Good Morning, Destroyer of Men's Souls

by Nina Renata Aron

  Is love a meritocracy? Do some people excel because they cultivate a talent for it, because they practice a set of exercises and improve over time? Fromm thought so. He outlined a theory of love as a skill that could be mastered like any other and stated that “love is an action, the practice of a human power, which can be practiced only in freedom and never as the result of a compulsion. Love is an activity, not a passive affect; it is a ‘standing in,’ not a ‘falling for.’ ”

  I heard something similar echoed by a therapist—one in a string of withholding, mildly disapproving motherly types I selected over the course of a few years after my husband and I split, perhaps to punish me back into goodness. This particular mother/doctor, wearing (if not clutching) actual pearls, urged me repeatedly to shift my focus away from the breathless declamations of love I found so romantic—what were those but words—and look instead at actions. My own and those of the people whom I said I loved, those who claimed to love me back. What had they done for me lately, she was asking. Love is an action verb, she said. It sounded like a line you’d find on the marketing materials of a weekend marriage-saving seminar, but I repeated it like a mantra for a period of days to see whether I thought it was true, whether it might help me if it was.

  I understood this basic premise—that healthy love inheres in the repeated carrying out of various duties. But when I thought about love-the-action-verb, I could only think of the steady, daily, repetitive motions of parenthood. The over-and-over-ness of it all, like a movie montage—the sticky rip of diaper tabs, the rhythmic industrial squeeze of the breast pump. Those were things I liked even when bored and exhausted because they were done in service to the highest form of love. I thought of my own mother’s hands buttering innumerable towering slices of cinnamon toast, gathering hundreds of pigtails and weaving thousands of braids. That was surely a “standing in” love. Loving as doing. But wasn’t it also a “falling for,” the wildest falling for? In the moments when I wasn’t mechanically completing the menial assignments of motherhood, wasn’t the pulsing, radiating love I felt precisely a “passive affect,” in Fromm’s words, one I often observed dumbly as it crashed over me? I felt conquered, annexed by that love.

  If that therapist were to prescribe a healthy relationship for me, I suspected she might appreciate one studded by a few grand gestures—well-timed, not wholly impractical. Not the skywriting-scale stuff you see in the movies—in real life, that degree of earnestness is something to be suspicious of. She would want me to find a mate who might whisk me away on a trip, present me unexpectedly with a nice gift. Reasonable surprises. Instagrammable surprises. But at the center of the love the mother/doctor wanted me to covet was a man content to play a long game—undaunted by commitment or by the mundane, ready to embark upon the Groundhog Day slog of life. I pictured a kind-eyed, clean-cut man, a tall catalogue model in a nice sweater, his face gently etched with crow’s feet, the markings of a lifetime of smoldering warmth. Like my husband, except paying more attention. With this type of person, I should make patterns on the surface of my days and in so doing discover that healthy romantic love could be like babylove—this was what she was saying. It, too, involved tasks and activities repeated over time until they’d worn a groove into everyday life. And the groove itself was a form of romance. The groove was devotion.

  What had people done for me that had truly made me feel loved? she had asked me at the next session. I thought about the time K, with a beatific, postcoital smile, wrote I LOVE U in my menstrual blood on his bedroom wall, just above his bed, dipping his middle finger lingeringly into me like a quill into an inkpot as I watched and laughed and my eyes went wide as teacups. Was that gesture a doing or merely a saying? Was it an action verb? Was it empty, or was it a promise? Watching him do it gave me the feeling I’d always understood to be love—something low, rumbling, a little bit evil, a little revolting. Some sick and special secret wizardry that fouls you up with its unexpectedness, its brazenness. You can’t wear a groove into everyday life with moments like these—they are by their nature strange and singular. I didn’t mention this incident to the therapist—I rarely talked to her about sex, and I found it tragic to play the rebellious teenager trying to shock a grown-up—but I thought about it all day, how wonderfully cracked open and raw that had made me feel. That fear and wonder. Into the computer program I’d purchased to use as a diary, I typed a cube of questions, the same kind I was always typing. Wasn’t love a hideaway. Bordered by darkness. A place of dissonance and therefore revelation. “Love that is compatible with bill-paying, child-rearing, with cleaning out a garage?” I asked incredulously. But but but. “Isn’t the real thing supposed to get in your way a little bit?”

  One of the earliest stirrings of curiosity about men that I ever felt was for Lord Licorice, the Victorian villain of the Candy Land board, who in my memory stood slightly bent in a skintight, dark red costume, devilishly twirling his mustache. I must have been about six. Looking already toward a cartoon goth for subterranean messages of lust. “Be careful,” read his description in the instructions, “he may try to block your way along the path with his icky, sticky licorice!”

  I wanted to find an explanatory framework that would enable me to be more comfortable with this period of painful flux. That would distract me from a simpler explanation, that perhaps I was just brazenly selfish—amid the aches and strains of normal life, I went looking for something shiny and new. Tore up the page I was on and started fresh. Maybe what I failed at was just working. Trying. Practicing Fromm’s skill-building regimen and earning over time the insignia of a love expert, a love colonel. A lieutenant of love, practiced in the art of the everyday, in weathering loneliness, shouldering time and quiet, washing and rewashing the cast-iron pot.

  chapter twenty

  The end of a marriage takes on its own momentum. It was happening even as we were discussing whether it should happen. Even as we were experimenting with honesty, clarity, and remorse. I thought about my parents with their cigarettes on the screen porch.

  The spectacular birth of our daughter was our finale, the last moment of deep, intentional, loving partnership. Out with a bang. I recovered from the birth quickly—I was so guilty, I didn’t feel entitled to any special dispensation anyway, it was just a baby, I was fine—and we set about disassembling our shared life.

  I rented an apartment for a couple months, the basement of a North Berkeley house a few blocks from the home I’d shared with my husband. It was not a nice place, but it was my space, the first space I felt I could be in freely with K. When he knocked on the door that first night, I opened it and we stood embracing silently in the doorway for what felt like an hour. The kids were asleep—my son in the extra bedroom and my daughter, so small she couldn’t even roll over yet, on the taut floral sheets on my bed at the center of a fort made of couch cushions. The living room, which the front door opened into, was dotted with cardboard boxes and trash bags filled with clothing. K smelled my hair and kissed my head while I cried against his jacket. All I want in the entire world is to make you happy, he finally said. He opened his bag and took out a smaller plastic bag, inside which were two matching pairs of athletic shorts and kneesocks. I could picture the American Apparel on Haight Street where he’d stopped when he got off work. Team outfits, he said. Put these on and meet me on the couch. In the bathroom, I dried my eyes and blew my nose while I peed, then changed into the sporty ensemble and emerged to find K on the couch in the same garb, leaning on one elbow like a 1970s centerfold and eyeing me intensely. I lay down next to him, laughing.

  You look great in a pair of kneesocks, Pimentoloaf, he said, shaking his head.

  Thank you for this gift, I laughed.

  Well, we’re a team now, he said.

  On my phone, I took a picture of our intertwined legs in the matching shorts and socks, and we kissed and cried until the baby woke up.

  The next day was the day he overdosed w
ith his friend Will and came home bleary and quiet with the electrodes stuck to him. I was speechless for hours as we lay with the sleeping baby in our bed. Then tears began streaming down my face. I didn’t erupt, didn’t wail, just calmly begged.

  Baby, please don’t do this, I said, you can’t do this now. Please, please don’t die now. I need you, we need you. This life—I gestured to the unpacked room—is just beginning and I don’t want to do it all alone. He laid his big hand on my head and brought my fingers to his lips to kiss them.

  I’m so sorry, he said. I promise I won’t die again.

  * * *

  •   •   •

  I wanted to make him happy, too. I dropped out of the doctoral program, defeated and exhausted. Did I even drop out? I just stopped going. No one cared. I got a job as a researcher and writer at a branding agency in downtown San Francisco and went to work in a fog. I was back to drinking again, but I was exercising restraint, drinking moderately and only when the kids were asleep. I brought home vanilla vodka and a big can of pineapple juice, the kind they used to pour from at snack in elementary school, the kind you have to start with the triangle end of a bottle opener. I poured the vanilla vodka—only $9.99—over ice, filling the glass by about three quarters before topping it off with the pineapple juice. Sometimes I threw in a maraschino cherry from a jar that had stood so long on the liquor store shelf its white lid had collected a fine layer of silvery dust. A low-rent piña colada. I brought home weed and its many cousins, herbaceous and fruity taffies and gummies and chews and suckers that were then newly and readily available. I wanted to get fucked up, and to be fucked up with K, but I also wanted to be the cool girlfriend who gets him fucked up. The nurse who breaks out the fentanyl lollipops. Not like the real junkie girlfriends, who had vied like vermin for his drugs, who might have stolen his morning shot and fucked up his whole day. I wasn’t one of those. I was a mom. I wanted to be his good time, but when I couldn’t, I would at least protect his good time. Arrange for it, facilitate it, create the conditions for him to enjoy himself.

  The baby was too young to be away from me at all, so even when my son spent time with his father, she remained with me, strapped to me in the supermarket and Sephora, at cafés and in bookstores and to Claire’s apartment and to the playground again and again, an already all-knowing appendage who issued side-eye from any number of fabric baby carriers and who learned to laugh within the first six weeks, a boisterous chirp that activated the devastating dimple in her right cheek. She was on my body the entire time I unpacked in the apartment, and then again a few months later when I packed to move into the next place. When K held her she looked especially small. One morning, I called in sick and we dropped my son off for preschool and went to a diner with the baby, still in her yellow-and-white footie pajamas with her kewpie tendrils swirling messily about her head. K held her and let her play with a spoon as I drank my coffee. She smashed it against his cheekbones and his nose and he put on a face of exaggerated concern and grabbed it back and when she giggled crazily, he kissed her neck and the insides of her open, reaching hands. What are you gonna do about it? he teased her. She looked at him with adoration and wonder, waiting to see what he’d do next, the same way I did.

  chapter twenty-one

  “‘I love you’ is always a quotation,” writes Jeanette Winterson on the first page of Written on the Body, the bible of love books, the Buddha at the center of my shrine to erotic obsession, to infidelity justified by temporary insanity. She’s right: “I love you” is a citation, a reference to one’s past, to the entire past, to history. “I love you” is both singular and iterative. It denotes millennia of humans clamoring for meaning, for immortality: a symphony in one note.

  As our love came into full, mad flower, I searched for solace in Winterson and elsewhere, steadying myself through others’ tales of desperate love, stories I realized I’d been collecting rather compulsively my entire life. My love arsenal was comprised of hundreds of songs, novels, and films, and falling for K offered an opportunity—or an excuse—to go back through them all, sewing all the while the tapestry of our story, which was every bit as exhilarating, and as tragic, as any I’d collected, as any that came before. This was something I’d always done, a way of grounding myself, situating my narrative among others I’d learned and loved. It was, perhaps, also a way of elevating us.

  After all, a keen, literary attention to detail had formed the bedrock of my desiring life. My sense of romance was informed by the idea of a man hyper-attuned to specificity, a man in a reverie over the clasp of a woman’s necklace, the gather of her stockings at her ankles. “In the corner, in a trenchcoat, her hair gleaming, sits a silent girl with a face like a bird…” writes James Salter in A Sport and a Pastime, “…One of those hard little faces, the bones close beneath it. A passionate face. The face of a girl who might move to the city.”

  It seemed to me at the time that technology had destroyed certain forms not merely of romance, but of interest, curiosity, that a certain kind of fixatedness was dead. On the train, people looked at their phones. They collapsed their biographies into personal ads and used computers to find dates. They ordered books one at a time from warehouses controlled by robots. With the entire human catalogue of pornographic images and acts freely available on the Internet, it sometimes seemed there was nothing left to imagine, and no one really minded.

  But in K’s obsession with me, there was a charmingly outmoded fixatedness that I cherished, a fine-grained attention to the minutiae of me so intense it was almost frightening.

  In the laser beam of his gaze, I came radiantly alive. Suddenly, strangely, unmistakably, I was legible. An open book. His love invited me to perform every femininity I could possibly want, every character I’d ever read, every starlet I’d ever wanted to be. He could see it all. He wanted it all, every inch of me, every word, urge, hormone, every costume change. I felt how I’ve always wanted to—I was safe and beautiful, pinned like a butterfly, still containing mysteries in my diaphanous wings. I was a looker, a hooker, a tired, middle-aged professional coming home to make stir-fry and make her husband listen to her yammer on about the day. I was a teenager with cramps. I was a frontierswoman hanging the washing on the line, squinting against a gust of prairie wind. I was a mob wife, clad in black lace with lipstick the color of blood, making his dinner. I was a worthwhile object of obsession. I was no one special and didn’t care because I was with him.

  * * *

  •   •   •

  I loved him like a dog. When he described dopesickness as a totalizing, almost existential feeling of dread, I thought it didn’t sound that different from the way I felt when things were bad with us, or when I couldn’t reach him, or when he said he was going to leave me. I obsessed over him the way he obsessed over getting high.

  But a totalizing love is not a safe love. When he was gone, I thought I would die.

  When I imagined him dying, I thought I would never love again.

  In the book Desire/Love, Lauren Berlant writes that “the love plots that saturate the public sphere are central vehicles for reproducing normative or ‘generic’ femininity.” This does not mean that the love itself feels generic; rather, she goes on, the delusion of singularity is part and parcel of the form itself: “[T]he heteronormative love plot is at its most ideological when it produces subjects who believe that their love story expresses their true, nuanced, and unique feelings, their own personal destiny.” To Berlant, this is akin to the capitalist commodity obscuring the relations that animate its production. Love and the proliferation of narratives about love’s uniqueness are used to reproduce the traditional form of normative femininity. And women remain love’s gatekeepers, as “the institutions and ideologies of romantic/familial love declare woman/women to be the arbiters, sources, managers, agents, and victims of intimacy” to such an extent that we do not realize we are unwittingly perpetuating the same cycles, the same
expectations and forms.

  Was this what my grandmother had fallen for? And my mother? Does all romantic love entrap you with the certainty of its own singularity and then reveal itself to be a myth designed to obscure your captivity?

  * * *

  •   •   •

  As a girl, I lived in thrall to a certain mousy, WASP-y beauty that devastated me, blank pale fair faces that were canvases onto which any idea or fantasy could be projected. I loved and hated these tabulae rasae, and the love and hate were heads and tails of the same coin: envy. Gazing into slick, high-contrast fashion spreads, I recall feeling actually ill with longing, a sense of dread that I would have to live out the rest of my life—a flat, undifferentiated forever—looking like me. I kept it to myself. I thought the shame of self-hatred, of hopeless aspiration, should be concealed. Even more crass than wanting something so badly was acknowledging it out loud, or worse, pinning models’ pictures to your bedroom mirror the way some girls I knew did. “Thinspiration,” these collections of images are called now. But I was thin. More than the dainty birdcage of ribs and arms, more than thigh gap, I coveted small, proportional faces with little non-Semitic noses, adorable, freckle-strewn noses, and straight, Wheat Thins–colored hair. “Ethnic” was the word most frequently used to describe me—that was still okay to say, people seemed to love to say it—or sometimes “exotic.” My sisters had, in my eyes, been granted a softer beauty, but I looked severe. My hair was thick and black, my eyes heavily lidded, my nose large and crooked. Sometime around the beginning of high school, a grown man told me I looked like the actress Rossy de Palma, one of Almodóvar’s muses. This was before the Internet, so I couldn’t look her up, I just remembered her name and felt gleeful thinking I resembled a European movie star. When I finally saw her—a striking, cubist painting of a woman (whom I’ve since come to love)—in a film still from the movie Kika, I came home and cried into my pillowcase.