Books |
First Comes Love
Marion Winik
By
Published: Jan 01, 2008
Category:
Memoir
I idly opened “First Comes Love” at lunch. By dinnertime, I was cruising toward the finish and reading in a taxi — and I wasn’t thrilled to walk into the restaurant and see that the people I was meeting were already there. I took my seat and announced, "Tony is just about to die." And then, eyes brimming with tears, I read to the end of the book.
Tony is lanky and funny and achingly smart. He is also gay and a hog for drugs that work best with needles. Marion Winik isn’t daunted. The day she meets Tony in New Orleans, she "borrows" three bags of heroin from her sister’s stash, and he buys some needles, and they settle in to a routine that will be rich in intoxication and very, very short on sex.
But what does sex matter? Marion marries Tony. Has two children with him. Cheats on him even as he lies to her. Fights with him, and breaks up with him. And, despite her exhaustion at ten years of a patently unworkable romance, stays with him when AIDS leads him to more drugs and a surprisingly tender ending.
No. Not possible. But “First Comes Love” is a true story. Indeed, it reads like a diary — it’s stripped of "fine writing" or cheap analysis. And yet The New York Times chose it as a Notable Book of the year. Marion Winik, it turns out, had the ideal training to write this sort of open-the veins memoir. She was a poet. And then she was a veteran writer of technical manuals for software. The result is an unadorned, confessional style that always tells and never judges. She started writing “First Comes Love” six months after Tony died, and, once she hit her stride, went right to the end.
And this is, after 5,000 nights together, pretty much what The End is like to the one who’s left:
If I were not so numb my heart would be breaking, if it were not already broken my heart would be breaking, I am drinking the wine in big sips, the fancy red wine he wanted, and I am waiting for the Polaroid to develop. It is coming out with a greenish cast, not beautiful and rosy like he looks. The breathing is getting worse and worse and I am afraid to be here but I can’t leave. Jesus Christ, Tony, did you really do this? Did I really let you? Are you really leaving?
Oh baby oh baby, I whisper, saying it to him and to myself, finally crying after the eerie calm of this whole long day, the chaos of this whole long week, this whole long month, these many years of everything that could never happen happening and happening, for better and worse, for breakfast and babies, for road trips and fistfights, till death, that stupid unthinkable, out in the corridor all along, comes in with his noisy vacuum cleaner to do us part.
I don’t know how it gets more real than that. But don’t, please, hold just that grim image in mind — this memoir is as funny as it is sad, for the narrator never loses sight of her situation. As she would say, what do you expect when you marry a charming, gay, drug-user who, after the marriage, adopts your last name?
Who needs to read this? Of course, it’s “must reading” for gay junkies married to women who want kids (and for the women who love them). If you’re a reader (or know a reader) who likes a book with a moral that cautions against something — drugs, promiscuous gays, overeducated women who majored in trouble, or whatever – this would certainly be a useful educational tool. But even more — and this is why I take the trouble to feature it here — “First Comes Love” is a world-class love story that hard-core romantics won’t want to miss.
No, all you need to want to devour this book is the experience of even once caring about another person. Of wanting to put that person’s welfare above your own, even if it turns out that you can’t walk the walk. Or just being on the receiving end of another person’s dreams.
“First Comes Love” is not a book you’ll pick up and put down. It will definitely lower your productivity and make you unavailable to the folks at home until you turn the last page. That’s as it should be. Tony is dying.
To buy “First Comes Love” from Amazon.com, click here.
For Marion Winik’s web site, click here.
