Truth and Beauty

But it never worked that way, and the sex just made her lonelier. I understood that, as it had made me lonelier too. I couldn’t ever remember being lonely before, certainly not in this way, until I had seen the edge of all the ways you could be with another person, which brought up all the myriad ways that person could never be there for you.

A FEW WEEKS later we went to see Peggy Sue Got Married at the mall downtown. Lucy and I were shameless about movies. We would see almost anything that allowed us to sit in the dark air-conditioning of a theater. The night had been fine when we went in, but now it was late and the rain was beating down in dark curtains. We sprinted across the street to a sports bar and took up a little table in the back, ordering drinks while we blotted our hair with thick stacks of paper napkins. There was some game playing on the ten television sets that hung down from the ceiling of the bar, and though there were very few women in the room, no one noticed us at all.

“My God, that was a bad movie,” I said. “Nicolas Cage. What was he thinking?”

“I didn’t hate it,” Lucy said.

“Really?” I was going to tease her, but suddenly she was crying. “What is it?” I said quietly. We could have both sobbed out the darkest corners of our grief and no one in that bar would have known.

“They were together,” she said. “It wasn’t perfect, but they were together.”

“Pet, it was a very stupid movie.”

“I am always going to be alone,” she said. Her hair was still wet. Her cheeks were wet. “I am never going to find someone.”

“You’re going to find someone.”

“You don’t understand.” She folded her arms on top of the small table and put her head down to cry.

Lucy tried constantly to find and fully participate in any joy that was available to her, but still she was pulled into scorching bouts of depression. Her grief about feeling ugly and her desire to be loved in a way that would be huge enough to meet her needs would regularly roll her into a little ball and paralyze her. She would cry for hours and then for days. Lucy’s sadness terrified me, in large part because it made such perfect sense. No matter how anyone argued for the virtues of her talent and her friendships, the many jewels of her life, there was no denying the fact that what she had been through and what was still ahead of her seemed insurmountable. The damage to her face was a fact, but over the years she had cemented that fact to the idea that she was unlovable. She would tell me that she would give it until winter, then she would go out to the cornfields wearing a light jacket at night, drink a bottle of whiskey, and lie down in the snow.

I put down my head as well and she turned to show me her wet blue eyes. “Listen to me. You will find someone. You always find people. You haven’t found the right one yet, but no one has. You aren’t going to be alone. You’re going to have me.”

A unified roar went up in the bar. A necessary point scored by the favored team, I could only assume. I put my hand on Lucy’s back and felt her uneven breaths, the tremor of her shoulder blades. I was stunned by the rawness of her pain. I came to understand that night in the sports bar, safe from the blinding rain, that I could not worry about Lucy anymore. I knew then it was just too enormous for me to manage and that worrying about her would swamp me. If I was swamped by worry, I would be useless to her. It was even possible that I would desert her, and that was the thing that could never happen. I decided that night I would take all the hours of my life that could so easily be spent worrying and instead I would try to help her. I had been raised by Catholic nuns who told us in no uncertain terms that work was the path to God, and that while it was a fine thing to feel loyalty and devotion in your heart, it would be much better for everyone involved if you could find the physical manifestations of your good thoughts and see them put into action. The world is saved through deeds, not prayer, because what is prayer but a kind of worry? I decided then that my love for Lucy would have to manifest in deeds.

Dearest Pet,

We had a little mini-blizzard here today. Snowflakes as big as 10p pieces and so plentiful you could barely see across the street. I was in the gym when it started, and rushed myself a bit so I could make it outside before it stopped. Unfortunately I didn’t make it, but still, it was a new aberdeen, and I had fun walking around, thinking Gee, aberdeen actually looks pretty. Then I started thinking, Fuck, it’s cold out, so I went to Café Drummond and sat in the back, drinking tea, reading a book I’d bought earlier. It’s a big expensive book, my christmas present to myself, on the history of cinema, full of all sorts of snooty intellectual theories which I always find so entertaining. Maybe I’m just a common snob, or a pseudo-intellectual, but I really do get a kick out of that long-hair stuff. I left about 3:30, which is when the sun begins to set. The sky was clear, a sort of pale baby blue, and scattered in it were big cotton clouds; it wasn’t just my clothes which were layered: it’s amazing how many things we can think of at once: how pretty it was, how normally ugly it is, the theory of authorship versus genre, what a good workout I’d had, how much I hated my ass, how I wish I could write better, you, B——, David Madole, the other David I’m obsessed with, and, inexplicably, Beth Filson. Only now, as I’m typing this, have I realized the only thing I wasn’t thinking of was how lonely I was. I guess I was my old self for awhile there, my better self. Lately I’ve been completely obsessed by my loneliness: it colors (note I didn’t say colours) everything I see these past few weeks. It’s okay to be lonely, I know that, but I don’t like the way it’s become the thing by which I measure everything else. I can’t seem to try to not be lonely: it only seems to happen accidentally, like this afternoon.

On the cold mornings that we were both home, Lucy would get up in the dark early hours and come into my room. “Scoot over,” she said, and I would press up against the wall beside my single bed and she would crawl in beside me and wrap her arms around my waist. We would lie in the warm flannel sheets and I would listen to the steady sound of her breathing behind me. “Someday we’ll look back on all of this and we won’t even believe we were here,” she whispered. “We’ll say, ‘Do you remember when we used to live in Iowa?’”

I smiled, warm, already falling back to sleep. I told her, “We’ll say, ‘That happened during the Iowa years.’”

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