How to Stop Loving Someone

by Joan Connor

  U.P.S. must send their trainees to a boot camp in Iraq; he doesn’t blink.

  Although—there is a pause. I use this pause. I imagine an ordinary agoraphobic-claustrophobic day, a day like any other when I am crouching behind my couch, when my knight in unshining truck might knock only to spot me through the light-admitting window, hiding, abiding, biding my time. That could, under the right circumstances—a nuclear holocaust, an Oz tornadic dementia—be explicable. Without the right circumstances, and augmenting the circumstantial evidence with nudity and unconventional headgear—an impromptu exegesis of intimacy with one’s household furnishings might only add to the confusion. Demeanor is everything. Poise. I opt for interrupted impatience. I yank the door, tornado-whorl away my debutante breeziness. I aim for professionalism. “Yes?”

  His brown trousers crease. He can’t look me in the envelope.

  “I just wondered,” he says. “We seem to have so much in common.”

  “Yes?” I say, adjusting the peak of the envelope on my head, hoping that it looks official.

  “Would you have dinner with me sometime?”

  “Yes,” I say. And shut the door. It rings like a steel plate.

  “Sometime” is iffy. This week I have been working on an analysis of Schopenhauer, editing an analysis of Schopenhauer, editing an analysis of Schopenhauer’s theory redacted for a chapter in a philosophy textbook. Schopenhauer. Rhymes with shower. Lack of power. Why doesn’t he call? Not a tough question. But I miss my clubbiness. Maybe I should order another book? Then sometime could be real time.

  I scrub the toile upholstery. I spray it with Scotch-guard. You never know when that might happen again.

  I cavil with Schopenhauer. “Conceptions and abstractions which do not ultimately refer to perceptions are like paths in the woods that end without leading out of it.” Love, what about love, Arthur? Love, you nasty old reprobate, you misogynist, you canal leaper, you pusher of women down stairs? Surely love could exist in a world of ideas. Love, my noumenon. A priori, fixed and still. My donnée. Couldn’t love preexist without having to attach itself to the phenomena of people. I’ll stay in the woods, thank you very much, let others seek the trod path out.

  But, but. . . . Where is my Mr. UPS?

  Will, Schopenhauer, will? Will someone to love you. Will that.

  Quietism? I have plenty of that. But no quiet. How to still the eternal internal dinning? I keep replaying our parting scene. Me, in manila. Him, in brown. Me, saying yes. Him, asking me out to dinner.

  “Time, causality, and space are nothing more than functions of the brain.”

  Might I then, A.S., rewind time, replay the scene? Recast myself as the merchant of Venus, a soliloquy tripping from my tongue?

  I am a woman. Hath not a woman chutzpah, toile, dementia, sentences, afflictions, fashions, fed up with the same fools, hurt by the same demons, subject to the same psychoses, healed by the same meds, warmed and chilled by Shelly Winters and Suzanne Somers as a man is: if you pricke us do we not breed?

  Yikes. Enough of that. If I could rewind the scene, I’d stop the tape earlier—me, clad; my temples, gray; my head, unenveloped. I’d walk calmly to the door. “Yes? What? Oh thank you. Yes, I’d love to.”

  How now could he ever forget a woman trying to pass herself off as a naked biped parcel with a home dye job? How could he ever forgive? The quality of mercy is strained.

  And then I hear the truck, and I bolt for the closet.

  Inevitably, a knock. A knock-knock, and I am the joke. What am I doing in the closet? The closet. I have evidently mistaken myself this time for a broom. Emotional Tourette’s. I have Emotional Tourette’s Syndrome, ETS. I could use a steel plate, a patch plate to hold everything together, a stabilizer.

  “Kristina? Are you, um, indisposed?”

  I crouch with the quiet dustmop, the broom. Oh, sweep me off my feet.

  “I forgot to suggest a time for dinner. How about Saturday?”

  “That would be fine,” I call to the coat hangers.

  “What? Sorry, I can’t hear you.”

  “Fine.”

  “At seven?”

  “Yes.”

  “What?”

  “Oh, balls,” I yell and come out of the closet, literally speaking. Claustrophobic, you know. Burst out, more precisely.

  He stands at the sidelight window. Must have nerves of steel plate, he never flinches.

  “Mothballs,” I say, waving off invisible moths. “Phew.”

  He grins. The brown sets off his gleaming teeth and lightning flinders down my spine. “Seven?”

  “Lovely. Seven. Lucky number, seven.”

  He hands me a stack of packages. “I’ll pick you up.”

  I stare into the brown sugar slurry of his eyes.“Mmm.”

  Saturday. I wear tap pants, one of the Miracle bras, a crushed velvet gown, brown. I confess to immediate disappointment. He shows up in a car, an ordinary car; beige, an ordinary beige; with two ordinary doors, four ordinary wheels. Upholstery, remarkable only for its ordinariness, also beige. I feel wan. The date is over before it begins. Is this some flexion of the cosmic will? Some deterministic means by which I preserve my claustrophobia ? Twice, in the car I consider rolling down one of the ordinary windows and leaping out at the observed speed limit. But I will myself to sit tight, to stay the course.

  I had anticipated a lark, a joyride in the cunning brown van, mafficking in the traffic, a rollicking, frolicking ride. Sigh.

  He drives us to the Panda Palace, along the way, pointing out wayside distractions—his favorite bookstore, antique store. Does he shop for a living?

  As he pulls open the door, whiffs of soy waft at me amid a drift of clinking tea cups and ice cubes and convivial laughter. The dining room is alarmingly crowded with happy people. His palm in the small of my back guides me to a table with a centerpiece of tiny paper parasols.

  I want to be witty, charming. “Do you, by any chance, have a steel plate in your head?” I ask.

  “Beg pardon.” He reaches for my hand.

  I tuck it into my purse. Staring at my hand tucked into my purse makes me think about muffs, warm furry handmuffs. “I think it’s best to get some things straight at the get-go,” I say. But I may have said, “gecko.” It would unnerve a more neurotic man.

  He tosses his forelock. “I agree.”

  Or maybe I said ‘gingko’. “Did I say gingko?” I ask.

  He lifts a parasol and hands it to me like a flower. “No, would you like to?”

  I cannot look into his eyes. I keep my hand in my purse. “Like to what?” I mumble.

  “Whatever you’d like.” He lowers the parasol and sets it next to his chopsticks in their paper sleeve of a sleeping bag, twinned, joined. “First dates are awkward,” he says.

  “And second and third.”

  He laughs, that brown, yummy little laugh.

  I still haven’t forgiven him for the car. “Look, why are we here?” I ask.

  “I like Chinese. Don’t you. . . .”

  “No, why are we here?”

  “Oh.” He settles back in his banquette. “Well, Aquinas argued the primum mobile, and that if we can conceive of perfection, then some ideal must exist. Of course, a leap of faith is requisite for happiness.”

  “No. Why did you ask me out? I mean, there I was. Naked. I had an envelope on my head. I mean, are you sick or what?”

  Both of his hands are on the red tabletop. “I thought that you looked pretty,” he says. “I admit the envelope was an odd choice, a fashion risk, but you wore it well. And you order so many books. I am quite a reader myself, and you just don’t meet many women up here who read that much.”

  Is he stoic? Stupid? Stable? I rattle my hand around in my purse feeling lipstick, wallet, comb, the comfortable touch of familiar objects that are not mere projections of perception. Try combing your wind-tossed hair with a perception. I have Schopenhauer on the brain. “You didn’t find me ‘undersized, narrow-shouldered, broad-hi
pped, and short-legged’ ?”

  He shakes his head, that stallion tress whipping. Neigh.

  “Sexus sequior?” I ask.

  “I found you, I find you,” he corrects himself , “lovely, albeit eccentric.”

  Schopenhauer, I am thinking. Rhymes with Eisenhower which reminds me of a knock-knock joke. “I’s an hour late for lunch,” I say.

  He only smiles and orders a poo-poo platter for two from a hovering waiter.

  “I read somewhere that Carl Jung invented the fortune cookie,” I say. “Can you imagine that? You crack open your cookie and read the little banner—Where there is love, there is no will to power; where there is will to power, there is no love.”

  “I would very much like to hold your hand,” he says.

  I leave my hand in my bag. “Muff,” I say, but I may have said ‘mush.’ Just as well. Or ‘much.’ I was nervous. “Did I say ‘much’?” I ask.

  “Not enough. Carl,” he says.

  “What?”

  “Carl. That’s my name. Also. Like Jung. I thought you might like to know. And David Jung invented the fortune cookie; he gave them to the dispossessed on the streets of L.A. in the twenties.”

  Carl. And I give him my hand.

  “You are lovely, he says.

  “Poo poo,” I say as the platter arrives.

  It is Sunday, and I am reading Schopenhauer. “A man cannot resolve to be this or that, nor can he become other than he is, but he is once and for all, and he knows in the course of his experience what he is.”

  Was personality pathology? Why had I behaved so perversely? As Carl had eaten his delicate wings, a spot of grease, just a touch, on the plump soft bottom lip, I imagined going to bed with him, imagined that he was the sort who, when aroused, would roll toward me and say something unforgivable like, “Special delivery for Ms. Corkery. Handle with care.” And beyond that. I saw myself calling him after the weekend, only to discover that he answered the phone by saying, “Yello.” Not the color. But the telephone greeting that fans of Barry Manilow left on their answering machines because it sounded slick. And beyond that—to discover that he called his girlfriends pet names like “foxy thang.” No, no, it would not do.

  I needed a tracking code for my imagination. It got so far out there that it just got lost. In the midst of all this and dinner, I tried to crack my fortune cookie open and it exploded crumbs all over the two of us. “Eating disorder,” I mumbled; then I turned to him in an agoraphobic spasm and said, “Listen, I really have to get out of here. It’s getting way too crowded. Please take me home.”

  Is change impossible? Do I set out to sabotage every possible love, because....

  “Good morning, Kristina,” he says then, still smelling of sheets and a hint of chocolate—rich, sweet, secretive. He kisses the back of my neck.

  I flick off my computer and twist to kiss his brow. “Git,” I say. “Scat. Get your ass back into bed. I am bringing you breakfast in the boudoir.” And I hear the espresso pot blow and splatter in the kitchen.

  “Go on.” And he obliges.

  Sour Schopenhauer was wrong. Forgive the liberal translation. Anus obit. The asshole died, his pessimism, grave.

  Last night, I asked Carl to take me home, and he did. I found a use for the tap pants. And he never, not once, said anything remotely like, “special delivery.”

  Carl is taking me for a ride in his truck today, and I’m bringing him breakfast in bed, an almond biscotti, a fortune cookie, apple Brown Betty, espresso with sifted chocolate arranged on a steel plate.

  What can I say? Even last night, despite my hunt-and-peccadilloes, he saw in me something—how did he put it?—not noumenal but numinous. Luminous.

  My brown bear is moving in. Truth: it was more than just a metaphysical attraction. (The rat-a-tap tap pants.) But it was that, too. There’s no explaining the metaphysics of love and no physic for it. It’s hope. Faith. Taking that running leap. The lovers’ leap, the lovers’ leap of faith. We fling ourselves off the precipice. We catch each other on the way down. It’s a very optimistic enterprise, love. And everything’s looking UP.

  The Wig

  WHEN MOLLY, MY FIRST WIFE, bought the wig, I was initially put off. A natural beauty, she had never struck me as a wig-wearer. Her hair bounced, short, curly and red. “It’s for the beach,” she said. “When my hair’s wet, I won’t have to fidget with it. I’ll just put this on.” Wearing the wig on her fist, she stroked the long hair that sleeked down her forearm like a pelt.

  I shrugged. “Hair dries.”

  “But I won’t have to bother with it. It’ll be more efficient, traveling.” Molly packed the wig carefully in a hatbox for the trip.

  I’d always wanted to go to Greece, and we’d arranged an exchange with a British Classics professor who was also on sabbatical for the year, granting him the use of our Cambridge townhouse for three weeks in his Páros rental.

  Leaving Boston during a miserable April drizzle, we arrived to Greek sun, reaching Parikia by ferry from Naxos. The surprising green waterfront drew its clean line beneath the shimmery white buildings of the village. Her hair crimped into tight curls by the salt air, Molly squinted, her eyes shaded by her hand. “There are supposed to be two great churches—one’s on the waterfront. The other one, Our Lady of the Hundred Gates, is famous for its ikons. But I don’t think you can see it from here. It has a blue dome.”

  I shrugged, seeing only the blue dome of sky, the azure strangeness of the sea, the white village aquiver, suspended in light like a mirage. Molly was chattering about the marble quarries, about Asklipiion, the ruins, the churches. But my pagan self had not crossed over for the bound treasures of books, for tour-guided pages of architecture and Cycladean statuary. Leaving the books to Boston, I had crossed for less studied expeditions into the imagined groves of light and taste, figs and dusty sun-split olives, fluttery poppy-reds. “What is the ikon for pure pleasure?” I asked.

  Molly squinched her nose, tossed her tight red curls. “Philistine,” she said. And she scouted the landing for the red-shirted contact our landlord had appointed to transport us.

  When I entered our small white farmhouse, I settled immediately into it, loving its coolness, and shadows, and shuttered windows open to the flower-tangled porch. For the first few days, the wig sat on its Styrofoam stand on the rough plank table by the door. I tried to cajole Molly into walking down to the beach with me, but she refused. “I’m not going swimming at a nude beach.”

  So I packed a couple of token books and went down alone. I didn’t read. I watched the young local girls with their black, coily hair and nearly black bodies as they shyly glanced at the newcomer and giggled. I wasn’t ogling. Their nakedness to the sun, their only cover, the crotch hair shaved in decorative vees, simply gladdened me. I turtled into the sand, and threw my arms wide to the sky. I let the heat steam me, the waves rock me. I felt less tired of myself than I had felt in years. In this light, middle age no longer unfolded like a death sentence.

  In the afternoon, I climbed back up to our house and ate warm tomatoes and olives on oiled bread with Molly on the porch, sipped the dark sweet local wine. As Molly undressed for bed on the third night, her body glimmered in the cave-like darkness, her paleness, phosphorescent. In the dim interior, only the white wig stand and Molly gleamed.

  “Come to the beach with me tomorrow,” I said. “It’s crazy not to enjoy the sun. We’re here for such a short time.”

  My skin tight with salt and sun fitted me. The sheets whispered against me like fanned air. Wanting her to share this sensual contentment, I slid my hand between Molly’s legs and coaxed, “Come with me tomorrow. If you’re uncomfortable about it, put on a swimsuit. Just come with me.”

  In the morning, Molly agreed to chance the beach. I tried not to gasp when she came out to join me with a cheery, “Ready.” She wore a demure plaid two-piece, tennis shoes, a towel around her neck, sunglasses. But what stunned me was the wig. Its severe bangs, its starkness, those black a
s licorice whips on her corpse-white shoulders. I covered my reaction, but she looked like a vampire beatnik who’d holed up in a dim coffeehouse for a decade. Her strangeness hurt me, so I held her hand tight against my waist as we walked to the beach.

  The dark girls tittered, but Molly, secure behind her sunglasses, seemed oblivious. “It’s beautiful here,” she said.

  I told her I was happy she’d come. And with her stretched to the sun on the white towel beside me, I was. She placed her white hand on my naked hip. “Unhook my bra,” she asked. And I did, pleased to see her back bare to the light. When she rolled over, she surprised me by slipping off her top. I squinted sidelong at her small breasts, those nipples which my nighttime hands knew so well poked up so alert, so curious in the sun that they seemed alien to me. I didn’t dare say anything. Molly only said, “This feels nice.” And she rolled the bottom of the suit down an inch or two below her navel to savor more sun.

  By the afternoon of the following day, the bottoms had joined the bra in the beach bag. Molly turned a sienna brown that reminded me of our northern Indian summers, of early September oak leaves. Walking naked on the beach, her long body, brown but foreign among the hard black bodies of the local girls, she stood out, but beautifully. She still wore the wig, but now, against her chestnut skin, it slicked long and elegant down her arms, emphasizing her height, or perhaps, like a heliotrope, she actually inched, lengthening toward the sun. The wig’s black bangs frizzed into curls from the salt, glamorous and dangerous. She developed an aloofness, a 40’s movie star pose as she reclined on the beach among those darker bodies talking in their shadowy language of sounds and gestures.

  I got to know the names of two of the laughing girls, Irini and Maria, whose inquisitiveness daily edged them closer to our beach towels. Our conversations were exchanges of pointed fingers, words, and giggles. “Wife,” I said pointing at Molly. And Irini and Maria hid their mouths behind their hands.