Гвен Купер - Homer's Odyssey

Well, now she had. And he did.

My first thought was that Laurence’s and my days as friends were numbered. It was hard to imagine that any girlfriend would tolerate his close friendship with the likes of me. Then I immediately hated myself for thinking of me, rather than being happy for my friend’s happiness. But as soon as the word happiness crossed my mind in relation to Laurence and some woman who wasn’t me, my head shut down and my body went numb. I felt as if I were in shock, like somebody who’d walked away from a car accident.

I tried to conceal all this from Laurence, to act as if everything were normal, but I don’t think I did a very good job because he kissed me on the cheek more gently than usual as he put me into a cab bound for home.

The insomnia set in that night, and it went on for weeks. Poor Homer, who slept when I slept and—so it would seem—didn’t sleep if I didn’t, got very little rest himself. I took to pacing the floors, and Homer dutifully followed me step-by-step in slow circles around our one-room apartment. I felt bad for depriving him of a full night’s rest, but I had a lot to think about, and there was no point in wasting eight perfectly good hours sleeping.

I tried to reason myself out of my funk, to convince myself that I only thought I wanted Laurence now because he wanted somebody else. I was the worst kind of cliché and, more than that, I was selfish. I was spoiled and selfish and used to having all of Laurence’s attention to myself, and it was clearly the attention—and not the man—that I was suddenly so covetous of.

But then, as the sleepless nights rolled by, I understood—in a way that was so clear, it was shocking I’d never seen it before—that I had compared every man I’d dated over the past three years with Laurence, and they’d all come up short. They were never as funny as Laurence, never as smart as Laurence, never as manly or strong of character as Laurence was.

Anybody with two eyes in her head would have seen, long before this, that the essential complaint I’d had about all these men was that … they weren’t Laurence. I thought I’d been evaluating them on their own merits, but really all I’d done was reject them for committing the unpardonable sin of not being the one man I was already in love with.

Perhaps it had taken me so long to recognize that I loved him because he didn’t look the way I’d always thought the man I would end up with would look—he had none of the skinny, bookish appearance of the men I customarily dated. Then I thought about Homer. Homer lived in a world where vision didn’t exist, where the way things and people looked wasn’t only an irrelevant consideration, it was no consideration at all.

I could wrap things up with a nice neat bow right now if I said that I learned from Homer that love is blind, that it doesn’t always grow in a straight line from the way somebody looks.

But that wasn’t true—looks did matter. No matter how much of a life I’d been able to give Homer, no matter how much happiness he’d been able to carve out for himself, the one thing I could never give him was the specific joys that vision could bring. It was the easiest thing to take for granted, how looking upon a well-loved face could lift your spirits in a way that nothing else could.

So it wasn’t that I realized looks were irrelevant—it was that I realized that nothing in life made me as happy as seeing Laurence’s face. Sometimes, if I was meeting Laurence somewhere, I would pick him out from a crowd while he was still yards away. When I saw his face, even at a great distance, I would laugh—not because he looked funny or was doing anything particularly humorous, but because seeing his face made me so happy that some of my happiness had to spill out in the form of laughter, or else it would make me too giddy to stand.

I had been given a gift. There was something I could see with my eyes that filled me with joy every time I saw it. Not everybody was as lucky as I was.

Still, I had no more reason for supposing now than I’d had when I met him that Laurence would ever be interested in fully committing to someone. I had even less reason for thinking that “someone” might be me. Now there was this other woman—Jeannie or Jeanette, or whatever Laurence had said her name was. For all I knew, Laurence, like me, had never thought of the two of us as anything more than friends. Or maybe he’d thought about it, I was pretty sure he’d thought about it, but that had been three years ago. How could I know what he thought about me now?

What scared me the most was the prospect of losing our friendship. I didn’t know what I would do if I tried to be Laurence’s girlfriend and wound up losing him altogether. And yet, I’d barely been able to speak with him since he’d told me about the woman he was dating. I might be terrified of moving forward, but moving backward was impossible and even standing still was rapidly becoming an unrealistic option.

That was something else I’d learned from Homer—sometimes, to get the things that were good in life, you had to make a blind leap.

It was Homer, I realized, who had brought me most of the insights I’d acquired about relationships over the past few years. It was Homer who had taught me that the love of one person who believed in you—and who you believed in—could inspire you to attempt even the most improbable things. Somewhere along the way, I had decided that because Laurence and I had yet to find a lasting love with another person, we were somehow fated to be unable to do so—at least not with each other. But where was that carved in stone? If anything, Homer was living proof that dark predictions about potential happiness were nothing more than an opportunity to prove all conventional wisdom wrong. Wasn’t Homer someone who was supposed to have been timid and fearful, someone who might go on to live a life but who would never have an exceptional one? Yet who had I ever seen find as much to celebrate in the midst of the everyday than Homer?

Actually, I had found one person like that—and that person was Laurence. Like Homer, Laurence had that within him which was incorruptible, and which could find something to rejoice in among even the most grindingly mundane aspects of day-today life. Not only was it a quality I respected, it was something I aspired to. Perhaps that was why Laurence and Homer had become the most important fixtures in my life.

I had nothing but logical reasons why Laurence and I shouldn’t try to be a couple, just like I’d had nothing but logical reasons why I couldn’t possibly adopt a blind kitten—which only went to show that, sometimes, the thing you were looking for could only be found in the very last place you would have expected. It was Homer who had, from the first time I saw him, begun to change the ways I evaluated my relationships. When I’d met him, and recognized his innate courage and capacity for happiness, I’d understood that when you see something so fundamentally worthwhile in somebody else, you don’t look for all the reasons that might keep it out of your life. You commit to being strong enough to build your life around it, no matter what.

In doing so, you begin to become the thing you admire.

Above all things, Homer had taught me that there was great joy to be found in great risks. I had been dating since I was fifteen years old, and in that entire time I had never once made anything like a declaration of love unless and until someone else made it first. The potential reward had never seemed to be worth the risk. Laurence had begun dating somebody else, and I had less reason now for thinking that risk might lead to an eventual reward than I ever had. I think, though, that I was almost more afraid of success than failure. The prospect of picking up the phone and making a single call that would, if it went the way I hoped, change the entire course of my life was terrifying. But if you were never willing to be fearless, you would never achieve anything worth having.