Small yellow notes from me, left on the bathroom mirror in the morning:
I love you.
I’ll miss you today.
Small yellow notes from him, left on the counter in the morning:
You are special.
I’ve never been this happy.
Thank you for last night.
A phone call in the middle of the workday in the second month of us. “I was driving along, and all of a sudden I noticed how green everything is,” Bill said. It was early spring, and the new green of the Willamette Valley was particularly dazzling when the sun shone. “But more green than usual,” he said. “Like I was really, really, seeing it. Because of falling in love.”
I looked at the pale green buds on the rhodies that hinted of the pink blooms to come. At the new grass in front of the building. And the blue sky so blue.
“Me too,” I said.
Green became our word for these days of easy falling.
We both knew this was the falling, not the staying.
In bed at night, talking and touching after making love, we learned each other, the paths to our hurts, the paths to our strengths. The trampoline scar on his lip, the mill-accident scar on his elbow. The barbed-wire scar on my thigh, the iron burn on my forearm.
We spoke of our hidden scars, the one on his heart from betrayal, the one on mine from rejection. My fear of open closet doors, the memory of a stranger with a knife; Bill’s missing of a distant father, weariness from women he couldn’t fix but thought he should be able to. I shared as much as I knew about myself in that moment, and he shared as much as knew about himself.
This was the starting place. This was the skin, and what was below the skin. We didn’t yet know our subterranean, our hidden. We would discover this together. We’d each had our own experiences, past loves. We now knew it is with the other that we learn about ourselves. The mirrors we hold up.
For now, everything was green, and we were like the ant from the fable, storing love away for the winter we both knew would come: the inevitable struggle for power and love and self that had spelled the end of each of our past relationships. This spring of ours would turn, too, the struggle would come, and we would make our own story, we would make our own scars.
When Bill left me alone in his house the first time, there were cupboards and closets and drawers to search. The hunt for clues that could hurt me. Old habits.
One ear listened for his return. Two hands opened an album in the hall closet, pictures of his first wedding. Him in a pale-yellow suit, his curls combed straight. His head was turned and tilted down to her; she was tall and lean and tan, her hand on his arm. She looked like a city girl, with long hair parted down the middle and eyes that said, “He is mine.” She was prettier than me. This picture couldn’t tell me what went wrong.
In a tin on his dresser I found an on old badge from the fire department. I held the weight of it in my palm. I liked that he was a fireman. He said his job wasn’t that dangerous. Most of the calls they went on were medical. Little kids, young people hurt or dying. A different kind of danger.
He’d told me that being a firefighter hadn’t been a childhood dream or a young man’s ambition. He came across the job by accident, a neighbor by a mailbox on a Wednesday afternoon. A neighbor who said this is a job where you work twenty-four hours on, forty-eight hours off. To a young man like Bill, this sounded like the ideal job to give him freedom.
I found a shoebox filled with small pieces of colored paper, each in a different handwriting, each addressed to him.
You are one of the kindest men I know.
Remember self-compassion.
Thank you for being there when I needed you.
You are a warm and loving man.
Your honesty blows me away.
I knew these kinds of notes, notes that people wrote to each when they took the sort of classes I’d taken back in Eugene. This was part of what drew me to Bill. He’d taken even more classes than I had.
The closet and drawers held nothing to hurt me, only clues to who he was.
He had told me about that book, The Magic of Believing, that he’d ordered off an advertisement at the back of a magazine. I loved that boy who’d already been searching. I loved this man who kept all these notes to remind himself that he was good.
Things could go wrong. To protect myself, I’d ask, “When you say you love me, what does that mean?” Rather than saying what I wanted: I want it to be only you and me. Three months together was long enough to know.
For Bill, the question was just the question, and he answered it exactly. “It means I love you.” He never looked behind the question for the hidden doors, the indirect way I’d learned growing up to ask for what I wanted without risking myself.
I took another arcing shot. “Does that mean we’re not seeing other people?”
“Of course,” he said, a why-do-you-even-need-to-ask surprise in his voice. “I want it to be you and me. Exclusive.”
This was not enough. “We don’t sleep with anyone else, right? And we don’t date anyone else, right?” Setting the rules with my questions so it looked like him setting the rules. If he got the answers right.
“Yes,” he said. And, “Oh, there’s one thing.” Like he just remembered. “There’s a woman I was dating before I met you. She likes to go out dancing, and I still want to do that once in a while.”
“Dancing?” I kicked that word like barbed wire was wrapped around it. Dancing was touch. Dancing was sexy. Dancing led to other things.
“You don’t really like to dance,” he said.
A week after we’d made love that first time, we’d gone to a club with strobe lights and a steady techno beat and songs I didn’t know. Even though in those seminars I’d learned to love dancing, my old shyness had returned. I might not find the beat, feel the music, look good enough and free enough for him to keep liking me. I stayed in my chair.
Lost on me then was the fact that I could fall into bed with him more easily than I could dance in front of him.
“Next song,” I’d said. Then, “No, not this one, maybe next.”
I couldn’t keep saying no.
Finally, we went to the dance floor. I moved a few stiff steps, then a few more. He wasn’t watching. I moved again, easy, easier, felt the steady rhythm in my feet, in my legs, my body. My arms opened wide, I closed my eyes, remembering: Oh yeah, I love to dance. And when I was almost lost in the music, I opened my eyes.
He was dancing, happy, like that fizzy bubbly music on his stereo. He did not hold the beat. He was like a boy. Bouncing. He smiled at me. I looked around to see if anyone saw him not holding the beat, looking the way he looked. My laugh was not a this-is-fun laugh, but a nervous settle-down-you-look-silly laugh. My hands went to his arms, to slow him down, to make him look sexier, to make it look like I wanted to be closer. I slipped my hands into his and tried to lead him in the swing, but he flung me too far. He let go and started to dance alone again. I lost the beat, I stopped moving. “I’m sorry,” I said. “Sometimes I feel like dancing, and sometimes I don’t.”
We left the bar not long after. We hadn’t gone dancing again.
I didn’t want to dance with him. I didn’t want him to dance with another woman. I corralled him with my jealous questions. “Where’s the line? How do you know she knows that’s all it is? What if she thinks it’s something more? What if you really like dancing with her and one thing leads to another?” In each question was the demand, the command: You can’t dance with her.
“What if I asked you all those questions about going to a movie with your ex-boyfriend? I trust that you know the line and you’ve been clear with him about it,” he said.
“That’s different.” Me and Stephen, the man I had thought was the one. A dark theater. Arms, shoulders, legs, close. “It’s just.” I stopped talking. That man and I had already been something more than dance partners. We were going backward now and becoming friends. No sex, no possible sex. I trusted myself almost completely.
I folded my arms. “I don’t want you to dance with her.”
“You’re trying to control me.” Bill’s voice was quiet and patient.
I wanted the magic power of my silence to twist his arms, to get him to give in, to say he wouldn’t dance with her.
“You can’t control me with jealousy,” he said. “With not talking. I see it. It won’t work.” He would say this and what followed again over the years, until I finally understood. “I love you. You can trust me. But this is your thing to work through.”
He called out my old familiar tricks. He set them between us, as though holding up a mirror with a you-can-do-this-another-way sureness. My ugly fears were reflected.
The image sent me scrambling backward. The girl I’d always been scrambling and flailing at a cliff, like the cartoon coyote with nothing to grab on to.
Except this.
“I trust you,” he said. “I want you to trust me.”
This is when I began to understand that jealousy is not love, and angry silence doesn’t change a thing; they were weapons aimed at my own heart.
“Okay,” I said. Swallowing, breathing. “Okay.” Hitting the ground, not broken, but someplace completely new.
Over the years I would teach him the Western Swing. He would dance it with me, badly at first, swing me out too far or with not enough sureness in his arms. I told him the moves. “Spin me. Hand behind your back. Wring the washrag.” I’d grab his hand and twirl myself. We would keep dancing, wherever there was music. One day, we would go out on a dance floor and he’d swing me just the right distance, his arms strong and loose. When I reached for his hand before he offered it to me, he would say, “Let me lead.” And I would.
He never did go dancing with that dancer.
“How do you know you’re loved?” I asked him.
“The notes you leave me, the way you touch me.”
“How do you know you’re loved?” he asked me.
“Flowers are one way. Plus, when you tell me.”
An any-day-no-special-reason bouquet of carnations, dyed pale green and pink and blue, was delivered to me at work. The card said, “Everything is still so green.”
We had made it through that talk a month earlier, and we were still falling in love.
“Thank you for the flowers.” Phone in one hand, cupping one pale blue bloom with the other. “They’re pretty. Carnations.” I’d never really liked carnations before; Mom always said they were a cheap flower.
“I love carnations,” he said. “They last a long time.”
The simplicity of these flowers. The complete lack of pretension in this man. Nothing underneath, nothing to read into or look for. No guessing. I learned and admired this about him, but it would take years for me to really trust that he meant what he said.
I was beginning to see that I kept things hidden and expected to be guessed at. Wrong answer and we all lose. With this man, I wanted to come out from hiding.
He asked me to help him pick out a new bed. “I want you to like it too,” he said. We’d been together five months, and I spent most nights at his house. I helped him choose, Danish modern blond and sleek, with matching dressers, one long and low, one tall and narrow.
In the mornings, when neither of us had to work, we stayed there. This one room in the house was more him than her.
“I love your new furniture.” I ran my hand across the cool grain of the wood.
“Every time I look at it, I feel guilty,” he said. His voice sounded worn down by the weight of this gift to himself.
“Why?” I put my hand on his chest.
“My mom’s never had anything this nice. I feel bad. Spending money on it when I could do something for her.”
“Wow,” I said. “I look at it and think you have something beautiful that you worked hard for.”
“I look at it and feel like I don’t deserve it,” he said.
This is when I knew he was broken in his own ways, and that I was strong in my own ways.
“You take on burdens that no one asks you to take on.” I would say this many times over the years. “You can’t give love without giving to yourself,” I said. “I want you to love this bed.” I moved his hand to my breast. “I love being here with you.”
And we took in another kind of beautiful.
“How do you show your love?” I asked him.
“Honesty. I tell you what’s going on for me. And I touch you.”
“How do you show your love?” he asked me.
“I tell you. I look for what’s important to you and try to give that back.”