Authors: Frances Kuffel
The ironies are rife. Kevin, gay and closeted, was hiding behind what I should have been learning—how to talk to the opposite sex, going to the prom, falling in love for the first time. But of course his story didn’t end there. After graduating, he came out and cozied up to Jack Daniel’s like the boyfriend high school never gave him. I’d gone on to college and more college, worked in publishing, wrote a book about my dramatic weight loss and then wrote another book about my more mundane regain. I know from Grace that he’s in his fragile first year of sobriety and is starting beauty college; I’m a sometimes–adjunct professor but mostly walk dogs for a living.
So much for our halcyon days. Which is why I am dying to talk to him.
“Put that Kevin on the phone,” I demand. “I need to talk to Kevin Willoughby.”
“How the hell are you?”
I start to laugh.
“Not well, Kevin. Not well at all.”
“What’s wrong, darling?”
“I have new neighbors.”
“Are they partiers? Complainers?”
“No. They’re gay.”
“Uh-huh,” he says cautiously, letting me know he’s waiting to see how this plays out.
“They have the garden my apartment looks out on. Summer’s coming and last night they were listening to
Fiddler on the Roof
.”
I can hear the hideousness dawn on him. “I see.”
“It’s going to get very . . . brunchy around here in a couple of months. I swear I’ll call the cops if they have
Oklahoma!
with their mimosas.”
Kevin has a laugh that is as dangerous and infectious as bubonic plague. I hunch-run to the toilet before I wet my pants, and when we catch our breath, he wheezes, “Where have you been all my life, Frances Kuffel, and when does your plane land?”
• • •
By the time we head out to Kevin’s favorite pho noodle shop on East Yesler Way, I am as tense as I would be a month later in Santa Fe.
There is a difference, however. In Santa Fe, I am tight with waiting, wondering, searching for the magic words or slant of light to fill Dar with that love he isn’t sure he doesn’t have for me, a double-negative that is too big to overcome.
Kevin and I, on the other hand, have sat on his small balcony discussing AA and the 12-step program for compulsive overeating I’ve not been attending lately, telling our drunkalogue and fatalogue stories with increasing glee, then a sharp
ritenuto
into the grim side of addiction, how we avoided everyone and everything in order to eat or drink alone, consuming so much that we passed out only to wake hours later to do the same thing again, our underlying convictions that we are pieces of shit and that addiction is both our punishment and solace. At several points along the way, each of us lost everything and learned nothing. I declared bankruptcy in my thirties because I couldn’t pay the cost of takeout. He was fired from a glamorous, well-paying job. Drunkenly careless, he contracted HIV in his thirties; overburdening my body with fat and hormones, I had emergency surgery to remove a thirty-six-pound ovarian cyst and my gallbladder in my thirties. At 336 pounds, I couldn’t walk for more than ten minutes. He spent the first three days in rehab leaning heavily on a walker.
We discover that we have unknowingly dallied in each other’s shit and I am shaking from the intensity of the second conversation we’ve had since high school. I’m not hoping I’ll turn, eyes bright, and give him a private peek at how pretty I can be. I am not waiting for Kevin to realize anything about me.
He already knows. He’s known for years without knowing me. And I am shaking and sweating because I want to dance or scream the loop-de-loop of a roller coaster.
I look up at the soft blue March Seattle day as we walk to my car. Daffodils are out and the pear trees are flowering. Across the street is an old white house that needs rose trellises and hanging pots of begonias.
“Just think what
we’d
do to that house,” I say as I fish out my keys.
“I
know
,” he says in that way that says he really does.
April
I should know that Dar’s aloof tolerance is a deal breaker when I beg to make one dash into the St. Francis souvenir shop. I want to buy gifts for my friends who are taking care of my dog. They are Vatican II babies like me who revel in bloodied martyrs and swooning penitents. Such tchotchkes have no charm for Dar, and he’s eager to move on to the art galleries where he can speak seriously with owners about the Mesa museum he volunteers at. I snatch Christmas ornaments of Francis of Assisi and primitive angels, hurrying, embarrassed, not wanting to waste Dar’s time.
When Kevin and I went down to the piers a month earlier, he knelt to pose goofily with a photo of Ivar Haglund at Ivar’s Acres of Clams and solemnly wrapped his arms around a scary arcade clown. He deliberated with me over crab-shaped salt and pepper shakers and pulled a stranger over to photograph us with a plaster fisherman, then dragged me to the Olde Curiosity Shoppe to visit his friends, the petrified remains of a dog and a human who seems to be screaming that Mount Rainier has erupted and swallowed her child.
If I’m honest—or later, when I begin to get honest—I am mystified by Dar’s lack of schlock idolatry. He’s too smart and too funny not to groove on jumping beans and Barack and Michelle Obama Day of the Dead figurines. After all, he’d laughed at the junk in the truck stop we gassed up at, modeled a baseball cap with a propeller on top and stuck a navy blue leather cowboy hat on me.
What happens in a truck stop, I am forced to conclude, stays in the truck stop.
• • •
I am hurt but determined to make the best of it. I breathe deeply for the first few days back in Brooklyn, walking dogs and taking too many pictures of tulips showing their Georgia O’Keeffe to the clement sunshine, but I can’t stop thinking about my conversation with Dar. I laugh crookedly and add to my list of Wrong Things to Say When Saying It’s Over:
I love you, but I’m not in love with you.
*
It goes right up there with:
You would like her.
*
Let’s get married, but to other people, and then tell each other about it.
And
I owe you an amends for how I treated you when we were together.
*
I do like absurdity. In the end I tell myself I’ve come out ahead. Then I turn my attention to Dar and to what went, maybe, right.
• • •
“I want to remember . . .” Dar says, pounding along to “Need You Now” somewhere near Gallup on our way back to Phoenix, and proceeds to rattle off meaningful moments in our thirty-six-hour trip to fine arts purgatory. A few days later I email him from Brooklyn with the precise list:
The smell of pines as we climbed east and up in elevation from Phoenix
The pitcher of ice water with floating tangerine quarters in the lobby of our hotel
The portrait of our ghost, Julia Staab, hanging over our very own fireplace, across from our very own four-poster bed
The pony-hide armchair in the art gallery
The ukulelist and his girlfriend, who sang an affectless “Oh, Susannah” (and their conversation about clawhammer music after)
Ginger-pineapple juice
My entrée of shrimp with a green chili and lemongrass sauce [that he preferred to his plato supremo]; my lavender ice cream [that he preferred to his crème brulée]
The urn of Mexican cocoa in the hotel lobby (the best he’d had since living in Nicaragua)
The massage with oil made of bergamot, lemon, lavender and rosemary
The prayer wheel garden
“Thank you, thank you, thank you,” he wrote back. “I love that you remembered that for me.”
“
Love?
” I screech to Kevin. He’s taken to calling me a couple of times a week before he has breakfast and goes off to cosmetology school. We talk about living one day at a time and how much we want and don’t know how to be happy-joyous-and-free, as well as about the chittering Vietnamese students who dyed his hair platinum one slow afternoon and my audition in Santa Fe. “He loves my memory but he doesn’t love me?”
“That’s exaggerating, Frances, darling. I know he loves you.”
“Yeah, yeah, yeah,” I singsong back at him. The rest of that sentence doesn’t need finishing.
“If I’m not
easygoing
, why did I let him eat my dinner? Why did I smile and go study paintings while he talked to street musicians and gallery owners?”
“What do
you
want to remember from the trip?”
I’m stumped. I liked my shrimp and the lavender ice cream but an overeater has a hard time remembering tastes. A massage is a massage. The prayer wheels in the cool daffodil light will stay with me, though. “I liked the storm drain covers,” I say. “They had the city’s coat of arms on them.”
“That’s hilarious! Seattle has special drains, too.”
“I know! I took pictures of them. They’re walking squids or something, right?”
“I’m not sure. So if you liked the drains, what would he repeat back as the things
you
wouldn’t want to forget?”
“Probably the same things he loved,” I say. His mother gave him the trip for graduation—he had finished yet another bachelor’s degree, this time in social work. He’d earned that trip. Having earned the trip, it became a star turn, the Lone Ranger joined by Tonto so that he’d have someone to talk to and be admired by.
“When you’re . . . uncomfortable,” Kevin says, either searching for words or trying not to offend me, “you get all, you know, arms crossed and frowny-eyed and your voice gets kinda high-pitched. Did you do that?”
“You mean diffident? You saw the pictures he took of me. I’d give the Phantom of the Opera a shot at homecoming prince.”
“How much did you apologize?”
“For how I looked?”
“Partly. But for the waiter not bringing water on time or the cost of gas or for him ordering the wrong meal?”
“Or for him not burning CDs to play in the car? Yeah, that was my fault, too.”
• • •
The words “you never know what could happen” are still so alive in me that I rattle off Dar’s pleasures in the trip as that last shred of hope that I’m too smart to grasp at very often. Memory and sentiment have always been my province. I’m the one who has family stories from generations back, insists on holiday traditions and cried when the seam of a leather jewelry box my mother gave me forty years ago finally ripped. Maybe it’s being adopted or maybe it’s not having kids of my own, but I worry that my little pod of Kuffels will fade a little around the edges if one of us doesn’t know how to make my grandmother’s sugar cookies or that my great-great-grandfather died walking north from Andersonville when the Civil War ended.
All that remembering of other people’s stories makes me a sometimes-brilliant gift-giver. Such talents can make me less than easygoing, I suppose, but they
are
talents, fonts of generosity. Exactly what woman is going to remember bergamot and rosemary when she buys massage oil for Dar? Who will send him a perfect bouquet of daisies for graduation and give him a cotton candy maker for Christmas?
Do I buy love?
There has been a succession of such gifts that are so apt that the only thing I can top them with is to go away and leave my friend/crush/lover alone to enjoy them. That solemn teddy bear we named Étienne, the Irish print of the crofter’s cottage, the Grover Washington CD, the book of World War II maps . . . ?
Or do such gifts demand too much gratitude?
Dar may find me high-strung, but it’s not like I email him every week or even call him every month or confide my loneliness, depression and agoraphobia in him. In fact, he turns me into an insouciant ingénue. I tend to forget to turn the oven on when he comes to dinner at my father’s house and not be able to make up my mind as to what kind of cheese we should buy: Is this what being un-easygoing is?
Does he remember how we met, for God’s sake?
August 2005
Because of the heat wave stretching from coast to coast that prohibited dogs from flying, I had to leave Daisy, my boon companion, with my brother in Montana when I was due to go back to New York. Daisy is not an easy dog, but she’d been my blessed bane for the past two years. She is ageist and racist, and highly suspicious of wheelchairs, canes, crutches and walkers. Walking the broad length of the Promenade at night, she will sniff out and want to take down the drunks, drug addicts and mentally disabled from four blocks away. She comments on these people in a manner not dissimilar to Sandra Bernhard. For the last two years, I’d spent a couple of hours every day in the dog run lobbing balls while she shrieked “throw-the-ball-throw-the-ball-throw-the-ball” in a voice that disintegrated glass.
Finding myself alone was disorienting. My bed was too big. If the buzzer went off, there was no torrent of protest. I didn’t have dirt in my shoes and mud stains on my shorts. I cleaned my apartment and threw out bags of dog hair and grit and it didn’t stack up again by suppertime. I was forced to find something to do as I watched the weather reports in Missoula, Minneapolis and New York, and I decided to take advantage of my bachelorettehood.
What better statement of liberation could I make, then, than posting on craigslist? In the two years I’d had Daisy, I had had one sort-of boyfriend. In the few months before I got her, I’d gone through a mildly slutty period, but in my momentary independence I went, shall we say, a little over the top.
*
I could have paid for any number of useful things—teeth whitening, having my apartment painted, a plane ticket to Milan, taxes—with what I spent on corsets, high heels, push-up bras, hose and garter belts in the summer of 2005. I got some good use out of them and when, after three weeks of record high temperatures, Daisy was finally able to fly home, I had been paddled, whipped, flogged and fucked in a number of creatively organic and inorganic ways. I was down to one or two emails of interest from the original post. If I was going to finish this project, I’d have to find a way that didn’t excite her wild defense of me. Anyway, I was losing interest. I like kink as much as the next girl, but I think it’s kinkier to be ball-gagged by someone whose mother has asked me to pass the mashed potatoes.