The Possibility of Love

Sara Was an artist. Which meant that there was paint everywhere--all over her jeans (knees artfully ripped), crusted under her fingernails, spattered on the floor of her studio. There were splotches on her forearms in the shapes of African nations. Sometimes she brushed her bangs away from her face, inadvertently trailing white streaks in her hair. Her being an artist was probably the reason her name lacked an "h" as well.

I remember the music too, always blaring while she painted. She liked to work to Metallica, sometimes Verdi, Wagner. Anything pastoral, really.

Bridget

I've always been a sucker for girls with grandmothery names. Hazel, Gertrude, Betty, Esther. I love them all, I love the anachronism. And more often than not, they act a little grandmothery, as if living up to their Forties monikers. They wear shoes that are slightly off, or they drink a lot of tea, knit. One was a quilter, another one played bridge. Still another dabbled in shuffleboard. They walk a lot slower than I do, and I have no doubt Florida is in their future.

I like watching them act prim, knowing what happens when the turtleneck comes off, when we're alone. It's like a secret, and every important love requires a secret.

Lulu

One year I told every girl I met that I was a filmmaker. All because Sara once said, "Martin Scorsese makes me horny."

"Martin Scorsese?" I asked her. "With those eyebrows?"

"Yeah," she said. "He's a total fucking genius." (She also said firemen made her horny, but I have neither the build nor the uniform to pull off that one. UPS guy, maybe. And certain skyscrapers--the Chrys'er Building--made her horny.)

You tell women you're a filmmaker and they get a glint in their eye. They touch your arm. They laugh at your jokes. They're thinking Kubrick, Coppola. They're thinking house on the beach in Malibu, fawning starlets, Tom Cruise inviting you to lunch. The more delusional ones imagine a trip to the Oscars. Then they realize you wait tables or tend bar. You proofread, you file. You're someone's assistant.

I met Lulu at a fancy party at my friend Tiffany's apartment (the size of Rhode Island, I swear). There were exceedingly well groomed people serving drinks and carrying trays of food in portions meant for babies or birds. Tiffany, a friend from college, was an heiress, and everyone she knew seemed to have perfect hair and names like Paige or Cece or Lulu. Often there was a "de" or "la" involved (the men frequently had numbers or "Jr." attached). They had porn star or stripper names, which is kind of excellent. These girls are about the furthest things--behavior-wise, family history-wise--from strippers and porn stars as you can get.

When I introduced myself to Lulu, I told her I directed movies, but she seemed more interested in my retro sideburns and my history with a minor punk-rock band. True story: In high school I wore a dog collar and ripped T-shirts and sang in a band called Misrule, a name we chose after looking up "anarchy" in the dictionary. But for the purpose of impressing girls and introducing a sexual element right off, I always change the name. Fuckers. We were called Fuckers, and at one point David Geffen came to see us at CBGB (our only gig outside our parents' basements and the school gym) and was interested in signing us. Only when he wandered backstage, our drummer yelled, "Who let Frank Perdue in? No Frank Perdues allowed. Frank Perdue, go back to Arkansas." Sammy the guitarist explained that it wasn't the chicken magnate but David Geffen, Cher's ex-boyfriend. To which the drummer started chanting, "No Cher ex-boyfriends, no Cher ex-boyfriends. Go back to Cher."

Lulu was sufficiently impressed by this story to sleep with me that night and for the next few weeks. She had the best underwear of any girl I've ever gone out with--drawers full of disturbingly sexy silk and lace things. Camisoles, fancy bras, teddies, garters (for Christ's sake), feats of engineering that would have had me baffled in my teens. I had no idea of all the options available to a woman of means.

Em

Another one with missing letters. Short for Emily, right? I asked early on. She shook her head. "Just Em," she chirped. "My father's name is Evan, and my mother's is Mary. So, Em." Congratulations, I thought, your parents deserve a medal for compromise.

I met her in a bookstore where she was a cashier. I was into Foucault and Lacan and Bataille at the time because I was in college and smoked British cigarettes, and I didn't know better yet. I thought a bunch of French intellectuals had figured out our darkest secrets. I thought those idiots had all the answers--their books were impossible to understand, and their theories had a whiff of sex, so they must be on to something. Besides, they weren't American. When you're that age you're convinced that America is vapid and superficial and that true enlightenment exists only where you need to show a passport.

Em must have had the same feelings because when she rang up my stack she was impressed enough to ask me out for a beer. At the bar I pretended to be interested as she prattled on about the panopticon and the Other. She used the words narrative and deconstruct repeatedly. She pointed to the dart-board and marveled at the preponderance of the circular form in the world. Deleuze may have been mentioned, Roland Barthes. Let's drown this pitcher and then another, I thought. Then you won't give a shit about those motherfucking frogs. As she talked I imagined her shedding her clothes, touching her, kissing her until dawn.

She tired of me before I tired of her. In fact she was too beautiful to be with one boyfriend. She looked like a model, which is something lots of guys say about their girlfriends--especially when the women live in Canada and it's impossible to verify. But in this case it was true. And she was smart as hell, despite the misstep into useless critical theory, one I'm sure she's outgrown by now. It's a dangerous thing to be both brilliant and beautiful--you end up wrecking people even if you don't intend to. When she broke it off, I said, "I still love you." She said, "Don't say that. Everyone says that." First I wanted to kill her, then I wanted to kill myself.

I wrote her desperate letters. Drunk on heartbreak and gin, I ripped out pages from a Derrida book and used them as stationery, writing my own pleas on top of the dense paragraphs. I thought she would appreciate the postmodern gesture of it all, my destroying one thing while creating another. But she never answered the missives, and now I own several books with random missing pages. Not that I'll ever crack them again. Those clowns would surely approve of my passion.

Susie

She loved Nascar, cocaine and talking dirty. She wasn't real--she was like some fantasy cooked up in the mind of a randy teenager from South Carolina. (I suppose these days, with the Internet and all, you can get a lot closer to realizing your fantasies, but Susie happened pre-Information Age, so I believe I deserve some credit.) I knew from the moment we met--snorting lines at a New Year's Eve party--that we wouldn't last. We were doing the drugs off a framed picture of the host's geeky cousin, some Sears portrait of a kid beaming a smile full of braces. When Susie bent over the glass I couldn't help looking down her shirt at her braless breasts. They were perfect, and I got lost.

I took her voracious appetites as a challenge. She had the energy of a comet. I wanted to turn myself into some kind of machine, with gears and pistons that never tired, that could click into service at a moment's notice. I wanted to sell everything I owned and stay with her. I thought peanut butter sandwiches had all the nutrients we needed to survive. Once while we were having sex, she made me pull out of her and she snorted a line off me, right below my belly button, caressing me all the while. When I looked down, there was stray coke nestled in the hairs snaking toward my crotch. It's hands-down the sexiest thing a woman has ever done to me. Ever will do.

Jason

There was a time when someone decided that cool girls should have boys' names. I'm guessing it started with all those women's magazines swollen with noxious perfume strips and sex quizzes.

So I started meeting cute girls who were named James, Mason, Nick, Adam. No joke, I actually knew a girl named Adam. I never got over the weirdness of calling my girlfriend Jason; I abbreviated it "J" or "Jas" whenever I could. Fortunately we stopped seeing each other before we got to the "I love you" stage. I don't think I would have been comfortable saying "I love you, Jason." Someone might have overheard.

Nancy

Nancy's father was a famous sculptor, and in a way I was much more in love with him than with her. He would disassemble old cars bound for the junkyard and then use every piece, down to the upholstery and nuts and bolts--even the red needle from the speedometer and the black-and-white digits from the odometer--to fashion an abstract sculpture. The pieces filled entire rooms, and they were far more delicate than their previous incarnations. If you looked hard enough, you'd see faces emerge, limbs, people laughing and crying and praying. The installations captured me for hours.

Nancy caught on because I peppered her with questions about her father. I wanted to know all the details of how he worked--when he got up in the morning, what kind of music he listened to in the studio, which tools he used. Things he said at the dinner table, books he read. I made her show me family photo albums repeatedly, and I hurriedly flipped past the pages of her in pigtails and braces. I even raced through the shots of her in a bikini, 18 and nubile and flawless. In fact, I skipped any pages that didn't have snapshots of him.

Finally she said, I think it's weird how obsessed you are with my dad. I guess I was supposed to refute it, say something like, Don't be silly, you're the one I'm infatuated with, then turn back to a shot of her sunbathing on a beach in Mexico. But instead I said, Why? It was one of the few moments I can remember when I've been completely honest with a woman, aside from the unstinting honesty of lust.

Cynthia

She went Amish. One day, a couple of weeks after we stopped seeing each other, she called and left a message on my machine. "I've decided to join an Amish community," she said. I had to play it a few times to be certain I was hearing it right and it wasn't just some strange fantasy. Indiana was where she was headed, I think, maybe Iowa--one of those lonely "I" states marooned in the Midwest (weird stuff happens when you get too far from the ocean). I remember being surprised that it wasn't Pennsylvania, because that's where I thought all those people lived and raised barns and sold pies, wore bonnets and were quiet.

(continued on page 166)

Love (continued from page 88)

Later she wrote me a letter. She talked about the horses and buggies. None of the clothing can have decorative buttons, she explained; such things are a sign of pride and showing off. I imagined her walking amid the picturesque rolling fields wearing a shirt that swung open with each breeze, her modest breasts exposed accidentally. I felt a little perverted for thinking about an Amish person like that.

Jesse

She hated her name. She said, "It's a fucking guy's name" (this was before the crossover thing was deemed cool). She had concluded, simply from her name, that her parents had wanted a boy and didn't love her, that every time they looked at her they were disappointed she couldn't play football or have a deep voice or pass on their name. My dad never asked me to help with home-improvement projects, she recalled. I could have, she said. All he needed to do was show me how.

She harbored too much bitterness, which was no good because I always need to be the one harboring bitterness. It doesn't work when there are two of us--it's like we're both on the same doomed team.

Amy

Amy was an industrial designer who specialized in radiators. I'm not talking baseboard units spanning the foot of a wall or the heaving, clanking things parked in the corners of bedrooms. She designed heating systems for office buildings and factories. She talked about British thermal units and cubic feet and mean Celsius grade. R-factors and Q levels. Listening to her talk was like hearing a foreign language.

I'll admit it: It bothered me that she could get jazzed up about something as boring as radiators. She didn't defend herself or her work with any grand theory, no "where would we be without radiators" rationale. She was just really into the mechanics of heating. One night we were out, and she was drinking her beers much faster than usual. She was smoking, too, which was rare. I assumed something bad had happened to her and asked what was wrong. She shook her head. "This fucking architect," she said, nearly spitting. "He wants to put radiant heating in the Sanders building. Radiant. Fucking. Heating. Do you know how much that's going to cost in heating bills?"

"No." (Do I care?)

"Tons." She stared into her mug, then at the ashtray flooded with butts.

"Goddamn architects," she kept repeating, as if they were baby killers. I excused myself to play a game of Space Invaders.

Amanda

My first older woman. (My last, too, if I have any control over it.) She had an ex-husband, and she complained about him incessantly. He ran off with his secretary, "a woman as dumb as a summer day is long," she said. "His secretary. He didn't even have the guts to be original." She talked about him so much I started picturing the two of them having sex. I'm not in touch with myself enough to find this a turn-on.

She also used the word lover a lot. Again, not high on the list of things that get me excited. In fact, it's squarely on the list of things that annoy me, right up there with drinking the last of the milk and putting the carton back in the fridge. Why not say "boyfriend"? Maybe there's some law for women: You hit 35 and get into gardening and you can't say "boyfriend" anymore. But you can have one.

Walker

My favorite name of all. A little masculine, but it made me think of the photographer Walker Evans, whose pictures I love. I also loved the idea of a walker, someone who wanders the country from town to town, city to city. You learn a lot by walking, much more than you do by driving. Without getting too New Age, it's good to have your feet on the ground--you can feel the pulse of the earth, get a little closer to finding out why you're here.

We fooled around on the rooftop of my apartment building, two figures vast and tiny amid the silhouettes of water towers and chimneys. We were exposed to all the freaks with telescopes and binoculars, the lonely souls who look for their lives in others. The tar paper stained and burned our legs and arms, but we didn't care--our bodies ordered us not to care. The twinkling lights and swirling gusts off the river made us ignore the potential surveillance and the bruises to come later. We ignored everything but each other and the bold magic of our perfect fit.

Eve

My only palindrome. She's the one who prompted this reckoning. If it weren't for her, I wouldn't be thinking about the sum total of the women who have drifted in and out of my life. I wouldn't be torturing myself with the acid of memory. One night she said to me, "You know what your problem is? You have no faith."

"Why is that a problem?" I asked.

"Because it means you're not living for anything. It means there's nothing in the future for you. You're not looking for anything beyond what will amuse you or keep you busy in the next five minutes."

"We're breaking up, right?" I said.

"Yeah." She took a long drag off her cigarette. "This is the end."

"Because I don't believe in God?"

"I'm not talking about religious faith," she said. "I don't believe in God either, but I believe in something, and someday I'll find out what it is."

"What if you're wrong?" I challenged. "What if I do have faith in something? What if I'm really private, and I just haven't told you what it is?"

"Do you?"

"Yes."

I was lying and she knew it. But I was feeling desperate, clawing for some way to persuade her to stay with me. They always look so good when they're leaving.

"Will," she said.

It's never good news when they use your name. When you hear them say your name, you should excuse yourself to go to the bathroom, then sneak out a back door and disappear for a while. A day or two. A week if you have the guts. If you're lucky, by the time you next see her she'll have forgotten why she doesn't like you--women are impulsive, they have a lot more on their minds than just you. And you can squeeze out a couple more days from the dying horse.

But I didn't bolt for the bathroom. Because she was right. And I was in love with her for a moment, for being so right. Goddamn Eve and her rough kisses and her dead-on analysis of me.

Lindsey

The only girl to ever stalk me. I was living in Virginia, and I had a Hüsker Dü bumper sticker on my car. I would take long aimless drives to learn the city; I would get lost so I could find my way. I stopped at stainless steel diners, construction sites, arid riverbanks thick with algae. Two consecutive days I noticed the same car behind me, a white Chevette, making the same random turns.

She found out where I lived, and she left a note in my mailbox asking me out, writing her name and phone number on an old drugstore receipt. I suppose it's not really stalking in the criminal, scary, I'm-in-love-with-a-soap-opera-star sense of the word, but stalking in the sense of following. It's really a question of degree, no?

Jade

One year I said to myself, Enough is enough. I'm only going out with girls named after rocks.

I thought they might be more solid, less prone to hysteria, which is my least favorite quality in women. Ruby, Sapphire, I even knew a Lapis, though he was a guy. Jade was Irish, with an accent so thick I understood about every fifth word. I figure the accent and our ensuing miscommunication added at least a few weeks to the relationship.

Despite her heritage, she was like all the rest. Needy and sexy and emotional and loving and possessed of the knowledge of how to hurt me.

Georgia

She was the start of my obsession with geographical names. I knew a bunch of women who were named after places--Dallas, Memphis, Anniston (a military town in Alabama). There's a porn star named Houston, though I don't know her personally.

I liked Georgia's name so much I'd use it as often as possible. As in, "Hey, Georgia, where do you want to eat tonight? Yes, Georgia, the Union Cafe is good." I must have sounded like some car salesman, one of those guys who inserts your name in every sentence because he wants you to trust his lying ass.

Georgia thought I was strange for using her name so much. Georgia said it sounded like we were strangers, not two people sleeping with each other. And before long, we were just that--strangers, who weren't sleeping with each other.

Cheryl

Guitar-store Cheryl. I own a guitar, a ruby-red Gretsch with matte chrome hardware. It's one of the more beautiful things in my apartment, and I have it hanging on a wall in my living room like it's a piece of art. People who come over ask if I play, and I shrug and mutter, "A little." But I don't know how to play a single chord. I have a strap and an amp, even a distortion pedal. From time to time I sling the ax over my shoulder and finger the frets. I strum. I close my eyes and imagine a stage, monitors, a drummer pounding the skins behind me. I hear requests, I envision a set list taped by my feet. I will never learn how to play.

Walking into a guitar store is like entering a time capsule. Every guy has hair down to his shoulders, some down to their asses. The walls are covered with autographed Stevie Ray Vaughan and George Thorogood eight-by-tens. There's always a guy playing Stairway to Heaven, along with a kid accompanied by his mother, far more embarrassed than he needs to be, especially because she's the one with the credit card. Someone is always asking if he can "plug in." If you're a girl and you work in a guitar store, it's hard not to look like a babe. Pretty much all you need to do is bathe regularly.

Liza

Which brings me to now. I like the name--short, sweet. There aren't many words you get to use every day that have a "z" in them. Plus it's not an ostentatiously weird name like Flower or Tree. As alluring as those nonstandard names have been, more often than not they've been attached to nonstandard personalities. Nonstandard in the way that meant we loved each other with abandon for a few weeks, a few months when we really tried, then ran out of love. And then we ran out of sex.

I want it to work out this time, I really do. I look at Liza and think I could be happy with her for a while, for years, for the rest of my life even. I look at her and I see the possibility of perpetual love. In her blue eyes, in her dirty blonde hair that sticks up with static whenever she wakes up from a nap. For a few minutes, while the room and the world realign themselves in her vision, she is completely unself-conscious. She stares at me like she's just met me, and in return I have permission to gaze at her. I study her cheeks, I look at her mouth, I finger her chin. I trace her earlobe, I thumb the base of her neck, the well of her collarbone. I forget her name.

We kiss, and when we break I say good morning, no matter what time of day or night it is. Eleven p.m., 12 noon, she makes it morning over and over again. A tiny gesture, but it makes her smile, and her smile warms me. It's something I never planned, and it's utterly necessary for our happiness.

This is what I am coming to learn. Love isn't in the grand outbursts like trips to Paris or diamond rings or marriage proposals, no matter what the jewelry companies and fat romance novels would have us believe. It lurks in the nearly silent corners, spaces and moments we take for granted. The way she blinks her eyes, zips her jeans. The way she hiccups, the way she needs to consult a cookbook to steam rice. I know this because we get into fights. I yell at her, or she yells at me, we each say things we regret. I think I'll be angry for the rest of the night, the rest of the week even. Then I'll glimpse her knee, her eyelash. While I'm on the porch trying to suffocate my loathing with cigarettes, I'll hear her cough. In the kitchen I'll see a phone message she scrawled for me, pinned under a magnet on the refrigerator. And I finish hating her. I forget why I was mad. Fuck Eve. I do have faith in something. I believe love can renew us.

I'll admit it: It bothered me that she could get jazzed up about something as boring as radiators.