measured way, “what kind of person voluntarily comes to a hellmouth like Normandy Falls. Now I know the answer. Welcome home, Edmund.”
—
For the first time in many months, I experienced the alien sensation of freedom. It made me feel oddly weightless, invisible, insignificant, and soon I developed a number of curious new habits. Before rising from the futon every morning and facing the day, I spread my arms in the wide and solitary waste of an empty bed and then sparked a big bowl of the really fine sinsemilla I purchased once a week from Xavier D’Avignon, the gnomic
chef de cuisine
who sold his homegrown bud in the alley behind the bistro (“Marijuana and sunshine go together like milk and cookies, don’t they, son?”). I wanted badly to see my new life as an adventure, and in the afternoons I often paged through
The Odyssey,
the one book on which I relied to navigate life’s unexpected twists and turns, committing to memory Homer’s unrivaled descriptions of human striving and caprice. In time, I assured myself, I would meet a bewitching Circe, an insatiable Calypso. In the evenings my mood darkened sharply, and with the blinds pulled down and the volume on the TV turned way up, I watched black-and-white films directed by famously acidulous auteurs of the French New Wave until I nodded off to the ironic laughter of self-important Parisians.
Although I no longer suffered so acutely from the Catholic guilt that, as a child, I’d been encouraged to cultivate and keep close to my craven soul, I found that my Sunday-morning ritual, which used to consist of a quick lay followed by a bland breakfast of milk and cereal, now included a visit to that strange church near the square, refuge of heresiarchs and proselytizing cranks. I wasn’t religious in any conventional sense of the word, but from the back pew I sang hymns with great enthusiasm as if beseeching heaven for a miracle, the transubstantiation of the bread and wine not into the Body and Blood but into a potent aphrodisiac that would resurrect my sex life, and this made me wonder if the church had a patron saint of concupiscence, of orgasms, of libidinous games and freaky fetishes.
At night I fantasized about inviting a bevy of pretty coeds back to my bachelor pad. I’d be like a wild animal released from its enclosure at the zoo, a tiger, a panther, a mountain lion, but then I felt idiotic for having thought of myself as a noble hunter instead of a more suitable creature like a ferret or a frog or a lice-infested vulture. The absence of physical love, I believed, was to blame for this terrible funk, and after a few months without the familiar cushion of Morgan’s warm rump and the comfort of her firm tits, I worried that my own plans for a happy future might never come to fruition.
I fought the urge to call her and beg forgiveness, but one sleepless night, while staring into the whistling void of my threadbare apartment and listening to the dripping faucets, I suffered a sudden panic attack. I looked at the pages of my neglected thesis scattered on the coffee table and raced to the bathroom. In the mirror I saw an unshaven beast, stooped and haggard, with tartar-caked teeth and unspeakable impulses incubating in the back of its reptilian brain. Only then did it occur to me that sex was not the problem. The real reason so many people remained in unhealthy relationships was because they were incapable of caring for themselves, and as I shivered in the dark, appalled by the distorted, fun-house reflection staring back at me, I now understood that I belonged to their shameful number.
—
By the spring my grades began to suffer, and after weeks of procrastination and unproductive research on my thesis about the more sordid stories of the syphilitic genius Guy de Maupassant, I was placed on academic probation and summoned to my adviser’s office. He answered my knock and showed me into the room. Small-featured, meticulously groomed, dressed in a
—
For the first time in many months, I experienced the alien sensation of freedom. It made me feel oddly weightless, invisible, insignificant, and soon I developed a number of curious new habits. Before rising from the futon every morning and facing the day, I spread my arms in the wide and solitary waste of an empty bed and then sparked a big bowl of the really fine sinsemilla I purchased once a week from Xavier D’Avignon, the gnomic
chef de cuisine
who sold his homegrown bud in the alley behind the bistro (“Marijuana and sunshine go together like milk and cookies, don’t they, son?”). I wanted badly to see my new life as an adventure, and in the afternoons I often paged through
The Odyssey,
the one book on which I relied to navigate life’s unexpected twists and turns, committing to memory Homer’s unrivaled descriptions of human striving and caprice. In time, I assured myself, I would meet a bewitching Circe, an insatiable Calypso. In the evenings my mood darkened sharply, and with the blinds pulled down and the volume on the TV turned way up, I watched black-and-white films directed by famously acidulous auteurs of the French New Wave until I nodded off to the ironic laughter of self-important Parisians.
Although I no longer suffered so acutely from the Catholic guilt that, as a child, I’d been encouraged to cultivate and keep close to my craven soul, I found that my Sunday-morning ritual, which used to consist of a quick lay followed by a bland breakfast of milk and cereal, now included a visit to that strange church near the square, refuge of heresiarchs and proselytizing cranks. I wasn’t religious in any conventional sense of the word, but from the back pew I sang hymns with great enthusiasm as if beseeching heaven for a miracle, the transubstantiation of the bread and wine not into the Body and Blood but into a potent aphrodisiac that would resurrect my sex life, and this made me wonder if the church had a patron saint of concupiscence, of orgasms, of libidinous games and freaky fetishes.
At night I fantasized about inviting a bevy of pretty coeds back to my bachelor pad. I’d be like a wild animal released from its enclosure at the zoo, a tiger, a panther, a mountain lion, but then I felt idiotic for having thought of myself as a noble hunter instead of a more suitable creature like a ferret or a frog or a lice-infested vulture. The absence of physical love, I believed, was to blame for this terrible funk, and after a few months without the familiar cushion of Morgan’s warm rump and the comfort of her firm tits, I worried that my own plans for a happy future might never come to fruition.
I fought the urge to call her and beg forgiveness, but one sleepless night, while staring into the whistling void of my threadbare apartment and listening to the dripping faucets, I suffered a sudden panic attack. I looked at the pages of my neglected thesis scattered on the coffee table and raced to the bathroom. In the mirror I saw an unshaven beast, stooped and haggard, with tartar-caked teeth and unspeakable impulses incubating in the back of its reptilian brain. Only then did it occur to me that sex was not the problem. The real reason so many people remained in unhealthy relationships was because they were incapable of caring for themselves, and as I shivered in the dark, appalled by the distorted, fun-house reflection staring back at me, I now understood that I belonged to their shameful number.
—
By the spring my grades began to suffer, and after weeks of procrastination and unproductive research on my thesis about the more sordid stories of the syphilitic genius Guy de Maupassant, I was placed on academic probation and summoned to my adviser’s office. He answered my knock and showed me into the room. Small-featured, meticulously groomed, dressed in a
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