Larry Benjamin's Blog: Larry Benjamin's blog - This Writer's Life - Posts Tagged "what-binds-us"

Two days before the release of my debut novel, What Binds Us, this waiting is what I imagine being pregnant is like: for thirty-eight weeks you carry this child and for those thirty-eight weeks everything is possible; he could be president, he could be beautiful. And then he’s born and what he is is real, flesh, yours.

Waiting, I find myself trapped by two fears—equally paralyzing—what if the book sucks? what if no one reads it? What if it doesn’t suck and I never write again? I went to bed.

I awoke at 4 a.m. because the words were coming, would not stop coming, were shouting to be heard, written down, not forgotten, wouldn’t in fact stop until pen hit paper. (These are the words that came—part of my next book, I think.)

Then it struck me: I got the words. I am a writer. Nothing more, nothing less am I. I got the words. Will continue to write them down.

After, when that rush of words, released in the writing down, quieted, I began to write this blog entry, to admit this writer’s fears.

Sunday at midnight, I bought the book on Amazon. At 1:30 a.m. I held my Kindle in my hand and did what I suppose every mother does—counted the toes, the fingers, the ears, the eyes, in this case I read the words, studied the commas (when you write really long sentences, commas are important). Again, I guessed what I felt was a feeling like that of a new mother: despite the preparations, despite what you know to be true, he doesn’t seem quite real, this child. Not yet. Not until you can hear his sound in the world will he seem real.

And then you hear his sound in the world and you don’t care if he’s president, if he’s beautiful because he is, above all, yours.
What Binds Us

Today, I’m chatting with m/m romance author, Dev Bentham. Dev and I first met two years ago as new authors when Carina Press released our debut m/m romances, Moving in Rhythm and What Binds Us on the same day in 2012. Since then we’ve become friends, though we’ve never met. In honor of the second anniversary of debuts on March 19, I thought I’d catch up with Dev and see she’s been up to.

Keep reading.

In today's flash fiction post I revisit the setting from What Binds Us In the two years since What Binds Us was published, many readers have asked what happened to Matthew and Thomas-Edward after the book ended. This is not meant to be a sequel but it does provide a glimpse into their lives after their original story ended.

Read Micah’s Story Now.

Perhaps our human relationships and experiences with love can be better because we have loved a dog or a cat.

In this week's blog post, I explore the relationship between the ability to love an animal and the ability to love a person.
Read the rest.
What Binds Us

Nearly three years after being published, and having published three books, I think the biggest lesson I learned—and perhaps the hardest to learn—was the fact that as a writer you don’t own the reader’s experience. Each reader experiences the book differently; they are free to interpret it how they want relative to their own experiences. Some will love it, so will hate it, others will have a reaction of “meh.”

I read most reviews, and I admit I take them to heart. I won’t say they influence my future writing, but I do read them, mostly because I’m interested in what readers think of my work. Once in awhile, I’ll read a review and realize the reader really got my story. That happened the other day. I got a Goggle Alert for What Binds Us, my first book. It was a review by someone named Richard Green on a site I was unfamiliar with. (I should point out it appears to be a pirate site of some kind, offering PDFs of books, immorally if not illegally; but that is a whole other post....) Anyway as I was saying, this guy really seemed to get the book. His review in part is below:

What Binds Us is more a gay historical drama than an m/m romance. There is a certain degree of romance but it isn't what drives the narrative. At least it didn't feel like that to me. So, to that extend, the blurb isn't very indicative of the plot.

This is essentially Dondi's story as told by his ex-lover and best friend Thomas-Edward. I dare say it's the story as Thomas experienced it. The first person POV adds to that effect.

The book is divided into three parts: Sunrise, Eclipse, and Sunset and, as early as in the Prologue, we learn that this is a collection of "Memories of a love lost and a love found. Memories of a life shared and a life lost" and that there's tragedy ahead: "I must write it all down—quickly, before it leaves me. Like he did. Gone too soon."

So. It's the late seventies, and the two meet in college (they're roommates), Thomas a quiet middle class black guy from New Jersey, Dondi a loud and theatrical bon viveur, who uses his wealth to enjoy life to the fullest. Here's Thomas' first impression of Dondi: "He seemed about my age, but while I felt barely begun, he seemed complete, an epilogue to a fantastic story."

So I was really intrigued by his review and yes, giddy with excitement. Then he wrote:

Dondi shows Thomas how life should be lived, clubbing, shopping, drinking, smoking pot. "Dondi became my guide, my Virgil, on my personal odyssey of self-discovery. (It was Homer, by the way; the one who wrote the Odyssey. Virgil wrote the Aeneid.)

What? Wait a minute. Hold up! He is the second reviewer to make this mistake!
Homer did, indeed, write the Odyssey, and Virgil wrote the Aeneid. I know that. I read both. In Latin. In the sentence he quotes, I was referring to the Inferno by Dante, which I’ve read three times, in translation, in which, Dante, lost in Hell, is guided by the Roman poet, Virgil, through the nine circles. It is I’ve been told an obscure reference so I’ll have to cut him some slack, but still it rankles. Did these reviewers really think I’d confused the two? Did they think my editor and copy editors were also confused about who wrote what?

But as I say, the reader owns his/her experience and I have learned to accept that.

The rest of the review appears below—mostly because he quotes some of my favorite lines from What Binds Us. Unfortunately the review ends abruptly—it appears he ran out of space—which is unfortunate because I thought it was a well-written review and I really wanted to learn what his conclusion was.

At a certain point they become lovers, Thomas having almost instantly fallen in love with Dondi. But it doesn't last, because Dondi doesn't believe in love, he isn't the "forever-and-always, you-for-me and me-for-you-only" kind of guy. They remain roommates though and their relationship keeps evolving. Dondi keeps falling in love (his version of it, anyway) moving from one guy to the other, from an unnamed lad with sun-bleached hair to the son of his Latin professor to the next random guy in the endless line of his conquests. But Thomas remains the person Dondi considers his only true friend, the only constant in his extravagant lifestyle.

Then Dondi asks Thomas to spend the summer with him and his family at their summer house in Long Island and Thomas meets Matthew, Dondi's younger brother. They first become inseparable, and then they fall madly in love. And they're the real thing. If Dondi was an epilogue, Matthew was a prologue, a promise waiting to be kept. He seemed about to begin. He seemed to be waiting for something. I asked him once, years later, what he’d been waiting for. He surprised me by answering simply, “You.” and "Matthew was like the afterimage from staring at the sun too long. If Dondi was the sun, Matthew was cool water or the dark side of the moon." Thomas and Matthew remain together and, over the years, the reader sees how their lives span around Dondi.

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The death last week of Maurice White, who founded Earth, Wind and Fire, made me, like a lot of people sad. The music of Earth, Wind and Fire marked the beginning of my journey to adulthood. Their music is also inextricably tied to my relationship with my freshman roommate Yone, the first friend I ever had. For me, listening as radio stations played their songs back-to-back was more than a tribute to Maurice White, or a celebration of their musical canon. I was listening to part of the soundtrack of my life. This realization got me thinking about the role of music in my life and writing.

In my books, I use music—to locate the story firmly in time, or to express something about the characters, or their emotion or mood. In What Binds Us, the signature song for Matthew and Thomas-Edward is Randy Crawford’s “Where There was Darkness,” which describes the gratitude they feel for having, unexpectedly found each other; the song’s lyrics express what they cannot yet articulate to each other and they don’t in fact recognize the song is their shared truth.

In Unbroken, “The Morning After,” the theme song from The Poseidon Adventure informs Lincoln’s character—it’s what gives him strength and purpose. Deliberately there is no music in Vampire Rising. Taking its place is silence and the screaming of mockingbirds. Indeed, there is very little sound save the sound of hatred and violence and religious piety, and beneath that, the steady hum of love.

Growing up we listed to calypso, the Ray Coniff Singers and Herb Albert and the Tijuana Brass. I remember The Mighty Sparrow’s “The Congo Man,” and “The Girl from Ipanema” which, in my memory, plays in an endless loop in the background of my childhood. Later, on AM radio, we heard Tony Orlando and Dawn’s “Tie a Yellow Ribbon Round the Old Oak Tree,” and Carly Simon’s “You’re So Vain,” and Helen Reddy’s anthemic “I Am Woman.”

It wasn’t until college, though, that I heard R & B, soul, and funk. Freshman year, my roommate, Yone, introduced me to WDAS and Royce Rose and Parliament Funkadelic and the iconic Earth Wind and Fire. This became the soundtrack to my early college years. Later, Prince’s yearning, declarative “I Wanna Be Your Lover” became the anthem of my lonely, yearning self. Diana Ross’ “Upside Down” and Teena Marie’s “I Need Your Lovin’” echoed the sounds of my heart breaking for the first time. And later the Spanish version of Kool & the Gang’s “Celebration” reflected my head-over-heels love for Germain, the first boy who loved me back. And still later, Randy Crawford’s “Endlessly” summarized how I loved him; for years I closed every letter, every card to him with “endlessly,” followed by my name. I never knew if he ever understood what that was a reference to.

Later, after I met Stanley, “This Ain’t no Thinking Thing” by Trace Adkins became “our song.” Later it was replaced by Sam Smith’s “Stay With Me.” That was the song playing as, hand-in-hand, we walked down the aisle at our wedding. We caught some flak for that from some who said a song celebrating a one night stand was inappropriate but, for us, for me, the lyrics “This ain't love, it's clear to see,” was exactly what we gay and men and women have been hearing from our straight counterparts since time immemorial—hell Lincoln’s journey in Unbroken begins when his parents tell him he can’t fall in love with another boy—the lyrics second part: “But darling, stay with me,” for us spoke of our plea to each other. The world’s disapprobation means nothing as long as you love me and stay with me.

All of these songs—even the ones that remind me of heartbreak and an alienating, painful childhood—come together to form the sound track of my life.

So what about you? What songs are on the soundtrack of your life? Tell me in the comments below.

Check back next Tuesday for Part 2, where I’ll be talking about smell and memory.

A few months ago, I met my friend Brenda for lunch—we’ve been friends since my sophomore year of college—we don’t see each other often but when we do, we simply pick up our friendship, our conversation, where we last left off. After that lunch, I walked her back to her car and hugged her as is my habit. Later, she emailed me, “You know,” she wrote, “After I left, I realized I could smell you and I realized you smell exactly the same.” It was then that I remembered I’ve been wearing the same scent, Cartier’s Santos for decades. It seemed to me she took comfort in that familiarity, that sameness.

Years ago when Toby, our silky terrier, had to be in the hospital over a few days, the attending vet suggested we bring in one of my worn t-shirts to comfort and calm him. Now, years later, on the rare occasions I must be away overnight for work, I leave the t-shirt I slept in the night before for Toby. Otherwise he sits by the kitchen door all night waiting for me to come home.

If you read last week’s blog post, you know I wrote about sounds, particularly the role of sound, of music, in my writing. This week, I turn my attention to smells.

When I approach a story, I try to give it dimension. I may only be writing words on a page, but I try to manifest those words corporeally in the material world. As I write, I see my settings, my characters in a movie. Perhaps, that’s not right. I see them as living. While I’m writing I live in the story. The fictional world becomes real for me. There is color and furniture and sound; often music is playing nearby or in the background. The characters have words and feelings, but they also have density, and their own particular smells.

This was perhaps truest in my first book, What Binds Us.

When protagonist and narrator Thomas-Edward first meets main character Dondi, he tells us:

“I smelled him before I saw him or even heard his voice. It was a smell that was peculiarly his own—clove cigarettes and sex. A scent that clung to him even when he was freshly showered.”

We know very little about Dondi’s mother Mrs. Whyte—we never learn her first name—but we know what she smells like. The first time he meets her, Thomas-Edward notes:

“She wore Opium. Its opulent scent wafted over me.”

When he parts from her that first summer, he again notes her scent:

“All of a sudden the steel went out of her posture and she leaned into my embrace. Her lips touched my cheek. The scent of Opium enveloped me. It was like falling into a soft-scented cloud. I could get lost in that smell. I could close my eyes and no one would ever find me.”

And when he meets her again after many years absence he remarks:

“She entered the room behind me. She still wore Opium. The smell took me back all those years to the first time I’d met her, when she’d descended the stairs so elegantly and called me Thomas-Edward.”

Thomas-Edward notices smells. A lot. Including the smell of old money:

“I ran up behind him, looking over his shoulder into a high ceilinged room. Pale sunlight filtered in through half-open shutters. The walls were lined with glass-fronted cabinets holding leather bound books; the gilt lettering on their spines gleamed dully. The room smelled of paper and tobacco and leather.”

And the smell of betrayal:

“In the breaking light I could see that his mouth was bruised and raw-looking. He smelled of sex and someone else’s cologne. I held him and watched the new day dawn.”

Thomas-Edward may have smelled Dondi, his first love, but he tastes Matthew, his endless love:

“He tasted of butterscotch. I called him my butterscotch prince. He snuck across the street and stole peonies from Mrs. Chang’s garden and presented me with a contraband bouquet. He told me I was his world.”

This last was not quite random. Research has shown that our body odor, can help us subconsciously choose our partners - read more here. Further, kissing is thought by some scientists to have developed from sniffing; that first kiss being essentially a primal behavior during which we smell and taste our partner to decide if they are a match. Thomas-Edward and Matthew are a match.

Read more about smells and emotions here.

We had just gotten home on Saturday, when two black women walked up to the kitchen door. Attractive, smiling, there was an openness about them that made me rethink my original dismissive appraisal: Jehovah’s Witnesses.

As I corralled the dogs, the older of the two said to Stanley, “Hi. We used to live here. We were hoping we could come in and see the house—”

“Oh,” Stanley cried, “You’re Moodys!”

They seemed surprised we knew who they were. I guess they don’t know they are practically legendary. In fact, nine years after we bought it, our house is still referred to as “The Moody House.” We’d, of course, heard about the Moodys before. A local realtor, who spoke highly of the family, once told us that when her own daughters had held a party which her mother chaperoned, her mother had called her in a panic and whispered there’s a black kid dancing in the garage with the girls!” Her response? “That’s not a black kid, that’s Moody!”

We took them—they turned out to be Mr. Moody’s daughter and grand-daughter—through the house and they shared memories and answered our questions. Towards the end of the visit, after they’d cried, and thanked us for taking care of the house, Kim who had lived here for thirty-some-odd years, asked us, “What’s the neighborhood like?”

I forget my answer but it wasn’t until after they’d left that I realized there was more to her question. The Moodys had bought our house in the 70s. They had been the first black family to buy a house in East Falls. A title search had revealed that the couple who’d sold the Moodys the house had held the mortgage. Most likely because, as a black buyer in what was then an all-white neighborhood, Mr. Moody had been unable to secure a mortgage through a commercial bank. That this occurred in the 70s, dismays me.

Remembering that, I wondered how I should have answered Kim’s question.

On our block, I’m one of three black people. There are more gay couples than black people. With the exception of a couple of “A-list queens,” who don’t speak to anybody, everyone has been welcoming and inclusive. But racism does raise its head from time to time.

There is a woman in the neighborhood—I’ll call her Lily. Reasonably intelligent and seemingly liberal and without prejudice, she remarked the first time she heard me speak publically, “You are so articulate.” The second time she heard me speak she came up to me afterwards and said, “You express yourself so well.” The first time she walking out of our house she stopped in her tracks, looked at the house and exclaimed “You live there?!”

Once, as I was raking leaves to the curb, a city worker who was picking up the leaves asked how I’d gotten the job raking leaves at this house. “It’s my house,” I explained. “I live here.” He glanced up at the house again, then at me. “You live here?” I could forgive his surprise. He was after all black and ours is still perceived as a white neighborhood. I could forgive his surprise in a way I could not forgive Lily’s.

When we first moved to East Falls, we got a flyer under our door telling us Halloween was being celebrated a week earlier than the calendar date. We thought this odd but went along with it. And in truth Stanley had a blast giving out candy to the children in costume.

This went on for several years until younger people started moving into the neighborhood and questioned the practice. It then came out that neighbors had started the practice of the early Halloween in large part to avoid having to open their doors to the black children from the projects in the neighborhood. So, neighbors would discreetly pass around the date of the “East Falls Halloween” then on actual Halloween everyone would turn out their porch lights and not answer their doors.

It’s been my experience that racism is subtle and often catches one off guard. In my interracial romance, What Binds Us, this happens twice to main character Thomas Edward.

The following scene occurs when Matthew and Dondi, both of whom are white, take Thomas, who is black, to a black tie ball at a country club on Long Island.

Matthew snorted and walked off in the direction of the bar. I was standing alone, waiting for him to return with our drinks, trying unsuccessfully not to feel out-of place when a dowager thrust her empty glass at me. “A refill, please,” she said.

Matthew took my arm, handing me a gin and tonic. “He’s a guest,” he told her. As we walked away, I turned. “We’re not all waiters anymore, you know,” I told her. She at least had the good grace to be embarrassed; her white arrogance changed to scarlet shame.
Matthew led me outside. “I’m so sorry that happened,” he said, blushing.

The second incident occurs at a hospital where Dondi is an inpatient. Thomas, as Dondi’s best friend and primary caretaker, tells the doctor they will be stopping treatment.

We were utterly silent as first one doctor then another droned on about grotesque invasive procedures, experimental and useless.

“No,” I said, interrupting one monologue.

“Excuse me? What did you say?” the interrupted monologist, a kindly and bespectacled senior physician with brilliantine hair, asked.

“No,” I repeated. “I said ‘no.’”

“No, what?” he asked wearily, removing his glasses and polishing them to further brilliance in that white light.

“No more pills. No more impossible treatments. We’re taking him home.”

The doctor glanced at Matthew and Colin. I intercepted the look. I stood and leaned toward him, my palms splayed on the table. “Do not think,” I said through gritted teeth, “that because I am black I am not a part of this family.”

Recently during an astonishingly vitriolic debate about a proposed new playground in McMichael Park, it was suggested that instead of the park a playground should be added to the Mifflin school—a long time neighborhood school, currently at about 50% capacity and whose students are mostly black. Odd in a-neighborhood that is overwhelmingly white.

One person, calling it a “heretical thought” posted the following on the community bulletin board, Next Door East Falls:

“…there is an 800-pound gorilla in the room that everyone pretends not to see, and will go to great lengths to avoid confronting the truth about their choices. I wouldn't send my own kids to Mifflin unless a critical mass of other middle class (and mostly white, to be perfectly honest) parents choose to do the same. …I choose to be honest. Most people feel the same way but refuse to admit to themselves certain uncomfortable truths…”
I found his post disturbing but ultimately not surprising. What I found more disturbing was not so much that no one challenged him on this but that a few people actually “thanked” him for posting.

The sad truth is eight years into the country’s first black presidency, we are still not a nation that is “post-race”— arguably we should be, but we are not. Racism simply put on a new hat and stepped into the shadows.