Another Insane Devotion Read Free Page B

to be able to say, “I love you,” back. This is more difficult than it sounds. In James Salter’s Light Years, a little girl is writing a picture story: Margot loved Juan very much, and Juan was mad about her. But Margot is an elephant, and Juan is a snail. In the classical myths, humans and gods love one-sidedly, a predicament the gods usually solve by means of rape. The poor humans just pine. Tristan and Iseult may be the poster children for requited love, but even they needed a love potion, and it’s significant, I think, that the love they came to embody, courtly love, has conditions so extreme as to be essentially unrealizable. It must be adulterous; it must be pure. The lovers
must love equally. We have to speak of such love the way we speak of black holes. Who knows what happens to someone who enters a black hole? Is he crushed by its gravity, which is massive enough to crush stars? Do its attractive forces wrench him in two or draw him into a wire of infinite length and infinitesimal thinness and stretch him across all space and time? What message does that wire transmit, and who hears it?
    There was a moment when F. and I loved each other equally, when we looked at each other with eyes whose pupils were similarly dilated. F.’s pupils were easier to see because her eyes are blue. Mine are dark, and this makes the state of the pupils more elusive, a trait I found useful back when I was getting high.

    There are nights when I wake beside my wife as if beside a stranger. Her body is familiar to me; I know it almost as well as my own. Maybe I know it better, having looked at it and touched it with greater attention than I ever gave myself, because I wanted to know it. There’ve been few things in my life I’ve wanted to know so badly. But something’s gone wrong. Two years ago, she asked for a separation. A while later she
changed her mind. I couldn’t tell you why. Or rather, I could tell you: Because of the children we didn’t have or the child we borrowed. Because of the kitten we rescued and then lost. Because of money, because of sex. Because I didn’t pay enough attention to her, because I paid too much. Because she got bored, and then got interested again. But any of those explanations would be wrong.
    Now it’s my turn. I don’t know what to do with F. I look at her the way you look at a house you are thinking of moving out of. It’s gotten too small for you. It needs a new furnace; the floor slants. Why do you stay? But how can you ever leave?
    â€œThey lay in the dark like two victims,” Salter writes of a husband and wife, “They had nothing to give one another, they were bound by a pure, unexplicable love. . . . If they had been another couple she would have been attracted to them, she would have loved them, even—they were so miserable.”
    I remember when people still spoke of couples as being estranged. “Miss Taylor and Mr. Burton are estranged.” The term has passed out of use—unfortunately, because it is so accurate and absent of blame, saying nothing about which party has become the stranger and leaving implicit the fact that when one falls out of love, as when one falls into it, one becomes a stranger to oneself. Proust describes that earlier estrangement well, when he has Swann realize, with an inward start, that he has fallen in love with Odette, whom only a little while before he found a little boring and her beauty a little worn:
    He was obliged to acknowledge that now, as he sat in that same carriage and drove to Prévost’s, he was no longer the
same man, was no longer alone even—that a new person was there beside him, adhering to him, amalgamated with him, a person whom he might, perhaps, be unable to shake off, whom he might have to treat with circumspection, like a master or an illness.
    I gaze down at my wife in the dark but see only the dim curve of her body lying on its side like a