The question came to me while I was taking breakfast on the patio at noon. What had I most wanted from this life during my 82 years? What did I most want in the years left to me?
The answer came immediately in a short phrase I had never been visited with before. What I have most wanted all my life, without really knowing it, and what I want now and for the rest of my days, has been for someone to look into my face with love.
I don’t mean merely that the person love me. (Some “merely”!) I mean that the person look at me with love. My mother and father loved me, but I don’t remember either of them ever looking at me with love. Nor did my first wife. Nor do my sons or grandchildren. Nor can I remember my many friends of a lifetime looking at me with love. As I sat on the patio in the wonderful, sad light of September as it filtered through the leaves over my head, I realized how very rarely I have seen that look of love. During certain stretches of time it has been rarer than an island in the Pacific, a two- or three-mile outcropping in an otherwise vacant body of water larger than all the land on the globe, so large and so vacant one could crisscross that ocean many times without ever coming upon another such island.
Only one person looked in my face with love nearly every day we were together: my second wife, Kathy. She has been gone almost 8 years now, and no day passes that I don’t remember her face looking into mine with beaming love. It wasn’t desire for sex or for anything else. It was simply the joy in her face gained simply from looking at me. She looked at me that way nearly every day for the 24 years she was in my life. Even through 11 years of Alzheimer’s disease. Even through the very last and worst of those years, when she no longer had language or could toilet or shower by herself. Even to the very last of those days, all I had to do to see that look was to look at her from across a room with my own look of love — just my look, no spoken words — and her face would break into joy and she would gush, “Oh, thank you!” as if I had given her the whole world.
I have countless photographs of her looking at me with love. One of my favorites is in a simple plastic slipcase pinned to my refrigerator by a magnet. Her face is turned up toward mine, and mine down toward hers. It was taken in 2007, and I am wearing a greenish-blue polo shirt. Her face looks like sunshine. That is the look I have wanted all my life. Every time I open the drawer where that shirt is stored, I remember her face that day.
In another favorite, we are sitting looking into each other’s eyes at the end of a dinner party at a dear friend’s house. She is wearing a dress she wore many times, as only she could wear that dress, and I am in a suit and tie. Behind us is an illuminated china cabinet. But those are just the trappings. What matters is the look of love on both our faces.
The morning after I asked and answered my question — What do I most want from this life? — I was standing at the kitchen window taking my early morning pills and looking through the window at two large saucers of water I put out each summer and autumn for birds to drink from and bathe in. I had taken the saucers in during the three weeks I was away on my annual visit to Walloon Lake. When I returned, I put the saucers out again, all clean and filled with fresh water — but the birds did not come back. I don’t know why they stopped coming. Where did they go? I wonder that every morning when I take my pills and look through the window at the unvisited saucers. This morning, remembering yesterday’s reverie of seeing again my wife’s look of love, I realized that that may well have been the look on my face each morning as I watched the birds drinking and bathing. Each morning I looked at those birds with love. I couldn’t see my own face, but I knew how I felt inside, and I knew how I talked to the birds through the window, and I knew how that feeling of joy came over me as I watched and talked. I hope that was the look I gave my wife each day, but I know well that I often failed her, and I wonder how she was able to keep giving me her look when I failed to return it — for that is what the look of love demands: that we mirror it back to the one who looks at us with love.
Standing before that window, seeing my own dim reflection in it, I was aware that throughout our lives we humans are circling in the sky like birds seeking prey. We spend our lives circling, looking. For many of us, early on, we think it is success, fame, power, money, sex we are after, and we dive out of the sky to snatch up those things. Only after we have had them for a while do we realize they are not the food we most want. What we most want, I am declaring to you, is for others to look into our faces with love.
What makes up this look? Openness. Welcome. Vulnerability (for if one loves, one is vulnerable). Kindness. Real presence. And the rarest thing of all: Joy. It is the delight taken from looking at the other. Sometimes this joy is quiet, sometimes outrageously present. But such joy is not at all the same thing as that terribly American thing: fun. Almost everyone on a dating site feels compelled to claim he or she is fun. No quality is more mentioned than fun. It is a word in italics on all dating sites. But few speak of joy because joy is much harder to come by, immeasurably deeper, and nearly impossible to fake. One sees an amalgam of these qualities — openness, welcome, vulnerability, kindness, presence — in the face of someone looking at another face with love — but especially one sees joy. And the cause of that joy is the face one is looking at.
Want to know the likeliest place to find this look? The faces of loving mothers, especially during their first years of motherhood. The sweetest, luckiest thing a child may ever get is the look of love on his or her mother’s face. The twinkle in a mother’s eyes may become the beacon of a child’s life the rest of his or her days. It is the one gift that truly lasts a lifetime. This is where we first learn what we most want in this world. And then, in our quests for success, fame and fortune, we forget it.
Until one day we are old and sitting in the sun and we find it again.
I was reminded this evening of that look during the homily at Mass. The priest was talking of his favorite moment each day, at 2:45 p.m., when the children under 5 come out of school across the street from the rectory and wait sitting on the grass for their parents to pull up in cars to take them home. As soon as many children see their mother or father opening the car door, they throw out their arms toward their parent and their faces burst into joy at the face of their mother or father. It is the priest’s favorite moment of the day, and it is a look that can sustain a parent through all the hardships of the teen years and the inevitable breaking away of those children in their teens and 20s. That look of love will remain in the hearts of those parents for the rest of their lives.
A week ago, cruising the aisles of Costco, I realized that besides looking for pecans, cheese and pasta sauce, I was also looking into the faces of my fellow shoppers to see who was pretty or handsome and who was not, who had dignity and bearing and who did not, who was successful and who was not. And in that moment I realized I was also searching for the look of love in these faces. I didn’t expect to see the actual thing manifested in the store, and certainly not toward me — though I didn’t completely bury that hope — but I was hoping I would see a few faces that showed at least the capacity to look into another face with love. And then, after some reflection and memory right there in the aisles, I was astonished to realize I had secretly been looking into faces to find this look of love for decades — without even knowing I was doing it.
What I found that day was scores of faces preoccupied with shopping, faces dulled by dailiness, faces enduring lives of hardship, faces passing through space but not really present. But here or there I caught sight of the openness, the vulnerability, the kindness, the readiness for joy that hinted this face would be able to look into another face with love. Whenever I saw such a face, I tried to catch the owner’s eyes and return the look. I knew no one would be conscious of what was happening. It would be just a flicker and then it would be gone. Only I would know what had transpired.
Does the admission of my realization strike you as strange? Maybe even creepy? I expect some readers will think so. But I also expect those readers have lived much of their lives on autopilot, seldom venturing outside their comfort zones, and that those comfort zones were established early. I also expect those readers have seldom looked into the eyes of others with a look of love — even if they love those others.
Why are so many people unable to look into other faces with love? Why have I never read an essay like the one I am writing? Why is this topic not in the front of our lives? Why is this essay so weird? I don’t know the answers to these questions. I only know that I have never read another essay about wanting to look into faces that looked back with love. It’s as if we are admitting that such searching is a badge of shame. But I do not feel at all ashamed, only glad to be saying this weird thing out loud after so many years of carrying it around unconsciously. And why has it been unconscious? Why does it come to both the reader and me as a revelation?
Why is the world not admitting to its seeking the look of love? It does admit to seeking glittering attractiveness. Nothing hidden about that quest. Just look at the covers of nearly every magazine at the checkout counters of big-box grocery stores. Twenty ways to dump calories, burn fat, hide wrinkles, shape muscles, curve legs, butts and breasts, sculpt the face. Stars and starlets look out from these covers with smiles and suntans, flirting with (and manipulating) potential readers to buy these magazines if they too want to be attractive and sexy.
But attractive though they may be, few actors or actresses have the look of love. Marilyn Monroe was surely beautiful, and she could conjure sexuality, desire, availability in her face, but not, I think, the look of love. Cary Grant is probably the greatest icon of male handsomeness — and is one of my favorite movie stars — but I can’t remember a single moment where he conveyed the look of love. I can only think of a few movie stars who do have it.
Ingrid Bergman is one of them. That moment in Casablanca where she is looking up at Bogie with crystalline eyes beneath a wide-brimmed hat: I will let it stand for the many moments in that film where a similar look is present. But even more than these iconic moments, I am thinking of the real Ingrid Bergman — the person, not the actress. I am among the fortunate few to have seen the documentary of her life, Ingrid Bergman: In Her Own Words, put together from the home movies and photographs she and her family had shot. It came and went from movie theaters in 2015 with no more than the faintest ripple of notice. Luckily, it came to my tiny movie theater, and I went. I was so taken by the look of love that flickered in Bergman’s face all through the film that I went back two days later and watched it again. I wasn’t there to see a movie star. I was there each time to see her face shining out that look of love.
Audrey Hepburn is another who sometimes had that real thing in her face. Especially in Roman Holiday, Sabrina and Charade. But the real thing is even more evident in a small movie about her life I saw by accident on Netflix. As I was sorting through available titles, I came upon Audrey: More Than an Icon, and there, flickering in and out, was once again that look of love.
Donna Reed often had it. I am especially remembering her performance in It’s a Wonderful Life. So did Julie Andrews, most memorably in The Sound of Music.
Tyrone Power had the look playing Larry Darrell in The Razor’s Edge (1946), but Bill Murray, who played the same role in a remake 38 years later, did not. Walter Pidgeon has it as Captain Thorndike in Man Hunt, though he is not at all in love with the woman who saves him, played by Joan Bennett. He is on the run from Nazi thugs who have him trapped from both ends of a city block in London when he ducks into a doorway just as the prostitute who lives there is going out to earn her money for the night. He clasps his hand over her mouth, and they hide in her apartment. Though they come from opposite ends of the social spectrum — he is a famous big-game hunter from a very visible high-society family — he begins to care deeply for this woman without ever being in love with her. It is one of my all-time favorite films. I’ve watched it maybe 10 times now. I treasure it in large part for the way Thorndike treats this woman, for the look of love he gives to her.
But no man on screen equals Gregory Peck for the look of love. It is there when he plays a priest in Keys to the Kingdom, another favorite of mine that no one watches anymore. And it is there in Roman Holiday and many other films, but it was also there in real-life photographs and his appearances at the Academy Awards.
By now you are surely aware that the look of love isn’t the same from face to face, just as beauty isn’t the same from face to face. The accidents may change dramatically, but the essence remains. That is true for both physical beauty and the look of love.
One woman in my youth had this look. Though I haven’t seen her or heard her name in more than 60 years, I can still see that look in her face, still hear her voice, still remember the name we knew her by: Dottie. She had two sisters, neither of whom even came close to this look. I saw her at Christmas each year from when I was 10 till I was about 18. During that time she lost her very handsome and kind husband, still in his 30s, a man she much loved; but the look of love never left her face. It was the way she looked at me through sparkling eyes and talked to me with real attention as if I were the only person in the room.
And then those Christmas gatherings came to an end, and I never saw her again. But I still think of her, remember her, want to know how life played out and whether that look of love lasted till the end. I suspect it didn’t, and, given the heartache and broken dreams life is for all of us, why would I expect it to last to the end? It is enough I saw it for eight or nine Christmases. They have lasted me a lifetime. For that is the power of the look of love. You don’t forget it, and it will shape you without your ever knowing you are being shaped.
Writing about Dottie reminds me of my encounter with David Brooks’ The Road to Character. The book came my way when Charlie Rose was interviewing Brooks about it, shortly after my wife died in March 2015. Brooks said the inspiration for it was a Catholic priest he knew who was “insanely joyous.” That was enough for me to get the book, for I was in the deepest grief of my life and needed all the joy I could find.
Now, thumbing through that book again seven years later, I come upon these sentences near the end of its introduction. Brooks is speaking about people who possess what he calls “eulogy virtues,” virtues that make one good, rather than the “resume virtues” that make one successful. These people, he writes, “radiate a sort of moral joy. . . . They are not thinking about themselves at all. They just seem delighted by the flawed people around them. They just recognize what needs doing and they do it. They make you feel funnier and smarter when you speak with them. . . . After you’ve known them for a while it occurs to you that you’ve never heard them boast, you’ve never seen them self-righteous or doggedly certain. They aren’t dropping little hints of their own distinctiveness and accomplishments.”
Brooks and I are not writing about exactly the same thing, but I see an enormous amount of overlap. He is focusing on the character of such people, and I am focusing on a certain look in their faces when they are looking at you. We want to be with such people as often and for as long as we can. We are more alive when we are with them, happier when we are with them; and we feel a noticeable emptiness in the world when we are away from them. They may not be insanely joyous, but they do find joy in us and they give that joy back to us.
It can happen almost anywhere, but it often happens when we are not expecting such a look. A week ago I had to visit my local hospital for tests at 7:30 a.m. In the lobby a woman was greeting entrants. She was wearing a mask, but above the mask, her eyes looked at me with joy, as if I were the only person she was going to greet that day. In that fraction of a second, I was so taken aback that I gushed out my gratitude to her for looking at me with joy. “But I’m wearing a mask,” she said, “how can you tell?” “Your eyes,” I said, “and the huge smile around your eyes.” A few days later, when I returned for more tests, I looked for her, but she was not there. Wherever she is, I know she is giving others that same look of love.
If we have not found others with that look in our lives, or if we have found those others and lost them through separation or death, we will search again for it, though we may not at all be aware we are conducting such a search. It may well be a surreptitious hunt hidden even from those of us doing the searching. But why are we on such a search?
I came upon the most profound answer to this question recently while reading Paul Tillich’s collection of sermons titled The Eternal Now. In the first sermon, “Loneliness and Solitude,” he addresses the most elemental facts of our existence: that each human being is alone, and that he knows he is alone, and that such aloneness is unendurable, and so each human being spends his life reaching across the boundaries imposed upon him by his separate body to others who are alone in their separate bodies, too. Tillich’s ultimate answer to the problem of loneliness is far more profound than mine. He suggests we seek genuine solitude in which “the center of our being, the innermost self that is the ground of our aloneness, is elevated to the divine center and taken into it.” I expect Tillich is right — and he spends a great part of his sermon unpacking this thought — but I also expect few of us are capable of such solitude for an extended time. And so we all seek, and shall continue to seek, the look of love in others’ faces for as long as we humans shall endure on this earth.
Mel Livatino lives in Evanston, Illinois. A regular contributor to this magazine, he has published in The Sewanee Review, Portland and other journals. Since 2004, 12 of these pieces have been named notable essays of the year by the series Best American Essays, and he has recorded more than 50 of them for Recorded Recreational Reading for the Blind in Sun City, Arizona.