Hypocrite in a Pouffy White Dress Page 25

  “I’m sorry,” I said.

  “Oh, well. Naturally, reading your article, I thought … well.” She sounded apologetic and embarrassed. For a moment, an uneasy silence percolated between us.

  Then she seemed to brighten. “Well, what about that rabbi on the cover?” she asked. “The cute, pregnant one. She’s still single, isn’t she?”

  No sooner had I hung up when the phone lit up again. “Susan,” Helen called over, “a Mrs. Lowenthal’s calling for you about the rabbi article.”

  “Susan Gilman,” I said, picking up the receiver.

  “Susan Gilman?” a woman said primly. “Is this the Susan Gilman who wrote the article this week on lesbian rabbis?”

  “I’m afraid so,” I said.

  “Well, Susan, my name’s Harriet Lowenthal,” said the woman, “And I know this is probably going to sound really strange to you, but are you by any chance single?”

  By the end of the day, I’d gotten no fewer than seventeen calls from Jewish mothers wanting to fix me up with their nice, lesbian daughters. This was not including the dinner invitation I received on my voice mail from a woman who described herself as a “fabulous fifty-one-years-young kosher dyke just back from three years in Nairobi.” I also got a call from someone named Alma, who told me she was a “goddess-worshipping but culturally Jewish” mother of three. “I’m really bisexual,” she explained. “And while some people think I’m just kidding myself, the fact is, I really do like to date men once in a while. After reading your article, I thought I should ask you out because you seemed like an open-minded-enough lesbian to handle it.”

  I did receive one disgruntled phone call from someone named Myron Leftcort, who told me it was a good thing Jews didn’t believe in hell because otherwise that’s where I’d be going—along with all the gay rabbis I’d profiled, my editor, my publisher, Noam Chomsky, Ivana Trump, Andy Rooney, the Pointer Sisters, Imus, Caspar Weinberger, Al Sharpton, and about three dozen other public figures he seemed to have some gripe with. Someone also walked in and handed Helen an angry, anonymous letter scribbled on the back of a paper placemat from a Chinese restaurant. On one side was a handwritten diatribe declaring that The Jewish Week was a disgrace to the Jewish people and that “lezzies and fags are abominations.” On the other side were the standard little red drawings of animals and the question What’s Your Chinese Zodiac Sign? The anonymous letter writer was apparently a Goat—he’d taken great pains to circle it and write in the margin “the best!!!”

  “He’s telling us we’re all bad Jews while he’s eating pork fried rice and dabbling in the occult down at Woh Hopp’s?” Lippy laughed. “Wow. You can’t make this stuff up.”

  Rather than being shocked or appalled by the idea that there were gay and lesbian rabbis in their midst, our readership, it turned out, seemed far more concerned that there might be someone—anyone in the Jewish community—who had not yet been set up with their still-single gay daughters.

  All week long, phone calls came in from desperate mothers and exuberant dykes. Rabbis called, hoping to set me up with their closeted gay colleagues. Grandmothers called, offering to mail me pictures of their granddaughters. It wasn’t people’s assumption that I was gay that bothered me; rather, it was the relentless wisecracking from my colleagues.

  “Maybe you should change your voice mail message,” Steven suggested. “You know. Hi, this is Susan Gilman, lesbian reporter at The Jewish Week newspaper. By that I mean I write about Lesbians—not that I actually am one.”

  “We all knew you were desperate,” said Lippy, “but using a cover story to troll for dates? Why couldn’t you just use the personals like any other pathetic loser?”

  “Maybe, up until now, you were straight by default,” my colleague Toby suggested. “You know, maybe you’ve just been going out with men because you’ve never thought a woman would ever have you.”

  Even Sheldon got into the act. “Susan, I know that homosexuality is something you’re born with,” he said slyly, “but maybe you should try converting anyway. Because let’s face it. You haven’t gotten this much action since the day you walked in here.”

  Though I prided myself on being able to take a joke, by the end of the week, I had pretty much had it.

  Some of the rabbis I’d interviewed were so scared of having their identities revealed that I’d had to promise I wouldn’t just use a pseudonym for them, but a pseudo-initial. And I had to assign them initials that rarely appeared in English or Hebrew names, either. Q*, I ended up writing (*not his real initial), knew he was gay ever since he began having fantasies about Jacob wrestling the angel in Hebrew school. It was heartbreaking, really. Why did everyone assume that only a gay reporter could write empathetically about such a community?

  “When I wrote about Ethiopian Jews, no one assumed I was Ethiopian,” I said with some annoyance. “When I wrote about runaway teenagers, no one called up offering to place me in a foster home. And when I did that piece on Jewish fashion models, photographers didn’t suddenly line up outside wanting to take my picture.”

  “Well, maybe that’s because they’d already seen what you looked like,” Lippy offered.

  Mercifully, the next Tuesday, another issue of The Jewish Week hit the stands, and readers found a whole new series of articles to complain about. My stint as a lesbian heartthrob literally became old news.

  A year later, leaving behind my disgraceful career in Jewish journalism, I moved to the Midwest for graduate school. During the summers, I returned to New York City starved for irony, bagels, and people who did not wear terry cloth sun visors color-coordinated with their track suits. While the truth was, I really enjoyed the Midwest, like most things, I enjoyed making fun of it even more. Plus, few of my friends had ever ventured farther west than Pittsburgh, so my life in Michigan made me somewhat of a novelty—albeit one like a shunt or a hairpiece.

  “Oh my god. Are you all right? How do you survive out there?” my friend Nicole teased. “Quick, let’s get you to a sushi bar and a museum.” She then invited me to join a group of her friends for dinner at a chi-chi restaurant. Among them would be Rachel, an Über-hip columnist for the Über-hip Village Voice newspaper. Rachel was famous among the downtown crowd as a cultural critic, art expert, and lesbian activist—the Trifecta of Cool, really.

  I would willingly have donated a kidney to write for The Village Voice, and though I tried to be very nonchalant about it, I was thrilled at the prospect of meeting Rachel and her lover, Lana. I’d been angling for an introduction ever since Nicole had become chummy with them at their synagogue. In my fantasies, Rachel would befriend me, then generously fork over her job. Really, she’d say, the Voice needs some new blood, and with your talent, we’d be crazy not to snap you right up.

  “Come by our synagogue after services,” Nicole suggested now, “and I’ll introduce you.”

  I’d known Nicole since we were fifteen, when our friendship could have easily served as a case study in adolescent girl hysteria. Together, we’d watched General Hospital obsessively, danced to the B-52’s in her living room like maniacs, and consumed vast quantities of Tab with frozen Cool Whip because one tablespoon of nondairy whipped topping, we discovered, had only nine calories. Every time a boy touched our breasts, we had to call each other up, pull our telephones into our respective bathrooms for privacy, and squealing, issue a Special Report. For each other’s birthdays, we made personalized collages documenting every single “in-joke.” Reading them, you’d have thought we were suffering from Alzheimer’s: Do you remember, our litanies always began, Strawberry daiquiris at Poncho Villas? Listening to Air Supply? “Oooh, I’m driving my life away” and giving Mark kissing lessons?

  Yet a few years after college, Nicole had an experience that was hers and hers alone. One day she walked into the waiting room of her therapist’s office, and met an attorney named Kay. They fell deliriously in high-octane, triple-caffeinated, whiplash love. Within the year, they’d had a commitment ceremony and exchanged we
dding rings. Kay joined Nicole’s temple and converted to Judaism.

  “Well,” Nicole’s mother sighed, “we always did want our daughter to marry a nice Jewish lawyer. So okay. It’s a woman. What can you do?”

  Ironically, the rest of my cohorts and I were dating one inappropriate guy after another—then, stupidly, bragging about it. We were sleeping with drug addicts, having vague “uncommitted” relationships, then getting drunk on Jell-O shots and calling ex-boyfriends at 2:30 A.M. We were staggering around bars in lace stockings and leather jackets, then coming home with toilet paper stuck to our shoes.

  In the meantime, Nicole and Kay had a custom-designed living room set, plans to have children, an investment portfolio, and respectable positions on the board of their synagogue. They had the most stable, promising, adult life of anyone I knew, and if you thought about their happiness long enough, it could depress the hell out of you.

  Having read her byline for years, I’d somehow gotten the idea that Rachel would be a haughty, anemic European lesbian who’d sit at a cafÉ smoking Gauloises while making withering pronouncements about Derrida and the death of postmodernism. Instead, she was affable and robust, with cool, red-framed glasses, brown lipstick, and a slightly goofy, asymmetrical haircut. To my great amazement, she’d actually read The Jewish Week newspaper. “Of course I know who you are,” she said, pumping my hand vigorously. “It’s one thing to write about progressive subjects for the Voice. But for a conservative paper like The Jewish Week? That takeschutzpah.”

  I couldn’t help it; I beamed. I didn’t expect Rachel to even know or care who I was, let alone see my antisocial impulses as anything remotely flattering. “Well,” I heard myself saying, “we all do what we can to subvert the patriarchy, I guess.”

  “And that cover story on gay and lesbian rabbis,” Rachel said, shaking her head wondrously. “That was really a coup. Lana and I talked about that for weeks.”

  “Thanks,” I said proudly. “It seemed to make quite an impression.”

  “Look, I just have to ask.” She leaned in toward me intently, clutching both my hands in hers. “What was it like coming out at a newspaper like that? I mean, The Jewish Week, with all of its religious commentaries and Orthodox rabbis. How did you tell them? Did you start with one editor, or just casually let it slip, or come in wearing a pink triangle, or what?”

  For a moment, I was stunned. Then I began to laugh. “Actually, it wasn’t like that at all because—”

  Yet before I could finish, a woman in a Dupioni silk coat ran up to Rachel and shouted, “Sweetie! Congratulations! Donald and I are both so happy for you!”

  Just the week before, Rachel and Lana had had a commitment ceremony at the synagogue. Now, Lana had suddenly materialized, and she and Rachel were engulfed by well-wishing fellow congregants. I looked around for Nicole, hoping she might be able to help set the record straight, so to speak, but she and Kay had gotten lost in the throng. Ah well, I thought, I’ll clarify things over dinner.

  Oddly, though, I felt tickled.

  Back in college, I’d spent ridiculous amounts of time at the womyn’s center, sitting cross-legged on the floor with other young, privileged, Ivy League feminists passing around a “talking stick” in order to share endless testimonials about how marginalized and oppressed we all were. In this feminist community, it was taken as gospel that lesbians were, by definition, sophisticated, liberated, and enlightened, whereas straight girls were misogynistic, spineless breeders who’d been brainwashed into wearing high heels and voting Republican.

  But now Rachel, of all people, thought I was gay. How cool was that? If only all my old cohorts back at college could see me now, I thought. Susie Gilman: so hip, you’d think she was a dyke. I Can’t Believe She’s Not Lesbian.

  Naively, I’d thought my long hair and lipstick pretty much broadcast to the world that I was heterosexual. But for all I knew, people took me to be a transsexual post-op. And this was possibly a very good thing. Talk about street cred, I thought. I could hit all the coolest girlie bars that Nicole and Kay went to, the Lunchbox and the Clit Club. No more third-tier journalism and Midwestern cheese fries for me: as a sexually ambiguous cultural critic, I could become the darling of the hard-core Downtown Intelligentsia. I imagined myself in ripped fishnets and blue lipstick, writing scathing exposÉs about funding for AZT, penning a column called “cliterature,” reviewing performance art at PS 1. Mysterious, yet scathingly sexual, I’d walk into cocktail parties in the East Village and people would nod in my direction and whisper: I heard she slept with Madonna. And just think of the networking possibilities!

  What was the harm, really, in not letting people know my true sexual orientation, I wondered. Certainly, gay people didn’t always come out immediately. And while some people were secure enough to always be themselves in any given situation, I had never been one of them. In my undying callowness and naked bid to be loved, I was endlessly reinventing my personality, nipping and tucking it here and there. In junior high school, I’d bought records just because Dawn Chapnick, the most advanced new girl in eighth grade, said they were “wicked”: how else to explain owning both “More Than a Feeling” and “Dust in the Wind”? In high school, I’d doctored fake IDs so I could drink underage, and at Studio 54, when Vanessa’s druggie, debutante friends asked me where my family “summered,” I replied blithely, “Oh, you know. Sometimes at the Betty Ford Clinic, sometimes Gstaad.” Around boys I dated from Harvard, I’d tried to be erudite; around street girls from my neighborhood, I’d tried to act tough. On dates, I’d feigned interest in all sorts of nonsense—trout fishing, Civil War reenactments, foosball. My personality, when I really thought about it, was a perpetual motion machine of self-invention, a giant mood ring in a hall full of mirrors.

  If I did not let Rachel know that I was not, in fact, a lesbian, I wouldn’t be committing a crime. I’d just be sparing her embarrassment—and assuming a mantle of fabulousness in the process. Why, I’d be like a drag queen, except in reverse. If gay men could dress up as straight women, why couldn’t a straight woman masquerade as a butch for an evening? Hell, they had “Queen for a Day.” Why not “Dyke for a Night”?

  And then, whenever it did come out that I had a boyfriend, well then, I figured, all of us could have a really good laugh.

  “Susie, this is Bridgette,” Rachel said slyly, when we arrived at the restaurant. She directed me to a delicate, Pre-Raphaelite-looking redhead in a batik sundress. “Why don’t the two of you sit over there?” She pointed to the last two places across from each other at the end of the table, where a lone hurricane candle flickered seductively. Bridgette smiled at me coyly, then ran a hand through her hair. I knew the gesture all too well. It was one I’d made about a zillion times with guys I’d been attracted to on first dates. Loneliness had its own, sad perfume, and I could smell hers a mile off. It was unnervingly like my own.

  I felt a bolt of panic.

  “So,” Bridgette said as we all settled in. “Rachel tells me you’re a writer?”

  “Not just any writer, Bridge,” Rachel prompted across the table, “she’s the one who did that big story on lesbian rabbis.”

  “Oh,” said Bridgette. “That was very good.”

  “You are one gutsy dyke,” Lana declared, taking a swig of ice water. “I’ll say that.”

  “Well, actually—” I began. I had to come out to them, I realized. Immediately. Sins of omission were one thing, but leading someone on falsely was quite another.

  Yet at that moment, Bridgette reached across the table to pour a glass of wine for me. Her hands shook and liquid spilled across the tabletop. “Oh, I’m sorry,” she cried. “I’m a terrible klutz.” We scrambled to sop up the mess with our napkins. She set down the carafe, then put her head in her hands.

  “Oh, I’m just never any good at this,” she said miserably. “My dad, he was an alcoholic, so I think I’m just bad, you know, at being casual about wine and stuff.” Then she straightened up and attempted to smi
le, trying to look happy, and attractive, and secure in herself.

  “Bridgette’s been in recovery,” Rachel said, seemingly for my benefit, “and she’s been doing an amazing job of it.”

  “Amen,” said Lana, raising her glass toward Bridgette. “To you, girl. You’ve been an inspiration.”

  I looked at Bridgette, then at the glass of wine in her hand. “You’re recovering from alcoholism?” I said.

  “Nuh-uh.” She took a sip of wine, which seemed to embolden her. “Sexual abuse. My uncle raped me when I was fourteen.” Then she set down her glass and took a breath decisively. “But I don’t want to talk about the past,” she said, willing herself to smile. “I want to talk about hopeful things. Love. Art. The future.”

  “Hear, hear,” said Lana.

  “So,” Bridgette said, leaning toward me, “do you go out a lot?”

  “Oh, Susie, before I forget,” Rachel interrupted, foisting a pen and paper napkin at me. “Give me your phone number. My editor wants to talk to you about doing an article for him.”

  Distracted, I wrote out my number. “Which editor?” I said as casually as possible. “Leonard?” Leonard was the editor-in-chief at The Village Voice.

  “No, the one at Outweek,” said Rachel. “You know, he actually dated one of the rabbis you profiled. I think he’s dying to get the scoop from you. Hey, an old ‘Academy’ exchange,” she said, studying my phone number. “You’ve got a place on the Upper West Side?”

  “It’s my mother’s,” I said. “I’m living back home for the summer. Listen.” I took a deep breath and said, “With this Outweek thing. I think you should know—”

  “Well, that’s gotta suck,” declared Lana. “Moving back home with your mom.”

  “Yeah, well,” I said. “What can you do? Listen, with Outweek—”

  “Are you out to her?” said Rachel.

  “Well, no, as a matter of fact, I’m not,” I said, seizing the opening. “I’m not, because, you see—”

  “Hey, Rach,” Lana called across the table. “Do you have your house keys on you?”