Crush

Chapter Four The Reading

Four

The Reading

I dreamed about the British Library—the mezzanine coffee shop, the thick plastic bags for carrying PENCILS ONLY into the Reading Room, the candy-colored lockers. Full of longing for who I was there and how free I felt, I started to make plans to see friends and to work on projects and to look around for other men I could flirt with and perhaps even kiss.

In the course of this campaign, I reached out to David, a handsome friend from college with whom I’d happily have been locked in a closet. If Paul and I hadn’t started dating then, I might have pursued David. And yet, I wasn’t sure he’d have been interested. As long as I’d known him, he’d preferred reading to parties. He was quiet, but when he spoke people leaned in to listen. I had a low-key crush on him for years. How could you not? He was at once bookish and smoldering. I’d have made him with a computer like those guys made Kelly LeBrock in Weird Science .

When I looked him up for the first time in a while, I could see that he’d grown nerdier, with thick glasses and clothes that somehow always seemed askew. Yet he still had an undeniable appeal, with strong arms and kind eyes. At the prestigious university several states away where he taught religion, he was a favorite professor—buoyant, disheveled, disarmingly earnest. Somehow he’d avoided the anti-sincere drubbing of our generation; he must have hopped back onto the curb as that bus hit everyone else.

It had been years since we’d last been in touch, but when I texted, he replied eight minutes later.

“I’ve almost written you several times,” he said. “I read your last book!”

“So you’re the one,” I said.

“I loved it. Really. I’m heading into class right now, but I’d been meaning to tell you what your work meant to me. Now I will!”

Two hours later, a long email arrived. He delivered a gorgeously written review in which he said something I found profound. He said he thought the book was partly about the damage done by bohemians who didn’t revolt enough against the values with which they’d been raised. When David rebelled against his unrepentant hippie parents, he’d constructed a new value system from the ground up by reading widely. Even in college, he didn’t do drugs or sleep around. He believed in the virtue of solitude to an extreme that girlfriends had found alienating.

He told me that he’d recently discovered that his nickname around campus was the Monk, but he didn’t mind. Better, he thought, to have a reputation as uptight than as a libertine. And though conscientious, he was not a prig. Every rule he followed was one he negotiated with his own conscience. When you leave a tradition, as he had eschewed his parents’ hedonism, it’s important to replace what you reject with something better, he said. Otherwise why bother?

This unconventionality seemed promising for my designs on him. But he scorned the bed-hopping of his academic colleagues. When women came on to him—and I suspected many did because he looked like Indiana Jones in the campus scenes before he became an adventurer—I bet he talked to them about pleasures of the flesh versus of eternity until they turned around and started talking to someone more likely to put out.

He said more about my writing—so much more, including praise so specific and generous that it felt like I’d just been photographed with a camera somehow at once high definition and infinitely forgiving. In his rave I thought I saw a blurring of his affection for the work and for me.

It can be hard to separate how we feel about people from how we feel about what they make. That’s why Veronica said she’d been burned one too many times by blurbs heralding books as unputdownable when she’d found them to be, in fact, quite putdownable. She said there should be stickers on books: “No sexual favors were provided in exchange for these blurbs.” (When I told that to my editor friend Helen, she said, “No! The blurb industry would collapse!”)

I wrote a long email back to David. He replied swiftly with one equally long. We were both showing off, making each other laugh. Our enthusiasm picked up speed like a boulder rolling down a hill. Within a week, we were checking in with each other several times a day. Soon David started to tell me about his students, his family, and his research, saying each time, “I don’t do this. I don’t talk about myself.” He said that for a long time he’d found it difficult even to get up in front of his classes.

I, on the other hand, a dutiful book-tourer, had a lot of experience talking about myself; and I enjoyed asking questions and hearing what he had to say. Every time another message from him landed I felt as though I’d been handed a small, perfect gift. And all I had to do to get more was ask. I kept putting quarters in the slot machine throughout the day; every pull yielded a jackpot.

Pulling myself away from the computer was difficult once I started composing a reply. But one evening I had to because, for the first time since the upheaval of the pandemic, I was asked to do a reading. It was part of a series held by a cheerful, community-minded young man on a kayak pier.

Paul came with me. We left Nate alone with takeout. As the sun set, I sipped a plastic cup of red wine and watched kayakers dart across the water like bugs skimming the surface. We watched the rain hold off until it didn’t, and the event moved to a lounge located inside the kayak rental shop.

A comedian and a musician performed, and then I did my reading. During the Q pay attention; pay attention.”

I gestured to the crowd—some old people, someone holding a new baby, a few smartly dressed people on dates. Being together like that, just a group of human beings in a room, felt important whether I was the one talking or the one listening.

I said that I’d long wondered if going many years without publishing anything had been, as so many key choices in life are, an elaborate revenge scheme. An art teacher I had in middle school said you weren’t a real artist unless you shared what you made. I protested. I was writing a lot that I wasn’t sharing. I did not want to be told by a community theater director in architect glasses that therefore my work had no value. I vowed not to publish anything ever; that would show her.

What she should have said, of course, was: “Some things take time to find their way into the world. As James Salter said, ‘There are stories one must tell, and years when one must tell them.’ One day you’ll be around people who want to hear what you have to say.”

Walking home after the event was over, I turned to Paul, who seemed uncharacteristically quiet. “How’d I do?” I said.

“What?” he said, as if it were a strange question to ask. “Oh, great. But that conversation raised a lot of questions for me. I’ve never really found my outlet, you know? I haven’t done anywhere near all I hoped. I feel like no one cares what I have to say.”

I tried to focus on him as he talked. He was fired up, and I knew that in such circumstances it was often best just to provide a sympathetic ear. He continued to talk all the way home, and as we sat on the couch, and as we lay in bed.

At one a.m. he was still talking. I considered trying to change the subject toward something light that would let us sleep, though given the heaviness of the existential angst he was describing I feared my deflection would come across as the old joke, “Otherwise, Mrs. Lincoln, how did you like the play?”

At this point I made a strategic error. I told him things weren’t as bleak as he said. I pointed out all the good in his life. And I noted that he kept saying a number over and over again for how much money he made, and it wasn’t right: “It’s half that,” I said, “but that’s okay!” I went on (I should not have gone on) to say that being the sole breadwinner had been, as he knew, hard for me at times, like when Nate was a baby. I hadn’t had the option to stay home with him. When I was trying to write my first real book it took years because I had to work to support us at the same time.

“But I accept that imbalance now,” I said, thinking this would make him feel good, and he would be impressed with my beneficence. “I got over it. Now I don’t even feel like you should do anything else. I came to realize that you deserve half of what I make because you do a lot of intangible things to help the family. And you’ve always been so supportive.”

Sadly, his love language was not Withering Critique.

“You’re making me feel worse!” he said, his forehead furrowed. “I was coming to you with my problems and you’re basically saying that I should feel bad. And I know other men are into you right now. I get that you’re distracted. But I want your attention too.”

“The whole thing about other men was your idea!” I said, sitting up in bed, abandoning all hope of falling asleep. “I thought you liked it.”

“I do!” he said. “But it’s confusing. Promise you won’t leave me.”

“I won’t leave you,” I said, but he didn’t seem to hear me.

That evening lasted a century. He slammed a cupboard when he got out a glass for water, and I worried that he’d wake up Nate. I told him to be quieter, which only made him more upset. Staying up all night fighting is my idea of hell; I’d list it as an allergy on health forms if I could.

As Paul wound down and I was able to close my eyes around five in the morning, I noticed my mind drift to David. I thought of a quote he’d sent me that day from the French philosopher Paul Valéry, one of many writers it turned out we both loved: “If we are worth anything it is only because we have been, or have the power to be, ‘beside ourselves’ for a moment…. There are molecules of time which differ from the others as a grain of gunpowder differs from a grain of sand. They look much the same but their futures are quite different.”

Were David and I gunpowder or sand? I wasn’t sure. But I thought there might be a clue in one exchange that day. He’d said, “In spite of you trying to distract me, I graded all the exams!” I’d replied, and I realized as I lay there in bed that my reply dimmed the lights, set a record spinning on the turntable: “When I’m trying to distract you, you’ll know.”