Crush

Chapter Two Mornington Crescent

Two

Mornington Crescent

While it was true that I never complained about how much I was doing to keep food in the house and money in the bank, it was also true that I was exhausted. For my entire adult life I’d been working more than full time while cooking, cleaning, and handling all the chores that come with responsible adulthood. If I’d been approached by the devil at a crossroads, I would have asked for nothing more than a week alone with no errands.

And so with a half-baked idea for a book project about a Victorian novelist named Ouida, I applied to do research at the British Library. I booked a trip for a week to go to London and to the novelist’s hometown, then told the few people I knew in the UK that I’d be there.

Boarding the plane, I felt like I imagined my friends did leaving for summer camp. (Instead of going to camp, I’d spent childhood summers watching approximately as much television as there were hours in the day.) Paul, Nate, and my parents appeared unfazed by my departure, evidence that perhaps I was not holding my finger in the dam as much as I thought.

When I landed, I left my bags in my tiny room at a cheap, oddly shaped scholars’ hotel near the British Museum and started walking around the city. Block by block, I felt my soul return to my body.

The next morning, I began my research. Given that travel and books were two of my two favorite things, being in a library in a foreign country was joy squared. And the British Library is the library-est library. I loved the efficient request desks and carrels, the luxuriously padded trays for transporting various kinds of material, and the bossy yellow signs: No Photography Allowed .

You could take photos though; you just had to request permission. When I asked, a librarian came and stood over my shoulder and watched as I photographed the pages of a crumbling newspaper obituary like she was my second in a duel, my henchman, my liege. When she left my side after several minutes, I wanted to salute her.

Doing research in that library was like worshipping in a church. For two days I flipped through Ouida’s archive. She wrote in purple ink on purple paper, and in purple prose, her giant signature filling up half a sheet:

“Do you know Lady P? I do. She is an old painted yellow-haired Jewess, and she has just joined the women’s Primrose Rifle Club!”

“What think you of the régime of vanilla cream, cayenne pepper, and unlimited brandy on which the British nation is now habitually fed?”

“I am amazed you do not see how useful to Europe it would have been to divide the USA. And it would have been even better for the Yankees. It would have prevented spreadeaglism.”

Vain, petty, florid—it didn’t take me long to realize she might not be someone I wanted to spend an extended period of time with, even before I got to her opinion of Tolstoy (“absolutely silly…I cannot think a man who believes in Christianity is a man of great intellect, and his logic is sadly defective in many other ways”) and her casual prejudice (“You cannot trust Italians out of sight”). But if you go looking for anything you always find something. Research pays off even if for a while it’s not obvious how.

In the archival material about her, I found other people whose voices spoke directly into my ear. Henry James called her “unpleasant little Ouida…withal of a most uppish, and dauntless little spirit of arrogance and independence.” Oscar Wilde corresponded with her. His letters sparkled across the years with wit and good humor. I felt love for him. I wanted to write back.

After several hours of this, I’d roam around the city and either I’d take myself out or eat with a friend. All food tasted delicious. I suddenly loved beer. I walked twenty thousand steps a day, wore dresses instead of jeans, and scribbled notes on scraps of paper. I was in love with the world and felt like it was in love with me. I wanted to kiss everyone I saw. I wouldn’t, probably, but now who knew?

I met up with Ryan, an old friend who I’d worked with at one of my first jobs. I hadn’t seen him much since he went to L.A. to try to become an actor and then wound up moving to the UK for a job in finance. At the pub he showed me where to sit to see all the action and what to order and how. In describing his hard-charging colleagues at work he made me laugh so hard I choked. Everything he said struck me as uniquely brilliant. I could have listened to him talk all night.

When I took a weekend trip alone to my research subject’s hometown outside London, I texted Ryan throughout the trip. He charmed me by phone as he had in person. From the train there I sent him a picture of a mysterious structure covered in tubes that caught my eye out the window.

“What’s this?” I asked.

“Oh, that? That’s just the Martian Embassy,” he said.

It was the ArcelorMittal Orbit, a sculpture and observation tower in Queen Elizabeth Olympic Park.

He turned me on to Mornington Crescent, a BBC radio game in which players engage in a battle of wits naming Tube stations, trying to get to the Mornington Crescent stop.

“King’s Cross.”

“Devilish move. I’ll need to counter with…Piccadilly Circus.”

“Ah! Well played. Camden.”

“You’ve left me wide open there—Mornington Crescent!”

Everything about this game I found extremely funny, especially when the players grew indignant: “If we’re not going to follow the rules, there’s no point playing.” There were no rules. The game was improvised. I thought it was the cleverest thing I’d ever heard of.

Ryan liked me too. He called me beguiling, told me if I was single he’d try to marry me. Then he asked me if this was part of my research trip—if he might be research. I didn’t say no.

On my last night in town, we ate French fries and drank beer until our other friends fell away, hour by hour, until it was just the two of us, alone at a bar, sitting very close together. He looked at me in the bar light, the rest of the crowd bustling around like porters in a train station. All was still until he leaned over and put his hand lightly on the back of my neck and pulled me toward him.

My brain shut down. His mouth tasted like beer and salty popcorn. I felt like I had as a teenager, learning what felt good and what felt even better. His body pressed against mine, and I thought, Yes! This! I want this!

Last call. I caught a glimpse of myself in the window, smudged makeup, hair mussed. I looked like someone completely different, someone rumpled and fascinating. We left it at that because that was enough. I tried to figure out what the name was for the feeling I got from that kiss—and the other side of the same precious coin: the freedom to wander around a strange city. It was something like power , or openness to adventure. And I must have been radiating it because everyone seemed to want to talk to me. That whole trip, if I sat down alone in a pub for dinner, within minutes a man would ask if the seat next to me was taken.

Whenever Ryan had gotten up to get us another drink, he’d returned to find someone talking to me. A disproportionate number of these men were named Sean, so Ryan started to tease me about having ensorcelled a nation of Seans. I felt like I was in a game show money booth with bills flying all around me, only instead of money, the currency was attention. I could have as much as I could grab.

And kissing Ryan wasn’t really cheating . If anything, it was just a slight veering . I looked at the Underground map and felt that I was not so far afield of the Central Zone. I imagined myself still just in Zone 2, safe.

Why had I denied myself for so long? And why were so many tales about women’s sexuality so depressing? “Sexy” people had always reminded me of the Texas expression “all hat, no cattle”—a cowboy who doesn’t actually have a ranch, just the outfits.

But in London I was truly sexy. My secret had nothing to do with fashion or technique or anything taught by women’s magazines; it was joy. The discovery felt mythological, like a sword pulled from a stone, an herb stolen from a garden. Suddenly it felt good to sleep and good to wake up. It felt good to be tired and good to be working. Blankets felt good, and wind. Bad things felt good. Good things felt like heaven.

I once heard about a scholar who, as she was sitting down on the dais at an academic conference, looked to her left and her right and said, “Ah, it’s wonderful when you’ve slept with everyone on your panel.” I thought of the bumper sticker Good Girls Go to Heaven—Bad Girls Go Everywhere , and felt its truth. I was only being a little bad, and I already felt happier than I had in years.

While still in London, I had tea with an old ex-boyfriend and his new partner. I thought of the Taylor Swift line in “Invisible String” about how she used to grind a cold axe for her exes and now she buys their babies presents. I bought his baby a Petit Bateau onesie, and we had a lovely afternoon.

I felt at peace now with all the men who’d ever rejected me, like a bookish friend I was obsessed with when I was nineteen. He made me read so much George Steiner. I got through all of After Babel and he still wouldn’t date me; I wanted to take him to court. But I’d since become the very pink of forgiveness. I genuinely wished him— wished everyone—well. And the world kept rewarding me for my magnanimity.

At an outdoor café on a street lined with expensive clothing stores, I had drinks with a dashing friend at which he said—and if I hadn’t heard something similar from a bunch of Seans that week I’d have been caught off guard—that he found me attractive. I liked how he smiled with his whole face and how he used dramatic flourishes to make his points.

“You’re making me blush,” I said. “I’m glad I have makeup on so you can’t tell.”

“I can tell,” he said.

We left it at that. But that was plenty. Until that trip it had been a long time since I’d had a sense of freedom, possibility, and being at home in the world—not as a mother, wife, and daughter, but as someone new in town, someone who sort of enjoyed getting lost on the Underground.

When I got an NHS alert that I’d been exposed to COVID, Ryan said he was glad because if I was positive he probably was too. That meant we could quarantine together at his apartment and stay in bed for ten days.

“I’ve never wished so hard for someone to have COVID,” he said.

The test was negative.

While I walked around London, I called Veronica and asked her why as a happily married woman in middle age I’d become, all of a sudden, some sort of vixen.

“Because you’re alive ,” she said.

That was how I felt: more alive than I’d felt in a long time. The more alive I felt, the more attention I got, and the more alive I became, on and on in an endless cycle of aliveness. I walked down the street convinced that I was glowing.

I’d only felt even close to that radiant once before. After high school, using my babysitting money, I spent months backpacking, walking for hours through one city or another. When I was hungry I stopped at a bakery and got a hunk of bread. When I was tired I lay down on a hostel bed. When I craved company I sat in a park and hoped whoever talked to me wasn’t a murderer.

Having been raised agnostic, in those days I was what hippies call a seeker. I craved a connection to the eternal, an undeniable encounter with the ineffable. Something was calling me, but I couldn’t name what it was. I thought perhaps I was looking for someone or something to love with my whole heart. Whether that meant religion or romantic love, surely God or men would take me out of myself; either one would do.

Over the years, my craving for a mystical experience passed away like my penchant for clove cigarettes. Like all my friends not in the middle of an active crisis, I had settled into something that looked a lot like contentment.

Veronica, too, had built so much for herself. We talked on the phone all the time about how big our lives were, how lucky we felt. She and I had friends, spouses, children, jobs, volunteer work. How could we be disappointed when we’d received so much?

Generations of women had struggled to “have it all,” and here I was now, the final panel in the evolution chart. Since London, I’d been listening on repeat to Lucinda Williams’s “Passionate Kisses” and Mary Chapin Carpenter’s “I Take My Chances.” In considering women’s problems, I’d begun to wonder if we weren’t aiming too high, expecting too much, but rather aiming far too low . Freedom and security could be compatible! Why not?

My marriage was a road stretching all the way to the horizon. I could take little detours off that main avenue, onto the side streets of other men, as long as none of the detours became its own road. Only sometimes did I worry that all the energy I put into crushes could be better spent. But I had faith in my ability to control them. And the risk was paying off.

In London, I couldn’t stop thinking of how I’d been as a teenager. I could vividly recall how it felt to drink a light and sweet coffee at lunch on a fall day in front of my high school. I floated back to class smelling like coffee and oranges and smoke and fresh air and Herbal Essences shampoo, a pencil in my ponytail, my bra strap showing.

“When we’re young we’re so open to the world,” Veronica said on the phone as I talked to her while walking through the city. In the background, I could hear her girls watching a movie and laughing. “And you’re like that now. So maybe that’s why you’re thinking about your teen years again.”

Back then, I’d spent time with a classmate on stoops and rooftops, enjoying a classic 1990s no-labels-friendship-but-we-slept-together. As adults, we ate salad on lunch breaks from his lawyer job. One day he said he was thinking of switching careers, and he’d found himself thinking back to a night in my twin bed after the prom. While rolling around, we’d accidentally broken one of the commemorative glasses they gave us.

“Oh! Should we stop and clean that up?” he’d said.

“Do you want to?” I’d asked.

He said that prom night was one of the only times he vividly remembered being asked what he wanted. And so he found himself thinking of that now and asking himself—as he’d asked himself whether he wanted to be a good kid and immediately clean up broken glass or continue to fool around with his non-girlfriend girlfriend—whether he wanted to keep being a lawyer or go back to school for something more fun.

What was the takeaway? That sex with me in the 1990s was better than sweeping up broken glass. And also that there’s power in asking earnest questions about what we want, especially when it’s a more difficult choice than sex versus vacuuming.

I wanted to send word to my generational cohort: Don’t we make our own cages? When we rattle the bars don’t we often find that they are made of cardboard? That we’ve cut them out for ourselves with X-ACTO knives? Look! We are free! We have nothing to lose but our PTA membership!

In The Notes , Ludwig Hohl advised: “Work toward raising the emotional state of one’s usual (daily) life to the state one is in when traveling —to that state of openness, of readiness to offer oneself, of being able to see things in their full proportion, of internal tension and fecundity of thought— that is life.”

London had given me this elevated emotional state. I felt like a new person—or like my true self, like Bette Davis at the end of Now, Voyager , a siren emerging from beneath layers of split ends and line-toeing. I’d walked for miles and kissed a man deeply for the first time in many years. Then it was time to go home.