I went to dinner with two friends tonight, an old boss and an old college friend who know each other through some connective tissue of the gay community in New York, and it was, as it always is, nice to see them. They’re smart and funny and handsome. Like, so handsome. Which makes me feel like utter shit, even though it is great to get updates on their lives and be in their company. I gained a lot of weight during this punishing, nightmarish winter, and haven’t had a haircut in months, and left my beard clipper thing in Boston a couple weeks ago. So I’m puffy and bushy and just feel so far from what I want to look like. And certainly so far from these two thin, groomed, accomplished guys I went to dinner with.
Vanity, and whining about vanity, is a really boring thing, I know. But I’ve been feeling miserable about it for enough time that it feels good to just type it out. I try to talk to my therapist about it, but he wants to bore deeper into other, more substantial things. So I go along with that, leaving sessions feeling a bit lifted, a bit clarified, a bit understood maybe, but then I’ll walk by a window and see myself reflected, there in all my me, and things crash down again. I hate being this shallow, this tethered to something so dumb and, intellectually anyway, meaningless. But, hey, there it is. I hate the way I look. There are some things I could do about it, of course–gym, diet, basic maintenance–but I don’t.
Because it’s so much more dark comfort to complain, to feel sorry, to set myself in stubborn opposition to the handsome world. I’ve become obsessed with various gay guys’ Instagram accounts, guys who are paid, either directly or indirectly, for being good-looking. Your sham gurus, your brand-shill dopes, your YouTube stars acting all “Who me?” with their feet pigeon-toed in. I hate them! And I seek them out, every day, with fervor. Part of my anger is justified, I think–trading on looks is fine, but don’t so blithely pretend you aren’t. But a lot of it is just pure, white-heat jealousy. I’m so jealous of these lives, that seem so pretty and carefree and fulfilled, while I glare at them from my couch. Why can’t I just be one of them?
Surely if I was one of them I would have a boyfriend, I would have sex, I would have an answer to myself–at parties full of couples, during visits home, at any moment when someone might otherwise cock their head with a curious kind of pity, listening to me sputter on about my silly old lonely life.
I went to a play at my college a couple of weekends ago, with my parents. It was a gay play, and one of the characters was a hot cater waiter who another character, a 40-year-old guy, falls in love with. And the waiter falls in love with him. Of course my reaction to this very trite play was to pretty much immediately feel ancient and gross. Because both actors were young and cute and really only playing at insecurity. During intermission, the mother of the boy playing the waiter was introducing herself to the student director and various other gangly kids. She was in her mid-40s, tanned and coiffed and stylishly dressed. She looked very much the part. While I fiddled on my phone, texting with a college friend about what a mistake it was to go to this play, I heard my mother whispering to my father. As I listened, I realized she was hissing about this woman, this beautiful creature’s beautiful mom, saying things like “I’m sure she has plenty of time to work out, and plenty of money to buy those clothes.” So she was doing what I was doing in my head, just about the mom instead of the son. The terrible game of comparing, the bitter wishing, the justifying of unfair resentment. We were both convinced, sitting there in a rinky-dink little black box theater, that we had it so much worse than these two people.
So I inherited that from my mom, at least. Not her delicate features or her fair hair, not her Streepian prettiness. But that. That keen sense of another’s betterness, that pointed longing. I thought to myself, I should write about that. I mean, what a strangely comforting thing to overhear. And what a silly thing to think about now, a few weeks removed. These strangers, who probably scanned the crowd and barely noticed the two people furiously, quietly projecting so much onto them.
At dinner tonight I offered up some dim news about a nice guy who I might have the beginnings of something with, who knows what exactly. They hadn’t asked, but I brought it up anyway. They smiled and asked questions and I don’t really think there was any condescension there. Because, I guess, it was only me who thought it so unlikely, thought myself so undeserving.
After dinner, I hugged my friends goodbye and walked the two blocks home. When I got inside, I went right to the mirror and looked, to see what sort of nightmare I’d forced them to suffer through for two hours. But instead I just felt a sudden skip of guilt, for having been so cruel to the person I found, tired and expectant and familiar, blinking back at me.
