1 was willing to negotiate the reality- television. 1 was equally willing to try new foods and even eat out now and then. Yet the cornerstone of any negotiation had to be take-out Chinese and "Sixty Minutes" on Sunday nights. Beyond that, I was open to suggestions, provided there was at least one other day of the week that we all agreed to order in Chinese. We could have Rumanian cuisine for all 1 cared, as long as it wasn't on Sunday and as long as it left room for one other day when 1 could have the wonton soup, egg roll, and chicken chow mein, the combination plate referred to in shorthand by cognoscenti around the world as the number one.
We finally agreed on Sunday and Thursday. I still loved Bill's meatloaf, but he was hell-bent on creativity. He didn't like having the same comfortable foods all the time. He said experiment was at the heart of truly great cuisine. He wanted to try new things, to experience tastes and sensations he hadn't tried before. What he said he liked was an implicit criticism of me. I am a creature of habit and the same old things are what make me happy. A new taste or smell is like a strange city or foreign country. It's okay to be a tourist now and then. However, 1 like to get home. What 1 like when it comes to food is what I know; it's rare that I'm able to assimilate a new taste or texture. But I gave in, feeling like a rat in a laboratory experiment and gritting my teeth through a hundred meals that were memorable in the displeasure they caused. 1 don't differentiate one Chinese meal from the other and 1 don't remember any of them, but that's what I like.
1 actually felt that part of Bill's and Monica's pleasure in sampling the cuisines of the world came from seeing me suffer. And God forbid if it turned out I liked a dish. That was a sure guarantee I'd never taste it again. Look what happened when Bill made hummus: He showed me how you smear the "homos" on a wedge of pita bread, add cucumber, tomato, and a touch of mint, and I loved it. The next day, I was jumping for joy. Finally, he'd come up with a new dish that was not only edible, but delicious. 1 immediately said, "Let's have `homos' again soon. 1 love `homos."'
"What you mean to say is that some of your best friends are homos."
"It's hummus!" Monica admonished.
"Homos." 1 repeated.
"No, hummus. The accent is on the first syllable, and you have to make a little chhhhh sound with roof of your mouth. Chhhommos! Say it."
"Chhhummus."
Needless to say, even though I finally got the pronunciation of hummus, I wasn't offered any after that night, although I did get to try some very enticing dishes, amongst them duck with prune stuffing, lamb shank with olives and lemon, and choucroute. I wish I could say Monica was one of those dishes. Back when I couldn't find Monica, I went through my period of being overweight, but at least I was aware of it. I was afraid I would be unrecognizable, that no one would know me under the layers of fat; but when Monica lost her boyish figure, she didn't seem to care.
After all we'd been through, I'd become attached to her; I wasn't going to leave her. However, 1 often wondered if her mind wasn't drowning in all the flesh she was putting on. It used to be that our waterbed was in danger of busting. Now that we had a regular bed, the problem was Monica's heaviness, which created a trough at the center. It was particularly difficult to read a magazine before I went to sleep because every time Monica shifted, I would roll into her-something that wasn't helped by the fact that I was beginning to have a weight problem of my own. I wanted to say something, yet I didn't know what I could say without risking eliciting her animal rage. She loved her meals so much. I also didn't want to do anything to inhibit the healthy interest in food that was the fruit of all our work with General Shapiro.
Gradually, 1 found myself getting caught up in the food hysteria. Along with my two Chinese meals, I began to look forward to my Bries and Camemberts, my terrines and fois Bras. 1 loved "Sixty Minutes 11" almost as much as "Sixty Minutes," but I couldn't resist "The Apprentice," which led me to "Who Wants to Be a Millionaire?" "Survivor," and even "Fear Factor." Soon it didn't matter what I was watching as long as 1 had something in my mouth, just as it didn't matter what 1 was eating as long as something was on the tube.
Along the way, Bill and Monica were becoming interested in fine wines. There was constant talk of Chateau this or that, the grand crus and the premier grand crus, and arguments about the excellence of unattainably expensive wines like the Lafitte Rothschild '66. Naturally, because of my ongoing membership in AA, I staved out of these discussions, but I was satisfied. With my tastes for both food and television expanding almost as quickly as my waist, I was finding a new sense of adventure in life, which 1 suspect was exactly what General Shapiro was talking about.
Yes, 1 was fat again, but after all the months of uncertainty and fear, when 1'd come to after explosive sex not even knowing where 1 was, after all the months of haunting art galleries and museums, after all the worrying about landlords and structural damage, 1 was truly happy and well adjusted for the first time in years. 1 could just see General Shapiro smiling and, with that false modesty, declaiming, "It's you guys who did the work."
It's not that Monica and I no longer had problems. No couple is immune. General Shapiro used to say, "When you stop having problems, you're either dead or having an affair." But our problems kept changing. Now that sex and food were no longer the issue, we had to contend with our weights and our elevated blood sugars. We lived on the second floor, and it was becoming increasingly hard to walk up the stairs. In addition, Monica's ass had become so big that it sometimes shook the toilet seat from its hinges-but these were designer problems compared to what we had faced in the past. And, in spite of the fact we were no longer having sex, l loved Monica more than ever.
(1>3
For the longest time I was sure I'd come to the last stop on the line. Monica, Bill, and I never disagreed anymore. Every night exemplified the fact that human beings can live in peace and harmony if they talk out their differences. We'd eat in front of the television together, watching the programs that had been agreed on beforehand. Usually the three of us sat on the couch, pulling over little tray tables, which we stacked in the corner of the kitchen at the end of each meal. There were times when we sat together at the dining table. We did this, for instance, on the night Bill cooked up a fondu and there had to be some place to put the cheese pot. Occasionally we ate at the table when we were having Chinese dishes like Peking duck, which require several different plates (for the sliced duck, the bones, the pancakes, the scallions, and the hoisin sauce). But our dining table was far from the television, and all of us agreed that the distance deprived us of a certain intimacy with whatever program we were watching.
Our bliss seemed complete until the day Bill informed us he was leaving. There had been no warning, no way of foreseeing he had been unhappy-and he wasn't. He just, as he put it, "wanted something more." Bill was going home to Kansas to live with his mother. Bill's father had been a soybean farmer; as he prospered, he'd employed many farmhands, one of whom had introduced Bill to the pleasures of fellatio. Bill's father had always hated his son's love of cooking and sewing. He was embarrassed by the boy. But his relationship with the farmhand was the last straw. Discovering Bill and the farmhand in an empty silo, he had thrown Bill out of the house despite his mother's protests. Bill's attempt at marriage and fatherhood had been a concession to his father's values. But his failure had sent him into a tailspin; he'd been spared the life of homelessness and self-abnegation by me that day in the bus station. By now his father was long dead, and when he'd written his mother, she'd opened her arms to him. The farm had been sold, and when Bill told his mother of his great dream of running a restaurant that would cater to gay farmhands, called Cock n' Bull, she fully supported the idea. Kansas was no longer the way it had been when he was a boy growing up; there were substantial gay communities, in even the most rural areas, whose needs were waiting to be met.