The Love of My (Other) Life (8 page)

“This isn’t you, you’re not like this.”

“In your world, I must be some kind of sanctimonious nun, who won’t do what it takes.”

He stiffened and glared. “You’re my wife, the most amazing woman and friend and musician ever.

You’re strong and wonderful.”

But I had had enough. I didn’t want to participate in his hallucinations any more, even if he was the most considerate lover I’d ever taken to bed. Not that I had a large sampling to compare him against because I’d married young, but still. I reached inside myself for the union of patience and firmness, the way I often did at work. “Look, I’ve been humoring you.”

“Humoring me, that’s what you call what we did?

I knew we should have done it again right away. The decohering slowed me down. Damn!”

I felt my cheeks burn scarlet. “You seem harmless, despite the delusions and fantasies. But this is real. And there’s a side to it you don’t understand.

So please, just shut up and let me work it out, so I can keep my thumbs and go back to painting.” I marched back to Guy, steeling myself for a difficult conversation. I could feel Brian’s forlorn eyes on me.

Brian sat on the floor of Tessa’s dorm room in Branford College. She had a tiny single, which seemed wallpapered and carpeted with sheet music.

The cello leaning against her desk made a dissonant contrast with the boom box, which was blasting

“Like a Virgin.”

“Isospin should be allowed, it’s a real word,” Brian grumbled. He looked across a scrabble board at Tessa.

“Not in the scrabble dictionary,” Tessa said, wagging her finger at him. “You know the rules. Drink!”

“The scrabble dictionary is out-of-date, unfairly biased against scientific terminology, and just plain wrong, ” Brian said. He reached through the pile of empty Pabst Blue Ribbon cans on the floor to find a full can. His woozy fingers curled around one. He pulled off the tab top and then chugged. Then he belched, an elongated sound like a cow lowing.

Tessa fell over, laughing.

“You’re gonna win just because I can’t spell anymore,” Brian said.

“I’m going to win because I’m the superior player.”

“In your dreams,” Brian returned.

“It’s true, I got 800 on the English SAT.”

“Show off.” Brian sniffed. Then he gave Tessa a serious, brooding look. “What did the male magnet say to the female magnet? From your backside, I found you repulsive. However, seeing you from the front, I find you rather attractive.”

“You don’t like my backside?” Tessa leapt to her feet, turned, and wiggled her tush at him. Just then, the boom box experienced a moment of quiet. “Justify My Love” kicked up.

“This is the song I first got laid to!” Tessa said.

She swayed her hips. She danced rhythmically, seductively, as she sang along with the song—and all the while she stared into Brian’s eyes.

“You said we could only be friends, but you don’t have to have a PhD to know that’s not friendship music.”

“‘Don’t want to be your sister, either, I just wanna be your lover,’” Tessa sang, huskily. Then she ran her tongue over her lips.

Brian grabbed her by the ankles. She tumbled down, laughing. Brian rolled her onto her back and climbed atop her. “What poor schnook did you date rape to this tune?”

“He loved it,” Tessa said, weaving her arms around Brian.

“I bet he did,” Brian said. He pressed his lips against hers, softly and quickly.

“My brother’s math tutor. He was twenty-three.

I was sixteen. I never told anyone, not even David.

Kiss me again, Prof.”

But Brian paused. “What about old David, Mr. Perfect from back home? I don’t want to share you with him.”

“That’s done,” Tessa said. “He wants a girl at school with him. Besides, he was getting boring.”

She faked a yawn and rolled her eyes.

“Good,” Brian said. “Just so you know, I’m telling everyone what we’re about to do. Twice.”

Tessa laughed. “That’s not very gentlemanly of you.”

“Yes, it is, because I’m going to marry you, too,” Brian said. Then he kissed her for real because he meant it.

The ugliness that repels us in nature exists, but it becomes acceptable and even pleasurable in the art that expresses and shows beautifully the ugliness of ugliness,” Guy said. “I will have that skull.” He passed by Brian, blowing dark smoke in his face and sneering in warning.

“I’m not on board with the ugliness of ugliness,” I said, but affected my most unctuous manner.

“Tomorrow afternoon,” I called to Guy’s departing back.

Brian was looking dispiritedly at three teenagers bouldering across Rat Rock, cheering each other on.

He mused, “Climbers have such fun together. That sport is all about camaraderie. I always wanted to do it.”

“You have to give me back the skull before tomorrow,” I told him.

“I never got to learn, though. No time, and other priorities. But I’m glad I spent the time the way I did. I wouldn’t change anything.”

“Brian, focus!” I snapped. “I need the skull.

Seriously!”

He gave me a wan smile, and it was as if most of the fizz had gone out of his internal ginger ale. But as he looked at me, his eyes brightened. “I know.

Let’s get food and have a picnic, like the people in your drawing.”

I snorted. “They’re not having a picnic!”

● ● ●

But a little while later, we were. We sat on a bench along the bike path by the Hudson River boat basin, not far from where Mrs. Leibowitz had gone for her ride. It was evening and the sun slanted down over the river, which reflected back streaks of red, orange, and pink. Across the river rose the variegated Jersey skyline, with tall buildings whose lit windows winked at Manhattan.

I was soon deep in the idea of rendering the whole view as a landscape painting. It would be so breathtaking—I could even give it a Goya-like sadness—it would be beautiful and evocative in the way that nothing at the Frances Gates Gallery even aspired to be. What was wrong with contemporary art that the very principle of beauty had been lost?

That ugliness had been enthroned? That art had become so constrained into individual expressiveness that no one but the artist who assembled it knew what it meant?

Didn’t people realize that they were shortchanging themselves by accepting this drek as art?

“You know what’s weird?” Brian was saying.

“Weird?” I knew damn well what was weird.

“Weird is Cliff Bucknell getting millions for crap.

Weird is Dung Madonna ever getting funded. Annie Sprinkle, for Chrissakes. The junk that passes for art in the Whitney Biennial, that’s weird!” Somehow I had found my way to my feet and was gripping Brian’s arms.

“Down, girl. Boy, you get triggered easily by that art stuff. I meant weird in terms of parallel worlds.”

Brian pried off my fingers and maneuvered me firmly back to my seat beside him on the bench.

“Oh, that. Nothing’s weird. It’s not weird at all, you showing up like a bad virus and claiming to be from a parallel world. Not weird, nope.”

“Ha ha,” Brian gave me an ironic, sidelong glance. “What’s weird are the differences between here and where I came from. Some are minute.

Some are huge. But you’re still Tessa, my wife. You are, and yet, you aren’t. It’s a paradox.”

“You’re not my husband.”

Brian reached over and took my hand gently.

“Believe me, I know things about you. You lost your virginity with your brother’s math tutor. You were sixteen, he was twenty-three. You seduced him in the music room when your parents took your brother to soccer.”

“I tried to seduce him, he said no,” I murmured.

In my mind, a split-screen opened up. On one half, set in Brian’s imaginary alternate universe, I was sixteen again, all skinny limbs and a big mouth freshly released from braces. I was passionately kissing that math tutor. I could still see how hot he was: burly and dark-haired with clean-cut features that belonged on a movie actor, not on a math nerd. Then I unbuttoned his shirt, and I could almost … almost … feel the juicy triumph of the moment.

On the other half of the screen of my mind, in the real world as I knew it, I remembered running my hands along the tutor’s shoulders. He turned away, told me I was too young and innocent, and to stop it because I didn’t know what I was doing. I had never felt so vulnerable.

Not long after that, David had a party. His parents were out of town, and I finagled to get him alone in a closet and have my way with him. After that, we’d been together more or less forever… .

Until three years ago.

“There was no rejection in my world, Lolita,” Brian said. He was peering closely into my face, must have seen the emotions chasing themselves across it.

I shook my head and grinned. “My mom was sick upstairs in bed. I was so humiliated. But no one knows about that, not even Ofee!”

Brian raised my hand to his lips and kissed my palm. “You love red wine, but you’re allergic to it.

You sometimes get a histamine reaction. Here.”

He released my hand and gave me a folded photograph.

I was suspicious but I opened it. There I was, smiling back at me, radiant in a big white wedding dress with a gossamer veil floating around me like a white aura. On either side of me stood Ofee and Brian, both in tuxedoes.

“It’s photo-shopped,” I stated, though a shiver went along my spine. “Ofee would never wear a tuxedo, not in any universe.”

“Happiest day of my life!” Brian said.

“Do you need medication? This is a really elaborate stalker gig.” I held out the photo for him to take.

Brian secreted it back on his person. His eyes were effervescent when they returned to me. “Let’s go back to your apartment. One of your drawings showed people having sex.”

“None of my drawings shows people having sex!

And neither are we. From now on, we’re strictly platonic.”

But it wasn’t a vow I could keep when we got back to my apartment. Brian kissed me in that inscrutably irresistible way that high-jacked my good sense, and I blamed my lack of willpower on the red wine and my histamine reaction.

Too bad I didn’t get a histamine reaction in this world.

The next morning, I left a note for Brian next to him on the bed where he was still sleeping soundly. “Thanks for everything, you’re amazing, please leave,” read the note. “PS, I saved the last yogurt in the fridge for your breakfast. Please put my skull on the kitchen table.”

I was in my office helping Mr. Jenkins figure out his amplifier telephone when cacophony erupted in the church. I had a sinking feeling, and when I peeked out into the church, sure enough, there in the nave was Brian performing magic for a crowd.

He was clumsy and obvious, narrating his inept trickery with jolly, oblivious patter. It made me groan. I slammed my office door shut.

“EH?” shouted Mr. Jenkins.

“Nothing, nothing, Mr. Jenkins,” I said, waving him to silence. I took a moment to think deeply.

What to do, what to do?

Then I grabbed my cell phone. It was still working, though for how much longer, I didn’t know. My mobile bill was getting a little stale. I peered out through a crack in the door and waited for my best friend to answer his cell phone, half a world away.

“Tessy, sweetheart, is that you?” Ofee drawled.

“Ofee, I miss you!” I cried.

“I miss you too, Tessy, but I only have a moment.

I’m actually in Scorpio pose right now. Demonstrating for my students.”

I had a flash of Ofee, unibrow and all, twisting himself into a pretzel while talking on the phone to me. In the background, beautiful Thai people served fruit and drinks to impressed onlookers.

“Okay, sweetie. Don’t you still do privates with the dean’s wife at Columbia? Have you heard of a guy named Brian Tennyson?”

“Brian who? Oh, wait, yeah. The physicist. He’s an author, too,” Ofee said. His voice changed timbre, and I could tell he was transitioning to a different pose.

“What pose?” I asked. “You mean he’s a real professor?”

“Flying crow,” Ofee said. He raised his voice, speaking to someone near him. “That’s great, Martin, what do you call that, Sleeping Warrior with piña colada? Just breathe.” His voice returned to a softer tone. “Tessy, I heard some gossip. He went crazy.

Break with reality. Institutionalized. Big scandal.”

That makes sense. I opened my office door wider to see what was going on.

Brian was trying to summon a quarter from elderly Mrs. Simon’s ear while doing a card trick for a choir singer. He yanked the old lady’s wig, pulling it askew.

I yelped. “Gotta go, love you!” I threw down my cell phone and darted toward Brian.

“Here, Blue Eyes, pick a card.” Brain fanned out a deck of cards and held it toward the choir singer, who obliged.

“Help, I can’t see through my hair,” quavered Mrs. Simon.

The choir singer replaced the card in the deck.

Brian grasped Mrs. Simon’s wig and righted it.

He dropped half the deck, saved the other half, and triumphantly held up a single card. “Shazam, the nine of spades!”

“I drew the three of diamonds,” said the blue-eyed choir singer.

“I’m sure it was the nine of spades,” Brian insisted.

“Three of—”

“Brian, time for lunch,” I said, reaching through the group. “Let’s go.”

“Tessa, I missed you this morning. That wine last night really zonked me out.” He nuzzled and then kissed me.

I tried to push him off me and lead him away, but he turned back to the choir singer and resumed arguing good-naturedly.

Naturally, Reverend Pincek chose that moment to bustle up and join us. “Tessa, I didn’t know you had a boyfriend.”

“He’s not my boyfriend.”

“Well, he seems very nice,” the rev said. “Maybe he could entertain the kids at our Saturday open house. Will he work for free?”

“He’s only in town for a few days,” I said, hurriedly, to dispel such a disastrous notion.

But Brian suddenly tuned in. “I’m here until Sunday afternoon. I love kids. I wanted some of my own.”