Mike Albo
While driving me to the train after visiting last Christmas, my Republican but understanding father told me next time I could bring someone home with me. All I could say in response was a cheery “Okay!” while I looked at the Northern Virginian vista of plazas and neo-Colonial homes.
I can’t imagine bringing someone home for Christmas. You and your gay partner (what everyone would call him before you two arrived) would have to be groomed like grooms, dressed in carefully fitted American Apparel clothes that didn’t look too matchy-matchy, conversing with semi-masculine voices about your career and cars.
If I could jam my byzantine, vague relationships with men into a tightly wrapped gift, I would. My affairs don’t fit easily into one seat at the dining room table.
“Hi Mom, hi Dad! This is F. I just met him on Saturday! We made out at the Slide, and then my friend Bill said that he had had sex with him last week and that it was great!”
“Hi Mom, hi Dad! This is R. We hook up occasionally, but then he always ends up talking about his stupid boyfriend in Berlin so I am not allowed to feel anything significant for him!”
“Hi Mom, hi Dad! This is G and S. They are a couple who kind of have sex with me but also have sex with other guys, too!”
When I was thirty, I fell in love with this guy who I had barely had sex with who had an “open relationship” with his boyfriend. Let’s call him G. (I would try to make up a full fictional name for him, but right now I can’t think of one that doesn’t have pre-attached meaning to it. So let’s just stick with initials.) He was blond and lunky and had a face on the angelic side of looks. His boyfriend, S, was a sexy, acrobatic, freckly dancer who was often out of town traveling with a dance company. Their apartment was decorated in perfectly shabby chic furniture and items they brought back from their trips to Zimbabwe, Thailand, and Guatemala: headdresses, conch shells, worn-in wooden beads, and chandeliers with oyster interiors. They would walk around their apartment shirtless, hosting parties, and doing tons of drugs that never seemed to affect their toned bodies. They had a dreamy array of friends from their travels and S’s dance company tours: A British girl who I found out later was a Lady. A brooding, gorgeous French actor with a promising career. Two angularly handsome, intelligent brothers from Brittany, who insisted, with genuine, un-American sincerity, that I come visit them.
It was 2000, and G lived a rambling, fabulously worldly lifestyle that matched that spotlessly positive year. He seemed to have money from somewhere, and would spend a lot of time on Orbitz or CheapTickets.com finding amazing deals to Mexico, Costa Rica, Los Angeles. We began to take trips together. He would call me up, and in a week I would be on another plane with him and S, to another beach or city or hotel, a Lover Without Borders. Foolishly openhearted, I suppose I was in love with S, too. He seemed welcoming and happy to have me around, and we kissed when we were drunk.
I don’t think I really set out to sleep with them, but slowly, over the year, I did, between them—sort of sexually but sort of not, like I was a house cat. I was caressed; they laughed at my jokes and fed me. When S was gone, G gave me more attention, and we would make out. But it was kept above the belt, so it seemed “okay.”
I know how completely unhealthy it sounds, but remember, it was 2000, before the paradigm shift, and it seemed right at the time. I think I had a job then, but I just remember buying CDs with G, chatting with him constantly on my new Nokia cell phone, and charging sashimi deluxe dinners for us on my MasterCard, calmly trusting that somehow in the blue, confident glow of our boom economy, all would be easily paid off by day-trading for a couple of hours. I was like an Enron executive of desire, bloated with confidence.
But also like a white-collar criminal; in the back of my mind I knew this idyllic arrangement was doomed. I spent the year with them, in various hotel rooms from Chicago to Zihuatanejo, accruing debt, believing the hype, waiting for a significant moment, I guess, when G would look at me, next to a lakeside landscape or other beautiful, expensively lit location, and tell me, finally, how strongly he felt. Everything would fall in place, and either G would break up with S and devote himself to me, or, even better, the three of us would get married and live a fantastic, slightly Euro life that bent conventions.
G’s self-made life made me question the whole “This is my boyfriend!” schematic that kept me feeling inadequately single every Christmas. He was thrilling and made me feel expansive, like the smell of airports. He was an alluring, beckoning, blue-eyed escape.
One night, in early December, G and I were drinking dollar beers ironically at the Dugout, an old West Village gay bar. G also had a little baggie of coke. (Lord knows how I did that drug back then. The next day I would always wake up sick, looking rapidly aged and part lizard, like I was in special-effects makeup.)
G grabbed me by the waist. “I bought you a ticket to Paris for Christmas.” We would fly there, spend the night, and then S would join us, coming from Geneva, where he was rehearsing a dance performance. The three of us would travel to Brittany and spend Christmas Eve with the two angularly handsome, intelligent Breton brothers and their parents at their converted farmhouse on the outskirts of Rennes.
I made one feeble gesture of hesitation. “I don’t know. My parents would be so disappointed.”
Hopped up, G hugged me and bit me on the neck. “Screw your parents.” he said. “Let me be your daddy.” He followed it up by looking at me with blue eyes that lit up like gas jets. I bent and bent my Prevacid cardboard beer coaster into four fibrous tatters.
Listen, reader, I know I shouldn’t have gone. Trust me: years have passed; I have shoveled myself out of debt and acknowledged my faults. In our country it’s impossible to do anything rash and passionate without immediately being confronted by all the self-killing therapist-speak floating in the air like soft Muzak: I keep choosing men I can’t have. I avoid serious, fortifying relationships in favor of “destructive” ones. I am insecure or narcissistic or obsessive-compulsive or whatever else. I know, I know, I know.
Before you roll your eyes and think I am just a silly, ranting queer, let me ask you: Would YOU have turned down a ticket to Paris for Christmas with a totally hot guy? Ask of yourself, my reader, and then, ye be the judge of me.
I was on Flight 929 to Paris, seat 28F, dead center of the airplane. G was to my left. He gave me a Valium and bought us three small bottles of Cabernet. He gazed at the flight attendant, and she gave us an extra bottle. There was such promise in everything around me—in the twinkling seat belt lights and soft, square blankets and rhombus-shaped chicken breasts. An old man sat to my right reading a book entitled In Quest of Nirvana—a wink from the universe of what was to come.
We got off the plane, and G knew exactly where to direct our taxi. There was a fresh wind blowing, the mild temperature of a floral refrigerator. G had reserved a hotel room in Montmartre, where buildings sprout out of steep streets and look crooked. We walked past shops, with cheeses and fruits arranged in the window like Gourmet magazine covers. Everyone passing by wore their scarves and peacoats with effortless style. Schoolchildren in cute uniforms ran by giggling. I had walked onto the set of my own private Moulin Rouge.
Our hotel room was orange and gold. Across the way, a stone church charmingly clanged its bell on the hour. There were two twin beds. G slid them together to make one, and I felt a Frenchy breeze inside of me. We went to a perfect little restaurant nearby with a rusty spiral staircase up to an airy room where we ate next to an aviary of chirping birds. The staircase was a little hard to negotiate on Valium and red wine, but Paris was so well art-directed, I felt like I didn’t need to have much balance. We studied a face-lifted woman sitting next to us as she constantly adjusted her Hermès scarf, and it instantly became another marvelous private joke between us. “You are my favorite person to travel with,” G said. Everything was pointing so passionately toward a lovely climax that I felt all I needed to do was be classy and wait for that perfect moment, when G would make some absolute statement.
After dinner we walked through Pigalle and ended up at a dark little bar called Flipflop, near our hotel. We met the friendly owner, Thierry. It was poetry night, and we listened to drunks ranting spoken word in French. G put his arm around me and ordered me three Labats in a row. I drank them, and Paris turned into a nostalgic Impressionist poster. I was enjoying the colorful smears when I saw G talking to Thierry. “He has hash,” G told me, and we walked outside.
We were back at the hotel room, with Thierry. There was a short talk about the Future of Art when the Frenchman suddenly dove on G and kissed him. G kissed him back. I watched them chew on each other’s mouths. I sat there, drunk, on the edge of the bed and tried to find the right time to join in, like I was jumping into a double-Dutch match. But Thierry kept getting in the way. I pulled away, closed my eyes, and felt the Spins coming on. I ran to the bathroom to throw up the Labat and rhombus chicken breast and clams and white sauce. I heard their wet smackings while I curled up on the floor tile. Why hadn’t G kissed me yet? Did he just want hash? It was the night before Christmas Eve.
S arrived the next afternoon. He walked into the hotel room and looked at the beds pushed together, and I saw his face slightly fold inward. “I’m feeling a little sick, so I’m going to get another room,” he said. There was an unwritten agreement with G that I would not mention the Thierry experience, but I wanted to tell S, because he must have sensed the sexuality in the room. I felt like I was being blamed for being sluttier than I was, when, for once, I wasn’t. That night, G slept with his back to me, like we were septuagenarians.
The next morning, Christmas Eve day, he woke up and walked out without saying a word. I went down to the tabac across the street and sat there at the brass-topped bar drinking cappuccinos and eating almond pastries (the only thing I knew how to order) and trying to figure out why G was being cold to me. When I returned, the two of them were sitting on the bed, detectably cooling from a heated conversation, smoking the hash. They gave some to me, and we took a taxi to the train.
The wind evolved from delightfully bracing into icy, sudden gusts that made you wince. While we waited for the train, hail came. Thousands of mothballs bounced in front of flower shops and newsstands. The clouds outside were brownish black for most of the trip, and by the time we arrived in Rennes the sky had unnoticeably turned into night. In my hash high, I had no idea where I was, except that the rain was hitting the windows as if it were trying to get to me. We walked into an echoey station and were greeted by the Breton brothers and their father, a handsome Sean Connery look-alike in a heather-gray sweater and intelligent reading glasses. He guided us in the darkness to a sleek silver auto. The rain, whipped up in the wind, pelted my face painfully. I leaned down to put my bags in the trunk and slammed my forehead on the sleek, thin, expensive edge of the gleaming sports car.
In the car, I casually touched my forehead. I felt flaps of skin, and a trickle of blood dripped between my eyes. The cut was gushing, but no one seemed that concerned. I didn’t dare suggest their taking me to the emergency room; I’d be perceived as an American hypochondriac. I didn’t want to be any more of a nuisance than I suddenly felt I was being on this trip. The father gave me a roll of pink toilet paper. I tried to be cheery and comedic while I held a wad of tissue against my gash.
The car took us out, farther and farther into the flat countryside that appeared as an expanse of tar. The brothers pointed out the shadowy facades of five hundred-year-old churches. We turned onto a bumpy pathway between high mounds of grass. We pulled up in front of a large brown house that seemed warm inside. The mother greeted us sweetly, scooted me inside, and bandaged me up, pinching my wound closed and taping it with gauze. Then we sat down to eat a beautiful feast—oysters, salmon loaf, layered pig, apples from their garden, foie gras, clementines, lots of red wine. The act of eating kicked in the hash again, and I talked energetically and busied my mind listening to the history of Brittany while I studied G and S closely from the other side of the table. They were shoulder to shoulder. S was whispering angrily. He cut the air with his hand and stood up briskly. He said he was sick and needed to sleep. G looked like a reprimanded dog. After a proper amount of time, he followed him upstairs.
I stayed up and talked with the Breton brothers, but I was jealous and felt like crying. Funny how a mind can do that: divide you into a bubbly social being with the ability to ask questions and say, “I know!” while you seethe inside. I went to the bathroom and looked in the mirror. The gauze on my head was taped into a cross. It was Christmas Eve. I had a bloody cross on my forehead on Christmas Eve.
In the morning, I woke up in a warm bed in the upstairs loft. I had passed out from the food and wine and felt like a stuffed duck. G and S were on the floor beside me. G’s arm was around S, and they were sleeping off the hash, Valium, and alcohol, transforming it all into their consistent good looks as if they were vampires. God, I had to get away from them. I walked down the stairs. I needed one moment to be alone. The sweet mother was awake. She took off my bandage and said that my gash was fine and healing. She gave me some coffee and patted my forehead. “Go outside,” she said to me, and pushed me out the door. Outside were bumpy green pastures and a canal. The sky was cloudless. The Bretons’ garden was stippled with perennials. Next to the doorway was an old blue wheelbarrow, with three kittens tumbling over one another. I walked down a brick pathway walled in by cypress trees, to a view of a pasture on the other side of rusty barbed-wire fence.
Back in Virginia, my family was having another thoughtlessly pleasurable Christmas Day. My niece and nephew, brainwashed from Disney specials and Nickelodeon shows, their little developing consumer fangs exposed, were tearing through the wrapping paper of gift after gift, just as the tactless Americans before them had done, including me. The room was filling with the smell of fresh, fuming Fisher-Price plastic. My mom was getting a lovely sweater or pair of earrings and growing a little tearful, and my dad was throwing presents to my brothers from across the room—“Hurry up and open ’em!” he always says—having a wonderful time, which, I realized just then, has been one of my favorite things to see.
G came up behind me. “Where are the cows?” he said.
“I don’t know.”
“Watch out. The fence is electric,” he said.
I wanted to hurl myself on it and fry into a little blackened, ignored pomme frite.
Why the fuck did you bring me here? I wanted to say. But S beat me to the drama. Anything I tried to say now would seem tiring and overly emotional. And anyway, what right did I have? I was just the tossed-around handbag on this trip.
“It would probably get rid of my hangover,” I said instead. G put his arms around me from behind. Here was my moment, but I was too overstuffed and hung over from the sumptuous food, rustic beauty, and from G, who made it all unsatisfying. I wanted to sit in the Dugout and yell at him like I was a brave, runny-nosed drug addict who didn’t give a shit who heard him. We walked back, and I stopped to watch those helplessly mewling kittens so well placed and perfectly cute, like the little conniving creatures planned it that way.
Back in Montmartre, G and S slept in the other room. I spent the night alone. The wind sounded like it was picking up again. It whistled through the narrow Montmartre alcoves. In the dim light before sunrise, the windows of my room blew open with a violent whistle and the long white curtains actually heaved and billowed in a manner seen only in horror movies. The church began its ominous early-morning gongs. I sat up in bed, gasping. When would this goddamn biblical, overly symbolic imagery end? I was so afraid that I would be surrounded by escalating, momentous intensity for the rest of my life— doomed bells, hail and howling wind, trees struck by lightning and bursting into flames, infestations of locusts—all with a bloody, weeping mark of Satan on my head!
G walked in at nine and told me, in the flat tone of an itinerary, to hurry and pack and meet him in the tabac. Our plane was leaving in three hours. He was cold again. S had already gone back to Geneva, so I guess he didn’t need to dangle his seduction over me to keep us both in place. The clouds outside were moving at a threatening angle, as fast as black migrating birds. Warped sheets of metal and shutters from the Parisian windows were strewn all over the streets. I walked with my bags across to the tabac, pelted with wrappers, onion skins, leaves, and all the other attractive debris of Paris.
Later, on the plane back to New York, finally reading the London Independent, I discovered that deadly high winds had hit France that week—the worst in one hundred years. They’d even blown out the windows of Notre Dame. Something like sixty people had been killed.
At Charles de Gaulle, no one seemed to notice the scabbed gash on my forehead. Our plane somehow slipped between the storms and ascended before they shut down the airport. It was an empty flight, and G scooted into a seat a row behind me. He took two more Valium and ignored me. With a puckered Charles Manson mark on my forehead, I watched Julia Roberts being a runaway bride on the seatback screen.
I would love to say that all this has been composed with that calm, practiced distance they teach in writers’ workshops, and that I am happily coupled now with a nice, supportive hedge fund analyst, and that our clean, supermodern apartment will be featured in the March issue of Dwell. Wrong!
I mean, my cut healed; I don’t have a satanic scar. Also, I gained, finally, the self-preserving sense to step away from G and S. Although that wouldn’t happen for another several months. Upon landing in JFK, I still had yet to experience more fully the rotten undersides that come with being an enchanted fool. I’ll spare you the details, but let’s just say the drama widened to B, Q, P, R, and F. Know this, reader: I am no longer the junkie mistletoe hanging between two men, but I still have a gusty love that has no home.
I’ll be going down to Virginia for the holidays, loving it when absolutely nothing extraordinary happens. I will celebrate a Christmas of scrutable, easy-to-process magic, bought in stores or online. My future husband better fucking appreciate it. Or my two husbands.