Either—
“I’m stunned. Give me a minute to catch my breath.”
Or at the very worst—
“It’s none of your business, Ofer. I’m warning you. Stop opening doors in this hotel without knocking or asking permission. You don’t own it or my family just because you’re married to me.”
But you took another line. Without hesitating, you chose to defend your family to the hilt, even if it meant destroying our relationship. You said—
word for word—
“You have no idea, Ofer, of what you’re getting us into. I’m asking you to drop this whole revolting fantasy of yours, to say you’re sorry, and never to mention it again.”
Word for word, right?
(Relax. This letter will never reach you.)
And now listen to the theorem of my Parisian (an ugly little bird, pecking away):
“Let’s assume that your ex-wife was right and that you concocted a fantasy for reasons of your own. Let’s also assume that in the end you would have been forced to admit it. Then, too, your marriage was doomed. Because to judge by your anger and obsessive behavior, your case involved two different conceptions of love. There’s first love and there’s second love. The experts can distinguish between them, even if sometimes they’re hard to tell apart, because each has a logic of its own. They can exist side by side, not without conflict, until something comes along to turn them against each other. And then it’s good-bye.
First love (my Parisian explained) preserves throughout a marriage the bright, living kernel of the falling-in-love that engendered it, that outgoing of the heart by which the lover recognizes, sometimes instantly and sometimes by progressive stages, the human being who can soothe or satisfy his deepest desires — the one person with whom he can redemptively re-create the primeval love for a father, mother, sister, brother, or other family member that could never be fulfilled. And though, when he falls in love, the lover may know little about the beloved, whose soul may be a mystery and whose body may hide beneath its clothes an ugly defect or scar yet to be uncovered by his desire, still he is bonded to his beloved blindly and trustingly and is ready to die for her even before he has seen her nakedness. This is the meaning of the expression “falling in love,” found in so many languages, for the lover has as it were fallen into a deep pit (at the bottom of which may lurk a snake or scorpion), and there must build his love for himself.
And even after (my Parisian continued) the outward signs have yielded their inner promise in all its glory or poverty, its undreamed-of heights or insufferable depths, the glow of the first falling-in-love continues everywhere and all the time. Yes, even when the beloved is in a wheelchair in an old-age home, diapered and connected to tubes, even then the flash of a smile in moldering eyes, the ancient movement of a veiny hand, the heard-again lilt of a dear voice, even a single sentence containing the right words, can resurrect the first falling-in-love in a twinkling — that love that unconditionally and in advance forgives every weakness and failing, if only for the reason that in advance it knew nothing about them.
Indeed (in my Parisian’s opinion), nothing is more democratic than this total embrace of the beloved; for just as the state, or the republic, can never revoke the citizenship of a citizen, be he a spy, traitor, rapist, or murderer, so first love forbears in all things because the first, unconditional falling-in-love persists.
Such (thinks my wise Parisian) was my love for you. This is why I am still stranded in it, waiting for another falling-in-love to set me free….
(And it will—)
And yet, says my Parisian, who is four years older than I am even though she’s a class lower — because she has a rich father who periodically treats her to a new career—“your story makes clear that your ex-wife’s conception of love is of the other variety.” And this is why, she explains, what happened to us was inevitable.
And that’s precisely what I need: to understand calmly the necessity of our separation, so that I can say good-bye for good, graciously and with a light heart.
It seems, Galya, that your kind of love has to do with choice. That’s the great difference. Perhaps yours is the more developed variety, skipping love’s primitive and dangerous “fall” for what is deliberately and courageously chosen — not because it is the best choice, since there is always a better one, but because it has potential. (I once watched a nature program on television about a certain species of duck or swan that takes four years of painstaking investigation to choose a mate — the longest aptitude test on record.) Rather than marriage as a first flowering of feeling that lasts only until the next falling-in-love, the love of choice offers something less passionate but more stable: responsibility. In a moment of crisis the first kind of lover declares emotionally, “What’s done is done — I fell in love with you, and so I forgive you,” but whereas the second kind says coolly, “Yes, what’s done is done — I chose you, and I am responsible for my choice.” But — and here’s the rub — while love of the first kind can by its nature overlook what it doesn’t like, love of the second kind is incapable of such evasions. And so when something bad shakes the foundations, “responsible love” is too weak to support it — and at that point the whole structure collapses, and all that’s left to say is, “You’d better pack your things, Ofer, and go to your grandmother’s.”
Once, some two years ago, a month or two after I arrived in France, in a moment of deep sadness but also of intermittent hope (I didn’t know you were about to remarry), I decided to write an itemized account of the horribly quick parting that you subjected me to after forty-two days of struggle. I bought a big yellow notebook, which went well with the yellow light of gray Paris in August ’93, where I found myself after my expulsion from the Paradise in which you lived with your father, mother, and sister (who to this day can inspire in me, along with horror and revulsion, a good, stiff erection).
Anyway, you and your family, even your hotel, were cloaked by my imagination in the late-summer light that I remembered from the brambly little hill near the gazebo under which we were married. That’s how I had imagined Paradise back in Bible class in grade school, perhaps so as to give it a Middle Eastern touch: a lush green oasis fed by springs and surrounded by soft, friendly desert.