As I look back on it, I realize that that night marked a watershed in the history of my affair with Paul Bayard. I had a great deal of opportunity to analyze why things went wrong in the months that followed, as I much later walked the decks of foreign ships in unfamiliar oceans or waited to meet some new link in a chain of seeking that somehow seemed to grow longer with each new attempt on my part to reel it in. with the benefit of this cheap hindsight I came to know that our decline was inevitable, and had probably started the night that seedy club manager had tried to use Paul's talent to gain access to my body.
But during the period of decay itself, as things went from bad to worse between us, I was not able to see things quite so clearly. All I knew was that for some inexplicable reason, Paul had turned away from me. I think I would have been able to understand and handle it better had he turned argumentative, or irritable, or even vicious and violent. The coin of strong emotions has two sides, after all, and one expects a great love to breed great antagonisms as a sort of natural fallout.
Instead, Paul simply withdrew. He grew morose and uncommunicative, and took to spending long periods away from our apartment. Although it was difficult for me to see him physically disappear in this way, it was even more tormenting to have him present in the house in body only, while the essence of him, the beautiful spirit that I loved so desperately, had obviously moved out.
I did not confront him at first, hoping as I did that his withdrawal was only a matter of some stray mood, or some necessary passage of the artist through the shadow of his own internal moon. At the time I had no other way to explain it, this mysterious and almost total absence, and I was not yet willing to admit that what I was seeing was nothing more unusual than another end to another love affair. I suppose I had ended so many of them myself, the sudden cooling of the flame, the awkward period afterwards when one tries to rekindle what has died forever, the petty arguments and the ultimate escape, that I refused to believe that it could happen to me in reverse.
Besides, I was convinced even then, even in my confusion and anxiety, that Paul had not stopped loving me. Something else was going on, I was sure, something that had nothing to do with me. Paul's withdrawal was not a sign of lack of love, but of some interior struggle that I could not understand without some kind of information from him, and he was simply not talking.
I think it was the long stays away from home that convinced me more than anything else that I had very little to do with what was happening to Paul. Within a very few weeks he was staying away for days at a time, and soon those days were stretching into weeks. Although part of me knew there was a special, concrete explanation for this, another part of me was growing wild with yearning for him. For the Paul I knew was still alive inside this tough new shell.
Probably the worst aspect of this for me was the fact that I no longer could count on any comfort whatsoever from Paul's body. His withdrawal from me was absolute, total, so that even on the few nights that he deigned to sleep with me in the apartment, he simply flopped himself into bed and rolled over to face the wall. Nothing I did could revive or encourage him in any way, when I touched him, I could feel his body turn to stone, a rigidity so complete as to be positively frightening. After a few nights of this, interspersed with those terrifying long absences, I even found myself wishing that he were the type of man who could simply objectify women, take advantage of them, use them for their bodies alone, and that he would coldly ravage me, impale me on the sword of his mysterious anger.
Never have I come so dangerously close to losing my integrity, the pride and confidence that have kept me alive and triumphant even in life and death situations. Never before had I been so willing to submit myself to a man and his needs, never been so desperate to have a man's interest and sexual reassurance. When I realized this, realized how close I had come to total surrender, some kind of alarm bell went off deep inside me, and I knew that I would have to take the bull by the horns.
Finally I confronted him. He had come home from one of his weeks away, had given me the same offhand 'hello' with the same unreadable expression that I had now become accustomed to, and had brushed past me to flop exhausted on to the couch. I wondered briefly, as I had wondered many times before, if Paul had simply found some new woman to keep him happy and was staying with me for reasons that neither of us could fathom. But as before, I again found that possibility unlikely, since absolutely none of the telltale signs of infidelity were there.
Still, I had reached the end of my rope. Something was going to get settled right then and there, or I would be on my way. I walked over to the couch and sat down next to him, feeling him stiffen as I did. But I was simply not going to be put off this time.
"Paul," I said, "let's stop this. Please tell me what's going on with you."
