Topics: Editor's Pick, Life stories, Love and Sex, Thanksgiving, Life News

I met the man who would become my husband in the run-up to the 2004 presidential election. If I were more susceptible to omens, I might have looked at the timing as foreboding. We were — and remain — committed Democrats. We went on canvassing dates, waking up before dawn to drive the short distance across the border from the solid blue state where we attended graduate school to the decidedly undecided state next door whose electoral votes looked like they could be the difference between a continuation of the nightmare of the Bush administration and the installation of John Kerry, who seemed to us a worldly, experienced, honorable man.

My future husband was — and is — a kind and gentle person. He was studying Comparative Literature. My field at the time was European History. We met early in the semester and made each other feel deeply at ease. As the autumn wore on and the election grew closer we’d go canvassing or drinking with fellow-traveler friends and stagger back to my apartment for tired but affectionate sex. He was eager and lively and seemed to be enraptured by my body. It was all somewhat strange. I was coming off a series of punishing relationships and pseudo-relationships, loveless fuckfests with scholars of different fields, stripes, marital statuses. These relationships, if you could call them that, were volatile, often demoralizing, sometimes fun. I wasn’t a masochist, exactly, but there was something enlivening about low-level psychic pain. Genuine warmth, by contrast, left me bored and restless.

D., my future husband, worked hard to make me come in those early months, but often failed. He held me and I wrapped myself around him, feeling his disappointment, his self-reproach, his yawning sense of inadequacy. I promised again and again it wasn’t him or us but me. And in fact it wasn’t really me, per se. There were all sorts of proper nouns conspiring against him. There was Lexapro. Yasmin. And also, there was Dubya.

Sometimes, as we lay in bed in the increasingly chilly nights, we role-played our apocalyptic fantasies of what life would be like in a second Bush administration. My husband favored a scenario where a casus belli to declare war on Iran was dug up, leading to a wholesale destabilization of the Middle East and a series of increasingly painful terrorist attacks on the U.S.

I was more focused on life in Canada. Or Panama. Or New Zealand. Any other country that would have us — tucked-tail liberals fearing a future of endless war and Judeo-Christian-fueled repression. A small city, I imagined, nothing so big as to attract terrorist attacks. He dwelled on the damage and I talked about our little house beyond the fallout zone. Grim as it may sound, it was actually very romantic. We understood a crucial bleakness in one another, the way others might bond over a sport or Russian cinema. We had a common relationship with doom that felt right.

There’s no need to rehash how the first Tuesday of that November turned out. We met at the house of a friend’s thesis adviser, someone who had once been a minor figure in the Carter administration, full of hope we both knew was hollow and false and had been swiftboated into oblivion before we even plopped down on the couch. D. and I left after Florida was called for Bush, a little before midnight. Did we really believe that our future, the country’s future, the future of the planet, had been plunged into desperate doubt by this one vote? Or were we indulging in a negative fantasy?

The next morning we had perhaps the most vigorous sex we’ve ever had. He was angry, he was desperate, he fucked like he was looking for an answer inside of me for what had happened last night. He wasn’t just aggressive, he was interrogating my body, which, without any solace to offer him, was only good for more punitive searching. I didn’t tell him to stop. He missed the class he TA’d.

For the next few days, our couplings continued in this vein. He was more aggressive and adventurous than he’d ever been, and the fact that I played along only encouraged him, though I felt more defeated than aroused. When he was inside me, I was still thinking of Canada, imagining a flat in Montreal or a cottage on the Pacific coast of British Columbia. I began to think the relationship was doomed.

I told him spending Thanksgiving together, with either of our families, felt a little rushed, and he agreed. He went back to the East Coast to be with his parents. I, too broke to visit mine and, unwilling to hit them up for plane fare, got on a bus headed for the Chicago suburbs, where an aunt and uncle on my mom’s side had invited me for their big annual Thanksgiving gathering.

It’s an easy target for mocking, the Thanksgiving dinner. The ethically stunted, the politically abhorrent, the morally perplexing individuals we find ourselves sharing this meal with feel almost obligated to play their part. It’s odd that we’ve codified this behavior, turned it into a part of the ritual just like football and trampling strangers to death before dawn the next day for a cheap DVD player. At any dinner there is always someone who is going to offer an unsolicited opinion on what the country really needs, just between you and me. One year, Uncle So-and-So dropping n-bombs before we even reached the table. Another year, Dad’s Coworker X openly wishing “Monica [Lewinsky] had taken a big chomping bite.” As far as I knew these were people who, on a regular day, were garden variety Republicans. But the turkey and the assembling of bodies and the beginning of the seasonal cold activated something vicious in them.

My initial reaction to the buffoonery, by the time I was old enough to know what it was, was often disgust, and I can remember slinking away from the table as quickly as I could. Once I was in high school and began helping myself to a glass of wine like the grownups (it grew bigger each year), I found myself joining in the fray because why not. It was pointless debating but pointlessness seemed to be the point. Rebutting the stranger with a combover who believed that every Palestinian wanted to bomb Israel into the sea was more fun than sitting in my room alone, waiting for my friends to finish their dinners so we could smoke weak joints in the Target parking lot. I glared, they smirked. I rolled my eyes, they tut-tutted. And so on and so on.

In a way, it was the reverse of the playacting I did later with the men I slept with and pretended to admire, men who might have been selfish douchebags or insensitive pricks, but who were at least progressive, enlightened, academy-educated insensitive pricks. They didn’t think twice about asking to come on my face but would call me a reactionary if I put on mascara. An English doctoral candidate whose dissertation was about Virginia Woolf and early postcolonial theory, a man who called himself a feminist whenever he got the chance, confided to me that he received blow jobs from about 80 different women per calendar year. His true passion, though, was to fuck redheads in the ass. The sociologist who talked me into a threesome with his best friend used an argument that included lots of hash and a discussion of communitarianism.

I was pulled toward these left-leaning dudes. We spoke a common language, shared a belief system, and, maybe most importantly, hated the same people for the same reasons. Nobody wants anything more from a romantic engagement than a reminder that she isn’t the only one who sees the world in a particular way.

But it was during the 2004 presidential campaign, just as I’d finally met the man who would break my marathon of infatuations with lefty man-children, that one of my darkest, most deeply hidden secrets began making itself known to me. I’d see G.W. Bush on the campaign trail, smiling his witless smile, spouting unfiltered hollowness in his affected twang, looking halfway between a goon who wanted to see your tits outside a football game and the inquisitor who’d light the pyre at your auto da fe, and I knew… or, I knew without knowing. There was a dim, muted part of my brain that wanted to fuck him, that was tired of the skinny academics I took to bed. My fantasy was to fuck a Republican.

The conservative contingent at my aunt and uncle’s was smug on arrival and they wasted no time in expressing relief over the electoral disaster they had recently avoided. My mom’s sister could offer me little more solace and than an exaggerated eye roll and a quick, generous refill of my wine glass. Her sympathies were liberal but her passions were domestic. Her husband to this day openly questions our current president’s birthplace. I was very much on my own.

I drank, thought briefly about D., drank some more, noshed on almonds, tried to imagine what it would be like to engage in the kind of postgame congratulating the Dubya fans were going on with. They struck up an odd refrain. “There hasn’t been another 9/11.” They said it sincerely, repeatedly, with variants and personalizations. “He’s kept us safe from another 9/11.” “We will not have another 9/11 because he won and you can bank on it.” This statement or ones like it went on for so long that I began to wonder if they were actually commercials during the football game on TV.