How I used to write in my journal

December

Sitting across from Michael at the Golden Apple. A drizzly day. My spanking new saddle shoes. Michael chowing on waffles with gusto. I always used to love watching him eat. And the eyes. I could lose myself in them. (Well, I did!) And when he would become aware of something – the semi-homeless man who sat near us – the way he takes things in. And the kindness, too. The kindness in his eyes revealing the kindness in his heart. Listening, eyes on me, mouth full. We are sort of restless in one another’s presence. Ants in our pants. It’s like at any second we’re about to start eating each other alive and ripping our clothes off. Yet we don’t. And the repression of that impulse at all times causes some stress.

First half of talk. Acting. My plans. Our plans. But underneath it all I was thinking, Michael. You proposed marriage to me. What is up with THAT? Fuck acting!

This, to me, was different from my need to get laid. I could justify that away. Okay, it’s not gonna happen. Yes, it’s a disappointment. You’re sick of living like a nun, but that is no reason to throw yourself at Michael. When Michael and I sleep together, it’s gonna be fuckin’ serious, fuckin’ for real, and so I could have a little dialogue with my horn-dog self, banking her fires.

But this I wanted to push. I felt entitled to do so.

It would not be okay with me if he and I parted company without talking about marriage. It needed to happen. And I realized it would have to be me that did it. So I did. A lull came, and then Michael said, “What else?” And I said, grinning, “Well, it’s funny, and kinda weird. I just received a marriage proposal out of the blue!”

And the changes that went over Michael’s face – that funny face he makes – the face captured in the hysterical picture of me and him being forced to play cards. The sort of flared nostrils, the smile playing about his lips – a contemplative humorous making-fun-of-himself face.

He said, slowly, realizing the terrain was changing, coming into the game with me, “Really?” Taking on the rules of the game I set up.

I said, “Yeah! Can you believe it?”

Still with that funny flared-nostril pseudo-serious face, pouring syrup on his waffles, glancing at me quickly, looking away, inhaling, all with something very real going on underneath. Then he said, “I’m jealous.”

“Really!” I said, interested in that response. “You are?”

My heart was in my throat. Since I was determined to really discuss this, we didn’t stay in game-land for very long. We both got so nervous though. Like: Are we really talking about this?

There was a moment where Michael got sort of openly nervous and skittish, and I suddenly got this weird sensation that I was pressuring him, and I immediately realized the absurdity of that. He’s the one who said, “Will you marry me?” I didn’t say it! He did. We’re 9 years old.

I said to him, “Michael, the only reason we are having this conversation right now is because you proposed marriage. I’m just dealing with the reality of your proposal.”

He started laughing. “I know. I take full responsibility for anything that happens from here on out.”

We had a really excellent talk about getting married. About each other, about what we want in our lives, what we want from a relationship, what we found in each other that autumn in Ithaca. He, at one point, got really nervous – so nervous that he started feeling physically ill. He insisted it had more to do with the waffles he had just wolfed down, but I was skeptical. I didn’t give him a hard time about it, though.

He said, “I asked you to marry me because I meant it.” (I took note of the past tense, but shut my mouth and just listened. Let him have his say.) “Also” – with a sort of wry twist of his mouth, “I asked you because I felt pretty certain you’d say no. It was an impulse. You had really been on my mind, and in that moment, I wanted to marry you, but it was also my way of saying to you – Keep me on the back burner. Make sure I’m on the back burner. Somewhere. When you get ready to settle down, I want to be considered.”

I just listened. I’m good at that.

But then I told him that I would actually not say no. “If” he asked me to marry him (for real, I mean, not our practice run) – I would not say no. I would say yes.

He could not believe his ears. He thought he hadn’t heard right.

“What?”

Everything got even more electrically charged between us. We were listening to each other thru the pores of our skin. Trying to figure out what we really were saying.

He was stunned.

“You’re kidding me … right?”

“Why do you think I’m kidding you? No, I’m not kidding you. If you asked me to marry you right now, I would say yes.” I had no fear from then on.

So he thought and thought about this new development, looking at me with semi-apprehensive eyes, trying to see if I was teasing – Then he said (and I loved this, it was such a Me moment, such a Sheila moment), “You like me that much?”

Not love, but like. I was so charmed by that, it was so truthful, so us.

I started laughing. “Yes, I like you that much. There’s nothing you could do that would make me not like you that much.” [Still true, by the way. Still true. Thank you, God. Thank you for Michael.]

He kept thinking about me liking him “that much”. I didn’t say anything. I waited. And what was his comment, after another long contemplative pause? He said, relishing each word, “That … is …. so …. cool!”

Now, for me, there was such a beauty in his phrasology. (“Watch your phrasology!” “Not one more poop out of you!” “I think he means peep.” “Great honk!” “Watch your phrasology!”)

But his word choices:

“You like me that much?”
“That is so cool!”

The childlike nature of his word choices … suits me. It’s endearing to me. That kind of shit makes the world go round for me. These insights into people’s hearts, the way these men that I love negotiate their ways thru the world. They are so rare. They are rare and precious jewels. I cherish them. I cherish their rarity. I hover over it. I guard it with my life. With my own rarity.

I love love love it that Michael thinks it’s “cool” that I “like” him enough to marry him. This, to me, is familiar somehow. Like that song I sang at Jackie’s wedding. “Feels like home to me … Feels like I’m all the way back where I come from … Feels like home to me … Feels like I’m all the way back where I belong …”

Reminds me also of the last line of Cuckoo’s Nest. “I been away a long time.”

My God.

You recognize your home even if you have been away from it a long time.

I don’t even know if I love Michael, but I do know that he’s home.

I knew that something very true happened between us in Ithaca, even though our outer circumstances may have been artificial. The feeling of lying with my head in his lap, being read to … and chasing each other, drunk, thru the sunset-drenched fields, laughing and screaming and kissing … and drinking coffee every morning, reading our respective books … It felt so natural. We had such a groove.

And I have to back up a little bit, and say, about it being “artificial” and all:

Maybe to a civilian it would be “artificial”, but this sort of thing is the actor’s world. It’s my reality. Relationships start on location all the time. Or with touring shows. Romances start that way all the time. It makes total sense to me. It also appeals to my cut-to-the-chase mentality. With the focus being mainly on work. The intensity of that atmosphere, the intimacy it fosters – it’s REAL. We are actors. We are gypsies. Our homes are always semi-temporary, our families are makeshift. We form intense bonds quickly. We thrive in a high energy atmosphere. I am not a normal person. I am not a regular citizen. I am a fringe-dweller and proud of it.

So Michael and I dated for 6 weeks. So what? To us, in out of town mode, it felt like a year. So much happened. John Cassavetes and Gena Rowlands knew each other only 4 months before they got married. And it began out of their work. He came to see her in a play, went backstage to meet her, and 4 months later, they got hitched.

Who am I talking to right now? The doubters, the skeptics.

He and I talked about marriage, our concept of it. I told him how I, unfortunately, told many people about his proposal, and it set into a motion a cycle of conversations with my friends, all who weighed in with opinions on whether I should or should not. “You have no idea what you have started. I mean, I’ve had arguments – actual arguments – with friends about this.” How to say that what had happened between Michael and I three years ago was enough for me to take the proposal seriously. Michael wanted me to just keep talking, so that he could calm himself down (and digest his waffles. Uh-huh.) “Keep talking. Don’t stop talking.” So I kept going. I talked. I talked my head off for half an hour, my saddle shoe-d feet up on the booth opposite me, Michael’s hand on my foot. An anchor. I babbled. He was perfectly happy to sit and listen and soak up every word. Then it was his turn and he talked. It was so great.

I even told him my fears about domesticity. That married women seem to discuss curtains with such desperate seriousness … so it makes me feel like interest in curtains is a requirement of marriage – and I just could not be less interested. I never will be interested. I mean, I want curtains, of course, I don’t want people to be able to stare into my apartment, but that’s about it. But see how this is what I talk about when I talk about being afraid of marriage? It’s about losing my self – feeling like I can’t just be who I am – wild Sheila – but also – marriage, as it is discussed, seems to be all about domestic concerns, and that stuff does not interest me at all. It stresses me out, actually. I don’t want to get neurotic about shit I don’t care about. What if I don’t obsess about sun-dried tomato dip and curtains and wine racks? T. required me to be interested in that stuff. It bored me to tears. He couldn’t just let me be. It put the fear of relationships into me forever. I had to pretend to give a shit in order to not piss him off. I can’t have that again. So that was basically what I was babbling about like a lunatic, nursing my 8th refill of joe. But Michael, of course, didn’t treat me like a lunatic. He listened seriously. The good thing, though, is that he is NOT on the side of my neuroses. T. was. He played up the neuroses, he argued with me about my neuroses, tried to talk me out of them – which naturally made things worse. Michael is supportive if I’m insecure, but he doesn’t go there. He says stuff like, “Okay. You’re totally acting crazy right now.” But he’s on the side of my strength, my bigness, my reality, my sexiness, my uniqueness. He doesn’t give credence to crazy stuff.

He said, “Marriage, to me, is not about materialistic things. Like curtains, plates, a house. It’s about companionship. A partnership. That’s all. Going thru life together as opposed to by yourself.”

I talked a lot about myself – and the other marriage proposal I had – the one I turned down – I just felt like a round-hole of marriage was being offered to me, the square peg. I would have to fit into that concept of marriage, rather than make up my own way. And so somehow, to me, in my lexicon, his out of the blue proposal made a lot of sense to me. It suited me. And if I were to get married, it would of course be in these sort of abnormal impulsive circumstances. And it’s hard to explain to people who truly fit in to a more traditional set-up. It’s okay that they fit in to the status quo. But I don’t. And this feels right to me.

He couldn’t get over the fact that I was dead serious. My response was: well, sure – why not? I have come to the point in my life where I trust responses like that. There I was – with T. – deeply ensconced in a relationship – and when he proposed to me – deep within my soul, an alarm bell rang. Something held me back. My gut feeling. Thank God I listened to it.

And why shouldn’t I listen to my gut here?

I said, “I just have this sense about you, Michael. About you and me together. And I don’t even know what to call it. We haven’t even given it a shot yet, but I still have this feeling. That there is something to explore here. The way you look at the world, the way you look at theatre and art, what you seem to aspire to – and the fact that you care about things. You have ideals. You get angry at the same things I do. You have zero tolerance for the same shit as me. I don’t know. There’s a kinship here – I felt it in Ithaca, and I feel it now.”

I loved this, too. At one point, Michael said, “So …. what does Mitchell think of all of this?”

That just makes me laugh. Everyone always needs to know what Mitchell thinks. I’m so glad that Michael and Mitchell know each other. Because Michael is this unknown entity to everyone else – but Mitchell has experienced him, and us together. Michael knows how much I trust Mitchell so he wanted to know Mitchell’s opinion.

Now of course Mitchell had told me that David had come to him, saying, “Tell me about this Michael guy. Who is he? What do we think of him?” And Mitchell said, “In a way – in a wierd way – what’s going on between Sheila and Michael – is true love.”

So I told Michael that. No response yet – he was pondering it – listening.

I said, “Mitchell said that when he first heard that you had proposed to me, his first thought was, ‘Wow, that’s kind of crazy’ … and then his second thought was, ‘Huh. But it makes sense.'”

That was sort of my response, too. Like: Wow! Crazy! But then … well, let me think about it …

That was Ann’s feeling about it as well. Taken aback at first, then immediate acceptance. “Oh. Well. Of course. That makes total sense.”

So hearing of Mitchell’s validation calmed Michael down. Mitchell has a lot of power. But I feel that he deserves it. He’s earned it. Also, to quote Mitchell – I don’t give him any more power than I give myself. That’s the beauty of it.

I did say to Michael, “God, it’s scary how much we both need Mitchell’s endorsement! Like – what if he said he didn’t think it was a good idea?”

We talked a lot about Relationship One. Our first stab at it. And he was so self-deprecating that I finally had to yell at him. “Will you cut that out, please??”

He felt like he had to apologize profusely, and I felt like that was totally unnecessary. He was talking about his insane jealousy towards me (“Why were you talking to that guy?” “You like Pat better than me. What did you guys talk about?” Etc. He wore on my last nerve.) “You shouldn’t have had to deal with that,” he said. I told him that no one had ever been as openly jealous with me as he was and I had kind of gotten off on it, although it was a very new sort of energy for me to deal with. Like the time he yelled at me after talking with Pat about Tropic of Cancer. He was beside himself. “You know how I feel about that book. Why were you talking about it with him??” “Uhm … cause he asked me if I liked the book? Uhm …”

He said, “I was a mess. I treated you unfairly.” On and on with the beating himself up, as though he thought that was what I needed from him. I said, “I don’t feel that way. Don’t say that to me cause you feel I want to hear that.” I also said, “And, as you recall, I wasn’t in the best place either, Michael. It wasn’t like I was totally healthy and you were a psycho. There was the ghost of the Baby Boomer – the timing was off. For both of us.” I don’t know if I convinced him or not but I really tried.

We kept bursting into nervous laughter, because we were actually talking about getting married. We felt so subversive.

He said to me, “Logistically, it would not be good. We’re on separate coasts.”

I kept saying, “Look. I don’t want to get into some anxietal unhappy long distance situation with you. That is the farthest thing from my mind. I tell you this – I am ready. In terms of being ready for a real relationship. But I’m so not into pressure. Also, I don’t want to get SAD about this. Know what I mean? I’ve never been SAD about you and I don’t want to start now. I don’t want this to turn into a sad thing before we’ve even discovered what’s here. You know?” I really feel strongly about this. So we discussed logistics.

Then he qualified all of this by saying, “Besides, I can’t marry you yet. My parents would kill me!” That made me laugh. “They don’t even know who you are! So we’d have to work on that before we get married. I mean, God!” I just sat there in my saddle shoes, drinking black coffee, beaming at him.

Then he really got to the heart of the matter. Another level of truth. I saw it happen. And I waited to hear what he would say. There was a sort of cautious tentative look to him, he was a little bit afraid to verbalize it. I was staring at him, sending him “It’s okay, it’s safe” vibes. And he said, “Okay … see … here’s the thing I’m thinking now. This all makes me very afraid because …. what you are offering me here is an opportunity. You know? And – if I choose now not to take it …. And then … I lose you … and you find someone else while you’re waiting for me – well … then I’m gonna have so many regrets. I’ll have to live with the fact that I let you go – and I lost you …”

Now I – from my side of the fence – with all my experiences – this speech of his really hit home with me. And I couldn’t say to him, “Oh, no, that’s not true” – because it is true. Life is about living with regrets. At least a mature life is about living with regrets. And – yes. Maybe we are at a crossroads, and yes, he might lose me. To whomever comes along next. I realize that. And – yes. This is tough decision. Or whatever – it’s a risk. The whole thing I went through with P. taught me so much about love and loss and regret and letting go. I felt like Methuselah sitting there across from Michael.

I nodded at him. “Well, yes. See, that’s the thing.”

That’s the way life is.

It’s a gamble either way.

You play, you win. You play, you lose.

It was just so great to talk about it openly. Because I wasn’t about to say, “Oh, I’ll wait till you’re ready” – I wasn’t about to say “I’ll move to LA in June” – No. That’s not true for me, it’s not what I want. I have already MADE those mistakes.

So now? It’s a risk.

Michael and I may not end up together. I’ll live. It won’t destroy me. I may meet someone else in the next year who sweeps me off my feet and that’ll be that. I’ll have to break the news to him, but if he told me he was seriously dating someone – I mean, I’ll live. That’s all I can say. I’ll live. I may experience severe disappointment but I know, too, that no promises were made. He would not be betraying me. If I got together with someone now, I wouldn’t feel like I was cheating on Michael … and that is where we stand right now.

Life’s a risk.

You play. You win. You lose. You play.

And I feel so much more philosophical about all of this since P. I don’t have as many needs. And I’m also honest.

I said, “Don’t make some hasty decision because you’re afraid of losing me. That will never work. But yes. You are right. You may end up having to live with that regret. That’s the way life is.”

But he seemed really afraid. I found the whole thing so damn poignant. Just the words being said: Losing you, regrets, the future, opportunity … human beings trying to work it out.

And we sort of left it at that.

I mean, leave it to me to let things remain in this uncertain risky place, but that felt the most right to me. For now. It may change. I may end up moving out there, or falling in love with someone. Do I love him? People have asked me that. Am I in love with him? I do not know. Probably not. Love Shmove. There! I’m fascinated by him, I am challenged by him, I have vast feelings of tenderness for him, I find him intensely sexually attractive, I find him mysterious, interesting, he’s very funny, we have the same absurd sense of humor. I love him, quite definitely. But in love? Does there have to be a difference? I remember Paul Newman’s answer to the question: What is the key to your long-lasting marriage to Joanne Woodward? “We have a lot of laughter and a lot of lust.” Not a word about love. That suits me. That makes sense to me.

I have no idea what love means. What in love means. I feel like we could have an incredible sex life. I feel like we would have titanic arguments. I feel like the jealousy thing is part of who he is, and I’d have to deal with that. I feel like we could be silent together, reading, cooking, hanging out. There’s a peace in our energy together. Does all of this add up to love? Maybe to me it could.

So we left it at that. The words were out there. Everything spoken out into the universe, and so now we just have to see what happens. No neuroses, please. I don’t want to miss him. Before I’ve even gotten used to him. I’m so used to being sad about the men in my life. I don’t want to be sad about Michael.

He asked me if I was dating anyone, and I said no. He didn’t believe me. He refused to believe me. He got angry at me for lying to him, actually.

Later that night, Michael and I were back at Mitchell’s. He and I fell asleep on the couch together, wrapped up in each other’s arms, pig-piled. I think we were both having a shared narcoleptic episode. Like, we lay down on the couch, turned on the TV, and both CRASHED at the same moment. We had an exhausting day. So Mitchell came home to see this Romeo and Juliet tableau on his couch. We woke up, and lay there, and Mitchell stood over us, and talked to us. Rather firmly. Asking us if we had come to a decision.

Michael and I both said things along the lines of, “Well, I don’t want to assume …” “I don’t want to assume that Sheila …” “I don’t want to assume that Michael …” Mitchell finally said, frustrated, “One of you had better start assuming something.” He had had it with both of us. Michael said, “Tell us what to do.” Mitchell went off to the kitchen to get a drink, saying, “I think you should spend the rest of your lives together. What more do you want from me?”