In the Dream House Read online

  “No,” you say, wiping the tears from your glasses. “I can’t wait to try.”

  Dream House as Daydream

  She and Val need to go house hunting in Bloomington, and they want you to come along.

  A few days before you leave Iowa, you find a vintage photograph for sale, black-and-white with three women laughing, one of them holding a baby. From the forties, maybe, but you’re just guessing. You buy a frame at a thrift store and take the picture with you.

  In Indiana you go from house to house together. You drive; your girlfriend is in the passenger seat; Val is in the back. The loose explanation is that they are the couple and you are the friend with wheels, but in every place you are all thinking about bedrooms. Do you need two, one for you and her, one for her and Val? What about a futon in the office? You all laugh, crowd into rooms. If the landlords have questions, they don’t verbalize them. You think, They can’t even imagine it, the perfection and lushness of this arrangement.

  One house is magical—tucked into a deep pocket of trees, all wood and rustic, with more rooms than you could fill if you tried. You remember a puzzling set of indoor windows, as if the house had swallowed a second, tiny house. Another is hilariously dilapidated, and every surface of the kitchen is covered in clean, drying shot glasses; a party house with at least one curiously conscientious resident. It smells like teenage boys: sweat and scented sprays and Doritos.

  During a long interval between appointments, you visit a pet store and see a tiny pile of ferrets, nestled together in their enclosure. You give them all funny voices; tell a story about the boss you had at a summer job who asked if she could show you a photo of her kids and then showed you a picture of her ferrets. By the time you’re back outside in the sunlight, you’re all laughing.

  The last house—the most perfect—is owned by a beautiful young couple, both redheads, whose children come to the door clutching their mother’s skirt while she stirs a bowl of batter. It is like a fairy tale. Chickens peck in the yard; a beautiful, lanky dog sleeps on the porch. The house is heated by a wood stove. You know the place is impractical—too far from town—but you love it so much your heart aches. It is here—standing under a canopy of trees, watching your girlfriend talk to the husband—that you first admit the fantasy to yourself: that one day the V structure of your relationship will collapse into a heap, and the three of you will be together.9

  You put Val on a plane, and then the two of you drive back to Iowa. As farmland scrolls past you, you find yourself imagining a whole new life, a perfect intersection of hedonism and wholesomeness: canning and pickling, writing in front of a fireplace, the three of you tangled in a bed. Fighting with your kids’ guidance counselor. Explaining to your children that other families may not look like yours, but that doesn’t mean something is wrong. Most kids would give anything to have three moms.

  You catch yourself mourning already. You look over at her. “Let’s take one more road trip together,” she says.

  9. Thompson, Motif-Index of Folk-Literature, Type T92.1, The triangle plot and its solutions.

  Dream House as Erotica

  In the late spring, you surprise yourself by asking her to cover your mouth as you come. She does, pressing a firm palm against your crescendoing howl, and it’s as if the sound is being pushed back into your body so that it might suffuse your every molecule. When you are ebbing, and try to inhale but can’t, she lets go, and you can feel the lingering tingle of unlanguage.

  After this, you ask her to talk to you in a low, raspy stream while she fucks you, and she does: switching effortlessly between English and French, muttering about her cock and how it’s filling you up, pushing her hand over your face and grabbing the architecture of your jaw to turn it this way and that. She shaves her cunt smooth, and it glows like the inside of a conch shell. She loves wearing a harness; you suck her off that way and she comes like it’s real, bucking and lifting off the mattress.

  You don’t know what is more of a miracle: her body, or her love of your body. She haunts your erotic imagination. You are both perpetually wet. You fuck, it seems, everywhere: beds and tables and floors; over the phone. When you are physically next to each other, she loves to marvel over your differences: how her skin is pale as skim milk and yours, olive; how her nipples are pink and yours are brown. “Everything is darker on you,” she says.

  You would let her swallow you whole, if she could.

  Dream House as Omen

  You both take jobs as standardized-test scorers at Pearson to make some extra cash. The building is low and squat, in a corporate park just outside Iowa City where the town gives way to cornfields. It reminds you of a job you had at nineteen when you were a glorified telemarketer, calling homeowners in the Lehigh Valley to convince them to replace their windows.

  You sit at long tables where there is a computer at each station. You wish you could grade essays, but you spend the majority of the time evaluating the sort of long-form math problems that gave you hives as a teen, laughing out loud at cheeky kids who make drawings or jokes or write “Fuck if I know” where the answer should be. It is mind-bendingly boring, but it is income, and the two of you even make a sort of friend: a woman who sits with you at lunch, and whom you often drive home.

  The hours are long, the breaks are short, and by the end of the day you are usually eating Cheetos from the vending machine and feeling bloated and pickled from the preservatives. You go to the bathroom a lot, mostly just to get your blood flowing and keep you from falling asleep.

  It is on one of these trips that you hear a woman sobbing in the handicapped stall next to you. You pee—except you peed half an hour ago, so it is barely a trickle—and after you wash your hands you rap lightly on the door and ask if she’s all right. She unlatches the door, hiccupping, a slender, small woman with huge, dark eyes. She says that she’s having a traumatic episode. You ask her if she wants to go outside, and she says yes, and the two of you go and sit on a patch of grass by the entrance to the building. She tells you that she was raped, a long time ago, and she has been struggling to get someone to believe her. The two of you begin to talk—well, she talks; you mostly listen and nod.

  The afternoon creeps by. You keep waiting for the boss to notice you’re missing, to come out and yell at you—but they either don’t know, or don’t care. At a certain point, you wonder what time it is, but you are afraid to interrupt the stream of her monologue by pulling out your phone.

  When you finally do, you discover two things: you’ve been out there for almost two hours, and your girlfriend has called and texted you half a dozen times. Where are you, where are you, where are you, she asks, and just as you lift the phone to your ear to call her back, the front door of the building opens and a herd of scorers begins to pour out, including her. You give the woman you’ve been talking to your phone number, tell her to call you if she needs anything, and then dart across the lawn.

  Your girlfriend is glowering. Your new friend is running next to her, looking a little anxious and breathless, and gets to you first. “She was just worried about you,” your new friend says, with such preemptive anxiety that you are taken aback. The three of you get in your car, and your girlfriend is radiating fury. You drive silently to the friend’s house. When you get there, she seems almost reluctant to get out of the car, and once she’s out she lingers, like there’s something she wants to say. But then she goes inside. As you pull away from the curb, your girlfriend slams her hand on the dashboard as hard as she possibly can.

  “Where the fuck were you?”

  You explain about the woman in the bathroom, what she said to you, how you couldn’t text because she was talking and you didn’t want to interrupt her. You fully expect this explanation to deflate her rage—you even expect her to apologize—but somehow she gets even angrier. She continues to pound the dashboard. “You are the most inconsiderate fucking person I’ve ever met, and how fucking dare you just walk out of the building with no explanation like that.” Every time
you bring up the woman she starts yelling again. A few blocks from your house, you pull over.

  “Don’t talk to me like that,” you say. Then, horrifyingly, you start to cry. “I had to make a decision, and I feel confident that I made the right decision.”

  She unbuckles her seat belt, and leans very close to your ear. “You’re not allowed to write about this,” she says. “Don’t you ever write about this. Do you fucking understand me?”

  You don’t know if she means the woman or her, but you nod.

  Fear makes liars of us all.10

  10. Thompson, Motif-Index of Folk-Literature, Type C420.2, Taboo: not to speak about a certain happening.

  Dream House as Noir

  She is not your first female crush, or your first female kiss, or even your first female lover. But she is the first woman who wants you in that way—desire tinged with obsession. She is the first woman who yokes herself to you with the label girlfriend. Who seems proud of that fact. And so when she walks into your office and tells you that this is what it’s like to date a woman, you believe her. And why wouldn’t you? You trust her, and you have no context for anything else. You have spent your whole life listening to your father talk about women’s emotions, their sensitivity. He never said it in a bad way, exactly—though the implication is always there. Suddenly you find yourself wondering if you’re in the middle of evidence that he’s right. All these years of telling him he’s full of bullshit, that he needs to decolonize his mind and lose the gender essentialism, and here you are learning that lesbian relationships are, somehow, different—more intense and beautiful but also more painful and volatile, because women are all of these things too. Maybe you really do believe that women are different. Maybe you owe your father an apology. Dames, right?

  Dream House as Queer Villainy

  I think a lot about queer villains, the problem and pleasure and audacity of them.

  I know I should have a very specific political response to them. I know, for example, I should be offended by Disney’s lineup of vain, effete ne’er-do-wells (Scar, Jafar), sinister drag queens (Ursula, Cruella de Vil), and constipated, man-hating power dykes (Lady Tremaine, Maleficent). I should be furious at Downton Abbey’s scheming gay butler and Girlfriend’s controlling, lunatic lesbian, and I should be indignant about Rebecca and Strangers on a Train and Laura and The Terror and All About Eve, and every other classic and contemporary foppish, conniving, sissy, cruel, humorless, depraved, evil, insane homosexual on the large and small screen.

  And yet, while I recognize the problem intellectually—the system of coding, the way villainy and queerness became a kind of shorthand for each other—I cannot help but love these fictional queer villains. I love them for all of their aesthetic lushness and theatrical glee, their fabulousness, their ruthlessness, their power. They’re always by far the most interesting characters on the screen. After all, they live in a world that hates them. They’ve adapted; they’ve learned to conceal themselves. They’ve survived.

  In Alain Guiraudie’s Stranger by the Lake, the young protagonist, Franck, witnesses an older man, Michel, drowning his boyfriend in a lake that serves as a local cruising spot. Shortly thereafter, he begins an affair with Michel. After the boyfriend’s body is found, the gay community that exists along the shore is shaken, thrown into emotional turmoil while simultaneously maintaining its collective routines. As an enterprising inspector begins to sniff around for answers, Franck finds himself lying for his new lover and trying to get closer to him.

  Franck’s decision to stay with the handsome, magnetic murderer is only a few notches exaggerated from a pretty relatable problem: an inability to find logical footing when you’re being knocked around by waves of lust, love, loneliness. Michel does not have the campy fabulousness of so many queer villains, and is in many ways far more sinister. He is attractive, charismatic, and morally empty. We are given almost no clues about his backstory, his murderous motivations.

  There is a question of representation tied up in the anguish around the queer villain; when so few gay characters appear on-screen, their disproportionate villainy is—obviously—suspect. It tells a single story, to paraphrase Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, and creates real-life associations of evil and depravity. It is not incorrect to tell an artist that there is responsibility tangled up in whom you choose to make villains, but it is also not a simple matter.

  As it turns out, queer villains become far more interesting among other gay characters, both within a specific project or universe and the zeitgeist at large. They become one star in a larger constellation; they are put in context. And that’s pretty exciting, even liberating; by expanding representation, we give space to queers to be—as characters, as real people—human beings. They don’t have to be metaphors for wickedness and depravity or icons of conformity and docility.11 They can be what they are. We deserve to have our wrongdoing represented as much as our heroism, because when we refuse wrongdoing as a possibility for a group of people, we refuse their humanity. That is to say, queers—real-life ones—do not deserve representation, protection, and rights because they are morally pure or upright as a people.12 They deserve those things because they are human beings, and that is enough.

  Toward the end of Stranger by the Lake, the police inspector confronts Franck as he leaves the beach for the day. Franck is, literally, trapped in the beam of the officer’s headlights, and as the conversation progresses the metaphor is sharpened even more. “Don’t you find it odd we’ve only just found the body, and two days later everyone’s back cruising like nothing happened?” the officer asks him.

  Later in this scene, Franck will be visibly overcome with grief as the officer asks him to have compassion for the dead man, begs him to have a sense of self-preservation.13 But even in his grief, he is clear-eyed. “We can’t stop living,” he says.

  We can’t stop living. Which means we have to live, which means we are alive, which means we are humans and we are human: some of us are unkind and some of us are confused and some of us sleep with the wrong people and some of us make bad decisions and some of us are murderers. And it sounds terrible but it is, in fact, freeing: the idea that queer does not equal good or pure or right. It is simply a state of being—one subject to politics, to its own social forces, to larger narratives, to moral complexities of every kind. So bring on the queer villains, the queer heroes, the queer sidekicks and secondary characters and protagonists and extras. They can be a complete cast unto themselves. Let them have agency, and then let them go.

  11. A cliché born of a necessary evil: the fight for rights. As with race and gender and able-bodiedness, the trope of the saintly and all-sacrificing minority is one that follows on the heels of unadulterated hatred, and is just as dangerous (though for different reasons).

  12. This type of characterization was useful during the fight for marriage equality in the United States, but its shortcomings are many. It is, for example, not an accident that people have had trouble wrapping their heads around Jennifer and Sarah Hart, a white lesbian couple who starved their six black adopted children before deliberately driving themselves and their kids off a cliff in California in 2018. It is also not an accident that people struggle to conceive of queer women as capable of sexual assault or domestic abuse. (There’s plenty of sexism tied up in this, too, a Lizzie Borden type of conundrum. Who is capable of committing unspeakable violence?)

  13. There is a second, minor detail in this scene that sent me spiraling: the inspector asks Franck, “What if there’s a homophobic serial killer on the loose?” The inspector does not necessarily know that the murderer is gay himself; he is guessing that the victim of a maligned demographic might have been targeted for belonging to that group. But I wondered: if a gay murderer targets only gay men, is that gay murderer himself homophobic? This question is something of a snake eating its own tail, and I cannot dig myself out.

  Dream House as Road Trip to Everywhere

  It is July. Iowa in July is nothing but drama: wet he
at, tornado warnings, thunderstorms so violent you have to pull the car over. Mosquitoes flock to you; your legs are swollen with their needs.

  You plan your trip: Iowa to Boston, Boston to New York. In Boston she’ll show you her old stomping grounds; in New York you’ll both get to spend time with Val. Then New York to Allentown so she can meet your parents, Allentown to DC to meet your college friends, DC to northern Virginia for one of your oldest friend’s wedding, and then down to Florida so you can meet her parents. The idea of the open road lights you up. You have always adored driving great distances across your country: it is the only time you ever feel any kind of patriotism.

  Her parents don’t want you to drive. They worry about accidents; they beg you both to fly. You come to a compromise: you will drive to DC and fly to Florida from there. They pay for your tickets.

  Every step of the trip is sweet and sour. While you drive you slip your hand between her legs, jerk her off as you zip past cornfields and stopped traffic. (She is hot; you are stupid.) You fight near a rest stop in Illinois about, of all things, a Beyoncé song. (“If the lyrics were about how men ruled the world,” she says to you, “you’d hate this song.”) When she kisses you in a McDonald’s parking lot in Indiana, you both look up to see a group of men—a risk of men, a murder of men—standing there watching, laughing, pointing. One man does that tongue-waggle-through-the-fingers thing, which you have never seen anyone do in real life. You fly out of there as fast as you can; you don’t even buckle your seat belt until you’re back on the interstate.