It's Not You It's Me Read online

  It’s Not You, It’s Me

  by

  Gabriella West

  To protect the privacy of the individuals mentioned in this book, most of the names have been changed.

  Kindle Edition

  Copyright © 2014 by Gabriella West

  All Rights Reserved

  www.gabriellawest.net

  Beginnings

  A long time ago, I joined an LGBT running club—as a walker. That’s how this story begins.

  September 1995. The first time I met Eileen I was standing beside my car in Golden Gate Park, ready to go off to the women’s brunch. My friend Suzanne and I had just finished walking around Stow Lake, as part of the San Francisco gay and lesbian running club FrontRunners, which met at the lake on Saturdays. But we were just walkers. While the male and female runners took off across the park en masse, Suzanne and I and sometimes a couple of other “unfit” women got to amble at a gentle pace for an hour around the pretty, luridly green lake, past clusters of ducks and the always-surprising sight of turtles lying out in the sun on wooden stumps.

  Suzanne was tall, with clipped hair, glasses, and a baby face, while I at age 28 was shorter, plump, and voluptuous, my dark hair medium-length and messy. Out of shape as I was, I did not receive much beyond surface friendliness from the jockish, lean women there. Yet I was tolerated and for that I was grateful, for I had never known what it was like to be accepted. I had not fit in at school, or at college, and now in the lesbian community, it seemed, I was also a misfit. The party line at the club, though, was that everyone was welcome—gay, lesbian, bi, transgender, all sizes, and all races. I had not yet really begun to question the rhetoric.

  We were setting off to the weekly post-exercise brunch at a local cafe in the Inner Sunset when one of the club officers asked if I could give Eileen a ride; she was new in town. It seems unlikely, looking back, that she would have asked me herself. A tall, pale, compact-looking girl with a mass of thick brown hair got into the back of my car. She looked wholesome and Midwestern, my type, and in fact she told us she was from Nebraska, an Irish-American Catholic no less.

  “I’m from Ireland myself,” I told her. “I’ve been here since ’88.”

  “Oh really,” she said. “Do you miss it?”

  “No,” I answered. “I didn’t really like growing up there. I always felt like a fish out of water. I was glad to leave.”

  She seemed to enjoy my candor. Much later she told me that that was what she first liked about me, the fact that I wasn’t crazy about Ireland. It seemed a strange thing to pick up on. What I found appealing in her, oddly enough, was her shyness. She seemed a little tentative, still new and green to the ways of the city. A little remote, a little sad. I even wrote about it in my diary that night, that I’d met a new girl, liked her, that she’d seemed shy and sweet. She reminded me physically of women I’d known in Ireland—pale, repressed, angular in face, self-possessed. A twinge of familiarity had passed through me when I’d seen her. But it seemed like she hadn’t felt the same sense of recognition.

  It wasn’t the beginning of anything. Not at all. The next time I remember seeing Eileen at the club, maybe a couple of months later, I got quite a shock. A skinny woman in bright-blue Lycra running shorts brushed past me, her mop of hair cut short and curly. Giving me a goofy grin, she said loudly, “Hi, Gabriella!” This offhand brashness annoyed me. I stared at her in astonishment, something contemptuous probably flashing in my eyes. I didn’t respond.

  Without thinking about it, I wrote her off. She’d gone over to the other side. But what did that mean? The girl I’d thought was an introvert was in fact an extrovert. She was an officer of the running club now. Everyone liked her, she was endearing, and she was friends with the “in” crowd. She passed out of my world, no longer a potential friend. For about a year, we barely spoke. She was never rude to me, just simply kept me at arm’s length.

  * * *

  Beneath the surface, we all have secrets. My secret life, which I did not discuss with anyone at the club except Suzanne, was eating away at me. I had fallen in love with a male friend. We had been close friends for two years. He was married. We flirted; he made it clear he did not want to have an affair with me. He invited me everywhere; his wife, also my friend, was growing increasingly fed up with the situation. With the selfishness of the lover who pursues the elusive beloved, I did not particularly care about her pain, yet was often tortured with guilt. Sometimes I was happy, sometimes frustrated, sometimes in despair. Going to the club gave me some kind of hope, for here I was among other lesbians, here I could pick up the threads of my life, my “true” sexuality. I had gotten off to a good start, it seemed, had several buddies that I chatted with each week.

  As I continued to go, though, I noticed that people sometimes looked at me oddly, as if they wondered what I was doing there. A bisexual woman who sometimes walked with me complained that she was being shunned, that people in the group wanted her out, while others came up to her privately and confessed that they too slept with men, but that they could never say so. It was easy for me to be friendly with this woman, for I recognized another drifter, another free spirit. I wanted the club to extend its arms to us, not to force us to be like the others. I wanted to be myself and still be liked. Loved, even. Yet it seemed that love and approval was only given to those who adapted the best to the club’s unspoken rules. The tomboyish, athletic dykes who gossiped about sex and flirted among themselves, though they did not date, or date for longer than a few weeks, were the group’s movers and shakers. Eileen, quietly and firmly, had cast her lot in among them.

  Yet Eileen, like all of us, was looking for something. Having established her place in the hierarchy, perhaps she felt freer to chat to me. One Saturday morning at brunch we had a conversation about theater. It turned out she was interested in being a playwright. I told her I was a writer. Email addresses were exchanged. The table was hushed as we talked to each other, and now I realize it took courage for Eileen to publicly show friendliness to me. At the time, blissfully unaware, I merely accepted it as my due.

  And so we began chatting. It began with the occasional hello and slowly, slowly began to build. Eileen invited me to a Christmas party she was having in 1996. I was dating a plump, freckled redhead called Julie, though perhaps dating is a misnomer, for we hadn’t even kissed. I still thought about my male friend all the time, though we no longer saw each other. The worst seemed to be over, though. And so it was with a sense of quiet anticipation that I walked into Eileen’s Mission District apartment for the first time. (I had brought Julie along for support.) Her place was on the second floor of a shabby building in a rough neighborhood, across from an evangelical church that proclaimed “God Is Not Dead” and a funky lesbian cafe (now long-gone, of course) called Red Dora’s Bearded Lady.

  Distracted by the crowd in her small apartment, Eileen barely spoke to me past a friendly greeting, yet when I found a moment to give her the gift I’d brought she accepted it with obvious pleasure. It was a large blue clock with a picture of a teacup on it. It would look pretty on her wall, I thought.

  I met her friends and said hello to her mother, a slim, austere lady with dyed auburn hair who was visiting from out of state. When I tore myself away, for I thought it was only fair to Julie not to make her spend too much time among strangers, I asked her what she thought of Eileen.

  “She seems so normal,” Julie said dismissively. “I could never be friends with anyone like that.”

  But I want to be, I thought to myself. I love that about her, and I want some of it.

  My tepid little romance with Julie sputtered out soon after. Her timid manner and hesitation about getting physical with me were too much for my insecurities. I wanted
to be wanted. And I knew I didn’t really want her, either. Yet I thought she was a sweet, earnest person and felt guilty about dropping her. In recent years, through the magic instant-reconnection of Facebook, I’ve been delighted to see her pursue a graduate degree and become a fine poet.

  Eileen and I actually got to talk about my subsequent romance. She was pursuing an older woman at the club, an intellectual with gray hair who looked as if she could be Eileen’s mother. When she spoke about her futile efforts to get closer to this woman, I looked at her strangely. I could not imagine why she was attracted to someone whom I did not find attractive in the slightest, who seemed so dry, so incapable of fun or tenderness. I was doing a frustrating little dance myself with a younger, intellectual type from Match.com, a girl who constantly flaked out on me, who talked about how important her friends were, and who at one point actually called another woman up from my apartment while on a date with me. I sat and listened in confusion while she set a place and time to meet this woman, saying “I’ll be wearing a Brown University T-shirt”—the same phrase she had emailed to me before we met. This threw me into a tizzy, for I so much wanted to care about a worthwhile person and be cared for in return. Surely this girl was using me, had no good intentions. When I ran my little drama by Eileen, though, expecting sympathy, she looked at me oddly and said only, “Well, you know the saying. ‘All is fair in love and war.’”

  I did know the saying, but felt disappointed and hurt. I fell silent and the subject was closed.

  * * *

  We’d started to do what Eileen in her joking way called “doing doggies,” walking the abandoned dogs at the local S.P.C.A. Eileen always chose the most difficult ones, the dogs who didn’t show any affection, who strained at the leash and required constant vigilance. I kept urging her to walk the sweeter, friendlier dogs, but she did not seem as interested in them. Our conversations were mostly about our work problems. She was temping, trying to do freelance journalism. I was stuck in a dead-end university job, with a new boss I loathed: a priest. Eileen was now a supportive friend, and she called me at home often. I actually avoided calling her; some instinct told me not to pull at her too hard, to let her set the pace. This seemed to intrigue her, and the pace picked up.

  When she told me over burritos after one of our doggie walks that she’d been sexually abused as a child by a relative, I found it difficult to know what to say. My first reaction was surprise that she’d even told me. We didn’t seem that close. I had had intimacy before with close friends (and I yearned to have it again), and what Eileen and I had seemed different: a pragmatic, working friendship. I don’t remember reacting with much visible sympathy, even, for her announcement was matter-of-fact, as if it was nothing to be concerned about, all far in the past. “That hasn’t happened to any of my friends, as far as I know,” I blurted out, “and I’m surprised, because it isn’t as if my friends have been terribly functional or anything!”

  Looking back, this was an odd reaction for me to have, for within the past year Julie had told me that she’d been repeatedly molested by her adoptive father growing up. I’d wondered if this was the reason that our relationship never became physical, and it had disturbed me greatly at the time. But somehow, when Eileen told me her secret, Julie’s revelation slipped my mind.

  “Well,” Eileen said quietly, “it’s happened to a lot of women I’ve known.”

  I was getting closer to the core, obviously. The mask was slipping. She was giving me glimpses of who she really was, but I didn’t even recognize it then. Perhaps, perversely, I wanted the old, cheerful, endearing Eileen back. This Eileen was someone who had secrets, who did not tell all she was feeling. I was seeing the tip of the iceberg, and I did not know if I could bear more revelations. I wanted to tell her about me, my complicated love life, my messy little problems, but I wanted her to remain solid and strong, supportive and caring. I did not want to see the cracks.

  Happy Together?

  Suzanne, my bespectacled companion from the running group, was still a friend of mine, though not one I saw much anymore now that Eileen was taking up a larger portion of my time. Suzanne suggested that we go to see the film Happy Together at the Castro Theater one November evening in 1997; this movie about a deeply unhappy and dysfunctional gay male relationship appealed to our shared cynicism. We were both single. For my part, having turned 30 six months before, I assumed I would never have a relationship with anyone. I just didn’t seem to have the ability to make it happen, the ability to hold someone’s interest. All the people I was ever seriously interested in were quite elusive and held me at a distance. The people who liked me weren’t that appealing to me. I understood this, but had no clue how to break the pattern. It was my tendency to assume that all relationships were inherently fucked up and unstable, that perhaps I wasn’t missing out.

  At the same time, I hugged the knowledge to myself that Eileen and I were getting ever closer. We were hanging out more and more, and she had actually asked me over to her place to watch the lesbian-themed TV show Ellen a couple of times, which I saw as a huge mark of her approval. It was weird, the two of us alone in her small studio apartment at night; I’d sit on the loveseat while she perched on her single bed by the window. I noticed her looking at me in a more relaxed and yet focused way; I had her attention now. And wasn’t that all I really needed? I asked myself. She’d never tell me that she was interested in me. She’d been single for years, and wouldn’t take a chance with someone like me. Besides, I wasn’t her type. Her only previous lesbian relationship had been with an older woman in Nebraska, a runner, and someone who didn’t “do” depth, as Eileen used to say. I was all about depth, perhaps too much so. And I was all too aware of my baggage, much of which I had not yet shared with Eileen.

  Eileen had also started introducing me to her social group, which was quite separate from FrontRunners. There had been a strange episode recently at her friend Aiden’s house. Aiden was a close friend of hers whom I assumed was a gay man—he had a boyfriend. His roommate Timmy was another gay friend of Eileen’s, a slender, dark-haired guy whom I’d met at the Christmas party that I went to with Julie. I’d liked him: he’d been calm and friendly to me. They lived in an apartment near Duboce Park. Aiden and Timmy, though good friends, couldn’t have been more different: Aiden had been to music school; Eileen admired him. He and Eileen had written a children’s musical together called Wink, Eileen told me several times. He was bald with glasses and big soft eyes, Jewish, a sophisticated, intellectual type. Timmy was an earnest guy from Boston who was sweet and direct, had no artistic ambitions that I knew of ... and who held his own, wryly, amid these complicated, shifting friendships.

  We’d been hanging out in Aiden’s bedroom that day after a group of us had been invited to meet Eileen’s visiting aunt, who had left; we’d all had a few drinks. The party was winding down, but I wasn’t ready to leave yet. Eileen and I had been perched on Aiden’s bed. Somehow I ended up sitting on the floor beside Aiden while he was at his computer, tinkering around. I looked up at him, smiling, and he blurted out, “I can’t believe I haven’t had sex with you yet!”

  The fact that Eileen was in the room too helped smooth over the moment, though I was slightly jarred. I left Aiden and went to lie beside Eileen on Aiden’s large bed. We were all fully clothed, a little tipsy, and the mood was flirtatious in a low-key way. But I had no idea that it meant anything. Eileen told me later, once we’d started dating, that she’d had “filthy thoughts” about me while I relaxed beside her on the bed that afternoon. How very Catholic of her, I thought, flattered. Clearly, Aiden’s flirtatiousness toward me had only increased her own desires. The fuzzy boundaries of that day didn’t bother me at the time, and I didn’t wonder why Eileen was so comfortable on his bed. It was good that she didn’t detail the filthy thoughts, though—I might not have liked them. She was clever about that stuff, always knowing how to manage the moment.

  * * *

  That Saturday, before the movie with
Suzanne, Eileen and I had met up in North Beach. We’d gone to see a young Japanese classical violinist she liked perform a free show at Tower Records. I stood towards the back of the store, leafing through records as I listened, while Eileen, her face shining, stood near the musician as she played. “I went up to her afterwards and she hugged me!” Eileen babbled afterwards. I smiled. It was good to see her happy.

  And then we went for coffee nearby in a little Italian café, sharing a dessert—Eileen’s idea. The afternoon wound down, too fast, while I talked. I talked to her for the first time about my friendship with the straight couple, who were now shunning me. I found myself getting caught up in my story, laying bare my emotions to Eileen. I wanted Eileen to understand, somehow, what kind of person I was. This episode scared me still, showing me that I had few boundaries and that I could possibly have broken up a marriage—for after all, what was a marriage? I wasn’t sure. It was just two people who didn’t seem very happy or fulfilled together. How could I hold a marriage sacred if one partner seemed to invite me inside, while the other partner seemed to have no power or will to push me out? But what I really wanted to hear was that Eileen didn’t judge me for any of it.

  She rose magnificently to the occasion, telling me that it wasn’t my fault, for after all there were surely intimacy and commitment problems in the marriage, and I had just been an unwitting party to this troubled relationship, lured in. As she spoke gently and kindly to me, I tried to accept this not completely convincing notion of myself as an innocent. Eileen knew what she was talking about: She was worldly, wasn’t she? I felt comforted, at peace. But I had to meet Suzanne soon for a movie, I explained to Eileen, and I was worried that I didn’t have time to drop her home first. “I’ll drive you to the Castro, drop you off, and you can pick up the car from my place later!” Eileen suggested. It made sense—I could even walk to her apartment from the Castro.