You Can Be Right (or You Can Be Married) by Dana Adam Shapiro

Author:Dana Adam Shapiro
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Scribner

How did it feel?

It felt really different to be on the other end of the stick, so to speak. It hurt a little bit. The tightness. It was uncomfortable. So I thought, “I didn’t even like it and I exposed myself to this scary risk. At least I got it out of my system.” But a part of me knew. The moment I was entered the way a man would enter a woman, it opened up something very real inside of me.

Were you happy that you did it?

Yes, at first. But I went on to feel like I had done the most horrid, dangerous, cruel, irresponsible thing ever when . . . well, my fiancée started to have all this genital itching and discharge. And it upset me like nothing else ever had before—or since—in my life. I started to get panic attacks with a lot of physical symptoms, which I knew overlapped a little bit with acute retroviral syndrome.

What’s that?

It’s something people get within two to six weeks of becoming HIV-positive. It’s like a bad flu. And being somewhat medically savvy, I knew just enough to be worried and it totally flipped me out. My mind never had more than ten minutes’ rest before I was back on this topic: Oh my God, I could have killed myself and killed Barbara in the process.

Did you eventually end up telling her everything?

Yes.

Everything everything?

Eventually. She saw me suffering and was like, “Gosh, what is it? You can tell me, it’s okay.” Then I made the full confession.

Did she freak?

She lost her fucking mind. Her shoes were off, and she grabbed one of them and whipped it hard against the wall, denting the thing. She ripped her engagement ring off, threw it on the ground, and stormed off. She was like, “What a crock of shit! What sort of pathetic sham of a man are you? Get away from me, I don’t know who you are!” Which was certainly a reasonable thing to say at the time.

Wait, back to the itching and the discharge. Had you contracted an STD and given it to her?

You know what? It turned out that her doctor had changed the antibiotics she’d been taking for frequent UTIs. And changing a woman’s antibiotics can cause a yeast infection.

So it was just a huge spook?

It was Desdemona’s handkerchief. Yeah, it was a whole lot of nothing that led me to change the course of history.

Wow. Okay, so you enter therapy, you get married, you’re living together.

Yes.

And did that experiment with the guy turn into a thorn in your relationship or was it more like, “Let us never speak of it again”?

We had a few clashes because of the way she lashed back at me for it. She just felt that this experiment was something I had done to her. And she would just lose it. “You cheated on me!” I would try to explain, “There was a part of me that existed before you that was always curious. I

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