My Husband Clive
Clive is not my husband.
Once, Clive told me he loved me. I think he both meant it and was getting carried away. He’d broken up with me a month earlier but wanted to keep seeing me. When he told me he loved me, I thought oh crap and then I thought seventy-six other things all at once, and then I thought I should say something, but all I could think to say was “Thank you.” I didn’t say thank you.
Three months later, I told Clive I loved him. Before that, I had broken up with him. I hadn’t intended to return, but I missed him. I made a list of reasons to love him and let it marinate for awhile. Then I told him. I stuttered and had a hard time looking him in the eye, but I did have a moment of happiness imagining our future together.
Pema Chodron, a Buddhist monk my friend recommended I read, says that disappointment and anxiety are signs that we are about to venture into unknown territory. We’re supposed to “stay” with these fearful feelings rather than run away from them. Doing so will pierce that hardness in us that comes from fixating on the known path rather than allowing “room for not knowing.” When we allow ambiguity, we can begin to experience the “freshness of the present moment.” I like this Buddhist language, its promise of adventure. In the past, I’ve scurried from men who disappoint. No more! Clive is a good man, and I will stay! I will sit with my ambivalence, let it teach me to appreciate the moment!
And yet.
Clive and I have different tastes in music, houses, neighborhoods, hobbies, apples. He loves happy happy Cuban and Argentinian music, two-car garages and minivan neighborhoods, motorcycles and trains and gardening and hunting, and Red Delicious apples. One day Clive wanted to show me the tulips he’d selected from his flower catalog. Clive loves flowers. I think they’re fine. He was very excited about the tulips. He had selected “Prince’s Coterie” or something like that, a color combination of bright red, yellow, and purple tulips, perky and primary on the glossy page. “What do you think?” He was rubbing my back as we stood outside behind my car, the magazine spread on the trunk. I prefer, when I think about them at all, less obvious flowers, flowers that don’t stand up straight and say, look at me, I’m a flower!
“Very nice!” I said.
“And I want to plant these little blue flowers all over the lawn on this side of the house so that when snow’s on the ground, we’ll be able to see the blue flowers coming up above it! Won’t that be amazing?”
“Mmm, yes,” I murmured.
“Aren’t flowers awesome?” Clive said. I thought, what the heck is wrong with me that I can’t appreciate flowers? His hand rubbing my back made me wish he’d pick me up and say, “Forget the flowers, we’re going inside.”
See, Clive is the first man I’ve dated who cares about my sexual satisfaction and puts some effort into making it happen. That’s not the half of it. Clive is kind, hard-working, ethical. He can spin a simile like no one else I know. He always wants to show me things when I visit–a new model steam locomotive that actually produces steam, the bottle of coal-scented fragrance that will make the train smell authentic, the strips of cork that go under the tracks to support them and look like real earth, the paint swatches for the spare bedroom, a newly-turned banana pepper in his garden, his live chipmunk trap, a website about the real train that is making its once-in-a-lifetime trip back west and selling passenger rides. I follow him from room to room, trying to access the freshness of the present moment.
When I was young, I would at times get stuck in a crippling fear of eternity. We would live in Heaven forever, I was taught, forever the same age, forever happy. I pictured a merry-go-round forever circling, from which we couldn’t escape, and my stomach would turn, and I would feel a dark vacuum sucking up my brain. Christians are taught to see Heaven as the ultimate fantasy, the place where all bad things will end, so why wouldn’t I buy into this as I buy into the fantasy that meeting the right man will solve my deepest problems? Oddly, I somehow see through the Heaven fantasy to the reality beneath: the very groundlessness that Pema teaches me to seek. I want to escape eternity because it seems too glaringly spacious, with nowhere to hide and gather back all of the pieces of myself into one boundaried whole. The loss of the self as I know it: my worst fear.
Maybe this is my problem: I’m trying to be present in Clive’s moments, mistaking them for my own. For example, the trains. I tried to access his moment, his enthusiasm, and it worked but it drained me. Instead, I should learn to be alone when I’m with Clive, to be in my own moment. But I’ve never been adept at balancing self and other. It’s all self or all other, with me. Plus, I’m afraid that if I let myself be in my own melancholic moment when I’m with Clive, I’ll associate that melancholy with Clive and blame him for it and start thinking that with someone else I would be different, happier.
Clive is very affectionate. I had long buried my ability to touch, hoping it would surface and flower with the right stimulus. And it has flowered. I respond more and more freely with affection, squeezing, patting, kissing, knee-rubbing Clive. But sometimes I catch myself caressing the steering wheel as I would Clive, or caressing my own arm as it is entwined with his. It takes me a moment to realize my mistake.
I have a precocious eleven-year-old friend named Aiko. Aiko came with her mother Kyoko one night to our monthly gathering of women friends. “How is Clive?” the women asked. They expected a brief, happy answer, and I balked. They pressed. I said something about how I needed to learn to live in reality, that I had for too long expected and hoped for a kind of fantasy that I now knew was a lie and ultimately both impossible and unhealthy. Aiko leaned her head on my shoulder, smiled, and said with a sigh, “Princess Cindy.”
Clive has somehow along the way become synonymous with husband, maybe because our relationship feels like what I imagine marriage feels like after ten years. Dogged. Determined. He called last night at 7 p.m. I didn’t want to answer; I wanted to eat my dinner.
“Hey,” I said.
“Hey, how are you?” he said. He sounded glum. “Where are you?”
“At home,” I said. Please don’t want to drop by now, not when I’m about to eat, I prayed. He told me he was just leaving work–a late night in a week of late nights. I asked him how I could help, hoping he wouldn’t ask me to drive over and comfort him. He kept talking, and I kept thinking about my food growing cold. Finally, I transferred the lentil-vegetable stew to a bowl and, because it was so soft, decided I could eat without him noticing. I took small bites, barely chewed, and swung the phone away from my mouth to swallow as he chattered on about our upcoming trip to Jim Thorpe, a town in eastern Pennsylvania that runs an old steam engine for tourists.
“I don’t want to hang up,” he said.
“Mmm,” I sympathized, holding the food in my mouth.
“I’d better go,” he said. “I’m hungry, and I don’t want to make you listen to me eat.”
“Cuz that would be gross,” he added.
He knew. He somehow heard my mushy bites, sensed my full mouth and throat. I should have said, “Shoot, you heard. I’m sorry,” and soothed the awkwardness with self-deprecating jokes. But what if he hadn’t heard? I was afraid to find out for sure. We hung up. My bowl was empty, the stew now unsettled in my stomach. I resented Clive’s interruption, resented his neediness. I resented myself for not being more patient. I resented how long it took to drive from my apartment to his house. Sometimes he has to deal with a crappy day on his own, I guiltily sulked. It will be good for him, help him make peace with loneliness. This is a valid Buddhist principle: we are not to deny people their emotional pain, their best and only teacher. But what if the sentiment is born from peevishness? Is it still true?
I don’t want Prince Charming. I have a hard time distinguishing between charm and manipulation, so I avoid the Princely types. I admit I get suckered in by romantic novels and movies, even when I know they’re ridiculous, that we don’t have one soulmate we have to find before he gets hit by a bus. But I’m Romantic in the sense that I believe that when I meet the (or rather, a) Right Person, I’ll recognize him. People say that being with the Right Person feels like coming home; Clive is starting to feel homelike, but in a way that makes me remember being a young adult and wanting more than anything to leave home.
Sometimes when Clive goes on a long trip, I think about what would happen if his plane or car crashed and he died. I would be sad, of course, and I would go to the funeral and comfort his mother. I’d also feel relief. A decision made for me. A chance to start again. And then I realize that I’m such a terrible person that I will be the one to die, and I’ll deserve it.
Clive was sick on Saturday, which meant I could have him to myself all day. No yard work, no runs to Lowe’s, no painting or cleaning or filing or trombone practicing. (Sometimes I suspect Clive manufactures these distractions: evidence of his own ambiguity?) We watched District 9 on his laptop, and snuggling there with him, watching Wikkus as he is infected with alien blood, hunted by the State, betrayed by his father-in-law, and terrifyingly alone, trying to claw his way back to his wife, I felt, for the first time, what it must mean to be separated from a spouse. I glimpsed, for a brief flash, the terror of intimacy, the open, beautiful wound of it. How even at your dirtiest, most alien worst, you must believe–you have no choice but to believe, against all possibility–that you are loved. (Clive, by the way, in sweatpants and sweatshirt, with stuffy sinuses, is at his most sweetly cozy and huggable.)
I can’t sleep with Clive. In the same bed or even, apparently, in the same room. I’m a light sleeper, and Clive snores. When I’m lying awake, staring at the ceiling, feeling the uneasy aloneness that only occurs when I’m lying in bed, sleepless, with another person who is sleeping soundly, I get angry, wondering what the hell I’m doing in this strange bed with this strange man when I could be at home. Clive’s bed is lusciously comfortable, a king-size tempurpedic mattress that both gives and supports at the same time. We have plenty of room to stay to ourselves, although I still wake up at night with an inch of mattress on one side and Clive a snoring blockade on the other. I tell myself that I just need practice, that if I lived with him and had no choice but to sleep with him, I would adjust, that the tightening of my muscles, the held breath, the startle-effect when Clive moves suddenly in his sleep, would fade.
I love my own queen-sized, 100% natural latex foam, hypo-allergenic bed. I’ve been debating whether to buy a new comforter for it, but a) I’m overly nervous about spending money, and b) I wonder if soon I’ll be living with Clive, where we won’t have room for my queen-sized bed and I’ll likely have to give it to my Mom. Do I delay gratification now in preparation for the possible future? Of course not. But I’m afraid that the more I beautify my apartment, the more attached I’ll become to it. I’m afraid I’ll choose mine, all mine over Clive.
Clive, meanwhile, has made no indication that he wants us to live together. I begin to wonder if he, too, struggles against his disappointments with me. I see small signs at first, the sort of questions/jokes about whether I’d ever consider breast implants or bikini waxes, whether I’d ever smoke pot, whether I’d, just this once, try eating meat or dairy again. His insistence on the fresh moment seems forced, at times combative, as if to contrast my natural melancholy. Together we strain for good cheer, trying to be perfect for each other so that we won’t have to blame ourselves if our relationship fails.
If I knew for sure that Clive loved me, would that make a difference? Should it? Or must I accept his ambivalent moments just as I must accept my own, accept the existential doubt inherent in all relationships? Is doubt inherent in all relationships? If so, what level of doubt is acceptable? At which level should you just go ahead and commit? Can anyone tell me? Please?
Pema would probably tell me that authentically dwelling in ambiguity is not the same as waiting for a decision to be made, hoping for a sign, feeling simultaneously self-righteous and miserable. When you settle into ambiguity, you give up hope. You stop looking for signs.
I decide to tackle the sleeping problem. This time, I take a book into Clive’s bathroom, hoping that reading quietly, alone, will help me retrieve my consciousness from Clive’s and thus deeply relax. But tiptoeing back out into the dark bedroom, trying not to bang into the dresser or bed frame, trying to slide into bed without waking Clive, sets my heart racing again. I lay frozen, assuring myself he’s still asleep, then take a few deep breaths and dare to shift onto my stomach. About forty seconds later, Clive rolls over and lays his hand on my lower back. Immediately my heart spikes and my restless muscles want to shift. But if I shift so quickly after he’s put his hand on me, will he think I don’t want him to touch me? I wait, immobile, and try to observe my jumpiness objectively. Don’t conclude that jumpiness equals incompatibility; don’t build a huge emotional drama around simple twitchiness. I move cautiously, letting Clive’s hand slide to the bed. By now, I have to pee, and by the time I return, having winced at every floor creak and at the flushing toilet (if I flush, it might wake him; but if I don’t flush and he uses the bathroom in the morning before I do, he’ll think I’m gross), I am again wide awake. Maybe I won’t be able to sleep with anyone, ever. I think of the olden days when men and women slept in separate beds, even separate rooms, and I understand, now, how sleep can be more seductive than romance.
Clive has a friend named Kris. Kris is tall, rangy, melancholy, with dark eyes and dark, choppy hair. He plays guitar in a punk band, and I could have swept him out of my consciousness if Clive hadn’t told me he’s 35. Not a young jackass after all. A man, and a man whom Clive admires not only for his talent but also for his determination and work ethic. Kris spent much of his twenties in jail, then got sober and finished his degree in chemistry. Kris has a mystery about him, a laid-back coolness, an unreachable core. He lurks, he probably broods. I want him to want me. I tell myself that it’s not just a raw sexual attraction but also a soul-lust, a sense that somewhere, in darkness, we could find each other. My therapist says this reminds her of when I was five, waiting outside my Dad’s closed office door for him to come out and pay attention to me.
Sometimes I don’t like my therapist.
I visit home and unexpectedly break down when Mom asks about Clive. “I don’t think you’re in love with him, Cindy,” she gently suggests, as I bawl into a napkin. Sometimes I want to move back home with my mom, to make salads with her and watch Frasier and House and CSI reruns and get annoyed with her and feel sorry for myself and wish I had a life. I want to want friends but not have them, to long for a partner but not meet one. Keep the dream alive by keeping reality at bay.
I try to work through the Kris-fantasy. Pema writes, “Whether we experience what happens to us as obstacle and enemy or as teacher and friend depends entirely on our perception of reality.” Kris nodded hello and shook my hand after a concert I’d attended with Clive, and boom: obstacle. How do you befriend a fantasy? Experiment A: instead of shaming myself out of it, stay in the fantasy. Discover that fantasies have power because in them I am not myself. Either my shyness takes on a potent seductive power or I am an Amazon of confidence and wit. I don’t know Kris, but I know myself. If I insert my actual self into the fantasy–the awkward, shy self, the self that craves respect, honesty, playfulness, give-and-take–it shifts into painful reality, and I see that Kris is simply another rendering of my old hope that the right person will help me access my most authentic self: will, in short, cure my fundamental discontent. Experiment B: if possible, befriend Kris himself. Maybe he’s not the rock-star I imagine. Maybe he’s just a talented, hard-working man who also wants to be loved. To treat him as a friend, then, will de-mystify him.
I’m not sure what Pema had in mind, but these experiments have left me with the dreadful suspicion that every path with every man will lead to the same place: two people on a long car ride, with stale breath and bloated stomachs, sitting on crumbs, each wishing they could just listen to their own music.
Clive has me over on Tuesday night for dinner. Can I make dinner for you? he’d asked, and I’d said of course. He has set the table and brought out the candles. He made the main course, a carrot-apple soup, the night before, and while it reheats, we listen to my new Nields CD. Fresh from mourning the dissolution of fantasy, I am able, in this tender state, to see Clive anew, as a person apart from myself. He is quiet tonight, calm, as if he, too, returns from an interior space. We sit on the couch listening to “This Train is Bound for Glory.” I hold his forearm, finger the soft hair, the ridges of veins. Everything is at the surface. Clive gets up to stir the soup and chop the chives and walnuts. When Clive talks about how much his Dad would have loved to see his garden (we’re eating salads made with garden bell peppers), I feel such a pang of loss for myself, not having met his Dad, that the tears nearly spill. Thoughts of Kris resurface, wanting to ride this emotional tide. I let them stay, flow beneath and into my feelings about Clive, about Clive’s Dad, and now about my own Dad, also lost. Maybe I’m not in Pema’s moment, but I’m in my own, finally, riding a current of then and now and what might be, all moving together as one, and as Clive moves to the kitchen to dip our second serving, I am still, somehow, here, in this dining room chair, looking out the sliding glass doors at the two small garden boxes, at the bird bath, at the black-pearl sky.
~This essay was published in a less-edited form in Memoir (and) in 2011. Memoir (and) seems to be defunct now.
Once, Clive told me he loved me. I think he both meant it and was getting carried away. He’d broken up with me a month earlier but wanted to keep seeing me. When he told me he loved me, I thought oh crap and then I thought seventy-six other things all at once, and then I thought I should say something, but all I could think to say was “Thank you.” I didn’t say thank you.
Three months later, I told Clive I loved him. Before that, I had broken up with him. I hadn’t intended to return, but I missed him. I made a list of reasons to love him and let it marinate for awhile. Then I told him. I stuttered and had a hard time looking him in the eye, but I did have a moment of happiness imagining our future together.
Pema Chodron, a Buddhist monk my friend recommended I read, says that disappointment and anxiety are signs that we are about to venture into unknown territory. We’re supposed to “stay” with these fearful feelings rather than run away from them. Doing so will pierce that hardness in us that comes from fixating on the known path rather than allowing “room for not knowing.” When we allow ambiguity, we can begin to experience the “freshness of the present moment.” I like this Buddhist language, its promise of adventure. In the past, I’ve scurried from men who disappoint. No more! Clive is a good man, and I will stay! I will sit with my ambivalence, let it teach me to appreciate the moment!
And yet.
Clive and I have different tastes in music, houses, neighborhoods, hobbies, apples. He loves happy happy Cuban and Argentinian music, two-car garages and minivan neighborhoods, motorcycles and trains and gardening and hunting, and Red Delicious apples. One day Clive wanted to show me the tulips he’d selected from his flower catalog. Clive loves flowers. I think they’re fine. He was very excited about the tulips. He had selected “Prince’s Coterie” or something like that, a color combination of bright red, yellow, and purple tulips, perky and primary on the glossy page. “What do you think?” He was rubbing my back as we stood outside behind my car, the magazine spread on the trunk. I prefer, when I think about them at all, less obvious flowers, flowers that don’t stand up straight and say, look at me, I’m a flower!
“Very nice!” I said.
“And I want to plant these little blue flowers all over the lawn on this side of the house so that when snow’s on the ground, we’ll be able to see the blue flowers coming up above it! Won’t that be amazing?”
“Mmm, yes,” I murmured.
“Aren’t flowers awesome?” Clive said. I thought, what the heck is wrong with me that I can’t appreciate flowers? His hand rubbing my back made me wish he’d pick me up and say, “Forget the flowers, we’re going inside.”
See, Clive is the first man I’ve dated who cares about my sexual satisfaction and puts some effort into making it happen. That’s not the half of it. Clive is kind, hard-working, ethical. He can spin a simile like no one else I know. He always wants to show me things when I visit–a new model steam locomotive that actually produces steam, the bottle of coal-scented fragrance that will make the train smell authentic, the strips of cork that go under the tracks to support them and look like real earth, the paint swatches for the spare bedroom, a newly-turned banana pepper in his garden, his live chipmunk trap, a website about the real train that is making its once-in-a-lifetime trip back west and selling passenger rides. I follow him from room to room, trying to access the freshness of the present moment.
When I was young, I would at times get stuck in a crippling fear of eternity. We would live in Heaven forever, I was taught, forever the same age, forever happy. I pictured a merry-go-round forever circling, from which we couldn’t escape, and my stomach would turn, and I would feel a dark vacuum sucking up my brain. Christians are taught to see Heaven as the ultimate fantasy, the place where all bad things will end, so why wouldn’t I buy into this as I buy into the fantasy that meeting the right man will solve my deepest problems? Oddly, I somehow see through the Heaven fantasy to the reality beneath: the very groundlessness that Pema teaches me to seek. I want to escape eternity because it seems too glaringly spacious, with nowhere to hide and gather back all of the pieces of myself into one boundaried whole. The loss of the self as I know it: my worst fear.
Maybe this is my problem: I’m trying to be present in Clive’s moments, mistaking them for my own. For example, the trains. I tried to access his moment, his enthusiasm, and it worked but it drained me. Instead, I should learn to be alone when I’m with Clive, to be in my own moment. But I’ve never been adept at balancing self and other. It’s all self or all other, with me. Plus, I’m afraid that if I let myself be in my own melancholic moment when I’m with Clive, I’ll associate that melancholy with Clive and blame him for it and start thinking that with someone else I would be different, happier.
Clive is very affectionate. I had long buried my ability to touch, hoping it would surface and flower with the right stimulus. And it has flowered. I respond more and more freely with affection, squeezing, patting, kissing, knee-rubbing Clive. But sometimes I catch myself caressing the steering wheel as I would Clive, or caressing my own arm as it is entwined with his. It takes me a moment to realize my mistake.
I have a precocious eleven-year-old friend named Aiko. Aiko came with her mother Kyoko one night to our monthly gathering of women friends. “How is Clive?” the women asked. They expected a brief, happy answer, and I balked. They pressed. I said something about how I needed to learn to live in reality, that I had for too long expected and hoped for a kind of fantasy that I now knew was a lie and ultimately both impossible and unhealthy. Aiko leaned her head on my shoulder, smiled, and said with a sigh, “Princess Cindy.”
Clive has somehow along the way become synonymous with husband, maybe because our relationship feels like what I imagine marriage feels like after ten years. Dogged. Determined. He called last night at 7 p.m. I didn’t want to answer; I wanted to eat my dinner.
“Hey,” I said.
“Hey, how are you?” he said. He sounded glum. “Where are you?”
“At home,” I said. Please don’t want to drop by now, not when I’m about to eat, I prayed. He told me he was just leaving work–a late night in a week of late nights. I asked him how I could help, hoping he wouldn’t ask me to drive over and comfort him. He kept talking, and I kept thinking about my food growing cold. Finally, I transferred the lentil-vegetable stew to a bowl and, because it was so soft, decided I could eat without him noticing. I took small bites, barely chewed, and swung the phone away from my mouth to swallow as he chattered on about our upcoming trip to Jim Thorpe, a town in eastern Pennsylvania that runs an old steam engine for tourists.
“I don’t want to hang up,” he said.
“Mmm,” I sympathized, holding the food in my mouth.
“I’d better go,” he said. “I’m hungry, and I don’t want to make you listen to me eat.”
“Cuz that would be gross,” he added.
He knew. He somehow heard my mushy bites, sensed my full mouth and throat. I should have said, “Shoot, you heard. I’m sorry,” and soothed the awkwardness with self-deprecating jokes. But what if he hadn’t heard? I was afraid to find out for sure. We hung up. My bowl was empty, the stew now unsettled in my stomach. I resented Clive’s interruption, resented his neediness. I resented myself for not being more patient. I resented how long it took to drive from my apartment to his house. Sometimes he has to deal with a crappy day on his own, I guiltily sulked. It will be good for him, help him make peace with loneliness. This is a valid Buddhist principle: we are not to deny people their emotional pain, their best and only teacher. But what if the sentiment is born from peevishness? Is it still true?
I don’t want Prince Charming. I have a hard time distinguishing between charm and manipulation, so I avoid the Princely types. I admit I get suckered in by romantic novels and movies, even when I know they’re ridiculous, that we don’t have one soulmate we have to find before he gets hit by a bus. But I’m Romantic in the sense that I believe that when I meet the (or rather, a) Right Person, I’ll recognize him. People say that being with the Right Person feels like coming home; Clive is starting to feel homelike, but in a way that makes me remember being a young adult and wanting more than anything to leave home.
Sometimes when Clive goes on a long trip, I think about what would happen if his plane or car crashed and he died. I would be sad, of course, and I would go to the funeral and comfort his mother. I’d also feel relief. A decision made for me. A chance to start again. And then I realize that I’m such a terrible person that I will be the one to die, and I’ll deserve it.
Clive was sick on Saturday, which meant I could have him to myself all day. No yard work, no runs to Lowe’s, no painting or cleaning or filing or trombone practicing. (Sometimes I suspect Clive manufactures these distractions: evidence of his own ambiguity?) We watched District 9 on his laptop, and snuggling there with him, watching Wikkus as he is infected with alien blood, hunted by the State, betrayed by his father-in-law, and terrifyingly alone, trying to claw his way back to his wife, I felt, for the first time, what it must mean to be separated from a spouse. I glimpsed, for a brief flash, the terror of intimacy, the open, beautiful wound of it. How even at your dirtiest, most alien worst, you must believe–you have no choice but to believe, against all possibility–that you are loved. (Clive, by the way, in sweatpants and sweatshirt, with stuffy sinuses, is at his most sweetly cozy and huggable.)
I can’t sleep with Clive. In the same bed or even, apparently, in the same room. I’m a light sleeper, and Clive snores. When I’m lying awake, staring at the ceiling, feeling the uneasy aloneness that only occurs when I’m lying in bed, sleepless, with another person who is sleeping soundly, I get angry, wondering what the hell I’m doing in this strange bed with this strange man when I could be at home. Clive’s bed is lusciously comfortable, a king-size tempurpedic mattress that both gives and supports at the same time. We have plenty of room to stay to ourselves, although I still wake up at night with an inch of mattress on one side and Clive a snoring blockade on the other. I tell myself that I just need practice, that if I lived with him and had no choice but to sleep with him, I would adjust, that the tightening of my muscles, the held breath, the startle-effect when Clive moves suddenly in his sleep, would fade.
I love my own queen-sized, 100% natural latex foam, hypo-allergenic bed. I’ve been debating whether to buy a new comforter for it, but a) I’m overly nervous about spending money, and b) I wonder if soon I’ll be living with Clive, where we won’t have room for my queen-sized bed and I’ll likely have to give it to my Mom. Do I delay gratification now in preparation for the possible future? Of course not. But I’m afraid that the more I beautify my apartment, the more attached I’ll become to it. I’m afraid I’ll choose mine, all mine over Clive.
Clive, meanwhile, has made no indication that he wants us to live together. I begin to wonder if he, too, struggles against his disappointments with me. I see small signs at first, the sort of questions/jokes about whether I’d ever consider breast implants or bikini waxes, whether I’d ever smoke pot, whether I’d, just this once, try eating meat or dairy again. His insistence on the fresh moment seems forced, at times combative, as if to contrast my natural melancholy. Together we strain for good cheer, trying to be perfect for each other so that we won’t have to blame ourselves if our relationship fails.
If I knew for sure that Clive loved me, would that make a difference? Should it? Or must I accept his ambivalent moments just as I must accept my own, accept the existential doubt inherent in all relationships? Is doubt inherent in all relationships? If so, what level of doubt is acceptable? At which level should you just go ahead and commit? Can anyone tell me? Please?
Pema would probably tell me that authentically dwelling in ambiguity is not the same as waiting for a decision to be made, hoping for a sign, feeling simultaneously self-righteous and miserable. When you settle into ambiguity, you give up hope. You stop looking for signs.
I decide to tackle the sleeping problem. This time, I take a book into Clive’s bathroom, hoping that reading quietly, alone, will help me retrieve my consciousness from Clive’s and thus deeply relax. But tiptoeing back out into the dark bedroom, trying not to bang into the dresser or bed frame, trying to slide into bed without waking Clive, sets my heart racing again. I lay frozen, assuring myself he’s still asleep, then take a few deep breaths and dare to shift onto my stomach. About forty seconds later, Clive rolls over and lays his hand on my lower back. Immediately my heart spikes and my restless muscles want to shift. But if I shift so quickly after he’s put his hand on me, will he think I don’t want him to touch me? I wait, immobile, and try to observe my jumpiness objectively. Don’t conclude that jumpiness equals incompatibility; don’t build a huge emotional drama around simple twitchiness. I move cautiously, letting Clive’s hand slide to the bed. By now, I have to pee, and by the time I return, having winced at every floor creak and at the flushing toilet (if I flush, it might wake him; but if I don’t flush and he uses the bathroom in the morning before I do, he’ll think I’m gross), I am again wide awake. Maybe I won’t be able to sleep with anyone, ever. I think of the olden days when men and women slept in separate beds, even separate rooms, and I understand, now, how sleep can be more seductive than romance.
Clive has a friend named Kris. Kris is tall, rangy, melancholy, with dark eyes and dark, choppy hair. He plays guitar in a punk band, and I could have swept him out of my consciousness if Clive hadn’t told me he’s 35. Not a young jackass after all. A man, and a man whom Clive admires not only for his talent but also for his determination and work ethic. Kris spent much of his twenties in jail, then got sober and finished his degree in chemistry. Kris has a mystery about him, a laid-back coolness, an unreachable core. He lurks, he probably broods. I want him to want me. I tell myself that it’s not just a raw sexual attraction but also a soul-lust, a sense that somewhere, in darkness, we could find each other. My therapist says this reminds her of when I was five, waiting outside my Dad’s closed office door for him to come out and pay attention to me.
Sometimes I don’t like my therapist.
I visit home and unexpectedly break down when Mom asks about Clive. “I don’t think you’re in love with him, Cindy,” she gently suggests, as I bawl into a napkin. Sometimes I want to move back home with my mom, to make salads with her and watch Frasier and House and CSI reruns and get annoyed with her and feel sorry for myself and wish I had a life. I want to want friends but not have them, to long for a partner but not meet one. Keep the dream alive by keeping reality at bay.
I try to work through the Kris-fantasy. Pema writes, “Whether we experience what happens to us as obstacle and enemy or as teacher and friend depends entirely on our perception of reality.” Kris nodded hello and shook my hand after a concert I’d attended with Clive, and boom: obstacle. How do you befriend a fantasy? Experiment A: instead of shaming myself out of it, stay in the fantasy. Discover that fantasies have power because in them I am not myself. Either my shyness takes on a potent seductive power or I am an Amazon of confidence and wit. I don’t know Kris, but I know myself. If I insert my actual self into the fantasy–the awkward, shy self, the self that craves respect, honesty, playfulness, give-and-take–it shifts into painful reality, and I see that Kris is simply another rendering of my old hope that the right person will help me access my most authentic self: will, in short, cure my fundamental discontent. Experiment B: if possible, befriend Kris himself. Maybe he’s not the rock-star I imagine. Maybe he’s just a talented, hard-working man who also wants to be loved. To treat him as a friend, then, will de-mystify him.
I’m not sure what Pema had in mind, but these experiments have left me with the dreadful suspicion that every path with every man will lead to the same place: two people on a long car ride, with stale breath and bloated stomachs, sitting on crumbs, each wishing they could just listen to their own music.
Clive has me over on Tuesday night for dinner. Can I make dinner for you? he’d asked, and I’d said of course. He has set the table and brought out the candles. He made the main course, a carrot-apple soup, the night before, and while it reheats, we listen to my new Nields CD. Fresh from mourning the dissolution of fantasy, I am able, in this tender state, to see Clive anew, as a person apart from myself. He is quiet tonight, calm, as if he, too, returns from an interior space. We sit on the couch listening to “This Train is Bound for Glory.” I hold his forearm, finger the soft hair, the ridges of veins. Everything is at the surface. Clive gets up to stir the soup and chop the chives and walnuts. When Clive talks about how much his Dad would have loved to see his garden (we’re eating salads made with garden bell peppers), I feel such a pang of loss for myself, not having met his Dad, that the tears nearly spill. Thoughts of Kris resurface, wanting to ride this emotional tide. I let them stay, flow beneath and into my feelings about Clive, about Clive’s Dad, and now about my own Dad, also lost. Maybe I’m not in Pema’s moment, but I’m in my own, finally, riding a current of then and now and what might be, all moving together as one, and as Clive moves to the kitchen to dip our second serving, I am still, somehow, here, in this dining room chair, looking out the sliding glass doors at the two small garden boxes, at the bird bath, at the black-pearl sky.
~This essay was published in a less-edited form in Memoir (and) in 2011. Memoir (and) seems to be defunct now.
