“Sit down?” she suggested shyly.
I knew this wasn’t right, couldn’t be right. But she was hurt by my silence and became silent herself, in a more grievous way, with a stony look in her eyes, and her hurt mattered more to me than my rightness. I told her I would either be more careful or start sitting down, but she could sense that I was resentful, that my submission was grudging, and there could be no peace in our union unless we truly agreed about everything. She began to weep, and I began the long search for the deeper cause of her distress.
“I have to sit down,” she said finally. “Why shouldn’t you sit down? I can’t not see where you spatter, and every time I see it I think how unfair it is to be a woman. You can’t even see how unfair it is, you have no idea, no idea.”
She proceeded to cry torrentially. The only way I could get her to stop was to become, right then and there, a person who experienced as keenly as she did the unfairness of my being able to pee standing up. I made this adjustment to my personality — and a hundred others like it in our early months together — and henceforth I peed sitting down whenever she could hear me. (When she couldn’t, though, I peed in her sink. The part of me that did this was the part that ultimately ruined us and saved me.)
She was more lenient of difference in the bedroom. It was certainly an unhappy day when she connected the dots for me and explained that we couldn’t have intercourse when only one of us could take satisfaction in it. At my suggestion, after hours of pained discussion and silences, we tried it anyway, and I had to suffer the guilt of her sobbing when I came inside her. I asked if she’d had no pleasure, to which she sobbed that the frustration outweighed the pleasure. We had the whole unfairness conversation again, but this time I was able to point out that, by her own admission, she wasn’t normal, i.e., that we weren’t dealing with a structural gender imbalance. In the end, since she loved me, and was probably afraid of losing me to someone more normal, she agreed to make other arrangements for me. These were a little strange but very creative and, for a while, satisfactory. First I had to take a shower, then we had to converse with Leonard and get his amusing Belgian bull’s-eye take on the news of the day, then we undressed, and then she — there’s no other way to put it — played with the dick. Sometimes it was a camera slowly panning over her body and then shooting its favorite parts. Sometimes she wrapped it in her cool, silky hair and milked it. Sometimes she nuzzled it until it wet her face, as if it were a shower head. Sometimes she took it in her mouth, her gaze not moving from it to my eyes until the moment she swallowed. She was affectionate to the dick in much the same way she was affectionate to Leonard. She told me it was pretty like I was pretty. She claimed that my semen smelled cleaner than other semen she’d had the misfortune of smelling. But the strangest thing, in hindsight, was that she always made the dick not part of me. She didn’t like me to kiss her while she was touching it; she preferred that I not even touch her with my hands until she was finished with it. And always, as I discovered, she was counting. When a full moon came around again, restoring normalcy, she informed me when an orgasm of hers had equalized our tallies for the month. And then everything was OK with us. Then we were one again.
Two other crises bear noting. The first was my acceptance by the journalism school at the University of Missouri, an excellent school that my mother had encouraged me to apply to because it was affordable and not so far from Denver. I may have been besotted with Anabel, and I may have turned against my maleness as an impediment to our union of souls, but the male part of me was still there and well aware that she was strange, that I was young, and that a vegetarian diet wasn’t agreeing with my stomach. I imagined regrouping in Missouri, becoming a lean and mean reporter, sampling some other girls before deciding whether to commit to a life with Anabel. I made the mistake of breaking the Missouri news to her on the night before a full moon. I tried to jolly her into her bedroom, but she went silent. Only after hours of sulking and prodding, hours we could have spent in bed, did she lay out my thinking for me in its full male vileness. She didn’t miss a thing. “You’ll be there having your excellent journalist’s life, you’ll be happy not to be with me, and I’ll be here waiting,” she said.
“You could come with me.”
“You can see me living in Columbia, Missouri? As your tagalong girl?”
“You could stay here and work on your project. It’s only two years.”
“And your magazine?”
“How am I going to start a magazine with no money and no experience?”
She opened a drawer and took out a checkbook.
“This is what I have,” she said, pointing to a figure of some $46,000 in the savings ledger. I watched her write me a check for $23,000 in her elegant artist’s hand. “Do you want to be with me and be ambitious?” She tore out the check and handed it to me. “Or do you want to go to Missouri with all the other hacks?”
I didn’t point out that checkbook gestures aren’t so meaningful coming from a billionaire’s daughter. Doubting her vow not to accept more money from her father was as grievous a wrong as doubting her seriousness as an artist. She’d already trained me never to do it. She was rabid on the subject.
“I can’t take your money,” I said.
“It’s our money,” she said, “and this is the last of it. Everything I have is yours. Use it well, Tom. You can go to school with it if you want to. If you’re going to break my heart, this is the time to do it. Not from Missouri a year from now. Take the money, go home, go to journalism school. Just don’t pretend you’re in this with me.”
She went and locked herself in her bedroom. I don’t know how many times I had to promise I wasn’t leaving her before she let me in. When she finally did, I tore up the check—“Don’t be a fool, that’s good money!” Leonard cried from the headboard — and seized her body with a new sense of possession, as if becoming more hers had made her more mine.
My mother was furious about my decision. She saw me starting down the path of indigence my sisters were treading, the path of my father’s stupid idealism, and it did me no good to cite the many famous journalists who hadn’t gone to grad school. She was even more upset, a month later, when I told her I was coming to Denver only for a week that summer. I’d spent all of eight days with her since her hospitalization, and I felt I owed her (and Cynthia) a month at home, but Anabel had been counting on our starting a life together the minute I graduated. She took my proposal of a month apart as a catastrophic betrayal of everything we’d planned together. When I suggested that she join me in Denver, she stared at me as if I, not she, were the insane one. Why I didn’t resolve the crisis by breaking up with her is hard to fathom. My brain was apparently already so wired into hers that even though I knew she was being unreasonable and heartless, I didn’t care. All drugs are an escape from the self, and throwing myself away for Anabel, doing something obviously wrong to make her feel better, and then reaping the ecstasy of her renewed enthusiasm for me, was my drug. My mother cried when I told her my travel plans, but only Anabel’s tears could change my mind.
Anger with the two of us was broadcast in my mother’s swollen face at the graduation party. There was no safe way to explain to my friends and their normal-looking parents that she didn’t always look like this. Everyone was sweating mightily by the time Anabel arrived, wearing a drop-dead sky-blue cocktail dress and accompanied by Nola. They went straight to the wine, and it was a while before I could pry my mother away from Oswald’s parents and lead her to the corner where Anabel was sitting in Nola’s little cloud of disaffection. I made the introduction, and Anabel, stiff with shyness, rose and took my mother’s hand.