Crush

Chapter Twenty-Four Rendering Unto

Twenty-Four

Rendering Unto

I kept thinking about the biblical admonition to render unto Caesar what is Caesar’s. My job now, I decided, was simply to give everyone what they were owed: Paul, David, Nate, the lady at the post office. To Paul I needed to show appreciation. And so I not only continued to sleep with him, but I also took him on a weekend trip. I wanted to prove that I was not withholding love from him to give it to someone else. Pacified and cared for, he said I should go ahead and see David again because he knew it would make me happy.

When he said that, I stopped crying every day. I reassured Paul that I didn’t even need to be alone with David or to sleep with him, if I could only see him…

David came to town.

Walking to our meeting spot, I saw him from a great distance. He noticed me the second I noticed him. We smiled at each other and shook our heads in astonishment as we got closer and closer. We met at a crosswalk and held each other until a car came close and then we picked a side of the street. On the sidewalk, we stood looking at each other in awe, smiling and hugging.

Then we started wandering. I told him that I’d been given Paul’s blessing to see him but that I thought we should try to segue now into a platonic friendship. He agreed, and said he was just so glad we’d get to see each other and talk.

For three hours, we caught each other up on our lives and walked through one neighborhood after another, barely noticing where we were. This was all we needed! A friendship! Closeness! And this wouldn’t jeopardize my marriage. I wanted to kiss him, but I held myself back. We were learning to restrain ourselves. When we did, it felt like we’d passed a test. I left our walk proud, nourished, and sunburned.

Straight from there I went to see Paul for dinner. He was angry with me that I’d seen David, even though he’d known I was going to see him and had explicitly said it was fine. I thought he’d be pleased that we’d kept our hands off each other—didn’t he like knowing that we could? But of course sex was never the problem, and so my decorum did not make him feel any better.

I asked him friendly questions, tried to keep it light, but he sulked as we sat down at an outdoor restaurant. He glared at me as British people chain-smoked next to us. He had the psychic energy of a troll under a bridge.

“Why are you in such a bad mood?” I asked.

“You’ve read a thousand books with David, and you can’t finish the one book I asked you to read.”

“Which book?”

“ Polysecure .”

“I read some of it.”

He glared at me. “When are you making space for what I want? When do I get to have some of the aliveness you have? When’s it my turn?”

Your turn for the universe to reveal its glory to you in someone else’s arms? Are you going to find your spiritual twin on Tinder? I thought. But instead of saying that, I said, “I’m sorry. I understand that you want more of my attention and for me to be more enthusiastic about your desire for other people. I’ll do my best to get there.”

When we got home, I opened up the book he wanted me to read, highlighter in hand. I learned that I should name my reactive self. Was I the Ice Queen, the Bolter, the Bulldog? I guessed Bolter because of the time I’d responded to his staying out late by flinging books into bags.

The book asked: “What is your reactivity protecting?”

Uh, vulnerability?

“What did the vulnerable part need?”

In my mind, I pronounced it with a w not a v , because one of Veronica’s daughters was in a Latin summer program once that was extremely challenging. When we asked how she was, she said, because v ’s are pronounced as w ’s in Latin, “I’m feeling wery wulnerable .” Veronica and I immediately abandoned the correct pronunciation of the word and have used hers with each other ever since. All those years of wulnerability .

But back to my assignment! What was the cure for vulnerability?

Safety, connection, to be seen, to know you matter.

Where could I find that safety? How could I give that to myself and to Paul?

Nonmonogamy isn’t so different from monogamy, the book argued. It just tends to amplify the problems that are there in any intimate relationship, the terror of loving and being loved. The challenge of any close relationship is to work through the fear and come out stronger.

“Because what you’ve done is the exception to the rule, we have to think about the rule now,” Paul said. “And if the rule bent for you it needs to bend for me. I’m not saying we have to have a coming-out party as nonmonogamous with flags outside the house and promise rings for all our lovers, but I’d like some acknowledgment, some labeling. And I’d like people beyond just our friends to know what’s up. If we say ‘open marriage,’ then if people find out either of us is doing something they would know it wasn’t ‘cheating.’?”

I resolved to try to embrace an open marriage, to see what I might learn. I told Paul that of course I wanted joy and connection for him too. He’d been struggling, and if he thought it would help for him to be with other people, then I wanted that for him.

“As I give you permission, I’ll add that if you go wild right now, I think it will hurt us,” I said. “If you act in a way that seems unkind, then I might think less of you. I don’t particularly want to share you with random people online. It’s hard for me to imagine that being meaningful or good for you. But I know that you’ve made space for me to do what I’ve done, and so I will learn to handle the discomfort.”

He met a French woman at a bar and they stayed out late talking. He made plans to see her when he was in Paris the following month.

Was this okay? Was that? I understood that negotiating boundaries, constantly discussing everything, was the price to pay for a nontraditional relationship. But sometimes it felt like parenting a toddler, where they kept pushing and pushing for something, and you constantly had to set limits or permit treats. Or maybe it was like making out with someone at Antioch College in the 1990s: May I touch you over your shirt? May I unhook your bra?

Sometimes it all seemed fine. Other times nothing seemed fine at all.

“When we retire, what should we do?” Paul asked one day over dinner.

Don’t you need a job first before you can call it retiring? I thought. But I said the truth: “I’d like to teach more. I’m looking forward to being a grandmother. And at some point I’d like to look into becoming a foster parent for babies. What about you?”

“I’d like to go to Sandals Jamaica,” he said.

When you lose regard for a spouse, how do you get it back? Is it on them to be more regardable? Or is it up to you to try to see them more generously? Was I thinking too much about “the marriage” and not enough about him as a person? When I was unmoved by how upset he was, was that me being a monster or myself for the first time, or both? I couldn’t put my finger on what had changed. Everything was just as it had always been, but somehow it had become untenable.

I thought about one of Veronica’s daughters. She was the tiniest thing, and when she got worked up her voice went higher and higher and she got cuter and cuter. When she complained about something, it was very hard not to smile at this little whistling teapot of a child. I pitied her in her adorableness.

Paul was not like that. When he got angry, I liked him less, though nor did I like him when he became cheerful, because the reason for his giddiness was the prospect of joining dating apps. Enlivened by the idea of putting together a profile, he became more helpful around the house. When he woke up in the middle of the night, he didn’t wake me up to argue; he read a book, or he went and slept on the couch.

I didn’t even know how to describe to people who asked what was happening with David. I considered showing them the description of “intimate friendship” from The Chinese Pleasure Book and the definition of “limerence,” and the way his hand fit on my hip like it was designed for exactly that purpose.

Even with all that had been said on the subject—hours and hours of talking, writing hundreds of thousands of words on this very question—when Paul asked me to describe my feelings for David, and to tell him what I wanted, I tried to speak but couldn’t.

On the way home from dinner at a restaurant where we’d tried to talk about other things, to get along, Paul and I got in a screaming fight in an empty park by the water.

“This was supposed to be something we were doing together! Now you’re in love with someone else and I have to just sit there and watch it happen?”

“You pushed me to be in an open marriage and I didn’t want to! But I agreed to try it! Then you said I could sleep with this person and just not fall in love with him! And I tried! But I’m not built that way! You started this! You wanted this! I was happy! And now I’m miserable! Yes, I love someone else, and I miss him so much but I’m here with you trying to make this all work and reading fucking Polysecure ! Anyone else wouldn’t have come back to you after California! Sometimes I wish I hadn’t!”

Enraged, Paul threw, in a surprisingly graceful arc, our paper bag of leftovers into the river. I watched the food sail through the night and into the water. He kicked a trash can so hard it rocked on its pedestal. I thought he might throw himself over the railing and into the swirling water below. If he did, I wasn’t sure how hard I would try to stop him.

I sat there on a bench by the water and wept as he stormed around like a Tasmanian devil on a loop in a cage. When he was facing away from me and at a distance, I began to walk swiftly in the other direction, wild-eyed, sobbing. I was a block away when my phone rang.

“I’m sorry I lost my temper,” he said.

“It’s okay,” I said. “But I don’t want to see you again tonight.”

I took a shower, put on pajamas, got into bed. I made up the couch so he could sleep there. Earlier in the night he’d said he was worried I hated him. I’d said no, of course not. And I meant it. But as I fell asleep I thought, I didn’t then, but now I do .