Love Sick Read online

  • • •

  It was the infancy of the ’70s, the Age of Aquarius, an era of pop loyalty that promised we could be there for each other with songs like “You’ve Got a Friend,” “Bridge Over Troubled Water,” “I Don’t Know How to Love Him,” and “With a Little Help from My Friends.”

  • • •

  It’s a Saturday night when I call Will not just to reminisce but to ask, after all these years, who we were and what happened to us. “Why did you like me?” I ask him as I settle into my pillows and my dog settles against me. After forty-nine years I’m not particularly surprised that he is as askance that I liked him as I am for being liked.

  “Well, you. Then your mom.” Will is a scientist, a well-known endocrinology researcher. He takes his time in responding to the question, careful to answer in an organized and factored way. “Then your house.* The ditch.* Your father was always home, reading, and I was terrified by him but I also felt accepted by him, almost appreciated. You know, as a misfit. Like he thought, That Willy is the perfect companion for Francie.”

  “Were you ever in love with me?” I ask. This question is a huge risk. I gave him seven years of my young life and this might be the first time I’ve broached the subject with him. “You know,” I hurry on, “in that crushy way.”

  Tomorrow Will turns fifty-five years old. I want to celebrate his once having had a crush on me.

  “Oh, no-o-o,” he says. “You were much too important to me to have a crush on.”

  Good answer, Will.

  “Did I ever hurt you?” he asks. My eyebrows shoot up. I’m the one trying to reconstruct the best and most ruinous relationship of my life, the one that helped set me up for the purgatory of not just spinsterhood but deep longing for a friend.

  “Uh, yeah,” I say, like, duh, Bullwinkle.

  “Really?” he asks sharply and curiously.

  Actually he administered three deathblows to my heart, but I tell him about the one that exemplified best how he could plunge me into mourning.

  First, though, you have to know that when Will and I went to public high school, drift was inevitable and, on his part, desirable. Although we’d had different homerooms from fourth through seventh grades, we were in the same by-subject classes, cheek-by-jowl through the Goths and Vandals, predicate nouns and Confirmation instruction. In high school, our schedules were different. Electives separated us further. He was making friends in his choices of Spanish and chemistry, and I was failing Russian Novels and German. We were both thespians—along with Kevin, who Will remembers fondly*—but Will was by far the more successful of us. He was funny, evil, musical. I was so serious about acting that I could only do tragedy. Will got leads and won prizes. I did not. He was in choir and the select singing groups and edited the newspaper.* He got As, and his cadre of tiny, petite girls with long blonde hair and great tits depleted whatever hope I was managing to hang on to in those awful years. Their physical attributes were beyond what any diet could ever endow me with. Among all of his minions, it was Kat who became his New Best Friend.

  I made five-minute friends and was unsatisfied because they weren’t Will, couldn’t make me laugh or think or try the way he did. Had our yearbook had captions under our graduation pictures, mine would have been “Most Depressed and Best Underachiever.”

  Still, Will didn’t quite let go. He might show up with Kat to give her a tour of my house or we’d go to the occasional movie together. Kat and I became uneasy friends. She was the first woman I could really talk to about books and writing and music, but she was tiny and sexually precocious and I felt like a bumbling Macy’s parade cartoon next to her. We are still uneasy friends, spending at least as much time not speaking to each other as being the best of pals.

  One of those times Will sought me out was an evening in our last year of high school. We headed to the basement, as we always did. My father had installed an old slot machine and a professional-quality pool table that we mostly used to zoom the balls around without bothering with cues or any desire to sink them. The pool balls were like worry beads, and I was worrying mightily as Will sat and slowly pedaled on the stationary bike and explained a few things.

  “I’m gay, France.”

  Silence except for the soft banking of a pool ball.

  “I like guys.”

  “But you hang out with girls.”

  “But I don’t want to fuck them.”

  “You’re always talking about how beautiful and sexy Kat is.”

  “That’s because she is. She’s the most beautiful girl I know.”

  “Does she know you’re gay?”

  “Of course.”

  I could taste the bile on the back of my tongue.

  “Why would you want to fuck a guy?” I tried to imagine what this entailed. The only thing I could conjure up was two men rubbing the tips of their penises together in imitation of the missionary position, which was the only sexual configuration I’d figured out. The Godfather didn’t have any queer killers and I was too heavy to absorb the scenes of Sonny Corleone fucking a woman against a wall.

  “I don’t know. I just do.”

  “Who do you want to fuck?”

  “No one.”*

  “I don’t get it,” I said. “I think it’s weird.”

  “We’re thespians, France. Who do you think likes to act? You’ve known other guys who’ve come out. It’s not like I’m the first.”

  “Yeah, but you’re you.” The boy I, by then, dreamed about the missionary position with, about touching me. The boy I looked at and really did quiver as my nipples hardened.

  On his way out, he hugged my mother good-bye with tears in his eyes. “I love you, Will,” she said, and he swiped his arm across his face. “Thank you, Mrs. Kuffel. I love you, too.”

  One more betrayal, I thought. My mother was wondering if he would take me to the prom—and he was gay. On top of that, I hadn’t known it in the twelve years since I pushed his head into the drinking fountain. A pile of betrayal.

  And then in the summer between our freshman and sophomore years in college, Will, Kat, and Lawrence, another friend from high school, all worked at Mario’s, where Missoula ate its first manicotti. Will was studying piano in Arizona. Kat was a precocious poet at the University of Montana, and Lawrence was going to college in Chicago.

  Had anyone asked, I would have said I was the same Francie Kuffel all of them had known for years. Sad, ponderous, alienated. I had made one change, though. That summer I took a course from a professor whom our high school honors English teacher had spoken of as the most brilliant teacher of Shakespeare who never gave As. I’d tucked that sentence away as a silent challenge and got an A in the junior-level study of tragedies.

  That A was my talisman against the bullshit of high school and the accomplishments and independence of my friends. They would have been impressed by that A for approximately one second before turning the conversation back to whoever they were having—or wanted to have—sex with and whatever other topics thin kids talked about. But I had begun to strike back.

  One night, out of the blue, Mary called. Mary was a year younger than Kat, Will and I, and had spent her senior year as an exchange student in Japan. She wanted to reconnect with old friends. “Would you give me a ride over to Mario’s?” she asked.

  My heart sank so quickly that she could have heard it over the phone if she’d known what the noise was. It was one of those moments when you know you’re agreeing to a bad idea. I had seen very little of Will and Kat that summer. He was working a couple of jobs to supplement his music scholarship in Arizona and she was living with a guy in the MFA program. I was in summer school and therapy, where we talked a lot about Will and Kat and agreed it was best not to see them much. When I did, on occasion, join them for a gin and tonic at the dark red-lit gay bar called the Flame, they were full of plans to move to New York City as soon as pos
sible, talking about Keith Jarrett and Robert Altman and Bartók, smug with the esoteric pleasures of Kat’s graduate school friends and their parties. Behind, it seemed, in everything except Hamlet, I could keep up only with what could be bought or explained, as Will did when he played me the Concerto for Orchestra and pointed out the section in the intermezzo in which the violins take up the melody only to be laughed down, honkingly, by the horns. “That’s you, France.” I looked at him and didn’t dare ask if I was the violins or the snickering brass.

  Unable to say no to Mary, I drove over and picked her up. She was excited to see everyone and I hung back, near the door, silent and lumbering and ashamed. Lawrence called me the next day and admitted that after we left, Will turned to Kat and said, “That was Francie trying to prove she has other friends,” at which Kat smirked and probably went back to jiggling her boobs for extra tips.

  Never has anyone fallen out of love faster. It was the last truth that broke the camel’s back. Like the Bartók horns, he truly disdained me. There was so much of Will I wanted, vampire-like, to absorb and be. He held the future in his skills and lack of family connection. The little I had was the past or pointless—that A in Shakespeare, my bedroom that looked out over the old willow trees swaying like the Oregon ocean, my therapist, my family’s house on Flathead Lake. They were small, now, offering very little toward adulthood. He was excited to grow up and I was afraid. He had left me behind long ago and I didn’t know it had happened until that night when he held up a mirror to me and I saw nothing but the restaurant door in its reflection.

  I didn’t speak to Will for the next ten years. I didn’t need to. His words were the judge’s gavel. His words followed me back to school. I failed a poetry workshop that fall because I was so frozen I couldn’t withdraw, and too frozen by Kat’s presence in it to attend. I went to school in London the following winter and there began to put the ghosts behind me. I watched Vladimir Ashkenazy’s hands blur through a performance and could see that there was more to Bartók than the Concerto for Orchestra, more to the piano than Will. I made friends with the students in my study program and traveled and went to the ballet with them. When I returned to Missoula, Kat and Will had moved to New York. A little battered, friendless after being abroad for a year, I could make my start on life.*

  • • •

  Will is appalled at the story. He has a lovely quality of forgiving and forgetting. I laugh and say, “I’m al-l-l about revenge. I never forget and I rarely forgive.” He is silent in a way that asks what I’m planning to do to punish him for that night thirty-five years ago when he confirmed everything I feared most about myself. I laugh. “Don’t worry, honey. You fall into the category of rare forgiveness. And anyway, I came to understand a long time ago that when we were kids I wanted to be you and you wanted to be me and neither of us could forgive each other for that.”

  “Mmm. Maybe. I definitely wanted to be a Kuffel but you were part of the package. It wouldn’t have been any fun without you.”

  At which I begin to cry.

  • • •

  Unwittingly, Will and I settled on a ten-year plan in which once a decade we would try to be friends. It took a couple of trial runs to get it right. Therapy helped. Achievement helped. He became a doctor, I became a literary agent; his research led to a vast amount of publication and international seminars, I began to write in earnest. When I published my first book, before Will and I reestablished contact, I thought to myself, Well, Ames, we’re even. You’ve spent your life working on diabetes and I’m touching a lot of lives that are prone to it.

  Not surprisingly, the confidence of Passing for Thin prodded me to find his email address and wish him a happy birthday after not speaking for twenty-nine years.

  “There isn’t a day that goes by that I don’t hear your voice,” he wrote back. “I’ll hear you on my deathbed.”

  • • •

  Will Ames was the first boy and the first man I was in love with. It lasted eight years and is in many ways the template for all of the other important crushes and love affairs I’ve had. It wasn’t until my mid-forties, when I was in a normal-sized body, that admitting to having feelings for a man didn’t take months of therapy and, usually, having to get drunk. That was also when I began to date and, for a few months at a time, have boyfriends. In the five years of knowing Dar I had gained a lot of weight back but had not lost all of my hard-found ability to openly want to be with a man. I didn’t learn that skill from Will, but the outcome of it has been weirdly similar. Men love to talk to me. Sometimes they fall in love with me. They always fall out of love with me and then dance fast and long to keep me as a friend.

  Dar had gone from the amazed first conversations to dancing. He’d simply skipped the middle part.

  • • •

  In two things, I am very lucky.

  I am tenacious. I can struggle inwardly with my feelings and wait forever for the object of them to come to his senses and realize he has them, too. When he doesn’t—and in my experience, no one ever has—I’ve perfected the waiting game well enough to survive the inevitable bomb of the truth.

  And I never forget. Will and I picked up at exactly the moment before things went wildly out of balance. My brother comments that he always knows when I’ve talked to Will because for the next several hours, my eyes dance, I am animated and kind of silly, my ghosts of loneliness and fear drop away. Will is my human equivalent to an antianxiety drug. As is Kevin, whom I depend on as I try to figure out where it all went wrong with Dar.

  “It’s because I’ve gained so much weight,” I say.

  “I thought you looked great,” Kevin says. “You couldn’t have gained ugliness in the weeks between Seattle and Santa Fe.”

  “It’s because I’m stupid about music.”

  “No. You’re stupid about the music he knows about and you don’t.”

  “If I spoke Spanish and knew how to scuba dive—”

  “—or you sprouted wings and could fly. How ’bout that, Tinker Bell?”

  “Tinker Bell was pretty uptight, too,” I remind him. “Dar thinks I’m tense.”

  “Try intense. You don’t let people off the hook very easily.”

  “I’m sorry.” I backtrack immediately. “How have I hooked you?”

  “I dunno but you have. I’ve never told anyone the things I’ve told you. I think it’s because nothing shocks you. I trust you because of that. No one takes pictures of me, and you were snapping away down on the piers and I was mugging like America’s Next Top Model. You just do that.”

  “It’s because I love you,” I say. “I talked to you and fell in love and then I saw you and I fell more in love. You can’t do anything to make me change that. Even taking a bad picture doesn’t make me not love you.” I laugh. I can understand why Kevin Willoughby, the Cutest Boy in High School, is sensitive about having a camera aimed at him.

  “It’s because you love me more than your baggage”—a standing joke he has. “It’s because you love my baggage.”

  “I loved Dar when his baggage was all over my floor,” I wail.

  “That wasn’t his baggage, honey. That was his bags. He was high on crack but the real question is why was he high on crack?”

  I can only think of generalities. He was, I tell Will, who actually met him, unsatisfied with his life. He had been deeply satisfied teaching grade schoolers and building houses in Nicaragua. Coming back to work in IT in New York must have felt empty and pointless. He hadn’t felt that way when he and his wife moved to New York after school, but signing on with that nonprofit had redefined him.

  “Uh, France?” Will says when I end my rant. “Have you thought about the word ‘wife’?”

  Will and Kevin, being gay, don’t date in a world where everyone our age has been divorced. They’ve had serious relationships that involved custody of dogs and KitchenAid mixers when they ended, but I’ve alm
ost stopped thinking about past marriages. Divorce is like bronchitis: At some point everybody’s had it.

  Except me, of course. I spent the better part of fifty years hiding behind being guys’ best pal, having no faith they could love me. So what do I know, really?

  “Who divorced whom?” Will asks.

  “She did.”

  “Was it bitter?”

  “I don’t know. Dar kinda makes it sound like a childish mistake.”

  “He’s only forty, France. If he was divorced for a couple of years before he met you, they were children.”

  “They were college sweethearts,” I tell him.

  “Don’t you think you’d better move on?” he asks.

  I sigh. “Kevin says the same thing. ‘You don’t have to sit around like you weigh 300 pounds anymore,’” I mimic. “Except I more or less do.”

  “I’ve always thought you were pretty.”

  “Right,” I snort. “That’s why you ignored me for Kat and all the cool girls.”

  “I didn’t say I thought you had great tits, France. I said I think you’re pretty. And a lot more. You don’t have to sit around being all depressed about Dar. Go get over him.”

  “What’s the point? I’m fifty-three.”

  “Fifty-three is the new thirty-three.”

  “Yeah, you can say that. You’re still fifty-two.”

  He chuckles his evil, smug chuckle, but the days are getting longer—June and fifty-three are coming his way.

  “I’m tired of men,” I whine. “I have Daisy. I want to move to Seattle. I want to write a novel.”

  “So write about dating,” Dr. Will says. “You write about everything else you do.”

  • • •

  I call Kevin a few hours later. “Who was the first guy you were really, really in love with?”

  “Greg Alexander,” he answers promptly. They were in the same class in high school, were in choir together and hung out for a while in the same gonzo group of snow-heads and guests at a rich friend’s Georgetown Lake cabin where there was plenty of pot, beer and acid. Greg cleaned up when he decided to take over Sentinel High School government, and he and Kevin saw less of each other after that, and although they have spoken about the big events in their adult lives, Kevin has never told Greg how he felt. “In fact,” he adds, “I’ve never told anyone about Greg, but oh my God, I think about him every day.”