The Tragedy of Arthur_ A Novel - Arthur Phillips [25]
Dana’s fantasies about secret lovers and seducers who trade kisses and sympathy for knowledge were not entirely unsourceable. Her crushes at this time—tenth, eleventh, twelfth grade—were painful for me to watch. She was so eager and yet so worried about being discreet that she made her desires and her true self invisible to the beloved parties, even as she threw herself into their company, into friendship, never giving the slightest hint of romantic interest. For obvious reasons, she didn’t dare confide in anyone except me. She would probably have avoided me, too, if she’d had to screw up her courage and reveal herself, but we were still—at fifteen, sixteen, seventeen—transparent to each other (though some smudges were beginning to appear). She never had to take the plunge and say to me, “This is who I am.” I just knew. She risked no rejection from me, and she knew that, too.
In high school, when the rest of us dreamt of being original but strived to be like someone we knew or some archetype, Dana was already, if uneasily, her own true self. She wasn’t the “outsider girl” or the “artsy girl posing to be noticed for her offbeat originality.” I mean that she was already something only a few people ever become, even in adulthood. She could see the world as it was, take it as it was, could usually read people and situations (even if they didn’t know themselves perfectly) and then make her own decisions about how she would exist in that world. She understood her emotions far earlier than anyone else I knew, lived unpressurized by peers. She did not fake or judge unfairly. All this would be unique enough, even without the superficial talents that also defined her.
She didn’t deny to herself that she was gay, and when that part of her grew enough to assert itself, she accepted it without a blink of shame or regret. Until she called it by that name to herself, she was just someone who looked to other girls to feed her desire for love and intimacy, because that felt natural. That was natural. I was the exception, but even then I felt that I was no longer enough for her, and would soon be even less.
She wanted love in general, and this or that girl in particular, so badly that she was often vulnerable to terrible suffering. She was quasi-scientific in her planning and her calculations about whether this field hockey girl or that moody sculptress might possibly feel the same, but when the time came she was always just their good pal. Still, rumors spread (thickly and forcefully enough to break my nose).
In those early days, she was a funny blend: for all her skill in reading other people, she was still inept at gauging their desires. This is probably normal for someone as bookish and theatrical as she was. Adolescence produces all sorts of variations of incomplete emotional development; it’s the island of Dr. Moreau of human personality. My own lumpy and bizarre self was top-to-bottom, inside-and-out unappealing, while Dana at least looked good and was certainly motivated by good feelings: she loved art and loved life, loved her family and her friends, and was only sad because she wanted to love more and to feel a flood of such love washing over her in the same volume that she was ready to let it wash over another person. This, of course, led to pain.
She was learning a very difficult skill, much more complex than those being learned by the conventional girls and boys, far harder than the skills practiced by the lascivious would-be lotharios, so Dana necessarily loved awkwardly. She was by no means ready to tell the world what she was; she only hoped by some osmosis to sense others like herself. But in 1979, in a Minneapolis private school where we were scholarship kids with a definite cloud of pathos hanging over us, it was not at all clear that there were any confirmed lesbians to be found amid the kilts, or even any girls open to experimentation