October 18th, 1978
Return to normalcy.
Tonight I finished the crazy freelance job which has literally dominated my life for three weeks. I stare at my face in the mirror. My skin is pallid and pastey from long hours of strain and overwork. Now it is over and I feel proud that I was able to do it.
All day today I walk around with a knot in my stomach trying to really imagine that my relationship with John is over. I am angry and hurt at the humiliation of his picking up a trick right in front of me at the party that night. Old feelings surface. The days of Richard and Joel are ingrained intact in my memory. The largest pain of my life– the role of the wronged woman– the devoted spouse and the cheating husband. Can it be coincidental that this chronic theme to my life so resembles the drama of my childhood between my mother and my father? I doubt it. Yet it annoys me to think that I could be victimized by unconscious drives to recreate scenes from the past.
Finally this afternoon John called me. First he tried to carry on a normal conversation. Then he edged towards the phone calls last night and I was able to tell him how I felt about discovering that he’d had a date with Jerry from the party. I explained that I was far better able to deal with knowing that he’d been out with someone than the fact that it had happened in my presence. Apology– he begs me to forget it. I tell him that I will try. Inwardly I seethe at this cuckolding.
As soon as I talk to him though, the knot in my stomach disappears. The silly grin and jokes reappear and I resume some vibrancy that I had lacked all day. I am happy and funny again. The old Larry returns.
Have I fallen in love? Can this be?
And these amazing similarities that it has taken me so long to identify. The three men that I have truly loved have shared such common elements. Jimmie, Richard, John… All of them have lacked a certain worldliness, perhaps a sophistication, that I am not able to describe well. It’s not a lack of intelligence or perception. I have considered all of them my equal in sensibility. It’s more an absence of cunning. They have all been rough in their own ways. Not dull– but unfinished. I love people who are unfinished. These men have lacked a certain personal presumption. I hunger for the kind of basic straightforwardness these men have shown.
These men, these men– in fact I am only writing about John. But I am trying to understand the process of Larry falling in love. Such a powerful state. Everything changes so suddenly and so permanently. I have gone through so many total life changes. I have had many extraordinary relationships in my life– complete exchanges of love– and so many have gone away. Can I really believe that anything is going to last forever? I am hesitant to give my all to anything anymore. Even my job.
I feel as if I am being drawn into this relationship with John as if by fate. I feel that it is almost uncontrollable. I will continue to love him whatever the cost. Perhaps I am reveling in some masochistic pleasure at loving a man who does not bore me.
*Look motherfucker, the last time you “gave your all” as you so dramatically like to put it– you nearly perished. It’s been three years of loneliness and craziness since you broke-up with Richard. Three years of dying.
**Right, and for the first time in three years that pain has diminished. For the first time I am loving again. And it’s a beautiful feeling. I would rather be genuinely loving and hurting a little in the prowess than to be self-guided and controlled into a life of sterile emptiness.
*Yeah, and look at the way you pick ‘em, honey