It's not that I wanted to be married. It's that I wanted a Marriage Equivalent, although I never knew exactly what that was, and often suspected that there was really no such thing. Yet I was convinced there had to be something better than the lonely farce living across town or hall could, with very little time, become.
"We need them for their phillips-head screwdrivers," I said.
Eleanor raised her eyebrows. "That's right," she said, "I keep forgetting you only go out with circumcised men."
And then the nurse-practitioner told me that if I had a child it might straighten out my internal machinery a bit. Prevent "Career Women's Diseases." Lumps often disappear during pregnancy. "Can I extend my prescription on the sedatives?" I asked. With each menstrual cycle, she went on to explain, the body is like a battered boxer, staggering back from its corner into the ring, and as the years go by, the body does this with increasing difficulty. Its will gets broken. It screws up. A woman's body is so busy preparing to make babies that every year that goes by without one is another year of rejection that is harder and harder for it to recover from. Soon it could go completely crazy.
When I went out to see him at gigs, I would come in and sit alone at a table way in the back. I felt like a stray groupie, a devoted next-door neighbor. He would come talk to me on his breaks, but he talked to almost everybody who was there. Everyone got equal time, equal access. He was public. He was no longer mine. I felt foolish and phobic. I felt spermicidal. I drank and smoked too much. I started staying home.
"You can't really be a fallen Protestant," she said. "How can there be any guilt?"
"There can be guilt," I said. "It's my piety, I can cry if I want to."
"But being a fallen Catholic - that's skydiving! Being a fallen Protestant - that's like mugging an old lady, so easy why bother."
I missed him. Love, I realized, was something your spine memorized. There was nothing you could do about that.
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