Chapter Thirty-Seven Eucatastrophe
Reading W. H. Auden taught me a new word: “eucatastrophe,” a neologism Tolkien made out of the Greek for “good” and “sudden turn.” It means “a massive turn in fortune from a seemingly unconquerable situation to an unforeseen victory, usually brought by grace rather than heroic effort.” That’s what began to happen when I returned home.
Letting myself love David, it was as though I’d cast a spell on the world. Holding his hand one day as we sat in his car, I hallucinated that his hand was my hand and mine was his. Joining each other on work trips, we slept intertwined in generic hotel rooms; on visits to each other’s homes we began to colonize closets and shelf space. Sometimes we fell asleep talking and woke up in the middle of the night talking more. Each room became that first one when the lights went off.
David sat with me at my father’s memorial service. That night after everyone else had left I made us bowls of ice cream. He and Nate joined forces to mock my love of Magic Shell, the chocolate syrup that hardens when you pour it on ice cream. On his way to bed, Nate hugged him, said goodnight, and David looked at me with shock and delight. How was that for a stroke of fortune no one could have seen coming—he and Nate got along. We loved each other’s friends.
There were also misunderstandings and conflicts and tears. In trying to make a spiritual love work day to day, it was as though we’d entered the crystal chamber Superman submits to so he can become human and grow old with Lois Lane. We still couldn’t keep our hands off each other, but we were still taking off blouses and scrubbing our skin with lye.
“You’re talking to someone else through me,” he would say sometimes when I got mad at him. “Probably your father. Because I don’t hear myself in what you’re describing.” There was a lot about living like a monk that he still preferred, and he had a much higher tolerance for skin hunger. I tried not to take it personally, but did not always succeed.
Veronica said, “Here’s your mantra: ‘I love him. Sometimes his personality stresses me out. It’s going to be okay.’ And I do think you will be okay. But I also think that it started out so intensely that living in the real world will mean sort of starting over.”
“Why can’t we just have it be the same as it was but, you know, with us together all the time?” I said.
“Because he’s weird .” She laughed. “You’ve fallen in love with a wonderful but also very weird person. And now that you’re trying to bring your relationship into the real world you’ve got what musicians call ‘demo attachment,’ where you get so into the sound of the demo, which is all potential, that you keep comparing it to the fully orchestrated final song.”
They say of Shakespeare plays that the way you know if one was a tragedy or a comedy is whether it ended with a death or a wedding. In life, it’s harder to tell, because usually a wedding or pregnancy doesn’t wrap everything up in a bow of joy. So what does a true happy ending look like? I think it’s always a surprise.
“The good that one expects does not come to pass, but unexpected good does,” wrote the nineteenth-century French writer Jules Renard. “There is justice, but he who dispenses it is playful. He is a jovial judge, who laughs at us, plays tricks on us, but who, when all is weighed, never makes a mistake.”
What proves love is real? What does real even mean? There’s no evidence in timelines—whether we stay together for a month or for the rest of our lives. There is no security in living together, nor in having children, nor in wearing rings. All we have at the end of the day is ourselves. Falling in love returned me to myself. I shook my life upside down like an old purse. I put some things into a new purse and left some things out, and that was what I’d carry for some unknown length of time. My only orders now came from Dolly Parton: “Find out who you are and do it on purpose.”
Nate brought over friends, who stoically answered questions about where they would be going to college, and we all played Past Lives, a board game from the 1980s that I’d had since high school. You move backward in time, hoping not to lose turns on squares like “100 Years War” while accumulating works of art, historic relics, and “karmic credits,” which function like money.
At the end you get a karma points score, a number you look up in The Book of Past Lives to learn if you were Joan of Arc or the rat that started the plague, Leonardo da Vinci or Lady Godiva. If you get the maximum number of possible points you learn that you were not a great leader or religious figure. The best score, the highest-level person you can be, is the builder of the pyramids, author of the most profound aphorisms, composer of the most enduring songs: Anonymous.
There’s no happily ever after when it comes to love—just a swirl, before and after ceremonies of fear and bliss. The point was not that I found a man who could please me. The point was that I learned how to accept pleasure. That, not self-sacrifice, was what it meant to be the more loving one.
I often replay the moment when I knew that everything would be okay. It wasn’t in bed with David. It wasn’t a scene of domestic tranquility with Nate. It wasn’t writing. It was in a moment of transition, making polite conversation with a man who was neither a love interest nor a relative.
The castle administrator was driving me through the Scottish countryside, listening to a classical music show on the BBC and occasionally pointing out sites of interest.
“In that direction is a prep school where the great poet W. H. Auden taught in his youth,” he said.
“Really?” I said. “You know, I think about him all the time.”
“He was an extraordinary man, and apparently also an excellent teacher.”
“Do you know what he cabled back when he was asked to marry Thomas Mann’s daughter?”
The administrator turned his head away from the road to look at me, his eyes sparkling. It was as if this proper English gentleman was Life itself, God’s own representative on earth. He tossed back his head and said, a look of triumph on his face: “DELIGHTED.”