Love Of Couple

House For two years we moved around each other in the same social circle, just outside of reach. It’s true, I was intrigued by this man who rejected all my overtures of friendship, my invitations to join my inner circle. I was thirty-one, married ten years, with two kids. I had no idea that I had never fallen in love. If I thought about it at all, I suppose I consigned the notion of falling in love to B-movies and romance magazines, teenagers, and women who paint their toenails pink. Then, he walked into my house one day, sat on my red sofa, and told me he would love me forever, die for me, jump over the moon for me, fetch me whale bones from the bottom of the sea. This man is a lunatic, I thought, and that was probably my last rational thought on this planet. He repeated to me fragments of conversations we had had, and he told me what I was wearing, or how I was standing by the dining room window or sitting in the lobby of the museum that time we said nothing. Search Readers Write Love Stories By Our Readers•August 1989 For two years we moved around each other in the same social circle, just outside of reach. It’s true, I was intrigued by this man who rejected all my overtures of friendship, my invitations to join my inner circle. I was thirty-one, married ten years, with two kids. I had no idea that I had never fallen in love. If I thought about it at all, I suppose I consigned the notion of falling in love to B-movies and romance magazines, teenagers, and women who paint their toenails pink. Then, he walked into my house one day, sat on my red sofa, and told me he would love me forever, die for me, jump over the moon for me, fetch me whale bones from the bottom of the sea. This man is a lunatic, I thought, and that was probably my last rational thought on this planet. He repeated to me fragments of conversations we had had, and he told me what I was wearing, or how I was standing by the dining room window or sitting in the lobby of the museum that time we said nothing. The quality of light in the room began to make a subtle shift. Pink, I swear it was turning pink, and I was falling. I had been memorized by another being. Some kind of Gatsby had walked into my house. Yes, it was one of my favorite novels. I was a romantic, all right, just one locked in a heavy state of denial. Had he moved to kiss me, the spell might have broken on the spot. Instead there was a waterfall of words and I am a poet and words were enough. Still, I hadn’t said a thing. I just stared like some hypnotized deer, stunned by the headlamps of some oncoming Mack truck roaring down the highway toward me. I became frightened when I heard him say he would be the one standing beside me when all my friends deserted me. I think I made a nervous laugh and found enough of my voice to say he had to leave. I told him I wasn’t going to be his tragedy. I was holding on to the mantelpiece when he walked out the door. I couldn’t move and I couldn’t speak, but I was listening to the romantic that had been loosed in me. She was saying, Daisy was a fool, only a fool would say no to the kind of love that walked into the room today. But what if it’s a lie? I asked. She said, I’ve never heard anyone lie so beautifully. I felt a Yes welling up inside me and all the agitation fell away. In that sudden calm I knew I did not have to run after him and call him back or even phone him the next day. It had happened. It was unstoppable. When I saw him next, there was that Look; words were no longer necessary. The friends deserted. A few came back, but he was the one standing beside me, and still is, ten years later, and I am still amazed. Isabella Russell-Ides Austin, Texas Glenn and I met working on the undergraduate literary magazine. I was terribly reserved at that point in my life. We spent an entire semester meeting for lunch in the student union, looking around at anything but each other. We were so aloof. Once, he called to invite me to go parachuting, and he asked in such a roundabout way that I hung up feeling I had invited myself. One night, he touched me lightly as I got out of a car. I told my sister, “I think he touched me but I’m not sure. Do you think he might have?” I became wildly interested in him and told everyone that I was madly in love. I had no plan for expressing this to Glenn. We kept up our strange ritual of restrained but persistent acquaintance. I began to wake fully in the middle of the night. I sat and wrote in my tiny efficiency until morning. I never fully admitted to myself the source of my intense and unusual energy. Glenn made the first expression of desire. I often fantasized later that I had been bolder. Still, the reality of what happened was exquisite. I cannot find the words to describe delicately enough the strangeness and intensity of our coming together. I don’t know why it took us so long. Neither of us was the other’s first lover, so I cannot wholly attribute it to shyness. In retrospect, it is as though we were deeply and fully savoring a stage in the development of a relationship that remains, eight years later, one of the great joys and mysteries of both our lives. Name Withheld My lover of seven years — those tender years from ages sixteen to twenty-three — was missing. She had left her home without a word and nobody had heard from her in more than twenty-four hours. She was not doing well emotionally at the time, and although “the worst” had clearly crossed all our minds, there were still other explanations as to where she might be. About halfway home from work that night, I started hyperventilating. I had to pull over to the side of the road. She was dead. I knew it. She was dead. I wept uncontrollably, then headed to her family’s house. After I got there, it took me a long time to leave my car because I knew of the impending news. When I went inside, even the air was dead. The unnecessary confirmation came in a few choking words: “She is gone.” I ran to the closest empty room — a room where we had spent many, many hours together, lifetimes together for adolescents. Like a dog, I lay on the floor under a desk, pushing myself into the corner of the room. I have never felt such pain. It felt as if two sharp sets of claws were ripping my insides out. The tears weren’t easing any of the pain. It was the most difficult moment of my life. I ran outside and lay in the field and I asked God why she took her own life. Was it because of something I did or didn’t do? I asked her the same question. There was no reply. I was completely shattered. I needed love, time, and healing. The night before, when she was missing, I had dragged my phone into my bedroom in case she called me. The following night, after I knew she had taken her life, I didn’t have the heart to move the phone out of my bedroom, as if she still might call. I left the phone there for a few days, because I loved her. I still love her. Name Withheld Everyone in my family told stories. To this day, an event isn’t as real to me when it happens as it is when I have told someone about it, or written it down in my journal. People in my family told stories about the world, about other people, and about each other — their favorite topic of conversation. But this is the only love story I ever remember being told in whispers. Nanny (my mother’s mother) was in love with a man who was only half Jewish. It was the right half, his mother, but he was raised as a Christian, so Nanny’s father wouldn’t let her marry him. They pleaded, and finally my great-grandfather said that they could get married if the man converted to Judaism. He agreed. Then it turned out that he hadn’t even been circumcised. So he agreed to do that too. In the end, however, my great-grandfather wouldn’t allow the marriage. This was during World War I. My grandmother’s beloved enlisted, and almost immediately flew his plane into the side of a mountain. When she told me that story, Nanny was already an old woman. Her marriage to my grandfather hadn’t worked out. They divorced when my mother was five. I couldn’t understand why she hadn’t run away with the first man. And I wasn’t entirely clear about why he had killed himself. For years after she told me that story I used to wonder who I would have been, or even if I would have been, if Nanny, instead of marrying Grandpa Lester — whom I saw only a few times in my life, and who smelled funny — had married the handsome man in the cardboard photograph, with the big moustache and the big, dark, piercing eyes. Andrew Ramer Brooklyn, New York That mint, that kiss, that joy-dispensing gypsy who smoked Old Gold cigarettes and smelled of cloves and taught my brother and sister and me to play poker and bingo: my grandmother. For her, anything was a metaphor for grace or mirth — mud, a dream, the color of an eye, a soup can label, the scent of talcum, towel-dried hair, thrice-warmed coffee, toenail clippings. I remember her stooped like a peasant in a van Gogh sketch, coaxing huckleberries from low bushes. Our shadows grow long across the field. She stands, and the dress that hangs on her like a worn-out wing is suddenly struck through by a stray beam of day’s end light. She motions and says — what? I don’t remember. Or does she smile? I don’t remember: I am watching the sun set at her hem. Her face was strong-boned, yet delicate — this due to her wide, full mouth, high cheekbones and thick, black brows beneath waved, white hair. Her eyes were blue and beyond description. In them was something clear and substantial, so that she often seemed to be seeing more than what she was actually looking at. The last time I was with her, morphine was fogging her. I kept talking, talking, to fill the room and fog my own pain. My words sounded stupid, specious. Finally, I just shut myself up. That was so much easier, just being there with her in the stillness. After a time, I stood to go, and I reached down to her. She was so small: cancer, that great shark, had eaten away so much of her. Her arms reached up and pulled my face into her neck. We stayed like that — joined without words — for minutes; then she whispered, “I don’t want you to feel bad.” Tears I hadn’t known were there slid out of my eyes, wetting her loose skin and her loose nightgown. I tightened my arms around her, tightened my closed eyelids, and promised (lied), “I won’t.” Rusty C. Moe Indianapolis, Indiana Love is a hope, a promise, a band-aid. Once, she’d rush to you, the giggle of her arms raised to yours, the sweet breath of her day held gently around you. Evenings, the moon sighed as you read aloud, her mouth moist on your arm. You stayed up late to protect her dreams, to smooth a forehead, to tuck a tender blanket. “Am I pretty?” she asked, twirling around you. You wore her beauty in your face, measured it with your voice. Now, she slams her face closed. Your words are dried crusts, forgotten, undelicious. Your arms are an outgrown T-shirt, your ideas a Beowulf. She sees you as a series of untranslatable Olde English phrases. Still, you remember the way she used to look at you, the everything you were to her, and wish you could find again the promise of love in your daughter’s face. Deborah Shouse Leawood, Kansas We fell in love at a rock ’n’ roll bar. I was the bartender. Chuck used to come in for beers after work. He had blue eyes and nice biceps. I didn’t see what brought him to the LayZ J Saloon. It was an awful place. Once the band kicked in, you couldn’t hear a thing. People leaned together shouting at each other, communicating only the most rudimentary messages. The ventilation system didn’t work, and on Saturday nights people fainted on the dance floor. Bikers had started coming in, and sometimes there were fights. People threw up in the bathrooms. I assumed Chuck came to flirt with a skinny, blond foozball player named Starla. Aside from that, he seemed to find the LayZ J amusing. On Saturday nights he’d take blotter acid and stand at the bar, grinning from ear to ear. I’d catch a glimpse of his face in the crowd and he’d laugh. He laughed at everything, including me. He thought my boyfriends were idiots. Maybe he thought I was an i***t, too. I liked to drink beer with him during my breaks. He had eyes that looked back when I looked into them. If he left me in the dust intellectually, he didn’t seem to mind. In him I found a human presence — a heart in that environment of duplicity and compulsion. Though I didn’t know it, being with him was showing me glimpses of who I was, or who I might be. Until then, I had seen myself through the eyes of the other men on that side of the bar. “I like a man with a strong jawline,” I told Chuck. He didn’t take me seriously; he had a girlfriend who didn’t hang out in rock ’n’ roll bars or drink too much or wear clothes that were too tight. She belonged to a utopian feminist collective. She was part of a worker-owned feminist bookstore. Her dog was a vegetarian. Who could follow an act like that? She sometimes came to the bar with Chuck and her other boyfriend — they all had a house together over on the east side. They were anarchists. Chuck told me he didn’t believe in the psychology of love. “Hmph,” I said. One afternoon Chuck stopped by to talk to me about an article I’d written for the local alternative paper. It was a criticism of the medical industry. He handed me a paperback book, Tools for Conviviality, by Ivan Illich. “One of my favorite books,” he said. “I think you’ll like it.” It was happy hour and we were standing at the bar, rows of drunk men in baseball caps on either side of us. Outside it was autumn, the leaves just turning, the sun shining.