I SURVIVE THE SPRING AND SUMMER AND FINALLY GET TO the end of it.
There isn’t a lot to tell – or there is. Gloria and I become exclusive at her insistence. This, ultimately, means that we somehow own each other – each other’s genitals and actions and possibly even thoughts.
In my adult life, I have never had a long-term exclusive relationship like this, so I am not entirely sure what to expect. There is some residual part of me, a ghost of my childhood naïveté, that keeps insisting this kind of arrangement is for something – that there is a huge prize at the end of it all, an endurance prize, a Lifetime Achievement Award – but this idea is absurd. If I were to use one of Gloria’s adages: it just doesn’t feel like me. I only go along with it because I have no mind or energy to argue it. I
