20. The Best Thing I’ve Done
The Year of Paying Attention
The best thing I’ve done as a grownup is to fall in love, something I didn’t want, couldn’t plan, and was dragged, bewildered yet willing, into. It was like being hit by a meteorite, right place and time, all luck, it seems. I’m embarrassed about it. It happened when I was married, no less happy that the long-marrieds around me, happy as was reasonable, I thought — until I wasn’t happy anymore. How can I describe this without justifying it? And what’s the point of that, anyway?
I was too old to fall in love. It’s common enough to be attracted to a pretty, smiling face, but that’s not love. Interest and attraction isn’t love. The very thought was idiotic. Only a selfish jerk would allow such a thing to happen, exploding the lives of his young adult daughters, treating his long-suffering wife with such gross disrespect. I needed to snap out of it — I’d been briefly, secretly smitten with women before, and always regained my bearings, woke up from a pleasant, harmless little reverie before I made a fool of myself or hurt anybody. But this was not that. I could not get my bearings. My rational mind was trussed and tossed into the trunk of the love bus.
Romantics think about love a lot, the meaning of love, the illusion of love, the impossibility of love, the ridiculousness of love. This kind of love is earthly, personal, carnal. It’s sharp more than sweet, feels dangerous. It can’t last, can it? My headlong tumble started years ago, and I’m still in its grip. It’s exciting and unreasonable. This fifth year feels less intemperate, but the original disorientation persists.
A friend of mine is similarly in love. He’s cut from the same bolt of romance-hungry fabric as me. We’ve compared notes over many years. Like me, when worked up, he is prone to second-guessing, insecurity and over thinking, yet for a long stretch of time we have compared giddy notes on this bewildering heart condition. We discuss it, like a rare species, a kind of furry animal living in our kitchens. How’s yours today? It’s just great, I’m looking at it now — how’s yours? It seems unlikely that we’d be simultaneously delusional for this long.
Early in our romance, I began to meet the people in Sarah’s life, including a man named Reese, who’d had a big career in cable television. Sarah had been his assistant in her twenties, and she still helped out in his office occasionally, for a few days now and then. The work seemed to consist of doing the Times crossword puzzle and making plans to eat somewhere. One day I was invited to join them for lunch. Reese was thoughtful, charming, courtly. I wanted to make a good impression. He regarded me with some reserve. As he and I exited the restaurant, walking behind Sarah chatting with his current assistant, Reese looked me straight in the eye and said, “She’s a very special person.” There was no mistaking his meaning — he was giving me a test and a warning — see her for all she is, or you’re a fool, and my enemy. I felt strangely reassured — I wasn’t crazy to be crazy about this woman.
***
Daughter Lizzie told me over dinner that she was worried she’d be mad at her drummer boyfriend when he returned soon from a multi-week, multi-state tour. I admired her self-awareness, and felt bad for Dan, who probably didn’t suspect that resentment and vitriol might be his welcome home present. My own self-awareness was nonexistent until after I’d hit forty; before that I could tell you how I felt (bad, mad, sad) and why (you’re awful, I’m a loser). I figured all of this negative emotion was unavoidable, because I was very sensitive (touchy and self-serving), and if you loved me, you’d understand (hostage taker). Lizzie was a squealing toddler when I began to try something new in this arena, my own anti-home-warfare tactic, slowly developed post-booze, when I was hoping to be less of a dick upon arriving home.
“As I’d come up from the subway, I’d remember that I did not want to complain or start an argument when I walked into the apartment,” I told Lizzie. “As I stepped out of the elevator, knowing you and Ellen and Mom would be inside, and it would be chaotic, I’d visualize my goal — walk the 25 paces to the bedroom, and take off my suit and tie without starting trouble.” I said it always worked when I remembered to do it, and there I’d be, home with my wife and kids, relative peace in the valley, or on the 8th floor. Sometimes.
Is it pathetic that I needed a strategy, and sadder still that it only worked when I was paying attention? Maybe. But it beats the well-known miserable family trope: Dad comes home, the parents commence arguing, everybody is miserable, then somebody gets addicted to meth or starts living in the woods or gets a face tattoo.
The irony of my conversation with Lizzie is not lost on me. She witnessed the end of her parents’ marriage, and now her father is sagely suggesting how she might protect and preserve her relationship. At least I wasn’t giving her unsolicited advice, more commonly know as criticism.
My parents didn’t offer me much relationship counsel. Over the years my mother demonstrated how to quietly and patiently manipulate my funny, oversensitive, secretly anxious father; she knew his resistance to some suggested activity would soon enough crumble beneath the weight of his own guilt if she let him be, rather than push him.
My father taught me something as well, and I’ve spent years trying to unlearn it — a man is responsible for the happiness of his wife and children, and perhaps to a lesser degree everyone he loves. If they are unhappy, he needs to try harder. Any family dissatisfaction was my failure. Only after joining the “feelings” 12-step program did I see the lunacy of this belief. Eventually I instituted new guidelines: I treat people with as much love, respect and patience as I can muster, which waxes and wanes; and my happiness is my business, mine alone, while their happiness is theirs. I muddle this when I’m distracted or self-obsessed. Paying attention doesn’t always make things better, but it seems to keep me from making things worse.
Another simple truth I forget a lot is that in most situations people will do what they did last time, mostly. Somebody described the process of pursuing change as, “Oops, I did it again; oops I did it again; oops, I almost did it again.” A little success in this area makes me want more, and of course all my screw-ups result in vivid reminders of what happens when nothing changes. Which is that nothing changes.
Next week: Let’s Be Friends
