Another Insane Devotion Page 6
To me, a good boyfriend is somebody who cares.
Someone who thinks I’m special.
She makes me feel like I’m important.
I can have a good time with him.
No one in my recollection said anything about love. This may be due to the same reticence that kept the kids from writing about sex (unless that’s what the last author meant by “a good time”). Maybe they thought it was creepy of me to even be asking them about their girlfriends and boyfriends. But maybe they already knew that love has about as much to do with what makes someone a good girlfriend or boyfriend as it does with what makes someone a good wife or husband, which is not a whole lot. More, in the second case, but even there the relation is not so much necessary as contingent.
Love is a feeling, and girlfriend or boyfriend, like wife or husband, is a function, or maybe a job; you could think of a date as a job interview. My students were trying to define the qualifications for that job the way personnel directors might mull over the requisite skill set of a CEO or a die-punch operator. You could argue with some parts of this analogy: employees, for one thing, usually get paid. But you choose the people you go out with the same way you choose the ones who work for you, down to the guy with a van you hire for a couple hours to move a bookcase. That’s why you find notices for both on Craig’s List:I’m hoping to find a man who is also educated, intelligent, healthy, a non-smoker, employed, enjoys travel, culture and trying new things and who too wants companionship, friendship and hopefully ultimately a LTR. I go to the gym 4 to 5 times a week and hope you are also fit and take care of yourself. If you are looking for a FWB, hook up, fling, or NSA relationship than I am definitely not the woman for you. So if you think you might be what I’m looking for, please say hello and tell me about yourself.
We all want the same thing. That person that will care for us, listen, comfort us, make us feel special, never hurt us, accept us for who we are, and basically love us unconditionally until the end of time. We want a friend, a lover, a companion because no one wants to grow old alone. We need that person who will nudge us when we’re sleeping and stop breathing so we don’t wake up dead (lol).
So, I’ve found a great house to buy. Now I just need a man to share it with. Man must:1. Have a retirement plan.
2. Believe in aliens.
3. Be comfortable in most any social situation.
What’s striking about these ads is the way they combine specificity and generality, skepticism and idealism: only somebody very idealistic expects to find unconditional love in adulthood. Their specificity is the specificity of the educated consumer who knows what she wants or, more commonly, what she doesn’t want (e.g., a smoker, an FWB, or an NSA relationship). Even so, consumers may sometimes be overwhelmed by the abundance of choices available to them, and the variety, the latter suggested by such categories as Strictly Platonic, Men Seeking Women, Women Seeking Men, Men Seeking Men, Women Seeking Women, Casual Encounters, and Misc. Romance. This vertigo, the vertigo of the shopper staring dazedly into the ice cream freezer at the supermarket, may be the source of the posters’ vagueness. And, of course, much of the language they use has no agreed-on definition. Is a “casual encounter” the same thing as a one-night stand, and if not, how many encounters can you have before they stop being casual? Does “LTR” mean a lifetime relationship or just a long-term one, and how long is long-term? And is “lifetime relationship” an anachronism, as meaningless as the wish for someone who will love us to the end of time?
There were no personal ads in the Middle Ages. To the extent that people chose at all, they chose spouses from a narrow pool of neighbors or, more likely, had spouses chosen for them by their fathers or male guardians. (Doubtless, there were also casual encounters and misc. romances back then; that’s why we have the fabliaux.) It was the difference between shopping at the Whole Foods and at the local farmers’ market, your dad standing beside you at the produce stand, reaching over you to squeeze the plums. “He’ll take these.” What did those people want, our great-great-many-times-great grandparents, with their bad hygiene and their lives brief as a struck match? In the case of the upper classes, we know what their fathers wanted. It was they who drew up the marriage contracts:I, Thibaut, count palatine of Champagne and Brie, make known to all, present and future, that my loyal and faithful Guy of Bayel and his wife Clementia have made a marriage contract in my presence with Jocelin of Lignol for the marriage of their son Herbert with Jocelin’s daughter Emeline. These are the clauses:
[1] Guy has given to his son whatever he had at Bayel, at the village called Les Mez, and at Bar-sur-Aube and within those village districts, including tenants, woods, lands, and all other things.
[2] Jocelin has given his daughter Emeline an annual rent of 5l. [from his property] that will be assigned by two other men, one to be named by Guy and the other by Jocelin. And Jocelin will give his daughter 100l. cash [as dowry], which is to be invested in income-producing property by the two appointed men within one year after the marriage.
[3] Peter Guin [of Bar-sur-Aube, chamberlain of Champagne and Jocelin’s father-in-law] and his son Guy affirmed in my presence that they gave whatever they had at Les Mez to Emeline or to Jocelin’s other daughter Lucy, whom Herbert earlier had engaged to marry.
[4] Herbert will hold the above mentioned 5l. rent, the property purchased with the 100l. cash, as well as the land at Les Mez, in fief and liege homage from Guy, son of my faithful chamberlain Peter Guin, save liegeance to me and save the liegeance contracted to anyone else before the marriage.
[5] Guy of Bayel and Clementia agreed that if Emeline dies before the marriage, they will have Herbert marry another of Jocelin’s daughters when she becomes nubile, under the same terms.
Beyond the exchange of property, there was some doubt as to what a marriage was or how it was delimited, especially in the early Middle Ages, when the church hadn’t yet elevated it to a sacrament. As late as the fifteenth century, a lawsuit arose in Troyes over whether a young couple could have their union performed by one of their friends, in the street, or whether they needed a public figure, a schoolmaster, to do it, or a real priest, or whether they could just as legitimately take the vows on their own, without anybody officiating. The vows might be short; for example: “I swear to thee, Marguerite, that I will love no other woman but thee to the day of my death.” “Paul, I pledge my word that I will have no other husband than you to the day of my death.” (In the French, Paul addresses his fi-ancée in the familiar second person, tu; Marguerite uses the formal vous.) Symbolic gifts would be exchanged. The couple would shake hands or kiss. Sometimes, the boy would seal his commitment by putting his tongue in his beloved’s mouth, announcing that he was doing it “in the name of marriage.”
The last gesture suggests a popular attempt to resolve an old theological debate as to whether marriage was defined by a sexual act or a verbal one: by fucking or an oath. The first definition justified abducting and raping the young woman who caught your fancy, which explains those peasant ceremonies in which the groom and his friends pretended to kidnap the bride, who pretended to be upset about it. But it seemed like something was missing. In the twelfth century, Gratian formulated a two-part definition of marriage:It must be understood that betrothal begins a marriage, sexual union completes it. Therefore between a betrothed man and a betrothed woman there is marriage, but begun; between those who have had intercourse, marriage is established.
Other churchmen argued that all that was needed was the verbal consent of both parties, two people saying, “I do.” After all, if sex was what made a marriage, one could say that Mary and Joseph had lived in sin.
It’s startling to see how matter-of-fact the medieval church could be about sex, down to earnest discussions of the morality of the female orgasm and whether a woman whose husband came before she did was allowed to fondle herself: fourteen out of seventeen theologians said she could. It was a practical application of Paul’s teaching: “The husband must give the
wife what is due to her, and the wife equally must give her husband his due” (1 Cor. 7, 1–3). The idea of the debt, or debitum, informed all of marriage, gave shape to it the way the skeleton gives shape to the human body. It was the simple counterpart to elaborate contracts like the one between Guy and Jocelin, made not between two fathers but between a wife and a husband and governing not the division of property but the sharing of duty and pleasure. The poor had no property, but they could have orgasms, and people took it for granted that wives as well as husbands were entitled to them. Just give me my propers when you get home. Both Otis Redding and Aretha Franklin sing “R-E-S-P-E-C-T,” and both their versions are considered definitive.
It makes sense that the church would concern itself with the pleasure of the married couple. A marriage in which both spouses get their propers will be fecund and stable, producing children for the glory of God and the increase of Mother Church. Satisfied spouses are less likely to go splashing around in the concupiscent puddles of the flesh. The sex the church sanctioned wasn’t concupiscent. It was temperate, cheerful, orderly, the payment of a debitum. Who gets hot and bothered writing out the month’s checks? Marriage was chiefly an economic relationship. Its purpose was to increase the property of propertied families or to maximize the labor of two individuals—and more, when children came—by joining them in a common domestic enterprise. In medieval art, the common people are often depicted laboring, the men in the fields, the women in the house. There’s a painting I like in which three housewives stand proudly amid dozens of perfect cannonballs of dough they’ve rolled and patted into shape and are now feeding into a brick oven on an immense paddle. In their spotless dresses, they look as improbably put-together as June Cleaver vacuuming in her heels. Sometimes they work together, as in the images that show men and women picking cabbages (the man carries his in a basket balanced on his head) or harvesting olives.
The work wasn’t easy. Think of the strength and endurance it took to cut wheat with a sickle and bind it into sheaves and heap up the sheaves in stooks, all day long, day after day in harvest time, beneath a sun that filled the entire sky. Think of the labor of shaking the olives from every tree in the grove, the leaves hissing and flashing silver, the tedium of gathering the fallen fruit and pressing it into oil. “Cursed is the ground because of you,” God tells the first, fallen couple. “In toil shall you eat of it all the days of your life.” These are the words that make Masaccio’s Adam cover his face and weep. Yet in most of the medieval images, the men and women look happy or, if not happy, content. This may be testimony to the value of the debitum, not just the sexual debitum but the entire system of mutual credit and debit, boon and obligation, that formed the economy of marriage. Beyond its harsh beginnings, the haggling and ritual rape (and sometimes real rape, too, which the victim was expected to forget once the rapist did right by her), the system was pretty fair. And there was probably added comfort in the simple fact that wife and husband worked together—sometimes side by side—and not alone.
Inwardly, I’d vowed not to write Bruno another e-mail or leave another message on his voice mail until I heard from him, but I broke my promise later on September 30, when I sent him a “missing cat” flyer I’d made up when I was supposed to be reading students’ manuscripts. I asked him to make copies of it and put them up around the college and, as long as he was up and about, on some phone poles, too, just the ones in the neighborhood.
I don’t remember whether I consulted F. about the wording. She probably would have thought it was too much to mention Biscuit’s sinus problem, and, really, I question why I did, since the photo would be enough to show anyone what she looked like. I may have wanted to explain the discharge under her eyes. I have few pictures of her that don’t show some; it’s embarrassing.
I left the reward unspecified because $100 seemed too cheap, and I didn’t want to say $1,000 for fear it might incite scam artists or even a backwoods home invader. And anyway, I didn’t have $1,000, though I guess I could have borrowed it.
The word “economy” comes from the Greek words oikos, “house,” and nomos, “manager”: hence, a household manager or steward. Traditionally, this was a man’s job. The stewards in Jesus’s parables are men, as is the Reeve, or steward, in The Canterbury Tales. Economics is a stereotypically male profession; witness the gender balance on the president’s Council of Economic Advisors. Only at the turn of the twentieth century did home economics emerge as a field of study for young women. By the time F. and I were teenagers, it was a required subject in most public high schools, though only for girls. A few years later, in the purifying glare of the women’s movement, it would vanish from many curricula. Maybe it would have been better if boys had had to take it too. Who isn’t better off for knowing how to sew on a button? I don’t know if home ec traditionally included learning how to pay bills. In many households, that was the wife’s job, even if she did it with her husband’s paycheck. F. and I have never worked out this aspect of our domestic economy. Both of us pay bills, grabbing the checkbook off each other’s desks. Only I bother balancing the account. F. just writes down what she spent and waits for me to do the math.
The first time I thought that we might make a couple, I was living in a loft in a neighborhood that still went by the name of the industry that had vanished from it years before. The city’s full of neighborhoods like that. With its high ceilings and ponderous, steel-sashed windows, the loft was a relic of that industrial past. The enormous radiator bolted to one wall was usually too hot to touch, but periodically it stopped working, and in no time the room would be cold, cold enough to make your breath steam. After coming up several times in response to my heat complaints, the super took me aside and explained that the radiator needed to be bled from time to time and gave me a little, short-stemmed key so I could do it myself. He winked. “Just don’t tell anybody where you got it from.”
The trick was to turn the valve just until water started trickling out and then shut it quickly. I did it so often I got good at it, and when the radiator went out one December morning while F. was staying with me, I was almost happy for the opportunity to do my impression of a mechanically competent person for her; we were so still so new to each other that she might believe that person was the real me. I addressed the radiator, fitted the tip of the valve into a matching slot in the key, and gave it a turn. Then I gave it another. Then I cried out as the valve shot into the air, narrowly missing my eye, and was followed by a jet of scalding water. I’m not sure “jet” is the right word. “Jet” connotes something of limited duration; this water kept coming and coming. Hotly, it gushed from the top of the radiator and arced several feet before splashing back down. It was like something in a national park that people stand around and take pictures of. I groped on the floor for the valve, but it had rolled out of sight, or else the water was already too deep for me to see it. There was a particular horror in seeing how quickly it spewed out, like blood from a wound. I cursed helplessly, monotonously. Sometimes I just moaned, “Oh no!” and was seized with shame at what F. would think if she heard me, a grown man, moaning over a leaking radiator.
She brought me a kitchen mitt. I could have kissed the hand that gave me that mitt. It wasn’t enough to plug the flow, but with the mitt on I could slow it a little, and at least I wouldn’t get scalded any more. Of course, I had to stand there with my mittened thumb jammed into the spraying radiator, like the intrepid Dutch boy at the dyke, while the water mounted around my ankles. F. thought I ought to call the super. I didn’t want to. Have I mentioned that I was in the loft illegally? Not long afterward, the super called me. F. held the phone up to my ear so I could hear his small, angry voice berating me. Trying very hard to sound calm, I reminded him that I’d only been doing what he told me to, and he stopped. Maybe he was scared I’d tell management about the key. Shortly, he came up with three porters and capped the spill with a replacement valve while his assistants baled out tepid water gritty with iron clinkers that rattled in t
heir buckets.
When they left, the floors were wet, and the books on the lowest shelves of the bookcase were sodden; I had to throw a lot of them away. I was starting to shiver. The radiator was pushing out heat again, but the loft had been cold for a while, and my pajamas were soaked. F., though still in her pajamas, an oversized men’s pair in robin’s egg blue flannel, was dry, partly because she’d stayed away from the radiator and partly because at some point she’d put on a pair of rain boots. They were bright red and came almost to her knees. Back then, she was dying her hair red, a sort of candy-apple red, and I remember noting, as I watched her gamely mopping the floor, that she was color coordinated: red hair, red boots, and blue pj’s. The pj’s went with her eyes. How diligent she looked to me. Her diligence had nothing heavy about it, as diligence so often does, the heaviness of the five-hundred-pound barbells of virtue and of the strongman deadlifting them with popping eyes. F.’s diligence was light and playful. She made mopping look like a game. Bitey seemed to think it was. She followed F. closely, darting as close to the mop head as she dared, then darting back, after throwing a punch or two at its dank tentacles. I doubt I consciously thought that being with F. would make domestic labor fun. Nothing makes it fun, except maybe amphetamines, and then only for some people. I had only an idea of lightness, lightness in the face of calamity, and I knew it had to do with her.