At some point in Connie’s moisturizing, her hands downshifted. All that manic whipping around turned into something gentler, more deliberate. She had reached that point when the lotion, absorbed into the skin, ceased being a sloppy slick and now retarded as much as lubricated motion. She was no longer just applying the lotion. She was working it in with more attentive strokes, concentrating on one finger at a time and on the little blond webbing between fingers. She conjoined her hands as if in sensuous prayer and then unconjoined them to make a pass across the spur of a thumb, all of this as patiently as a player working oil into a new ball glove. She concluded (her attention half turned now to something new) with a series of ritualized, perfectly silent hand embraces, one hand clasping the other, the other hand clasping the first, the first on top again, and so on, conveying to anyone watching an indescribable sense of satisfaction at another satisfying job complete. I tell you without exaggeration that I was brought to tears. I admit, it could not have been just anyone. I would not have been brought to tears watching Big Jim the Ranger hydrate his hands. It was Connie who brought me to tears and always made me sorry that I did not understand in a more intuitive and personal way the multitude of minor banes people everywhere around me were trying to soothe in what were so easy to dismiss as vain and empty rituals of comfort.
“You’re doing it again,” she said, without looking over.
“What?”
“Staring at me. Objectifying me.”
“I’m not objectifying you.”
“You’re always objectifying me,” she said. “You idealize me, and then you’re disappointed when it turns out I’m not perfect. You blame me for not being godlike. It’s tiresome.”
“Trust me,” I said. “If somebody knows you’re not perfect, it’s me.”
“Then why do you do it? Why do you scrutinize me? Aren’t you sick of it by now? Especially when you’ve made it painfully clear just how far I fall short?”
“I used to think you were perfect, but those days are long past.”
“So please, stop looking.”
“I wish I had let you teach me about lotion,” I said.
“Teach you about lotion?”
“Yeah, the reasons for it.”
“The reasons for lotion are self-evident,” she said. “You put it on, you feel better.”
“I never feel better. I always feel icky.”
“Not after you rub it in. After you rub it in, you feel good. Your hands feel good. They feel moisturized.”
“But what does that matter when they’re just going to become all liver spotted, bony, thin skinned, and tendony?”
“Because it’s what you do with them in the meantime,” she said, turning at last and slapping my forehead with her palm. She turned back and, peering up at God, made a vigorous full-armed gesture of supplication that might have been comedic if it didn’t go on so long. “Now take a squirt and rub it in and see if your hands don’t feel better.”
“I don’t think I will,” I said.
“No,” she said, “because if you did that, you might like it. And heaven forbid you should like something, knowing what’s coming, knowing they just turn liver spotted and die. Better never do it at all than do it, enjoy it, and lose it in the end.”
I stood up and walked away. Then I came back.
“You didn’t return my call,” I said.
“You have to stop calling, Paul.”
“It’s the time of night. I’m not in my right mind.”
“The time of night is half the problem.”
“I try just to text.”
“I’ve never once received a single text from you.”
“Texting is for children, I hate texting, it hurts my fingers. But that doesn’t mean I don’t try.”
“A call or a text, Paul. At that hour, they’re pretty much signaling the same thing.”
“I wasn’t calling to get back together,” I said. “We said we could be friends. Friends call friends.”
“We can’t get back together,” she said. “We will never get back together.”
“And that wasn’t why I was calling.”
“Why, then?”
“Night.”
She looked over at me for the second time.
“It’s not my problem anymore,” she said.
The phrase “pussy whipped” gets the job done, I guess. It evokes. You picture a milquetoast, a little pansy boy. He takes his balls off, like a pair of dentures, and places them on the nightstand before snuggling up to Queen Nefertiti to watch Sleepless in Seattle. If that’s your thing, God bless. Me, I never do anything romantically that doesn’t involve blood, fever, and the potential for incarceration. I don’t get pussy whipped. I get cunt gripped. I get cunt gripped and just hope to get out alive. What doesn’t kill you makes you stronger, as the saying goes—so that you can look forward to that one irrecuperable battering ram of a ballbreaker that will finally do you in.
To be cunt gripped means to show up at the door unannounced. It means calling at all hours. It means saying “I love you” far too soon, on or around the second date, and saying it all too frequently thereafter. When they caution that I might be moving too fast, I double down and send them flowers and fruit. To be cunt gripped is to believe that I have found everything heretofore lacking in my life. They fill an enormous void, the women I fall in love with, and I will revert to nothing—to less than nothing, now that I know consummation—unless they remain filling it forever. Fear of losing them provokes me to act desperate in a whole host of ways that inevitably sends them scrambling for the door. I’ve only been properly cunt gripped four times, not counting a dozen or so partial or short-lived cunt grippings: once when I was five, once when I was twelve, a third time at nineteen, and finally with Connie, who came to work for me when I was thirty-six and she was twenty-seven. Each time—with the possible exception of that first time, when I was still so new to the world that it’s hard to remember much beyond her name (Alison), our hand-holding, and a long cry under trash-strewn bleachers—I have never been able, once cunt gripped, to hold on to my essential self. I mean by that whatever makes me me: a success at school, a dedication to the Red Sox, a determined belief in the nonexistence of God. It all vanishes, leaving… what? Was there a person there? All I could ever find was untethered want. The girl, or woman—first Alison, then Heather Belisle, then Sam Santacroce, and finally Connie—consumed me to the extent that I could say of myself only that I was Paul-who-loves-Alison or Paul-who-loves-Connie. It was flattering to them at first, of course, that someone should take such a dire interest, but the flattery was soon smothered under a shit-storm of need, jealousy, irrepressible and indiscriminate praise, and an obsession that scared parents and friends. Everything I held in high regard before falling in love dropped away, and I appeared to myself, and no doubt to the objects of my desire, as a tiresome refrain offering them nothing to love in return. Needless to say, it never lasted long. Of Alison I’ve already recounted everything I remember. I fell in love with Heather not long after my father died, and as I look back on it now, that love affair was as much about Roy Belisle, Heather’s dad, who coached our coed baseball team and drove a pickup truck and had really cool arm veins, as it was about the wet new thrill of Heather’s tongue. (I couldn’t picture Mr. Belisle in a dry bathtub with his clothes on, staring for hours at the browning grout, and then rushing me off to the mall to buy ten pairs of running shoes, which he’d hide from Mrs. Belisle by digging a large hole in the back of the apartment complex.) I spent a long Presidents’ Day weekend making out with Heather in her garage and, during meals, admiring Mr. Belisle’s arm veins while watching him turn the dials of his police scanner. It all came to a swift end when school resumed on Tuesday and Heather dropped me for a boy with a bad haircut. I was stunned, hurt, and embarrassed, in withdrawal from Heather’s tongue—the first tongue I’d tasted and the reason, at least in part, that I became a dentist, awakened to the mouth and all its marvels—and angry that fir
st my dad and now Mr. Belisle had been taken from me by a fickle and irreconcilable force. I did what anyone would do: I walked twelve miles to the mall, got into the backseat of an unlocked car, drove with my unsuspecting chaperone another dozen or so miles, waited in the garage a long time before entering his house, found a closet, masturbated, fell asleep, and in the morning came full upon all the family at breakfast.
The cunt gripping I underwent at the hands of Samantha Santacroce was a much more involved ordeal, ending with my transfer out of the University of Maine at Fort Kent, with certain restrictions on my freedom to reenter campus grounds. Sam and I spent eleven weeks together, during which we both understood our souls to have awakened at last and our hearts to have been filled for the first time. We were instantly inseparable, arranging our walking patterns to and from class to minimize the time we had to spend apart. We ate together, studied together, and slept together, whispering late into the night so as not to disturb her roommates. We shared the same coffee cup, the same straw, the same toothbrush. We fed each other watermelon from our mouths. We watched movies and football games under the same blanket and sat together doing our homework in the student union, looking up at regular intervals to moon at each other with shameless abandon. Sammy was always sucking on a lollipop. I loved nothing more than to hear that sugary globe knock against her sturdy white teeth while the stick grew moist and pulpy at her lips, until at last she took the nub of candy between her molars and cracked it to smithereens. She swished the clattering shards around, melting them down to oblivion. When she was finished, and the stick had been deposited with others inside an empty bottle of Diet Coke (which also contained wrappers and wads of gum), she ran her tongue over her upper lip in search of some minuscule overlooked crystal and, if she found one, drew it in and pinned it between the cairn of her canines. Then she sucked her lips clean of their sugary coats—first the upper lip, plump and double peaked, followed by the lower one, seated upon a more perfect plumb line. Of the character and true nature of Samantha Santacroce, I knew essentially nothing, but that I wanted to live forever on the edge of her glossy red lower lip, that crimson promontory, warmed in the winter by her syrupy breath and bathed with the same summer heat that brought out her freckles, I had no doubt.
What I did know about Samantha Santacroce, because she impressed it upon me at every turn, was the fierce and unconditional love she felt for her parents. This stood in stark contrast to my impulse to hide my parents away in a closet of shame. Sammy talked about hers as if they were the people with whom she willingly planned to spend the rest of eternity, college being less a time of rebellion and self-discovery than a temporary parting in a lifelong affair. I was almost jealous of them. Bob Santacroce was a big man with fair hair who had done well in the furniture business and now spent many of his mornings on the back nine. Barbara had raised Sam (and her little brother, Nick) and now remained busy with tennis and charities. I heard so much about them before we met that they grew incomparable within a few short days and mythical within the week, so that by the time Sam and I showed up at their house for Thanksgiving, when I planned to announce my intentions of marrying their daughter (“Wait, wait,” Sam had said, “you plan to do what?”), I was intimidated, nervous, and as in love with them as I was with Sam herself. The Santacroces were a picture-perfect family of Catholics whose tidy garage, sturdy oak trees, and family portraits through the ages would absolve all the sins and correct all the shortcomings of my childhood. Like my infatuation with Heather Belisle, my infatuation with Sam Santacroce had this extraneous element that had nothing to do with our shared love of dogs and Led Zeppelin, her blond pageboy, or the taste of her red mouth. There were no poorly attended funerals in the Santacroce family, no scrounging for quarters under the car seats, no runs to the recycling center for macaroni money, no state-appointed psychologists, no suicides. I loved Sammy and wanted to marry her, but I also loved Mr. and Mrs. Santacroce and wanted to be adopted by them and live under the spell of their blessed good fortune forever and ever. I would affirm God and convert to Catholicism and condemn abortion and drink martinis and glory the dollar and assist the poor and crawl upon the face of the earth with righteousness and do everything that made the Santacroces so self-evidently not the O’Rourkes.
But Sam had a change of heart. We were running hand in hand at breakneck speed toward the cliff of endless love, but she stopped short just as I upshifted, so that I ran straight off without her and hung there for a second like in a cartoon, trying to find the ground beneath me, but there was no ground, and I plummeted. I failed to see it coming, or willed myself not to see it, despite half noticing that my heavy and fatal proclamations of love were no longer being returned with the same frequency and then not at all. I tried to understand what had happened, what I’d done. It appeared that what I’d done was nothing more than continue to do what Sam and I had been doing together for eleven straight weeks, which was making of the other our everything. Abruptly she stopped while I went on, and on, and my going on made her more certain that her stopping had been the right thing to do. I no longer had a self of my own, except the one full of love for her, and as everyone knows, that’s a self that invites abuse quicker than it does affection.
I guess I began to menace her. All I did, for the most part, was sit on the outdoor stairs leading to her apartment and cry, and when at last she let me in, try to get a grip on myself so that I could talk over the tears that, now in her presence, were less hysterical but still ongoing. Once or twice they found me inside the apartment, her and her roommates, when they returned home. I was waiting in Sam’s room, on the bed, facedown, crying into her unwashed pillow, no harm to anyone. But they didn’t like finding me there. The first time was scary and weird, and I surrendered my key and promised not to do it again. But of course I had a spare and did do it again, addicted as I was to Sam’s bedsheets and sick to death at the idea of her out in the world without me. I was unable simply to sneak in and breathe in the sheets and touch her things and smell her lotions and look through her Santacroce photo albums and then leave, because I couldn’t leave. Her room was the only place I cared to be, with or without her. And because she didn’t want to be with me, I was in her room without her, and when she found me there a second time, she called campus police. My mother had to come get me. She was afraid for me, they were all afraid for me, and they should have been, because I was nothing, I was Paul-who-loves-Sam, now Paul-who-loves-Sam-without-Sam, and so less than nothing. I had seen God, but God was gone.
A few years later, when I was more or less over her and had completed two semesters of premed at a different branch of UMaine, Sam found me and told me that she looked back on our time together with regret. She was sorry she’d lost me because no boy before or after had loved her as I once had. At last she knew the importance of that and wanted a second chance. She asked if I still loved her and I said I did. Six months later we were living together—not with her parents’ blessing, but I didn’t care and neither did Sam. I wasn’t cunt gripped this time, merely in love. More than anything, I was amazed: amazed that I had Sam Santacroce back and that she was more in love with me than before. What a reversal!
It lasted for about a year, during which time we made a few trips to the Santacroces’ and I tried my best to see them as I once had. But I had ruined my chances with them, and they didn’t know forgiveness. They didn’t approve of me, and now that I was love-sober, not to approve of me was not to approve of the world. And in fact they didn’t approve of the world: they judged and condemned the world. They made donations and participated in food drives, but they despised the poor. They blamed homosexuals for the spoliation of America, and probably African Americans and working women, too. Old Santacroce, Sam’s grandfather, held a bewildering grudge against FDR, widely considered one of America’s greatest presidents and dead by then over fifty years. When Bill Clinton came on the TV, Sam’s mother would have to leave the room. I understood so little of it, and slowly my old self reasserted
itself. I found it impossible to believe that I had once considered converting to Catholicism for these troglodytes, and in retaliation I made poor Sam sit through long diatribes on the hypocrisy of Catholics and the stupidity of Christianity in general. And then one night I confessed my atheism at the Santacroce dinner table, and the Santacroces all turned to me in horror. Sam ran after her mother, who, from the other room, called me Satan himself and forbade me from ever entering the house again. That was fine by me. Sam and I didn’t last much longer. Her parents were asking her to choose between me and them, and she was not going to give up the two people who had nurtured and loved her more than anyone in the world. I was sad to lose Sam, whom I was all wrong for and who was all wrong for me, but I was pleased to know that after the cunt gripping eased, I returned to my former self: that there was, however nebulous and prone to disappear, a self to return to.