Do you remember where you were the day Kennedy was shot? I don’t. I was born the year Kennedy was shot. So I can’t remember anything about it. But I remember Michael. In every part of my life.
The first time I saw Michael, he was standing next to Phillip in the painting studio at Texas Tech. It was late at night. I walked up to the floor to ceiling windows and looked in at them from the outside. Two tall, thin, beautiful young men, standing next to each other, painting on canvas. I held my breath. Staring at the image of them … something happened in my heart. It throbbed when I looked at these two men painting. My eyes stung and my throat got tight. But I just took a swig of vodka from a flask and walked up to the glass window and lifted my shirt up and pressed my bare tits up against the glass and knocked. Phillip turned and laughed, pointed. Michael turned, and laughed, and our eyes locked.
Michael. My father’s name.
Is that what my father looked like, I thought, as a man in his early twenties? Tall, thin, beautiful, his hands making a dance against canvas?
I didn’t learn to love men from anything I knew. I learned to love men from loving Michael.
There is so much I didn’t glean from being a daughter in a family full of women.
I didn’t learn to love holidays from my family. I learned it from entering Mike and Dean’s house, beautifully decorated — as beautiful as you imagine fantasy worlds as a child — warm amber rooms and candle lights and ribbons and the smell of baked things and spice — with no father to smash it apart.
I didn’t learn how to cook from any mother. I learned to cook from watching Michael — his hands, the patience, the artistry, the care, the joy of putting something into your mouth so filled with love it made me weep to chew.
I didn’t learn how to be feminine from any women. I learned to take off my combat boots and comb my crooked hair from looking at pictures Dean took of me over the years, pictures where he showed me that someone like me could be … pretty.
Michael was at my first wedding on the beach in Corpus Christi when I said I do to Phillip on the white sand. Michael and Dean were with me at my second wedding with Devin on the top of Harvey’s Casino in Lake Tahoe, where a strange casino minister with hair black as a record album recited a Hopi prayer while my mother waited to drink and gamble. Michael was not with me when I married Andy in front of a justice of the peace in San Diego, but my big belly was, and it carried something of him, too.
Once Michael came to visit when Philip and I still lived in Eugene. After the baby died. Philip and I were nothing about each other. I had already begun a new chapter with Devin in a house across town. Philip worked at Smith Family Bookstore by day, and by night he painted in a one-room efficiency somewhere else. The plan was that Michael would visit Phillip for a few days, and then spend a couple with me. But on the second day Michael showed up on my doorstep at three in the morning. I opened the door. He looked like ass. He had his suitcase with him. He said, “I can’t stay in that fucking efficiency. It reeks. There’s cat piss and shit and oil paint everywhere. The guy doesn’t live like a human.” And I let him in.
It was then that I knew that we had both loved Phillip. Together. Deeply. And that both of us left Phillip. Divorced him. Forever. Unable to understand how to live with his brilliant, passive hands. It was a sacred truth between us.
After Devin and I divorced, Devin went to visit Michael and Dean in Seattle, I guess wanting to feel like they were still his friends. I hated knowing he was there. My Michael and Dean. Goddamn you, Devin. But then Mike called and told me, “All he wants to talk about is how many times a day he fucks the womanchild. I don’t give a shit how many times he screws the infant. GAWD. It’s so juvenile.” The next day he called again and said, “Devin drank all the alcohol in the house while we were at work. I think he stole one of our pans. And some of Dean’s CDs. He’s never staying here again.”
I know it’s petty. Idiotic. But I loved him so much for telling me that.
When Andy and I were first getting together, it was hard. Andy was still married. So we had a couple of rendezvous out side of San Diego. One of them was in Seattle where Mike and Dean lived. They had moved there from Dallas sometime after my baby died. They moved there for work, I’m sure — both of them are astonishingly talented graphic designers. But to me it seemed that Mike had moved to Seattle to be closer to me. I mean I wished it was true. I wished the moment when he said one afternoon “We should live closer together,” the afternoon we downed 12 beers in a row in my house in Eugene, was somehow why he was near. It’s the wish of a child.
I called Mike in Seattle from San Diego to tell him about my man situation. I didn’t call my mother, or my sister, or my father, or any woman friend. I called Michael. I called to tell him that I thought I had fallen in love with a man who was not yet untangled from a marriage gone bad. That the man was younger than me. A lot. That the man was big and beautiful and played the cello and could beat the crap out of pretty much anything. That the man had lived in Spain and witnessed some ETA stuff and that the man had interviewed people from Earth Liberation Front and that the man kissed me so hard in Tijuana I thought I’d swallowed my teeth. That the man was my student. All things that ought to have made another kind of friend go, Lidia, you are making a mess. But you know what Mike said? He said, “Jesus. Thank god you finally got with someone whose story can keep up with yours!” Then he said, “We’re going out of town for a week. You should come house-sit and bring this guy up.”
I did.
Our son Miles, my beautiful alive boy, was conceived in Michael’s house. In Mike and Dean’s bed. On the 600 count twill sheets. With Jake the dog loyally guarding our love. In his house, the only house I ever felt the word “home” in my heart, a boy was born.
In my head and heart I carry so many images of Mike and Dean. Me and Mike on the floor of a Baptist church at midnight, Dean playing Bach on the church organ. Me and Mike and Dean stripped to our underwear, running into the ocean on the Oregon coast. In December. Eating a Christmas rabbit with olives and capers that Andy and Mike cooked — snuggled up in Italy — me and Dean filling our mouths with more than food. Mike and Dean opening the door when I sent my sister to them — my sister whose lost tenure had manifested as a nervous breakdown — how they said, “You can come in.” How they let her live with them until her self returned. Miles and Mike and Dean and Andy on top of the Space Needle. My god. How many ways are there to love men? It’s enough to break a heart open.
The images in my head and heart. I know what they are. I do. They are a family album. It is possible to make family any way you like. It is possible to love men without rage. There are thousands of ways to love men.
A Sanctuary
THERE’S SOMETHING I WANT TO TELL YOU ABOUT THE miles.
When my son Miles was born we drove from San Diego to a place near Portland, Oregon. I’d been fired in San Diego and miraculously rehired in Oregon — back toward what I knew, and what Andy knew, the Northwest. Andy drove a U-Haul, and my dear friend Virginia and I drove a used Saab with Miles gurgling and pooing his pants in the back like a little road warrior.
Virginia. Everything that matters to me is a word. Slowly this woman grew in my life, a beautiful wetted stone turned over years. First she was my student, then my friend, then nothing I’d ever met before. Virginia became a friend who stayed near. She showed me intimacy is a word untethered from sexuality. Unconditionally, I drank.