A few months ago, I read a magazine article called, “Is My Boyfriend Gay?”
Aidan had already come out, but I wanted to see if there were signs, things I had missed, markers that might have been useful. Besides the obvious stuff—he doesn’t like ha**ng s*x with you, especially touching you between your legs—most of the signs were laughable. Gay men are more likely to have hair that whorls counterclockwise, to have an index finger longer than the ring finger, and to have older brothers, the article said. Aside from Aidan’s collection of older male siblings, I’m pretty sure that even if I had walked around our marriage inspecting his hair and measuring his finger length that I wouldn’t have put two and two together. Besides, another thing that’s common with married g*y men is they often make great husbands because they try so hard to live a straight life, while denying their sexuality. For better or for worse, Aidan was a perfect husband. He was kind, he was supportive, he believed in me. He complimented me every day. He cooked for me. He always took care of Ethan when I had a gig and never once complained about the odd hours a musician keeps.
Kelly’s comments about being able to help other women going through this echo within me, and before I know it, I’m speaking from the heart, saying to Jayden, “Actually, I’ve asked myself that question a lot. Countless times. I felt pretty stupid. And I beat myself up a lot for not having known. But the fact is, I was pregnant with his child and I desperately wanted my marriage to work.”
We talk for another few minutes and then Jayden thanks me for my time.
After I hang up, I remember Matthew’s advice to be myself. I don’t know if he’s right or not, I don’t know if he fed me a handy line reporters use to get people to open up to them. But at the end of the day, I don’t want to be false; I don’t want to be phony. I spoke the simple truth to Jayden, and I think he appreciated it.
As I turn onto Jeremy’s block, I noodle on all these interactions with reporters. On trying to be myself. On answering honestly. Is there a song in there? Maybe it’s a stretch, but I need something, anything, to get my creative engine rumbling along. So I hum a loose little melody—just be yourself, be who you are, speak the truth.
But it sounds so treacly, it makes me want to yak up my sushi lunch. Clearly, there’s no song in answering a reporter’s question honestly. Then I lose my train of thought when I notice a pair of teenagers practically stumbling out of Starbucks, hanging onto each other, a boy and a girl, each with a hand in the other’s back pocket. He reaches across her with his free hand, pushing a strand of her blond hair behind her ear, then lays a quick, but not too quick, kiss on her lips. They gaze at each other—they actually gaze; who gazes anymore?—and then dash off toward the nearest subway, I imagine, to catch a train to a make-out hideaway somewhere.
It’s like a punch in the gut, a sharp, cold reminder that Aidan and I never staggered out of a coffee shop in midday, woozy on our love, giddy with the prospect of pending nakedness. These scenes of public affection bear about as much similarity to my marriage as Japanese or differential calculus do. But I want what the Starbucks Couple has. I want someone to want me. I want to be desired, I want to be admired, I want to be adored. The gal who cuts my hair has a tattoo across her right arm in a cool cursive font that says, “I want to be adored.” I love that tattoo, I love the earnestness of the sentiment, I love her ballsiness in branding it on her body.
I’m not afraid of tattoos, or piercings for that matter. I have both—a belly button ring and a tattoo on my ankle. The tattoo is a small, silvery illustration of a glass slipper. Jeremy’s a former tattoo artist; he launched the label when a wealthy customer died, leaving his inker with a hefty chunk of change in the will. Jeremy handed the key of the tattoo shop to his younger brother and pursued his lifelong dream—to run a record label. After I signed with the label, his brother inked me and I surprised Jeremy with it a few days later when I showed him my ankle. He knows I’ll never leave him, even though other labels called me after Crushed shot up the charts to see if I’d jump ship. I said no. My loyalty is on my skin.
But I push tattoos and teenage desire out of my mind as I open the door to the Glass Slipper offices, in the heart of the garment district on the seventh floor of your average, ordinary, completely unremarkable Manhattan office building. Jeremy wanted to name the label Gnarled Sunrise, but his wife liked Glass Slipper better, so he deferred to her, though he christened the accompanying recording studio with his name of choice. The walls are plastered with album covers, music posters, magazine reviews. I spend the next hour eating the most amazing chocolate cake with butter cream frosting from Kara’s Kake Saloon a few blocks away and chatting with the label’s fifteen full-time employees and a handful of freelance sound mixers and producers who work regularly with the label’s acts.
The great thing about working for an indie is just that—working for an indie. Glass Slipper is smaller, eons smaller, than the Capitols and Islands and Virgin Records of the world. We don’t have the money, the staff, or the resources of the big guys. But, there’s tremendous freedom and faith. I asked Jeremy once why he stuck with me after my first three albums, when most big labels would have dropped me. I remember him leaning back in his creaky desk chair, placing his meaty, inked arms—covered in dragons, Chinese characters for good fortune and health, and the names of his three kids—behind his head.
“I liked you,” he said. “I knew eventually you’d produce something great. You were like this diamond in the rough.”