.
do you say this?” I ask, recovering some degree of decorum.
“Because I’m having fantasies,” he says. Then he starts to cry—huge wracking sobs that let me know this is no strange joke he’s pulling.
The tsunami of panic in my chest subsides just a bit. Fantasies. Okaaay. Aaron, being the most honest and loyal man on earth, not to mention being rather bland in his sexual tastes, perhaps didn’t realize that fantasies—even those about the same sex—were normal. He’d probably jerked off to a picture of Orlando Bloom and was having a meltdown about it.
“About men going down on you?” I gently probe.
“And me“—sob sob—”going down on them.”
Slightly more ominous. Men will fantasize about anything going down on them. But wanting the cock in his own mouth? This just moved from yellow to orange on the sexual-identity alert scale.
“These must be some serious fantasies if you are willing to risk a ten-year relationship by telling me about them,” I say.
Aaron’s silence confirms the worst. Yes, these are serious.
Panicked, I toss out: “Do you think we should … have an open relationship?”
He sort of hiccups and nods.
“Maybe, uhh, I could help you experiment?” I venture.
He looks at me like I’m crazy, then avoids eye contact. “I don’t think that will work.”
Then it crystallizes. Haa! I’m getting it now. He doesn’t want spice, playtime, fantasyland within the safety net of our beautiful, if predictable, relationship. He wants to dump me, get out there, and start sucking dicks full time.
“But babe, you don’t even like your ass touched. How will you function as a queer?”
No answer.
“Well, babe. You know I can’t be your beard.”
“Beard?”
“How will you make it as a fag if you don’t know the lingo?”
I pause.
“Did you get turned on by the sex scenes in Brokeback Mountain?” I ask, as if conducting some sort of psychological evaluation.
A couple of months earlier, at my insistence, we had gone to see the Oscar-winning love story of two homosexual cowboys. During the infamous pup tent scene, when the cowboys first get it on, I’d touched Aaron’s arm and giggled, wanting to make sure he wasn’t too uncomfortable.
Afterward, he’d hardly said anything about the film. Certainly, it hadn’t evoked any “Now that was a movie I could relate to!” type reaction.
He shrugs. “Not really. I don’t find either one attractive.”
Oh, so Jake Gyllenhaal and Heath Ledger weren’t good enough for him. This meant he had a “type.” We’d moved into the red zone.
“Whom are you attracted to?” I ask.
“Um … hairy men.”
Hairy men? Hairy fucking men?! I’d spent years mowing this guy’s back because he hated the hair on it. Spent a decade shaving between my legs because he preferred smooth pussy. And he likes hairy men?!
When the jokes don’t make the problem go away, we decide to get drunk. We open beer and a bottle of wine (thank God we have them on hand) and begin smoking like fiends (something we’d never done inside our apartment).
We talked and talked. Went up and down, back and forth, to and fro. I swung wildly from the most psychotically hopeful scenarios (“We can be roommates and live together and have our little affairs on the side!”) to the most biting and terrifying visions of my future. (“I have to worry about being a thirty-six-year-old single woman in this city! All you have to worry about is AIDS!”)
I didn’t see much bleakness in Aaron’s future. He was cute and hetero looking and acting. Men would be all over him. His friends were not homophobic and would all support him. His family might be shocked, but they too would come around because Aaron was such a sweet, lovable guy (not to mention he had a gay sister who had not been ostracized). Within a year, he’d be living in Chelsea with his hair-stylist boyfriend, wearing muscle shirts and walking his poodle. Meanwhile, I’d be the head case who scares away men due to my tendency to scream Areyougayareyougayareyougay? if they prefer a Seinfeld rerun instead of sex.
You hear that cliché: feeling like you’re in a waking nightmare. And so it was. I sat in a chair across from Aaron with my bare knees pulled up under my chin, frantically wondering, “When will I wake up from this? None of this can be real.”
I have no idea how I survived that night. With Aaron still in the living room, I curled myself into the fetal position on the bed and lay in some kind of catatonic state for the next few hours. I think I got maybe two or three minutes of sleep.
I’m not a dumb woman. There had been no signs. I never caught him checking out the waiter. There was never a drunken confession of a high school blowjob from a beer buddy. There were no requests for strap-ons. He’d never come home raving about his new (hot) friend, Brad, from the gym. (In fact, he was always canceling his gym memberships for lack of use.) I’d met guys who told me they’d recently come out, and I’d thought, “Whom exactly were you fooling?” Aaron was not one of those guys. His voice had a soft deep timbre; his entire demeanor, from his gel-free hair to his loose cords and scruffy shoes, was relaxed and masculine.
Weren’t red flags, pink flags, any kind of fucking flags supposed to precede something like this?
I had accepted that, despite being a Carrie Bradshaw type—thirty-six years old, a writer, and New York City resident—I would never taste Sex and the City adventures. In fact, for the past few years, I was never quite certain when I would next experience real sex. Although Aaron had never gazed upon my naked form and exclaimed, “Not for me, honey!” things had been going downhill in that area for a long time. But we were working on it. We’d been to therapy. We’d had our Saturday night “sex nights.” When was the last time we’d had one?
Anyway, I wasn’t about to toss out the best man I’d ever met and take my chances in the dysfunctional dating capital of the world just to find more sex. You only had to read a few of those Smart Women, Stupid Choices types of books to know that mind-blowing sex with exciting bad boys was a fast track to heartbreak. Besides, what couple still had hot, or even regular, sex after ten years? I didn’t even know whom to ask because no one I knew had stayed together as long as we had.
I thought I’d escaped. I’d picked Aaron, not only because of his appeal to me and our mutual attraction, but because he was so good, reliable, safe. He was nothing like the men in my family. And yet—here it was. I had not escaped.
At some point, I tiptoe out in the dark and find Aaron, where he lies on the couch. I can hear his light snoring. How he can sleep at all is a mystery to me. I kiss his cheek because I think it might be the last time I ever do so.
The second the clock hits 7 A.M., I jump up and call my friend Tyler. I know he wakes up early. Even though we’d never met in person, he’s the only one I can think to call.
We’d met in a screenwriters’ chat room five years ago and conversed (even flirted a bit) every day by message board and email. Yet it was only a few weeks ago that he’d told me he was gay and that his “wife” was actually a man. About his online misrepresentation, Tyler admitted that he’d enjoyed our harmless flirtatious banter and though we were both loyal in the extreme to our long-term partners, before he knew it, he was caught up in a lie he hadn’t quite intended.
He must have some idea what’s going on.
Tyler