Crush

Chapter Eleven Heloise and Abelard

Eleven

Heloise and Abelard

For decades, I filled a journal once or twice a year. From the time I started talking to David, I finished a whole composition notebook each week. Before, I read a book a month; now I skimmed at least two a day. David compiled the first six weeks of our correspondence into a single document; he reported that it was 182,000 words long. No matter how many emails and texts, there was always more to say. I wondered what might feel like enough.

After that first Zoom, we began to meet that way once a week, sometimes for two hours at a time. We texted. We started a shared Google doc. If we’d had fax machines or a telephone made of tin cans and string, I think we would have used those too. And my fantasies evolved. Now I was daydreaming of kissing his neck, lying in a bed with him, touching his face…

I knew I’d fallen in love with Paul, but that had been so long ago. I wondered if maybe I’d forgotten how it felt, the way people forget the pain of childbirth (though I had not forgotten that), but I didn’t remember it being so all-consuming. I needed to stay married though. I’d made a promise, and I intended to keep it. My mother did not raise me not to keep promises. If she’d managed to stay with her husband, surely I could stick it out with mine.

I’d just have to make some rules for myself and live by them. And so I decided to keep a boundary, one that would let us continue to talk as much as we liked: we’d simply never be alone in a room together. There was only so much damage we could do from afar. Our patron saints would be Heloise and Abelard corresponding from their respective religious orders.

Their twelfth-century letters were sexy, but only in reminiscing about their former connection, back when he’d been her tutor, before her family had gotten him castrated. He wrote: “We were united, first under one roof, then in heart; and so with our lessons as a pretext we abandoned ourselves entirely to love. Her studies allowed us to withdraw in private, as love desired, and then with our books open before us, more words of love than of our reading passed between us, and more kissing than teaching.”

We could imagine a kiss but enjoy our distance, which would make room for a powerful lifelong friendship. The way we’d keep things perfect would be to keep them distant, as they had been for Heloise and Abelard even after she wrote, “If the name of wife appears more sacred and more valid, sweeter to me is ever the word friend, or, if you be not ashamed, concubine or whore.”

“Now seems a moment to live deliberately,” David said. “And while we’ve never wanted to outsmart love—only embody it fully—if we are going to make ambitious demands of our love, we’d better know what we are demanding.”

We were committed to sacrifice, even though the attraction was growing like a magic beanstalk. My desire was everything I’d been led to believe was possible when in my adolescence I’d encountered the erotic one-two punch of Jane Eyre and the Family Ties episode where Michael J. Fox gets together with Tracy Pollan.

More and more, I felt that David and I weren’t in control of how we felt. I wanted to kiss him more than I’d ever wanted anything. I wanted more, too, but that was as far as I’d let myself go even in my fantasy life. I’d always had excellent willpower. But not anymore. I wouldn’t have trusted myself in a hotel room with him, nor in an elevator, nor even seated next to him in a dark restaurant…. I could have gone full Green Eggs and Ham describing my desire and what a movable feast it was. But I believed we could turn it into something productive rather than destructive. What we could do with that feeling if, as sober, responsible adults, we could contain it! We could power a city!

“Your marriage is important to you and so it’s important to me,” David said. “Of course if you were free things might be different. But this is our spiritual challenge, and we are surely learning from it.”

We had heat-reduction strategies beyond emulating Heloise and Abelard postcastration. We took days off from writing to each other. Well, we tried to take days off and wound up taking half days off, but it was something. He kept a list during those interludes of all the times he’d wanted to be in touch. The numbers were spaced out by a few minutes. I felt his absence like a phantom limb.

Early in the pandemic shutdowns, there was talk about “the hammer and the dance,” where you’d relax the rules gradually, dancingly, and then when things got rough you’d bring the hammer down, and then after a while you’d dance back out again. That was more or less what we were doing. We started texting until we realized that the flirtation had spun out of control, so we stopped, judging the moonlight too strong for us. Then we grew frustrated at having to email photos of book pages and resumed texting all day.

As best I could, I distracted myself with work, including teaching and mentoring, writing essays, and cowriting a television pilot.

“We should write a book together,” David said one day during a staff meeting.

“What would it be about?”

“Us? It could be called This (Whatever It Is) .”

Whatever it was called, I began to believe that it would be the best book I’d ever write or read. In any case, what was I going to do, walk away from the question? Besides, writing a book about our mysterious connection might give us some critical distance, sublimate our longing into something potentially useful.

We agreed that this would let us have a purely epistolary affair, the perfect, safe affair—Abelard and Heloise 2.0. We didn’t have to give each other up to be good. We compiled a short commonplace-book’s worth of aphorisms about how perfection is overrated.

He quoted Randall Jarrell: “A good poet is someone who manages, in a lifetime of standing out in thunderstorms, to be struck by lightning five or six times; a dozen or two dozen times and he is great.”

I replied with the Ted Williams line “Baseball is the only field of endeavor where a man can succeed three times out of ten and be considered a good performer.”

Yes, we would canalize our feelings into work. I wrote up a proposal:

“ This (Whatever It Is) is an epistolary memoir. A casual exchange between two people led to a torrent of long emails back and forth all day, every day, about what we were doing and reading and thinking. We read the same books, listened to the same music, and our letters kept circling around the question of what to do with each other that wasn’t the usual thing people do in such situations, which is either to stop speaking or have a disastrous affair. We rallied every relevant resource like we were living in The Arabian Nights , only we were both Scheherazade.

“Together we worked tirelessly to answer questions like: What do you do with overwhelming relationships that don’t quite fit into your life? Can you have intimacy without consummation? Can you make room in your daily life for spiritual love? Our struggle to find a vocabulary to discuss our liminal relationship, to be close with out transgression, to be true friends to each other—these questions consumed us. Ultimately, we contained the attraction that had drawn us together and realized that these conversations might serve others encountering what Emerson called ‘a wandering spark,’ those longing to love and be loved without causing others harm.”

I told Paul about this book plan, expecting that he’d be relieved. Now we had something to call David: my collaborator. Collaborators talked all the time, didn’t they? We had to talk a lot, for the book .

Paul looked skeptical. He said he had two rules if we wrote a book:

“One: I will not throw a book party where you and David sit on stools at the front of the room mooning over each other. Two: The book must not be called The Greatest Love of All: How an Inconvenient Love Changed My Life . If it is, I will throw a car.”

“I never thought of that title but it’s not bad,” I said. “Because that song ‘The Greatest Love of All’ is about loving yourself. Whitney Houston is singing about learning to love what’s inside of you, not someone else. And I think that’s the point of whatever we’re working on. It’s not a romance, but rather through talking to each other we’re learning more about who we’re meant to be in the world.”

“I will throw a car ,” Paul said.