stephanie, to Haystack Rock, thinking that I would use this time to tell her that I was gone for good.

On the final day, when we stopped at a Mexican restaurant near Mount Rainier, matters finally came to a head. Steph and I had, in keeping with character, kept from being intimate during the trip because I had been afraid to remove my shirt in front of her, uncertain of what she might see that I could not, from any angle in a mirrored bathroom. An imagined tapestry of evidence on the palimpsest of my back would have indicated that I had been participating in something other than sexlessness, and I was cowering from the confrontation, any confrontation. How I would normally break off a relationship in my youth was, I'd put on a drunk, stick on a cheap hat, and then trusted it to luck, like I did with everything else.