Today I felt like a failure. It was really more tonight, as
I sat before the fire trying to read, and after Roy asked me to marry him.
He had just come in, and like a man on a mission gone
straight to the kitchen, without saying hello, and I could hear things opening
and closing as though he were looking for something he couldn't find, swoosh
and clunk, and I could hear ice clinking, then he walked over to me in his
mismatched socks with a bourbon on the rocks, and set it next to me. And
he smiled. It was rare that I saw his top teeth. I gazed past his
shoulder and thought about how I had been happy moments before, reading Sherman
Alexie stories, petting Lucky, and now there probably were cupboard doors and
drawers left open and definitely were shoes in the kitchen and who was going to
put those away.
Roy was silent as he got to his knee and how he asked me to
marry him doesn't matter. I heard the words but I was looking at his HIKE
NAKED t-shirt, and before I could stop myself, before I could scan my thoughts
through the Instragram wisdom filter of: Is it true, Is it kind, Is it
necessary? Or count to ten or do any of the other things one is supposed to
do to be a successfully communicating human being, I pointedly stuck my finger
on the line I had been reading and said, "Roy. I take my bourbon
neat!" Then I laughed loudly, maybe to play the situation off as a joke,
add levity—maybe in mild panic--and his face slipped and fell and when I
stopped the slightly hysterical sounding he just looked at me, and left the
room. I think he had been serious; I know I was serious. Was he
joking?
I could hear him in the bedroom shuffling around, things
opening and closing swoosh and clunk, like he was looking for something he
couldn’t find, which didn’t surprise me. I heard a long zipping
sound. Roy came out and sat down, and looked at me with a pale,
disheveled expression that usually filled me with pity, but somehow, today, did
not. Rinsing through my head were watery thoughts that Roy isn't a small
child and his pants should be closed when he leaves the bathroom and I don't
find experiments with how many days in a row a person can sleep in a shirt and
wear that same shirt to work before someone complains of the stench amusing--at
any age. I said, "I don't want to marry you, Roy, but it isn't
personal--I don't want to be married to anyone. " This may have been a lie,
but to him or to myself I don't know. And it may not have been a lie at
all. He replied that he was going to stay in his office. I fished
the ice out of my glass, and chewed it
before opening my book again. He got up and left. I’d moved my finger
from my spot, and where had I stopped? Chasing that line, I felt like a
failure. I didn't know what had happened. I didn't know what was
going to come next. I found my place quickly—and I do think that what I
said was true, kind, and necessary.
It's funny how we ignore red flags: with eyes focused
on the white flash of the destination, we register warnings en route only
partly. We stop for the hitchhiker, intuit that our gas tanks will hold
much more than the E would indicate, we decide to wait for the next rest stop
before pulling out to use the toilet. All of these can lead to disaster,
but often enough to keep us incautious, don't. When I first met Roy, it
was before the practically paperless days of today, when people used filing
cabinets to store their documents in some sort of order or jumble, but at least
contained in enclosed spaces, out of sight. Roy had a filing cabinet, but
it was empty, and instead, all across the floor of his basement were piles of
papers, separated from one another but not coordinated other than in a vaguely
concentric circle in which he could stand, in the center of it all, and look
around the floor at his feet for what it was he needed. When I saw this I
was stunned by the glorious mess and overt visibility of it all, and I was
charmed. I did not think that he was showing me the hard metalled
mechanisms of his functioning, and that those exposed gears were
permanent. I thought he was wondrous and other, and this was both true
and my mistake. I fell in love with him, though for all the years we have
been together it has not been infrequently that I have found stray pieces of
him spread so wide that they were actually in my belly button, and I have been
resentful each time. But I cannot say there were not red flags.
And, in the interest of full disclosure, I don't know what love is, anyway. For this reason I take
slight issue with my assertion, above, that I came to love
him, when just before I noted that I had regarded him as wondrously
other. With certainty I thought that what I fell in was love, as I grew
to know him. But, I think my mind was blown by that otherness, that
transparency: he was unlike everything I knew so well to be right and true,
things like secrets, using filing cabinets, and not drinking and driving.
The line he sauntered was between order and chaos but he definitely tilted
toward chaos, and this impressed me, kept me in an almost constant state of
shock, and was addictive. Too, while he was so relaxed as to be almost
comatose with regard to certain things, he could be icily cruel, almost on
accident. And the blade of this brutality through puffs of softness was
so familiar to me that I felt exquisite recognition, and a certain license to
be the same. That's what I came to, then: home. I came to
home. I say this now in all honesty, but would be remiss not to mention
that I'm not really that sure of anything. Insanity is always so
convincing, isn't it?
The nearest I can pinpoint to the
beginning of this profound understanding of my own lack--but again, this is
memory--was when I was old enough to wonder if I were beautiful. I didn't
want to be subjectively beautiful, I wanted to be objectively beautiful, but in
a move that was equally desperate and fateful, the person I turned to to weigh
in on this was my mother. And mothers are not objective in their opinions
of their children, which fact does not improve the outcome of this
exchange. At any rate, I asked, "Mom. If you were driving down
the street and saw me, would you think I was beautiful?" And she
replied plainly, merely, "John. Beauty is as beauty does." And
this answer meant, to me in all of my elementary school wisdom, that my own
mother did not find me attractive. This was probably not what she meant--or
was maybe not what she meant, but it fossilized, the shame did. To her
credit, my mother had at least answered me in the way she best knew how, and
did not tell me that boys should not be concerned with their own beauty, or
that boys were not beautiful but were rather called handsome, or any other of
the possible responses one could have when asked a delicate question by a young
son. My mother never overtly expressed anything other than love, in her
way. But we are limited, people, in what we can give. It doesn't
depend on what is needed at all--that is the myth of parenthood that can slay
us, parent and child alike. I can safely say: she did her best. And
it is not for me to judge the overall quality of that degree. And
like the turtle from the fable, this rejection lumbered along inside me, ready
and steady and true to course, growing larger and larger until in my twenties,
when it grew dissatisfied, trapped in a housing too uncomfortable to bear and
unable to find another, and that is when I started cutting.
The first time, I was in my twenties. I know that is
late to start, but I was a late bloomer in many regards, and it's not like
self-loathing, self-negating, or self-harming is a race. I remember the
relief of an actual physical pain, the relief of an actual flowing of blood
that was the purest, loveliest shade of red I could imagine--the red of my
childhood, the red of fire trucks whipping past with firefighters inside at the
ready, my piano teacher's lips as she coached me to hold my hands as though
they held an apple underneath, the red of Christ's thorn-torn scalp as he
suffered for salvation. In this way the effect of cutting braided the
emotional and intellectual. I was mesmerized: by the chameleon nature of
the blood of me, that it was blue inside my veins, and became red once
freed--and by the metaphor of it: with each slice, and finally, I was receiving
oxygen, was becoming. The red instructed, saved. There were
so many things amiss, then, that this constant--a razor, a surface of flesh,
and five seconds or less, the sting, the red, the breath, the rest--this
sequence of constancy anchored me, and it was enough of an anchor, for
awhile. And then it wasn't.
And somewhere in my late twenties, after the hospital and
all the rest, I met Roy, and I didn't need to cut anymore--he pretty much did
that for me. And he didn't need to hide his barely-functioning side--I
pretty much did that for him. We were a pair.
And when I tell you that there were red flags, unheeded red
flags, and when I tell you that we tend to ignore them, for whom do you think
the red flag was flying? That is this story, the story of us.
