topic/love

I find myself moving toward you through the grass, carrying a new glass of wine, and when your eyes avert to mine, it feels like some piece of machinery has just seized in my chest. Like worlds colliding. As I draw near, you take the glass out of my hand as if you had previously sent me off to get it and smile with an easy familiarity, like we've known each other forever. You try to introduce me to Dillon, but the skinny-jeaned artist, now effectively cockblocked, makes his excuses and leaves.

Then it's just the two of us standing in the shade of the hedgerow, and my heart is going like mad. I say, "I'm sorry to interrupt, but it looked like you might need rescuing," [...]

I only remember pieces of what was said in our first moments together. Mainly how you laugh when I tell you I'm an atomic physicist, but not derisively. As if the revelation truly delights you. I remember how the wine had stained your lips. I've always known, on a purely intellctual level, that our separateness and isolation are an illusion. We're all made of the same thing - the blown-out pieces of matter formed in the fires of dead stars. I've just never felt hat knowledge in my bones until that moment, there, with you. And it's because of you.

I have been living with the same person for thirty-six years. I cannot read this man’s mind. He has anterooms in his personality I strongly suspect I have never seen. Mysteries abound. And yet time has produced an uncanny mental mirroring between us. A friend tells a story, and it triggers an immediate, identical association in each of us. Before my husband opens his mouth, I know what he will say or before I speak, he knows what I will say. The link between the heard story and our spontaneous double response is rarely obvious and why our two heads have summoned the same material at the same instant strikes us as inexplicable. It happens again and again and more and more. It may be that two minds with years of talk and grumbling and fighting and laughing and all-around bumping into each other behind them have states of mind in common. The winds rise, and the clouds begin to move, and the sun comes out at just the same time in two heads rather than one.

The husband watches the wife sleep. The house is nicest whenever she is asleep because he worries less about her and knows for a fact that she is resting, and for a little while at least he manages to forget that she is dying. This is more bearable than watching her lie awake and worry about dying. The husband is unsure if he has loved anyone in his life, at least in the way he thought he would love when he was younger, but now he thinks that maybe this is what love is supposed to be; you build a life around a person and when they threaten to go, you worry and worry that they will take you with them. If this is it, then he would prefer to go back to being a stranger to his wife.

Ashley looks at this shambles of a person every day and sees someone else. She sees that person so intensely that I am renewed. I can never deserve this; all I can do is try to return the favor. When she has dashed herself against some bureaucracy for days and weeks to secure some small mercy for someone else and has failed to do so, I tell her, because it’s true, that I don’t know anyone else who does as much good for as many people as she does. I shovel snow. I clean the bathroom. Most of all, I see the more than there is in her that is in her. As she sees the more in me than there is in me that is in me. We will help each other remember it, till the error that is time is corrected and all those flickers stay in place.

Chen spoke first. He changed the direction of the conversation. “The work of the revolution is a life devoted to the people, that is to say, the public. It’s a public life. A man’s private life, one’s deep interior, must at times be forgotten or sacrificed.”

The young man shifted. We shifted too, wanting to avoid the weight of these words.

“Here.” Chen retrieved the book offered as a gift, searched the pages. “This is one of my favorite paintings. Twin peaches in a small basket. Peaches represent long life, but as you know they are delicate, bruise easily. If the tree lives long, the fruit is ephemeral. Picked ripe from a tree, there is nothing sweeter or more succulent. Here twin peaches sit together, sweetly and exaggeratedly red in color for a lifetime.” Chen reached up to touch the soft fuzz of the young man’s felt fedora and tugged it down in jest.

If we felt confused, it was also the young man’s turn to look with questioning, as well as sheepish, eyes.

Chen sighed. “Revolution is old, but older yet is the sentiment of this painting, of love and of poetry.”

That strange word “believe,” with “lie” in it, is still going through her head when he has pulled down the straps of her dress, and spun her around, the dress slips over her narrow hips to the floor, and she’s standing in front of him in a little white slip. On the way to the couch they walk hand in hand through the dark corridor, and pause for a moment in front of the large mirror.

Do you suppose a mirror remembers all the people it’s ever reflected?

Maybe, he replies, but you know I — I will remember the picture of you in this mirror as long as I live.

So will I, she replies.

And they go on.

None of them could know, none of them could visualize Mexico City and the first unbelievable year, driving down to the coast for the weekend, through Cuernavaca, her bare legs with the sun lying on them, her arms, the dizziness and submission he felt with her as before a forbidden photograph, as if before an overwhelming work of art. Two years in Mexico City oblivious to the wreckage. It was the sense of godliness that empowered him. He could see her neck bent forward with its slender nape. He could see the faint trace of bones like pearls that ran down her smooth back. He could see himself, his former self.

— I talk to her, he admitted.

— And your first wife?

— I talk to her. We have three kids.

— He left her, Adele said. Casanova here.

— Some women have minds like cops, Phil said to no one in particular. This is right, that’s wrong. Well, anyway . . .

He stood up. He had done everything wrong, he realized, in the wrong order. He had scuttled his life.

— Anyway there’s one thing I can say truthfully. I’d do it all over again if I had the chance.