How I See It - Memoir (and)

First, before I knew what he wanted, I wanted him.

Of course, I may have been responding to the signal, deep and ultrasonic, that he wanted me. That’s usually the way it goes, although I’m often unaware of it and think what I’m responding to is the thrill of a deep voice or an unexpectedly sweet smile. And even then, I usually tell myself what I’m responding to is the erotic pull of a man’s mind. Well, it’s true I’ve been involved with some very intelligent men—but not one of them was homely.

What it felt like, then, at first, was that I wanted him. I didn’t know what I wanted him for, what I wanted to have with him, what the full nature and limits of the wanting were, but the want itself was so strong that before I had him, he was often all I could seem to think about. When I barely knew him and thought I might never see him again, I felt bereft, as though I had lost something already dear to me. I was on a bus, traveling away from the place where we had met, and my head was filled with all the things we would never do together, so real they seemed more like memories than dreams.

That was how it started: going into the future to make up a past that I could feel sorry in the present for never having had.

I told myself, as I always do, that I had never felt anything like this before. But that was indeed how it felt.

So I pursued him. I want you, I told him—though not, of course, in those words.

He wanted me, too, it turned out—only he had a few reservations, about where I lived and what I did and what else I wanted, besides him. Whether we really wanted the same things in this life or whether the only want we had in common was each other.

For a time, these doubts of his organized my own wanting into an effort to prove myself worthy of his wanting. I did not want to be found wanting in the wanting department. So for a while I was the one wanting and he was the one deciding.

But as my efforts began to pay off and he began to believe that I really could be—indeed, was—what he wanted, I began to worry that I might not want to be that person at all. I feel like it’s all about what you want, I periodically complained to him, in tears, and he would respond, sometimes calmly and sometimes in a voice of strangled frustration, That’s because you won’t tell me what it is you want.

It’s true that having put so much of myself into becoming what he wanted, I could no longer say exactly what it was I wanted. If only I could feel more certain that the me he wanted was the real me, I thought, I would be able to declare more certainly that I wanted him—even as I knew that until I could declare that, he would have difficulty wanting me in the way I wanted him to.

Indeed, for a long time he seemed to want me so angrily that it didn’t feel like wanting to me, and my saying so made him nearly crazy with unhappiness. When I saw that, my heart opened wide, because I could feel then that he really did want me, whoever he thought I was, and I wanted him. But in the heat of our sudden reconciliation he would want to make a plan for our future together, and I would feel pressured and mistrustful, worried that what we wanted when we were upset was not a good foundation on which to build, and it would begin all over again.

When we finally broke up, he announced that he had never wanted anything as much as he had once wanted me, and as soon as he said that, I knew that the one thing I knew I wanted was not to lose him. He pointed out, in a tired voice that made me both sad and resentful, that not wanting to lose something is not the same as wanting to have it. I pointed out that I didn’t want to lose him even now, when he was telling me he no longer wanted me, whereas he only wanted me when I was being what he wanted.

He assured me that I was making no sense. How could I possibly want you if you weren’t what I wanted? he wanted to know, and I felt—maybe unfair—that if he had wanted to understand what I meant, he could have.

It sometimes seems like all our time was like that. But there was one weekend—we both remember it, I know, because we used to talk about it—where I took a train from somewhere else to see him, and he took a train partway to meet me. It was fall, the season of coolness and warmth. I don’t remember what he was wearing, but I remember what I was wearing—not because it was anything special, but because I could tell from his expression when he walked toward me on the platform that he was happy with the way I looked.

To be honest, I don’t actually remember his expression from that day; what I remember is what he later told me about how he felt walking toward me right then, and my imagination has supplied the look on his face—probably pasting it in from some other occasion whose specifics I’ve forgotten.

That was a good weekend for us. Just enough had already happened that we were comfortable together, but only barely.

It wasn’t until later that he confided to me the real reason he remembered that moment on the platform so clearly: it was when the trouble began. It was when he knew for sure this was what he wanted.

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