“That doesn’t say much for your sense of spontaneity.” She fixes you with her green gaze. You’re startled by how specifically it communicates her disappointment; you suspect that her emotions may be more deeply held, more genuine than your own, and thus easier to read. Whether true or not, the thought that it might be increases your annoyance; but then she cuddles against you, her softness a distraction, and says, “I won’t do it anymore if you don’t want.” You’re coming to understand that’s how things work in your relationship, and how they probably always will work—she cedes control to you when control is no longer an issue.
Days, weeks, months fly past, and you move in with her, but what you know about her never gets much more detailed than the fact that she likes teriyaki. Oh, there are things you discover through observation and experience. Things about her character, her quirks. She believes the world will end in a series of cataclysms for which we should prepare. She loves the rain and likes to run out into it without an umbrella, sometimes without clothes. She keeps a large aquarium filled with water, with a pump that gurgles loudly, but no fish—she explains that she hasn’t found the right kind to put in it, but enjoys the sound made by the pump, so having fish is unimportant. She eats a weird vegetarian diet, flavored with herbs grown in a garden at the side of the house, that you also must eat (though you supplement it with burgers you sneak after classes or while at work in the microbiology lab). She has the habit of calling you “angel,” a term she also applies to taxi drivers and restaurant workers, random people, and when you ask why she does this, she says that some people are descended from angels—she recognizes them by their aura—and she’s just acknowledging them as such. She practices Tantric magic, sexual magic, a discipline you’re coming to appreciate, being a direct beneficiary of it. But her history, the plain truth of her, remains elusive. She says her parents died when she was young and she was brought up “…all over the place…” in foster homes, but she pushes the subject aside so quickly, you have the idea that it may be standing-in for a more unpleasant truth. She doesn’t appear to have any friends, but claims to have a few and promises you’ll meet them soon. As far as you’re concerned, the fewer friends, the better. Your fascination has grown to the level of obsession and you want to monopolize her time. Trying to explain how you feel to your best friend, Gerald, you’re reduced to cliché and hyperbole, and say that she’s redefined your view of women.
At twenty-four, Gerald’s a full year older than you, yet he still wears his baseball cap backwards and acts like an idiot. He tells everyone he’s in a band (he’s not), shares an apartment with a lipstick lesbian whom he claims is his girlfriend (she’s obviously not), and is employed as a barista, manning the coffee cart outside the University Book Store. Nevertheless, you maintain the illusion, held since you attended high school together, that his opinion has value. He slams an espresso shot, wipes his mouth and shudders as if in reaction to raw whiskey.
“Yeah?” he says. “She a trannie?”
You tell him that the qualities you perceive as flaws in other women, Abi possesses as strengths. Her skill at manipulation, for instance. You never feel used, you say, when she manages to get her way by manipulating you, because there’s always something in it for you, and also because she performs the act with such subtlety, it’s as if she elevates it beyond criticism. And that has allowed you to see that the art of manipulation in the female is pure and necessary, as essential to her well-being as body mass and muscle to a male.
You understand that you’re talking utter bullshit. You’re trying to convey Abi, all of her, by describing, ineptly, one aspect of her, and that can’t be done. Gerald isn’t listening, anyway; he’s leafing through a skateboard magazine.
“Dude, is she hot?” he asks.
“Why don’t you tell me? You want to meet her?”
“’Cause if she’s hot…” Gerald swats at you with his magazine and grins. “None of that other shit matters.”
Gerald’s partner, a white guy who’s too cool to talk—he nods, he grunts, he gestures—and has nasty-looking blonde dreadlocks that have been dipped in blue dye, takes over at the cart and you drive to Abi’s house in Gerald’s shitbox. It’s raining steadily by the time you arrive and Abi is out gathering herbs in the garden. Her T-shirt’s plastered to her body, reminding you of an old Italian flick in which Sophia Loren wandered around for half the movie wearing a ragged, soaked-through dress. You park across the street, point Abi out to Gerald, and the two of you sit and watch for a minute. Her curves accentuated by wet black cloth, Abi looks nothing if not hot.
“I don’t get it,” says Gerald. “She’s a plumper, dude. I didn’t know you’re into plumpers.”
You gape at him.
Gerald turns his eyes toward Abi once again. “She’s got some potential, okay? But seriously, man. Way she is now…I mean, she’s built like your mom. What’s your mom now? Forty-five, forty-six? If Abi-whatever is this big at twenty-five, time she’s forty-five, she’s gonna be like one of those freaks they have to cut through the roof to lift ’em outa their bedroom.”
“Fuck off!!”
“No, really. I’m trying to help you out, okay?”
“No, really! Fuck off!”
“Hey, man! Since you been with this chick, she’s got you so whipped, it’s like you’re not even the same guy. You’re all fucking oh-I-love-her-so-much-she’s-such-a-big-fat-goddess. You should hear yourself. You got me thinking about doing an intervention.”
Gerald has adopted an earnest expression that doesn’t quite cover up his underlying attitude, which you perceive now to be one of jealousy—you haven’t been spending much time with him since you hooked up with Abi and he’s taken it personally.
“I’m serious,” he says. “I’m thinking about it.”
“You’re being a real asshole, y’know.”
“You’re the asshole! Letting this cow lead you around by the dick!”
You open the door and Gerald, angry now, says “Carole, man. She was hot. I can’t figure why you broke up with her. But this one, she’s got a butt on her looks like a bagful of oatmeal. Maybe you got a thing for chicks who look like your mom.”
You jump out of the car, slam the door.
“Maybe you got a thing for your mom?” Gerald shouts. “Little Oedipal thing? Maybe that’s why you’re so into Miss Piggy!”
He says “edible” for “Oedipal.” You tell yourself it’s time you put high school behind you. Gerald’s trapped in a universe of Tool concerts, stoner weekends at Rockaway Beach and raves in some scuzzy warehouse with underage girls on Ecstasy, whereas you have moved on. Steaming, you flip him off as he pulls away from the curb, shouting something about “…fat bitch!”
Abi stands at the edge of the garden, her fingers black from grubbing in the dirt, and there’s a smudge on her chin, too, where she’s wiped her face; strands of wet hair cling to her pale cheeks. She looks like a sexy vampire fresh from a dirt nap. “Hey, angel,” she says, and asks who was the guy in the car and you say, “Just this assbag.” From the way she kisses you, a promise of more and better to come, you imagine that she must have heard some of what Gerald had to say and the kiss is your reward for defending her.
Gerald’s dismissal of Abi, however, has planted a seed and in the weeks that follow you spend a good deal of time wondering if your entire experience with her has been the product of a newly manifested perversion. The suspicion that your feelings might be unhealthy or somehow unreliable causes you to notice things about her that are less than ideal and you become aware that she’s far from the perfect woman you described. Her refusal to talk about personal affairs now strikes you as pathological. While she’ll go on at length, say, about the relationship between astrology and electro-magnetism, or the role of angels in human affairs, she’s reluctant to speak of anything regarding your relationship. This frustrates you—it’s like you’ve switched roles with her, like you’re the sensitive woman and she’s the uncommunicative guy. Equally frustrating is her tendency to talk about the end of the world as though it’s already occurred. Because of this, it’s impossible to make plans more than a couple of weeks in advance without prefacing the discussion by saying, “If we’re still around…” or something of the sort; otherwise she’ll point out the omission and maneuver the conversation onto a different track. Her passion for the rain seems demented, cracked, fetishistic; her diet gives you gas. Perhaps the most problematic of her flaws is a lack of empathy. Crossing a Safeway parking lot with her one evening, you encounter a deaf couple having an argument, a man and a woman of late middle age, reeking of alcohol, wearing soiled down jackets and baseball caps. Instead of making delicate, quick speech with their hands, they jab at one another with fists and fingers, gesticulating wildly, their fury all the more intense for its silence. Abi laughs and says disdainfully, “From a distance you’d think they were Italian.”