Oh, and another time he gave me a sex concussion. I can’t really go into the details, because my mother will probably read this, but basically he had a bunk bed in his dorm room (because he’s an only child and only children are obsessed with bunk beds for some reason), so we were on the bottom bunk and I tossed back my hair in what I envisioned would be a total porn-star move, except the wooden beam of the bunk bed above us was too low, and so I violently head-butted the wood plank and totally knocked myself out, which is pretty much the least sexy thing you could ever possibly do. Like, if I also lost control of my bowels that would be worse, but not by much. Then when I’d recovered, Victor was all, “Sex concussion, motherfucker!” like it was something to be proud of. Basically it was like autoerotic asphyxiation, except instead of being choked you get whacked in the head with a two-by-four. And instead of having an orgasm you lose all muscle control and pee on yourself. Which I totally did not do because that would be disgusting. I hardly ever pee on myself.
But none of those things were what I meant when I say he was dangerous. I meant that he was dangerous mentally. For one thing, he was rich. I mean, other people might not have said he was rich, but he was the first guy I ever met who owned his own tuxedo. He’d spent long summers with his grandparents in the rural countryside, so he felt as if we weren’t so different, but when I told him that my parents didn’t believe in air-conditioning he gave me this look like I was some sort of starving leper who needed a fund-raiser. The division between us was evident even when we’d go out for lunch. He would order a giant steak, and I’d get some sort of weak peasant broth, because I refused to allow him to buy me anything (and also because of the whole anorexia thing, which actually comes in quite handy when you’re too poor to buy solid food).
He was dangerous because he was different, and smarter than me, and he wanted me to be a grown-up. My mother decided that I needed to marry Victor before I slipped back into my pattern of dating poor, mentally unstable artists. About six months after Victor and I had been dating I came home to find that she’d packed up my stuff and told us both that I should just move in with Victor, since I was “obviously already sleeping with him.” This was when Victor and I both got very quiet, and I wondered when my mother had turned into the crazy parent, because I wasn’t really prepared for both of them to be unstable. Then I realized that this whole scenario was less about my mom’s instability than it was about her saving me from my own. I was pretty sure my mom’s infatuation with Victor as my potential husband stemmed from how impressed she was with the whole “owns-his-own-tuxedo” thing, and I considered just telling her that he’d rented it and then changed addresses without returning it, but before I could open my mouth to protest, Victor slipped his arm around my waist and beamed down at me, saying, “Totally. You totally need to move in with me.” I suspected he and my mother had plotted this, because I didn’t really want to move in with him, but he later admitted that he wasn’t expecting it at all, and that although he did want me to move in, he was afraid to do anything other than agree with her, because he assumed my father would shoot him, in some sort of milk-without-the-cow scenario. One where I was the cow, apparently. I told Victor that he was being ridiculous, because although my father did own several full gun cabinets, the only weapon he actually used was a bow and arrow, because it was “more sportsmanlike.” But then I remembered that Daddy had mentioned looking at a new crossbow just last week, and decided it was best to just not mention that at all. Victor frowned and pointed out that most people don’t own entire pieces of furniture dedicated to weapons, and I began to suspect Victor was not actually from Texas. Then we both sort of stared at each other like we couldn’t understand what the hell was wrong with each other. This probably should have been my first warning of what my future held.
Victor and I were still poor college students at the time, so we rented a tiny one-bedroom apartment in the worst part of town, and it was surprisingly wonderful. Except that the guy next door to us was some sort of mentally ill hermit who never left his apartment, but would wave to me from his window occasionally wearing pants. I’m not sure where the comma goes in that last sentence, since “occasionally” modifies both “waving” and “pants.” As in, he waved to me occasionally, and (on those occasions when he waved) he was occasionally wearing pants. But he seemed to do it with less of a lurid “Look-at-my-penis” motivation, and more of a sad “I’m-simply-too-unstable-to-know-how-pants-work-today” sort of way.