The Dry Season

It is raining. Drops spatter against the plane’s windows as we descend through the clouds and prepare for landing. The woman is seated four rows behind me, but I spotted her before we boarded: tousled hair in a wool beanie, leather boots belonging to the category worn only by lesbians and Dickensian orphans, giant backpack. I felt myself begin to glow with a chemistry visible only to the object of my attention. I do not understand the biological protocol that enacts once it is triggered, but I do know that more often than not the end result is sex, and if my past is any indication, some sort of romantic entanglement.

Just a few months earlier, I would have lurched at the call. But I am six months celibate and have made a promise to myself. In those first months, I was more vulnerable to the familiar siren song of a cute dyke, and while a few nearly pulled me back in, I’d managed to stay the course. The woman at the fancy book party. The film director. All the loose ends with whom I’d cut off contact months ago. But here I am, turning my profile to the angle mathematically most likely for her to see me, rolling my shirt cuffs up to bare a few inches of forearm tattoos, dangling my hand with its short unvarnished nails into the aisle.

Like most femmes, I am an expert at signaling my queerness through physical clues legible only to other queers. I can communicate my sexual identity through the set of my shoulders, if need be. I sit in the cramped airplane seat with my legs comfortably spread, my elbows on both armrests, exuding a physical entitlement to the space I occupy. So much of heterosexual attraction is contingent on the minimization and infantilization of the female body: crossed legs, tilted heads, widened eyes, slackened mouths. A disregard for this affect suggests that a woman’s desires lie elsewhere.

This is why it’s easy to mistake some women who have gone through menopause for lesbians: they have both stopped giving a fuck what men think of them. This secret language, in all its permutations, drove and defined over two decades of my life. I’ve largely abstained from it over the last six months. But now I think: we are on a flight to London and unlikely to come any closer to one another than we are now. There is little danger of a full relapse. There is no harm in indulging the pleasure of the dance.

We land at London Gatwick and the attractive stranger gathers her belongings, runs a hand through her messy hair, and, yes, glances in my direction, before she rises to her feet and steps into the aisle. Goodbye, stranger, I think with some relief.

To my great surprise, these recent months have been the happiest of my life. It wasn’t happiness, exactly, that I sought when I decided to spend this time celibate. I had just gotten so tired. I met my first girlfriend when I was fifteen years old, and spent the next twenty years in relationships. I was a serial monogamist, the ends of many of my affairs overlapping slightly with the beginnings of the ones that followed, forming a daisy chain of romances. There were a few brief periods of singleness, but I was never alone, really. There was always a cohort of flirtations. A string of dates. A lover from my past ready to step into the present. After a few weeks or months, I’d found my next forever.

Our culture tells us that such abundance is a privilege, and in many ways it is. Sometimes, I felt proud, though I knew it was artificial. Whatever our accepted story about attraction, I understood that the magnet in me drew its charge from dubious qualities. Once I reached my thirties, I started having moments of unease when I contemplated my pattern. I was just a relationship person, I consoled myself. I had spent my happiest times partnered, I thought, without considering the givenness of that, having spent most of my life partnered. I was reassured by the fact that I never felt afraid to be alone. I did not consider how one might not ever feel the thing she had successfully outrun.

Then I spent two years in a ravaging vortex of a relationship. When I finally emerged, I thought, I should take a break. After this revelation I promptly got into five brief entanglements. Each had a frantic tinge, like the last handful of popcorn you cram into your mouth after you decide to stop eating it. I realized that my resolution would have to be more intentional. I drew more specific boundaries: no sex, no dates, no nothing. At the age of thirty-­five it was time to meet myself unmediated by romantic and erotic obsession.

In only six months, my life has opened up like a mansion half of whose rooms had been locked. There is so much more space in which to live. From the long mornings at my desk to evenings of reading myself to sleep, or nights spent dancing—­the summer heat luscious and exhausting, each morning marked by my aching feet, the pleasurable wince as I brew coffee in the morning. I have luxuriated in the solitude and the companionship of true friends.

I am sometimes lonely, but that, too, is novel, a weather system that moves through me and, after a day, or sometimes just an hour in the late afternoon as the light shifts toward evening, it moves on. I anticipated that I would miss the thrill of seduction, the rituals of pursuit catalyzed by attraction, but that urge has also come and gone, never surging strong or long enough to compel me from observation to animation. Until today, that is.

The customs line is interminable, the booths woefully understaffed for the number of incoming passengers, but I’m distracted by the inching undulation of the line as it snakes forward, delivering my crush and me past each other by mere feet at regular intervals. Both of us studiously rotate between staring at our phones, squinting ahead at the front of the line, and posing in such subtle affectations that no casual observer would discern anything other than boredom and frustration in either of our comportments.

It must seem arrogant of me to assume that my airplane crush reciprocates my attention, but trust me that when you’ve been performing this choreography for more than twenty years, you know when your partner feels the music and when she doesn’t. The first decade was spent being humiliatingly mistaken a good portion of the time, while I cultivated this precise radar, but in the years since it hasn’t led me astray. The thrill, of course, resides in the slender possibility that this time, this time, I might be wrong.

She reaches the booth ten or fifteen people ahead of me and despite devoting a valorous twelve minutes to backpack reorganization and another three to shoelace tightening, she is left no other option but to continue on her journey. My disappointment as she disappears into the airport is matched by the return of relief. The spell is broken. I have not violated my abstinence. I dig my passport out of my jacket’s interior pocket and shuffle forward, happily bored, mistaken once more in my certainty that temptation has passed.

Soon after I got clean and sober at twenty-­three, my sponsor told me I couldn’t steal anymore. She probably would have told me this sooner, if she’d known that I was still stealing things—­mostly books from the Barnes & Noble in Union Square and bags of food from the self-­serve bins at the overpriced health food store on University Avenue, but I’d never mentioned it, until I happened to be on the phone with her as I walked to my building’s laundry room and found that someone had left a stack of quarters on the table by the change machine. I can take them, right? I asked her. Absolutely not! she said. We don’t steal.

At the time, I wondered why I had even mentioned it, but now I understand. I wanted to stop. When she told me that I must, I felt awash in relief. I used to get a terrible wave of dread right before I stole, as if someone else was making me do it. Once I saw an opportunity, I felt compelled to do it, but the act was stressful to a degree never matched by the benefits of my loot. I wasn’t addicted to stealing; it was a habit I had gotten into as an addict who wanted to spend every cent that crossed my palm on drugs. Necessity had been replaced by the inertia of habit. It hadn’t occurred to me that I could give myself permission to stop.

Incredibly, after I have navigated the swarmed airport, retrieved my suitcase from baggage claim, ridden the shuttle to the adjacent train station, deciphered the cryptic train tables and British accents, purchased my ticket from a reluctant kiosk, and arrived at the correct platform, there she is, the woman from the plane. She glances up, probably sensing my stunned stare, sees me, looks momentarily stunned herself, then looks away.

We don’t make eye contact again, but stand a few yards apart on the platform, waiting for our train. I hold very still, as if it will quell the tumult inside me. I have fleeting, stupid thoughts, like maybe it is fate and who am I to defy the Fates? Or maybe in a foreign country it doesn’t count as violating my abstinence. I think of Saint Augustine, though I find him simpering, and the pears he stole as a teen with his ne’er-­do-­well friends. “Doing this pleased us all the more because it was forbidden,” he wrote in his Confessions. “Such was my heart, O God, such was my heart—­which thou didst pity even in that bottomless pit.” I think of how when I was a child, my appetites were so great that my parents used to sometimes refer to me as a bottomless pit. “I loved my own undoing,” wrote Augustine, and I know what he meant, the ecstasy of yielding to the forbidden.

The train finally pulls up to the platform, whipping my hair around my face. We board the same car from different doors. Again, I settle four or five rows ahead of her. My body feels rubbery with exhaustion—­I hardly slept on the plane—­but buzzy, animated by the prospect that something is going to happen. The only question is whether what happens will be what has happened before, or if I have the power to change it. To do something different.