The Year of Yes (15 page)

“I don’t want to have a baby, and it takes more than nine months, anyway,” I said. “It takes the rest of your life.”

“I didn’t mean to scare you,” said Wonderwoman. “More wine?”

I had a sudden image of myself, reclining drunk and bleary on a mattress somewhere, while a turkey baster squirted something viscous in my direction.

“I have to go,” I said, putting down my glass.

“Shit. Ouroboros syndrome. Pretend we never had this conversation.”

“Am I only a womb?” Granted, this was melodramatic. I was twenty-one. There was only so much maturity in me, and, while it was enough to conduct a semiadult relationship (sort of, anyway), it was not enough to have anyone’s baby. Suddenly, I wanted to clamp my hands over my crotch and hop in urgent circles, like a four-year-old who had to pee. That was all my nether regions were for! Not birth. Never. I wasn’t going to show my cervix to anyone’s video camera, and I wasn’t planning to ever talk about how far I was dilated. I didn’t want to know that I could stretch to extrude a cantaloupe. I didn’t want to think about it. Not one bit.

“No, no, you’re misunderstanding. You’re more than a womb to me.”

That was when the Bee Gees appeared, and did the hustle, right there, right in Wonderwoman’s living room.

You’re more than a womb! More than a woooo-ooomb to me!

“Why won’t you look at me?” Wonderwoman put her hand on my chin, and turned my face in her direction. I looked at her for a moment, and she was beautiful and successful, and I got along with her better than I’d gotten along with any of the boys I’d been out with, and then Paul Anka arrived with
a Casio keyboard under his arm, and began a command performance of “(You’re) Having My Baby.”

One of the serious disadvantages to having been born in the late seventies was the fact that whenever anything stressed me out, a mangled part of my brain would embark on a clock radio mélange of nightmarish soft rock.

“I’m sorry,” I said. “I can’t.”

“You’re so young. It wouldn’t really affect you,” said Wonderwoman. “I make enough that you could just stay home and write while you’re pregnant. It’d be perfect.”

That wasn’t really what I heard. What I heard was Sheena Easton trilling “Morning Train,” a peppy song all about staying at home and doing nothing but eating bonbons while your man goes to work to support you.

What I saw was Wonderwoman, conquering the world, wearing a leopard print power suit and matching spike heels. What I saw was myself, conquering nothing, wearing a tattered minitoga, pabulum on my shoulder, pained expression on my face, and bundle of joy clutched like a bomb against my ridiculously swollen breasts. My mom had been an A cup until she’d gotten pregnant with me and had become a D. They’d never really gone down. The photos showed her pregnant like a torpedo. I was built like my mom. It’d be the same damn thing. Too young, too young, too young. And too selfish, too.

“I’m sorry. I have to go.” And, like an asshole, I ran.

I thought the confusion between us was too large for anything to proceed. Maybe that wasn’t true. Maybe I was just a coward. This was very possible. We should have been friends to start with. Now, though, I had the sense that she’d just been marketing the best parts of herself in order to gain
access to my childbearing capabilities. I didn’t stop to think that we were all marketing the best parts of ourselves, all the time. Anything real would have to contain both the best and the worst. Considering I’d never had a relationship I’d considered to be worth pursuing for more than a few months, I had no idea what that would be like. Maybe the Bee Gees would appear every night. Maybe I’d just have to get used to it. But for now, I was on the train, and I was going home to my tortured nonlove affair with Zak, who said, “I told you.”

“It wasn’t that she was a girl, it was that she wanted me to have a baby.”

“You’re. Not. Gay. Accept it, and move on.”

“It was only about the baby,” I said.

“You don’t have a baby,” said Zak, changing tacks. “He died this afternoon in a car accident.”

But I was not in the mood to play
Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?
Who was afraid of Miss Woolf? Me. I had a feeling that a long and happy affair with someone like Vita Sackville-West was not necessarily in my cards, and it made me bitter.

“I’m burning your baby?” said Zak. I was not in the mood to play
Hedda Gabler,
either. Hedda was a bitch.

“I didn’t want it anyway!” I said, and crawled into my hut, like the wretchedly immature creature I was.

A COUPLE WEEKS LATER, my friend the Actress came to town. She was an onstage goddess, one of the most stunningly talented people I’d ever met. She lived, to her frustration,
in L.A., where she was making a reasonable if unsatisfying living doing film, television, and the occasional worthwhile theater assignment. She came to New York intermittently, because L.A. was not the town for a woman like her—wild, dreadlocked, and unapologetically exuberant.

I owed the Actress. Just prior to the beginning of my Yes Year, she’d saved me from Martyrman. I’d met both of them at Sundance, and the fact that I’d immediately felt compelled to start lying to her about whether or not I was sleeping with him ought to have told me something. I’d still been a teenager, though, just out of high school, and he’d been tenacious. For over a year, we’d had a long-distance thing, him calling me every week or so and periodically coming from L.A. to visit me, while I dated all of NYU and bemoaned him to my roommates, too ball-less to break it off. One day, the Actress had called me up.

“Diiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiivaaaaaaaaaaa! Diva! I know you don’t care if I sleep with Martyrman, right? I’m sick of looking for anything else in this stupid size-two town.”

“Please,” I’d said. “Take him! Absolutely! Need his number?”

“Does that mean he’s bad in bed?” The Actress sounded suspicious.

“Not all that bad. Not all that good.” I had to be honest. She was a friend.

“Oh well, screw it, I’m desperate.”

She’d called me a couple of days later, and said, “Here’s the good news: It reminded me that I’m tired of men. I’m trying girls again.”

He, on the other hand, had said nothing about it. I’d therefore felt at least tangentially justified later that month
when I’d broken up with him at a bed-and-breakfast in Bucks County, Pennsylvania, the useless folk-art capital of the universe. I’d happened upon him in the bathroom, putting talcum powder on his thighs, and that had been the end of whatever attraction I’d had left. Lubricated by an entire bottle of the bed-and-breakfast’s homemade apricot brandy, I’d swiftly ended things, using his liaison with the Actress as an excuse. Yes, this was beyond shallow, and yes, I felt guilty about it. I’d behaved rottenly, but then, so had he. He’d informed me, over and over, that I reminded him of his ex-wife, an Oscar-winning actress who’d left him for a grip. She, though brilliant, was fifty, and I was vain. After we’d broken up, he’d refused to take me back to New York, saying that (a) he just wanted to spend the rest of our romantic weekend together, and (b) he’d already paid for the B&B.

I’d been too broke to escape by train, and so we’d ended up spending three torturous nights together on a feather bed, trapped by out-of-season rains, the only people within a hundred miles who weren’t in love. We’d hunched bitterly over the frilly breakfast table, flinging scones like hockey pucks. By the time we’d finally made it back to the city, I’d hated us both so much that I’d puked for four days. When Martyrman had gotten back to L.A., he’d called the Actress to tell her that she was the devil incarnate.

“Diva, you owe me something better,” she’d said, when she’d called me to report.

She came to New York, and we went out to dinner. I gave her a running monologue of my successes and disasters, and she said, “Well, chick, someone ought to purge you of that last thing. I promise, I won’t ask you to have my baby.”

While I’d thought I was done with my Sapphic phase, the Actress was someone I was crazy about. It seemed like a great idea to have a date with someone I already actually enjoyed. And to sleep with someone who fell into that category? It’d be the first time in a long time.

The Actress arrived at my apartment, the night of our rendezvous, with a full face of makeup. Foundation. Lipstick. All the various pencils and creams and paints that make a woman look like a woman from fifty paces, and like a mannequin at two. It was stage makeup. But what play were we doing? I was stunned. The Actress was a beautiful woman. Not conventional, but that was why I liked her. Why was she painting herself for me? I loved her already.

I suddenly felt like every man I’d ever hated for judging my looks. Except that I wasn’t judging hers. She just thought I might, and was preempting it with eyeliner. It occurred to me that maybe I’d been wrong a few times. Maybe guys hadn’t even noticed the things that I was obsessing over. Maybe they liked me because they liked me. Maybe Great Lash, or lack thereof, wasn’t the deal breaker I’d thought it was.

I looked at the Actress. I was afraid to touch her face. I wondered if men had felt this way about me. I’d spent hours on my makeup on occasion. What girl didn’t? We spent all our time trying to find someone who wanted to wake up next to us every morning, and every night we painted ourselves to look as much like someone else as possible.

Now that the Actress was standing in front of me, I didn’t know what to do. I couldn’t kiss her without kissing her lipstick. I thought she was sexy because she was raucous and crazy, because when she laughed the whole room shook,
because she was hilarious and loud and irreverent, not because she was perfect.

I loved her because she was so entirely human. It sounded stupid, but this was a revelation for me. I’d tried to be perfect as much as every other girl in the world. I’d stood in other people’s bathrooms, peering into mirrors, poking at my face, poofing out my lips, sucking in my stomach, pushing up my breasts, razoring my legs until they were plastic-smooth. Wielding tweezers like surgical instruments.

When I was a kid, my mom had regularly announced that we were “not far descended from the apes.” My first memory of her involved a waxed upper lip, and a shriek of pain as she pulled the wax off. I’d wondered what the hell she was suffering for. Monkeys were cool. Not so, as I got older. I wanted to be not a monkey, but a mole rat. Pink and hairless. I knew people like this. People who had no body hair at all, or silken blonde legs and arms. I, on the other hand, was apprehended by my mother while shaving my entire body at the age of twelve. I’d lathered my upper lip, and taken her leg razor to it, thinking I had the perfect solution to the fact that, in my seventh-grade PE class, a boy had told me I had a mustache. And really, I didn’t. Neither did my mom. Paranoia was part of our personality.

Despite the fact that my postfeminist brain had been raised on Simone de Beauvoir, Camille Paglia, and Erica Jong, I’d still done a hell of a lot to make myself into whatever I thought a male ideal was. It had taken a lot of work. And the work really never ended. Sometimes I felt like one of those toys where you turned a crank and long spaghetti strands of clay grew furiously from colanderlike heads. Part of the appeal was that those strands could be plucked,
squished, and put back in the jar to use again. Not so, hair. The stubble advanced like a lame militia crossing hard terrain: slowly, but surely. I didn’t want to imagine my insides as one big ball of hair, like a two-story sphere of string. I didn’t want to be a roadside attraction. I wanted, albeit secretly, to be a Barbie doll.

Yet, here we were. We were so not Mattel plastic. The Actress and I stood in Vic’s bedroom, totally imperfect. And that was the point. That was what was great about it. Here we stood together, and love was possible anyway, despite everything that was wrong with us. It was a minor miracle. Maybe it was a major one.

We were human. We were a mess. And we were kissing. It’s always weird to kiss a friend for the first time, and this was no exception. It was weirder still because she was a woman. But we got through it. And even though it didn’t seem that I was really attracted to girls, I could accept that love was larger than that. I could, at least, sleep with someone I cared about, even if she did happen to be female. I could care about her more, because of it.

We got our clothes off, and we left the bright lights on. Here we were, together against all those guys we’d fucked in the dark, against all those times we’d hidden our flaws and failures, because we thought we wouldn’t be loved if we let them show. We left the lights on, and we looked at each other, and we made love.

A COUPLE OF HOURS LATER I put on a pair of overalls without a top and meandered into the kitchen. Zak was there, standing under the glare of the fluorescents, staring vacantly into the fridge.

“Hey,” he said, without turning around.

“Hey,” I said.

“Hey,” said the Actress, in her big, booming voice, emerging from the bedroom, wrapped in a towel.

“Oh God, who are
you
?” Zak flipped around. He’d been expecting only me. Instead, I was wearing lesbianic overalls and hanging out with a half-naked woman.

“You must be the famous Zak,” the Actress said. “I’ve heard all about you. I’m going to go and get fried rice. Want some?”

“Sure,” said Zak, looking from me to her and back again.

When the Actress got back, the three of us stayed up half the night, laughing hard together at the kitchen table. Even though I knew the Actress and I weren’t going to conduct some wild love affair, it was nice to know that we still enjoyed the hell out of each other, and that after our clothes went back on, we were still friends. It wasn’t very often that that happened.

“So. You don’t do things halfway,” Zak said when she was gone.

“I’m not gay,” I said, sadly. “There are all these wonderful women out there, and I can’t have any of them.”

“Oh well. More girls for me,” Zak told me, and patted my back. “I didn’t need you as my competition. Life is hard enough.”

We spoke for a while at maximum volume about Sartre and existential loneliness, and then I crawled into my hut and Zak followed me. Eventually we passed out, tangled up. We did this on a somewhat regular basis, post-deep conversation. We always woke, hours later, our limbs pins and needles, our arms trapped beneath each other, sleepily murderous. Whichever of us was in the wrong bed would stagger across the kitchen and into their hut or bedroom, respectively. This night was the same. Chaste as usual. Damn it. Or not damn it. Who could tell? Zak and I getting together could have been nightmarish.