Swish (25 page)

And I hated myself for denying mercy to a grieving father. He had very clearly loved his son deeply even as he had probably fucked him up beyond all repair—well, now definitely beyond all repair, seeing as how he was lying in a box under the earth and would never be in a position to forgive anybody ever again.

On my way out of the session I felt a tap on my shoulder and turned around to see hot Jon, who looked unhappy. “I want to hear more about your story,” he said.

“Fine,” I said, “but are you all right?”

“Oh, I’m okay. It’s just that last year I had such a wonderful experience at the conference, but so far this year I feel numb. I mean, if I’m here again and I’m not getting any new perspective on my life—well, it’s a problem.”

“That’s rough.”

“I look at my life, and I ask, am I happy? The first time I asked myself that was a year and a half ago, and I thought, damn it, I’m
not.
I mean, is this all there is? Make money, get rich, retire, live a life without joy?”

I didn’t know what to say to this. For the first time, somebody I’d met here was expressing doubt. For the first time, somebody was saying he wasn’t sure what his next step was.

Was this what they were all thinking?

“But I don’t want to go on about myself,” he said. “I want to hear more about you, why you came here.”

This time Rob wasn’t around to rescue me by telling us about the workshop he’d just been to. “I don’t know,” I said. “I just feel…an emptiness. Like, I wonder why I’m not filled with joy every time I see my boyfriend.” I have not been filled with joy under any circumstances since I went off Prozac in 1999. But it would have been one thing to acknowledge that I had bad brain chemistry; to depict Mike as being a lesser part of my life than he actually was felt uncomfortably close to betrayal. I blamed Jon for this, and I suddenly realized he was incredibly annoying.

And he wouldn’t let it go. He kept on asking questions. He asked about my boyfriend. He asked about my experience in the lifestyle. He asked about my childhood, and I talked about how my father had worked a lot and I had had to take care of my dying mother and I couldn’t complain because he was off saving the world. I talked and talked and talked. I did not wish to say the things I said to him, because they were true and because they were not things I felt comfortable revealing, but I was unable to make anything up. By now I found him extraordinarily unattractive. The more strongly he expressed sympathy the more adamantly I refused to let it move me. I apologized for talking so much, when in fact I was furious at him for making me do so.

Finally—
finally
—I was able to wrench the conversation around to him, and he revealed that, after the Exodus conference the previous year, he had walked out on Stacey on her birthday and spent the rest of the day in a gay sex club. Eventually, however, he had realized that the lifestyle was miserable and that he belonged with his wife.

“And now things are amazing,” he said. “I mean, okay, I’ve never gotten an erection looking at her, or at any woman. So when we have sex, we turn the lights off, she touches me, she scratches my back, and that’s how we start. No, it’s not the same excitement I get from sex with a man. But it’s so wonderful to wake up next to someone you trust and who trusts you and hear your seven-year-old daughter and your twin sons laughing, who love each other so much, and you.”

Your
daughter
? I thought.
Your
sons
?
You have
children
?
I just met you, and I can see your marriage imploding before my eyes. What were you
thinking
?

“There’s one guy here,” he said, “who really triggers me. I told Stacey, and she said, what are you going to do about it? I said, I’m gonna get to know him. And I went and spent a long time talking with him. He told me all about his life, and I’m like, Whoa, you have some serious stuff going on. You have problems just like me. And I don’t feel inferior to him anymore.”

Fuck.

He was talking about me.

He had sought me out, without his wife. He had made a big deal of being interested in my story. All that insistence on finding out what was missing from my life—he hadn’t been grilling me; he had really wanted to know. He had needed to find something wrong with me so that he could keep believing that to be happy he had to be straight.

What damage had I done him by shoring up that belief?

The next afternoon Rob invited me and Jon to go swimming with him in the Asheville River. Jon declined, saying that he and Stacey wanted to go to the local crafts fair, but I was all for the idea of taking my clothes off in front of Rob. Unfortunately, before we left he acquired three other companions—Bill, the cute, bubbly twink; Louis, the hairdresser with bad hair; and Greg, the sullen deaf guy. But something about the river eased my spirits, and before long I was jumping from the log that hung from the tree, Wicked Witch of the West or no, and swimming back to shore, laughing the whole time.

And for the first time since the start of the conference, I didn’t feel like a con man. I don’t know whether it was the absence of a notebook that did it, or the fact that nobody was discussing brokenness or healing or father wounds, or the fact that I couldn’t see a goddamned thing because I didn’t have my contacts in, but I could almost feel my innards untwisting themselves.

I attempted a back somersault off the log, landed on my back, and got water up my nose, but I tried again and this time I went in upright. Bill followed my lead; Rob started to but he was too muscular to pull his knees far enough into his chest for a somersault. Louis was well built too—and well tanned, though his bronzed palms gave him away as a user of self-tanning cream—but he was sitting on a rock on the shore, not swimming.

I stood with Rob knee-deep in the water near the bank and talked with him and Louis. I kept losing my balance, but I was not sorry to have to reach out repeatedly and grab Rob’s arm to steady myself.
Is he into me?
I wondered, and couldn’t tell. I am an unskilled interpreter of nonverbal clues in even the clearest of circumstances; in murkier situations, when the people around me are stifling all their impulses, I feel moorless; and in murkier situations when the people around me are stifling all their impulses and my vision is not corrected I might as well be clutching jetsam on the high seas. So in order to see whether Rob was indeed into me I climbed out of the river to put on my glasses, but when I did so everything came into sharp focus again, and I instantly felt severed from human connection with the four men fifty feet away from me. I had forgotten for a quarter of an hour that I was an outsider, and, now that I remembered, the feeling was excruciating.
If this is what clear vision costs,
I thought,
I prefer not to see.
I put my glasses back in my sneaker and climbed once more onto the rock.

Forty-five minutes later, dry and clothed, we headed back to the car, where we stood around uncomfortably; something didn’t seem quite right. Then Rob pulled a bottle of hair gel out of his bag and we all took some and everything was okay again. Rob and I walked along the river; twenty sullen feet ahead of us was Greg, with Bill and Louis in front of him. “Greg is frustrated with me,” said Rob. “I think he’s attracted to me, and that’s not what I’m here for. He wanted to touch my leg in the car.”

“What’d you do?” I asked, willing Greg to fall into the river and drown.

“I just moved it away.” Okay, Greg could stay alive.

I mean, it’s not as if I would actually have done anything with Rob had the opportunity presented itself. First, it would totally have fucked him up even further; and second, I already had a boyfriend, one who had no wish to be free from his homosexuality through the power of Jesus Christ, one who could write me prescriptions for benzodiazepines.

“We’ll be there in a second,” Rob called to Bill, Louis, and Greg, who had returned to the car. Looking at me, he said, “What are your plans for when you go back?”

A flash of inspiration struck me. “I don’t think I’m going to try to change. But when I get back home, I’m going to be faithful to my boyfriend. I’m going to treat him better. I’m going to be a better person.” This, I realized, would be the end of the story I told the people here. And maybe by giving them an example of someone who had made a different choice, someone who didn’t hate himself—or at least who didn’t hate himself for being gay—I could at least keep questions open in their minds.

“But how long is that going to last?”

“We’ll see.” I wasn’t sure I felt comfortable with where I thought this was heading.

“I’ll be honest with you,” he said. “You’re smart, you’re personable, and I think you deserve more.”
You left out cute,
I thought petulantly. “My skin may want a man,” he said, “but inside I just want total intimacy.”
The two propositions are not mutually exclusive!
I wanted to scream at him. “I want everything for you, great relationships with men
and
women. When you say those words,
my boyfriend
—well, it just…it doesn’t fit.” Disappointment bloomed in me.
I was going to rescue him,
I thought,
and instead he’s trying to rescue me.
But neither one of us was interested in being rescued.

In the car on the way back to the conference center, Rob asked Louis, “How do you see yourself as a man?” Louis looked perplexed. “I mean,” Rob explained, “are there ways in which you see yourself as not measuring up to what you think of as a man?”

“My career,” Louis said. “I missed the boat by not going to college, and now it’s too late. I only became a hairdresser because my wife was one. And she was better than me. We got divorced a couple years ago and it was horrible. I’m selling my condo at a loss to meet the settlement terms. All those messages I was checking earlier were from my realtor.”

Somehow he had begun to seem less annoying.

After Rob parked, Louis and I walked back together to our rooms. “I wanted to jump into the river,” he said suddenly. “But I had an accident when I was a kid and almost drowned. Ever since then I’ve been scared of the water.”

“We would have saved you,” I said.

“I heard somebody drowned in that river three days ago. Not unless you’d all ranged yourselves across the river to catch me. I could have done it then.”

“Next time,” I promised him fiercely, wondering whether he would ever be in a position to take this chance again, and hating God for allowing life to lacerate a person so.

Later that night I saw hot Jon talking to very very handsome Matt. They were discussing gym regimens. “The conference has been hard for me,” said very very handsome Matt. “My head has been full of defiling thoughts, and I’ve had a hard heart.”

Realization hit me in the face like a mud patty: It was Matt to whom Jon was attracted, not me. It was Matt who triggered him. It was Matt he had told his wife about and sought out and talked to for a long time.

I instantly lost the remaining shred of interest I had in Jon and went to the ice-cream parlor, where I was propositioned by a sizzling ex-gay standing in front of me in line. (“What would you do if you had the chance to take somebody back to your room?” he asked me, staring me in the eyes as he licked his butter pecan ice cream. I did not take him up on his offer. My boyfriend fucking
owes
me.)