The Look of Love

No beginning, no ending.

Alan Tudyk in Resident Alien

This is the start of year three for Everything is Personal and the start of year four for

Oldster Magazine

, Sari Botton’s joyous meditation on where a person is on the animal of a life. I write a monthly column for Oldster called “Notes on Another New Life,” and to celebrate my collaboration with Sari, I’ve collected samples from several recent columns and mixed them into a new piece for today’s post.

The vinyl siding has been stripped from our house, and it’s standing in underwear with holes, waiting for new clothes. Last night, we arrived at a restaurant 30 minutes early to meet a friend. My mistake. I had a margarita that was perfect and wondered about the disruption to my attention span. It made Richard very happy not to be alone in a shredding sense of things getting away from him. Some things falling away from me good riddance. My sister once told me she had not been jealous of anyone in her life. I believed her, although I didn’t know how this was possible. She had been the model I had set my sights on with no chance in hell of becoming.

Yesterday, Richard said one of his fingers was hurting. It was making it hard for him to hold a cup of coffee, and he was startled, as if he were no longer himself. Then he remembered his father had complained of arthritis in his hands and that his father had said his own father had had the same thing happen. Richard said, “I felt like my father was inside me,” and he liked the sensation, and he stopped feeling he was no longer himself.

Richard’s father had been a tailor in Syston, the midlands village in the UK where Richard grew up. Richard said, “When my dad was getting old and couldn’t cut patterns anymore, I didn’t think about what he was going through, and now I am.” It was a form of retroactive empathy. At the same time Richard had felt his father enter his body, he’d entered his father’s body, at least imaginatively. He said, “I have his DNA. I actually am him, in a sense, and he’s still alive in me.”

We were walking on Warren Street when he said this, up and down the spine of the town as we do every day. A few years ago, when we started this routine, Richard thought he might get bored with the same route, but we aren’t bored. We talk to people on the street and in shops. We talk to each other in a way that only walking produces. A thought is a step? A thought is a breath?

I was taken by Richard feeling easier in himself when he experienced a jolt of understanding for his father and when he felt their attachment physically. These are happy memories for him. It never rains in his backward glance. In Richard’s family, no one raised their voice. Before I met these people, I thought they must be repressed, but no, they just liked each other a lot, and everyone liked Richard the best, which explains why he is sometimes surprised and let down the rest of the world isn’t his family.

On the street, I thought this loving way of looking over your shoulder probably perks up your cells as much as your mood. I wondered if I could learn this way of being from my love, and I thought I already had learned it a little if I was even having this thought. Then I thought: This is one of the things that happens to people when they stay together long enough. It’s not just you come to look like your dog and your dog comes to look like you. You start to take on the DNA of their temperament. Maybe. Anyway, nice thought.

The premise of the TV show Resident Alien is that an alien with a snake face and the body of a giant, standing cricket, has come to earth to destroy the human population because humans are so stupid they have doomed life on their planet. Something goes wrong, and the alien can’t complete his mission, and in order to figure out his next moves he assumes a human form. The human body he moves around in belonged to Harry, a doctor in a small, Colorado town, and the alien assumes Harry’s job by learning medicine on his cell phone.

The show has a Northern Exposure vibe, in that we come to know the various residents of the town, who are connected to each other by threads of feeling the alien comes to understand. That’s the basis of the series, and you ride along on the comic brilliance of Alan Tudyk’s performance as Harry, who is always an alien and always a being, now transformed by Harry’s DNA, into something hybrid and endlessly reborn to itself, moment by moment, as he discovers what it means to be human. As you watch, you realize how much of life we spend learning to be human, ourselves. Harry falls in love with the feeling of love—an emotion his species doesn’t have—and after that you don’t really care that much about the snake face and creepy extra pair of arms he has. He comes to look the way love always transforms the beloved.  

My mother, when her heart valves were clogged like tubes full of toothpaste, had to sign a form consenting to emergency bi-pass surgery. She said, “What would you do in my place?” I said, “I would want to live.” She said, “What’s so great about living?” I said, “The story.” She said, “What is the story?” I said, “I’m looking in your eyes. A bird is sitting on a tree outside your window. A child is laughing on the street below, and we are having a conversation. That is the story.” She said, “How come you suddenly care if I live or die?” I said, “The mystery of DNA.”

When a contractor we didn’t go with said the materials he’d use would last for thirty years, I imagined Richard at 103 and me at 107. It was easy. Why would anything change? In thirty years, we’d have to paint the siding again and apply more sealer to the deck. Richard and I used to stream a show called The Good Place. The characters are either dead or they are demons. After several seasons, the dead people can continue to exist for eons with a beloved soul mate. They can eat all the frozen yogurt they want and attend as many concerts as they have ever wished to hear. Each dead person can decide when they’ve had enough eons of pleasure and are ready to be dead dead. They have finally grown bored to death. 

I don’t think this would happen to me—look at he Warren Street walk! For one thing, I don’t see myself getting sick of frozen yogurt, and I don’t want to be dead dead, ever. There’s an idea going around that’s supposed to console people about death, that your molecules will float around forever as the star dust they came from. Your molecules will more likely swirl around like leaves in front of an unswept door on Broadway. Wherever your molecules float, it won’t mean a thing to you now or when you’re dead.

Monks in medieval monasteries, when they looked at the sky and imagined they were being watched, may have felt comfort. For me, there’s no consolation in any concept of what you become after your brain shuts down like HAL the computer in 2001 A Space Odyssey. As HAL, the great, malevolent computer is being unplugged, he sings the song, “Daisy,” with more dread and poignancy than has ever been captured in a death scene. Basically, death is murder. You know it, and I know it.

My father and sister with a mystery dog.

I would like to collect the dead members of my family. That would be all of them. Would everyone tell a Jewish joke? How fast would I want to send them back where they came from? I have been jealous of all my best friends. That’s why I sidled up to them in the first place. They thought I was in love with them, and they were right.

I used to walk the streets of New York as if a day was as long as two days. I didn’t need more sleep than that. I wear a white angora sweater and a pleated skirt, in homage to my sister. I clean the toilets in our house to create a sense of worth in my life. I sometimes feel blurry from the trance of being alive. When someone I love says, “Are you going to leave me?” I say, “Where would I go?” I am honestly trying to think of where I could go. One of the reasons I’m happy in this moment is I don’t want to hitch my wagon to the next wagon that pulls up in the driveway and looks more beautiful and alluring than any wagon I have even seen. I never thought I’d say that.

Even if I wanted to leave the room where the members of my family were gathered, and I would, I would want to leave it as soon as the joy of seeing them wore off, let’s say in five minutes—because I would feel the wear and tear of seeing my place in their tiny universe. Even if I wanted to leave them, I would want to call them back from the dead on a regular basis.

Recently, I met a man who described the pattern of his days: gardening, working in his studio, talking with his wife, cooking dinner, and sitting with his wife while they streamed something before bed. He was smiling. Pleasure was shooting out of his eyes, past his fancy glasses. He had outlined the day Richard and I basically live, and we, too, feel happy in the pattern, and you have to think how could anyone not feel happy in this pattern. The pattern and happiness are maybe the same thing, independent of the person living it. This is of course impossible and true at the same time. Once you have hit on an example of something that is impossible and true at the same time, it turns out most moments in life that make you feel you are not alone in your relationships, or in your sex, or in the universe are both impossible and true at the same time, and this knowledge of the universal nothing and everything is briefly comforting.

BIZ

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