"Watch out: you might get what you're after!"
That's from an old Talking Heads tune I was into in high school. They say you should be careful what you wish for, but it's not a sentiment I ever understood.
Not until now.
The Buddhists, as Naomi would no doubt remind me, think desire is what connects us to the wheel of samsara, to suffering. Which may be. But I've always felt there are two kinds of desire: there's desire for control, for possession, and sure, that could be connected to samsara, I can see that. And then there's the desire to be loved, and I never could see how that had suffering in it too. Not-being loved was suffering, but being-loved had to be a good thing, and wanting love had to be a good thing.
I started wanting love, like really wanting love, in high school. I wanted romance, I wanted a little action, I wanted to be like the other guys I knew who had girlfriends and dates and maybe even sex. But you know what it's like being a geek in high school: the girls I fell in love with didn't even know I existed. I did one girl's homework for the better part of a year, even. (Imagine: me, Blair Sandburg, on the high school honor council, doing someone else's homework.) And I hoped, I wished, I willed her to notice, during one of those late-night study sessions, that while I filled in the blanks in her French workbook there was something else I was after. She didn't notice. She asked for advice about some other guy she had a crush on. I was like her little brother, for crying out loud.
The thing I wanted was to be needed. Which, let's face it, was not a need that Naomi was capable of filling. Don't get me wrong; I love Naomi. She's a great mom. But there's a little narcissism in every free spirit, and Naomi had that in spades. It never occurred to her that I wanted to be needed. She didn't know I wanted to be the center of somebody's universe. If she'd thought about it, she probably would have wanted to free me from those constraints, from that old paradigm, anyway. And of course all that did was make me want it more.
I've always been verbal; I wrote down my fantasies, back then. In little, tiny handwriting when I was supposed to be taking notes on chemistry or physics or math. In those fantasies, the person I wanted - that girl I had a thing for, some misunderstood rock star, somebody famous, somebody perfect - always wanted me back.
Sometimes the person I wanted came to me wounded, in those dreams. Came to me hurt, or beaten up, or attacked. And I was always the one who could soothe their pain. I could nurse them back to health, I could salve their wounds, I could make them whole. That's what I wanted: to make them whole.
I went to college, I discovered girls did like me after all, I even discovered boys liked me, although I never liked them back. (Never occurred to me to like a boy, until a certain primitive throwback to pre-civilized man stomped into my office and threw me up against the wall, but that's another story, never mind, anyway.) But college was great: being desirable was heady stuff. And being smart was heady stuff. And in time I forgot all about those fantasies, and when I heard that Talking Heads song on the radio it made me laugh a little, and the pieces stayed disparate. For a while.
It's only now, three years into my friendship with Jim and one week into our romance, that the pieces are coming together. And I don't like the picture they're forming. And I want to take the puzzle back and try again.
If I told Naomi how Jim and I finally figured out that we were each operating under the serious misapprehension that the other one wasn't interested (and torturing ourselves to no small degree, to boot) she would smile smugly and tell me that I slipped up because I wanted to slip up, that I sabotaged my perfect cover on purpose, because I wanted him to know. Well, fine. I'd sabotage myself like this any day. Let's hear it for shooting myself in the foot, when it brings me Jim Ellison on a silver platter.
How it happened was this. I was sitting at home last Saturday morning. It was a particularly cold and nasty Cascade winter day, always my favorite thing. (Yeah. Right.) I was thinking about Jim, as per usual, which was making me wretched. The prospect of my unrequited feelings for Jim - and unrequited lust too, let's be frank here - continuing to be unrequited was a miserable one. But the prospect of trying to find someone else to date was equally miserable; I'd tried that one repeatedly, I knew whereof I spoke. It sucked.
Naomi was always in favor of talking about issues, but telling Jim anything seemed out of the question. I mean, what was I going to say? "Excuse me, Jim, but I'd really like to jump your bones?" I don't think so. I've been thrown out of the loft, thank you. It's not my idea of a good time.
I decided to try an exercise: I took my notebook and wrote down all the things I wanted to say. Just to try the words on, just to see how it would sound, just to see if I could get the words out of my head and into the world. I tried different lines:
I love you, Jim.
Don't kick me out, but I'm in love with you.
Please don't hate me because I love you.
Please don't hate me because I want to make love with you.
God, I want to make love with you.
It went on from there, in the same tiny hand I'd used for my high school fantasies all those years ago. By the time I filled the page I was half-hard and completely maudlin. I decided it was a bad exercise. I gave up.
And no, I didn't do what you're thinking; I'm not that transparent. I didn't leave the page lying around for Jim to find. I ripped it out and threw it in the fireplace. The phone rang. I took a message for Jim and left the notebook by the phone. The page burned, but the kindling was lousy, and I couldn't get a log to catch. When the fire refused to start, I decided I wasn't fated to relax at home all day anyway, and I went to the U to get some work done instead.
When I came back in early evening, Jim was sitting on the sofa holding the notebook and staring into space. I thought he'd zoned. I didn't even bother to take off my coat, just ran over there and knelt at his feet and tried to look into his eyes. "Jim," I said urgently, all thoughts of my morning misery gone - because let's face it, those are the dynamics of our relationship: when Jim's in trouble I push my unrequited bullshit aside. "Jim, are you okay?"
The way Jim tells it, he came home during the afternoon and found the phone message. Picked up the notebook. And felt, in the indentations on the page, his name, over and over. And words like "love," and "God," and "want," and "fuck." Being the thorough guy that he is, he sat down and read the whole page like Braille. He says his first thought was terror, followed by an intense wave of relief. He says he sat down, still holding the notebook, and started thinking about exactly what he wanted to do with me when I got home. He must have spent all afternoon hard; it would explain the particular, shall we say, urgency of the events that followed.
So there I was, kneeling between his legs, looking at him, worried. And he looked at me, and I could tell he saw me, and I realized he wasn't zoning, and I realized he knew, and before I had a chance to say anything he pulled me to him and kissed me.
And he pulled me up onto the couch, and we found a way to fit our bodies together, and we necked for a long time. Kissed, and touched, and groaned, and eventually came all over each other. And it wasn't the way they write it in the storybooks, but it was pretty wonderful anyway.
After a while he moved slightly beneath me, and I shifted to give him some breathing room, and his voice (coming from somewhere under my ear) said, "We ought to do some laundry." He sounded amused.
"You're right, we're a mess," I said, and laughed, and he laughed too. And we wound up stripping our clothes off and throwing them in the hamper, and he put on a robe and I put on sweats, and we ordered Thai, and had it delivered, and he didn't say anything when I asked for mine spicy, and I didn't say anything when he ordered the spring rolls fried instead of in cold rice wrappers, and we watched some movies, and it was pretty much like always, except charged somehow. Because everything was different. Because we were both grinning like idiots.
Eventually he got around to telling me about finding the notebook, and I told him about writing it, and it came out that no, neither one of us had ever done anything like this before, and yes, both of us were pretty damn excited about trying it. And both of us felt pretty stupid for waiting so long to figure this out, but it seemed more productive to focus on the present than beat ourselves up about the past, so we focused on the present. We focused on each other. We smiled a lot.
He made some stupid crack about my height, and I grabbed a throw pillow and whapped him one, and he knocked me back into the sofa and kissed me while he had me pinned there, for good measure. I told him I could get used to being pinned to furniture, as long as he was doing the pinning. He told me it had better be him, since he was planning to kick the ass of anyone else who tried to touch me. We sort of laughed and necked some more.
And then he said, "Sandburg, you still get cold sleeping down here?"
And I said, "Yeah, kinda," because I do; I'm always cold.
And he said, a little gruff, "It's warmer in my room. Heat rises. And I'm pretty warm. If you want."
And God help me, I couldn't keep from glowing. "Yeah," I said. "I want." And we grinned at each other again and he went to brush his teeth and I went to brush my teeth and when I got upstairs he was in bed waiting for me and I thought, 'it just doesn't get better than this.'
So fast-forward to now, Saturday, one week later. My bedroom's basically become the spare room it was always meant to be, and we've managed to refrain from broadcasting our new status to the entire station, and it's been a really good week.
And this evening we were flopped on Jim's bed - our bed - kissing and touching and rubbing again. We've gotten a little more audacious over the course of our week together: some licking, some sucking, some exploration. And I was exploring Jim a little more, and my finger ghosted over the crease of his ass - that beautiful, firm ass that's started starring in its own whole set of fantasies - and his whole body turned rock-solid. Except for his erection, which faded. And he turned away. I realized he was shaking.
I moved up to hold him, and he was definitely shaking, and I reached around him and stroked him gently, soothing him, murmuring "I'm here, it's okay" like some kind of mantra. Eventually his body calmed, the muscles unkinked, and he let out a sigh that cut into me somehow. "You want to tell me what that was?" I asked.
He uncurled from me. "Let's make some coffee," he said. Somehow I knew that he wasn't avoiding the question, that he needed fortification for this one.
Wrapped in robes and blankets, perched at opposite ends of the sofa, coffee cups firmly in hand, we looked at each other. He looked down. And he told me the story. The whole time, I felt like my stomach had dropped an extra few floors without me, the way you feel when an elevator lurches, the way I felt when good old Galileo decided to play tricks a while back.
"When I was a kid," Jim said quietly, "six or seven maybe, I had a babysitter. Named Terry." He stopped and took a deep breath. I could see the tension in his jaw, in the side of his neck.
The sick feeling in my stomach intensified. We've all heard these stories, we just never expect to hear them from someone we love. I knew what was coming. I was just waiting for the details.
Part of me wanted to say, "Hey, it's okay, man, you don't have to tell me this," but I knew it wasn't true. He did have to tell me. And it might as well be sooner rather than later. I held my tongue.
"I still remember what he looked like," Jim said. "Tall. Blond. Big hands, or what seemed like big hands, then." He was gripping his coffee cup so hard I was surprised it didn't break. His pauses made my ribcage feel like his coffee cup: like I was caught in a too-tight grip, waiting for what came next.
"My father didn't want us to have female babysitters: thought all that girl attention might screw us up somehow." There was a dry loathing in Jim's voice, and whether it was for his father, or for Terry, or for himself, I couldn't be sure. "Terry's dad was military, so he had perfect army-kid manners. He was a lifeguard, had a crewcut, the whole nine yards. Dad thought he was great."
Talk about your 'bleak midwinter': I was made of ice. Sure, your Dad thought he was great, I thought. Bet your Dad never said half the nice things about you that he must've said about Terry. I wanted to scream at William Ellison for not seeing: not seeing what Terry was doing, not seeing the beauty in his own son, not seeing anything. I wrapped my blanket tighter, and nodded, trying to look encouraging.
Jim finished his coffee in one long gulp. "Terry had some...tendencies Dad never dreamed of. He taught me his favorite game pretty early on. If I let him do what he wanted, without acting like a baby, I got an ice cream cone. After a while, when I knew Terry was coming, I'd ask Dad for the ice cream money beforehand. Terry told him he made me work for the ice cream; Dad must've figured I was washing Terry's car, or something."
If he had been choked up or shaking, it would have been easier for me: that, I know how to deal with. I can comfort someone who's upset. It was the matter-of-factness of his tone that broke me. I felt like I was swallowing around an enormous rock that had lodged itself in my throat. "Did he rape you?" The words sounded inept and strange.
Jim shrugged. "I guess so," he said.
"You guess so?!" I knew I sounded angry, and Jim winced, and I hated myself for it. "No, no, it's not you, I'm angry at him," I said, and it wasn't enough, but he seemed to understand.
"He said not to tell anyone, and I didn't," he said. "I - somehow I forgot about it." He rubbed his fingers over his eyes. He looked tired, and hollow, and confused.
Made yourself forget is more like it, I thought, but I didn't say it.
"I didn't remember it until you." He must have seen the look of horror on my face, the terrible feeling that I was somehow connected with this, this monster, because he hastily said, "You don't remind me of him, that's not it. I mean, I was never interested in a man until you. And I guess wherever I had this memory hidden opened up when I let myself believe that you might want me."
There was a pause as I tried to digest all of this. I'd said I wanted to hear, and I did; but some part of me wasn't ready for it. Wasn't ready to know that he'd been hurt.
"He went to college. I don't know what happened to him."
"I'm not interested in what happened to him," I said. "I'm interested in -"
In what happened to you. The words echoed, unspoken. As if the two were parallel. What happened to Terry? He went to college, had a life, whatever. What happened to Jim? He was assaulted by someone he trusted, it changed his whole life, whatever.
I tried again. "I care about you," I said. I reached out tentatively, touched his arm, he looked up at me, his face unreadable.
"You're the first person I've told," he said, which somehow I already knew. And then he said the words right out of those old high school fantasies: "I don't want to remember it. I want you to be my first time. I want my first time to erase that. I want you to heal me."
I've been hating myself for ever having those fantasies.
The whole rest of the evening, as we've been curled up together - no thoughts of sex, I think we're backing off for a little while, but I wanted to hold him, and he seems to want to be held - I've been kicking myself over and over. Like somehow those inchoate fantasies of comfort created this situation: like wanting the chance to heal someone made Jim get hurt. Like God is sitting up there somewhere, rubbing His hands together, saying, "OK, Blair, you wanted a wounded bird to fix, here's your wounded bird."
But I didn't realize how much it would hurt to know about Jim's pain. I didn't realize. And I can't imagine how much it's hurt him, if this is how much it hurts me. And I wish I'd never wanted anything at all.
The End