I saw us yesterday, in Midtown. I was walking up Lex toward 52^nd and my hotel. Ghosts, holograms—we were reflected, Husband #1 and I, in faded-denim blue, in the plate glass window of an upmarket chain retailer—globalized clothing. We looked like we wanted things. And we did. Want things. Each of us did. Only they were different.

This post represents a petite lyrical interlude in the to-date largely linear trajectory of our little journey through Bad, Bad Love (mine, anyway—we all have our Bad, Bad Love stories; or maybe some of the very, very lucky, or unadventurous, or boring, among us do not). We will return to the story line, dear and faithful readers, we will, we will! But this week I am here, again, in this city, where so much wanting went on between Husband #1 and me, so much of it not for the same things, or not for the same things at the same time, or for diametrically opposed things all the time, and so I want to talk a little bit about want.

What he wanted was clear: he wanted to be a famous painter. Our ghosts, when I stumbled upon them, were in the process of shopping Husband #1’s slides around, on foot, from gallery to gallery, trying to gin up some interest. That was how you did it back then, in the early ‘90s: place to place, face to face. None of this query/attach files/hit send stuff. You stared bored dismissal in the face, people. You sucked it up under the barely-not-rolling-her-eyes stare of whatever under- or unpaid (because she didn’t need it—daddy paid the rent) Art Slut was sitting behind the desk. And not doing much, because she didn’t have an iPhone because it was the 90s, and there was barely email yet, so what was she doing with her time? Definitely not contemplating Husband #1’s slides with the rapt and admiring attention he was convinced they deserved—he didn’t “know anyone.”

And neither did I. This was perhaps my greatest failing in his eyes, and it wasn’t actually a failing, but rather a gross misreading on his part: an almost-PhD in medieval Islamic art and literature, specialization in al-Andalus, from an Ivy League institution does not translate into art world connections.

But, says fifty-something me, from the distance of a whole lot of years, I guess you could forgive him for thinking that. He wanted so badly, he was starting from nowhere (as far as Nueva York is concerned, a smallish university city in Argentina is nowhere). You can kind of see how his lizard-brain got there.

Weirdly, the first gallery we wandered into, with his slides (me having translated his curriculum vitae into English at no charge because that’s what girlfriend-wives do; you may be thinking to yourself, didn’t you have better things to do, like maybe work on your dissertation? Answer: yes), was overwhelmingly receptive. I’ll say no more about them for the moment than that they were located on the Upper East Side, which is maybe not the most obvious place for an art gallery (this, through the 20-20 of hindsight, should probably have been a sign unto us).

They wanted a painting—no, wait, they wanted two. We went home and had celebratory sex and then went out and spent too much on dinner, and then they strung him along like a pimply freshman with a crush on the head cheerleader. For, literally, months. More than a year. He never did get a one-man show out of them. But that didn’t stop him from trying.

Or from wanting.

As it turned out, they weren’t a very well-known gallery, not even especially well-run, as I would find out, a year or two down the line, when I, very very briefly, worked there, while Husband #1 was on vacation in Argentina, again. But we’ll get to all this in good narrative order. My purpose here is to evoke this early, tiny, fleeting mirage, a sluttish little teaser of success, that felt to Husband #1 like Prophecy: literally, the first gallery he stepped into (why we chose that one is lost in the mists of forgetting; if I see the ghosts again in Midtown, I’ll ask them) wanted his paintings! Not only was it Prophecy, it was Destiny! He was destiny! I was destiny (insofar as I helped him attain his…)!

Except… it wasn’t (he wasn’t, I wasn’t). Not Destiny. More like curse. The owners of the uptown gallery were, at best—at the very best—harmless sheisters. And nowhere else was particularly interested. I can still see us, along with the odd friend (usually someone to whom Husband #1 was trying to sell a painting), maneuvering our way down Broadway, or up it, an enormous and enormously unwieldy canvas between us. A call, returned! After ten or fifteen of his… and this was what you did. On the off-chance that maybe…

Only to be told no. Or told nothing. Which made the wanting that much worse. His, and by extension mine, because somehow (how? good question) I had become heart-and-soul invested in the project of his Artistic Greatness.

Or maybe I was just trying to have one or two good days strung together. The only way for there to be a good day was if Husband #1 had some viable path toward convincing himself, for the day, the hour, the week, the minute, that his career was “going somewhere.” If not, look out.

I’m not talking about slaps or kicks or punches. It never got to that. There was only one occasion, late at night, when we teetered. Drunk, atop a flight of very steep stairs. I would have punched back, and the more severely battered one would likely have been him.

No, I’m not talking about physical abuse. I’m talking about hours and days (and more days) of sighs and silence and passive-aggressive banging around in the studio. Which always managed to be the front room of the apartment, and so we never had a living room, making the kitchen table the social center of gravity. Which was also my desk, because I had no office, because tiny apartment, because front room studio. This, as you might imagine, created problems when there were a lot of Argentinian guests in the house. But we shall get to those in good time.

In his Argentinian hometown, Husband #1 was already a locally famous painter: the next item on the agenda was to go global. He’d gone to Madrid as a first step, partly because of the presence of the Erstwhile Professor of Painting (translation: free room and board). Also because of cultural affinity (Spain and Argentina are radically different places for sure, but there are links between them that are not present, say, between Buenos Aires and Kankakee. Just to throw an example out there). And there was the language thing. He barely spoke a word of English: that (along with blow jobs on command—apparently my skills are formidable; I should add that a number of streets, in our marriage, were not two-way—and cooking, and other girlfriendly contributions—notice that I do not say ‘wifely’: this is a deliberate choice) was where I came in.

New York was where you really got famous, there was still a whiff of Keith-Herring-sized mega-success in the air, so to New York he’d come. Or rather we had, though I would bet a large amount of money on the verb being conjugated in the singular, more often than in the plural, in his mind: vine, he venido, not venimos, not hemos venido.

He and however many thousand other artists, certain the City would choose them with as much conviction as they had chosen it. His love, alas, was unrequited. He wanted, as a friend of mine who is a scary-good reader of Tarot likes to put it, what did not want him.

So he changed his painting (we’ll get to that). He immersed himself in generically Eastern philosophy (which, as I would discover, was kind of an Argentinian thing at that time). He invited his friends—all of them; we’ll get to that, too—to stay with us, especially in the second of our tiny Manhattan apartments (this one slightly less tiny, and in the East Village rather than the West, but still tiny), for insanely long periods of time. He became obsessive about going bald (counting the hairs caught in the bathtub drain, and falling victim to at least a couple of grow-hair scams of which I am aware, maybe more, and maybe more since, because from what I can see on The Internets, he still has a full head of it).

He wanted what all great (male) artists have wanted, from the dawn of time: to screw their female models (how trite, but there you have it), and to screw anything else not nailed to the floor that would have him, because that was his God-given right as a creative genius.

How do I know all this, you ask? Well, because—among other things, to all of which we shall get, each in its turn and in good time—he took to leaving his journal around our tiny West-Village, wanna-be Mafia-owned apartment. And then the East Village one too.

Did I read it? You bet your ass I did. Indeed, it is arguable that he wanted me to: half the time he left it open.

Wanting and not getting made him reach for other things that he could get, and—this is all I will say for the moment because I want to give a few instances their due in individual posts; there are some real doozies—that made me miserable.

The alchemy of wanting what doesn’t want back had become contagious. And somehow—right now I couldn’t even begin to tell you how; I do hope to understand how, through the next series of posts—what I wanted had become largely circumscribed by him.

Lots of poets believe that wanting is the key. Loving is the key. Getting, and being loved back, not so much. And, now, I’d have to say I agree with them (though back then I did not).

Some of my favorite lovers and wanters are the authors of the Mu`allaqat, known in English as the “Hanging Odes.” I think I may have mentioned them once or twice on here before – those pre-Islamic poets? They knew all about Bad, Bad Love; in fact they reveled in it. Per al-A`sha (6^th c. A.D., possibly early 7^th):

Bid Hurayra farewell./The riders are departing./Can you, man that you are,/bear bidding her farewell?

Brow aglow, hair flowing,/a gleam from the side teeth as she smiles/she walks gently as a gazelle/tender-hoofed in wet soil.

And then there are some tents, a stanza or so of sand, some hip swishing, and then

You hear her anklets whisper/as she turns away/like cassia rustling/suppliant in the breeze…

Do these sound like lovers who are doing everything they can to remain attached at the hip? No, no, no, my friends. She smiles and shows her teeth as she walks away. And he’ll be fine–he gets to wallow in his misery and write (gorgeous) verse about it for the rest of his days.

So maybe the key to keeping love from becoming Bad, Bad is knowing how to let go, not only gracefully, but willingly. Because you have to let all things go, eventually.

But try to tell that to a thirty-year-old.

Many years later, I am here again, in this city, this weekend, because I want things. I want to be a writer. Well, I am a writer. I want to be recognized as a writer. This week is Book Expo (the latter part of which is BookCon, which is really for the readers, and that’s why I’m here, in support of BIRDS OF WONDER).

It’s a hungry feeling, wanting. I want this book to do at least decently, for an Indie (we were close, so close, to not being Indie). I want my next one, already well advanced, to sell to a biggie. In part, friends, I am eating my slice of humble pie (which is not my usual fare: in my day-job career, I am crazy successful): my debut novel came close but did not sell to a biggie. Close may be close, but it’s still no cigar: I am indie, so I go to indie things, rather than to biggie things.

I want the biggie things.

It’s strange to come to this raw kind of wanting in my fifties, when—frankly—my career as a medievalist is set. I’m top of the heap. I don’t have to want any more, because I have.

But now I want something else, so badly I’m willing to be a bottom. While the publishing industry has at me. Does with me what it likes.

Am I like Husband #1, convinced of my genius when maybe I should be less so? Wanting to be a writer is its own hell of Bad, Bad Love. It can make you high, so high, or it can eat you up inside, corroding your day (your week, your month) with self-doubt. But it sure makes you feel alive.

And there’s this: Maybe I do best on the margins, when I really want in (certainly my best work as a medievalist was produced in that frame of mind). Because if I get in, well and truly in instead of partially with part of one foot, I’ll see that the literary world, like any other world, is not so great inside, and become disillusioned, like I have, on my worst days, with scholarship, and with academia… which is perhaps one of the reasons I quarantine my romantic life the way I do. More on that in future posts, down the road, promise.

Because if you live with What You Want, have easy access to it each and every day, how do you continue to want it? Student though he was of Things Eastern, Husband #1 was not at all interested in that sort of philosophical question. I suspect because it had to do with the plural “we” rather than the singular “I.” But before the bad alchemy swung into operation, we had to get there. And in order to get there, we had to get here (here being, for the moment, Manhattan). Which we did, flying across the Atlantic on standby and looking for an apartment while staying with two old college friends of mine we’d called on the payphone from JFK… in Connecticut, WHAAAAAAAT?

Do what Uncutt Art says: protect your heart. Trust me, it’s worth it. Easy for me to say, having spent decades doing just the opposite, gathering material.

It was cold in Connecticut, it was winter, I’m not sure Husband #1 had ever seen snow. It was suburban. I don’t think he’d seen that either. So that’s where we will start next week.

But first, I would like to tell you this. A few years ago, out of the blue, I got an email from Husband #1. Asking for my forgiveness. Saying he knew he’d hurt me and now he needed forgiveness. The message was far from perfect: still 100% about him (he “needed”), smacking of some sort of cleansing exercise from the latest self-help book in which he had no doubt immersed himself. Also smacked of maybe an ultimatum from his now-wife.

I am sure she is lovely; I am equally sure that her intelligence and talents do not threaten his; in fact, I know this. If I said how I know it, I would tread dangerously close to revealing identities, and that is not my objective or desire, so you’ll have to trust me. I also suspect that Wife #2 might have been behind the email, as I also suspect he’d been up to his old tricks, and she – unlike me, perhaps because I feared the response – had put her foot down. Own up, man up, make amends, and then effing stop it. Or else. And he was toeing the line.

At the time, I told him to go pound sand, that this wasn’t a customer service window or a Burger King where he could have it his way (not sure he got the joke). Which, now, feels mean-spirited.

Because now I want too. I know what it’s like. And being in the big, bad City makes you just want more (I don’t, though, think I’m hurting anyone else with my wanting. At least I hope not). So he’s forgiven. Not for him, for me—no sense in dragging that shit around, it’s really heavy. And, hey, just like al-A`sha, I get the last laugh, because now I get to write about it.

Off to BookCon, my friends. To eat my humble pie and make whatever hay I can. Wish me well.

Catch you next week, with some more Bad, Bad Love, colonial American style.

¡Qué biennnnnnnnnnn!