Between the Worlds

 Photos by Andrew Graham

The Thinning Veil

Sometimes, making love with my partner, I have an odd sense of the two of us being in a roomful of men.

When I say odd, I mean it's not exactly the fantasy of sharing him with others, and sharing others with him, that's coming forward for me. Nothing odd about that: to be clear, the prospect turns my crank, and if it suited him as well--which it doesn't--we could explore it.

Partly, it's the enduring presence of his former partner--in his life and by extension in mine. Bob died over twenty ago. His books still line the shelves that cover whole walls of our summer house--many of them inscribed to him by their authors, some of them annotated in his hand. I still find postcards addressed to him when I pull a novel out. His photographs hang everywhere. Years after his death, we finally poured his ashes into the bay, floating in a kayak together with Bob's first high school lover and lifelong friend, reading Whitman to each other in a light drizzle and watching a white heron fly low over the water toward an island at the mouth of the creek. Early on, only half jokingly, I came to say that I was in a three-way relationship, and that sometimes one of us being dead made it less challenging, sometimes more so.

Partly, it's the long, ongoing repair and reinvention of my friendship with my own former partner, now long coupled up again himself, and the nostalgia of remembering the house I bought with him, and then finally sold eleven years ago, and the garden we created together before we separated. There are times I can't escape the awareness, never entirely comfortable, that I'm still in love with him too. It took me years to admit that to myself.

Partly, it's the wider awareness of the other men I've let into my heart, and into my pants, over the years--some of whom I dated; some who became soulmates on the short, intense roller-coaster rides of workshops; some whose names I only learned while we were having sex, or never learned at all, and never saw again. Objects that represent them sit on my altar: the icon G. gave me on my fiftieth birthday; the crystal pendant cross S. brought me on a visit twenty years ago; the natural phallus of stone, ground smooth by millennia in a creek bed, that A. found walking with his dogs and saved for me; W.'s tuning fork.

Partly, it's my partner's erotic history, more active and varied than my own--and how my nose is now and then pressed to the glass with envy about that.

In the shadow of all these, it's something else as well, something more. It's a sense that when we're in bed together, though we're two isolated individuals, we're also part of something larger, something more general. Something that embraces the other men who dwell within us: those who've slipped away, carried elsewhere on the diverging currents of our lives; even those who've passed beyond the veil of death-- "these waves of dying friends" that the late poet Michael Lynch so movingly commemorated in the early years of the AIDS crisis.

I can't describe more precisely what I sometimes sense so strongly within/behind/beneath/beyond the experience of being with this particular man. But whatever it is, it flies in the face of the romantic cult of the couple as a self-sufficient unit. It's radically opposed to the notion that we find one person who somehow completes us, so that anything else becomes an admission of emotional failure and defeat. Queer cultural theorists like Michael Warner and Eric Rofes long argued that the focus on same-sex marriage rights flattened and suppressed the richness of this broader web of emotional, erotic, and spiritual connection. I can't help but agree.

Strangely, I'm reminded of what Plato said about (gay) love in the Symposium: that we start by loving an individual, progress by loving many individuals, and end (ideally) by loving what we find embodied in them all. That's one of the few things I can take away from Plato at this point in my life without vehement disagreement.

And perhaps even more strangely--I connect what I'm feeling to this moment in the year--Hallowe'en, All Souls, the Day of the Dead, Samhain--when the curtain between what's present and what's vanished from our daylight lives is pulled aside, and we're in communion with the dead--and by extension, with the otherwise departed, and with the alternative worlds of our unrealized longings. If Bob's ever in bed with my partner and me, surely it's now. I'm glad for the thought he's there. Along with all those others, alive and dead and alive, across town or across oceans, at the far-flung corners of my life and my husband's, the men of our queer tribe, who nestle and nuzzle around us.