by Glenn Dixon
I guess I’d thought that all these letters would tell me something real about love. Something I could learn. But I had my own problems, and maybe, I thought, maybe the first step should be writing my own letter to Juliet.
* * *
I’d had a couple of late nights out in Verona, and I was finding it harder and harder to drag myself down to the offices di Giulietta, or at least to make it there much before nine in the morning.
I’d also forgotten what it was like to write with a pen for hours, the cramping in the meaty heel of my hand, having to stop to shake it out, every so often, like an injured bird. And no matter how many letters I answered, more and more kept avalanching across my desk.
One letter came from a girl in England. She was doing her sixth form—which is something like grade twelve—and she quoted almost the entirety of the prologue from Romeo and Juliet. “I want to be in the theater,” she wrote. “I know everything about the play. I have studied it all my life.”
You should have been at the opera last night, I thought. Maybe you could have explained it to me.
“I don’t really believe in true love,” she went on. “I think, anyway, I will have to sacrifice a husband for a career. Having said that, the idea of being in love is very attractive. I don’t want to be lonely. Should I let love be a priority, or should I continue to let my head rule over my heart?”
I paused before answering. “Your dreams are important,” I wrote. “They are what make you you. The right person will understand this. I wish you luck. Maybe one day you will perform Shakespeare onstage. Maybe one day you will direct the play you love so much.”
I read the answer over. Not bad. I didn’t want to give this girl false hope, but I didn’t want to spoil her dreams either. I was trying to be a grown-up. Giovanna would like that. She’d told me from the first day to put my answers into the envelopes but not to seal them. I imagined she and the other secretaries checked my answers. Maybe, maybe not. All I knew for sure was that someone, sometime later, would type the return address on the envelope and off the letter would go, back into the real world, eventually arriving at a faraway mailbox, giving the original writer a little electric jolt of pleasure and surprise and maybe, just maybe, an answer to their questions.
* * *
I responded to one last letter, then stood for a midmorning stretch. On the wall behind my chair, a poster of Gustav Klimt’s The Kiss gave the office its only color. Beside the poster, taped to the whitewashed wall, was a small square of yellow paper. I leaned in to read it. “Ogni pensiero, ogni sentimento ed ogni azione . . .”
“Only” something? “Only sentimental,” maybe? I gave up and sat back down. I wished I’d made more of an effort to learn Italian before I’d arrived. I had borrowed an Italian grammar book from a friend of mine, Desiree. She was fluent in Italian and she’d lived in Italy for almost eight years. I’d barely cracked her book open, though. There never seemed to be enough time.
Just as I pulled another letter toward me, Giovanna’s daughter, Margherita, appeared at the door. She held up a plastic desktop clock, then plunked it down onto my desk with a frozen grin like that of a synchronized swimmer.
“What’s this for?” I asked.
“Per sapere l’ora,” she murmured, then reversed herself out through the door.
Across the hall, Anna was craning her neck to see what was going on.
“What did she say?” I called over.
“She said, ‘The clock is for telling time.’ ”
Was Giovanna trying to tell me something? I knew I was getting a little lackadaisical with my departures and arrivals, but it didn’t seem particularly Italian to be worried about punctuality. Besides, it wasn’t like I was getting paid. I glared at the clock, but it wasn’t giving me any answers.
* * *
After the disaster in Bali, it didn’t take long before there was another boyfriend and then, a few years later, another one after that. In the end they weren’t good to her—or so I thought—but they were square-jawed and handsome and I knew I couldn’t compete. I was stymied. Like an insect trapped in amber, I’d been fossilized as her friend. I tried a few times to reiterate how I felt, but she would explain, patiently, as if she were discussing an idea from our university days. “I love you too. But I’m not in love with you. There’s a difference.”
I wasn’t sure about that. I wasn’t sure about that at all.
Still, it was a friendship worth holding on to. She and I would talk for hours, having conversations like I’d never had before. We’d discuss Foucault and Darwin and Adam Smith. She could speak with authority on the theory of conspicuous consumption and quote whole passages of Alice in Wonderland, all of “Jabberwocky,” for instance, playing with the words, as happy as a child.
The average human has a vocabulary of about sixty thousand words. Some of us, like Claire, have more. The funny thing is that 98 percent of all conversations—about anything—use only about four thousand of the most common words. So what are all the rest for? One theory has it that the rest are there for courtship, that they are displays of intelligence, just as facial symmetry is a display of health. I’m not sure I quite believe that. Words are not peacock tails. Words mark meaning, in deeper and deeper levels of subtlety. They are critical to our understanding of one another, to the expressing of our deepest thoughts and feelings, and recognizing those in others. Physical attraction is one thing but really seeing into the soul of another person—that should be more important, shouldn’t it?
A pathway runs along the riverbank where I live. You can walk across a footbridge and off into a forest of Douglas fir trees. Claire and I walked there dozens of times, maybe hundreds of times over the years. She always had cold hands. Her fingertips would go white and then purple. Even on the brightest spring days, her fingers lost their color. She’d hold them up for me to see, shaking her head, surprised at their hue. On the far side of the river, train tracks run along a ridge. Long trains thumped through, carrying wheat and canola to the Pacific markets of China and Japan and India. Claire always waved to the conductors. They leaned out of their tiny windows above the roaring engines to make sure the tracks were clear ahead. She raised a hand with fingertips the color of amethyst and the conductors waved back at her. Once, after a long train had passed, she turned to me, glowing. “You’re my best friend,” she said, and I didn’t know what to say in return. So I said nothing at all.
* * *
What is most useful in all the research on love? What is the most important thing to know? Well, probably this: Love is not just one thing. Love, by most accounts, has at least three distinct aspects. This is sometimes called the triangular theory of love and, for true love to exist, you need all three sides of the triangle: passion, intimacy, and commitment. And that requires some explaining.
Passion, in this case, is defined as lust or sexual desire. It’s the tangible, the touchable—the kissing and hugging and, yes, the sex act. It’s often the catalyst that gets the other aspects going. Or not. I don’t know. Maybe intimacy and commitment can develop in other ways, but what we do know is that passion alone is not love. How many have fallen on the sword of that misconception? Romeo was attracted to Rosaline, there’s no doubt about that, but he lusted for her. He didn’t truly love her.
That brings us to intimacy, the second essential for true love. Intimacy here means trust and not just physical closeness. Implicit in the idea of intimacy is the sharing of your deepest self—your secrets, your fears, your dreams—with this other person, and that this intimacy is reciprocated.
The third aspect of the triangle is commitment. This is the conscious decision, freely made, to settle down with one particular person and only that person. It’s the choice of monogamy, if only for a time. And how long that will last . . . well, that’s up to you.
* * *
The clock read ten when Anna appeared in the doorway of my office. She held a sheet of paper in her hand. “Can you do me a favor?”
“Sure. What is it?”
She slid the paper onto my desk. “We are planning a city tour of Verona,” she explained. “It is one of our ideas.”
“Okay.”
“We need new ideas for raising funds. We receive ten thousand letters a year, but the city pays only a set amount for the postage. It is not enough.” Anna met my eyes. “It is a big problem, so now, probably, we need to find other possibilities to make money.”
“So, a city tour?”
“Yes.” She pushed her glasses up the bridge of her nose. “I want to know if the English is correct before I put it on the Web page.”
“I’d be happy to look it over.”
“Grazie mille,” she said, “And don’t worry about the Italian parts.” She paused. “You don’t speak Italian, do you?”
“No. I’m trying to learn some. I brought a grammar book. A friend lent it to me but I haven’t really . . .” It sounded more pathetic with each phrase I uttered, so I stopped.
Anna stared at me. “Va bene.”
“What is that? Everyone says that here.”
“It has a thousand meanings, but probably it means something like ‘okay.’ ”
I nodded.
“You say it now.”
“Va bene?”
She kept a poker face for a moment; then her whole face lit up. “Bravo,” she said. “That is a good try.”
She bustled out the door and I went back to work.
Half an hour later, just as I’d finished the corrections, Anna appeared again, carrying a tray. “Coffee?” she offered. I picked up a tiny espresso cup from the tray. It was no bigger than an eggshell. I pinched its delicate handle and brought it to my lips. The espresso was as thick as melted chocolate, earthy and rich. “Grazie mille,” I sputtered.
Anna tipped her head graciously. She eyed the tour plans I’d been working on and I saw from her frown that she wasn’t pleased with the number of pen-stroked corrections I’d made. I couldn’t help it. I’d been an English teacher for a very long time.
“Va bene,” I said, holding up the paper. “It sounds like a great tour.”
Her eyes squinted through her emerald-green glasses as she studied my corrections.
“I like your glasses,” I said.
“Green is my favorite color. It is my favorite since kindergarten.” She touched the corner of her frames. “That is when I was first married.”
“Pardon?”
“You know how children are. There was a boy I liked, and we played that we were getting married. We had the whole ceremony, and I remember that my dress was green. So green has always been my favorite color.”
“And now?”
“What do you mean ‘now’?”
“Are you married?”
“I just told you I am married.”
“No, but really married. Or do you have a boyfriend?” I suddenly realized maybe I’d crossed a line. “I’m sorry, is that okay to ask?”
“I have very high expectations,” she explained. Her forehead furrowed, but there was mirth in her eyes.
“Right,” I said.
“He must be better than my first, and probably that will not be easy.”
* * *
We know now quite a bit about what’s going on in the brain when we’re in love. Passion, for example, in the triangular theory of love, is all about testosterone. That’s the chemical surge of sexual desire in both women and men.
Feeling close to someone, sharing your secrets, sets a whole different array of neurochemicals into motion. There’s dopamine, the neurochemical at play in the reward centers of the caudate nucleus. But there’s also norepinephrine and serotonin, the latter a neurotransmitter well known in the field of antidepressants. These neurotransmitters give us the giddy, happy feeling we have when we’re truly growing close to someone. They give us the cozy pleasant lull we feel when we’re having an intimate conversation over wine and candlelight.
As for long-term attachment, that’s our brains producing oxytocin, a bonding hormone. This is the same neurohormone that makes goslings imprint on the mother goose. It’s the same hormone that gushes around in pregnant women, bonding them to the baby about to be born. Oxytocin is a strange and powerful compound that we’re only now starting to fully understand, and there’s no doubt that it’s flushing through our systems when we are in the presence of those with whom we’ve chosen to spend our lives.
These are the chemical moons that push and pull at the tides of love. These are the biological stars that bend us to our fates.
* * *
Just before one o’clock, Anna came in to collect the espresso cup. She was going to wash up, then head home for lunch.
“Anna,” I said, “what does this mean?”
She looked at the yellow patch of paper tacked onto the wall. “ ‘Ogni pensiero, ogni sentimento ed ogni azione . . .’ ” she read. “This means ‘Every thought, every emotion, and every action . . .’ ” She read the next line silently. “Then, yes, these things it says are based on fear or on love. Amore is love. You know this word, I think.” She jabbed at the word on the paper.
“Amore,” I said.
She continued reading from the yellow paper. “ ‘Maestri sono coloro che scelgono l’amore.’ Maestro—do you know maestro?”
“Master?”
“No, it means ‘teacher.’ This line says that teachers are the ones who choose only love.” Anna paused. “You are a teacher, are you not?”
“Yes,” I said. “I am.”
* * *
My students always seemed to know when the balcony scene was coming.
Sadia had been talking about it for days before we actually got to it, and at the appointed hour, she sailed into the classroom with a knowing smile. She pulled her hijab down over her forehead and opened her book, not even looking up as the others made their way to their seats. Even Devin arrived on time, which was unusual. He slipped into his seat without a word. A reverent silence hung over the classroom.
“But soft,” I began, “what light through yonder window breaks? It is the east, and Juliet is the sun.
“So,” I said, “who is the sun?”
Andy squinted up at me, trying to work it out.
“It is the east and Juliet is the sun. Anybody?”
“Er, Juliet?” offered Devin.
“Yes. Now, why do you think Romeo is saying this?”
“Because he likes her?” Andy said. Poor Andy. He wore his rugby jacket every day in class. He was a fullback, broad across the shoulders but so new to his brawn that he shuffled and slouched uncomfortably most of the time. I could see that he was doing his best.
“Sure,” I said. “Because he likes her.”
Andy beamed.
“Okay, so—listen.” I read on:
Arise, fair sun, and kill the envious moon,
Who is already sick and pale with grief,
That thou her maid art far more fair than she.
I glanced up from my book. Everybody had their heads buried in the text, even Devin. They hated when I interrupted, but I really wanted them to understand this. “Who is the moon?” I asked.
Sadia rose a couple of inches from her seat. “Rosaline,” she announced. “Rosaline is the moon.”
“Yes,” I said. “The sun outshines the moon. Romeo has found someone who outshines Rosaline.”
“In your face, Rosaline!” said Devin.
I kept reading:
Her eyes in heaven
Would, through the airy region stream so bright
That birds would sing and think it were not night.
“Yeah,” said Devin. “That’s good.”
“You bet it’s good,” I said. “This is the greatest love scene of all time.”
“But,” said Sadia, “isn’t he being kind of creepy, sneaking into her backyard and watching her through the window?”
“Balcony,” Devin corrected. “She’s come out on the balcony.”
“Actually, if you loo
k, you’ll see that Shakespeare never says ‘balcony.’ ”
“It just says ‘enter above,’ ” said Devin. He gaped up at me. “Where’s the balcony?”
“Well,” I said, “in Verona, they do have a balcony at Juliet’s house.”
“You just said there wasn’t one,” said Devin.
“I said that Shakespeare doesn’t mention one in the play. Now, though, it’s become so much a part of our popular culture that in Verona, at Juliet’s house, they added a balcony on the second floor.”
“Why would they do that?” Devin asked.
“I don’t know, but it’s kind of beautiful.”
“But it’s fake,” said Devin. “It’s not in the play.”
“Sometimes,” I said, “imagination is as important as reality.”
“People need stories,” said Andy. “Even if they’re not real.”
“Yes,” I said. “They do.”
* * *
Everything I’ve told you about Claire happened long ago in the first few years that I knew her, just after we’d been at university together.
And then, after only a few years, she suddenly disappeared. She’d taken a position on the other side of the country and, in a way, that made things easier for me. I loved spending time with her, but I hated it when she opted for someone else, someone strikingly handsome. “It’s like a scene from Clockwork Orange,” I once told her. “I feel like I’m chained in place, eyelids propped open with toothpicks, forced to watch something I don’t want to see.”
“I’m sorry,” she said, and I knew she meant it. She insisted again that you can’t help who you fall in love with, but her approach to men did seem strange. Claire was brilliant. She was controlled and poised, and she often said that she wanted to live her life impeccably. Yet her relationships seemed a little impetuous to me. She could be as giddy as a schoolgirl, and I found that hard to understand. Until, of course, I realized that I was probably no different. There was nothing reasoned about my love for Claire—it was an instinctual and inextricable pull.
