Burly Girls, Bowheads, Young Studs, and the Old Bunch. * This is so wrong, right? But then, what’s not right in the story of the world’s oldest love affair? * I love the way he describes some types of women: “Not a woman but an unmade bed of girls and babies, the unborn and those lost to him, mothers and girlfriends and sisters and nurses. The lost and unspoken for, the unmentioned, the abandoned.” * “For more than half his life, his mother had been a ghost for him. There was something of this in all his relationships with women, some fundamental sense of the unreliability of the world. Some nights he would dream of her, dead in her coffin, or in her grave. Sometimes he’d feel her beside him, whispering words of advice. Sometimes he wouldn’t see her at all. Or else it was impossible to tell if she were present or not.” * “The night had gone by while they had been dancing. He had spent it in lovemaking. But now the night had gone by while he had been telling her about the man whose name was John Paul Sartre. “I don’t want you,” he said. “I don’t want to make love to you. I love you.” She looked away, the breeze ruffling her hair. “The words you say to me are the music of the night. The words are like a flute, flute,” she said.” * “And he was the man who could find a way to speak in a manner that made himself, and the woman he spoke to, both completely vulnerable, naked, all to each other. It was as if there was a part of each that could only be revealed by the other. To each of them, and everyone in the world, it was more than a secret, more than a secret and more than a love. And so they never spoke of it.” * “He knew it all was going wrong: in the sense that things in America were becoming bad, when the world was falling into chaos and America could not help or save anyone. In this sense his life was going wrong: in the sense that he was an actor who was not getting the chance to perform his best. And yet he was also happy, in the sense that he felt his life was about to make sense. He knew that one morning soon he would wake up and she would be dead and they would be standing in a room filled with her friends and family and everyone in America would be crying because she had died. And in this sense he felt his life was going wrong. But he felt at the same time that he would do it all again, because he believed with every part of his being that what he was doing in his life was right. He had never really thought of these three loves as separate loves, but the two men in his life, and all the women, were separate loves.” * “In this life, there were things he did not understand, or did not want to understand, the sort of things that only a woman would know or understand. And because of this, he did not love any of the women he had known. He loved them in a way, but their way was not his way, nor would his way ever be theirs. It was as if he loved them like a child might love a puppy or a kitten, with an intensity that was hard to put into words. “If it had been just a love of words that he had spoken of in the song, he might have found a way to explain it. But it had been too big for words. And in the face of this immensity he was afraid to speak. What he had felt for her had always been true, but the fact that he had never been able to say it had always been like a deep pain under his heart, and so he had not spoken of it. “And there were times when he was awake at night when he had a sudden longing to wake her up, for the first time in a way that was like a pain, to tell her how he felt, and to reach out and touch her in a way that he had not touched her in the waking hours of his life. In those moments he felt that he had a terrible, terrible desire to hold her and never let go, for as long as he might live. He felt as if he were some sort of magician who could have the power to make a wish and see it come true, and he would know what to do, but he would not do it. He knew it would take nothing for him to reach out to her, touch her face, and hold her in his arms, but when it came to these things he was incapable. It was as if someone else were playing the role of the magician. Or else he was that magician, and all he had to do was wish, but he could not do it.” * “And he had often been asked why he felt it would be easy for him to die, to die now at this time, but the truth was that if someone asked him this, he would answer no one, because there was no good answer. He could not understand why they asked him. He could only answer with the truth: He felt as if he were dead, and would rather be dead than live.” * “He had walked through the streets of Rome, the sun low in the sky, on a day he would remember for the rest of his life, because he was struck by something in that city and something in him, something that made him feel he could hear the music of the night, singing the name of John Paul Sartre. He had gone to a bar, sat on a stool in a white wooden booth, and ordered a drink. The bartender had asked him if he was American, and he had said yes. The bartender then asked him why he was in Rome, and he had answered that he did not know. The bartender then asked him if he was a journalist, and when he said he was not, the bartender shook his head, and turned away. And he had gone to Rome because he had heard it was a city where you could feel the feeling of the past. And that was the name of the city.” * “He knew that someday she would die. In that way he knew she was like any person he had loved in the past, or any person he would ever love in the future. “And yet she would live for the rest of his life. For as long as he lived, she would be alive, in a way that would keep him from dying for the rest of his life. This was part of the beauty of what he had come to believe: That he was living with a woman for whom death was a word and a future without her was impossible.” * “And so he felt as if something was about to be revealed to him that had been hidden, or had been kept from him, or about which he had always known but only barely understood.” * “And at the same time, he felt that the person he had been living with would die, and the person he had been living with would not, and it was almost as if there were two of him, one living and one dying, neither of them being him. And the one dying would be the one who would die. The one who would die would be the man that he saw in the mirror every morning. The man he would wake up to every morning and see there in the mirror. And yet he had been living with this man for over two years, and so he had gotten used to him and the idea that he would die. And yet the man in the mirror was not him, and the feeling was unbearable.” * “And so he did not want to see himself in the mirror, but knew he could not live with himself if he did not.” * “And as he went on with her, with the woman he had loved, whom he had loved as a person, as a being, a living person, he realized that what he had believed was simply not true: that every person is mortal, and that all people are bound to die. “And then he began to realize that his entire life and the lives of all the people in the world, and the lives of all the people who had ever lived were one and the same, and that as life was unfolding it would continue to unfold in its own way and that to hold it back by loving something or someone was only to fall into a trap, a trap of his own making. “He knew that it would take nothing for him to change the world, that all he would need to do is let his own self out. He knew, too, that his own self, the self he had been when he was born, was bound to die. But at the same time, he knew that he was living as if nothing in his life would ever change. As if the life he had always been living would go on and on, as it had always gone on and on. “And then he realized that what had made him want to live for himself, in that place he had never been before, was the one thing that might yet be able to make him change, a love that was a love of loneliness. And yet what he felt was that what he had always done was right, even though there was something in him that wanted to change. And this was the thing he could not stand. “He knew there was a way in which it could all change.