And here I’ve gone and done to Evelyn what so many people have done to me.
Her love affair with a woman signaled to me that she was gay, and I did not wait for her to tell me she was bisexual.
This is her whole point, isn’t it? This is why she wants to be so acutely understood, with such perfect word choices. Because she wants to be seen exactly as she truly is, with all the nuance and shades of gray. The same way I have wanted to be seen.
So this is my fuckup. I just fucked up. And despite my desire to blow past it or to reduce it to nothing, I know the stronger move here is to apologize.
“I’m sorry,” I say. “You’re absolutely right. I should have asked you how you identify instead of assuming I knew. So let me try again. Are you prepared to come out, in the pages of this book, as a bisexual woman?”
“Yes,” she says, nodding. “Yes, I am.” Evelyn seems pleased with my apology, if not still slightly indignant. But we are back in bus
iness.
“And how exactly did you figure it out?” I ask. “That you loved her? After all, you could have found out she was interested in women and just as easily not realized you were interested in her.”
“Well, it helped that my husband was upstairs cheating on me. Because I was sickeningly jealous on both accounts. I was jealous when I found out Celia was gay, because it meant that she was with other women, or had been with other women, that her life wasn’t just me. And I was jealous that my husband was with a woman upstairs at the very party I was at, because it was embarrassing and threatened my way of life. I had been living in this world where I thought I could have this closeness with Celia and this distance with Don and neither of them would need anything else from anyone else. It was this odd bubble that just up and burst.”
“I would imagine, back then, it wasn’t a conclusion you’d come to easily—being in love with someone of the same sex.”
“Of course not! Maybe if I’d spent my whole life fighting off feelings for women, then I might have had a template for it. But I didn’t. I was taught to like men, and I had found—albeit temporarily—love and lust with a man. The fact that I wanted to be around Celia all the time, the fact that I cared about her enough that I valued her happiness over my own, the fact that I liked to think about that moment when she stood in front of me without her shirt on—now, you put those pieces together, and you say, one plus one equals I’m in love with a woman. But back then, at least for me, I didn’t have that equation. And if you don’t even realize that there’s a formula to be working with, how the hell are you supposed to find the answer?”
She goes on. “I thought I finally had a friendship with a woman. And I thought my marriage was down the tubes because my husband was an asshole. And by the way, both those things were true. They just weren’t the whole truth.”
“So what did you do?”
“At the party?”
“Yeah, who did you go to first?”
“Well,” Evelyn says, “one of them came to me.”
RUBY LEFT ME THERE, NEXT to the dryer, with an empty cocktail glass in my hand.
I needed to go back to the party. But I stood there, frozen, thinking, Get out of here. I just couldn’t turn the doorknob. And then the door opened on its own. Celia. The raucous, bright-lit party behind her.
“Evelyn, what are you doing?”
“How did you find me?”
“I ran into Ruby, and she said I could find you drinking in the laundry room. I thought it was a euphemism.”
“It wasn’t.”
“I can see that.”
“Do you sleep with women?” I asked.
Celia, shocked, shut the door behind her. “What are you talking about?”
“Ruby says you’re a lesbian.”
Celia looked over my shoulder. “Who cares what Ruby says?”
“Are you?”
“Are you going to stop being friends with me now? Is that what this is about?”
“No,” I said, shaking my head. “Of course not. I would . . . never do that. I would never.”
