Guilty pleasures July 21, 1985
Mary Ann hasn’t written yet, perhaps upset about the story I
sent her, and perhaps the fact we did our anti-Bible issue of the zine.
Mary Ann never was one for realism. She likes things romantic,
and after having decided the direction of her life, she buried her head in her
faith, punishing herself for past sins like flagellants, although her mortification
is of the spirit rather than the beaten flesh.
In many ways, she’s become symbolic of our generation that
has gone too far to excess and now must atone for its guilty pleasures,
purifying their souls through austerity we all found unpleasant when we grew up
with it as kids.
For all the years in-between, she has struggled with her
religion, a jet set kid with a Catholic school conscience, a dual existence she
somehow maintained until she decided to take the deeper plunge and found God
again.
She rode the fast lane, but kept looking back, while the
rest of us – too cowardly to go as far as she did – looked on with envy.
This is the problem with the story I sent, hinting at her conversion
and my own attraction to her, as if I hated her surrendering it before I got to
taste the forbidden fruit.
Maybe I’m lucky. Maybe I would have ended up as road kill
like a number of her ex-lovers did, wounded people who took the ride and got
pushed out of the car while it still traveled at high speed, and by the time
she slowed down it was too late to rescue them, only live with the regret of
having wounded them so deeply.
I always played the safe man in her life, the one she could
trust not to hit on her, and to whom she could share her deepest secrets
without judgement, when in fact I ached to be to her what the other men were,
keeping my distance only because I feared ending up like them – or maybe didn’t
want to lose what I had with her, even if it did not go as far as I wanted.
The story dispels that, giving insight into what I was
thinking at that moment when we got stranded together and had to share a model
bed overnight until the car could get fixed the next day.
She seemed unaware of the agony of being so close and yet so
far away, and the struggle going on inside of me to take a step I knew almost
certainly would lead to doom.
She was aware of the other men, especially the macho cowboy
who came to her assistance in an attempt to fix the car for her – as shown in
the story, someone who would not have hesitated an instant if he could have
switched places with me in the bed later that night.
She thought it funny that she had slept with me and not had sex,
calling it innocent, when it hardly was, something the story made all too clear.
At the time, she also struggled because she had to choose
between two men to spend the rest of her life with (neither one of whom was me)
and perhaps was too focused on that to examine what went on between us too
closely.
She has still not resolved that conflict (which would have
been made worse had we actually gotten involved). Her whole trip west with the
one she chose was partly an attempt to escape from that other choice that still
haunted her, and to save the man she did choose from a dark life he had led for
years here in the east.
She would also get to raise their child in an environment free
of those same temptations, the needle and the damage done.
But I think she still thinks she made the wrong choice in
men, but by this time could not back out of it without completely alienating her
other friends and her family, who had condemned her for the choice she made in
the first place and came around only because she stoutheartedly pressed on. How
could she go back and choose the other after twisting so many arms to make them
love the man she picked in the first place?
In that regard, I’m the only one who hadn’t opposed her
choice, even though I secretly thought she had chosen wrong – and perhaps, deep
down I envied both of them, wishing I might have been one of the two, and could
never be.
Although not articulated as blatantly as that in the story,
Mary Ann is smart enough to pick up on it, and perhaps this explains her
silence.
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