Love Is a River

I don’t have any bad feelings about it, Keith says.

That’s good, I say.

I have many bad feelings about it, or rather one bad feeling, over and over. It carries little emotional weight, but that constantly.

Guilt.

* * *

We have just spent several hours unwinding the final strand that connects us. (For nearly three years it’s been stretched thin and thinner so that it’s begun to unravel, but we—I--haven’t had the heart to finish the job.) We have been to the bank to shuffle accounts, he has invited me to the house to see what he’s done to the bathroom that he tore apart … how many years ago? We can’t remember. He has put air in my tires and checked my oil and fiddled with a few things under the hood. This is how he always said I love you, with his handiwork. Earlier, I paid for dinner; this is how I always said I love you back, by taking care of business. That’s what I’m doing today, taking care of our last bit of business.

* * *

On an insignificant anniversary of Barbara’s death, Keith and I went to dinner. We weren’t marking the day. Eating out was routine, a better alternative to my cooking or my mood when I was cooking.

Still, I was cognizant. I thought: The day everything changed could be the day it changed again. I looked across the table. Said, It’s time. He agreed. Three days later I lived in a different city.

It was that easy. In our marriage, there were few surprises.

* * *

The biggest surprise was the marriage itself. The brainiac and the high school dropout. What is that?

* * *

On the night of the day that Barbara died, my doorbell rang. I had lived in the apartment since spring; that night was November. The bell had never rung before.

It was Keith, the man next door with the beautiful garden, who was always out tending it in the afternoon when I got home from work. We had often chatted over the fence.

I opened the door, my face full of tears. Somehow we got to this moment: He invited me to a concert. I refused.

What must he have been thinking? I wondered later. He said, I wondered why you answered the door.

I did not walk down from the third floor because I was curious to see who was there. I was hopeful. I hoped it was her.

* * *

Seven months later, the woman Keith loved with all his heart died.

* * *

Imagine Hansel and Gretel without the breadcrumbs. How do you survive? We were not strong for one another; we were equally bereft.

Consoling one another, we never said, “It’s OK,” or “It will be all right.” We said, “I know. I know.”

Then one day Keith stopped saying, “I know.” He had stopped needing to hear it long before I did, but on that day I knew he was right. You can’t say “I know” forever. At some point something changes, and then you can say only, “I remember.”

* * *

Keith and I have this in common: unrelenting creativity. Keith’s genius resides in his hands, and I am not being sly. He can take anything—he can take nothing at all—and create a thing of function and beauty.

Once he built a wooden clock from plans ordered from a magazine. The gears didn’t mesh right. With a compass and protractor, the high-school dropout figured out the geometry used to create the number and size and placement of teeth on gears of various circumference, and the height and slope of the sides of each tooth, and the width of the top of each tooth. Then he drew up his own plans.

He cut the gears from oak, black walnut, guncalo alves, purple heart, bird’s eye maple. Even with all of the gears’ various sizes and weights and grains and resistance, the clock keeps time within seconds per day. One museum has already laid claim to it.

The clock sits in a corner of Keith’s workshop, the gears choked with sawdust. He never fully finished the project. The pendulum is a cheap dowel piercing an orange plastic ball; the weight is scrap metal. I know why he left it like that: The creative work was making the gears; the rest was mop up.

In this Keith and I are exactly alike: What interests us is always what’s in the making, never what’s done.

* * *

Several friends said, We never could see what you saw in him. Beyond the creative genius part, I never tried to explain.

"It is only with the heart that one can see rightly," Saint Exupery said. With my heart I saw:

Keith is an enlivened heart. To tell me who he was, he played for me this song by Tret Fure:

My house I leave open
My faith lies with friends
If I can’t trust my instincts, I’ll lose in the end
I’d rather risk injury than be on my guard
That side of the moon is too dark.

It became our shared point of reference, our song. Recently Keith gave me a CD onto which he copied the song. Even as we go our separate ways, it's still true north on his compass and mine.

* * *

If you ever grow heartsore, seek out Keith in his workshop. Only spirit can take you to that hushed place where you become the thing you are doing. Watch him, attentive and tender, coax new meaning from metal or wood, and you will be restored. You will see:

“Let the beauty we love be what we do.
There are hundreds of ways to kneel and kiss the ground.”

Not to paint too soft a picture: The man is 6-foot-5 and can bench press me. He owns a rifle and pistol, which he uses to shoot beer cans on stumps and doughnuts hanging from trees. He drives a motorcycle, a dirt bike, and a riding lawnmower he geared up to make it go fast. He likes to do wheelies on it, and more than once he has flipped it. He swears like a trucker and tells dirty jokes. He loves Pink Floyd.

He likes beer, and the more he drinks, the sweeter and more gentle he gets.

* * *

Keith and I were lucky. We were lost in a dark wood, and we walked out together. As children we had been bullied, jeered at, browbeaten and left to rot. When we discovered one another, we stared with amazement and admiration. If we didn’t love in a soul-binding way, we lavished on one another the necessary precursor: profound, enthusiastic certainty that the other was wholly worthy, doubly so, of a place on this planet.

We did more than survive grief. We engaged life. Certainty is contagious. We believed in one another, and then we believed in ourselves. We helped one another stake a claim in the world, and build our lives, and step into them.

We were divinely lucky to meet when we did. Fate dealt us a good hand, and we played it well.

Still, I can’t stop apologizing every time we meet. Keith needs a friend by his side. I need solitude the way a tree needs wood. I was not always nice about it.

You did fine. Don’t feel guilty, Keith says.

* * *

At dinner, Keith heaps some of his food onto my plate. He knows I want it, and he’s offered to let me nibble right off his plate as I did when we were married, but I decline. That day is over. Besides, it used to annoy him no end.

I miss it, he says.

Do you ever think about Mary? I ask.

I am not starting anything. I just wonder.

I do, he says. More and more lately. I don’t know why.

I think one good-bye brings on another.

* * *

The sun is on the slant.

Now that we have finished with the bank and dinner and house tour and mechanicking, Keith is leaning against the back fender of my car, his arms crossed. We chat, but things are winding down. It’s well past time for me to go, but we have never been quick to say good-bye.

I have something to say, and this may be my last opportunity. After this moment there will be nothing between us, no connection to give me the right to say personal things.

I want to say, Love is not what we thought. It is not a bridge, uniting two grieving hearts, then falling down.

I want to say, Love is the river that carries us into the future. That’s what our love did, is doing now.

Instead I say, I still love you. Quickly I add, Like a brother, like family.

Keith smiles sadly. He knows. The affection we feel in this moment, it is old affection. He has a girlfriend now, and I am meeting a favorite lead at the Turn in two hours.

It is time.

Keith pushes off the car, his arms open, and wraps me in a bear hug. My face ends up smashed in his armpit, and we laugh. Soon after we were married he read that women need frequent whiffs of the pheromones emitted in a man’s sweat, and he kindly volunteered his. It’s silly joke, and it gives us a cozy moment.

You can say all you like about the intimacy of the tango embrace, it is nothing, it is not a pale image, it is not even of the same ilk; it is a caricature of this: genuine, old, familial love. This is the connection that requires no tending. If I never see Keith again, we will always be family.

We know that. We know how way leads on to way. When two roads diverge, you cannot travel both.

Don’t be a stranger, Keith says.

He helps me into the car, then shambles over to the crabapple tree, picks fruit and tosses it into the grass as I back down the driveway.

We wave and wave and wave as I drive away.