What's So Hot About Passion?
The author of Love Warps the Mind a Little tries to straighten things out

By John Dufresne

Sunday, February 9, 2003; Page W20

Cindy's at her desk in the kitchen writing poems, and I'm at my desk in the Florida room writing about love once again. I've been writing about love in stories for years. Love in flames; love in embers. Love in bloom; love deflowered. Love adrift; love on the rocks. Blind love; mute love. Love this and love that. I've been writing about love because I'm trying to understand it, and I don't. But I have learned this much: Troubled love may be the only love worth writing about, but it's not the only love worth living.

I ought to know something about love and romance. After all, I grew up in Worcester, Mass., the self-proclaimed Valentine Capital of the World, the Heart of the Commonwealth, where, in the mid-19th century, Esther Howland refined the manufactured Valentine card. Thanks to Esther, folks no longer had to articulate their own thoughts and feelings about love. The shy and the unimaginative were now as eloquent as Cyrano:

Harken to my own heart's song, Love me lots, I'll love thee long.

Well, okay, not Cyrano exactly, but still, the New England Valentine Co. had certainly, and for all time, democratized the art of the impassioned epistle. Love's ardor was now measured in trochees, monosyllables, borrowed sentiment and perfect rhyme, which, of course, will not do for an essay about love.

I got my first inkling that love was a glorious mystery when I was 5. Each morning on the ride to Sacred Heart, the high school girls in the back of the school bus sang about ricochet romances and aba-daba honeymoons. And they sang about the kids on the bus: "Paulie and Georgia sitting

in a tree, Paulie and Georgia sitting in a tree, K-I-S-S-I-N-G!" We clapped along. "First comes love, then comes marriage, then comes Georgia with a baby carriage."

Georgia, I could tell, was the girl across the aisle in the gray woolen coat and the yellow galoshes, the girl blushing and smiling, looking over her shoulder at the boy with his toque pulled over his eyes. What brave new world had I wandered into? In the classroom we sang about farmers and falling bridges, but on the bus we sang, "'Baba, daba, dab' in monkey talk means, 'Chimp, I love you, too.' " We celebrated a wilder side of life.

If there were any kindergarten girls on the bus, I didn't notice them. My eyes were on Cookie Pepper, a dimpled high school girl with a sunny smile and shoulder-length brown hair. I thought she was beautiful, but I don't know why. I had no model for beauty. Mom, perhaps. But Cookie looked nothing like Mom. We had no TV, and the few movies I'd seen were animated. Why did Cookie's face, then, please me more than any other? And why did my pleasure in beholding her make me want to be close to her?

Beauty, I sensed, was the virus of love. I decided that Cookie was my girlfriend, and although I could not imagine us out on a limb, kissing or otherwise, I longed to hear our love proclaimed with a chorus of "Johnny and Cookie sitting in a tree." And then one spring afternoon, after the bus had dropped us at our housing project, Cookie bent over, lifted my nemesis, a boy named David, to her face and kissed him on the cheek. The other kids whooped. I was jealous and deflated, but also emboldened. I walked up to Cookie and said, "Kiss me, too." She said no and turned away.

Didn't she know who I was? I played the shadow in the school variety show, danced behind a big kid who sang and soft-shoed his way through "Me and My Shadow." I was the clown in our class production of "The Steadfast Tin Soldier." Everybody loves a clown. David was a philistine and a bully who had already sent me to the hospital for stitches, having sliced my ear with a sharpened stick and run home when I bled all over my sweat shirt.

I could have kept my heartache to myself, but I did something better. I lied, and therein made my insufferable world a far better place. I told my family that I'd been kissed by the one and only Cookie Pepper. I supplied the details -- she smelled like Halo shampoo, had a freckle near her left eye -- and David's story became my story. I had appropriated his undeservedly blessed life for my own, and all at once what had never happened became real. I no longer needed the treacherous Cookie at the back of the bus. I had the adoring Cookie in my head. This wild and wanton exaggeration, my picturesque falsehood, my romancelet, "The Kiss," was my first successful fiction. What a wonderful and just world I had wrought.

Cindy's running over to the supermarket. She knows I'll call her when she gets there. I always do. I'll remember that I need something. She'll tell me what aisle she's in, or if she's already in the checkout line, she'll read me the tabloid headlines. We've noticed that many of the headlines have to do with love gone awry: "Blind Sex Creep Busted as Hearing Tom"; "Bin Laden's Wild Night With a Goat"; "Man Sleeps With His Wife for Four Nights -- Before He Realizes She's Dead." I'll call Cindy, tell her: Forget the curried goat, hon, we'll go out to eat.

I WAS 11 before I ventured once again into the slough of romance. I went with friends to Thursday night dances at the Girls Club, where Miss Joyce taught us to fox-trot, waltz, cha-cha, stroll and jitterbug. We dancers were told to leave enough room between us for the Holy Ghost. I left enough room for choirs of angels. I suspected that each of the girls across the room was waiting for me to ask her to dance so she could roll her eyes, turn to her friend, and giggle behind her hands. Or even worse, she would say yes, and then I would have to lurch my way through Frankie Avalon's "Venus."

I was no Jimmy Mulhern. Jimmy had a blond brush cut with swept-back sides. He wore turquoise and black shirts, bolo ties, gray slacks and white buck penny loafers into which he'd inserted shiny new quarters. He danced with supreme self-confidence, rhythm, style and grace. He was "American Bandstand" material, and the girls lined up to dance with him. Me, I was a wallflower in the ballroom of romance.

When I got home from the dances, Mom would be watching "The Untouchables," and she'd ask if I'd had a good time, if I'd danced finally. Sookey's daughter says you never dance. I said, Then Sookey's daughter's lying. Tonight I slow-danced with a girl from Union Hill School. And I gave this girl a name (Rosemary), a face (adorable), and a quirky and endearing way of doing the bunny hop. I told Mom it looked like Rosemary and I might be going steady soon.

Eliot Ness told Rossi and Youngfellow to bust down the door.

Telling lies -- making up stories -- was becoming a lamentably necessary and therapeutic exercise. Still, I figured that if I could imagine a little dalliance in my life, a little tenderness, then it might really happen. Eventually (and inevitably, I suppose) I enjoyed my small share of romance. I became as eccentric, as manic, obsessed and unreasonable as the next love-drunk fool. Nothing is quite so breathtaking as romance and courtship; nothing is so intoxicating as being new to someone, as reinventing yourself, as sharing the marvelous secret that the two of you are the center of the universe. (Romance is not wanting to know the truth.) I loved falling in love, longed to be swept away. At once, my drab, ordinary (and so most terrible) life would acquire meaning, significance and direction. Everything about the grand passion is so unexpected and deliciously ecstatic. But, like youth and beauty, it is transient.

The sad and undeniable fact is that passionate romance -- the crush, the infatuation, the affaire de coeur, the amour fou -- cannot be sustained. Eventually the brain tires of pumping out all those endorphins. The real world intrudes. You need to eat, make a living, set your feet on solid ground. The two of you are no longer new to each other; the pursuit is over; you are mutually captive. Now what?

Romance, it turns out, thrives on absence, on unrequited emotion, on trouble and suffering. Its essence is uncertainty. When you're desperately smitten, you may be enthralled, enraptured and beguiled, but you are not happy. Romantic love is undone by happiness and by proximity. If Isolde had not been betrothed to King Mark, then Tristan could have married her, and we would have had no high tale of love and death. (Would literature vanish without infidelity?) When passion simmers, two things can happen. If you believe in romance (and when I say "you," I mean "I"), you probably believe there's only one person in the world for you, the aforementioned soul mate. So when your fervor cools, you think that this suddenly familiar and lusterless partner couldn't possibly be the one you're destined to be with; otherwise you'd still be all spoony, lovey-dovey and bewitched. And so you move on to satisfy your love tooth with the next sweetheart.

What you don't yet realize is that no lover can live up to the lover in your head, that every romance fails except as a prelude to abiding love, which is, in fact, your second choice, your alternative to flight. Romance is thinking with your body; love is thinking with your heart. Romance is anyone; love is someone. We need romance to make us feel alive, but we need love to go on living. Romantic love is meat to the teeth of time. Abiding love endures.

When I first met Cindy I'd just driven from Worcester to Arkansas with a deeply troubled and heavily tranquilized cat and a woman who would not let me leave her. I was in the teaching assistants' office in the English department at the university trying to decide which unoccupied desk I would claim when in walked Cindy Chinelly. She dropped a Norton Anthology of Something on her desk and introduced herself. I thought she said Sydney Schnelling. I thought, I'll take this desk next to the cute little German girl.

A few months later, we were free of our entangling amorous alliances, and I was driving 17 straight hours in my old Fury through the night and ice to get back home to Fayetteville and be with Cindy. And before much longer, we had settled into my apartment. We celebrated our domestic consolidation by taking an aba-daba honeymoon (in monkey that means "not exactly kosher") in Grand Isle, La., at spring break. We stopped at a budget motel in Natchitoches. I threw my back out sleeping on the lumpy mattress and in the morning could barely stand, much less walk. Cindy bought me Doan's Pills, and I lay across the back seat while she drove down Bayou Lafourche.

I got out of the car to take a photo of the Dufrene (without the "s") Bakery in Golden Meadow. We slept chastely and uncomfortably on the beach in a $5 tent and a threadbare and musty sleeping bag. A few days later in New Orleans we were sitting on a bench by the Cafe du Monde when a group of vacationing Japanese students decided Cindy and I were John and Yoko. I sat for half an hour getting my picture taken with the students. I kept telling them I was dead. One boy said I looked crooked. I said, My back! He said, Back in the U.S.S.R.!

They thanked me and gave me a stick of Lotte Green Gum, which I still have in a Ranger Joe coffee mug on the bookcase near some field guides. That spring Cindy and I spent a couple of nights in another budget motel in El Dorado, Ark. The first night we'd had mice in the room, eating our Moon Pies. I spoke with the manager. She said we had mice because of the holes in the walls. Yes, I understand, but we don't like them. She moved us to a new room. Cindy and I snuggled in bed watching the 10 o'clock Ark-La-Miss news when it suddenly seemed as if the walls were shimmering. I switched on the light, and we saw galaxies of glossy cockroaches meandering across their paneled universe. Cindy said: If we're going to keep doing this, we can't keep staying in these cheap motels. I said: Well, we should definitely keep doing this.

What Cindy and I do most every day is what we're doing now -- sitting across the house from each other writing, living for a time in our separate made-up worlds. I feel fortunate to find that I am at last beloved and in love. I still don't understand much about love, but maybe that's good -- the ignorance will keep me writing. I do know this: that my love is the Cindy in the house, not some woman in my head or in my lies. I feel like a guy in a tabloid story: "Man Sleeps With His Wife for 18 Years -- Before He Realizes He's Alive."

John Dufresne is the author of the novel Love Warps the Mind a Little.