“For a few years. Then she died when I was fifteen.
Her heart. Not real sudden. Not real slow, either. After that, I was
made a ward of the court. I spent the next three years, until I was
eighteen, in a series of foster homes. Four of them, in all. I never
got close to any of my foster parents; I never allowed myself to get
close. I kept asking to be transferred, see. Because by then, even as
young as I was, I realized that loving people, depending on them,
needing them, is just too dangerous. Love is just a way to set you up
for a bad fall. It’s the rug they pull out from under you at the very
moment you finally decide that everything’s going to be fine. We’re all
so ephemeral. So fragile. And life’s so unpredictable.”
“But that’s no reason to insist on going it alone,” Jack said. “In
fact, don’t you see-that’s the reason we must find people to love,
people to share our lives with, to open our hearts and minds to, people
to depend on, cherish, people who’ll depend on us when they need to know
they’re not alone. Caring for your friends and family, knowing they
care for you-that’s what keeps our minds off the void that waits for all
of us. By loving and letting ourselves be loved, we give meaning and
importance to our lives; it’s what keeps us from being just another
species of the animal kingdom, grubbing for survival. At least for a
short while, through love, we can forget about the goddamned darkness at
the end of everything.”
He was breathless when he finished-and astonished by what he had said,
startled that such an understanding had been in him.
She slipped an arm across his chest. She held him fast.
.She said, “You’re right. A part of me knows that what you’ve said is
true.”
“Good.”
“But there’s another part of me that’s afraid of letting myself love or
be loved, ever again. The part that can’t bear losing it all again. The
part that thinks loneliness is preferable to that kind of loss and
pain.”
“But see, that’s just it. Love given or love taken is never lost,” he
said, holding her. “Once you’ve loved someone, the love is always
there, even after they’re gone. Love is the only thing that endures.
Mountains are torn down, built up, torn down again over millions and
millions of years. Seas dry up. Deserts give way to new seas. Time
crumbles every building man erects.
Great ideas are proven wrong and collapse as surely as castles and
temples. But love is a force, an energy, a power. At the risk of
sounding like a Hallmark card, I think love is like a ray of sunlight,
traveling for all eternity through space, deeper and deeper into
infinity; like that ray of light, it never ceases to exist. Love
endures.
It’s a binding force in the universe, like the energy within a molecule
is a binding force, as surely as gravity is a binding force. Without
the cohesive energy in a molecule, without gravity, without love-chaos.
We exist to love and be loved, because love seems to me to be the only
thing that brings order and meaning and light to existence. It must be
true. Because if it isn’t true, what purpose do we serve? Because if
it isn’t true-God help us.”
For minutes, they lay in silence, touching.
Jack was exhausted by the flood of words and feelings that had rushed
from him, almost without his volition.
He desperately wanted Rebecca to be with him for the rest of his life.
He dreaded losing her.
But he said not more. The decision was hers.
After a while she said, “For the first time in ages, I’m
“Ach! Alan Alda wouldn’t eat peanut butter and onion sandwiches.”
“But I have one great virtue that more than makes up for all of those
terrible faults,” he said.
She grinned. “What’s that?”
“I love you.”
This time, she didn’t ask him to refrain from saying it.
She kissed him.
Her hands moved over him.
She said, “Make love to me again.”