Covering_ The Hidden Assault on American Civil Rights - Kenji Yoshino [6]
An older American student tried to help. Arad was struggling to come out himself, but seemed, I thought enviously, much more self-possessed. He was the prodigy of his class—his intellectual feats, in medicine and philosophy, were reported in hushed and reverent tones. Tall and angular, he accentuated his forbidding demeanor with a black coat that billowed out like the wings of a predatory bird.
Arad was kind to me. I never named my malady, but he knew its ways better than I. I remember sitting in his rooms listening to him describe the deadlines he had set for himself—to come out to his parents in three months, to go to a meeting of the college gay group in six months, to begin to date in a year. It was important, he said, to be a creature of the will. Unable to meet his eye, I looked over his shoulder at the wall behind him, which was tiled with diplomas and awards. In the center were some framed black-and-white photographs he had taken. One caught my eye—a statue of a kneeling angel weeping with her head buried in her arms.
It was a portrait of abject perfection, a portrait of him, and it terrified me. I recognized the striving impulse in Arad as an attribute of my former self, and felt shame for having lost the discipline he still possessed. Yet I was also frightened by the harshness of that will. I thanked him and left, never to return. I could not help him, and I knew he could not help me.
In my second year, I met the woman who would. Maureen interviewed me for a job at a management consulting firm to which I had applied—in the mantra of my classmates—“to keep my options open.” An expatriate American on the cusp of thirty, she was living in England with her husband, who was an Oxford don.
That day, I saw this contrast in her—flaxen hair against dark suit, slightness of build against stillness of carriage. I trusted her. When she asked me during the interview about a risk I had taken, I told her about writing my collection of poems, saying emotional risks often felt more real to me than physical or analytic ones. The day after the interview, she told me I had advanced to the next round, and offered to coach me through it. We scheduled a time to meet, and in a rash fit of trust, I sent her my thesis.
When we met again, she told me she disagreed we assassinated the selves we did not choose to live. In her view, while the chosen self lived in Technicolor splendor, the unchosen ones lived on in black-and-white. It would be easier, she said, if assassination were possible, as those unchosen selves became the demons that bedeviled the chosen one.
Not then, but soon thereafter, I learned of her unchosen selves. Maureen’s first fealty was to art—to the cello, as well as to literature. She had broken that allegiance to escape the starving-artist existence of her musician parents. Yet she now regretted having done so; by that time, she had stopped playing music or reading literature. She saw me as a younger self she could save from the same fate, a rescue connected to her own redemption.
Maureen startled me with her access to so many selves, not only in herself but in me. She acted as my sibyl in the world of business, which, as my father’s world, loomed in my mind as a sphere of temporal power. With her at my side, I became convinced I could master this world, a conviction that made it possible for me to reject it. Maureen also understood my more private literary self. Better read than I, she was an acute critic of my writing. I felt my isolation break, as if an audience member had walked through the fourth wall of a stage to put her arms around the soliloquist. Perhaps most important, Maureen understood the coexistence of these selves. Torn herself, she could frame the question of what I might look like whole.
The classical muse speaks poetry for the poet to transcribe. Maureen was a different kind of muse: she listened. In the writing I showed her, I still cloaked