Chapter Six Elegant Things
Six
Elegant Things
“I think about you a lot,” David said on our first Zoom call, which we referred to as a staff meeting. “Like, all the time.”
We’d been writing to each other every day, thousands of words by email and text. I thought about him as I fell asleep and when I woke up. But I hadn’t seen him in a long time. Now he was there on my screen. We both looked dazed.
“What do you think about?” I asked.
“Things I want to tell you or show you. Things I think you’d like or that I want you to see.”
Looking very serious, he asked if I understood what we were feeling. I said no and asked if he did. He said no. We stared at each other. I thought I might die; the cause of death would be a desire to tousle his hair.
What we felt was different than anything I’d known before, more all-encompassing. So what, if anything, were we supposed to do with it? The staff meeting adjourned, as staff meetings often do, with no resolution and no action items. Later that day I went to check my mail and found a box from him containing seventeen books. I sent him a photo of them all spread out on my bed, the cat looking at them curiously.
What exactly was happening? Infatuation? Lust? I was not sure any of the things I wanted from him were possible. But what we’d had so far felt impossible too. It also felt essential. Around him, it was as if I’d gone through a wardrobe into a land full of white witches and gentle lions and Turkish Delight for every meal.
And yet, if someone had asked who he was to me, I wouldn’t have known what to say. He was more than a friend but not a lover. Every time I got an email from him I thought at first that I had nothing to say in reply. Then an hour or two would pass and there we’d be again, thousands of words tying days up in ribbons.
One day David and I began—because this was the kind of thing that happened—sending each other emails in the style of the thousand-year-old Japanese court diary The Pillow Book of Sei Shōnagon . The form reminded me a little bit of Family Feud (“Things the Doctor Says,” “Things You Bring Camping”).
He wrote:
29. Elegant Things
The “Time Passes” section in To the Lighthouse . Your metaphors. “Another Girl, Another Planet.” Your nails in the photos you send of your hands holding books.
102. People Who Seem to Suffer
Lovers. Saints. Authors. Academics. Bohemians.
199. The Answer Is “No”
Any question you ask that begins with “Is it bad…?” Please don’t stop asking, though, even though you know my answer.
I wrote:
108. Things That Are Intriguing Mysteries
How you have time to teach when you write me so much.
124. One Has Carefully Scented a Robe
I’m glad you like my manicures. One of the things that made me start doing that was embracing the song “V.G.I.,” for “valley girl intelligentsia.” Another was a memoir in which the guy got a crush on a barista and one of the things that he liked was how cute her nails were, whereas his wife had apparently betrayed him by not having cute nails. And I thought the guy seemed shallow, and I also thought, I AM NOT GOING DOWN THAT WAY. Anyway, I did a reading once and a bookseller there and I got to talking. He said, “This local guy has an event tomorrow night,” and it was THE FUCKING MANICURED BARISTA BOOK. And I held up my hand and I said, “This glitter is that guy’s fault!” And the bookseller said, “Yeah, he’s divorced now.”
128. Nothing Annoys Me So Much
The stinginess of clocks. Surely they could lend us a few extra hours. There’s never enough time to say all I want and hear all I want to and from you.
The feeling I had walking around with David in my life was that at last my soul had company. I gave thanks for him every day, especially when, having run a series of hour-devouring errands, he made me laugh. Having those emails to reread, especially on days when the world was too much with me—late and soon and at Tony’s Auto Repair—made me feel rich. Every email felt like a fresh stack of library books.
At first he would ask if he was writing me too much. I asked him what part of Blanket Permission he didn’t understand. He stopped asking and just sent me several messages a day, sometimes more than a dozen. He wrote: “I want to tell you so much. Why?! And when will it end, for chrissakes?!”
I kept asking: Why did this happen? Why was I sent this person who felt like my destiny when I already had committed myself to someone for life? Was I double destined? I couldn’t tear myself away from him. There was just so much to get out.
He mailed me a little copy of Michel de Montaigne’s On Friendship (1580): “In the friendship which I am talking about, souls are mingled and confounded in so universal a blending that they efface the seam which joins them together so that it cannot be found. If you press me to say why I loved him, I feel that it cannot be expressed except by replying: ‘Because it was him: because it was me.’?”
One night I was in a cab on the way back from a comedy show taping I’d gone to with a friend. They’d done a million takes and it had gone late. As the cab moved through nearly empty streets of Chinatown, I imagined David in the back seat of the cab with me. I turned my phone back on and saw that he had sent an uncharacteristically short email, though still in his typical formality:
“I love you, my dear, dear friend. I hope you share my pride in the great love we have created—a love greater than both of us, mysterious to both of us, and that you know as well as I do that this moment—tonight—that love is in a state of perfection.”
My cheeks burned the way they did when I had to speak in front of the class as a shy child. There was no way I could unsee this email. Everything would change from this moment on. Why was he doing this? Why did it need to be said? There would be no coming back.
I put my phone down in my lap and looked out at the night. Between streetlamps, I caught my reflection in the window. I looked like I hadn’t slept in days.
David had often talked about Nietzsche’s concept of amor fati , how to love one’s fate is to be content with what is. I knew that by saying what we had was perfect already he thought we didn’t need to do anything about it; it could just exist. But he was wrong. He’d lived so much of his life in his own head that he didn’t know what I did. Once those words were spoken, even if they were gussied up with Nietzsche, something did change, instantly and forever.
I felt the same way. Of course I did. But my mother and grandmother had taught me the value of holding on to a marriage. I knew this message about the depth of our love, now blazing on my phone—just waiting to be glimpsed by Paul—was one of the more obvious ways people got divorced. Our feelings were too strong.
“This has gotten too romantic,” I replied. “Paul’s permissiveness doesn’t extend to this kind of declaration. We should tone it down.”
Even as I protested, I felt something shift in me during that cab ride.
You know as well as I do .
I did know as well as he did, yes. But I knew something more than he did too—I knew that no matter how much philosophy we wrapped around our love, our fate would no longer sit still, letting itself be appreciated and accepted; now that it had been invoked, our fate was coming for us.