I remember what it was like to fall in love with my wife.
The smell of it. Peated scotch, salty skin, cigarette ash, the acrid tang of semen, whiffs of shoe leather on carefully manicured toes. It had a sound. Her exclamations, her laughter, her moans and pleas when I hadn’t had enough. The little idiosyncrasies of her speech. The elaborate flourish she’d place on the first vowel of my name. It had a feeling, like a great hand propelling me forward. I remember the urgency to see her, the anticipation, the thrill of it. Spotting her in a crowded bar and walking straight for her, pushing aside anyone in the way until I am close enough to grab her forcefully and, without a word, kiss her hard, so that she feels it, so that she knows she is mine.
It was, at first, a love made of long nights, of pendant lights hanging over cocktail tables and neon signs reflecting off slick winter streets. Of bathroom doors slamming behind me as I pile in after her. She had game, real honest to goodness game. She could talk shit and crack jokes and walk fast in impossible heels and knew to reapply her lipstick in the few minutes between my softening cock slipping out of her and then needing her again. It was an exciting love, a determined love; an urgent, powerful thing. A love that whispered possibilities in my ear, a love that provoked unprecedented thoughts.
It didn’t remain that love forever. Ours is not one love but many loves. It is a restless and constantly changing thing. Our love isn’t satisfied to live once and fade quietly. It will immolate if left unattended, then rise anew from its ashes. Our love is a diva, a queen. It commands attention, it needs to be the center of conversation wherever it goes. It thrills onlookers and elicits admiring nods. But if it is deprived of that attention it will sulk and wail and smash dishes. Our love may seem brash and confident and impossibly strong but it is also vulnerable, sensitive, unsure at times. It needs care.
The first death-birth
Before I met her, I had come to believe that romance and pain were natural partners. Two forces in an equilibrium that could not be safely untangled. It was a simple equation: love could be exciting but that also meant it would end tragically. The relationships that survive would inevitably decay into drudergy, abuse and despair. And so I was not entirely surprised when she sat me down in a nameless bar and told me that she couldn’t see me anymore. She had a boyfriend, he was becoming overwhelmed by jealousy. I had a girlfriend, and my girlfriend was not her. She explained that, at her age and coming off her divorce, she wanted someone with whom she could take it to the next level. Someone available.
As she spoke, there was a brief moment in which her mask slipped. I realized that she must have been feeling real pain. Less because of the emotions she showed and more for the great effort she was making to conceal them. For as rambunctious and noisy as she can be, my wife is also, in many ways, a consummately reserved New Yorker. She moves through the streets armored in cool. She is structured out of compartments within which fierce passions roil, never allowed to bleed out without authorization.
I was cheerful. I didn’t believe her. I invited her back to my apartment to take some acid and celebrate our parting. I didn’t really think we’d break up. It seemed impossible. A deliriously intense trip followed. It was a funny, intimate, sexy thing. It seemed to last forever but eventually morning came. She put on her clothing and I slipped my winter coat over my bare chest. I walked her out, taking my dog with me. In the elevator she looked at me with sad, soft eyes and said “I find you so dear.” It was a strange thing for her to say, uncharacteristically formal. My mind unraveling, I finally understood what was happening: she didn’t expect to ever see me again.
She stepped into a cab. I said goodbye then walked my dog alongside the Hudson river. It was a frigid and frost-rimmed morning, the hard slap of cold air a welcome discomfort. Before long I was weeping. My dog sat and looked up at me with concern, eager to help. Then a curious thing happened. I found myself unable to accept this. Every fiber of my being contested the ancient and terrible logic I had been living by.
I went out to dinner that night with my friend, the Marine. He is a tall, athletic man with piercing blue eyes and a pitbull-like combination of warmth and ferocity. He listened carefully to my story. He knows the shape my wild heart as well as she does, for he has one too. He liked her a lot and liked her for me. He didn’t want to see her go. I asked him what to do and he said to me, “could you live without her? Could you be happy if you let her walk away?”
Outside the restaurant we shared a few cigarettes. I remember saying that if this doesn’t work out, if she doesn’t come back, I will be alone. The Marine answered, “we’re all alone. We all die alone. Guys like us, we’ll be fine.” We had been drinking and I was still feeling the acid but I understood what he meant. Regret is worse than loss. I knew what I had to do.
I spent the next week writing her love letters, chain smoking and not sleeping. I broke up with my girlfriend. My wife didn’t answer, not at first. I persisted until, a week later, a notification appeared on my phone. She had written back, complaining that I was making this impossible for her. That’s the point, I answered. It should be impossible to leave me. A couple of days later we met. I remember standing outside of a bar, smoking a cigarette as I waited for her under a streetlight. It had just started to snow. She stepped out of a yellow cab wearing stiletto heels, stockings and a knit dress that fell just off her delicate shoulders. She stood on her toes to kiss me hello. As we sat at the bar, I admitted to her that I had a lot of work to do. With stars in her eyes she replied “yeah, you do.” I knew then that she was mine and I was hers. Forever.
This was our first death-birth. A triumph.
The second death-birth
At the moment when I noticed, it seemed abrupt. Our relationship had changed; desire suddenly evicted, replaced by a dull frustration. It happened fast enough that I felt the shift, had time to protest. I recall us sitting in a third-tier cocktail bar on the Lower East Side, something tense and foul hanging in the air between us. The conversation is etched in my memory in the vivid way that often accompanies trauma. I asked her why things were between us were different now, why we didn’t have sex the way we used to, why she seemed constantly irritated with me. I asked her if it was because she was falling out of love with me. Maybe there was another man. Her reassurances were more dismal than that. No, she wasn’t falling out of love with me. This is just how relationships are, she told me. Things change, passions cool, it is how it is. I told her that even if this is the case, there must be something we can do. Our love is exceptional and nothing is inevitable, we can fight this dreadful momentum together. With a forceful certainty she told me that no, we cannot, and we won’t speak about it again.
My heart broke. I didn’t have the words to describe the change, but it felt like dying. Like an amputation, only less clean than that. More like a limb suddenly rent off me, something gory and brutal. It left behind a cavity, a need for some explanation. I concluded that my old fear was correct, that love and pain are inextricably linked. If even this love could decay then clearly I was doomed to unsatisfying relationships, it was a fate that I couldn’t escape. I sunk into a depressive rage. Perhaps this was my own fault, an outcome of some preferences that I couldn’t identify, or perhaps it was just the nature of romance. Ultimately it didn’t matter. It just is.
In hindsight, the trajectory is easier to see. The first year of our relationship was both rapturous and contented. We made love often, stayed out too late, eventually decided to stop seeing other people. I moved to an apartment closer to hers. One day blended into the next, the two of us devoted to little more than pleasure. When summer came we grew louche and tan. I continued writing her love letters, but I was running out of new things to say.
Unremitting pleasure is a funny thing. Appealing in concept, afflicting in practice. Absent the troughs provided by challenge, the peaks of our pleasure flattened into something less exciting. Our vacations, dates and little adventures all took on a feeling of obligation or, perhaps more accurately, unearned indulgence. Silently I blamed myself. Perhaps if I had recovered my ambition sooner this wouldn’t be happening. That was implicit in our covenant. She provides style, access and excitement; I provide energy, confidence, drive. A sense of safety, the clarity of purpose, freedom from want. That was my end of the bargain and I wasn’t holding it up.
It was a poor explanation, an equation that leant itself to many distorted thoughts and unhelpful feelings. Most of all, it wasn’t true. One thing doesn’t always lead to the other. Our bond wasn’t built on those sorts of exchanges. Our love, I have come to understand, is unconditional in the truest sense of the word; a concept that is so alien to me that I still don’t fully comprehend it. Sometimes I wish I had known that back then, maybe it would have helped avoid some of the pain that followed. Then I think that no, life is not like that, you cannot just subtract one experience and improve the whole. Moments of longing and despair are as much the parents of happiness as elation and joy.
This was the second remaking. An uncertain conception, stillborn and incomplete.
The third death-birth
My father’s death catapulted us into adulthood. Or, more accurately, reality. We were already very adult (at least in the stockings and cigarettes sense of the word) but the assumption of greater responsibility came swiftly when I realized that he was going to die.
I got a job, a good one. My wife and I started looking for an apartment to purchase together. In the process of signing the deal we got married, suddenly and without reservation. No, that’s not exactly right. It wasn’t sudden. We both wanted it for a long time. I had, in a sense, proposed to her years ago during a drunken cab ride home. “Baby, will you be my forever girl?” At this she blushed and hid her face before regaining her composure. “Yeah, I had that experience. It’s cool to be able to say ‘this is my husband.’ You should have that experience, too.” I wasn’t disappointed, I knew her heart and her mind too well. I smiled wryly and waited. Two days later she confessed that she was overwhelmed and didn’t know what to say and that yes, yes of course she wanted to marry me and love me forever. As if I had any doubt.
We had put off the wedding for years, as we wanted something extravagant. Guests flying to far flung places, something more like an affair of state. Now it seemed silly to wait, so we didn’t. I said my vows to her in the New York Marriage Bureau, witnessed by our family and friends. My father gave a moving speech during the luncheon that followed. Later in that sweltering July evening dozens of people showed up to an impromptu party, a raucous and joyful affair. In the year that followed I drenched her in jewelry and gifts, took us on an extravagant tour through Asia that was less of a honeymoon and more of a promise: this is how it will be.
Our friends congratulated us often. One of them - a brilliant and sensitive man with a powerful aspect - told me how love between him and husband changed over time, how it became more about building a life together, how that could be a beautiful thing. I sincerely agreed even as I concealed a sense of loss that I privately felt. I was thrilled to be married to her. I wanted a beautiful life together, I wanted challenges and to make a special home. But not at the expense of the sense of adventure we used to have. Our life now revolved around renovations and negotiations with lawyers and mortgage brokers and an ever growing list of bourgeois furniture that we apparently needed to buy in the future for reasons that I understood less and less each day. Much of our communication was a one-way barrage of withering criticisms, terms of endearment like “baby” followed by language like “you need to do” something, what exactly, it didn’t really matter. Always something to do. Money spent long before I made it, time filled before I had a say in how.
This was the third transformation. A glorious thing that I wanted so badly and felt tragically excluded from.
The fourth death-birth
I make no excuses for my errors, I expect no sympathy for my self-pity. I commit this to writing so that I am forced to look it in the face. So that I can prevent memory and the passage of time from smoothing the rough edges off of this splinter in our lives.
In the winter after my father’s death I began to have an affair. There had been temptations and mistakes in the past. This was different. It was a wild and reckless infatuation, its intensity unique in my experience save for the sole exception of my love for my wife. In my head I built an elaborate machine whose only purpose was to manufacture excuses for my infidelity. My father’s death was a tragedy, my boss was abusive, the apartment renovations were too demanding, the pandemic sucks, my wife was distant, short-tempered and aloof. My life was a treadmill of thankless obligations. Crucially, all were rooted in fact. The idea that they excused my behavior is not. One thing does not lead to the other thing. There is no excuse for betrayal. Even if I was being wronged, I should have stood up and faced it head on rather than nurse my grievances in secret.
For a while the affair flourished in liminal spaces of the sort that New York provides. The alabaster halls of the Met museum, eating outdoors in the frozen bleakness of New York’s pandemic winter. Periodic visits from the girl in which, for a moment, I was able to step outside of my life and into a magical unreality that I desperately wanted. So much so that I ignored the terrible signs of what was to come. The girl was a prolific liar, almost certainly a malignant sociopathic. While I believe her affection for me was profound and sincere, unprecedented in her life, I also believe that her definition of affection is hopelessly tainted by a compulsion for secrecy and manipulation. She was a full service sex worker (companion, escort, prostitute, whatever euphemism you prefer), the most highly paid of her type. Her clients were titans of industry, men whom I often envied and rarely admired. I was never her client and had little knowledge of her trade when I met her. When she told me I never thought less of her for it. If anything, I enjoyed the exclusivity we had. To have something with her that wasn’t for sale, it felt like a victory. I am grandiose, I thought I was winning.
I was not. In fact, I was pitted against something undefeatable. Not just the girl’s mercenary zeal or the many violences and grotesqueries of her profession, but also my own personality disorders and, most importantly, the incredible harm I was doing to my wife. At the time I had so many rationalizations but in hindsight I can see that my relationship with the girl was doomed from the start. Her manipulations were always easy to locate despite being carefully hidden, like chittering beasts slouching around the periphery of my vision. Eventually they grew so loud that I could not ignore them. Her lies metastasized voraciously until they became extreme. I thought I could change her. Not that I would compel her to stop sex work - I’m not that dull - but more that I could give her a reason to be honest and true. Each time I caught her in a lie, it was a defeat. By the same token, my lies to my wife grew ever larger until I was buckling under the burden of them. The tension between my guilt and my desire was making me insane. The distress of this experience made it impossible to contain the affair.
So I felt both panic and relief when my wife confronted me with her suspicions. I remember the pain in her voice. Her usual force was replaced with a ragged sob: “you don’t know what love means. You’re supposed to protect the ones you love. You broke my heart.” She threatened to leave me but on some level I knew that wasn’t going to happen. I wasn’t surprised when, some weeks later, we agreed to make it work. Go to couples therapy, try to heal. That isn’t to say that I’m not grateful. I am. It is a tremendous and full gratitude. It is more that I cannot imagine life without her. I mean that in the very literal sense of the word. A life without my wife is incomprehensible.
The affair forced me to confront certain uncomfortable truths. There is a hole in my heart. I have had it for my entire life. A great, hungry void. It has done me many services, its energy is useful. It compels me forward, demands that I make my ideas into reality. It devours insults and expels determination. It refuses to yield. But it is also senseless, thoughtless, capricious. It never rests, it seeps poison when it is ignored. I have tried to fill it with drugs, with sex, with money, with food, with exercise, with rage. Nothing ever worked. For a short while the affair filled that hole but with what, I didn’t ask. I should have. I have asked myself that question many times since. I don’t like the answers. I was so enraged by my guilt and shame that even admitting to the magnitude of my misdeeds took months. I simply cannot explain why I allowed something so clearly terrible to do so much harm to me and the one I love most. It is as though I held my hand against a flame until my flesh was charred, smelled the burning and did nothing to remove it.
This was the fourth renewal. A terrible one, this time. A demon I alone had birthed.
The fifth death-birth
My wife is irresistibly sexy. The shape of her hands and feet, the taste of her flesh. Her little pouts and expressions, her wide smile and her charming giggles. Her moments of vulgarity, her eager appreciation of art and perversion, high brow and low. Now my desire for her extends beyond those things. I desire her for her belief in me, for her strength, for her willingness to rise to the occasion. For the bravery and courage she shows in therapy, listening to my frailties and revealing her own. There is a substance and foundation to our affection now that neither of us have ever had before in any relationship. It is overwhelming to contemplate and yet I do not tire of thinking about it.
The last year has been difficult, at times nearly impossible. We move through it together. We are relearning how to love each other. A love that is about more than excitement, a love that is candid and determined and brave. We’re committed to growing together. For the first time in our lives together we are truly intimate partners, friends as well as lovers, our inner selves revealed to each other.
I apologize to her often, but that is not enough. The real measure of my commitment is my willingness to ask hard questions and to accept the answers. To change. For the first time in my life I believe that the hole in my heart could be sealed shut. Not filled, not occupied, not temporarily sated. Shut. I wonder what that will be like. Who I will be.
I feel at awe at my wife for having stood by me throughout this. I feel an excitement for the future. A confidence that we can overcome any challenges. A conviction that the best days of our lives are ahead of us. Always ahead of us.
This is the fifth of our rebirths. It is not finished yet, it has only just crowned. Despite that, I am absolutely sure that this is the best of them.
I love you baby. Forever.