Chapter Five
No String Theories Attached
For ordinary couples the playing field is pretty simple and the outcome quite predictable: you were either on or off, and fifty percent of the time you’d be off for good; the other fifty percent you’d be on with a lot of down time off. But for Jennifer, Miranda and me, there were shifting alliances in constant flux: three sets of couples embedded in a trinity holy or unholy, depending on your open-mindedness.
It turned out that Jennifer’s re-entry into the Eden she vacated for the faux Musketeer Gerhard and his theatrical faux pas de deux was harder for Miranda than for me. That line about the woman scorned – which my mother assured me Shakespeare had nothing to do with, and I tended to trust her on these kinds of things – was right on target, except whoever wrote it missed the bit about the fury being a helluva lot worse for the woman scorned by another woman.
Whenever I came to Jennifer’s defense Miranda accused me of being an arbitrageur, whatever that was, but it had a mercenary ring and she knew it; and when I tried to explain to Jennifer that Miranda’s position could be understood I got the ‘commie sympathizer’ sobriquet, which Jennifer knew was unfair because Miranda was more Bakunin than Marx, not that I could tease out the finer points.
So I was the middleman, in bed and out.
Luckily my unlikely show of force on the off-Broadway stage had earned me some esteem so that eventually I brought the warring quarks together close enough to lay their charges on the table.
“I don’t care about your – ‘thing’ with that thing who directed you,” protested Miranda, “but how could you waste your talent on such absolute tripe?”
I myself had given lots more weight to the ‘thing’ rather than the tripe part of the equation, but I let it slide. Jennifer blushed, but tried to explain herself.
“Look, I wanted to prove something, I wanted to see if I still had it, and getting the part with so much competition was…” And here she kind of drifted off and looked a little funny.
“And did you get the part on dramatic talent alone, Jen?” asked Miranda in a kind of still small voice.
Jennifer’s blushes turned to tears despite her best efforts and Miranda relented at the sight and the girls finally kissed and made up and are now kissing again just like old times, only better. And with Shangri-La going full steam ahead on an even keel I can breathe sighs that are equal parts relief and joy – but I had my worries. Especially about girls with personalities like Miranda and Jennifer, personalities I tended to associate with cheetahs and tigers who could have their way with almost anything they put their minds, hearts and bodies to.
I didn’t mind being mincemeat but when I thought of all the other bodies floating on the island of Manhattan and boroughs, the possibilities for trouble in paradise were too much to bear and too many to . . . to count. So I counted my blessings instead:
Jennifer
Miranda
Me?
“You’re a blessing in disguise,” said Jasper as we slummed it at a bar in Queens close to his matrimonial nest. I needed a bit of encouragement because with cannon to the right and cannon to the left I had begun to doubt my own ability to hold the fort.
“Your weakness is your strength, Gary. Believe me, life with Emilio would be a lot easier if I were as boring as you.”
I hadn’t expected this kind of a slap on the back.
“Boring is the glue that keeps those two feisty birds spinning around. Boring is good, Gary, at least for this phase. But the strategy has to shift. Don’t worry, you’ve got a few months’ grace period.”
“And then what? By the way, am I really that boring?”
“Do you want an honest answer?”
“No.”
“Good.”
Jasper, in addition to his experience as poet, entrepreneur, impresario, PR man, aspiring anarchist and a veteran of marriage with two divorces under his belt, was now testing the waters for his newest venture in online relationship consulting: Honesty. The upshot was that he was keen to dole out the honest advice in bucketfuls – or should I say bucketsful? Never mind.
“Let me give you some advice. Be yourself. To tell you the absolutely unvarnished uncoated simple truth, Gary, you’re your own worst enemy.”
“But I thought you said I was a blessing,” I replied.
“A blessing in disguise.”
“So how am I the enemy?”
“Because of the disguise.”
“What disguise? What are you talking about?”
“Calm down, the bartender’s giving us the eye. Lucky for you I’ve got a solution. You know a little about Plato, don’t you?”
“Not the cave again.”
“What cave?”
“Forget it. What about Plato?”
“The key to every successful relationship is to have something on the side.”
“I thought that’s how they fell apart.”
“You’ve got a one-track mind, Gary. I’m talking about something different. I’m talking about something on the outside of the inside of your relationships with the girls. Something that will make you feel better about yourself AND – and this is the beauty of it – that will make you look a whole lot more interesting to them. It’s about the psychology of women, Gary, and believe me, as a gay man, I’ve come to appreciate their depths like never before. That’s where Plato comes in. Actually, because you’re my friend, that’s where I come in too.”
The hairs on the back of my neck started to do a strange little dance, and I cleared my throat a few times while eyeballing the exit. I wasn’t ready for this, and I said it.
“Jasper, I’m not built that way.”
“What way?”
“You know.”
“No, I don’t know. What are you talking about.”
“I’m not a southpaw.”
“What?”
“I’m not a switch hitter either.”
Jasper stared at me and shook his head.
“You’re not a genius, that’s for sure. What I’m talking about, Gary, is the ‘Platonic relationship’ and how, with my help, you’ll take that damned Atlantis of yours to another orbit.”
Whew.
Then Jasper mapped out the strategy. I have to give the guy credit: he was never at a loss for crazy ideas, but at least this crazy idea wasn’t fraught like virtually all of his other crazy ideas. Complicated, perhaps; fraught, no – at least I didn’t think so. At the worst I’d be out a few bucks on reading materials and a few hours of my time meeting my new Platonic friend, so why not give it a try.
“That’s the spirit, Gary!” exclaimed Jasper, “It’s a risk-free trial with a double-your-money-back guarantee, and you don’t have to spend a cent. All I want in return, when you’ve raked in the chips, is a little quote for my website. Have we got a deal?”
“Okay, buddy,” I replied, shaking his hand and thinking that two times nothing was nothing, but never mind, it wasn’t about the money anyway.
Ω Ω Ω
At first I had second thoughts about the whole thing because Jennifer and Miranda couldn’t have been more alluring and indulging and they couldn’t have been more themselves. A weak reader might have supposed that I’d given their differences short shrift because I’ve been focusing on their shared delights; but a strong one would have detected my fine appreciation. Jennifer was all tall, curvaceous, bright blue-eyed effervescence with drama oozing out of her pores, while Miranda was sleek, sinuous and sultry and could play the violin like an angel when she wasn’t burning one. Jennifer had a talent for making money hand over fist without blinking an eye and Miranda had a talent for figuring out ways to distribute it for the yearning masses, equitably. Together they were now pooling their resources for a YouTube video depicting the anarcho-socialist ideal realized in a fictional ‘family’ of three pioneers. A sneak preview of the provisional script confirmed my worries: the ‘fictional’ accountant in the fictional family was nothing more than a straight man.
So I set to work.
Phase one was easy enough. I carted a few non e-books home and left them lying around the environs, books for the layman on quantum physics, quantum electrodynamics and even something called quantum chromodynamics. Loosely speaking, they all had something to do with numbers. Then came the tomes on supersymmetry, the multiverse, and best of all, a theory about strings that explained everything and was free of any of that bothersome scientific need for factual verification because nothing about it could be experimentally verified.
I can’t say I actually learned much about anything except that being a physicist, astrophysicist or cosmologist must not be a terribly fulfilling career or didn’t take up much time because virtually every one of them was hard at work writing best-sellers that purported to educate the great unwashed about things that could only be understood by a few dozen people in the world.
However, meeting Helena was another thing altogether.
“This is where my genius comes in, Gary, if I may say so myself.”
Good thing: I’d never have associated genius with the man. Chutzpah, yes, genius, no. Anyway, Jasper’s so-called genius came in with his personal selection, from a vast reservoir of connections in the gay and lesbian community, of the ‘perfect Platonic companion’ for me: Helena.
“Why is she perfect?” I asked.
“You’ll see,” Gary replied. “How’s Phase I coming along?”
“The girls are impressed,” I confessed.
“Hahaha, what did I tell you? They’re like open books. But I hope you realize how it hangs together. You see, Gary, you’re a numbers guy. So the topic of interest has to be related, but it also has to be a stretch. From counting bucks to counting stars: there’s a kind of symmetry, isn’t there? It’s almost frightening when you think about it.”
Stretch or no stretch, it was working like a charm. The girls were all over me for my new-found interests and the questions couldn’t come fast enough. Luckily for me they were as stymied by the higher languages of math and physics as I, but they liked the layman’s analogies – the big bang like a big balloon, wiggling superstrings that wormed their way through extra-dimensions, and our multiverse like a loaf of sliced bread. And they gave me an impetus for refining the stuff with my new Platonic friend to be.
“What’s she like, Jasper?”
“A particle astrophysicist – what can you expect? The kind who spend their lives learning more and more about less and less until they know virtually everything about nothing. Plus she’s as gay as they come – that’s the beauty of the whole thing. That’s what’ll keep it honest. Good luck with Phase II. By the time you get to Phase III you’ll be kissing me in gratitude, or trying to. Au revoir, mon ami.”
Helena had arrived punctually at a little bar near Washington Square where two people could actually converse without shouting: Jasper had been doing his homework.
“You’re late, but that’s okay,” she said. And she was right: I was running about thirty seconds behind.
“Sorry. I’m Gary.”
“I know. And you know I’m Helena.”
Right again: the scientific type.
“What would you like to drink? It’s on me.”
“Power trips? No thanks, let’s go dutch.”
So we went dutch and after about an hour and three drinks on my part I began to feel as if she didn’t hate me personally, but merely all mankind, the male part, that is. Which was a start.
I had come armed with my books, which she dismissed the way Rembrandt might have chuckled at a stick figure.
“Do you know what the M stands for in M-theory?”
“Mother?”
“You men are all alike. Always blaming your mothers.”
I have to admit, I was beginning to wonder how a Platonic friendship could be forged on the basis of antagonism, but somehow or other I slipped in something about my work and when she heard ‘IRS deductions” she lit up like a bonfire and we snowballed down the rest of the evening until pretty late, so late in fact that I had to make sure Jasper could cover me. You see, part of Phase II was that the meetings with the Platonic friend were to be kept under wraps until the time was ripe to let the cat out of the bag. Again, a Jasper machination, with Jasper as my alibi. Once the PF or PR, if you prefer, was in full swing then I’d let the girls in on it. And that’s where the psychological part would come in: according to Jasper there would be ‘retrospective jealousy’.
“No-risk jealousy that enhances your stature. You see, Gary, you’ve got to keep a woman – and in your case, two of them – on their toes. Let them become complacent, and you’re lost, or you’ve lost them, if you get my drift. So retrospective jealousy – which I might patent, it’s so damned good – does two things: it reminds them that you’re a force to be reckoned with, that you’re not just a measly boring accountant who’s lucky to pick up the scraps they throw you! But – and here’s another genius part – because the outside thing is purely Platonic, it doesn’t push them over the edge and create rifts and hysteria and cast you adrift, like that little bit you pulled with Svetlana.”
Complicated, I thought, but it made some kind of sense. And in truth it felt nice to be valued for my work with numbers, and the fact that I could end up saving Helena quite a piece of change softened the anti-male attitude a bit and we could go on to talking about other things.
I didn’t need to cart the bestsellers around anymore because the other things didn’t have anything to do with quasars or gravity waves: they were mostly about what we liked to eat, and wear, the non-science books we read, her last fifteen girlfriends and the view from Central Park West. And I could tell her about Jennifer’s quirks, the ones that drove me nuts, but which I could never tell Miranda about, and vice versa, for the sake of preserving the good ship Shangri-La. Helena, particle astrophysicist or astroparticle physicist or not, understood. And then I understood what this whole Platonic thing was really all about.
I guess you could say we were becoming pretty good chums. She was a treasure trove of information on tips about the other half, as I was I think for mine for her – never mind, you know what I mean. Because it was an exceptionally beautiful and cool spring we tended to talk a lot about the weather and trees and flowers, and the sky too, but in a Keats or Shelley rather than Hubble kind of way, and we talked about the art we liked and the galleries in Soho that were becoming more and more pretentious and where to get the best hot dogs in New York. I nearly forgot what she looked like I got so caught up in her personality – nearly, but not quite, because although she wasn’t the head-turning type like the girls there was an awful lot to appreciate and I found myself musing frequently about how her girlfriends had savored the goods.
One Saturday afternoon just as summer rolled in and right after we had seen the Vermeers in the cool of the Frick museum she pulled me up and said she’d wondered now for a long time how it would feel to kiss a man. I said, brushing her hair back gently, that she didn’t need to wonder anymore. And when she told me I kissed like the most wonderful woman I didn’t mind at all.
One doesn’t have to be a scientist to be able to make discoveries, and I’d discovered long ago that kisses can not only be contagious but that they tend to migrate pretty freely and multiply under the right conditions. At Helena’s digs near Columbia they migrated and multiplied like an avalanche.
On the way home I was tempted to blame it all not on the stars but on dark energy which makes up 95 percent of the known unknown uni-multiverse, according to what I’d read.
But I didn’t.
And I was also tempted to blame it all on Jasper, but there too I demurred. Because there wasn’t anyone or anything to blame, it was just too beautiful, even if I’d stepped into a wormhole with no way out.
I was late. The girls greeted me with a question mark and suggested that we cluster round the campfire for a pow-wow. I hemmed and hawed and noticed as we all sat down that they were holding hands. And just as I was about to open my mouth Jennifer put her fingers to her lips.
“Don’t say a word,” Jennifer said, “Jasper filled us in.”
My eyes widened the ways eyes might widen when they see a tiger or a cheetah, or both, coming straight at them in full stride. And my mouth was open too, soundlessly. I blushed.
“While you were exploring the universe, Jennifer and I were learning a little more about each other,” said Miranda, stroking Jennifer’s cheek.
“Why don’t we share our findings?” whispered Jennifer, as they took me by the hand.
“And let’s not worry about proving anything,” added Miranda.
Ω Ω Ω
“Jasper,” I rasped.
“Hey, Gary, look before you . . .”
“Jasper,” I interrupted, “you’re a sonofabitch.”
“Gary, listen to me, I can explain it all.”
“I dare you.”
“The idea was that they should know while you thought they didn’t know but because it was Platonic they had nothing to worry about! And that they would think you were being devious but idealistic at the same time: the perfect combination!”
“Is that all you can say?”
“Well, yeah, I guess. What else can I say? And you? Go ahead, say your piece, I can take it. I’m sorry.”
“Don’t be.”
“What?”
“I owe you thanks.”
“You what?”
“You heard me. Thanks. It all worked out despite your goofball plans and strategies.”
“But how?”
“Honesty.”
“C’mon, don’t kid me.”
“I’m not. Honest. But one more thing, my friend.”
“Whatever you want, Gary, if there’s anything I can do, tell me.”
“I want my money back.”
And I’d never heard him laugh so hard before.
*************
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you , sir, are a protean producer of art and criticism. As I struggle with an English sentence. Bravo