Chapter Fourteen A Room Without a Door
Fourteen
A Room Without a Door
When I mentioned the California trip possibility one night as we were getting ready for bed, Paul took in a sharp inhale of breath. He seemed to be thinking hard as he brushed his teeth. When he was done, he said, “On one hand, I find this scenario extremely hot. On the other, the emotional intensity freaks me out. I can think of another question to add to your research project: In writing so much about not having a run-of-the-mill affair are you doing exactly that? Are you so smart you’re stupid?”
In her 1996 song “Shameless,” Ani DiFranco sings about how she and this person who is married find themselves together in a room without a door. She predicts that other people are coming and will find them, and when they do they’ll be mad. They’ll want to know how they got into the doorless room—and more importantly, what their plan is for getting out. We had reached the chorus of that song.
“No one is driving this train,” Paul said, “not you, not him. We have to just see where it ends up. I’m the planet you live on, to quote that song you like. Other men have been like shooting stars, but this guy is fully another planet. I hope you don’t leave me for him. You really shouldn’t, by the way! I’m cool! He’s a nerd! He’s the kind of guy you marry; I’m the kind you have an affair with. The way you two write to each other gives me pause more than you sleeping with him. I don’t think any of this ends without pain and tears. It might work out, but it won’t be simple.
“You’ve read so much”—Paul said, casting an arm out in the direction of my bookshelf, crowded with books about limerence and friendship—“but even you can’t outsmart love. You’re going to the library to try to make sense of something you’re unable, or unwilling, to face in real life: you want each other. And that part I’m into, but when energy has no boundaries it can become chaotic. You really should put down the transcendentalists and read Polysecure .”
“If anyone can find a way to love each other without breaking containers, we can!” I said. “We’ve worked so hard to increase and not decrease love! This is our project—facing up to the reality that these things are usually doomed but finding our way to a happy ending!”
“If you see him in person, you have no idea what will be unlocked,” Paul said. “But I’m not going to be the one to stop you.”
If I was paying attention to what I cared about, everything was clear. I wanted to be the person I was with David. I felt more fully myself. I felt connected to something I couldn’t explain, something life-giving. Our friendship felt—and everything I said now sounded insane even to me—holy.
For all his initial promotion of polyamory, Paul had begun to add caveats. He liked the idea of me as a sexual being in the world. He was glad that I was finally seeing things his way. And yet, he was afraid of what might happen when I went to California.
He wanted it made clear that this time with David would be a holiday, not my real life. He said that all societies had found ways to siphon off emotions that didn’t fit inside of approved social institutions like marriage: “Bacchanals, Fat Tuesday, jubilee years, Carnival…There are ways to ritualistically contain these things. We just need to respect the container. You can go see him, but it would be outside the everyday. You’re creating a hypercircumscribed magical space. A trip would be your Shrove Tuesday, not open-ended. Or you could just not go. Why try to see him?”
The real answer was because if I didn’t hold him in my arms immediately I thought I would implode. And I believed that I could handle it. I was delirious, but I wasn’t dumb. I knew that at some point something might shift, that I’d want to be with him instead of Paul. But with everyone working hard to keep that from happening, I had faith that the threat was remote. I believed that I was mature enough to remain composed. Yes, if we were all in our twenties I might run after him, but we were old . We knew that just because you felt something didn’t mean you had to do anything about it. And as far as I was concerned, divorce was off the table.
When a decade earlier a friend of mine got divorced, women he dated sent him sexy pictures. He’d sometimes show them to me on his phone while our kids were nearby doing arts and crafts and eating buttered pasta. One Halloween a woman he’d broken up with appeared at his door heartbroken, weeping, cat makeup running down her face. I’ve thought often of that crying cat. That’s the kind of embarrassing scene that, as I had come to understand, came standard issue with divorce. I liked to believe that I’d be dignified even in the face of such loss, but we never know what we’re capable of, not really.
“You wouldn’t have to worry about that,” David said when I told him the crying cat story, as I told him every story. “If you ever got divorced, Penelope, you’d have suitors lined up for blocks.” I looked it up: in The Odyssey , when Odysseus is away Penelope has 108 suitors—52 from Dulichium, 24 from Same, 20 from Zacynthus, and 12 from Ithaca. “Again: I share your goal of protecting your marriage. Of course, if you ever left it, I’d be asking different questions.”
I shook off that sort of talk. We could do better. We would do better.