Chloé Harris
Contributing Writer
San Francisco
PHOTO NADIR
LA LANG OF LOVE
WHEN FRANK AND I FIRST STARTED DATING, IM and text messaging were key to our courtship. Since time was always of the essence, as was privacy during business hours, we established our own secret shorthand – Le Lang – that borrowed from the already prevalent use of abbreviations in our celeb-saturated media. After all, if this metamorphosis of language could put a snappy spin on Jen’s heartbreak over Brangelina and make TomKat sound (almost) cute – and save precious media real estate – then a little abbrev couldn’t hurt our fast-paced love life either. Natch.
But as a studied writer and a serious Scorpio, I was reluctant to chop to bits the rhetoric that I love – all it took was a single askew syllable to make my face twist up like an ampersand. But as my feelings for Frank thickened, our silly little lingo grew into a formidable glossary of code words. I began to realize that I was exhausted by years of writing stories that got to be so tightly edited they lacked my signature stamp, so I resolved to allow for more lightheartedness in language. Soon we could carry on lengthy conversations almost entirely in Lang, and since slang is viral, even our most verbally astute friends started to catch on to our contemporary speak. We deemed ourselves pioneers of modern language.
Frank and I longed for a terminology that would speak to our soulful pledge without falling into the conventional jargon that was neither allowed nor applicable to us.
But a year later, when Frank and I decided to tie the knot, we were faced with a whole new linguistic hurdle. A winemaker friend offered to minister our ceremony as a wedprez – he had, to our delight, conducted lesbian nuptials before. But when he emailed us a template, which we were encouraged to edit, words like “sacrament,” and “holy union” immediately stuck out. We wondered how we, a couple of ungodly women who couldn’t legally wed, fit within a convention where fathers had once given their daughters away for a ransom of land and cattle. If marriage can be between a man and a woman only, as dictated by the Bible and the Bush administration, then we would need to give the old vernacular new meaning. Language, once more, had become serious business. So, with red Sharpies in hand, we endeavored to banish the old Eng from the text. But no matter how custom-tailored the copy became, one word, circled in red and highlighted in yellow, bled from the page. The offender: “wife.”
As a child, Frank – sort of a female counterpart to Ludovic, the gender-perplexedboy lead in the French film Ma Vie en Rose – had once announced to her bewildered mother that someday she wanted to have a wife. Now, as an adult who never quite became the man she had imagined, Frank remained firm that she was to have a wife, not be one. As for me, the product of parents who are still married after 30-plus years under a happy subscription to traditional gender roles, “wife” conjured the image of my mother vacuuming our kitchen wearing only her La Perla lingerie – a common occurrence in my household growing up.
Until I was 23 – when I met my first girlfriend – I had assumed that I would eventually become a wife. (Though I had a hard time envisioning the vacuum, the La Perla was easy ambition enough.) But now I found a sense of silly romanticism in the idea. On one hand, I was enticed at the notion of being the materialization of Frank’s highly intuitive childhood fantasy; on the other, I wondered how I could be a wife if I were to have no husband.
Many months and bottles of wine later, Frank and I have still not settled the issue. “Partner,” the politically correct moniker of our time, sounded gay enough – I imagine Republican business “partners” wearing matching plaid pants on the golf course. But while we are certainly a team – equal partners, if you will, in all aspects of our relationship – we share a bond, not a boardroom. Frank and I longed for a terminology that would speak to our soulful pledge without falling into the conventional jargon that was neither allowed nor applicable to us. Frank’s answer was simple: “I just want to be ‘the love of your life.’” I answered dutifully, “You are,” but felt unsettled about our official term of endearment. For the next 50 years, would I repeatedly introduce Frank as “the love of my life”? It seemed that if ever there were an occasion for formality in speech, this was it. Finally, out of time and desperate for a TOE, we opted, reluctantly, for “partner for life.”
Now that we’re married, Frank proudly calls me her wife; I kiss her, happy to be the wife of the least macho un-husband there ever was. (We’re like the lesbian Ozzie and Harriet.) But I continue to toil over the title: Though I’ll resort to “partner” in a professional sitch, the word still feels unnatural. Inspired by Le Lang, I tried out a few nicknames: First I considered “hife,” an obv marriage of husband and wife, but couldn’t bear the sound of the word. I tried calling Frank my “wubby,” which I thought was tots cute. She hated it.
She’s Maddy – mommy plus daddy – to the weiner dogs, and “hottie,” “baby,” “love” and “punks” to me when we’re at home. Publicly, a colleague recently introduced Frank as my “wife,” and then quickly, in her correctness, questioned, “Is that right?” My friend Robs just calls Frank my husband; Elles, co-author of Le Lang, took to “Big Daddy” … Dear Mrs. So-and-So, I’d like you to meet my big daddy Frank. These days, I simply refer to Frank as, well, “my Frank.” While these two little words may not reflect our as-long-as-we-both-shall-live union, I can at least take comfort in calling her mine – despite the lack of legal superglue supposedly bonding us together. BOND
Chloé Harris lives and writes in San Francisco. Read more at chloe-harris.com.
WORDS CHLOÉ HARRIS