I couldn’t.

Bert Brisker would probably say about me, that at that time I wasn’t “intellectually pliant” enough, since what I was after was illusion complete and on a short-term, closed-end basis. And what I should’ve been happy with was the plain, elementary rapture a woman—any woman I happened to like—could confer, no questions asked, after which I could’ve gone home and let life please me in the ways I’d always let it. Though it’s a rare man who can find real wonder in the familiar, once luck’s running against him—which it was.

By the time I came back from teaching three months, which was near the end of this two years, I’d actually quit the whole business with women. But X had been home with Paul and Clary, and had not been communicating, and had begun reading The New Republic, The National Review and China Today, something she’d never done before, and seemed remote. I fell immediately into a kind of dreamy monogamy that did nothing but make X feel like a fool—she said so eventually—for putting up with me until her own uncertainty got aroused. I was around the house every day, but not around to do any good for anybody, just reading catalogs, lying charitably to avoid full disclosure, smiling at my children, feeling odd, visiting Mrs. Miller weekly, musing ironically about the number of different answers I could give to almost any question I was asked, watching sports and Johnny on television, wearing putter pants and plaid shirts I’d bought from L.L. Bean, going up to New York once a week and being a moderately good but committed sportswriter—all the while X’s face became indistinct, and my voice grew softer and softer until it was barely audible, even to me. Her belief—at least her way of putting things since then—was that I’d grown “untrustworthy,” which is not surprising, since I probably was, if what she wanted was to be made happy by my making life as certain as could be, which I could’ve sooner flown than do then. And when I couldn’t do that, she just began to suspect the worst about everything, for which I don’t blame her either, though I could tell that wasn’t a good idea. I contend that I felt pretty trustworthy then, in spite of everything—if she could’ve simply trusted just that I loved her, which I did. (Married life requires shared mystery even when all the facts are known.) I’d have come around before too long, I’m sure of that, and I’d have certainly been happy to have things stay the way they were while hoping for improvements. If you lose all hope, you can always find it again.

Only our house got broken into, hateful Polaroids scattered around, the letters from the woman in Kansas found, and X seemed suddenly to think we were too far gone, farther gone than we knew, and life just seemed unascendant and to break between us, not savagely or even tragically, just ineluctably, as the real writers say.

A lot happens to you in your life and comes to bear midway: your parents can die (mine, though, died years before), your marriage can change and even depart, a child can succumb, your profession can start to seem hollow. You can lose all hope. Any one thing would be enough to send you into a spin. And correspondingly it is hard to say what causes what, since in one important sense everything causes everything else.

So with all this true, how can I say I “love” Vicki Arcenault? How can I trust my instincts all over again?

A good question, but one I haven’t avoided asking myself, for fear of causing more chaos in everybody’s life.

And the answer like most other reliable answers is in parts.

I have relinquished a great deal. I’ve stopped worrying about being completely within someone else since you can’t be anyway—a pleasant unquestioning mystery has been the result. I’ve also become less sober-sided and “writerly serious,” and worry less about the complexities of things, looking at life in more simple and literal ways. I have also stopped looking around what I feel to something else I might be feeling. With all those eighteen women, I was so bound up creating and resolving a complicated illusion of life that I lost track of what I was up to—that I ought to be having a whale of a good time and forget about everything else.

When you are fully in your emotions, when they are simple and appealing enough to be in, and the distance is closed between what you feel and what you might also feel, then your instincts can be trusted. It is the difference between a man who quits his job to become a fishing guide on Lake Big Trout, and who one day as he is paddling his canoe into the dock at dusk, stops paddling to admire the sunset and realizes how much he wants to be a fishing guide on Lake Big Trout; and another man who has made the same decision, stopped paddling at the same time, felt how glad he was, but also thought he could probably be a guide on Windigo Lake if he decided to, and might also get a better deal on canoes.

Another way of describing this is that it’s the difference between being a literalist and a factualist. A literalist is a man who will enjoy an afternoon watching people while stranded in an airport in Chicago, while a factualist can’t stop wondering why his plane was late out of Salt Lake, and gauging whether they’ll still serve dinner or just a snack.

And finally, when I say to Vicki Arcenault, “I love you,” I’m not saying anything but the obvious. Who cares if I don’t love her forever? Or she me? Nothing persists. I love her now, and I’m not deluding myself or her.