Whether He Loved Me
Did he stop loving me, or was the capacity taken out of him? There is no committee for that question. But there is a second question underneath it, and that one has an answer.
Versión en español: Si me quiso
He never stopped saying it. That is the part people do not expect.
For nineteen years he told me he loved me, and for most of them I did not believe him — not because the words stopped, but because the way he said them changed. In 1997 and 1998 you could hear where it came from. What came later was the same sentence delivered from somewhere else entirely: flat, automatic, correct. The words outlasted whatever had been underneath them by about seventeen years.
It was the same thing that happened to the smile. The equipment kept working. What drove it was gone.
So there is a second question underneath the one about the drug, and it is worse.
Did he stop loving me — or was the capacity for it taken out of him, along with the smile and the tenderness and whatever else went down with them?
I will never know. But notice what the two answers do, because they do not do the same thing.
If the capacity was destroyed, then he did not stop loving me. He lost the equipment. Something happened to a man and the man could no longer do a thing he had previously been able to do, and none of it was ever a judgement on me.
If the capacity was intact, then he simply stopped. He looked at me and decided, over years, that I was no longer worth it. And that is entirely a judgement on me.
The first question at least kept its subject on him. This one puts me on the stand.
And there is nowhere to take it. The drug question has a Senate committee, an Inspector-General, a register, an audit — all useless to me, but they exist; somebody once thought the matter worth convening over. No committee has ever been convened on whether a man loved his wife. There is no file. There is no finding. There is not even the theoretical possibility of one.
What I have is the two years, and the two years are compromised evidence.
I was twenty-three and I was in love, and a woman in love is the worst possible witness to whether she is loved back. I would have read tenderness into almost anything. I have gone over those years so many times that I no longer fully trust my own footage of them; you cannot examine a memory that often without leaving fingerprints on it.
And there is this, which I have not set down before. I married him after the first deployment. The two years belong to a man I was not yet married to; the marriage belongs to the one who came back. I had already seen the change by then. I said yes anyway, because I thought he was coming back.
There is a darker reading available too, which I have to write down because refusing to look at it would be a kind of lying. It is possible that the warmth of those two years was the same instrument as the cold smile that came later, and that the only difference was that at twenty-three I could not yet tell the difference. That what I took for love was the opening move of something else. People who study this write about charm with an expiry date, and I know the pattern well enough now to see myself inside it.
I do not believe that. But I cannot disprove it, and I have learned to be honest about which of my certainties are arguments and which are just refusals.
There is one piece of evidence that runs the other way, and it is not a comfortable one.
He did not simply leave. He set out to destroy me — the complaints, the statements, the children, the years of it. And you do not do that to a stranger. You do not spend that kind of energy on someone who never mattered. Indifference is cheap; what he did was expensive. Whatever was driving it had to have been fed by something real once, because nothing else generates that much heat.
Which is a horrible thing to find comfort in, and for a while I did.
Then I understood the flaw in it. Wanting to keep something is not the same as loving it. A man can be enraged by the loss of a possession without ever having loved the possession, and the rage tells you only that he considered me his. So even that evidence dissolves when you press on it, and I am back where I started, which is nowhere.
I have given up on getting an answer to it, the same way I gave up on the other one. Nobody is coming to tell me. He could not tell me himself now, and I am not certain he could have told me then.
But somewhere in the last few years I noticed I had quietly swapped the question for a different one, and this second question does have an answer.
Not did he love me. That one is closed to me permanently.
Was I wrong to have believed he did.
And the answer to that is no. I was twenty-three. He was tender, and he was kind, and he smiled at me in a way I have never seen him smile since, and he gave me every reason. Believing him was not naivety and it was not a failure of judgement. It was the correct reading of the evidence available to a young woman at the time, and I would not have been a better person for having doubted him.
That is not the same as it having been true. I know the difference and I am not going to blur it.
But it is the only part of this I get to decide, and I have decided it. Whatever he was or wasn't doing in those two years, the woman who believed it was not a fool. She was twenty-three, and she was loved, or she was shown every sign of it, and she deserved for it to have been real.
I cannot give her the verdict. I can at least stop putting her on trial.
