Dear John, I Love Jane: Women Write About Leaving Men for Women (14 page)

Four years after I’d last seen her, Jessie phoned me from an army base in Biloxi, Mississippi. She had gotten my number from a mutual friend. In the background, her three-month-old baby screamed. She laughed about the kids. “Yeah, one’s four and one’s new. What a trip being a mother.” Her husband, also in the army, was away on active duty. “I was thinking about you,” she said, followed by a nervous laugh. Her familiar voice transported me right back to my college apartment, the tension that I now understood.

I told her about my job as a freelance designer, and how every year since graduation, I saved up money and sublet my apartment and traveled Europe for months at a time. And then, out of the blue, she asked if I’d ever been with a woman.

“Yes,” I said. “My first was with a British woman. We had a long-distance affair for over a year. What about you?”

“No, never. But I wanted to . . . with someone.”

“With who?” I asked, already knowing the answer.

“With you. I had a big crush on you, didn’t you know that?”

“Really?” Gratified to hear Jessie acknowledge that tense, scary, exciting feeling, I responded, “I guess I had a crush on you too.”

“You guess?” she asked.

“I didn’t know it at the time. I just knew I loved hanging out with you.”

“This is like having phone sex,” Jessie said, despite the fact that there wasn’t any talk of sex, just a sexy tension. How erotic can a conversation be with a baby screaming in the background?

Eventually she needed to tend to her infant. We promised we’d keep in touch. I wrote her name and address in my phone book with a permanent marker. That year we exchanged Christmas cards.

After I hung up the phone, I remembered Jessie in my college apartment, curled up in a boxy, wooden chair with mustard-colored pillows, speaking in hushed tones to her boyfriend. I walk past, smile, and look away, keeping that mysterious pang at the edge of my heart under wraps.

Bey ond Sexuality

Holly Edwards

I
havealways had a problem with the notion of sexuality being a major lifestyle choice. It annoyed me when people suggested that being gay was somehow a personality trait to be considered above all others, when in fact I felt it was akin to, or less important than, the color of one’s hair. But of course, my gay friends told me, I
would
think that. I was straight, and I spoke with the full force of heterosexual privilege behind me.

When Leo told me of his fear that he might be gay (and fear is the best word for it; white-knuckled, pant-wetting fear of being forced to live a life he didn’t want), I told him to chill out. Why worry? Just keep on trucking. If you get to the next stop and realize that you prefer boys, that’s just fine. Who cares, as long as you’re happy? I couldn’t understand his frustration. He had a support network, he had his family behind him, so what did it matter which side of his bread he buttered?

But it mattered to Leo. He couldn’t stand not knowing. The indecision was killing him and he found my advice unhelpful. I didn’t know what he was going through, he protested. I’d never questioned my sexuality. Not knowing whether he preferred girls or boys, he said, was to inhabit a limbo where you can never be truly happy. He was stuck on the fence, desperate to pick a side, but paralyzed by the fear of choosing wrong. As far as he was concerned, the choice was a one-way ticket.

And he was right, I didn’t understand. I’d never had any trouble working out who I fancied; it was as easy as putting on my shoes. I liked boys, and I always had. In fact, at this moment in my life, I liked one boy in particular, loved him in fact, ached for him, yearned for him, dreamed about him. It was my own private misfortune that the object of my affections was the poor, tortured Leo, and the more he wept on my shoulder for his own miseries, the more I loved him.

We limped along together for some months, nursing our own torments: his, the uncertainty of who to love; and mine, the terrible certainty of who I did love. One night it came to a head. Lying in bed together (we often shared a bed, but he never laid a finger on me, the swine) he confessed that his dream was to meet the perfect woman and settle down. The gay lifestyle was not for him. He wanted a family, a stable relationship, a
normal
life; he silenced my protests that this was an unachievable goal for gay or straight alike. He told me that if only he could silence the gay demon on his shoulder, he would marry his perfect woman. He told me her name.

It wasn’t me.

I dug my nails into my palms so tightly I drew blood to prevent myself from shrieking “What about ME? Why not ME!?” I knew then that I needed some distance.

My parting advice to him, when I left town the following week to travel and try to get over him, was not to take life so seriously. Sexuality is not the be-all and end-all—lighten up! He shook his head, as if to say, “Thank god you’ll never know what it’s like.”

I kept on the move. While I loved Leo, I knew I had to keep going. To stay in one place too long would be to fester and mope. So it was then that I found myself climbing down from a Greyhound at nine in morning, blinking in the desert sunshine, and shaking hands with a man named Ian, who was to be my new boss.

Sixteen hours on a bus from Brisbane—to a young British girl it felt like I was flying to the moon. I come from a small island; if you’re not careful, a sixteen-hour bus ride could end up in the sea. The town of Barcaldine felt like the quintessential middle of nowhere.

In Barcaldine, I felt good about myself for the first time in a long time. When I woke up each day, thoughts of Leo were not the first thing that came to mind. Over the past couple of months I’d obeyed some very strict rules: I only allowed myself to look at his picture once a week, and then only for five minutes. I was to keep telephone conversations to a minimum, which wasn’t easy because he called me every day to update me on his state of mind. After I hung up, to stop myself from brooding, I had to immediately occupy myself with some task, preferably slightly unpleasant, like cleaning the toilet, or picking up the dog turds in the garden of the house I was staying in. And if I found myself thinking about him, I would sing, as loud as I could, anything as long as it made me feel better. “Applejack” by Dolly Parton was a favorite, or “Coward of the County” by Kenny Rogers (I avoided anything by Donna Summer, as I used to listen to her with Leo, who was, unsurprisingly, a big fan). This therapy was worth the funny looks I got.

Barcaldine is well served by pubs; there are six of them all in a row along the main road in town, which equates to roughly one per family. I worked as a barmaid in the Commercial Hotel, and found that I enjoyed country living. My tastes in music were suddenly not as esoteric as I had thought, and it amused me to be in a community where a man’s worth was measured by the number of kangaroos he’d shot. I settled in quickly, and even found myself a boyfriend, a wide-eyed lad called Noah who drove a utility truck, wore a Stetson, and had never been to the city. For the first time in months, I stopped thinking about Leo with longing. Life was good.

Everything changed when Terry came to town. She was Ian’s daughter—his pride and joy—and had been riding in her car to Alice Springs when it hit a horse. The driver was in a coma. Terry had emerged bruised and cut to pieces, but otherwise fine. She was, however, utterly shaken, and so had decided to come to the country to recover with her family around her. I sometimes ponder the hand that fate played in this. If Terry’s car had not been coming ’round the bend at that exact time, if the horse hadn’t been there, would life just have continued along as normal, with me never knowing what might have been? Or would fate have contrived some other way to interfere?

There was something about Terry that appealed to me. I found myself trying to impress her, telling jokes and tall tales to make her laugh. I was jealous of people in her company; I wanted her all to myself. When we worked together behind the bar, I resented the boys who flirted with her, and gave them half measures of rum out of spite. When she confided in me that she preferred women, I felt a thrill of something like delight, although at the time I couldn’t place it; it was in the background, like a half-teaspoon of cinnamon in a chili con carne. My palate wasn’t sophisticated enough to discern it.

One night Noah took us to a party in the village. He brought his friend Ned, and later confided that he thought Ned liked Terry. I was horrified by the idea, and poorly concealed my distaste. Noah took offense, insulted that I didn’t think his friend good enough for mine. I stood my ground, but was confused: what did it matter to me? When Terry drunkenly proclaimed that she would go home with Ned, I counseled against it. I told her she’d regret it in the morning, that she was far too good for a country boy like him. She decided to take my advice, and Noah, furious with me for showing him up, insisted we all go home.

I was in disgrace on the walk back, and the boys stormed off up ahead. I felt nothing but relief that I had prevented Terry from making a terrible mistake, but when she asked me why I cared so much, I couldn’t tell her. The answer hid in my subconscious, like a particularly hard
Where’s Waldo
cartoon. I kept thinking I had it, but when I looked again it turned out to be a girl in a stripy sweater, or an old man in a red bobble hat.

Terry knew, though. She was teasing me. I think she’d known from the first day we met, when I tried to hold her attention with outrageous stories, like a child diving into a pool for the first time: “Look at me!” Walking back that night, she admitted that she didn’t really want to sleep with Ned. She stopped and held my gaze.

“It’s you I want.”

Were there fireworks overhead? Did all the streetlights come on, and did I imagine the Hallelujah Chorus singing behind me? The answer was clear as day, and I almost slapped my head at my stupidity, but until that moment it had never even occurred to me that my possessiveness toward Terry had been because I had a crush on her.

My relationship with Noah fizzled out after that, but I barely noticed. I was too busy embarking on the first affair of my life that could be termed “steamy.” It was a tabloid headline writer’s dream: HORSE CRASH VICTIM AND BRIT BACKPACKER IN LESBIAN SEX ROMP. It was intense; all thoughts of Leo evaporated, and my every waking thought was Terry. As if this weren’t exciting enough, our relationship had to continue in secret: we were both living in the rooms above the Commercial Hotel, separated by the thinnest of walls from Ian and Maxine, Terry’s mother, both of whom were unaware of their favorite daughter’s deviance.

Leo, when I told him, was aghast. Where was my crippling indecision, where was the specter of doubt over my head? How had I escaped the sleepless nights, lying awake staring at the ceiling, tortured by uncertainty? But it seemed I had taken my own advice: I didn’t stop to question what I was feeling, I simply went with it.
So I’m into girls now, am I?
my subconscious mused.
Cool.

Early on, in the white heat of first love, it wasn’t girls I was into, per se, just Terry. After all, I reasoned, why would I ever need to look at anyone again, male or female? I had Terry. It was only when things between us turned sour that I realized that people expected me to make a choice, and it was only then that I encountered the indecision that Leo referred to.

I had entered a strange realm where people appeared sexless. I was attracted and repulsed by everyone in equal measure. I could no more decide on which particular sex to pursue than I could proclaim to only be interested in people if they were exactly 5’4”. This didn’t stop constant speculation around me. How could I simply have changed? Did I not love boys as I always had? Was I a
lesbian
now? I recoiled at the label, but could not pretend to be straight; and as the dust settled over my feelings for Terry, I started to notice other women. Women had been so much white noise before Terry, interference that I largely ignored, but it now felt like someone had changed the focus on my lens. Now it was men who were blurry and featureless and women who were crystal clear.

I began another affair, but I wasn’t ready. It felt emotionless and stale. I liked the girl, and she seemed to like me, but there was none of the heart-breaking passion that I had had with Terry. Another affair fizzled and died in the wake of the first. It appeared that I was no longer able to treat relationships as lightly as I had before I met Terry. It could be that I simply held women in a higher regard than I had men, but I suspect it was more to do with being hungover from first love. My relationship with Terry may have ended, like it began, with a car crash—albeit a metaphorical one—but it had given me my first brief taste of what being in love could feel like, and after that, settling for anything less was like eating a baked potato plain, knowing how much better it would taste smothered in hot, melting butter.

Love, however, is hard to come by, and while I waited for it, I was plagued by an existential crisis: was I still a lesbian if I wasn’t presently attracted to anybody? Despite my brief forays into lesbian romance, Terry remained the only woman I had properly fancied. I was annoyed when people automatically assumed I was straight, but felt like a fraud saying I was anything else. I felt like I had to prove my lesbian credentials if I was to be accepted. I cut my hair and tried to dress more butch, thinking that would help, but it only served to make me feel even more uncomfortable and less like myself.

It took a long time for me to work through this and find my identity again, and I realized that until I did, love would have to wait. I remembered the advice I had given to Leo all that time ago and realized that I would do well to take it to heart myself.
Who cares, as long as you’re happy?
Leo was now happily cohabiting with his boyfriend, whom he called the love of his life, so it seems my words of wisdom hadn’t been so unhelpful after all.