Panting like an overweight Labrador and sweating like a brain surgeon, he awoke from yet another nightmare. Four nights earlier, I was superbly concerned and soothing. Now, four nightmares later, his midnight displays no longer alarmed me. He snapped up at the waist and began spastically hugging a pillow like he was trying to deflate it. I managed to open one rolling eye and push the words, “It’s OK, baby, just another dream,” through night-webbed lips, but I can’t claim I sounded too warm. I just couldn’t believe that fear was suddenly going to dominate our lives, my life with him of all people.
He used to be fearless —matador fearless, karaoke fearless. That’s the word I boastfully waved at my sister when describing the guy I’d just met. And now, where did all this fear come from? “I was calling you at the new office,” he choked as the skin below his eyelids twitched like something was trying to chew its way out of his face, “and you—you put me on speaker, and I could hear them offering you things so you wouldn’t leave the building and come home to me. Food and money and video game consoles and silverware—monogrammed, sterling. And you kept saying, ‘What else do you have?’ “
I think I stroked his hand. “Doesn’t sound like much of a nightmare.”
“And then they said, ‘Okay, Miss Miller, you can go home now,’ but the worst part, the terrifying part was that you were let down by that, and you said, ‘Oh, OK.’”
“Uh-huh.”
The next morning, the trumpeting dawn of our much-heralded “life together,” he still hadn’t snapped out of it, couldn’t bring himself to show any excitement. Sometime in the past month my boyfriend—who was not just physically fearless but emotionally fearless, the man who met my father with the same cool that he had displayed doing his dissertation work, living for 97 days among honest-to-God cannibals—had been transformed, as if he’d been clumsily replaced by the CIA with a man physically identical to Terence but caffeinated by the stupidest fears.
Once we’d settled on our moving plans—no, earlier: the day I received the call from Google, he began to quiver and melt. We had enjoyed exactly two full days of engaged bliss before the most enthusiastic, open man I’d ever met began conversing entirely in doubts, fall-backs, and hypothetical questions. What if Google’s stock fell? Would I be the first layoff? Why couldn’t they find me a job in the New York office? Why did I have to buy the Beast without consulting him?
“Why not something more sensible?”
He actually said that about my new car when I pulled up in it. He was on the stoop, talking to the Syrian guys who ran the beer-and-mango bodega on our corner. I put one leg out, flexing the calf for a film noir dismount, purring, “IS F,” and then I emerged, laughing, to hug him, because you cannot be more officially grown-up than accepting a wedding proposal and a job offer in the same week and then buying yourself a sweet Lexus sedan with your own money. He looked at the car, down the full length of it, his face a reprimand. “Nice wheels,” said Aziz.
What had I done to him—to us—that suddenly a car wasn’t sensible?
When we first started dating and he used to take me to hear music from countries I’d never heard of, in bars I once would have avoided, I asked him about his doctoral work. Yes, he’d slept with cannibals, no big deal. And did he have a name for his dissertation yet? “Yeah,” he said, and shrugged—he actually shrugged. “Why They Didn’t Eat Me.” But now a Lexus wasn’t sensible?
When the graffiti-spattered articulated ribs of the moving-truck door clattered down, and our hired gentle giant—with his Brooklyn Cyclones hat and his handlebar mustache and his rose tattoo with the word “Mother” inked in—latched that padlock the size of my face, and all of our possessions were braced for their own odyssey west, I remember savoring the very grown-up thought that even if all our stuff were lost, I’d still be OK. Terence, on the other hand, was moved to say, “I don’t think they secured the futon well enough. I’m going to have him redo it.” I revved the Beast and put on my sunglasses because by now I was about ready to cry if he didn’t at least pretend to be excited to be with me.
I know I am to blame for what happened next—in the desert, obviously, but also in Indiana. I started the trip in high melodrama mode from the very first block, because this, after eight months together (three with him living with cannibals), was how our life began: in the stunning Beast, on our way up the West Side Highway, with me about to make more money than either of our parents could imagine earning; with him not required to contribute a single penny for the first year so he could finish turning his dissertation into a book; with a realtor’s erotic dream of a house sparkling in readiness for us; with a Napa Valley wedding to plan—and with him asking if I shouldn’t have the lumbar support set a little more forward.
So, bumper to bumper in the Holland Tunnel, I finally broke: “I swear to God, Terence. By the time we see daylight again, and that’s daylight in New Jersey, if you haven’t turned back into the Iron John I first met, I swear I’m going to use the ejector-seat function I paid an extra eight grand for. And then I’m going to back up and run over your limp body.”