This time?

She would have pointed out the often-pointed-out fact that I needed to feel in control of things—thoughts, feelings, situations, people, men—that might not, in actuality, or should not, be in my control.

Like Donald and his past.

Donald, for all his eccentricities, for all his idiosyncracies, for all his at times alarming peculiarities—there was his exquisite emotional sensitivity; his obsession with his weight and the compulsive behaviors surrounding the maintenance of it; his extreme dislike of and propensity to become deeply depressed by unseasonably warm weather during winter months; his ability to be completely unhinged by the absurdities and banalities of the everyday world (I’m thinking now of the time we had to leave a restaurant— meal half-eaten, leftovers frantically wrapped up in to-go containers, all because the spinach salad he ordered had several strands of uncooked but bent spaghetti spanning the plate like the St. Louis Arch)—did not feel the need to control love. He believed in love, trusted in it, knew it would come to him and behave itself if he waited long enough for it.

Which it did, and which I did, sometime after that fourth date of ours.

Looking out that first time through the eye of my perpetual inner storm into his eyes—huge, green, unflinching—I glimpsed:

Inner calm. Peace. Security.

It was dark, though, on the couch, and then in my bedroom, rolling around and ripping each other’s clothes off with a ferocity of lust that two years of enforced involuntary celibacy had almost made me forget was possible.

It beckoned; I succumbed.

Later, though, I would see other things in Donald’s eyes, too: I would see the ghost of Adrienne lurking around the pupils, hiding beneath the lashes, staring out at me and whispering like a taunting poltergeist out through a television set:

I’m here!

7

Our first real fight was, big surprise, on the eve of Adrienne’s first official visit to Washington. It was a mere week after she’d called with her news, and I was, understandably, I thought, still reeling from the announcement, when she called again—this time to say she was coming in for a whirlwind weekend of apartment-hunting and, dot dot dot—and here is where the fight started—anything else we could suggest.

Upon hearing what I later said was an egregiously pushy and manipulative “hint” but what he maintained was “nothing more than an innocent desire on her part to fill up a lonely time away from home,” Donald reacted with alarmingly Pavlovian behavior and invited her to have dinner with us. “You must come,” he said, then added, as if she needed to be convinced: “I’ll cook.”

He’d cook?

In the year I’d known Donald, he had barely ever cooked for me. Once, very early in our courtship, he made a plate of perfectly scrambled eggs to replenish our diminished energy following a rather exhausting afternoon on the living room floor. The other time was his assembly of a BLT using bacon he’d microwaved and lettuce and tomato he’d purchased cut, sliced, and washed from the salad bar of Washington’s most annoyingly elitist organic supermarket. But he frequently reminded me of how much he detested cooking, and why. When he was growing up his mother, a divorced working parent, had always made him start dinner before she got home from work.