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: : : HE TAKES A SWIG OF Asahi and looks intently at her. —What about you? he asks. —Are you happy?
—Yeah, she says. —I guess.
She means it. She enjoys the time she spends with Thomas. There is a comfort to it. Although she's always felt suspicious of comfort. It makes her feel like there is something she is forgetting to do.
When she was younger, she used to wear a pin: if you're not outraged, you're not paying attention. On an evening like this she can't locate any trace of her outrage anymore. She reads the paper; she follows the evolving boondoggle in Iraq; she knows the Patriot Act allows the government to search her library records if they feel like it's a good idea; she turns on the TV and sees all manner of sexist bullshit flying by—these things all concern her, sure, but that concern never quite translates into rage, and without the rage she never quite manages to do anything.
She remembers living with five other women in a collective house in Hyde Park; remembers the way that they took one another's rage and honed it, made it keen. She remembers an evening they spent writing postcards to senators and representatives, telling them to vote down the Defense of Marriage Act. She remembers marching through downtown Chicago when Clinton signed it into law. Standing in Daley Plaza on a cool fall day, arm-in-arm with her lover, the two of them raising their fists into the sky and shouting. Asserting that their union had a reality and demanding that the world recognize it. Seven years ago now.
These days, it's hard for her to get angry about the fact that gays still don't have the right to marry—when she went to grad school, and began to go deeper into gender studies she decided that a truly queer politics would reject marriage, reject monogamy, reject standard heterosexual relationships as a point of reference entirely. Around this time she also began to refuse the idea that there was such a thing as lesbians at all. The idea of sexuality as an either/or proposition stopped seeming right to her: it began to seem like a reflection of heterosexual rigidity. She wanted a sexuality that was perverse, welcoming, characterized by aporia—she wanted it badly enough that she was willing to sacrifice for it. She knew that she would have to. When she began sleeping with men again the other women at the collective house asked her to leave.
Ever since then she has lived by herself.
And now it's 2003 and she's in a relationship with a guy, that for over a year now has been completely monogamous (OK, monogamous except for one evening, New Year's Eve, when her lover Ingrid was in town, visiting from Germany). She enjoys the time she spends with Thomas. There is a comfort to it. But this comfort wasn't what she wanted, all those years ago, when she packed up her bags at the collective house. When she walked out of there for the final time, knowing that she would never return, this was not the future that she thought she was heading towards.
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