Marcie is in love with Charlie Brown, and with Peppermint Patty, but Peppermint Patty loves only Charlie Brown. Lucy is in love with Schroeder, but Schroeder is in love with Beethoven. Charlie Brown’s little sister Sally is in love with Linus (“Isn’t he just the cutest thing?”), whose affections, in turn, are reserved for his blanket. Charlie Brown loves the Little Red Haired Girl, whom we never see. “Peanuts” was just one broken heart after another. My favorite strip was “Peanuts,” which, if I’d been paying attention, contained some lessons for me about the world that lay ahead. One was to wake up in the morning as the girl I knew myself to be the other was that an all-encompassing love would erase this desire completely. As a closeted transgender child, I had hoped that a similar love might fall upon me, and, in so doing, cure me of the unfathomable desire that had dominated my heart since I was five or six. They were like the Quaker version of Morticia and Gomez Addams. My parents’ marriage had been like that: selfless, giving, ideal. I had grown up believing in the transformative power of love. I knew Rachel would realize something was up the first time that she sneezed. Jean had two cats, and my girlfriend-who I’ll call Rachel, and who remembers none of this, not even the play-was allergic. In the weeks to come, I would take care to wash my sheets. I looked over at Jean, and she looked at me, and at that moment we came to an unspoken agreement about all the trouble we were about to cause. During a movement called “The Catacombs,” the music grew dark. “Not a word about the utter tedium of the unrequiting.”Ī year later, I was sitting on a couch with a half-Irish writer named Jean, listening to “Pictures at an Exhibition,” a piano piece by Modest Mussorgsky. “Gallons of ink and miles of typewriter ribbon expended on the misery of the unrequited lover!” Close replied. “He wants to punish me with his pain, but I can’t come up with the proper guilt. We had descended the sixty-odd blocks to see Tom Stoppard’s “The Real Thing,” at the Plymouth Theatre. It was 1984, and my girlfriend and I had been living together for a couple of years. We were watching a play about infidelity.
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