energized love life, I found myself wondering if Jane was really as blindly and uncritically satisfied as I myself was. One Sunday morning, as I lay on the couch reading the newspaper, Jane pulled open my robe and gave my penis a squeeze and a quick kiss. I put down the paper, looked at her, decided to voice what I was thinking. “Is it big enough for you?” I said.
She looked up at me. “That again?”
“That again.”
She shook her head, smiled, but there was no sign of the old impatience or annoyance on her features. “It’s perfect,” she said. “It’s like
I put down the paper, pulled her up and on top of me.
We did it there on the couch.
I wondered sometimes about the other aspects of Jane’s life, her friends, her family, everything else she had left behind when she’d come to Thompson. I asked her once, out of curiosity, “How’s your mom?”
She shrugged.
“How’s your dad?”
“I don’t know.”
I was surprised. “You don’t keep in contact with them?”
She shook her head and looked away, far away, into the distance. She blinked her eyes rapidly, held them open wide, and I could tell she was about to cry. “They ignore me. They can’t see me anymore. I’m invisible to them.”
“But you were always so close.”
“
And she did cry. I put my arms around her, held her close, held her tight. “Of course they do,” I said. But I was not so sure. I wanted to know what had happened, how they had drifted apart, what it had been like, but I sensed that this was not the time to ask, and I kept quiet and held her and let her sob.
Five
The days flowed into weeks, the weeks into months. Spring drifted past, became summer, became fall. A year went by. Each day was like another, and though the routine was established and unchanging, I didn’t mind. Truth to tell, I liked it. We worked and played and shopped and slept, made friends, made love. Lived. I rose in the hierarchy of city hall according to the Peter Principle, and Jane became a supervisor at the day care center where she worked. At night, we stayed home and watched TV. Television shows I liked were moved to different time slots, then canceled, but it didn’t really matter because others took their places and I liked them, too.
Time passed.
I had a good life. It was boring and mundane, but I was content with it.
That was the weirdest thing about Thompson. The weirdest and most horrifying thing. Intellectually, I could see how pathetic everything was, how desperately ineffectual were the attempts at distinction and originality: the sad efforts to dress and behave outrageously, the endeavors to be different that only ended up drab and gray. I could see the strings; I could see the man behind the curtain. But emotionally, I loved the place. The city was perfect. I had never been happier, and I fit right in.
This was my kind of town.
The range of occupational skills here was staggering. We had not only accountants and office workers — the most prevalent occupations — but scientists and garbage men and lawyers and plumbers and dentists and teachers and carpenters. People who were either unable to distinguish themselves at their work or who lacked the ability to hype themselves in their jobs. Many were more than competent — bright men, intelligent women — they had simply been outclassed in their chosen fields.
At first, I’d thought it was our jobs that made us faceless, then I’d thought it was our personalities, then I’d wondered if it had something to do with our genetic makeup. Now I had no idea. We were not all bureaucrats — though a disproportionate number of us were — nor were we all possessed of the same bland character. Here in Thompson I found that, once again, citizens were separating into gradations of visibility.
I wondered if perhaps there were people who would fade into the background here as well, if there were the ignored of the Ignored.
That idea frightened me.
Did I miss the old days? Did I miss the Terrorists for the Common Man? Did I miss the adventures, the camaraderie —
I can’t say that I did. I thought about it now and then, but it seemed so long ago that it was as though it had happened to someone else. Already those days seemed like ancient history, and when my thoughts turned in that direction I felt like an old man looking back on his rebellious youth.
I wondered what Jane would think if she knew about what I’d done with Mary, if she knew about the woman I’d almost raped.
If she knew I’d killed a man.
Men.
I never asked about her missing years, about what she’d done between the time she dumped me and the time I found her again.
I didn’t want to know.
Exactly a year and a month from the day we had met again in the supermarket, Jane and I were married in a short civil ceremony at city hall. James was there, and Don, and Jim and Mary, and Ralph, and Jane’s friends from work and my friends from work. Afterward we had a reception at the community center in the park.
I had invited only the terrorists who had come with me to Thompson in the van, but as we danced and partied, I felt guilty that I had not sent invitations to Philipe and the others. Somehow, despite all that had happened, I still felt closer to them than I did to many of the people here, and in spite of our rift, I found myself wishing that they were here to share this moment with me. They were my family, or the closest thing to it, and I regretted not sending them invitations.
It was too late now, though. There was nothing I could do about it.
I pushed the thought out of my mind, poured Jane some more champagne, and the celebration continued.
We spent our honeymoon in Scottsdale, staying for a week at the resorts. I used my old terrorist tricks to get us poolside suites at La Posada and Mountain Shadows and the Camelback Inn.
That first night, our wedding night, I snagged the keys to La Posada’s honeymoon suite, and I opened the door to our room, then picked up Jane and carried her across the threshold. She was laughing, and I was laughing, and I struggled not to drop her, finally throwing her, screaming, onto the bed. Her dress flipped up over her head, exposing her white panties and gartered legs, and though we were both still laughing, I became immediately aroused. We’d been planning to wait, have a long bath, a sensuous massage, work our way up to the lovemaking, but I wanted to take her now, and I asked her if she was really sure that she wanted to slowly build up to it.
In answer, she grinned, pulled down her panties, spread her legs, opened her arms for me.
Afterward, lying there, I rubbed my hand between her legs, feeling our mingled wet stickiness. “Don’t you think we should do something different?” I asked. “Don’t you think we should try some new positions?”
“Why?”
“Because we always do it in the missionary position.”
“So what? You like it that way, don’t you? I do. It’s my favorite. Why should we force ourselves to meet other people’s expectations? Why should we conform to other people’s ideas about sex?”
“We
“It’s not average to me,” she said. “It’s great.”