We Learn Nothing Page 2

  There’s a fine line between the bold romantic gesture and stalking. The tricky crux of the matter is that it depends to a great extent on how that gesture is going to be received—which factor, unfortunately, the impetuous suitor/obsessed stalker has lost all ability to gauge. A friend of mine reports that all the women he’s polled have been enthusiastic advocates of the bold romantic gesture, but this, he suspects, is because they’re all automatically picturing John Cusack making it, not Steve Buscemi or Peter Lorre or the Creature from the Black Lagoon. Often you don’t know whether you’re the hero of a romantic comedy or the villain on a Lifetime special until the restraining order arrives.

  That astronaut’s official NASA photo and her police mug shot make for instructive before-and-after illustrations of the effects of love, as grimly cautionary as ad campaigns about the ravages of crystal meth. I was moved to unpleasant recognition by that photo of her face—gaunt and disheveled, deranged, exhausted, utterly broken and lost. I had seen that face before, in the mirror. And so, I bet, have most of us. We’ve just been lucky enough not to have it photographed for the public record. But we shouldn’t let ourselves forget it, or the weeks or months we spent curled up weeping on the couch, smashing glassware, kicking through drywall, sending ill-advised emails and having wrenching late-night phone conversations, watching whole seasons of TV series at one sitting, listening to the one song we could still bear to hear over and over again, planning impulsive romantic proposals or scheming terrible revenge. We’ve all worn the diaper.

  I’m as cheered as anyone when some crusader for family values is caught in a cheap motel, a defender of traditional marriage arrested in a men’s room, or some censorious guardian of the children has his laptop confiscated. But I can’t quite bring myself to join in the smirking over more ordinary lechery and weakness—a former governor mooning over his “soul mate” at a press conference, a talk-show host confessing on the air to affairs with his interns.* Whom, exactly, do we think we’re kidding? Is all this solemn reproach and pretended incomprehension just for the benefit of prigs and evangelicals, the same way movies have to be hilariously bowdlerized on TV for the sake of viewers under ten? The usual rationale for our nosy interest in the private disgraces of public figures is that they show poor judgment, but this is like charging kamikazes with poor navigation; these transgressions take place in a realm beyond judgment. The truth is, people are ravenous for sex, sociopaths for love. I sometimes like to daydream that if we were all somehow simultaneously outed as lechers and perverts and sentimental slobs, it might be, after the initial shock of disillusionment, liberating. It might be a relief to quit maintaining this rigid pose of normalcy and own up to the outlaws and monsters we are.

  Whenever I have to listen to the media’s priggish tittering over the latest sex scandal, I feel like a closeted homosexual having to smile tightly through his coworker’s jokes about fags. I’ve had the kind of romantic life that would give a biographer a lot to work with, punctuated by passionate and disastrous affairs. I enjoyed reading about H. G. Wells, who was an early advocate of free love and contraception and a very sloppy practitioner of both. His biography is full of lurid scandals like the one in which a pregnant young lover slashed her wrists in his study, obliging him to flee to the Continent while it all blew over. (I’ve often wished for a Continent to flee to.) It’s easy to forget that such lives are more fun to read about than to live. Biographies tend to focus on the delirious highs, like Ava Gardner and Frank Sinatra tossing empty champagne bottles out of their convertible and shooting out street lights with a pistol on their first date, and elide the years when the subject lies alone in bed drinking and watching her own old movies on late-night TV. The goal of a life is not to provide material for good stories. Because it must also be noted that I’ve spent a larger percentage of my life than any sane person would wish crouching on the bathroom floor sobbing into a smelly old towel.

  Heartbreak is the common term for this condition—a Hallmark euphemism for something that’s about as romantic as pancreatitis. I’ve endured three or four let’s call them episodes in my life. Which may not seem like all that many unless you’re a friend of mine who’s had to watch. I would not want to relive even one second of those times, nor would I wish them on anyone else, but I also don’t know if I can relate to anyone who hasn’t gone through them. (I respect people who had to quit drinking lest it kill them, but those who never saw the appeal of the stuff in the first place seem not quite to be trusted.) At such times we are certainly not at our best but we are undeniably at our most human—utterly vulnerable, naked and laid open, a mess.

  Whenever I overhear someone talking on a cell phone about an illicit affair or excruciating divorce, or read the anguished confessions on postsecret.com or the hopeless mash notes in the “missed connections” ads, it feels like a glimpse into the secret history of the world. It belies the consensual pretense that the main thing going on in this life is work and the making of money. I love it when passion rips open that dull nine-to-five façade and bares the writhing orgy of need underneath. Seeing someone working at her laptop in a coffee shop, you construct a fantasy of her as smart, hardheaded, and competent—All Business—but then when her girlfriend arrives she pours out the same old story of crushed-out delusion, drunken flirting, mixed signals, and trick questions. It thrilled me to overhear my postmaster, whom I’d never imagined as a Byronic hero, saying mournfully into the phone: “Shelly and me never meant for anything to happen. It just happened.” Listen to some country songs, the music of the heartland, that alleged bastion of family values: lachrymose ballads about loving the wrong man, killing your wife in a jealous rage, truckers and waitresses suffering Shakespearian torments, torn between passion and virtue.

  My friend Lauren once told me that she could totally understand—which is not the same as sympathize with—those losers who kill their exes and/or their exes’ new lovers, that black, annihilating If-I-can’t-have-her-then-no-one-else-will impulse, because it’s so painful to know that the person you love is still out there in the world, living their life, going to work and laughing with friends and drinking margaritas. It’s a lesser hurt than grief, but, in a way, crueler—it’s more like being dead yourself, and having to watch life go on without you. I loved her for owning up to this. Not that Lauren or I—or you—would ever do any such thing ourselves. But I sometimes wonder whether the line between those of us who don’t do such things and the few who do is as impermeable as we like to think. Anytime I hear about another one of us gone berserk, shooting up his ex’s office or drowning her kids to free herself up for her Internet boyfriend, the question I always ask is not, like every other tongue-clucking pundit in the country, how could this have happened? but why doesn’t this happen every day? It makes me proud of all of us who are secretly going to pieces behind closed doors but still somehow keeping it together for the public, collaborating in the shaky ongoing effort of not letting civilization fall apart for one more day.

  This kind of anarchic, Dionysian love doesn’t give a shit about commitments or institutions; it smashes our illusions about what kind of people we are, what we would and would not do, exposing the difference between what we want to want and what we really want. We may choose friendships based on common interests and complementary qualities, but our reasons for falling in love are altogether more irrational, projections of our most infantile wants and pathology. (Lovers know that it feels less as if they’ve chosen each other than as if they’ve both been chosen by something else.) Seeing the people our friends are attracted to often illuminates aspects of their personalities we don’t recognize. Sometimes it reveals something unexpectedly beautiful, as when a driven careerist marries a feckless artist, or a glamorous woman mentions that her first boyfriend was disfigured. But sometimes the things we learn about them are things we would’ve preferred not to see. Their voices change around their lovers in ways that make us cringe to hear. A lot of couples look disturbingly alike. (I remember meeting one
couple who I at first assumed were identical twins until I saw them kiss. It somehow seemed like a depressing indictment of our whole species’ capacity for loving anything even slightly other than ourselves, as well as negating the whole point of the last billion years of sexual reproduction. Why not just bud like hydras if we’re going to mate with our doubles?) Our lovers are summoned up by the most primal and naked parts of ourselves. Introducing these people to our friends and family is, in a way, more heedlessly exhibitionistic than posting nude photos or sex tapes of ourselves online; it’s like letting everyone watch our uncensored dreams.

  I have watched my female friends’ reactions as they’ve met some of my girlfriends. I could see them thinking: Really? (People of the same gender, or impartial sexual orientation, can see more easily through the camouflage of beauty.) These friends are like my sisters; they know me well and love me, and I respect their opinions and trust their judgment. And yet, on those occasions, I smiled defiantly into their eyes, beaming the telepathic message back at them: It doesn’t matter what you think. Later they would get to hold me as I wept. There’s no reasoning with someone in this state: your best option is to cold-cock him and dump him on a boat bound for Hong Kong with a note pinned to his shirt: Sorry. Doing you a favor. Thank me later. I’ve known so many people who claimed to be happy in relationships in which, to the outside observer, they appeared to be miserable. When they finally broke up with their beloved antagonists they described themselves as bereft, even though to everyone around them they seemed possessed of new energy, health, and good humor. What the people in these relationships are is not “happy”; it’s something more necessary than happiness, for which we don’t have a word in our language.

  I have known some people who selected their mates on the same bases on which they chose friends: affinity, compatibility, common goals. I like to believe that these people are innocent of true passion, that they haven’t yet met the person for whom they would forfeit everything. What I fear they actually are is emotionally healthy. I have one friend who had a history, in adolescence and early adulthood, of attractions to brilliant, self-absorbed, alcoholic men, and after one especially damaging relationship she simply decided never to get involved with that kind of man again, and married someone altogether different. I find this admirable, but it is also alien to me. I recently met a very difficult but beautiful ex-girlfriend for coffee, and as we were talking I had two epiphanies: 1) I do not even like this person and yet 2) I would sneak off to the bathroom with her right now. With some people, it’s all a foregone conclusion once you get close enough to inhale the scent of their hair.

  I have loved women who were saner and kinder than me, for whom I became the best version of myself. But it’s also a relief to be with someone who’s not better than you, who’s just as bad and likes it. With these women, I didn’t have to impersonate a better person than myself; we were complicit, accomplices. They each had a streak of reckless selfishness, a readiness to wreck everything. One threw her mother’s fifteen-thousand-dollar engagement ring into a mountain lake in token of her vow never again to submit to monogamy. Another I will always remember in afternoon barlight as she suddenly swept a tableful of peanut shells onto the sawdust floor, crying “Hah!” with lusty abandon. I had to turn my face away; I knew then that we were in too far to back out. It was like that floating, slow-motion moment before the roller coaster begins its heady, accelerating descent. I still have a piece of art that another lover bought for me, a cartoon by one J. W. Banks showing two hapless characters in a single-propeller plane that’s hurtling earthward, streaming flames: “Oh my God forgive me I’ve lieded,” the one in the pilot’s seat confesses aloud. “Mo, I never flew one of these things before. I forgot our chute’s and we going to crash.” His comrade Mo, to whom this is all clearly news, clutches the sides of the cockpit, his mouth popped open in a comical little O?! of alarm. It was meant as a rueful joke; we still thought we knew very well that we didn’t know what we were doing, what kind of dangerous contraption we’d gotten ourselves into. We adored feeling out of control, the intoxication of free fall. We didn’t know yet how far down it was.

  Even in the midst of these deliriums, some tiny, invincibly sane part of my brain, like the last surviving scholar barricaded in the library of a burning city, realized that the intensity of emotion I was experiencing was disproportionate to my actual investment in these relationships. I spent a summer racked with loss over a woman with whom I’d had only four weekends and a lot of phone calls, which we mostly spent listening to each other breathe. I wasted a year of my life torturing myself with jealousy and rage over someone I knew I didn’t want to be with; what I wanted was not to lose her. That passion took these women as its objects as arbitrarily, and as indispensably, as a fetish fixates on an elbow or stiletto or a bathtub full of flan. Those emotional cataclysms were not only incommensurate to the circumstances but felt much bigger than I was, like a lightning strike channeled through a 60-watt bulb. I knew—not that it helped—that this must be some awful abreaction, erupting from someplace deeper inside me than I knew I went. I was like a luckless hiker blown apart by old unexploded ordnance from a war he’d never even heard of. Anyone who’s read Freud or spent time in therapy or just listened to call-in radio shows knows that these episodes are reenactments of old infantile melodramas, unexorcised abandonments or betrayals. (The imperious fury I felt at these breakups was like nothing else I’ve ever experienced in adulthood, but anyone who’s heard an infant waking up alone in the night would recognize the howling.) The trick, I suppose, is to find someone with a touch of the pathology you require, but not so much that it will destroy you. But, as with drinking just enough to feel mellow and well-disposed toward the world, but not so much that you end up vomiting in the street, this can take some trial and error to calibrate.

  These erotic addictions have only occasionally overlapped with, or unexpectedly become, what I’d call love. Love tends to sneak up on me over a period of years, and had less the quality of some transfiguring vision than of simple recognition, like suddenly seeing the answer to a puzzle that’s been obvious all along. Someone shows you the rabbit’s foot she just bought, explaining, “It was the last green one,” or simply reaches out and takes your lapel to steady herself as the subway decelerates into the station, and you realize: Uh-oh. Even though those breakups and disentanglements hurt, and it may always make me a little sad to see those women, they are the ones I will love for life, the ones I’d want to have by my deathbed. The kind of bond I feel with the women I’ve fallen so horribly in love with is more involuntary, as arbitrary and indissoluble as the one that unites the survivors of some infamous disaster. One of my former lovers proposed having T-shirts made as souvenirs for all the participants in/casualties of our affair that would read Armageddon ’97. She finds this funnier than I do.

  It came as a belated epiphany to me when I learned that the Greeks had several different words for the disparate phenomena that in English we indiscriminately lump together under the label love. Our inability to distinguish between, say, eros (sexual love) and storgé (the love that grows out of friendship) leads to more than semantic confusion. Careening through this world with such a crude taxonomical guide to human passion is as foolhardy as piloting a plane ignorant of the difference between stratus and cumulonimbus, knowing only the word cloud.

  I don’t know whether I would trade in those dizzying highs to rid myself of the memory of the crashes and wreckage. About the best thing I got out of any of those affairs was a really good pie crust recipe. But if anyone were to ask me, “Have you ever been in love?” I could at least say, with the same sort of rueful pride as a recovering alcoholic who’s asked whether he’s ever been known to take a drink: “Oh, yes.” I’ve known kisses so narcotic they made my eyes roll back in my head. For a few weeks one winter I walked around feeling like I had a miniature sun in my heart. I learned that making out on the subway is one of those things, like smoking cigars or riding Jet-Ski
s, that is obnoxious and repulsive when other people do it but incredibly fun when it is you. And there are still songs that, whenever I hear them, whatever I’m doing, will send me into a moment’s exquisite reverie, like an old injury’s twinge at an oncoming storm. Maybe one reason artists seems so susceptible to love affairs is that being in love is one of the only times when life is anything like art—when we actually feel the way torch songs and arias sound, the way Gene Kelly looks singing in the rain. It might all have been worth it if I’d been the only one hurt.

  A few years ago my friend Kevin, who’d just spent a month in the hospital after a heart attack, gave it to me straight: “You gotta stop being heartbroken all the time. I gotta stop being a big fat slob who almost dies.” For both of us it meant giving up some beloved vices. Neither of us is exactly practiced at renunciation, or even moderation, so we’ve both had the occasional backslide—I’ll have a fling with a grad student/lap dancer or he’ll eat an entire clam pizza and collapse. But for the most part we’re both being more cautious of our hearts.

  Right now I’m neither in love nor heartbroken. I almost hesitate to say this: it still feels provisional, like remission. Sometimes I’m afraid it may be as ephemeral as that temporary sanity that afflicts us for as long as forty-five seconds after orgasm. But at other times I worry it may be permanent. Maybe we have a finite capacity for falling in love that gets depleted with age. Or maybe romantic love is an affliction of adolescence, like acne or a passionate ideological investment in pop songs. It’s mostly a relief to be free of it, like not waking up hung over. At those moments when I’ve felt myself starting to relapse—waiting for someone to call who wasn’t going to, that familiar helplessness clutching my gut—I’ve recoiled like a recovering alcoholic waking from a dream of being blackedout drunk, relieved and thankful that he’s still sober.