(You Can't) Want What You Want
A break-up in seven parts
[Leaving the dystopia alone for a minute. Here’s little essay for y’all.]
We are driving around Chattanooga, the Reverend and I. We pass frozen red dirt where someone’s digging a foundation for a new row of condominiums. We pass leafless crepe myrtle trees and oak trees whose leaves, brown and garrulous, gossip about us. We pass graffiti, Darkness Cannot Drive Out Darkness, Dr. King, Tesla holding his dove. All this is illuminated by streetlights, or nothing: there are no stars.
Near the university, the Reverend sees a young person lying under a bare locust tree on a bank of frozen bermuda grass that slopes down toward the busy, four-lane avenue.
“Wait, turn around.”
I cannot turn immediately. The Reverend, impatient, is about to boil right out the door and cross the road in the middle of traffic.
“Hold on!” I say, grabbing hold of her to stop her. “Let me get turned around.”
She’s bigger than I am and could plow out of my grasp if she wanted to, but she quiets down. I turn the car around the the Blood Assurance parking lot, return the way we came and find a place to pull over.
The Reverend climbs out of the car and strides up the bank toward the young person. She squats down to speak with them.
From my vantage, the young person is indistinct. Fair skinned, fair-hair-haloed, could be boy or girl, could be in their teens or twenties. The Reverend, though, dark under the streetlight, is plain enough: a tall, broad-shouldered, long-haired Cherokee woman wearing a clerical shirt and collar over a 19th-century calico skirt, petticoats, and paratrooper boots.
I knew the Reverend by sight, as many Chattanoogans do, before I met her. She’s older and less vigorous now, but she cut her teeth on hospice work in the 80s, tending people with AIDS no one else would touch. In the years before and after that, she would fill her rucksack with donations and go around to homeless camps, handing out food and blankets and other goods. Between that, you’d find her on the university campus, arguing religion with anyone who’d spare a moment.
When I asked her about her costume, early in our relationship, she said: “The clerical shirt shows I’m a helper. Homeless folks can be wary and the collar puts them at ease. The skirt lets people know a mile away they’re looking at a trans woman. For someone in the LGBT community, it tells them I’m safe. And the boots are for running away from the police.”
And she objected to my word costume: “My skirts are traditional; a Cherokee woman would have been wearing skirts just like these 200 years ago.”
The Reverend talks with kid for a while. She finally comes downhill with them and helps them into the car. “We’re going to the hospital,” she says.
Turns out the kid has been tossed out of the emergency room a few hours before. Homeless and confused, they lay down under a tree on the bank of the road in the cold. They may not be sick, but they’re disoriented and — close up in the back seat of my car — younger than they looked from a distance. High school age? Junior high? I can’t quite tell.
Back to the hospital we go.
“Find a place to park,” the Reverend tells me. “This might take a while.”
I drop the Reverend and the kid off in front of the emergency room doors. Then I park in the empty lot out back of the rehab center and wait there, walking around my car to stay warm. It’s a couple more hours before the Reverend comes back.
“The social worker finally got the kid’s parents on the phone,” she says. “They’re coming in from Middle Tennessee for them.”
“But what happened?” I ask. The Reverend explained that the kid had been dismissed from the emergency room a few hours before. This time, though, the Reverend came in, escorted the kid to the sign-in desk, and then sat in the waiting room beside the kid, all those 250 pounds and voluminous skirts, just daring them to turn the kid out while a clergy chaperone was there to ensure someone gave them some help.
“But there are cops in the waiting room,” I say.
“Oh yes.” A pause. Her eyes gleam. “They know me.”
At any rate, this time the hospital took the trouble to evaluate the kid, call in a social worker, and have the social worker persuade the kid to call their family. The family had not rejected them. The family was worried. They were driving as fast as they could. The kid, now officially signed in, was not going to be turned out into the night until their grownups arrived for them.
“Did you say anything?” I ask.
“Oh, no. I didn’t have to say anything.”
At this point I decide I had the best girlfriend in the world.
I don’t want to write about sex with my girlfriend because that is her business. But I can write about sex from my point of view, four years ago when I started dating my girlfriend.
I did not want anything to do with it.
It was a nice idea in the imagination, but in practice, it came with a lot of grief.
She agreed.
We committed to celibacy — in today’s language, we described ourselves as asexual.
It’s a question of choice, isn’t it? Celibacy is a choice, asexuality is an orientation — but the truth, perhaps, lies somewhere in the middle. You choose what seems best to you, based on your beliefs or aesthetics or just your senses of smell and taste and sight, whatever it is that arouses you. It’s just a gut feeling, isn’t it? Towards, away.
Still, as T.E. Lawrence says in the movie, a man can do whatever he wants — but he can’t want what he wants. A choice, but something intractable, too.
Then we got used to each other. We were happy. We planned to spend our lives together. Possibly, she took pity on me. Certainly, she showed me patience and compassion.
Then, after a scary visit to the emergency room myself, I started taking iron. Just over-the-counter iron. Just a few grains. A drop.
I’ve written about that. From so-anemic-the-doc-wanted-to-give-me-a-transfusion to only middle-of-the-road anemic, everything changes. I sweat when I exercise. My exercise tolerance is the highest it’s ever been, higher than when I was 25 years old — and I’m 50. I maintain my body temperature better. I want to eat different food. I get acne. Probably, I smell different.
And this other thing happened.
I explained to my the Reverend: “I’ve been thinking about men.”
That was nothing. She thinks about men, too. Men have nice booties. They’re tasty, from a distance. They have that energetic way of moving and doing things. Still, we both prefer them to stay at that distance.
A few weeks later, I explained again: “Like, a lot.”
She said we could have an open relationship.
I did not want to have an open relationship, though I don’t mean to criticize anyone who does. I just don’t like that kind of complicated goings-on.
We argued about it — not argued, you know, but that kind of discussion that goes around and around, each bending over backward to accommodate the other.
“But if you really want something, you should have it,” she said, for about the third time. “I don’t want you to feel any lack.”
We were taking a walk. We went through Hill City (gentrifying) into North Chatt (already gentrified) looking for traces of how people lived a century ago, 50 years, 25. Every acre, every block, every plat on the map has a story. Anywhere within a three-mile radius of the neighborhood where she grew up, the Reverend can tell you the history of each block. What was destroyed for a highway. Where the old department store stood, the technical high school, the record shop.
There in Hill City, on the sidewalk beside the corner market, I came to a stop.
“I’m not going to cheat on you with a man,” I said. “Men are trouble. I’m not going out looking for any kind of a man. And I’m not going to cheat on you with a girl; I don’t want to be with any women at all.”
She looked at me.
I looked at her.
I had no idea I was going to say it until it came out of my mouth. But as we both heard it, we both knew what it meant.
She said, “I guess that’s that.”
If I could have, maybe I would have pretended to myself she was a man so I could stay with her. It would have been wrong and dishonest of me, but maybe I would have.
But I can’t, and that’s that.
My Reverend. My sweet girl. Why do I love the Reverend so much? Because she gave me the example of courage. Because she gave me a wholesome environment where I could learn to be healthy and fearless.
What am I doing now?
Being celibate. Hanging out with the Reverend. Trying to treat her with the honor and friendship she deserves.
It seems like a good choice.
The Reverend and I take a walk. We pass graffiti — the mushrooms from Mario and Luigi, Robert E. Lee, some Union guy in side whiskers. I drive the Reverend to the pharmacist and she picks up her mom’s medicine. The pharmacist knows her and asks after her mom.
Another time, though, someone throws a spit cup at her out of a truck. Then they make a second pass, hollering. We get down a side street before they can come back around, hoping they don’t see which way we turned.
What if they stop next time, they or others like them? What if they get out of the truck? What if my middle-aged, not-so-large self isn’t big enough to protect her? What if she’s alone? What’s my responsibility, now, if they catch her alone?
I try not to abandon her.
At least partially, I’ve abandoned her.
It’s a couple of years in the future. There’s a man lying unconscious, torso on the sidewalk, legs halfway out into M.L. King Boulevard. He’s wearing a white t-shirt. He has tattoos. He looks sallow and sick. Maybe someone’s beaten him. There’s blood crusted around his nose.
The Reverend drops to one knee, skirts trailing in mud and engine oil. “Are you okay, buddy?”
She tries to shift him, but she’s going on 60 now and she’s had health problems. No one stops to help. She sees you walking past — maybe you’re in historical garb, too, wool trousers and frock coat to match her calico skirts.
She hails you.
“Good morning! Can you give me a hand?”
What do you do?