Francis Levy - Erotomania - A Romance

Along the way, Bill and Monica were becoming interested in fine wines. There was constant talk of Chateau this or that, the grand crus and the premier grand crus, and arguments about the excellence of unattainably expensive wines like the Lafitte Rothschild '66. Naturally, because of my ongoing membership in AA, I staved out of these discussions, but I was satisfied. With my tastes for both food and television expanding almost as quickly as my waist, I was finding a new sense of adventure in life, which 1 suspect was exactly what General Shapiro was talking about.

Yes, 1 was fat again, but after all the months of uncertainty and fear, when 1'd come to after explosive sex not even knowing where 1 was, after all the months of haunting art galleries and museums, after all the worrying about landlords and structural damage, 1 was truly happy and well adjusted for the first time in years. 1 could just see General Shapiro smiling and, with that false modesty, declaiming, "It's you guys who did the work."

It's not that Monica and I no longer had problems. No couple is immune. General Shapiro used to say, "When you stop having problems, you're either dead or having an affair." But our problems kept changing. Now that sex and food were no longer the issue, we had to contend with our weights and our elevated blood sugars. We lived on the second floor, and it was becoming increasingly hard to walk up the stairs. In addition, Monica's ass had become so big that it sometimes shook the toilet seat from its hinges-but these were designer problems compared to what we had faced in the past. And, in spite of the fact we were no longer having sex, l loved Monica more than ever.

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For the longest time I was sure I'd come to the last stop on the line. Monica, Bill, and I never disagreed anymore. Every night exemplified the fact that human beings can live in peace and harmony if they talk out their differences. We'd eat in front of the television together, watching the programs that had been agreed on beforehand. Usually the three of us sat on the couch, pulling over little tray tables, which we stacked in the corner of the kitchen at the end of each meal. There were times when we sat together at the dining table. We did this, for instance, on the night Bill cooked up a fondu and there had to be some place to put the cheese pot. Occasionally we ate at the table when we were having Chinese dishes like Peking duck, which require several different plates (for the sliced duck, the bones, the pancakes, the scallions, and the hoisin sauce). But our dining table was far from the television, and all of us agreed that the distance deprived us of a certain intimacy with whatever program we were watching.

Our bliss seemed complete until the day Bill informed us he was leaving. There had been no warning, no way of foreseeing he had been unhappy-and he wasn't. He just, as he put it, "wanted something more." Bill was going home to Kansas to live with his mother. Bill's father had been a soybean farmer; as he prospered, he'd employed many farmhands, one of whom had introduced Bill to the pleasures of fellatio. Bill's father had always hated his son's love of cooking and sewing. He was embarrassed by the boy. But his relationship with the farmhand was the last straw. Discovering Bill and the farmhand in an empty silo, he had thrown Bill out of the house despite his mother's protests. Bill's attempt at marriage and fatherhood had been a concession to his father's values. But his failure had sent him into a tailspin; he'd been spared the life of homelessness and self-abnegation by me that day in the bus station. By now his father was long dead, and when he'd written his mother, she'd opened her arms to him. The farm had been sold, and when Bill told his mother of his great dream of running a restaurant that would cater to gay farmhands, called Cock n' Bull, she fully supported the idea. Kansas was no longer the way it had been when he was a boy growing up; there were substantial gay communities, in even the most rural areas, whose needs were waiting to be met.

Monica and I threw Bill a surprise banquet during which we served not only Bill's favorite dishes, but those he had only dreamt of making, like pheasant under glass. That evening the television was his. We placed the remote in a box, wrapped it in beautiful paper, tied a ribbon around it, and handed it to him the minute he walked in. Bill was totally overwhelmed when he walked into the apartment to see the trouble we had gone to, and after all the tears and hugs he insisted 1 order in Chinese and watch any news magazine I wanted to see-even if they were the lesser ones like "MTV Cribs." He couldn't bear to see me white knuckling it through gourmet dishes and watching reality TV (despite my growing weakness for it) when I was dreaming of Chinese and "Nightline." Even though I was embarrassed, I caved in-especially since my pyorrhea had been acting up again and I needed softer foods like lo mein. I didn't want the evening to end. I had the two people in the world who were most important to me and my most favorite programs and food. Thinking it over afterwards, I realized that Bill hadn't become any more enamored of news magazines or Chinese food; he had just wanted me to be happy during our last moments together. I remarked to myself how curious it was that I didn't feel the same way. I loved Bill and wished him the best. But, after all, we only had one television, and while Bill had been served everything he could have ever desired, he certainly didn't get to see his favorite programs, the way I had been hogging the tube.

The mind can play strange tricks. I had blocked the fact that Bill had departed. I was shocked returning home to an empty kitchen that first night after he left. Now Monica and I were like two siblings left alone to fend for ourselves with the parent gone. I'd been doing some volunteer work for a local amateur theater club which was mounting a revival of Fiorello, and when I came home I found Monica lying on the sofa in front of "Oprah" like a beached whale. We'd gotten to the point where we knew each other so well we didn't even need to say anything. Monica went on watching as if I wasn't there.

When "Oprah" ended she said, "I guess we'll just order in some Chinese." I don't know what got into me. I suspect it was some sort of conditioned response provoked by the timing of the finish of the program and the mention of take-out Chinese, but I pulled my dick out of my pants and held it in front of her mouth. She looked at it with the same welcome you might have given a burglar crawling through a bedroom window in the middle of the night. She didn't scream. Her expression was a mixture of amazement, disgust, and fear. I sheepishly stuck my dick back in my pants and flipped our remote to CNN.

Going back to a strict regimen of Chinese food would have perpetuated the same old patterns and would not have been taking into account the growth of Monica's personality-or of her stomach for that matter. I knew that Bill's departure had traumatized her, but Monica also had a tendency to push her feelings down to the deepest recesses of her being, which, considering the increased space her being took up, was now quite a distance from top to bottom. She was plainly sinking into a depression in which nothing mattered. 1 could have eaten Chinese food everyday and it wouldn't have been a symptom of anything. However,1 knew that Monica's willingness to return to our old habits was not a sign of mental health. Monica had been Bill's sous chef and 1 thought getting her back in the kitchen again would be the answer, though it was important that she start small. 1 suggested we take time out of our regimented television schedule to hold a marathon screening of recordings of "The Martha Stewart Show" that we'd made when it looked like Martha was headed to prison, but Monica wasn't responsive.