In the Dream House Read online

  You tremble for the better part of the next hour. As you walk back to the car, she keeps apologizing for not intervening sooner.

  “Sooner than immediately?” you ask.

  “I saw him coming from a mile off. I saw what he was going to do,” she says. “I know this is new to you, but I’ve dated a lot of women. This is just par for the course. This is the risk you’re taking.”

  The drive home is wild, almost tweaked. You cover half the country—North Carolina to Chicago—in one day like fucking maniacs. You could, you think, drive forever and ever with her at your side.

  Dream House as Romance Novel

  A week after you get back from Savannah, you are fucking on your bed and you come and she says, “I love you.” You are both sweaty; the silicone strap-on is still in your body. (When dating men, you always loved feeling a cock soften inside you afterward; now, you pant on her chest and slide off and it springs back to where it was, slick and erect but spent just the same.)

  You look down at her, confusion muddled with the vibrations of orgasm,3 and she claps her hand over her mouth. “I’m sorry,” she says.

  “Did you mean it?” you ask.

  “I didn’t mean to say it just now,” she says, “but I meant it.”

  You are silent for a long beat. Then you say, “I love you too.” It feels stupidly, sickeningly correct, and you don’t understand how you didn’t know until now.

  “If I don’t get into Iowa, I don’t know what I’ll do,” she says. “I want to stay here with you. That’s all I want.”

  3. Thompson, Motif-Index of Folk-Literature, Type C942.3, Weakness from seeing woman (fairy) naked.

  Dream House as Déjà Vu

  She loves you. She sees your subtle, ineffable qualities. You are the only one for her in all the world. She trusts you. She wants to keep you safe. She wants to grow old with you. She thinks you’re beautiful. She thinks you’re sexy. Sometimes when you look at your phone, she has sent you something stunningly filthy, and there is a kick of want between your legs. Sometimes when you catch her looking at you, you feel like the luckiest person in the whole world.

  Dream House as Bildungsroman

  I didn’t date when most people dated. When other teenagers were figuring out what good and bad relationships looked like, I was busy being extremely weird: praying a lot, getting obsessed with sexual purity.

  The summer I was thirteen I was saved around a bonfire at a Christian summer camp. I’d spent most of the weeklong session making box-stitch plastic lanyards and climbing trees, but now the counselors—barely in their twenties—fed us s’mores and encouraged us to think about everything we’d ever done wrong. A “Certificate of New Birth,” printed on thin, grainy paper, was presented to me the next morning. It marks the exact moment of conversion at 10:20 p.m., well past my bedtime.

  Afterward, I was an antihipster, as earnest about Jesus as I could possibly be. I walked around with a patch on my backpack that said “Ask Me Why I’m a Christian.” I wore a ring that said “True Love Waits.” I went to church and liked it. I believed Jesus was my savior; that he had a personal stake in my salvation, as personal as my parents’ love for me.

  When I was sixteen, a new associate pastor, Joel Jones, was rotated into our United Methodist parish. When he introduced himself to the church youth, I felt a kick deep in my pelvis. He was handsome, with a goatee and straight, sandy hair that jutted out over his forehead. He was a little pudgy, but only just. He had a wedding ring. And when he shook my hand, he looked directly into my eyes.

  Joel was around a lot. He participated in youth group events alongside his normal church duties. He gave smart, politically progressive sermons that sowed chaos and indignation among the older congregants, which delighted me no end. Sometimes I would linger after the service was over. He always talked to me like I was an adult; he always remembered my name.

  In my senior year of high school, our church connected with a Methodist congregation in Lichtenburg, South Africa, that was looking to start a youth camp for its children and teens. A group of adults—including Joel—decided to do a trial run, and they invited me to go with them.

  We departed a frigid Northeast midwinter and arrived in the middle of a Southern Hemisphere summer. The camp was held on a sprawling farm outside town, a palatial property with a pool and a large white fountain and a gate running along the road. The campers, ranging from my age—seventeen—down to nine, stayed in a converted barn. I ran an arts-and-crafts elective. We built bonfires around which we sang and played guitar and made spontaneous confessions.

  Boerboels—a South African breed of giant dogs that resemble mastiffs—roamed the grounds. There was a new mother with distended nipples and a loping gait, and her massive puppies, who scrambled over each other to get to our outstretched hands. The owner of the farm grew sunflowers, and in the fields their luminous heads were always turned toward the light—one morning he drove us into their midst to show us how they followed the sun’s path across the sky. The land around us was so flat you could see black thunderclouds slit through with lightning in every direction; storms so distant they never arrived. I had never been so far from home.

  Every night, after the campers went to bed, I would sit and talk with Joel. He spoke openly, honestly of his faith; how he struggled with his own imperfections: pride and jealousy and—his voice dropping low—lust.

  “I’m supposed to be a man of God,” he said one evening as mosquitoes chewed up our limbs in the darkness. “But I feel so weak. I feel like every day I fight against my instincts, and half the time my instincts win.” He put his head into his hands. I reached out and touched his arm, and he didn’t shrug it away. When he spoke next, I felt the vibrations of his voice in my fingers. “I’m supposed to lead all of these people and be an example, but sometimes I wonder if I’m the right person for the job. Maybe it should be someone better.” I’d never heard anyone talk this way about himself. “I don’t know what God wants from me,” he said, finally. “As a leader, and as a man.”

  I wanted to cry. I considered my own lusts and shortcomings, the way my life was coming apart. My parents wouldn’t stop fighting. An assault was years in my past and yet continued to interfere with my sleep, my ability to receive touch. I thought often about sex, even though it frightened me. I was always crying, always uncertain. What, I wondered, did God want from someone like me?

  One night, Joel and I took our sleeping bags outside and slept next to each other under the stars. I’d never seen a sky like that, unstained by city light. The Milky Way was stunningly clear; starmatter smeared across the black. There were new constellations here, on the bottom of the world. The planets gleamed; satellites slipped across the sky. When I woke up, there was a dung beetle pushing a small brown ball through the grass inches from my nose. I am normally terrified of insects, but at that moment, instead, I was cracked open, ready for wonder. In the beetle’s determination and slow progress, I saw indescribable splendor.

  When Joel woke, we walked to the pool and stared at the edge of the still and glassy water. He pulled off his shirt. He had a rectangular insulin pump attached to his abdomen; this vulnerable detail tugged on some mysterious thread inside me. He unhooked his pump, and turned to me, arms outstretched, and let me push him in. When he came up from the blue, he grabbed my ankle and pulled me in with him. We circled each other, my clothes floating weightlessly around my body. Only when I got out of the pool an hour later did I realize what I’d done: the fabric was soaked, slightly bleached, heavy as lead.

  After we got back to the States, I would drive to church after school and just sit in his office for hours. He kept the door closed.

  We talked. We talked about God and ethics and history and school; his marriage; the sexual assault in my freshman year that I couldn’t excise from my brain. He gave me permission to swear in front of him, which I did, profusely. “Fuck that fucking fuck,” I’d yell, new to profanities. “That asshole. That shitty asshole.” Joel watched m
e meditatively from his office chair, rocking against its hinges. Once, I sat down on the floor, and he joined me there, our knees touching. “Sometimes you just need a change of perspective,” he told me.

  Eventually, he insisted on meeting outside work. He gave me his cell number, and when I called he met me wherever I asked him to go. I felt a strange rush of pleasure at this development. We’d moved past the default scenes and settings of ministry. He met with parishioners during office hours, with the door standing open. But he met with me at diners at two in the morning, and I saw his face in the reflection of darkened windows. I drove to his house and waited for him to get dressed so we could go out. If his wife wasn’t home, he’d change in front of his open door as I looked and didn’t look, and then we’d drive to local restaurants and he’d buy me potstickers or grilled cheese sandwiches and I’d try not to cry too loudly. Once, I fell asleep in the booth, and he waited for me to wake up.

  My mother didn’t like that I called Joel by his first name. “It’s inappropriate,” she said. “He should be ‘Pastor Jones.’” What I couldn’t explain to her—what I barely understood myself—was that Joel wasn’t just my pastor. The boundaries that should have been up between us—minister/congregant, adult/teenager—had completely dissolved. We were friends. We were real, honest-to-goodness friends, and I did not have a lot of those.

  Joel rarely mentioned my age, but when he did I could see the gulf of time between us, and I hated it. His words were a mantra that I repeated in my head. It’s going to be okay. It’s not your fault. You’re not a bad person. God loves you. God loves you even though you’re not perfect. I love you.

  And I wanted him. On top of all of this, I wanted him. I knew he was married, but it didn’t seem to matter. He told me that his wife couldn’t get pregnant, and they’d stopped having sex altogether. Maybe that was what I sensed in him: something caged, unfulfilled. He radiated desire. I wanted to kiss him, I wanted him to hold me, I wanted to associate sex with something besides fear and guilt. I wanted my life to be shaken up, to go from being who I was to someone renewed.

  In those months, hazy from lack of sleep and raw with anxiety, I felt like a calculator with someone’s finger over the solar panel—fading in and out, threatening to shut off altogether. Joel, though, seemed to run on his own hunger. I wanted to be like that.

  I wept the last time I saw him. I was going to college, but I didn’t want to be so far apart. He assured me he was just a phone call away. “Plus,” he said, “DC isn’t that far. Maybe I can come visit.”

  At school, I had my first kiss, my first grope in the dark. I felt strange afterward: elated and sad and content and like an adult. When it was over, I went back to my dorm room. It was after midnight. I took my phone into the hallway so my roommate wouldn’t overhear, and I called Joel. He asked me what had happened. I told him, one detail after another. He didn’t refuse any of them; just listened until I was done.

  “What should I do?” I asked him, the question slipping out of my mouth before I could stop it. Until that moment I’d been, secretly, excited, bolstered with the newness of a man’s stubble across my face, hands that went where I wanted them to. But in Joel’s silence, which carried a whiff of disapproval, I recalled the sin of it.

  For the first time, he didn’t seem to know what to say. Where there had always been smooth advice that felt right and good and clear, now there was reticence. Hesitation.

  “Ask for forgiveness,” he said, finally.

  A few weeks later, Joel stopped responding to my calls.

  I went about my normal routine, but his silence hovered around me. Was he angry about my hookup? Was he—jealous? I panicked. Maybe he had lost interest in me. Maybe I’d crossed some invisible line, committed some unforgivable act. I sent him a few emails, spaced at what I hoped were ordinary intervals. He didn’t respond.

  A few weeks later, I was sitting in my dorm room on my brown corduroy comforter, trying to decide whether to go to the dining hall, when my phone rang. I told my roommate to go ahead; I’d follow in a second.

  My mother’s voice was restrained, slightly chilly. “Pastor Jones has been fired from the church,” she said.

  “What?”

  “The rumor is, he was having an affair with a parishioner,” she said. “A woman he was giving marriage counseling to.”

  I hung up; called Joel. His phone rang and rang. I couldn’t believe that he could do such a thing, and then hated myself for judging him. And as his voicemail message played, a small-girl, jealous part of me wondered—if that was what he’d really wanted—why he hadn’t chosen me. I’d been there. We’d been so close. He could have done it, and I would have, happily. “Call me,” I said, trying to steady my voice. “Please. I need to talk to you.”

  I took a train home and drove to the parish house. It was dark, but I knocked on the door anyway. When Joel didn’t answer, I went home and emailed him again.

  “Please,” I said. “Please don’t shut me out. Or if you’re going to, just tell me, tell me so that I’m not dangling in this in-between place. You stood by me when my world was falling down around me. Please let me do the same for you.”

  He responded a few hours later. “Carmen, I’m okay but things are confusing. I have to go, the library is closing. Joel.” That was the last I ever heard from him.

  By the time I got around to dating people I was a little desperate, a little horny, and a lot confused. I had figured out exactly nothing. I came of age, then, in the Dream House, wisdom practically smothering me in my sleep. Everything tasted like an almost epiphany.

  Dream House as Folktale Taxonomy

  In Hans Christian Andersen’s story, the Little Mermaid has her tongue cut out of her head.4 In “The Wild Swans,” Eliza is a princess who is silent for seven years as she stitches nettle shirts for her brothers, who have been turned into the eponymous birds.5 Then there’s the Goose Girl, whose identity, title, and husband are stolen by a treacherous maid, and who cannot speak of her plight for fear of her life.6

  The Little Mermaid suffers in other ways too. The process of growing legs is as painful as knives slicing open her tail. She dances beautifully because every time she steps, she is in agony. Still, the prince does not pick her. At the end, she considers killing him to save herself, but she chooses to die instead and is carried away by angels. (She has, through her suffering, earned a soul.)7 But before that, the witch takes the muscle of her tongue and cuts through the tissue. If you have ever sliced a pork chop with a shitty Ikea knife, you know what it was like—that sawing, that rocking back and forth, the slick and squeaky give of the muscle, the white marbled fat.

  Eliza, on the other hand, is lucky. Well, lucky-ish. Well, luckier. The nettles are stinging nettles, and she has to harvest them from graveyards. And she has to be silent the whole time: silent as she creates the shirts with her raw and blistered hands, silent as a man falls in love with her, silent as they try to burn her for being a witch. And even once she has finished her task, she faints before she can speak, and so her brothers have to speak for her.

  And the Goose Girl? She survives. She straight-up survives. Yes, the false princess has her beloved talking horse killed and his decapitated head hung from a gate for all to see. Yes, she has to watch someone waltz around with her identity on like a costume, afraid to say what needs to be said. But in the end, with the help of a kindly king and a goose-boy, her truth comes out. She marries her prince and rules with kindness and is happy until the end of her days.

  Sometimes your tongue is removed, sometimes you still it of your own accord. Sometimes you live, sometimes you die. Sometimes you have a name, sometimes you are named for what—not who—you are. The story always looks a little different, depending on who is telling it.

  There is a Quichua riddle: El que me nombra, me rompe. Whatever names me, breaks me. The solution, of course, is “silence.” But the truth is, anyone who knows your name can break you in two.8

  4. Thompson, Motif-Index of Fo
lk-Literature, Type S163, Mutilation: cutting (tearing) out tongue.

  5. Aarne-Thompson-Uther, Classification of Folk Tales, Type 451, The Maiden Who Seeks Her Brothers.

  6. Aarne-Thompson-Uther, Classification of Folk Tales, Type 533, The Repressed Bride.

  7. Thompson, Motif-Index of Folk-Literature, Type Q172, Reward: admission to heaven.

  8. Thompson, Motif-Index of Folk-Literature, Type C432.1, Guessing name of supernatural creature gives power over him.

  Dream House as Menagerie

  A line has been crossed—you’ve fallen in love. “I have to talk to Val,” she says. “I have to tell her, I have to figure this out. We’ve been together for three years,” she finishes, by way of explanation. And though everything has been on the up-and-up, you feel a weird stab of guilt. This is how emotions work, right? They get tangled and complicated? They take on their own life? Trying to control them is like trying to control a wild animal: no matter how much you think you’ve taught them, they’re willful. They have minds of their own. That’s the beauty of wildness.

  Dream House as Star-Crossed Lovers

  One day, a letter arrives. She is rejected from Iowa’s graduate writing program but accepted into Indiana’s. She tells you this with sorrow, over the phone even though you live less than a mile apart.

  You cry in the privacy of your bedroom. This was inevitable, you think. It’s been great, but it’s over.

  A few hours later, she knocks on your door. In your bedroom, she kisses you and explains: Val is going to leave New York and come live with her in Indiana. But she wants you to come and visit, to continue dating. “Val says we can try it,” she says. “I just—I think I’ve always been polyamorous, and it makes so much sense. I want to be with both of you. I want to make this work. Is that crazy?”