You know why? Because he was a fire-breathing monster. My kids had never known him any other way and neither had their dad and I. I think it’s true that Ian didn’t know who he was before he was burned, either. He was a man made by the fire.
And because of the fire, he was also a rich man—he’d received a settlement from the gas company. He’d grown up lower middle class, but by the time I met him—when I was twenty-seven and he was thirty-one—he reveled in being a bit of a snob. He bought exquisite food and outrageously overpriced booze. He collected art and hung it in a series of hip and tony lofts. He wore impeccable clothes and drove around in fancy cars. He loved having money. He often said that being burned was the best thing that had ever happened to him. That if he could travel back in time he would not unlight that match. To unlight the match would be to lose the money that had brought him so much happiness. He had an incredible life, he said, and he was grateful for it.
But there was one thing. One tiny thing. He was sorry he couldn’t have love. Romantic love. Sexual love. Love love. Love.
“But you can!” I insisted, though it’s true that when I first met him I was skittish about holding his gaze because he was, in fact, a ghastly sight, his body a rough yet tender landscape of the excruciatingly painful and the distorted familiar. I met him when I was a waitress at a swank French bar where he was a regular. He sat near the place where I had to go to order and collect my drinks at the bar, and as I worked I took him in bit by bit, looking at him only peripherally. We chatted about books and art and shoes as he drank twenty-dollar shots of tequila and ate plates of meticulously constructed pâté and I zipped from the bar to the tables and back to the bar, delivering things.
After a while, he became more than a customer I had to be nice to. He became my friend. By then, I’d forgotten that he looked like a monster. It was the strangest thing, but it was true, how profoundly my vision of Ian changed once I knew him. How his burnt face became instead his bright blue eyes, his scarred and stumpy hands, the sound of his voice. It wasn’t that I couldn’t see his monstrosity anymore. It was still there in all its grotesque glory. But alongside it there was something else, something more ferocious: his beauty.
I wasn’t the only one who saw it. There were so many people who loved Ian. And we all insisted over and over again that our love was proof that someday someone would love him. Not in the way we loved him—not just as a friend—but in that way.
Ian would not hear a word of it. To so much as contemplate the possibility of having a boyfriend was unbearable to him. He’d made the decision to close himself off to romantic love way back when he was still in the hospital. No one would love a man as ugly as him, he thought. When I argued with him, he said that I had no idea about the importance of physical appearance in gay culture. When I told him I thought there were surely a few men on the planet willing to love a burned man, he said he would make do with the occasional services of a prostitute. When I said I thought that his refusal to open himself up to romantic love was based on fear and conquering that fear was the last thing he had to heal from the trauma of his accident, he said the discussion was over.
And so it was.
One night after I got off work, Ian and I went to another bar to have a drink. When we sat down he told me it was the anniversary of his accident and I asked him if he would tell me the entire story of that morning and he did. He said he’d just woken up and that he was gazing absently at a sleeve of saltine crackers on the counter the moment his kitchen flashed into blue flame. He was amazed to see the crackers and the sleeve disintegrate and disappear in an instant. It seemed to him a beautiful, almost magical occurrence, and then, in the next moment, he realized that he was engulfed in the blue flame and disintegrating too. He told me about falling down onto the floor and moaning and how his roommate had awakened but been too afraid to come to him, so instead he yelled words of comfort to Ian from another room. It was the people who’d been on the sidewalk down below and seen the windows blow out of his apartment who’d been the first to call 911. He told me about how the paramedics talked to him kindly as they carried him down the stairs on a stretcher and how one of them told him that he might die and how he cried out at the thought of that and how the way he sounded to himself in that cry was the last thing he remembered before he lost consciousness for weeks.
He would never have a lover.
He would be happy. He would be sad. He would be petty and kind. He would be manipulative and generous. He would be cutting and sweet. He would move from one cool loft to another and change all the color schemes. He would drink and stop drinking and start drinking again. He would buy original art and a particular breed of dog. He would make a load of money in real estate and lose another load of it on a business endeavor. He would reconcile with people he loved and estrange himself from others. He would not return my phone calls and he would read my first book and send me the nicest note. He would give my first child a snappy pair of ridiculously expensive baby trousers, and sigh and say he loathed children when I told him I was pregnant with my second. He would roar at Thanksgiving. He would crouch beneath the bed and say that he was a fire-breathing monster and he would laugh with all the grown-ups who got the joke.
And not even a month later—a week before Christmas, when he was forty-four—he would kill himself. He wouldn’t even leave a note.
I’ve thought many times about why Ian committed suicide, and I thought about it again when I read your letter, Beast. It would be so easy to trace Ian’s death back to that match, the one he said he would not unlight if he could. The one that made him appear to be a monster and therefore unfit for romantic love, while also making him rich and therefore happy. That match is so temptingly symbolic, like something hard and golden in a fairy tale that exacts a price equal to its power.
But I don’t think his death can be traced back to that. I think it goes back to his decision to close himself off to romantic love, to refuse to allow himself even the possibility of something so very essential because of something so superficial as the way he looked. And your question to me—the very core of it—is circling around the same thing. It’s not Will I ever find someone who will love me romantically?—(though in fact that question is there and it’s one I will get to)—but rather Am I capable of letting someone do so?
This is where we must dig.
You will never have my permission to close yourself off to love and give up. Never. You must do everything you can to get what you want and need, to find “that type of love.” It’s there for you. I know it’s arrogant of me to say so, because what the hell do I know about looking like a monster or a beast? Not a thing. But I do know that we are here, all of us—beasts and monsters and beauties and wallflowers alike—to do the best we can. And every last one of us can do better than give up.
Especially you. Anyone who has lived in the world for twenty-six years looking like what he is—“a broken man”—is not “just average on the inside.” Because of that, the journey you take to find love isn’t going to be average either. You’re going to have to be brave. You’re going to have to walk into the darkest woods without a stick. You aren’t conventionally attractive or even, as you say, “normal-looking,” and as you know already, a lot of people will immediately X you out as a romantic partner for this reason. That’s okay. You don’t need those people. By stepping aside, they’ve done you a favor. Because what you’ve got left after the fools have departed are the old souls and the true hearts. Those are the über-cool sparkle rocket mind-blowers we’re after. Those are the people worthy of your love.
And you, my dear, are worthy of them. By way of offering up evidence of your didn’t-even-get-started defeat, you mentioned movies in which “the ugly characters are redeemed by being made beautiful in time to catch the eye of their love interest,” but that’s not a story I buy, hon. We are way more ancient than that. We have better, truer stories. You know that fairy tale called “Beauty and the Beast”? Jeanne-Marie Le Prince de Beaum
ont abridged Gabrielle-Suzanne Barbot de Villeneuve’s original “La Belle et la Bête” in 1756 and it is her version that most of us know today. There are many details that I’ll omit here, but the story goes roughly like this:
A beautiful young woman named Belle lives with a beast in a castle. Belle is touched by the beast’s grace and generosity and compelled by his sensitive intelligence, but each night when the beast asks Belle to marry him, she declines because she’s repulsed by his appearance. One day she leaves the beast to visit her family. She and the beast agree that she’ll return in a week, but when she doesn’t the beast is bereft. In sorrow, he goes into the rose garden and collapses. That is how Belle finds him when she returns, half-dead from heartbreak. Seeing him in this state, she realizes that she truly loves him. Not just as a friend, but in that way, and so she professes her love and weeps. When her tears fall onto the beast, he is transformed into a handsome prince.
What I want you to note is that Belle loved the beast when he was still a beast—not a handsome prince. It is only once she loved him that he was transformed. You will be likewise transformed, the same as love transforms us all. But you have to be fearless enough to let it transform you.
I’m not convinced you are just yet. You say that people like you, but don’t consider you a “romantic option.” How do you know that? Have you made overtures and been rebuffed or are you projecting your own fears and insecurities onto others? Are you closing yourself off from the possibility of romance before anyone has the chance to feel romantically toward you? Who are you interested in? Have you ever asked anyone out on a date or to kiss you or to put his or her hands down your pants?
I can tell by your (articulate, honest, sad, strong) letter that you are one cool cat. I’m pretty certain based on your letter alone that a number of people would consider putting their hands down your pants. Would you let one of them? If the answer is yes, how would you respond once he or she got there? I don’t mean to be a dirty smart-ass (though I am, in fact, a dirty smart-ass). I mean to inquire—without diminishing the absolute reality that many people will disregard you as a romantic possibility based solely on your appearance—about whether you’ve asked yourself if the biggest barrier between you and the romantic hot monkey love that’s possible between you and the people who will—yes! without question!—be interested in you is not your ugly exterior, but your beautifully vulnerable interior. What do you need to do to convince yourself that someone might see you as a lover instead of a friend? How might you shut down your impulse to shut down?
These questions are key to your ability to find love, sweet pea. You asked me for practical matchmaking solutions, but I believe once you allow yourself to be psychologically ready to give and receive love, your best course is to do what everyone who is looking for love does: put your best self out there with as much transparency and sincerity and humor as possible. Both online and in person. With strangers and among your circle of friends. Inhabit the beauty that lives in your beastly body and strive to see the beauty in all the other beasts. Walk without a stick into the darkest woods. Believe that the fairy tale is true.
Yours,
Sugar
I CHOSE VAN GOGH
Dear Sugar,
I was sexually assaulted at seventeen. I was naïve and I didn’t understand it. Anxiety became a deep part of my life, and it almost pulled me under. Trudging onward was all I could do. I’ve made peace with it.
I have been dating a great guy for about a year and a half. How do I tell him about my sexual assault? Do I need to? It doesn’t affect my relationship or my day-to-day life, but it was a formative and intense thing and therefore played an important role in shaping who I am today. We’ve been through some emotionally intense events, so I know he’s capable of hearing it. I would love your advice.
Signed,
Over It
Dear Over It,
I have a friend who is twenty years older than me who was raped three different times over the course of her life. She’s a talented painter of some renown. When I learned about the rapes she’d endured, I asked her how she recovered from them, how she continued having healthy sexual relationships with men. She told me that at a certain point we get to decide who it is we allow to influence us. She said, “I could allow myself to be influenced by three men who screwed me against my will or I could allow myself to be influenced by van Gogh. I chose van Gogh.”
I never forgot that. I think of that phrase “I chose van Gogh” whenever I’m having trouble lifting my own head up. And I thought of it when I read your letter, Over It. You chose van Gogh too. Something ugly happened to you and you didn’t let it make you ugly. I salute you for your courage and grace. I think you should tell your boyfriend about your sexual assault and I think you should tell it straight. What happened. How you suffered. How you came to terms with the experience. And how you feel about it now.
You say this terrible experience no longer impacts your “day-to-day” life, but you also say it played an important role in shaping who you are. The whole deal about loving truly and for real and with all you’ve got has everything to do with letting those we love see what made us. Withholding this trauma from your boyfriend makes it bigger than it needs to be. It creates a secret you’re too beautiful to keep. Telling has a way of dispersing things. It will allow your lover to stand closer inside the circle of you. Let him.
Yours,
Sugar
THE OTHER SIDE OF THE POOL
Dear Sugar,
My two grown sons, ages thirty-five and twenty-three, have returned to the nest, my home. They didn’t ask. They simply showed up.
My younger son is going to college, but he hates it. He wants the financial aid money. He drinks, blows weed, watches daytime TV, and plays computer games. His eighteen-year-old girlfriend and their baby are going to move in soon, to fill out my already crowded spare bedroom. (Since the baby is my new grandchild, I’m kind of excited about that.)
My older son is also enrolled in college and is taking it seriously and getting good grades, but he drinks and is very moody and sarcastic to me. I’ve cleaned out my savings to make his car payments and cover his bills.
I’m a recovering alcoholic and have my own moods. I’m supporting the household with the dollars I can eke out as a writer, which is to say, not much. But I’m resourceful; I use coupons and shop at thrift stores.
My question is how do I get these men launched in life and out of my house? I want to write in privacy, pace the room in my underwear working out dialogue, research, sing, shake my ass, practice yoga, read, find my things where I left them the night before, enjoy a fragrant guest bathroom where the toilet seat remains down, eat tofu and oranges, drink green tea—not chips and hoagies. I don’t want to have mayonnaise spilled down the front of the kitchen cabinet. I want to cry over romantic movies and hear Mozart’s greatest hits, pay my bills, buy some bangle bracelets.
I’m stuck, Sugar. I love these kids. Their father, my ex-husband, died last year and I understand the loss and confusion my sons feel about this. I know the economy is hard. I recognize that building a life, finding someone to love, enjoying life’s many pleasures, is hard work. But I’m afraid my sons are failing in the job of getting on with it. I’m afraid I won’t be able to cover all the expenses. I’m afraid that what I want as I prepare to enter old age won’t be attainable. I’m afraid my sons will never launch. I’m crowded with fear.
What do you think I should do?
Crowded
Dear Crowded,
One of my earliest memories is also one of my most vivid. I was three and enrolled in a swimming class at the local YMCA. On the first day, I, like all the three-year-olds, was issued what we called a bubble—a flotation device that buckled on around the shoulders and waist and featured an object about the size and shape of a football that was pressed up against my back. This would allegedly keep me afloat. “Don’t worry!” my mother assured me over and over again. “Your bubble will hold you up!”
She said this same thing in various tones, with various degrees of patience and exasperation, week after week as I clung to the side of the pool, but her words meant nothing. I would not be persuaded to join my peers in the water. I was terrified. I felt certain that if I let go of the wall, I would immediately drown, bubble or not. So each week, I stubbornly stationed myself there while watching my classmates kick themselves around the pool. “See!” my mother would point to them excitedly when they passed.
But I would not be swayed.
On the final day of the class, the parents were meant to swim with their children. My mother put on her suit and sat beside me on the side of the pool and together we dangled our feet in the water, watching the other kids perform the techniques they’d learned. When it was nearly time to leave, she said to me, “How about we just go in the water together? I’ll hold you.”
I was fine with that. That’s how I’d always gone into the water, clinging to my mother, who might gently splash me or bob me up and down until I laughed. So into the water we went. When we got out to the middle of the pool, she convinced me to let her hold only my hands while dragging me through the water, and though, while she did this, I repeatedly begged, “Don’t let me go, don’t let me go,” and she repeatedly promised, “I won’t, I won’t,” in one sudden burst of power, she swirled me around and flung me away from her.
My memory of how it felt to glide through the water without my mother is still so fresh, so visceral, even though it was forty years ago. The sensations were both physical and intellectual. How strange and glorious it was to be anchored to nothing, to be free, in some particular way, for the first time in my life. How quickly I shifted from the shock of my mother’s betrayal to the terror of my new reality to the pure delight of how it felt to swim. My mother had been right: my bubble held me up.