The Rachel Incident(8)
There’s something about sex with a long-term partner at the age of twenty that makes it the most depressing sex of your life. At least in your teens, everyone is prepared to eat humble pie together. Everyone’s embarrassed, no one knows what they’re doing, there’s slightly more is this all right? and does that feel good? In a way, the sex I had as a teenager was more mature than anything between the ages of eighteen and twenty, where the boys were so certain that they had found a winning formula. Jonathan had one girlfriend before me and had told me she fainted when he went down on her. This meant I was supposed to faint also, or at least come close. I was so annoyed at myself for not enjoying it more. The whole thing felt very ticklish and lonely.
It’s tempting, when you’re talking about your sex life as a young woman, to slip into little melancholy asides about how you gazed heavy-lidded at the ceiling while a dull brute pummelled away at you. Sadly, I don’t think I can say any of that and get away with it. The sex was unsatisfying but I couldn’t have been more obsessed with having it. I was always on top, moaning away like a stuck pig. If someone told Jonathan tomorrow that Rachel Murray said he was a bad lay, he would laugh and tell them to get fucked. I don’t think he’d entertain it for a second.
“How are you getting on with your man?” Jonathan asked afterwards, as we lay on the bed.
“James? Great.” And then, carefully: “I think we’re going to be friends, you know.”
“Are you going to become one of those fag hags?” he said. “Like Will and Grace?”
(Have patience: this was considered to be an extremely witty thing to say in 2009.)
“Do you think he’s gay?” I asked earnestly.
He looked at me, not even bothering to argue. Just a raised eyebrow that said, Oh, come on.
“What makes you think that?” I pressed. Ever since my faux pas at Sober Lane, I was fascinated with what made a person seem gay. Neither of us had any gay friends at that point. There were certainly gay people, acquaintances and people you would just know to see around, but for some reason we hadn’t ended up being friends with them.
We were completely cut off from gay culture, and yet we both had perfect confidence in this assumption about James.
“I have eyes,” Jonathan said simply, and he left soon after that.
We ordered a pizza for dinner and James plugged in his TV and DVD player. The only DVDs he had were three seasons of Frasier.
“Your boyfriend thinks I’m gay,” he said, without emotion.
I waited a second before answering. “No.”
He paused the DVD on Kelsey Grammer’s contorted face, ranting about Seattle spa memberships. “Listen,” he said, as if he were about to lay down an important house rule, like no shoes on the carpet. “I’m camp as a row of tents, I know that, but I’m not gay.”
I laughed awkwardly.
“Don’t you think if I was actually gay, I’d go ahead and just be gay?”
I nodded. It made sense. If you walked around with Cher on your iPod then you had probably thought more seriously about whether you were attracted to men than the average rugby-playing alpha male. I saw James as extremely advanced, a person who had interrogated all sides of his soul. He was too emotionally intelligent to get stuck in the doldrums of what music or behaviour seemed gay or straight.
In that moment, he wasn’t just a person to me. He was the future of people.
The truth was that he was terrified.
“What was your endgame?” I asked him once, years later.
“To wait until I could move away,” he said. “And then go somewhere where no one would know me.”
Which he did. Which we both did.
But I’m getting ahead of myself, because before any of that happened, Dr. Byrne happened first.
4
DR. BYRNE was the only other man in my life whose opinions I cared about. When I wasn’t hanging off James’s word, I was clutching on to Dr. Byrne’s. I must have cared about Jonathan’s thoughts at some point. But student relationship dog years being what they are, any deep respect I had for him had long since worn off. We were already behaving as though we were in a years-old marriage, functional but surly.
Dr. Byrne dressed like he was impersonating a university professor. In my memory he has patches on the sleeves of his coat. It’s possible that I’m inventing that detail, but everything else about him suggested coat patches. The first time I saw him he was ten minutes late and sweating. He seemed angry at us, the first years, for having the gall to attend a 9 a.m. class.
He was horrible at mornings, which I related to him being a very big person, 6'5 and extremely wide, a farmer’s build. I’ve had this idea in my head since I was young that a person’s body is a factory, a big Edwardian job, and that you need every worker comfortably sitting at their station before the day’s work can begin. The bigger the person, the further the workers have to travel: trudging up stairs, turning down corridors. This was my own explanation for being bad at mornings and I was happy to extend the kindness to Fred Byrne.
“Right,” he began. “The Victorians.”
He nudged his brow with the heel of his hand, trying to stop a bead of sweat before it fell on the lectern.
“Who knows Sherlock Holmes?”
He knew that most of us would drop out by the end of our first year. That’s how it is with Arts. People love it for the variety but can’t handle the droopy uselessness of it, and when the hangovers and the depressions kick in around February, it’s hard to justify dragging yourself out of bed for Cronus eating his babies. Dr. Byrne was passionate about his subject but he also did not like to waste energy, so he spent those first few classes giving us just enough information about the Victorians so that it might one day be handy in a pub quiz.