That comic appeared in Suspicious Package, Issue No. 5, and sold for $3.95, and went through several printings, and won a nice award at a convention, and later became a key chapter in my book. Marital failings, artistic desolation, the inability to meet expectations, grown-up male alienation. She saw me churn through the material of my friendships and housemates and saw how it tore me up to use that stuff and also how excited and relieved I was to be making headway in the cartooning world. She saw how the irresistible substance of our relationship presented itself and became central to my work and how much richer and more complex my comics became as I struggled under the weight of the material. She wanted me to succeed. I wanted to tell my story, wanted to peel back the onion, uncover the mess, surprise my eyes with what my hand could do, alone at my desk at strange hours, heart pounding, pits sweating, cackling silently to myself and hoping I could shock the world. I connected to a second self, a deeper sense, a subaudible language of colors, shapes, of gnawing contradictions.
You trade security and comfort built up over months or years for a moment of self-expression, followed by more years of confusion, resentment, guilt, all the trust undone, finally earning it back. She felt ridiculed. I had hurt her. It took years for her to forget and move on. Why did I do it? Because I’d been dying for a story and it walked through the door.
Kill your thoughts. Kill your mind. I gave up on dramatic and artful self-destruction, the deeply personal, soul-baring exercise, the creative public spectacle of my demise. The slow grinding degradation. The self-immolation. I gave up on sending tricky smoke signals through semiautobiography.
Why did I tell that story of her on the plane and me back home? To embroil Robin, to mythologize her, to upset her, break her open. I’d convinced myself that everyone wants to be immortalized in a work of art. I told that story because it confused me. Because it felt good to scratch the itch of that confusion. Because the work of telling it became a consolation. Because when I worked on it, I took hold of dark matter. I felt an ecstatic thrill seeing my work on the page. I wanted to leave my mark. I thought I could transform it into something else. Because if I didn’t somehow address these ideas, I was literally thinking myself out of existence. Which, I guess, was what I’d done, which was why I didn’t want to be alive anymore, and why I went to my suitcase to find a belt and hang myself.
Someone had thrown my suitcase on the floor and was lying in the nearest bed, staring at me. A woman with bare shoulders lay in my sheets in the dark.
“Hi, funny bunny.”
“What are you doing here?”
“Looking for you.”
I sat down beside her on the bed to steady the visual. Her eyes were dark. She’d tried and failed to make some kind of knot on top of her head, and part of a ponytail fell across her massive forehead. She looked like a stunned gymnast trying to get up off the floor.
“You’re all wet,” she said, and leaned into me. Her skin against mine for the second time in one day wiped out the hours in between. “Your face is wet.”
“It’s raining.” It was fated and epic. It had meaning and destiny. It was too much to take in. We kissed and she touched my face and I leaned back and squeezed alongside her. Maybe I could’ve laid down on the other bed, but if I did, in this state, we’d be like invalids in some ward.
“You smell like booze.”
“I’m so drunk.”
She explained that after I’d left her dormitory she’d heard the voices of her returning suitemates. They sat with her for a few minutes, and were nice, then let her sleep, and when she woke up it was dark and she packed up and turned in her conference pass to campus security. But then in the parking lot she couldn’t locate her car key, and came here looking for me, and found my door open.
On the night table I noticed a bag of cherries I’d brought from home, a can of club soda, and the bottle of OxyContin, now empty. Between the painkillers and the Valium she’d had enough drugs to level a hippopotamus. They’d also given her an anesthetic to put her in some twilight state of amnesia. Despite my own inebriation, I figured that if she’d driven home with all that in her, four hours in weekend summer highway traffic, she’d be dead by now.
“How is it?” I touched the splint.
“Hot,” she said. “This thing holds steady at about a hundred and forty degrees.” I remembered the ice melting out there on the grass where I’d dumped it. “I was awake anyway,” she said, “thinking about all this.” She seemed on the verge of apologizing for what happened in her dorm this afternoon. “I don’t want to go home,” she said. “I know it’s wrong, but it doesn’t feel wrong.” She reached over to me. “My hands fit your face. I love you here next to me.” She touched my cheek.
She was being nice. She put her head on my chest and said she loved listening to my heart. Uncontrollable brain-stem functioning and preorgasmic jizzing scattered into doubt and muddled sensations and further reversals of mood. I shoved my face into her hair, sniffing, wondering how long she’d been lying here, wondering whether we had a future, how we might survive. She loved me. She looked forward to seeing me, but then Mike figured it out and got horny and jumped my girlfriend. One day she hoped to have something better, maybe not with me but then who? I thought of high-ranking church officials begging for her support, scientists and art collectors, meeting her for coffee, kissing her on both sides of the mouth. Museum directors, social entrepreneurs, animal activists, education reformers, emailing, phoning, pleading for money, staring at her breasts. I tried to get ahold of myself.
She said, “I love when you’re above me. Did you know you close your eyes? That’s when I like to watch you.”
Maybe she wasn’t so irresistible. Maybe she threw herself at men because she wasn’t so high on herself. Maybe the early hardships somehow reinforced an innate insecurity. The crummy childhood, rusty car, and crappy house, set against standout athletics and straight A’s, and that psycho who tried to bash her head in, her father’s death, the unexamined grief and confusion, the humiliating rituals of male oppression that had to be tolerated, had to be withstood. Maybe she liked to be treated badly. I could handle that. Treating loved ones badly was a talent of mine.
“Oh, I almost forgot,” she said. “It’s our anniversary. Happy one year of insanity.”
We made out for a while. It was total heaven. “I waited for you to come back,” she said, “and now you’re here.”
“This is my bed.”
“You’re the only thing that matters anymore. Are you real?”
“Yes,” I said. “Are you?”
“Yes,” she said. “I am real.”
I imagined an easy, raucous, searing, sexually explosive bond that would carry us through our days. I imagined our multiple houses, landscaped gardens, marble pastry block, weekends with blended families, visits to the Cheneys, a generous stipend, hush money for Robin, a little gold Rolex for Beanie to suck on.
“A year ago we didn’t know what we were getting ourselves into,” she said, “but now we do. We know the deal.”
“What does that mean?”
“We won’t be as lost or sad or lonely. I’ll know you’re listening to me. And I’ll listen to you.”
“Okay.” I sensed intent, a firm design, a direction.