Chapter Twelve Game Plans

Twelve

Game Plans

Valéry wrote, “Hope sees a chink in the armor of the scheme of things.” And so David and I continued on our treasure hunt through the history of world literature for inspiration. We decided that as long as we were being considerate and responsible toward everyone else in our lives—particularly my family and his students—we could keep up what we were doing, with the golden rule: “If it increases love, it’s virtuous. If it decreases love, it’s vicious.”

Catching Veronica up one day as we sat in the park I concluded my short lecture with, “So you see, we just have to choose, at every turn, to make the more loving choice!”

She made a face.

“What?” I said. “How can you find fault with making loving choices?”

“Did you crib this foundational rule from Highlights magazine?” she said, shaking her head. “Because this sounds a lot like that cartoon, Goofus and Gallant : ‘Gallant holds the door for the older lady; Goofus lets it slam in her face.’ ‘Gallant pets the dog; Goofus kicks it.’

“Outside of pediatricians’ waiting rooms and eight-year-olds’ brains, choices are much more complicated than that. You can ignore the dog, write a poem about the dog, train the dog to talk. Everything you’re calling ‘good’ can backfire. The ‘bad’ can turn out to be the best thing for everyone. Adults deal in moral ambiguity. Never hurting people or getting hurt is impossible if you’re living an honest life.”

“I’m not living an honest life?” I asked indignantly. “I’m a goddamned paragon of my community!”

“Yes, the community loves sacrifice, and you’ve done that well. But no, it’s not honest. Deep down, I think you want more and that you’re angry. And that you’re right to be.”

I wrote down the conversation so I could bring it to David, yet another offering, just as he was taking notes on everything he heard for me. Both of us were lighting candles every day on our shared altar.

In Robert Musil’s The Man Without Qualities , a great scientist is asked how he manages to come up with so much that is new. His reply: “Because I never stop thinking about it.”

David and I were like that. And surely this attention would be rewarded with a breakthrough.

Only it was getting harder and harder to be apart. I wanted to hold him. I didn’t know when I’d ever wanted anything more, or when I’d been more conflicted about what that would mean. I imagined us inside a Choose Your Own Adventure where at the end of a scene you are presented with a choice: “Do you go inside the cave? Turn to page 65,” or “Do you take the potion? Turn to page 7.”

Here, as I saw it, were the different Choose Your Own Adventure plots we could follow as two people kept apart by circumstance. Turn to…

page 51 : Stoic renunciation ( Brief Encounter, Age of Innocence— practical, wistful)

page 19 : Run off together; caught and punished (Hollywood—messy, potentially “Wave of Mutilation”–style destructive)

page 92 : Socially approved but circumscribed long-term physical and/or emotional and/or intellectual affair (the French?—enlivening, dangerous)

page 33 : Double suicide (Shakespeare/ Dateline— tragic, gruesome)

page 14 : Contained sublimation (only example might be Viktor Shklovsky’s Zoo ???—cool, tricky!)

“Obviously, double suicide is off the table,” I wrote to David. “Sublimation seems like our stated and excellent goal. I fear renunciation as an inevitable necessity of failing to successfully pull off the others. I also fear the statistical likelihood of punishment when sending too many messages of adoration through hackable channels (which is all of them). Actually, now that I’m looking at it, I guess my lurking worst-case scenario has been that we fail at sublimation (and I’d know it was definitely my fault because you are an ascetic by nature, but I am occasionally persuasive), so then we wind up unable to control this, at which point the only option left would be renunciation. But most of the time I believe we can totally pull off page 14!”

What would have happened if he’d never done what he did next? Would page 14 have been possible? I’m not sure, but here is what he did:

“I think we should see each other in person, even if it’s only once. I have to go to California in a couple of months to present a paper at a religion symposium. I want you to join me.”

Nabokov wrote that the wise reader reads the book of genius not with his mind or heart but with his spine. That email of his I read with my spine.

“I want to, of course,” I said. “I’ll think about it. In the meantime, you can change your mind if you want.”

“I won’t change my mind,” he said.

For a new perspective, I saw an old friend for coffee. With her I was able to talk about the most important things with no restraint even if we went a year without seeing each other. Our three-hour talks were both exhaustive and nourishing. I knew she’d help me decide what to do with David.

“Wow!” she said after hearing about him. “He’s your soulmate collaborator! That’s the most important thing! All the rest is in service of that! Martin Buber in I and Thou said, ‘All actual life is encounter,’ and ‘The world is not comprehensible, but it is embraceable.’ Is it possible that in some way your destiny is connected to this other person, and you’re just trying to figure out in what way?” She asked when I would see him. I told her about California.

“Does that sound sordid?” I asked.

She shook her head.

“You have to ask: If this was my last year alive, how would I want to spend it? If I had thirty years? If you’re saying ‘Things are good enough—why should I blow them up?’ The answer is because ‘good enough’ should not be the goal,” she said. “We didn’t work this hard”—by “we” I sensed she meant women—“to be fine .”

For so long I’d been fine. Truly fine. I’d wanted nothing but to enjoy the fruits of my labor—marriage, career, friends, community. When I felt blue I’d double down on doing good out in the world; I found it usually cheered me up. I held babies, got ice cream for my parents, told my kid I was proud of him. I felt like if I died I could feel at peace with how I’d chosen to live my life. And yet, whatever I did now, someone was sure to get hurt eventually.

“You’re lit up,” she said, as if she were a doctor giving me the opposite of a fatal prognosis. “You’re glowing. As a creative person this is where you have to live. And it’s all here, right?” she said, and she ran her right hand gently along her left forearm. “The creative, the spiritual, it’s in our bodies. Why wouldn’t touching be a part of it too?”

If ads affect your reading experience, click here to remove ads on this page.