Everything Changes

either blind optimists or merely idiots, needing to be close to that kind of woman, even platonically, to feed the ugly, deformed thing in us, the hunchback in our bell tower that lives to experience that beauty on any level we’ll be allowed. But now I’ve lived the dream; I’ve risen above my sexual station and landed a woman just like that, who actually loves me back. I’d have to be certifiable to put it at risk.
    I’ve always known that infidelity is in my blood, enmeshed somewhere in the strands of my DNA, and I’ve dedicated my life, more consciously than I would care to admit, to doing everything in my power to not be like Norm. Yet here I am, engaged to one woman, obsessing about another, and, for reasons still unclear to me, getting hot and tawdry with a college girl in the back of a van. It’s as if his very proximity is accelerating the genetic fate I’ve been fighting my whole life.
    I dial Hope on my cell. “Hey,” she says, her voice husky with sleep, and I can picture her perfectly in her high four-poster bed, curled up under her floral-patterned comforter in a sheer nightshirt from Victoria’s Secret, her fresh, cool linens smelling faintly of lilac, her face scrubbed and Ivory clean, her sandy-colored hair pulled back in a loose ponytail, her bare legs freshly shaved and moisturized, her body warm with sleep. I can feel myself growing stiff just thinking about it.
    “Hey,” I say.
    “I miss you,” she murmurs. “Where are you?”
    “In a cab.”
    She yawns, and I can see the feline arc of her back as she stretches. “Mmm,” she says. “I wish you were here with me now.”
    “I can tell the driver.”
    She giggles. “No. I need to sleep. I have an early meeting.”
    “Oh, well,” I say.
    “It’s not that I don’t want you in my bed, because I do.”
    “I know,” I say. I can’t get her bed out of my mind now, everything clean and smooth and fragrant. Ever since the first time I slept with Hope in her bed, the smell of freshly laundered sheets gets me aroused. “I love you, Hope.”
    “I love you too, babe,” she whispers, and I can tell she’s falling back asleep.
    “I’m lucky to have you,” I whisper, a bit self-conscious about the cabdriver, even though odds are he doesn’t understand a word I’m saying.
    “You’re sweet,” she says. “I think I’ll keep you.”
    “I’ll speak to you in the morning.”
    “Good night, babe.”
    I can fix this,
I think desperately as I flip the phone closed. It’s within my grasp. All I have to do is rededicate myself to Hope, establish some healthy distance from Tamara, and make sure I avoid any more unfortunate lapses like the one tonight. In other words, live my life the way it’s set up to be lived. Be the anti-Norm.
    But then I think of Tamara’s wide, sensual eyes glistening with ethereal tenderness and understanding and wisdom and pain and—I’m pretty sure about this—passion. Not passion for me, of course, but for life, for love, for a party to be named later. And when I think of that party being anyone other than me, when I think of those lips, moist and plump as grapes, kissing someone other than me, of her leaning her head on anyone else’s shoulder, of some other man’s leg rocking her porch swing, things inside me start to wither and fall away.
    I stare at myself in the taxi window, watching as the lighted signs from storefronts pass through the sad, amorphous ghost of my reflection, and the ghost makes me think about Rael, and I wonder if he’s looking down at all of this, if he’s concerned or pissed or just laughing his ass off because he knows now that none of it really matters anyway.
    Outside, a woman walks a Labrador puppy, who tugs eagerly at his leash, tearing back and forth frenetically along the sidewalk, thrilled beyond measure to be a dog. As I watch the dog urinate into my reflection, I wonder how I can be in such an abject state of misery when just a few days ago everything was fine. It occurs to me, just before I pass out, that maybe I was miserable before, but things were going too well for me to notice it.

Chapter 13
    I wake up Tuesday morning with swollen eyes, my throat parched and sore, and a world-class hangover like a spike through my brain. I lie paralyzed, trying to slip under the radar of the spectacular pain in my head while disjointed images from last night flicker through my mind in reverse order. I vaguely recall the rough shoves and curry smell of the cabdriver,