Bill liked reality programs like "Survivor," as well as news magazines like "Sixty Minutes," and as time went on he became more and more of a presence in the house. In the past, when we were fucking all the time, we would never have been able to have dinner guests and we didn't need them. But now that we were more well adjusted-and not driven to ripping each other's clothes off whenever we could-I for one felt a certain hole in our lives, a hole that had formerly been occupied by sex and now would be filled with socializing.
Then there was Bill's cooking. While I still loved Chinese, Monica, in particular, started craving more variety, and Bill was a virtual lexicon of specialties, from his meatloaf to more exotic fare like grilled squid, corn fritters, and conch. We were both unselfconsciously gaining weight and loving it.
As we grew closer to Bill, our eating and television-watching took on an intensity and variety that rivaled our most passionate sexual episodes. Every meal had a significance, both in terms of the ingredients and amounts we were consuming and in terms of the television programs we watched. Bill showed up early for "The Today Show" and cooked everything from porridge to kippers and pancakes. Lunch celebrated the beginning of the afternoon soaps and was thus one of our most important meals. Fish chowder and bouillabaisse appetizers were followed by Bill's famous caesar salad and then a hearty dish like osso buco. Bill was opposed to the stereotypic notion that lunch should be a light, practical meal composed only of pasta and salad. Lunch was an issue for Bill. He felt it was slighted, the very way he had felt slighted and marginalized as a homosexual male. Now that sex was no longer the lingua franca of the household, the playing field was more leveled, but Bill's lunches were almost like crusades. There was an ideological consistency to his insistence that they last from two to three hours, just in time for the three of us to take our warm alcohol-free zabagliones into the living room to watch "Oprah." The large lunches didn't stop Bill from preparing high tea or even larger and more elaborate dinners, and on weekends and holidays, Bill even cooked up a midnight buffet. Within weeks, our apartment was like a cruise ship-at least from the culinary point of view.
Bill could be as temperamental as an artist, and in many ways his fits, in which he would throw a perfectly good paella, coq au vin, or leg of lamb into the garbage, reminded me of the creative agonies of Pollock and DeKooning. I could see that Monica received some degree of stimulation from the scenes Bill threw, and it was a good thing he was gay or she might have had a full-fledged regression. Luckily there had been no gay abstract expressionists, so it was hard for Monica to transfer the powerful emotions she still had for Pollock and DeKooning onto Bill. Larry Rivers was AC/DC, yet he was a pop artist, and Monica had never been stimulated by the work of Andy Warhol, Rauschenberg, or Johns. If she had been, then there would have been no problem in her wanting to fuck a gay man. The hypergraphia satyriasis would have kicked in, and we would have been off to the races. As it was, Monica, Bill, and 1 looked forward to shopping at Sam's Club, the warehouse food outlet off the interstate where you could buy 1000-roll packages of toilet paper, ten-gallon drums of orange juice, and boxes that contained 12 dozen eggs. We went there on Tuesdays and Fridays after dinner, which gave us something to do related to food when we were inundated with feelings of loss over a meal ending. We might have been stuffed, considering the enormous amounts Bill cooked, but all the lust we had for each other was now shifted to varying dishes, and the end of our meals inevitably left us feeling restless, bored, and yearning for the kind of excitement only a discount food outlet could provide.
Besides the arguments about reality television versus news magazines, which had been subsiding, the three of us got into arguments about what to eat for dinner or, on occasions when we went out, what restaurant to go to, reminding me of the kind of relationships where couples argue about how and when to have sex. When it came to sex, there had never been a struggle since our sex transcended consciousness. When it came to our appetites for food, we were afflicted with too much consciousness. Monica and I became competitive and somewhat anal-retentive, and Bill, who placed such store on his refined taste, didn't make things any better. As far as I was concerned (and in spite of the increased sensitivity of my palate) I could have ordered in Chinese food until the cows came home, but Monica, who complained about my lack of adventurousness (another comment common to couples who argue about sex), was aligning herself with Bill, who was becoming a snob. Despite his humble origins, he began to display the characteristics of a landed aristocrat. He'd developed a peculiar sneer that was half Oxford don and half rearing horse. The stability of our little menage was beginning to be threatened by the alliance between Monica and Bill against my constant, "I have a craving for Chinese," or "It's too much trouble to cook, let's just order in Chinese," or "It's actually cheaper to order in the Chinese than to go out and buy the ingredients for a meal."
One thing I learned in my AA meetings was acceptance. We are all children of God and everything is as it's meant to be, though 1 have to say that when I go two or three days without ordering in Chinese, I start to get irritable. And if I'm going to watch "Sixty Minutes" or any of the other magazine shows, Chinese is a requirement. I'm basically an easygoing guy, but I'd say that in general if I'm deprived of my Chinese on Sunday, I can get depressed and even aggressive. On one occasion when 1 was deprived of both "Sixty Minutes" and Chinese, my Tourette's was ignited and I started yelling, "Fuck you, mommy: " 1 would have been the first to admit I was a Chinese food addict, but there are worse things one can be addicted to. Destructive sex that ruins other people's apartments is one example. My obsession with Chinese food wasn't hurting anyone, and from a health standpoint 1 had been switching from sauteed broccoli in garlic sauce to steamed broccoli in oyster sauce, from white rice to brown rice, from chow fun to steamed vermicelli noodles. Sure, repetition can be confining, but as Emily Dickenson once said about her resistance to change, "1 know Amherst well."
"I don't call fortune cookies almond cookies or those little pieces of pineapple and orange sections they give you in Chinese restaurants dessert." Bill's tone was sardonic, but I knew he was hurting. Our differences were creating an even greater rift than had occurred when I refused to let him suck my cock.
There were times when I thought the three of us should see General Shapiro, who had told us when we left that he would always find time for us if we ever wanted to come back, while at the same time making it absolutely clear that he didn't have any time left in his schedule. This was just one of the paradoxes of the treatment. Another was the fact that he could talk endlessly about himself and his marriage heroics on the couples counseling battlefield, but when you asked him about his personal life, he would admonishingly say, "I thought we were here to talk about you." 1 wanted to talk to him about food and sex and ask him how he decided what to eat and where to go to dinner with his wife, but I knew he was going to give me that quizzical stare that turned wishes into neuroses. Yes, there was something wrong with me, and one of the chief symptoms was that I wanted him to tell me what to do. Yes, I knew it wouldn't do any good. I was going to have to work the food thing out with Monica and Bill on my own.