Love II
The question on everyone’s lips, it seems, is not how easy it is to fall in love, but how easy it is to avoid it. Insufficiently tempted, we’ve opted en masse to tempt fate, although for a decade we’ve also been cultivating the only available defense, a strict aesthetic judgment. When I asked his wife whether the Greek man she’d started seeing, and, it seemed, enjoying the company of, was in any way at risk of provoking in her feelings more sublime, she responded by smacking her forehead. “Oh Kris, you should have seen his sunglasses.”
Someone asked me recently how many times I’d been in love, and I caught myself reevaluating the numbers, adding asterisks, auditing the data collectors, because I wanted to tell myself that this time had been different, because I wanted to believe that the future would be more different yet. I wonder. I’ve lived thirty-six years. At what point do you know more or less what life has on offer? At what point does it become just moving around commas?
During the pandemic, M. and his wife began dating another woman, who soon moved into their apartment. Every night, he slept in the middle of the one bed they all shared, and every morning, the first to wake up, M. looked at the ceiling, like an unparadoxed Buridan’s donkey. It was the happiest year of his life, and it was followed by the most miserable. Eventually they forced him to choose. Neither being in love nor out of it will solve your problems. The husband and the bachelor will each, as Svevo wrote, have their regrets, although presumably of different flavors. When I think about the question too coldly, I reason that, if you spend a lifetime making wine for yourself, but you possess only one bottle, you can either know the range of tastes for five-year wines, or you can know, once, the flavor of a single fifty-year vintage. This exercise reveals many flaws in feeling and thinking, but the upshot is that I can warn you not to fall in love with someone who mistakes knowledge for pleasure. Better to find a know-it-all, like the one who told his wife she need not worry about his remarrying after her death, because with a different woman it’d just be the same problems. One should hide the knowledge that one has a choice with the same care that one would hide in one’s house a gun.
Overly unhitched men of a certain age have a tendency to become weird. I’m in the at-risk demographic. First-, second-, and third-hand observations of the travails (and successes) of romance in middle age have made me feel for the first time the weight and import of the phrase, “He was never the same again.”
I joked with her that every one of my new mistakes and mispeakings she fashioned into a jewel that she strung onto a necklace with the others. On our ruined nights, she donned this necklace in all its dazzling, peremptory beauty. It had the power we might attribute to certain cathedrals—it made me want to kneel and bury my face. By no means could I inspect the gems, to see if they were diamonds or mere zirconia. The anguish and the elation of being in love with someone is that, like when reading Tolstoy, one takes their every word, especially the most clichéd, as utter and irreproachable truths.
He told her, coaxing one from her equally diaphanous hair, that the sight of cottonwood fluffs in the air would always remind him of her. It was the most he could muster a few minutes after she’d told him, with devastating honesty, that she had digressed them from the act because she knew if they had she would have fallen in love. They’d met on the night train to Dubrovnik—he’d lain awake waiting for the rare flashes of sepia light from outside to swing across her face, to see if her eyes were also open. Now, in a café on the Stradun that offered the worst food he’d ever eaten in his life, she let him take her hand, and then, when she noticed his thumb on the diamond of her engagement ring, she took it back with a bashful smile and offered him the other—for her sake, he wondered, or his? Or his? Everything interested him, in a way. He showed her how he was shaking. He imagined having to write her a letter, in which he tried to explain that the rush of life and excitement he felt in that moment exalted not only her, but many things, also cottonwood fluffs in long blond hair, also night trains. Love is all curiosity, he thought, a little punishingly, after she’d left to catch her flight, but not all curiosity is love.