Once, when i had already been married for a time, I went to a friend's wedding and fell in love with the bridegroom. It happened out of the blue, in an instant, as unexpectedly as a sneeze. I was not responsible for it; it came upon me; it was an incursion, an invasion-a possession, like that of a dybbuk. Or it was what diplomats call an "intervention," an intact sovereign tract subjected without warning to military fire. Or it was a kind of spell, in the way the unearthly music of a fairy-tale pipe casts a helpless enchantment so that, willy-nilly, you are compelled to dance and dance without surcease.
The bride had a small head and a Cheshire-cat smile. I had known her since childhood. Together, under the heavy-hanging trees, we had gathered acorns and pretended to dine on them. But we were not confidantes; we were not close. We had differing temperaments. She was humorous: her jokiness cut with an icy ironic blade. I was na?ve and grave and obtuse. She was diligent at the violin and played it well. I hid when the piano teacher rang the doorbell. She was acutely and cleverly mathematical. I was an arithmetical imbecile. She was tall and I was short: we were seriously divided by our arms' reach. Often I felt between us a jealous tremor. I was jealous because she was almost two years younger, and even in girlhood I lamented the passing of my prime. At eleven, I scribbled a story and appended a lie: "By the Young Author," I wrote, "Age Nine."
The bride was standing under the wedding canopy in a white dress, her acorn head ringed by a wreath, when lovesickness struck. The venerable image of arrow or dart is crucially exact. Although I had met the bridegroom once before, in the long green darkening tangle of a meadow at dusk-it was a game of Frisbee-I had been unmoved. His thighs were taut, his calf-sinews thick; he had the inky curly hair of a runner on a Greek amphora. The white disk arced into the sky along the trajectory of an invisible yet perfect night-rainbow. He sprinted after it; his catch was deft, like the pluck of a lyre. He was an Englishman. He was a mathematician. He was nothing to me.
But when I saw him under the wedding canopy next to my friend, I was seized and shaken by a dazing infatuation so stormy, so sibylline, so like a divination, that I went away afterward hollowed-out. Infatuation was not an added condition: it was loss-the strangeness of having lost what had never been mine.
The newly married pair departed for England by sea. A shipboard postcard arrived: on the one side a view of the ship itself, serene white flanks pocked by portholes; and on the other an unfamiliar script. It was the new husband's. I studied his handwriting-examined its loops and troughs, the blue turns of ink where they thickened and narrowed, the height of the l's and d's, the width of the crossbars, the hillocks of the m's and n's, the connecting tails and the interrupting gaps. The sentences themselves were sturdy and friendly, funny and offhand-entirely by-the-by. Clearly, composing this note was a lunch-table diversion. "You do it," I imagined the new wife telling the new husband. In a minute-and-a-half it was done.
For weeks I kept the card under my eye; it was as if the letters of each word were burning, as if the air above and below the letters shuddered in an invisible fire. The words, the sentences, were of no moment; I hardly saw them; but the letters crazed me. They were the new husband's nerves, the vibrations of his pulse, his fingers' pressure, his most intimate mark. They were more powerful than the imprint of his face and shoulders, which had anyhow begun to fade.
Infatuation has its own precision. It focuses on its object as sharply as sunlight through a magnifying glass: it enlarges and clarifies, but it also scorches. What we call lovesickness, or desire, is deliberate in that way-the way of exactitude and scrupulous discrimination-and at the same time it is wildly undeliberate, zigzag, unpremeditated, driven, even loony. What I finally did with-or to-that postcard was both meticulously focused and rapaciously mad.
It was the hand which my desire had fixed on-or, rather, the force and the brain which flowed from that hand. I wanted to go into that hand-to become it, to grow myself into its blood vessels, to steal its fire. I had already felt the boil of that fire under my own hand: the phosphorescent threads of the letters, as blue as veins, bled hotly into the paper's grain.
And I knew what I would do. I took my pencil and slowly, slowly traced over the letters of the first word. Slowly, slowly. The sensation was that of a novice dancer mimicking the movements of a ballet master; or of a mute mouth speaking through a ventriloquist; or of a shadow following a light; or of a mountain climber ascending the upward slope of a "t," stopping to rest on the horizontal shelf of the crossbar, again toiling upward, turning, again resting on a ledge, and then sliding downward along a sheerly vertical wall.
Letter by letter, day by day, I pressed the point of my pencil into the fleshly lines of the sea-borne bridegroom's pen; I jumped my pencil over his jumps and skips, those minute blank sites of his pen's apnea.
In a week or so it was finished. I had coupled with him. Every word was Siamese-twinned. Each of the letters bore on its back the graphite coat I had laid over it. Breath by breath, muscle by muscle, nerve by nerve, with the concentration of a monkish scribe, with the dedication of a Torah scribe, I had trod in his tracks and made his marks. Like a hunter, I had pursued his marks; I had trapped and caged them. I was his fanatical indelible Doppelg??nger. And a forger, besides.
All this was done in secret: lovesickness is most often silent, private, concealed. But sometimes it is wily and reckless. I once observed an illustrious young professor of philosophy swinging a small boy between his knees. The child was rapturous; the man went on teasing and swinging. He had a merry, thin, mobile face-not at all professorial. And yet his reputation was fierce: he was an original; his famous mind crackled around him like an electric current, or like a charged whip fending off mortals less dazzlingly endowed. It was said that his intellectual insights had so isolated him from ordinary human pursuits, and his wants were so sparse, that he slept on a couch in his mother's apartment in an outer borough. And here he was, laughing and swinging-himself a boy at play.
The blow of lovesickness came hammering down again. I had no connection of any kind with this wizard of thought. It was unlikely that I could ever aspire to one. But I had just been reading Peter Quennell's biography of Byron, and was captivated by its portrait of Lady Caroline Lamb, a married flirt who had seduced and conquered Byron (or vice-versa-both were mercurial and inclined towards escapades). Quennell described Lady Caroline as a volatile woman in search of "some violent, self-justificatory explosion, some crisis with which she could gather up the spasmodic and ill-directed energies that drove her... The fever of Romanticism was in her blood." She delighted in spats and subterfuges and secret letters delivered to her lover by a page who turned out to be Lady Caroline in disguise. It was she who invented Byron's most celebrated epithet-"mad, bad, and dangerous to know."
Certainly Byron found her dangerous to know. When, exasperated, he tired of her, he discovered she was impossible to get rid of. He called her "a little volcano," and complained that her fascination was "unfortunately coupled with a total want of common conduct." In the end she became a pest, an affliction, a plague. In vindictive verses he pronounced her a fiend. She was a creature of ruse and caprice and jealousy; she would not let him go. She chased after him indefatigably, she badgered him, she burned him in effigy, she stabbed herself. And she wrote him letters.
The fever of Romanticism was in my blood; I had been maddened by a hero of imagination, a man who could unravel the skeins of logic that braid human cognition. Byron had his clubfoot; my philosopher still slept on his mother's couch. Byron spoke of his pursuer as a volcano; I could at least leak epistolary lava. And so, magnetised and wanting to mystify, I put on a disguise and began my chase: I wrote letters. They were love letters; they were letters of enthralment, of lovesickness. I addressed them to the philosopher's university and signed them all, in passionately counterfeit handwriting, "Lady Caroline Lamb."
But what of lovesickness in reverse? The arrow not suffered but inadvertently shot? The wound not taken but blindly caused?
The second world war was just over; the college cafeteria swarmed with professed communists, grim veterans on the GI Bill, girls flaunting Edwardian skirts down to their ankles, and a squat square moustached fellow who insisted he was a monarchist working for the restoration of his dynasty. There was, in addition, an aristocratic and very young Turkish boy, a prodigy, whose father was attached to the UN and whose mother wore the veil. The Turkish boy and I studied Latin together, and sometimes spoke of amor intellectualis-but intellectual love rooted in a common admiration of Catullus's ode to kissing was too heated, or not heated enough. In the cafeteria I was often ambushed by spasms of bewitchment-over a green-eyed sophomore with a radio-announcer voice, for example, who was himself in love with a harpist called Angel. I waited for him at the foot of a certain staircase, hoping he might come down it. I cultivated one of his classmates in the hope of learning something intimate about my distant love-and I did: his nickname was Beanhead. "Beanhead, Beanhead," I would murmur at the bottom of the stairs. All my loves at that time were dreamlike, remote, inconclusive, evanescent.
But one winter afternoon, a foreign-seeming young man (I had noticed him in the cafeteria, curled over a notebook) followed me home. What made him appear foreign was his intensity, his unembarrassed persistence; and also the earnest lustre of his dangling black bangs which shielded his eyes like a latticed gate, and freed him to gaze without moderation. Following me home was no easy journey-it was a subway ride to the end of the line. Despite that curtained look, I saw in his face an urgency I knew in myself. Unaccountably, I had become his Beanhead, his Byron, his bridegroom. I pleaded with him not to undertake the trek to the northeast Bronx-what, I privately despaired, would I do with him?
He filled an underground hour by explaining himself: he was a Persian in command of the history and poetry of his beautiful country. With my permission, because at this moment he was unluckily without a nosegay (he was prone to words like nosegay, garland, attar), he would offer me instead a beautiful poem in Arabic. He drew out his notebook and a pen: from its nib flowed a magical calligraphy. "This is my poem, my original own," he said, "for you," and folded the sheet and slipped it into my copy of Emily Dickinson, exactly at the page where I had underlined "There's a certain Slant of light/On winter afternoons."
"You don't really want to ride all this distance," I said, hoping to shake him off. "Suppose you just get out at the East 86th Street express stop and go right back, all right?"
"Ah," he said, "will the moon abandon the sun?"
But the third time he demanded to come home with me, it was the sun who abandoned the moon. I had had enough of lovelorn importuning. He accepted his dismissal with Persian melancholy, pressing on me another poem, his original own, that he had set down in those undulating Scheherezadean characters. At the entrance to the subway, forbidden to go farther, he declaimed his translation: "There is a garden, a wall, a brook. You are the lily, I am the brook. O wall, permit me to refresh the lily!"
No one is crueller than the conscious object of infatuation: I blew back the black veil of hair, looked into a pair of moonstruck black eyes, and laughed. Meanly, heartlessly.
And once i made a suitor cry. He was, I feared, a genuine suitor. By now the war was long over, and nearly all the former GIs had returned gladly to civilian life. My suitor, though, was still in uniform; he was stationed at an army base on an island in the harbour. He had a tidy blond head on which his little soldier's cap rested; he had little blunt fingers; everything about him was miniature, like a toy soldier. He was elfin, but without elfishness: he was sober, contained, and as neutral as khaki. He put me in mind of a drawing in a children's colouring book: round, clear pale eyes anticipating blueness waiting to be filled in. On weekends he came to call with a phonograph record under his arm. We sat side by side, sternly taking in the music. We were two sets of blank outlines. The music was colouring us in.
One Sunday he brought Richard Strauss's Death and Transfiguration. The jacket gave the title in German, Tod und Verkl??rung, and a description-tone poem. But it was "transfiguration" that held me. Would the toy soldier be transformed into live human flesh and begin to move and think on his own?
When he returned to his island, I put Death and Transfiguration on the record player. Alone, I listened to it over and over again. It coloured the empty air, but I saw that there would be no transfiguration. Stasis was the toy soldier's lot.
The next Sunday, I piled all the records which had been his gifts into his arms. "At least keep this one. You liked it," he said dolefully: it was Tod und Verkl??rung. But I dropped it on top of the farewell pile and watched him weep, my marble heart immune to any arrow.
Not long afterward, a young man whose eyes were not green, who inspired nothing eccentric or adventurous, who never gave a thought to brooks and lilies or death and transfiguration, who never sought to untangle the knots in the history of human thought, began, with awful consistency, to bring presents of marzipan. So much marzipan was making me sick-though not lovesick.
Ultimately the philosopher learned the true identity of the writer of those love letters; it was reported that he laughed. He is, I believe, still sleeping on his mother's couch. I never saw the bridegroom again. He never sent another postcard. I suppose he is an unattractive old man by now. Or anyhow, I hope so.
The marzipan provider? Reader, I married him.
