• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

By Root 373 0

to anew apartment we took together on 61—at first largely financed by her salary. We outlasted the schtupfest, found we liked each other, and two years later were married. Mal was the best man. Henna’s parents came down, and were polite—icily so, in retrospect—and it was only many years later that I discovered how much they’d hated the idea of her marrying me. I was poor, I was a rookie cop, and I was resolutely not from above the line. All this was their problem, not mine, but they were Henna’s mom and dad. One night, not long before she died, Henna accidentally revealed just how much they hated their son-in-law, and I understood for an instant just how much she’d given up to be with me, and how little I’d given her in return. For a moment, just a moment, I had a glimpse of the kind of man I’d become; but then I stormed out of the apartment and spent the next few hours with the woman I was having an affair with.

The first three years of our marriage were a contented blur. Henna professed herself happy, told me how she loved me, and so the days went by. I discovered that I could do policework, and that it mattered to me. I was busy trying to get into Homicide. Henna put up with the late nights, the no-shows, the worry that one night I simply might not come back. We talked, we smiled, we went out and did things together. Occasionally we would flare up over something, and argue briefly and bitterly, but, in general, the times were good.

But the truth is this: I never really loved Henna enough, not until it was far too late. I cared very deeply, and I felt affection, but even on the day I proposed to her I believed it was not love I held in my heart.

I thought I had known absolute love before, when I was eighteen. Her name was Fhee, and we spent two years together before the relationship blew apart. Fhee had a smile like a cat in front of a fire, and I was so terrified of losing her. She was an uncontainable force of nature, a shout of existence with thick auburn hair and big brown eyes; a lithe, running woman who always seemed to be turning and urging me to catch up with her. Her skin was sometimes smooth, sometimes rough, and her hair hung in rats’ tails to the middle of her back. Making love to her was like a delicious road accident which left you breathless and shocked. Instead of a gentle celebration of considered love it was a function of her whole being, a physical reaction as unstoppable as a sneeze, as elemental as fear.

A few weeks after we parted I ended up in The Gap, because I was angry and unhappy and didn’t feel I had anyplace else to go. I was there for over two years, and that period changed my view of the world for good. By the time I came out, Fhee was gone. I only saw her once more and that was many years later.

Sometimes it’s hard for me to believe that I let a marriage slide because of some idealized first love, something that had died long before; but ifs a sad fact about life that you can’t always learn from your mistakes, because by the time you’ve made them you’ve changed the playing field forever.

As I got older, I became increasingly haunted by a vision of some perfect woman I believed I was destined to find. In each person I would see only what was lacking, and in every place and activity know the lack. Sometimes I felt I could actually see this woman, feel her, smell her. I knew exactly what she would look like, how she would speak, how she would be.

I knew when I married Henna that she wasn’t that woman, though she should have been. I married her anyway. I married her because she wanted me to, and because I loved her too much to disappoint her. I don’t want you to get the idea I had an especially bad time. Henna played a mean game of pool, was very nice to me, and I missed her like hell when she wasn’t there. She laughed like a drain, didn’t take me too seriously, and had the cutest chin of all time. It wasn’t that Henna was bad, or deficient: It was just that she wasn’t her, and sometimes when I went to meet her I expected someone else. The other woman. The one who would have made me afraid.