Crime, revisited

The more that I read John Michael Greer, the more that I find myself in worlds of thought that are different from the ones I used to frequent. And so an idea occurred to me earlier this week — a silly one, trivial really, but I figured I'd record it here because why not?

For years I'd joked to myself that I'd married Wife deliberately, knowing it was going to be a painful slog, "as punishment for my sins." I'd say this, knowing that consciously I didn't believe in any metaphysics that could make sense of it, knowing that consciously it had to be a joke, and yet feeling that at the level of some subterranean emotion there was something to it. A few years ago I even tried to think my way through this paradox, in a pair of linked posts here and here. And maybe that explanation is the true one.

But Greer is a magician and an occultist. So he takes ideas like reincarnation and karma absolutely seriously, and talks about things like "the work you have to do in this life." And so it occurred to me, ... did I deliberately choose a life where I'd marry Wife, in order to burn off some karmic debt acquired earlier?

More generally, I thought about the affection I have always felt for narcissists and crazy people: people I've known personally, like Wife, Scarlett, D, and even Tartuffe back when I was a little kid; but also authors, like William Blake, or Julie Powell, or Robert Pirsig. (See also this movie review.) And all of a sudden I wondered, "Might it be that some of the work I have to do in this life has to do with dealing with crazy people? This could explain the inexplicable attraction" I feel towards them. In other words, if that were defined up front — before my birth — as a boundary condition, it wouldn't have to make sense to me in-universe (as indeed it doesn't) so long as it was a fact (which it is). 

I don't know what to think of the doctrine of reincarnation itself. In fact, I wrote out my thoughts on it earlier this evening and posted them here, on the Patio. But the idea did cross my mind.

        

What was wrong with us all?

I've wanted to write this post since I spoke with Cassius back on New Year's Eve, but I've had no idea how to start or what to say. That's still true: I still have no idea. But instead of trying to work this out, I've just spent my evenings drinking too much and browsing the Internet. So I may as well make a stab at it. I can't promise not to drink too much tonight, but I can try to explain what is irking me. Solvitur ambulando.   

Back when I was growing up, in the 1960's and 1970's, there was a pretty common idea of what adulthood looked like, at least in certain basic respects. You went to school for a while (through high school or through college), started working at a job, got married, and had kids. Marriages might not be perfect, but they provided islands of stability in an uncertain world, environments in which it was safe to raise children. Once upon a time, there was even an assumption that they were permanent, though that became obviously less and less certain as the 1970's wore on. But long-time readers know that even when I started out this blog in late 2007 I still believed that marriage should be permanent -- see, for example, this rant from early 2008. 

Anyway, of course intellectually I understood that just because a huge number of cases averages to X, that says nothing about individual cases or about tiny sample sets. So if you had asked me, back when I was in college, "Are you mathematically certain that the lives of you and your friends will fit the Standard Narrative?" I would have known that I could not answer Yes. But at an emotional level I would have thought I should be able to answer Yes anyway, or else I would have thought that any deviation required some kind of systematic explanation beyond random chance. I never was very good at understanding statistics.

How did it turn out? Let's look at my sophomore year in college. During that year I was part of a well-defined group of seven friends. I mean, of course we all had other friends too, but the seven of us regularly ate together and hung out together. How well did the seven of us fit the Standard Narrative?

• Hosea: Pretty well. I married two years after graduation. We had two kids. We stayed together for thirty years. But now we are separated. Also, Wife was a bipolar, abusive narcissist, so "stability" was sometimes a question. But I did my best to compensate.
• Cassius: Married a few years after graduation, a woman 22 years his senior. No children that were genetically his own, but two stepchildren from her past: one was three years older than Cassius, and one was three years younger. One way or another, the domestic environment (including the domestic power dynamics) had to have been very different from what you expect from the Standard Narrative. After he was widowed, he started a relationship with an abusive, nonbinary sociopath. He suffers from gender dysphoria and is now considering gender transition.
• Schmidt: Flunked out of college and went home to live with his parents. Never left. Took over the family business after his father died. After some years, figured out that he is gay. Never married. Never established any long-term romantic or sexual relationship with anyone. No children.
• R: Shortly after graduation, he entered a prolonged sexual and emotional relationship with a woman a generation older, just like Cassius. But to the best of my knowledge he never married her. The relationship lasted at least three years, probably rather more. Cassius tells me that R is now living on the other end of the country and has a 14-year-old son. I got no more news than that, so I have no idea whether he also has a wife. Maybe so. A fortiori, I know nothing about their relationship -- if any.
• Mac: No idea. I have no data. I know where he is working now (because the Internet is amazing). But I know nothing about his personal or domestic life. Mac was always kind of wild. It's hard for me to imagine him settling down with a wife and kids. On the other hand, back when we were in college most of us assumed we would end up in academic careers and Mac is the only one with a professorship today. So you never can tell.
• Scarlett: As you know, she doesn't want to talk to me. But I've been following her online (off and on) for over a decade, so I know something about how her life has turned out. She entered graduate school the year I left it -- at the very same school. Then it seems like she was associated with that graduate school from then (the mid-1980's) until only a couple of years ago. That would be thirty years or more. I'm pretty sure she wasn't a student all that time. For a while she was the Director of the English as a Second Language program. She wrote scholarly articles and contributed to at least one book. But so far as I can tell, she never finished her Ph.D. And today she is working in a more-or-less clerical or administrative job in the same city, but in an organization totally unconnected with the University. Now, in fairness this school -- think of it as the University of Hell -- is well-known for feeding on graduate students, chewing them up until all the nutrients have been extracted from them and then spitting them out. But it's sad. As for her domestic life, ... strictly speaking, I suppose I should say that I have no data. But she is still using her maiden name. And graduate students at the University of Hell have a hard time maintaining relationships, to say nothing of marriages. It is almost impossible for me to imagine Scarlett as both a graduate student and a mother. So my bet is that she has had no long-term relationships and no children. Maybe I'm wrong.
• Marie: I've talked about her a lot, of course. But as for the Standard Narrative -- some short-term romantic relationships, but nothing long-term (before me, if you want to count me). No marriage. No children.

In other words: of the seven of us, two certainly married and another two might have; the two who definitely married are no longer so (but there is no data about the other two); three have definitely (or pretty definitely) never married. Also -- again, of the seven of us -- two have children genetically their own, and one has legal stepchildren who are about his own age; three definitely (or pretty definitely) have no children; about one, I have no data. This is a poor showing for the Standard Narrative.

But what's the most remarkable failure with respect to that Narrative? 

• Is it that only two of us begat children (or three, if I should add Mac to the list)? 
• Or is it our track record with romantic relationships, wherein: ... 
• at least two of us (me and Cassius) entered abusive relationships, ...
• two of us (Cassius and R) entered relationships with partners a full generation older (so that the power dynamics were inherently unequal), and ...
• three of us (Schmidt, Marie, and probably Scarlett) managed to avoid any long-term relationships whatsoever? 

Only Mac is an unknown quantity on these scales.

And I wonder, what the hell was wrong with us? Why did we turn out this way? Was it literally just random chance? (As I said, I was never very good at statistics. It might have been.) Or did we have something in common: something that made us choose each other as friends, because we somehow resonated with each other; but which also made us weak or ineffectual in romantic relationships, so that we later sought out partners who abused us or who overawed us with age and experience ... or else we avoided romantic relationships altogether? Is it even possible that any common feature might answer to this description?

I truly don't know. And maybe it's just random chance. But I can't stop wondering about it.

__________

P.S.: If I try to make the list longer, I come up with two other friends I can fold into the mix.

There's Dale: he didn't go to the same college that I did, so he wasn't part of the group I listed above. But I knew him in high school. His marriage ended up being eerily similar to mine.

And there's Fillette: as far as I can tell, her life fit the Standard Narrative pretty well -- stable marriage, two daughters, and lots of friends saying wonderful things about her life after she died. My data is skimpy, but she may have come closer than any of the rest of us to realizing the Standard Narrative. Good for her.

            

Scarlett

A while ago I mentioned that I had tried to get in touch with an old school friend named Scarlett. Sure. Let me tell you how that worked out.

First, a few words about what Scarlett was like back in college. (This means 40 years ago, or so.) She looked nothing like Vivian Leigh. But her attitude was strictly "Take no prisoners." She might have been "only" a freshman when I was already a sophomore; but she had read more literature than I had ever heard of, had heard more music than I knew had ever been written, and had cast-iron opinions about all of it. Also she was a show-off, not only intellectually but in dress and style. She replaced the interior door in her dorm room with a beaded curtain, and sat around in a silk smoking jacket. In all these respects she was maybe a little like Bunthorne.

I was afraid of her scorn, but I also found her brass bitchiness really attractive. When I first met Wife, some years later, the very first thing I thought about her was that she reminded me strongly of Scarlett. (They even had the same hair color and general build, though Scarlett was a little taller.) Anyway, the flamboyance together with the arrogance are why I call her "Scarlett". She also dearly loved the color red.

[Update added July 19, 2020: I've thought about this some more since then, and realized that I was partway in love with Scarlett for exactly these reasons. Also this is part of why I fell in love with Wife so quickly, because she reminded me of Scarlett. That must be part of the reason I wanted to get back in touch with her, too.]

We all graduate. We lose touch with each other. I marry Wife and lose touch with everybody I used to know, because my new life is so bloody crazy. So ... fast-forward a few decades.

From time to time I would check the Internet to see if I could find any trace of people I used to know. It was partly a fantasy, partly a distraction. But twelve years ago I found an article she had posted online, and what I thought was her email address. I sent an email to the address commenting on the article, and got an error message back. Oh well. No other signs.

And every few years I'd look again. There were indications she was still in the same city where I'd found her the first time, still doing the same kind of thing ... but no clue at all towards a physical or electronic address.

And then finally this year it looked like my travel schedule would take me into the same ... large urban area in whose orbit she was living. (If she was still there.) So I did a few more searches, and -- lo and behold! -- she is now working somewhere new, somewhere that posts the email addresses of selected personnel on the web. If it's really the same Scarlett, I can reach her now!

Actually, when I first saw that my travel schedule seemed to be veering in that direction, I also checked our college's alumni directory and got a street address. No guarantee that it was current, but it's something.

So several weeks ago I sent her a card.

When a while went by and I had heard nothing, I sent an email.

When another while went by and I had still heard nothing, I sent a second email ... this time asking her opinion of an article I had seen about some Romantic composer I had never heard of before, a guy named Korngold. I figured it would be right up her alley.

Finally I got a reply, as follows:

Hello Hosea,
I've been out of town for a few weeks, and was very surprised to find not only your card, but also two emails in my work in-box when I returned.  I'd be interested to know how you got my work email address, since it's never been posted in our alumni directory.  Also, I must ask you not to use it again -- my work email is strictly for work.
Yes, I remember you -- we corresponded briefly after college, too.  I recall that in the last letter you sent, you said your life had become very, very busy and that you would not have time to reply to me any longer...but that you would be happy to receive any letters I might send.  You may recall I didn't reply.
...So I have to ask:  why the sudden urgency to get in touch with me now?  It surely can't be because of Korngold!

Best wishes,
Scarlett

Aha.

In other words, "Dear Hosea, You were a flaming asshole thirty-five years ago and therefore I wrote you off forever. Why the fuck are you contacting me now?" I suppose it is a fair question.

I sent her a reply in which I apologized for having been a jerk, and asked her forgiveness. I also told her that if she did not reply, I wouldn't pursue it. She has not replied.

Why did I do it? I hoped maybe I could re-establish some channel of communication, as I have done with Marie and Schmidt. Doubtless part of it is that I was so fascinated by her back when we were students, although my attraction to high-maintenance women has dimmed somewhat after Wife and D. And I was curious to learn if the resemblance to Wife carried through in some of their life experiences. Did Scarlett have the same struggles with mental health? (In retrospect I wouldn't be surprised if she had been a touch bipolar back then.) Did Scarlett have gastric bypass surgery for her weight? Did she ever establish any kind of permanent romantic bond with anyone? (She still goes by her maiden name, but that proves nothing.)

And is she happy with where her life has taken her? I was hoping to learn that.

I guess I won't. Damn shame.

[Update added July 19, 2020: Again, in retrospect I can make this easier. I got in touch with her again partly because I wanted to know if she had turned out the way Wife had, and partly because I had been in love with her way back when. So I could still think about her and sigh just a bit. Her reply, when I finally did reach her, confirmed that she was just as much a narcissist as Wife or D, and that I was better off not falling into her orbit again. Also, from what I could tell by stalking researching her on the Internet, it looked like she had spent the last thirty years in graduate school. Apparently she had given seminars and contributed to a book, but I saw no indication that she ever actually got a Ph.D. out of the whole thing. So in asking whether she was happy, I would have been asking her to reckon with some kind of academic failure. (That might be another reason she wanted to avoid the contact ... fear of having to explain where her life has gone since the Good Old Days when she was a Watson Scholar.) Anyway, that would have been malicious of me. Yes, I rationalized it to myself by suggesting that I could tell her why I think it is fine to be outside the Academy, but that's a little bit like saying "Your life would have been so much happier if you hadn't jumped off that cliff." Again, malicious. It's really just as well she blocked further communication. And I guess I really was being something of an ass. I wish I could see these things before I do them, rather than always only after.]

Out of your past

How do you react to someone who appears unexpectedly out of your past?

I don't know for sure how often this has happened to me -- not often, if ever. But in general my idea is … well, is it someone I want to see? Do they want something from me? How did this happen? These are all questions or concerns about the person generally, and about what's going on here and now. It's also the kind of reaction I got from, for example, Inga when I first contacted her out of the blue after years.

Turns out there's another way to respond, though, which is to pick up the conversation based on the very last encounter you had with that person, even if it was decades ago. I've seen this at least twice.

When Wife was first diagnosed with lupus she was afraid she didn't have long to live. And one of the things she decided she wanted to do before dying was to straighten out things with an old boyfriend, someone she had been with in a frustrating relationship before she met me. So she looked him up on Google, and then wrote him to tell him about her diagnosis. He wrote back, very concerned about an almost-meeting that she had almost-engineered twenty years before, the last time the two of them were in the same city. And he wanted to make very clear to her that he was absolutely devoted to his wife and she should get any ideas about cheating with him out of her head.

She told me she wanted to write back to say, I'm not trying to fuck you -- I'm trying to tell you I'm dying! But in the end she just dropped it.

Over the last month or two I have looked here and there on Google and finally succeeded in tracking down a current address for a woman named Scarlett, that I used to know in college. So I mailed her. It took a while, but I finally got a reply courteously asking me not to use her work email address any more (but giving me her personal address), and asking why after all this time I was contacting her, … and reminding me of something really shitty I had said in my last letter to her 35 years ago, to which she had decided not to respond.

Wow. I never remembered saying such a thing. But she seemed to remember it like it was yesterday. Of course, she was the one who was shat upon, not me; so I suppose it makes sense that her memory would be a little bit sharper. But still … wow.

And I wonder -- what makes it possible to remember such a specific hurt that long? Is it the nature of the wound, or the nature of the person wounded? In other words, does it say something about Scarlett that she has "held this grudge close to her heart and nurtured it well"? (That was an expression Wife used to describe herself, back when I first met her. I laughed and thought it was a joke. It wasn't.) Or is it just that anyone who had gotten a letter as douchey as the one she quotes from me would remember the sting in exactly the same way? (I have no recollection of writing this letter, but I totally believe it. I was really self-centered back then.)

I don't know the answer. I wish I did.
 

Hosea and Marie's soundtrack: a meme

Usually it takes me a while to think of the music that fits a certain relationship. I didn't post a soundtrack meme for Wife and me until 2009, the year we separated our finances and I began the process of pulling away from her in earnest. I didn't post a soundtrack meme for D and me until 2014, after the affair was well over. I didn't post a soundtrack meme for my father until 2015, the year he died.

Now you could argue that I've had plenty of time to think about a soundtrack for my relationship with Marie. I met her 36 years ago. But I've already mentioned that I normally don't think of my life in terms of songs. So it would be believable if I hadn't really thought this through yet.

Only this one is a slam-dunk. I'll explain why in a few minutes, after I get one other song out of the way -- a more normal one.

See, actually I want to give you two songs. The first one came to me last night as I was typing my "Year 1" post about Marie. I don't remember if I knew it back then, but it characterizes nicely the social isolation I felt at the time.

Before I forget, let me start off quoting a paragraph of rules: 

The Rules:
Write a post about the soundtrack of your life. Please include somewhere in the body of the meme "This was started by Kyra (last refuge of the lonely housewife)"... I want to google to see how far and wide this meme travels.  

Anyway, this is how I lived my life back when I was in college. Not completely -- I dearly wanted something better -- but I was afraid to go look for it.

"I Am a Rock" by Simon and Garfunkel

A winter’s day
In a deep and dark December
I am alone
Gazing from my window
To the streets below
On a freshly fallen, silent shroud of snow
I am a rock
I am an island

I’ve built walls
A fortress, steep and mighty
That none may penetrate
I have no need of friendship
Friendship causes pain.
It’s laughter and it’s loving I disdain.
I am a rock
I am an island

Don’t talk of love
Well, I’ve heard the words before
It’s sleeping in my memory
And I won’t disturb the slumber
Of feelings that have died
If I never loved, I never would have cried
I am a rock
I am an island

I have my books
And my poetry to protect me
I am shielded in my armor
Hiding in my room
Safe within my womb
I touch no one and no one touches me
I am a rock
I am an island

And a rock feels no pain
And an island never cries
__________

But that's only the first song, and not the important one. The second is the one I called a "slam-dunk" choice.

Why a slam-dunk? Because this time I don't have to think of a song after the fact to characterize the emotions of the time. This time it's a piece of music we listened to there and then. And Marie loved it above all the things of this world.

When she first got to college, Marie knew nothing -- or almost nothing -- about classical music. But Scarlett loved classical music and played it quite a bit. So did Schmidt, as Marie and I got to know him. So it was through Scarlett and Schmidt that Marie learned to enjoy classical music ... and particularly to love Beethoven ... and above all Beethoven's other works, the Seventh Symphony in A Major ... and above all other works of man or God, the Allegretto, the Second Movement.

We would sit in Schmidt's dorm room -- or Scarlett's, but more and more we went to Schmidt for this sort of thing -- and he would put on his recording of Josef Krips conducting the London Symphony Orchestra. Marie would close her eyes and relax. As the Second Movement started, her face would melt into a beatific smile as if she were listening to angels. And when we left to go our respective ways, she was happy and renewed, no matter what life had been throwing at her.

She even said once, a year or two later, that the Seventh Symphony may well have saved her life. During most of her sophomore year she was sick with a bug that just wouldn't go away. And the muscles of her back tightened up in knots that none of her friends could massage away. So she had begun to despair of the possibility of pleasure in life, and from this she began to question "If pleasure is impossible, why go on living?" But she never went so far as suicide ... because one ineffable pleasure remained to her unsullied by any of the dross of the world. If she could enjoy nothing else, she could still listen to Beethoven. And that was enough reason to go on living.

Ever after -- from her freshman year (my sophomore year) to the present day -- I have found those two, Marie and the music, inextricable in my memory. If I think of Marie, I hear the Second Movement in the back of my mind. And if I hear the Second Movement, I always think of Marie.

In fact, I think of her at one moment, in one scene. There was a huge public rhododendron test garden just across the street from campus, and it was unlocked at night. Many is the time when I -- with or without friends -- would have to get out of my room late at night, and would go walking through the gardens. So when I hear the Second Movement what I see in my mind is Marie, standing in the moonlight in front of one of those huge rhododendrons, breathing in the scent and smiling up at the stars.

It has been 36 years. If the image is still that strong for me today, I assume I will be seeing it -- whenever I hear that music -- till I die. I guess I could do worse.

Anyway, here is the music, the voice of angels, the soundtrack for all my memories of Marie.

Second Movement of Beethoven's Seventh Symphony

Back-story on Marie, year 1

A few months ago, I wrote to Marie, my college girlfriend. And heard nothing back. Then I e-mailed her. And heard nothing back. Perhaps there's a message here, but I'm going to try one more time.

Why? In a recent e-mail, Schmidt said he had talked to Marie on the phone and she mentioned getting a letter from me. Apparently she said nothing about the e-mail. So perhaps the e-mail went astray or I had the address wrong. And perhaps she just hasn't gotten around to writing a reply.

In any event, if she didn't get the e-mail then she didn't get my promise to let it drop if I never heard back from her. I still want to give her the opportunity to ask me to go away just by failing to reply, but it's no fair my assuming that's what she means if I don't know that she heard me offer it. So this weekend I am going to write another letter, sent to the same address as the first one. That, at least, should get through.

Meanwhile I think it is time to give you a little of the back-story on her. Why am I prepared for the possibility that she might not want to talk to me again? Then if we do re-start our friendship -- given that I'll write about it -- you'll know more about our background. And even if we don't, the background will illuminate where my head was when I met Wife ... which might help explain why I married her.

Early in my sophomore year in college, four of us who had met (one way or another) the year before started to have lunch together regularly. I was one of this party; I probably won't have to give the other three names in the long term, so for now I'll call them A and R and Mac. (Schmidt joined us later in the year.) We were all sophomores, and all guys. Now, A began a relationship with a flamboyant freshman woman named Scarlett: I don't know quite how they met or how it started, but it didn't take long. And one evening Scarlett had a bunch of friends over to her room. Her two roommates were there, and one or two other freshman women from the same dorm. We all sat around and talked. I forget if there was food or wine or music; all I remember is talking. And as the evening got later, I did more and more of the talking, telling long stories about ... God knows what. (It will come as no surprise to you that I was telling long stories.) Over time people drifted away. A was still there because he was going to spend the night with Scarlett and it was her room. R was still there, I think Mac was still there. And there was one other freshman woman, directly across from me. Earlier in the evening she had been sitting, but by now she was lying on one side and listening with rapt attention. And smiling. She wasn't pretty -- her face was angular, her nose and chin jutted out sharply -- but her smile softened the effect, and every storyteller adores the look of an avid listener. At the time I didn't catch her name.

The next morning at breakfast, she was there in the cafeteria getting her food about the same time I was. We greeted each other with polite chit-chat (probably asking "Did you ever get any sleep last night?") and I apologized for having to ask her name again. She said it was Marie.

Soon, our lunch group of four had expanded to six with the addition of Scarlett and Marie. There was always a lot to talk about. In a little while more, Marie and I realized that we were taking the same Physics 100 class. We were in different sections, but by the second semester our schedules had shifted to allow us to share a lab. And we continued to talk a lot. Marie would show up at my dorm room to discuss physics problem sets, and we would talk for hours ... sometimes even about physics. I remember her standing in my doorway in a powder-blue jacket, primed, focused, fully alert, and with a slight smile as I opened the door. In retrospect, if I had put out my arms she would have jumped into them.

Why didn't I? Several reasons. In the first place, all of us thought she had developed a relationship with Mac. Maybe she had, I really don't know. I never asked. But when we were all together she and Mac usually had their hands all over each other. On the other hand she spent a lot of time with me too, and she beamed when we were together. Whatever there was with Mac, it didn't occupy her whole attention.

More fundamentally, I was cripplingly shy and socially naïve. I was frightened of doing anything wrong, with the result that often my interactions with girls were embarrassingly awkward. If I had been less afraid of doing something wrong, I would have done fewer things wrong -- but of course that's what I see now, decades older, looking back. Back then I was desperately young for my age. And yet maybe it wasn't obvious to others just how shy I really was ... because I had a loud voice and I covered my terror of intimacy with voluble expertise about any number of arcane topics. To the rest of the world I was a born scholar, someone who never had to worry about living in the real world because he was never going to leave Academia ... someone who never had to worry about love or sex because all he needed was his books.

God how I hated those books, sometimes. I could see the walls that I had built for myself, even if other people didn't always see that they were just walls and not my real nature. I could see that somewhere out beyond those walls there was a Real World, and that it was richer than anything I had inside: a Real World where people fell in and out of love, fought, broke up, made up, had sex, held each other, yelled, stormed, cried, and laughed. I yearned with all my heart to be free of those walls, and yet at the same time I was terrified to stick even a little finger out of them and I was sure I didn't speak the language. So I was stuck there, walled in by my books, without even a cask of amontillado to cheer my isolation.

At the same time I also loved my studies. I couldn't have done so well at them if I hadn't. And this digression is partly beside the point.

Don't get the idea that the infatuation was all on her part. Quite apart from my yearning to breathe free, I was deeply fond of her. I never used the word "love" to myself, largely because I didn't really know what it meant. How could I tell for sure if this thing I was feeling was love? But I was always glad to see her; my heart always beat a little faster when she was there; she brightened my days, and if I went a few days without seeing her those days were just dreary. I came to her room as often as she came to mine ... oftener, really, because her room was larger than mine and there were more places to sit down. Besides, she had a whole steamer trunk full of different kinds of tea, and she would put on water to boil whenever I came over. She had a large collection of poetry that she was always trying to discuss with me (and which I felt hopelessly incompetent to discuss), books on feminist theory, books in French (we both spoke French), ... it was just a delightful place to be. Much better than studying.

Was I in love? In retrospect, yes of course I was in love. Today it is obvious to me. But back then I didn't know the words to describe how I felt. That's how desperately clueless I was.

At the end of the school year in May, just before final exams, my college throws a big party that lasts all weekend. There is a huge barbecue, beer and drugs flow freely, there is music and dancing everywhere. Marie and I were about to go to the barbecue, but stopped by her room for something first -- that room where I had spent so many hours drinking tea, playing with her cat (which she had against dorm regulations), and talking. We got whatever we were there to get, and then Marie told me she had something to say. She sat down on her bed, stared at the floor far away from where I was standing, then rubbed her eyes with her hand and said haltingly, "It's just that ... I find you very attractive, and ...."

I don't remember what she said after that. I fainted.

Yes, it was a hot day and I was wearing something heavy that didn't breathe well. Yes, I'd probably had a beer already, so my head was a little light. Still, I fainted ... for the third and (so far) last time in my life. I must have said something about feeling hot. I don't remember saying it, but the next thing I knew Marie had helped me down the stairs into the basement where it was cooler, she had stripped off my heavy un-breathing shirt, and she had a wet washcloth on my forehead. After a while I felt better and we went to the barbecue. And we never picked up that conversation.

I wanted to. But I couldn't. Every day after that I told myself I had to go talk to her. And every day I failed to do it. I berated myself for my cowardice, I felt dismal for my failure, and I felt even worse that she had exposed her heart to me and I was just letting it hang out there in the wind. I knew I must be causing her terrible suffering, and I felt grief for it. But I could not make myself go and talk to her about it. When we saw each other we talked about other things, as if it had never happened.

And then the school year was over and we went to our homes. We wrote each other many letters over the summer, all about bright and cheery things. And we never talked about it.