It's Not You It's Me Read online

  Suzanne must have thought that I was in a strange mood that evening, oddly detached from her and indeed from the film, in which a gay Asian couple in Argentina go through round after round of passion, betrayal, and abandonment before their relationship ultimately disintegrates. We went for pizza afterwards. “I know I haven’t seen much of you lately,” Suzanne said with an embarrassed look. “I’ve been a bad friend.” I didn’t bother to acknowledge this. “I’ve been seeing a lot of Eileen,” I said. Then—and this was more difficult to admit, for some reason—I added, “We’ve gotten closer.” It was hard to keep the glee I was feeling out of my voice.

  Suzanne nodded and said something perfunctory, but I had sensed for a long time that she did not like Eileen much. It didn’t trouble me by this point. Perhaps it was because they were both raised Catholic in the Midwest and too similar, I speculated. Eileen seemed drawn to opposites: her best friend, Leila, was a Jewish writer; I was a literary type. I thought that I knew Eileen well by now, and nothing Suzanne could have said that evening would have carried any weight with me. And besides, I realized much later, Suzanne was not the kind of person to attempt to stop a disastrous relationship from occurring. She knew the social rules all too well: if you saw a friend was interested in someone, even if you disliked them, you were politely encouraging, that was all.

  The moonlit walk to Eileen’s neighborhood was a good release for me. I was nervous, and my mind wasn’t working well. I was at one of those turning points in my life where I knew something was going to happen but I couldn’t see ahead. Things were moving and shifting, and I couldn’t quite tell how. Perhaps I sensed, in some part of my brain, that the evening had been scripted by another, that Eileen was drawing me back to her for a Second Act. Weeks later, she would tell me that she thought of our afternoon together in North Beach as our first date, and I was always oddly bothered by that, for I hadn’t seen it that way.

  So there I was, buzzing at her front door, being let in to her musty-smelling apartment building. I climbed the stairs to ring at her apartment door; the cracked, flesh-colored paint must have been decades old, but worn-out stuff never bothered me. My heart was beating a little. I went in, and sat down on a plush chair that Eileen had set out for me in the middle of the room. I felt as if she’d put me in the spotlight; but immediately, as if to distract me, Eileen offered me alcohol. Vodka was all she had. She showed me an enormous plastic bottle of vodka and my eyebrows rose. How strange, so out of character! She explained that a heavy-drinking female friend who came to visit her from Nebraska had brought it. I was never one to refuse a drink, especially when I was nervous. We drank it on the rocks, sitting opposite each other with what seemed like a wide expanse of dingy carpet between us, though her living room was small, with a twin bed on one side by the window, and a piano against the opposite wall on top of which Eileen arranged tall votive candles in glass jars. How I wished, even then, that I could slow time, somehow savor this moment forever, because I loved being there with her, I loved the feeling of us slowly coming together.

  But nothing could stay unspoken like that between us two. There had to be a moment where Eileen pushed things to a conclusion. And so, numbed with alcohol, I said something stupidly flirtatious. “I’m often attracted to friends,” I found myself saying wildly. I was smiling, because she was looking at me so intently, and the alcohol was hitting my brain at just the right spot. We had been drinking for about an hour.

  “Are you attracted to me?” Eileen said very fast. I felt my face paling, my heart revving up. I wasn’t sure how to answer.

  “Because I’m attracted to you!” she announced.

  I couldn’t believe the directness of it. I gasped. Then, uncharacteristically, I found myself grinning with delight. Mentally, I was high-fiving myself. I’d done it! She’d said it! But it was still a shock. Eileen excused herself to go to the bathroom, leaving me to ponder what had just happened.

  Another, soberer voice was starting to kick in. Where would this lead? We couldn’t be a couple! We were too different. Perhaps the film that evening had hit home deeper than I’d thought. I knew instinctively right then that it wouldn’t work out for us, despite everything. And I hated myself for this knowledge, this self-doubt. This had always been my problem. I was often unable to act because I could see, down the line, the destructive possibility of every action. This should have been a happy moment of togetherness. When she came back I said to her anxiously, “But Eileen, you don’t see us as a couple, do you?”

  She looked unprepared for my question. Silenced.

  “I really value this friendship,” I continued shakily. “I would hate for the friendship to end, if things don’t work out.”

  At last she said, a little subdued, but with her usual warmth and charm, “You shouldn’t worry about that. Besides, I usually stay friends with my exes.”

  I wanted to believe her.

  We were both quite sober now, it seemed. And it was very late. She walked me to where she had parked my car, in an alley near her apartment. After a moment of awkwardness, we hugged. It was an intense hug, but I did not feel aroused by it. In the car, alone, I thought, again, “This won’t work.” Some ingredient was missing, but I was not experienced enough to know what it was. And after all, perhaps it was something in me. I trusted Eileen, that she meant what she said, that she truly cared about me, that she had hope for us. I saw all that, but could not see the same confidence and steadfastness in myself. What did she see in me, after all! I’d always had the sense that she was a good person, and I could not say this about myself. But the strange thing was, she seemed to admire my character in the same way I admired hers. I could not get my head around this. It seemed impossibly precarious. Love had always been destructive for me; it had always brought me down, face to face with my demons: possessiveness, jealousy, anger, and selfishness. I could not associate the darkness that had always accompanied love for me with the lightness and decency I saw in Eileen’s personality. What would it mean to be loved by someone like that? Would it be redeeming? Or would I fail, and be cast aside?

  * * *

  A couple of days later, I was on my way around to Eileen’s again. This time I felt wary, guarded, and distant. Anticipation was mixed with dread. We had not seen each other at all the day after we had declared our feelings, for Eileen had some public commitment to the running club she had to make. It had been a long two days. I hadn’t told anyone and I didn’t know what to do, but I kept clinging on to a childish hope that things would somehow turn out all right. She had said she was attracted to me.

  We greeted each other nervously. I sat down on her loveseat while she sat in the corner of her room. Each time we met, I mused to myself, we took different positions in the room. Perhaps this was like a chess game. But I didn’t know what to say or do, so I just sat there, waiting.

  At last Eileen asked me to come over and sit beside her. “You seem so far away!” she said with a laugh. I forced myself to get up and walk over to her. It shouldn’t be like this, I thought, difficult like this. But it seemed like I couldn’t refuse her request.

  We kissed, clumsily. None of the fireworks occurred that I’d felt with my one previous female lover, a few years before. It was awkward, just a physical gesture, but rather endearing.

  “Let’s lie down on the bed,” Eileen said, so we did. And once we were lying together on her twin bed, and I could feel the warmth of her body, and her face against mine, I stopped questioning so much. We just held each other that whole evening, and I remember saying to her, “I trust you.” “I trust you too,” she said. I liked the way she felt against me, her curly hair, the smoothness of her skin, the way she was actually very gentle and sweet once all her bravado was gone. And I liked the fact that she didn’t want to have sex immediately. It was reassuring that she wanted to proceed in a thoughtful, measured way.

  As we parted that evening, I felt that there was an “us” being created. A fragile, delicate kind of bond seemed to be forming, an
alliance between two people who really had very few things in common. Despite our friendship built up over the last year, I felt as if I didn’t know her yet, the private Eileen. But here she was, showing me in to her inner world. It felt thrilling to be allowed in when everyone else was kept at a distance. It must mean something, I thought. It must mean that this was meant to happen.

  We got together next for a dinner with my father, who had blown into town from the East Coast. He had divorced my mother when I was five, moved back to the States and remarried, and had been content to be a part-time father to me ever since. In recent years our meetings had been strained, so I wanted Eileen along with me for comfort. We met at a busy restaurant in North Beach where a jazz pianist played in the background. While my father talked in a grandiose fashion about his exploits in the deep South, where he had attended a Faulkner conference and—despite his marriage—romanced the local women, I just stared at him, feeling alienated. Eileen, at my side, kept a reassuring hand on my knee. This steadied me, made me feel loved and cared for. It seemed awfully bold, too, and I wondered at her: she was so confident and self-assured with my father, carrying on a glib, joky conversation, talking about her past as a journalist in Lincoln, Nebraska. My father seemed impressed. At one point he reached into his wallet and pulled out a photo of himself, his son, and adopted baby daughter. “My children!” he announced loudly. I was not among them.

  As we left the restaurant, Eileen made a point of walking over to the pianist and tipping him liberally. My father turned to me with a broad smile. “She’s great,” he said. I nodded. As we drove home in the car, Eileen gave her opinion on my dad. “He’s incredibly unlike you,” she remarked thoughtfully. “But I can see that he cares about you a lot!”

  I wondered how she had picked that up. Still tense from the evening, I wandered into her apartment. Eileen had obviously decided that since she had carried off the evening so well, she might as well continue her lucky streak. She put on a CD of Beethoven, her favorite classical musician. The futon was laid out on her floor. “I thought it would be more comfortable than my twin bed,” Eileen said self-consciously. Again, I felt a clutch of panic, and that strange sense of not being ready, not knowing what to do.

  As the loud, portentous chords of Beethoven swelled around us, we undressed awkwardly. There was no way of making this easy, I thought, but perhaps it would be all right. Once we were lying naked together, though, I simply felt more fear, more tension. It was almost unbearable. I was going through the motions and had broken out in a cold sweat. We rolled around uncomfortably, she unusually silent. What was she thinking? I wondered. Did she assume I was usually this bad in bed? We hadn’t had the presence of mind to talk about what we liked. Perhaps we’d both desperately hoped it would flow naturally between us.

  After we had lain still for a few moments, Eileen completely silent, I thought that I had better get up and go. I wanted to be alone, anyway, to try and make sense of all this. The thought had floated into my head that Eileen would realize it had all been a big mistake and wouldn’t want to see me again. She might call it off, I told myself, so be prepared for that. I dressed quickly and efficiently, wondering if Eileen was asleep.

  Finally she said, “Where are you going?”

  “Home,” I said awkwardly. “That didn’t really work, and … I thought you might want me to go.”

  “No, no,” she said. Her tone was unexpectedly gentle. “It’s not your fault; first times are always difficult.”

  I paused. She got up and began to make us a cup of tea. It touched me that she didn’t want me to go.

  Once we were sitting together in the kitchen, I joked, “I think it was the music. It wasn’t right,” and this was the way we carried it off. Eileen made it seem as if it was simply a hiccup, something to be expected between two people who didn’t know each other very well. It was a reassuring explanation, and I decided to accept it. It must be that. The idea that Eileen might prefer being passive in bed hadn’t really occurred to me. It didn’t seem to gel with who she was, the take-charge kind of person that she appeared to be. She explained that her ex had been dominant, and she’d got used to that. The breakup with her ex was explained vaguely: Things had just stopped working between them after six months. Always eager to give Eileen the benefit of the doubt, I hadn’t pressed for much detail, though it bothered me that she had never had a relationship that lasted longer than six months. (She even had a male ex now living in San Jose who she had also dated in Nebraska, for about six months, and whom she could never mention without a slight curl of her lip. He was the first person she’d ever had sex with, she informed me, but any warm feelings she’d ever felt for him had certainly dissipated. Despite her “I usually stay friends with my exes” line, I never met him.)

  Besides, we were a very different couple, weren’t we? We had all sorts of stuff to talk about, philosophical ideas we had in common, and values that we shared. Her ex sounded pleasant, but dull. Eileen was always talking about how interesting I was and seemed so eager to see me. Everything she said made me feel hopeful about our future, so I decided to give it a little more time.

  * * *

  Eileen once told me she had been named after her aunt Eileen, her father’s sister, an Irish Catholic who was a gifted piano player from childhood on, but who hated to play piano! She told this anecdote in a rueful tone of voice. “I can’t imagine that, hating what you do best,” I said.

  “I can imagine it all too well,” Eileen said with a sigh.

  In the years that followed, I had to wonder if she had been thinking about the way she performed in bed when she made that seemingly random statement about her aunt. There was something strange about our sex life as we continued to see each other. Now things had become incredibly fulfilling, for Eileen had figured out what I wanted and was setting about trying to give it to me. While she was amazingly skilled, I felt guilty at being the object of her attention. It seemed that she was not a particularly sensual lover, but enjoyed technique. For my part, the sensuality that I’d shared with my ex-girlfriend was not very exciting to Eileen, and I couldn’t figure out how to please her. It seemed that everything I did was slightly wrong, but it seemed that everything she did was increasingly wonderful. Her long fingers, as they slipped inside me, seemed to tease out unknown levels of pleasure. “Oh … perfect, perfect,” I groaned as I came. It astonished both of us how quickly I orgasmed. “You’re an orgasm machine,” Eileen used to say in a tone of wonderment. I did not like being compared to a machine, for I knew that some women had multiple orgasms. I just hadn’t known before this that I was one of them. The joy in exploration was a little dimmed by the fact that our sexual encounters were so one-sided. Eileen kept reassuring me that this was fine, but I didn’t see how it could be fine, in the long run.

  That December, the movie Titanic was playing. I prevailed upon Eileen to go with me, hoping that seeing a nice, long, romantic movie together would be a good break from her mother, who was staying for Christmas and who seemed to bristle at the sight of me. It didn’t help, perhaps, that Eileen acted like a puppy-dog around me, hugging me and stroking my hair at any opportunity. When we met up for Titanic, though, Eileen was distracted and spacey. She got into these moods, and I was never sure what they meant. We held hands in the cinema, but after a while it seemed so awkward that I slipped my hand out of hers.

  In the car afterwards I kissed her with real passion and intensity, for I had begun to feel as if I was not seeing enough of her. She didn’t have a car, so it was hard for her to come to my place by public transit, and she never made the effort, preferring me to come to hers. While her mother was staying, we had barely slept together.

  Eileen made some feeble movements with her tongue. Finally I backed off, getting the message that she was not enjoying it.

  “You know,” she said, searching for words, “I … don’t like kissing.”

  Don’t like kissing?? I stared at her in shock. Could she really mean it?

&nbs
p; “I thought everybody liked kissing!” I said with a laugh. It didn’t receive much response.

  I started the car and we drove off towards her place. I felt exhausted suddenly, and the terrible thought occurred to me that I was wasting my time. She was pulling away from me, and my first reaction was always to pursue. But maybe there just wasn’t enough there, I thought. Her mother’s unfriendliness had shaken me. Eileen had said that her mother was OK with her daughter’s sexuality in the past, that she had even liked Eileen’s ex, so what could be the problem except a very personal dislike of me? It was disturbing, too, that I felt merely tolerated by her friends. Her closest male friends, Timmy and Aiden, were fine; they seemed to even approve of our relationship. But two of her women friends, including her best friend, Leila, were poisonously cold and mean. It wasn’t fair, I thought, for Eileen kept telling me what a good thing I was in her life. Shouldn’t her friends be glad she was happy? But it was true that Eileen inspired great devotion in her friends and I guessed that both of those women had wanted to be in my place.

  Ironically, my friend Suzanne had begun dating Leila! This presented complications, for now Suzanne was present at every social gathering, and yet I felt I could not tell Suzanne much about our relationship, as it would undoubtedly be relayed to her girlfriend. One of the unwelcome things that Suzanne told me, though, was that Leila had been in love with Eileen for a long time, and had suggested that they begin a relationship at one point. Eileen had mentioned something about this, but she had minimized it, made it sound as if it was simply a crush that had been deflected neatly into a friendship. What Suzanne said made it sound more serious and more ominous. I treated Leila with extreme caution after that, and Eileen seemed peeved that I didn’t make an effort to be friendly and gracious to her. Was that my role? Well, it seemed that I was failing in my role more consistently as Christmas passed and the New Year began. Yet a photo taken of us in Leila’s apartment on New Year’s Eve shows two women who seem very much in love. Eileen is putting her head against mine, a warm smile on her face, while I’m beaming in a childlike, trusting fashion. Life was still pretty good.