In One Person

would not be the last time I underestimated Atkins’s inferiority complex. After that first time, I couldn’t read
Madame Bovary
to myself; I was permitted to read that novel only if I read every word of it aloud to Tom Atkins.
    Granted: Not every new reader of
Madame Bovary
takes away from that novel a distrust (bordering on hatred) of monogamy, but my contempt of monogamy was born in the summer of ’61. To be fair to Flaubert, it was poor Tom’s craven need for monogamy that I loathed.
    What an awful way to read that wonderful novel—out loud to Tom Atkins, who feared infidelity even as the first sexual adventure of his young life was just getting started! The aversion Atkins felt for Emma’s adultery was akin to his gag reflex at the
vagina
word; yet well before Emma’s descent into infidelity, poor Tom was revolted by her—the description of “her satin slippers, with their soles yellowed from the beeswax on the dance-floor” disgusted him.
    “Who cares about that sickening woman’s
feet
?” Atkins cried.
    Of course it was Emma’s
heart
that Flaubert was exposing—“contact with the rich had left it smeared with something that would never fade away.”
    “Like the beeswax on her slippers—don’t you see?” I asked poor Tom.
    “Emma is nauseating,” Atkins replied. What I soon found nauseating was Tom’s conviction that having sex with me was the only remedy for how he’d “suffered” while listening to
Madame Bovary
.
    “Then let me read it to myself!” I begged him. But, in that case, I would have been guilty of neglecting him—worse, I would have been choosing Emma’s company over his!
    And so I read aloud to Atkins—“she was filled with lust, with rage, with hatred”—while he writhed; it was as if I were torturing him.
    When I read aloud that part where Emma is so enjoying the very idea of having her first lover—“as if a second puberty had come upon her”—I believed that Atkins was going to throw up in our bed. (I thought Flaubert would have appreciated the irony that poor Tom and I were in France at the time, and there was no toilet in our room at the pension—only a bidet.)
    While Atkins went on vomiting in the bidet, I considered how the infidelity that poor Tom truly feared—namely, mine—was thrilling to me. With the accidental assistance of
Madame Bovary
, I see now why I added monogamy to the list of distasteful things I associated with the exclusively heterosexual life, but—more accurately—it was Tom Atkins who was to blame. Here we were, in Europe—experiencing the sexual
everything
that Miss Frost had so protectively withheld from me—and Atkins was already agonizing over the eventuality of my leaving him (perhaps, but not necessarily, for someone else).
    While Atkins was barfing in that bidet in France, I kept reading aloud to him about Emma Bovary. “She summoned the heroines from the books she had read, and the lyric host of these unchaste women began their chorus in her memory, sister-voices, enticing her.” (Don’t you just love that?)
    Okay, it was cruel—how I raised my voice with that bit about the “unchaste women”—but Atkins was noisily retching, and I wanted to be heard over the running water in the bidet.
    Tom and I were in Italy when Emma poisoned herself and died. (This was around the time I was compelled to keep looking at that prostitute with the faintest trace of a mustache on her upper lip, and poor Tom had noticed me looking at her.)
    “‘Soon she was vomiting blood,’” I read aloud. By then, I thought I understood those things that Atkins disapproved of—even as they attracted me—but I’d not foreseen the vehemence with which Tom Atkins could disapprove. Atkins cheered when the end was near, and Emma Bovary was vomiting blood.
    “Let me see if I understand you correctly, Tom,” I said, pausing just before that moment when Emma starts screaming. “Your cheers indicate to me that Emma is getting what she
deserves
—is that what you’re saying?”
    “Well, Bill—of course she
deserves
it. Look what she’s done! Look how she’s behaved!” Atkins cried.
    “She has married the dullest man in France, but because she fucks around, she deserves to die in agony—is that your point, Tom?” I asked him. “Emma Bovary is bored, Tom. Should she just
stay
bored—and by so doing earn the right to die peacefully, in her sleep?”
    “
You’re
bored, aren’t you, Bill? You’re bored with
me
, aren’t you?”