Love Begins in Winter

by Simon Van Booy

  When they arrived, I wrote back to Jennifer, asking if she had loved Dr. Felixson and why the affair had ended after only a few weeks. She wrote back almost immediately. She said Blix Felixson was the only man she had ever met who could love unconditionally without having to be loved back. She said it was unnerving because he was never disappointed by anything.

  Or he was disappointed by everything. But I didn’t suggest this. I had learned my lesson.

  December 23rd, 1977

  For infants, discomfort in any measure is hopefully met with physical and emotional contact with a parent or caregiver. Could it be then, in the silence and confusion after we falsely perceive childhood has ended, that our experience of discomfort is met with an instinct to seek solace through the same end? An emotional reassurance from another human being bound up with physical embrace? So then, in adulthood, could it be possible that we spend the majority of our lives looking for comfort from strangers?

  Adult fears are idealized to the point where they have become too big to fit through the hole they originally came through.

  People’s expectations of coupling may be too grand, and thus disappointment, loneliness, and often pain are the inevitable adjuncts of something we thought would be the ultimate answer (an emotional cure-all) to our ongoing fears. Many people who feel an emotional emptiness when alone for long periods look to marriage the way someone financially poor views winning a jackpot.

  All wars are the external realization of our internal battles. Humans must learn not to blame each other for being afraid, disappointed, or in pain. We perhaps might learn to view those we have special feelings toward as being our companions rather than our saviors, companions on the journey back to childhood. But there is nothing to find. We must only unravel. And in the meantime——lower our expectations of each other (and ourselves!) in order to “love” more deeply and more humanly.

  It is almost dark now. I can hear rain on the window, but I cannot see it. A car drives past. I wonder who is in it.

  I wonder what life would be like if I now were married. Perhaps the smell of cake would fill the house. I think of Mother and Father. I remember launching my model aeroplanes off the hill at Skansen. Visiting my father’s office in Stockholm in the bright noon sun. I remember my father’s face. My mother’s face. If only I could speak to them now. It would be a different story altogether. I would forgive them.

  Dr. Felixson died alone and was not discovered for several days. The Southampton Press reported that a doctor of many disciplines who was of some note, had passed away from causes unknown at his Shinnecock Hills cottage, and was discovered by a landscaping crew who called local police when they saw an elderly man through an open window lying on the floor, apparently unconscious.

  July 7th, 1977

  It’s true the people we meet shape us. But the people we don’t meet shape us also, often more because we have imagined them so vividly.

  There are people we yearn for but never seem to meet. Every adult yearns for some stranger, but it is really childhood we miss. We are yearning for that which has been stolen from us by what we have become.

  Brian is something in the universe and I am something in the universe, and our real names are not sounds or marks on a page but bodies. We meet and then we recede.

  We can never truly be one sea, though we are both water.

  June 21st, 1978

  We are not at home in the world because we imagine it is as we have become, full of nothing but yearning and forgetting and hoping for something so raw we can’t describe it. We think of the world as the place of beginnings and ends, and we forget the in-between, and even how to inhabit our own bodies. And then in adulthood, we sit and wonder why we feel so lost.

  It is Sunday afternoon and Brian and I are driving out to Hampton Bays to see Alan. We’ve been together almost four years. I have been editing the journals of Dr. Felixson. They will be published the year after next by a man I think Dr. Felixson would have admired. I have my own practice now, but eventually I’d like to teach. I have had an article published on Dr. Felixson’s methods in pediatric psychology in the New England Journal of Medicine. His first book, The Silence After Childhood, is being reissued next year by a publisher based in Berlin. Since my article was published, I have received thirty-four letters from doctors across the world.

  Brian sometimes tells me anecdotes about when Dr. Felixson examined him as a child. I love these and write them down.

  Brian and I have also decided to live together, but we’re never getting married.

  November 17th, 1980

  Today, a woman touched my sleeve in the supermarket as I was trying to pick out good strawberries. She asked if I was the children’s doctor from Germany. I corrected her and explained that Sweden is much, much colder in some ways but not in others. She asked me if I had a moment, and I said of course, though I thought to myself, it is an interesting thing to say because one’s life is nothing more than a string of moments. Each life is like a string of pearls.

  This woman wanted to know why her four-year-old son, when she met him at school, had given his macaroni drawing to another boy’s mother and not to her. She said she didn’t speak to her son all the way home and even cried. Then she said he cried and locked himself in his bedroom. She was worried that her son didn’t love her——otherwise why would he give his drawing to some other child’s mother?

  I laughed a little and ate one of the strawberries I was holding. Is that all? I said. She nodded. Well, I explained, you are worrying about the wrong person. I explained that the reason her son had given the drawing to another mother was because he loved her, his own mother, with such blind, unprecedented devotion, that naturally he felt sorry for every other woman in the world, whom he did not love so vehemently.

  Then of all things, the woman started to cry. She touched my sleeve again and said, Thank you, Doctor. She said she was going to buy him a toy to make up for it——but I said to her, Perhaps, Madame, instead of buying a toy, you should simply go home, find your son and remind him of the event, and tell him that you love him with equal devotion, and that you will never again question his judgment when it comes to how he expresses his love for his mother.

  When I thought more about the encounter on the way home, I found myself getting depressed. So when I got home, I put my robe on and gave my strawberries to the birds. What a beautiful child that woman has, I thought. What a genius boy, and what a hard life he has ahead of him in this world where beauty is categorized and natural love is negated by flattery.

  TOYS

  Toys are the props by which children share their fears, their hopes, their disappointments, and their victories with the outside world.

  The toys parents choose for their children will set the boundaries of their play (fantasy). A heavily representational toy may limit the child’s play to those aspects the child associates with the context. For example, a toy based on a television character will determine the way the child plays with the toy and thus limit the fantasy.

  Toys that are not representative of some third party (the child and the toy are the first and second party) allow children to develop and explore their own fantasies with less distortion. However, if your child seems unhappy at the idea of playing with pieces of wood or wool shapes, then introduce a few props from nature (leaves from a park or hard vegetables such as pumpkins or potatoes). These will allow your child to set his fantasy in the natural world.

  Present your child with a cooking pot, and he will pretend to cook. Give your child a gun, and he will pretend to shoot. It’s an easy choice for the thinking parent (unless the child is born into ancient Spartan culture!).

  For a child, asking someone to play is an act of trust. And trust helps build love. For the child is eager (through toys) to share her private world with you, and to express through play (with toys as props) what she cannot express through language—either because she doesn’t inherently trust language (and why should she?—see Chapter 2, “Everything I
s a Metaphor”) or because she doesn’t yet possess the skills to express herself clearly through the speaking circuit.

  Play to a child’s emotional development is like food to physical development. Play is a tool for loving. Even the most healthy adult relationships I have studied rely heavily on forms of play.

  CONVERSATION WITH FOUR-YEAR-OLD DOROTHY

  Dr. Felixson:

  Why are toys so important?

  Dorothy:

  They are important for kids.

  Dr. Felixson:

  Why is that?

  Dorothy:

  Because kids like to play.

  Dr. Felixson:

  Hmm. I wonder why they like to play?

  Dorothy:

  I don’t know.

  Dr. Felixson:

  I wonder why kids want to play with grown-ups?

  Dorothy:

  Maybe because they like grown-ups so much?

  Astonishing, isn’t it? Dorothy knows she is being questioned, and like most children, she wants to please. She is eager to talk, but perhaps a more effective way to understand children is to do it on their own terms. If I were to play with Dorothy (toys of her choosing) and then study that play, I might understand Dorothy’s world more clearly. To question Dorothy as though she were a simple adult as I did above is a great failing on my part. And since writing this, I have changed the way I explore children’s perception. To experience an apple, don’t eat the apple—become the seed.

  PAGES 221–223, CHAPTER 8, THE IMPORTANCE OF TOYS BY DR. BLIX FELIXSON, GREENPOINT PAPER-BACKS, NEW YORK, 1972.

  Driving through Riverhead, Brian asks me to unwrap a sandwich we picked up at Greenpoint Café for our trip. He watches me unfold the paper and reaches out to take a half. I slap his hand.

  “No,” I say. “I want us to share the same half.”

  Trivial secrets and unspoken pacts keep us going.

  We’re driving through East Quogue. The road has thinned to a gray strip that slips through a forest. I think of the forest as my childhood.

  Brian touches the back of my neck. My concentration breaks like a wave against the shore.

  “Remember the champagne glasses?” he says.

  I think of the two delicate champagne flutes we left in the Adirondack Mountains a few weeks ago. Brian and I were hiking. There are forests so thick it’s like perpetual night—or the subconscious, Brian remarked. The air is thin and crisp. At night, we fell asleep with wood smoke in our hair.

  After hiking nine miles up into the white breath of a mountain, we were truly invisible to one world but in the palm of another. Brian heard a river. We followed the sound and then spotted a rock in the middle, large and flat enough for our bodies to sit on comfortably. It had been raining, but it’s amazing how quickly the sun dries the earth after it has been washed.

  Brian and I lay our bodies on the rock. I closed my eyes. The sound of water was deafening. Brian unwrapped a bottle of champagne and two wineglasses from several T-shirts. I was surprised he would bring such things up into the woods. Then he explained. It was the anniversary of our first date. I told him it wasn’t but that I’d help him drink the champagne to lighten his load.

  We lay on our backs. The sun in and out of clouds. The silence of the sky intimidating. A landscape of thought.

  Then Brian laughed and told me I was right. It wasn’t our anniversary. I felt then he was somehow disappointed and so told him that every moment with him is a small anniversary. I don’t know what it meant. It just came to me.

  We kissed, and that led to us making love. It was sweet and slow. My foot trailed in the water like a rudder.

  After, Brian pulled a towel from his rucksack and put it under our heads.

  When I awoke, Brian was gazing down off the side of the rock into a deep pool. His bare back was a field of bronze muscle. I had forgotten his male strength. It was late afternoon. The sky had bruised. There was a wind and the trees shook. Wind is the strangest thing. The word describes a phenomenon.

  I reached for Brian. I lay my palm on his back. He pointed to the pool beneath the rock. The scent of pine was overwhelming.

  While I was sleeping, the champagne glasses had rolled off the bags and fallen into the rock pool below. By some miracle they had fallen upright. The river gushed through the rocks and then into the pool where the glasses stood. Each glass held the weight of an entire river without knowing where it came from and how much was left.

  Suddenly, in the car just a few miles from Alan’s house in Hampton Bays, I reach for Brian’s arm. I dip my head and bite into it. I feel my teeth clamp his warm flesh. He shouts, then screams when I won’t let go. The car runs off the road into the woods. There is thumping from underneath. Brian yanks his arm back, still screaming. The front wheels come to rest in a tangle of leaves and branches. I can taste Brian’s salty blood in my mouth.

  Brian looks at me and then incredulously at his arm. It bears the perfect indentation of my mouth, but the line is blurred by shallow bleeding.

  Brian’s eyes are full and swirling.

  We breathe heavily, as though inhaling one another. Then it starts to rain. Nothing but the sound of drops falling. The rear lights of passing cars break into blood-red bloom through the rain-spattered windshield.

  My eyes like leaves, long and wet.

  Alan has baked lasagna. He arranges the chairs so that we sit close, so that in the end, as light dims and the curtain falls on another small day, we won’t lose sight of each other’s eyes, even if everything in-between has been lost or fell away one cloudy afternoon to the sound of passing traffic.

  The Missing Statues

  ONE BRIGHT WEDNESDAY MORNING in Rome, a young American diplomat collapsed onto a bench at the edge of St. Peter’s Square.

  There, he began to sob.

  An old room in his heart had opened because of something he’d seen.

  Soon he was weeping so loudly that a young Polish priest parking a yellow Vespa felt inclined to do something. The priest silently placed himself on the bench next to the man.

  A dog with gray whiskers limped past and then lay on its side in the shade. Men leaned on their brooms and talked in twos and threes. The priest reached his arm around the man and squeezed his shoulder dutifully. The young diplomat turned his body to the priest and wept into his cloth. The fabric carried a faint odor of wood smoke. An old woman in black nodded past, fingering her rosary and muttering something too quiet to hear.

  By the time Max stopped crying, the priest had pictured the place where he was supposed to be. He imagined the empty seat at the table. The untouched glass of water. The heavy sagging curtains and the smell of polish. The meeting would be well under way. He considered the idea that he was always where he was supposed to be, even when he wasn’t.

  “You’re okay now?” the priest asked. His Polish accent clipped at the English words like carefully held scissors.

  “I’m so embarrassed,” Max said.

  Then Max pointed to the row of statues standing along the edge of St. Peter’s Square.

  The priest looked up.

  “Well, they’re beautiful—oh, but look, there is a statue missing,” the priest exclaimed. “How extraordinary.”

  The priest turned to Max.

  “Why would a missing statue upset you, Signor Americano—you didn’t steal it, did you?”

  Max shook his head. “Something from my childhood.”

  “I’ve always believed that the future is hung with keys that unlock our true feelings about some past event,” the priest said.

  “Isn’t everything something from childhood?” the priest continued. “A scribble that was never hung, an unkind word before bed, a forgotten birthday—”

  “Yes, but it doesn’t have to be so negative, Father,” Max interrupted. “There are moments of salvation too, aren’t there?”

  “If there aren’t,” the priest said, “then God has wasted my life.”

  The two men sat without talking as if they were old
friends. The priest hummed a few notes from a Chopin nocturne and counted clouds.

  Then a bird landed in the space where the divine being had once stood—where its eyes had once fallen upon the people who milled about the square, eating sandwiches, taking photographs, feeding babies, birds, and the occasional vagrant who wandered in quietly from the river.

  The priest looked at Max and pointed up at the statues again. “They should all be missing,” he joked, but then wasn’t sure if the man beside him understood what he meant.

  Max blew his nose and brushed the hair from his face.

  “Please forgive me,” Max said. “You’re very kind, but really I’m fine now—grazie mille.”

  The Polish man sitting next to him had entered the priesthood after volunteering as a children’s counselor in the poorest area of Warsaw. He couldn’t believe what he saw. He quickly climbed the ranks and was skilled at negotiating the bureaucracy that plagues all men of action. Through his close work with young, troubled children, the priest understood the reluctance of men to share their troubles.

  “You can tell me anything,” the priest said. “I don’t just pray—I give advice too.”

  Max smiled.

  “I simply want to know why a missing statue has reduced a young American businessman to tears,” the priest said.

  The priest’s hair was as yellow as hay. It naturally slanted to one side. He was handsome, and Max thought it a shame he would never marry.

  “Just a long-ago story I once heard,” Max said.

  “That sounds nice, and I like stories very much,” the priest said. “They help me understand myself better.”