Myth The social deaf-blindness that is part of my disability often leads to an awkward choice of companions. I spent roughly twenty- five years of my life picking the wrong men for me, with often painful results. Eventually, a therapist gave me the best piece of advice I had yet received on the subject of men. “Don’t pick,” she said firmly. But it wasn’t always a disaster. My first choice of a mate was based, roughly, on my fifteen-year-old conception of Humphrey Bogart in the movie To Have and Have Not. I learned early to make up the world and the people in it, having no social insight, in real life, with which to sort out the various kinds of human beings. The knowledge that I have no clarity of vision came over me only in my middle years. It is frightening, funny but frightening, to know you have been navigating the rough seas of human relationships all your life without compass, coordinates, or clue from the stars as to your position, relative or otherwise. I never got over my mother’s notion of me. This was despite my understanding from a slight acquaintance with quantum physics and metaphysics that we are all the same stuff, simply clusters of atoms, stardust sharing the same universe, or, subatomically speaking, just energy and light, waves or particles, all informed with cosmic intelligence, all flowing interchangeably throughout the universe. I kept trying to tell myself that it was only my perception that kept on insisting that we are all separate beings, but it was no use. It damn well felt, still feels, that my mother was separate, discrete and distant from whatever universe I inhabited, her atoms at war with mine. “You don’t belong in this family. I don’t know what to make of you. I tell you things over and over again, and still you can’t seem to behave yourself appropriately or wear appropriate clothes or do something appropriate with your life or choose appropriate friends.” Bad me. Well, she was right. I was, and remain, clueless. I cannot process visual clues about people or their moods; I do not know when to talk, when I’ve been talking long enough, how to repair it when I’ve said the wrong thing, even to know when I’ve said the wrong thing; how to stop my babble from frightening other people and terrifying myself. This also goes on in my sleep. There is not a night of my life that isn’t enriched by nightmares of rejection, or a morning I awaken not pregnant with the heavy rock of depression, that compound of fear, grief, and rage weighting my insides so that I am bent, as I get out of bed to walk toward the bathroom, like Igor swinging on the church bells. I fight against this weight with all the energy and capacities at my command. I fight the dark up into the light. Then I soar. So much for the tiny tragedies of living. From time to time, however, someone has been fascinated instead of appalled at my intensity, my energy, the variety of my drives. If I have no coherence, I lay claim to a kind of manic, entertaining charm the generous call vitality. My first real sweetheart was a year ahead of me in high school. I was sixteen, he a year older. He was tall, with broad, bony shoulders, a small waist, and a blond crewcut over dark Irish blue eyes. Everything about him was belligerent and sad, from the stoop of the shoulders to the full pout of lips that kissed me long and lingeringly, with such soft yearning, it made my heart stop. We were in rehearsal together in our yearly high school Shakespeare production. This took place after classes on the little outdoor embankment under the spell of soft May evenings, suspended between the moon above us and the scents of new grass, flowers, greasepaint, and healthy young bodies. A Midsummer Night’s Dream, with me cast as the more humorous of the romantic female parts. Indeed. I caught his attention with my chatter, but I captured him, one night after rehearsal, with an accidental moment of silence, a gift of the gods. When I grew up in the mythical New York City of the 1950’s -- it was safe from the threat of murder and muggers to walk in the soft moonlit nights along Central Park paths but worth your life at your mother’s hands to be caught making love at home -- the boys of our youth knew the art of kissing. In the long, velvet nights between when listening parents at last fell asleep and the first pale lightening of dawn, when the silhouettes of skyscrapers became once more the city’s gleaming skyline; in those dark hours of slower traffic and faster heartbeats, the city’s young lay in each other’s arms on living room couches, under park trees, and in any apartments or townhouses where parents were to be late or away, even between the guilty sheets of teenage beds. The boy and I spent the summer kissing. I have never since known the sweet bliss of such kissing. We kissed in cars parked under lamps along city streets. We kissed as we walked hand in hand through New York City’s myriad atmospheres, overheard conversations, glimpsed lives. We kissed on the beaches of the Hamptons, where his parents owned a summer cottage, our bodies held tightly in the shadows of sand dunes, cooled in the salt spray and white-foamed waves. The song Tenderly played everywhere, full of our words. Sea and mist and kissed. I can’t forget how two hearts met, tenderly. We kissed on dance floors, in the apartments of our friends, in the big, cool shadowy spaces of my parents’ Park Avenue apartment, after hours. It was on the leather couch in the den of his best friend’s father, in the basement of the dark, yellowly-lit townhouse, that my rare instant understanding of another human being brought about the first love, sad and sweet, of my life. To this day I can remember nothing we talked about (except for the cruelty of his father and my mother, the passive indifference of my father, his mother). But I can still feel the soft fullness of his mouth covering mine and his hand under my sweater holding my adolescent breast. It was because of his own father’s drunken cruelty, so similar to my mother’s drunken cruelty, that we came close, the boy and I. I was shocked into silence, I understood him completely. For the first time -- and back then girls didn’t -- I took him in my arms and kissed him. It was high drama, the first. But the moment of clearly seeing another human being burned brightly and burned out. And he became, poor boy, the first of the lovers I made up because I could not see them. My myopia was not deliberate. It existed nevertheless. And so we walked and kissed, married and finally made love, went to Japan for his peacetime army stint, and afterwards lived through his college years, my first jobs, and my pregnancy, all of it full of chatter, but more deeply, in the shadow of his silence. I had no idea how he felt during the nights of those years we slept together in bed, whether he fell in love with the Far East as I did. I began my publishing career after we returned from the year in Japan while he finished his business degree courses at New York University. My pregnancy left him more silent than ever; the novels I began writing he did not ever read. I made up his part of the unspoken conversation as I went along. Poor boy. He had no life with me at all. And the miracle of companionship had never happened. My loneliness, and I can only suppose his, was virginally intact. When I ran out of imagination, or at least imaginary dialogue, after my son was born, the boy’s part in my life stopped. There was no one there that I could hear nor find. The connection broke when the dialogue I had supplied ran out, and when the quiet overwhelmed me the marriage was over. I had no capacity for comfortable silence because I could not find someone unless he spoke to me. But the myth had been born. All men afterward were patterned, if not on the actual boy, on my first sixteen-year-old love. He was the outsider, the maverick, with that hooded, defiant look in his eyes for others, and the look, only for me, that said everything is wrong and only you can fix it. My hero had more street smarts than book learning, created rather than inherited his life, possessed integrity rather than merely the survival instincts of the powerful or the accrual instincts of the rich. None of your boy-next-door with the steady job and future prospects, the happy life of the party, the conservative family-type, self-preservative moralist for me. I wanted no up-and-comer. I wanted a let’s get out of here-and-goer. My man was an outlaw, an unattached free spirit. He was a rebel adventurer on the high seas of life. A buccaneer would have been nice. An artist, now that I had begun, in my own new apartment in New York where I had moved with my son, to write children’s books, would do.
|
||||