Not the coin of exposed scalp that demarcated the end his youth, not the credit failures that sank his capital-starved web design consultancy, not his wife’s discovery of certain episodes of ages-ago marital infraction—no, what ended up being Niall McNeil’s life-defining crisis defied articulation, and he could only render it approximately as a form of “masculine inexpression”—nnnnn but this term fell short of communicating the agony, his aching paralysis, this feeling of shame mixed with desperation, which in his lifetime he had only previously experienced when he was twelve and had lost his bathing suit to a surprise swell in the ocean. It was as if the world was just no longer glad to have him in it, and he felt sure that his condition was transparent to his family and his coworkers at BriqHouse Interactive and to passersby who, at a glance, could see immediately through him into the essence of his humiliation.
For though he had children, and in spite of being endowed with an orthodox heterosexual libido that alternately pleased and annoyed his wife, and in spite of having been raised on a dairy farm in Wyoming, later allowing him to draw upon stories of a roughneck childhood that made his Yale classmates feel small and milquetoast and circumscribed within their own quaint urban or suburban knowledge of the world, and notwithstanding his barrel-chested physique and his Lacrosse trophies and his surfeit of leg hair and his disdain of cooking, in spite of all of these things, at this time in his life, Niall could not speak, or move, or even sit still with a neutral expression without betraying a consistent involuntary tendency to do, in his words, “sissy things”…
…for instance, when startled, he would cover his mouth, and not even with his whole hand, just the four non-opposable fingers pointing straight up, as if he were some kind of lady-in-waiting who just dropped her parasol into the French Riviera, or something, oopsie-daisy!, and how could it be helped?—it was a reflex!—or how about, let’s see, how about the way he’d bob up and down whenever he spoke passionately, which was embarrassing enough when he was standing up, but ten times worse when seated, which he realized entailed not only a silly jouncing of his posture, but also a totally unseemly rhythmic flexing of the buttocks, such that he was literally hopping with his butt, as if his chair were playfully swatting him on his dainty buns, or (this was more of a stretch) as if he were getting it in the ass and was thrilled about it—though, let’s be clear, it wasn’t his sexual orientation that he was concerned about, for, alright, despite having said that thing earlier about his heterosexuality, the truth is that he did enjoy the occasional discreet homosexual tryst from the ages of twelve to twenty-seven, but even those were imbued with a pungent maleness, he had usually been dominant, and hadn’t his partners—they were guys, weren’t they?—hadn’t they commented on his then-rugged physique with something like Beta-male reverence? So no, his sexuality was not at stake; again (and this is absolutely the most rigorous way he could articulate it with the full weight of his Masters’ degrees in Philosophy and Psycholinguistics), it was his autonomic behavioral inexpression of maleness—there was no, like, “Inner Ponce” struggling to get out, but rather, he insisted to himself, it was a cognitive-behavioral (or perhaps even neuromuscular) disorder that afflicted him particularly in the hands and below the waist: his toes wiggled like anemones for up to ten seconds during orgasm; instead of lifting his knees while jogging, he kicked his feet up behind him, giving the impression of his running away from, for instance, a bee; he tended to cross his legs at the ankles; he would say “Ta-ta!”; he heavily favored his right leg, so that, when standing, his hips were coquettishly outthrust; he took an excessively long stride which again evoked a kind of bounciness, and though his friends at work called it The Cocky Walk or The Niall McNeil Pimp Strut, he knew that it was more like a skip or a prance; when he hugged people he would pat them lightly and quickly (“fluffily”, he thought), when what he wanted to convey was solidity and competence; he would idly interpose locks of hair between his large fingers and sort of twirl them about, which, though he used several fingers and not just one, was still just much too fanciful.
And, seriously, this wasn’t just a matter of ordinary self-consciousness or insecurity or gender dysmorphia, those standard furnishings of the American male psyche—he wasn’t a bigot, after all, and he could accept things like grown men doing yoga, or women named “Joey” or “Brett”—but his was not a problem rooted in masculine shame or inadequacy, but rather in existentialist ontology: in a manner endemic to where he was raised, he clung unswervingly to notions of self-actualization and duty and making one’s mark in the world and to many other notions falling under the purview of Free Will (to the extent that he adopted in college a belief that the biochemical properties of the human brain enabled it to somehow stop electrons in midflight and thereby control its contents like a sort of “gatekeeper”, or something, ergo Free Will), which is to say that he attached more than the usual amount of significance to how one’s composure bore on one’s essential humanity, and so to the extent that he couldn’t keep his behaviors from expressing themselves in ways he was convinced were effete, precious, twee, wussy, rococo, fanciful, prissy, and/or frou-frou, so too was he each of those things, way deep down in his otherwise completely suitable being.
[Excerpt ends here]
—Jul 13, 2008