I Hate Everyone, Except You(45)
Divers also recovered several skeletons of people who got trapped aboard the ship as it sank, some of whom were women. (Historians aren’t even sure what women were doing aboard the ship in the first place.) Based on mineral testing and X-rays of the bones, scientists determined that pretty much everyone had suffered from severe malnutrition as a child or walked with a limp because of injuries that had never healed properly.
In the darkest part of the museet, six heads glow from inside glass cases. They’re creations of forensic artists, facial reconstructions of six skulls found in the muddy wreckage. There’s a blatant honesty and exactness you might expect from a Swedish forensic artist, from the enlarged pores they added to broken capillaries to overgrown eyebrow hair. If this ship had sunk off the coast of, say, Barcelona, I’m sure the reconstruction would have gone much differently. All the dead people would look like Calvin Klein fragrance models on the receiving end of fellatio. But not these old Swedes. They are rough-and-tumble.
Except Beata, whose reconstructed face caught my eye. She was beautiful, in that profoundly dejected kind of way. Physically she was a mix of weak and strong features: pronounced cheekbones and a big nose that appeared to have been broken once or twice, small blue eyes, thin lips, and a ruddy complexion. Her blond hair was pulled back from her face, covered by something resembling a folded dish towel. I’ve done so many makeovers in my life that I’m almost embarrassed to admit my first thought was, With a little concealer and the right lipstick, I could make this chick look like Uma Thurman.
But I let that moment pass. I looked at Beata for a while, and she looked at me. Her expression was that of a woman who had been thoroughly beaten down. What were you doing aboard this ship full of men, Beata? I wondered. Were you a stowaway? Were you a whore? Was it your job to clean those two toilets? Was life so bad on land that the sea seemed like an escape? An adventure? And who broke your nose? Some guy you were shacking up with? Your father? Your mother?
I just could not even fathom a situation in which this woman’s life was anything but pure misery. Only thirty or so people died aboard the Vasa. Because it had barely left the dock, most passengers just swam to safety. But why did Beata die? Maybe she got pinned under a table or crate when the boat capsized. Or maybe she couldn’t swim. Or maybe going down with the ship was better than going back to shore.
Tell me, Beata. Tell me!
“Hey handsome.” Damon had walked up behind me. He whispered in my ear, “What are you thinking?”
“Oh, you know, just the usual nonsense,” I said. “How do you feel about picking up and going to Paris tomorrow?”
“I think that is a brilliant idea.”
The Internet service in Sweden is pretty fast, so we were able to book a flight to Paris and a hotel room in the First Arrondissement in less than fifteen minutes. It’s not that Sweden is unlovable, or unlivable, it just wasn’t our cup of gl?gg.
*
Paris, on the other hand, can make you feel like all is right with the world, that every cathedral deserves flying buttresses, every meal deserves dessert, and every pedestrian deserves painful but gorgeous shoes.
Damon and I were walking through the immaculately groomed gardens of the Tuileries when our phones started to blow up. It was June 26, 2015, and the US Supreme Court had just ruled that same-sex couples were entitled to all the benefits of marriage on a federal level. We both teared up. Our lives are nothing short of amazing, filled with people we love and who love us, but sometimes you don’t realize you’ve been a second-class citizen until you’ve received the right to be first-class.
We decided that to celebrate I should post our wedding picture on my Facebook fan page. It’s a candid shot of us taken in our backyard in Connecticut. We’re holding hands as we walk down the stone steps to our pond, where our friends and family were waiting for us. Neither of us is looking into the camera but we’re beaming with joy.
The post received 180,000 “likes” and more than 6,000 people stopped whatever they were doing that day to wish us love and congratulations.
Five people thought it was appropriate to tell us we were going to hell.
If you’ve never been told by a complete stranger that you’re going to hell, let me try to explain the feeling to you. It makes you feel something like sadness, but it’s not quite sadness. Sadness is when your favorite grandfather dies or your parents tell you the dog you grew up with has cancer. And it’s not really anger, because anger is when you see a drunk driver on the highway in front of you when you’ve got your family in the car. And it’s not exactly pity, because pity is what you feel when you pass a homeless mother and her two children on the street. It’s all of those emotions rolled up into one not-yet-named-in-English emotion. But it doesn’t consume you in the fiery way that rage can or the chest-crushing way sorrow can. It’s smaller, subtler, like a thousand shallow pinpricks.
Soon after the marriage equality ruling, Ted Cruz called the day “some of the darkest twenty-four hours in our nation’s history.” And at that moment I realized why I had been having disturbing visions of his face: God wanted me to know, in no uncertain terms, that Ted Cruz is a huge, painful asshole.
And that even if he, or someone just as horrible, becomes president, it’s not worth jumping ship.
THE WAY IT WENT
Clayton,* recently hired as a host for what would prove to be a short-lived home shopping network aimed at an upwardly mobile audience, sat at his desk writing notes on his blue cards for the next day’s show. He had never been good at sitting still for any extended period of time, so his gaze frequently strayed to the plain-faced clock on the wall nearby. It was 4:50 p.m., so he could leave the office unnoticed in a little more than an hour. He had to prepare for a date that night with Tim, a handsome computer programmer with curly black hair he had met at the gym four months earlier.