The boys I loved were the boys who never asked me
out, and I loved them because they were impossibilities. If you never love
anyone within the realm of possibility, you can never be hurt—the distance is
salvific. It preserves and delivers you from heartbreak. The fruit vendor at
the corner of 86th and 2nd, he sold me cherries,
tangerines, and a sense of romance that would never pass from my dream world
into reality. He didn’t even speak English, just gave me a dazzling smile as he
weighed the fruit, and I left dazed, with boxes full of blackberries and
peaches.
I doted on the Hispanic men who ran the grocery
store near my house in Brooklyn. The store had everything from papayas, curry,
and rice to pigs’ tails in bloody buckets and salted fish drying on the
shelves, their metallic eyes cold and glazed over. The men who ran the store,
five or six of them in all, appeared to all come from the same family—very
short, eyes creased at the edges, tanned like leather, and sullen until a smile
lit up their faces. Honestly, I found it difficult to tell them apart, but I
took care to try and make whichever one I was speaking with at the moment smile.
One of them, close to my age, frequently asked me what my plans were for the
weekend and offered to teach me Spanish, but I always demurred, keeping him at
bay. One night, as I was buying a week’s worth of potatoes, onions, and pears,
I heard two of the men talking about me behind a heap of pineapples they were
unloading.
“She’s beautiful,” one was saying, “the one with the
blue eyes, who was buying the pears.” I was the only white girl in a shop
filled with African American and Hispanic women, all dark-eyed.
His friend snorted. “Don’t get your hopes up. She
only dates white men, I’m sure of it.” His friend protested, and they bickered
quietly, switching into Spanish behind their pineapples as I tried not to laugh
on the other side. These were the compliments I stored up to smile over later,
the ones that held no threat, no danger of actually affecting my world.
I found myself drawn to marginalized men—immigrants,
vendors, delivery boys, gays, cross-dressers, other people on the edge of
society. One of my good friends when I was at Sarah Lawrence College came to
school as a gentle Jewish boy named David from Philadelphia. He had long
eyelashes and dark curly hair, worn long, and he always looked like he was
flinching, like he was waiting to be hit. By springtime, he had changed his
name to Davia and started wearing dresses and eyeliner. We often talked about
faith, wrestling with the idea of condemnation together, struggling to
reconcile righteous judgment with the grace of God, and I found myself crying
for him as I fell asleep at night, for his doe-like tenderness and lost soul.
The next year, when Jenna and I lived with the
artists, a gay couple sublet a room in our apartment for the month of May. All
the doors in our apartment were made of glass, including the bedroom doors, so
that we had to put curtains on the doors to preserve any sense of privacy.
While some of the boys we lived with—the type of boys who skulked around in
their underwear and left used condoms on the floor after their girlfriends visited—made
me wish there were iron bars on our door instead of curtains, I trusted Liam
and Stephen the second they moved in to our house. They brought with them a
record player, a box of recipes, two mandolins, a violin, and Stephen Fry’s
autobiography. We spent the weekends reading out loud to each other, baking
pies, and listening to my grandfather’s vinyl Reflections of An Indian Boy. That
summer, I went to the East Village to see the neo-futurists, a confessional
theatre group that ran a show of thirty micro-plays in sixty minutes, honest,
bizarre, and engaging. I had been often, but had always managed to avoid being
pulled up on stage until my last visit.
Near the end of the show, Dan, one of their regular
performers, came out onto stage with the skeleton of an umbrella, sheets of
paper clothes-pinned to the umbrella’s arms. As he spoke, he pulled one page at
a time off the umbrella, dropping it on the floor like a tree shedding its
leaves. As the pages swirled about his feet, he told us that they were the
pages of his first novel, which he had scrapped after showing the completed
product to his mother. She cried when she read it, saying, “Dan—it’s just so
gay.” She asked him never to talk or write about being gay again, and suggested
therapy. When Dan’s umbrella was bare, all the lights went out and we were left
in our seats in the dark of his loneliness. When the lights came back on, and a
few funny skits had brought laughter back to the room, Dan came out again with
a bucket, which he filled with ice and water. He began a monologue about the
Coney Island Polar Bear Plunge, and as he spoke, he took my hands, led me from
my seat and plunged both of our arms into the bucket of ice water, holding my
hands underwater in his. As our arms went numb, he spoke poetry out into the
audience, describing the feeling of leaping off of Coney Island’s pier into the
bay to celebrate the New Year. He spoke of everything being washed away by the
bite of frigid water, of the old year being stripped down to its skin and being
born again into the new year. He spoke of forgiveness and purity, and when he
was finished, he looked straight into my eyes for a moment and smiled as our
baptized hands surfaced, up and out of the water, regaining sensation.
I rode home on the subway that night, sitting by a
homeless man on the A line as we rushed beneath the East River. He thought he
was Santa Claus and sang me carols all the way home, snapping in and out of
lucidity to tell me that he also was a dentist from Guatemala. His blackened
teeth suggested otherwise, as he switched back to the North Pole and tried to
sell me one of the poinsettias in his shopping cart. As I listened to him sing,
his growly voice became more and more endearing. We all were on the fringes—Davia,
Liam and Stephen, Dan, Santa the Guatemalan dentist, the fruit vendors—and
needed to make safe havens around ourselves to harbour one another in the gaps
between our small worlds.
For the past three years, I’ve received a telephone
call every few months from a man who introduces himself as Cousin Paulie from
Connecticut. That’s how he opens every conversation after my hello: “Hello!
It’s Cousin Paulie from Connecticut!” Then, without fail, he asks for Marge or
Nancy, his spinster nieces. Every few months, we have the same conversation: I
tell him he has the wrong number, he apologizes but persists in asking for his
relatives, I repeat that he has the wrong number and ask how he’s been doing
since our last conversation and we eventually settle into a rhythm of chatting
about the weather, his nieces, and his increasing senility. He must be in his
late eighties, by the rasping sound of his voice and his constant state of
jolly confusion. These have been, historically, my most pleasant friendships
with men: distant, on the fringes, guarded against any sort of reality or love,
and therefore with nothing to forgive. I keep my heart in a box, and I would
bury it if I could, to keep it safe.
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