Trip Diary - Three: Between Fantasy And Reality

“I got some things I can’t tell anyone. Got some things I just can’t say. They’re the kind of things no one knows about. I just need somebody to talk to me.”

Physical intimacy is a strange and wonderful thing. I’ve been fortunate enough to have experienced quite a lot of it in a relatively short life, and as my fiction shows, it’s one of my favourite subjects to write about. The thing that fascinates me most is intent. In a conversation about infidelity I had with an ex-girlfriend, I remember horrifying her by saying it wouldn’t bother me if she slept with someone else.

“Well it would bother me if you did,” she fired back, staring at me as if she’d never actually seen me before.

“Intent bothers me. The act itself, not at all. If you got hellishly drunk and some guy took advantage of you, I wouldn’t dump you over it. Too many people see things that way, as though their partner’s body is their exclusive property and any desecration of that sacred ground means the end of a relationship. Personally, I think that’s bullshit.”

Funny how vivid that memory is. I can see us sitting on my bed. I can recall exactly how it felt to hit on one of my favourite themes and then warm to it, stake out my ideological ground to see what followed.

“Independence is a big deal to me. That’s why I dislike neediness,” I said. “Everybody has needs and everybody gets insecure. In every relationship I’ve been in, though, there’s been a problem with power. I always end up trying to be an agony uncle or some kind of superhero boyfriend. It isn’t fair.”

“What does that have to do with intent?” she asked.

“You don’t belong to me. I don’t belong to you. The ideal, I suppose, is that we’re two separate individuals. When we’re together, we’re greater than the sum of our parts. That’s a relationship, in my eyes anyway. Except it never seems to work out that way.”

“Go on.”

“Intent. That drunken encounter scenario, for example. You’re pretty much passed out. Sure, you made a decision to get wasted, but not to sleep with someone else. Your intent was not to go behind my back. It happened, but you didn’t mean it. It wasn’t an act of infidelity on your part. Listen, do I get jealous when you look at other men? No. Do I mind that you have male friends? No. They hug you, dance with you, kiss you on the cheek when you’re leaving. They’re friends, and at least one part of every friendship is attraction, sexual or otherwise. I’m not interested in the physical aspect of that.”

“There are friends of mine that bother you. You can’t deny that.”

“Only because I know that somewhere in your head is the thought of them as a boyfriend, as an alternative to me. After me or instead of me.”

“I do not!”

“Right.”

“Michael!”

I was laughing and she was trying not to.

“Back to intent,” I said. “I don’t own you. You’re not mine. What interests me is the commitment we’ve made to each other. If you betrayed that with intent, I’d finish with you, even if it was just a kiss. In the past, I’ve done things in relationships that would make you run screaming into the night. Every commitment is different. You can’t stand the thought of me looking at another woman, never mind touching her. I could live with the idea of you being touched by another man. In the right situation, I’d even get off on that. I’m always going to look at people and things I find beautiful, but in committing to you, I’ve also committed to who you are, and that means not touching other women or betraying your trust and your expectations. I’d never do that. I’m just not that person. If I felt it was going to happen, that I couldn’t avoid it happening, I’d be honest with you about it.”

“You mean you’d finish with me.”

“Before I betrayed our relationship, yes. Nothing’s more important than honesty. Nothing.”

The reason I’m thinking about an old conversation with an old girlfriend when I’m wrapped in blankets and Jennifer on the morning of November 20th several years later is because I’m not sure if I have taken that step or not, if I have made a commitment. I believe very passionately in the one night stand, the zipless fuck, and friends with fringe benefits. I’m an erotic creature, and I take my pleasures where I find them. But nothing’s more important than honesty, and honesty tells me that the physical intimacy of the night before was none of those things. This is a unique situation I find myself in, and for a boy whose relationships have taken him through some pretty kinky and emotional territory, that means something.

The problem, I suppose, is the gap between fantasy and reality. Jennifer and I have spent nearly five months doing nothing but talk. We’ve discovered that we like each other a great deal and decided between us to see what the next step would turn up. My greatest insecurity before travelling to America was that she wouldn’t fancy me. I already knew she liked my mind, liked the person I am. Photos and webcams can be deceptive, though. I don’t think you can truly judge a person until you meet them, see how they talk and how they move, discover the little truths that almost never find words, truths that are in the eyes and the language of gesture and inflection. I could say Jennifer had beautiful eyes, but I couldn’t truly believe it until I’d stared into them. And before we met, I had no idea about her smile. All the photos were serious. I knew her online and over the phone for five months, yet I had no idea that she could smile and make me feel like I was falling in love. That’s why we had to take this step, and that’s why I’m glad we did.

But what happens now? We have a week together and then I go home. What happens after that? When there’s a world to cross and two completely separate lives to consider, it’s more than a simple commitment that can be broken if one of us is sure that it’s not what they want. It’s turning away from one life in favour of another. It’s changing everything. Of course that frightens me, and of course I’d like some kind of guarantee. Then again, maybe it’s that sense of uncertainty that makes it so exciting. If I knew all the answers, there’d be no need to think about the questions. When you get right down to it, that’d be bland and grey and tasteless; the relationship as TV dinner; exactly what you expect and never too much or too little.

In the case of Jennifer, I quickly discover that there’s really no such thing as too much. After a little more of that ol’ intimacy, we get ready and head out to find some lunch. My jetlag is receding into the background, and although I no longer feel tired, the feeling that the time is all wrong won’t leave me. My brain insists it should be dark, and aggressively rejects both sunshine and the idea of eating. These things are not scheduled right now, it tells me, this is highly irregular.

Which is at least part of the reason why I feel so alien when we go into places like Subway and Target, the other part, of course, being that I am alien.

“Where are you from?” asks the girl behind the counter in Subway, suddenly smiling out at me from a sea of bland, bored faces.

“London,” I reply. “England.”

“I study dialect,” she says. “I like your accent.”

Beside her, another girl looks up. “Where?” she asks.

“England,” I repeat.

She looks at me like I’ve just explained the mating habits of the male silverback gorilla in unnecessary detail and returns to her sandwich-making. I send a psychic message to Jenn: Save me. I’m pretty sure she doesn’t hear it, but we leave anyway.

The thing that gets me about Target is the prices. Jenn probably loses count of the amount of times I say something along the lines of: “Shit, that’s only five pounds!” She bears the awful weight of my Englishman Abroad enthusiasm like a trooper, even when the guy in the liquor store asks me for ID and I fall into utter confusion. The only time you get asked for ID in England is if there’s reason to believe you might be under the legal age. In California at least, they pretty much always ask. Oh, and America only deals in packets of twenty cigarettes whereas we have the option of tens. This is how I somehow end up buying four packets of cigarettes when I’d only wanted two.

Not the best of starts, but I’m hoping to improve as the week goes on.

Jenn and I head home, where we smoke and drink and eat fast food and watch movies and listen to music. This, really, is how we spend the next three days. It’s exactly what I want, too; to get to know the girl and the place. Shared taste and culture-references were what brought us together in the first instance, and having the chance to sit down with Jennifer and just hang out is the reason I came here. Sure, I want to see America, I always have. But it was never enough to make me fool the credit card company and just fly on over here. America can wait.

So it’s Jack Daniel’s and Wild Turkey and Marlboro Lights, it’s Subway and Pizza Hut and Baja Fresh, it’s a nostalgia trip into movies like Top Gun and Beverly Hills Cop and Pump Up The Volume and Office Space, it’s playing Jenn albums I’d wanted her to hear by the likes of Therapy and The Manic Street Preachers. Above and beyond all that, it’s conversation and kissing and hugging and intimate things that aren’t for sharing with the world at large. It’s only three days, but those days bring such a feeling of relief and happiness and contentment that it seems hard to understand the reactions of some of the friends and family I talk to during that time, friends and family who find it impossible to believe that we’re not actually doing anything. Of course, we’re doing the most important thing, but that’s not always easy to explain.

We’re together, I think, over and over again. I’m here.

I’ve tried to write about Jennifer so many times since I got here. I’ve struggled to put into words just what it is about her and failed miserably, mostly because every description wants to be an essay and I keep finding myself distracted by my thoughts and my excitement and my worries. There’s just so much about her that makes me smile, from the fact that she has a psycho cat that clearly loves her deeply, despite its many idiosyncracies, to the way all her plates and cups are paper because she refuses to wash up. We don’t always like the same films and the same albums, but when we do, we almost always like the same scenes and the same songs. I make Jennifer laugh. More importantly, she makes me laugh. That’s something I’ve never really found before, as strange as that sounds. We just…click. That’s the only way I can find to say it. It ain’t analytical and it ain’t my usual landslide of words, but it’s the best I can do. When I’m with Jenn, it feels like a partnership. It feels natural.

We talk about going to Las Vegas and getting married. In jest, of course. On Saturday night, I drunkenly pop the question and she drunkenly accepts. I don’t know if she even remembers that, but I do. On Monday, the subject comes up again and we consider the idea of taking a roadtrip because I’ve never been and she hasn’t been in years. Why being with Jennifer is exciting and different is because from that conversation we end up on the internet renting a car and booking a hotel for the next day. Later that night, I lie in bed and think of all the times I’ve planned to do things and then never done them. In a way, that shames me. In another way, it’s exciting, yet another affirmation. I honestly couldn’t tell you if Jennifer does things like that on a regular basis, but I don’t believe she does. What made that happen, I think, is the fact that we were together. That’s the feeling I’m talking about, the click. I wouldn’t have done it if the decision was left purely up to me. I don’t know if Jenn would have. Together, though, we just went right on ahead.

I go to sleep that night feeling I might go out of my mind thinking about Las Vegas. Of all the many things I’ve always wanted to do, that’d make at least the top five. I want to drive Interstate 15 through the mountains and the Mojave Desert. I want to follow in the footsteps of Hunter Thompson and get out of my head at the Circus Circus. I can’t believe all this is happening, I really can’t. I keep thinking that any minute now I’m going to wake up and be crushed by the disappointment of finding myself back in the Darkened Room.

But I don’t wake up. I put my arms around Jenn and I fall asleep. And whatever it is that I dream of, there’s no way I’ll be waking up disappointed.