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“It sounds as if you are doing the wondering for both of us. And one of the things that it is important someone in my job understand is that illness brings out different qualities in different people. Some are enriched by it—yes, I know, you do not want to consider the possibility, but it is true, and I have seen it. Some people have a talent for it and some rise to the occasion. And some are diminished by their fear. They often deny, or withdraw.”
“You make concessions when you’re married a long time that you don’t believe you’ll ever make when you’re beginning,” she said. “You say to yourself when you’re young, oh, I wouldn’t tolerate this or that or the other thing, you say love is the most important thing in the world and there’s only one kind of love and it makes you feel different than you feel the rest of the time, like you’re all lit up. But time goes by and you’ve slept together a thousand nights and smelled like spit-up when babies are sick and seen your body droop and get soft. And some nights you say to yourself, it’s not
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The being happy. It’s so much easier, to learn to love what you have instead of yearning always for what you’re missing, or what you imagine you’re missing. It’s so much more peaceful.”
At dinner that night at the restaurant where I worked, where they fed us free, he told me that he was gay, that he thought sometimes that his quiet all his life had been a way of holding back the words that frightened him so. All the time I thought he hated me for something I hadn’t done, he believed I would be repelled by what he was doing. It was joy, knowing both of us were wrong.
We’d made her simpler all her life, simpler than her real self. We’d made her what we needed her to be. We’d made her ours, our one true thing.
