Maybe what I felt when F. and I Skyped was the anxiety that arises from sensing the disjunction between those beings. Intellectually, yes, I understood that what I was seeing on the screen was in fact F., or the light that had bounced off her in her room in Italy and then been captured by a webcam, digitized, and transmitted over the Internet as packets of data, just as what I was hearing was a digital transcription of her actual voice. I didn’t think it was a special effect, though within my lifetime we may reach the point where we can no longer tell an actual person on the screen from a complex animation of that person, maybe stitched together from the billions of digital photo and video and audio samples that have been taken of her in her lifetime, the ones she posed for, the ones snatched on the sly by surveillance cameras in banks, airports, office buildings, and subway stations, not to mention the cameras that gaze impassively down on our streets, waiting for someone to bite into the vouchsafed fruit and look up with juice shining on her lips.
But the F. that I was seeing and talking with was a mediated F., an F. that had been mediated over and over. Between the image on my screen and the woman in a room in Umbria lay an uncounted number of operations, as if a gold coin of great worth had been changed into one currency after another by a series of invisible money changers, one of whom eventually gave me what he said was a sum equivalent to the value of the coin. I guess it was in dollars. But what were the transaction fees? At those moments when F.’s voice didn’t sync with the movements of her lips, what was she really saying? When her lively, changeable features were replaced by a Mondrian schematic that might be the universal skeleton of digital beings, what expression was being hidden from me? On seeing her face appear on my screen, I felt the pleasure I always felt on seeing her after some time apart, but how much of that pleasure was borrowed from memory? And if my memory had been as limited or, say, as capricious as Biscuit’s, would I have looked at F. with the same incomprehension, seeing only a tiny, smiling figure in a window the size of a credit card, with a piping voice that was almost familiar?
When we speak of love, we must speak not only of desire but delight. Desire doesn’t last very long—typically, no more than three years. Delight doesn’t always last longer than that, but it can. Studies have yet to identify its upward limit. Delight is not a condition of lack but of sufficiency, a plenty wholly independent of the circumstance of possession. You don’t have to possess the object of love to delight in it, any more than you have to possess the sun to bake voluptuously in its warmth. You can revel in the object from afar, regardless of whether she loves you back or is even aware of you crouching in your blind, camouflaged in your cloak of reeds. Just watching her is enough. I don’t desire Biscuit; I’m relieved to say I never have. But thinking of her, I visualize her busy gait, the purposeful mast of her tail, her trills and chirps of greeting. I recall the way she rubs her jowls against mine, the way she rolls onto her side and pumps her hind legs to tear the guts out of an imaginary enemy, and I’m filled with pleasure. A similar pleasure comes over me when I think of F. Her high, round forehead, which seen in profile—say, on those afternoons she used to walk down Astor Road beside me—looks as innocent and intrepid as Mighty Mouse’s. Her silent, pop-eyed grimace of mock frustration. The little grunt with which she settles into herself as she gets ready for sleep. Her Midwestern reticence and her heedless blurtings. The look of undisguised appetite she casts at a stranger’s entrée in a restaurant, as if at any moment she might reach over and help herself to a forkful of it.
These details seem to reflect something pure and unselfconscious in the object, the object as she is when she thinks no one is looking. When I see my cat or my wife, I seem to be seeing her as she truly is, free of all my wonderful, occluding ideas about her, including (in F.’s case but not Biscuit’s) the wonderful, occluding idea of desire. There’s a Zen koan that asks, What was your original face before you were born? Perhaps what I am delighting in are those unborn faces, the woman’s, the cat’s. And perhaps this pleasure, so generous and self-renewing, allows us to participate, even at a remove, in what God may have felt as he looked down at his creation and became lost in its splendor, maybe to such a degree that for a time he forgot that he created it, that it was his.
In the foregoing, of course, the words “see” and “seeing” are used figuratively as well as literally. It’s possible to delight in the love object even when one cannot actually see her, as, for example, when one is separated from the object by time or distance. Under such circumstances, one must be content with the images afforded by other faculties. One must imagine the object as she might be. One must remember her as she was.
Bruno didn’t return phone calls with the promptness one values in a cat-sitter. The first week he was at the house, I had to leave four or five messages before he called back to tell me—wearily—that the cats were fine. When we Skyped, I told F. I was beginning to think the kid was a lox. As if he’d overheard this and resolved to make a better impression, the next week he called me on a Monday evening, before I’d even begun to pester him. But when his name came up on my caller ID, I felt a twinge of unease, and the moment I heard his voice, my whole being constricted like a single great muscle in spasm.
10
THE HOUR PASSED; A DISPATCHER’S VOICE, BLURRED by tiredness and bad acoustics, issued its summons. I made my way to the gate and boarded the late train I had taken so many times with F., the two of us drowsy but excited after a night in the city and eager for bed. The black river scrolled past. The mountains on the other side were invisible now; I could only feel their dreaming weight. The Catskills aren’t high as mountains go—geologically speaking, they aren’t even proper mountains but an ancient plateau carved into relief by millions of years of water erosion—but they’re some of the oldest in America. Their original sediments were laid down during the Devonian period, 350 million years ago.
Washington Irving calls them “fairy mountains,” foreshadowing the enchantment that propels the plot of his most famous story. Rip Van Winkle may be the only character in American literature to have a bridge named after him. The honor seems all the more anomalous because the story that bears his name is so lightweight. A village loafer, fleeing his scolding wife, wanders into the mountains, where he meets an odd company of men who dress in antiquated clothing and amuse themselves by playing ninepins. They ply Rip with booze till he falls into a drunken sleep. When he awakens, he creeps back home, nervous about what his wife will put him through for having spent the night abroad. Instead, he discovers that twenty years have passed. His wife and most of the people he knew are dead, and the only Rip Van Winkle his neighbors have heard of is his son, who has grown up to be a great idler in his own right. Old Rip is taken in by his daughter and lives to a happy old age. The end. Offhand, that doesn’t seem worth a bridge.
When I got off at my country station, I reflexively looked around for our car. On nights F. came to pick me up, I always loved the moment when I first saw its headlights shine at me across the parking lot and recognized her small face behind the wheel. It wasn’t there; I called a taxi. By the time I got to my house, it was one in the morning. I’d been traveling eleven hours and was out more than $500. I stepped through the gate, which creaked, and as if in answer, the light in the bedroom went out, Bruno signaling that he was unavailable for a late-night search party. As transparent as the ruse was, I still kept my voice low. “Biscuit!” I called. “Biscuit!” I could hear the despair in it. What creature in its right mind gravitates to despair? A Saint Bernard, maybe. But not a cat. At last I gave up and went into the barn to sleep. Even with the heater on, it was cold, and I lay under the thin blanket with my hands clasped between my thighs for warmth.
Back when I was in my thirties, it became common in certain circles to speak of love as discipline. I would characterize those circles as people made queasy by the sexual weightlessness of the preceding two decades, by their sexual weightlessness, people in bounding, caroming flight from the idea that love
is never having to say you’re sorry. Actually, the secret meaning of “love is discipline” might in fact be “I’m sorry.” I’m sorry I didn’t call you. I’m sorry I didn’t show up. I’m sorry I came with somebody else. I’m sorry I lied about my wife, my husband, my girlfriend. I’m sorry I gave you that herpes. I’m sorry I forgot your birthday. I’m sorry I forgot the check. I’m sorry I told you I love you. At the time I meant it, I really did.
People spoke of commitments, and of those—usually, but not always, men—who avoided them as “Peter Pans” or “com-mitmentphobes.” Suddenly, without any prompting, we had returned to the medicalized sexual ethics, or the moralizing sexual psychology, of the 1950s, when men—and back then it was always men—who didn’t want to marry were diagnosed as immature or latent homosexuals, although in the 1950s homosexuality was itself seen as a kind of immaturity, as if every gay man were a little boy who hadn’t yet learned what the different holes are for. By the time I am speaking of, however, a commitment didn’t have to mean marriage; the sixties hadn’t been entirely in vain. It was like medical insurance, with different plans offering different kinds of coverage. A commitment could mean that you no longer had sex with other people or that you wouldn’t have sex with them without telling your partner first, so that she could then decide if the commitment was still working for her. It might be an agreement to see each other so many nights a week, to keep clothes and toiletries at each other’s apartments, to spend the holidays with each other’s families and buy presents for people who weren’t related to you by blood or law. It might mean buying property together. It might mean maintaining this state of affairs until you finally decided to marry or found a reason why the commitment should be dissolved, the dissolution in a way being a fulfillment of the commitment, an escape clause written into it from the very start.
Of course, the idea of love as obligation is very old. It’s one reason why we have marriage at all. In the beginning, it was obligation that made love possible, and that may still be so, going by studies that show that couples whose marriages were arranged report the same rate of happiness as those who chose their spouses. Having moved into this house of obligation, they make up their minds to be happy in it, although the windows are a little small and the kitchen doesn’t have enough counter space. But obligations arise even in love that has no romantic component and even when there’s no real reason to observe them. In the Bible, Ruth chooses to stay with her mother-in-law even after her husband dies, though it will mean a life of exile and poverty. “Whither thou goest, I will go,” she tells Naomi. “And where thou lodgest, I will lodge” (Ruth 1:16). No rule is at stake. Ruth’s husband is dead; she’s free to go. Naomi has told her to go. Ruth begs to stay with her because she loves her. She has come to love her, love growing out of the old, otiose obligations like life bursting forth from something dead, as if a stone were suddenly to send forth green shoots. Love may arise out of obligations, but it also gives rise to them, and the latter kind are stronger than the mandates of any church or law court. We don’t obey them out of fear but out of a murky inner necessity. We don’t know why, only that if we don’t, we won’t be able to live with ourselves. “Law isn’t all,” goes a poem by Ishmael Reed:The driver’s test
says nothing
about dogs, but people
stop anyway.
I woke early, with an aching back. I shrugged on jeans and boots and went outside. The sky was the damp pale gray of a pearl. Dew hung on the grass, which needed mowing. When Rip Van Winkle returns to his house—the house he remembers leaving only the day before—he finds it “empty, forlorn, and apparently abandoned,” and looking about me, I was struck by how decrepit my home had become, the grass too long, the screen door of the barn loose on its hinges. When I’d washed my face earlier, the water that came from the faucet had smelled of sulfur. I called for my cat in the same meek voice I had used five hours ago and then thought, Fuck it, it’s my house, and shouted her name. “Biscuit!” Shouting, I made my way to the back of the garden and then through some brush that separated it from the college dorm where the year before I’d seen a topless woman stride up the walk, purposefully but without haste, her breasts bouncing.
After Rip learns of everything that has taken place during his slumber—his wife and friends dead and his very country transformed into this unprecedented thing, a republic—Irving writes that his “heart passed away.” He asks after Rip Van Winkle, and his neighbors point to his son lounging by a tree. “He doubted his own identity, and whether he was himself or another man.” Alongside all his other losses, he has lost his place in the world, the space that he alone occupied. Such loss of place is a kind of death; it may be worse than the physical kind. Thinking about our deaths, we imagine that they will create a void in the lives of those who love us. The thought of that void can be comforting, the way it can be comforting to picture the weeping mourners at our funerals. At least somebody is crying for us. But no one is crying for Rip. No one seems to realize he’s gone. His place in the world has been filled, as if it had been dug not in earth but the sea. “I’m not myself,” he stammers. “I’m somebody else—that’s me yonder—no, that’s somebody else; got into my shoes—I was myself last night; but I fell asleep on the mountain . . . and everything’s changed, and I’m changed; and I can’t tell what’s my name, or who I am!”
Another writer, one whose instincts were tragic rather than comic, might have lingered on this trauma. Irving brushes it aside. The displaced person is granted a new place in the home of his daughter and the life of the village, where he takes up his old occupation of lounging on the bench outside the inn. And although his voice falters when he asks after his wife, he takes the news of her death as “a drop of comfort.” It’s a heartless moment, but comedy is often heartless, and obligation doesn’t always lead to love.
I felt something brush my ankle and looked down. It was Biscuit: that cat and no other. She grinned up at me, purring. I gaped down at her. When I reached for her, her small body felt as strong and supple as a trout’s. Her fur was matted in places, and when I stroked her head, I encountered stiff quills of what might be tar or pine sap. “You dirty cat!” I scooped her up in my arms, and she let me press my face against her for a while before pushing me away. Once I let I her down, she seemed to remember that she was angry with me: I’d left her. Ostentatiously, she turned her back, then went over to a shrub and sat down in its shade, her tail lashing. I didn’t try to coax her out. I just watched her. I know that my feelings were absurd or at least inflated, just as I know that I have no knowledge, not even an inkling, of what Biscuit was actually feeling. She may have been irritated at being picked up and then mauled by a great, naked, bony human head. She may not even have remembered that I’d been gone. A cat is a wild thing whose nature has somehow grown around human beings and become entwined with theirs, but that nature is still wild.
After a while I got up—in my absorption I had sat down in the grass—and called to my cat before setting off toward the house. I didn’t look back, but it was only a moment before she caught up with me. She stayed more or less at my side until we neared the driveway. Then she bounded ahead of me, pausing once to look back, or so it seemed to me, to make sure I was still there. Again, she grinned, openmouthed. When I opened the door of the house, she trotted inside as if she’d been gone no more than a few hours and was looking forward to taking a couple noisy mouthfuls of dry food, then curling up on her favorite chair.
In grade school science they taught us about the water cycle. Rain falls from the clouds and gathers in lakes and rivers and oceans, then evaporates in the heat of the sun to become water vapor, and the vapor rises to form new clouds, which release rain once more. I still remember the poster, with its arrow-headed circle.
I’d like to think that love, too, is cyclical, at least under the right conditions.
The cycle begins with desire, the hot, quick spark that passes between two people and sets them ablaze. If it burns long enough
, we call that love, and the people cleave together. They may not become one, a romantic fancy that has furnished the justification for a whole lot of pathology, but they fuse a little in spots, like tin soldiers cast in a single mold that have to be twisted apart. They pledge themselves, or as we’ve gotten used to saying, they commit, and even if their obligation remains informal, even if it remains unstated, they feel its rigor. Brought together by desire, they now sometimes resist it, the impulse to go home with the stranger at the art opening, to let the phone keep ringing while they watch college basketball or a crummy movie on the Lifetime channel. They obey desire’s summons only when it leads them back to each other. That’s how they stay together. Desire breeds love, which in turn breeds obligation, and the obligation makes love stronger.
But love is hot and obligation is cool, and below a certain temperature the fire goes out, and we look into the eyes in which we once saw a furnace and see only a stack of debts. Debt is another word for obligation. Forgive us our debts, as we forgive our debtors. The Gospels knew how hard it is to love someone who owes you something, or who you think does. It’s even worse when you’re the one who owes. Not even Jesus asked us to feel good about the bank. And so instead of being a self-renewing cycle, love may be more of a self-annihilating arc, canceled by what it calls into being. We build a chapel in the garden, and the next thing we know, the garden is filled with graves.
Another Insane Devotion Page 21