So yes, him. The one who liked to wear my underwear—one of you dear readers wanted to hear more. Actually, there was more than one. Three of ‘em, by my count, that liked to dig around in my closet and play dress-up. There was the ethereal, sylph-y grad student in Classics who spent most of his time playing D&D—I found him on an archaeological dig somewhere in the Mediterranean. We hooked up on the sly all over the dig site—what is it about shovels and trowels and dusty work boots? He was terrible to me, in the end, and I hankered after him all the harder for it. He liked a vampire-sleeved, full-skirted black velvet number I wore pretty much whenever it was clean in those days, with a sweetheart neckline and a fitted waist. He looked hot. He took it off and we had great sex. A lot.
I don’t know what happened to him in the end. I do not believe it inaccurate to imagine him conventionally married somewhere along the Northeast Corridor (my money would be on Boston), father to beautiful Aryan offspring. Teaching Latin in a respectable boys’ school because he never finished the doctorate because D&D. I would bet a large amount of my juicy 2017 tax return that he does not wear his wife’s dresses. Quite probably because he does not find them interesting enough to bother.
And there was the guy in my intensive Arabic program, also blond and ethereal, son of a fundamentalist of some sort (it’s always the minister’s son…) from upper Michigan. Having his very own ruhr springer halfway around the world in Cairo. He was more gamine than handsome, in the red dress we scrounged up somewhere, at his request, for a Halloween bash we were throwing (I did some of the hardest partying of my life among the ex-pat community in Cairo). He took choosing eye shadow as serious as a heart attack. He even shaved his legs. I dressed as Eve for that party—there was a florist’s shop on the ground floor of our building, it was easy to bargain for a day’s leftovers, which were the basis of my costume. And a cut-up spring green bed sheet so there’d be something to pin the flowers to, and not much else. Monsieur Gamine and I never got together, some bad things happened to me that year and I went to some dark places, where wholesome preacher’s chillun couldn’t easily follow. Closet drag queens or not. Last I heard he, too, was conventionally married, a father, etc., etc. As noted above, this is the effect I tend to have.
But the one we’ve gathered to hear about, I believe, is the tanned and unconventionally handsome Brit with the camera slung around his neck (he was a filmmaker/3rd-tier actor/L.A. factotum taking a break from his habits and his co-dependent marriage—yes, if you’re keeping track, another married one—as a handyman around his parents’ property in Southern Spain). Smiling his bright white, gap-toothed smile as he trailed 29-year-old me through the Alhambra until I put down my champagne glass and talked to him. He ruined a black lace teddy. Stretched its poor seams to their ripping point, and once he was out of it, it did not regain its shape.
I actually didn’t mind that much about the teddy, I’d gotten it on sale at El Corte Inglés in Granada; I could raid my graduate student stipend again the next month. He didn’t look especially good in it, his face was too masculine, with a big beaky nose. Truth to tell, the teddy was incongruous on either of us in that rustic cabin, against the backdrop of rural Andalucía that peered in through the naked windows, in a place where dusty work boots (those again) were the default footwear of all persuasions and genders. But he seemed to enjoy it, and, as I say, I didn’t mind it. So we made a fire, put a blanket on the floor, and got very drunk and very high. It’s quite likely we did a couple of lines as well, he had a very big problem with white powders that he was trying unsuccessfully to remedy in the wilds of Andalucía, where he probably hadn’t imagined he’d have such an easy time finding dealers.
It is possible that I was more open than some might be to the idea of my beloveds in my clothes because of the stuff I was studying—I was, at that time, literally swimming in medieval Arabic love lyrics sung by lovesick (male) poets to effeminate, or at the very least androgynous, male beloveds:
I lay awake, insomniac, during the night through which you slept,
The night is careless of that which I suffer—your gaze knows it.
Inside the litter* adorned is a face that keeps hidden its secrets…
Lo, when he decrees a halt, beauty sends forth its own legal decree,
Leading them astray from the path of moderation…
–Abu Bakr `Ubada ibn Ma’ al-Sama’ (the latter part of which translates, more or less, as “Son of Water from the Sky”; translation mine)
*Litters! Those again. I defined them in last week’s post. NB: as made clear in these lines, they were not just for the ladies.
I spent hours and hours with these pretty boys and my Arabic dictionaries, translating them. We got up close and personal. So of course I liked them. As I did the troubadours, which were also part of my project, who reveled in effeminate style—Glam Rockers of the twelfth century, they sported trailing locks and sleeves and had the ladies swooning.
No, I had no problem with the ripped teddy, or with crazy drunken nights when we did crazy drunken things. What I had a problem with were the bad, bad love parts—did I mention he’s remarried now, conventionally? Like I said, I tend to have that effect.
The bad, bad love parts were really, really bad. I think I will save those for next week. And we will eventually get back to Kurt-not-Kurt, I promise. All this is taking us right straight back there.