Love and Glory

Chapter Thirty

“What do you do for social life, Boonie?” Jennifer said. We were alone in the teaching fellows’ office, studying. It was evening and the building was empty except for us and the night cleaning man who shuffled about, dragging his big trash barrel and emptying wastebaskets into it. Jennifer had made us two cups of instant coffee with hot water from the office percolator, and we were taking a break.

“I talk with you,” I said. “When I should be studying.”

“Besides that?”

“I haven’t much time for much besides that. I teach my two sections and grade freshmen compositions — ugh — and take my own classes and study and work weekends as a carpenter. Sometimes I have a couple of beers with the guys I work with.”

“No girls?”

I shook my head.

“That’s too bad,” Jennifer said. “You have a great capacity for affection.”

The fist that I kept clenched inside me tightened a little. “Yes,” I said. “I do.”

We were quiet, sipping coffee. Somewhere, on another floor, a vacuum cleaner hummed. Jennifer’s makeup was perfect, her hair exactly in place. She’d been at school since nine o’clock in the morning, but she looked as if she’d just arrived. Her commitment to her appearance was large. As we sat I thought about aging. Neither of us was old, but we looked different than we had. Jennifer’s face was more interesting now. There were no lines, no double chins, and yet it was the face of a thirty-six-year-old woman. What had changed?

“You’re too closed in, Boonie,” Jennifer said. “You’re the most entirely autonomous person I’ve ever met, but you pay a high price for it.”

“Not as high a price as I paid when I wasn’t autonomous,” I said. “When you married Merchent I nearly went under. By the time I bottomed in L.A. a derelict, I was dying. If autonomy means being in control of your life, I had none. Now I do. And I will never lose it again.”

It was the first time I’d ever spoken with her in anything but general terms about the bad years. And I found my voice thick with intensity when I spoke of it now. I realized as I heard the intensity how vital my self-control was, how much it meant to me to have dragged myself up out of the bad years. Jennifer heard the intensity too.

“Would you like to tell me about it?” she said.

The vacuum cleaner on the floor above continued. The tone of its hum alternated slightly as it moved forward and backward over the industrial carpeting. Jennifer was leaning forward at her desk, her chin resting on her folded hands.

“Yes,” I said. “I would. I can’t remember long stretches of it, but I can give you some highlights.”

I talked for nearly an hour in surprisingly lucid chronology. The keeping of my journal probably helped the sequence of events in my head, and some of what I told her I remembered from my journal entries rather than from the events themselves.

The vacuum cleaner had gone by the time I finished speaking, and when I finished, the silence was complete. Jennifer had not moved, her enormous eyes steady on my face, her chin still resting on her hands.

“My God,” she said.

I was quiet. I felt complicated. There was triumph of a sort; I had finally told her what she’d done to me. But I was embarrassed too, embarrassed that I felt triumph, and embarrassed that I had confessed something shameful. I was risking my control; I had closed the emotional distance between us, and I knew it and it frightened me. I had always fancied myself as one bearing pain with dignity, and this torrential confession seemed antithetical to my fancy.

“How did you stop?” Jennifer said. “What turned you around?”

“I had to have a purpose,” I said. “I decided to get you back.”

She didn’t waver. Maybe she already knew it without exactly saying it. Now, as the words hung between us in the untidy little room, she kept her eyes on me.

“So you stopped drinking, and began the weightlifting,” she said, “and the running, and the books?”

“And the nutrition and not smoking and the carpentry and the boxing and the courses and the whole...” I searched for a word.

“Self-improvement,” she murmured.

“The whole self-improvement,” I said.

“For me?”

“If I were going to get you, I had to deserve you.”

“For you too,” she said.

“Absolutely. It saved me.”

Jennifer moved her chin slightly, rubbing it against her hands.

“And now?”

“It continues to save me,” I said. “It’s what I do. It is my single stay against confusion... hell, against dissolution. Without you I would dissipate.”

“Still?”

“Still.”

“But you’re so contained, Boonie. So sure of your integrity, so” — she lifted her chin and spread her hands — “so integrated.”

“As long as I can believe in you,” I said. “If I can believe in you, I can believe in me. But without you... I can find no other purpose in life. It’s the difference between love and masturbation. I have to love someone besides myself.”

“But you must love yourself too,” Jennifer said.

“I was dying,” I said. “I needed something to live for. Having someone to love makes life livable, but I think probably I have to be loved back to love myself.”

“And it has to be me?”

“Yes.”

“Wouldn’t it be simpler to fall in love with someone who will love you back?”

“I don’t make the news,” I said. “I just report it.”

“I don’t understand that,” she said. “I don’t understand why you are so centered on me, why you don’t find a woman who is single and loving and responsive and everything you want.”

“I have chosen you,” I said. “I have made a free commitment. There was a woman in L.A. I could have chosen. I didn’t. I chose you. I have faith in you. I, by free act of will, love you, and choose always to love you.”

Jennifer shook her head sadly. “You want the wrong person,” she said. “You don’t know me. I’ll never be what you want me to be.”

I felt the bottom falling out, the blackness beneath. Control. I took in a deep breath. Control.

“It doesn’t matter what you are,” I said. “I choose to love you, and I won’t choose not to.”

“Boonie, I—” She stopped, tightened her mouth, and let her breath out through her nose.

“I know,” I said. “There’s nothing to say. Just know that I won’t quit, and that you can ask me for anything.”

“I’ve always known that,” she said.