Of all possible inevitabilities that Niall McNeil had dreaded upon turning thirty-the encroaching baldness that threatened to expose the angular contours of his head, or the bursting of Bubble 2.0 that would sink his ailing, venture-funded web design consultancy, or the never-ending worry that his wife might uncover certain episodes of ages-ago untowardness that he had gone to considerable expense to bury-none of these had been anything to fret about, after all, and what ended up being the real problem was of the sort that one veils even to oneself; then, even after the problem had floated up into his awareness, it seemed so vague and unnatural as to lack a proper articulation, and he could only render it approximately as some form of “masculine inexpression” — nnnnno but see, this term evoked all the wrong sorts of clichés and it fell short of conveying the aching paralysis Niall suffered each day, the persistent anxiety of calling attention to his wretchedness, a feeling of shame mixed with terror, somewhat akin to losing your bathing suit to a surprise swell in the ocean. His sense that the world was glad to have him in it, his pride and propriety, had gone totally AWOL, and worse, he felt certain that its loss was transparent not just to his family and his coworkers at BriqHouse Interactive, but to any old passerby, who, at only a seconds’ glance, could see immediately through him into the essence of his humiliation.
For, in spite of having children, in spite of possessing an orthodox heterosexual libido that alternately pleased and annoyed his wife, in spite of having been raised on a family-owned dairy farm in Wyoming where he could tame fathoms of wilderness and relish nature and masturbate undisturbed when he needed to and which, later, allowed him to draw upon stories of a roughneck childhood that made his acquaintances at Yale feel comparatively milquetoast and circumscribed in their own quaint urban or suburban knowledge of the world, and notwithstanding his average physique and his Lacrosse trophies and his dense leg hair and his sincere lack of interest in cooking, in spite of all of these things, at this time in his life Niall felt he could not speak, move, or even sit silently with a neutral expression, without betraying what he perceived as a consistent tendency to do, shall we say, “sissy things”: 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 what’s more, was thrilled about it-though, to be clear, it wasn’t his sexual orientation that he was concerned about, for, okay, 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, expressively male themselves, hadn’t they commented on his then-rugged physique with something like Beta-male reverence? So no, his sexuality was not what was at stake; again (and this is absolutely the most rigorous way he could put it with all the combined force of his Masters’ degrees in Philosophy and Psycholinguistics), it was his autonomic behavioral inexpressivity of maleness-there was no, like, “Inner Ponce” struggling to get out, but rather, he insisted to himself, it was a form of cognitive-behavioral, or perhaps even neuromuscular defect that resided elsewhere, an obscure collusion between subconscious brain and insubordinate body.
His troubles afflicted him throughout his entire being, particularly in the hands and below the waist: his toes wiggled like anemones for up to ten seconds during orgasm; instead of raising 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 said “Bye-bye!”; he heavily favored his right leg, so that, when standing, his hips were coquettishly outthrust; even just walking down the street, he took an excessively long stride, producing again this bouncing effect which, though his friends at work playfully referred to it as “the Cocky Walk” or “the Niall McNeil Pimp Strut”, he knew that the more apt comparison was to skipping or prancing, you know, la-dee-da, boop-dee-boop; when he hugged people he would pat them lightly and quickly (”fluffily”, he thought), when what he really wanted to convey was solidity and reassurance; scratching his head in thought, he’d interpose locks of hair between his fingers and sort of twirl them about, which, though he used several fingers and not just one, was still just much, much too fanciful…
…and if this were all just a matter of self-consciousness or insecurity or gender dysmorphia, standard-issue in every American male psyche, perhaps he could accept it-he did not consider himself narrow-minded, and could with little effort accept the notion of grown men doing yoga, or women named Joey and Brett-though the problem with his problem was that it was not rooted in shame, but rather in existentialist ontology: in a fashion common to the region where he grew up, he clung fervently 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 an foundational belief that the chemical 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 self-control and composure bore on one’s essential worthiness, and so to the extent that he couldn’t keep his behaviors from expressing themselves in ways he was convinced were effete, precious, twee, silly, wussy, rococo, risible, prissy, and/or frou-frou, so too was he each of those things, way deep down, in his otherwise suitable being.
[Excerpt ends here]