I liked Mark a lot, though you know that's not his real name, and because of a confidence I still feel bound to keep all these years later, I will say he was a friend of friends I'd gone to San Francisco to visit when I was in my late twenties. He'd offered us his home as a place to spend the night as we traveled south to a town where another friend had rented a house for the summer. We arrived just before dinner, and I enjoyed watching the easy familiarity with which Mark and my friends interacted as they prepared the meal, which lasted long enough that some of us were still eating while others went upstairs to go to sleep. Those of us who were still awake kept talking and eating and drifting off until Mark and I were the only ones in the room. He asked me where I'd met our sleeping friends, how long it had been since I'd seen them last, and then we talked about art and music and writing, and he told me how he'd spent a year not too long ago traveling across the country. Then he asked me if I had a girlfriend. When I told him no, he fell silent, turning his face to the wall.
"You know," he said, "I'm gay."
"So?" It was the first response that came to my mind.
Mark let out a laugh that I thought would wake everybody in the house. "Tell me, do you know what it means to desire men?"
It was both a question and a challenge, and a shiver of fear and anticipation ran through me as I wondered where this conversation was going to take us. The lines I'd written years before while sitting in the library trying to make sense of the vision I'd had of myself beating Beth senseless—a bearded man, shirtless, in faded jeans…take me in his mouth—came to me suddenly. "Yes," I answered.
"And yet you have been with women." Again, there was a challenge in his voice.
"Yes."
"So you are bisexual." It was a statement, not a question, and the matter-of-factness in Mark's voice took me a little by surprise.
"I guess so." I stressed the last two syllables to make it sound like this was something that didn't need to be said, but the reality was that during the previous few years my sexuality had become a source of real anxiety for me. I'd found myself fantasizing more and more about having sex with men, sometimes even with men I knew. It wasn't something I felt compelled to act on, and I will not say I was not a little bit afraid of it—and so I had not really tried to figure it out in any conscious and explicit way—but I had come to accept it as part of what went on inside me sexually. So what was really true was that sometimes I felt straight and sometimes I felt gay and sometimes I felt bi, but I wasn't ready to share that uncertainty with Mark, especially as it became clear to me that he wanted to seduce me.
"Have you been with a man?" He sounded like he expected me to say no.
"Not yet."
"Why not?"
"It just hasn't happened yet."
"Then how can you say you're bi?"
"I know what I feel." At this point I was as much challenging Mark as he was challenging me.
"And that's enough?"
"For now, yes, that's enough."
"I envy you," he said. "To be so sure of what you feel, of who and what you want…you have no idea how lucky you are!" Then, the desperation in his voice painful to hear, he asked me, "Can you imagine what it means to look into the eyes of your lover as he takes your orgasm in his mouth and not merely see the face of your mother staring back at you, but to think, to feel, to know, it is her body into which your own body is pouring? How do you tell this man that you love him? How do you know it is him you really love?"
In the silence that descended between us, Mark smiled a small, bitter smile and lit a cigarette. While I stared into my wine glass trying to think of something to say, he got up, walked over to the stereo, put on a tape of Simon and Garfunkel's Greatest Hits, and, with his eyebrows raised in a question his grin said he thought he already knew the answer to, he sat in my lap and put his head on my shoulder. I held him silently, with my eyes closed, until the shock of his nibbling gently at the arch of my ear pulled air into me in a gasp that he used to turn my face to his and put his lips against mine. He was tender and tentative, and I lost myself in the taste and the smell and the touch of him. The next moment, however, trying to sweep me up in the force of his desire, he wedged my lips open and filled my mouth with his tongue. Mark was a small man, so it was easy to hold him back while I tried to explain that he was moving too quickly and trying too hard.
"Fine," he said and stood up. "Your bed is upstairs. Sleep well." Before I could say another word, he turned, walked quickly through the door of his room and closed it behind him. I sat there for a few minutes more, decided against going after him, and went upstairs to sleep.
A gentle nudge woke me. When I stirred, Mark rolled himself naked into my arms. His erection was warm and insistent against my leg, and without being fully aware yet of where I was or what was happening, I reached down and wrapped my hand around his penis. I thrilled at how alive this part of him felt, at the contrast between the hardness of the organ and the smooth softness of the skin that covered it. I reached further down and cupped his testicles in my palm. They too were soft, but Mark took my hand in his own and said, "This is wrong. Let me love you. Isn't that what you want?"
And suddenly I was very far away. Something in the intonation of his voice, the stress he put on the words "me" and "you"—I probably will never know exactly what it was—but I was in that moment once again thirteen years old, sitting on the bed in the old man's apartment with my pants down around my ankles, and the lust in his eyes, and the calculated honesty of the concern in his voice, But don't you want me to love you?. And I knew Mark was not trying to abuse me, but I could not stop the rage that was rising in my chest. I took his head forcefully between my hands, looked him steadily in the eye, and said as calmly as I could, "I don't want to do this now."
Fortunately, for I think I would have hurt him otherwise, Mark saw that I was serious and went, with apologies, back to his room. The next morning when I woke up, he and my friends were already finishing breakfast. After they left the kitchen, Mark and I had a few moments alone, and I tried to explain why I pushed him away, but he wouldn't let me. "Don't worry," he said, "It's over. We won't see each other again, so there's no need for platitudes or excuses." I went upstairs and packed my things, waved good-bye from the back of the car we'd rented to take us on the next leg of our journey, and he was right: We've neither seen nor spoken to each other since.
I spent most of that afternoon in the garden of my friend Elizabeth's rented house, sitting in the shiver of my own self-disgust, wishing I were a snake so I could shed the skin Mark had touched. I wasn't ashamed of having wanted him or of anything we did or might've done had we gone further, but I was ashamed of having remembered the old man, of the way I'd remembered the old man, and of still being afraid, and of how close I'd come to hurting Mark for something about which he could not possibly have known. The irony, of course, was that Mark—whose orgasm for whatever reason triggered in him the hallucination that it was actually his mother with whom he was making love—was one of the few people who'd have understood, really understood, what happened in my head to make me push him away—and then I realized even more than I'd been ready to want Mark physically the night before, I'd wanted to tell him the morning after. Not because telling him would have made it possible for us to make love, but because it might have earned me his companionship and understanding, and yet I also have to admit that part of why I wanted his companionship and understanding was because when I held his penis and cupped his testicles, I knew—or at least I imagined that I knew—exactly what my touch felt like to him. The landscape of his body seemed as familiar to me in that moment as the landscape of my own, and the power of knowing this felt to me like the power not to be lost anymore, as I had all too often been lost trying to love in the landscape of the bodies of women.
To Section Four
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