[This is an attempt by one Faith Keener to produce a sequel to OF FIRST LOVE AND BROKEN HEARTS. She is a close friend and quite some good writer so this just as close as anyone could get to the facts. There you go.]
"He is gay. He is going to waste you," The truth behind his friend's statement came hitting hard as I held Mitch's hand in mine. A statement I wished I had heed a year and a half earlier. I became involved because of the determination that churns like an engine inside me, this credo of mine that will-power and intensity can do anything, can break through any obstacle. I felt so much masculinity in Mitch, felt so physically attracted to him, that I refused to believe he could never function with a woman he loved. After all, he had fathered a brilliant kid (yes he has a five year old son called Terrence). I guess I really thought for a long time that the love of a good woman could convert Mitch, really thought I could save him.
I remember how I used to bask in his affection and aura. I was the person that Mitch, the arbiter of intelligence and cleverness, had chosen to adore, which gave me an identity, something to be. I loved being with him, this man who was utterly romantic, utterly aware. There would be flowers delivered to me on occasions, a poem in the mail, a gift in elegant taste for no reason. He was my knight who saw into the subtleties and absurdities of everything. Our minds were like two little kids playing the telephone, schmoozing and giggling into Dixie cups connected by a string of brains and affection-I am also bright, you know. My first phone call every morning was to him.
I remember how he would put his arms around me and hold me and kiss me warmly. He would say, "I love you. There's no one like you," and be masculine and passionate, and I would tell him,"You are sending me the right vibrations," all the while shutting out the image of his doing the same with some man elsewhere.
He would say, "I'm not."
As in my whole relationship with him, I was living my dream vicariously, luxuriating in the glamour of being behind the art scenes. I had always wanted to develop a voice through lyrics and I was already open to him, already moving instinctively in his direction by improvising and taping and developing my own voice. Also, the act of creation fascinates me. You can only sit with a blank page and wait. You cannot press a button,cannot program it. Everything comes out of smoke and mist and nothingness, a mystical happening, something to be worshiped. Writing meant an inspiration.
He was a charismatic man who people turned and looked at. As a poet, he was a potential William Blake, writing pieces that were beautiful, touching, original, with great internal rhymes. He had an irreverent, caustic, very dry wit, a brilliant, precise mind, and an insatiable appetite for gossip(you can almost guess my own appetite tripled his). This rich description is from the days when I was notoriously poor in perceiving his faults-I was blindly head over heels in love.
Despite his being gay, we so adored each other that what we had(whatever it was) became a sort of reality-as though by desperately wishing, we could make it real. He was frustrated as I was-one of the few gay men I have ever known who really hated being gay and hated himself. The only thing he took pride in was his mind and his work. Ours was a very sad love affair.
I was in love with a man who was my dream-a man who looked right, who was right for me and my family(yes, I consider them), adored me, lived for the arts, a man who had a happy place for me in his life-perfect except for one little flaw. H e was a homosexual. What a waste of such a good man! I was hot with shame. I, who prided myself on being honest with myself, I had let delusion take over, let wishful thinking convince me that this relationship could work-and now I had been told to get lost because my loved one was going to be a homosexual for a while. I felt slapped hard across the face.
"What am I doing? What am I doing?" I felt entirely defeated, entirely inadequate. I who always believed there MUST be a away. But there was no way I could compete, no way I could change and get him. A homosexual is a homosexual is a homosexual. Torn by mixture of anger and grief, I walked through the night, knowing this precious relationship was over, but still absolutely crazy about him. Besotted.
Mitch and I continue seeing each other, but the relationship faded back to what it should have been-an extremely warm friendship-and I wondered to myself why I constantly chose impossible men.
