The Conversation by David Brooks

Author:David Brooks
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: FIC019000;FIC027020;FIC048000
Publisher: University of Queensland Press
Published: 2012-10-04T00:00:00+00:00

‘You’ve not had a repeat – a similar experience?’

‘You mean have I had sex with another woman? Am I a lesbian? No. Not really. I thought I might be, I wondered, but although I think I may be bisexual – I think probably everyone is bisexual in some measure – and I did try it again, it was only a trial and it just proved to me that what had happened with Graziella was something different and special. This time, this second time, it was all quite deliberate. I went to a lesbian bar, and picked someone up, but when it came to the physical act – and she was very tender, too, this second woman – there was no real feeling, no real desire. It was just a kind of acting. And I froze her out just as I had Paolo. There was no necessity to it, there wasn’t any particular attraction. I didn’t need her; I just wanted to try it. And I realised that the night with Graziella had had something about it that couldn’t be found in this way. With Graziella it was spontaneous, unexpected, completely unplanned.’

They paused, smiled, made eye contact. Each of them, it seemed to him, trying to search the other, or perhaps just for the next thing to say. A late arrival at the restaurant – a large man in a business suit, looking exhausted, distracted – squeezed past them on his way to the one remaining table. They each moved their seats slightly, then shifted them back.

‘And the older man?’ he said, wanting more story.

‘I’ll come to him, but first, I want to ask you, how do you feel about that idea that I just mentioned, that everyone is bisexual? I mean, maybe there is no actual, natural gender limitation at all, maybe that’s only cultural. Perhaps the only reason that people don’t know that they’re actually bisexual is that they haven’t experienced it with the right people, and because society is always sending this constant message that they should be heterosexual, that it is only that that is normal. It’s like, as we’ve been saying, a lot of people don’t ever get to sleep with somebody they’re deeply attracted to, and they just take what is available to them. So?’

‘So?’

‘So what about you? Are you bisexual? Have you ever slept with a man, or been deeply attracted to one?’

He was taken aback. It wasn’t a kind of question he was used to contemplating, let alone one he might have been expecting. ‘No,’ he said, stumbling a little. ‘No, I can’t say that I have. I mean, I have never slept with a man, or ever felt the desire to.’

‘That sounds like an automatic answer to me. Are you sure about that? Never? At all?’

‘Yes. I’m quite sure. I don’t want to rule out your idea entirely. It actually seems quite plausible. But the cultural conditioning is very strong, as you say, that pressure to be heterosexual, and perhaps in me it’s been too strong to allow anything else through.

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