Romance: The Art of my Love: a story of betrayal, desire, love, and marriage (2 page)

Steve thought people needed sex. It was a matter of human physiology, and there was nothing to be done about that. Having a consistent sex partner made the job much simpler. There was no need to dream up new methods, be creative, or break a sweat trying to lure a new girl or guy into your bed. No romantic hand-holding, walks in the moonlight, flowers, or making out in dark movie theaters. Steve had absolutely no time for that sort of silliness. And I didn’t demand anything like that from him. I followed my grandmother’s teachings and took a purely practical approach to our relationship. Everything went very smoothly for Steve and me at first. It also helped that he was such a friendly guy, easy to talk to, and he knew tons of funny stories. He could make me laugh like nobody else.

I had so many questions about sex, and hoped that Steve could help me answer them. In that regard, I was to be sorely disappointed. Talking about sex was something that Steve never liked. He wouldn’t and couldn’t. We always did it in the same position. I had to be on top because he was afraid of crushing me. And before that I always had to get him ready orally. Steve explained that otherwise he couldn’t come, especially using a condom. I never got any oral sex. He and his needs were at the center of the process. I was just a tool to satisfy him. In the end, that became clear to me. Actually, I knew it from the very start, but as time went on, it started to annoy me. The most surprising thing for me was how we had managed to do it that first night. I had been practically passed out, after all. Apparently, I do a good job following instructions even when semiconscious. All in all, it just didn’t work out with Steve.

And then, after my grandmother died, Paul appeared on the scene. With Paul, everything was completely different. First of all, Paul was literally the man of my dreams: tall, thin, and blond with enormous blue eyes. I especially loved his eyelashes, which were very long, and swept upward like a girl’s. They were dark at the roots and lighter at the ends. I could spend all day looking at those eyelashes.

Paul was naturally quiet and shy. He was originally from Boston. His parents, who were both engineers, had fairly quickly realized they were better off apart and split up. After a while they both started new families and had more children. Paul bounced back and forth between them until he finished school. Later he admitted to me that he only applied to colleges as far away from Boston as possible. He was tired of being a living reminder of the mistake his parents had made, and he never did have very warm relationships with them. Later I realized that Paul had long felt left out, unneeded, and so he had escaped as soon as he could.

Despite his quietness, or maybe because of it, Paul had a good amount of success with the opposite sex. He gratefully accepted every sign of attention, and he tried to provide each one of his partners with as much pleasure as he could. Before me, he had mostly gone out with older girls who were demanding and straightforward about what they desired. When we started dating, what Paul liked most about me was that I had no requirements and made no demands. 

If I believed in fate, I would say that we were simply destined for one another. He and I were both lonely, not especially wanted by anyone, both looking for some human warmth and sympathy, but also not accustomed to having anyone around. The first time we had a conversation, we found out we had the same tastes in almost everything. We liked the same films and music, we loved to take long walks down the street or through the woods without talking, and we could spend hours without exchanging a word, thinking our own thoughts. The fact that we could now keep quiet together, and that keeping quiet together was cozier and nicer for both of us than doing it alone, was probably the deciding factor in our relationship.

For the first time in my life, I was enjoying a feeling of stability. Paul had become a constant in my life. Like me, he wasn’t prone to sentimentality, and he never spoke to me about love, or about how lonely he was without me. With every gesture and every glance, though, he let me know how dear I was to him, how much he needed me. His face shone with a special light when he saw me. He even told me directly, a few times – which was very unlike him – that he couldn’t imagine a future without me. That was bigger than a declaration of love. For me, anyway. I understood very well what I meant to him, because he meant absolutely everything to me, too: security, stability, someone to take care of me, affection, even a family. We really did become each other’s family, right from the start.

Keeping to my covenant with my grandmother, I studied art and even did a pretty good job of it. But I never did learn to sell my paintings for any sort of decent money. For this reason when I graduated from college, I had to compromise, and declare myself not just an artist, but an art teacher. I found a job teaching high school. The school where I ended up was a good one, an expensive private school for girls. All the girls who signed up for my class really wanted to learn. There were no discipline problems, no afterschool activities to supervise, and, after work, I still had the energy to draw for myself all the things I could never stop drawing.

Paul also worked hard. He found a job teaching English and literature at a local college. His real dream, though, was to write a screenplay. He had been working on one for a long time. It was a cross between an action film about bank robbers and a comedy. It seemed to me that the main problem with his writing was that ambiguity between genres. If he could have just decided which one he was writing – an action film or a comedy – he would have had an easier time, and finished the writing without a hitch... but he couldn’t decide. So, every evening, before going to bed he sat up till late at his computer in the kitchen typing, and then erasing, almost everything he had written.

That is how our life was. I worked at the school, and then painted in the attic. There was a tiny closet that Paul converted into a studio for me. Paul worked at the college and wrote. Even books or television were a luxury for us. We were both permanently exhausted. Our sex life was not what you would call fulfilling or varied. Paul was always very gentle and sweet with me, though. He never rushed me, and never insisted when I wasn’t in the mood. And I found it hard to deny him anything. He was so tall, thin and quiet. He blushed so beautifully. One glance from him, and immediately something inside me, in my stomach, constricted. I wanted to hold his head tight and stroke it. And feed him so that he’d put on at least a little weight.

But all my efforts were futile. Paul never gained an ounce. He was a hardcore tennis player. At least once a week, usually on the weekends, he made the trip to his tennis club. His regular partner was a Mexican guy named Juan. Paul talked about Juan a lot at home, so much that I started to feel like I knew him, even though I never actually met him. From what Paul said, Juan was good at tennis and had played for a long time, but he never had any real success because of his explosive temper. Mistakes and points lost threw Juan off kilter and interfered with his concentration. He’d then make even more mistakes and completely lose control over himself. He was the kind of tennis player who swears on the court and could break his racket in a fit of rage. That would have been fine if they only ever played against each other. However, when they played doubles against another pair, things were different. Then Juan’s anger was directed at Paul and Paul alone. All Juan’s mistakes and lost points were Paul’s fault. Paul put up bravely with Juan’s outbursts because they still won more often than they lost, and also because, with his busy work schedule, it wouldn’t be easy to find another regular partner at the club.

Sometimes I wondered whether our life could be called a happy one. We were young, and got along well together. We never talked about love, but for the two of us it was kind of understood. Otherwise, why would we have gotten married? We didn’t have much of a wedding, just a short civil ceremony. No fancy dress, celebration, or honeymoon. We just sat in a restaurant and drank some champagne.

Did I mind? Had I wanted something else, something more elegant and romantic? I don’t know. Honestly, I don’t think so. My grandmother had taught me to be suspicious of romantic declarations, flowers, and other sentimental nonsense. I had never cared much for dresses. My wardrobe consists mostly of jeans and shorts in various stages of disintegration, which I wear with t-shirts and sneakers. When I work, the paint always ends up on my clothes eventually, by some mysterious manner, so I didn’t want to spend the little extra money we had on expensive things that I’d just ruin with paint. Life with my grandmother had taught me practicality and thrift. True, when I started working at the private school, I couldn’t teach in jeans and had to beef up my wardrobe a little. Even there, I spent most of my time in my artist’s smock, anyway. Nobody could see what I was wearing under that smock. Paul had also had limited funds his whole life, and was used to living modestly and making do with not very much. We weren’t all that interested in clothes, cars and other status symbols. They just didn’t seem necessary to us.

My husband was the first person in my life who I could talk with honestly – literally about everything. Before I met him, I didn’t even know how much I had missed that. With Steve, if we talked, it was never for long – we never had much time. He didn’t burden me with his problems and he always tried to make me laugh, but we never got to the point where we’d have a serious conversation. With Paul, though, talking was always fascinating. He was smart, well-read, and educated, and he knew how to listen. At least he always listened to
me
very attentively, even when he was tired, sick, or in a bad mood. He could spend hours discussing with me any sort of stupid incident at the gas station or the store, or problems at work.

Other parts of our life tended to be difficult and dull – to the point that I even stopped perceiving it in color. For the last year, I’d been painting in monochrome. Black, gray, and a little bit of white, like black-and-white photography. As if somebody had switched off the colors in the world around me. Then they turned off smells and loud sounds. Everything was stale and lackluster, as if it were reaching me through a smoky haze. I even seemed dull and boring to myself. And sometimes a nasty thought loomed in my head: Is this really what happily ever after is like?

My office at the school was next to the film and theater classroom. A big-breasted blond woman named Diana ran it. Diana had always loved artists, so she wanted to make friends from the start. I may not have been a typical bohemian, but you know what they say about any port in a storm. Plus, I adored really good movies, not just dumb comedies and sappy dramas. Diana realized that I would be an appreciative audience, and she started introducing me to the classics. Maybe that was the reason I began painting in black and white, thanks to all the black and white movies Diana served up to me.

Diana was married to our history teacher, Pete. Pete was older than her, a shortish, stocky guy with a mane of uncut, unkempt hair and a permanent smattering of gray stubble on his chin. He was the perfect image of an eccentric old professor and really did know a lot.

Diana told me once that she had married him out of desperation. Her love affairs always ended badly. Diana loved drama, which is why she taught it, and she couldn’t imagine a life without passion, tears and farewells. After her last unhappy and very public romance (her young man that time had been our gym teacher), when she had been left alone and sad, Pete had taken her out to dinner and proposed marriage. It turned out that he had been in love with her for a long time, but had been afraid to speak up because she had a boyfriend. Once they broke up, Pete thought he ought to seize the opportunity, strike the iron while it was hot, and so on. Anyway, Diana thought it over (for one night) and decided that she was sick and tired of the dating scene, of all the hellos and goodbyes. She was already 35 and she was done living over her parents’ garage. It was high time she had her own home and her own family. 

Unfortunately, Diana’s wedding didn’t put an end to her love for drama. Now it just smoldered within her, in secret. I’m not sure why Diana picked me as her confidante. Probably the reasons were purely geographical. My office was right next door to hers, and we talked every day during lunch. And my husband didn’t work at the same school. Diana thought that Paul and I had the ideal relationship, and I didn’t try to convince her otherwise. I talked about myself as little as possible and didn’t really have anything special to talk about. There wasn’t any drama in my life. Plus, Diana was very sophisticated when it came to sex. I, on the other hand, remained thoroughly unsophisticated and learned a lot from her.

Diana was not satisfied by her sex life with Pete. Sex with him was boring, uninteresting. Yes, he tried to please her, but he never took the initiative and he was not inventive. And when a furious Diana would banish him from their marital bed after another scandal (and she loved scandals, the kind with screaming, tears, swearing and threats of divorce), he would obediently totter off to sleep on the couch in his study, where he would quietly masturbate, alone.

Diana divulged all of this to me with no sign of embarrassment, never worried that I might say something to Pete. In that, she was correct – I never could have said a word to Pete, even if I had wanted to. I didn’t even know how to talk about such things. Soon I started to see him differently, with Diana’s eyes, rather than just with mine. That made it agonizingly uncomfortable for me to see him at all, and so I tried to avoid him at school.

Diana, meanwhile, started to take lovers, and she experimented with them. They were her route to uninhibited passion and drama lacking in her family life. During lunch, she would tell me everything, in detail. Those details were too much for my active imagination. Her stories and her approach to sex made me start thinking about my life with Paul. No, I certainly had no need for drama. Definitely not screaming, scandals and divorce. Since I had met Paul, I had never even looked at other men, and I hadn’t wanted anyone but him. It had never once occurred to me that Paul might cheat on me with another woman. But now, hearing Diana’s adventure stories, I started to think about it.