Love Ain't Nothing

Love Ain"t Nothing.

Ellison, Harlan.

FOR SHERRI, WHO PICKED UP THE PIECES.

FOR LESLIE KAY WHO ARRANGES THE PIECES.

FOR LORI, WHO IS OPTING TO BE ONE OF THE PIECES.

There is an inscription on the lintel over the octagonal portal to Ellison Wonderland. It says: Always look up.

Never look down; All you ever see are the pennies people drop.

There is a seven-headed dog guarding the octagonal portal to Ellison Wonderland. If you aren"t nice, it will bite you in the a.s.s.

Kilimanjaro is a snow covered mountain 19,710 feet high, and is said to be the highest mountain in Africa. Its western summit is called the Masai "Ngaje Ngai," the House of G.o.d. Close to the western summit there is the dried and frozen carca.s.s of a leopard. No one has explained what the leopard was seeking at that alt.i.tude.

THE SNOWS OF KILIMANJARO by Ernest Hemingway

INTRODUCTION.

HAVING AN AFFAIR WITH A TROLL.

One evening I met a young woman for whom I quickly developed carnal desires. We met at a party, I think. I don"t remember now. It was a while ago. And I cut her out of the crowd and finally we got back to my house and it started to go wrong. Oh, not wrong in the way that once we were alone the s.e.xual thing didn"t seem to be working out: quite the contrary. She began getting misty-eyed. I could see that she was forming a fantasy view of the man who had swept her away to this strange and colorful eyrie. She was thinking ahead: can this one be THE one I"ve been looking for? And I didn"t want that.

No point here in going into the reason I didn"t want that; perhaps I was the wrong one for her on more than a casual basis, perhaps she was wrong for me permanently, perhaps it was a hundred different little things I sensed in the ambience of the evening. Whatever it was, I wanted to discourage the fantasy, but not the s.e.xual liaison. I"m not sure there"s anything wrong with that. But maybe there is. It depends where your concepts of morality lead you. For me, it was better to be upfront about it, to say there"s tonight, and maybe other nights, but under no circ.u.mstances is this permanent.

And I tried to tell her, gently.

And that was wrong. Because it was hypocritical.

I wanted to have my picnic, but I didn"t want to have to spend the time necessary to putting the picnic-grounds back in the same condition I"d found it.

(That isn"t a casually-conceived metaphor; and it"s quite purposely not coa.r.s.e in its comparisons. To love well and wisely, I now believe, we must attempt to leave a situation with a love-partner with the landscape and its inhabitants as well off, or better off, than they were when We arrived. Like this: (Walter Huston and Tim Holt and Fred C. Dobbs [sometimes known as Humphrey Bogart] are about to leave the mountain from which they"ve clawed their gold. And Huston says to Holt and Bogart, "We"ve got to spend a week putting the mountain back the way we found it." And Bogart looks amazed, because they are running the risk of being set-upon once again by Alfonso Bedoya and his bandidos. So Huston explains very carefully that the mountain is a lady, and it has been good to them, and they have to close its wounds.

(And finally, even flinty, paranoid Bogart understands, and he agrees, and they spend a week repairing the ecological damage they"ve done to the mountain that was good to them.) So instead of trying to weasel and worm my way through an explanation that would have been no real explanation at all, I asked her if she would mind my sitting down and writing something for her. She said that would be nice, and I did it, trying to say as bluntly as possible with fantasy images what words from the "real world" would not adequately say. And this is what I wrote: She looks at me with eyes blue as the snow on Fuji"s summit in a woodblock print by Hiroshige. She says, "You"re really different, really unique." Beneath the paleness of her cheeks the blood suddenly rushes and she only knows her nervousness has increased in the small room, though nothing has altered from the moment before. She does not understand that her skin and survival mechanisms have registered the presence of an alien creature. Her blood carries the certain knowledge. Like the sentient wind, she perceives only that she has crossed an invisible border and now roams naked and weaponless in a terra incognita where wolves a.s.sume the shapes of men and babies are born with golden glowing eyes and the sound from the stars is that of the very finest crystal.

To her fingertips come the vibrations of flowers singing in silent voices, telling of times before the watery deeps carried the seed of humanity. Her skin: absorbing the vibrations of unicorn"s hooves as they beat the molten earth into gold. Her nostrils: bringing to her the scents of dreams being born. Her delicate nerve-endings: vital and trembling with expectation of oddness.

She sits with a troll, with another kind of creature, and her uneasiness grows. Cellular knowledge a.s.saults her in wave after wave, and she cannot codify that knowledge.

"Let me tell you a story," I say, and in few words explain the horizons of the land into which she has wandered.

Will she understand that mortals and trolls cannot mate?

It didn"t go well with her. It was a sour relationship from the start. I wound up doing her damage, hurting her; she didn"t hurt me. I don"t brag about it, I"m certainly not proud of it, there was no notch cut in the stock of the weapon from the encounter. Machismo wasn"t part of it: I hurt her and she didn"t hurt me only because it didn"t mean as much to me. I was a hard thing. Colder. She was vulnerable. It had to happen, I suppose. If I"d been a nicer person I"d have forgone the s.e.x and sent her away at the start. I explain it now, by way of justification, by saying she is a born victim: someone waiting to be savaged by love. But the truth is simply that I am precisely like everyone else when it comes to love ... I am a child. I want my picnic, and I hate cleaning up the mess.

Pause. Go back to the start of this book, just before the beginning of this new introduction. Read the quote from Hemingway"s "The Snows of Kilimanjaro." Do you know what it was the leopard was seeking? Do you understand why the creature climbed to that alt.i.tude and what happened to it? The answer to the riddle is the answer, I think, to understanding how to travel the road of love. I put the quote there, what has become a powerful literary metaphor since Hemingway first wrote it exactly forty years ago in 1936, because it seems to me to contain the truest thing one can know about traveling that difficult road. Friends of mine, around this house as I a.s.semble this book for a publisher"s deadline, don"t seem to understand why that little parable, riddle, metaphor, whatever the h.e.l.l it is, seems so eloquent, and so right for this book of kinda sorta love stories. I hope these words will clear it up for them. Probably not, though. I"m not too clear on this subject of love myself.

In fact, some years ago, when I was writing the introductions to the stories in an anthology I edited called DANGEROUS VISIONS, I found myself writing these words about myself and Theodore Sturgeon: "It became clear to Sturgeon and myself that I knew virtually nothing about love but was totally familiar with hate, while Ted knew almost nothing about hate, yet was completely conversant with love in all its manifestations."

That was in 1966. Ten years ago. I"ve revised my estimates of both Ted"s and my understandings of hate and love. It"s been an interesting ten years for both of us, and if I were to take the toll today I"d have to admit grudgingly that I"ve had some of the parameters of the equation of love drilled into me by experts. And so now, ten years later, I set down these first few tentative thoughts about the subject, offering as credentials the stories in this collection.

I can tell you many things love is not. Telling you what it is comes much harder to me. When one feels like a novice, it becomes an act of arrogance to pontificate. Much of what I think changes from day to day. And I suppose by the accepted standards of success, I"m a poor spokesman. It seems the more experience I get, the less sure I become about anything where love is concerned. (I"m not talking about my three marriages and divorces. That"s another thing, and peculiarly, it has less to do with my caution about this subject than more "informal" relationships.) Lori and I were talking about this several weeks ago, and with what I take to be the normal curiosityof anyone merging his or her life with someone else"s, she asked me how many women I"d been with. For a few days I wouldn"t answer her. I wasn"t hiding anything, I just didn"t think she"d care to hear the real answer. Finally, I told her. "I tried to count up, one time about six years ago," I said. "And I used snapshots and correspondence and phone lists I found lying around in old files and desk drawers, and I had to stop when it got over three hundred. I suppose I"ve been to bed with maybe five hundred different women."

She didn"t say anything for a long while, but I could see she was shocked. When I"d tried to take the tally half a dozen years ago, I"d been shocked, too.

I realize there will be guys out there who"ll read that figure--five hundred--which I think is pretty accurate, and they"ll react in one of several different ways. There will be a.s.sholes who"ll think that"s pretty terrific. There will be amateur Freudians who"ll think it"s sick. There will be professional sympathizers who"ll feel sorry for me. There will be guys who can"t get laid who"ll think I"m lying, trying to trumpet some kind of bogus swashbuckler image.

Each view has some validity going for it.

But mostly, since I went through all those days and nights and people, since I was there (or as much of me as I had control of was there), I subscribe to the view that I was looking for something very hard, perhaps with uncommon desperation. I think I understand the psychological reasons I was on that endless hunt, and I submit there was less of deviation, perversion or obsession than of loneliness and a determination to find answers. I"m constantly perplexed at the dichotomous position of people who laud a student"s seeking everywhere to find the answers to life, or creativity, or the existence of G.o.d, or the direction of the student"s career ... who cluck their tongues and badrap the same attempts to discover the answers to interpersonal relationships by those who seek in every area that presents itself. If the true purpose of living a fulfilled life is in establishing meaningful liaisons with people, if it"s part of that fulfillment to seek and find and give and accept love, then why should the search be looked on with such moral disapproval?

Perhaps I"m advocating profligacy, but I don"t think so. Discovering the nature of love is infinitely more complex and exhausting than, for instance, learning how to be a brain surgeon. But the smug, self-satisfied moralists think it"s precise and proper for someone to spend fifteen years learning how to ease a subdural hematoma, yet twisted, sick and sad for someone to spend the same fifteen years learning how to ease his or her loneliness. Answers to the former can be found in medical textbooks and in O.R.s all over the world; answers to the latter slide and skitter and avoid discovery save by chance and steady application to all possibilities.

The search is as important as the discovery.

(And therein lies the core of the answer to Hemingway"s riddle about the leopard.) Lori seems to feel as I write this, that even if I don"t have the answers. at least I"ve had a greater opportunity to find the answers than those who deny the search, settle for whatever"s handiest, and then spend the rest of their lives with secret thoughts and open frustration.

On the basis of her view, and the fact that I trust her opinions most of the time, I"m plunging ahead with this essay on love. I hope to G.o.d she"s right. If she"s wrong, and I"ve been merely a profligate, indulging myself in adolescent s.e.x-antics, I"m going to look like a righteous schmuck by the time this introduction is completed. If I don"t already.

Ambrose Bierce has two definitions of "love" in THE ENLARGED DEVIL"S DICTIONARY (Doubleday, 1967, and a sensational book). Bierce, a cynic beside whom I look like Pollyanna, writes this: Love, n. The folly of thinking much of another before one knows anything of oneself.

Love, n. A temporary insanity curable by marriage or by removal of the patient from the influences under which he incurred the disorder. This disease, like caries and many other ailments, is prevalent only among civilized races living under artificial conditions; barbarous nations breathing pure air and eating simple food enjoy immunity from its ravages. It is sometimes fatal, but more frequently to the physician than to the patient.

People reading my books, most particularly the introductions in my books, think I am the reincarnation of Bierce: that I am a mean, pugnacious, constantly depressed or alarmed sonofab.i.t.c.h into whose life the sunshine of affection has never cast its effulgent glow. f.u.c.k you, I say politely.

Even the most drooling of the Jukes or the Kallikaks* should be able to perceive that someone who manifests such volatile feelings about injustice, racism, stupidity, mediocrity and general negative bulls.h.i.t in the Universe has his times of joy and happiness and n.o.ble dreams that soar aloft as one with the greatest aspirations of the human race. Those who read my works and remember only the stories and essays that deal with blood, l.u.s.t, violence, death, disfigurement, pain, depression, smarmy s.e.x and ka-ka do me a disservice. Also, they are sick and ought to be "put away," if you catch my drift. I have written dozens and dozens of kind, gentle, happy, funny stories and introductions. But do they remember those? Do they? Huh, I ask you, do they!?! Not on your cryonic crypt, they don"t! All they remember are stories such as "I Have No Mouth, and I Must Scream" or "The Prowler in the City at the Edge of the World." All they recall when my work is mentioned are the shrieks of torment coming from my characters.

When the truth of the matter is that I"m basically a very happy fellow. Funny, too. I adore small children, dogs of all breeds, Barney Miller and Richard Pryor and George Carlin and M*A*S*H, noodles, the humorous novels of Donald Westlake. (Noodles have always seemed hilarious to me, go figure it.) For instance, I got a letter today from Debe (No Last Name Given) at Millikin University in Decatur, Illinois; and she went on you wouldn"t believe about being a fan of my writing, but how disturbing it all was, how I always seem to write sad or mean stuff. "Is there another side?" she asked. "We all have our demons. But tell me more of you. You must have some light, some happiness, something good that you cherish?"

Now, see! There you go. A perfect example. Here"s this young woman (I presume she"s fairly young from the writing and the content) who encounters me in a series of books and gets all grunched out of shape because she thinks I"m downcast, and she wants me to spill the beans on myself, to tell her what makes me smile and laugh and love.

And apart from wanting to keep some personal feelings to myself--Gawd, you"re a greedy bunch, no matter how much I blather and reveal, you"re never satisfied--the things I do unleash are frequently as happy as they are miserable. But when I try to look on the bright side, and pa.s.s along the lucent limbus of my personal joy, everyone who remembers those screams of anguish comes down on me like a tsunami, accusing me of being maudlin and saccharine.

So if the observations I make about love seem just a tot on the pragmatic, even cynical, side ... well, it"s purely an attempt to walk the tightrope: to indulge an uncommon (to my readers) softness of spirit without slopping over into Rod McKuen-ism; to be as tough-minded as possible (and thereby useful) about something as intangible as love, without sounding bruised or discouraged; to avoid cliche without purposely wandering in the glades of perversion.

I"ve included two of those tightrope-walking routines in this book. Originally, they were installments of a column I wrote for Art Kunkin when he was editor of the Los Angeles Free Press and later, when legitimate-thugs-turned-illegitimate-"businessmen" screwed him out of his own newspaper and he started an abortive, short-lived compet.i.tor, for Art"s Los Angeles Weekly News. Though they"re true, not stories, they read like stories--I"ve listed them on the Table of Contents as Personal Reminiscence I and II--and it"s in the story-form that I feel most at ease writing my views of love. Unless one is Sh.e.l.ley, a Nunez de Arce or La Rochefoucauld, one has no business publicly shooting off one"s mouth about something as mysterious and ethereal as love. Unless one is le Marquis de Sade, in which case one has a personal vision of love that defies all strictures.

But in fiction, even a groping dullard like myself can stumble upon a truth or two; or at least a rule-of-thumb that seems to work in certain situations, among certain kinds of people. So when I pa.s.s along these remarks, I"ll try and couch them in anecdotal terms, all the better to entertain you, my dears, and not coincidentally to alleviate my own nervousness in this area.

So here is just about all I know concerning love. Some of it light and happy, some of it cynical, perhaps some of it even accurate and truthful. One never knows, do one.

The minute people fall in love, they become liars.

You"d think such good feelings in the gut and other places would make people want to ensure the continuance of those feelings. But their fears overcome their good sense, not to mention their ethics. They begin to lie, virtually from the first moment they feel the stirrings in the aorta ... or wherever it is love is supposed to make itself felt.

They lie in a hundred different ways. From the first tentative social conversations that bore them silly, they lie by pretending to be interested in inanities. This is a generality, but I think it holds: if it"s guys, they listen to ba.n.a.l bulls.h.i.t just on the off-chance they"ll get laid. If it"s women, they listen to the blown-out-of-proportion nonsense of men so they can reinforce the guy"s need to be a Big Man. They lie to one another with looks and with words, and only the body-language tells the truth.

They lie to keep the upper hand, even before they"re threatened. The fear of rejection is so ingrained, from the schoolyard, from the locker room, from the parties, from the Homecoming Dance, from the years of seeing lithe tanned women in bikinis and feral muscular men with shirts open to the sternum up there on four-color billboards; they fear the unknown outer darkness of someone saying, "No."

So they lie to one another. Granted, it"s akin to the social lying we all do at parties, in restaurants, at social events: putting up with trivia to be politic or civilized or "gracious," whatever that means. Nonetheless, it is lying. And by feigning interest in that which bores or turns one off, they set up artificial grounds for a potential relationship that they have to maintain all through the rest of the a.s.sociation. I know a young woman who met a guy at a party. He turned her on, and he started voicing some of his rustic views on busing. She had worked for the integration legislation as a regional attache to one of the senators pushing the facilitation of busing. She came out of ten years of hard and thankless work trying to achieve racial balance. He was a divorced businessman with two kids, who was, at heart, a man who feared and hated blacks. Though he would have gone to his grave swearing there wasn"t a scintilla of bigotry in his well-clothed body. But they turned each other on, and she listened and nodded, and said nothing. They started dating. It lasted six months. Then it fell apart. When his narrow view of the world became too much for her, she started to fight back. Now he tells everyone she was a "castrating b.i.t.c.h" and she harbors guilt feelings for her own intransigency. False and untenable rules for the relationship had been the order of their mating from the git-go. It was doomed to fail.

Earlier, I pa.s.sed along a generality. There are, of course, exceptions. There are women who listen to the c.r.a.pola put out by guys at parties because they want to get laid, and there are guys who put up with women"s inanities because they want to be polite. It happens. But the point still holds. They do it because they want to be liked. They lie and listen to lies so they"ll be accepted. The first faint stirrings of love--barely codified, still inarticulate--force them into the role of liar.

And then the lies, once having been freed from Pandora"s Hope Chest, begin to breed. They multiply like maggots and riddle a relationship like a submarine hit by a depth charge. Consider just the most obvious ones we"ve all either used or been victimized by: You walk into a room and she (or he) is brooding.

"What"s the matter, something wrong, something bothering you?" That"s what you say.

Then he (or she) replies, "Nothing."

A lie, a bald-faced lie. You know d.a.m.ned well there"s something wrong. The way the legs are crossed, the way the arms are folded, that telltale pursing of the lips, the vacant, abstracted stare, the peremptory way the words are bitten off. There"s something wrong. But she (or he) says, "Nothing."

Is it because the brooding party really has something heavy to brood about and, out of love, chooses to lie rather than to lay it on the other person? Is it (more likely) that the brooder has been brought down by something the other party did, and wants to whip a little unconscious, free-floating guilt on the perpetrator before spilling the loadof s.h.i.t being carried in the gut? Is it part of the stylized ritual of hide-and-seek so many lovers play? Is it a physical manifestation of the brooding party"s having done something they mutually consider "wrong" (like going out and getting laid on the sly), and getting him or herself set to rationalize it in such a way that the other member of the team feels like the criminal, using the brooding dark mood as a kind of head start in the argument that will follow?

What does it matter? What we"re dealing with here is dishonesty, cupidity, misdirection, acting-out ... lying.

Here"s another one. And you"ve all been on one or the other end of this one: "No, I have a headache."

"No, I"m tired."

"No, I"m a little inflamed."

"No, I have a hard day tomorrow."

"No, it isn"t right."

"No, I"m still in love with [fill in appropriate name]."

Now none of those oldies but goodies is being spoken by a man or woman on a first date. I"m talking about their use in an already ongoing relationship. But a relationship in which one of the partners has been turned off, and won"t cop to it! So he or she lies. Again and again and again. Instead of simply saying, "You have bad breath," or "I"m not s.e.xually turned on by you any more," the lies are ranked like Mirv missiles and fired off, one each time an enemy approach is sighted.

Here"s another one. Before they met, he was attracted to medium-height, auburn-haired females between the ages of seventeen and twenty-eight with high conical b.r.e.a.s.t.s and very thin legs. She was attracted to guys with tight little a.s.ses and an almost total absence of chest and arm hair; guys with blue eyes and heavy torsos and English accents and thin, aquiline noses. But one time he made the error of going on admiringly about one of those fantasy-women just a few seconds too long, as they sat there watching the hair coloring commercial in which the woman appeared, and she got extremely uptight. And one time she made the error of spending a half hour in a corner at a party talking to a guy just like the kind she lubricated for, and he (her boy friend) went into a towering Sicilian machismo rage about her flirting.

So now, they purposely turn away from the somatotypes that attract them, when they"re out driving, when they"re walking in the shopping mall, when they go to the movies, when they spend an evening at the bowling alley, when the tv camera pans across the bleachers at the football game, when they"re at a party. She"ll test him by drawing his attention to a girl he"s already clocked and turned away from, by saying, "Do you think she"s attractive?" And he"ll glance over quickly, and with feigned disinterest mumble, "Legs"re too skinny." But he has a stack of beaver magazines hidden away in his work bench, each magazine containing 372 unretouched shots of girls just like the one he dismissed. He"ll test her by introducing her to a guy at the office party who fits her secret s.e.x fantasies, and later asking, "What"d you think of Ken?" And she"ll go right on basting the roast or drawing up the blueprints for the new museum wing or finishing the sketches for that children"s book, and she won"t even look up as she says, "He"s nice enough, I suppose. Not very bright, though, is he?" But half the time when she"s f.u.c.king him, she"s envisioning Ken.

These are only a few. There are others, many others. Add your own at leisure. Talk it over with your mate or love-partner. See if you can get further examples to convince yourself that what I"m talking about here is hypocrisy and fear, not standards of s.e.xual conduct. What I"m talking about is the t.i.tle of this book: love ain"t nothing but s.e.x misspelled. The perversion of s.e.x in the name of love, using two quite clearly separable needs as reinforcements of one another, because you"re not secure enough in either to think they stand by themselves and take care of themselves and enrich through their separate powers. The perversion of love to obtain s.e.x as a commodity. The lies that are told because honesty might well mean rejection. And the unbelievably crippling fear of rejection that moves most of us more than we care to admit. Thus doth love make liars of us all.

An obnoxious woman is a strong man"s "limp."

(I"m sure there"s a reverse to this, as seen from the viewpoint of a woman; but being a man, I"m most familiar with this side of it. You"ll forgive me if I report this section only from what I know, even if it is one-sided. Female readers can mentally write an addendum in which they project what I"m about to say for the flip-side.) Here"s this really sensational sweet guy. He"s gentle, fair, moderately talented, seems to be happy with his life and what he"s doing; and he"s involved with a woman who is a righteous phony. She"s loud, she drinks too much, she"s a f.u.c.king pain in the a.s.s at a dinner table: namedropping, interrupting, belittling him in front of his friends, cutting the other women who try to show some warmth to the guy because they"re embarra.s.sed for him, interrupting everyone, rearranging the environment to suit herself ("I have to sit here, not there" ... "Would you ask the maitre d" to lower the air conditioning" ... "There"s absolutely nothing on this menu, would you ask the waiter if they can find me an abalone steak" ... "Sid, would you mind not smoking, I washed my hair this afternoon").

And you ask yourself, how can this terrific guy hang out with such a creep?

(It occurs to me that the reverse, a sensational woman tied to a schmuck guy, is more clearly changing these days. The incidence of women splitting from their husbands, initiating divorce or dissolution of a living-together situation, is very much on the rise. Female-initiated divorces have risen in this country alone by three times what they were even fifteen years ago. Now it"s the men who try to hang in there with a lousy relationship while the women, I suppose because of widespread consciousness-raising that has advised them it"s feasible to break up without social stigmatization, are taking off. But that"s just a guess.) I"ve fiddled around with trying to come up logical on this one, finding some kind of Universal Truth why strong people should harness themselves to albatrosses, but this is one of those aspects of love that I"ve seen again and again, and every time it"s for a different reason. In one case it was that the guy wasn"t sufficiently secure in his ego-strength, sufficiently filled with feelings of his worthiness to love and be loved in return. In another case it was because the woman was devoted to the guy in private, absolutely revolved around him. In yet another case the guy felt guilt about how he and his woman had gotten together, and he hung in there because he was paying dues.

Lori shrugs and says, "Love is blind."

Maybe that"s the best answer. I don"t know. It"s one of those troublesome areas that defies pat answers.

All I know for sure is that there are many, many women and men who are hanging out--because of "love"--with partners who are clearly their inferiors.

s.h.i.t, maybe it"s that one of the selfish aspects of love is that we be able to feel we"re the dominant love-partner in the link-up. I don"t know. Think about it; maybe you can write a critical study, then we"ll both know.

Love weakens as much as it strengthens, and often that"s very good for you.

The operable part of that aphorism is that vulnerability is a good and enlarging thing. When you fall in love, you start to need. For people whose self-sufficiency or fears of life have made them encysted creatures, love opens them.

For instance, the other day Lori and I were talking about what a p.r.i.c.k I am when someone tries to chop me conversationally. Being a "fast gun" in a verbal encounter has always been a stance I believed to be extremely pro-survival. There aren"t too many people who have as vicious and insulting a manner as I can manifest when I"m annoyed. That"s because in some ways I"m conversationally suicidal: I"ll say anything. There are no bounds to how deeply I"ll cut to win. That"s simultaneously one of my strengths and one of my weaknesses. I won"t go into how it got started, it goes "way back. I"ll just say that it makes me a very enclosed individual a lot of the time. I"m constantly on the alert for the attack.

So Lori put forth the proposition that I was stronger than she in such situations, and I said, "No, we"re evenly matched." And then she said, with considerable disbelief, "But you could cut me up in a minute and we both know it."

Which led me to think about it and I responded, "Then why don"t I?"

"Because you love me," she said.

"Right," I said.

Then she grinned and made the perfect point. "You"re handicapped."

Right!

Willingly, gladly, joyously handicapped. A mercurial sprinter happily tying a bag of cement to his left leg so he can race with fairness to the compet.i.tion, because he loves the race, not the winning.

Love can do that. It can make you dull those savage aspects of your nature so you become more nakedly ready to accept goodness from your love-partner. It is even more pro-survival, if one accepts the theory that life is a string of boredoms, getting-alongs, sadnesses and just plain nothing-happening times, broken up by gleaming pearls of happiness that get us through the crummy stretches on that string.

Weakness becomes strength.

After you"ve had the Ultimate Love Affair that has broken you, leaves you certain love has been poisoned in your system, then, and only then, can you be saved and uplifted by the Post-Ultimate Love Affair.

Because that"s when you"re most uncertain, most self-doubting, most locked into a tunnel vision of love and life. And that"s when new experiences come out of nowhere to wham you.

I guess this ties in with what I was saying about pain in the introduction to PAING.o.d and about how we cannot savor the full wonder of joy unless we"ve gone through some exhausting, debilitating times of anguish. No one likes pain (and please be advised I"m not advocating S-M or any of the torture-games some people need to get them off; I"m talking about life-situation pain; enemas and shtupping amputees and whips "n" chains may be superfine for Penthouse and other sources of communication for those who"re into such things, but I"m not, and so when I talk about pain I mean getting your brain busted, not your body shackled; okay?) but it seems to me that we spend so much time avoiding pain of even the mildest sort, that we turn ourselves into mollusks. To love, I think, one must be prepared to get clipped on the jaw occasionally.

Otherwise, one would always settle for the safest, least demanding, least challenging relationship. Wouldn"t we?

I think that makes sense.