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down—that I relished more than anything else. But there had to be a split first so I could feel the full power of their subsequent Socratic fusion. I loved smelling the glue. I believed in destroying a home to make a more powerful, integrated home. So from 2000 on, and maybe once a year or twice, until 2006, when we parted, I would encourage SL to leave by introducing him to someone else. He was reluctant and obliging: surely he could meet white girls on his own? But that wasn’t the point: the ones he could meet on his own had nothing to do with me, just as SL saying that one reason he loved me was that I was such a respite from his normal life, why get all mixed up with his desire to begin with? But who doesn’t long to be mundane? To say who they are through domestic complaint? To have love every day? (SL laughed and loved me more than he couldsay when, early on in our relationship, I said how marvelous it must be to be married; you could have sex whenever you wanted it. What did I know? I didn’t grow up with anyone who had been married in any conventional sense.) Having not grown up hearing complaints about the old ball and chain, I longed to be one; what a novelty, to be a source of love and irritation, all at once.
    But I must have been, especially when SL, to accommodate me more than anything else, went out into the world of living women; he did it for me, our we, and yet it was my I who stood at the threshold of our imaginary house with blood in my eyes when I saw, upon his return, the long hairs across his teeth, and toes.
    One thing that occurs to me now: perhaps SL left so he could return home to the happy news of my desire. Because in all the years I loved him, I did not say I loved him, or, more specifically, how I loved him. If I did, wouldn’t that end up in a garbage bag, too? My love for SL: this wasn’t the yearning one finds in early and bad Gore Vidal, or Edmund White, or James Baldwin novels; that is, I did not worshipfully suffer at the altar of SL’s love of women. If anything, SL was a supplicant at the prie-dieu of my queerness. As such, he was beyond heterosexual. Let’s call him something else. And it occurs to me now that the vengeful queen in me—the queen who wanted to extract his revenge for all he’d felt reading all that early self-pitying or romanticized or both Gore Vidal and James Baldwin—did have a subconscious interest in his pain for loving other kinds of people more than he could love me, but that wasn’t true, and yet I wanted it to bebecause it justified my not saying what SL longed to be said, despite the hair across his toe: that I could not name my desire because he knew he was my desire and how can you describe yourself to yourself?
    I think SL felt a very great sadness over my inability—my unwillingness—to express my desire, to say I want you, do you want me, such a basic thing, and, potentially, so beautifully expressed, as it was, for instance, by Diane Keaton, another white girl we loved, when she asks the Woody Allen character in 1977’s Annie Hall whether he likes her or not, but I just couldn’t do it, that meant everything was at stake, and wouldn’t someone leave or die because of it?
    But in 2007 someone did die. She was one of my first I’s, and integral to all the years I’ve described. I’ve waited until now to talk about her because that’s the way she would have wanted it. She was a great believer in traditional story structure, and would say, apropos her appearance here, what readers crave most, what fills them up, is the story of love, and how it ends. As a spoken-word critic—one of the very best—she knew what was real when she read it because she trusted her gut. Indeed, she had a great interest in her gut; she was always thin, but she ate more food than any human I have ever known. (Even after she got sick she longed for me to describe a dinner party I’d attended. She licked her lips. “I’m always hungry,” she said.) She came