“He was living on West Fourth Street and had been suicidal for years. He told everybody his brother was a movie star, and that was true. His room was in the back of a store and on the floor was a single mattress. The mattress looked like an unopened envelope. He said he had not made love in three years, and after he came, he cried, and the next day he hovered in a doorway, there was a violet gash on his neck. Then he disappeared forever.”
Obliviously, I love you.
She was becoming stiff and rose from the table, and walked from room to room, imagining she was a ferocious animal. Paige paced back and forth, back and forth, not sleek as a tiger or cunning as a fox but on the prowl. She felt a little hungry.
“Even today love, too, is in essence as animal as it ever was.” (Freud)
Paige took up the scissors again. Love, she considered with affection, should be generous, at the very least it should appear to be. She smiled absentmindedly as she cut more hearts, attempting to keep them attached like a chain of paper dolls. Was she fashioning love? Wasn’t the memory better than the love? The shapes grew progressively more uneven and awkward.
“You planted yourself in my garden, taking up room, then, oh, you grew, you became a weed, you were so tall, with such nerve. Your satin trousers and you were much too sleek. I tried to escape, but you insisted. You kept on insisting, about what, toward what end, I can’t remember. I wish flowers had never been looked at before. When we stood up, I felt taller, as tall as you, no, taller. You were awkward, but I remember all your questions.”
Awkwardly, I love you.
Dearest,
I can still say it, common as it is, common as mud and as thick and undecipherable. In my dreams I cleave to you, I hold you, your body bent to mine, your body reminding me of someone else who is no longer here to love me, but then that’s love, one body replaces another. I don’t mean that, not just any other, yours, only you. And only you understand me, the me who loves you. You and I make meaning together, that’s how love is, what love is — meaning. Meaning I love you. Meaning, I love you. “I love you” means I won’t listen to reason.
“Everybody has a different idea of love. One girl I knew said, ‘I knew he loved me when he didn’t come in my mouth.’” (Andy Warhol)
Paige thought about coloring the hearts and affixing titles to them. I’m glad no one can see me, she thought, and hummed aloud: I’m a little teapot, lift me up, pour me out. I’m a common heart, a commoner, a common metaphor, a cup of tea, a loaf of bread, a bouquet of posies. I am also beside myself. Hush, Paige admonished, be still, useless heart. Then she uncorked a bottle of red wine.
Commonly, I love you.
Since childhood, Paige had read poets and listened to the music of composers and songwriters who ordinarily took love as their subject. It made sense because love is mute, nearly unspeakable, so it needs a voice; still, it’s impossible to give it fully or sufficiently. So, no one can say enough about love or for it, and it cannot be encompassed or conquered, since it’s abstract, constantly inconsistent, outrageously ineffable, obdurate, and evasive. Therefore, Love endures as a subject worth taking up.
Paige allowed these sentiments and others entry, yet feared that whatever she had experienced and read, the cautionary tales she imbibed, couldn’t protect her. She hoped, desperately, to invest in knowledge and gain strength for the lovesick nights, for those raw, endless hours that robbed her blind and stole her reason.
“The night murmurs/Its thousand loves/ And false counsels/ To soften and seduce the heart.” (Puccini, Tosca)
“There was a time when I believed your love belonged to me/ Now I find that you’re shackled to a memory/… How can I free your doubtful mind?/ And melt your cold, cold heart.” (Hank Williams)
Blindly, I love you.
Dearest,
Even when my eyes hurt and everything’s blurred, I keep writing and reading. Weak eyes still love stories. Remember when you said I’m full of stories. You are too. Isn’t this how you seduced me? Wasn’t it your story, how you told it, how I sank into it, submitted, and collapsed into the superb rendition of your life — into you? I thought I saw you in your story. And isn’t this how I seduced you? It wasn’t my beauty, was it? It wasn’t my youth, was it? I think it was my story, one word after another after another, circling around you, gathering you to me. My lines roped you in, the way yours did me, our lines — to continue this pathetic figure of speech — tangled, and we became one story. I have a French friend who always said about her love affairs, I’m having a little story with him. With words like sticky plums, I drew you close.
My grip, on you, on my own tales, is sometimes tenuous. I might slip, but I always love you.
Paige drank the wine, but she barely tasted it, she was transfixed. In her red bathrobe she looked comical, like a giant valentine. From time to time she glanced at the clock on the wall, but she wasn’t sure what time it was. Every month the clock needed a new battery, but she forgot to change it. It was good that actual hearts didn’t have batteries to be changed or recharged. Except there were pacemakers. Maybe that’s why she felt run down, her heart was mimicking a machine. Paige stacked the paper hearts like honeyed pancakes.
Sweetly, I love you.
“She was so much in love, she wanted to make love all the time. He was away. She left their house and walked to a canal and saw a man standing on a bridge. She liked him, and it was easy to make love. Her exciting, grand passion threatened to make negligible any differences between one man and another. And, also, her love made her expansive, bigger than she was. She abandoned herself to the threat of self-annihilation — that’s what love is — and spent the afternoon with the stranger. There was no restraint, she gave him everything he wanted, without regret. He gave her his address, and she tore it up later.”
“Such wayward ways hath Love, that most part in discord/ Our wills do stand, whereby our hearts seldom do accord.” (Henry Howard, Earl of Surrey)
Discordantly, I love you.
You are everything. “You” is everything to the sentence, I love you, for without “you,” could “I” love?
Dearest,
It‘s strange to write “I love you.” I don’t mean to you, what’s strange is to write it, to commit it to paper or the screen. I don’t mean that it could be anyone but you when I write, I love you. Only you could be the you that I love. That’s obvious. Isn’t it obvious that I love you, and that, without you, I cannot love. You alone will see where I’m leading, where my thought carries me, because my thought carries me to you.
“The air is fragrant and oddly pure this morning. It wafts into my room and reminds me of days when I played for hours in the forest down the road, our jungle, or maybe it was next to the house then, back then. I can’t remember. I remember how in the winter the pond would freeze over and all of us kids would ice skate, our hands tucked into our sleeves or sheltered safely in woolen mittens. Mittens are for little creatures who need shelter all the time. With mittens we are small animals with paws. The boys I played with — were you one of them? Even then? Steve, Ronnie, Jerry. They were always around the house. Jerry was dark and round. Ronnie, tall and blond, angular and angry, a bad boy. He became a lawyer. Steve stood apart and sulked. I wonder what happened to him.”
Abruptly Paige jumped up from the table. At the sink she poured out the dregs of the tea. It was late, and the city was quiet, sleeping. Does a city sleep when it can’t close its eyes? Isn’t everyone wrong about something like love?