"ARTEMIS"
Copyright 2006 by MARGE SIMON
A Meditation
on Love
My husband, Aaron, was a thirty-year-old filmmaker when we met. I was a twenty-seven-
year-old actress. Unsurprisingly, each of us had been in love before. In fact, I was still in love with Eric, who had said he couldn't marry me. Not that I had wanted to get married at the moment when Eric spoke, but his cutting off the option turned me numb. I could see myself, like Hans Andersen's Little Mermaid, dancing on tender, bleeding feet at his wedding and turning into sea foam when the sun rose.
Aaron looked like Eric, which was what first attracted me. He had just ended a relationship with a girl named Sasha, a femme fatale. "I got tired of being in a crowd," Aaron told me when we had become serious and were confessing our past loves, not so much as apology, but as protection against surprise.
Aaron's first major love was named Hope. In the pictures he showed me, she looked like one of today's Calvin Klein perfume ads, blonde hair blowing in the wind. Her father was a writer, her mother a painter. Aaron had met her at Black Mountain College. His rival for her affections was named Schuyler. After his first year at Black Mountain, Aaron was drafted into the Army, but Schuyler was 4F. Aaron got a furlough at Thanksgiving and, instead of going to see his mother, went to Edisto Island, off the Carolina Coast, where Hope was on vacation at her parents' house
They walked hand in hand on the beach. They talked about how they would marry when the War was over—all the plans that young lovers make. Then Aaron went back to the Army, and Hope returned to Black Mountain and Schuyler. She married Schuyler during Aaron's stint as a Military Policeman in Marseilles. The war ended. Schuyler was institutionalized for schizophrenia. Hope divorced him and phoned Aaron. But by then, Aaron was involved with Sasha.
Aaron and I got married because we were ready to settle down. We loved one another, but it wasn't like Romeo and Juliet. I sent a wedding announcement intended as a final goodbye to Eric. To send him an invitation would have been crude, I thought
It amused me that while Aaron said he wasn't jealous, he was. Little by little he alienated my male friends from the theater world until one day they were all gone.
A couple of years after our first daughter was born we were at the theatre and Aaron became restless. He went out for the second act, and when he came back, he was freshly doused with Old Spice. He had gone to a barber and had a shave and a haircut. "Sasha is in the audience," he said, as if that justified leaving me without explanation. "You shave for her but not for me?" I thought this but had the sense not to say it just then.
Leaving the theater we "encountered" Sasha and her husband. George, or whatever his name was, was a good six inches taller than Aaron, who was six feet. As we walked alongside them, Aaron kept jumping into the air as if he were slam dunking, saying, "My, how tall your husband is!" "Yes, he is," said Sasha, who looked like a perfectly ordinary woman to me with a face a little like a pudding. Both Sasha's husband and I were silent. I wondered whether he, too, was embarrassed.
Two days later, Aaron showed me a letter that Sasha had written to him (well, he had to, she'd sent it to our apartment; it had her return address on it, and I had picked up the mail.) She apologized for her stupid behavior—what stupid behavior? Aaron had been the one who had shaved and jumped up and down—and hoped we'd all be friends.
Later, when we were in our late thirties, Hope telephoned Aaron again. She had married a dentist, was living in Florida, and had created a puppet theater. Did Aaron use puppets in his films? She was coming to New York City with her husband and could she come to the studio, blah, blah, blah. Aaron got excited about her visit and invited her and her husband the dentist to dinner at our apartment.
I objected. "Take her to lunch. I don't want to cook and serve a meal to your first love." But Aaron insisted on dinner. "What do you plan to cook?" he asked. "Toads and snails and puppy dogs' tails," I snapped, and he replied, "That roast beef you marinate for two days would be nice, with roast potatoes and apple pie." I complained to my lifelong friend, Paula, and she said, "It will be a lot easier if you make a good dinner and are charming."
My older daughter, Liza, had heard all this, (she was twelve, and knew how the world should be). When the dinner was over, and we were all being polite in the hall, she made some remark about how nice it would be if Hope stayed in Florida. Aaron was upset. I was secretly pleased. And nothing that Liza said ever stopped Hope from 'keeping in touch.' Later, Aaron told me that he had only invited Hope and her husband to dinner to show her what a great wife and children he had. Good save! I thought, half believing him.
But he got tired of the notes from Hope. "I don't run puppet shows," he said. "What does she think I can do for her?"
"She means well," I told him. "Florida isn't New York. It's a smaller, more naive community." I was just as sweet and unconcerned as I could be!
Somewhere in our early forties, just about the time I was content with Aaron and our children, Eric, the man who had said he couldn't marry me, telephoned. He said, "Thank you for the wedding invitation. I couldn't come because I was attending one of my own." "We were married on the same day?" I gasped. He telephoned again a few weeks later and said, "I love you." I got so dizzy that I had to sit down. I agreed to meet him for lunch. In the spirit of full disclosure, I told Aaron. "Go ahead," said my husband. "He wants to sleep with you."
"No!"
Aaron laughed. "Have a nice lunch," he said on the morning of the event, showing me that two could play the 'I don't care' game.
"How can you be in love with two people?" I asked my erstwhile lover after we had agreed that we both loved our spouses.
"You can," he said, adding somewhere in the conversation, "You are the love of my life."
Well! Aaron had never said such a pretty thing. To my dismay, I realized that I was still passionately interested in my luncheon companion. "But I can't," I told him when he asked me to. "I can't because…"
"I don't want to know why you can't!" he said. Among the truths that I held to be self-evident at that time was that you loved sequentially. That when you left someone, you stopped loving him and loved the next one, and so forth and so on. When we said goodbye my erstwhile lover said, "If ever you can, call me. That's an absolutely open-ended invitation."
I walked the three miles home to calm myself. I reflected that had he, indeed, married me, I might be the wife he was willing to betray with another woman. I did love him. I couldn't control that, but I could control what I did about it. I never called him.
When Aaron and I were in our later forties, Hope told us that her daughter, Kalliope the oboist, was studying at Juilliard. Would we keep an eye on her? Our daughter, Liza, was in the Martha Graham Company and I identified with the mother of a young girl exposed to the evils of the performing world in Gomorrah-on-the-Hudson. I fussed over Kalliope much more than Aaron did.
By then, Aaron was a psychotherapist and totally out of the film business. Kalliope went back to Florida at the end of her Juilliard training. The fairly mild northern winter was too much for her. Hope dropped occasional postcards to Aaron about her puppet theater. So life continued until Aaron died of a heart attack at 58.
He died on Friday, July 16th, and was buried on Sunday. On Monday, he got a letter from Hope. I opened and read it.
Dated July 14th:
"Dear Aaron, I had a dream last night. I don't quite grasp the meaning, but since you were in it, I thought I should let you know. You were seated at a table and I was beside you. We were looking at something by the light of a lamp with a huge, white Victorian shade. There were fancy little blue flowers painted around the rim. Your face was brightly lit and you were smiling. . .. Why? Do you have any idea?
Hope
P.S. Thanks for helping with Kalliope. She's playing in an orchestra now—in Ft. Lauderdale, thank goodness!"
It was several weeks before I could bear to thank Aaron's friends for their notes of sympathy. And I got so tired of telling people that Aaron was dead that it was after Thanksgiving before I wrote to Hope. Kalliope phoned me then. She had opened my letter to Hope as I had opened Hope's letter to Aaron. "My mother is dead," said Kalliope. "She was diagnosed with lung cancer in August and died at the end of September. "Oh, Kalliope, I'm so sorry," I said, truthfully. "And I'm sorry about Aaron," she responded.
So somewhere deep in her soul, Hope had known that they were both dying and her dream said that death wasn't so bad. Well, they're together, now, I thought. Together for all eternity? Where is my place? Surely not with the man I loved when I married Aaron? The man who had said he couldn't marry me? The man who had propositioned me when we were both married to other people. I wanted a life, so I had learned to love Aaron.
One thing more. The Monday that Hope's letter arrived—the Monday after Aaron's funeral—I was asleep alone, without him after 28 years—and he took my hand. He took my hand firmly and pulled me to go with him. And I pulled my hand out of his, half asleep as I was, not understanding. Then I woke. I wept and reached for him, "Come back! Come back! I'll come with you."
But he never returned. Maybe he and Hope are back in South Carolina, walking on the Edisto Island beach. Maybe when I die I'll walk along with them. Maybe, if you truly love someone, it lasts forever.
A few years later I would sometimes fantasize telephoning Eric. Three things stopped me. (1) Vanity: I was by then more than sixty years old and would have been attractive to Aaron because we had been together so long, but I shuddered that I, a straitlaced, elderly widow, could attempt to impersonate the love of anyone's life; (2) Sisterhood: My former lover had a wife whom he may have been willing to betray, but I was not; and (3) Reality: So many years have passed that we might not know each other any more even though we still love the people we used to be.
So I let it go, and continue to long for Aaron and Eric simultaneously. Maybe, as you go on living, and love deeply over and over and over, it's really the same love, and it doesn't disappear: it simply grows and increases to include each new beloved while not letting go of the old.
Copyright 2006 by Jean Cavrell
"A Meditation on Love" was originally published by Peralta Press
Jean writes:
