Men After My 23rd Birthday

At 27, I do the stupidest thing in my entire life, but it seems smart at the time: I tell myself that graduate school is not a fulfilling way of living, and being a college professor probably won't be either. I need a job with more meaning, I say to myself, and the right place to find this is in religion. I finish up my M.A. In History, but when I am done I leave the University. I apply to a Claremont School of Theology, to enter their Religious Counseling program, and while I am waiting to be accepted, I go home and stay with my parents in Barstow. While I am there, I substitute teach again, and pay a small rent to my mother. Now I've got more time on my hands, and with more time, comes more chance for dating. In other words, I go from my normal average of one date a year, to a new average of one boyfriend:

The first one, I meet while I am still completing work for my M.A. I am at an SCA event with Katarina. Like always, I am following her around like a little baby duck follows its mama, because I don't know any SCA people except Katarina and a couple of others, but as for her, she knows everyone. Like always, I am just hugely grateful to anyone who will talk to me and make me feel less lonely. Then I meet Henry, who not only talks to me, but is also interesting.

Henry is this black man, a couple of years older than me. He's good-looking in a piratical kind of way, and he's got a generic Ren-Faire-looking costume on. We bond right away because we're both madly interested in sewing and the history of costume. Henry makes dolls (like me). He knows even more about costume than do, and what's more he makes custom Kinsale cloaks. – I have never even heard of Kinsale cloaks. Apparently, they are quite costly, because of the good-quality materials he uses. Just hearing about them, I am weak in the knees for wanting one, but I don't want to pay the price he mentions, and of course I'm never going to ask him to make me one for free.

I get the idea that Henry is gay for some reason, maybe because my History of Costume professor when I was an undergraduate was gay, and floridly gay at that. Henry's not though, and what's more, before I leave the event, he tells me he's in love with me. This is kind of disturbing to me. His rapid infatuation seems stalkerish, and it's only because he made such a good impression with his conversation that I go along with it at all. I agree to see him again. I tell myself that maybe we can still end up being just friends and also, maybe I'll get to feeling more strongly about him myself.

We start going out. Henry is a perfect gentleman. He pays for my dinner, and gives me small, caring little gifts. I grow fonder of him, and I tell myself it's love. Then I let him kiss me. It's not bad. – It's not good either, but it's not bad, not like some of the guys I've kissed. And Henry is so nice. Who wouldn't want to be with a nice guy like him? I agree to call what we're doing “dating”, and I start saying I'm Henry's “girlfriend”. If he gets more out of our long make-out sessions than I do, – If there's still some tiny part of me that's regretting the fact that we couldn't just be friends like I wanted to in the first place. – what of that? No relationship is perfect.

Then one weekend Henry invites me to his place. He has a gorgeous place, that he shares with friends he's known since the early 70's. It's out in the country in Topanga, and it's all built by hand. It's all hand-crafted wood and hand-designed details, like something from the cover of a John Denver album, or the best-planned hippie commune ever. Oh my god, I still dream about that place. There are women who would marry a man just to get their hands on a place like that. But I am not one of them. I am there because I want to believe I've found true love with Henry.

And when we go to bed, he is a gentlemanly lover. He is caring and affectionate, and there'd be foreplay all night long before the main event, only I call an end to it (it's getting boring). He enters me. And oh my god, it hurts! It hurts like all holy hell; he's so big, and I'm so dry. That is because I didn't allow more foreplay, – It's because I made him wear a condom, and he said that would make the sex worse, I think, and right away I feel guilty. I do my best to give Henry a good time despite the pain, because I know it's my fault.

I also don't come. And I feel guilty about that too. Some girls lie and pretend to come, but I don't do that (because I don't have the faintest idea how to pull it off). I apologize to Henry, but he will have none of it. Not all girls like it right away, he says. We'll keep doing it, and I'll get used to it, and after a while it will start to feel good. So we do it some more. We do it three times on Saturday, then we do it three more times on Sunday. We do it three times a day every weekend for like a month. Henry buys lube and after that it doesn't hurt any more, but it never starts to feel really good. After about the fourth weekend, I start begging off doing it, at least not quite as often.

– It's about then that I read the old Woody Allen joke for the first time, where the psychiatrist asks the husband how many times they do it per week. “Oh, practically never,” he says. “Just three times a week.” Then he asks the wife the same question: “Oh all the time,” is her answer. “At least three times a week.” That's how I feel, I think when I read it, and I am guilty all over again, because I am so young, to have turned into the middle-aged wife in a joke. –

About that time, I move back to Barstow. It's kind of a relief, having an excuse why I can't see Henry as often. He visits pretty regularly, but my parents are there most of the time, and I tell him I don't want to have sex with them there. Henry buys it, and we're pretty much back to being good friends the way I it wanted to be in the first place. Only there's this uncomfortable feeling that hangs over me all the time: I know I'm still Henry's girlfriend. I know we have had sex, and he's just waiting until we have the chance to do it again. Then my parents go out of town for the weekend and we do have sex again. It feels like it makes my home, which has always been a refuge to me, just a little bit less safe.

It's a little while after that, that I tell Henry I think we should stop dating. For good, he asks me, because that will surely break his heart. He looks so pitiful that I can't hold to my guns, and I back down and say no, just for now. After that, I feel relieved. A temporary break-up is better than no break-up and, because he thinks he's still got a chance, Henry's still staying around as my friend, instead of talking to me, and begging me, and making me feel guilty. And some time goes by.

While I am temporarily (permanently) broken up with Henry, I meet another guy in my Drama class. I forget his name within a couple of months of when we lose touch. Steve, I think, or maybe that's because he reminds me of Steve Earle. He has a sort of a Steve Earle thing going on, a dark past in the military, and too much drink and drugs, and some radical leftwing opinions. We're platonic as hell, but he lords it over me like he's my boyfriend anyway. I finally cut him loose because he confides in me all the time, but the one time I try confiding something in him, he laughs in my face about it.

Then I move to Claremont, and I meet Jim. I meet Jim my first day in class, and I also meet a woman named Jen. Jim and Jen both ask me out the first month I'm there, but I only recognize the romantic intentions from Jim. To be fair to myself, he's the only one that tries to kiss me.

After Henry, I have learned my lesson, I think, and I am not going to get involved with anyone else unless I really have feelings for them. Once again as with Henry, I see Jim as a friend. He's a good friend, we get together and we talk for hours, and when I have to stop talking and go home, it's always with regret. But as with Henry, this all feels much too fast to me. What is it about men, I think, that always makes them want to decide they love you when they barely even know you?

Fortunately, Jim's pretty nice when I say I don't want to go out with him. I say I don't love him, and I've never felt love for a man before, and think maybe I am designed to live in celibacy. It's the first time I've ever given myself permission to admit that, that sex isn't something that really fits me, and it feels good. And Jim and I go back to being good friends. He doesn't ask me out any more, but we still have fun in class together, and we still stay talking to each other for hours every day afterward. It's nice. He's a good friend.

Then Jim has to go out of town during Spring Break that year. He leaves me to house-sit for him and watch his cats. Once again, I find myself falling in love with a home, the way I can never seem to fall in love with any person: Jim's got all these huge bookshelves, and he's got so many books they still don't all fit. He's got biographies of Judy Garland, not just the ones I've read already, but ones I haven't even heard of. He's got a movie-edition copy of Gone With The Wind with photos of Vivian Leigh and Clark Gable. He's got every movie Vivian Leigh or Judy Garland ever did, on videotape. And he's got these two cats:

It's the cats that really decide it for me. One of them is this evil little grey kitty named Muffin. She poops behind the curtains, and she's so scary it takes four days before she'll even come out from the bed and look at me. The other is this 17-year old mama-cat. She's so skinny her striped coat sticks out where all the bones are, and her meow's aged until it's just a rusty creak. Anyone who takes such good care, of two such misfit cats, I think, has got to be a pretty special person. And Jim's talking about moving to the Midwest after he graduates. What if he moves and I never see him again? I think that would be unbearable and so, for the first time in my life, I'm the one that makes the move on a guy.

I ask Jim out. Even though I'm nothing but a starving student, I pay for his dinner to make sure he knows it's a date. I keep pushing Jim until he's interested again, and we start going out together, and in no time we're having sex – It's better than it's been with anyone else so far, if not the biggest thrill in the world. – and getting engaged, and then getting married at the end of the summer. I drop out of school and put my efforts into helping Jim get through.

There's two years of work before he finishes seminary. They're hard, but they're good years. Jim and I feel very close to each other. When I lose heart, he's there for me. When he feels like there's no hope of going on, I try to be there for him too. We have sex a lot, and it's good, friendly sex. We don't have the money for big gifts, but I just treasure the smaller ones all the more for that. Then right before he graduates, I am diagnosed with endometriosis. Right after he graduates, I get pregnant (because they say I'd better do it while I still can). I have a baby boy, and things change between me and Jim.

Right from the start, the boy means everything to me. I know what everyone says about how to keep a marriage together: You have to think more of your husband than you do of the baby. Even if it feels like you can't, you have to, because he's your husband. He's the one who's going to stay with you the rest of your life. I can't though, I just can't. My feelings for Bobby aren't something I can control, they're visceral; they control me.

A year after that, we move to Indiana. Maybe it's kind of a consolation prize I'm offering Jim, because I know he's wanted to move all his life, and because I can't give him the love I tried to give before. Anyway, it only takes me about six months to realize what a horrible mistake I've made. Winter in Indiana isn't just a season, it's like something alive, a monster that swallows life as I've always known it. The weather outside hits incomprehensible levels, -15 degrees Fahrenheit, or even lower if you take the wind chill into account. What's worse, there are huge snowstorms, that can block us off from being able to go anywhere for days at a time. I'm stuck alone in a cramped house with a baby and a husband who can't pay me the attention I want, because he has work to do. I block out as much of the loneliness as I can with books, but there's too much of it to block it all out.

That summer I think about divorcing Jim. I tell myself there's no way, just no way I can survive another winter in Indiana. I tell myself that I will surely go crazy if I try. But in the end, I don't do it. The boy needs his father, I think. And how will I support myself and make enough to pay for childcare for Bobby as well? In the end, it's ten more years before I divorce Jim. We're back in California again by then, and the straw that breaks the camel's back isn't about Indiana (although that's part of what makes the back easy to break).

And after Jim there are no men in my life. – There is no more anyone in my life. Sometimes I feel lonely about it. Sometimes I try to date. But it all comes down to the fact that I don't like sex. I don't really like other people touching me (although I'll make an exception for the kids). And how do you find a life-partner who only wants to be with you platonically?