Thirst for Salt

by Madelaine Lucas

To crave and to have are as like as a thing and its shadow. —MARILYNNE ROBINSON, HOUSEKEEPING

Longing, we say, because desire is full of endless distances. —ROBERT HASS, “MEDITATION AT LAGUNITAS”

How could I not be hung up on the past, I wanted to say to my mother, when so many things I’d loved had been left behind there?

It’s late, but my body keeps New York time. This is what happens when you break with one life to live another—it causes a doubling. Knowing eleven at night here is seven in the morning there. Some part of you is always in conversation with that other self.

Always the beggar for his love. I was like the desperate ocean, wearing away at him. The ceaseless questioning of the tide to the shore that I heard from our bedroom window all winter long. Asking, Do you love me? Do you love me? And his answer, which never quite satisfied: If I didn’t, would I still be here in bed with you? It’s not so easy, I’d tried on one occasion to explain, to tell what keeps people together, what makes them fall apart. You can leave someone and still love them. You can lie with someone and never love them at all.

What is it about her and me, I wonder, that has always drawn us to these kinds of places? Something lonely deep down in the bone. A marrowed loneliness, passed down womb to womb. We wanted to believe, my mother and I, that love could restore what was beyond repair, and if not, at least let us walk around in the wreckage.

Sleep with me tonight. I thought I just did. I don’t mean fucking, he said, and I marveled at the word in his mouth—not a curse or a blunt force but somehow spoken with lightness, worn in with the warmth of many years. I mean come home with me. Spend the night. I want to be able to reach for you.

Who is to say what love is or what it wants to be, the shape it takes, or how quickly it comes on? Love has always made a fool of time.

It is easy, I have learned, to mistake solitude for softness, for depth.

Love had a way of doing that, I would learn. It could collapse or rearrange time the way I’d thought only art or memory could.

Two weeks had passed since I’d returned to Sydney from Sailors Beach, and for the first time I was taking the train down from the city to spend the day with Jude. I could have borrowed a car, but I wasn’t yet confident at navigating the highways alone. Also, I liked the anticipation of it, the sweetness of delay. The slow train winding through the outer city suburbs that would lead me back to him, passing through Hurstville, Helensburgh, Thirroul, waiting to catch sight of the ocean. The taste of it first—salt in the air as we arrived at the last stop on the line. And then, stepping onto the platform, there above the gabled wooden station—a swath of blue.

I don’t need you to be here, Jude would tell me in time, but I want you to be. And that’s how it should be. It’s better that way. Love, he would tell me, is all about choice. Free will. Need is about dependency.

Jude thought we should be like a gift to each other, but I longed to be essential. That was love, I decided, as our intimacy changed and deepened over the course of the year. Not being able to do without. Wanting—that was just desire, fluid and changeable as the tide. Need was real love, the truest kind I’d known, born as it is out of what we lack, and that was how I felt about Jude back then—that he completed me, we completed each other, as in the old myth about the origin of love. And if I was essential, the other half of whatever he was, then he could never abandon me.

Unrequited love is still love, he said. But it’s never a great love. Can’t be. It’s one-sided. Except in the case of the ocean. For the ocean, we can make an exception.

How I wished I could reach back in time when he told me that and pluck him out of that bedroom, that lonely childhood. Longing to have known him as a boy, that somehow I could have taken care of him like a mother and also grown up to be his lover—a strange but true feeling—and maybe that’s when it started, the desire to have a baby that would be ours together. It seemed as close as I could come to meeting him as a child.

LOVE—GREAT LOVE, AS JUDE WOULD SAY—HAS A WAY OF seeming both miraculous and inevitable. After my brother was born, all the years I’d been without him seemed impossible. I felt like he’d always been a part of me, had always been there, waiting in the wings to make his appearance. That kind of love, it alters the past as well as the future.

I needed to hear it, the reassurance of those words. Repeating it to him over and over that winter, IloveyouIloveyouIloveyou, like a prayer. Sometimes I would keep myself awake after Jude had fallen asleep to look at his face, missing him even in sleep. So sure, in these moments, that if he ever tried to leave me, I wouldn’t let him. Undignified, the scene I’d make. Not too proud to beg. I’d wrap myself around his legs the way I used to hang from my father’s when I was a child and he would come to visit—remembering the way he used to play along, swinging me from his boot with each heavy stride. I wanted us to be like rocks or anchors, keeping each other in place. Love, I’d read, was supposed to be a light and weightless feeling, but I had always longed for gravity.

It’s so easy for a man to think of a woman as a trap, Maeve said then. I never wanted to be that for him. I wanted us both to be free. But maybe that’s naive. If I’m honest, I think what I’m waiting for is some sign that he wants to be with me first. It can’t just be because of this, she said, pointing at her stomach, though her figure had not yet changed.

I really did think he’d changed, Maeve said. But none of us really do, do we? If anything, I think we tend to double down over time, become more stubbornly ourselves. People don’t grow up after all, I’m sure of it. We just get more things, have children.

When I returned to the kitchen, Jude was kneeling beside Maeve on the floor. His hand on the rise of her stomach, and hers on top of his, holding it in place. Laughing together. A look on his face I’d never seen before—though maybe a glimpse of it, the night we’d found King on the beach and taken him home. Dancing in the kitchen, the dog’s paws up on his shoulders. The look when he’d turned to me and said, Can we keep him? Fear and awe, tenderness and wonder. Boyhood returned to him.

LOVE, I STILL BELIEVE, EXISTS outside of time. Or it is its own time. It makes its own measures—not in minutes or hours or calendar days but in something closer to seasons, or tidal movements.

I wanted so much more to be the one who’d taught him desire, the way he’d taught it to me until I was fluent in it, this new language my body had learned.

It occurs to me now that the sharpest feeling I had in that moment was not one of betrayal but one of shame. It was the shame of witnessing a private moment, of seeing something I was not supposed to see. The intimacy of it, the tenderness of that touch, the way they broke apart—and yet it was I who felt indiscreet and indecent. It seemed clear I couldn’t stay there, a trespasser where I didn’t belong.

King’s gone? He’s not with you? I thought I left him inside. Well, he’s not here. I’ve called him, looked everywhere in the house. If he’s not with you, the dog’s gone. King must have followed me, I realized, down the hall and out the front door. I’d meant to take him with me, but in my distress I’d failed to put him in the car. I had left him behind.

Do you still love Jude? I think a part of me always will. It always feels that way at first, she said. But it will stop. I promise.

I lay curled into a ball on my childhood bed that had once been my mother’s when she was a girl. I’d have a daughter, I was sure. Women are born with all their eggs in their ovaries, like the seeds of a fruit. I’d been with my mother since she’d been in my grandmother’s womb, and now I was sleeping in her bed and my mother was in the next room sleeping in her mother’s. It made me think of us like Russian dolls. Women carried inside women carried inside women.

lying in bed later that night, I remembered what the vet had said last winter. Nothing that could shock or strain the heart. Like cold water, abandonment, grief.

Method of contraception. Trust, I wanted to say.

As all lovers learn, when love ends, you lose the future as well as the past.

These days, the ache for a baby is like a bruise. It hurts, that kind of longing. It is the truest form of unrequited love, the most pure, because the object of desire is only imaginary, not yet born.

Thinking, as I stood in a blue polyester gown on the steps of the library on commencement day and watched a woman from my year pose for a picture with her little boy, By now I could be the mother of a five-year-old. And then it passed, and I could look at children again and see them for what they were—just kids, representing nothing but themselves.

What continues to surprise me, and what I still don’t understand, is not the reasons that love ends but the way that it endures.

It never really goes away, the longing for the life not lived, because isn’t that part of how we come to know ourselves too? Through what we lack as much as what we have, all we dream but do not hold. Some desires have no resolution.