The Gay & Lesbian Review

ERRI

CHLICHENMEYER

A‘Real’Marriage, After All

The Marriage Act:

The Risk I Took to Keep My Best Friend in America,

and What It Taught Us About Love

by Liza Monroy

Soft Skull Press. 320 pages, $16.95

N HER LIFE, Liza Monroy confides in

The Marriage Act

there have been three important men: her father, her boyfriend

Julian, and her best friend Emir. She has barely seen her fa-

ther since she was six years old, following her parents’ divorce.

Julian lived in Manhattan, far fromMonroy’s home in L.A., and,

although they were engaged, their relationship was rocky. Emir,

however, lived just three blocks away, and Monroy saw him

whenever she felt she needed him. She needed Emir a lot.

Monroy and Emir met in college, both dreaming of making

screenplays and films. He was in the U.S. on a student visa, a

Muslim boy from a country Monroy called Emirstan. She had

been running from her mother’s influence, and he was gay.

While she was not gay, they had much else in common, became

fast friends, and were soon inseparable. And in the weeks fol-

lowing September 11, 2001, when just being Middle Eastern was

cause for suspicion, Emir’s visa was about to expire.

By that time, Monroy’s engagement had fallen apart in a

messy, devastating way. She was afraid of love, but more terri-

fied of being alone. She asked Emir to marry her, which seemed

like a great solution: Emirstan was murderously intolerant of gay

men, and deportation could be dangerous, even deadly. Even

Emir’s own father was a homophobe. Marrying her gay best

friend would allow Monroy to practice at marriage until she felt

comfortable enough to have a “real” husband, at which time they

could get divorced. Needless to say, Immigration and Natural-

ization Service frowned on marriage for a green card’s sake, to

put it mildly; and, as luck would have it, Monroy’s mother was

an INS agent. Risking deportation for Emir and a heavy fine for

both, they asked themselves: what exactly makes a marriage? If

the key ingredient is love, then Monroy and Emir had that. If it’s

needing one another, they had that, too. Did marriage

have

to be

about having sex and raising children?

With all the angst of a Woody Allen movie and a weak abil-

ity to keep mum about life-and-death secrets, Monroy describes

the stress, misgivings, and melodramatic scenes, and finally how

she almost sabotaged her own gutsy plan to keep her gay best

friend in the U.S. It all sounds pretty madcap—and it would be,

if the author weren’t so nervously repetitive and fussy. Monroy

fashion. He very quickly meets two older women, Vera and

Elsa, who are eccentric, new-age Bohemians at heart. At a party

at their bungalow, Vera and Elsa introduce Frame to a youth

named Chase who has pale skin studded with an array of tat-

toos, dark hair, sculpted muscles, and the surprisingly high-

pitched voice “of a boy emanating from the body of a man.”

The older Frame feels an almost immediate and overpowering

lust/love for the much younger Chase. And it is that feeling that

he chooses to act on despite his better judgment.

Chase is a product of the new millennium: a former un-

derwear model who, lacking a real job, has created his own

soft-core pornographic website, Chase.com, which is marketed

with the cheesy—and not quite true—slogan: “

I Want To Share

My Whole Life With You

.” Apparently, Chase.com appeals to

a cadre of anonymous viewers willing to pay money to see

Chase in a variety of erotic poses and situations. And there’s

no small irony in the fact that Chase refers to his legions of

fans as the “chasers.” As intrigued by and attracted to Chase as

he is, it does not take much cajoling on the seductive Chase’s

part to get Frame, or “Jimmy,” as the youth calls him, to film

Chase as he showers and then masturbates using Frame’s ritzy

room at the Hotel des Bains as a backdrop for Chase’s “art” (as

he refers to it).

At Chase’s instigation, Frame also allows himself to be tat-

tooed with an enormous letter “V”—for “vincible” (as opposed

to an “I” for “invincible”)—on his leg. Meanwhile, encouraged

by Vera and Elsa, he purchases a whole new wardrobe of outra-

geously expensive clothes, then undergoes liposuction in order

to remove his paunch, and has both Botox and Masculane in-

jected into his face to reduce the “stage-four crow’s-feet” around

his eyes. These are clearly the actions of someone who is unable

to think entirely rationally because of his obsession with a beau-

tiful youth. Frame’s devolution climaxes in a seedy porn studio

in Hollywood where he is filmed while fellating Chase for all the

world—including the “chasers”—to see. This is the most physi-

cal intimacy that Frame will ever share with Chase.

With a title like

Death in Venice, California

, a happy ending

is not, of course, in the cards. Frame’s fixation on Chase is such

that he fails to take care of his own physical needs, notably the

wounds incurred by the tattoos and the plastic surgery, which

have left him losing blood, with the predictable result. The novel

works due to McCabe’s skillful handling of his central charac-

ter. Although the story is told from Frame’s perspective, the tone

is matter-of-fact to the point of being clinical, allowing the

reader to keep his distance from the narrator. Readers can sit

back dispassionately and watch what happens to Frame, secure

in the knowledge that they would never be so foolish as to sac-

rifice everything for a pretty face.

Death in Venice, California

is McCabe’s homage to Thomas

Mann’s 1912 novella. Like Gustav von Aschenbach, Frame is

an aging writer who finds himself facing a crisis of the spirit, so

he goes on a sojourn to a warmer, somewhat exotic climate, falls

under the spell of a beautiful but unobtainable youth, and at-

tempts to camouflage his age with the available tools. Both

Frame and Aschenbach are fools in search of new experience—

tragic clowns who make the mistake of losing themselves in

profane love while ostensibly on a quest for art and beauty. In

addition to tracing the consequences of Frame’s foolish choices,

McCabe also considers the fate of Chase, a young man whose

chances in life have been limited by no fault of his own, a beau-

tiful youth who catches a break but who’s destined to be tossed

aside by the next hot young thing to come along.

________________________________________________________

Anthony Guy Patricia is a doctoral candidate in English literature at

the University of Nevada, Las Vegas.

The Gay & Lesbian Review

WORLDWIDE