Dear John, I Love Jane: Women Write About Leaving Men for Women (3 page)

He stopped crying. Sat at a desk in our cramped apartment and made a giant eye out of construction paper. The only other art project I had seen him undertake was when we painted bright, intricate designs on our plastic, thrift store headboard. We ditched that headboard when we moved to Georgia and bought a grownup bed. The eye, he told me, was to watch over us. The iris was green, and the lashes were thick, black, and rectangular. The pupil, dilated. He used double-sided tape to stick the eye to the wall above our cherry headboard. It wasn’t long before the tape dried out and the eye fell behind our bed. Within three months, our marriage dried out. Again.

But we traveled to Asheville, North Carolina, together. He had his master’s in accounting, and we both had the quixotic notion that a new setting would put the adhesion back on the eyeball of our commitment. I craved the mountains. Having grown up on the Cumberland Plateau in Tennessee, I believe the elevation is good for the spirit. The Georgian humidity had worn me down into its red soil.

So I convinced two schools in Asheville that they wanted me to teach their students: one was a day school and the other was a boarding school. Wes had no trouble landing an accounting job, and he had definite ideas about which job I should accept. Though I wanted to teach at the day school, he insisted I take the job at the boarding school, as room and board would be free. Wes is the man, after all, who convinced me to sleep in our car on long trips rather than paying for a hotel room. The same man who stuck dated labels beneath light fixtures to prove that I had foolishly squandered money on light bulbs marketed to be longer-lasting. So we moved our mismatched furniture into the girls’ dormitory where I would have countless duties. I taught ninth-grade English and coached cross-country and track.

My first morning at the school, I ran the cross-country course and lost myself near the horse stables. I ran into a clearing and faced a huge, wooden throne. A man in blue jeans and a striped button-down shirt sat on it. He was completely still. He did not budge as I walked toward him to ask him for directions back to the school buildings. Blood soaked the wood behind his mangled head.

The newspaper article said he was found at a clearing on Asheville School campus; a clearing that Camp Hollymont uses in the summer. He had shot himself in the head the day before he was found. There was no mention of me, and the headmaster told me I was not to discuss the unfortunate man with any other faculty members, and certainly not with the students who would be arriving in a couple of weeks.

I learned the campus and neighboring trails well, thanks to other teachers who were distance runners. Four of us formed a running group. I did not discover any more dead bodies on these group runs, but I did discover Becky. Since she was married with two young kids and a baby, I was not too concerned that I found her sexy. Though I had thrown away the printed proof of my attraction to women, I ran behind Becky, watching her muscles move beneath her tight skin. I found reasons to touch her curly, blond hair. I lay awake at night thinking of ways I could amuse or impress her. I convinced myself that a crush was allowable, though it did make sex with Wes even less bearable.

One February night at dusk, I was at the track, counting out steps for my J-run to the high jump. Having been told that I would coach this event during track season, I had watched a couple of videos and a practice at the local college. Though I felt uncomfortable practicing this event on the wide-open track, I needed to be able to do what I would soon instruct others to do.

After I cleared the lowest height a few times, clapping and cheering startled me. I sat up on the blue landing cushion and saw her. Tall, lithe Becky. She had a way of finding me.

Though she wore jeans, I coaxed her to the blacktop before the high jump. I showed her how to run the J formation and marked off her steps with a little rock. She ran through the marks but stopped before the bar. Again and again, I showed her how to throw her body over the bar.

She told me, “This is outside my comfort zone.”

My sweat drying in the coolness of the approaching evening, I felt charged—like I did on the mesa with Grace. Becky didn’t jump that night.

I was off duty that Friday. The two of us went to a bar—a cheesy bar where two guys who brought their own pool sticks tried to pick us up. We were there because it was across the street from the campus. We both wanted to drink. I ripped the cardboard coaster into pieces as I confessed my attraction to her. She told me she wanted me too, but she was a mother. We had made the J-run together. Before she took me to my dorm, she parked her car by the stables—not far from the throne where I had seen the dead man. We kissed. I thought nothing could make me stop kissing Becky. I kissed her with a three-year hunger, and she opened. So soft, so lovely. So illicit.

Our affair blazed. We reached for each other whenever we could. Made love in my apartment between classes, on the wrestling mat late at night, in the woods mid-run, and in the headmaster’s bathroom during a spring faculty party. Her back against the door. My hands pushing up her blue dress. Her mouth on my neck. My fingers in her warmth. One night, we drove to the new soccer complex. I lay on top of her in the back seat of her minivan. Police lights discovered us. We sat up. The policeman asked us where our boyfriends were. Had they run off into the woods? He would not believe that no men had been with us. That we could be there in the back seat together. Alone.

Wes found a blond, curly hair on our sheet. A CD player was plugged into the wall next to the bed. Shaking, he asked. I told. Everything. I asked him to leave me. He was gone within the week. The dean of faculty asked me if our small apartment contributed to our separation. Just the small space I had tried to exist in since puberty, I thought.

I adopted Zora from the pound after Wes moved out. Becky and her daughter helped me pick out a medium-size female with about three breeds in her. She has tweed-looking fur covered with big black spots on her back to match her black head and her right hind leg. The employees were calling her Beatrice, so the first thing I did was upgrade her name to Zora. When the volunteer rubbed Zora’s belly, he showed me a woman-symbol tattoo beneath her fur. I thought she was a feminist miracle dog, but he explained veterinarians often make this tattoo to eliminate the guessing game of whether or not pets have been fixed. Since she’d already been spayed, I got to take her that day.

I was in love with Becky and she with me, but the little shoes by her front door broke my heart. Wes was hurt. Angry. We didn’t talk much by phone. Only once in person. He did not tell Becky’s husband, Pete, anything. He did tell me to think about her family. I told Becky it was over because of the little shoes. She disagreed. Yes, she had a family—was a mother and a wife—but she would decide what was right for her. She came to me at night. Crawled into my bed. We agreed we could not leave each other.

She told Pete. Then she called me to tell me she told Pete. Pete, the assistant headmaster, told the headmaster. The headmaster told me I had four hours to get off campus. Called me a sinner. A homewrecker. Told me I was sick and could possibly teach again once I got help. I still had a handwritten note he put in my box a week earlier in which he expressed how thankful he was for my teaching and coaching. That parents and students had nothing but positive reports. In closing, he’d written that he hoped I would stay with the school a long, long time. I left that note in his school mailbox along with the keys he told me to return. I was the corpse in the woods who needed to disappear to keep the campus from being tainted.

I loaded all I could fit into my Jeep. Zora sat in the passenger seat. And we drove to Becky’s friend’s house because I had nowhere else to go. Becky was fired, too. Pete begged her to stay with him, but she rented a house. They told their kids they were separating. I called my parents and siblings. Told them I was fired and gay. And I was as out as out can be. I was an outcast. My family offered nothing but love, but I lost every friend I had in Asheville, except Becky. I was not just out, I was inside out. Raw. I was a scandal. But I was still in love, and Becky and I played pool with Big Joan at a dive near my parents’ house the day after Christmas. The next semester, I got a job at the rival school—the day school that I had applied to before I moved to Asheville.

But Becky’s mom sent her Christian pamphlets about the sinfulness of homosexuality and told her she was ruining her and her family’s lives. Pete often called her and cried. He is Catholic—one of the reasons for their three kids. And though I got along well with her kids, her daughter wasn’t sleeping well.

One night after I timed her kids running the indoor obstacle course I made out of chairs, toys, balls, and canned food, she told me she was going to try to make things work with Pete. I ran seven miles down murky streets and never felt tired—just the pain that I was still alive.

I ran and ran and ran and ran and ran. And running is magical. Eventually I get somewhere. Six years ago, I got to Lucy. We met training for the Boston Marathon.

One night when the snow came down like feathers, I opened a beer because I knew school would be canceled the next day. Lucy, who never misses opportunities, called me and asked if I wanted company. We sat on the couch I had impulsively bought the day before. I drank a second beer as she sipped wine I worried had sat too long since I’d opened it. Her face flushed, and she explained that always happens when she drinks because she is half-Japanese. I had no excuse for my flushed face. I excused myself. Went to the bathroom. I washed my hands and then brushed my teeth. When I joined her on the sofa, she held my face and said, “Do you want to do this?” Yes, I did. Despite a broken marriage, despite the Christian pamphlets, despite losing a job, despite scandals, despite abandonment, despite Becky’s relationship with a woman other than me after leaving Pete a second and final time, despite the laws, despite gossip. I wanted Lucy. I wanted me. As we moved on the new couch together, I did not feel the fiery rush of the forbidden. I felt certain. As certain of us as I was that I would have the next day off to remember every detail of our first evening together.