Sex, Love, and Art in the Suburbs

What happens when life doesn't go as planned? Now in his 40s, a former bohemian comes to terms with a kind of life and love very different from what he'd expected.

- By Garth Greenwell

It's a strange thing, inhabiting a life you never would have imagined for yourself.

I turn 44 this spring. For the past nine years, I've lived in a small city in eastern Iowa; for almost as long, I've been in a relationship with a man I met soon after moving here. Six years ago we moved in together, and three years ago we bought a small Dutch colonial. In many ways, our lives are typical of one kind of midwestern American life. On nice evenings, we sit in our yard and say hello to our neighbors; in the autumn we rake leaves. A year ago we adopted two cats.

This is a life that no one I knew in the pre-Internet, premarriage equality South I grew up in, at the height of the early AIDS crisis, could have imagined. When I got a scholarship to music school, art opened an escape from that world, and until my mid-30s, my life was shaped by one of the models of artistic life America allows: I moved every few years, collecting degrees, then pursued teaching gigs. Eastern Iowa was just another stop on an itinerary that led I wasn't sure where. I would always be in motion, I thought, always on my way somewhere else. I loved it, not least because it was what I thought an artist's life should be: always unsettled, full of possibilities, free from the obligations of rootedness.