“What does that have to do with me and words?”
“Oh, only that you’re so terrible with them but so good with numbers. Sorry, I guess I didn’t explain that.”
（Regan explained very little. Half of what she said existed in silences that Aldo tried and struggled to interpret.） “So I’m not unspecial?” he asked.
“Of course not.”
“And you’re certainly not unspecial.”
“Sweet of you.”
“So should unspecial people only deserve each other, then?”
“I don’t know,” she said listlessly, “I just don’t like him. But Madeline does, so why do I have to?”
“You don’t, I just wanted to know why.”
He was worried she’d become agitated, but she seemed to settle instead.
“Ah,” she said, smoothing out the furrow in his brow. “Trying to solve me again?”
“What makes you think that?”
“Oh, only that I know your equation face so well by now.”
He felt desperately uninformed. “Equation face?”
“No, you know what it is? It’s the little moan you make,” she said, as if that was as unremarkable a detail about him as the color of his hair. “That sound has a face, and that face is very similar to your equation-solving face. It’s frustration and restraint,” she clarified, surer now after having built some momentum, “like you want the satisfaction of the end result, but not too quickly, not too easily. If it comes too easily, it’s not worth doing. You know how good it’ll feel to figure it out, but you don’t want it yet so you’re pushing it away. It’s like that,” she said.
Regan always spoke about sex with an incredible, incomprehensible ease. For Aldo, sex had always been a little dirty, a little taboo, certainly not something to discuss. She brought it up easily, without batting an eye. For her, sex was part of her humanity. It was part of how she experienced the world.
“I don’t think you can ever really know a person without fucking them,” she said once, which was a moderately disturbing thing to hear. “I don’t need to know everyone,” she said, watching his face change and laughing a little to herself. “Not everyone is worth knowing in full, I’m just saying, you can’t know someone until you’ve had sex with them. I mean, look at all the kinks a person can have, the things they can be attracted to, whether they have to feel love or not feel it. Whether they enjoy it or not. It’s all so comprehensive to who a person is. Can you really understand someone without knowing what brings them pleasure? No, you really can’t, so we have to resign ourselves to knowing that we won’t know most of the people in our lives at all.” Then she added, conspiratorially, “But that doesn’t mean I can’t make guesses.”
She confessed to him that her relationships with men, which he’d already understood in an abstract way to be flawed, were like that because she was constantly thinking of herself as a sexual object.
“I think it was just like that, from so early on,” she told him. “For boys, sex is a part of life, a rite of passage. Boys look at porn when they’re twelve, thirteen! Boys get to have sex just as it is, just sex. Girls are taught fairy tales, they’re taught happily ever after, they’re taught sex as a consequence of marriage. Imagine seeing the world that way, as if sex isn’t a right but a rung on a ladder. We have to withhold it, can you imagine that? Because it’s so brainless and simple that if men get it too easily, they’ll just leave. Because really, how the fuck is my vagina different from any other woman’s? No, the thing that makes me different is somewhere else, literally anywhere else, but I can’t enjoy sex without some archaic sociological risk. And if you think about that it’s even worse, because look at the vagina, Aldo. It can have infinite orgasms. It doesn’t require any recovery time. It can come and come and come and what, maybe it gets dry? Lube it up again, easy. If any sexual organ is omnipotent it’s the fucking cunt but no, penises are the ones who get to decide whether a woman has value. Who let that happen? Really, Aldo, who? Maybe this is why men rule the world, because they were clever enough to convince women that virginity is precious, that sex itself should be secret, that being penetrated was sacrosanct. It’s idiotic, it’s even dumber than it is cruel and that’s the worst part. The idea that I should want sex less than you, why does that exist?”
Not that her relationships with women were much better. In fact, Regan had told him right away that she didn’t have many friends, and gradually, Aldo discovered that she had been right, or at least honest. That, of course, was the interesting part. Regan didn’t have a lot of time or energy for the sort of love that required openness, and it made Aldo realize that the best thing he could have done to win Regan over was to immediately identify her primary truth: that she was most comfortable when she was at her falsest. Regan did not enjoy honesty. She hated it, was repulsed by it, and by her own truths especially. With other peoples’ truths she merely collected them like shiny things, tucking them away or else carrying them around, wondering where to put them.