Twenty Thousand Days

[Note: I wrote this to speak aloud at ‘What I Did For Love’, an event that Sari Botton held for her excellent Substack publication, Oldster. It had its turn on Oldster, and now the slightly altered version is my late summer offering to counter the gloom.]

You get through life by ignoring the accumulating evidence about yourself . The blindspot shields and protects you ,until you write a memoir.

A memoir puts witnesses into your past, as if you had said to each one “I will haul you out of your today and put you inside my yesterday. I will make you watch what happened ten thousand days ago, twenty thousand days ago, and I will make you feel what I felt.”

Thus summoned, the witnesses notice all the things you avoided while you were writing your book. It was only when my memoir had been written, rewritten, rewritten, proofed, edited, and published, that I knew who I was. I was proud to have bravely acknowledged all my failings.

It took others to tell me that I’d failed the love test.

You pass the love test by getting married, staying married, having children. You pass the love test by having one great love, by being consistent, loyal, true. I’d been the broken-hearted teen who goes on to have too many adventures, because when you start with a broken heart, the stabler forms of love look like laborious in-jokes.

Instead, I had adventures. I became an arts journalist, a critic, a profile-writer, and given the character of people in the arts, I had adventures with men who did things in the arts, so the book read like a catalogue of choice cultural scalps.

Those people who read the book all asked more or less the same question, which was “You’ve had a lot of men in your life, why are are you so alone? ”

Sometimes I heard pity, “Poor you, you’ve never known real love”, sometimes I heard scorn, as if they were catching me out me for being inconsistent, distractable , a slut.

I heard : “You never took anyone seriously.”

Or sometimes: “Who did you really love?”

Oh for fuck’s sake, I wanted to say, leave me alone.

But for six months it was my job to solicit the attention and engagement of these readers , as I promoted the book that had dragged them into my life.

I hadn’t felt like a loser as long as no one was looking, but now that I’d forced strangers to look at me, I could see myself with as strangers did, and I was suddenly aware I’d wasted my capacity for love on loves I did not believe in. I’d never had a child. I’d turned the gold of real love into numberless sparkling anecdotes. They were good stories, but they weren’t the real thing.

I’d been married once, I’d lived with various men, but it never felt real.

I didn’t like saying “I love you,” because it always sounded like a lie.

I had given up on men, to conserve energy. I’d been alone for five years, and for years before that. I was old: 68 .

But now, on the road and off, I talked about myself for a solid six months after writing about myself for a solid six years.

It was nauseating. I felt like a mad crone hawking my vintage selves at a street fair, waving shreds of my life in people’s faces, old satin underwear, torn lace, masks, bras, shoes, wrinkled nighties, shouting “Come and get it! Fresh defeats! Acid moments of self doubt! Tiny triumphs! Names I hope you’ll recognize!”

As the six months of relentless print self-promotion tapered down into obscure podcasts hosted by people I’d once met, I was asked to participate in an evening at Joe’s Pub where I would join five other women in reading letters to The One Who Got Away.

Fine. Anything to move a few more books. The tide of sales had slowed. My popularity was ebbing. I mean, five other women at Joe’s Pub?

Ok. To work

The One Who Got Away.

I’d clearly been asked because I was unafraid to drop names. Names of men famous in the arts.

A week before the show at Joe’s Pub, the crone hawking pieces of her past to strangers combed through the inventory of lost loves looking for something juicy.

Juicy for whom?

I was not going to stand on the stage at Joe’s Pub and drop names at the audience. Again. No, I thought. I have to learn from this. Who is it who got away? All of them, obviously, but who was the one who counted?

Who had I loved?

I sat down to write my way through to an answer. I caught little flashes of distant ancient intensities, past secrets. Nothing moved me. No, not you, not you, not you. You’re all substitutes.

For…

For…

For…the boy who was the first kiss, when I was sixteen. In London.

The boy I saw across the crowded entrance hall at the Lycée on the first day of fall term, the boy with curly brown hair and green eye and huge lips and a long dark coat almost to his feet.

The sight of him hit me so hard that I fell back into the pebbly wall, out of breath. Lycée kids swirled around me; he was standing on some steps, above us. My friend Joce knew him; she said he was so good at math they called him ‘the genius’. He was eighteen, the boy who made me dizzy every time I glimpsed him, the boy who gave me my first kiss during the first math lesson in my bedroom on a Friday night when my parents were out of town, in Paris.

And then he broke my heart.

I’d written him in the memoir, but kept him sacred: he was the only man in the book who didn’t have a name.

We had stayed distant friends. His first marriage, his second, happy marriage, four children, a proper grown-up life back home in London, grandchildren. He was a government statistician. His family was in the arts, not him.

I didn’t think about him. I’d dropped the torch with his name on it when I was 22, but Yes, he was the one who got away.

The boy who broke my heart before anybody else could.

I wrote the letter. It took a few days. I wanted to be accurate, it’s the least you can do when addressing someone who isn’t there.

At Joe’s pub, the five other women were charming, some very young. A lectern was set where the stage comes to a point out over the audience.

I took my turn to face a darkness so total I could touch it, a darkness that made the stage the most private place on earth, and in that private darkness, I read out my letter.

Spoken aloud, the words in the letter were more real, bigger, heavier . They changed me as they came out.

I said “You are the one who got away.”

I told the dark of Joe’s Pub what I couldn’t say that December day after he’d ended it, when we walked up from the Lycée to Kensington Gardens and sat on a bench facing the Albert Memorial. I had had so much to tell him, but when I’d opened my mouth, nothing came out but stammers. The beginning breath of each word, but no word.

“I love you” I said aloud to the dark in Joe’s Pub.

“I love you” I said aloud to him for the first time, and it was true.

At the end, I said his name, three times: Nick, Nick, Nick.

He was three thousand miles away but that wasn’t important.

I came off that stage, my head atomized, my heart restored, the compass adjusted to true, in the knowledge that I had loved one person from the edge of childhood to the edge of old age .

I could feel the love inside me, not as hunger, longing, want, but as a newly revealed fact, simple, unquestionable, all mine .

I didn’t have to tell him, it was mine to know, not his.

Two years later, his wife died; I wrote to him, he wrote back. I remembered how broken, how sad my father was after my mother died, I felt compassion. Compassion.

Three months later, he wrote again , and soon we began to speak. I realized that the compassion was love.

Soon, he came to see me on the way to his granddaughter’s 8th birthday, and then we were together.

Two years later, during Covid, a judge married us in front of six masked witnesses in an empty town hall in the middle of a snowy field . I was 72. He was 74.

I had waited twenty thousand days.