Monday, April 03, 2006
On Being Bisexual (Pt.3)
One thing I need to mention about E was that he had a weight problem before we met. He was quite huge. Then he went on a diet and took charge, and lost a lot of weight. When I met him, he looked pretty good. Still big, but in an acceptable way. I mention this because the weight loss made changes in his head. He started to look around and see that people would be attracted to him. And he would be attracted to them. It probably reworked his thinking about his wife, D. Not that he was a total philanderer at this point, but it gave him new ideas.
When they first hooked up, E and D went looking for another couple just like them, a bisexual couple. They quickly discovered such a item does not grow on every tree. That's when they started exploring individually.
It was not until they moved to the south of France to live, around 1971, that E and I finally ended up in the sack. We had come close before, his wife D had nearly interrupted us one afternoon by coming home earlier. She had no problems with me diddling her husband, but it did not sit quite well with me. D really liked me and wanted to jump my bones. But for me the chemistry just never came along. It was an odd situation. I liked him, but not her. Not that way. It was sad, and I felt sad about it. It should have happened, on paper at least. But it couldn't.
The pair settled in a rented villa outside the seaside resort of St. Tropez. They were going to hang out there for a while. B was then about three years old. My friend D's desire to be with women was now nearly overwhelming. It became this way after living for a while in France. Pulled up from her normal American roots - and D in many respects is more of a True Blue American woman than I am by far - she could perhaps finally face her desires and take the risk of finally choosing. She had met a woman through a personal ad in the Berkeley Barb. How she managed to land that in the south of France I have no idea, and did not think to ask. D was ready to leave E, and her son, to go and be with this woman, whom she had never met. She arrived back in the bay area, dropped by to see me in my Berkeley Hills lair, and gave me the return half of her roundtrip ticket to France.
"He really wants to see you," she said. D proceeded to embark on a relationship with this woman, which lasted for a while. And then like nearly all the lesbian relationships I have heard about, or witnessed, they break up. The whole thing takes on this ritualized kind of lesbian mating dance: they draw together in animated anticipation, they separate with appropriate angst.
At this point in time, I was beginning to think rather cynically I suppose that most lesbian relationships were inherently doomed to breaking up, because there was not a strong enough dynamic, like testosterone, say, to hold it together. I know I will get major flak for this, but I sense this is the area of the problem, even though I feel I have far to go in defining it.
I kept my mouth shut about all this though, and took the airplane ticket.
Soon thereafter, in the fall of 1972, I flew to Europe for my second trip.
This proved to be an extended vacation of several months. I had quit my job as a medical transcriber, and no unrequited love(s) were holding me back, I could move to my own personal agenda.
Maybe it was something about that villa, it's low-lying rectangular shape that made you feel like you were forever walking from one end to the other, it became kind of creepy there in the winter, when the cold winds came and the days were nearly always overcast. Hanging out there with E was not what I thought it would be.
He and I had become entirely different people in ways in the intervening two years. But that we had yet to discover.
TO BE CONTINUED
