Читать книгу The Story I Am - Roger Rosenblatt - Страница 17

Mash Note

Should we mix it up this Valentine’s Day? I mean, a knock-down-drag-out, no-holds-barred, mano a mano donnybrook? You married a writer. You asked for it. Tell you what. Let’s make love instead. Let’s do both, and fight between the sheets. Does that make sense? Does anything about love make sense? Love is irrational, delirium, which is why neither of us would want to be one of those gods graced with eternal life, because if you have eternal life, why panic? Where’s the fire? But if you’re mortal, and are we ever, carpe diem, carpe whatever frantic impulse comes charging through your heart. So, what is it to be, baby? A shot to the kisser, or embraceable you? (I like a Gershwin tune. How about you?) Plant one on me.

The safest place to be in a tornado is a storm cellar. The safest place to be in a tornado is a railroad apartment on Bleecker Street or a Motel 6 or Williams-Sonoma or a bank vault or a North Korean prison. The safest place to be in a tornado is in your arms, you said, and you thought you meant it but you didn’t. Love is no safer than a bread knife. Take the storm cellar. Tea for two and two for tea and me for you in a cottage small by a waterfall? I don’t think so. Embrace the peril. If we’re going to pick our song, let’s make it “That Old Black Magic” and revel in the spin we’re in.

How do conservatives fall in love? Conservatively, I suppose, like porcupines. Love may be better suited to liberals, for whom disorder is a work of the imagination. Within the blink of a black eye, you can be enthralled by me, disgusted with me, appalled, enchanted, smitten, bored (Bored? With me?), forever mine, forever through with me. Analyze that.

The trick is not to forget that we love each other, because couples do that. They forget to remember. As if love were keys to misplace or a purse to leave in an airport. What? Did I slip your mind? Did you slip mine? My irreplaceable you. Me sweet erasable you, you’d be so nice to come home to. That is, you or Tracey the waitress with the boobs I glimpsed in Applebee’s last Tuesday. Unforgettable, that’s what you are not, unless I concentrate on you.

Pope John XXIII said life is a holy mess. Is that so? Is the Pope Catholic? Life is a holy mess. Love is a holy mess. You were not meant for me. I was not meant for you. Yet there we were in the snow, our first night together, the quiet luster of you, composed like a Gershwin tune, like “Embraceable You,” while I, a whooping rhinoceros, stomped about in boots, a rhino in boots, until we stopped, stood thigh to thigh, looked up, and caught the moon between the tangles of the clouds. My heart fell open like a knot.

Be my valentine in a blizzard, where the air is so thick, we cannot see two feet ahead of us, and we flail about snow-blind, without a GPS. Be my GPS to the tundra, the Klondike, and I’ll be yours. The outer world of fanatics hates at the drop of a hat. Let us love fanatically, unhinged. O, promise me nothing. Is that you standing before me in the whiteout? Come to Papa. Do.

{ from the book-length essay The Book of Love }