What I Know About Love

People have been falling in love for a very, very long time. It was not always so regulated, and in the very beginning, it wasn’t studied or even said out loud, only felt. Two (or three, or four!) hairy, smelly bodies rolling around on the cool floor of a cave, or necking in the orange light of Man’s very first campfire. It only grew from there. Ancient Greeks fed each other olives and danced under the moonlight. Bathsheba and David got it on. Men with vitamin C deficiencies aboard the HMS Endeavour fell in love on the high seas, and King Henry VIII of England fell in and out of love six whole times. Madame Bovary was bad at love and Eliza beth Bennet was good at it. Love was quantified in fat juicy emeralds and gaggles of geese and babies and fidelity. People fell in love and then got married. People got married and then fell in love. People fell in love and didn’t get married. People didn’t fall in love and got married anyway. People fell in love with the same person again and again and again. People loved one-sided and two-sided and many-sided. Lots of us pulled our hair out trying to sniff out the best ways to love or to figure out where it all went wrong. We stood on rocky outcroppings and gazed at the sea, or wrote sonnets by candlelight, or lay on sofas with our eyes closed and tried to explain it to strangers.

My grandmother could never love a man properly because she was really in love with her brother. Not pathological, incestuous love, but love all the same. Maybe the same could be said for him because he spent his life eating women like one eats pink frosted petit fours or finger sandwiches—he gobbled them up whole. He died in a head-on collision with a Ford GT. Five months later my grandmother married a man who tried to kill her with a can of whipped cream. My mother was in love with my father but he struggled to in-love her back. As much as I want to think there was a high-minded reason for this, I have the feeling he just woke up one day and found her repellent. He never did anything about it—the not in-loving— and I’m not sure my mother ever knew but I have to imagine she had a sneaking suspicion. I fell in love with a boy from school and we slept together in the back of his car with the seats folded down, parked in a lovers’ lane. He was very nervous but I wasn’t scared at all until afterward when I remembered the Zodiac Killer and the Texarkana Moonlight Murders and possible charges for public indecency and thought about how foolish we were. I think I fell in love with a girl-friend of mine in college but it could never be confirmed because I didn’t know what to measure it against and nobody offered me a ruler.

I met Harry in the summertime in Virginia. He was wearing a red bandana around his neck, no shirt, dirty jeans, and boots with the silver spurs that look like something from the inside of a watch face. I was taking my charge—an elderly woman with Down Syndrome—for a walk in the woods. Her name was Jane and she was always very irritable, wringing her hands and complaining, pinching and pulling the soft skin on my upper arms. He was standing in the trail, the red triangle at his throat, lots of black hair on his chest, and going in a line down his belly. Jane was wagging her finger at him as if to say nonono or I don’t think so mister or don’t you dare. I waved and Harry nodded. I went for a walk every day (without Jane) until I met him again.

We got engaged. I told my parents over the telephone that he lived on a farm and I would be living there, too. We were married by a large animal vet erinarian who moonlighted as a minister. Harry ran a stable and I worked with Jane and the other people at the community across the big green field. I loved that he rode horses and could corral a stampede of huffing puffing cows with a yeeeeeeeeeaw sound. I loved that he loved his dogs and smelled like yellow hay and slept butt naked and did not cry and moved deliberately and spoke the same way. I’m not sure what he loved about me because he was never one to say things outright and maybe not even to think them outright. I do know the parts of my body that he loved because he paid them special attention. The obvious parts but others, too. The arch of my foot and the hard bottom of my heel. The knobby bone be tween my breasts where the rib cage joins. The inside of my wrists.

Harry was as silent as a stone and he would not budge. I spent my days alone or with Jane, spoon-feeding her yogurt. Harry was with the horses, with the cows, with a beer, with Joe at the fence, operating loud machinery, squatting by creeks, yanking out ticks, listening to owls hoot-hoot and hawks whistle and not listening to me. I talked myself in circles. We ate without speaking or I spoke by myself. I read books that I asked Harry to read but he didn’t. His father died and then my mother died. He got quieter and I got louder to make up for it. We made a latein-life baby so I would have someone to talk to and play with because Jane died. I didn’t have anything to do with myself but talk in circles or yell at his quiet face that made me so angry because it was so smooth, unhurried, not busy, not longing. The baby was a little girl we both loved. Harry actually talked to her and it made me so angry I could scream. So, I was jealous of my own baby girl because she got what I wanted and she couldn’t even speak English yet.

Then, Lucy was in school and things were as usual, only we were even older. I longed for less because I was tired even of longing. Harry was as usual only he was leaving the gate open and the cows were tramping into the road. He was opening beers, having two sips and leaving them on the armrest of the deck chair and going to the fridge and getting himself another. He would sit down only to find the one he’d already opened sweating in the sun, leaving ring marks. I knew some thing was not right when I found him asleep on the toilet even though he said oh well, it happens to the best of us.

Harry and I were sitting on the deck chairs and I had my feet in his lap. At this point, we already knew what was happening, although he remembered what it was that was happening less and less. He was holding the hard bottom of my foot in his hand. The dog was panting and taking big sighs that wobbled his jowls, snapping at fat carpenter bees. The air was thick with bees and leftover heat from the sun that was now behind the blue hills. Even I couldn’t remember the last time Harry held my feet like this, with the heel fitted into the palm and the flat of his thumb pressed up against my ankle. A big black fly was crawling up my leg, stop ping here and there to rub its hands like some kind of sneak up to no good. I want ed to shoo it away but I didn’t because I had a feeling about the moment we were in. Something was going to happen and I didn’t want to scare away whatever shy thing was making its way towards us in the evening air. Harry started squeezing the heel of my foot very hard. He opened his mouth, closed it, and then opened it again. I looked in his eyes and they were working and reaching. He was squeezing my heel so hard it was turning white where he wasn’t pressing with his fingers. He was making noises with his mouth and throat like he wanted to speak but he couldn’t make the words come out, only a lolling sound like his tongue was swelled up, and he looked so angry.

This is what I know about love: There is that honeyed time when nothing is real and you are in love—this passes. Then, there is the time when you realize this is “real,” which is a new, different, and dignified delight. And then comes the time for expectations of how you should each behave and what you each need and what is not given and what is given too much. And this is a long, long time with lots of feelings of betrayal and anger and running up against each other’s walls. And then there comes the time, a long time later, when you stop expecting anything from them at all and find that’s what you’ve been working towards all along.