Authors: Frances Kuffel
If I could multiply Nan, Jean, Ben by 3.333333 and add a couple of casual boyfriends in the mix I might have all those private names, too—Francie, Francie baby, Franny, Fran, Frances darling, Frances, Frank-o . . .
That’s what it’s really about, along with the inversion of Bobby’s problem: He’d met and left so many women who could have been Miss OK, while I’d met and been disregarded by so many men I still think might have been Mr. Perfect.
In “Someone Is Waiting,” Bobby thinks of all his married women friends and asks the woman who has aspects of each to wait for him. I think of all the men who have brought me to my knees or worse when they liked but didn’t love me or when I wasn’t valuable enough to hang on to.
I took the time today to make a list of those men who touched me deeply. At the age of fifty-four, I have had eleven such men who have threatened or promised—oh, shit, I wish I could write this as well as Sondheim:
Someone to crowd you with love,
Someone to force you to care,
Someone to make you come through,
Who’ll always be there,
As frightened as you
Of being alive,
Being alive.
*
• • •
You know about Dar, and to be fair, Will loves me, now, as much as I now love him. The first boy who made me aware of being a girl was Joey Wade, who was in Sr. M. Marcella’s first grade class with me. Was it my mother or his who decided we’d make cute sweethearts? All I remember is that he had a fire truck cake for his birthday party and I felt important and imposed upon, mixed up together, to be his girlfriend.
Joey left St. Anthony’s after first grade and is notable only for that first awareness that Will would bring into crashing, hormonal brilliance six years later.
So that’s eight men left. Eric, as eHarmony pointed out, has never, quite, left my orbit. I think he would want to be best friends except that part of me hates him and another part of me is too ashamed to have much to do with a man I loved when I was a size six.
The man I loved in my thirties, Andrew, suggested, when I confessed that I was in love with him, that we get married—to other people and then tell each other about it. Even I had more dignity than that, but I’ve looked for him on the Web over the years and finally ran him to earth on LinkedIn.
“He lives in Salt Lake and he’s so gray!” I told Grace. “And buttoned to the neck.” I met Andrew through Grace when she was dating him in college. It was between graduate school stints that I planned our family and named our children.
“You don’t think he’s become a Mormon, do you?” she asked.
“I don’t think Fichte and Joseph Smith would be two of the people one would want to meet in heaven,” I said slowly. “But it’s weird, you know, because he wrote me that he just finished a study of Fichte—in German—but he’s all capital letters on his skill profile—SOS and BTW and whatnot, all to do with advanced computing. He has two daughters and some big career and he’s still reading Fichte. Which is the real Andrew?”
I could hear Grace clicking on her computer. “His Facebook picture shows him with a young woman. Must be his daughter.”
“Please tell me she’s fat.”
“She’s beautiful.”
“Then tell me her name isn’t Claire or Margaret.”
“He doesn’t say.”
So maybe our ghost children are intact and waiting for another incarnation. He was pleased to hear from me and asked what I was reading lately (hence the brief Fichte exchange), but I’ve given up being smart since leaving publishing. I was rereading the Harry Potter series at the time and I was embarrassed enough that I didn’t get around to answering the email.
Maybe there will be no incarnation for Andrew and me.
I found several other men I’d had damaging crushes on through Facebook and LinkedIn. I’d Googled and scrubbed Facebook for years looking for the boy I dreamed about in high school (yes, I’m a slut: I could be in love with Will, see the writing on the wall and have a simultaneous serious pash for another boy), Shawn Eyre. With a name like that, I didn’t understand why every girl in our class wasn’t in love with him. Shawn was everything I wasn’t. National Merit Finalist. Government. As normal as apple pie.
I finally realized he didn’t spell his name “Shawn” and found him easily on LinkedIn, which seems to have more of us Boomers than Facebook.
He wrote back immediately, with curiosity and proper punctuation, telling me he lived in Seattle and was getting married for the first time in six months.
“Sean Eyre??” Will nearly shrieked. “You never told me that.”
“I only really got to know him when we were seniors. You and I weren’t speaking that year.”
“I always remember him as sort of . . . a gentle soul.” Will probably thinks of me as a gentle soul, along with Genghis Khan (
He was really passionate about his life
) and George W. Bush (
He always reminds me of a Havanese. They’re the most loving dog I know
). This had never been my impression of Sean, whom I thought of as kind of forced to excel by his parents, who were in the snooty Missoula circle my parents could be found in if the cause was right. Maybe Will saw the what and I saw the why of Sean. That could sum our friendship skills up neatly.
“Whatever,” I snipped. “Don’t you see the cruelty here? I’ve never been married. He’s never been married. I’m going to move to Seattle someday. He lives there now. I came
this
close. God hates me.”
“I can see why you’re disappointed.”
“You know what he said about you and me?” I laughed bitterly. “He remembers how comfortable we each were in our own skin.”
Will laughed as bitterly as I. “Yeah, I was this faggy artsy type and half the time I was living on other people’s couches.”
“And I was a two-hundred-forty-pound underachiever going through serious depressions no one recognized and I couldn’t find panty hose that came up to my waist.”
“If he thought we were so at home being weird, can you
imagine
how he must have felt?”
I was quiet at that because I couldn’t, in fact, imagine it. No wonder he’d said he wasn’t in touch with anyone from Missoula except his family.
I found I had to be careful with Sean. It was a little too exciting to hear from him, I had a little too much fear about emailing him, waited too ardently for a reply. He recommended a couple of books that were terrific and mentioned a hilarious “Shouts & Murmurs” piece, and I tended to make idiotic spelling errors out of nervousness. He was a Dar sort of Andrew, a Will-ish Eric, shelf material. Better off behind crystal wineglasses I never use.
• • •
As I walked dogs and listened to Sondheim scores on my iPod, I reckoned up that about half the men who’d made me feel, as Bobby in
Company
said, alive, still liked me. At least, they did once I tracked them down. Excluding Joey and his fire truck cake, the other half make up a group I decided was like Sweeney Todd’s reaction to the beggar woman: “Off, I said! To the devil with you!”
*
Daily Formetti might not have cast me off—I don’t remember. Through him, I met the boy I went out with my junior year in college and who has a name so common I’ll simply call him John Doe. John and I broke apart (versus “up”) when he got sober. A year or two later I received an amends letter from him to which I responded bitterly, and I received no further communication from him.
I can’t track a John Doe with no other information than the University of Montana in the late ’70s, and Daily is dead. Daily taught me one good lesson: Don’t fall in love with a priest. He should have reinforced what I learned at eighteen from Will: Don’t fall in love with gay men.
But what could I do? Of these ten men, I actually fell in love at first sight with two of them, Daily and Eliot. Both of them were gay. Which is the more important lesson here—don’t fall in love with gay men, or love at first sight does not work out? It’s been thirty years since I fell in love on a first meeting, and it will add greatly to my happiness if I never do so again. No one needs that kind of tension in her life.
Let’s be very, very precise about this: I was into Eliot the first time we met (on the phone, as it happens), but I was never in love with him. I wanted to
be
him. Even more than Sean, he’d had the charmed life I was too much of a fuckup to have crafted for myself. This was no flannel-shirt-and-
Liza with a Z
fag hagism, it was Thomas Mann, Tchaikovsky and von Gloeden hagging, with a dash of Bronski Beat when we went sightseeing. I can name twenty writers, composers and directors that are part of my life’s blood that Eliot introduced me to. He had a grand, expansive, adjective-ridden brain and a lovely academic curriculum vita: the right undergraduate college, the right graduate school, tenure track at a fine college where he remains to this day, his first novel published while I floundered in my five minutes in a PhD program.
To be a true fag hag is to give up everything except what one’s fag handpicks from one’s arsenal of qualities, talents, abilities, and adding what one’s fag finds missing. Eliot is the only gay man I have done this for and my motto in those years was “Heaven doesn’t want me and hell’s afraid I’m going to take over.” We were, in the end, performance art, and performance art is fleeting. If it has any permanence, it’s in photographs or memory. Perhaps I should be proud of the fact that I found permanence, lampooned in that first novel published in the years I struggled to get over him.
This book is predicated on my quest to replace Dar: Replacement is a tool I’ve used before. Becoming absorbed in Andrew allowed me to rearm myself, to get beyond the woman who was abandoned to shreds of self on a dance floor in Provincetown.
I can Google Eliot any time I want, but it still stings, his successes versus what a fuckup I feel. Recently, though, in my ongoing attempt to get rid of stuff in anticipation of leaving Brooklyn, I read a novel his editor gave me back in the days of being a literary agent. It is a mid-career novel. I thought it would be as quick a read as his first and that I would soon put it out one fine weekend day, to join all the other giveaways that make their way on to the balustrades and stoops of the Heights, a veritable free book fair.
I was wrong.
I got to the middle of the book just as it was time to walk a dog and without thinking, I said to Daisy, “I don’t like this person very much.” I had just read a scene in which a professor at a community college mangles a conversation about Isobel Armstrong with a male student. “Why
wouldn’t
a community college student find Armstrong difficult to handle?” I complained to Daisy, who was looking hopeful that my new restlessness foretold a walk or maybe a trip to the dog run. “What kind of elitist
is
this author?”
I looked at her watching me with her intelligent amber eyes and realized I wasn’t riffing on Eliot. He had become a separate entity from the man I’d boozed with and bought marionettes for thirty years ago.
I’ve taught that level of college for half of those thirty years. I know that student and I know the courage he and the others had that Eliot shrugged dismissively at in the novel. It’s damned fucking
hard
to be the first generation to say, OK, I give up: I’ll go to college and I’ll take the required courses that are going to screw with my head because I’ve never thought about contractions or what Emily Dickinson means when she writes, “As cool to speech as stone.” Eliot can write brilliantly about Beckett but he doesn’t know shit about tickling the kid whose biggest dream is to own a boat into caring about something not bound between magazine covers.
Eliot hated musicals. He scoffed at them. They were some of those things I didn’t bring up around him because they broke our hag code. But how far is
South Pacific
from
Madama Butterfly
, really? It’s community college compared to Yale, but I’m willing to bet a lot of Yalie PhDs are out there teaching community college.
And didn’t Sondheim go to Yale?
• • •
Which leaves one man on that list, Gregory McCarthy, who is also the person most likely to really understand my raucous, doomed ballet with Eliot. Greg was straight, but more bookish and, most important, more theatrical than anyone I know. He’d understand about fag hagging and he’d understand why Bernstein is as shattering as Gounod. Gregory and I fell in love with each other . . . but at different times. I requested his friendship on Facebook but he didn’t respond. His page didn’t look much used, but I only have that silence to go on. I’m sure he would tell you I hurt him—as his literary agent and as a woman who wanted him to be the writer Eliot is, I should accept that accusation. No one enjoys her guilt as much as I do, but for whatever reason, I don’t accept it with Gregory. He got married, seems to have a going writing life and is beloved in his hometown, the metropolitan area of which is over five million people. Whatever hurt or setback I caused him, he has plenty of compensation. I have Daisy and thirteen dogs to walk. I deserve a five-minute pity party except that, the lack of a Facebook connection aside, I don’t think about Gregory much.
I can’t think about any of these men for very long without feeling the pinch of rejection and, with some of them, competition. John Doe, Eliot and Gregory cut me off at the knees, while Dar, Sean, Andrew and Eric unsettle me too much. I felt enough kinship with Eliot, Gregory and Dar that they feel like phantom limbs or a fifth, bloodless chamber of the heart.
Into the Woods
begins with two words: “I wish.” It is a cautionary tale about going into the black forest in order to find the right way to love. Looking at the roster of men I have been truly foolish over, I can see I did not choose wisely—if love is a choice. I walked around with my ears full of “A Little Night Music,” daring Richard Strauss to out-magic “Perpetual Anticipation,” and wished I had a man to love and love me back, such a simple, human thing. I couldn’t choose the love me back part, but I didn’t have to waste time over drugs, Brahmins, alcohol and needing the sanity of the exact opposite of Johann Fichte either. Not wasting time is part of adulthood. But I’d gotten stuck in the forest with my wishes and my history and there was a terrible chance I was neither a grown-up nor alive.