It’s a Wonderful Life, Between Heartaches

Outside, as I write this, is a beautiful Indian summer day, warm and breezeless beneath a pale, unfettered sky. Inside my heart there are more than the usual amounts of pain and anger.

There is no way to reconcile the afternoon’s loveliness with a soul’s distress other than the obvious, which is to remember that the weather has as little influence on our moods as our moods have on the weather. But this is smug and fatuous and unhelpful.

What gives?

Men and women in general, and that contested rope between them--love. I look around and think about my friends and family, and I can’t help but notice a lot of disappointment that was once hope, a lot of confusion that was once clarity, a lot of sand slipping through fingers that once seemed to hold only gold.

For one thing, I have a friend whose wife left him after 20 years of marriage. They have three fine children, a warm and spacious home in San Juan Capistrano, jobs that have been rewarding. They still have those things, I suppose, but he lives alone now, surrounded by birds in a rental not far from his former home. His birds--rare, exotic, expensive, hard-to-care-for and noisy--have been a love of his life. Sometimes when I talk to him on the phone, he has to go into the bathroom to be heard above their chatter.

What happened?

That’s a complicated question for which I have gathered only dull and partial answers from others who know her: She was unfulfilled; she was not autonomous; she was suffering a midlife crisis. She was not happy.

Mystified, hurt, angry, proud and shamed, her husband sits on bar stools next to me, and we joke about finding his next wife. But he doesn’t want a next wife, he wants her, and after a drink or four he’s the first to admit it. Some women I know are after him, but he’s the most married single guy they’ll ever chase. He is not happy.

I have another friend who was married once, briefly, but it ended. He’s an idealistic type--hard to please and critical, but forgiving and often generous. Fortyish now, he lives alone in a house that is too large for just him.

For the past couple of years he was seeing an intelligent, pretty, practical woman, and they usually seemed pleased to be together. They were proud of each other in an unoffensive way, affectionate and attentive. Sometimes when I’d see them, her young son would be with them, and my friend would look a little awkward, not sure how to act. He had told me more than once that he feared he wouldn’t be able to find the courage--or love--that would allow him to stepfather this little boy and be happy himself.

My friend announced a couple of weeks ago that he and this woman had called it quits.

The reason?

He was still unsure that he could get used to someone else’s son living under his roof--that spacious, too big roof! But the time had come to make a decision one way or the other. Funny, but he told me he feels ready for the familiar chaos of a household not devoted exclusively to himself.

I have another friend whose husband of 14 years fell in love with someone else. He left the state and is reputed to be remarried and quite happy. She is not.

Yet another friend is still in love with a guy who broke her heart a decade ago and wonders if they might be good together again. He wonders too. I know both of them well enough to understand that more than anything else, they are terrified of what might happen if they try, and terrified of what might happen if they don’t.

When I’m in the room with the two of them, I can sense a flexible present trying to accommodate a specific past in the name of a hypothetical future. They are too scared for happiness to be even in their vocabulary just yet, and, yes, I’m terrified for them too.

What gives?

At times like this, I’m convinced the founding fathers considered “the pursuit of happiness” an “inalienable right” because it is such a fragile thing--as hard to find and keep as life and liberty itself. At times like this, I’m convinced that happiness is alien, caused only by an occasional convergence of uncontrollable forces.

And if you subscribe to that notion, it follows that anyone who expects a relationship (not to mention a life) to produce a high degree of happiness is being tragically optimistic.

Therefore, at times like this, I want to tell all my aching friends that life is geared to misery, toil and heartbreak, so stop heaping more of those things onto your loved ones just because you don’t feel happy.

Right now, with optically pure sky overhead and the warmth of a late autumn sun on my arms, I am convinced that life is vain bitterness and grand delusion. I’m convinced that we live short and die long. That life mocks hope.

But, to be truthful, I’m only good for about one day of this, then I start to crack. If I’m just another hungry child bawling for my happiness, then so be it.

So while I brood under these perfect skies I keep one eye trained on tomorrow, or a day soon, when the storm winds will howl in off the ocean and the sky will be black as midnight at noon and the rain heaving down will be cold and sharp as ice picks and somehow the world will seem a happier place.

I noticed just a moment ago that a breeze has come up, and the evening is already turning cool.