“You’re telling me.”
“And all for lessons on the significance of a teaspoon in The Mill on the Floss.”
“Yes,” Preston says, as Crosby and the kid materialize beside him. “Well. Among other things. Mark”—he sticks out a hand—“see you on campus tomorrow. And Paul”—he plants one on his cheek—“call your mother back.”
Once they’ve left, Paul asks, “Do you think that they ever go home with just the two of them? Like, on their wedding night, do you think they’ll come to Maryann’s after the reception to find some twink to sleep with?”
Mark collapses into the sofa, the cushions swallowing his head, his neck, and he grins. “We-ell, whatever works, right?”
“We-ell, somebody’s changed his tune.”
“What’s that supposed to mean?”
Paul settles into the devastating realization that he’s not going to be getting his whiskey anytime soon. “I just mean that when you first saw them skip off with someone at that house party in Rehoboth, your opinions were a little more…”
“Homo-normative?”
“I guess that’s one word for it. I was going to say traditional.”
Mark shrugs. A black leather ottoman sits in front of him, and he tosses his legs atop it.
“I’ve changed my mind,” he says. “People change their minds.”
The air-conditioning dies, and other noises emerge from the silence in which they’ve been hiding: beers fizzing, bottles opening, Tina Burner muscling her way through the last hour of her set.
Mark continues, his voice acquiring a lilting, pedagogical edge: “Just last month I was reading this article—or, essay, I guess; it wasn’t like some peer-reviewed thing—that Alcott Cotwald published in Brain World—”
“I thought you said that magazine’s a joke.”
“I did. But when—”
“When Alcott’s publishing in it…”
Mark finishes what’s left of his Guinness and licks the bubbles from his lips.
“He’s a brilliant behavioral economist.”
“You like him because he’s hot and has a British accent.”
“I’ve never even met the man. We were in Asheville when he came to Wharton to lecture.”
“You’ve shown me his pictures. Were you ever going to get me my whiskey?”
“Can you just let me finish?”
Paul doesn’t answer; he stares at the bar, where half-filled bottles of vodka and rum and tequila stare at their own imperfect reflections in the mirrored backsplash.
“O-kay,” Mark says. “Anyway. Alcott looked at the risk-reward analysis of remaining faithful in monogamous relationships. Which, I mean, that’s nothing new from a research standpoint. Graduate students have been writing subpar dissertations about that shit for years. I should know—I’ve had to sit on enough of those fucking committees. But what Alcott did that was different is that he looked specifically at couples that have some sort of understanding or arrangement when it comes to monogamy. So, he basically took all those pop-psych, ‘sex-positive,’ narcissistic Dan Savage ramblings and gave them some academic backing. Which, obviously, Savage has just creamed himself over, but that’s beside the point.”
Someone knocks over a Rolling Rock. The bottle rolls along the bar, gushing its foamy insides; the bartender snatches it and rights it. With an ash-colored rag he goes about sopping up the thin amber puddles.
“Another smart thing he did was that he looked at all kinds of couples: gay, lesbian, straight, bisexual, trans, questioning, queer, non-gender-identifying—fuck, am I forgetting anyone? He even took an historical account of other ethnic and cultural groups that’ve had a history with … er … different variations on monogamy.”
Bulldozers rearrange debris inside Paul’s head—not removing it, just piling it into bigger and less organized lumps—laying the foundation for tomorrow’s hangover.
“Yeah?” he says.
“The Comanches, the Greeks, even the Samis. All of them practiced versions of monogamy that allowed for some … practicalities.”
“Or some fucking around.”
“But how is it ‘fucking around’—which, by the way, I think is a pretty vulgar description of it—if there’s an agreement that states otherwise? ‘The empty moral obligations of postwar Christian society have led to a construction of monogamy that discounts very concrete sexual realities. Even more troubling, though, is how readily we reject those realities as negatives when perhaps the real cost of the new monogamy is the death of wholly human desires.’”
“That doesn’t sound like your prose,” Paul says. “You hate the word society.”
“It’s a quote from Alcott’s essay.”
The bulldozers continue their industrious dozing. Paul scratches at the plots of stubble on his cheeks.
“So what are you saying, exactly?”
“I don’t know.” Mark shrugs. “Maybe that Preston and Crosby and all our friends who are like them are on to something? Maybe they’ve got, like, a more evolved view of relationships than this puritanical one-person-for-the-rest-of-your-fucking-life routine. I mean, you figure that they both want to be with each other, and they realize that this … this other thing is just sex. Or, no, that’s discounting it. It’s not just sex, it’s actually a very real desire that they’re acting on within the confines of a set of rules that they’ve established, instead of society—”
“Society.”
Mark plows on: “And honestly, I imagine the costs of that decision are far less than the costs of, say, your standard, Middle American, heteronormative, monogamous marriage, where these feelings are repressed, and someone ends up ‘cheating’ or ‘straying,’ because, really, you can only repress something that’s inherently human for so long. And then the ‘affair’—God, what a terribly vague term that is—ends up defining the rest of the marriage, if, in fact, the marriage manages to last at all.”
Paul doesn’t want to ask. He feels like he’s standing ten feet away from the mouth of a deep chasm, and he hates heights. “So you’re saying this is something you might want one day. This Alcottian view of monogamy.”
“I think so. Yeah, I do. It just seems to make sense to me.” Mark reaches over and wraps his hand around Paul’s inner thigh. He kisses his neck, sweetly, and swipes his empty cup. “Now I’ll get you that whiskey.”
Paul takes the glass back from him and sets it on the floor next to the couch. “You know, actually, it’s late. Let’s just go home.”
Mark kisses him again, this time on Paul’s cheek. His lips feel dry. “You sure?”
“Yeah, I can already tell that I’m going to feel like shit tomorrow.”
Mark smiles and helps Paul up off the couch. “Such an adult these days.”