…. There must be millions of aging males, now slipping into their anecdotage, who recall their Willie Baxter period with affection, and who remember some similar journey into ineptitude, in that precious, brief moment in life before love’s pages, through constant reference, had become dog-eared, and before its narrative, through sheer competence, had lost the first, wild sense of derring-do.
E.B. White
Last night I watched Stripes and found the whole thing just as silly and unbelievable and weirdly enjoyable as it was when first viewed (and whatever happened to P.J. Soles?).
This cinematic choice is likely what later kicked off a long involved dream in which one of my teenage boyfriends returned to attempt a reconciliation with the child we created. His efforts included an offer of Disney adventures, approximately ten years after such a ruse had any hope of being successful. In the dream my daughter just rolled her eyes and took off with friends, leaving me to have an awkward conversation with the estranged other parent.
Of course I am a pragmatist even in a dream state; asleep or awake, I bear no grudges, and found the encounter both creepy and hugely amusing.
Why? Because in real life he was always hilarious – one of the funniest and smartest people I’ve ever met. His youthful exploits were not just unlawful, they were genius in both scope and intent. He was also changeable, a rare trait: over the couple of months we lived together he metamorphosed from being a punk kid, the suspect or witness in several capital murder cases, to an Airborne Ranger.
Then he walked out of our shared life. Then he reinvented himself. Then he did it again. And again. And again. I wouldn’t recognize him now if we passed each other on the street.
His skills as a social chameleon are equal to my own, but I have doggedly remained true to the idealism of my youth and the commitments I made when my daughter was born. He has moved through too many different lives and political affiliations to list.
Over the couple of decades I raised my daughter he sent maybe three or four birthday presents, never called at other holidays. His absence puzzled me, but I didn’t think about it often, or talk about it at all. There was no point dwelling on the issue: it was my choice to have children. I never cared what the fathers thought about the pregnancies, so it isn’t fair to expect them to support or love the resulting offspring.
For eighteen years there was no communication. The situation was stable, and vacant.
Then, moments after my daughter became a fully and officially autonomous adult, her biological father finally wrote – not to her but to me, invoking the pet names used in the first flush of our romance.
This initial sortie proved the start of a trend: over the course of this year every single person who has ever fancied themselves in love with me has been in touch (except the one who would eat his teeth if he made the attempt – and he wrote to James, which is the same difference).
The reasons vary somewhat, but seem to be predicated on some kind of nostalgia. This mostly doesn’t bother me – I am still quite fond of a few of them. But the encounters run the range from the minor – a fellow mysteriously collected during adventures with Ana Erotica who checks in every few months to see if I’ve changed my mind about sleeping with him (and, regardless of eyewitness accounts that he has a stupendous penis and delightfully macabre hidden tattoos, no is still the answer). To the major – most worryingly, a friend who appeared to get over his infatuation more than a decade ago, but recently declared lifelong love while I stuck my fingers in my ears and hummed.
From what I can gather this sort of thing is happening to lots of my age peers, to varying degrees. I suspect it is the same urge that takes people to their twentieth high school reunions: just something developmental that creeps up when youth finally vanishes and it is time to review the choices that were made. But, you know, the choices were made.
Nobody has ever broken up with me, so it isn’t really my brief to claim superior moral ground. My exes could provide endless lists of my callousness, usually taking the form of clear-eyed and preternaturally chipper investigations, complete with notebook.
The fact that I ended a marriage with the calmly stated but flippant advice that the young man in question should consider reading a self-help book seems, even to me, both eerie and cruel.
Though what else was I supposed to say? I was twenty years old, sick of being married to someone who lived two thousand miles away, and not even remotely distressed; if anything, I felt dizzy anticipation of a freedom I would instantly squander.
The end of a relationship is in some sense a small death, because the bond between two people has its own strange and tenuous existence independent of each individual. Growing up sick I learned caution, to keep something of myself always reserved for the next crisis. I’ve never had a crush on anyone, never experienced unrequited love, never fallen in love before the other party fell in love with me – and I doubt that I ever could.
I’ve never had my heart broken, no matter how extreme the circumstances, no matter how much I mourned a loss, though I know that I have broken hearts, inadvertently but also on purpose. If I had the choice I would not be a creature of such extremes, but my DNA dictates that this life will be perilous and short. This doesn’t bother me – I do not lament what cannot be changed – but it scares the shit out of everyone who has ever ventured close enough to see the facts clearly.
When I was younger this element of my life was scourge, anathema – youth prefers immortality, and I represented the opposite. I broke up with most of the exes when I realized they would never be able to handle a true crisis. In the case of my first husband, it was very clear – he took off at the first hint of the illness that nearly killed me in 1989. He wasn’t there for any of the gruesome medical drama, or the birth of his child.
Whereas my first sort-of-accidental date with the second husband involved a ride to the hospital, where I had radioactive isotope tests. Then we went to see Malcolm X. Romantic? No. Realistic? Yes.
People in their late thirties and early forties get at least a hint of mortality, and plenty of people have encountered incontrovertible proof. They have lost parents, peers, been sick, cared and grieved sufficiently to finally understand. Unfortunately, I never had the gift of ignorance.
All these years, through all this trouble, I have understood exactly what was happening. I see, and I remember, and I use the raw materials to build something new and different.
A couple of people who claimed to love me admitted that they wandered away out of fear – that I would die, or that it was too difficult to parent my eccentric offspring, or that they could not have my attention in exactly the way they wished.
The latter is quite perceptive; I am not an attainable goal. I am a person, with lots of problems, and a primary stated allegiance to my children. The depth of that commitment is the element that will never change. I have my priorities sorted.
When the ex-husband sent a message last year I was appalled and erased it without reply. Not because I have any personal problem with him. No, something else: I erased the message, deleted his address, because he had a whole lifetime to establish a relationship with the baby he never knew. That was his prerogative – eighteen years ago.
I’ve loved and raised the girl no matter what the challenge or consequence, and if he wants to know me again, he will have to find his way through her. Furthermore, he will have to be accountable to her grown-up self, and answer her questions. They’re harder now than they were at age five.
Hence the dream. I have a remarkably high tolerance for chaos and a sincere love of excessive behavior. My expectations are consequently low (obviously, I would not expect saintly conduct from a person picked up in criminal court) but my ambitions are huge. I know that people can do all sorts of surprising things, can reinvent themselves, can create wonder out of horror.
Perhaps the brown-eyed boy I loved before I was grown enough to understand the consequences will find his way back to us. Maybe not. I really don’t care, one way or the other. I honor what we had together, and what came from it. My daughter is my physical clone but she has the strange humor and eccentric intellect of the man who did not raise her.
You can’t separate one from another – she exists as the product of everything, and nothing. She is extraordinary.
It was a privilege to know her as she grew.