Lightning Rods by Helen DeWitt

This time he had been able to step aside from those preoccupations and realize that Louise was actually not seeing anything that went on in those terms. The reason he was able to do this was not just the fact that he had obtained satisfaction earlier in the day, but that he had the certainty that he could get it again the following day if he wanted it, without any of the undoubted hassle of persuading someone to go back with him, persuading someone that they were both adults, and then in the morning getting rid of her without a lot of hassle. The disability facility lacked a lot of the features you typically looked for in sex—tits, for example. The possibility of things developing in an oral direction. But it wasn’t bad for what it was. And somehow it had enabled him to get to know Louise without coming across as obnoxious. If you’re in marketing you tend to be pretty direct, and that can spill over to parts of life where it is not really adaptive. Somehow he had gotten around that pitfall for a change.
    One thing you soon realize in marketing is that there’s a lot goes on in people that they themselves don’t necessarily understand. That applies to you just as much as anyone out there. Once he had recognized how much his drives were coloring his life he was able to see that he would have to do something about it if it was not to affect his developing relationship with Louise.
    So he made a point of going to the disability after that, and he started going out with Louise—dinner, movies, concerts—and he was able to give her the space she needed without getting impatient the way he otherwise might have.
    Now the thing was, Louise was not the kind to go home with someone from a bar, but she was no dachshund. She wasn’t what you would call a babe, but that wasn’t to say she wasn’t attractive. The more Chris got to know her and the more she relaxed, the more attractive she became.
    They discovered they had lots of other things in common, like sharing a liking for R.E.M. and spaghetti Westerns. The relationship gradually deepened. One day Chris picked Louise up at the library on a Saturday, and she was reading to the little kids in the children’s section. It was obvious that this was somebody who would take a lot of trouble with her own kids. Chris had had to fight every step of the way to make himself what he was, with no help from his family, and he had always promised himself that if he ever had kids it would be different for them.
    He decided that he was ready to settle down and he asked Louise to marry him and she said yes. So it’s funny the way things work out, because none of that would have happened if he hadn’t been able to let her take her time. Once they were engaged there was no longer any need to make use of the facility, it had served its purpose. It was just for those few crucial weeks that it had helped to keep drives he had not been fully aware of under control.
    But one day they were talking about something and Louise said if there was one thing she hated it was being lied to. “I can stand anything but a lie,” she said. “Don’t ever let there be any secrets between us, Chris.”
    Afterwards he could never work out how it happened. Maybe he had had too much to drink, so that he had felt as though he could tell her anything and it wouldn’t matter. Whatever it was, Louise had suddenly sensed that there was something he wasn’t telling her and she had said the thing about a secret was that not telling it made it much worse than it actually was. So he had said it wasn’t anything really, it was just a facility they had at work that he had made use of a couple of times, and Louise said you mean like corporate hospitality or something and he said kind of and he explained and Louise just totally freaked out.
    It was at a time like this that the facility really came into its own. There are times when you just want something completely uncomplicated. There are times when you just don’t