At the Bottom of Everything(16)

Not since first discovering masturbation had I overused myself quite like I did with Anna in those months. I felt like a wrung-out washcloth. It was as if we were conducting some sort of experiment, as if we’d been sent to keep each other from ever getting anything done. I hadn’t thought about law school in I didn’t know how long. I hadn’t done laundry in so many weeks that I had to take socks and underwear from Joel’s dresser. I would have said that I wasn’t much of a tutor before, but now I’d go through whole appointments without opening my mouth to do more than yawn.

“How long do you think we can keep going like this?” Anna said once.

“I have no idea. We should be submitting records to Guinness.”

“What do we do if we fall in love?”

“More or less what we’re doing,” I said, pushing her bedroom door shut.

I had rarely in my life been more certain that what I was doing was foolish, and I had never cared so little. At Nicholas’s birthday party, during which a horde of boys raced around the house waving lightsabers, Anna pulled me into the guest bedroom and kissed me with lips that tasted like ice-cream cake. On a Sunday in April, when the weather was on its annual campaign to make D.C. seem not just habitable but glorious, we hid behind a tree off the Billy Goat Trail and, while I peeled off her shirt, I whispered that I loved her. Maybe I did love her, I thought. Maybe love didn’t have to be so complicated and bloody; maybe “I love you” could be not much more than a sexual exclamation, a way of expressing happiness and disbelief.

But then the strangest thing happened, as suddenly as an attack of hay fever: I got jealous.

It started, I think, when I asked her one day (we were getting dressed in her bedroom, she was brushing her hair in front of the closet mirror) what was the longest that one of her affairs had ever lasted. She thought for a few more seconds than I would have liked and said, “I think with Max it was like five months.”

I made a noise that apparently conveyed something pathetic, because she came over and cradled my head. “I never liked him half as much as I like you. He was full of himself.”

That night when I was home, and for the next couple of days afterward, I found myself returning to the thought of Max like a loose tooth. He’d watched her clasp her bra, just the way I had. He’d felt the notches on her spine and the pale fuzz at the bottom of her back.

“What’s wrong?” she said the next time we were together. “You’re not kissing me normal.”

And it was true: I wasn’t doing anything normal. I had a miserable new pastime. On the afternoons I wasn’t with her, when I usually went to the bookstore/coffee shop near my apartment to sit with my laptop, I found myself going to the one where Max worked in Tenleytown. She’d pointed him out to me once that March—she’d made us cross the street—and at the time he’d meant nothing to me, or if he had meant anything it was what a conquered people mean to their conqueror: Look at him scuttling along! But now that seemed impossible.

Now I watched him replacing the milk in the fridge, ringing people up, leaning on the counter reading Black Book, and I seethed with the private insanity of an assassin. I performed Google searches in the idiotic hope of learning his last name. I watched him get into his car (green Camry, COEXIST bumper sticker), and one afternoon, before shame or sanity stopped me, I even started to follow him.

A large part of the problem was that he was, in just about every measurable way, more attractive than me. I say this now as if it were a sad but simple fact, but at the time I felt as if my entire future depended on my finding an angle from which it wouldn’t be true. He was definitely taller and stronger than me; that was a lost cause. But there had to be things I had over him, didn’t there? Maybe something about my eyes? My stomach dropped the first time I heard that he had a slight southern accent (he was instructing a customer—wrongly!—on the fastest way to the Tidal Basin). He was Texan, I learned, after I’d overheard two women in the same day ask in just the same scarcely-controlling-themselves voices where he was from.

He was long without being quite lanky; his forearms were the forearms of someone with a gym membership. But there was a delicacy to him too, the little bit of stubble on his cheeks, the strands of black hair that hung over his eyebrows. He looked like someone who’d talk to you about the global food system, or how he was trying to phase plastic out of his life. Once in a while he wore a little flat-brimmed black canvas hat, which I wanted someone to join me in laughing at.

And he had tattoos. Tattoos! (Had Anna ever kissed them? Had he given her a tattoo-by-tattoo tour?) I was consumed for the better part of a morning in figuring out what the one on his left arm was—if it could only be something moronic, then I felt that I would finally be vindicated. A wheel? A ship’s steering wheel? Was it a naval thing—maybe he was from a Texas military family? Or was it the kind of wheel where each spoke represents a different realm of reality, and at the center is your desire to demonstrate that you once spent three weeks in Tibet?