Crush

Chapter Ten Permission

Ten

Permission

There used to be a video store near our home staffed by a young couple. They showed movies in the back room for kids every weekend— Paper Moon almost caused a riot because of the little girl smoking—and the adults could sit in the front room drinking Bloody Marys and eating popcorn. It was about as great a gift to parents of young children as has ever existed on this earth.

Nate never missed a film. His laminated punch card filled up fast. He had a bronze one, then silver, then gold…then they didn’t know what to do because no one else had seen that many movies. They asked him what color he wanted. And so he came to possess the only ruby video card in existence.

David would have had the only ruby card if I’d given out punch cards, though I didn’t know what exactly ours would signify. The relationship seemed to be dictating its own terms. One day, after confessing that he’d seen every bit of footage of me online, he said, “Frankly, if it weren’t so wholesome and mutual, it’s the kind of thing that might be scary.” He named his favorite clip.

“My dress was too tight,” I said.

“Was it? I didn’t notice,” he said, in a way that made it clear he certainly had noticed.

As I’d grown more philosophical, he had apparently become less monk-like.

I thought of a line I’d heard about problems just being questions asked in the wrong way. We would only need to find the right way to ask what we were to each other, the best databases and search terms, and everything could be figured out in no time! We had library cards and motivation. I had the honor-student’s confidence that with enough hard work there was nothing that could not be understood.

We made a list:

What the fuck is this?

What do we owe each other? What do we owe ourselves?

What do we want from each other? What do we want from ourselves?

We who leave a tradition must have something better in mind, right? What?

Who are we when we’re at our best?

We kept searching one library and bookstore after another for clues to what we were feeling and what to do about it. We were broadcasters on election night in the early days of television, ties loosened, jackets off, running electoral-vote scenarios on a chalkboard even after the viewers at home had gone to bed.

Here’s one of the things we found, from Sheila Heti:

“All this seemed to be happening of its own accord, this laying down of a bridge on which things between them could pass; not necessarily sexual things, or even intimate things, but things as yet unknown.”

Here’s another, from a passage in a book about the Chinese court concept of an “intimate friend”: “The most deeply felt affinities between people were likened to ‘soundless music’…True friends consider themselves stupendously lucky to have encountered one another…intimate friendship hardly qualifies as completely ‘voluntary’ in the modern sense.”

That was right! Nothing about what we were experiencing felt voluntary! We made each other better too. Without my levity, he could be opaque. Without his gravity, I could become distracted from what was truly important. Of Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers it was said, “He gave her class, and she gave him sex appeal.” I turned him on to 1980s movies and he introduced me to Annie Dillard. We joked that we were John and Yoko, and he was Yoko. I’d be the one saying, “Let’s write a song called ‘Help!’?” And he’d say, “Yes! Or how about a Tsurezuregusa ?”

I tried to convince myself of the plausibility that I’d never spend time around David and that I would not suffer from the lack of it, but I also began fantasizing about holding his hand. If he were a record it would have been all scratched up. If he were an item of clothing he would have been threadbare.

Even as I worked very hard to make him and whatever he and I had into a research project and a symbol of safe expansion, I did begin to suspect that we’d become the romantic equivalent of two very drunk people convincing each other that they are excellent drivers. We were both eager to throw each other the car keys, stumble down the driveway, hit the road.

I thought back to the closest thing I’d ever had to this feeling before. It was twenty years earlier, when Paul and I were still boyfriend-girlfriend, not yet engaged. I’d gotten a crush on a friend—in truth, it was far beyond a crush. I broke it off as if it had been nothing. I talked about it as if it had been nothing. But it was definitely something.

I made the break for what I thought were good reasons. I bought into the idea that “cheating” was “bad,” that to be “faithful” to your partner was “good.” But was it good to have two loves in your hand and to fling one away? I suffered. He suffered. I broke both our hearts. I thought that was the price we had to pay for falling in love when I already had a boyfriend, when I was “taken.”

In talking to David I began to realize that I’d committed a sin against that man, but even more so against myself, by giving him up the way I had. David felt sorry for me. He said, “Most sins inflict their punishment on the sinner above all. Heaven and hell are contained in the deeds themselves—I think Blake said that.”

At the time, ending it made me feel virtuous. I’d seen Brief Encounter ! I’d seen Lonesome Dove ! I knew what was supposed to happen! You were supposed to choose! And so I chose. And how could I regret the choice when I’d stayed with the man I chose for so long and we’d had a family? Without that choice who knows if I’d have had children at all, much less my perfect son. Once I’d sacrificed another love for Paul, I knew that whatever happened I would stay with him and so justify that choice. If I’d refused my friend for a less-than-eternal love that would have been a heresy. But if I’d left him for the man I’d spend the rest of my life with, then it was clearly the right thing to do.

Still, ever since I’d felt remorse without knowing quite what I should have done differently. Many times I’d be walking through town, and I’d imagine that any second I might see that other man. I wondered if he’d stop to talk or blow past me. I wondered if he’d forgive me if I said I was sorry. I wondered if he should. What else could I have done? In the past I’d asked that question rhetorically. Now I was asking it in all seriousness: For real, what else could I have done?

Whatever it was, could I do that now? Was this the chance to do it right? A chance for redemption? To have two loves and not reject one just to maintain some preconceived idea of what relationships were supposed to look like?

Fidelity to yourself and to other people, how to love well, and faith in the goodness of the world—those were the themes of what I was reading. What did love dare us to do? If David was making me feel more like myself, if I was fully present as a wife, mother, and friend—and I’d never been so present in my life, that was a fact—where was the danger? No, really, where was it?

One day as I sat at my desk wondering what it would be like to feel David holding me, I heard a neighbor’s cat in heat. For days the yowling was relentless. So many people said something that the neighbors put a sign on their window that said: Please Leave the Horny Cat Alone .

At our last staff meeting David and I had talked about whether we could or should see each other in person. We decided it was probably better not to. I believed that with my heart and I was resolved. The neighbor’s cat cried from another, far less evolved, universe.

David and I didn’t want to complicate things. We didn’t want to be common. So we were not going to be like the cat. We were going to be sober and mature. We worked on the problem of what to do about safely containing our love like it was our job.

Day after day, he sent me photos of pages he was reading, looking for an answer. In such photos, my eye went to his thumb holding down the page before I saw the words. I saw worlds in the wrinkles at his knuckles, the tension with which he held the books. The truth was I just wanted to see him so bad . It was all I could think about. Every night, the cat’s howls echoed down the street. I really wished that cat would shut the fuck up.