Crush

Chapter Nine Abundance

Nine

Abundance

“I don’t know if I should be jealous, because I don’t really know what the hell this is,” Paul said of my relationship with David as he made dinner and I worked at the kitchen table. “You’re not kissing him even though you have permission. It’s not purely emotional, sexual, intellectual, or a friendship. It’s got some of all of these, but it feels like something new. Mostly I’m just impressed.”

Family life was better than ever. I played Uno with Nate. (New rule: when you won you had to yell, “Uno Out!”) I took him shopping for jeans, compulsively cleaned the house, set out bright flowers, grilled fish for dinner. At night, when Paul was out with friends, I wrote back and forth with David.

I’d look at an inbox of thirty-six new emails, many from famous people, and the only message I’d care about was the one from David telling me whether or not he liked the new cover of the Replacements’ “Skyway” on our shared playlist. I had a tall stack of manuscripts on my desk to edit and blurb but the only thing I wanted to read was a sexy Octavio Paz poem David had mentioned in passing.

Every second of every day felt more worthwhile now that he was in my life. And I looked forward to going to bed because as soon as I turned the light out and closed my eyes, there he was. As in Jonathan Richman’s song “Astral Plane,” if I couldn’t see him in real life, I’d see him in my dreams.

Paul had chosen to be philosophical and capacious about all of it. “Our love is abundant,” he said. “Abundance means we can spare it. There is no need to hoard love. There’s plenty . Creation is an abundance of love. We should be giving it away in little ways all day and in big ways all our lives.” I thought about how love and money both so often go to people who already have them. It’s hardest to acquire money when you’re broke and to find love when you’re lonely.

Paul saw his occasional flickers of jealousy as a welcome spiritual challenge, especially because my desire to keep him on board made me more forgiving of things about which I’d formerly been critical. Paul knew everything that was happening. I figured that because we were still attracted to each other we were doing well as a couple. He was happy to see me happy.

“I don’t want it to be that I’m the wall and you’re Pyramus and Thisbe,” he said. “Or that I’m the blood feud and you’re Romeo and Juliet.”

He felt that my friendship with David was making his life better too. We felt proud of ourselves for making space for this kind of life-giving connection. He began to talk about how he’d like to find a close friendship like that too. I would have been a hypocrite to say no, though I did feel strange about the notion of his pursuing other people for this sort of deep connection. But he was being so considerate about David; how could I begrudge him anything?

He offered an analogy to what he saw as our willingness to create space for something that might make others uncomfortable. He had a friend who worked as a technical director for theaters. Paul said tech people often started with a list of rules: No glitter, no liquids, no hanging anything from the ceiling. But this guy started all conversations with a simple question: “What do you want to do?” He’d work with you to try to figure out how to make it work, how to let you do the show you wanted to do. Maybe glitter was fine if there were a tarp. Maybe if we rigged pulleys we could…

That seemed like a strategy for a lasting marriage, and for a richer life than past generations of women were able to have. You could come at commitment from a place not of rules but of Tell me what you want . Let’s see if we can figure out how you can have it . That doesn’t mean infinite permission. The technical director would have to say, often, “That’s not possible.” But there was a reason why. And he always had a plan B, something that was sometimes even better than the original proposal.

So that’s what Paul and I were doing, I decided: a new and better kind of fidelity, a fidelity to each other and to ourselves. That didn’t mean there was never static. As Paul, Nate, and I pulled into our auto repair shop for an oil change, Paul pointed to one of the techs and asked, “Is that your boyfriend?” He knew someone there always went out of his way to be extra helpful when I brought in the car.

“No, that’s Evan. He’s also lovely. But my boyfriend here is Kris.”

Nate, from the back seat, said, “I thought Tom Hanks was your boyfriend.”

“Your mother has a lot of boyfriends,” Paul said.

I heard an edge in his voice.