Francis Levy - Erotomania - A Romance

Monica grudgingly began to accept that Sunday night was a special time for me. I'd come to cherish "Sixty Minutes," which is the grandfather of all the great television-magazine programs. She came to understand I would be a little more distracted, a little less attentive to her interests because I had just watched "Sixty Minutes." We were both learning to accommodate our likes and dislikes. After "Sixty Minutes" was over, I generally experienced some degree of depression and she left me alone. There had been some rough Sundays when she watched something after "Sixty Minutes" and sought validation for her feelings of excitement about the program. But she came to understand she didn't need me to affirm her. She'd made a choice and that was enough. Constantly asking me, "What do you think, isn't such and such exciting, romantic, suspenseful?" — when I was depressed about having to wait another week until the next "Sixty Minutes"-had caused several spats. We were growing. And there were moments when Monica paused from her own excitement to exhibit sympathy for the loss I was feeling. That was also progress.

We both realized there was no need for the bunker. When we'd first found the concrete cinderblock structure in the deserted factory area of town, it felt like an oasis. We were able to fuck without causing structural damage to the edifice we occupied. It was probably the way people prone to grand mal seizures feel after waking up to find themselves in a safe, padded cell. But with our life changing, we had new requirements when it came to real estate, one of which was our enduring interest in ordering in Chinese food. Now that we weren't fucking our brains out, Ting looked bored, and we were back to square one when it came to calling for deliveries. It took hours for him to come, and he'd often send replacements who couldn't find our address. When they did, they could be surly, uncooperative, and perpetually argumentative about the tip. We needed to move to a place that was closer to the major Chinese restaurants so we could get our food delivered in a timely manner. On Sundays, with everyone in town ordering in Chinese food, we were never going to get what we wanted in time to watch our programs. Of course we could order hours in advance to insure we'd get it in time for say, "Sixty Minutes," but then the food would be traveling around on some delivery boy's bicycle and it would arrive cold.

1 was also getting tired. It's hard enough trying to communicate with the Chinese people taking the orders; every time I gave my address, there would be a long silence. In the background, 1'd hear urgent voices talking the Mandarin dialect. I don't know too many Chinese restaurants that turn down customers. So they'd reluctantly take the order, but there was much irritation, especially when we tried to confirm the number of rices that came with the main dishes or we asked for an extra bag of noodles with the wonton soup.

We had been fucking our brains out at the time we rented the bunker, so naturally neither of us remembered signing any leases but apparently we had. We made an appointment with our landlord, John, who turned out to be a recovering sex addict himself. When we explained to him that when we had moved in six months before, we had been young and inexperienced, but were now trying to build decent lives in which we could watch television together, he was fully understanding of our plight. He admitted he was aware we were going to be a handful from the moment his property manager described the shenanigans that went on in the rental office. On the other hand he knew the concrete bunker was the safest structure in town when it came to turbulence within the psyche or without. The bunker had also had a sobering effect on the previous tenants, a couple so enamored of each other that paramedics had to be called on several occasions to pry them apart. He said he was glad that letting ourselves play out our tumultuous love, without the interruption of neighbors complaining about broken beams or chipping plaster, had brought us back to our senses. He happily cancelled our lease. We had a week to move out and find a new place. During that week, several real estate brokers came by with prospective tenants-including a pair of lesbians who were leaders of our town's only female motorcycle gang, a dominatrix who wanted to turn the place into a dungeon, and a married couple who hated each other, but couldn't imagine what life would be like without their constant fighting.

We left our waterbed. We told each other it was leaking and about to burst, but neither of us wanted to admit we no longer needed it. Waterbeds are great when you spend most of your time fucking, but they're terrible when you're tired and need to simply fall asleep. They never stop undulating and you can actually get motion sickness if you're the type of person who needs to read before sleeping. We were lucky we were able to get our old apartment back. In addition, Bill was looking for an excuse to break away from his aerobics teacher, who'd become too possessive. He was happy to cook us a welcome-home dinner. Bill was still in love with me, but he was no longer jealous of my relationship with Monica, and that first night back we all noted how well we got along.

Bill liked reality programs like "Survivor," as well as news magazines like "Sixty Minutes," and as time went on he became more and more of a presence in the house. In the past, when we were fucking all the time, we would never have been able to have dinner guests and we didn't need them. But now that we were more well adjusted-and not driven to ripping each other's clothes off whenever we could-I for one felt a certain hole in our lives, a hole that had formerly been occupied by sex and now would be filled with socializing.

Then there was Bill's cooking. While I still loved Chinese, Monica, in particular, started craving more variety, and Bill was a virtual lexicon of specialties, from his meatloaf to more exotic fare like grilled squid, corn fritters, and conch. We were both unselfconsciously gaining weight and loving it.

As we grew closer to Bill, our eating and television-watching took on an intensity and variety that rivaled our most passionate sexual episodes. Every meal had a significance, both in terms of the ingredients and amounts we were consuming and in terms of the television programs we watched. Bill showed up early for "The Today Show" and cooked everything from porridge to kippers and pancakes. Lunch celebrated the beginning of the afternoon soaps and was thus one of our most important meals. Fish chowder and bouillabaisse appetizers were followed by Bill's famous caesar salad and then a hearty dish like osso buco. Bill was opposed to the stereotypic notion that lunch should be a light, practical meal composed only of pasta and salad. Lunch was an issue for Bill. He felt it was slighted, the very way he had felt slighted and marginalized as a homosexual male. Now that sex was no longer the lingua franca of the household, the playing field was more leveled, but Bill's lunches were almost like crusades. There was an ideological consistency to his insistence that they last from two to three hours, just in time for the three of us to take our warm alcohol-free zabagliones into the living room to watch "Oprah." The large lunches didn't stop Bill from preparing high tea or even larger and more elaborate dinners, and on weekends and holidays, Bill even cooked up a midnight buffet. Within weeks, our apartment was like a cruise ship-at least from the culinary point of view.

Bill could be as temperamental as an artist, and in many ways his fits, in which he would throw a perfectly good paella, coq au vin, or leg of lamb into the garbage, reminded me of the creative agonies of Pollock and DeKooning. I could see that Monica received some degree of stimulation from the scenes Bill threw, and it was a good thing he was gay or she might have had a full-fledged regression. Luckily there had been no gay abstract expressionists, so it was hard for Monica to transfer the powerful emotions she still had for Pollock and DeKooning onto Bill. Larry Rivers was AC/DC, yet he was a pop artist, and Monica had never been stimulated by the work of Andy Warhol, Rauschenberg, or Johns. If she had been, then there would have been no problem in her wanting to fuck a gay man. The hypergraphia satyriasis would have kicked in, and we would have been off to the races. As it was, Monica, Bill, and 1 looked forward to shopping at Sam's Club, the warehouse food outlet off the interstate where you could buy 1000-roll packages of toilet paper, ten-gallon drums of orange juice, and boxes that contained 12 dozen eggs. We went there on Tuesdays and Fridays after dinner, which gave us something to do related to food when we were inundated with feelings of loss over a meal ending. We might have been stuffed, considering the enormous amounts Bill cooked, but all the lust we had for each other was now shifted to varying dishes, and the end of our meals inevitably left us feeling restless, bored, and yearning for the kind of excitement only a discount food outlet could provide.