Love I
One of the ongoing debates in the ecumenical councils of their relationship was whether he’d be opportunistic in securing her affection during a vulnerable period, an accusation, as he saw it, that he denied, though she maintained that she respected the verve and determination, esteeming herself too highly to imagine having been scavenged. A different woman, having agreed with her husband that they could see other people, the next day flew to Denver, where she announced to a friend of equally long tenure that she had always felt there could be something more between them. As for myself, I’m terrible at playing dead, although I guess I can see the appeal of laying out in the desert, closing your eyes, and wondering whether the beak devouring your heart belongs to an eagle or a vulture.
His desire for love grew, it seemed to him, in proportion to how much love he had. When he was single neither the sight of someone leaning in perfect peace against their partner’s brave shoulder nor the dreamy photos from a couple’s vacation could stimulate in him, as it seemed to do in others, a yearning for a symmetrical affection. What crossed his mind instead was something like the words, good luck! No one seemed happy enough to merit envy. But the moment he fell in love he wanted to stamp the whole world with this outrageous feeling. As if only his were good enough. But I am not possible! I am not possible! he thought, angrily, to himself.
Neither of them had been broken up with before. “It’s alright,” he said. “You can do the honors when the time comes. I’m less competitive.” My friend P. has a running joke with his wife that he’s going to leave her for a younger woman (they’re both in their eighties – “You better hurry up,” she responds). Another friend told his fiancée that he would be for her an excellent first husband. Incidentally, I’m always skeptical at the weddings of people who are marrying a second time, events that are as humorless as the first time around, as if they’ve learned nothing. Basically, you can tell everything about a couple from their jokes.
The searching eye is not the adoring eye. We seek out the gaze of our beloved, hoping for some sign of warmth and favor, only to be met with confusion, even fear—unbeknownst to us, they’re looking for the same signs, receiving the same disheartening glance. Neither consummation nor confession eliminates this dynamic, which repeats itself during every quarrel. The best hiding place for a wounded heart is behind a mirror. This is why lovers’ arguments have the quality of collapsing into themselves down to infinity.
She had an elegantly simple metaphor for creating love, that is was like passing a ball back and forth. Yes, sometimes you challenged the other person with a difficult lob, insofar as variety and extension made the game more fun, but the goal was fun, and certainly one did just take the ball and run off without explanation. This wasn’t my problem in particular. It was more that I’d spent so much time practicing against a wall that, in deference to its obvious superiorities in returning a volley, I had become one myself.
“Of course,” she said, “love is the best feeling in the world.” “How about success?” I said. They shade into one another. To help explain what it was she made him feel, he told me, with some embarrassment, that she made him feel like a man. Later he came to regret quarrying so much pleasure from such a polluting mine.
She wanted to fold herself into him, under his skin, diffused across an atrium of warm and stagnant blood, maybe the capillaries at his wrist, so she might feel also his gaze when he checked his watch. She imagined love as sheer pleasure, an intoxicating blanket constantly revealing deeper, softer, warmer recesses. He looked at his watch. He’d done his loving for the day, had performed the necessary lustrations, lit the candles, dusted the altar, and now it was time for work. He imagined love as a numinous moon, shining an edifying light on the isolation of things. Before this dusk could fall, however, he received a call from a friend, disconsolate. Two nights ago, this friend had made his girlfriend what he felt was a great gift, an allowance for certain intimate liberties, which she’d accepted, but which seemed to have left no mark on her psyche, no pimple of gratitude that she would pop in his presence. He imagined love as a sacrifice, a living martyrdom, a pyre that would burn but not devour him as it cast exalting radiances upon the face of his beloved. The beloved was at home. What was she thinking about? Mortgages and dining room tables, and in which chair she would want him seated. She imagined love as the gruff robustness of clan alliances in hilly highlands, Afghanistan, Appalachia, a handshake for the glory of mutual friends and the tears of mutual enemies. That all this resolves mostly in talk talk talk is beside the point—the wonder is that we’ve granted to one word the burden of carrying all that cannot be said by all the others.