The Fixed Stars Read online

  As soon as I’d put down the phone, I said, I felt critical of Ash. It was almost like my vision changed: I pulled up a photo of Ash on my phone, giddy to study the face of “my girlfriend,” and now it had no impact at all. Yesterday it would have made my eyes roll back with pleasure. I hate this feeling, I told him. I remember it from when I was dating Brandon. It scares me.

  Of course it does, my therapist said.

  It’s like I can let myself be open going in, and then it gets harder just at the point when I always thought it would get easier. Like, I can’t hold on to the glee of it.

  Well, let’s look at Nora, he said. You made yourself busy trying to do everything the right way, trying to win her love. That might have given you, in a sense, a feeling of control. That’s not the case with Ash. Ash is clear: they are telling you who they are and what they want. Ash met your ex-husband at a dance party, and Ash still wants you. Maybe they even want all of you, what about that? Maybe they even want the parts you don’t want them to see.

  27

  My mother turned seventy in late November, and to celebrate, she and I took June to New York City for three days. Brandon flew separately to his parents’ house in New Jersey, and we all met there for Thanksgiving. Upon our arrival I broke out in hives. At least by now I knew which antihistamine to buy. My mother and I slept downstairs in the guest room that Brandon and I used to sleep in, and he took his childhood bedroom upstairs. June was thrilled for a slumber party with her grandparents. His mother commended us on the whole situation, said how glad she was that we’d come. But I don’t know how you think you’ll do this, she added, once you have other people in your lives.

  I made my usual biscuit recipe and he, his garlic mashed potatoes. At his aunt’s house, we sat around a long table decorated with flowers and ribbons and turkey-shaped sugar cookies. June darted from the kids’ table to my lap and back, and when it was time to say what I was thankful for, I cried into her hair. I remember thinking that night that our marriage hadn’t failed. We were succeeding, if on different terms from the ones we’d set out with.

  Ash and I had been dating for six weeks. For all my interest in staying casual, that’s not what we were. We were falling in love. To love Ash felt easy, inevitable, and I made no move to stop. But I was afraid. Well, I thought, you wanted to know what it was like to love and be loved by a woman, didn’t you? Here you are. But how was I supposed to trust what I wanted, when I knew very well that what I wanted could change?

  I took solace in the fullness of our lives—that between Ash’s work schedule and my custody schedule, we rarely saw each other more than once a week. I needed breathing room, a safe distance from which to study Ash, to believe in what I felt. The week of Thanksgiving, Ash was with family in California, and I liked missing them. I wanted them closer.

  A couple of weeks before Christmas, I asked if they wanted to meet June. Ash came over one Sunday, late afternoon. We wouldn’t make a big thing of it. June was fresh from the bath, and she sat on my bed in her pink fleecy bathrobe, watching a show on the iPad and eating sheets of dried seaweed the size of playing cards. Ash and I stood in the doorway.

  This is my friend Ash, I said, and June looked up from the screen. She was sleepy, couldn’t be bothered. Ash waved and grinned and said, Whatcha watching? June shook a piece of seaweed in greeting. In the hall Ash squeezed my arm and beamed. I’m so excited, they whispered. Thank you.

  The days shortened, gaining speed. It was nearly Christmas. I got a two-week teaching job near Toronto, my longest stretch away from June. Brandon and my mother gamely stepped in to pick up my slack, but I beat the shit out of myself about it. The timing was wrong: June cried for me; the restaurant needed me for payroll and scheduling; I knew I never should have gone.

  Ash and I fought the day before I left. I’d told them that, on a grocery run, I’d picked up an extra box of dishwasher detergent for Brandon’s apartment, having seen a few days earlier that he was out.

  You know, you don’t have to take care of him anymore, Ash said.

  I’m not taking care of him, I snapped. I’m just being considerate. Am I not allowed to be considerate?

  That’s not what I’m saying, Ash sputtered. I just—just, you’ve told me what your pattern was with him. How you felt like you were always taking care, like no one else would do it if you didn’t.

  What I really want is for you to say nothing negative to me about Brandon, I said. Ever. I can’t stand it.

  When I arrived in Toronto, I saw that Ash had sent a long text: You are doing so much. You’ve been flying back and forth across the country over the last month and have managed to remain a steadfast, attentive mother. You’ve survived a case of hives. You’ve managed a restaurant from afar. You are curious and caring, committed to relationship and friendship. I want you to know that I admire you. Thank you for sharing yourself with me in all of it. I see you. I’m here.

  “When you look at yourself in the mirror,” writes author Ursula K. Le Guin, “I hope you see yourself. Not one of the myths.”39 I was trying.

  On a walk in our heavy coats, a friend commented: You seemed to disappear when you were dating Nora, and you haven’t with Ash. That seems like a good thing.

  I could feel it too. It’s weird, I said to my friend. I never fell in love with a man because he was a man, you know? I mean, I wasn’t falling in love with a penis. I loved his body because it was his. And I don’t think I was drawn to Nora because she was a woman, exactly. I don’t think I want a woman because she is a woman. Ash is not a woman in the same way I am, but they’re also not a man. And I like that so much. That they’re making their own form of person—like, this person who is themself.

  My friend nodded, said: I’m so happy for you.

  I couldn’t tell if she understood. But I was happy too.

  28

  “I eliminated gender, to find out what was left.” This was how Le Guin explained her creation of an androgynous race of humans, the Gethenians, in her novel The Left Hand of Darkness. “Whatever was left would be, presumably, simply human.”40

  I liked that so much. Of course: under gender we find the bare thing, the person themself. Of course.

  But what about sexual orientation? I wanted to add. What do we find under that? What is left if we eliminate orientation—or if it changes willy-nilly? Is there anything solid to me at all, anything I can count on? I’d tried to interrogate myself—had parked myself under fluorescent lights in the cinderblock room of my history, went after myself like Vincent D’Onofrio on Law & Order. I wanted a voiceover, some deep baritone: What do we make of our unreliable narrator? She would have swapped anything, even her sanity, to make sense.

  It was January, and I was Swiffering the bedroom when I saw it, the book I’d bought in the fall: Sexual Fluidity: Understanding Women’s Love and Desire. The capsule description was a firm handshake: “Having tracked one hundred women for more than ten years,” it read, “Lisa M. Diamond argues that for some women love and desire are not rigidly heterosexual or homosexual, but fluid, changing as women move through the stages of life, various social groups and, most importantly, different love relationships.”41 I read it in two days, while June was at Brandon’s.

  The premise was this: in the course of her career, Diamond, a professor of psychology and gender studies at the University of Utah, had read countless studies of sexual orientation. She noticed that the overwhelming majority had recruited only men as their subjects.42 As a pregnant woman and new mother, I had been baffled by how little we know of women’s bodies; apparently, we know little of their sexuality either.

  The studies Diamond read had built and upheld a born-this-way model of sexual orientation, the longtime prevailing model. But since the studies had looked only at men, Diamond wondered how well the model fit non-heterosexual women. So over the course of a decade, she conducted her own methodical study. What she found surprised even her: among female subjects, the norm was not stability in sexual attraction and ide
ntity but change. Most women reported having a certain orientation, as men did, but their attractions were more nuanced, layered, sensitive to circumstance. Diamond called this quality “fluidity.”

  Her study dialogued with others, too, that were similarly affirming. Diamond cited a 2000 article by psychologist Roy Baumeister suggesting that women’s sexuality is more “plastic” than men’s, in the sense not only of variability in sexual attraction, but also in sex drive, qualities they like in a partner, and what they like in bed.43 (I imagine this will shock absolutely zero women.)

  “The notion of female sexual fluidity,” writes Diamond, “suggests not that women possess no generalized sexual predispositions but that these predispositions will prove less of a constraint on their desires and behaviors than is the case for men.”44

  This made my eyes well, though for most of my life, I probably would have nodded politely at Diamond’s assertion and then privately, internally, scoffed. Riiight. Explain it however you want. Clearly these people were closeted, and now they’re just coming out. That’s what I’d thought when I heard about people who lived for years in the straight world—acquaintances, strangers, celebrities like Cynthia Nixon—coming out as gay or lesbian. I’d had a similar feeling upon hearing of seemingly straight women dating a lesbian for a while and then going back to men. She was just experimenting. I wouldn’t have believed me.

  Both women and men who deviate from the born-this-way model have historically been presumed to be exceptions and weirdos. People whose sexual identity and behavior didn’t fit neatly into categories—or whose attractions were not consistently same-sex or other-sex—have been routinely excluded by researchers or tossed out of studies of sexual orientation.45 Bisexuality has been, for this reason among many, consistently understudied—leaving us, writes Diamond, with a distorted and incomplete understanding of the nature and development of sexual orientation.46

  But the “exceptions” no longer look exceptional to some researchers, like Diamond. Some have come to view female and male sexual orientation as wholly different phenomena. They begin from the acceptance of paradox, rather than try to explain it away. From this starting point, Diamond posits a new foundational principle: that one of the defining features of female sexual orientation is its fluidity, or a “situation-dependent flexibility in sexual responsiveness.”47 This flexibility means that, regardless of their overall sexual orientation, women may find they experience desires for men or women (or, presumably, any gender) as they move through life, encountering different situations and relationships.

  Diamond’s study isn’t without problems: Who is she referring to, I wish I could ask, when she uses the word women? Who, by her lights, is “female”? Does her model of sexual fluidity apply to both ciswomen and transwomen? What about those for whom gender means more than “male” or “female”—who are intersex, genderfluid, non-binary? Diamond’s book was published in 2009, barely over a decade ago, but surely her study would be structured and executed differently today, when we talk with dazzling precision and nuance about gender and sexuality spectrums, when the New York Times celebrates Pride with a glossary of LGBTQ+ terminology, twenty-two words and growing.48

  Still, Diamond’s work meant something to me. I took pictures of passages and texted a blizzard of them to my friend Matthew, who’d been listening to me grapple since jury duty with what I could now giddily call my “fluidity.” Diamond’s writing is often impassioned, and I liked it. I felt set on fire by it, elated by not only the affirmation of her findings but by their specificity.

  Diamond combs through theories on the biological roots of sexual orientation, studies of genetics and of prenatal hormone exposure. Though no one yet agrees on a clear biological basis for sexual orientation, she notes that female homosexuality seems to have different paths of causation from male homosexuality. If this is so, it makes sense, then, that same-sex sexuality would unfold differently for women and men over their lifespans—and not only because of biology, but because women and men encounter wildly differing social and cultural contexts as their sexuality develops.49 Among those who are not heterosexual, Diamond found few features of development that were not differentiated by gender. It’s common in studies of sexual orientation for gay men to report feeling “different” in childhood, as well as having early attractions to other men. But in Diamond’s study, fewer non-heterosexual women recall similar experiences. Women also show greater variability in the age at which they notice same-sex attractions, question their sexuality, pursue sex with other women, and first identify as non-heterosexual. And not all women are equally fluid. The same way that women might have different baseline orientations, Diamond found them differently sensitive to situations that could lead to attraction,50 differently impacted by outside factors that could, depending on one’s disposition, speed up or slow down the expression of fluidity.51

  In addition to the passages I’d sent to Matthew, I texted a barrage of Diamond quotes to a gay male friend. I knew he felt he was born gay, but he’d been sympathetic to my experience.

  This reinforces an idea that I have, he wrote back, which is that sexuality and gender are highly individualistic in many ways. We try to make everyone who is “queer” fit some idea of what we think that means. But queerness should really make us realize that the common thread is only that we are all unique. And our sexuality is personal and specific, and it can evolve, just as we do in non-sexual ways.

  Whatever a person makes of Diamond’s binary read on gender, her findings feel necessary. Rigorous data about female sexuality is still rare, and young women need and deserve accurate information.

  “Many of the women in this study,” Diamond writes, “expressed embarrassment when explaining changes in their sexual feelings, relationships, or identities because they had internalized the prevailing cultural message that such experiences were highly atypical.”52 Many non-heterosexual women end up feeling “doubly deviant, their experiences reflecting neither mainstream societal expectations nor perceived norms of ‘typical’ gay experience.”53

  But then I am frightened, too, of how conservatives might weaponize the notion of sexual fluidity. Part of me wants to keep it quiet, a nod between initiates. A good portion of my ease in coming out has rested on the fact that most Americans now accept the born-this-way narrative, that being queer is as much a part of one’s basic makeup as being straight is. If we weren’t born this way, what ground could we stand on? How many will see an opportunity to conflate “change” and “choice”?

  As kids we used to talk about what we’d be when we grew up, as though we would reach a destination of being, a pinnacle to our striving. Nothing about adulthood—not the death of people I cared about, not a lurching entry into business ownership, not even motherhood—had diminished that conviction for me. I believed it completely, wholeheartedly, until I saw Nora. Even if, I wanted to know, if I accepted the idea that sexuality can be pliant—at least for some of us, some women, me—why couldn’t I go back to how I was before?

  Sure, says Diamond, but humans undergo plenty of powerful psychological changes that they do not choose and cannot control. Change, choice, and control are not the same. Think of puberty, she writes. Think of everything, I penciled in the margin.

  Not a single woman in Diamond’s sample, not even those who reidentified as straight or wound up with male partners, voiced regret about her same-sex experiences. “To the contrary, the vast majority were grateful for having had the opportunity to reflect deeply on their emotional and physical desires and to explore their own capacity for intimacy. Whether society chooses to support or punish such opportunities, of course, is up to us.”54

  29

  On January 11, 2017, five months after Brandon moved out, we had our first and only meeting at the divorce attorney’s office. I wore my favorite pants. We carpooled. In a windowless conference room downtown, with silk flowers and cherry-wood furniture polished to a high gloss, our attorney walked us through the details of an unconte
sted divorce in the state of Washington. It took ninety minutes. I remember the attorney’s surprise when we agreed to assume our own credit card debts, and when Brandon absolved me of responsibility to help pay down his undergrad student debt. This was debt he’d incurred before we met, and it seemed logical that it should stay his.

  This is not my business, said the attorney, but you two get along so well. Are you sure you want to get divorced?

  We were stupidly proud of his strange compliment.

  Still, I was aware of the trust we had for each other, that somehow it was intact. The particulars of our split—that a discrete event had precipitated it, and that we had moved quickly toward divorce—had spared us some of the hurts that accumulate when a relationship breaks down and isn’t laid decisively to rest. It is grueling to work through difficult feelings, but I couldn’t stomach the exhaustion of letting them linger. We’d had the huge privilege of therapy, among a whole teetering pile of other privileges. Neither of us was interested in vengeance. We were bound together by June—for better or for worse, for real this time. I hoped the fact of her would motivate us to work hard on whatever we had left.

  I cried only when we talked through the parenting plan. Dividing up hours and holidays with our child seemed as vicious, as unthinkable, as severing a limb. With our custody arrangement, I would miss half of our daughter’s childhood. I attempted to cheer myself with a sobering fact: So do many (most?) parents who work full-time. I should feel lucky for my freedom, contingent as it is on my child’s father being a willing, reliable, and enthusiastic co-parent. I would rarely worry about June when she was not with me. I want her to love her father. She should.

  The attorney finished our paperwork and filed it the next day. This would start the clock on a ninety-day mandated waiting period, and then we could formally divorce.