FROM Year Seven When I Call Her My Husband

When I call Linnea my husband I mean that she's a woman who has to lead when we slow dance, who is compelled to try to dip and twirl me, no matter that I have rarely been able to relax on a dance floor since I stopped drinking. She leads me between the black-walls of a gay bar, our faces streaked with neon and silver disco light, the air so dark Linnea's black leather belt and both our black boots seem to vanish, leaving parts of us afloat in the heavy smell of booze and cigarettes. She leads me slipping under streamers and lavender balloons, in the center of the light cast by several dozen candles, on some friend's polished oak dining-room floor cleared for party dancing. She leads me across a Sunday morning, sun streaming into our living room through southern exposed windows, so bright it sets the dust spinning. We dance clumsily on the purple oriental rug we bought cheap at a garage sale, the worn wool covered with cat and dog hair, the dog barking and nipping at our heels, me in stocking feet, Linnea wearing athletic shoes because the arches of her feet went bad a few years back.

When I call her my husband I mean that she's a woman I saw dressed seriously in a skirt and heels just once, early on, when she still tried to cross over for job interviews. Her head, shoulders, hands looked too large, her gait too long, an inelegant drag queen. This is a woman who's happiest straddling a motorcycle, who wears a black leather jacket and square-toed biking boots even when she's not riding. For years I've been telling her that her thick, curly hair would look fantastic long, wild with its own life like the hair of Botticelli's Venus or Arlo Guthrie's hair in the Alice's Restaurant days, but she will always be a woman who wears her hair short, cut to look slicked back at the sides, a grease-free DA. She's a woman who does not look like a man, yet is often mistaken for one, a woman who meets a clamor of gasps when she enters into the pale green light of shopping mall rest rooms. The other women are caught with their naked hands motionless over the bright white sinks. The boldest and least observant among them checks her own reflection in the mirror, straightens her back, breaks from the pack to protect the others, points to some unseeable place on the other side of the cloister wall-"This is the women's room."

I mean Linnea is a woman who once stood at the center of the Gay-90's Saturday night throb, her Levi's tight across the ass, her black leather boots and black leather jacket absorbing the speckled silver light refracting from the spangled curtains of the drag stage. She was caught in a fast second of instinct when she swung around and decked a drunk flat in the nose. He had reached between her legs from behind to grab what he thought was her dick. "He got two surprises that night," is what Linnea says about it.

I mean Linnea is a woman who is a woman because she was born with a woman's body. The large breasts and tender nipples. The monthly swelling, cramps, and blood. The opening up into her that she will do anything to protect, even break a man's nose in the glittering dark of a bar where drag queens sway on a sequined stage in sequined gowns and sequined eyelashes, their breasts made of foam rubber or silicone, their dicks taped up safe between their buttocks, as they smile like pop stars before paparazzi and mouth the words of Whitney Houston songs.

FROM Year Six The Laws of the Game

My little brother Paulie was breathless. Even over the phone I could tell that his chest was pounding, his thoughts racing.

"I've got news," he said. "We're engaged."

The room where we stood trembled red. Every December on Portland Avenue Linnea hung Christmas lights, the flickering kind, usually an unbroken line of red or gold or blue, because she knew I liked the solid strings, the unbroken impact of just one shade, better than the random tones of the multi-colored strands. She hung them while I was out, working or shopping for groceries. Then she waited for me to return, laughed when I gasped at the transformation, the center of our home rinsed in new color. This year she taped them up in the front window in the shape of a top-heavy star. They blinked out at empty Portland Avenue as Linnea and I leaned over the phone.

"You are?" I said. "Engaged?" And then I was breathless too.

It was a usual New Year's Day in Minneapolis, strangely quiet. Everyone in the city seemed to be home. Nursing hangovers. Watching football. Linnea and I were not hungover, but there was a football game droning from the TV in the next room. I didn't know which teams. When I tried to pay attention to the game the players blurred, and I thought of the electric football set my brother's Paulie and Benny shared when we were kids. Little plastic quarterbacks and linebackers buzzing along on a rattling electric field-a mass of tiny men who all looked the same, jumbled up in a ridiculous, toppling mass. It's not because I'm the only girl child in my family that I grew up hating football. My mother is the biggest football fan of all, with closets of Illinois colors, blue-and-orange sweatshirts and caps and windbreakers that could almost double for both the Fighting Illini and the Bears if not for the grand embroidered logos-a snarling mammal, a fake Indian. But early on, I was compelled to distinguish myself from the rest of the family, perhaps from my mother especially. What I liked was different from what they liked. Whether it was my difference that influenced my preferences or my preferences that defined my difference I never have been certain. What I can say definitely is that I have always hated football.

"It's New Year's Day," Linnea said. "I have to watch football." It meant something to her, so I tried not to complain, even though this sounded a lot like something one of my brothers would say, even though I was annoyed by the constant shouts and banter of the announcers and the camera shots of male fans with their bare chests painted the clashing colors of some team they adored beyond all reason. The game itself has always mystified me, even though I've tried to follow Linnea's careful explanations. But the questions I ask defy easy answers. Is the hollering coach with the scrunched face a happy man? Is the boxy guy in the middle of the field married to someone he loves beyond all reason? Does he think about his love when ten guys try to crush him with the entire weight of their hurled bodies?

"It's just a game, " Linnea said.

Just a game, which aside from the grunting and body bashing, is precisely why I don't understand. How do people feel such physiological allegiance to something as separate from their own bodies as a team of beefy guys whose faces they can't even see, whose hearts they will never know? Even in high school I had a problem with team spirit. My high school was enormous, over a thousand in each graduating class. I knew one, maybe two, football players. A couple more I recognized from those Saturday-night bacchanals advertised by word of mouth when some rich kid's parents were out of town. There was usually a hard-jawed sports hero or two reeling and barfing on the front lawn from all that free keg beer. The few times I actually went to a football game, the fun for me was getting stoned and watching the cheerleaders. Were they really so much prettier than everyone else? Did they deserve their nearly holy status? When their arms flew up over their heads and their feet rose up off the ground, levitated by a long physical wail of joy (what was going on down there, on that painted grass) were they sincere? Did they really love their team beyond all physical law, beyond all rational explanation? And what was the point, on those gusty, late October Saturday mornings, of clapping with mittens on?

But it was New Year's Day and Linnea and I were still working out the concessions we would make for the sake of each other's marital bliss. So I put up with the football game, and Linnea put up with my bitching about the football game. It was a million years since high school and my brother was on the phone from Chicago. The same game that pulsed and shouted in our living room echoed long-distance through the speaker phone, as my little brother told me he was getting married.

FROM Year Seven Our Muddy Bodies Longing

If gravity has a sound, it would have to be that of rain, the constant, inevitable, pummeling, pushing into, under the earth's crust. The force that causes the rain to fall down instead of up, that causes the bits of bricks loosened by storm to drop and the rain collected in the gutters to run downhill, this is the same force that holds the Earth, the sun, the stars together. It's what holds the planets in their orbits. It's what keeps the big rock of Earth from breaking apart. We tend to think the same of our customs, the rituals of common culture. Without the nuclear family, our politicians tell us, without that fundamental thing, the one-man-one-woman marriage, our shaky organization will break apart, our insignificant bodies will no longer be held to any ground, our limbs and hair and lost shoes spinning through space, a cubist collage of all we hold dear. The thing we celebrate at almost every one of these cultural pageants, these things we call weddings, is our contract with nature, our agreement to behave as we believe the authority of gravity demands. But gravity is the least understood of all the elements. Suction, a helium balloon, helicopters, super glue, a dollar bill let loose in the wind all defy the gravitational field. If the politicians, the morning commuters, the crowd at the baseball game would just look up, if the wedding parties, the mothers and fathers of the bride and groom and the guests in their party clothes and polished shoes would follow the wave of the organ bellow out the heavy church doors and up into the heavens, they might all see the rest of us up here, alone, in pairs, in odd-numbered clusters, unbound and flapping, proving that nature is always more complex than we want to believe.

FROM Present Tense Community Property

Most lesbians know the joke. What does a lesbian bring to her second date? A U-Haul.

Of course, it is not only gay men who love a random encounter. It is not only women who crave a common kitchen. Still, it does seem that the urge to share the circular breath of home comes early in so many woman-to-woman love affairs. How many times do our flocks of more rationally thinking friends shake their heads and call out from the neighborhood trees? Toooo Soooon. Toooo Soooon. And how often do we do it anyway, so eager to trip through new doorways together, to touch strange walls and odd cracks between the bathtub tiles, to touch heads as we gaze into unfamiliar mirrors, trying to determine how we feel together in this new place. We breath in and this fresh atmosphere seems to hold a protein we'd been missing. We breath out and our spent air mingles, fogging the bathroom fixtures.

I wonder how the ground where we stand makes or unmakes Linnea and me. Was moving in together the equivalent of a wedding? Did we become more married, once we bought a house? My cousin Dino, who, unlike me, does not believe that public announcement is any way to honor homosexual love, has told me that he believes it's property that makes a gay marriage. We were standing on a sidewalk on the North Side of Chicago and looking up at the peonies growing in wide concrete planters that he and his long-time companion Danny had placed on either side of their polished condo door. He said the word property the way Scarlet O'Hara says, "Tara," in the scene just before intermission, when she holds the red earth in her palm. I could see that Dino's condo was a property it would be easy to love, a block from the Lake Michigan shore. The condo had wide, shimmering windows that looked out onto the city, a dining room furnished with a long table and tooled leather chairs they bought in Mexico, a wall sculpture they shipped back from their recent vacation in Greece, and Dino's white baby grand that reminded me of how he was when we were kids together. He won piano contests when he was in grade school and acted in semi-professional shows until he graduated from high school. I thought he would grow up to work on the stage.

Joint property equals marriage? No, I don't agree with Dino's math. Collecting houses is one of Dino's passions, but I can't think that fact will ever make him more married. He made his pronouncement during the time when Linnea and I owned nothing but a bed, and so I laughed and said, "Well, we have a dog. . ." Then we changed the subject, to the potted peonies, I think, the brilliance of the pink blossoms and the fertilizer he used to help them bloom.

FROM Twelve Years and Counting Landscapes of My Beloved

So in our twelfth year of living in sin Linnea and I finally decided to get married. Not that we were sure yet just what it meant for two women to use those words. Not that we hadn't already considered ourselves some kind of united, for years now, living together, traveling together, caring for a dog and three cats, buying joint gifts for our in-laws, attending weddings and funerals and holiday dinners. The only thing we had never done was walk down that mythic aisle.

But for all our asking and wondering and fantasizing over the years of what our sort of wedding might be, we never fully imagined that Las Vegas backdrop of bubbling lights and kerchinking coins. We never thought that our honeymoon entertainment would be front row seats at a topless revue, a stage so bright it made the back of our eyes ache as chorus boys in leather loincloths snapped their fingers and tapped off tempo. It's a gay men's chorus with showgirls I whispered to Peter across the nightclub table as we watched the big entrance of fifteen skinny women, their nipples tight in the breeze of the stage, high kicking gazelle legs up into cascades of head dress feathers while a dapper man in a glittery tux sang before a set that was no less than a replica of the Titanic, creaking and sinking into the electric sunset behind all those stepping and twirling feet.

We had, of course, heard of Las Vegas, but hadn't really pictured it. Acrobats in tie-dyed bodysuits levitated with pointed toes off silver poles. Amazing fellows in black tie and tails made whole sports cars disappear from a mottled stage. Caverns of blinking and purring slot machines made our hearts pump harder and our fingertips tingle as they stole all our silver. White tigers circled in a glass-enclosed casino zoo. Looking out over the traffic were truck-sized busts of two pretty boy magicians whose best trick was an old-fashioned one, perfected years ago by Liberace, their obvious homosexuality so deeply unmentionable yet so essential to this boulevard of really big shows. It was hilarious and over-lit, a drugged-up half-time at the football game, the Olympics of American Entertainment, but was it any place to get married?

Apparently so, judging by the avenues of wedding chapels. The sign before Wee Kirk O' The Heather insisted it was Las Vegas' finest since 1940. The Hitching Post was on the shadowy side of the boulevard-English, French, Polish, Russian, and Spanish spoken there. The Graceland Chapel, a wooden hut bathed in white and green light with walls full of photographs of the King, was the spot Jon Bon Jovi and Fernando Lamas exchanged vows with their brides. The Silver Bell Chapel featured its namesake in neon, a silent chime of gassy light, never ceasing in its claim that 300,000 happy couples were married there-no word if they were all still happy when they left. The Little White Chapel was the place where Joan Collins and Michael Jordan were wed, not, of course, to each other, and also the home of the $25 drive through ceremony, a long driveway to a sliding-glass window under a canopy painted with bare-bottomed cupids and Frank Sinatra's voice piped through the outdoor speakers. The Sweethearts Wedding Chapel advertised a $65 wedding pack. Burgler bars protected their plate glass so that the white lace-bound mannequin in the window looked to me like a bride behind bars, and I wondered how often it happened-women who were optimistic on their way into town but haunted on the way home by the edge of a sound, the tumblers in a lock turning, a gate shimmering shut to which she knows she has no key. So happy they had to put her in jail, one of our confidants quipped later, when we passed around the pictures.

When we tell people now about our wedding we get one of two reactions. Either they laugh and stammer you did that? How fabulous. Or else they look at us oddly, wondering, why, how, what could have moved us to do it that way? I wondered that myself on the drive in the rented Cadillac from the airport to our downtown Vegas hotel. The blue neon pulse of the pyramid-shaped Luxor casino ghosted our faces, on and off, sputtering moments of real and not real. A miniature New York City was scrunched into the space of a city block. This was more than some lunatic's daydream but a thing they really did build. And the people came to see it-Miss Liberty and the Coney Island roller coaster and the Chrysler building all rubbing shoulders. Vegas is not a real landscape but a fantasy that suggests our best memories can be recreated by remembering only the high points. If it muddies the romance then leave it behind.

What could be the reason that Linnea and I would choose this trippy place to get married?