Bear with me as I create an analogy based on bicycling champion Lance Armstrong. Much has been made of Armstrong’s natural or genetic gifts; he has, as I understand it, three lungs, no doubt a considerable asset in the Alps. But we all know that an extra lung in and of itself does not account for Armstrong’s preeminence. He also has spent a good deal of time on his bicycle, making himself better than everyone else. Without work ethic, a freakish genetic mutation is nothing more than a freakish genetic mutation. To achieve elite status in any pursuit, one requires a combination of innate ability and determination, and what I am trying to tell you now is that young Charlie Valentine, Perlis High School class of 07, possesses precisely this combination in the field of love. Even as a sophomore in Beginning Love, Charlie instinctively understood what many – my former husband Dennis, for instance – will never, never understand about intimacy and affection. But he has also developed his gifts with real initiative and self-discipline, devoting himself to his studies, devouring the love canon.
I will never forget walking into Beginning Love nearly three years ago and seeing skinny Charlie sitting in the back row with his notebook open to a clean white page. I and everyone else in town knew that his father had pushed his mother down a flight of stairs when Charlie was just an infant, and that Charlie had spent his youth in a series of foster homes, some of which were case studies in pernicious love. I certainly expected him to be a typical Perlis youth; that is, I expected him to regard his own heart, and the hearts of everyone around him, as an old piñata, bludgeoned, shredded, plundered of all sweetness. And yet Charlie quickly proved me wrong and he almost immediately distinguished himself as an affectional savant. While he lacked the conceptual framework, critical vocabulary, and familiarity with the canon that he later would develop, he somehow had a native empathy and a real sense for the art of love. In the second week of class, months before the Communication Unit, Charlie respectfully engaged J.T., one of a dozen or so students vying for the position of class clown, explaining that J.T.’s unruly in-class comments were, like all sarcasm, ‘corrosive to genuine trust and intimacy’. The ensuing period of silence – broken finally by the sobbing of a jilted cheerleader in the hallway – was the most powerful six or eight seconds of my teaching career. And while I may be a fatalist, I don’t consider it mere fatalism to say that I will never feel another moment like it, in or out of the classroom.
While most of his peers enthusiastically desist their formal love education after the required Beginning Love, Charlie enrolled in my Intermediate Love, an elective, during his junior year. Intermediate Love, as you may know, is basically a course in boundaries, responsibilities and needs. To begin the Needs Unit, I administered, as I do almost every year, the Mortenson Passion Vector Diagnostic Exam (popularly, the Passion Grapher), which measures the relative warp of the subject’s amorous desires, interests and goals. Students answer 234 questions and, with the aid of Passion Grapher software (what a racket), their responses are converted into a graph of passion vectors. The straighter the lines, the healthier the lover. I probably don’t need to tell you that the Passion Graphs we derive at Perlis High usually look like bonsai trees – a typical junior’s vector will loop back to cross itself or veer wildly off the edge of the page. The software version we use at Perlis is no doubt dated, but still, we had students whose passions’ coordinates were literally unrepresentable in two-dimensional space. There are crooked needs and then there are crooked needs. But Charlie’s passions? Strong, lovely, majestic blasts, right down the middle of the diagnostic fairways. These vectors looked like they had been drawn with rulers. (It is a testament to his romantic discretion – often mistaken here as shyness – that Charlie has not taken a girlfriend at PHS.) I sent the results to Dr. Mortenson himself, and he replied, six months later, by denouncing me and my ‘hoax’. Nobody’s desires are that straight, he wrote, and particularly not those of a sixteen-year-old foster kid from the sticks.
The final project in Intermediate Love is a Personal Love History. The PLH requires students to investigate the types of familial and romantic love they have experienced – the forces that have shaped their predilections and capacities – since childhood. The purpose is to understand one’s heart as the product of specific circumstances. (The implied logic that once students understand their own hearts they will subsequently act in their hearts’ best interest has always struck me as a form of optimism that borders on mental illness, but the curriculum comes down from on high.) Charlie’s PLH was of breathtaking scope and tone; he covered four generations of his family, and his 53-page treatment of his ancestors’ staggeringly warped passions – accounting for more than two dozen love-induced felonies over a century – was both firm and empathetic. Judicious throughout, the PLH was by turns clear-eyed castigation and tender memoir. One of the writing samples you will find in Charlie’s file is a short excerpt from this masterpiece.
You will notice from Charlie’s transcript that he has not taken Advanced Love, but please note that our county does not offer Advanced Love. The official explanation is that there is not enough student interest, but the real reason is that Advanced Love would likely include a Sex Unit, and the school board has prohibited sex education in county schools. However, for his senior year, Charlie, on his own initiative, planned an independent study with me that has extended and expanded his intense exploration of love. He developed his own massive and diversified reading list, which includes work from many genres and disciplines – poetry, fiction, religion, philosophy, psychology, and even biology and chemistry (though he remains passionate in his position that the sciences will never be able to account fully for love). Late last fall, Charlie created a love tutoring center at the high school, staffed by volunteers that he trains. Within weeks, Charlie opened up a second center in the basement of the Perlis Baptist Church, open nights and weekends. It is far too early to determine what kind of effect the centers are having at school and in the community, but social services did report a slight drop in abuse, neglect and abandonment during the Christmas holidays, typically the high season for love-related mayhem.
I hesitate to mention one last point about Charlie’s recent studies because I fear it may negatively affect your estimation of his candidacy. But if this is the case, then your brain is as weak as your heart. Lately, the scope of Charlie’s focus has broadened considerably to include politics, economics, government and history. In our weekly meetings the last few months he has begun speaking much more expansively about love and justice. I’m not sure I know what he’s up to, but if I had to guess, I’d say he’s developing a theory of love and revolution. Many years ago I surrendered all hope of any meaningful change in the world, but Charlie’s interest in the intersection of love and political economy has stirred some long dormant part of my heart.
It is true that almost every student I teach snickers and punches a classmate whenever I mention the love canon. And it is also true that many of them think eros is the plural form of the kind of sharp projectile their camouflaged daddies shoot at large game. Many are pregnant; many have black eyes; many are so damaged that they will never give themselves fully; many are so damaged that they will never stop giving themselves fully; most are reckless, blind, angry, and deranged by lunatic desires. Most are so irrevocably lonely and love-starved as to be unreachable by love. Inevitably, Charlie’s talents seem miraculous in a town like Perlis. Nevertheless, I am certain that Charles Valentine would be, even in the most love-enlightened community (and please do tell me where that might be), an exceptionally gifted and promising student. Charlie has my respect, my envy, my blessing, and my very highest recommendation.
He also has my heart. I imagine by now it is obvious that I am deeply, deeply in love with Charles Valentine. One evening last winter I saw him in the parking lot of the mall theater. I had had, it is true, a couple of tall vodka tonics, and I asked Charlie, out of earshot of his drug-addicted foster aunt, if he would like to come to my apartment some time (‘or now’) to
drink lemon liqueur and chat in front of my gas log fireplace. Of course it was wrong – let me count the ways: he’s eighteen (actually seventeen at the time), I am decades his senior, he’s my student, and all of the boats in this town have glass bottoms. But he is an extraordinary boy and the wind was so cold and my phone sometimes goes weeks without ringing. I like to believe that Charlie hesitated just a moment before he declined my proposal, doing so in a way that allowed me to retain my meager stores of hope and dignity and professionalism. In fact, his rejoinder was so tenderly delivered as to make me feel, for just a moment, worthy of expert love. I remember his cheeks were blasted red by the wind and his hair stood up funny in front. As usual he was not wearing proper winter clothes, and he shivered slightly as he pointed out to me that he might compromise his grade in the independent study if he were to come to my apartment. He added – and here his tone was elegant, rich and complex – that I would likely find him much less interesting and desirable the moment he ceased to be so scrupulous in his passions. This, I concede, is probably true. Such is his empathy, such is his understanding of the paradoxes of love!
This recommendation completes Charles Valentine’s Love Credentials File. You, holding this letter, you with your scars and rusty scalpels, you do not deserve Charles Valentine because nobody deserves him. If by some fluke you find yourself in his midst, I implore you to receive him with gratitude and with reverence.
Here he comes, Raisin Hearts. Here comes my Charlie and he is not mine, not mine, not mine.
Sincerely,
Paula Gates
Director of Love Education
Perlis High School
A. L. KENNEDY
Another room. We still have these in common at least: the so very many rooms. Not exactly empty, hardly full, and the small unbalanced weight of us soft inside them while we look at the distance between the window and the wardrobe, the bathroom and the table, the nightstand and the necessary bed – if they give us nothing else, there always is a bed. The cities outside, they don’t matter. I am in my rooms and you are in yours and the distance between us too deep to see.
And the travelling. We both know about that – one loneliness pursuing while we hide in the rush of another – our type of flight.
The way to Norwich, I remember, was very cold. Trains stammered and wandered and stopped in the damp, flat country and the sleet kept coming, nothing to stop it, and my coat still smelt of holding you, which is to say of that goodbye which seemed hardly final at all and also like tumbling over into nothing, no one.
Although I am an adult, we are both of us adults, and quite aware that we can live without anybody, anything. There are very few losses we won’t survive after our fashion: keeping ourselves from the thoughts we would rather not have and breathing and blinking and swallowing as we should. We look very much like other adults, are credible.
Such a bad journey, though, to Norwich and I wanted to call you and say how many hours longer it lasted than it ought to have done, how many baths I took to try and warm my hands, my body, rinse away what won’t be shifted.
Little Formica unit in that room, bible and a hairless carpet, television bolted to the wall, fawn kettle, three custard creams I didn’t eat and this space I could almost touch, could have occupied a month before, a week before: the shape of myself on the bed and calling you, feeling better, understood.
Like being in London and back in that place I can’t go to any more – where the rooms have good, thick walls and little kitchens, proper sheets – and meeting the way we did then: on the run and gently, perfectly unhinged. Dinner when I couldn’t find the restaurant, doped up and stitches in my mouth, and you came out looking for me when I phoned and then I circled round, holding your voice in the receiver, and watched until I saw you walking up towards me, talking me in.
Talking the way I hadn’t, didn’t, don’t – about penguins’ eggs, dentistry, lamp oil, cruelty, theft, forgiveness, coming quietly, the possibility of losing everything, the possibility of writing on the dark. And we said we were glad that we were alive: more precisely, that we were glad of each other’s lives, if not our own. Which is the way that joy comes in – quietly and written on the dark.
The rooms always come with their different shapes of darkness: lintels and blades of shadow where we stumble in the small hours and cannot find the glass, the switch, the door-knob, whatever it is we are reaching for and think we need. Sitting perhaps in that room in Cologne and beyond the generous window and the sense of expensive confinement is a streetlamp and the cemetery wall, a view on to old graves, and I think I need to try and make you laugh – nicely hard and always worth it – and I think I need to do that and I think I need to see the black flame of your hair – suggesting the black flame in your head – and I think I need to see the way your beard grows when you leave it – as if it would like you to seem ridiculous – and I think I need to feel the way your stomach flinches under touch – that nice shyness – and I think I need to see you smile and I need the way you smell when you haven’t washed and I need to see you smile. I need to see you smile.
But I’m wrong, of course: I don’t need it. What I have must be enough. No one survives without having enough. I have the light from the smoke alarm in the ceiling, the pinprick of red ticking on and off, and I have this tiredness and this fear that all there is left will be waiting by myself while dying comes closer, travels. You said you were afraid all of the time. Now that’s how I am, too, but I can’t tell you.
And I did nothing to help you when, from the first time, you helped me. Dying in a plane crash, never finishing another sentence, being ugly, being selfish, being useless, being hurt – the stupid fears a stupid person has – you lifted them very precisely away, as if you knew what you were doing and knew me. The good I found in you I never showed you properly. I was not convincing.
Now I’m in this room, in New York – thick rain clattering down the skylight and it’s my late evening in the middle of your night: even our days separated, staggered apart. My luggage has gone missing and this would be funny if I could make it a story for you – another disastrous journey that wouldn’t much matter, because we’re all right and care that we’re all right. Only I have no story, because you don’t want one.
I have this which you won’t read. Whatever form of words I find, it will make no difference – there’s nothing more you’ll let me say to you. I work in invisible ink, unsay myself in rooms I don’t want and don’t know and I keep on the road to stay ahead of so much silence, to be beside you in this one way, travelling as I know you’re travelling, running.
I never was sure what we believed in, except each other, but since I am helpless and you may be too, I make us a prayer every night which asks if you could be happy, if you could be safe. Then I would have almost enough.
My love never was any better than that.
JEFF PARKER
From: [email protected]
Date: Wednesday, November 22, 2006 11:42 AM
To: [email protected]
Subject: a little catch-up
Dear Jana,
Hi, I found your address online. It might be weird to get an email from me after so long.
I don’t rightly know where to begin. I often remember those days in ’94 and ’95: You and I, two spry young HTML coders who couldn’t get enough of each other. What really did it for me was how you brought our work back to the bedroom. Serious. I loved that. If you had been one of those, ‘Fuck me with your big dick’ kind of girls, I don’t think we would have made it as long as we did. But there was this one thing you would scream – I can hear your voice right now: ‘Open carrot, div, align equals right, close carrot, indent, open carrot, image, space, source equals harder dot harder dot harder dot jpeg, close carrot, outdent, open carrot, backslash, div, close carrot.’ I couldn’t control myself. And you didn’t have to worry about referring to external javascripts or style sheets or database query strings which is what it’s all about now, so techni
fied and unerotic. Those days, the early days of the Internet, were much simpler times. Give me a basic scripting language over object orientation any day.
It’s not the reason I’m writing. I haven’t really told you anything about me yet though, have I? If you’re interested, I kept on with the coding, moving up here and there as the technology changed. Eventually I bought a book on SQL and learned databases. It was a good move at a good time from a career perspective. The past five years I’ve been in database design. It’s interesting, when you’re building databases all day you focus in on one thing, you know, the primary key. Everything else is relation, relation, relation. Does this other thing relate to my primary key? If so, how? If not, how to organise the relation?
Coming around to it, finally, my wife – yep, I’m married – wants to have a baby. We’ve been trying for a while and with no results. I suggested she get a fertility check-up and she kind of half got offended. Ah, that’s not true. Lisa doesn’t get offended. Everything is ironic with her. But she got ironic offended and said I needed to get a fertility check-up too. I said, ‘Look, it’s not me okay. I’ve been responsible for two abortions in my life.’ Lisa thinks this is a trip. She accuses me of bragging about my abortions. But I’m a good sport and I went and did the jerk off into a cup thing. The results came back showing her pond fully stocked. Me? Low sperm motility, which means the percentage of moving sperm and their quality of motion. I’m telling them that their results must be off, to retest, and they say things like, it’s not the first time they’ve had a guy who can’t make babies suggest a history with a woman who claimed they made a baby. I about punched him for, in effect, calling into question your good name – you know how fond I’ve always been of you, Jana, even after we split. I checked around on the Internet and certain people’s sperm motility does decrease over time, especially if they’re mountain bikers or some new studies show that cellphones actually have an impact. But I don’t ride and I don’t talk so much on the cell, surely not enough for that. Quite the opposite. I sit ten-hour days in a one-thousand dollar ergonomically correct office chair, comfortably resting my balls on an indentation which keeps them, as I code, warm and balanced.
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