“She is an object of my love, my affection.  As I am hers. So my love for her is about her, and her love for me is about me.”

“But you and Bette… that’s different.”

He paused, searching for the right words. “With you and Bette, love is not just about the other, not just an attitude toward the other.  Love is an emotion you share with one another.   So this love is not so much about you, or about her, but about the world you share, a unique world you share with one another.”

He paused, and they shared a companionable silence.

Then he asked, “Why do you love Bette, Tina?”

She shook her head, “I don’t love her because of something, Logan.   Or because of a list of why’s.  I don’t love her for a set of reasons, or for the million positive attributes she has.  If it was, then another person who could possibly fill the same set of ideal characteristics could come along, and I could love that person just as much.  I know that that’s not the case.”

She wanted to be careful with her words, too.  “Bette and I are lightning in a bottle.  We created a world, a “loveworld” where we play lovers, in the many senses of that word. And where we created the better versions of ourselves.”

“But,” she continued, “ I realize now that this world is not the only one we live in.  We also had our individual work “worlds,” and we grew apart, absorbed with other things.  In a way, we found this loveworld was fragile; and I found, to my dismay, that I was not strong enough, and allowed these terrible influences that began to overwhelm me, and caused me to come unhinged, to break through.  Although, over a couple of months this past winter, through therapy, we eventually found a way to rebuild this precious world, as you rightly said, I had to accept that I would have to make peace with what I had done, at the risk of destroying this loveworld completely.”

“So now, although the love exists; our world no longer does.”

And I have no idea whether it ever will, again.

xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx

(The morning after Bette and Tina started talking, in Chapter XII.  The scene begins in Bette’s hotel outside of central Paris)