THE RHODODENDRON

Was I not the rhododendron, too, fatally and beautifully enmeshed in a web of depraved souls all looking for the same things?

It was almost six p.m. and the sun, a bloody chrysanthemum, bloomed full at the edge of a greying sky. I was recumbent in the bed of a man whose name I did not remember, barely clothed, watching the top of an old elm turn gold. Sunlight filtered through the floor-length windows like honey, casting the bedroom and everything inside it—the beige walls, blue sheets, and my flesh spilling out of them—in the glow of distant stars. Their caresses set me on fire.   

        Inches away, the man was no longer looking at me. He was blinking too quickly at the screen of his Samsung, typing furiously with one hand since my head still rested on the other, trapping it. I breathed him in, soft and redolent of mint. His dog, a small white mutt called Elizabeth, sat in the corner and stared her beady eyes at me. The sun sank long and red right in front of my eyes. After a while, I sat up and put on my t-shirt. He retracted his arm and typed some more, even faster now. When he finished he looked up at me and smiled faintly, without teeth. He was rather handsome in the light, I thought, but I would never see him again. For some time we stayed like that, me half seated and him horizontal next to me, stuck in a strange torpor. As clouds began to roll and tumble like waves in the sky, a silent shadow washed upon the shore of the bed. Soon, the sun disappeared entirely, and the Twin Peaks theme played ethereally in my mind:

Light and shadow change the walls

Halley’s Comet’s come and gone

The things I touch are made of stone

Falling through this night alone

…

Forever and ever

The world spins

“Want some water?” he offered, getting up. I followed his naked body to the kitchen, where we maneuvered through a canopy of copper tins and pans hanging from tiled walls. Leaning against the cold, granite countertop, I took a sip of water and spat it out in the sink. Ice cubes clinked in the glass and produced a music of their own, which made me feel suddenly like an adult. If this were an old movie and I were some Hollywood starlet I would be smoking a cigarette. It was dark enough that the cindering cherry of my Virginia Slim would flicker in the faint light of his apartment, illuminating the edges of my painted lips. I would be wearing his dress shirt, too big and open at the collar. When I exhaled, everything—my melancholic face, petite features, and wispy blonde hair in postcoital disarray—would disappear for a moment in the fog, melting away… A nasty fall mosquito sucked on my thigh and woke me from my reveries. I set the glass down in the sink.

The man was putting on his clothes in the living room, which was large, open, and cluttered with African art and artifacts. Barefoot, I walked towards him until all that was between us was a massive wooden table, resplendent with sculptures and masks. I must have said something like, “these are beautiful” or “do you collect?” because the man began giving me a tour. These are wooden statues of Mende women with caved-in faces and elongated heads, and those are husk dolls from Cameroon adorned with cowry shells. A bronze helmet-mask marking the passage of girls into womanhood struck me as particularly beautiful. The features carved out on the mask were androgynous and clustered, as if someone had taken the malleable clay form of a face and pinched it tightly together. A crown of sorts rose out of the helmet and two holes were cut for eyes. The clan elders would place these on the heads of young women in an elaborate coming-of-age ceremony, the man explained. Secretly, I hoped that he would offer it to me as a parting gift.

When he was finished speaking, I could tell that neither of us wanted me to be there anymore. But I thought it would be rude to just leave, even though we had met online only hours before. “Cool,” I muttered—because it was—“I took a class on African history once.” I felt guilty about how little I could offer him in this exchange. 

The man had folded my jeans and laid them flat on the sofa. I was touched, and almost wanted to kiss him goodbye, but I knew better than to attempt the forbidden. By the time I was on street level it had started to drizzle, the air fragrant with wet magnolias. I could tell from the grey and swollen sky that a brutal storm was coming, but for now it was still calm. For a while, I wandered the streets like a carcass looking for its soul. College Hill seemed forever away, and the river, which might as well have been the Styx, flowed endlessly in front of me. Should I not have come? I thought as I looked hopelessly for a scooter. Was it a mistake? No, it couldn’t have been. I knew deep in the pit of my self-consciousness that there was no way I wouldn’t have come. I needed the man as much as he needed me; we were as alone as each other—two strangers stranded on the desert island of lust. In the hollowness of my desire, I hadn’t needed to look any further than him. He was there, an icon on a phone, a lighthouse in the fog, and that was all that mattered.

The pavement was wet and I couldn’t find a scooter. My mind filled with those catastrophizing thoughts that always arise only when it’s too late. What if he was sick with something? What if I am too? “But what about the stuff that gets around the sides of condoms?” I remembered the line from Lena Dunham in Girls and suddenly began to chuckle. It was pouring rain, and I was soaked on a sidewalk in Downtown Providence, laughing out loud at the words “But what about the stuff that gets around the sides of condoms?” I laughed harder.

By the time I finally found a Spin, my feet were cold and dripping. I rode to the bottom of the hill, pushed the scooter up, and continued down the slippery, poorly paved Rhode Island streets. There was something biblical about this scene, almost as if I were being condemned by flood for my sinful impulses. As I slid through intersections toward campus, the image of a sprig of rhododendron I had cut from outside Hegeman and placed on my mantle suddenly appeared in my mind. The flesh of the blossom was so delicate and pure that it appeared as if on the very brink of speech. And I was under the impression that, if it had unraveled its petals and spoken, it would have asked me to take it home. So I did. 

I didn’t know why I thought of this flower now, precariously balanced on a skidding scooter in the rain. But it reminded me of that great gothic novel Rebecca, in which the rhododendron represents the titular woman herself—larger than life, overwhelming, promiscuous. “The rhododendrons stood fifty feet high,” writes du Maurier, “twisted and entwined with bracken, and they had entered into alien marriage with a host of nameless shrubs.” Was I not the rhododendron, too, fatally and beautifully enmeshed in a web of depraved souls all looking for the same things? And what were those things if not intimacy, adventure, thrill—all represented by the rhododendron in its ever wayward sprawl? Floating down Benevolent Street, which was starting to resemble a river, I wondered if Rebecca and I were not the same iteration of one cosmic utterance. Rhododendron—slaughterous red, rebellious, and fantastic—what could I do but rejoice in our mutual identification? The fact that the rhododendron shared an etymological root with the state in which I lived—rhodo, meaning rose—seemed too serendipitous to be pure coincidence. The harmony of converging symbols was overwhelming.

Lost in this floral chimera, at some point while riding downhill on George Street, my consciousness lapsed and my left hand let go of the brakes. I zoomed down the pavement, with its potholes and patches of raised cement like Band-Aids, bumping up and down at the speed of gravity. I didn’t care that there were cars around me, or that there was a busy intersection coming up. All that mattered was the wind blowing beads of sweat off my forehead and filling up my shirt, which had a picture of Whitney Houston on the front. Thinking of nothing but the rhododendron, I went faster and faster with abandon, ballooning, becoming light, ascending. Suddenly I realized that this was the feeling of letting go, of pure freedom. The world spun. 

As monstrously modified Rhode Island cars swirled around me at breakneck speed, I suddenly thought of Jordan Baker, that careless woman from The Great Gatsby who despised bad drivers. “I hate careless people,” she says hypocritically as she discards her own prudence for freedom. But hadn’t I done the same? Weren’t I, Jordan, Rebecca, and even Whitney Houston, whose radiant face was getting soaked in the rain, alike in our careless pursuit of liberty and happiness? We defied the normative sexual constraints that shackled us and spread, like the rhododendron, amidst thorns and bracken. We reached with complete abandon at that glorious freedom, which liberated first our bodies then our minds. We dared to love, to feel, to desire, to blur the boundaries between ourselves and the world, to let things in and to set ourselves free. What a revolutionary existence, I thought as I halted to a stop in front of my building. It was still pouring, but I had become one with the rain.

When I entered my room, the first thing I saw was the sprig of rhododendron wilting in an empty bottle on my mantle. I stood in front of its decaying bloom, a puddle collecting around my feet, and listened to the rain pelt on my windows like bullets. The man was probably lying in his bed now, I thought, or cooking dinner in his kitchen with those copper pots and pans. Staring at the crumbling petals of the rhododendron, I felt as if I had left something of myself behind in that big, beige apartment. Despite my newfound sexual freedom, it felt as if my time there had been a ritual left unfinished. I longed, against all reason, to go in for that goodbye kiss as Rebecca, Jordan, or any Hollywood starlet would have done. But the man was not Humphrey Bogart or Nick Carraway, nor were we ever destined for great love. We weren’t even destined for great sex. 

Alas, the illusion ruptured in front of me, and I realized that I would never be a Virginia Slim-smoking starlet, a Gothic heroine, or a reckless it-girl from a Fitzgerald novel. I was not likely to meet a man in a café or bookstore and fall helplessly in love. I was not likely to have a torrential affair with boomboxes and roses in the rain. There would be no goodbye kiss, no second “date,” no future. Of course, queer relationships don’t always have to be this way, but nothing changes the fact that it isn’t easy being queer and human in this world. That’s why I’ve had to become the rhododendron, sprouting through cracks and grabbing pleasure wherever I can find it. 

To be queer is to shatter the conventional love story, the cliché meet-cute, and the infantile happily-ever-after. These tropes rarely make space for our queer realities, and I must learn to exist beyond their constraints. To live this life fully and freely, to take pride in my body and its desires, I must extend my stems and blossoms everywhere, taking up space, intertwining myself with men and their Mende sculptures and blue sheets. But in the end, perhaps more often than not, the rhododendron has to let things go.

Late at night, bathed in the sweet, liberating perfume of rot, I placed the rhododendron on my desk and began to write: The sun, a bloody chrysanthemum, bloomed full at the edge of a greying sky…

AUTHOR: A.L. is a sophomore at Brown. They are current looking for a mushroom big enough to live in.

ARTIST: Mindy Ji is a second year at Brown. She is an American actress, comedian, writer, producer, and director. She first gained recognition starring as Kelly Kapoor in the NBC sitcom The Office, for which she also served as a writer, executive producer, and director.