my first life

Many moons ago, when I was a wild, unhappy twenty-four-year-old graduate student with a job at Stanley Kaplan’s SAT prep headquarters in Manhattan, some friends dragged me to Mardi Gras in New Orleans, which they envisioned as offering some sort of rest cure for my manic-depressive tendencies and my drug problem. There I met Tony Heubach, an irresistible, funny, elegant figure skater turned bartender whom I fell in love with at first sight, irrevocably and utterly. It made not the slightest dent in my enthusiasm that he was gay. It was certainly no secret, as he worked in a gay bar where most of the regulars were his ex-boyfriends, and that’s where I hung out with him as the original rockslide of infatuation became a full-on avalanche.

Here is the two-minute version of why I married a gay man, in hopes that it may shed a few beams of light on the current narrative.

While this was not the first time I’d been crazy in love—I was a pony-league love-a-holic by the time I got out of fifth grade—before I met Tony, no one had ever matched me card for card. When our intensities collided, our trains jumped the rails. I don’t think it meant that he wasn’t gay, or even that he was truly bisexual. As far as I know, aside from a few unhappy experiences in his teens, he had never slept with another woman, or wanted to. I was an exception to his rule, which made the whole thing even more white-hot. Having a beautiful gay man change his life to be with me was like getting the Nobel Prize for lovability, and despite the sad outcome of this situation, I don’t think I was ever quite as unhappy again.

There were many advantages to having a gay husband. He was fantastically neat and clean, and trained me in his orderly ways. He could cook, bartend, devise and execute wall treatments, garden, iron, arrange flowers, set a perfect table, and professionally cut and color my hair. He bought my clothes, he cleaned our pool, and he would eventually do the lion’s share of child care. Still, the two of us settling down together was only a little like settling down, which was just right for two such unruly characters.

The year we got married, the first news reports about a mysterious virus affecting gay men, Haitians, and hemophiliacs were coming out. By then, Tony had become a hairdresser, I was writing computer manuals, and we had moved from our first apartment in the French Quarter to a house in Austin, Texas. Tony had dropped the last name of his homophobic father and become Tony Winik. I was sitting with the new Mr. Winik on the ledge of our pink-painted carport one afternoon when he said Uh-oh, and read me the article from the New York Times.

When we got tested, we learned that I was negative and he was positive. That was surprising, since our unsafe contact had included IV drug abuse. In any case, I wasn’t that worried. I thought of AIDS as some silly little thing like Legionnaires’ disease, which would be cured in a few weeks. I was ready to plump up the nest and start having kids. I had quit all my vices and read up on conception, and this bump in the road wasn’t going to stop me. A child could only be infected with the virus by the mother through the blood in the placenta, so as long as I remained negative, our offspring would be in the clear.

I got pregnant easily, remained HIV-negative, had a fat and happy pregnancy. But the next spring, with the nursery painted, onesies stacked, car seat by the door, our baby was stillborn. No reason for this was ever found. Though I was counseled to wait at least six months, Hayes was born less than a year after his brother died, and Vince was not far behind.

My impatience served me well for once, because our blissful days as new parents were short. By 1992, many of Tony’s old friends from the French Quarter and some of our new crowd in Austin had fallen ill and died. Tony had been cutting hair at home and taking care of the boys while I continued working at the software company, but by then he was having physical symptoms as well as emotional ones. The latter involved visits to the Birmingham, Alabama, love shack of a louche architect named Tomé. Soon I had a big crush on someone else, too.

The last part of our eight-year marriage was a train wreck. It’s little surprise that our sex life never really worked out; our second-biggest problem was that while I was a bubbling geyser of self-analytic conversation, Tony was inarticulate when it came to his feelings. Verbal attempts to solve our conflicts consisted of my stating my point of view, then my stating his point of view, then my offering the rebuttals for each side, while he rolled a joint, Windexed the French doors, and read the paper. And that was in the good times.

After about a year and a half of precipitous physical decline, Tony checked out of the Austin AIDS hospice on August 20, 1994, and came home to take a big handful of sleeping pills followed by a shot of Morton’s No-Salt in the vein. I held a funeral on Mount Bonnell with a bunch of preschoolers releasing helium balloons.

I will spend the rest of my life missing him.

A couple years after Tony died, I went to Chicago to be on The Oprah Winfrey Show to promote the memoir I’d written about our marriage, the one I showed Humberto. At that time Oprah had not yet started her book club and was not known as a lover of literature, so I had my doubts about this outing from the start. When I heard her intro to the program (“TODAY WE MEET WOMEN WHO HAVE HAD THE EXPERIENCE EVERYONE DREADS—WHEN THEY HEAR THEIR HUSBANDS SAY THESE THREE WORDS: ‘HONEY, I’M GAY!’ ”), whatever hope I had left—briefly fanned by the Best-Selling Author Barbie look created for me in hair and makeup—evaporated.

Most of the women on the show had discovered late in life that their husbands, clergymen and lawnmower salesmen, were gay. Not me. As Oprah described my book, which she had clearly never read, it was “the strange life of a woman who actually wanted to marry a gay man” by the “NPR commentator Marion Nik.” It was getting worse by the minute. She didn’t even know my name.

“Why did you want to marry a gay man?” she asked with concern. “Did you ever have sex? Did your husband need to be really drunk to make love to you?”

“What?!?” I stammered.

She repeated the question, and I briefly thought of hitting her. Our one moment of connection occurred off-camera, when she took a close look at my periwinkle silk shantung Isaac Mizrahi blouse. Her face lit up and she asked me several enthusiastic questions about it.

By then I was dating an Irish food writer with a black leather jacket, a brushy mustache, and sea-green eyes. I’d fallen for him without much of break once Tony and I were through. He was the opposite of Tony in almost every way, and weighed twice as much as him. When the big man and I split up after five years, I fell right into Crispin’s tattooed arms. Perhaps I was so unhappy in the pre-Tony years that I was afraid to be alone again. Certainly this was my state of mind when I arrived in Baltimore.