Tolstoy Lied : A Love Story (9780547527307) (48 page)

The work of repair is not interesting. It's hours when you expected to be finishing the roof tiles but you're stuck laying foundation—miles of it. There is, of course, a CIA directive against discussing this part. Love—this is what they don't want you to know—isn't for the faint of heart; it requires modern skepticism as well as an anachronistic gameness for hard labor. The film industry, being in cahoots with the CIA, collaborates by fading to sunset as soon as the heroes are horizontal. Hollywood shows sex because it's easier than showing love. Love—real love—is not cinematic. The entire film industry runs shrieking from the part where George convinces me in a lengthy kitchenette soliloquy that he knew enough about me to propose. Where I realize this is a man who truly prizes honesty; who won't let either of us get away with what he thinks is bullshit; a man with whom I can't, so long as I speak my mind, get lost. It's the stuff no one talks about: How trust grows rootlets. How two people who start as lovers become custodians of each other's well-being.

At the hospital George settles opposite Mary and addresses her as though he sees, immediately, what it took me months to see: that her seemingly static vigil over her daughter—the silent, shock-absorbing acceptance that so ticked me off—was never apathy, but strength. And a form of maternal love I'd never seen. As Mary talks about Elizabeth's condition, George reaches for Mary's hand. Mary lets out a surprised huff but doesn't pull away. Half an hour later she's cackling as she tells him an anecdote from Elizabeth's childhood.

Never, in all those months, did it occur to me to hold Mary's hand.

We walk Central Park, the new grass a lovely pale green in the cordoned-off fields. Children funnel down the paths toward the carousel, trailed by stunned-looking parents. Neither of us speaks until we reach Sheep Meadow. “Okay,” George says. “I get the part about timing. I see that I pushed. But what was the problem with the whole world getting in your face about engagement? I mean, isn't that supposed to be part of the fun? When everybody gets excited for you?”

“People congratulating me,” I say, “would have been fine. But not when I knew you and I weren't working. That was unbearable. And, George, you don't know what the wedding buzz is like for women. People all but yelling at you to drown your worries in floral arrangements. Wedding vendors vending kitsch as if it has a thing to do with love. Bridal magazines blaring:
Weddings are romantic. Roses are romantic.
”

As George listens, a corner of his mouth twitches, and I see he's about to laugh at my distress. I finish, an extra edge in my mimicry: “
Moons are romantic.
”

With a settled expression he reaches for his belt buckle, turns around, and, in the middle of a trafficked path, in the center of Central Park, moons me.

The smell of simmering onions warms Yolanda's apartment. In the living room she addresses me in a hurried whisper. “Would you believe it?” she says. “He's an electrician. Or maybe an electrical engineer. One or the other.”

I set the coffee table with plasticware. “I'd believe anything. I've decided he's one of the smartest people I've ever met.”

“He fixed my oven this afternoon, just took it apart and rewired it. Then he made this little diagram of what he'd done for me, and he looked up the words in the dictionary, and explained he'd been at school a long time studying it.” Yolanda's glowing. “He has a six-year-old boy back home, and an ex-girlfriend who broke his heart—until he met me. He showed me his son's picture. He says he'll introduce us one day, maybe we can visit him.”

From the kitchen George laughs aloud; through the door I see him pass a beer to Chad. George says something in a broad, Canadian French, which prompts a roar of laughter from Chad—then a long, mellower-accented, bemused-sounding reply. They clink bottles.

“
Santé,
” says Chad.

“
Santé,
” George replies.

Yolanda is still whispering. “Chad says—he looked the word up and he swears this really is what he means—he says I'm
vivid.
And he loves it. But he thinks I work too hard at being vivid. He thinks I need to
float.
”

Yolanda looks so sated I think she's going to pass out.

“He's perfect.” She shakes her head, trying to disbelieve herself and failing. “Okay, he does have this one thing he does. I guess it's a cultural thing. He comes to my yoga class, and during silent meditation he sings. Loud. It's kind of beautiful, I think. But some of the other students complained that it interfered with their solitude. So the instructor—who I guess tried saying something to Chad, but she was probably so polite and Buddhist about it that the message got lost—just left me a voicemail telling me, in a polite Buddhist way, that we've been kicked out. I haven't told him. I just said I'd outgrown the class and we're going to a new studio.”

“Don't you need to say something, in case he gets the same reaction in the new class?”

She shakes her head firmly. “No way. I made a promise to myself. I promised I'll never tell him. I'll make myself live with the embarrassment. This is a big city. There are plenty of yoga studios.” Beneath the light of the side-table lamp she splays the fingers of one hand, examining her manicure. “It's good to be reminded there are things about each other we have to just accept. Isn't it?”

I move into his place and sublet mine. There is no talk of weddings. We're too busy learning how to argue.

I flex my fingers once more at George's head. “I'm changing your mind,” I say, “using magic brain waves.”

He lowers his magazine. “I still think the sofa looks better on this side.”

“Maybe I willed you to say those exact words just now.”

Dropping the magazine, he springs out of his seat, hoists me on one shoulder, and lands us on the sofa. “Try it my way,” he whispers, as I stretch beneath him, lacing my fingers into his.

I shut myself in the bathroom and cry. George thinks it's self-indulgent that I'd rather eat takeout or canned soup seven days a week than give up work time in order to trade off cooking dinner with him. But how can it be self-indulgent if I'm willing to eat cardboard pizza slices so as to have one hand free to hold a pen? If I'm not asking him to cook for me, either? I'm certain Shakespeare's depressed stifled sister cooked gourmet meals every night. Me, I've read Virginia Woolf. I harbor murderous intentions toward the angel of the house.

Between the claustrophobic bathroom walls, cracked tiles swimming before me, I wipe tears and turn on the shower. As I shampoo I continue the quarrel under my breath. Winning. And shut off the water with the unsteady hope that George will be waiting for me in our bedroom; that he will not have closed himself off from me with a change of subject, a faraway expression; that he will feel it, too: that happiness can be built up, brick by brick, out of argument.

Which is—I confess it to myself in the steamed bathroom—the most Jewish idea in the history of Jewish ideas.

I wrap myself in a towel (in our bedroom he stares at the ceiling, meditating his way to a compromise) and I take a moment (he inhales steam from my shower, sighs) to let my breathing settle. With my finger I write it on the mirror:
Love [sic].

The labor of becoming a couple is bewildering. But this time I choose it. And I discover this advantage to commitment: arguments get solved. You can storm out onto the fire escape if you like. But it's a long shaky climb down, and an awkward drop to the sidewalk. And then what? Where will you sleep? At a certain point you begin to feel ridiculous out there. At a certain point you
lower your head, climb back in through the window, and negotiate.

“You hardly ever let go, do you?” he says, turning to me as the cab bounces down the avenue. “You wear your mind like armor. Like you're afraid if you're unintellectual for too long, you might actually enjoy yourself.” And before I can respond he's calling to the driver for a change of destination.

“I thought we were going home.”

Wrapping his arms around me, George murmurs in my ear. “We're going to a karaoke bar. I'm not letting you back into the apartment until you've made an ass out of yourself in front of strangers.”

And, two beers later, I do.

Before I met this man I was perfect: I had no faults I was aware of. Now all I can do is absorb the pleasures and stings that come with being known. And conduct myself with humble, patient obstinacy—knowing that while a woman's independence may be a hothouse flower, I am not. I will survive the jousting. So we stake out positions, compromise, draw and redraw lines. I trust George. But I don't trust the world. And I can't forget the first thing I learned from the month I wore an engagement ring: if you're not careful, it represents engagement not only with the man you love, but with the world—with its propriety obsessions, its taboos, its hysterias. A step not to be taken lightly.

But then there's the second thing I learned: that that ring represented an extraordinary invitation—to stop watching the mess of human desire from the shoreline.

“Halt!” shout the feminist police. The squadron crests the hill and stops, horses chafing. “Do you have a permit for that compromise?”

“It's just a small concession,” I explain, “about how often I cook dinner.”

“No woman should ever feel obligated to be domestic,” calls the lead officer, her cheeks glowing from the wind. “Just say no.” She wheels her horse and, bright standard fluttering, squadron following, gallops off.

Feminism taught me how to critique the world, but not how to live in it.
Relationships are sacrifice,
my aunt Rona mentions
casually at the end of a phone conversation; and I set down the receiver and glare at my office bookcase, outraged: no one in years of women's studies colloquia ever mentioned this. You cannot mention feminism and voluntary personal sacrifice in the same sentence. It's against the law. Feminism has been too busy rebounding from millennia of oppression and establishing our right to be all we can be to acknowledge that every human being—every human being who wants to live in relationship to others—gives up some portion of her wide-open vista.

Which may not be feminism's fault. But it's time to update the model.

On lunch break at the American Women Writers' symposium I overhear two senior English majors discussing Frances Newman. “She was amazing,” says one of them, dipping a piece of celery into creamy dressing. “Did you know that she never gave herself to anyone? She just lived for herself—for her writing. She made a feminist choice.”

Reaching for the vegetable platter, I chide the two gently. “There's no such thing as a
feminist choice,
” I say. “That's redundant. Feminism
means
having a choice. And feminism doesn't care which choices you make, either. Just that you have them. The point has never been to establish some principled refusal to give yourself to another human being. The point is to make sure you can give yourself—or
not
give yourself—of your free will.” The two listen warily, their faces set in that impassive expression students use to rebuff overenthusiastic professors. “Feminism has nothing against relationships,” I persist, “even those with actual men.” I dunk a slice of pepper into the dressing. “We get to talk about love too, you know.”

One of the students looks indignant. The other relieved.

Weeks pass. Two walls have dropped from between us: pride and justice. It no longer matters who was right. The Hippocratic oath has no place here—
do no harm
is the wrong standard for love. Everyone does harm. Now George and I have new problems to face together. George's search for a well-paying, conscience-satisfying job. Elizabeth's troubled progress. George's father's continuing uneven health.
My own parents' awkwardness as they re-embrace George: awkwardness fueled, I understand, by their love for their only child—a love I know is real, though inaccessible to me.

“Don't take the SchoolNet job if it's not right,” I say to George as I pull a Mrs. Hale's Presto Chicken Pie out of the oven. “I can swing us for a few months. Find the job you want.”

“How will I pay you back?”

I shut the oven. “We'll put it on our thirty-year to-do list. Let's make a thirty-year to-do list.”

George nods. Then he nods again. He leaves the kitchen for a moment, then returns. He stands opposite me. “We'll work through our differences,” he says. “But while we're working through them—because I expect that may take thirty years, or fifty, if we're lucky—will you?”

The ring glimmers from his palm. I slip it onto my finger.

“I always loved this ring,” I say.

George folds my hand in both of his. His voice is deliberate; his eyes are a bright brown, and wonderfully still. “Please,” he enunciates. “This time, keep it on.”

Slowly I nod. We look, together, at the ring on my finger. It's the sign of a beginning.

As is the courthouse wedding we plan. Thirty guests. Dinner at our favorite Italian restaurant. Tulips. George will convert because it's important to him. We'll go to synagogue for holidays, listen to the sermons, hash them over at home. The prospect of marriage, to my surprise, has transformed while my back was turned. It's no longer a threat. Marriage is a tool for our protection. An arrangement designed for the express purpose of making sure we hang in there while doing the necessary work. And this time it's for the two of us—nobody else. No gifts, thank you kindly.

“The important thing,” says the hawk-eyed matron pairing socks at the Laundromat, “isn't whether two people can find each other. That's hormones, and the thrill of the unknown. Got nothing to do with nothing. The important thing is whether, after you lose each other, which you
will
”—she shakes a menacing finger—“you can find each other again.”