Crush

Chapter Eight Full-Force Gale

Eight

Full-Force Gale

Out of nowhere, Veronica’s father, Bob, died. I went to his funeral by the ocean, where he’d retired after a lifetime of meaningful public service and lovingly raising three daughters my age. At the memorial, I watched one person after another take the stage and talk about what he’d done for them.

One said, “I’m another of the lost boys the girls brought home because life was rough at my place. Bob took me out and talked to me about books. He said, ‘All philosophy agrees on the way to live a good life: Be born to a rich and noble family. You screwed that up, so we need to figure out something else for you.’?” Then he did. So many people in that crowd had good lives, happy kids running around, because of what that man did for them.

Throughout the service I sat in the row behind Veronica and occasionally put my hand on her shoulder. I was glad she couldn’t see me cry; the tears were more for myself than for her anyway. Bob and my father had both been bohemians and both had daughters. My father, so different from Veronica’s, had cancer, and it wasn’t clear how many months he had left. When the time came for his funeral, I could not imagine anyone saying that when it came to love he’d given more than he got.

Love filled the room at Bob’s service, and love welled up in my heart every time I heard from David. Plutarch said that “lovers themselves believe, and would have all others think, that the object of their passion is pleasing and excellent.” I kept wanting to turn to the person next to me and brag like the proudest parent at the school recital: “That’s my kid up there!” Only in David’s case it would be: “That’s my whatever he is sharing another pearl of wisdom! Isn’t he smart? And handsome too? Here’s a picture! Here’s another picture! Here’s—where are you going?”

Emerson pointed to an intimacy beyond romantic love. Learning that lesson, David and I could avoid getting caught up in anything physical, temporal, or earthly. Our love could grow and spread outward into the world. We could see that not as a sacrifice but as a gift.

At the funeral reception, one of Veronica’s aunts monologued to me about her garden for twenty minutes, and my attention never flagged. A four-year-old clung to me like we were on a sinking ship, and I wound up cleaning an entire globe’s worth of fake Frozen -themed snow off her buffet plate. In my state of limerence I’d somehow passed mindfulness and intentionality and entered a new state of total presence.

Full presence was my mantra. Veronica had always said that if you’re truly focused, “very, very present,” no matter how difficult a situation is, you can download Apache helicopter instructions to your brain like they do in The Matrix . And that’s what I was trying to do every second. I made meals each day for my family. The house was well kept. I was at inbox zero.

“I’ve noticed you don’t check your phone anymore when we’re together,” Veronica said. “Not that it really bothered me, but it’s nicer now.” In my joy at beholding the world so closely and carefully I believed that nothing could go wrong.

The night of the funeral Veronica came to my hotel for dinner and decided to stay for a slumber party, and so briefly escape her aunts and cousins with their landscaping stories and Dollar Store toys. As we sat on the balcony of my—now our—room and looked out at the ocean, I read her one of David’s emails. She’d been following along as we’d grown close, but she’d never heard his writing voice before, and she looked surprised.

“Is he a character in a Russian novel?” she said. “Why does he talk like that?”

I explained to her that after initially finding his messages bewildering I began to adjust to their language and tempo. As I did, I found that each one made me think of a thousand things to say. I was writing back from some until then untouched part of my mind and heart. My replies to him struck me as some of the best writing I’d ever done. I loved who I was when I was talking to him.

I told her about the British writer Charles Williams, who wrote a hundred years ago about moments when “a hand lighting a cigarette is the explanation of everything; a foot stepping from the train is the rock of all existence.” Williams, one of the Inklings with J. R. R. Tolkien and C. S. Lewis, described a form of mystical vision in which we saw the person we loved “as he or she was seen through the eyes of God.” With David, that was how I saw myself too.

“You’ve certainly caught feelings, haven’t you?” she said.

She liked Paul. I liked him too, I reassured her. I had this all under control. David and I had never even kissed, even though Paul had said I should kiss people. We were so saturated by books and songs and poems that I felt that it was more a research project than an affair. I imagined saying to her, “Affair? No! We are just ascending a ladder to pure language!” She let it drop, and I was glad. Then I excused myself to check my email. I hoped I’d have a long message from David, and I did.

I’d sent him a photo of fog over the water along with the W. H. Auden poem, one of the last he ever wrote, “Thank You, Fog.” His gratitude came from the joy of spending time with friends at a country house so shrouded in fog that there was no reason to leave their cozy company.

David had replied with this from Rabindranath Tagore, the Bengali poet: “The feeling which I had was like that which a man, groping through a fog without knowing his destination, might feel when he suddenly discovers that he stands before his own house.”

My own house. Something about that phrase seemed to encapsulate how I felt about David. He was my house . We still hadn’t discussed attraction, only shock at having found in each other a kind of twin. The truth was, Paul had sanctioned sexy flings, not full-blown romantic entanglements. And so for David and me to be alone together, much less to kiss, seemed unwise. We lived in different cities. People in our situation got tractates or benders, not both, and we were choosing the former.

If anything, what we were having was an intellectual affair, even if David did keep using phrases like “a covenant to fulfill.” I didn’t know what that meant, but I believed that if loving someone but not taking that feeling to its logical conclusion was an Olympic sport, I was at the mall rink every day working on my triple axel.

I didn’t know how David was making time to write so much to me. I wondered if he was neglecting his students. I began to worry that I was becoming a member of the B-52’s “Deadbeat Club,” the equivalent of a stoner roommate always trying to get him to stay home and play video games. I asked if I should leave him alone more.

“I’m here for all of it,” he said, “especially the jangling shiny objects that are emitting sparks of holy light.”

Psychologist Adam Phillips called lovers “frantic epistemologists,” “readers of signs and wonders.” And I saw signs for us everywhere. After Veronica fell asleep, I stayed up wondering if I was spending too much time talking to David. I flipped on TCM. A 1949 movie called Holiday Affair was just coming on . Two men pursue a war widow played by twenty-two-year-old Janet Leigh. Carl, the one who’s not Robert Mitchum, gives her up because she loves Robert Mitchum best. When she says she’s sorry to have wasted so much of his time, Carl says, “No time is wasted that makes two people friends.” I took that as reassurance that whatever was happening, it was something good.

At a diner breakfast with Veronica the next morning I was making faces at a baby in the booth behind us when the mother handed me the baby to hold.

“Why do people always want to hand you their babies?” Veronica said. “No one ever hands me babies.”

“Do you want them to?” I said.

“Not really,” she said.

“See? That’s why.”

Turning to the mother I said, “She’s adorable, and seems very smart. What’s her name?”

“Cherish,” her mother said.

“Cherish!” I said, almost flinging the baby back at her mother so I could text David, who’d just used that word in his email the night before.

Everything that happened became valuable to the degree it was worth telling him.

“Why am I telling you this?” he often asked after a story about his day. “Because I want to tell you everything.”