Passion and enduring love often seem odds. So why do we keep
striving tocapture both in the same relationship?
At the age of 77 my father fell in love with a woman of 64. My
father--small, Sicilian, tender-eyed, working class, intelligent, twice
married--is a man who's sinned and been sinned against maybe more than
most, but who's managed to keep his courtly, nineteenth-century style of
dignity.
And Rosa (or so we'll call her): a Caribbean immigrant,
down-to-earth, savvy, also twice married, and with a style, a dignity not
unlike my fathers. They were brought together by the odd, fateful
coincidences that always bring people together--suddenly a stranger is in
your life, deep in your life, and everything changes. In any case, more
than 30 years since his divorce from my mother more than 20 years after
his second wife died; and at least 15 since the only affair he ever
had--suddenly there was a woman in my fathers life. And no one was more
surprised than Papa himself.
He would rhapsodize about his Rosa. "You know, son," he once said
with a sweet, shy smile, "how a little kid separates the food on his
plate--the peas, the potatoes, the meat--and saves the best for last? I'm
glad I saved the best for last."
I don't readily admit to being hopeful (Hope makes you soft,
doesn't it? And soft gets you hurt?). But I was speaking in a veiled way
of my hopes when I said to my brother Vinnie, "Isn't it great! You can be
pushing 80, living alone, thinking your life is over and all you have are
books and memories, and zap! One fine day you can still fall in love like
a youth."
Vinnie was, to put it mildly, less enthusiastic: "Have you gone
nuts? You know what this means? No matter how old you get, how wise, how
bitter, how experienced, it makes no difference. Love can still grab you
by the balls and lead you wherever it wants to!"
My brother was appalled at precisely what delighted me: the power
of love to lead you by the balls (or whatever else), in any direction it
warts to, unpredictably, unreasonably, and no matter what you've been
reading, thinking, or telling yourself about love. Suddenly the lines
from silly songs tell more truth, more cogently and sweetly, than whole
libraries of philosophy, the hail-splitting insights of psychology, and
the suburban homilies of self-help books. It won't matter who's from
Venus or Mars, much less what Freud said about sleeping with your mother.
Gershwin's "They Can't Take That Away from Me," sung in Frank Sinatra's
smokiest, most intimate voice, will sound far wiser. Audrey Hepburn's big
loving eyes in Breakfast at Tyffany's will seem to reveal reveal far more
than Tolstoy's Anna Karenina when she threw herself under a train. You'll
feel, as the poet Anna Akhmatova put it, that "the secret of secrets is
in me again." Who would deny that these are the times we've felt most
alive?
And yet, what did I actually say the last time I was falling in
love? "Shit, I'm in trouble now." Deep terrors get stirred. Our
experience of love is in part an experience of failure--giving too much
or too little of ourselves, going too far or not far enough. "In love,"
the Spanish poet Antonio Machado wrote, "a little exaggeration feels
right." Yes, but too much exaggeration obscures the face of the beloved:
Are you seeing the real person, or are you making your lover up as you go
along, both engaged in a mutual act of living thereater, playing roles
loosely based on dreams, expectations, and even the truth? Both of you
are trying to live up to some dangerously high hopes, and that's
nerve-wracking, but still--the liveliness of the adventure sweeps you
along, and the beauty of it all makes you forget the odds. (Isn't that
the dark purpose of beauty? But even if it is, should beauty then be
denied?)
In any case, for two years they were pretty happy, and beautifully
silly, my father and Rosa. I watched, living vicariously through them,
hoping my father would have better luck than I was having in the same
arena. (Yes, it's so much easier to speak of them than of myself--at
least I can pretend to be a little objective. My wounds are still too
fresh for commentary.) Then their occasional fights turned into a fairly
regular rhythm of conflict. All too familiar. The particular issues don't
matter much, not really, because their underlying trigger is usually the
same. To put it as benignly as possible: People hurt each other plenty
just by having different needs, when those needs aren't in sync. And most
of us aren't very graceful about not having our needs met when and how we
want them met. No one can put a finger on when exactly it starts, but
little irritations become large issues. Something sours at the core. No
longer is this other person a door into "the secret of secrets"; our
lover becomes a walking symbol of what we most want and can never quite
have--someone who sees us as we most want to be seen. The fights get
worse, as each strives to be seen in their own way, on their own terms.
And then...
Tags:
balls,
brother,
coincidences,
down to earth,
enduring love,
immigrant,
little kid,
love,
marriage,
memories,
nineteenth century,
nuts,
odds,
passion,
potatoes,
relationship,
second wife,
security,
stranger
