Grace, a story

I'll call her Grace.

There was a time when we drove to a big party in another city together. Not wanting to wear her dress in the car for several hours, she hung it from the hook in the back seat. She looked not awful but considerably less than what she could be wearing jeans and a sweatshirt and no makeup. When we got to town, I pulled up in front of a stately old hotel and, much to her irritation, went in with her.

She walked into a bar attached to the hotel and, after quickly surveying the room, flashed me a malicious smile and said, "I hope you will be comfortable waiting," and then disappeared into the washroom with her garment bag and makeup kit.

I sat down and noticed that I was getting some rather unwelcome looks. It took me a minute or two to realize that it was a gay bar. It was nine o'clock so the bar was still relatively quiet, there might have been two dozen guys there, all shooting quick glances at one another. They treated my presence as an act of aggression.

It was a little like being in a porn theatre as most of the clients present had obviously come seeking gratification not a chance to socialize. Most were sitting by themselves and were waiting for the chance to make something happen; they were waiting for that opening that no one knows how to create but most know what do do about when it does happen.

The only exceptions to this were some middle-aged queens at the bar. Clearly out, they openly advertised their sexual availability in their dress and behaviour. In doing so, they made themselves less attractive for the effeminate display necessary to remove all doubt as to their sexual interest is not attractive to anyone. Hardly anyone likes effeminate men. Even effeminate men seek partners who aren't effeminate.

By sitting in a group and comfortably chatting with one another, they had made themselves even less approachable.

Gay friends of mine almost always seem to have become more effeminate after coming out of the closet. Grasping that this is not helping their appeal, many put much effort into looking and acting straight but this always came off a little too polished. I almost said "a little too polished to be convincing" but that of course is the rub. They didn't want to appear convincingly straight; they wanted their interest in attracting partners of the same sex to be obvious enough that others would know to pursue them.

I digress because I want to say something about my friend Paul who once told me that he often missed the days before he'd come out of the closet. There were long, slow tortuous manoeuvrings around other men who were just as reluctant to acknowledge what they were doing as he was. There were magic moments when other men just seemed to figure him out and moved in on him like wolves after prey. Other times there were men whose desire was so strong they made blunt overtures having no notion of Paul's interest and risking reactions ranging from agonizing rejections to violence. No matter which of these scenarios he found himself in, the feeling of accidentally finding a magic kingdom was intoxicating.

Paul cherished the memories of his days as a "secret slut". He had not, he told me, come out of the closet in any dramatic way. His friends were embarrassed when he started to tell them not because they were uncomfortable at being told but because they had all suspected as much for years. Oddly, they were relieved at finally getting it out and the anticipatory shame he had felt had been pointless.

Unexpectedly, he felt some disappointment in no longer needing to be furtive about seeking partners. He could walk into actual gay bars like one I was sitting in waiting for my friend. But he missed that feeling of uncertainty that came with his undeclared interest. He didn't describe it that way. That "feeling of uncertainty that comes with undeclared interest" is my way of explaining it. It's something I have seen on the faces of women I have watched interacting with men and I sometimes am coldblooded enough to see it on the faces of women interacting with me. I prefer it when I am so wrapped up in similar feelings so as to not notice.

As a man, I keep my interest undeclared by declaring it. I show an interest in all women comfortable that most will take this as me "just being a man". This is a good thing because the truth is that I would want to gently extricate myself from almost all if they responded too eagerly. A couple of of times that it did happen I went through with it seeking to avoid insulting the woman involved only to cause her even more pain by seeming to lose interest in her very quickly afterward. I want them to leave their interest undeclared and take it as their due that I will continue to show interest without getting any admission of actual interest on their part. I want them, in turn, to enjoy the feeling of uncertainty that comes from knowing that all men have some interest in them and so they therefore cannot be certain just how strong my interest is.

What I really want in women is that they should be genuinely interested in being womanly for its own sake. I like to think that they would make all this effort, develop all this womanly virtue, even if there were no men around. That may seem selfish to women but it is exactly the way heterosexual expect men to behave in the company of other heterosexual men. We expect one another to be good at being men. We want women to work at being good at being women in a similarly disinterested way. Which is not say that we don't realize, and in fact hope, that women will compete with other women.

It was just that effort, that display of womanly virtue, that my friend had denied me by showing up for the drive down having made no effort at all. Now that we were in town, she was about to make the effort for a group of people who had not reliably shown up and driven her here.

All that resentment soon disappeared when the middle-aged queens at the bar suddenly burst into applause as she came out of the washroom. The transformation was amazing and had been achieved in remarkably little time. One of the queens compared her to Grace Kelly because of a scene in Rear Window where she pulls off a similar transformation in Jimmy Stewart's apartment. The comparison was apt even though my Grace was physically unlike Grace Kelly being brown and curvy instead of blonde and willowy.

Grace could turn on sexual power at will like that. She was always good looking but, when she wanted it, she could turn on an erotic power that everyone—male and female, hetero or homosexual—could feel. The funny thing is that no one hated her. Everyone I ever met in those years who knew her spoke well of her.

Even I could never hate her although she had too often shown me that she no longer believed I was worth the effort of her turning that power on. She'd done it plenty when we'd first met and I, like Paul, had intoxicating memories of those days of concealed interest.

There was a connection between that power and actual sexual arousal for her for she too was intoxicated by that uncertainty and I knew that a few hours of her flirting with men at the party would pay off for me later. Using her power and having it responded to always got her desire flowing. She didn't seem to mind if the actual sex wasn't with the guys she had had help her prime the pump. That's not unusual and, at the risk of being obnoxious, I think most women are like that.

I didn't feel comfortable in that relationship despite the benefits. Eventually, I let her leave me.  That was a long while ago now.

I found her on a professional networking site the other day.

Her picture is on her page at the networking site. It's a sad picture. It's not that she looks old. She looks her age and she looks attractive. It's that she looks like someone trying hard. She looks like someone who is trying too hard, because the look she is struggling to achieve—that of a sexually powerful woman—can only be achieved by women who can project an air of effortless grace and she is, as I say, obviously really working at it.

 She is, for example, standing at an angle to the camera and sticking her breasts out. This makes her  look ridiculous. She looks even more ridiculous to those of of us who knew her back when because we can see that somewhere along the line she has had a breast augmentation. Her already largish breasts are now huge and her body looks disproportionate in a Pamela-Anderson way.

They were, as I say, already largish, 32 C. I suspect the motive for the surgery was not primarily to increase their  size but to counteract the effects of age and gravity. Just as a dying her hair to conceal gray required going a shade darker than her natural brown, so too concealing the effects of gravity required going a cup size or so larger. The result is to make her look cheap and stupid. Even the guys who have sex with women like that laugh at them. It's most definitively not the look you want to project to people you are hoping might hire you.

Sadder than Grace's picture is her career record a few lines below it. That record doesn't go all the way back to when she first graduated from university but I remember that part. Her first career job (as opposed to waiting tables) was a money loser. She had to borrow money from her parents to cover expenses through the three years she had that job. But it was a well-picked entry level job; it just didn't pay well as is also true of a lot of good entry level jobs. Among other things, this keeps most people who don't come from the class that can afford to squander a year or so on internships, whether officially declared as such or not, out of certain fields.

In any case, Grace worked hard and she learned on the job. She worked as hard as the most ambitious of her peers and she dressed noticeably better than them, albeit thanks to her parents' generosity.

From there, it was a steady upward path. By the time she was twenty-seven, her picture and profile appeared in a couple of buiness journals. She didn't really belong there. You only had to read the profiles next to hers to see that, as good as she was, she didn't have the extraordinary talent or achievements they had.

Grace's steady upward path ends in the aughts. She not only stops moving upwards, her stay in positions gets shorter. And, as you go on through her CV, you start to see the sorts of filler jobs and fake jobs that people resort to when they're trying to make it look like they're working through what are actually blank spots on their resumé. It's particularly pathetic that this is all online because Grace is apparently unaware that she is advertising her decline far and wide. If she'd really been as capable as those peers who appeared beside her in those  journals long ago, she'd know how to make herself look better.

It's funny to type the words "she'd know how to make herself look better" now because, as I said above, she was really good at making herself look really good. She had the skill, and it is a rare skill, of looking sexually powerful plus (this is the rare part) sophisticated and intelligent. Like Grace Kelly before her, she was actually neither of these latter two things—or, rather, she was only sophisticated and intelligent about being a certain relatively rare kind of highly desirable woman. She could have been sophisticated and intelligent in other ways too but she didn't work at those other things.

The special skills she did develop—and her career was built on them—made her very accomplished at being the sexually attractive but sophisticated young woman that everyone wants to have around. In the 1960s, she would have only been a secretary but in the 1990s, she made a real career out of it. Her presence at the board room table made others feel like winners because they were in the presence of someone who looked like one of life's winners. And while she might not have made any original or profound observations, she was always polished enough that the people who had hired her could feel confident she would never embarrass them. What often happened was that she would repeat other people's insights at the table and they just seemed better insights because they were in her mouth.

Her future now looks bleak. Her professional life is on the wane, her love life has been an unmitigated failure. I won't go into it in detail but she has started enough serious relationships and failed in every one of them that it is now obvious that she doesn't have what it takes to make a marriage work. Her one shot at actual marriage lasted about five years and her ex-husband quickly remarried after she left him. Since then she has drifted into and out of several relationships each time with a guy who had less status than the previous guy. All of the men who once loved her before that failed marriage are now happily married to other women. Grace herself will probably be single the rest of her life.

Grace's life is now, and will most probably continue to be (as Ford Madox Ford would have it) a sad rather than a tragic story. I pray it's not tragic and hope it's not any sadder than it has to be.

Of course, some people really do win lotteries. There was a real Grace Kelly and she really did marry Prince Rainier. It says a lot about the kind of game that Grace Kelly played that the American Film Institute placed her in their list of the top twenty-five female movie stars. Grace Kelly could act just as I can wash the dishes, which is to say she did it well enough. Her primary asset was her ability to be Grace Kelly and she did not have any ability to act parts that weren't variations on being Grace Kelly. If you look at the rest of the list, both the recipients and the current stars who presented the awards, you can see that she is not the only female star in this category.

Just about everybody else who buys lottery tickets loses. We might even wonder about those who seem to win. Neither Grace Kelly nor my Grace ended up happily. I wouldn't want anyone to hate either of them for doing so, although I know that some of Grace's friends from those days when I knew her would style their current attitude as deceived or disillusioned.

I do think, however, that we should be able to acknowledge that Grace's current unhappy state is entirely her own fault.