Can't Think Straight:. Kiri Blakeley
issue. Magazines blared with cover lines like, “The Sexless Marriage,” and there was even a popular term to describe it: Double Income, No Sex, or DINS.
There was a din all right—it was so loud, it had rendered me stone deaf.
But the cold hard truth was that there hadn’t been much in the way of warning flags. A lackluster sex life here, a beard there, none of it really added up to gay, let alone years of pervasive and masterfully covered up deceit. This was a man who was so honest he would call himself on his own slightly illegal shot in a game of pool, even if no one but him had noticed. And yet he had done this.
I wasn’t sure how I was to wade forward in the world with this newfound knowledge: the crippling awareness that you could never know anyone. That, in fact, the person you know best could be the person you know least.
Day 3 On Friday, I prepare myself for an evening out—my first since the news. I’m careful to dress to the nines: miniskirt and high heels. I tousle my hair and put on lots of makeup.
I’d always felt that I was an integrated personality, but I suddenly get a crash course in compartmentalization. I split myself right down the middle and push the devastated portion of myself, that portion that would prefer to become nonfunctional, into a bottom drawer. Probably similar to what Aaron had done all these years (only he used a closet). I should have known eventually this discarded side would bang on that drawer, and push and kick until she burst out, and then she’d wreak havoc for having been shut up. But you do what you have to do to get through the next few hours.
I meet up with Julie and her friend at a Brooklyn bar called Loki. As much as I don’t want to be the girl who regales everyone with the sitcom-y plot of her boyfriend who turned gay, I can’t seem to help spilling it. First of all, it’s a good yarn. The writer in me has to appreciate it. Second, it’s all I can think about, let alone talk about. Half the time, people respond by telling me about their former boyfriend/girlfriend who also came out. If homosexuals are ten percent of the population, my friends and I seemed to have dated all of them.
“Hello,” Julie says, grinning dazedly, like she’s just been bonked on the noggin with a wrench. I turn to see a dangerously attractive dark-haired man with a slightly gap-toothed smile next to us on the sidewalk, where we had stepped out for a smoke.
“I locked my keys in my apartment and I’m just wandering around!” he exclaims. His voice had an orgasmic lilt. He could have been a BBC announcer.
“Your voice is beautiful,” I purr. Okay, I’m tipsy. “Are you British?”
“Indian.”
He doesn’t look Indian. Italian maybe. He has deep-set ice blue eyes, like a Siberian Husky.
Julie and I chat with him about the missing keys and then go back inside. He sits somewhere else, but out of the corner of my eye, I catch him staring at us. Audacious. I ignore him and continue telling Julie’s friend my gay fiancé story.
Julie’s boyfriend, Jake, arrives and we decide to head for another bar. Julie catches up with the Indian guy, whose name turns out to be Rahil, and invites him to come with us. I’m a little miffed. A single guy hanging around with us might attach himself to me. And I want to be free—for the first time in ten years—utterly free. Sure enough, when I break off from the group to go to a deli and buy mints, Rahil trails me. Truth be told, I wasn’t even sure if, at this stage of the game, hot men would still follow me around. Apparently, they would. Or this one would. Maybe he could smell my newly devastated, nihilistic state; maybe I was shedding single, horny molecules.
He keeps up a barely intelligible stream of patter. He’s in finance but wants to quit his job to become a full-time “djembe” drummer. Not even a rock-and-roll drummer—some kind of Caribbean music drummer. It doesn’t sound like the kind of thing that will offer steady employment.
Back in the bar, Rahil and Jake get into a fight about India. I can make out only snippets of it.
“There’s one billion poor people in India and what are you going to do about it?” Jake demands.
The evening moves on and everyone gets drunker. I usually limit myself to two or three drinks, but tonight I’m going to get blitzed. Numb myself but good.
For March, it’s unseasonably warm. We sit outside at some tables. I tell Rahil that I’d just broken up with my boyfriend of a decade because he is gay and had been hooking up with men behind my back for years. Aaron had said “two years,” but I figured that was like a woman revealing the amount of men she’d slept with—you could safely double it.
“My friend in India keeps telling me she thinks I’m gay,” Rahil responds, cheerily. “I looked around the room and tried to find a man I was attracted to, but I couldn’t!”
This seems like the kind of red flag I wish Aaron had waved.
“But you’re straight?”
“Straight, straight, straight!”
“Prove it.”
“How?”
“Whom do you fantasize about?”
“Angelina Jolie?”
“That’s who my boyfriend always used to say.”
“Cameron Diaz!” he backtracks. “Cameron Diaz!”
Jake gets jealous that Julie is talking to some guy for too long and they get into a fight. Rahil and I decide to give them some space. We go upstairs, order drinks, and raucously sing to the U2 song blaring from the jukebox. I’m not a U2 fan, but singing along somehow becomes a lifeline to the living. Just to be able to stand and open my mouth and not have it spew out something about Aaron. I feel like someone should congratulate me.
At some point during all of this, I notice that Rahil is looking better and better. Alcohol and sexual deprivation will do that to you.
Rahil and I go out for a smoke. As he speaks, I feel my eyes zeroing in on his lips. For how many years had I gotten the drunken urge to kiss a strange man in a bar and not done it? How many nights had I gone home feeling guilty and unworthy because I’d even contemplated letting another man’s lips near mine?
As I watch Rahil’s lips, I realize there is nothing stopping me for the first time in ten years. Nothing. Invisible steel bars had been raised. So I lean in and kiss him.
I don’t know what his reaction is, because I’m too drunk to see it. But he doesn’t pull away. He puts his tongue in my mouth. I’m pleased he doesn’t try to take out my tonsils, drool on my lips or do any of those other nasty things I remembered happening when I was last single, back in my early twenties. I’d always thought Aaron was the best kisser I’d ever had. But Rahil’s technique is more formed. His tongue has a plan. It doesn’t just come in and feel around in the dark.
Nevertheless, I’m too drunk or too emotionally sandblasted, or both, to enjoy it. Well, I enjoy it the way you might when you throw a stick for a dog: a pleasant enough way to pass the time, but not exactly a turnon.
I look back through the bar window. Julie is giving me the thumbs-up sign with her eyes.
Rahil wants to give me his number, but I refuse to take it or give him mine.
“I’m sorry. I’m in no place for that right now.”
“That’s fine, I totally understand,” he trills, and heads off into the darkness.
The next day, I force a little polar ice cap over my heart and haul Aaron’s most cherished possessions—his guitar and some music equipment, even our shared computer, since it contains his Pro Tools software and original song compositions—over to Julie’s. I tell the super to change the locks, and then I inform Aaron he will get his things back after he pays a lawyer to transfer his shares in the co-op