Love In The Time Of Gay Marriage
The Article: And Baby Makes Five: Modern Love In The Era Of Gay Marriage by Julie Weiner in Vanity Fair.
The Text: I first met Martin’s ex-boyfriend at a tuxedo shop on lower Fifth Avenue. I had known Martin had been living with Ted six months before we starting dating. Through his and Martin’s shared DVD collection, I had known Ted’s affinity for French New Wave and the Weekend at Bernie’s series; through Martin’s closet, Ted’s old Yale sweatshirts; through Martin’s maritime trinkets and hand-selected seashells, I had learned of Ted’s family’s cottage on Martha’s Vineyard.
But before that blustery October day, when I introduced myself to Ted and greeted him with a hug, I had never known of Ted’s easy warmth, unreserved kindness, and sleepy, autumnal smell. I walked into the tuxedo shop the day before my wedding to Martin for a last-minute alteration. What I ended up altering was all three of our lives.
I invited Ted home to the prewar town house that Martin and I had recently purchased on King Street, in a liminal, industrial area between SoHo and the West Village.
“Martin?” I called, walking in.
“Yes? I’m in the solarium!” he called.
Ted and I, holding hands, walked down a hallway and through several rooms to get there.
“Ted, oh my God, what are you doing here?” Martin asked, putting down his copy of The Recognitions.
“Ted, please,” I interrupted. “Let me.” I kissed Ted gently on his outer ear in a way that straight people would dislike.
“Martin, I know you and I were supposed to get gay-married tomorrow. But I think that Ted should get gay-married to both of us.”
Martin stared back at me. I looked down at our recently refurbished floor crafted from imported Brazilian wood.
“You know I love Ted,” Martin said slowly. “But Ted is married! Married to a Republican congresswoman with whom he has six Christian children! We can’t gay-marry Ted.”
Ted shuffled his feet. “Now that I can gay-marry you two, what good is my family? I was looking for a means of escape from my traditional, responsibility-filled, missionary-position-during-sex-filled life, and this joint gay wedding tomorrow is just the ticket.”
All three of us embraced.
We embraced through the wedding—a tasteful affair at Blue Hill, just north of the city—through the honeymoon to Positano, and through Ted’s daughter’s eighth-grade graduation, which we crashed for purposes of distributing homosexual literature to prepubescent children. But by the following October, we were practically living in different newly constructed wings of our town house.
Then, Martin brought home George.
Clutching a bag of groceries from E.A.T., Martin entered the wine cellar, which Ted and I had raided with plans to sell alcohol to minors in exchange for acts of sodomy. With all the money we had saved through our tax benefits as a married triple, we had plenty of expendable income for drugs, wine, cigarettes, and Bill Maher books, but we couldn’t buy youthful flesh. (This was back before President Obama passed his landmark adolescent-homosexual-prostitution legislation, ObamaBare.)
“Lovers,” Martin said. “There’s someone I want you to meet. This is George.”
Our eyes fluttered up, to the left, to the right, and finally downward, where we saw George, a cinnamon-colored border collie with penetrating eyes and a hypnotic energy.
“Hi, um, sit! Please,” Ted said. “No, oh! God! Not like that. Not a command. I mean, would you like a chair?”
George stood motionless—his placidity a mirror onto which all three of our very souls were reflected, deconstructed.
“We must marry this dog, immediately,” said Ted, hopped up on Lambrusco and the legality of consecrating such a union.
“I’ve already called the Century Club!” Martin said. “Thanks to this gay-marry app on my iPhone, it only took two minutes to meet George, fall in love with him, and book the venue and kick out a previously scheduled wake for a distinguished conservative thinker!”
“iGay!” I said. “I downloaded that, too, and married this baby on the way over here. I completely forgot to tell you.”
“Mazel tov!” Ted said, slapping me on the back in a gay way. “Tell me about him.”
“Her, actually,” I said. “And she’s Mexican, so this marriage is providing her with a green card.”
“Oh, lucky day!” Martin said. “I can think of just the manufacturing job for her!”
“Woof!” barked George.
It’s summer now, and the five of us—Martin, Ted, George, and the Mexican baby whose name I didn’t bother getting before marrying her and still don’t care to learn—have such an obscene amount of money from tax breaks that we’ve spent all summer on sabbatical from our creative-industry jobs. The sex has become tedious, but the replacement sensation—a puddle of fur, navel piercings, love, and formula—has reached a boring, blissful equilibrium. Free time bleeds into free time that bleeds over—our capacity for pleasure now a hemorrhaging wound.
To amuse ourselves, we like to play a game wherein one of us pretends to be sick and we all visit each other in the hospital. Is it sanitary for a dog to enter a hospital? It doesn’t matter, is the way we like to look at it—it’s unconstitutional for a dog not to visit its bisexual-Mexican-baby spouse in a hospital. We are only shackled by our lack of rules. Looking back, the before seems an eternity of pleasure from the immediate.
