Innocent

CHAPTER 15

Anna, September 2, 2008

After my marriage ended and I moved in with Dede, the same question obsessed me. I would lie in bed in the mornings and wonder for an hour, Was I ever in love with Paul? I thought I had been, but now I had my doubts. Yet how could I, or anybody, ever make such a fundamental mistake? How would I ever know the real deal?

Man by man, relationship by relationship, those issues have perplexed me and left me feeling each time that something was missing. I have been fascinated by some men and in other cases-none more than Rusty-virtually obsessed, gripped by a fierce hunger. But could anything so fraught be grown-up lasting love? Could it have led to that? I have awaited the Day I Know I Am Really in Love the way some people anticipate the Rapture.

I was gloomy the first weeks of August and was reluctant initially to believe it had anything to do with Nat. In time, I faced the fact that I missed him or, more honestly, the chance I'd seen in him, an opportunity to have something different, which felt both new and right. This realization hit me harder than I might have anticipated. It brought up a lot of stuff about Rusty, which I didn't expect, especially anger. Late at night, there were moments when I couldn't understand my own reasoning. What taboo was I violating, whose feelings was I trying to spare? If the father didn't want me, why couldn't I be with the son? Wouldn't that mean things had worked out for everyone? When I reconsidered all of this in the morning, it felt as though all the ground I'd gained in the last fifteen months had washed away beneath my feet.

But I thought I was getting over it. It felt as though I had put this disappointment on the shelf beside many prior ones. And then this morning, I was in the supreme court hearing room to assist Miles Kritzler, who was arguing a futile mandamus petition for an important client. He got oral argument by rule, but the justices were not happy he was taking their time, and they sat up there, all seven of them, with these looks that said, Just kill me. His red light was going to come on any second, and just then somebody scampered up onto the bench to deliver a brief to Justice Guinari, and when I looked over, Nat was already facing me, so thin and haunted and impossibly beautiful, those sea blue eyes full of an amazing beseeching look. I was afraid the poor man was going to start weeping and that if he did, I would cry, too.

When I got back to the office, there was a message from him in my voice mail:

"When I leave work around six, I'm going straight to your apartment. I'm going to ring the bell, and if you're not home, then I'm going to sit on the front step until you come home. So if you've gotten a grip again and still don't want this, then you better go sleep at one of your girlfriends, because I'm going to be sitting there all night. You're going to have to tell me no to my face this time. And unless I understand you a lot less than I think I do, I don't think that will happen."

I knew then that for all the hesitation and reluctance, all the telling myself, 'No, this is insane,' all the warnings of incredible peril, that despite all of that, my heart had a plan and I was going to have to follow it. As the songs say, I would give everything for love. This is a greater, deeper truth about me than any of the admonitions and lessons I have been trying so hard to take in. And I have always known it.

In the last few months I lived with Dede, I was dating a cop named Lance Corley, who had been a student in an econ class I took at night to finish college. He was a sweet man, big and handsome, and when he came by he spent a lot of time with Jessie. He had a daughter of his own he didn't see much. I could tell that Dede had a crush on him almost from the start and that it was only getting worse as time went on. She was completely transparent. She'd ask me several times a day when I thought he might show up. In the end, Lance decided he was going to try to reconcile with his ex, mostly because seeing Jessie had made him realize how desperately he missed his own daughter.

When I explained all that to Dede, she was sure it was lie, that I was not letting Lance come to the apartment because I didn't want him to fall for her. It got so bad that I finally asked Lance to call and explain, but that was a mistake. The utter humiliation of Lance knowing she harbored this flaky hangup with him infuriated her.

I woke up about six the last morning I lived there, and Dede was standing over my bed with a pair of kitchen scissors between her hands, extended in my direction. I could see she was completely smashed, shaking as if there were a motor in her chest, her face blotchy and her nose running as she stood there crying, toying with the idea of killing me. I jumped up and screamed at her. I slapped her and cursed her and took away the scissors while she crumpled in a heap in the corner of my room so that someone happening by might even have mistaken her for a pile of dirty laundry.

Now I listened to Nat's voice message six or seven times and then picked up the phone to call Rusty. I said I had to talk to him, even though I couldn't imagine what I would say. But crazy things happen in life all the time when people fall in love. I have a friend who got divorced and married her ex's brother. I heard about a lawyer in Manhattan, one of the senior partners in his firm, who at the age of fifty fell in love with a boy working in the mailroom and changed genders so the young man would have him, which actually worked out for a while. Love is supreme. It has its own quantum mechanics, its own rules. When love is involved, you can give only so much ground to propriety or even wisdom. If you love somebody badly enough, then realize that is who you are and try to have him.

That day at Dede's, while I packed, she went on crying and saying, 'I wasn't going to do it, I wasn't going to do it. I was pretending or something, but I wasn't going to do it.'

She said that a thousand times, and finally I was completely fed up. I zipped my last bag and slung it across my back. 'And that's what's wrong with you,' I answered.

Those were the last words I ever spoke to her.