Best lingering result of this relationship: Once, in bed, we had a postcoital chat about Harry Potter, which was ended when she threatened, “What if I told you I would not have sex with you again until you read a Harry Potter book?” I waited until she fell asleep, drove to the local grocery, bought The Sorcerer’s Stone and Chamber of Secrets and had, by morning, finished the first one and had started the second. She kissed my neck, ran her hand down my chest and, laughing said, “I guess you’ve earned this.” I politely asked if she wouldn’t mind waiting until I finished the chapter.
We didn’t last long, but I do now have a Deathly Hallows tattoo.
She would certainly have been an ideal bride in the mind of almost any other American man: Temperate and clever; doe-eyed, with mason-straight white teeth, killer hips, and an ass that demanded watching as she left the room; perpetually dressed in “business casual”; not covetous of luxury and non-judgmental; easily pleased by everything on the well-known, society-prescribed list of Things Women Like (trading flowers for forgiveness, fancy chocolate, cashmere and films with happy endings, sentimental greeting cards on remembered special occasions, princess cut diamonds, massages and spa time, new shoes, and a man who will patiently wait outside the dressing room, but then later engage in some act of masculinity like fixing a car or whipping out the crescent wrench to retrieve a lost earring from the u-bend beneath a bathroom sink); a little submissive, but not wimpy; spiritual and a believer in destiny, but not religious in any way which would interfere with Sunday football games; smitten by little children and unafraid to play; from a rock solid family in the upper crust and thus possessed of faith in hard work, rags-to-riches, marriage, togetherness, and never ever going to bed angry.
Having in the past both been burnt badly in the search and struggle to find the ones we love and build with them traditional relationships—burning barns to which we are, like horses, every time deleteriously drawn—we’d reached the same conclusion, and over cigarettes admitted it was possible that we were idiots, imbecilic naïve creatures who comprehended only the misleading messages doled out by our hormones, who knew only how to seek out wants and were totally oblivious to actual needs; thus we, having both watched the same rerun the previous evening, decided in a Seinfeldian spirit, to predicate a relationship on the mutual mistrust of our own passions and better judgment, ignoring our every instinct: Despite a lack of attraction or significant logic, we decided to try our hand at romance.
It’s not like I was her type either: Too familiar with desolation and destitution, I had no great hope to overcome the latter, didn’t dream of Making It Big, of being rich and, a renter since birth who had never known to hold home ownership as a goal, I actually quite liked apartment life; I carried a serrated spear-tongue in my foul mouth, a misanthrope who made jokes so black that Beelzebub would brand them in poor taste; I was a hard-drinking ex-addict, already heavily tattooed and still bleeding ink on a bi-monthly basis; aggressively atheistic and casually blasphemous; uninterested in family dinners or children, and disgusted by babies; a depressed pessimist with a penchant for playing grating music—once we’d watched Good Will Hunting and both agreed (no offense intended or taken) that what she was doing with me was what Will had called “slumming.”
For a while, our friends were completely confounded and unwilling to mingle, not wanting to play the platonic version of our Opposites Game because, for them, there was no incentive to hang with folks they’d rather totally avoid, and so they stayed away from our unsettling experiment, leaving us mostly alone for long stretches of time where silences were often awkward, long past the point when they should’ve become comfortable, and everything felt forced—nothing was special, but nothing hurt; there was no acrimony and no passion; “Us,” the couple, was unspectacular, but not a disaster. We divided our time together equitably, though our actions were generally kept segregated and unblended (“Monday we’ll do what I want to do and Tuesday is all you, cool?”): Monday we were wholesome, spinning Simpsons DVDs for background noise as we sat together in the afternoon sipping tea in jeans and stocking feet, hunched over notebooks doing homework, speaking only when someone needed to pass the ashtray, then I would don a collared shirt, keep the sleeves rolled down, and we’d talk about our days over dinner someplace with a good-sized wine list, a place where I pretended I didn’t swear went easy on the wax, not so severely spiking my hair; then Tuesday we’d flip things and be miscreants, drink vodka out of the bottle, chain smoke, lay naked on the black-wrapped mattress and listen to Tricky or Mezzanine, and when the sweat from the last time dried, when we bored of small talk, we’d fuck again (it was definitely never making love).
One night I decided to make a big deal out of something she wanted to do: Though I had no interest in some insipid children’s film, I made reservations at The Expensive Place, I detailed the inside of my car, ironed a shirt, selected a tie, and bought her the sweater she mentioned seeing while out with a friend; I’d gotten advance tickets and a large box of the bizarre, high-priced jelly beans by which she was inexplicably entertained, and that came in abominable flavors like “worm,” “dirt,” “sardine”; and I managed to pull the whole thing off as a surprise when, after saying for weeks, “No way,” and suggesting she instead attend the event with a girlfriend, she pulled well-dressed (upon my instruction) into the drive, I gave her the sweater, and said that after dinner I would indeed accompany her to the midnight premiere of the Harry Potter movie. It was during dinner that night when I mentioned how nervous I’d been about the whole thing—I was unsure if she’d caught on by herself and there would be no surprise, or if her friend (whom I’d had to inform and bribe for her silence by providing a pair of advance tickets to the same show) had leaked the secret that they weren’t actually going later that weekend together to see the show; I worried the sweater wouldn’t fit or match whatever pants she’d chosen to wear, or that she might not even want to go with me since it was no secret I’d only be attending for her benefit, and did not myself give a shit—and she replied, touching my hand across the table, “Oh, you shouldn’t have been nervous, baby, it’s just me,” which of course kicked me right over the precipice, sent me falling—tumbling, really—in love. Our relationship mutated into one exactly the same as all the disasters of passion which had preceded it: as she snored, I would lay awake afraid to move, lest I should disrupt her slumber, and spend this paralyzed quiet time reviewing everything she’d said throughout the day—scanning the sentences I remembered for implications of dissatisfaction or disinterest; I coldly calculated things I could do which might win me her favor, like losing my interest in whiskey and suddenly discovering red zinfandel, or suggesting we take her parents somewhere for dinner or drinks; anymore, I had no personal investment in sex, but was instead psychotically concerned about the intensity and duration of her every orgasm (each one must trump the last; by this logic, after a month of this flavor of competitive lovemaking, I guess I hoped her bones would explode whenever she came); in short, because nothing’s less sexy than wanting for confidence, I spent every second struggling to not spend every second certain that she was about to leave me—which I was, certain.
After a month of this exhausting infatuation, I arrived one night at my apartment to find her car had beaten me there—though the door was always unlocked, we’d never been that kind of couple; like vampires, we always awaited an invitation—and I climbed dark stairs towards the bedroom, where familiar music and a strip of dim light from beneath the door told me she was waiting, all the while terrified that this early arrival was an ambush, that her car in the drive presaged the end of everything, that she’d come early to prep herself, and was going to call it quits on our ill-advised little experiment there, on my turf, so she could flee when she’d finished. I was confused when, closer to the room, I recognized the tune as “Piggy,” by Nine Inch Nails, and even more befuddled when I turned the knob to find her pacing in red leather pants, shit-kicking boots, thick eyeliner, hair tied back in a ponytail, unsteadily smoking a cigarette; she smiled shyly when she faced me (suggesting a night out on the town), and I think I managed an “uh” or some other dumb disfluency before she mercifully cut me off, explaining that the pants were from a piss-off-her-parents phase, but the boots were new, some of my music wasn’t so bad, she hoped I liked the look, and that she’d been a little worried lately that I didn’t get it—”I don’t think you understand,” she said, when I asked what the “it” was that I didn’t get, “That I’m fucking crazy about you.”
