While Monica's heft had increased since 1 first went to bed with her, my stomach had simply become more round. After my first run-in with weight gain, I'd been shaken up. Now with obesity threatening again, I started a program of intensive exercising that became a compulsion in and of itself. Once I saw the benefits of exercise, I couldn't stop. If I was feeling depressed, an hour's worth of exercise would put me in a good mood. If I was planning to eat a bunch of fatty TV dinners, I could either work off the extra calories before I ate or right after. I stopped seeing the point of not exercising. If I was having a talk with Monica, watching TV, or even eating dinner, I'd climb on my stationary bike or grab some hand weights. After all, if I hadn't stayed in shape then I wouldn't have been able to help Monica do basic things like getting up from the sofa. It's always important to have at least one person in a household who isn't suffering from obesity; that way there is someone who can get up quickly and have his wits about him enough to dial 911 if his obese significant other has a stroke or heart attack.
More often than not, Monica was left having dinner alone on the sofa with her tray table while I pedaled on our True, a stationary bike that has a basket in front to hold nuts, fruits, protein bars, and a bottle of water. Trues are enormously stable, but it's still hard to balance a hot meal on the basket top, especially due to the grooves created to hold water bottles. When I wasn't frantically bicycling, I was doing pull-ups or lying on my new bench with its forty-five-pound bar and complementary set of plates. I also kept hand weights, grips, jump ropes, and a Pilates ball nearby. Even though we were only separated by a few feet, we felt miles apart because my interest in getting in shape was causing me to limit my intake of foods, while Monica's modus operandi was to intake as much as humanly possible. As I started to see a six-pack emerge from my formerly distended stomach, I wanted to deprive myself, while she increasingly needed more. My improving physical condition, in fact, seemed to egg Monica on. As she watched me pedaling furiously, the beads of sweat accumulating on my forehead, she'd intone, "I know you're going to leave me," while stuffing her mouth with one of the buttered rolls that hung in a plastic bag around her neck in case she needed a snack between meals. She looked a little like a Saint Bernard with that bag around her neck, but I never complained to her about it.
Despite the fact that we were traveling different roads from the dietary point of view-with me becoming svelte and handsome and her becoming increasingly fat and ugly-Monica and I were building trust. We broached the subject of marriage on several occasions. Usually it's the woman who wants the financial security that marriage provides, but in our case both of us had brought it up at one time or another only to dismiss the necessity of creating a legal bond. We knew that a marriage could be complex and often involved hiring more than one caterer. In our case, there wouldn't have been any question about whom to invite since we had no family or friends besides Bill, and we would hardly have expected Bill to fly in from Kansas. But it would have taken weeks to agree on a menu, and then there would have been the problem of prying Monica away from the buffet to perform a ceremony. Monica had become a responsible adult in many ways, but she could be intransigent when she was hungry. We decided we had enough on our plates as a couple. We didn't need to complicate matters any further by exchanging vows and inviting the government into our lives.
I was still attending my meetings regularly, but in many ways we had become the average American couple. After all, Monica wasn't the only one on our block with obesity problems, and I was no exception when it came to compulsive exercise. You have people who jog and lift weights at all times of the day and night, and you have people in the same family whose hands are in the cookie jar at the same hour.
This polarity was becoming more obvious in our relationship every day. Monica had developed a love for ice cream, which she bought in gallon cartons and ate while watching any program except "Oprah." Considering that Oprah was battling the same weight problems that Monica was facing, it was easy to see why. And I had acquired a new piece of gym equipment that bore a striking resemblance to the rack, the popular medieval torture device. Like a lot of couples, Monica and I perfectly complemented each other. I represented control and she excess. I provided limits and she loosened me up. There was even a "Montel Williams" devoted to this very subject. You displace onto your partner those traits you don't want to deal with yourself.
The one thing we took from General Shapiro was an interest in cultural events and civic affairs. When he told us there were other things in life that a couple could enjoy together besides sex, it was a real eye opener. Now that Monica was no longer losing control of herself in front of abstract expressionist art, she began to see it in a new light. I thought she might end up disenchanted, thinking that abstract expressionism was meaningless scribble and that painters like Pollock had pulled one over on the public, but instead of being disaffected she became interested in the work of Pollock's wife, Lee Krasner, and other female abstractionists like Helen Frankenthaler. Once we had attracted a great deal of attention in museums and restaurants because we couldn't keep our hands off each other; now we were getting sideways glances because of the disparity in our appearances. I was even approached by someone from a group called Fat and Free who wanted to use us as Couple of the Month in their newsletter. And then there were the embarrassing incidents. We never became an object of curiosity the way we were when Monica insisted on having sex in public, but from a practical point of view, Monica didn't fit in certain spaces. For instance, when we tried to eat in a Fifties-style diner that had opened in town, Monica was unable to squeeze into a booth. Rather than feel ashamed, it was at times like this that my heart went out to her and I felt a love and pride in her that I never felt in all our passionate groping. I've always been interested in helping the underdog and I'll support the guy or gal who tries to fulfill his dreams even when the cards are stacked against them-even if the dream is nothing greater than trying to get too much to eat. There was something heroic about Monica trying to prevail in all her obsessions, whether they were sex or art or food.
We did have a last fling, one moment of total debauchery. Like the Proustian Madeleine, it was ignited by the olfactory memory of a thing. In our case, it was a restaurant rather than a pastry We had been driving home after seeing a production of The Marriage of Figaro, which was put on by the local opera society, and we passed The Golden Cock. Monica felt for my prick, which was stiff for the first time in months, and before I knew it she had her face in my crotch. I remembered how talented Monica had been in giving blowjobs, how her mouth seemed to have an almost unlimited capacity for sucking. She was a magician in making large objects disappear into relatively small spaces. But suddenly I noticed a change. Eating has always been the slang for fellatio. As The Golden Cock's neon sign disappeared into my rearview mirror, Monica seemed to be literally eating me. The blowjob was turning into another meal. She licked my cock as if it were a lolly and took my balls into her mouth, running her tongue up and down the sides of my scrotum as if she were wiping gravy off of a plate. If I'd had a piece of baguette on me, I would have offered it to her. Then, as we stopped at a red light and I came, she greedily swallowed my cum as if she were drinking a milk shake.