Vladimir(18)

The love affair marked some final stage of his development. On his return, he fucked his way through the entire comparative literature department, with a devotion and avidity that might be called (in fact, it is) a sex addiction, in modern parlance. Supporting himself with a combination of odd jobs, he tried writing short stories and poems for several years. When I met him, he told me how he spent years following one woman or another, becoming infatuated, obsessive, then tiring of her for some reason and finding his eye caught by a new one. Then one night he had a dream in which all the women he had ever engaged with gathered on a grand opera stage. They beckoned him up from the audience, then they became the audience, and pelted him with roses that turned to blood, and when he looked down he saw himself waist-deep in shit.

Textbook, I told him at the time. After the dream, he stopped writing creatively and applied for a joint masters-PhD program in comp lit, with a focus on Cervantes. I met him after he had finished his dissertation and was teaching the intro essay-writing course to freshmen, TA-ing some grad courses, and applying for tenure-track positions around the country. I was pursuing my PhD in English and American literature with a focus on women’s lit (not as “basic” as it sounds now, I say to my students).

The truth is, we did fall in love. Our hearts would bleat when the other was near. The realness of that early love is something I have returned to again and again as reassurance. We talked for hours, we watched each other walk across the quad, thrilling at the sight of our bodies in distance. We thought there was no one person better in the world. We allowed each other to relax, but we also challenged each other. We helped each other and we moved well together. I was an ideal weight when he met me and had clothes that suited me very well, with long hair that I wore in a high, silky ponytail.

Caught in the throes of love, alcohol, and excess, as well as the late nights and stress of my dissertation (I wanted to finish as soon as possible so that John and I could apply for jobs together), over the next few years I gained a massive amount of weight and smoked like a chimney, so that when we finally married I looked like a little squat toad, wearing a face with no contrast, a bad haircut, graying skin, and dry patches. John seemed to accept my decline with no comment, but my self-hatred swirled and cemented.

Vanity has always been my poorest quality. I hate it in myself, and yet am as plagued with it as I am with needing to sleep or eat or breathe. Despite my ability to read long texts quickly, to analyze them adroitly, to practice exegesis with precision, to publish articles and books on literary form, to write two novels, to raise a child, to be a mentor and friend to my students, still all the while I feel trapped in the prison of vanity. If I can’t be a woman who is effortlessly beautiful, I wish I could be one of those women who, gracefully or ungracefully, move through the world unconsciously, with a kind of peace about their physical form. I have never had that peace, I have always felt tortured about my looks. I think my mother used to comment on my beauty (though when I look back at old photographs, I was at best adorable, but never beautiful). By the time I reached a certain age, she was upset with my appetite and tried to control my consumption, leading me to hide food in my closet and eat all I could when she was not around. She pushed the agenda of my beauty even as I disappointed her, remaining short rather than blooming into height, with greasy hair, puffy and lank. When I was young I read without censure, including consuming endless women’s magazines and picking up “tips” that haunt me still. To this day I tense my ass at a red light and do calf raises while waiting in line at the grocery store, take the top piece of bread off my sandwiches, and destroy pictures that catch me in an unflattering light. My daily thrum of happiness depends on my number on a scale, as inane as I know that to be.

Which is all to say that in my toady-ness following our marriage, after the photographs came back and I was forced to reckon with the blandness of my face, obscured by flesh and bloat, and the squatness of my body, I suggested to John that he seek out other women. At first I did it like a teenager runs a lighter over their arm hair—to see how it might feel. I felt as though I had hoodwinked this handsome rising star in the academic world, that I had shackled him to me—a woman to whom no one could truly be attracted. When I suggested the availability of freedom he didn’t need much encouragement—he is still a cad, I like cads, and he is one. And after we moved and I had settled into my position at the college and learned to control my excess and reached peak attractiveness, lithe and disciplined, I kept encouraging him so that I could do what I wanted sexually, exploring the vigorous men of the country (I have always held that the most handsome men live in the country, while the most beautiful women live in the city, which is why in both places the pairs are unequal). Then after that halcyon period, and after David broke my heart and I chose asceticism, I ignored his behavior because it gave me room to breathe.

For John has always been a needy man, needing my affection and approval as much as he needed the admiration of the women he engaged with. When he was home he was always following me around the house, slipping his hands into the waistband of my pants or up my skirt. He always wanted to know if I loved him, if I was upset with him, if I was pleased with him. He would dog Sidney with questions about whether he was a good father, about whether he handled the play date well, or whether she had fun, or liked her treat, or if he made her happy or made her laugh. He could go from a faculty meeting in which he was praised to a class in which he was admired to the arms of a young woman who was thrilled by his attention to the dinner table of his adoring wife and daughter telling him that he looked nice, that he smelled nice, that he was a funny daddy, and he would still seem to be unsatisfied—some aspect of himself had not been acknowledged. Though perhaps, in those years that I had to fight to burrow little holes of solitude into the tightly packed days of school and writing and food and lessons and friends and social obligations, perhaps that was merely my impression of him.