Love, Alone

Love, Alone.

It was only as I walked with him back to Grand Central that I saw the fear return to his eyes. A paradox I couldn’t understand then, he seemed to exhale in relief of its return. For a brief time, he’d cast aside that horror he carried around like a talisman. But it became clear that he found comfort in fear. He’d never really loved a woman, but I know now that he clung with desperation to the security of being terrified by them.

I wish I could look back at that evening we’d spent in that tiny, austerely apportioned hotel room and say I knew then, at that moment, he would never be mine. I wish I could have predicted that, despite all his pretty sentiments and declarations, he would choose the displeasure of comfort over the discomfort of pleasure. But, as is most often the case-and what keeps us up at night-is the clarity brought about by hindsight alone.

I know now, anyway, that I'd served my purpose. He'd let as much of himself be healed as he could bear. To be sure, there was much more to be done. But he lacked the fortitude to press on. The prospect of venturing outside the gilded cage he'd constructed for himself was simply too overwhelming and, thusly, he returned to it that night and, with a sigh of relief, contentedly locked himself back inside. He was never quite the same after that. Neither was I. But I could handle it easier. I wanted him to be different than all the others. I couldn't stand the thought that he might be just another boy playing the role of a man, struggling to be heard by his mother and fighting to conquer her. I hated to think that he'd need to use me to do just that so he could feel better, like so many others had done. But that's the way it was, it seems.

In spite of all that, this is not a story I tell with a bitter tongue, neither is it one I hold inside a blackened heart.

It was through my own relentless pursuit of him-and, of course, my Self-that I came to be standing in the middle of Rockefeller Plaza at 6:00 the following morning. He was afraid to meet me in public, worried we'd bump into someone he knew. But I convinced him, with a subtle hand, that we should see each other once more before I left the city. Reluctantly, he relented, as I knew he would, and came for me.

In typical New York fashion, he wanted to keep walking through the plaza. For him, it was just another path to get to where he wanted to go. Much like I was. For me, this place and its antiqued opulence represented something I’d known my whole life; it was the manifestation of the idea that I could be better. I stopped abruptly to survey the scene before me, the golden statue calling to mind the great innovators of a different era. The plaque bearing the Credo of John D. Rockefeller caught my eye. Amongst other noble and demented ideas, he had proclaimed, "I believe that love alone is the greatest thing in the world; that it alone can overcome hate".

Looking up, I took in his words and laughed inwardly. I thought that Ol' John D. must have never loved someone who did not return the sentiment. Then, he would have known the way hate can feel like the very same thing as love and that nothing except time can alchemize a wound like that.

This place had only ever existed for me inside the television. Just like everything else in New York. I allowed myself a moment of gauzy nostalgia as I thought about what I might have been doing on an early summer morning, on one just like this, twenty years ago, at sixteen.

I was always the first to wake up in my home, especially during the omni-damp and scorching East Texas summers. Early morning provided the only hours of relative peace and solitude before I was invaded and enveloped by conflict. Slamming doors gave punctuation to my parents' voices as they rose, tangled up, and fell apart again. But in the quiet of those summer mornings, I could sit on my bed and practice living the life I knew I would create for myself. One cleaner, neater, with more order and discipline. So, I sat and astutely watched the "Today" show, Katie Couric and Matt Lauer, my summer school teachers in my continuing quest to rid myself of the vocal accent that could reveal me for what I really was. Rockefeller Plaza was my virtual setting for so many of those summer mornings, the hope of it carried me away from the reality of that filthy trailer, everything in it yellowed by a film of cigarette smoke and shiftless neglect.

So, when I found myself in the middle of this scene straight from my TV twenty years later, it seemed, for the briefest of moments, almost as though I might have died. Perhaps, I mused, this was the strange beginning to a horrifyingly realistic punishment that I was destined to endure as penance for all my sins.

And Rockefeller Plaza, empty and silent at 6:00am, except for the presence of a man who would never love me, was Hell.

"You know, they film the 'Today' show here," he said, breaking my internal narrativizing.

That was when I knew. In an instant, I arrived at the answer to the question I'd been examining over the past few months. Or, hell, maybe I’d been looking at it through darkened lenses my entire life. All roads, it seemed, led here-at least for this particular destination.

I turned my face away from the golden statues and the marble facades that called to mind the towering greatness of men and, consequently, of Man, in front of me. He'd ruined it. Of course, I too, had been thinking about the god damned "Today" show. But I'd been thinking it deeper. I always thought things deeper than him. That was his problem. He could never get below the surface of things. Well, that was the first of his problems, the one that prevented him from solving any of the others. I glared at him, launching all the arrows I'd been saving up, directly at his heart, one by one, until I saw his face fall. His eyes narrowed and I thought for a moment that he might actually cry. Because of me. Just as I wanted him to. And it occurred to me then how useless my power over men really was; I could make them feel any way I wanted them to, but never could I make a man do anything he didn't want to, not really. And this man didn't want to be uncomfortable. Loving me, he already knew, would be "hard" as he would say ("This is just so hard. If you only lived in New York, it'd be so much easier.") and he was "scared" ("It doesn't have anything to do with you or the way I feel about you. I'm just scared. Can't you understand? I've built this life and, now, there is so much to lose.")

"Please don't berate me, not now," he told me. "I'm sorry. You understand, don't you? I have a whole life… I just… I’m sorry... I'll never forget you. You know that. No matter what."

As I looked upon his classically handsome face, pitiful in the early light of this morning, I struggled to suppress an insanely inappropriate giggle. But it was farcical, really. If he'd had the capacity for understanding, he would have seen the humor of it. (But, of course, if he'd had that capacity, there'd be no humor in it in the first place.) The truth of the matter was this: I was just some fucked up white trash girl playing the role of a woman who'd been lucky enough to be born with a spirit that allowed for escape from a path of anxiety and addiction that killed my parents. And here he stood, in a suit that cost more than all the clothes in my closet together, ready to spend another day at his Wall Street firm, brokering deals that involved the exchange of money and power that would likely make my head spin if I'd ever cared enough to ask...on the verge of tears. Because of me. Because of my words and the way I could, without even trying, gather up just the right ones, arrange them with great precision, and slip them gently, however I wanted-like a noose or like a necklace-right around his throat.

He'd asked me to come here-on my own dime no less-yet again. Each time was exactly the same. When I was in Texas, he'd tell me all about his love for me, paint me pretty portraits of what life might be. Not as one might expect. He didn't promise me diamonds or an apartment in the city. (Looking back, those are the things I should have demanded. Fuck love.) He talked about wanting it all: the freedom to discover his deepest self, the openness to tell one another the longest-buried secrets in our hearts, to indulge in time together without consulting the clock, and the hope of helping me realize my own purpose. He talked and talked and talked until...he talked himself out of it.

So, when I arrived in New York each time, I could see that old terror in his eyes, in spite of his words. I slowly began to hate it. Not him, but his fear. I tried every approach to heal it. I tried validation and consolation, anger and catharsis. But it would never leave.

His gutless words here in his city, in his territory, in fucking Rockefeller Center, wearing that suit that made him look like everyone else, sent me over the edge. He was begging me for mercy. It made me ill. I didn't want to do it, but I knew it had to be done. The problem is, I'm still not sure if I did it for him or I did it for me. I looked at him as he stood, the idea of tears still there in his eyes, afraid to come near me. "I won't berate you. I've already given you enough of my words to last a lifetime… Except I'll tell you one last thing you need to hear. I've been holding it in for some time now," my eyes remained on him steadily even as his own faltered.

"You... are a coward".

I let it hang there between us for a moment and then I turned and left him standing there. Even as I walked away, I wished I could take that part back.

After I left New York, he told me he did indeed want to “have it all”: his (“real”) life in New York, his pretty and frigid wife, his million dollar home, and his high profile, high pressure, high yield career that would lead to even more.

As is usually the case, the telling of it here renders it flatter than I recall, but more vivid still than my memory alone. There were many things that happened before this...and a few things after.

Much like my "affair" (such a vulgarity for such a beautiful idea) unfolded in a storm of tumult and fury, so did my year-long Renaissance during which I began to heal the wounds of my past. It was maddening and it was madness. Though I was almost never by myself, I was lonelier than I'd ever been. I felt love easy and deep, but love never once found me.

God's cruel joke makes it impossible anyway. When we love something we want it every day. When we get it every day, we slowly begin to hate it. It's inevitable that we will lead lives of restlessness and dissatisfaction. As Bukowski said, we will forever be jumping in and out of beds, never to find the one... I now understand that if I had gotten to love him every day, I would likely have come to hate him soon enough. Love cannot survive the condition of being human. We’re far too ugly. So, of course, the hospitals, the mad houses, and the landfills will indeed fill. But our hearts? They will never be so lucky.

If I want to paint a generous portrait of myself, I will claim that it was this line of thought that led me to be with a married man in the first place. That I'd given up on love and I was scorching the Earth in its rememberance with sex and hedonism. But the truth of it is much more disgusting. I did it in the pursuit of love, that vile fiction that renders most of us crazy.

I won't try to bullshit you-or myself-as I recount the story. Neither, though, can I claim though to give you the exact truth. I can only tell you what I experienced. As for your Self, you will have to decide what to believe, you'll have to sort out who was good and who was bad, who did right and who did wrong. It's up to you. After I tell it, it's your story. I give it to you to do with it as you please. You can tighten it like a noose, believing both of us were bad or you can clasp it on like a necklace, and decide that both of us were good. As for me, I think the truth lies somewhere in between. Both of us played the villain. Both of us took turns as the hero as well. The beauty, so beautiful it's horrifying, is that, in the moment, as any story happens, you can never tell who is playing which role at any given time.

If you stop to think about it, it'll scare you to death… Which is why it's best, of course, to put such complicated matters out of mind. That's my advice. Take it from me: to dwell on these arbitrary categorizations will do you no good. It will only lead to the projection of your own pain. It will only turn you into a coward.