Free The Tooth Fairy: Parents, Lovers, and Other Wayward Deities (A Memoir) by Clifford Chase

curtain of his doorless room.
    I had had a boyfriend the previous spring, and when I walked the streets alone, I glanced at guys.
    Call her E., to spare her privacy, or because she’s elemental, or because the initial alone sounds less charged, more objective,
     than what her name came to mean.
    Even now, some combination of dread, embarrassment, and longing stops me after each sentence, and I have to take a breath.
    We were together, off and on, for more than three years.
    Her name is also a man’s name.
    But this isn’t merely a story of sexual confusion, rather of self-doubt, which is bigger.
    The auburn highlights in her hair, which she kept neck- or shoulder-length.
    The way she flipped it around, comically but also sexily, her manner of flirting being mainly to parody coquetry.
    For the next several weeks, E. and I continued our heavy petting.
    Her slender torso and round bottom, the utter softness of her small conelike breasts.
    At twenty-three my shyness about intercourse was a point of shame.
    At twenty-three I was somehow both utterly vulnerable, and utterly closed.
    Discovery of my finger on her wet button, and how it made her cry out.
    We went to see an avant-garde play called
Mr. Dead and Mrs. Free
, which contained a rap song about fucking.
    We walked arm in arm from the East Village to the West.
    E. was not a virgin but she reassured me that our necking made her feel pleasantly like a teenager again.
    She had moved to New York to find a job in publishing and now worked at
Rubber World
, a trade magazine. I had thought it unwise for her to take the position.
    I wrote of not being “in love” with her, of “gaps” between us that were “hard to define.”
    E.’s department at work was called Fulfillment. Her many jokes about this.
    My weariness of my own job, as the typist for a group of elderly journalists.
    My gigantic blue IBM, an early word processor, with its dial of fifty memory slots like a kitchen timer.
    I glanced through the
Times
each morning, but very little of the news penetrated.
    I do recall reading the article titled “Rare Cancer Seen in 41 Homosexuals.”
    Example of the homophobia that was simply normal in 1981: my roommate Owen had not allowed me to kiss my boyfriend in front
     of him.
    I kept gay themes out of the fiction I was writing.
    My letters home in which I tried to explain myself, without explaining myself.
    My many letters to friends, some sent, others not, some honest, some not.
    My mother’s curiously detailed letters from California that revealed nothing of her interior life.
    My tenement street full of fire escapes.
    One night I heard Owen arguing with his father on the phone; he hung up and screamed; I hesitated to go ask what had happened.
    He was writing a movie script in which the protagonist has twenty-four hours to screw as many girls as possible before he
     gets married.
    Janet, the other editorial assistant where I worked, openly disliked me, and my pal Leslie, the intern, had left.
    Cathy, too, had left New York, and I now had virtually no friends there besides E.
    She arrived an hour late for a movie. “I was so pissed waiting for her,” I wrote, “but then when I saw her face, she looked
     so sheepish and beautiful [that] I melted.”
    It was chilly and she was wearing a white wool shawl—it’s one of my fondest memories of her—but we didn’t screw that night
     either.
    My fear that intercourse with E. would be a “lie,” either because I wasn’t in love with her, or because I was “actually” queer.
    “My poor oppressed little homosexual self,” I wrote. “I keep ‘realizing’ it and ‘realizing’ it.”
    I developed a rash on my hand, where the pen rested.
    At work I had to apologize to my boss for walking away, in anger, while he was still speaking to me.
    Thus began the many years of asking myself how the hell I should support myself.
    “My tongue in her mouth—I can’t explain it, honestly, the feeling of—unity? Union?