Calypso Read online

I pointed out the long line, and she shrugged. “No problem, I’m a night owl.” She handed me a slip of paper with her number on it. “Just phone me when you’re done.”

  The woman looked to be around fifty, Mexican, I reckoned, and as short as a child. “In case you’re wondering, I am a doctor,” she said. “Not a surgeon, but I studied it for a year in med school, and unless your tumor has its own blood supply, removing it should be fairly easy.”

  Its own blood supply! I thought of those people you read about sometimes with terrible potato-size twins inside of them, complete with hair and teeth.

  Recounting this story over the next few weeks, I was surprised by the general reaction it got. “She what? You didn’t take her up on it, did you?”

  “Well, sure.”

  “And how did you know that she was a real doctor?”

  These were the same overly cautious people who threw out their children’s Halloween candy and showed up at airports with masks on. “How do I know she was a doctor? She told me she was.”

  The only real exception was my father, who once took antibiotics prescribed for his dog, saying, “Aw, who cares? They’re the same damn thing.” When I told him that a strange woman performed surgery on me in the middle of the night, his response was the same as mine would have been: “Sounds like you saved yourself some real money!”

  The doctor—I’ll call her Ada—returned to the theater after I’d finished signing books, at around one a.m. With her were the son and daughter of her girlfriend, both of whom were in their early thirties and looked more like soap-opera actors than real people. While their attractiveness was preternatural—almost outlandish—the way they related to each other as brother and sister felt familiar to me, especially their little insults, blanks, for the most part, more funny than mean. The four of us drove on deserted roads across the state line to a dark clinic located in what seemed like the middle of nowhere. The late hour, the secrecy—it felt furtive and dangerous, like having an abortion in 1950.

  My procedure began with a local anesthetic, and though I didn’t notice when Ada cut into me, I could feel slight tugs as she hacked at the tumor. It was like having my pocket picked by a trainee. My fatty pocket. The shreds were placed in a metal pan and resembled slivers of raw chicken breast.

  “Are my intestines hanging out?” I asked at one point.

  “God, no,” Ada said. “Your lipoma is in a sort of pouch, so there’s nothing at all protruding from the incision. If you want, you can look for yourself. I can get you a mirror.”

  “That’s OK,” I said.

  While she worked, I talked to the son and daughter of her girlfriend, hyperconscious of how good they looked and, by contrast, how awful I did, half sitting up, my hairy stomach showing. “How do you say ‘tumor’ in español?” I asked.

  “Tumor,” the woman said.

  I took Spanish in high school and am always delighted when I find another word I can toss into my vocabulary basket. It was like learning that shortcake is pronounced “shorto cakey” in Japanese, and beige “beige” in German.

  After I was stitched back up, we drove to Ada’s house, the only one with lights burning on its quiet suburban street. There I met her girlfriend, Anna, who wore a floor-length white nightgown. Her hair was white as well and fell to the middle of her back. “So nice of you to drop by,” she said, opening a bottle of codeine tablets. “Will you take some for the road? For the pain?”

  The house felt familiar, if not exactly like the one I grew up in, then at least close. “Artsy,” my mom would have called it, meaning there were paintings on the walls but they weren’t all pretty. The backyard was flooded with moonlight, and while looking out at the sleeping city below us, Anna’s daughter told me about her youngest child, a girl of five. “She’s going through a phase where she wants to be a dog, insists she’s a dog. The barking and walking on all fours is something I’m willing to put up with, but then she shit on the ground over by that shrub, and I said, ‘That’s it. Now you’ve gone too far.’”

  At four a.m. Ada and her girlfriend’s children returned me to my hotel, and three hours later I got up to go to the airport. All told, it was an exceptional evening: a chance to meet interesting new people and have at least one of them reach inside of me with her tiny hands. After I left El Paso, Ada shipped my tumor on ice to my sister’s house in Winston-Salem. Lisa put it in the freezer and promised to bring it with her to the beach when we gathered for Thanksgiving at the end of my tour.

  Meanwhile I continued on. In Houston I had an emergency root canal, which didn’t hurt nearly as much as I thought it would. A few days later, perhaps because hanging out with doctors was something I’d gotten into the habit of, I saw a podiatrist in Dallas. “What seems to be the problem?” he asked.

  “My left foot hurts,” I told him.

  He took some X-rays, but nothing showed up, perhaps because my foot only hurt a little.

  “This has to stop,” said my lecture agent, who’d been making all the appointments for me and was clearly tired of it.

  My last show was in Tallahassee, Florida, and the following morning I flew to Raleigh. My sister Gretchen picked me up at the airport, and by sunset we were with Hugh and my entire family at the house on Emerald Isle. I like having a place that theoretically belongs to everyone but technically belongs to me. It’s neutral ground but not quite, meaning that if someone hangs a picture I don’t care for, I get to take it down, saying, “Let’s rethink this.” I, on the other hand, can hang whatever I like. “Why would anyone frame a piece of plywood?” my father asked the night before Thanksgiving.

  He was frowning at the artwork Janet had given me during my visit to Omaha. “It’s a one-eyed raccoon looking in a mirror,” I told him.

  He took his glasses off and rubbed his eyes. “Like hell it is.”

  This Thanksgiving my brother-in-law, Bob, was deep-frying the turkey. It has to be done outdoors, so while he scoped out a spot and constructed a wind barrier, I took my frozen tumor and headed to the canal with Lisa and my niece, who was eleven years old at the time and very shy. It was cold, and during the fifteen-minute walk, I asked Madelyn who the most popular girl at her school was.

  She answered with no hesitation.

  “And is she nice?” I asked.

  “She wasn’t last year or the year before, but she is now.”

  “You will never forget the name of the most popular girl in the sixth grade,” I said. “Even when you’re old and on your deathbed it’ll come to you. That is her triumph.”

  “My most popular girl was Jane-Jane Teague,” Lisa told us.

  “That’s such a good name,” I said.

  Lisa nodded. “And you had to call her Jane-Jane—even the teachers. She wouldn’t answer to anything less.”

  We arrived at the canal to find three boys standing on the footbridge and looking down into the water, their bikes sprawled like bodies on the ground around them. I leaned over the rail, but instead of the snapping turtles I was expecting, I saw only sliders, which are significantly smaller and less awe-inspiring.

  “You looking for Granddaddy?” the boy beside me asked.

  I said, “Granddaddy?”

  “People call him Godzilla sometimes too,” the kid told me. “He’s the one with the messed-up head. Me and my brother feed him toast a lot.”

  “And grapes,” the boy next to him said. “We give him them and crackers if we got ’em.”

  I felt betrayed, the way you do when you discover that your cat has a secret secondary life and is being fed by neighbors who call him something stupid like Calypso. Worse is that he loves them as much as he loves you, which is to say not at all, really. The entire relationship has been your own invention.

  “I never knew the turtle had a name,” I said.

  The kid shrugged. “Sure does.”

  “So where is he now?”

  “Hibernating,” the boy told me. “Like every year.”

  I was crestfallen. “And when will he
wake up?”

  The kid reached down and picked up his bike. “Springtime, ’less he dies in his sleep. What, you bring some bread for him?”

  “Me?” I said. “No.” Ashamed to admit it was something more intimate.

  “And after everything I went through!” I whined on our way back to the house.

  “Your lipoma will keep,” Lisa assured me. “We’ll just put it back in the freezer and you can feed it to Godzilla or Granddaddy or whatever his name is when you return in May.”

  “And what if there’s a storm between now and the spring, and the electricity goes out?”

  Lisa thought for a moment. “Something that’s going to eat a tumor probably won’t distinguish between a good one and a bad one.”

  I won’t say the hibernating turtle ruined my Thanksgiving. He did make it feel rather anticlimactic, though I’m not sure why. If you were to throw a lipoma to a dog, he’d swallow it in a single bite, then get that very particular look on his face that translates to Fuck. Was that a tumor? There’d be something to see. Turtles, on the other hand, never change expression and live with fewer regrets. I’m certain that when I return in May and drop my little gift into the canal, the snapper will eat it unthinkingly, the way he’s eaten all the chicken hearts and fish heads I’ve thrown to him over the past year. Then he’ll look around for more before disappearing, like the ingrate that he is, back into his foul and riled depths.

  A Modest Proposal

  London is five hours ahead of Washington, DC, except when it comes to gay marriage. In that case, it’s two years and five hours ahead, which was news to me. “Really?” I said, on meeting two lesbian wives from Wolverhampton. “You can do that here?”

  “Well, of course they can,” Hugh said when I told him about it. “Where have you been?”

  Hugh can tell you everything about the current political situation in the U.K. He knows who the chancellor of the exchequer is, and was all caught up in the latest election for the whatever-you-call-it, that king-type person who’s like the president but isn’t.

  “Prime minister?” he said. “Jesus. You’ve been here how long?”

  It was the same when we lived in Paris. Hugh regularly read the French papers. He listened to political shows on the radio, while I was, like, “Is he the same emperor we had last year?”

  When it comes to American politics, our roles are reversed. “What do you mean ‘Who’s Claire McCaskill?’” I’ll say, amazed that I—that anyone, for that matter—could have such an ignorant boyfriend.

  I knew that the Supreme Court ruling on gay marriage was expected at ten a.m. on June 26, which is three p.m. in Sussex. I’m usually out then, on my litter patrol, so I made it a point to bring my iPad with me. When the time came, I was standing by the side of the road, collecting trash with my grabber. It’s generally the same crap over and over—potato-chip bags, candy wrappers, Red Bull cans—but along this particular stretch, six months earlier, I’d come across a strap-on penis. It seemed pretty old and was Band-Aid colored, about three inches long and not much bigger around than a Vienna sausage, which was interesting to me. You’d think that if someone wanted a sex toy she’d go for the gold, sizewise. But this was just the bare minimum, like getting AAA breast implants. Who had this person been hoping to satisfy, her Cabbage Patch doll? I thought about taking the penis home and mailing it to one of my sisters for Christmas but knew that the moment I put it in my knapsack, I’d get hit by a car and killed. That’s just my luck. Medics would come and scrape me off the pavement, then, later, at the hospital, they’d rifle through my pack and record its contents: four garbage bags, some wet wipes, two flashlights, and a strap-on penis.

  “There must be some mistake,” Hugh would tell them. “You said it was how big?”

  My iPad could get no signal at three p.m., so I continued walking and picking up trash, thinking that, whichever way the Supreme Court went, I never expected to see this day in my lifetime. When I was young, in the early seventies, being gay felt like the worst thing that could happen to a person, at least in Raleigh, North Carolina. There was a rumor that it could be cured by psychiatrists, so for most of my teens that’s where I placed my hope. I figured that eventually I’d tell my mother and let her take the appropriate steps. What would kill me would be seeing the disappointment on her face. With my father I was used to it. That was the expression he naturally assumed when looking at me. Her, though! Once when I was in high school she caught me doing something or other, imitating my Spanish teacher, perhaps with a pair of tights on my head, and said, like someone at the end of her rope, “What are you, a queer?”

  I’d been called a sissy before, not by her but by plenty of other people. That was different, though, as the word was less potent, something used by children. When my mother called me a queer, my face turned scarlet and I exploded. “Me? What are you talking about? Why would you even say a thing like that?”

  Then I ran down to my room, which was spotless, everything just so, the Gustav Klimt posters on the walls, the cornflower-blue vase I’d bought with the money I earned babysitting. The veil had been lifted, and now I saw this for what it was: the lair of a blatant homosexual.

  That would have been as good a time as any to say, “Yes, you’re right. Get me some help!” But I was still hoping that it might be a phase, that I’d wake up the next day and be normal. In the best of times, it seemed like such a short leap. I did fantasize about having a girlfriend—never the sex part, but the rest of it I had down. I knew what she’d look like and how she’d hold her long hair back from the flame when bending over a lit candle. I imagined us getting married the summer after I graduated from college, and then I imagined her drowning off the coast of North Carolina during one of my family’s vacations. Everyone needed to be there so they could see just how devastated I was. I could actually make myself cry by picturing it: How I’d carry her out of the water, how my feet would sink into the sand owing to the extra weight. I’d try mouth-to-mouth resuscitation, and keep trying until someone, my father most often, would pull me back, saying, “It’s too late, son. Can’t you see she’s gone?”

  It seemed I wanted to marry just so I could be a widower. So profound would be my grief that I’d never look at another woman again. It was perfect, really. Oh, there were variations. Sometimes she’d die of leukemia, as in the movie Love Story. Occasionally a madman’s bullet would fell her during a hostage situation, but always I’d be at her side, trying everything in my power to bring her back.

  The fantasy remained active until I was twenty. Funny how unimportant being gay became once I told somebody. All I had to do was open up to my best friend, and when she accepted it I saw that I could as well.

  “I just don’t see why you have to rub everyone’s noses in it,” certain people would complain when I told them. Not that I wore it on T-shirts or anything. Rather, I’d just say “boyfriend” the way they said “wife” or “girlfriend” or “better half.” I insisted that it was no different, and in time, at least in the circles I ran in, it became no different.

  While I often dreamed of making a life with another man, I never extended the fantasy to marriage or even to civil partnerships, which became legal in France in 1999, shortly after Hugh and I moved to Paris. We’d been together for eight years by that point, and though I didn’t want to break up or look for anyone else, I didn’t need the government to validate my relationship. I felt the same way when a handful of American states legalized same-sex marriage, only more so: I didn’t need a government or a church giving me its blessing. The whole thing felt like a step down to me. From the dawn of time, the one irrefutably good thing about gay men and lesbians was that we didn’t force people to sit through our weddings. Even the most ardent of homophobes had to hand us that. We were the ones who toiled behind the scenes while straight people got married: the photographers and bakers and florists, working like Negro porters settling spoiled passengers into the whites-only section of the train.

  “Oh, Christo
pher,” a bride might sigh as her dressmaker zipped her up, “what would I have ever done without you?”

  What saved this from being tragic was that they were doing something we wouldn’t dream of: guilt-tripping friends and relatives into giving up their weekends so they could sit on hard church pews or folding chairs in August, listening as the couple mewled vows at each other, watching as they were force-fed cake, standing on the sidelines, bored and sweating, as the pair danced, misty-eyed, to a Foreigner song.

  The battle for gay marriage was, in essence, the fight to be as square as straight people, to say things like “My husband tells me that the new Spicy Chipotle Burger they’ve got at Bennigan’s is awesome!”

  That said, I was all for the struggle, mainly because it so irritated the fundamentalists. I wanted gay people to get the right to marry, and then I wanted none of us to act on it. I wanted it to be ours to spit on. Instead, much to my disappointment, we seem to be all over it.

  I finally got a signal at the post office in the neighboring village. I’d gone to mail a set of keys to a friend and, afterward, I went out front and pulled out my iPad. The touch of a finger and there it was, the headline story on the New York Times site: “Supreme Court Ruling Makes Same-Sex Marriage a Right Nationwide.”

  I read it and, probably like every American gay person, I was overcome with emotion. Standing on the sidewalk, dressed in rags with a litter picker pinioned between my legs, I felt my eyes tear up, and as my vision blurred I considered all the people who had fought against this and thought, Take that, assholes.

  The Supreme Court ruling tells every gay fifteen-year-old living out in the middle of nowhere that he or she is as good as any other dope who wants to get married. To me it was a slightly mixed message, like saying we’re all equally entitled to wear Dockers to the Olive Garden. Then I spoke to my accountant, who’s as straight as they come, and he couldn’t have been more excited. “For tax purposes, you and Hugh really need to act on this,” he told me.