Another Insane Devotion (31 page)

 

Back when I was in my thirties, it became common in certain circles to speak of love as discipline. I would characterize those circles as people made queasy by the sexual weightlessness of the preceding two decades, by
their
sexual weightlessness, people in bounding, caroming flight from the idea that love is never having to say you're sorry. Actually, the secret meaning of “love is discipline” might in fact be “I'm sorry.” I'm sorry I didn't call you. I'm sorry I didn't show up. I'm sorry I came with somebody else. I'm sorry I lied about my wife, my husband, my girlfriend. I'm sorry I gave you that herpes. I'm sorry I forgot your birthday. I'm sorry I forgot the check. I'm sorry I told you I love you. At the time I meant it, I really did.

People spoke of commitments, and of those—usually, but not always, men—who avoided them as “Peter Pans” or “com-mitmentphobes.” Suddenly, without any prompting, we had returned to the medicalized sexual ethics, or the moralizing sexual psychology, of the 1950s, when men—and back then it was always men—who didn't want to marry were diagnosed as immature or latent homosexuals, although in the 1950s homosexuality was itself seen as a kind of immaturity, as if every gay man were a little boy who hadn't yet learned what the different holes are for. By the time I am speaking of, however, a commitment didn't have to mean marriage; the sixties hadn't been entirely in vain. It was like medical insurance, with different plans offering different kinds of coverage. A commitment could mean
that you no longer had sex with other people or that you wouldn't have sex with them without telling your partner first, so that she could then decide if the commitment was still working for her. It might be an agreement to see each other so many nights a week, to keep clothes and toiletries at each other's apartments, to spend the holidays with each other's families and buy presents for people who weren't related to you by blood or law. It might mean buying property together. It might mean maintaining this state of affairs until you finally decided to marry or found a reason why the commitment should be dissolved, the dissolution in a way being a fulfillment of the commitment, an escape clause written into it from the very start.

Of course, the idea of love as obligation is very old. It's one reason why we have marriage at all. In the beginning, it was obligation that made love possible, and that may still be so, going by studies that show that couples whose marriages were arranged report the same rate of happiness as those who chose their spouses. Having moved into this house of obligation, they make up their minds to be happy in it, although the windows are a little small and the kitchen doesn't have enough counter space. But obligations arise even in love that has no romantic component and even when there's no real reason to observe them. In the Bible, Ruth chooses to stay with her mother-in-law even after her husband dies, though it will mean a life of exile and poverty. “Whither thou goest, I will go,” she tells Naomi. “And where thou lodgest, I will lodge” (Ruth 1:16). No rule is at stake. Ruth's husband is dead; she's free to go. Naomi has told her to go. Ruth begs to stay with her because she loves her. She
has come to love her, love growing out of the old, otiose obligations like life bursting forth from something dead, as if a stone were suddenly to send forth green shoots. Love may arise out of obligations, but it also gives rise to them, and the latter kind are stronger than the mandates of any church or law court. We don't obey them out of fear but out of a murky inner necessity. We don't know why, only that if we don't, we won't be able to live with ourselves. “Law isn't all,” goes a poem by Ishmael Reed:

I woke early, with an aching back. I shrugged on jeans and boots and went outside. The sky was the damp pale gray of a pearl. Dew hung on the grass, which needed mowing. When Rip Van Winkle returns to his house—the house he remembers leaving only the day before—he finds it “empty, forlorn, and apparently abandoned,” and looking about me, I was struck by how decrepit my home had become, the grass too long, the screen door of the barn loose on its hinges. When I'd washed my face earlier, the water that came from the faucet had smelled of sulfur. I called for my cat in the same meek voice I had used five hours ago and then thought, Fuck it, it's my house, and shouted her name. “Biscuit!” Shouting, I made my way to the back of the garden and then through some brush that separated it from the college dorm where the year before
I'd seen a topless woman stride up the walk, purposefully but without haste, her breasts bouncing.

 

After Rip learns of everything that has taken place during his slumber—his wife and friends dead and his very country transformed into this unprecedented thing, a republic—Irving writes that his “heart passed away.” He asks after Rip Van Winkle, and his neighbors point to his son lounging by a tree. “He doubted his own identity, and whether he was himself or another man.” Alongside all his other losses, he has lost his place in the world, the space that he alone occupied. Such loss of place is a kind of death; it may be worse than the physical kind. Thinking about our deaths, we imagine that they will create a void in the lives of those who love us. The thought of that void can be comforting, the way it can be comforting to picture the weeping mourners at our funerals. At least somebody is crying for us. But no one is crying for Rip. No one seems to realize he's gone. His place in the world has been filled, as if it had been dug not in earth but the sea. “I'm not myself,” he stammers. “I'm somebody else—that's me yonder—no, that's somebody else; got into my shoes—I was myself last night; but I fell asleep on the mountain .  . . and everything's changed, and I'm changed; and I can't tell what's my name, or who I am!”

Another writer, one whose instincts were tragic rather than comic, might have lingered on this trauma. Irving brushes it aside. The displaced person is granted a new place in the home of his daughter and the life of the village, where he takes
up his old occupation of lounging on the bench outside the inn. And although his voice falters when he asks after his wife, he takes the news of her death as “a drop of comfort.” It's a heartless moment, but comedy is often heartless, and obligation doesn't always lead to love.

 

I felt something brush my ankle and looked down. It was Biscuit: that cat and no other. She grinned up at me, purring. I gaped down at her. When I reached for her, her small body felt as strong and supple as a trout's. Her fur was matted in places, and when I stroked her head, I encountered stiff quills of what might be tar or pine sap. “You dirty cat!” I scooped her up in my arms, and she let me press my face against her for a while before pushing me away. Once I let I her down, she seemed to remember that she was angry with me: I'd left her. Ostentatiously, she turned her back, then went over to a shrub and sat down in its shade, her tail lashing. I didn't try to coax her out. I just watched her. I know that my feelings were absurd or at least inflated, just as I know that I have no knowledge, not even an inkling, of what Biscuit was actually feeling. She may have been irritated at being picked up and then mauled by a great, naked, bony human head. She may not even have remembered that I'd been gone. A cat is a wild thing whose nature has somehow grown around human beings and become entwined with theirs, but that nature is still wild.

After a while I got up—in my absorption I had sat down in the grass—and called to my cat before setting off toward the
house. I didn't look back, but it was only a moment before she caught up with me. She stayed more or less at my side until we neared the driveway. Then she bounded ahead of me, pausing once to look back, or so it seemed to me, to make sure I was still there. Again, she grinned, openmouthed. When I opened the door of the house, she trotted inside as if she'd been gone no more than a few hours and was looking forward to taking a couple noisy mouthfuls of dry food, then curling up on her favorite chair.

In grade school science they taught us about the water cycle. Rain falls from the clouds and gathers in lakes and rivers and oceans, then evaporates in the heat of the sun to become water vapor, and the vapor rises to form new clouds, which release
rain once more. I still remember the poster, with its arrow-headed circle.

I'd like to think that love, too, is cyclical, at least under the right conditions.

The cycle begins with desire, the hot, quick spark that passes between two people and sets them ablaze. If it burns long enough, we call that love, and the people cleave together. They may not become one, a romantic fancy that has furnished the justification for a whole lot of pathology, but they fuse a little in spots, like tin soldiers cast in a single mold that have to be twisted apart. They pledge themselves, or as we've gotten used to saying, they commit, and even if their obligation remains informal, even if it remains unstated, they feel its rigor. Brought together by desire, they now sometimes resist it, the impulse to go home with the stranger at the art opening, to let the phone keep ringing while they watch college basketball or a crummy movie on the Lifetime channel. They obey desire's summons only when it leads them back to each other. That's how they stay together. Desire breeds love, which in turn breeds obligation, and the obligation makes love stronger.

But love is hot and obligation is cool, and below a certain temperature the fire goes out, and we look into the eyes in which we once saw a furnace and see only a stack of debts. Debt is another word for obligation.
Forgive us our debts, as we forgive our debtors.
The Gospels knew how hard it is to love someone who owes you something, or who you think does. It's even worse when you're the one who owes. Not even Jesus asked us to feel
good about the bank. And so instead of being a self-renewing cycle, love may be more of a self-annihilating arc, canceled by what it calls into being. We build a chapel in the garden, and the next thing we know, the garden is filled with graves.

And yet a part of me protests: What about my cat? What made me look for her but obligation? If not for that, she might have starved or frozen to death.

Actually, I doubt it. When I came back north again that Christmas, I learned that Biscuit had made a second home in the dorm behind our house. That was probably where she'd disappeared to back in the fall. She'd go over and let the kids fuss over her and feed her canned tuna. F. once went looking for her and found her lying in a trance of pleasure on a girl's bed. When she picked Biscuit up to take her home, the cat struggled bitterly. She was the same with me. I gave her first crack at the canned food, even locking Wolfie, the gluttonous new male, in the bathroom so she could eat unmolested, but she took the privilege for granted, and when I tried to pet her, she jerked away. Day after day I courted her. She'd eat the food I set before her, snorting with greed and congestion. She might deign to let me stroke her. Then she'd leap onto the kitchen counter and crouch there, surveying the room. Sometimes I'd see her take me in. At such moments her gaze might soften a bit. It wasn't loving; at best you'd call it benign. And, really, it was no different from the gaze she turned on F. or the other cats (though in their case, her expression would also be a little gloating, since she was looking
down
at them) or the furniture, never for a moment doubting that all of it was hers.

B
Y THEN, F. HAD DECIDED SHE WANTED TO SEPARATE. It may be because she'd met somebody else. It may be because I'd run out of money and could barely pay my share of the bills, let alone the room tariff on a hotel in Rome. It may be because I'd yelled at her about leaving dirty dishes on the kitchen counter. It may be because I'd refused to take a stand against the landlord who'd left bags of garbage in the house we'd rented from him—not just refused but gone to the party his wife had thrown for his birthday the previous summer and, I believe, brought along a present, though not an expensive one. It may be because I'd threatened to stuff Wilfredo into the car and take him down to the city and drop him on his mother's doorstep at two in the morning, and it may be because of the expression F. saw on my face as I said this. It was not formed to excite passion.