If You Knew Then What I Know Now (18 page)

 

Kim and I had been best friends for five years, since our freshman year of college. After I graduated a year ahead of her, I moved to Chicago. A year after that move, one weekend when she was visiting, I came out to her—she was the first person to ever hear me say, “I am gay.” When I told her, we were standing in a gay bar. In the
women's
restroom of the gay bar—a bar we'd been to several times before that night. In this private bathroom, giant mirrors stood all around us with their backs against the walls; as I told Kim what I had to tell her, I watched our dim and infinite reflections do exactly what we were doing. Before finally speaking those words, I had known I was gay but wasn't ready to admit it. Before that, I knew I was gay but made myself date girls because I didn't want to be. Before that, for almost all of my teenage years, I thought I might be gay and was afraid, so I prayed every night for it to be taken away. And before that, I didn't know I was gay, but I knew I was different, and I didn't want to be that either.

At the time, when I had to offer a reason for picking up and moving to Chicago with some savings, my car and two splitting
boxes crammed too full of books, I said I wanted to live in a big city. Only later would I see it more precisely as looking for a place big enough to get lost in, with space to figure out if I wanted to allow myself to be honest. Coming from the Missouri suburbs, Chicago felt limitless—the way it probably feels for any twenty-two-year-old looking for something. Even so, those possibilities felt private and singular, like finding something everybody else had overlooked—a quarter waiting and shining right there on the sidewalk.

“Oh my God,” was Kim's reaction in that bathroom, dance floor music thumping through the door. Even in a gay bar, the news that your best friend is gay can come as a surprise. A cigarette burned between her fingers, she leaned against the tiled counter. Her round face turned pink. “Why didn't you ever tell me before?”

“I haven't been keeping it from you,” I said. “I'm still figuring it out myself.”

Despite all evidence to the contrary—because I'd spent so long denying I was gay, she believed me because that was her job.
If I could tell anyone I could tell her
was the thinking, and not just because she was my best friend, but because she was also a friend to all gay men, it seemed.
Every
other man she knew was gay. She learned how to smoke, drink, dance and make fake IDs from the gay hustlers she'd hung out with since high school.

Besides the surprise she felt, she also knew that I needed her. So twenty days later, she drove 300 miles to Chicago with
her own car full of boxes, piled them on the floor of my studio, and we waited together for the lease to begin at our new two-bedroom apartment.

At the beginning, Rufus hated me. He hid whenever I walked in the front door, darting off and hovering behind those heavy seaweed leaves. It didn't even seem possible to hide in a goldfish bowl—a place where everything is out in the open—but he found the way. Though he never hid from Kim. “Even my goldfish doesn't want to look at me,” I'd complain, slumping next to her on the sofa, mostly joking. She was single too, and we spent our entire weekends drinking whiskey, searching for men.

“Maybe it's your voice,” she said. We would have been uncorking red wine, a movie playing on TV though we'd talk through the whole thing, eating something covered in cheese.

“I don't think goldfish have ears.”

“Well, it's just your presence then. You probably make him nervous.” And with my photocopied, spreadsheet grocery lists, meal calendars and rules about ashtrays and coasters, I made more than just Rufus nervous. You know you live in a smothering routine when an idea like, “Let's get a goldfish!” sounds exciting.

Every time he hid, I thought about his view of things from in there. Even if he did have ears, I imagined his bowl as completely silent—scary and muffled like sitting at the bottom of a swimming pool. And how strange to see
us
in his water—
which must have looked to him the same as the glass that held it, which also must have looked the same as the air surrounding it, the air that Kim and I moved through. Did he think all of us were underwater, part of the same big thing? There was probably clear separation, an
in here
and
out there,
but there wasn't any visible boundary—sort of an edge to feel but never see.

The only time he didn't hide from me was in the morning when I fed him, and it was my favorite time to watch him. After opening the curtains in the front window, I uncapped the small can of fish food and pinched some between my fingers. I'd let them spring open over the bowl and watch the clump of flakes fall; yellow, brown, and orange, the thin bits of food exploded over the surface, covering the whole bare face of the water as he ascended. His white mouth closed over the bits, his orange body wiggling and twisting as the food soaked around him, and sank.

 

Every Friday night, Kim and I went to our bar, the one where I came out, and drank and danced. Every Friday night. The bouncer hugged Kim at the door whenever we arrived. I had a crush on the guy named Joe who checked coats, whom we called Coat Check Joe, and every week, she and I shared in the anticipation of my seeing him again. He didn't know my name, but he pretended he was excited and kissed my cheek with his whiskery face, and that was all it took to love him. Being regulars there, as well as at our Thursday and Saturday places, made us feel as though we belonged to something.

But being such regular regulars also got boring, and even we, roommates and best friends since college, would run out of things to talk about. That's what happened one Friday night in April, about a month after the arrival of Rufus. In the dark back room with the pool table, we sat side by side on a bench, rattling ice in empty glasses.

“What should we do tomorrow?” one of us asked.

The other one shrugged. “I don't know.”

We sat, looked at people, rattled ice again, tipped back glasses for one more watery sip, looked around again, pointed at someone's ugly shirt, sighed.

“Another drink?” I said, hopping up.

“Sure.”

I bumped my way through the crowd of men. It had been ten months since I'd come out of the closet, and I'd dated, but nothing serious. Sometimes I felt too immature to date. Because I'd spent my teenage years pretending and denying, I'd missed out on melodrama and note-passing, first kisses with braces and school dance jealousies. So now I was twenty-three and unable to talk to attractive men without blushing, giggling, or touching my face a lot and looking at the floor. The only way I ever met men was because Kim could talk to anyone, and often did.

The bartender made two whiskey and cokes without me even ordering, and I threw down exact change. As I headed back to Kim, I saw him: about my height with uncombed dark hair, huge brown eyes and a lopsided smile, wearing a red and
white striped Polo shirt. One thin hand was lifted, and it pushed back the front of his hair as if he posed for something. He was talking to a man next to him, and I was glad because I was very obviously staring. It was love at first sight, though I wouldn't ever tell him.

“I just saw the cutest guy,” I said, when I handed Kim her drink. “He looks like Rufus Wainwright.” I sat and sipped and thought. “Oh my God. What if it
is
Rufus Wainwright?”

“Rufus Wainwright is not at this bar,” she said, stirring.

Suddenly this dream guy was walking toward us, the way it's supposed to happen in love stories. Coincidentally, his roommate was a guy we'd talked to a few weeks before, so they both came up, and the beautiful one sat beside me. He and his roommate were also best friends and had also just moved to Chicago, and we were all the same age. His name was Geoffrey, spelled the cute way.

“Do you know who Rufus Wainwright is?” I asked him.

“No,” he said.

“Well, he's this singer I like, I named my goldfish after him. You look like him. Or he looks like you.”

“You have a goldfish?”

“Yeah. Well, it's ours,” I said, swinging my head toward Kim, who was talking to the roommate. “Ours together.”

A month later, Geoffrey told Kim that he liked me, and she told me. Then I told him that I liked him back, and we started dating. It seemed perfect, maybe even fateful—dating a
man who looked like a man I loved enough to give his name to a fish. A couple of years later, I would tell Geoffrey how that first memory was so embedded in my head that it was as though him standing there with his hand on his hair was a photograph I could hold up whenever I wanted. I knew right where he was in the bar, I told him, what he was wearing, and doing.

“I don't remember any of that,” he said. “What shirt did I have on?”

“The white one with the red stripes. And the collar. You never wear it anymore.”

He thought a minute. “I've never owned a shirt like that.”

 

From the beginning, Rufus liked Geoffrey, who liked Rufus, always calling the fish by his own nickname, “Pretty,” while he would stand by the glass bowl and dip his fingertips just inside the water. Rufus climbed to the top and nibbled.

“Look. He's kissing my fingers,” Geoffrey said.

“Because he thinks it's food,” I said.

“No, it's kissing.”

After only a few weeks, I rarely slept alone. Geoffrey slept in my bed half the time in the apartment I shared with Kim, and the other half, we slept in his bed across town. Kim was supposed to remember to feed Rufus on those mornings, but rarely did. When Geoffrey and I slept, I clung to him the way you do only early in love when the comfort of that other body is better than the comfort of actually sleeping. Later, I would
announce a “no touching” rule because living, breathing skin against my skin kept me awake. But that was later. In those touching-and-sleeping days, after a few weeks, I knew this was the first time I would be in love.

Kim started watching TV more often, and grocery shopping and making dinner alone, and spending nights on her own at the laundromat because I did laundry in Geoffrey's neighborhood. She talked long-distance to friends in other cities, and stuffed unpaid bills into a shoebox she kept under her bed. When Geoffrey slept over, in the morning when all of us had to get ready for work in that small, foggy bathroom, there was a lot of door slamming.

One weekend, Geoffrey was out of town and Kim and I watched movies in our apartment and drank whiskey. We made egg rolls, played board games, painted our toenails. I waited for one of us to say, “This is just like old times.” We kept drinking whiskey, and talking and snacking, and then she said that as close as we were, there was something that she'd never told me.

“What?” I said. My spine was a hard straight line on the couch, she was perched on a nest of pillows on the carpet in front of me, legs crossed. Water filled to her eye rims.

“If you don't know, then I don't want to tell you.”

“What are you talking about?” I kept on asking until our glasses were empty and she got up to make refills. The next morning she said, “I don't remember that at all.” And though I might have guessed what she wanted to tell me but couldn't
let herself, it was easier to do what she was doing, and forget. It was in those days that I thought the size of a goldfish was determined by the size of the bowl it lived in. I said to Kim, Geoffrey, and anyone else that Rufus knew how much to grow, that somehow a goldfish's body only grew as large as their vessel could contain. I'd later learn that the size of goldfish is determined instead by the surface area of the water, by how much water is exposed to the air. I'd also find out that a group of goldfish is known as a troubling.

 

Months later, when I got home from work one evening, Kim and Geoffrey sat on the front porch smoking, sharing an ashtray. She'd been waiting for me so she could tell us something. “So I've made a decision,” she announced. “I'm moving back to Missouri.” I thought she meant at the end of the school year; she was a teacher. “I'm going next week,” she said. That day, she'd turned in a letter of resignation to her principal; her grandmother had died and she was shouldered with taking care of her frail grandpa, now alone. It was a lie.

“Oh,” I said. I didn't ask why.

She spent the next couple of days packing, taking only what she could fit in her car—the same way we'd both arrived to the city she was now leaving. Her suitcase would be stuffed so full of clothes that she'd call me into her room to help her zip it. I kneed the bulk down, pulled together the rows of teeth, and yanked on the slippery key. She took some of her
board games, and some of her kitchen stuff and some of her CDs, the important ones she'd need for the seven-hour drive, some of her movies and books. The rest, she said, would have to wait until later. She didn't ask about Rufus, and I hoped she wouldn't because I didn't want her to take him. He was our fish but he should stay here, in this apartment in Chicago.

But before the packing, on the night of her porch announcement, the three of us made dinner, drank wine, and watched something boring on TV. We didn't talk about anything. Then we went to bed, Kim to her room, Geoffrey and me to mine. In the dark, I slid under the blankets and fell on him, my mouth open over the arch of his collarbone, and I sobbed silently so she wouldn't hear me through our thin common wall. “Am I a bad friend? What did I do?” I whispered over and over, and he held me. A month and a half later he moved in. We bought a new green sofa, a lamp, a two-gallon glass jar for Rufus to replace his small round bowl, and a $15 sack of polished river stones to tile his floor instead of his brown gravel. I put the old bowl in a closet and eventually, Geoffrey carried it out to the alley. We didn't know what else to do with it; a goldfish bowl is one of those things that you don't ever need more than one of.