Can't Think Straight:. Kiri Blakeley
Paris Hilton or Gisele Bundchen. Not exactly the stuff of Pulitzer or Emmy. But it was fun. My family and friends enjoyed seeing me on the tube; liked hearing about celebrities I met or interviewed.
But I knew Aaron didn’t have that kind of ego-driven retaliatory nature.
I was more inclined to believe it was our recent decision to end our interminable engagement with a marriage ceremony. Aaron had asked me to marry him about a year into our relationship. The prospect so terrified me that I burst into tears and couldn’t put the ring on for months. Over the years, Aaron had been the one pushing for it; I was the “if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it” hold out. But specter of death—first my paternal grandmother and then my young niece—and the realization that Aaron’s elderly mother and my maternal grandmother (who helped raise me) most likely wouldn’t be far behind, gave us grim impetus.
Plus, it just started to seem silly and impractical. If I got hit by a wayward cab and lay in a coma, he wouldn’t be able to make any kind of decision or arrangement. Once we’d decided, Aaron ran into our local pub hangout, Last Exit, and announced it to his friends, as hyped up and excited as if his soccer team had just scored a goal.
“You know everything about me,” I’d told him. “It doesn’t get any better, and it doesn’t get any worse. I have no surprises.”
“Me neither,” he’d said.
Me neither!
When I asked Aaron why now, he said, “Because I respect you too much to keep doing this to you.”
There was nothing about respecting me enough not to do it in the first place.
My work voice mail contains a message from Sahana, one of my best friends from Columbia Journalism School:
“It’s midnight. I don’t know why I’m calling you at the office, as you must be at home, but probably asleep. I don’t know if it’s the right thing to say, but I love you and am thinking about you, and can’t stop thinking about you…. By the way, this isn’t a gay greeting. I just want to make that clear.”
That gives me a good chuckle. A pained chuckle, like you might make if you’re told a great joke as you lay dying.
The list of people I have to inform seems endless.
“Aaron and I broke up—”
There’s a breath-sucking pause on the other end of the line as the recipient processes this information: the couple who’d survived the longest, the decade-long Aaron’n’kiri phenomenon, has ended. Then I hit ‘em with the kicker: “He’s GAY!” So much better than “We’ve grown apart” or even “He wants to be single.” But that’s not all! Once they get the “What?!” out of their system, then I smack ‘em upside with the kicker to the kicker: “And he’s been cheating on me with men.” That’s when they drop the phone.
Of everyone, my father is the most maddeningly philosophical. “Sexuality is very fluid,” he drones. “My ex-girlfriend lived with a woman after me. And now she lives with a man.” Thanks for the paternal outrage, Dr. Kinsey.
On the opposite end, my grandmother wails and blubbers inconsolably and then declares, with a scary finality, “I’m too old for this world!” As if homosexuality had just been invented in the past decade.
Three of my friends (all writers) proclaim: “Think of all the stuff you have to write about now!” They have fun coming up with book titles: He’s Just Not That Into You…. Because He’s Gay; Till Dick Do Us Part.
Aaron and I fall naturally into an arrangement: he would tell his friends and family; I would tell mine. Aaron was dealing with a more varied array of less-than-ideal responses. His boss: “You’re not going to get all bitchy now, are you?” His mother: “Oh, no. Not another one.”
Only one person betrayed a streak of homophobia, and it was a young relative of Aaron’s known for being conservative in her politics. “All the gays I’ve known have been so promiscuous!” she hissed, after calling me as soon as she’d heard from Aaron’s mother. With Craigslist ads still dancing in my head, I was in no mood to correct her stereotype. Tyler, for example, had been with his partner for 20 years. Instead, I just gratefully gulped down her opprobrium.
Once I knew that he’d informed his lesbian sister, Darlene, I give her a call. I was curious to see if even her gaydar had malfunctioned on this one.
“I had no idea,” she says, “but he wouldn’t have come out during Dad’s lifetime.”
It was six years ago that Aaron’s father had died. He’d had plenty of opportunity since then. But when would’ve been a good time? After 9/11, when both of us, not to mention the entire country, were reeling? Or during my niece’s illness or in the agonizing months after her death? Aaron had been my rock during that time. He’d been right behind me in the hospital room, crying just as hard as I was, as Ana’s hand slowly went cold.
“He says he won’t be putting up rainbow stickers and that he hates gay music,” Darlene says.
I still can’t believe he’s saying anything about being gay at all. At the same time, I imagine running into him a year from now: a pride flag draped around his shoulders, Kelly Clarkson on the iPod.
I tell Darlene how Aaron had been cheating on me with men, a fact he keeps conveniently leaving out of his confessions to his family. I need them to know so I can collect the sympathy and so they might share my disapproval. Maybe it’s also some kind of little revenge. I’m going to tell your family how rotten and sneaky you are, so there!
Everyone wants to know if I’d seen any signs. People are eager to be reassured that something monstrously large can’t come along and knock them into another dimension without warning. They want to believe that tragedies can be avoided with the proper precaution, diet, and exercise. It’s like when you hear about a random murder. Well, what was he doing on that street at that time? Doesn’t he know any better? Unfortunately, there hadn’t been a pile of Playgirl magazines and Liberace CDs stashed under the bed to clue me in.
I scour the depths of my memory and can really only come up with a few things.
Exhibit number one: the beard.
The hairy intruder had appeared about a year ago. It went through all manner of incarnations: bushy, trim, with mustache, without, with sideburns, without. “You have such an adorable face,” I’d tell Aaron. “Stop hiding it.”
“I’m experimenting with facial hair,” he’d say.
Experimenting with more than that, as it turned out. He’d been sending photos of his woolly mascot to other beard aficionados. Something to do with the subgroup of homosexual men known as “bears,” I supposed.
But facial hair doesn’t always equal gay, right? I cut myself some slack on that one.
There also was his general withholding nature. Aaron, for all his apparent emotional availability, had always been rather reticent and closed off. He had no problem telling me he loved me or saying he wanted to get married, but I could hardly ever figure out what else he was thinking. For all the lip service that Aaron and I, like most modern urban couples, paid to “communication,” I often had the uneasy feeling that something was going unsaid. But I never imagined that something would be, “Honey, I like to suck cock.”
This brought me to the last and most glaring “clue”: our sex life.
If I were honest with myself, I remember our first argument about it happened about four years into the relationship, just after we’d moved from Manhattan to Brooklyn. After two weeks without a peep of erotic interest from Aaron, I’d finally raged at him in the middle of the street as we were antique shopping (he liked antiques—hmm). But over the years, he’d always pushed the issue back onto me: “Well, you