

, in an old jewelry box, I found these words, written in purple ink on a small piece of paper: Ariel missis papa She wants him now The fown isn't good A ledr isn't good And a memure is woors All I need is you? What lover couldn't identify with this lament? Of course a fown isn't good, a ledr isn't good, and a memure is woors. For when love is intensely physical in its nature, anything short of physical presence does not simply fall short, it leaves an abyss. A memory is even worse than the phone or a letter, for while the phone and the letter disappoint us in the thinness of actual presence they offer — the sound of a voice, a scrawl of words — memory torments us with the guise of full presence. To the one who thirsts, it offers not a drop of water, not a damp cloth pressed to the lips, but the mirage of a full and shimmering lake. Adult lovers can sometimes make a kind of delicacy of their longing, turning the very torment of imagined presence, of acutely felt absence, into a kind of ecstatic absorption, a prolonged tension that heightens the anticipation of reunion, of consummation. Small children who miss their parents do not have this option. And their parents suffer separation much as they do. Even people who miss their animals — their dogs, their cats and their horses — can know the sharp pain, the raw ache, that arises in the absence of one loved in and through the body. It's a pain that permits of no sublimation and can be remedied by one thing only: presence. All I need is you. . . What memure could my daughter, at age five, have found so tormenting when her father went away for a few days? She had a habit of falling asleep on his lap at night, her head nestled against his shoulder as he sat before the computer screen; was it this particular scene that came back to her, or one like it? Or was it a more diffuse, yet still intensely vivid, sense of his presence, a kind of blur of face/voice/smell that the moment she conjured it, she ached with longing? Or was it, rather, the ache that arose first and then gave rise to the memories that intensified the ache: the ache giving rise to the memories giving rise to the ache giving rise to the memories? Ariel is thirteen now, and recently we were separated for a month when I went across country to teach. The first ten days or so, we did just fine through phone, letter and email. After all, I said to myself, lately when we're together, she mostly ignores me; it's not like the way it was when she was little and her body was an extension of mine. We've moved into another mode of relationship, one more like close friends: you miss them when they're gone, but you don't feel it in your body. Then the ache set in. I felt it first as a hollowness in my chest, a kind of ringing emptiness, and then the ache seemed to give off images of her. It was much the way the ache of hunger beyond a certain point generates images of food, but without the degree of specificity with which hunger — with its meatloaf and mashed potatoes, its fried eggs and slices of rye bread with butter — seeking to satisfy itself, torments itself. Rather, it was that I felt the ache, and around the ache there hovered a kind of general sense of her, a sort of cloud of her, like a mist of fine particles that I could almost breathe in before they vanished into absence and the ache again. To breathe in. Isn't that what it's about, those relationships that are inextricably linked to breathing the sheer physical presence of the other, a presence that has the distinctness of the cloud that surrounds one planet and not another, whether red or yellow, cool or warm, composed of sulfur, ether or oxygen, a fine yet utterly identifiable particulate mist for which no substitutes, no look-alikes, no runners-up, no fown, no ledr, no memure, will do? In his novel Oscar and Lucinda, the Australian writer Peter Carey describes the way in which a son's love is inextricably linked to the experience of his father — a scientist who carried with him the scent of certain chemicals — as a kind of atmosphere. "His father was close and familiar, so familiar he could not have described his face to anyone. He was a shape, a feeling, that thing the child names 'Pa.' He was serge, formaldehyde, a safe place." When father and son are separated, Carey conveys the physicality of the son's grief in a way that is all the way more striking because its expression, in this Protestant English household, has been so restrained. "He wished to be home by the fire in the clean, lime-cold cottage where his father and he frightened Mrs.Williams [the servant] by discussing famous murders in calm and adult detail. They were closest then. Afterwards his father would give him a sharp hug and rub his beard across his cheek, making him giggle and squirm. This was called 'a dry shave.' It was an expression of love." I have friends to whom I am devoted, whose loss I would grieve acutely — but I don't need to inhale them. In these other relationships — between lovers, between parents and children — absence engenders a kind of cellular grief, a grief that is deaf and blind to all but its need to breathe in, breathe out, to smell, to touch the body of the other. In Jane Hamilton's novel, A Map of the World, a mother who has been in prison for several months is reunited with her family. As the father drives them all home in the car, he turns around to look at his wife: "She was holding hands with both girls in her lap in the back seat. She was resting her head against them, breathing heavily as if their dirty hair and clothes, and the forced air of the heater was fresh." In the same jewelry box in which I had found my daughter's note to her papa, I found several torn pages from a journal I had kept long ago, before my marriage, at the time of a tormented love. Rereading them, I see how close they are: the adult's grief, the child's sensation of abandonment. From these journal pages, written in a kind of shorthand as both a daily log and a reflection on absence, I reconstruct this painful passage in my life. It was a time when even though I saw quite clearly through the mind's eye what it was I had to do, the clarity brought cold comfort: February 20: . . . I've made it through the first week of separation. It's an elaborate regimen. As I go through each day, I recite, just under my breath, a list of phrases regarding M's untrustworthiness, his paranoia, his chaotic mode of life. As if fingering beads on a rosary, I recount for myself the various milestones of his wounding behavior. In the morning upon rising and at night before bed, I do my cognitive therapy exercises. On one side of a sheet of paper, I wrote down one of my operative myths, such as: my happiness is dependent upon being in connection to this man. On the other hand I counter it with what I know to be true: no one I have ever known has caused me such pain. But my body aches for him. I've been unable to sleep and have great difficulty swallowing. I'm growing thinner and thinner, and as I move about the world, I feel small and painfully singular. Above all, I have the sensation that there is too much air on and around my skin. The entire surface of my body feels exposed. Exposed. Like a baby left on a mountaintop. Oedipus. All of a sudden, it hits me. Isn't it strange that Oedipus, who was destined to enter the most devastatingly proximate of relationships — incest with his mother — began life lying utterly alone, on a bed of rock under a huge sky? But perhaps it's not so strange. Perhaps it is the very memory, or imagined fear, of such bare aloneness that propels us into our own dangerously too-close relationships . . . As a child, I slept with my father's handkerchiefs. At the start of each week, I picked a clean one from his mahogany drawer: its fresh, thin-cotton smell, mixed with the odor of dark wood, was him to me. I couldn't fall asleep unless I held one under my nose. I didn't suck it or twist it or stroke it the way some children do with their fetish cloths. I just had to breathe through it. If I didn't, I had a sensation of too much air — and too much cool air — against my nostrils. And that minute, almost microscopic, sensation was the portal to an immense anxiety. Exposure. Oedipus lying on the mountaintop. Too much cold air bearing down. What one wants is muffled air, air breathed through a loved one's skin. February 24: Yesterday was Day Ten of the separation. Unbearably restless in my house all morning long, I drove through a drizzle of rain to the bookstore. I walked up and down the aisles, completely unable to focus. Fiction? Religion? Psychology? Self?Help? I might as well have been in a cigar store or a bait-and-tackle shop, so remotely did the shelved objects seem to have anything to do with me. I found myself murmuring the words of a Mallarmé poem: La chair est triste, helas, et j'ai lu tous les livres. "The flesh is sad, alas, and I have read all the books." Yes, the flesh is sad. And not just sad; it is utterly ungrounded, uncentered. I flee the bookstore, with no book in my hand. How can I settle on a book when my very being is unsettled, dispersed? I get into my car, turn the key in the ignition, pull out into the street — but where is there to go? Now, without the body in relation to which my body has known where it was — near to him, far away from him — my being floats. Here is panic again, with its root pan, meaning all, everywhere. Everywhere and in all places, he is nowhere. Without being in relation to his body, whether near or far, there is no near or far anymore. There is no there anywhere. I drive past his house. My car pulls in his driveway. This is so unlike me. I don't do things like this. Hang up calls. Sudden stops. Where did the clarity go? I go up to the door. I knock and he comes. The greeting is awkward. All the habits are changing. Do we still embrace when we say hello? How close do we sit on the living-room sofa? Still — what have I got to lose? We make chitchat for a while, and then I tell him, I need you to hold me. We go into the bedroom and lie down on the bed. He puts his arms around me. It's clear to me that he's not in good shape. There is something dark and slack in his face — a deeply self-estranged look in his eyes that has grown all too familiar. Hold me harder, I say. In my mind, I'm berating myself. Backslider, I say. If one or two people I've confided in could see me, they'd be aghast. They know the oracle has spoken clearly to me: would Oedipus, having grasped the truth, slip back into bed with his impossible love? Yet, here I am, back in the lair with the beast. He begins to rant, in a particular way that he rants in his paranoid states. "The dogs . . . " he begins. "They're at my heels. The spears. They throw spears at me when I'm down . . . " I used to try and reason with him, but I won't anymore. Let him rant, I say to myself, pressing even closer to him, my face against his neck, the top of my head under his chin. He smells right. He smells right. His is the only skin in the world through which I want to breathe. Now, here I am. Here I am, where he is. There is a here here. Driving home, my mind is confused. Have I made a terrible error? Back in my house, I put on my nightgown, brush my teeth. Somehow I know, deep down, that in the morning — Day 12 — I will wake up and resume the labor of separation. For now, I will climb into bed, close my eyes, and sleep like a baby.
For more Noelle Oxenhandler, read: Nole Me Tangere: The Family Photographs of Sally Mann Spilled Milk The Flesh Is Sad ©2001 Noelle Oxenhandler and Nerve.com From The Eros of Parenthood by Noelle Oxenhandler. Reprinted by permission of St. Martin's Press, LLC. Copyright (c) 2001 by Noelle Oxenhandler.