Prologue

Though it's true there's a killing in my story, its principal violence is, I think I'd have to say, the violence of love. And even after all that's happened, I don't begin to know what love is--only what it does. When I have it in my life, I live with it gratefully but warily, the way I live with electricity or wind. That is, I can't comprehend electricity, but I know it has the power to kill, or to light a room; I don't understand the origins of wind, but I've seen how it can ravage the landscape, and have also felt the voluptuous relief of it on hot August days.

I was a late arrival to love--maybe because painting filled my imagination and used me up, and I wasn't particularly aware of any void in my life. For a long time I saw sex mostly as fleeting pleasure. After a decade of empty dalliances in my twenties, a couple years of celibacy, and two brief live-in relationships that expected too much, I fell in love for the first time when I was thirty-four, really in love--with a married man. It was only then that love presented itself in all its unruly splendor.

Once love happens, sex feels like a sacrament--even when it could be called adulterous by the Church. Or your mother.

My mother was a strict Irish Catholic, an old-fashioned woman who quit teaching when she married, to become what people used to call a "homemaker." My late father was her polar opposite--Jewish intellectual, a psychiatrist who agreed with Freud that religion is "an illusion." I can't imagine what brought the two of them together. I pray it wasn't sex--I've got enough of my mother in me that I really don't like to think of anyone's mother having sex. Mother provided my sex education in one anecdote: She told me she'd made my father kneel down beside the bed and pray with her on their wedding night before she would "consummate the marriage." Daddy was an athiest, but apparently he knew where his bread was buttered because nine months later I was born.

Obviously, sex is a mysterious force. Until Michael, I don't think I had a clue about the real power of erotic desire. With him I learned that you can disappear there, can lose yourself in the wilderness of mutual skin, and before you know it, your world has lost its shape and its boundaries. All that matters is the next touch.

I often had to wait for that, though, because now I was what people like to call the "other woman," a term that makes clear that no matter how real the love, you're a spare--like a summer house in the Hamptons or the shoes he saves for formal occasions; something he doesn't actually live with, but which he keeps just outside his field of vision, his real life, in case he should need it.

In that state two perfectly nice people can turn a world inside out and scarcely notice. At some point they may look around the ruined landscape and find they can't quite orient themselves to what they've made. The married party has another life and goes back to it after each assignation; the unmarried one becomes more and more solitary, spends too many free hours waiting for the married lover to appear. People speak of adultery as a double life, and I found it did add up to two lives: Michael had a life and a half to deal with; I had half a life. Even with the demands and pleasures of work, it began to seem as if the meaning of my existence could be summed up in one question: When will I see you again? It's not encouraging to realize your life's meaning has been reduced to the title of a bad song from your early dating years.

I'd show up at art openings and social functions alone, and when friends tried to fix me up with available men (often, oddly, with the words, "He's a big teddy bear," or, "He's a bear of a man," as if I were looking for someone to hibernate with), I'd turn them down with vague explanations. I couldn't tell them the truth: I'd promised Michael I would talk to no one about us until he'd found a way to tell his wife he wanted to leave the marriage.

It didn't take long for me to see how, caught outside the flow of ordinary life, a person can end up inhabiting a false universe. In time, as I became increasingly distant from my friends, that universe began to seem real, and it was hard to remember that I was only a viewer of Michael's world, not a participant in it. I knew every drama in the lives of his two kids, Finnian and Bridget--their problems and triumphs at school, their growing pains, every detail of the Thanksgiving when eleven-year-old Bridget unexpectedly got her first period at the dinner table and thought she was bleeding to death, and later that same evening when sixteen-year-old Finn showed up with a pierced tongue and announced over pumpkin pie that he was "primarily hetero" but considering his "sexual options." I fretted with Michael when Bridget refused to leave the house till the bleeding stopped five days later; I gloried in Finn's first poetry publication in a campus literary journal; I knew their lives as intimately as if they were my family, yet they didn't know I existed.

I remember sitting alone in the living room of my Cambridge apartment high above Brattle Street one night that fall thinking Winter's coming, and I didn't mean only the weather. The moon was big. I heard my own whisper leaping out into the room, I want to go home, as if the words had formed independent of me, frost on a windowpane, a chill. I want to go home.

All my life I've heard those words in my head, and I know I'll hear them till I die, no matter where I am. I've no idea where home is. But the words are always in my mind, except when I paint--they're what sends me to the canvas in the first place because they fuel that need, the hunger that ultimately feeds me, makes me know I'm alive. Alive and impermanent--the awareness of finitude is important there--it gives desire the edge of necessity.

I want to go home. The words sang in my blood, pumped through it each time I fucked Michael, I want to go home, and I climbed him like a ladder, fervid, hungry to reach the top, to know everything, every cell of him, to have it, have it, I want to go home, and the explosion then, that strange ecstatic apogee of having, the settling of the pulse into the air of the moment, that brief harmony of need and knowing, a perfect clarity, home.

Then the calm rolls in like fog, and nothing in the room, in your life, has edges. You think right then you might want it to last forever.

Lucky it doesn't. If that calm were a lasting state, no one would paint or write, design a skyscraper, or build a bridge. Erotic torpor. It's a killer. Sometimes when I was with Michael the words would go away for days at a time. Without them, I didn't paint, didn't need to.

And then he'd leave me to go back to his real life, and I would lock myself away with the words and the paint, and desire would reconstitute itself. Everything began to be red in those days, blood reds shading into odd reds I'd never seen. I think infinite shades of red must exist that I've still not seen. For a long time I tried to locate more and more of them in my palette. I filled canvas after canvas with unnamed reds, the reds of my longing and anger, of need and grief and jealousy. But the hardest reds to look at were the clear, sudden reds of knowing.

When I was a kid in Catholic school, we were told that in taking the sacrament of Holy Eucharist, we were eating and drinking the body and blood of Christ. I was so young when I learned about it--six years old--that it never seemed extraordinary to me, the idea that Jesus would want us to take him into our own skins that way, corporeally whole and entire, in order that he could take up residence, as the nuns told us, "in our hearts."

"That's how great is His love for us," Sister Mary Agnes would say.

Sometimes I wonder if I've taken my idea of romantic love from that early catechism lesson. Probably because I'm a painter, I tend to cast abstractions into visual images--it's how I understand them best. And the way I imagine it, desire rides on the blood, follows it through our veins and arteries to the heart, and when it finds its way at last into that soft chamber, it takes up residence there. Sometimes it can't get out again.

I'd like to understand such longing better. I've come closer to comprehending it in my painting than in my life, but for the most part it's remained a mystery to me. Still, I feel Ican't give up till I've found my way to some kind of clear and solid truth about the desire love fuels, that longing beyond mere arousal and more than just of the flesh.

If I could do that, sometimes I think it's possible I'd learn to trust it again.

Then I think of the events on Brattle Street and remember it was disappointed desire, distorted desire, that turned all the world the color of blood, and I have to wonder if anyone could ever be safe in such a wilderness.

Is it strange then for me to say that even considering its capacity for damage, I believe love should never be regretted? I do believe that. Regret is unbecoming. It's a way of not taking responsibility for what you've done.

Long ago I read about how Edith Piaf, "the Little Sparrow" of Paris, climbed to the top of the Eiffel Tower late one night and sang out over the streets of the city, in her unforgettable voice, the song, ``Non, Je Ne Regrette Rien.''

I'd like to be that way, regretting nothing. I'm aiming for that.