“Hijo! Your neck has many bruises!”
I sank into the cushions of my eighteenth-century chair.
“It’s from carrying the cross, Mama.”
“You’re a good boy,” she said, sitting back again with a smile.
I was hit by a car the next morning. I was crossing the street to go home after a long night, and I never saw the car coming. I refused to take the accident as a sign of divine retribution, payback for the lie we’d perpetrated on Alfonso’s mother. Even later, when the distraught driver brought me a present in the hospital, a light-up version of La Giralda, and it blew up in my face as I plugged it in, I refused to see God’s hand in my plight. All I could see was Alfonso. I was in love.
The day I left Seville, the father of my host family wished me luck with Alfonso and advised me to hold on to him.
“He comes from an old Sevillan family on his father’s side. And on his mother’s side, there is Franco.”
I had fallen in love with a boy from the family of Francisco Franco. Alfonso was all lover and no fighter, but the thought of Franco made me shiver in my sandals.
I wasn’t able to hold on to Alfonso—time and distance took care of that. I did see him again, three years later, when I was back in Spain for my junior year of college. He was living outside London, and I visited him there. He took me out for a curry in Tunbridge Wells. He was still the sweet boy he’d been in Seville, and as handsome as ever in his own disheveled way. I was no longer in love, but I loved how nice he had been to me, and I loved remembering our walks through the crowded streets of Seville at all hours of the night, the glasses of postura we shared, and how he talked about the city while holding tightly on to my hand.
I fell in love a few more times over the years, and thought each and every man was the love of my life. As Nancy Mitford has her character “the Bolter” say in The Pursuit of Love, “One always thinks that, every time.” The Bolter would know: she left her children time and time again to pursue new loves. I’d married the last love of my life, and we were happy. Now out of the blue, a man for whom I’d written volumes of poetry and crossed campus six times in one night for one more good-night kiss, and on whose chest I’d written my name in Sharpie to keep other women away, wanted back into my life. I had good memories of our times together, but love?
Back in December, I’d read Twilight at the urging of a friend’s daughter, and I found it hilarious. Thinking now about love, I saw how adept Stephenie Meyer was at portraying that first thrill of wanting more, physically and soulfully, from another person. Bella, teenage girl and the new kid at school, is lonely and feeling like a misfit. She finds herself strangely attracted to Edward, her handsome, sexy, well-dressed, and very smart lab partner. When she finds out he is a vampire, her desire doesn’t diminish. If anything, it grows. Bella describes her “overpowering craving to touch” her beloved vampire, and I recognized that sensation. I’d felt it in Seville for the first time, and it was scary but wonderful. There is no thrill like the anticipation of that first kiss. Meyer cleverly entwines teen hormones (sexual desire) and unexplainable phenomena (vampires) and twists sexual longing into a battle between good and evil. Desire is a monster, but a monster that the young lover (goodness) will accept and encourage because she is so sure the evil within desire can be tamed. Alfonso had no evil in him, but Andrew certainly did, and the desire to tame him had been irresistible twenty-seven years ago.
Maybe that is what love is: the taming of desire into something solid and sustainable. The passion I share with Jack is different from our first New Year’s Eve kiss twenty years ago. Weeks after that first spark of desire, Jack flew off on a business trip. I couldn’t bear the time away from him, and I jumped on a plane to meet him in Utah. We watched a lightning storm over Salt Lake City and spent the weekend at the Snowed Inn, up in the Park City hills. These days our passion is more content to stay at home, manifesting itself through affection, proffered cups of coffee, and whatever time alone we can wrest away from kids, his work, and my reading. We still have our Twilight moments, but even better, we have a love that has lasted more than twenty years.
In Family Happiness by Laurie Colwin, a woman with a perfect life, including husband, job, kids, and plenty of money and leisure time, falls in love with another man. Her husband and her kids are not enough for her. She explains that love in the family is “intelligent and deep, and never unrequited. It was the basis of all good things and there was nothing secret or covert about it.” On the other hand, her private love, the desire she has for the man outside of her family, is “feckless, led to nothing, was productive of nothing, and didn’t do anyone a bit of good.” Because Family Happiness is more fantasy than fact, Polly keeps both kinds of love in her life, the one of desire and passion and the enduring love of family. No one ever finds out about her lover, no one ever gets hurt, and only Polly has to suffer “a life of conflict and pain,” a price she deems well worth it.
In Ford Madox Ford’s novel The Good Soldier, love is given harsh treatment. Two couples, duplicitous and needy, manipulate desire as a weapon on the battlefield of life. When love manifests itself, suddenly and unexpectedly, it is seen as a weakness but also as a threat that must be squashed by the other characters through “perfectly normal, virtuous, slightly deceitful” activity. Desire can be indulged, but in Ford’s book, love leads only to madness and suicide.
In Maggie Estep’s Alice Fantastic, falling in love is simple, necessary, and basic. What happens after falling in love is more complicated, with plenty of desire, dependence, and jealousy expressed, fought against, and finally accepted. This loving was a vibe I understood, love not as a battlefield but as a series of leaps into the unknown, with an occasional bump, the rare injury, and a high-flying exhilaration that makes the bumps and injuries worth it.
Alice Fantastic offers all varieties of romantic love, but what had me rooted to the book is Estep’s portrayal of the love between the two sisters, Alice and Eloise. The sisters have grating differences and opposing outlooks on everything from work to romance. When they discover that they have unknowingly shared a lover (through individually experienced one-night stands), the accidental couplings only underscore their differences. Eloise feels cheap and angry, and Alice feels fine, although she’ll never sleep with William again.
When facing up to the secret revealed about their mother, the two sisters finally join together: “The tears came and Alice wrapped me in her arms and held me for a long, long time. We were like little kids then. The oceans of differences calm.” The “oceans of differences” between them are nothing compared to the love. The only thing they have in common (other than an accidental lover and a love of dogs) is how for each of them the person they love most, along with their mother, is the other.
It is only within the sibling relationship that such a dichotomy exists. I loved my sisters even when I might never have befriended them across a cafeteria table or at a party. I have more in common with my parents than I used to feel comfortable admitting to, but I had very little in common with Anne-Marie, other than our love for books and for beauty in art. Natasha and I have interests more in sync, yet none of us three sisters had similar friends or lovers. None of us could ever agree on the ideal meal, vacation, house, or political platform. When I started having kids, our disagreements extended to names, haircuts, and bedtimes for a child. As Rilke writes in his poem “The Sisters,” “Look how the same possibilities / unfold in their opposite demeanors.” And yet we loved each other completely and without question. We were there in the most important moments, and in the smaller ones too.
Anne-Marie was the first of my family to meet Jack. Her animated approval (“You two are like twins, perfect together!”) went a long way with everyone, me included. She walked me through my first labor pains with Peter. Up and down along the Hudson River we paced, Anne-Marie keeping track of the time of each contraction on a piece of paper. Every birthday that followed, Peter got a home-baked cake from her. The best cake was
the Lego brick–shaped one, frosted in bright red. I have a photo album of all the cakes she made over the years. In every photo she is leaning toward Peter with a big smile, her baked confection offered with both hands.
The simplest and yet profoundly moving explanation of love came to me through the words of a character in Ernest J. Gaines’s A Lesson Before Dying. The novel tells the story of Grant, a young man from the South who, having studied to become a teacher, is roped into visiting Jefferson, a boy sentenced to death row for a murder he witnessed but did not commit. Jefferson’s godmother wants Grant to offer Jefferson a modicum of education before he dies, so that he can die like a man, and not like the “hog” his own defense attorney called him. She wants to give her godson the dignity in the end to know “that he did not crawl to that white man, that he stood at that last moment and walked.”
During a visit to the prison, Grant witnesses Jefferson saying to his godmother, “It don’t matter. . . . Nothing don’t matter.” His godmother answers, “It matter to me, Jefferson. . . . You matter to me.”
You matter to me. Reading those words, I thought my heart would burst. That is the crux of love, one person mattering to another person, one existence that is important among all other lives. One person can count for something individual and special. We are not interchangeable. We are unique in how we are loved.
Desire for a person is not the same thing as having that unique appreciation and need for them, nor is affection. Desire waxes and wanes, and affection can be felt without long-standing commitment. But “You matter to me” means that the long haul is accepted, even willingly taken on: I will carry you, hold you, and applaud you, from here on in. Dependability: I will be here to take care of you. And when you are gone, I will be here to remember you.
A few days before the sudden Facebook message from Andrew, I had gotten a call from Jack. The boys were all home from school and I was just finishing up my book for the day, The Age of Dreaming by Nina Revoyr.
“Meet me at the doctor’s office. I’m having chest pains.” One hour later I watched him being taken away on a stretcher, hooked up to monitors and oxygen and God knows what else. I went home to tell the boys nothing, just that I was leaving early for my Improv class and that Peter was in charge of ordering pizza and getting everyone to bed on time. I kissed them all and left for the hospital.
The man at admissions sent me to the cardiac care unit with a wink: “Let me know if things don’t work out.” He was hitting on a potential widow? My skin crawled. Tears, held back so far, now came streaming down my cheeks.
Jack, as it turned out, would be fine. I would not be a widow, bad luck for the admissions Romeo. Jack had not suffered a heart attack. All the tests showed normal heart activity, good oxygen levels, and sound health. I spent the evening by his side, reassuring myself that he was okay. By the time the doctor came in for his evening summation, I was more concerned with going out into a dark and desolate parking lot than I was with the health of my husband. We were meant to have many more years together: we both had to stay alive. The doctor assured me that the lot was monitored, but he was willing to walk me to my car.
“No, I’ll stay just a bit longer,” I answered and returned to holding on to Jack’s hand. The last love of my life: I was holding on for as many years as we had together.
My father’s first and last love is my mother. He met her at an evening lecture of a philosophy class at the University of Leuven. He’d started medical school there, and she was a literature student. While the professor at the front of the lecture hall went on about Saint Thomas Aquinas, my father sketched my mother’s picture into his notebook. He still has that sketch, the notebook kept safe in a drawer by his bed. My mother had plenty of suitors before my father, but never fell in love. Her first marriage proposal was offered by the boy’s mother. He himself was too shy to ask. When my mother refused the offer, the shy boy ran off to the French Foreign Legion. As far as I know, no old boyfriends popped up in my mother’s life once my parents moved to America, but then her generation didn’t have Facebook to deal with.
It isn’t Facebook that brings old lovers face-to-face in Nicole Krauss’s book The History of Love. It is perseverance. The novel is the story of Leo: he “was a great writer. He fell in love. It was his life.” Writing and loving. But war separates him from his first lover, Alma, and she finds a new man, thinking she has lost Leo forever. When Leo finds Alma again, years later, what can she do? She holds on to the words he has written for her—he is a writer, after all—but she tells him to go. He continues to love her, but she loves only the memories she has of him.
Loving my memories of Andrew was not the same thing as loving Andrew. With Alfonso I had even sweeter memories—he never dumped me—but I didn’t love him either. The truth was that no matter how good the memories, those guys just had not been there for the long haul. I did not share thousands of moments with them, and there was nothing enduring about my long-ago feelings for them. I had nostalgia for those feelings but I no longer felt them. I had my answer to the question lurking in a Facebook message: I loved you once, but not still.
“Nothing in the world matters except Love,” an old friend gushes to the narrator of The Provincial Lady in London by E. M. Delafield. Her response? “A banking account, sound teeth, and adequate servants matter a great deal more.” I laughed and underlined the words. And suddenly I was reminded of the words used by Jefferson’s godmother in A Lesson Before Dying: “You matter to me.” It is not the emotion of love, solely and independent, that is important. It is the people I love who hold the word steady for me.
Of course there are plenty of little things that do matter in life, like a bank account and sound teeth, and plenty of things that don’t matter at all, like the state of my hair or the dust bunnies burrowing under every bed in the house. But amid all the big and the little stuff, the cardiac unit and the Facebook messages and the dust, it is the people I love that matter most of all.
I should let them know just how much they matter, at all times, to me. Words of love will keep us warm, even through the last days of winter.
Chapter 12
The Expansion of Experience
Now that I had taken the pains to learn something about it, I had better ask if I really wanted to know. I did. I needed to know, but I am not glad to know.
WENDELL BERRY,
Hannah Coulter
ON THE NIGHT OF FEBRUARY 13, 1945, MY FATHER SAW flames and smoke rising from Dresden, five miles off in the distance. Through the dark hours of the night and into the dawning of the next day, he watched in disbelief, his stomach in a knot, as the city was firebombed. He could smell the smoke and he knew there were more than buildings burning. He’d been on the road with thousands and thousands of refugees fleeing the incoming Soviet army. While he had camped in a field, the refugees continued on into Dresden, to join the citizens of one of Europe’s most beautiful cities and thousands more refugees.
By the time the bombing was over, Dresden was destroyed and most of its people killed, incinerated or suffocated in their underground bunkers. Estimates of the number of people who died in the two days of bombing range from tens of thousands to hundreds of thousands. My father could have been one of those people if he had not stopped to rest and sleep in a field. My father could have been killed two years earlier when the partisans came to the family farmhouse and killed Sergei, Antonina, and Boris. He lived through the war, or else I wouldn’t be reading these books now. But living, like dying, caused ripples to spread through his life, impacts from what he saw, what he suffered, what he knew.
When I began my year of reading, a cousin from Belgium sent me a book titled The Assault, written by Dutch author Harry Mulisch. For months it sat on my bookshelf, relegated to a far corner. “But it is a great book,” my cousin insisted. He didn’t understand that I was frightened by the book’s cover photograph of a dead body lying on a street, and even more by the text on the back cover: “A Nazi collaborator, infamous for h
is cruelty, is assassinated. . . . The Germans retaliate by slaughtering an innocent family.” I was scared to read the book because I knew it was about war and revenge and hate. I had heard the stories from my father, and I knew what had happened during the war. Did I really want to read about it?
But finally, in late March, I went over to the shelf and pulled the book down. It was my year to experience whatever great books had to share with me, and my own fears couldn’t stand in the way.
When I began to read The Assault, I did not get up again for three hours. Weaving a story around an actual event, the novel is about the murder of a cruel Dutch policeman during the final days of the Nazi occupation of the Netherlands and how that one murder had a lasting impact on everyone involved, from the family wrongly blamed for the murder to the German officers who responded with swift and horrible retaliation to the actual killers, as well as to the family of the slain officer.
At the beginning of the novel, a boy named Anton walks beside a canal, fascinated by the waves caused by a passing motorboat: “All across the water a complicated braiding of ripples developed which went on changing for several minutes. . . . Each time Anton tried to figure out exactly how this happened, but each time the pattern became so complex that he could no longer follow it.” As I read further into the book, I realized that this “complicated braiding of ripples” was a premonition of what was coming, the murder of the police officer and the subsequent killing of everyone in Anton’s family except for the boy himself. Anton will spend the rest of his life trying to untangle the events of that night of horror, struggling to understand why the Dutch officer was killed, why his family was targeted for vengeance, and where in the puzzle of pain the rest of the players fit.
Tolstoy and the Purple Chair Page 12
