Pros: 1. Acting. 2. Mel.
Cons:
Almost immediately after arriving in LA, however, the rush of sexual attraction evaporated into the thin air of my wishful thinking. By the end of our first year together, despite my desire to be attracted to him, my latent fear of my real sexuality was simmering and about to boil. I was almost positive I was gay. So I married him. The fact that I got shingles the minute we returned from city hall didn’t deter me from my quest to appear normal, and so my husband and I attempted a happily married life in an apartment complex in Santa Monica that had closely resembled the television show Melrose Place.
There was a girl who lived next door. She introduced herself to me as Kali, “K-A-L-I but pronounced Collie, like the dog. She was the goddess of the destruction of illusion.” Kali. A quick-witted artist with elegant tattoos and a killer vocab that made you feel like carrying a notepad so you could impress your less cool friends with what you’d learned. Every night she’d be sprawled on the floor of her studio apartment sketching voluptuous figures in charcoal, her thick burgundy hair spilling onto the paper. Every night I’d excuse myself from watching TV with my husband to go outside to smoke. I’d find myself positioning the plastic lawn chair to line up with the one-inch crack where her window treatments didn’t quite stretch all the way to the wooden frame so I could watch her. I would smoke and fantasize about being in there with her, but due to my being married and the fact she was straight and only flirted with me for sport, all we ever had together was a Vita and Virginia–type romance—a conservative exploration of hypothetical love in handwritten notes. She would often draw sketches of me and slide them underneath our door. Kali’s drawings were so precious to me that I locked them away in the heart-shaped box my husband had given me one Valentine’s Day. This was a contentious issue between Mel and me, which culminated in him demanding that I throw them away in the kitchen trash can while he watched. A seemingly endless succession of thick, wet tears dripped into my lap as potato peels slowly covered ink renditions of my face, my arms, my legs.
During my evening ritual of smoking outside and watching her, I was in heaven. Until invariably I was dragged back to earth forty minutes later by a loud, deep voice asking, “Are you smoking another cigarette?” Mel and Kali. Melancholy.
Strangely enough, none of this seemed strange to me. In fact, playing the role of heterosexual while fantasizing about being a homosexual had been my reality since I was a child. At age eight I would invite my school friends over on the weekends and convince them to play a game I called “husband and wife.” It was a simple game that went like this: I, in the role of husband, would come home from a grueling day at the office and my wife would greet me at the door with a martini and slippers. She would cook dinner on the bedside table. I would mime reading the paper. Occasionally, if I had the energy to remove my clothes from the closet, I’d make her remove hers to stand inside the closet’s long-hanging section to take a make-believe shower. The game didn’t have much of a sexual component to it; we were married, so the sex was insinuated. But I carried the role-play right up until the end where I judged my friend on her skills as a wife by timing her as she single-handedly cleaned up the mess we’d made playing the game in my room. Although I was aware of that manipulation (I could never believe they fell for that!), I think my intentions behind the game were quite innocent. I wanted to playact a grown-up relationship just like other kids would playact being a doctor.
It was the beginning of a recurring theme until the day my husband left me: I was pretending to be in a heterosexual relationship while exploring a gay one. My husband leaving put an end to the flirtation between Kali and me, as I realized I was no longer playacting. I couldn’t pretend to be in love with my next-door neighbor anymore, I had to find a relationship with someone who could simultaneously make me grow up and keep me forever young. I continued therapy, painted the kitchen walls, and fantasized about my future life: I would bring water lilies home to her every day in summer, I would wrap my arms around her waist as she chopped vegetables, I would fall asleep holding her hand . . .
2
“GOOD NEWS!” It was early to be calling my mother. It was 2:00 p.m. in Los Angeles, which would be only 7:00 a.m. in Australia, but I couldn’t wait a second longer.
“Hang on a minute, darling. I’ll just get my robe on and go to the other phone.” I stood breathlessly next to my car in the parking lot of Fox Studios, my cell phone plastered to my ear. I was too excited to get in my car and drive.
“Okay, darl. What’s going on? Did you get a job?”
“Ma. I’m going to be on Ally McBeal! I’m their new cast member!” I waited for the enormity of what I was saying to compute, but as the show hadn’t yet reached Australia, I was forced to say this: “Ma, I’m going to be famous!” Both of us fell into an awe-filled silence. I was excited, wondering what my brand-new life would be like, but with the excitement came a little fear. I was gay. I knew that being openly gay wasn’t an option, but what if they—the press, the public, my employers—found out? As the silence grew I couldn’t help but wonder how I was going to pull this off. I could sense by the length of the silence that my mother was thinking the same thing, since the subject of my being gay had featured heavily in all of our recent conversations since my breakup with Mel six months prior. Although I had come out to my mother at age sixteen after she found The Joy of Lesbian Sex under my bed, I had thwarted my own attempts to convince my mother that I was a lesbian by being with Mel, despite the fact that my dalliance with heterosexuality was actually the “phase” she referred to when talking about my lesbianism. However, after months of hour-long phone conversations, she finally accepted that I’d married Mel to try to bury my homosexual tendencies, and she was forced to take my sexuality seriously. Her feelings about it were a source of conflict to her and of confusion to me. She would be supportive to the point where she would talk to me about dating girls, but still she encouraged me to be secretive with everyone else, especially people who had the power to advance my career. She told me not to tell anyone, that it was “nobody’s business,” including close family members. She convinced me that because they were from another generation and from small towns, “They just wouldn’t understand.” So I didn’t talk to anyone about it. I didn’t want to upset anybody. I had upset myself enough as it was. And at least I could talk to her.
After several moments of processing and a few exclamations of pride, my mother gently said, “You’d better be careful, darling.”
“Don’t be crazy, Ma! I’m not even dating anyone. No one will ever know.”
And with that, my excitement about my impending fame dropped substantially. Well and truly enough to allow me to drive. I got in the car but instead of going straight home, I drove down Santa Monica Boulevard to a popular lesbian coffee shop called Little Frieda’s. I sat outside and savored every sip of coffee and every moment of being at a lesbian coffee shop, because after this, I knew I would never allow myself to go there again. The feeling that came with getting the job, the feeling that I had been chosen, was better than limply sitting outside at a lesbian coffee shop too afraid to glance at the other patrons much less approach them. I was not ready live my life as a gay woman. I had a career to establish. Being a regular cast member on a hit TV show was what I had been working toward. Famous actresses were special people. At last I had a chance to be special.