Free Trouble by Kate Christensen Page B

looking up from his book.
    Sixteen years earlier, I had gone one night, alone, out of sheer curiosity, to hear Anthony Bianchi lecture at The New School. He was a political scientist who specialized in international environmental policies; I had recently discovered a sudden, unprecedented urge in myself to become more informed about such things. I sat in the back of the auditorium and was instantly smitten when he began to speak. I could hardly follow a word of what he said, I was so busy admiring his forthright, easy, confident, irreverent delivery, his profound erudition, and his ability to make the audience, which was made up mostly of college-age and graduate-school kids, laugh. He was not especially handsome or tall, but he was strikingly charismatic in the way of all men who love what they do and are very good at it.
    I was single at the time. My private practice was just beginning to flourish; I was twenty-nine and, although I wouldn’t have articulated it to myself in quite this way back then, I was in the frame of mind to find a husband. When the lecture was over, I made my way to the front of the room and waited my turn, then introduced myself to Anthony Bianchi. I admitted to him that I hadn’t understood much of his lecture, and said I would like to invite him out for a drink and interrogate him. He looked me over with the careful, acquisitive scrutiny of a customer being offered a bargain that might be too good to be true but too good to pass up, and said he’d love to, that he had no other plans.
    Once he’d freed himself from the remainder of his admirers, off we went to a picturesque basement bistro on East Ninth Street. We sat knee-to-knee at a little table and drank wine. I found him seductively abstracted, even brusque; he was amused but impatient at my absolute ignorance about the things that most concerned him. But I was very pretty in those days, and young and bright enough, which didn’t hurt. I think I must have disarmed him with my frank, open curiosity about him; I got him talking about his childhood in the New Jersey Pine Barrens, his college years in Providence, at Brown. He was eight years older than I was; I loved the fact that he was a grown-up, a successful writer and professor. I loved the naïve, brash way he made me feel and act, and I loved the challenge of having to win him.
    It turned out not to be all that hard after all: I went home with him that night and tumbled with him into his bed. We did not sleep much that night, or many of the nights that followed. Our sex was so urgent, we sometimes bit or scratched each other; it was always mutual and to the point, since Anthony didn’t trouble himself much with foreplay, and I didn’t need it, I was so turned on by him already. I proceeded to fall so passionately in love with him, I felt as if all the skin had been flayed from my body. This caused me to behave in ways I never had before. I wrote vital, hot, urgent love letters to him and sent them through the mail; they delighted him, he claimed, although he never wrote any back to me. All the corny, cheesy love songs I’d sung along to in junior high made startling sense to me for the first time in my life, so much so that they seemed to have been written expressly for the way I felt about him: “The Twelfth of Never,” “Top of the World,” “You Light Up My Life,” “I Can’t Live If Living Is Without You.” I could not get enough of his stocky, compact, willing body, could not believe how lucky I was to know his erudite, curious, cynical, funny mind. Watching his face over a restaurant table as he talked could cause me to lose my appetite from love. The smell of the back of his neck could make me swoon. Misunderstandings and missteps and painful fights had been there all along, and he had been condescending and fatalistic from the start, but instead of seeing these as warning signs, I allowed whatever feelings of frustration and doubt I had to be swept away with sex. That