A part of me will always hate Alaska. Having spent the summer of 2006 as a tour director for Holland America Cruise Lines, I learned a keen bitterness towards the largest state in the US. A bitterness that broadly encompassed lost luggage, room complaints, and thousands of miles in the front of a tour bus filled with demanding senior citizens. When it comes to mind, many regard the place with a sense of naturally inspired awe while I am temporarily crippled by an arresting spite as my mind struggles to subdue the saturating weakness of betrayal. I was a restless 20 years old when my Christian boyfriend turned Bathsheba.
Christopher Stewart Keith. We met a year before going north at our private Christian university in Langley, British Columbia. Like all students, we had signed a behavioral contract with the school which banned drinking, smoking, sex, dancing, and “homosexual activity,” to name a few. I remember the first night we kissed when he told me how each of his three titles could act as first, middle and/or last names. At the time I found such a mundane fact endearing. At the time I was endearingly mundane. I had altered a thrift store plaid shirt for him and he had baked a strawberry rhubarb pie for me. It seemed like a fair trade. That night, we ended up taking a long walk and then broke into the campus music room where we watched a movie on my laptop while cuddling beneath a grand piano slip cover. I told him that I liked him and wanted him to be my boyfriend. “Alright,” he responded, “I’d like that.” We wouldn’t end up sleeping together until eight months later. It was awful.
I have slept with some very unattractive people. They weren’t all so bad to look at when we met but even the moderately handsome individuals seemed to wilt and gnarl with the time’s elapse. In the instances where I actually reached orgasm I still slunk away from each encounter with a feeling of hunger, of lacking fulfillment, like when someone hands you a stick of gum and your trusting fingers close around nothing more than an empty wrapper.
The night Chris first fucked me we were in a drafty cabin behind an expansive Alaskan resort in Denali National Park. The employee housing space, furnished with two creaky, sagging twin beds (little more than naked mattresses but for the faded. threadbare sheets that reeked of one-night stands and cheap detergent), rivaled Alaska’s finest honeymoon suite, to be sure. The whole situation was so stark and obligatory. We didn’t speak. We didn’t kiss. I let him inside, he came, and it was over. He turned to face the wall and fell asleep while I showered and resigned to the second bed. The sporadic, muffled drumroll of the leaky showerhead thudding lazily against the fiberglass floor beating my eyelids apart, forced my gaze to fall on the patchy moonlit pattern across Christopher’s dormant form.
“How did we get here,” I silently asked the lurid ruby numbers on the bedside alarm clock face (tour directors were not afforded tardiness). “11:59” blinked casually to midnight.
Christopher had a face reminiscent of a child playing house. All too-big suits and light pecks on tightly pursed lips. He always seemed to be reading life from a script he’d compiled from what he saw real adults doing. He cared fiercely for everyone around him in a way that cried out for recognition without words. On campus, there were three things he was known for: he offered well-worded advice, he provided patient back rubs, and he knew Mario Brothers by heart. Even the secret levels. I thought it so selfless how he wanted to become a children’s counselor. Now I realize it was due to the fact that he was still mostly a child himself. Then again, so was I. I remember the secret pride I felt when Chris’ dorm mate told me I had given him the best massage he’d ever received. And the sense of victory I greedily savored when Chris received the email from Holland America notifying him that he’d been reconsidered for hire and they’d like to offer him a summer position after all. (I had contacted the tour company following Chris’ rejection and requested their further attentions to his application and resume, both of which I had written).
We both longed to be necessary. We both worked fastidiously to become so. For me that meant being available, flexible, convenient. For Chris, that required independence, distance, and feigned maturity.
I can still remember with crisp clarity the first time we called off our relationship. March 12, 2006. Two days before our three-month anniversary. Two days after he had been denied the job in Alaska. I was the one who made the final call so Chris wouldn’t have to. I felt so big and small at the same time. We barely made eye contact. My pajama sweats felt lumpish and unattractive and the vinegary stains beneath the sleeves on Chris’ white undershirt posed an unavoidable cynosure. Long prior he had begun intimating that he was afraid of people finding out about the two of us. I said I cared too much about him to be the cause of fear or worry. We gave each other an extended hug, the phlegm dripping from my nose adding new stains to his garment. And then he left my dorm and mostly avoided me for the remainder of the semester. I grew increasingly torpid, vacating my room less and less. I told myself it was because I wanted to be there in case Chris happened to stop by. One of the few times he did actually make a brief visit was to inform me that he had been offered the summer position. I intentionally avoided telling him of my efforts to that end. I merely saw it as convenient. He saw it as something he was entitled to.
Three months later we would be in Alaska, separated for the first time in the two weeks we had been in training. Chris would call me, asking me what I thought of the future and I would transparently relate my hopes for the two of us to finish school together and move to Seattle after graduation. He would admit that he wanted the same and we would reinstate our relationship just before what would have been our six-month mark. Less than a month after he would kiss another boy.
We were in Dawson City, Yukon Territories, just east of the Alaska/Canada border. Our tours had serendipitously overlapped and I had finagled a swap in order that Christopher and I could share a room during the one night we were there simultaneously. We had just gone to bed and Chris was avoidant, terse, and brusque.
“You’re acting all detached and sulky. What’s the matter? Are you angry with me,” I asked the questions without needing an answer. Christopher’s behavior was all but incriminating. The weekend before, while I was on layover in Skagway and he was in Anchorage I had spent 3 days trying to get in touch with him to no avail. I lay awake all three nights with a sickening feeling in the pit of my stomach. By the third night I had memorized the flaws in the ceiling and counted the brass rungs on the bed frame with my toes to the point of sheer panic. When I finally reached him the phone conversation lasted a distant and inconclusive four minutes and 28 seconds. His voice was dull and labored and each of my inquiries was followed by an excruciating pause. He wasn’t talking to me. He was obliging me.
“I’m not angry. I’m just tired. Can we just go to sleep?” His last question sounded accusatory and immediately I felt like a child being swatted away while tugging on a busy parent’s pant leg. I left him be. After a half hour I knew neither of us was sleeping and turned to kiss his shoulder blade. He cringed as if my lips were acidic. Then he shifted his form so that he was face down in his pillow as if to smother what he was about to say.
“I allowed myself to kiss Lee.” Even though I was already anticipating this disclosure I still felt the knife of infidelity in my duodenum. All I could ask was why, why, why. Chris kept his face buried in the pillow. I don’t know, I don’t know, I don’t know. His sobs combined with the plush down made his words even more unintelligible.
We made love urgently, the sweat and salt water swilling together on our angry bodies. The room stank of perspiration and deceit by the time we went still from exhaustion. The next day he left early and I proposed that we not talk about it ever again.
“We’ll act as if it didn’t happen,” I pled with all of the pathos I could muster.
But it did happen. And I later found out that it happened again and again only this time with a different partner.
I met Scott in August, three days before Christopher kissed him while I slept next to them in the king sized bed in our Anchorage apartment. I knew immediately that I was attracted to him and wanted to be close to him in any way I could. But a part of me was still forged in brassy determination to recovering the feelings Chris and I once shared.
I felt that introducing him to Christopher would ensure my own loyalty while making Scott aware of my commitment to the relationship I was currently weathering.
I knew I was smarter, better dressed and more confident than my boyfriend but I still had my worries. And rightfully so. Scott was also in a relationship floating on stale bathwater and he spoke often of its dizzying spiral toward the drain. This gave Christopher and me opportunity to counsel, advise, and encourage this chiseled, six foot two, Mormon boy in the struggles of his love life, an opportunity that became a constant point of silent competition. Which of us could offer the keener insight, the better suggestion, the warmer shoulder.
It therefore came as no surprise that the day I had to leave for tour preparation I put Chris at a decisive advantage. That night, when I returned home, the three of us, Christopher, Scott and myself, ate dinner and settled into a movie in the large bedroom. Scott lay between Chris and me and before the opening credits had finished their infiltration of the unfolding plot, my eyes were closed, my body still, allowing the two of them unhindered access to one another.
September 1st Christopher and I flew south to prepare for another school year, him in Canada and me in Portland (I had transferred following the school’s discovery of my “homosexual activity”). By the time we had returned home our interactions had become elaborately maintained melodramas. And while we had planned on my staying with him the week after returning, our exchanges consisted of little more than laconic bouts of rehearsed speech.
Christopher: I’m going to the coast with my sister for the weekend.
Me: I’ll just head home then.
Christopher: You should call your brother to come and pick you up.
Me: He’ll be able to get me by tonight, I’m pretty sure.
Christopher: I’ll call you when I get back.
Me: Whenever you have time.
I would later be informed during an international phone call that “going to the coast with my sister” actually meant “flying to Utah to see Scott.” But just like before, I already knew.
I fucked Scott the morning of Chris’ birthday (May 2nd) the following year. January of 2007 Chris had moved in with me in Portland after running out of money in Canada. We played house for five months while I grew less and less invested and finally exacted my childish revenge, successfully destroying our relationship along with Christopher, Scott and ultimately myself.
Scott was driving from school in Utah back to Alaska for yet another summer in tourism and had called to see if enough time had passed since the previous summer’s offenses for a reparative visit. We had been talking off and on (unbeknownst to Chris) for a few months and I said I would need to ask my boyfriend. Chris was reticent to say the least but eventually agreed in what I took to be an effort at testing the fortitude of what he thought was a refurbished intimacy between the two of us.
When I broke it off for the second and last time I did it because I wanted to. It had nothing to do with Chris’ feelings. And the night I related my shameful behavior I spoke with uncharacteristic aplomb and little to no remorse.
Five days later I moved out leaving only a few dishes and the old leather couch I had bought at Goodwill. A few weeks later I took that too.
In some ways I felt relieved, as if a complicated and painful tumor had finally been sliced off of my body. But the scars from the operation were many and the residual clash of reason and justification clouded my perspective. The last thing I remember throwing out in the move was my box of pay stubs from Holland America. I would return to Alaska once more the following summer for a brief two week tour to help out the company at the end of a busy season. While there I would sleep with Scott one last time and then vow never to return.
I’ll most likely always hate Alaska.
