A Natural History of Love

  Leucothoe, a squat, bushy shrub outside my window, was named after a Persian princess, whose jealous husband chased her off a cliff and into the surging ocean below. Apollo took a fancy to her and changed her into a sea goddess, and, when he tired of her frothy ways, into a sweet-smelling plant. The bright red anemones which will bloom here in the summer take their name from Adonis, who was out hunting one day when a wounded boar turned and gored him in the groin, castrating him. It was an excruciating and deadly wound. By the time his lover, Venus, found him, he was delirious and nearly dead. Weeping, clinging to him, she moaned

  Kiss me yet once again, the last, long kiss,

  Until I draw your soul within my lips

  And drink down all your love.

  But, by then, he was far from her words or tears, down in the Underworld where she couldn’t reach him. As each drop of his blood fell to the ground, delicate red flowers bloomed. His severed penis was said to have run off and become his son, the erotic god Priapus.

  Soon a meander of purple and plum hyacinths will sprout along a stone pathway near the garage. Hyacinths get their name from a young sweetheart of Apollo’s, a boy he accidentally killed. The two were having a friendly discus-throwing match when Zephyr, the west wind, who wanted the boy for himself but had been spurned, got into a jealous rage and blew on Apollo’s hand so that it slipped. The discus flew off at a freak angle and broke the boy’s neck. Horrified, Apollo pressed him to his heart and wept. As the boy’s blood trickled onto the grass, a single phallic flower grew from it, a beautiful purple column on whose petals two letters spell the Greek word “Alas.”

  Today’s newspapers offer equally extreme (even mythic) sagas. A recent revenge scandal involves a highly respected chief judge of New York State, married for forty-one years with four children. Apparently, he was committing adultery with a woman who dropped him for someone else. The judge became unhinged. He began harassing the woman and her daughter with psychotic phone calls and blackmail. When he threatened to kidnap the little girl, the frightened mother notified the police, and thus began a public tale of passion, rejection, and desperation. The judge’s life was in tatters. His ex-girlfriend wanted nothing to do with him, his marriage was a disaster, and the political career he worked so hard at for so many years lay in ruins. Many had been touting him for governor. Having broken the law, he won’t ever be able to keep his job as judge. What interests me about this case, and those of crimes of passion in general, is how love may inspire people to act in ways that are obviously self-destructive. What the judge had to lose was vastly greater than what he stood to gain. Having lost control of his girlfriend’s love, he was willing to make do with controlling her fear. That’s not much of a replacement. He knew what the consequences would be. And yet he couldn’t stop himself.

  Spurned lovers sometimes choose imaginative forms of revenge. One woman I know, whose husband left her for a younger woman, took the breakup very hard. It was a social aggression, as well as a blow to her self-esteem. She had defined herself as her husband’s wife; and after the divorce she continued to define herself through him—but now as his ex-wife. She indulged in large and small acts of revenge. For various reasons, she decided to move out of town, letting her husband and his new bride have the house as part of the divorce settlement. It was a large, modern, magnificently landscaped house with many rare plants in its gardens. The summer before she left town, she ripped up all the perennials and planted just enough annuals to enjoy that season. By the time her husband and his bride moved in, they’d find all the gardens dead.

  I also know a woman, married to a writer, who left her husband somewhat melodramatically by creeping out of their bed one morning, filling her side of the bed with his books, and pulling the covers up over them. Another woman, when her boyfriend jilted her, dumped a big panful of heavily used Kitty Litter on her ex-boyfriend’s porch, with a note that read: Consider yourself lucky I don’t raise elephants. Yet another woman first learned that her boyfriend had found someone else when he called to say he was coming over to pick up his toiletries. That gave her just enough time to take his toothbrush, scrub the toilet bowl with it, then place it neatly back in his kit.

  Men are vengeful, too, but they tend to be less subtle and more violent about it. The front page of my hometown newspaper ran this headline today: MAN ALLEGEDLY DECAPITATES FOUR CATS. The story explained that a twenty-nine-year-old man, “distraught” because his live-in girlfriend had left him, decapitated her mother cat and its three kittens and then turned on the natural gas in his duplex apartment and threatened to blow up the building. Ultimately, he surrendered to the police and was sent to a psychiatric hospital.

  One popular novel about extreme revenge is Fay Weldon’s The Life and Loves of a She-Devil. An ugly, heavy set, happily married suburban mother of two discovers that her accountant husband is having an affair with one of his clients, a petite, rich, delicately beautiful writer of pulp romances who lives in a fashionably renovated lighthouse. Insulted, degraded, and spurned, the wife christens herself a she-devil and plots diabolical schemes to totally humiliate and bankrupt her husband and his mistress. The schemes all work, and soon the lovers are in deep personal, financial, and professional turmoil. Then she goes one step further and, having sent her husband to prison for embezzling money she had secretly squirreled away in Switzerland, she metamorphoses into his mistress. With the help of massive plastic surgery (which includes having her legs shortened), she becomes the evil twin to her husband’s mistress, who by now has been harassed into an early death. Then the she-devil gets her semideranged husband out of prison, purchases the lighthouse, and takes him to live with her in what had once been his illicit love nest. There she keeps him in poverty and poor health, has lovers while he watches, and generally torments him to the end of his days.

  This tale, which clearly touched a chord in the hearts and spleens of many, was made into not one but two popular movies. Even crimes that break moral laws, insult the legal system, and send shivers down the erect spine of bourgeois society, seem less craven when explained by love. Like truth, love is a rock-solid defense. Subconsciously, we picture love as a powerful geyser which builds up inside a person and has to vent its fury somewhere, be it for good or evil. We also realize that lovers need to prove their love, graphically, absolutely, with gestures that sometimes get out of hand and can become a soul-consuming end in themselves. We’re fascinated by passionate extremes and don’t always think they’re deplorable. It’s exciting to watch someone explore the body in a new way, to challenge old styles and ideas, and reinvent love. Breaking taboos, or just watching others break them, can be a positive, ennobling thrill. After all, every great work of art is a crime of passion.

  ALTRUISM

  One day a few years ago, on the isle of Jersey, a young couple took their infant son to the zoo. The boy seemed especially enchanted by the large, brawny gorillas, so his parents lifted him onto the wall of the enclosure for a better look. To their horror, the boy suddenly slipped over the side and fell down into the midst of the animals. A huge silverback—the dominant male—ran over to the baby and sat between him and the rest of the gorillas, and there he stayed, protecting the baby, until a keeper could be called.

  Why did the senior gorilla protect the human child? Was it an act of altruism? Why do people sometimes risk their own lives to save the lives of strangers? Of all the varieties of love, altruism is perhaps the hardest to understand. It seems contrary to the self-interest that drives us all. Our first instinct is to stay alive, and our second to make sure our kin survive. Why help hungry and homeless strangers? Why save other species? Why sacrifice one’s life for one’s comrades in wartime? Altruism impresses us. We admire the trait. We teach our children that it is a good and noble feeling. But we’re puzzled by it all the same. It just doesn’t seem to make sense in the brutal economy of life. We keep thinking there must be some secret motive, some hidden gain. A behaviorist would argue that the gorilla didn’t save the baby
because it felt anything like compassion. As top male, the gorilla acted automatically. It was hard-wired to protect young primates, and when it saw one in danger—even a weird-looking, hairless one—it soberly plunked itself down as a living shield.

  Some animals appear to be altruistic because we don’t fully understand their motives. They’re actually involved in a subtle form of commerce, an exchange of services or favors, called by scientists “reciprocal altruism.” On the coast of Patagonia, some years ago, I watched mother and baby right whales pausing in a nursery bay on their way to the rich feeding grounds of Antarctica. Males knew they’d find females there, and frequently came into the bay to mate. Working together, a group of three or four males would trap and rape a female. The female would try to avoid mating by rolling onto her back with her vulva in the air, though of course this meant that her blowhole was underwater and she couldn’t breathe. The males would surround her—one on either side and one underneath—so that when she rolled over to breathe one of them would have access to her vulva. It took several males to make sure that even one male could mate, because the female would bolt if she wasn’t trapped. Why did the males cooperate? Probably for two reasons: first, it may be that males join forces with related males, so that the family’s genes will survive, regardless of which male gets to sire the offspring. Second, because it encourages the exchange of favors—one day Fred makes sure Barney gets to mate; the next day Barney makes sure Fred does. When we buy a round-trip ticket, we have the full journey in mind, the outbound and the return. Reciprocal altruism is a round-trip ticket, the second half of which is momentarily hidden.

  What of humans? We are virtuosos of favor-swapping, we love the old quid pro quo, the you-scratch-my-back-I’ll-scratch-yours, the one-hand-washes-the-other. In smug moments, we label this a virtue—”cooperation”—which we praise as a holy act of goodness, trust, and decency. Psychologists don’t like us to feel smug for very long about it. They usually explain it either as hedonism (we perform altruistic acts because they make us feel good, and it’s the pleasure we crave) or an attempt by the ego-damaged to raise their sense of self-worth. The minute one imagines oneself in the victim’s predicament, and moves to save him, it becomes an act of self-love.

  That may be true. But if indeed we are cooperative by nature, it’s an ancient skill, the genes for which got passed along because they gave the more cooperative among us a better chance to survive. The urge to help people in distress is partially learned—some families and cultures prize it more than others—but it’s also deeply rooted in biology. As children grow, they automatically discover compassion. Around the age of two, they start to feel sympathy when they see someone in trouble, and they try to help. Add to this cooperative spirit a preference for the known over the unknown—people prefer what’s familiar, are frightened of what’s new—and you can see how warfare between so-called enemies might evolve as a sort of evolutionary twitch. Cross-cultural studies show that people prefer their family first; in-laws second; neighbors third; also people who remind them of family members, in-laws, or neighbors. Alien faces scare them, and they can be convinced by despots to regard them as subhuman.

  What about self-sacrificing altruism? This can be seen throughout the animal kingdom, especially among insects. Insects are social, too, so it’s tempting to imagine ourselves in their terms. But insects differ from us in one important way: they are closely related to each other, sharing the same gene pool, which they ruthlessly protect. It’s not only in their best interest to work for the common good, they might as well give their all for it. Humans speak lovingly of extended families, but to an ant the whole society is close kin, and it will die rather than allow its genetic line to dry up. Humans, on the other hand, are related in very small, nuclear families which are in glaring competition with one another. Unlike the ants, we must abolish our self-interest to work together, and that’s asking a great deal. It makes altruism all the more remarkable.

  Although this book is mainly concerned with romantic love, there are other varieties—parental, altruistic, religious, patriotic, and so on—which are equally intense and powerful expressions of our hunger to love and be loved. Over the years, I’ve been privy to many acts of kindness, some openly heroic, others simply generous-hearted. The two dramas that follow linger in my memory as examples of deeply felt altruistic love.

  FOR THE LOVE OF CHILDREN: INTERPLAST

  San Pedro Sula sits in the northwest corner of Honduras, between the glyph-covered Mayan stairway at Copan and the coral atolls of the coast. In September, beneath a giant Coca-Cola sign floating like a patron saint on a near hill, the downtown bustles with people keen to run their errands before the hot sticky hours of afternoon cascade into thick humid nights. On a tree-shaded street in the center of town stands San Pedro Sula’s public hospital, a sprawling maze of one-story buildings, porticoes, and courtyards. Its corrugated roofs have grown rusty over the years, and the peeling walls are painted pink and maroon, with a ribbon of green, yellow, and red (the national colors) dancing at eye level. Outdoor benches, overflowing with patients and their families, sit on a checkerboard of yellow and green tiles. People fill the wards, crowd the walkways, and spill into the courtyards. Many of life’s joys and afflictions are on parade: a woman with a machete wound just delivered by a jealous lover slowly enters the eye clinic; a badly burned man, cocooned in gauze, hobbles out of the men’s ward to get some fresh air; a man in a straw hat, holding the elbow of a pregnant woman, guides her toward a sign that says FARMACIA; a man and a woman exchange rapid, staccato accusations, while their hands make small slashes in the air; a young mother sits in a corner, nursing a baby, in her eyes the narcotic of her love; twin boys, each with a cleft mouth, race toy trucks along the cement. Here and there a policeman sits on a bench, rifle at his side, guarding a prisoner in a ward. Two parents and a little boy picnic under a cashew tree, its thick branches heavy with curved green nuts. A mango tree offers shade to a Honduran nurse, a pretty curly haired woman in her twenties, who methodically peels an orange until the rind looks like a projection of the world. Though she is shaded and sitting, sweat beads on her face. In Honduras, the sun’s opus grants a lavish array of fruits—mangoes, bananas, papayas, oranges, pineapples, and some of the sweetest grapefruits on earth. But, even sitting still, one is covered in a sticky, humid film. When you move, sweat saturates your clothes. Nonetheless, people often wear long sleeves and trousers; dengue fever, endemic in Honduras, is carried by mosquitoes, and there is no cure for it.

  Across the courtyard, in the clinic waiting room, a hundred people sit back-to-back on long train-station benches. All are waiting to see the doctors of Interplast, an organization based in Palo Alto, California, which for the past twenty years has been sending out volunteers to provide reconstructive surgery to needy children in the third world. Donald Laub got the idea for Interplast in 1965, when, as chief of plastic and reconstructive surgery at Stanford University Medical Center, he repaired the cleft lip and palate of a fourteen-year-old boy from Central America. The experience moved him profoundly, and he volunteered more and more time for such operations, finally enlisting the help of colleagues. In 1969, he founded Interplast, to repair children riddled by birth defects, but also to train host-country doctors in the latest techniques, and help them set up burn units. Among the handful of reconstructive groups of this sort, Interplast is one of the largest and best run. It has already changed the lives of 18,000 children with a wide range of deformities. In 1990 alone, Interplast sent medical teams on twenty trips, to Honduras, Ecuador, Peru, Colombia, Nepal, Mexico, Chile, Brazil, Western Samoa, and Jamaica. Its surgeons operated on 1,313 patients, provided 15,000 free teaching hours, and donated $3,209,840 worth of surgeries. Five hundred dollars covers the cost of one child’s operation, and as little as $15,000 will finance an entire trip. Most of Interplast’s money comes from individual donors. Despite the generosity of corporations, which provide anesthesia, antibiotics, and other necessities, on occasio
n the teams have had to cut short their trips and turn children away because they ran out of an essential supply like sutures.

  A typical team includes four surgeons, four anesthesiologists, six nurses, a pediatrician, and three support personnel. Although I have no medical training, I’ve joined the group as one of the support people, to help out wherever possible. Housed with local families, a team works with their Honduran counterparts; and high school students act as translators. David Fogarty, a plastic surgeon from Morgantown, West Virginia, usually acts as team leader. He donates a month or more every year to traveling with Interplast to locales from Cuzco to Nepal. When children need repairs that can’t be done in their own country, they’re sent to the United States as part of Interplast’s domestic program. The Fogartys have seven children of their own—two of them adopted (a girl from Honduras, a black American boy) and he often takes in Interplast children and operates on them himself.

  GUARDE SILENCIO a printed sign commands from one wall, but the room is abuzz with adults chattering to one another, parents comforting children, and children playing with small toys or occasionally crying. A large thermometer, part of an Alka-Seltzer sign, gives the temperature indoors as 90°F. A wall clock, part of a Phillips Milk of Magnesia sign, says that it is only 9:30 A.M. A thick line of people winds among the benches. Parents have brought children with lost or malformed eyes, children with cleft lips and twisted feet, children with webbed hands, children with bad burns. Mingling with them are the success stories: children returning for touch-up operations, or to have their progress checked. Some families have been waiting for twenty-four hours, others have traveled great distances, on foot and by bus, from the mountains and the coast. Babies are being fed or changed; older children play or lie sleeping. Overhead, two large fans turn slowly, stirring but not cooling the hot, soupy air. At either side of the maroon-and-cream hallway stand resin-colored doors, and above each is a hand-drawn number on a wooden plaque.