Trying to explain love is to lapse into cliché, is it not? It is like the language of sympathy, burdened with overuse and abstraction and inexactitude. (I am so very sorry for your loss. I wish you comfort in this terrible time of sorrow.) To speak of souls is laughably naive, sentimental. I have struggled—am still struggling—to find the right words, any words, to describe what I felt for her, my inappropriate, ill-advised, immoral love. But I will try again.
We humans speak of falling in love. Falling. Losing control. Taken over by gravity. Reeling toward the ground, toward scrapes and bruises and shattered bones, unless something—or someone—breaks the fall. Water. Soft mattress. Waiting arms.
Yet the sensation of falling is also the closest we have to flying. Something we can do only in dreams.
With Jess, I fell, as if from a great height. God, did I fall. I saw the ground coming, and I could not stop myself.
Why? Why her?
Because she was the sky.
Jesus, what does that even mean? All I can get at are strained metaphors. Here is what I think I mean: I looked up, and there she was—blazing blue, sun and shadow, air and cloud and lightning, a goddamn palette of nature, innocent and fragile but also strong, impervious. I could not stop staring at her shifting light.
Yet if I am honest, the power of the feeling intensified not because of how I saw her but because of how she saw me. She looked at me with such ragged longing, only in part sexual. There was a nakedness in her gaze, and I mean that both in the sense of straightforwardness and vulnerability. But more than that, in her eyes I saw reflected a version of me that I hardly knew myself. She did not know of my failure as an artist, or that my mother had left me, or that I would never be extraordinary. Under her gaze, I could forget those parts of me.
More truth, Dani? I wanted the physical, too. No, I did not touch her, but yes, I wanted to. I was willing to wait, but that waiting was not chivalrous or patient. I was mad with it, desperate, driven to distraction by the depth of that desire. This went beyond sex and pleasure, which I had had plenty of in my life. This was not a cliché, a middle-aged man frustrated in his bedroom. I felt more akin to a teenage boy, unable to control myself. The sight of her—smart, quirky, funny, radiantly beautiful—unleashed a wildness in me I still do not understand. Ferocious. Left me shaking.
I cannot speak for her, of why she was attracted to me. The obvious question: Was she trying to replace her father? It would be hard to say no. Even at the time, I recognized that likelihood. I knew she was confused and vulnerable; I knew the loss she sought to heal, even if she did not know it. I should have known better. I did know better. And I did it anyway.
Why, why, why, why, why? The question that haunts me. Hunts me, really. Chases me into the night, howling.
Today’s answer: Because I loved her, because of my mother, because of my marriage, because of my fallibility, because of lust, because of my life at midlife. All of them are true, all at once.
Never was any of it because of you.
Please know, I am not speaking of love in how I love you, which is its own precious thing. She was not my daughter, though you were the same age; I did not see her as I see you. Never. I have no predilections, no abstract desires. This was singular. I did not intend to seek her out, nor did she seek me. I knew it was unacceptable on so many terms—I was married, she was seventeen, she was your friend—but there it was. I have loved that way once, and it was her. I believed it like I believe in gravity.
Until then, I was not the sort of man who stepped out of line. The best I can explain it is that Jess opened a part of me I did not know was there. Let us say it was a circle. My life thus far was a line, and here was a circle. One straight, one curved, both potentially endless. Both perfectly lovely, both integral to the geometry of the world. The absolute truth is, I did not want to choose. I wanted both lives. The line and the circle.
I had not figured out yet what I wanted to do. I was trying to get my head around what I felt. The whole thing was terrifying, deeply distressing. Unbelievable, really. I do not blame Paul for what he did. He had every right to protect you and your mother, and it would have been unfair for him to hold that secret once he had it. It was not his to hold. He was a good-hearted kid, and I bear him no ill will, though I desperately wish it could have happened differently. Of course, I know now there would be no way to make it okay. I knew it then, too. None of it would have been easy, even had it been real. That is, even if she had come here with me.
You should know: she was telling the truth when she said nothing happened. Nothing physical. She also did not pursue me; I pursued her, not the other way around. Yes, she was attracted to me, but she turned me away. When I left town, I asked her to come with me, and she said no. She did not want me. I am not sure if she ever loved me. I only know it was real for me.
Perhaps this should go without saying, but I feel the need to tell you: I hope it is not her in the wash. I want her to live. That night I was stuck in Flagstaff in the snow, the night she disappeared, I sat in my hotel, despondent, looking out the window. A young couple was out on the street, skating on the iced-over streets in their tennis shoes. All these years later, the image stays with me. Gliding down the deserted street, laughing, flinging their arms out for balance. If she can’t be here, I want her to be out there, beautiful, dreamy, skating the streets of the world.
Dani, here is the truth: I have great remorse for the pain I have caused you and your mother, but I still do not doubt I loved Jess. That open circularity: I still feel it. Should I have ignored it? Probably. Many people do. I did not. I have been called everything from delusional, destructive, disgusting, despicable, and criminal to foolish, selfish, myopic, naive, and pathetic. Believe me, they have said it all, and perhaps you agree with them. Yes, I probably am all those things, too. Would it have worked out had she come here with me? Oh, good heavens. I do not know. Most likely not. Still—still, god help me—I wanted it to, even when it meant losing you.
But I didn’t know what it meant to live with that. To really live with what I had done. To lose you. I knew at the time I caused pain and upheaval and ruin; I knew I destroyed our family. Yet somehow I thought your absence would be temporary. Somehow I deluded myself you would come back. I never thought you would not be part of my life permanently. I never imagined this version of us. I never believed I would repeat my mother’s mistakes.
Yet I am not that man anymore. I am so far removed from him, I feel sometimes as if all this happened to someone else. I no longer know that man with the glowing hope in his heart, yet I am him. I no longer know that young painter with dreams of wildness that I could never capture, and yet I am him, too. I no longer know that middle-aged Realtor who spent his weekends holding open houses and fixing up a car for his daughter. I no longer know the boy who woke up one day without a mother and then lost her again at midlife. Of course I am him, and I remain responsible for my actions. I am trying to understand something about time here. I do not know the shape of myself.