EARPLUGS

One day I heard from a friend that Britte was home from France. Remembering how absolutely I’d once believed that we’d be friends for life, there at one or the other’s death bed, I needed answers—or, at least, to take a stab at closure—and made up my mind to call her, not the easiest thing I’ve ever done.

After our conversation I wrote:

“Britte told me her partner was a woman. Throughout our telephone conversation, her voice sounded unnatural. ‘I think of you every once in a while,’ she said, then added with a forced laugh, ‘It makes me nervous.’

“Last night I dreamed that by contracting my abdominal muscles, I was able to expel my uterus. It stood out from my crotch, still attached, like an elongated balloon, like an enormous phallus.

“I also dreamed my mother roused me from sleep and was trying to tell me something. I removed my earplugs and still couldn’t hear her. So I delved deeper into my ears and extracted another set of plugs, then another…and another.

“I woke before dawn this morning, remembering Britte and the past. I cried fitfully, not able to understand or order my riotous feelings. Agitation made me feel that in another moment I would leap out of my skin.

“I wanted to ask Beth, ‘Your partner…is it a man or a woman?’”

                                                                             …

It wasn’t until some time later that I finally met Britte face-to-face and heard, with a kind of dazed astonishment, the reason she’d pushed me away eight years before. It was simply that…she’d been so attracted to me, she confessed. Attracted? I thought incredulously. I could hardly wrap my mind around it. It felt like she was telling me the problem had been that I was too much, rather than—as she’d led me to believe at the time—too little. When she added that she’d learned more from me than anyone she’d ever known, I wasn’t sure exactly what she meant but found it painfully ironic, since, with the exception of my parents, I felt she’d hurt me more deeply than anyone I’d ever known.

It had never even crossed my mind that Britte might be a lesbian. During our friendship, she was infatuated with Salvador de la Mora, then Bruce. Besides, it would have seemed too anomalous for someone from such a “perfect” family to be gay. Back then—in psychiatric circles like my mother’s, at least—homosexuality was still thought to be caused by faulty nurturing—by a distant parent of the same sex and a “seductive” parent of the opposite sex. I remembered my mother asking me once, “What does Britte see in you?” A fair question (though it stung me at the time), which is why, perhaps, in the dream my mother is trying to tell me something I can’t hear. It didn’t occur to me that there was anything unusual about the intensity of my friendship with Britte—because I had passionate feelings for her and I wasn’t a lesbian.

I saw Britte only once after that, when she invited me to dinner to meet her lover, a former student of hers like me. (She couldn’t meet me alone, she’d explained, out of consideration for her partner, who would have been jealous.) I don’t remember much about the evening, probably because I was so nervous. What I do recall is that Britte had bobbed her wavy, honey-colored hair and that her lover seemed to me small, drab, and insecure…but then, I suppose I needed to see her that way.

Actually, I did almost run into Britte another time. She was a ways ahead of me in line at the Co-op Christmas tree sale one morning before dawn, when and where it seemed all of Berkeley had converged to haggle over the cheap trees. “Oh, no! It’s Britte!” I hissed to Ella. “Let’s go to the back of the line.” But the Co-op went bust a long time ago, and every so often it crosses my mind how strange it is that you can go decades in a relatively small city like Berkeley and never see someone who lives only a few miles away. I still dream about Britte, though—complicated, oppressive dreams—and, considering what a pivotal person she was in my life, I guess I always will.

                                                                             …

From Ruth, one of Britte’s roommates back in her college days, I learned recently that Britte broke up with that young woman years ago, and I found myself wondering whether her student-lover had been as devastated as I was; given my impression of her, it wouldn’t surprise me if she was. Britte subsequently found a partner her own age, then ended her friendship with Ruth because Ruth made the mistake, after inviting Britte and her partner on an outing, of asking if the partner would like to go even though Britte wasn’t available. I thought of the way Britte had wooed other people whenever we were out socially, how completely insensitive she’d been to my insecurities. And I thought to myself, How often we do to others the very thing we can least tolerate having done to ourselves. We do this, I believe, because our areas of greatest vulnerability are the areas where we are the most defended—by denial, self-righteousness, and self-delusion.