In the years before Haviva I could be forgiven for trifling with women and saying to myself—later on there will be less time to waste. Once, when I was falling in love with a girl, I went to see my old high school English teacher. He had nursed me through the unrequited love of my teenage years, a tennis player who masqueraded as straight until the year we left home. “Do you already know where the cracks are?” the teacher asked of my new relationship. This question did not surprise me. The romance was only two months old and I was in the flush of love. Yet I knew where the cracks were and I hurried past them with my eyes trained straight ahead, as through an empty parking lot at a dangerous hour. “Yes,” I said. I dated her for three more years.
When I was seventeen, I spent the summer on an island colony, where I worked as a hostess at a harborside restaurant and watched sailors jaunt back and forth along the docks in sunbleached caps. I fell in love with a girl who sailed tall ships on behalf of tour groups. She fucked me on the white couch of the house in which I was only a guest—so hard, and with such reckless pride, that I could barely stand up straight through my long shift at the restaurant. “I’m going to India in the fall,” she warned me, though in everything else she said—do you have any idea what it’s like to walk down the street next to a girl like you?—she was demonstrative and tender. We had nothing in common but passion. Still I spent the month of August in acute anxiety, gnawing peaches down to their pits in the passenger’s seat of her Jeep, before I talked myself into the reality of her leaving. After that I was good at balancing passion with cynical resignation. In the end, the sailor did not go to India. Now she is married to a marine biologist. They live on that island in a house just down the road from the one where she fucked me.
Once, after a breakup, I went back to the apartment I had shared with my girlfriend to collect my things while she was out. The apartment had belonged to her before we met. It was filled with her expensive furniture and artworks. My belongings occupied only the closet and some bookshelves in her office: it was as though I was a pet, brought there to keep her company and requiring only a few square feet of space for a dog bed. This was the insouciance with which she treated me, and so I was shocked and gratified when, as I left her, she reached levels of desperation never before expressed, pleading while she put Nina Simone’s trembling Ne Me Quitte Pas on the stereo system. When, in her absence, I returned to the apartment days later, I found a folded set of papers in the top drawer of the desk. I know in my gut how long ago she began to plan this, N had written of me. The marks listed unevenly toward the bottom-right corner of the page. The first summer, while we were in the park, she already knew she would leave.
Later on when I was in love with Haviva we had this argument sometimes—the argument about what love was. Haviva talked of futurity as though it were the abiding reason for our relationship. She said things like: “You’ll be so much more beautiful at eighty.” I imagined that this line signaled a depth of love unmatched by any carnal affection. When a friend of ours fell in love with a woman in her fifties, an artist, Haviva said, “I feel bad for her. Won’t it be so miserable, to watch her lover die?” I said, “Who’s to say she intends to be around when the woman dies?”
In my romance with N, the woman whose apartment I shared, I had always been disconcertingly aware of the question of who would leave. I could feel the upper hand entering and deserting me in turns: at restaurants when N paid the bill, at parties where I knew more women. The first summer, while we were in the park—an afternoon in mid-May that felt as though it promised everything—it had been she who had the upper hand. I had felt, with fearful excitement, that I would have to be available only sparingly, would have to perform that familiar process of turning myself into a commodity. My awareness of how we tossed this kernel of power back and forth did seem to signal that some end was inevitable, because it was exhausting to imagine maintaining this vigilance indefinitely. I said to myself: Later on there will be less time to waste and I will have the fortitude to decide, after just a night or a week, not to trifle with a woman.
We spent that day in the park in a large meadow filled with revelers: women sunning their shoulders for the first time in months, soccer players, picnickers, yogis. I was barely twenty, N fifteen years my senior. She seemed to know everything: where to eat, what to wear, how to fuck. “I’m not going to marry you,” I said to her, smiling from behind sunglasses. A child with a white rash of unabsorbed sunblock across his cheeks came to retrieve a runaway ball from our blanket, and the two of us just looked at each other. At the time I believed I meant this statement as a teasing means of reassuring N that I did not expect too much. In truth, I was grasping toward a modicum of power in the face of her intimidating experience: reminding her that though I had little knowledge or money, I had more time than I could yet conceive of, time that existed for her in the past, as a large room she remembered dimly and with the weight of regret.
I was often attracted to women who treated me, as N did, like a kind of wayward puppy. This was a means of concealing the power that a certain degree of indifference lent me. I entertained them with a keen memory for the plots of novels and a skill with cheese blintzes, and then once I was in their lives I would start to follow them around. I suppose I turned them into dog-owners. I wanted to know: how did they do their laundry? Did they separate their whites? What did they eat for lunch? I could sense when a woman enjoyed this particular type of attention. She could sense that I was malleable. Even though these women tended to be exceptionally capable—careful drivers, in their spare time carpenters or pastry chefs—they would start to ask: Would I go to the mechanic with them? Would I take a look at an apartment a friend of theirs was interested in renting?
Perhaps the problem was my diary: it was my chief confidant. In the mornings, after walking home from a girlfriend’s apartment, or, during the year in which I lived with N, when she had gone out to work, I liked to fill all the machines and turn them on at once: the dishwasher, the laundry machine, the coffee-maker. I listened to their changing rhythms while I wrote. The most common note I made was that whatever feeling I could or could not describe was familiar, and I would spend paragraphs tracing the other times I had remembered feeling it, the women who had incited it. When I woke in the night I would turn to the diary instead of to my girlfriend. I thought I was unhappy, always sitting up alone, wishing to be understood, but in fact I felt a kind of rich elation in my absolute privacy. It was the opposite of fear.
My attraction to women who enjoyed being followed grew more and more troubling, because when the relationships deepened into love affairs, I found myself struggling to believe in the quality of feeling in a woman like this—a woman who enjoyed a pet. I could not forget how easily she had revealed the contours of her life to me, or convince myself that only I could have aroused such intimacy. One woman endeared herself to me by consistently failing to dry her shoulders or her hair after a shower. She wrapped the towel right away around her torso, so that whenever she came to bed the pillows slowly soaked through. “Oh, you’re properly one of my girlfriends now,” she said to me when I laughed about this. “You should ask Pat about it. She always thought it was so silly, the way I did that.”
I thought I wanted to learn the way in which these women who held my leash were capable of trusting, so that love might grow easier for me. I was profligate in the pursuit of love, and yet it was rare that after the initial seduction I actually invited a woman to be my witness. Eventually I began to understand that the families of these women, like the families of so many queer girls, had, for one reason or another, failed them. My girlfriends were indiscriminate and greedy in their loving because they were anxious to foster families for themselves. One evening in bed the wet-shouldered woman began to cry as she made me promise that, no matter how our romance ended, we would always remain in each other’s lives. She had turned all her former lovers into sisters and mothers. Love was, for her, a theater that sanctified the wholesale commitments of strangers.
In response I dated a woman in her forties who was charming and promiscuous: sparkly was the way I described her to my friends. She lived in a rambling, badly-kept brownstone. Her autonomy impressed me. While we sat in the garden one afternoon she said, “Do you think we could be together forever?” I laughed and choked on the smoke from a cigarette we were passing between us. “Some people,” she explained, “when they’re falling in love, they say, I can do three years, or I can do eight years, but I don’t want to be with one person forever, and that’s just fine, I’m into that.” I thought about it. I tested it out. “We could be together forever,” I said. It seemed to me that if I were to make such a promise it would be to a woman like her, a woman who was a kind of prize. But did I really want her passion, broken as it was, divorced from hopes of permanence?
This sparkly woman, who seemed to me at the time experienced and wise, was prone to statements intended to reassure me with their logic, but which in fact filled me the dread. “What you are most afraid of will often happen,” she said in a period when I was jealous of her flirtation with a former lover, “not because anyone is trying to spite you, but because you are most afraid of what you can feel or see is true.” As she told me this I remembered that when I had lived with N, I spent the walk to my therapist’s office each week in terrific anxiety, moving blindly along a street flanked by a sculpture garden that even now fills me with dread, because I was afraid that my therapist would instruct me to break it off.
There was a conundrum: if I told the truth in the diary this would only confirm that I was bad, or cruel, or at the very least a trifler. No one accused me of trifling because I spent years and years being nice to the same women, one and then the next. But I knew I had a trifling heart. Why couldn’t I love properly? It was bad to think one thing and say another, even if, for the moment in which your breath left your body, you believed it, and even if everyone except N seemed to think that was just the way of the world. And how could I trust a woman, when I knew my own fickle nature, and I had nevertheless witnessed with my own eyes and ears how often I could convince even myself of earnest passion? When I told the truth in my diary it would read: I know something isn’t right, but I guess I’ll stay anyway and see what happens. The same things always happened.
The only woman with whom I did not withhold myself this way was a mathematician. By thirty she had made little space in her life for romance; she had been with only one other lover, a girl who had died tragically four years earlier. Though this woman was angelically kind and blessed with hair so thick and dark I could live on just the sight of it, I believe I loved her for her constancy. She approached love with an unguarded depth of feeling that convinced me she could not be robbed of it by any force but death. Certainly it seemed impossible that she could talk herself out of it, and I suspected she was never talked into it, either—love happened to her, then stuck, like a religious conversion. She could name when it had visited and describe its intractable nature. This was Haviva.
Sometimes when Haviva and I argued about love I thought: is it all a matter of language? When a friend, at her bachelorette party, broke into tears as she gave a little speech—I know we’re all trying to find The One, but it’s really friendship with you all that has made my life so good—I felt at the sound of the words “The One” a little ungenerous pinch. A dark, narrow hall full of closed doors at the end of which waited a spine of light. Yet I relished the prospect of bestowing the title Love of My Life, which seemed to me to acknowledge in its breadth and grace all the other loves that had fed it and taught it how to sustain.
With her degree in mathematics Haviva did bad things on behalf of a secret branch of the government. Even this thrilled me—that she was susceptible to such a transparent style of propaganda. This was the kind of buoyant credulity required in someone who would be loyal to me. I spoke to her about my doubts and my trifling, and she simply laughed. Then, because she was proud of how she fucked me, she would dare me to say I don’t know… again while her hand was inside me. In this theater, the theater of our fucking, I was filled with such absolute knowing that I could not even speak.
The way Haviva and I fucked felt almost apocalyptic. It was constant and in the best manner of love between women each act felt endless and bloody. We were always wet, always desperate. I began to cry at the same climactic moment every time. “Why are you crying?” Haviva asked me in the early days. “I’m so afraid,” I said. Even now, recounting this, I feel the brush of fear. “Don’t be afraid,” she said. “I can be certain enough for both of us.”
While I was with Haviva I abandoned my privacy. I could not write in the diary. If I told the truth it would only reveal that I was an insane person, a person who could never be happy. Or worse: a person who could only enjoy a blunt, dispassionate life. What could I write? That I was so happy I couldn’t stop crying, so happy that the world was unrecognizable to me, so happy that the possibility that I might ever return to that world in which I had spent so many interested and interesting years made me double over in pain?
I had started the diary in the first place for the sake of the tennis player I loved in high school, a feminine athlete gifted not just in tennis but lacrosse and golf as well. I thought of her every time I wrote. She used to play in crisp whites and pearl stud earrings. I was the way she learned about the world: she enjoyed that I made her parents uncomfortable, that, as I faced conspicuously away from her while she changed out of tennis skirts and into jeans, I would speculate about which of our teachers might be fucking, and in what corners of the school. My love for her was an unopened box, perfect, bottomless. “But you don’t know anything about love,” she said to me, when I suggested that our English teacher might be in love with the woman who taught music. The tennis player and her boyfriend, a mild-mannered Catholic, had a chaste relationship in which they wrote each other effusive love letters.
I began the diary one afternoon when the tennis player told me, in the field behind our high school, that I was not crazy enough to be an artist. “You can’t make anything,” she had said, pouring a few inches of water from her Nalgene into mine. “It’s more like you find things out.” I thought that if I were going to be a scientist I should start collecting data. A familiar feeling today—sadness, or a kind of defensiveness? I remember something similar once, one time in the backseat of the car, when S told me that I was better at being honest than being nice.
Haviva left me suddenly for the EMT who responded when her mother experienced a heart crisis following a fireworks show. Afterward I regretted that I had not confided in the diary. It was much better, I thought, to be an insane person than to be a trifler. In fact I was proud of the things I had felt. Surrounded by my humming appliances, I tried to describe retroactively how happy I had been while I was insane. But I was too disgusted by the world I found myself thrust back into. I couldn’t remember which words might apply to that kind of love.
Ten years after I left high school, my English teacher married the music teacher in a backyard ceremony to which the bride wore a dark blue dress. The tennis player, who I had not seen since we graduated, approached me in the gathering dark: she had cut her hair, but otherwise looked the same. “I’m sorry,” she said. “I loved you all along—did you know that?” I thought to myself that I had known it in the way I knew the locations of each relationship’s cracks: I had felt by instinct the shape of the truth, and walked past in determined blindness, knowing that I was not yet capable of meeting it. I smiled at her with immense feeling, because it seemed so innocent and special a truth to have known and not-known. “The time that I hit you, when you came out,” she continued, “I was so angry, because I was so afraid that I couldn’t, but you weren’t afraid of it. You faced it just like that. As if it were just a part of our life, as if it were a couch or a dog.”
How is it that knowing something is not the same as meeting it? In the days after Haviva I still thought often of the future in which there would be less time to waste and I would become, by force of will, a woman who never trifled but gave herself fearlessly. I anticipated this future with dread and fervent impatience the way a teenager anticipates freedom. I would have another chance. When would I find myself filled to the brim with certainty? When would time become a physical pressure, a single room? Now time has coalesced into a manor house filled with rooms of different sizes, all laid out on a scale that I comprehend implicitly, though the contents and promises of many of the rooms themselves remain mysterious. To my confusion, I continue to live as though I am roaming the grounds of the manor, viewing the house from every angle and wondering what great things I will do when I have finally discovered the best uses of time, gathered the courage to approach the house, and rung the bell.