Sitting on my bed with her back against the wall, Beth—who's come to visit during my first year of graduate school—tells me that she's at last made her decision: She's going to study fine art. I should be happy for her, but I'm suddenly listening from a place so deep inside myself that the sounds leaving her mouth no longer coalesce into meaningful units. There is a moment of blankness, and then, as if someone else has taken control of my brain, I am forced to watch a vision of myself getting up from the chair where I've been sitting, putting one hand around Beth's throat, holding her against the wall, and with my other hand slapping her face back and forth until she is senseless and bloody. I see myself screaming in her ear, letting her drop to the floor, and kicking her in the stomach as hard as I can. In the vision, my mouth moves but no words come out.
Unaware that I've stopped hearing what she has to say, Beth continues talking, gesturing to emphasize the importance of her words, imploring me with her eyes for I-don't-know-what, and then the violence in my mind begins again. Realizing that my hands have clenched into fists, I excuse myself and move quickly to the bathroom. Locking the door behind me, I take deep breaths and splash cold water on my face. When I'm sure the impulse to lash out has passed, I flush the toilet and go back to the bedroom where, thankfully, Beth notices it's time for me to go to class. I grab my books, kiss her quickly on the cheek, and, knowing that I will need some time alone to sort out what has just happened, tell her I have work to do in the library and therefore won't be back until just before we're supposed to go out for dinner.
The afternoon sun is warm on my face, and so I decide to walk to class instead of taking the bus. Beth's decision to become an artist should make me very happy. Not only does it mean she's choosing to do what she really wants to do, but it also holds out the promise of resolution to a troubling tension within our relationship. More than once she's told me she's afraid I will become more committed to my writing than to her. Now that she has her own art to commit to, I'm hoping she'll begin to see that the two devotions need not be mutually exclusive.
I'm starting to feel a little better, more in control of myself, but then, from out of nowhere, I see again the images of myself doing violence to her, and I know I'll never be able to sit through class. So, instead, I go to the library. My idea, as I settle into one of the chairs on the second floor, is to write out what I'm feeling in a letter to myself, a strategy I've used before when I don't know what's going on inside me. As soon as I put my pen to the page, though, what comes out does not begin Dear Richard. Instead, it is the beginning of a poem:
I want a bearded man, shirtless, in faded jeans,
to come one barefoot night and take me in his mouth.
I don't know where the words come from, but the shock of recognition when I read them is immediate and frightening, and I wonder if I'm trying to tell myself that I'm gay and that the problem I have with Beth is that she should have been Ben. I remember Brian and how we became friends in our senior year of high school, watching a teammate strike out trying too hard to hit the ball over the fence during a gym-class softball game.
"I don't get it," Brian said to no one in particular, shaking his head from side to side as the other boy slammed the bat to the ground, threatened to beat the shit out of the pitcher, and stormed off the field as if he'd failed to make a team he'd dedicated his life to making. "I just don't get it."
"Get what?" I asked.
We'd been standing next to each other through most of the class, but Brian looked at me as if he were seeing me for the first time, "What's the big deal? I mean, it's not like he's going to fail for striking out."
"You're right," I said. "It doesn't make sense."
Brian's face lit up as if he were visiting from another country and had at last found someone who could speak his language. Then his eyes narrowed a little. "Yeah, but at least you can hit the ball," he said, testing me. He was not much of an athlete.
"So I can hit the ball," I returned. "So what?"
And we were friends; and we quickly became best friends. Sadly, though, what I remember most clearly about our friendship is the day it began to end. "You're just different," he told me sitting in my room. "I've never met anyone like you, and they can't accept that."
"I've never met anyone like you before either," I responded, not even bothering to ask him who they were.
"But they're saying we're closer than we should be, that we're not, you know, normal."
"So? When have we ever cared what ‘they' have to say?"
Brian looked so grateful for these words that I thought he was going to cry, and his eyes did start to grow big with a feeling that welled up in him, but then he looked away and almost whispered, "Maybe they're right. Maybe we are closer than we should be."
I tried to convince him that he was wrong, but it didn't work. He started bringing female friends along whenever we went out, and—in my memory anyway—college applications, yearbook committees, and other graduation-related work suddenly kept him so busy he had less and less time to see me. The summer after graduation, while I was working at a sleep-away camp in Massachusetts, we wrote letters, but when I came home, he was gone, off to his freshman year at Cornell University. I probably had his phone number and address, but I don't think I ever used them, and I don't remember receiving either mail or phone calls from him. We did try once to reconnect during the winter break of our freshman year, meeting for a drink at one of the bars we'd hung out at when we were still close. He brought his girlfriend, a dark woman who sat silently in her corner of the booth while Brian and I struggled to find things to say to each other. The conversation is lost to me now, but I can still feel the finality of our good-byes, neither of us even pretending that we'd try to see each other again.
At the end of that academic year, while I waited on line to register for my sophomore classes, I met the woman who'd sat next to me in twelfth-grade English. "Whatever happened to your friend Brian?" she asked while we made small talk to pass the time.
"He's at Columbia," I answered, "but I haven't heard from him in a long while."
"You know," she said, "everyone thought the two of you were gay."
"I know."
"Were you?"
"No."
With cinematic timing my turn to register came next, and I gave her a small, silent wave as I walked to the registrar's window. Back in my room, however, I wondered about my answer. It was the answer I think Brian would have wanted me to give, and I gave it without a second thought. Despite its literal truth, however, or, rather, its truth given that what the woman probably wanted to know was whether Brian and I had ever had sex, the word "no" felt dishonest, as if I were denying the emotional content of our friendship, not characterizing its physical nature.
When I think about Brian now, I often wish to have back that moment when he decided "they" were right and we were wrong, not because I think I could have done anything differently to change his mind, but because envisioning how things might have been different is a gesture of defiance I feel I should have made a long time ago, a way to begin figuring out the answer I ought to have given to the woman from my English class, and of understanding why I responded with a homoerotic poem to the violence I imagined doing to Beth. We ended up not going to dinner that night, for after I wrote those two lines—and those two lines were all I wrote the whole time I was in the library—I felt better, calmer, more at peace with myself, and so I was able to tell her about the vision my imagination had conjured for me. We spent the night trying to understand where in our relationship my anger came from, but our only success—at least from my point of view, since it left me bent over, laughing with hysterical relief—was that I found the courage to scream out what I was really feeling, and they are words I regret even now, "I hate you! I hate you! I hate you!"
Beth, of course, was horrified and deeply, deeply hurt, but instead of breaking up with me, or at least putting some distance between us while I tried to figure out where my rage was coming from, she stayed with me for the rest of the weekend, a decision that can only be described as courageous and loving, and we found a way to feel like we could stay together despite what I had imagined and what I'd said. I was immensely grateful to her for that, though I don't think I ever expressed that gratitude sufficiently enough.
What disturbed me most at the time—aside, of course, from the content of what I imagined—and what continues to haunt me whenever I think about it, is that I didn't even know I was so enraged. There were tensions in my relationship with Beth, as there are in any relationship, but nothing of a magnitude, or at least nothing I experienced as of a magnitude, that corresponded to the violence I imagined myself doing. Even now, more than twenty years later—and in all that time I've had nothing even remotely resembling the experience I've just described—I find myself wondering, sometimes fearfully, at what I don't know about the subterranean workings of my psyche. I am an angry man, and I know that much of my anger is sexual, and if there is anything that being a man is supposed to give you license to do—and I am talking here about deeply held cultural values, not the laws of any given country, or the ethical or moral principles contained in religious or spiritual or other didactic texts—it is to take your sexual anger out on the bodies of others, usually women, and to do so with relative impunity. I have, as you will see, good reason to be angry. What I want is to stop being afraid of my anger, and of myself.
