Chapter 1123 Mid-Atlantic Time Zone （MST）
“It has to be me,” Van whispered. “It has to be me, it has to be me.”
Allie leaned into his chest, thought he was whispering to her, then realized he was talking to himself. His gaze was bright
and fixed, pointed toward the waist of the plane. The dividing curtain was pulled to the side and buttoned out of the way.
The gangly flight attendant, Albert Shook, was buckled into a fold-down seat, facing aft. His gaze was fastened on Allie and
Van—he watched them steadily, with a combination of warning and loathing. His five-o’clock shadow was up to about eleven o’clock
now, giving him the look of a man at the end of a three-day bender. The movie no one was watching cast a wan and sputtering
light down the length of the cabin.
“It doesn’t have to be you,” Allie whispered. “It can be us.”
He grudgingly pulled his stare away from the galley and met her gaze.
The way he looked at her, Allie had never felt so loved—or ached so.
Because he was staring at her with an apology, and a kind of regret too.
The regret she understood, the apology she didn’t.
He had nothing to apologize for. It wasn’t his fault she was so fucked up, so confused, so pathological.
It wasn’t his fault that when she drank or when she was sad, she slipped back into the person she was before she went to conversion therapy, before she learned that the things she wanted were a kind of self-hate, a kind of poison of the soul.
It wasn’t Van’s fault that she always thought of Donna when she came, a thing she had prayed to God to forgive her for.
He had tried to be exactly what she wanted.
He went down on her a lot and he always had the world’s best Bloody Mary ready next to her coffee in the morning.
He tried to make a game out of it, encouraging her to check out chicks with him, but that just made her feel dirty.
She had no resentment toward gay people at all, had loved old Mr. Wren, but she didn’t want to be one, any more than she wanted to be blind, or in a wheelchair.
When Theo died, her father had almost died with him, and her mother had come unhinged, and after all that despair, she couldn’t bear to be the cause of more pain.
At least Van could look at her again. Could look at her with love and the helpless anguish that was like love’s shadow. He had not been able
to look at her at all as he was loaded into the ambulance, the night he nearly fell to his death.
After he overheard her on the phone with Mona, Allie thought they would talk about it. She was prepared to tell him everything.
Almost everything. She could not tell him about going to dyke bars when she was new to New York City, didn’t think it was necessary.
That had been early in their relationship, and all she had done was look and blush and run home and masturbate and then pray
for an hour or two. Those few trips to gay bars didn’t count, not the way Mona counted, because the making out with Mona happened
after Van offered her a ring and she put it on.
Allie waited in the bedroom, crying and trying not to cry and crying some more, but he didn’t come in and didn’t come in,
and finally she went looking for him in the other half of his Park Slope apartment, and he was gone. No note. She spent a
sleepless night shaky and ill. She hoped he was out fucking someone better looking than her. She hoped he’d walk in at two
and begin shoving her stuff into a garbage bag while telling her what a shitty lay she was. Because then she could beg, she
could plead with him not to hate her. She could tell him the gay thing was just this weird impulse, that she had worked through
it before, she could work through it again. Only he didn’t come in at two, or three, or at all.
She called in sick in the morning, but he still didn’t come back, and finally she made up her face and left at lunch to put in a few afternoon hours.
He wasn’t in the apartment that evening either, and a dizzying fantasy began to roll over her, of him climbing on top of the fencing to leap off the Brooklyn Bridge, that he was dead, would be found bloated and chewed by minnows.
But he was asleep on the couch when she came home from work the next day, dried blood crusted around one nostril, dried blood
on his shirt, a small baggy of cocaine in his shirt pocket. He smelled bad, like he had slept in a puddle of beer, and maybe
he had. When he woke, there was no possibility of talking about what he had overheard. She had to look after him with ice
water and pain medication and bland food. They watched TV, sitting on the floor, until 1:00 a.m., and finally she asked if
he still wanted to marry her, and he said, “My dad would fucking strangle me if we canceled now. He’s already laid out twenty-five
thousand dollars on the reception. Marrying you is the first choice I’ve ever made in my life that didn’t make my father want
to throw me through a window.”
“I’m sorry. I’m so sorry. I will never ever—ever—I don’t even know why—”
“Shh. Stop. Listen.” He was smiling at her, his eyes bloodshot and watering, and when he touched her face, she twitched, as
if he had given her a jolt of static electricity. “I’ve kind of known for a while. I just didn’t want to know. I need you
to hear this: it’s okay. You like girls and it’s okay. You don’t need fixing. You never did. I think it’s a mistake to marry
me—”
“I want to marry you, I love you, I love you so darn much—”
“—but I understand why you feel like you have to. I know your parents don’t want you to be gay, and for some fucked-up reason you’re determined not to disappoint them.
As someone who disappoints his parents every day of his life, I can tell you, they’d get over it, people do. But if you have to be a certain way for them, then I will be your cover story.
I will be your shield so you can sleep with other women and your parents won’t have to know. I would stand in front of a tank
for you, the least I can do is stand in front of your parents and pretend we have a normal marriage. I don’t know what kind
of life we will have together. I know I will prefer it to a life without you.”
She kissed him to make him stop talking, kissed his face all over, even though he smelled like a dumpster after a summer rain, and then did her very best to fuck him like a rock star so he’d stop talking about how she was gay and see that she wasn’t.
The second time she came, it wasn’t even pretend.
And she thought they’d get through it, she really did, except in March they went out to see Suede—Van had to write two thousand
words about the influence of American country on Britpop for Spin—and Donna invited herself along. Donna was determined to see the show because she thought they were the sexy English guys
who had done the song “Supersonic.” Van saw no reason to correct her.
So Donna turned up in a denim skirt that was so short it barely covered her crotch and a black halter top with a Union Jack
on it that left her belly button bare to show her taut navel, and what really struck Allie was how her lips were shiny with
gloss, like hard candies. By sheer accident Donna had a pageboy haircut almost identical to Van’s own short cut, and in the
pulsing discothèque lights, they looked like twin sisters, not twin brothers.
They had watched the show in the crush, right up front against the metal barricade, and for a while Donna was right behind
Allie, hips pressed into Allie’s ass, leaning over Allie’s shoulder to cheer, the two of them swaying together, Donna’s candy-gloss
lips close to Allie’s cheek, her arms around Allie’s waist, like they were sisters, the best sisters ever. Van had looked
so happy, staring up at the stage, the light show making his eyes flicker and dance with a kind of fay brightness: it was
like the reflection of an aurora borealis, which once, long ago, Allie had confused with the ouroboros. They screamed themselves
hoarse and Allie had Van’s hand in hers, and sometimes she let go to run her hand down his spine, thoughtlessly rocking her
hips back again and again. It was the best she had felt in weeks, the freest, the easiest—feelings she only really associated
with church, with hitting just the right high note in choir, her voice joined perfectly with a dozen others, feeling loved
by God, feeling loved for who she was.
She had gone clubbing with Donna after the show, while Van slipped backstage to talk with Brett Anderson, Suede’s lead singer.
She promised Van she would be at his apartment in Park Slope by the time he got home, but actually Donna and Allie were out until almost two, drinking and dancing together, screaming along to Madonna, bellowing out the words to Boys II Men’s “I’ll Make Love to You,” while they held one another and reeled drunkenly across the floor, laughing at the gloppy sentimental sexiness of it.
“Half the guys in this room are going to go home and whack off thinking about us tonight,” Donna whispered once, and Allie had shivered and was glad she had Donna to hold her, felt protected from pervy skeeves by Donna’s sure embrace.
When she finally got to Park Slope, Van was lying still and stiff in bed already, pretending to be asleep. Her blood was wild
in her ears. She felt like she was still being spun across the floor, felt the music pumping inside her. She couldn’t remember
the last time she had been so horny, so wet. She climbed over him, had her panties down and her skirt pushed up, and he tried
to roll away, said, “I’m wiped, let’s tomorrow,” but she was insistent, pushing up his shirt, working her mouth down to his
crotch, bucking against his thighs, saying his name in a kind of trance state, over and over, only then he took her shoulders
in both hands and shoved her back and said, “Fuck’s sake, stop it. Just. No.”
He got up. He pulled on his jeans. He went out. Her heart thrummed and the room wheeled slowly around her. She couldn’t figure