Erotomania: The Sequel

I had been channel surfing when I came upon the interrogation scene in Basic Instinct (l992) with its famous crotch shot. The sight of Sharon’s Stone’s pussy must have been like Proust’s Madeleine awakening long forgotten memories. When a body changes as much as Monica’s had, it’s almost as if the personality has died and in the few times she talked about our past life fucking, it was as if she were describing another person. The fat had almost caused her to become disembodied from her former self. She was like an exile, like the diasporic Jew or the hegiric Muslim. She’d become a solitary consciousness seeking a home. I was reminded of so many of the ill-fated boats filled with Haitian and Cuban refugees whose cargos inevitably met a tragic fate. She had the look of the lifer, condemned to death in life, in the cell of overeating that she had created for herself.

I flipped the channel and on one of the public access stations a performer was reading the first line of The Communist Manifesto, “Workers of the world unite…” Flipping back, Sharon Stone was crossing her legs yet one more time.

“Let’s go to Sam’s Club,” Monica said, unwrapping a Twinkie and stuffing the whole thing in her mouth. “I have to change.”

Instantly La Grand Bouffe (l973) flashed through my mind. Michel Piccoli presided over a feast in a French Chateau where a group of bon vivants eat themselves to death. There was something elemental, almost heroic in the notion of gluttony. In Se7en (1995) it’s depicted as a mixture of Hieronymous Bosch and Arcimboldo. I could follow her descent from gourmet to gourmand, with us finally feasting on each other, a latter day Donner Party in which we ripped each other’s clothes off as we had in the beginning, literally dining on each other’s flesh. I imagined a dramatic decomposition and then a rebirth. Yes, I should give up the exercising and give in—watching television, cooking up Swanson’s Hungry Mans in the toaster oven—until we had achieved critical mass. Then would come the famous mushroom cloud sequence which ended Kubrick’s Dr. Strangelove (l964) with its ironic musical coda. Yes, we would meet again. This time the border of personality would literally be destroyed along with all the attendant meanings. There would be neither perception nor self-conception in the oblivion of mastication. We would literally vomit our brains out, becoming mindless torsos, and in so doing achieving our ultimate liebestod, a love in death, in which we had been so consumed by desire that we’d literally feasted on each other’s skin and bones.

“Can we watch a fuck film first?” I didn’t realize what I’d said until the words popped out of my mouth. It’s a funny thing about sex, when it’s not apart of your life, even the most harmless insinuations seem like vulgarity, and Monica looked like she was going to hurl there and then.

“All old married couples watch porn.” I was angry that I would have to explain myself, but when Monica wasn’t fucking her brains out there was something almost virginal about her. In her present sedentary condition she was as easy to shock verbally as she had been to stimulate physically in the days when we were two animals roving the veldt at night. “It’s how they get turned on.”

“We’re not married,” Monica reminded me. “But I heard of a terrific caterer named Leonard’s in Great Neck where they do Bar Mitvahs.” For a moment her eyes danced with delight, as if she drifted into a reverie of unattainable beauty, a dream which provided a moment of refuge from the harsh realities she faced. She momentarily forgot her annoyance about the porn as she contemplated the prospect of a catered affair.

“I had almost gagged at Pasolini’s Salo (1975), but I had often thought of the film when I considered the messy birth of our relationship. Is individuation an urge that is inherent in all life forms? Do molecules of substances, do atoms of inanimate matter exhibit the similar drive to differentiation and a countervailing need to return to oneness, commonality? Had we come full circle, doffing our clothes, losing ourselves in each other, going through the journey of self, in which we had ascribed identities to each other only to end up throwing off these identities and wallowing in our own vomit and shit? We were like those inside out sushi rolls. We had filled ourselves with so much food, culture, and identity that we had exploded. But we were in good company. Einstein had tried to unify gravity and quanta, but failed to discover a unified theory. Why should we expect to find that we would have an easier struggle in resolving the conflict in our existence between the chaos of the demi-urge and the desire for ultimate unity and oneness. It had been wonderful to be reborn, and ultimately lonely, and now we had entered an Orphic period of regurgitation in which we needed to destroy and rise up out of our own ashes, in order to create.

I stared meaningfully into Monica’s eyes. She looked like she was going to throw up and since she had a decent track record in this area, I took the alarm which had been ignited somewhere between my hippocampus and pre-frontal cortex (the area of the brain most involved in the production of short term memory) and ducked just in time to miss being hosed down with her insides. The only thing that Monica had left to do was to contract one of the hemorrhagic viruses which derive from Monkey’s, like Marburg’s or Ebola. Then literally she would have been able to pour her guts out to me.

Where to go from here? We had been reduced to the basics, like Beckett’s famous tramps Didi and Gogo. I’d recently done the sets for the Waiting for Godot which was playing in Fond du Lac. So the scene of devastation in which we found ourselves was close to home both physically and metaphysically.

I have always believed that the spiritual solution can be sought, but never taught. Augustine was struck by lightning and I had certainly had been struck in the face by Monica’s vomit, but I knew the solution she had to find. The ascetic life, the life of abstinence, the world of starvation and silence retreats, was something she would have to gravitate to. Cosmologists believe that something cannot come out of nothing, but nothing can come from something. Once there was literally no more room in Monica’s intestines, once her arteries were clogged, once her obesity had reached the point where she couldn’t budge and her legs were covered by broken blood vessels, when fat literally burst through her skin, once she had filled up all the empty spaces and stood there like the Hindenberg, waiting to burst, only then, when she had reached what we in AA call a “bottom,” would she be propelled to take that first step, to curtail her intake of junk food, and to consider the possibility of eventually denying her appetites. Like the serial killer who haunted Wichita and then lay dormant before striking again, the animal in Monica had arisen in her again—in the form of an obsession with food that equaled and indeed surpassed her one time desire for sex. And when I looked at her bloated face with its dumbfounded expression, I knew she was the only one who could do anything about it.