Look How Happy I'm Making You by Polly Rosenwaike

Author:Polly Rosenwaike
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
Published: 2019-03-18T16:00:00+00:00

Conception

On the Fourth of July, we’d dragged a futon onto the tiny deck of Finn’s fifth-floor studio apartment and pressed against each other under a blanket as we gazed up at the fireworks being set off from the park. I’d always wanted to make love while watching fireworks, and it was as I’d imagined, with the exploding lights in the sky like the explosions inside our bodies, bright colors illuminating everything before fading out into kaleidoscopic dust. “I love you,” Finn breathed, just after he came. I was stunned; he’d never said that before. We’d been seeing each other off and on for ten months, and Finn had told me—in the gentle, reasonable voice he might use with three-year-olds resistant to naptime—that he understood my wishes and concerns, and there wasn’t anyone else, but he didn’t want a relationship right now. I was willing to take what I could get.

As the moment calmed, I said, “I love you too,” but while his declaration had been a radiant burst vanishing into the night, mine stuck around like a red flare. The sky churned with the cloudy residue of powder and metal, carbon and hydrogen. And then the fireworks were over and we were left with the stars.

I thought of a poem, one of the few poems I had memorized and could summon up whole. “The More Loving One,” by W. H. Auden—four quatrains in iambic tetrameter, about stars but not really. I’d been assigned to read it in college, and the meaning eluded my nineteen-year-old brain, until my literature professor explained it in class. The professor was probably younger than I am now, and he had a handsomely brooding air and alternately wry and tender views on literature and life, which he confided as if we students were his intimates. Naturally, I was in love with him.

Humans are captivated by stars, but the feeling is not mutual. And this state of things, the poem tells us, is preferable to the opposite scenario: “How should we like it were stars to burn / With a passion for us we could not return?” We would not like it, Auden says, in so many (so few!) words.

Better to be the lover than the beloved, if one must choose between them. Amid the imbalance of the universe, let me be the one lit up with want.

Nothing really changed after that. We continued seeing each other without discussing the future or even defining the now. I didn’t try to pressure him into more; only a crazy lady would make demands of a star. But I staked my greater lovingness as a kind of claim. I aimed my telescope toward the celestial being yet to be born.

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