By the sixteenth “Cecilia,” James and I had given birth to our relationship and it wandered around the house like a sticky, curious foal. We picked up each other’s belongings—bad T-shirts, pretentious books, preserved concert tickets—and accompanied each with the same question: What the fuck is this?
“What the fuck is this?” I asked, discovering a collection of bandanas.
“What the fuck is this?” he asked, picking up my copy of The Pumpkin Eater by Penelope Mortimer.
“What the fuck is this?” I retorted, finding the top half of a Subway uniform.
“What the fuck is this?” he announced, finding a packet of Femfresh wet wipes that had come in a Student Health kit and I was too suspicious to use and too frightened of my own vagina to throw away.
What we were actually asking, of course, was: Who are you? Who were you? Are you okay if we have the kind of house where I slag you off for reading? How did you get fired from Subway? Are you really the sort of girl who washes her vulva with a deodorised wipe?
We were so busy falling in love that I had forgotten completely about Jonathan, who I had asked to call over around five. One of my main motives for moving out was sex. We had both lived at home for most of college and were still relying on house parties, parked cars and our parents’ schedules to have it. It was also getting exhausting, having sex at college. Doing it in a campus bathroom is exciting the first time, but there’s something depressing about asking your boyfriend to meet you at “our bathroom.”
He rang the doorbell and wandered into a maternity ward for private jokes. I wrapped my arms around him, giddy and sweating, excited to drag him into my new world, purely so the new world would have a witness.
“This is James!” I announced. They greeted each other warmly enough, but as I looked between them I felt an instant flash of revulsion for my boyfriend of two years. He had no features. He had eyes and lips and a nose but I felt like they had all been made by the Bauhaus, obsessively streamlined to perform a function and no more. Whoever had put James together had at least tried. He was sort of runty, with big eyes and big black brows on a face that was either elfin or bloated depending on the week he was having. He had a nose like an old man’s, with deep indentations at his nostrils. James had a look that most of us described as “emo” but really just meant his clothes fit him and they were from Topman.
I hugged Jonathan again, doing a show of devoted girlfriend-dom to drown out my new feelings. He seemed grey, like a mushroom. He kissed me on the forehead. “Give me the tour, then!” he said, and the tour lasted thirty seconds before we went upstairs and I showed him my room, the sheets not yet on the bed, and then I took my shirt off. It was mostly because I had been sweating and I didn’t want him to smell me.
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.