Things like the Truth

by Ellen Gilchrist

  None of that had much to do with young and old. Love is liking to be with another person. Having a good time in their presence, thinking you are good and valuable when you are with them.

  I remember the first time he saw my forty-four-year-old body in a bathing suit. He was taking me swimming in a beautiful clear lake formed by the dammed-up waters of the White River. As usual he did not tell me where we were going. We took bathing suits and a lunch and got in the car and started driving. We drove for more than an hour, going north and west from home, going deep into the Ozark Mountains. We turned finally into a park and drove around and up to an overhang and parked the car and got out and started walking.

  We walked down wide granite steps that had once been the top of a mountain. I learned to swim in a bayou in the Mississippi delta and I love the taste and feel of brown river water. We changed into our bathing suits in a grove of shrub trees. “This is the body of a forty-four-year-old woman in a bathing suit,” I said. “What do you think?”

  “I think you look wonderful,” he said. “Hold my hand.”

  Then we walked down the granite steps to the water and he watched as I slid into the lake and started swimming. No man giving a woman diamonds ever had more pleasure or self-assurance in their gifts than he did in giving me that blessed lake.

  Am I romanticizing all of this? Perhaps. I have had two great love affairs in my life. I don’t think either of them need romanticizing.

  I cherish the memory of that affair and I am always glad it happened. It made me understand my sons. It reminded me, at a time when many women are leaving such things behind, what passion is and does and causes, how it takes over and calls the shots and creates its own reality. As Edna St. Vincent Millay wrote, it is a “treasure never to be bartered by the hungry days.”

  Being Wooed

  BEING WOOED IS WHEN A MAN SETS OUT TO AND MAKES YOU desire and love him, need him, dream of him, miss him when he’s gone. A man could give me a Learjet, and I would certainly be glad, but that wouldn’t necessarily make me want to hold him in my arms or marry him or bear his children. I have had three husbands and many lovers, but only one of them ever really wooed me. He was a young musician who gave me spontaneous, original gifts from his heart, desiring me while I was doing dishes, putting me in the car and taking me to see a waterfall without telling me where we were going, bringing me a baseball shirt on the first day of spring. The baseball shirt was white with blue sleeves, and when I put it on, he said, “Wear it with those velvet jeans. I go crazy when you wear those velvet jeans.” An hour later I was out in the park watching him play softball with his old high-school basketball team. Life was beautiful and easy for this man, and when I was with him it seemed that way to me. He included me in everything he did. He offered me his whole world.

  Other men I had been involved with had tried to figure out how to woo me, but there was nothing spontaneous about their efforts. I could always imagine the whole, dreary process as they remembered it was about to be my birthday or Christmas and marched duly out to search for something to give me—knowing all the while, and rightly, it probably wouldn’t be anything I wanted, but at least I couldn’t say they didn’t try. It would be an expensive scarf with a horse-riding motif, a stiff arrangement of flowers sent by a secretary and usually delivered while I was out of town, or, occasionally, something with diamonds I would have to wear whether it suited me or not. I loved those men for their efforts, and I loved the way they waited to be praised, but still, something inside me always wanted to say: surprise me, serenade me, carve my name on a tree.

  The way to woo a woman is to adore her. The thing women want is to be desired. When the musician made love to me, he said, I’ve never known such happiness, I think about you all day long, don’t ever leave me, don’t ever go away.

  I think the other men I loved felt this way, but they couldn’t bring themselves to admit it. Perhaps men are afraid of women, afraid of their need for us, dazzled by our delicacy and beauty. Perhaps they feel that if they tell us how much they love us, we will take advantage of them, and, of course, some of us will.

  Being wooed is not the same thing as being seduced. When I was with the musician, I never felt I was being tricked or used. I felt something important was being made manifest. I never expected it to last forever, but I knew I was being changed by it. Even now, many years later, I remember that time without remorse or a sense of loss. I learned from that encounter, about love and its power to make the world seem wider and deeper, rich and timeless.

  One reason the musician was able to woo me was that I allowed him to do it. I never let the powerful, successful men I fell in love with pursue me, because I was pursuing them so hot and heavy they could hardly get a gift in edgewise. The wooing I wanted from them was a wedding ring. When I was in love, the only thing that made me feel safe was complete commitment. I always asked men to marry me before they could ask me. My need was so terrible that I spoiled all possibility of surprise.

  The musician managed to ask me first. He asked me the night I met him. It was spring, and new buds were on the trees, and the world seemed filled with poetry. The week after we met, he wrote a song about me and played it at a performance. What woman is immune to such wooing? We never did get married, but the fact that he had asked me made me secure.

  A man who is not afraid to woo is a rare and lovely creature. My oldest granddaughter is being courted at the moment by an endearing young man. She came down the stairs on Valentine’s Day dressed to go to dinner with him. He was waiting at the bottom of the stairs. When she was almost to the last stair, he opened a box and poured hundreds of rose petals at her feet. I think we are going to see a lot more of that young man.

  There have been moments in my life when the most rigid or unlikely man would suddenly do something that seemed a dance of courtship. Once, a spoiled southern mama’s boy dove from a yacht into a dangerous river in the dark to save me. Everything I thought I’d known about that man changed in an instant. I had insisted I could swim in any body of water and had jumped into the river to prove it, but the current was too strong, as he had told me it would be. When he saw I was in trouble, he saved me—and afterward he didn’t say, “I told you so” or get mad at me for putting him in danger. I loved him on and off for several years afterward. Nothing he did in his spoiled, indulged life could make me forget what he had done when it mattered.

  A writer I know told me she once fell in love with a man because he had a clothes dryer delivered to her house. She was young and poor and had to take her clothes to a laundromat to dry them. He saw a need and filled it.

  The way to woo a woman is to give her what she needs before she knows she needs it, or to give her what she needs before she asks. A politician gave me the best present I have ever been given by a lover. It was a large book, hot off the presses, of photographs of earth taken from a satellite. He knew my interest in geology and gave me something I wanted that I didn’t know existed.

  I never know I need love until it is offered to me. Perhaps wooing is the way a man reminds a woman of the joy two people can give each other. Who cares if it’s oedipal or electral or simple chemistry? It’s still the honey to end all honeys. It’s not for sale, this strange, rare happiness, but if it is, the coin of the realm is imagination.

  Writing Maketh an Exact Man, Part II

  I’VE BEEN THINKING ABOUT WRITING A SHORT PIECE ABOUT why I won’t get a brain transplant. I have already decided not to undergo any more cancer screenings since no one in my huge extended family has ever had cancer and I’m not going to get it. I’m going to die of a stroke in my nineties like all my female ancestors, and sooner if I don’t quit getting mad over the tackiness and fearmongering and wastefulness of the culture in which I live.

  That being so, I am going to have to learn to love my own brain and its ways of hauling me around the world. I am often contemptuous, impatient, and condescending. I don’t like people who have no self-discipline. I dislike drunks, dope addicts a
nd obese people. I am also kind and generous and useful.

  Until I began to tell people that I couldn’t get a brain transplant I didn’t know how to tell myself that it was all right to be myself. It’s all right to tell people who drink too much and are fat that alcohol is highly concentrated sugar and they should stop drinking it, if they are really serious about losing weight. I used to feel guilty if I said that to someone who had asked my advice about losing weight. But it’s the truth as I see it, and it is not possible for me to lie to people. I’m not good at it. If I know someone who has to be lied to then I don’t want to see them anymore. It’s a waste of my time and breath.

  The reason to stop trying to change your nature is that it wastes time you could have spent using your native talents and skills to get some work done in the world. As Einstein said, to pay the world back for providing you with food and shelter and electricity and plumbing and love and entertainment.

  I have pulled my punches as a writer off and on for thirty-seven years. The gloves are off. From now on I call it like I see it.

  It is making me a much better writing teacher than I was when I began to try to learn to teach. Writing is hard work. It means thinking and rethinking each sentence, rethinking structure while trying to save the natural tone, trying to save the truth of what you write, to believe in the voice your brain gave you the sentence in. Most of what I know about writing in the last few years is couched in the language of singles tennis matches at the major tennis tournaments. I love sports metaphors. I was raised on them as a child and I have come back to them in my old age.

  Play to win, don’t limp to the finish, keep your eye on the ball, concentrate, focus, practice, practice, practice.

  It is difficult to become a writer because the first thing you have to do is arrange a life that allows you to write. You have to be sober, hardworking, and in good health. You have to take care of your body and your brain. You can’t let people waste your time. Take the telephone off the hook when you have work to do. Unplug the computer, except for the part you are using as a tool. I still use an electric typewriter so I can unplug everything in the house except for that and if the electricity goes off I can write very well on a legal pad with a number-two lead pencil.

  I learned how to live as a writer by reading a book by Ernest Hemingway called On Writing. A young editor at Hemingway’s publishers had gone through his writings and pulled out all the advice about how to be a writer. That editor is now the editor in chief of Little, Brown.

  Meditations on Divorce

  I HAVE PUT THIS ESSAY IN THE FORM OF MEDITATIONS BECAUSE I do not have a theory to expound. I do not want to “lead you to an overwhelming question.” All I have to offer are the ideas I have been entertaining for many years as I watched myself, my friends, and my children live through painful and troubled times in the courts of love. The higher the intelligence, the slower the rate of maturation. This is true in phylogeny, ontogeny, and in our lives. The more intelligent and sensitive the person, the more likely they seem to have their relationships end in chaos. Perhaps the intelligence and sensitivity make it more difficult for them to endure relationships that have gone bad.

  Here are some of the things I have observed.

  Divorce is caused by stupid marriages. By people getting married when they are too young or because they are scared or because they think a wife or husband will “complete” them. And divorce is often a very good idea. It’s certainly better than a loveless or ill-suited or painful marriage.

  Children are the victims of divorce. Most grown men and women go on to other relationships and, except for wasting energy being angry at the person they have divorced or been divorced by, usually manage to learn a little something from the interchange. Of course, unless they are in some sort of therapy during the marriage or divorce, they generally go on to repeat the cycle, hopefully with someone at least slightly more suited to their real needs (which very few people ever acknowledge or examine, much less try to overcome or alter). Between them, my two brothers have married five women who look like my mother. Blond, blue-eyed, polite, quiet, gentle, inflexible. But neither of my brothers is interested in talking about animas or in seeing patterns in their behavior.

  Not that years of psychoanalysis have made a dent in my program. Every man I have been involved with has been the oldest son of a powerful woman. In the deep and meaningful relationships, the ones that ended in marriage, they have usually been the oldest son of three brothers. My father is the oldest of three brothers and the son of a powerful mother.

  Perhaps it does no good to know any of this. Perhaps it is impossible to choose who we love or want to breed with. Still, for me, the ability to articulate and understand my experience makes up somewhat for whatever inconvenience I have been caused by my unconscious strivings and yearnings.

  “We can do what we want, but we can’t want what we want,” a wise man wrote, and this is, alas, the long and short and the halter of it.

  Why do we make these crazy marriages that end in tragedy or divorce? Because we have mothers. When we are born we are held against the soft skin of our mothers. (Unless we are unlucky and lose our mothers, but that is another story.)

  This sets us up to fall in love. The minute you take off your clothes and lie down beside the soft skin of another human being, the relationship is changed forever. This is the ground of being. This is the big, big story. I have often thought, now that I am in my late middle age, a time surely of reflection and surmise, that perhaps we were better off with arranged marriages. To allow our young men and women to go off and lie down beside anyone they find attractive is dangerous. It often leads to marriages where the partners are unequal in money, scope, intelligence, sophistication, culture. These inequities are of no importance to nature, who wants us to breed far away from our DNA (hybrid vigor, that mother and father of beauty, genius, stamina, brilliance), but they are fertile ground for disagreement when the initial attraction begins to wane.

  I have known many wise and wonderful men and women who were good at everything but staying married. Well-meaning men and women, who entered marriages with the best and purest of intentions, have been shocked and stricken to find they could not maintain the love they felt for the person they married, or, worse, that they fell in love with “someone new,” as the language so brilliantly puts it. A marriage is altered by such yearnings whether the adulterous heart acts on them or not.

  Even the best among us are subject to Cupid and his arrows, to our unconscious wishes to re-create and recast our childhood, to fall into romantic dreams that are doomed to fade and die and be repeated with new actors.

  We reap what we sow. Divorce is the fruit of ignorance about our true nature. It is the harvest of ignorance. We cannot teach our children what we do not know. If we do not understand human sexuality and psychology, we cannot protect our young people from perpetuating the cycle of broken homes. We rush to buy our daughters elaborate wedding gowns and stage huge wedding parties. We feel like the bad fairy if we do not greet every engagement as a marvelous possibility, not to be questioned or probed. The minute two young people tell us they are getting married, we drop our judgment at the door and begin to ooh and aah.

  In this culture of bad marriages, divorce is a good idea more often than it is a bad idea. But it is nearly always a bad idea for the children. The child nearly always sees it as a fault of his own. He thinks he has failed because his parents do not live together. He thinks he has not been good enough to deserve the American dream of an intact family. This seems to be true even when the lost parent was abusive or alcoholic. All around him the child sees images of families with both mothers and fathers, and it makes him feel impoverished if he has only half this loaf.

  Perhaps there is nothing we can do about this. Perhaps we have to muddle along as we have been doing. Making messes of our lives and then cleaning them up as best we can.

  Years ago, Margaret Mead figured out a plan to lower our divorce rate and keep us from dama
ging our children. She posited a system of marriages. Any two grown people could apply for a license to be married or to cohabit. If the relationship was successful over a period of time, perhaps two to five years, then they could apply for a second license that would allow them to have a child together.

  God knows, I do not want government meddling in the private lives of citizens, but at least we should try to teach young people not to have children until they have achieved a stable home. This means we must fight against nature. Nature doesn’t care about quality. Nature has cast its lot with quantity.

  The young people of the middle class who have access to reliable birth-control methods seem to be working out a system not unlike the one Margaret Mead proposed. They have a series of cohabitations, and, if one sticks for a long period of time, they get married and produce one or maybe two offspring. Sometimes these arrangements continue to work after the child is born. Sometimes they don’t.

  I have thought about these matters for years, trying to understand my own failed marriages and the harm divorce wreaked on my sons. I took them away from their father and tried to keep them from him. I was so young I believed they belonged only to me. They had come from my body. I had risked my life to have them. It was impossible for me to think their father had any right to them. Now they are older and have divorces and broken homes of their own. Women have borne children for them and used the children to manipulate them. Women have taken their children from them and made them beg to see them. Because of this, they look at their father with new eyes and commiserate with him. I am glad that time and experience have partially healed a cruelty I thought I had a right to inflict.