The teacher loomed over him. “What is that creature?”
“My vagina. If I had one,” Alan mumbled.
“It’s very offensive!”
Alan quickly collapsed the tail against the body and smoothed it out, which shrank the hole, which upset Sister Goddess Jane. She found it offensive that he had made the hole so small. She said it was a typical sign of men wanting to hurt women, of being excited by women’s pain. She added, “You probably wish there was no hole at all, right? Or just a pinprick of a hole, so that you could go in there and rip it open, and have it be tight, tight, because that’s all you really care about, your pleasure.” She walked away.
He applied his fingers to the clay, trying to feel as cool as a gynecologist. In his mind, he told the chunk of clay to relax, to take a deep breath. He even placed a little Kleenex over the back part of it. The goddess came back and pointed to the Kleenex. “Sister Goddess Alan. What is that?”
“It makes me feel more comfortable that way. It’s more … clinical, impersonal.”
She snorted and let him be, for the moment.
He made the hole big. Like a grotto. So big that having sex with it would be like having sex with air. But he had to be careful, for if he made it too big, Goddess Jane would say something. He knew she would say it was offensive. So he shrank it slightly, but still left it quite big.
“Sister Goddess Alan?”
“Yes, mistress,” he replied, meekly.
“Goddess! Not mistress,” she said, looking shocked.
“Sorry! I mean Goddess. Yes, Goddess. Sister Goddess Jane.”
“You couldn’t leave it big, could you? You had to make it smaller. You just couldn’t make it a big vagina. You couldn’t bear the sight of a big vagina.”
It sounded to Alan as if she had a Japanese accent when she uttered that word, “vagina.” Her teeth sliced the air like guillotines, coming down three times on “va-gi-na.”
“No, I thought you wouldn’t like it too big,” Alan said.
“Don’t you think mine is big?”
“I’m sure yours is big. No! I don’t know,” Alan said, traumatized, enlarging the opening with his thumbs.
Following the dictum that you should get right back on the horse from which you have just fallen, Alan immediately signed up for another class, making sure to read it correctly this time. He took Acupressure for Your Pet: Alternative Health Care for Your Dog or Cat. Or rat, he thought to himself. The course description was, “Acupressure consists of gentle massage techniques that can be used by any pet owner in the treatment of various illnesses and behavioral disturbances. Bring Your Pet to Class.”
Alan and Pancake went to class and enjoyed it very much. They were popular among the traditional pet owners, except for one or two hysterical types.
Through tremendous willpower, Alan succeeded in not thinking too much about Lynn. He attended Stalkaholics Anonymous regularly. People talked about their itch to stalk. He embraced Step One of their twelve-step recovery program, which was: “I admit I am powerless over my stalking compulsion and my life has become unmanageable.” And he adopted their belief that “once an addict always an addict.” He knew he would probably have to attend those meetings for the rest of his life, just like the alcoholics.
Alan’s new life went well. He wasn’t absent from work as much anymore.
Alan tried to improve himself in certain ways. Pancake’s nervous body language had made Alan acutely aware of his own. He practiced moving in a calm and confident manner. He edited his movements, eliminating all the unnecessary gestures that cluttered his image.
He also developed a personal philosophy of mental health. After spending hours trying to figure out the one thing that could be responsible for stalking tendencies, he concluded that it came down to a difficulty in letting go. Stalkers had trouble letting go of the person they were obsessed with.
So he practiced letting go. He bought a rope, tied it to his bathroom’s doorknob, and pulled on the rope regularly, for many minutes at a time, until his muscles hurt and his face was red and the tendons in his neck were taut. Then he slowly let go of the rope, trying to appreciate the pleasures of letting go.
He came to believe that stress-related health problems were caused by not letting go, by clenching one’s muscles, being afraid of releasing them. So he got massages and forced his muscles to unclench, to let go.
Alan slowly changed. The change was internal, mostly, but sometimes internal things emanate.
He took more classes. He made friends. Some were recovering stalkaholics, like himself. He went out with them and met more new people. Before he knew it, and to his astonishment, he believed he didn’t care about Lynn anymore.
He met Jessica, a woman with a gun license, who became his girlfriend and moved in with him after three weeks. Alan marveled at how making just a few changes in one’s life, like taking a class, or getting massages to relax, could bring about a whole positive chain reaction. They were happy, the three of them. She and his rat got along well.
Ray the homeless man noticed the change in Alan and whispered little reinforcing tidbits whenever he passed, such as, “I’m proud of you,” and “You’ve come a long way, baby,” and “Super new girlfriend.”
During those same several months, Lynn and Roland sublet their apartments in the city and moved into Roland’s country house.
Lynn was taking a break from managing her gallery full-time, leaving it to Patricia, except on Tuesdays and Fridays, when she drove in with Roland, who commuted every day. Patricia would update her on everything, including the recent rejections Lynn had received in the mail.
Lynn had diligently gotten the five follow-up shots against rabies and had been fortunate to get no side effects.
She spent most of her week in the country, painting, not because she had a passion for it or any ambition to develop as an artist, but because she found it enjoyable.
As long as there was still uncertainty about whether Lynn’s desire for Roland would remain, the excitement and chemistry continued. Things changed the day Lynn finally felt confident enough to say, “Your appeal and my desire are here to stay. I know it. I can feel it.”
A few days later, Roland told Lynn, “Listen, I think you should have your weekend with Alan.”
She just stared at him, stunned, and finally said, “Are you insane?”
Roland sighed. “For my sake. I just feel that it wasn’t right, what I did. It wasn’t right what we did.”
“Forget it. It’s out of the question.” She got up and left the room.
He followed her. “I believe it’s important to act decently.”
“Why now? What’s going on?” she asked.
He threw up his hands and went outside to his lounge chair to tan. He liked to get tan, she didn’t, said it was dangerous, that he might develop a melanoma. The more she urged him not to tan, the more he did, until his face was all crispy.
The truth was that now that Lynn’s desire for Roland appeared permanent, their romance was less appealing to him. Alan’s no longer wanting Lynn also made it hard for Roland to keep wanting her. The couple fought all the time. Roland became verbally abusive, frequently putting Lynn down.
To make matters worse, Lynn got a call from Patricia saying that Judy had been run over by a truck and died. Patricia and Lynn speculated whether Judy had done it on purpose, to “refreshen her zest,” as she had put it, all those months ago. In any case, the news hit Lynn hard.
“As far as I’m concerned,” Roland said, “all her friends should feel responsible for her death.”
“I’m one of her friends,” Lynn said, staring at him.
“I know,” he said, staring back at her.
“You think it was my fault?”