His sense of poetry
Why you fall in love in the first place is like the door of a desired home that proves on opening it and stepping through to be only the first of many, not all of them your own. I could say “rooms,” but “homes” feels truer to what unfolded, not always even seen and yet I could see them by extrapolating from the sorts he liked or where he was likely to be found.
What you fall in love with in the first place is the nature of the man. Even in the absolute worst of it, there was this thread that no one else could break and I could always see. I can’t say I reeled him in, but I took him back.
Why he fell in love with me was bound up with this thread. I held my own in all respects, even if others waylaid him accidentally. I lived through it numerous times, a pattern and so not fixed the way a compulsion is, but gloriously unhinged in both directions, immense production and in time the clinic or the asylum, depending on who found him. It predated me and I overlooked it, because he was the real thing, however terrible it could be.
His sense of poetry was like those enormous atom-smashers you can’t get near with a watch on because it will yank it off your wrist or pull items of clothing from you if they have metal fittings. Yet they win Nobel Prizes with them, plumbing this or that mystery down to its sub-particles.
We were taken for an urban couple with a daughter, sought after as dinner guests, our own soirées “important” to our circle and those who observed it. A circle is like this, if it has any gravity, pulling people into its orbit. There’s anti-gravity too, of course, the attract/repel nature of personality, but “however terrible” cut right through this.
There’s no cure, I saw early on. It’s like those beach-front houses that wash away in storms, or if you’re lucky, are standing but filled with sand. It’s still paradise, you tell yourself, so you salvage it or rebuild.
You grasp that life is portable, that you can close the door behind you if necessary, but this didn’t actually apply to us, owing to the thread or tendril. There were other forces in play, like the rays in the movies that pass through walls, flashing alluringly or giving off sparks around the edges of his tailored suits. He should have come with a warning, I felt, but this could apply to any number of men.
Then suddenly it was over, the one thing giving out that didn’t occur to either of us, and not at home but in a cab, the driver flummoxed, barreling pointlessly to emergency. I’d written him out of the picture and life took this literally. But no, he’d come back, just as I knew he would.
His reputation has suffered, not least from the accounts of others. When I’m dead, when they unearth our letters, it will suffer more, despite his post-facto diagnosis. His poetry will find its place, likely a better one than his detractors have it. I never defend his work. I fell in love with him, his nature. We had this thread. I’d do it again. In a heartbeat.
