The first year of my relationship with Bernard was the happiest year of my life. Being with Bernard was like being on a spa vacation. When I was with him I was calm, and balanced, and pure, and attractive, and wonderfully relaxed—I was everything but tan. I had sometimes longed for men who were all the dangerous things that I was not, for men who were rough and strong, for men who were casual and irresistibly male, with thick hands and coarse hair, men who didn’t know what to do with words and music, and who grappled instead with bodies. But what I found was Bernard, who was tall and strawberry blond with chiseled features and attenuated limbs; he looked like an illustration of England. In surface ways, Bernard was a less self-conscious and less baroque version of me. He never frightened me, and at some profound level I suppose that he never fully satisfied me, but he made me very happy. No one had done that before.

The emotions that appear strongest are often the least, but I did not know that then. I had decided when I was growing up that I would occupy myself with emotions so powerful that they seemed almost to stand on their own, free of their objects. I engaged proudly with joy and tragedy, with the agony and the ecstasy. Before my mother’s illness, and throughout its early stages, I indulged in the extravagance of this emotional range, and when I talked, I talked in a rhetoric of melodrama. What I was later to learn is that language is not necessarily transparent, and that free-standing emotions can stand far away from you. I realized eventually that memorable experience is not always ostentatious. I thought, when Bernard and I were together, that there was some virtue in my knowledge of joy to the exclusion of happiness, while he believed that happiness was the goal, and that most joy was contrived. Here more than elsewhere, compromise was too difficult, and neither of us considered it. It was not until much later that I wondered whether happiness and joy should not live beside each other, so that you could know them both, so that one could lead you into the other and back again. Only then did I think that some language is transparent, and some language not; that meaning can slide between the cracks or lie on the manifest surface; that both ostentation and understatement have their vitality. Then I realized that simplicity is often as much of a defensive affectation as melodrama, and that to be content is something, but not everything.

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