In the end Mal decided that there was nothing much he could do so he might as well join the police. I watched him for the first year, saw him get wrapped into his work, and concluded that the kind of things he was doing would probably suit me, too. Suit me better than they did him, in some ways; the trawling through debris and junk, the psychos and streetwalkers, the blood and violence seemed to speak directly to some part of my mind. It looked like fun. The Gap had affected Bright Eyes in different ways, and in my case it was as if I’d blossomed there. Leaving it was like having some essential nutrient removed—not one whose absence kills you, but one that simply changes the color of your leaves. I’d learned to live inside fear. The idea of being a cop appealed to that side of me, as did the notion of remaining outside society. I wanted to stand looking in. So I went to the office, proved I could spell at least one of my names, and they gave me a badge and a gun.
I met Henna a few months later, in the depths of a riotous party on 110. Mal had wangled us invites, having met a group of above-the-liners somewhere along the line of duty, and we spruced ourselves up, hopped on an xPress and went in search of fun. I didn’t have much in the early parts of the evening, as I remember, and felt conscious of the fact that I was currently bunked down in a nasty apartment on one of 38’s more alarming streets. It’s possibly my imagination, but I rather got the impression that Mal and I had been invited as performing bears. I responded in the most constructive way I could: by getting profoundly drunk.
By ten I was so wasted I had been officially downgraded to a lower rung on the evolutionary ladder. Some guy in a suit came up, listened to my attempts to string words together, revoked my rights as Homo sapiens on the spot, and reclassified me as some kind of plant life. I had to fill in all kinds of forms and shit. It was very embarrassing.
But then I saw Henna, and got talking to her, and the evening turned out to be fun after all. She was tall and slim, with cool green eyes and an agreeably rangy figure, and even in my state I saw immediately that she was both intelligent and beautiful. She in turn seemed prepared to ignore the chip on my shoulder and the whiskey on my tie, and to find at least some of what I said interesting rather than merely aggressive, and at the end of the evening I staggered away with her phone number.
A month later she moved down from 102 to anew apartment we took together on 61—at first largely financed by her salary. We outlasted the schtupfest, found we liked each other, and two years later were married. Mal was the best man. Henna’s parents came down, and were polite—icily so, in retrospect—and it was only many years later that I discovered how much they’d hated the idea of her marrying me. I was poor, I was a rookie cop, and I was resolutely not from above the line. All this was their problem, not mine, but they were Henna’s mom and dad. One night, not long before she died, Henna accidentally revealed just how much they hated their son-in-law, and I understood for an instant just how much she’d given up to be with me, and how little I’d given her in return. For a moment, just a moment, I had a glimpse of the kind of man I’d become; but then I stormed out of the apartment and spent the next few hours with the woman I was having an affair with.
The first three years of our marriage were a contented blur. Henna professed herself happy, told me how she loved me, and so the days went by. I discovered that I could do policework, and that it mattered to me. I was busy trying to get into Homicide. Henna put up with the late nights, the no-shows, the worry that one night I simply might not come back. We talked, we smiled, we went out and did things together. Occasionally we would flare up over something, and argue briefly and bitterly, but, in general, the times were good.
But the truth is this: I never really loved Henna enough, not until it was far too late. I cared very deeply, and I felt affection, but even on the day I proposed to her I believed it was not love I held in my heart.
I thought I had known absolute love before, when I was eighteen. Her name was Fhee, and we spent two years together before the relationship blew apart. Fhee had a smile like a cat in front of a fire, and I was so terrified of losing her. She was an uncontainable force of nature, a shout of existence with thick auburn hair and big brown eyes; a lithe, running woman who always seemed to be turning and urging me to catch up with her. Her skin was sometimes smooth, sometimes rough, and her hair hung in rats’ tails to the middle of her back. Making love to her was like a delicious road accident which left you breathless and shocked. Instead of a gentle celebration of considered love it was a function of her whole being, a physical reaction as unstoppable as a sneeze, as elemental as fear.
A few weeks after we parted I ended up in The Gap, because I was angry and unhappy and didn’t feel I had anyplace else to go. I was there for over two years, and that period changed my view of the world for good. By the time I came out, Fhee was gone. I only saw her once more and that was many years later.
Sometimes it’s hard for me to believe that I let a marriage slide because of some idealized first love, something that had died long before; but ifs a sad fact about life that you can’t always learn from your mistakes, because by the time you’ve made them you’ve changed the playing field forever.
As I got older, I became increasingly haunted by a vision of some perfect woman I believed I was destined to find. In each person I would see only what was lacking, and in every place and activity know the lack. Sometimes I felt I could actually see this woman, feel her, smell her. I knew exactly what she would look like, how she would speak, how she would be.
I knew when I married Henna that she wasn’t that woman, though she should have been. I married her anyway. I married her because she wanted me to, and because I loved her too much to disappoint her. I don’t want you to get the idea I had an especially bad time. Henna played a mean game of pool, was very nice to me, and I missed her like hell when she wasn’t there. She laughed like a drain, didn’t take me too seriously, and had the cutest chin of all time. It wasn’t that Henna was bad, or deficient: It was just that she wasn’t her, and sometimes when I went to meet her I expected someone else. The other woman. The one who would have made me afraid.
The contradictory pulses of guilt and excitement, the feeling of a stranger’s lips on yours when you should be somewhere else: Somewhere in the gap between those two emotions, perhaps, was what I was looking for.
I never found it. Eventually Angela came along, and after that things were different. I slept around less, and when I did it was with a mean-spirited pragmatism. I loved Angela with all my heart, and part of the reason I was able to do that was that so much of Henna was in her. It was as if there was a version of my wife that I didn’t have to be married to, didn’t have to have a male-female relationship of any kind with, but could simply love. Angela wasn’t a flawed version of some imaginary woman; she was simply my perfect daughter. So much of the love we have for people depends on how they make us feel about ourselves, and Angela made me feel like I was worthy of loving. She would stand in front of me, looking up, and then suddenly just hurl herself upward as hard as she could, arms stretched out, trusting me to catch her. I’d fold her to my chest, and sometimes as I nuzzled her face I’d be aware of Henna in the background and be able to feel the tangible wave of her happiness and relief.
I would watch Henna and Angela together, and hear them talk, and during that period feel closer to happiness than any time before or since. I remember one afternoon when we all went walking, up on the Blue Ridge Parkway near Lexington, and Angela found a snail crawling over a rock. “Look,” she said, and Henna looked, and told her how snails carried their houses on their backs. Angela was entranced, and I knew for sure that was one story which she would never forget for the rest of her life, which she would tell her own daughter when the time came.