A mother's love

Chapter 32

When her one to two p.m. guitar lessons were over, Michaela started picking Brian up from school in her car. This precipitated a change in his status at school; students started taking notice of him but unlike at his previous school it wasn't for all the wrong reasons. He wasn't welfare boy anymore, he was the boy with the cool girlfriend. Brian didn't set the record straight about Michaela not being his girlfriend, in fact he encouraged their misapprehension.

"Dude, is that chick with the pink hair your girlfriend?"

"Erm, yeah, she is."

He still had no interest in forming any friendships with any of them because Michaela was the only person aside from Brenda with whom he wanted to spend his time. He spent all of his time with her from when school ended until Brenda was expected home from work. She gave him guitar lessons, they wrote songs, she showed him the city, they spent time with her friends. The next time Brian saw Jessica there was none of the residual discomfort that he was expecting. Her first words to him when they saw each other were that she had read The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle and she'd loved it. He spent that afternoon talking about literature with her and unlike at Michaela's show Brian spent most of the conversation listening to Jessica talk about her favourite authors and books and the ones he didn't know about he promised to read. The more Brian listened to the music that Michaela gave to him and listened to her talking about music the more he was able to participate in conversations with her musician friends like Sarah and Vince.

After spending months learning how to be an appropriate lover and partner for Brenda, Brian was undergoing a process of atavism that was taking him away from Brenda and pushing him closer to Michaela. He was connecting with her in ways in which he'd never connected with Brenda, couldn't connect with Brenda. With Michaela he was free; their togetherness wasn't constrained by the contravention of convention that constrained him and Brenda, and he was discovering that he was capable of enjoying age-appropriate pleasures like rock music, anime and manga. Just as Brenda had once done, Michaela was introducing him to a world that had heretofore existed to him as nothing more than an abstraction. Adjusting to the world that Michaela was introducing him to was easier than adjusting to the world of adult pleasure that Brenda had thrust him into, where he spent most of his time in a state of confusion about where he stood.

Brian and Brenda were living separate lives, seeing each other for less than three hours a day. The ease with which his relationship with Michaela was growing was in stark contrast to the uncertainty and tentativeness that had always characterized his relationship with Brenda. He was asking questions that he had previously been too overwhelmed by Brenda to ask, like why had she chosen him? And why was it that the physical intimacy between them only felt natural intermittently, especially since they'd arrived in Seattle? He asked no such questions of Michaela; she liked spending time with him and he liked spending time with her and that was all there was to it. He had underestimated how much she liked him and he liked her, as he found out one afternoon after school when she'd driven him to a lookout where they were sitting on the hood of her car and taking in the panoramic view of the Pacific.

"Listen, I know that I'm twenty-four and you're fifteen, but I really like you, you're sweeter than any boy I've ever been with, spending all this time with you I've been happier than I've been in years," she said to him.

"I don't know how my mother would feel about us..."

"You're still just a little pup, aren't you," Michaela said, running her hand through his hair, "I bet you've never even kissed a girl before; well don't worry, I can help you with that."

Brian offered no resistance against her advance. He welcomed her lips and didn't hesitate to open his mouth and receive her tongue. What he was doing didn't feel like betrayal; he didn't feel like he was betraying Brenda by being unfaithful to her and he didn't feel like he was betraying Michaela by being dishonest with her. He felt so different when he was with Michaela than he felt when he was with Brenda that it was almost as if meeting Michaela had produced a bifurcation of his personality, with a version of him that felt more real emerging and the version of him that had formed out of his relationship with Brenda receding. Kissing Michaela didn't just feel good, it felt right. The truth was that he was afraid of Brenda, afraid that he was never going to be able to meet the expectations he thought she had of him. Michaela, because of her openness with him and the immediate comfort it had established between them, seemed more within his grasp.