Square the Circle: Chapter 24

(Re)Making Love: a serial memoir

DaVinci’s  L'uomo vitruviano via Wikipedia

Come in the middle? Here’re links to ➡️ Chapter One, Chapter 2, Chapter 3, Chapter 4, Chapter 5, Chapter 6, Chapter 7, Chapter 8, Chapter 9 , Chapter 10, Chapter 11, Chapter 12, Chapter 13, Chapter 14 , Chapter 15 , Chapter 16, Chapter 17, Chapter 18, Chapter 19, Chapter 20, Chapter 21, Chapter 22, Chapter 23

Square the Circle

Heard on the street: “If you can’t solve the problem, prolonging it will make money.”

Read in The New York Times:

“In the latest installation of the soap opera that gripped Italy, Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi, 72, … demanded an apology from wife, Veronica Lario, 52, a day after she’d told Italian newspapers that she wanted a divorce. Mr. Berlusconi said he did not think the couple could reconcile. ‘I don’t think so. I don’t know if I want it this time,’ Mr. Berlusconi said in an interview that appeared … in the leading Italian newspaper, Corriere della Sera, ‘Veronica will have to publicly apologize to me. And I don’t know if that will be enough.’ In recent days, Ms. Lario has criticized her husband for cavorting with younger women and for his center-right coalition’s plans to nominate a slate of attractive women to run for the European Parliament.”

    —World Briefing, Rachel Donadio, The New York Times

Read in The New York Times: Alessandra Stanley, the television critic, commented on John and Elizabeth Edwards:

“Mrs. Edwards star turn on ‘Oprah’ doesn’t quite fit the template of naïve New World idealism; it looked more like an exquisite form of revenge, the kind of well-oiled comeuppance that Marquise de Merteuil concocted in Dangerous Liaisons.”

— “More Than One Way to Skin a Cad,” Alessandra Stanley, Week in Review, “Critics Notebook,” The New York Times

Read in The New York Times Magazine:

“The diagnosis was staring her in the face for years, but she did not see it. Psychologists call this inattention blindness—instances when we don’t see something because it’s not what we are expecting to see; it’s not what we are looking for. Sherlock Holmes has a somewhat different description. ‘I trained myself to notice what I see,’ Holmes says. Arthur Conan Doyle, himself a physician, imbued his character with the kind of keen observational skills so essential to a good physician. This ability consists of casting a wide net to see the whole picture—even when the complaint that brings the patient to medical attention is commonplace, like insomnia.”

—“Sleepless,” by Lisa Sanders, M.D., The New York Times Magazine

These headlines in my mind.

I roast a chicken, alone, on a Sunday and hold in memory the dinners I laid down on our mahogany table

Our table in Adams Morgan, D.C.

with its gold inlaid border that had begun to show the table’s age—now gone—like all the Sunday dinners, the weeks and months and years, in soups I had simmered, made fragrant with carrots and onions, bay leaf and peppercorns, in roasts I had crusted with pepper and salt, with leaves of rosemary grown in my garden—now gone—in buttery pie crusts I had rolled on my marble board in the kitchen—I still have the board but no room to lay it down—filled with blackberries from the bushes by my fence—gone—sprinkled with sugar and covered with strips of dough woven over and under each other like our lives.”

Is what I do in these pages revenge? I worry this thought. Meanwhile the headlines pointed me like a compass that tries to square the circle:

Prolong the problem. Demand apology. Humiliate spouse.

Or analyze: In her book Dreams of Love and Fateful Attractions, psychiatrist Ethel Spector Person notes,

“Many tentative forays into love are aborted either because they pose real or symbolic threats to selfhood. Even when the integrity of the self is not at risk as it is in enslavement, pride, and self- esteem may be (or appear to be) endangered. The love may become frightened at the strength of his impulse toward surrender and the lack of autonomy he thinks it implies and he may make strenuous efforts to disengage. Or, out of self-protectiveness, he may pick an Other who does not reciprocate his feeling, and consequently, one who sets external limits to his attempt to merge. Fearing merger, he thus sets up a situation which will prevent it. Similar motives dictate the behavior of the lover who after moments of great intimacy, particularly sexual moments, reasserts his separateness by withdrawal or by starting a quarrel. The more soulful and intimate the love-making, the greater the dread of loss of self, of dissolution (or emptiness) afterwards, and the sadness or distancing that surfaces in response to that dread.”

Or see: Two children have figured out how to dance, a performance. They are in a hospital (A lifetime of hospitals lie in my childhood and adulthood. Two hospitals more recently: D.’s hernia operation in D.C. and the birth of my grandchild in Chicago.) An elevator in the hospital and the doors to the elevator open onto the children, a boy and a girl, who are on the bed. The performance, the dance—had they been rehearsing?—was going to be at eleven in the morning. A third person, the observer who catches them at the dance in an inappropriate place, wants to help them, protect them. She watches the dance, a ballet: the boy lifts the girl who is on point. The angle of her body defies. Why, before he lifts her, while she stood on one toe, while she extended her leg back, her arm forward, did she not fall?

The observer knows this: If you can’t solve the problem, look. Do not try to square the circle. The circle will square itself.

Grateful acknowledgment is made to the following for permission to reprint previously published material in chapter 24: Ethel Spector Person: Excerpt from Dreams of Love and Fateful Encounters: The Power of Romantic Passion, W. W. Norton & Company, Inc., 1988.

Coming next, Chapter 25: “Pull Out the Map”

Love,