Exactly, that is past, she assures them. It is Ancient History 101, it is why he disappeared from the public stage for so long, to confront his demons and finally work all that through. He has been totally upfront and honest about everything, and hasn’t he channeled his furious, damaged genius into positive action and change? Look at what he is creating in the world — hasn’t he risen above such skeptical misunderstanding, such hurtful snark? It is the price of greatness, she supposes to them, sighing, the burden of his brilliance. She allows her own voice to be tinged with status, with ascendency, and the next night shows up determinedly and steeled by Two Buck Chuck Chardonnay at his door to offer herself in reward.
IT IS HER fault, she feels, the awkward and unsync’d grapple of it, then the ultimate, mortifying failure. He is unable because of her lingering bourgeois superficiality, she is sure, her tentative, going-through-the-sexual-motions motions. Chemistry is, well, just chemicals, she chides herself, just Bunsen burner hype, schoolgirl mythology. Get over it. Love is of spirit and souls, and so if her flesh is passive, unmoved — cringes, actually — and her lungs strain for air during his groping, mewling, her-pleasure-is-everything exertions, it is no wonder the potency of his own response is weakened, disempowered, if his own pleasure in her is dulled. She apologizes.
He does not accuse her — on the contrary, he revels in her refinement, contrasts her constantly with other women, the coarse, withholding, pedestrian past
a) girlfriends
b) wives
c) lovers
in whom he placed such mistaken, disappointed faith, who could not rise to meet him at his level of essential truth. He understands she is not yet fully his — a subtle darkening of his voice — but he assures her she is making progress, justifying his trust. He has peeled for her his very soul to pulp and seeds and she cups it so soft in her dear hands. Whatever else he may achieve in this life, his only true dream is to die in her arms. She alone is his last chance for a profound happiness. She has not run, has not fled, and he needs no greater reassurance or evidence of the redemptive promise of her love.
She clears her throat. She wills herself to pat, no, stroke his shoulder, his naked back, to initiate, but he stops her,
No, he says. There will be plenty of time. They will get there soon, together. He has no doubt. It is their fate.
ONE LATER NIGHT — ANOTHER wilting, truncated effort — he asks her, yet again, to share her pain. Her most visceral, damaging pain, the pain she hides from the world but he can discern and will rescue her from, what will at last fuse their souls and thus, successfully, their flesh. He needs this from her. But she can think of no pain worthy enough to share. She tries to remember the agonies of spirit she must have suffered when that
a) sweet, senior-year-of-college boyfriend backed out on the eve of moving in, he just wasn’t ready, he said, although she was really awesome and everything and he cared about her, and maybe he was just panicking, yeah, although didn’t that show his unreadiness to make a commitment, even to a really great girl like her, and while it did hurt at the time, of course, her truest distress was having cleaned out her closet to make room for him and his stuff and it was too late to get those clothes back from Goodwill,
b) cubicle co-worker she hooked up with and started dating after the office Groundhog Day pub gathering confessed he was also sleeping with Anita in Human Resources, but she kept dating him for another few months anyway, because while it did hurt at the time, of course, what she secretly hoped was Anita would feel guilty enough to push forward a raise or promotion for her, and it went on until the day he just disappeared from their cubicle to go back and live with his parents in one of the Dakotas, Anita told her, rolling her eyes, over their let’s-split-a-chicken-Caesar lunch,
c) hot wannabe actor guy from the CinemaSoape Laundromat — who she was sort of crazy about, or maybe was just crazy about the carnal sex and his pliable porno assurance with her body, although she nursed a hope this was or could be or would be love, but what would she do with this life-as-it-comes kid she could never introduce to her friends, her parents, even after he groomed the scruff and she bought him a decent jacket and pair of shoes — agreed to her ending it with nothing more than a carefree grin and insulting shrug, and while it hurt at the time, of course, when he offered to fuck her one final time in her car, she simply shrugged back and said Sure.
She is embarrassed by her lack of formative anguish. She feels shame at the juvenile unworthiness of her prior men, the mere and interchangeable boys she had chosen, those petty hurts; he will reassess her, realize she lacks profundity, a poet’s tender heart. When he continues to entreat she demurs, mysteriously, hintingly, as if still clutching to her delicate breast the most ineffable of torments, as if he has not quite yet earned the peeling open of her soul, and at his now darkened, newly hardened face, at the twitch in his eye, she wonders, suddenly a little afraid, how much time she has left.
ONE MANY-NIGHTS-LATER NIGHT he calls. He is rambling, a thick-throated, inchoate stumble over sentences and words and it crosses her mind — as fear? as hope? — that he must be drunk, wasted, in the middle of some kind of breakdown,
Are you all right? she breaks in. Slow down, what are you saying, I cannot understand you.
He gulps, edges consonants, asks if she has ever
a) been assaulted, taken against her will, she can tell him, such violation can happen to any woman, one never blames the victim, she is never asking for it, never seeking to be overpowered or hurt that way, even if there was no actual physical force he would understand because there is always always the threat and so the woman must submit, in the end, must spread herself wide and perhaps even take pleasure in it, sometimes that happens, it is no fault of the woman if she gets aroused, wet, orgasms climaxes comes, a woman’s body is designed that way, after all, to shudder and writhe and be possessed by the male force, and so she must confess, tell him all about it,
b) had sex with a black guy, a Mexican or a Muslim, or a dog, what is the ugliest, most filthy, diseased thing
she has ever allowed inside her, been penetrated by, taken in to her most sacred private places, sucked or fingered or fucked, because some women, very sick and disturbed women, do crave and seek out such self-punishing, unnatural defilement and so she must confess, tell him all about it,
c) been paid for sex, whored herself out for cash or drugs or tuition, but doesn’t every woman do that, in some way, sell herself for gutter slut cheap, because even the smart-negotiated exchange for marriage or caviar or jewels is still just perfumed, marked-up whoring, a piece of rotten meat with fancy sauce and price tag slapped on, just coldhearted, frigid, viper-bitch betrayal, and so she must confess, tell him all about it,
and he will try but cannot promise to forgive, although he may never be able to touch her again he can at least help her to repent, to cleanse herself, and so — Do not ever—there is vomit thickening her own throat now—ever contact me again, she says, and hangs up.
SHE NURSES HER nausea with quarts of ginger tea. She asks her landlord to turn up the water heater and scalding-showers herself every day, loofahs her crawling skin to a tender-bright new. There is a mailbox slew of fattened fine-stationery envelopes addressed in a blotty, barely legible scrawl she tears up without opening. There are sobbing voicemails and then heated, imploring texts, and she changes her phone number. There are emails with exclamation-point subject lines, and she marks them as spam, then deletes without reading. There are FedEx’d boxes she refuses to accept, although the nonplussed FedEx guy tells her there is no point, he cannot register her refusal or return to sender. There are deliveries of towering, long-stemmed vases and old-fashioned boxed bouquets she drops off at the nearest Cancer Treatment Center. She leaves the still gift-tagged, grand-event dress with a fancy consignment shop — a touch of guilt at not donating to some charity auction, but even her thirty percent share of the sale will help her cover last month’s bills, this month’s rent. She casually mentions to her friends and co-workers and parents that it is simply over, ended, is all — the age difference, sure — aiming for a shrugging, just-a-fling, nothing-to-see-here tone, but they continue to reference, to ask if she