One More Thing: Stories and Other Stories(35)
“I was really giving myself one semester—that’s only three months—to find a wife. Someone genuine and beautiful and interesting, and someone outside the circles in which I lived. This wasn’t much time, but I was an overachiever, and confident, and I was used to accomplishing major things in very set periods of time.
“On the first day of the first class, I saw her. The reason I was there—I knew that right away. Pale, freckles, hair in a messy, frizzy light poof. T-shirt. Beautiful. Last seat of the last row. She looked like she didn’t want to be there, and she didn’t: it turned out she was a French literature major, and this class was the economics requirement that she had delayed until her final semester because she hated anything that had to do with money. So I wasn’t in the best position to impress her. Which I liked, too.
“There were twenty students in the class, so I was able to institute fifteen-minute meetings with each student individually each week. I scheduled hers last, on Friday afternoons. I was even more taken upon second sight than I was at first. She was brilliant and sarcastic; inner fire, light touch, certain of her values, which I had a sense were better than mine and which I wanted to learn from. I was sold.
“Now, there were two pretty considerable obstacles in my path. The woman was about to become engaged to the only man she had ever dated, her boyfriend of five years, a man she told me she loved definitively. And in addition to that, she went out of her way to make it clear that, separately, she had absolutely no attraction to or interest in me as a person. She emphasized these things a little gratuitously, in fact.” He laughed.
“I continued to meet each of the students once a week for the twelve weeks of the class, just to justify seeing this woman. Every week when the two of us sat down, I started with the same question: ‘How’s your boyfriend?’ ‘Couldn’t be better’ was her answer every time, and then we would run out the rest of the fifteen minutes in a conversation about basic economics that neither of us had any interest in. This was nine weeks. The tenth week, I didn’t ask my opening question, and we just talked about economics the whole time. The eleventh week, she brought up her boyfriend right away and walked me through her doubts about the relationship for the entirety of the session, which this time ran almost an hour.
“On the final week of the semester, she told me that she was questioning everything in her life, that her relationship had in fact been over for some time, and that she didn’t know what to do. We continued to talk about this for the rest of the afternoon, over dinner that night, and the next morning over a balanced breakfast.
“She stopped returning my phone calls immediately and moved out of her dormitory. After several weeks, I tracked down her parents’ residence through a student directory to which I was not supposed to have access, and she picked up the phone in another room and delivered all the following news in the space of about a minute: she was pregnant, she was getting married within the month, and it had taken her brief time with me to make her realize that her boyfriend was and would always be the love of her life. I was never to contact her again. They were in love, she said.
“I was in love, too. I suggested that I might contact her fiancé and tell him everything, including my theories as to the timing of the pregnancy. She said she had already told him everything, that they were determined to raise the child as theirs, and that I was not welcome in their lives in any way. She raised the prospect of a restraining order against me and, more chillingly, whatever reputation-ruining accusations would be necessary for her to obtain one.
“But it was actually her passion that gave me pause, not her threats. Because while I knew I was in love, I could see that my love wasn’t as big as their love, and I decided that was reason enough for me to retreat. That’s the part that I’ve questioned since, and I’ll tell you why in a moment.
“Now, as you can see”—he leaned back and gestured around the office and to the immense window behind him—“I have an excellent career and, all in all, an excellent life. But I was right to try to act fast in that three-month semester: in the dozen years since, I have not come close to finding a person I’ve wanted to share that life with. Not anywhere close. So I share my life with no one. I am happy—make no mistake. The life I live alone is a great one. But I do wish I had a family. It’s the rare goal that has eluded me so far.
“Your parents love each other very much. From the information I know, I wouldn’t try to argue that they are anything less than one of the great love stories of our age. That they would sacrifice everything—from money, to truth, to enjoyment of the universally acknowledged finest breakfast cereals in America—just to stay loyal to each other, and to the family they were determined to have together? It’s something. It really is.
“But I ask you—and I can tell you’re smart enough to grapple with a real question: is love such a strong force that it needs to be obeyed by the people who lie outside it?
“Think about this, specifically. The love of your mother for the man you know as your father is the ultimate force known to those experiencing it. Fair. Fine. But to anyone else? To me? To you? Is it selfish to impose the consequences of your love—infinite only to you—on the lives of others? If it means denying someone something as big as the life he was meant to have?”
He pointed to me with the same hand that had gestured out the window. “What sneakers do you wear? What musical instruments can you play? What languages do you speak? Have you ever been to the Olympics? Read a book in a café in Barcelona? Pretended to read a book in a café in Barcelona? What colleges does it not even occur to you to wonder about?”