Ali Eteraz - Native Believer

Marie-Anne had not always been afraid of getting pregnant. Babies were how we had bonded. While we had been dating in Atlanta, until we graduated and met her parents, we always played games coming up with the names we would give our children, what they might look like, what their characteristics would be. We would have three. Two boys and a girl. The boys would be musicians. They would form a boy band out of Florida. One of them would then turn out to be gay and go off to Europe. The other, after a bout with alcoholism, would revive his career on Broadway. The girl would be an astrophysicist and marry a Latino musician who reminded her of her brothers. But eventually we had to stop playing these games. The turning point had been the dinner at the steakhouse in Buckhead when I met Dr. Quinn and Mrs. Quinn for the first time. After the initial pleasantries had been offered and the steaks had been consumed and the wineglasses were on their third refill, Marie-Anne had announced that she’d brought us all together to get blessings for our engagement. It hadn’t gone well. While her parents had done their best to feign politeness, the next few months revealed that they didn’t think Marie-Anne and I would make a good pairing. The stated reason hadn’t been, as we’d feared, anything related to race or nationality. Dr. and Mrs. Quinn were elites in the New South. They didn’t subscribe to the old prejudices regarding coloration and ancestry. They had signed numerous petitions trying to take down the Confederate flag at the state capital. They even had a dog named Malcolm. Their objections to me had been far more ephemeral and, in a way, far more personal.

We thought our only daughter would marry a quarterback from Clemson, Mrs. Quinn had put it in an e-mail I wasn’t supposed to read. Even a black construction worker that could handle you like a husband is supposed to. What is this pretty little boy going to do if you fall down the stairs? He’d probably start crying.

Marie-Anne had tried to reason with them, telling them that we didn’t live in the ancient societies where women were shrinking violets and men were their strong-armed defenders. The world belongs equally to women, she had assured. And I know how to make my way in it. The purpose of marriage today is companionship, emotional connection. He understands me in a way no quarterback or construction worker could. We connect in the mind.

Dr. Quinn, who had a political bent and enjoyed talking foreign policy with me, accepted his daughter’s choice. It became a regular thing between us to forward interesting political commentary to each other’s inbox. He had forsaken his ancestral Catholicism and gotten involved with a Unitarian Universalist congregation and was eager to find places in the world where the message of his church might best resonate. He didn’t really ask me for my input so much as he told me what his pastor had decided to do. I always suspected — and he made no effort to conceal — that he was far more dovish around me than he was otherwise. In this mutually indulged deception we formed an odd but comfortable connection.

Marie-Anne’s mother, however, aside from the perfunctory appearance at the wedding, hadn’t changed her mind toward me. Perhaps it was her own scientific background as a geneticist. Perhaps it was a traditionalist aesthetic dissonance about how men and women were supposed to look together. She had become more distant, more intractable. If Marie-Anne ever called her, rather than asking how I was doing, Mrs. Quinn instead tried to talk up some of Marie-Anne’s old boyfriends. She went so far as to make a social media page inviting Marie-Anne to a get-together at their Charleston home where all the other attendees were big and tall twenty-something men from South Carolina and Georgia. For four years Marie-Anne dealt with her mother with patient perseverance. She took me down to Charleston three times a year — Independence Day, Thanksgiving, Easter — hoping that her mother would be won over. Nothing changed.

At last Marie-Anne gave up. She allowed herself to be excommunicated from the religion of family. She told her father that she wouldn’t ever come back to Charleston. And she refused to break when her mother, in the guise of informing her about some tragedy in the extended family, wrote her long self-flagellating missives. It was an act of tremendous strength on Marie-Anne’s part to resist her family for my sake. No one else in this life had ever felt inclined to stand up for me like this.

That was why I couldn’t hate her for bringing pestilence upon us. The pull that our predecessors exerted upon us was a powerful thing. It was a force so strong that the only adequate release we had devised in response was to produce successors. But because of me, Marie-Anne had pincered the relationship with her predecessors into nothingness. Perhaps that was why she no longer wanted to look forward in time.

If things had stayed the way they were, we probably would’ve come around to getting a handle on the mess our family life had become. Maybe I would have been able to convince her that the solution to an imperfect family was not to kill the idea of family but to make another try, to keep pushing the aspiration of a perfect family life into the next generation. Something like that might have gotten us back to the baby talk. But instead the weight gain had struck. Marie-Anne’s body image took a nosedive, and sexing up her mind was the only kind of intimacy she would accept. Bottom line: there was no room for making children when the only communion was verbal and manual.

Mind sex, as we called it, wasn’t all that bad. What we lacked in physical performance we made up in narrative depth. We explored more of our subterranean interests. We were willing to say more deviant things in each other’s ears. There was something of science fiction in our intimacy. Didn’t all the scientists predict that in the future we would cease to have physical sex and be satisfied purely by the direct stimulation of our erogenous neurons using electronic stimulation? Marie-Anne and I decided that, as Sartre and Simone had been pioneers of the contemporary swinging culture, she and I were at the forefront of the kind of sex people would be having thirty years from now. At some point, she said, she would write a book about our experiences. It would be entitled Mindtimacy . Perfect for the virtual age.

Still, there were issues. Chief among the challenges of mind sex was that it was entirely reliant on conversation. When something created a mental barrier between two people it was impossible to appeal to physical connection to overcome that distance. Silence forced us to float away from one another. Each of us in separate quarters. Alone. Dissatisfied. Resentful of the other for withholding orgasms.

That was where we found ourselves now.

* * *

Being banished to the living room meant that I had plenty of time to become familiar with my surroundings. The first thing I did was reorganize the kitchen, reshelving everything from pots to wineglasses. Then I went through the bookshelf and familiarized myself with every book upon it. No more surprises. Next I set my sights on the two drawers underneath the television, which were filled with all sorts of film and music that we hadn’t gotten around to. I took all the music, burned it onto our hard drives, and discarded the vast quantities of CDs. At last I moved to our film library, most of which was composed of DVDs that Marie-Anne had brought over from her Charleston home, simply sweeping them into a suitcase and dragging it over when her mother told her to clear everything out.

I had never gone through the collection before. I was surprised by it. It contained almost nothing from Hollywood. Many of the films had come down to Marie-Anne from her father. There was a lot of Italian neorealism. There was some early Polanski, including his first work, the taut and tense exploration of infidelity, Knife in the Water . Then I got to the bulk of the films. Almost all of them were French art-house flicks from the fifties to the eighties. With plenty of time to burn, I blew through them. It was an aspect of Western cultural history I hadn’t consumed before. My favorite among these, from a cinematic standpoint, was The Battle of Algiers , about the French occupation of Algeria. Raw and violent. I liked it despite its overtly political flavor.