“It’s OK?”
“He’s perfect. I haven’t had a new animal since I was ten.” She glanced at her dresser. “The others are too worn out to talk to me anymore.” She stroked the bull. “What’s his name?”
“Not Ferdinand.”
“No, not Ferdinand. Only Ferdinand is Ferdinand.”
I don’t know why the name Leonard popped into my head, but I said it.
“Leonard?” She peered into the bull’s sleepy eyes. “Are you Leonard?” She turned its plushy face toward mine. “Is he Leonard?”
“Yes, I am Leonard,” I said in the Belgian accent of my mother’s gastroenterologist.
“You’re not an American bull,” Anabel said coyly.
Leonard explained, through me, that he came from a very old aristocratic cow family in Belgium, and that a series of misfortunes had brought him to Thirtieth Street Station in severely straitened circumstances. Leonard turned out to be a terrible snob, appalled by the ugliness of Philadelphia and the tackiness of America, and he was delighted with the prospect of entering Anabel’s employ — he could tell she was a kindred spirit.
Anabel was entranced, and I was entranced to be entrancing her. I was also afraid to set Leonard aside, afraid of what came next, and I now see that I couldn’t have found a better way to make Anabel feel safe than to play with a stuffed animal in her little girl’s room. I’d blundered into being perfect for her. When we finally dismissed Leonard and she pulled me down on top of her, there was a new look in her eyes, the unconcealable and unfakable look of a woman seriously in love. It’s not something a man sees every day.
I wish I could remember the sensation of being taken by her, or maybe it’s more accurate to say that I wish I could go back to that moment as the person I am now, could be in that state of trembling wonder but also have enough experience to appreciate how it felt to be inside a woman for the first time; to enjoy it, basically. But it wasn’t as if I’d enjoyed my first beer or my first cigar, either. The beauty of Anabel naked literally made my eyes hurt, and I was nothing but a thousand worries. If I remember anything from the moment at all, it’s the dreamlike sensation of walking into a room where two figures had been for my entire life, two figures who knew each other well and were talking about realistic adult things I knew nothing about, two figures indifferent to my very late arrival. These figures were the things so graphically down there, my dick and Anabel’s cunt. I was the young and excluded third party, Anabel a distant fourth. But this may have been some actual dream from some other time.
What I do remember clearly is what a full moon did for Anabel, how she came and came. I was too clumsy to manage it in the purely thrusting way I would have liked to, but she showed me different ways. It seemed inconceivable that such a total pleasure machine couldn’t come at other times of the month, but later experience seemed to bear this out. She was a nearly silent comer, not a screamer. In the warmer light of dawn, she confessed to me that during her now-ended years of celibacy she’d sometimes waited for her best day and spent the entirety of it in her bedroom, masturbating. The vision of her beautiful, endless, solitary self-pleasuring made me wish I could be her. Since I couldn’t, I fucked her for a fourth and last sore time. Then we slept until the afternoon, and I stayed in her apartment for another two days, sustaining myself with buttered toast, not wanting to waste the moon’s fullness. When I finally got back to campus, I resigned from the DP and let Oswald take over.
* * *
My mother had warned me that her face had swollen up from the high doses of prednisone that Dr. Van Schyllingerhout had her on, but I was still shocked when I met her at the airport. Her face was a ghastly fat cartoon of itself, a miserable moon of flesh, her cheeks so bloated they pushed her eyes half shut. Her apologies to me were piteous. She said she was sick about the state she was in for an Ivy League graduation she’d so looked forward to.
I told her not to worry, but I was sick about it, too. No matter how often you remind yourself that a face is just a face, that it has nothing to do with the character of the person within, you’re so used to reading people through their faces that it’s difficult to be fair to a deformed one. My mother’s new face repelled the very sympathy it ought to have elicited from me. She was like a shameful secret of mine, a pumpkin-headed scarecrow in a checkered pants suit, when I walked her across the Green to my Phi Beta Kappa induction. I avoided meeting anyone’s eyes, and when I’d deposited her in a seat in College Hall, I had to force myself to walk, not run, away from her.
After the ceremony, in what felt like a straightforward purchase of my freedom from her, I gave her my Phi Beta Kappa key. (She wore it on a fine gold chain for the rest of her life.) I left her in her assigned room in the Superblock to freshen up — the weather was bludgeoningly hot and humid — while Oswald and I set up our dorm rooms for a wine-and-cheese party. I’d conceived of the party as a way to introduce my mother and Anabel in a casual setting. Anabel was dreading it, but my mother had no reason to. She disapproved of Anabel without even having met her, and I’d been too cowardly to tell her that Anabel was coming to the party.
Back in November, I’d imagined that my mother would be pleased that I was officially dating a McCaskill heir. But she’d heard from my sister how Anabel and I had met. Cynthia had been amused by the butcher-paper story, but all my mother could see in it was kookiness, radical feminism, and public nudity. In her weekly dronings to me, she promulgated a new, invidious distinction between entrepreneurial wealth and inherited wealth. She also rightly suspected that I’d quit the job of executive editor because of Anabel. I explained that I wanted to focus on my reportorial skills — I was writing, with Anabel’s blessing, a major piece on scrapple — but my mother could smell our sex acts all the way from Denver. When I went home for Christmas and informed her that I’d not only become a vegetarian but was returning to Philly after only a week, her colon flared up badly again.
Let it not be thought that I didn’t know what I was getting into with Anabel, or that I made no effort to escape it. Three days a lunar month we were a pair of junkies who’d scored the cleanest shit ever, but on the other twenty-five I had to contend with her moods, her scenes, her sensitivities, her judgments, her so easily hurt feelings. We seldom actually fought or argued; it was more often a matter of processing, endlessly, what I or someone else had done to make her feel bad. My entire personality reorganized itself in defense of her tranquillity and defense of myself from her reproach. It’s possible to describe this as an emasculation of me, but it was really more like a dissolution of the boundaries of our selves. I learned to feel what she was feeling, she learned to anticipate what I was thinking, and what could be more intense than a love with no secrets?
“A word about the toilet,” she’d said one day, early on.
“I always raise the seat,” I said.
“That’s the problem.”
“I thought the problem was guys who think they can aim through the seat.”
“I appreciate that you’re not one of them. But there’s a spatter.”
“I wipe the rim, too.”
“Not always.”
“OK, room for improvement.”
“But it’s not just on the rim. It’s on the underside of the rim and on the tile. Little drops.”
“I’ll wipe there, too.”
“You can’t wipe the whole bathroom every time. And I don’t like the smell of old urine.”
“I’m a guy! What am I supposed to do?”