Crush

Chapter Five What Takes Place in the Soul

Five

What Takes Place in the Soul

This is what takes place in the soul:—

Admiration.

A voice within says: “What pleasure to kiss, to be kissed.”

Hope.

—Stendhal, On Love , 1822

When David, as chair of his department, had to deal with furious fellow academics, he did so with equanimity. The distraught or demanding could say anything, and he’d listen carefully, work to understand the message beneath the vitriol, and do what needed to be done. Describing to me how he’d recently quelled a crisis, I thought of a line from Parks and Recreation . Leslie Knope accepts her community members’ scorn with a smile, for what were enraged town hall meeting attendees doing but “caring loudly at” her?

I was reminded of something I’d witnessed at Disney World when Nate was five. A woman ahead of us in line was trying to fight with the woman serving breakfast, but she wouldn’t fight back.

“For that price, how can there be only three waffles?”

“Oh! Would you like more? Here, let me sneak another one onto your plate.”

“Is juice not included?! This is an outrage!”

“We do have a special including juice! Would you like that? I’d be happy to get that for you!”

It was like watching someone try to scale a plexiglass wall.

I was charmed by David’s unflappable good nature. How funny, I thought, that I’d reached out to him thinking I’d add him to my stable of crushes, and he’d quickly become one of my best friends. I’d thought I wanted him to like me, but it turned out I wanted to be like him. In our correspondence about books and minutiae I felt like the best version of myself.

When he mentioned that his day had been a cam pus nightmare like something out of Julie Schumacher’s epistolary academic satire Dear Committee Member s, I walked to the nearest bookstore, bought the book, read it in one sitting, and wrote him an email in the book’s style. Any other work I had to get done that day seemed secondary to making him laugh with a letter of recommendation in the style of Schumacher’s long-suffering English professor Jason Fitger.

Crushes had always made me feel powerful. This was the opposite. I was lit up, but I wasn’t in control. None of my old tricks worked anymore. I was rich in a defunct currency. A trillion zloty and I couldn’t buy a stick of gum.

The only consolation for my lack of agency was that David seemed mystified, too, by his own sense of powerlessness. He kept asking why he wanted to tell me so much. That wasn’t a problem for me. Why wouldn’t I tell him everything? He was the warmest audience, the most attentive interlocutor. I was charmed by his jokes and moved by his stories. If London made me feel drunk, now I felt like I’d taken a hallucinogen. Not a minute went by that I didn’t wonder what he was up to. Every time I turned a corner I saw something new I wanted to tell him about.

His emails were so well crafted that I sometimes laughed at their refinement. There were footnotes and links to sources, multiple languages and their translations. He had a formality more befitting the nineteenth century. I felt myself resist it at first, but soon found that I loved the way he talked, especially the anachronisms.

I’d always tried to put my finger on an odd feeling I’ve had at least once every time while becoming close with a new person—a sort of squeamishness . The person says something, does something that you would have said bothered you, something embarrassing or silly or too sincere. Instead of rejecting the gesture and condemning them, you embrace it, think, Maybe I do like someone who chews on their hair . Maybe I find an ironic T-shirt collection adorable.

In On Love , Stendhal describes a process of “crystallization”: “At the salt mines of Salzburg a branch stripped of its leaves by winter is thrown into the abandoned depths of the mine; taken out two or three months later it is covered with brilliant crystals….”

In the glow of my bejeweled connection to David I felt radiantly happy just walking around. I was transported by everyday smells like the burnt-salt of fresh pretzels or the old paper of the library’s reading room. I started wearing the sparkly rings I’d inherited from my grandmother, marveling at the rainbows they cast when light streamed in through the window.

“I feel like Emily in Our Town after she dies and realizes how precious life is, only I don’t have to return to the Grover’s Corners graveyard afterward!” I told my friend Helen over drinks. I said that very minute my inbox was likely filling up with emails from David, and that they’d contain the best stories I’d ever heard.

Helen seemed to be catching some kind of contact high from what I was telling her. She asked a thousand questions, responding to every answer as though the story of our correspondence was a concert by her favorite band.

After we paid the check and left the bar, she walked alongside me for a few blocks. As we waited to cross the street, she turned to me with a stupefied look on her face—eyes dilated, lids lowered—that I’d only ever seen in cartoons after the character ingested an aphrodisiac. She leaned over and kissed me on the mouth.

Surprised, I kissed her back. I’d somehow never kissed another woman before, not even in college. Her lips felt soft and warm. Her dark hair rested on the shoulders of her blazer. I noticed for the first time that she was extremely pretty. We made out on the street corner, then pulled away. And then we burst out laughing.

“I don’t know what that was about!” she said. “I’m sorry. I think maybe I’ve been a little pent up. Something about what you were saying made me lose my mind.”

“Maybe Love Potion Number Nine is just four vodka sodas,” I said. “And I’m not complaining. That was nice.”

When I got home I told Paul what had happened.

“You’re hell on wheels!” he said approvingly.

Was this who I was now? I thought. I’d barely kissed at all in years and now I’d made out with two new people in a matter of weeks. It felt weird not to be in trouble when everything felt so intense.

“Whatever, the world is weird now since the pandemic,” Paul said. “We’re all trying to get out of our houses after being cooped up too long. It’s two a.m. everywhere.”

COVID had changed everything. If the world as we knew it was over, how did we want to construct the new world? Could I really have, without apology, a husband and also an openness to kissing other people, plus one unprecedented connection to a religious studies professor in another state? If anyone judged me for it, could I just not care? When Nate was in middle school and getting wrapped up in his friends’ drama, every morning at drop-off I said as he went up the stairs, “I love you! Have fun! Care less!” Maybe that was good advice.

My family life was enhanced, not diminished, by whatever was happening. I made Nate food and took long walks with him, helped him with his college applications without losing patience. I tended to my parents when they needed me and was able to enjoy their company without feeling overly involved. I knew from the time in London that if I wasn’t around the world didn’t stop spinning. I had poker nights and a picnic club and attended readings. I had coffees and dinner and drinks with girlfriends who told me about their marriages and their projects and their children. Letters from Tom Hanks continued to arrive; Paul and Nate continued to tease me about them.

And David had become the best friendship I’d had in as long as I could remember. Somehow he’d become essential. I felt that I needed other languages to even get close to explaining it. I read a book about the Gaelic concept of anam cara , or “soul friend,” the person with whom you could share your deepest self and feel that you completely belonged.

We didn’t know quite what to do with each other except marvel. Our connection had begun to feel like a religious calling. In our correspondence I felt like I’d embarked on a pilgrimage, only with no clue where it led. In his presence I began to feel more and more like myself, but for the first time. I also felt like I’d been hugging the world hard my whole life, and now the world’s arms were wrapping around me and squeezing back.

What David and I had felt sacred—the word that kept coming to mind was important .

Was this what being devout was like? As a child, I’d been fascinated by the religious practices of my classmates. Daniel went to Hebrew school each week near the pool hall. Veronica’s mother set out big bowls of oranges and incense. Eleanor dressed up and went to a smoky Catholic church; when I went with her, the standing up and sitting down felt like a Hokey Pokey I couldn’t get the hang of. In my teens, I spent three months alone in India, staying at dollar-a-night hostels. I got caught up in the holiday Holi and wound up laughing hysterically, covered head to toe in multicolored paint after getting socked with paint-filled water balloons.

On a trip through the Holy Land as a nanny I left my room at three in the morning to climb Mount Sinai alone. At the top, I watched the sun rise. In those moments—and many years later giving birth and nursing—I felt a sense of the holy. I always wondered how anyone could look at a tree or a baby and not believe in some sort of animating spirit beyond what we could see or prove. It seemed, more than anything else, like bad manners: Black holes, childbirth, eagles, forgiveness—eh, I’m not convinced. What else ya got?

As a new wife and mother, I started going to church. I learned when to stand and when to kneel and when to cross myself and when to say, “And also with you.” And yet, once I’d become an adult, I’d given up on mysticism. So many of the people who talked about supernatural experiences seemed like kooks, with eyes like saucers.

My mature religious faith could be summed up by the Mister Rogers dictum, “Look for the helpers.” I cried when a marathon went by my house—as a band set up on the corner played “Road Runner” over and over for hours—because I loved seeing people trying to do something difficult and onlookers telling them they could do it. They didn’t know these sweaty strangers could do anything, much less run for twenty-six miles, but by having faith they were making it more likely that the runners would finish the race. Prayers change the person praying too—they pull you closer to your better self.

When I was writing, as a cash grab, about wicker and vaulted ceilings for Country Living magazine, one of the fancy-home owners and I bonded over our love of Christmas. She shared a letter with me that someone had given her when she’d bemoaned her daughter’s losing faith in Santa. The letter, written by a children’s book author and posted online, proposed telling the “Is Santa real?” child this:

“Santa is bigger than any person, and his work has gone on longer than any of us have lived…. Throughout your life, you will need this capacity to believe: in yourself, in your friends, in your talents, and in your family. You’ll also need to believe in things you can’t measure or even hold in your hand. Here, I am talking about love…. Santa is love and magic and hope and happiness. I’m on his team, and now you are, too.”

How slick is that ? You have two choices in life, kid: you can believe in Santa and get presents or you can be Santa and give them. No middle ground! No sitting back, skeptical and judgmental and smarter-than-gullible-little-kids. You get Santa done unto you or you do Santa unto others. I found that brilliant. And in my life I felt I’d received so much good fortune that I had an obligation to provide as much to others as possible.

But now? I’d leveled up. What I felt was beyond goodness; it was wonder . Within weeks of the start of our correspondence, David became, as the song goes, my favorite waste of time.

He was travel and libraries rolled into one. He surprised me every day. He introduced me to writers I’d thought I knew but had never actually read, like Ralph Waldo Emerson, who I’d had mixed up with Thoreau and filed under something-something-alone-in-the-woods-something . Every one of his essays seemed to be about us.

From “Friendship”: “The moment we indulge our affections, the earth is metamorphosed; there is no winter, and no night; all tragedies, all ennuis, vanish,—all duties even; nothing fills the proceeding eternity but the forms all radiant of beloved persons. Let the soul be assured that somewhere in the universe it should rejoin its friend, and it would be content and cheerful alone for a thousand years.”

Exactly right! Looking for explanations of how I felt about David, I jumped from one book to the other as if they were stepping stones across a river.

From The Epistolary Flirt from 1896:

“Irwin: And you think of me all the rest of the time?

“Evangeline: Not exactly think—that implies a voluntary action. But nearly every minute of my days and dreams has a sort of Irwinian flavor.”

My days acquired a Davidian flavor, the diffuse aliveness of the prior months focusing to a point that was his email address.

We read a book about Kabbalah that talked about “a fallen spark from the World of Love.”

Yes! I thought. That’s what I’ve caught! A spark!

I was becoming a version of myself that I liked better than any other iteration. And if by man’s law I was tempting fate by spending so much time talking to a man who wasn’t my husband, by a higher power to do anything else seemed wrong. Plus, as a writer, wasn’t it my job to be inspired? Here was daily inspiration! And I still had the energy to get my work done, and—electrified as I was—for sex with Paul.

I felt like a better mother too. Nate and I discussed his New Year’s resolutions, getting more sleep and not procrastinating. I said I was trying to think of some that would be good for me. He said that I was perfect and didn’t need to make any. While they’re young, sons probably should think their mothers are angels , I thought. I wondered how long that would last. Because the truth—Emersonian glosses aside, and regardless of the fact that David and I hadn’t touched—was that I was courting something that in pretty much every culture throughout history is a sin. To Paul and to myself I’d been saying of my correspondence with David: “It’s not what it looks like!” But sometimes I thought: What if it’s exactly what it looks like?