She feigned a smile unsuccessfully. It was a hateful smile of hubris against him and all his male counterparts to whom a woman, and a female to a lesser degree, supplicated herself. Even more, it was a hateful distorted smile against herself who, no matter how hard she tried, could not fully exit the trivial sphere of the personal domain any more than an obese woman could easily leave her apartment.
"Monogamy, what a premier virtue, it is!" she thought sardonically. This denunciation was a defense against her feelings of guilt over the sexcapade with Candyman. She knew that it was so, for the guilt was spraying out onto consciousness with that constancy of a fizz of breakers on a beach. She knew that it was so, for there was a feeling disgorging within her that was a nasty flair of a warm shaken can of beer oozing from between the closed tab.
She wasn't married or engaged to Michael—matter of fact, hating her as she knew that he no doubt did, she wasn't in any type of relationship with him unless that envisaged by an overactive imagination off and spinning downhill like a rolling wheel of a flipped car— and yet society's prudish stipulation that a woman be faithful to the partner she was with, or had been with, nonetheless had some sway of her movement and thought as it had at previous times when they lived together. Back then she would always try to restrain herself from those cans of beer that preceded her chewing tobacco snacks in order to be spared from his scowling, to continue to seem attractive to him, and to appear less extreme and headstrong than what she really was. Such was the influence of this mixing intimately: this blending of pathos and petulance blurring boundaries; this nastiness of prudish society inflicting one with guilt for pursuing more than the allotted share of the love it had espoused; and these incessant compromises of herself in order to keep a relationship with a man.
She was but a tiny shadow of original and independent thought that was dwarfed and absorbed by the massive conservative shadow of America. Her shadow was poised like the Statue of Liberty — the liberty which had inadvertently created her unorthodox perspectives, but hers was an inconsequential adumbration. Americans were a provincial people as all bullies of the world were provincial, and the thought of mixing with an American (even one as Italian as Michael) seemed nasty indeed. The nastiness of being here in his home came upon her like the sticky wetness of a man's semen. The nastiness of debasing herself from loneliness by coming here was to walk on the same spit and urine evaporating pavements within the swaths of mankind.
Her ideas rambled on fervently. "The whole thing is a laugh. If where one aims body fluids determines a relationship and love, this sorry world is in for more gory times….How on Earth is being faithful or not being faithful a measurement of this amorphous, multi-definable emotion called 'love?' How is it, or lack of it, relevant to anything at all? Hedonism causes one to accidentally fall into the obligations of child rearing and a marriage certificate is society's glossy endorsement of contained hedonism to perpetuate the species….Confinement is not compassion; hunger for that other one to stop the pangs of loneliness is no different than a hunger compelling one to eat…any hunger really— hunger is just there to motivate one to clog an emptiness….Empty heads need to be filled with empty people. Even if they are only speciously tangible and as impermanent as gusts of wind, they need them like the air they breathe….Mortal bits of dust feel more solid in a family unit…. And although I don't believe in being faithful as the measurement of a caring relationship I can't see what I'd replace it with. I'm not even sold that love exists…I mean outside of compassion and this nurturing-of-the-young thing, I think that this medley of different selfish emotions hiding themselves under the guise of love don't have anything good in them. And if I can't believe in the measurement of love as being faithful or that the thing proposed for measurement is lovely I might as well shoot for the moon by denouncing relationships altogether. This adulteration of oneself in these incessant compromises and mixing never enlarge a person. They mitigate a being." She was thinking about her tree planting days with particular abhorrence, and hardly thought of the old duties of being a home teacher, an errand wife/mom, and a wall decorator for Michael's school since now, when assessed from a distance, they were trivial discomforts by comparison. "Infatuations in fatuous humans foster the illusion that great things can come from human coupling as if hitching can concoct the Orient Express…Am I the only person who believes this way? I am. It is no wonder that most people I encounter think of me as a bitch…. Can't blame it on menstruation every day of the month. No, I take pride in my bitchiness. I relish having such an accolade. No, I can't blame it on a period every day of the month…. What am I doing here? Am I just wanting to wear a white wedding dress with my tampon the way little girls are conditioned to believe that marriage in a white dress is the portal to an epiphany? This ceremony of holy matrimony is ludicrous as if a god, if He were to exist, didn't have bigger things on his agenda than to sanctify the act of disgorging liquids on this one spouse….this crazy aiming of body fluids at this targeted spouse…Oh, this monogamy is sickeningly unnatural! As if signing a name on a piece of paper can contain or clean out the filth of a thousand daily fantasies and instinctual hungers….And then there are all these primitive jealousies to this pleasure bonding: monkey woman not wanting to lose her hunter who brings her and the children their meat; and monkey man needing to ensure that there is a female possession as loyal as a domesticated hound to satisfy him on evenings when his erotic hunts have eluded him, and that one who would not burden him with caring for children not of his own genetic transfer."
He had gone into the kitchen to fix some coffee so, alone, her ideas spun quickly on the axial of ruminations.
"Love, love—the means to everything! The things we are taught in music television videos and Hollywood movies. And then we emulate them in monkey see, monkey do….Okay, my perspective is strange but strange things have half a chance of being right. At least it isn't the stuff of idiotic masses. Am I such a libertine—I don't really think so—well, probably not. I am just an old fashioned, conventional girl who believes that sex only happens on a mattress of a bed and have never once used a car's gearshift as a dill-dough—I cannot even spell the word."
For all her cynicism that long-term relationships were of individuals who stymied and quelled their thoughts to live numbly with their partners and took on joint tree growing activities to have something in common with them, she did know that there were some happy marriages out there. Such marriages were unions of individuals who sought to edify the world meaningfully with their contributions and admired this trait in their partners. They were more than ordinary but not as extraordinary or extraordinarily peculiar in quite the way that she was. She felt that she was without a similar peer in the world and that from some snowy mountaintop closer to the sun she was peering onto the world and deigning her thoughts upon those who were less peculiar than she was. Her weirdness droned on: "For those less extraordinary/more than ordinary couples who believe in their oxymoron of a happy monogamy, I tell them it can only be had provided they do a bit of front seat/back seat sexcrobatics in a car and some rape role playing once or twice each week within the comforts of their bedrooms. Excitement allows for longevity—it isn't the love of Buddha that the better-than-the-masses (hereafter called the Betthams) are after, but excitement. They, the Betthams, are no different than any of the wallowing pigs in that respect."
Only briefly did it fleet through her mind how ludicrous it was for the damaged monkey that she was to define love at all. With not even a residue of "real love" there to her observation early in life, these speculations now were merely word play in her brain. They were the mere friction of cold, solid sounds and the static of them slapping against each other in their empty abstractions as she juggled them in her ennui and rained her sour stoic perspective down on them like tears of knives. To her she was a bored goddess making lightning and her unique take on love was the rightful striking of Zeus.
Still there were doubts. She did wonder whether the smudge of light penetrating her consciousness was enlightenment or peering onto the stars with damaged retinas. To be laconic, she wondered if her judgment calls were merely the moody caprices of her imagination. For in Houston, that Houston of long ago with a Gabriele that was a spasm then of myriad spasms in the lost dimensions of a changing life, hadn't she seen a fellow student as small as a boy and as limp as a sack of potatoes being picked up by his father, taken from his classroom at Rice University, lowered into a wheelchair, pushed toward a vehicle, and then driven off to the next classroom in a different part of the campus? She had; and it was only from her own obdurate bitchinesss that she concocted a barrier to keep herself from consciously recalling this father's spending of money and time to enlighten the dying. It was love in the best gesture mortals could do, and it went contrary to her assumption that human society was a loveless "hell-hole" that was beneath her.