Composing a Further Life

thinking things through right, I should have just packed the kids in the car, gone to Wyoming, established my residency, and divorced her there.
    “She was in a funny space; she didn’t want to be a faculty wife. She didn’t want to show up and be my spouse at church, the choir director’s wife. It wasn’t that she had to
do
anything, but she decided she just didn’t like that. Partly that was the female liberation thing, it was her consciousness-raising. I said, ‘Look, I’m not asking you to be entertaining people in the house, all I’m saying is just be my wife.’ ”
    Dan and I had talked about the role of spouses earlier. I had told him that both my husband and I have sometimes felt as if we are treated as appendages of the other. He has on the whole been less willing than I to go through the motions and even tends to take my absence for granted when in fact I might be interested in joining him.
    In an e-mail he sent to me before we met, Dan had written, “I was married for 11+ years and the marriage did not collapse on the issue of sexuality. It was more of ‘a funny thing happened on the way to Female Liberation.’ I am probably one of those in the middle of the Kinsey sex[ual orientation] scale.” Actually, in saying that he could have been happy continuing in his marriage, Dan was describing something that potentially made his life harder rather than easier, since there has been a tendency since Stonewall to regard bisexuality as a delusion and to insist that a given individual must be entirely gay or entirely straight.
    “So now I’m up to thirty-five,” Dan continued, as we sat sipping iced tea in his garden. “Thirty-five, professionally dead, not able to make it in singing, a liability of three hundred dollars a month for upkeep, no place to live. The house sold, and we got all of two thousand dollars out of it because we couldn’t make the payments.”
    With his ex-wife in California with the two children, Dan decided to experience San Francisco. “I didn’t know what I was looking for, but the people just weren’t there in Milwaukee. I was trying to figure out what I was gonna do with my life, so I sat down and said, What I’d really like to have, I’d like to be living somewhere in the west with a partner, with someone—I didn’t say male or female—with a partner, in a house with a garden and a fishpond and fruit trees.”
    “You got it,” I said, looking around.
    “I came out here, lived out of a suitcase, went to the baths. I discovered that it didn’t snow here, and that was kind of interesting. I wasn’t doing a lot of sex, and I was looking around, trying to do something, maybe music, while I was waiting, sending out résumés. I auditioned for some church jobs and didn’t get them. I had this Christmas caroling thing, and I did an est [Erhard Seminars Training] course, and I got very interested in that.
    “I was experiencing San Francisco a lot, just looking at it. I met a couple of men who were older. I had never met older gays who were fairly good looking and successful and not drunk. I fell in love with one guy, but he liked boys, like fourteen- and fifteen-year-old boys, and I thought, This is a disaster just waiting to happen, I don’t wanna be there. And there was another guy who was just screwed up. So I’m in San Francisco and I’m looking around and I heard about a gay fathers’ group, and I went there, and that’s where I met the doctor I told you about, whose wife was a lesbian and he was gay and they had kids. And it was kind of interesting.” By then I had noticed that, when Dan used the word
interesting
, it meant something like “appealing,” rather than “odd.” “There was another group at the time called G40 and although I was only thirty-eight, I went to this ‘gay men over forty’ group. It was the time of rap sessions; they’d do consciousness-raising things and they’d rap. So I got there and I met Ted, who died just recently. He was twelve years older, and he was a doctor, too. There were all these guys ‘exploring their gay side.’
    “Then I got a job with the Alameda County School Department, in a program for the arts in nursing homes. I was basically doing an exercise and music program for old people, a twenty-hour-a-week job. A couple of the nursing homes were really awful, but a couple of them were very good. One woman I remember was so upset one day when I went in; her son had just died. ‘He was so young,’ she