Crush

Chapter Seven The Third Path

Seven

The Third Path

Over Mexican food, a married friend of mine told me she’d had what she called a “crackle” with a man she’d met through work, that it was so strange . Nothing overtly sexual ever happened with the other man. She was strategic, avoided being alone with him, forced them to be family friends. He got married. They joke now about the early attraction. But she said it had been torment how she’d felt like there was no one to talk to about any of it. The detail she kept repeating was that at a conference cocktail party the man kept feeding her. She’d be talking to someone else and suddenly his hand was there, putting food directly into her mouth, saying, “You have to try this!”

She said that she was glad she’d gotten to experience desire for him and also managed to keep her marriage intact. Her husband had been concerned by the attraction, but during that time they’d had the best sex of their lives. That gave her hope that there was some way to handle such sparks in a nondestructive way. She told me about how another friend of hers was horrified that she still talked to the other man at all. This friend had been very flirtatious early in her life and went in the opposite direction once she married. Her rule for herself and her husband: “If we get attracted to someone we work with, we quit our jobs. If we get attracted to a neighbor, we move.”

My dinner date said, sipping a margarita, that just by staying in touch with the other man she’d pushed things a little further than that all-or-nothing friend might have, but that she still hadn’t let herself explore what more could have been possible. She’d always wondered if there were some other sort of relationship available with him.

Right! What was that perfect middle path between moving across town to save your marriage or “I live with my neighbor now”?

She didn’t know. No one knew.

I once had a conversation with an agent about when a book I’d written should come out. Though the original plan was for September, my publisher was pushing for January. “They’re the experts,” I said. “They’d know.”

“Oh, no one knows anything,” my agent said, as if he were surprised I’d thought anyone did. “Almost nothing sells either, so you might as well do what you want.”

When people said “I told you so” about open or openish marriages not working, I thought of other kinds of marriages—sexless, arranged, traditional, long distance. Do those always work out? What demographic has it completely figured out, start to finish, every time? When half of all marriages end, and plenty that last seem like perhaps they shouldn’t? “Polyamory” had always sounded to me like a high school elective no one would choose to take. Why was I suddenly entertaining it?

The real danger, Veronica often said, was contorting ourselves to fit the status quo rather than paying attention to what we cared about: “What will do more damage than almost anything is to say, ‘Here’s the person I need to be in order to make this work, and so whatever it costs me, I’m going to be that way.’?”

Paul started to notice, with mild concern, that all I talked about was David. But he also noticed that I was so incandescently happy that I wanted to have sex all the time. This, if I’d just stop seeming so moony, would have been a sign that I was finally on board with the adventuring he’d envisioned. He was all for the sexual charge; only the emotional part concerned him.

I told him not to worry about it, but keeping it under control had become another full-time job. I’d never lied to Paul, though I was glad he wasn’t asking too many questions. I continued reading stacks of books on love each week in an effort to understand what was happening.

One was a 1923 German epistolary novel called Zoo, or Letters Not About Love by Viktor Shklovsky. In his preface, the author writes, “In an epistolary novel, the essential thing is motivation—precisely why should these people be writing to each other? The usual motivation is love and partings.”

The man writing the letters is desperately in love with the woman, who doesn’t have time for him, and so they have a prohibition against writing about love. What winds up happening is that the more they try not to talk about love, the more everything seems to become about love. The woman tells a long story about a wet nurse named Stesha and then asks, seeming shocked by her own disclosure: “Now what made me inflict Stesha on you?”

It doesn’t matter whether you’re saying you love and want each other; once you’re inflicting Steshas, you don’t have to.

One night while it rained outside, Paul and I sat talking after dinner, and he asked about David. He was wondering if he should be afraid that I’d run off with him. I said no. I was committed first and foremost to our marriage.

“This is a nourishing, interesting relationship that is not threatening or taking anything away from us,” I said. “I feel closer to you than ever. If you feel uncomfortable at any point I will stop talking to him.”

“Can I expect a lot of birthday presents to show your appreciation for how generous I’m being about David?”

“Of course,” I said. I thought he might be joking but I wasn’t sure, so I bought him a guitar.

Truly, I did feel grateful. “For the sin against the HOLY GHOST is INGRATITUDE,” wrote seventeenth-century lunatic Christopher Smart, quoted by David in an email that he referred to as a “tractate.” I vowed not to sin in that way. I still felt full of love for Paul—even more so for letting me have so much in my life outside of him.

Over Paul’s birthday weekend, friends came over for every meal. I always had someone to talk to while I was making us pancakes, smoothies, sandwiches, lasagna. We played poker and Paul opened his presents. He loved the guitar.

Amid the celebrating, I noticed how secure Nate seemed. So many of my friends’ parents and Nate’s friends’ parents had gotten divorced. I’d seen the toll it had taken on some of those whose parents had split up. They seemed unmoored for some period of time between a few months and the rest of their lives. If the gods of their childhood could make a promise in front of the whole world and then break it, who could be trusted?

Not to mention what it did to relationships between kids and their divorced parents. You couldn’t predict it. One friend liked her philandering father’s girlfriend more than her dutiful mother’s new husband, and so she wound up living with her father. If I ever left Paul, dear God, what if Nate wound up staying with him whenever he was home from college? What if they celebrated holidays together, and for the rest of my life I only got brunch a few times a year at loud restaurants?

My son had become a kind and secure person. I didn’t know how much having married parents was part of that, but I didn’t want to find out. At dinner one night, as he took another taco off the stack I’d made, Nate told me that he sometimes wrote things and then when he read them back he was surprised by how good they were. He asked me if I’d had that feeling. I said I had. Once I wrote something about how my father hadn’t cared that much about me, and I realized by writing it that it was true. And having said it out loud, I began to feel less sad about it.

“Aw, Mom!” he said, and came around the table and hugged me.

I thought, You are welcome, world, for this remarkable person. And I also thought: Nothing is more important than preserving this child’s sense of safety and home.

“You and I raised our children to be people we wanted to know,” Veronica liked to say. “And now we have children we love to be around.”

My relationship with Nate and with almost everyone I knew was filtered through books in some way. I made my closest friends through reading one another’s writing or by bonding over our love of other writers. Books are powerful—you have to give book banners that. You could be the best librarian on earth and not know what book will do what, when, to whom. Generations of people could read The Sorrows of Young Werther without incident. Are you going to ban it because a couple of them read it and then jumped off a bridge?

When he was little, I read to Nate more or less every single night. Thousands of hours. Once a week I brought home stacks of books from the library, as well as audiobooks for him to listen to on the CD player in his room. Valéry called lions “assimilated sheep.” The way Nate spoke, even now as a teenager, was funny, warm, surprising—a ragù of P. G. Wodehouse, Frog and Toad , and World War II histories.

I worked hard to make our place comfortable for his friends and mine, and I liked having a home where people came when they needed help.

John, an old friend of the family who’d had a fire in his apartment, came over. I ordered us burgers, typed up his insurance inventory on my laptop, did his laundry, and gave him some replacement clothes he’d requested from Macy’s. (My braving Macy’s on a storewide-sale day was, I hoped he saw, a hall-of-fame display of friendship.) He told me that he’d been allowed to do one pass through his burned-up apartment before the building was demolished. The landlord shined a flashlight from one part of the room to another as he looked for things to salvage. “It might have been growing up Catholic,” he said, “but as I left every room I whispered ‘Goodbye, room.’?” He mimed crossing himself.

John babysat his former girlfriend’s kids. He worked at the food bank. After the fire, the community raised more than a hundred thousand dollars for him. He said he had the thought as he looked at all that money and at the hundreds of messages that came with it: Maybe I’m…a good person? After the burgers were eaten and the admin work and laundry done, I walked him to where he was staying. On each block he said hello to someone. At one point he stopped to pet a dog as he said to the owner, “He’s gonna get bigger? How old is he? If you ever need a babysitter!”

Watching this person who’d just lost everything still smiling at strangers, I thought of my father. Even surrounded by good fortune and people who loved him, he’d moved through the world in a cloud of distraction and mild annoyance. Had he ever once offered a word of unselfconscious praise for a dog or a baby?

I didn’t tell John about David, even though he was the only honest answer to the question, “What’s new?” David and I were writing each other thousands of words a day. We read books and listened to music and talked about love and longing, fidelity and infidelity. We could not shut up; we always wanted more.

I encouraged him to watch mainstream movies he’d missed out on in his self-imposed austerity. He was a good student; I could tell because he started to make uncharacteristic references to pop culture. After I told him I was sorry for leaving a five-minute voicemail, he said, “Never apologize for that. Nothing you send is ever long enough. You could Truman Show that shit and I’d tune in.”

We learned the word “limerence”—a term for involuntary obsession coined in the 1970s. I read definitions of the term as if I were receiving a diagnosis from a physician at a Swiss specialty clinic: “Limerence involves intrusive thinking…. A condition of sustained alertness…At peak crystallization, almost all waking thoughts revolve around the limerent object.” The physical manifestations included shortness of breath and a sort of delirium. I hadn’t inhaled fully in weeks. The air got caught somewhere.

How long did limerence last? According to one source, “From the moment of initiation until a feeling of neutrality is reached, is approximately three years. The extremes may be as brief as a few weeks or as long as several decades.”

One morning at 7:54 a.m. I realized that I hadn’t heard from David yet and I wondered if he would write that day, or if the fever had broken and the intensity had waned. Maybe he won’t write all weekend and that will be a sign that now we’ve reached neutrality.

At 8:11, a tractate came through. It was about a twelfth-century book he had on his syllabus called Spiritual Friendship : “Friendship is that virtue, therefore, through which by a covenant of sweetest love our very spirits are united, and from many are made one.”

He sent me photos of the title pages for his students’ essays about creative forms of friendship. One was about “Boston marriages,” where unmarried female friends lived together around the turn of the last century. Some of them were lesbian couples flying under the radar; others were friends who found a way to navigate the world together in a loving way. Another was about the cicisbeo , or cavalier servente , an acknowledged male mistress in eighteenth-century Italy.

“Did you turn your students into our unwitting research assistants?” I asked.

My real question, though, was how had what began as a simple college crush so quickly turned into a two-person cult?

Surely what was happening couldn’t be bad or tawdry. It could be dumb, I supposed. It could be embarrassing or na?ve. Certainly, it could fade away. And yet, apparently it could also last four months, four years, or four decades. All I knew was that honoring what we had seemed like a more valuable goal than trying to avoid looking stupid.

“I feel greedy to have all I have and want David too,” I told Veronica.

“Is it greedy to crave human connection?” she said.

“Maybe,” I said.