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"I'll wait to read it until then," I'd told her.
Is it any wonder that this was the novel I took with me to Europe in the summer of 1961, when I was traveling with Tom?
I'd just begun reading Madame Bovary when Atkins asked me, "Who is she, Bill?" In his tone of voice, and by the pitiful-looking way poor Tom was biting his lower lip, I perceived that he was jealous of Emma Bovary. I hadn't yet met the woman! (I was still reading about the oafish Charles.)
I even shared with Atkins that passage about Charles's father encouraging the boy to "take great swigs of rum and to shout insults at religious processions." (A promising upbringing, I'd oh-so-wrongly concluded.) But when I read poor Tom that defining observation of Charles--"the audacity of his desire protested against the servility of his conduct"--I could see how hurtful this was. It would not be the last time I underestimated Atkins's inferiority complex. After that first time, I couldn't read Madame Bovary to myself; I was permitted to read that novel only if I read every word of it aloud to Tom Atkins.
Granted: Not every new reader of Madame Bovary takes away from that novel a distrust (bordering on hatred) of monogamy, but my contempt of monogamy was born in the summer of '61. To be fair to Flaubert, it was poor Tom's craven need for monogamy that I loathed.
What an awful way to read that wonderful novel--out loud to Tom Atkins, who feared infidelity even as the first sexual adventure of his young life was just getting started! The aversion Atkins felt for Emma's adultery was akin to his gag reflex at the vagina word; yet well before Emma's descent into infidelity, poor Tom was revolted by her--the description of "her satin slippers, with their soles yellowed from the beeswax on the dance-floor" disgusted him.
"Who cares about that sickening woman's feet?" Atkins cried.
Of course it was Emma's heart that Flaubert was exposing--"contact with the rich had left it smeared with something that would never fade away."
"Like the beeswax on her slippers--don't you see?" I asked poor Tom.
"Emma is nauseating," Atkins replied. What I soon found nauseating was Tom's conviction that having sex with me was the only remedy for how he'd "suffered" while listening to Madame Bovary.
"Then let me read it to myself!" I begged him. But, in that case, I would have been guilty of neglecting him--worse, I would have been choosing Emma's company over his!
And so I read aloud to Atkins--"she was filled with lust, with rage, with hatred"--while he writhed; it was as if I were torturing him.
When I read aloud that part where Emma is so enjoying the very idea of having her first lover--"as if a second puberty had come upon her"--I believed that Atkins was going to throw up in our bed. (I thought Flaubert would have appreciated the irony that poor Tom and I were in France at the time, and there was no toilet in our room at the pension--only a bidet.)
While Atkins went on vomiting in the bidet, I considered how the infidelity that poor Tom truly feared--namely, mine--was thrilling to me. With the accidental assistance of Madame Bovary, I see now why I added monogamy to the list of distasteful things I associated with the exclusively heterosexual life, but--more accurately--it was Tom Atkins who was to blame. Here we were, in Europe--experiencing the sexual everything that Miss Frost had so protectively withheld from me--and Atkins was already agonizing over the eventuality of my leaving him (perhaps, but not necessarily, for someone else).
While Atkins was barfing in that bidet in France, I kept reading aloud to him about Emma Bovary. "She summoned the heroines from the books she had read, and the lyric host of these unchaste women began their chorus in her memory, sister-voices, enticing her." (Don't you just love that?)
Okay, it was cruel--how I raised my voice with that bit about the "unchaste women"--but Atkins was noisily retching, and I wanted to be heard over the running water in the bidet.
Tom and I were in Italy when Emma poisoned herself and died. (This was around the time I was compelled to keep looking at that prostitute with the faintest trace of a mustache on her upper lip, and poor Tom had noticed me looking at her.)
" 'Soon she was vomiting blood,' " I read aloud. By then, I thought I understood those things that Atkins disapproved of--even as they attracted me--but I'd not foreseen the vehemence with which Tom Atkins could disapprove. Atkins cheered when the end was near, and Emma Bovary was vomiting blood.
"Let me see if I understand you correctly, Tom," I said, pausing just before that moment when Emma starts screaming. "Your cheers indicate to me that Emma is getting what she deserves--is that what you're saying?"
"Well, Bill--of course she deserves it. Look what she's done! Look how she's behaved!" Atkins cried.
"She has married the dullest man in France, but because she fucks around, she deserves to die in agony--is that your point, Tom?" I asked him. "Emma Bovary is bored, Tom. Should she just stay bored--and by so doing earn the right to die peacefully, in her sleep?"
"You're bored, aren't you, Bill? You're bored with me, aren't you?" Atkins asked pitifully.
"Not everything is about us, Tom," I told him.
I would regret this conversation. Years later, when Tom Atkins was dying--at that time when there were so many righteous souls who believed poor Tom, and others like him, deserved to die--I regretted that I had embarrassed Atkins, or that I'd ever made him feel ashamed.
Tom Atkins was a good person; he was just an insecure guy and a cloying lover. He was one of those boys who'd always felt unloved, and he loaded up our summer relationship with unrealistic expectations. Atkins was manipulative and possessive, but only because he wanted me to be the love of his life. I think poor Tom was afraid he would always be unloved; he imagined he could force the search for the love of his life into a single summer of one-stop shopping.
As for my ideas about finding the love of my life, I was quite the opposite to Tom Atkins; that summer of '61, I was in no hurry to stop shopping--I'd just started!
Not that many pages further on in Madame Bovary, I would read aloud Emma's actual death scene, her final convulsion--upon hearing the blind man's tapping stick and his raucous singing. Emma dies imagining "the beggar's hideous face, stationed in the eternal darkness like a monster."
Atkins was shaking with guilt and terror. "I wouldn't wish that on anyone, Bill!" poor Tom cried. "I didn't mean it--I didn't mean she deserved that, Bill!"
I remember holding him while he cried. Madame Bovary is not a horror story, but the novel had that effect on Tom Atkins. He was very fair-skinned, with freckles on his chest and back, and when he got upset and cried, his face flushed pink--as if someone had slapped him--and his freckles looked inflamed.
When I read on in Madame Bovary--that part where Charles finds Rodolphe's letter to Emma (Charles is so stupid, he tells himself that his unfaithful wife and Rodolphe must have loved each other "platonically")--Atkins was wincing, as if i
