"Closeness can lead to emotions other than love. It's the ones who have been too intimate with you, lived in too close quarters, seen too much of your pain or envy or, perhaps more than anything, your shame, who, at the crucial moment, can be too easy to cut out, to exile, to expel, to kill off."(130-131)
Lucy Odoms, the heroine of Josephine Humphrey's Rich In Love, claims to be rich in love; when her brother-in-law Billy McQueen tells her "You have a lot of love," she readily agrees, thinking to herself "that was me. That was the me"(160).
Lucy professes to love a lot of things. However, her love seems rather general and diffuse. Seconding Mendelsohn's point, her love might be attributed to the distance Lucy attempts to maintain between herself and the world. She doesn't admit to seeking distance. Instead, she speaks of her attachment to panoramic views and the therapeutic perspective they afford.
Her father shares her feelings on this matter. A demolition man who claims he can tell how a building will collapse from standing on its roof, he recalls a religious experience he had standing on the roof of a condemned hotel in Columbia, South Carolina, prior to its demolition. From this vantage, "he felt queerly lifted from his own life into a clan and qiet myth"(81).Later, together with his daughter on the roof of their house, he tells her "from above, the world looks, well gorgeous. The higher you go, the better it looks" (84).
Lucy's ex-boyfriend Wayne points out that she is "happy as long as [she] can see at least three hundred yards. That's when you're at your best. I think you're afraid something is going to sneak up on you"(138). Lucy argues for "the human need for vista," and confesses "without it, I am in danger of losing myself behind my own eyes...A person has to now and then break out of the head and heart, places that cannot over any length of time, support life"(132-133).
Proximity clouds one's view. However, when she suddenly grows close, literally and figuratively, to her brother-in-law Billy McQueen, her clouded vision of him plays a part in her falling in love with him. Sitting on the pier with him, she admits to having once suspected that he "had gotten Rae pregnant on purpose in order to marry her. But suddenly I could see that he was not that sort of person. I saw it only now because I had not been close enough to him before"(154). Of course, in this scene, "his face two feet from [hers] in the moonlight," Lucy is falling in love with Billy. Shortly, he will "recognize" her being rich in love. Of course, Lucy later discovers that Billy did indeed get Rae pregnant on purpose.
And, also, I think we discover that far from being rich in love, Lucy is scared of love. Love is a cloud that impairs vision and knowledge. She grows so blind, she isn't able to 'see' her she's grown blind. In the past, she's recoiled from intimacy with Wayne; in the past, when they grew close, "the feeling that I called 'blinders' assailed me, and I had to get free"(161). Shortly after falling in love with Billy, she meets Wayne again and they begin to make love. Lucy claims that "'blinders' did not come"(161). Yet, she never really sees Wayne during the course of their love-making. Instead, she's wrapped up, however unconsciously, in a vision of Billy while making love to Wayne. Reversing the sleeping beauty motif, love lulls her to sleep, and, asleep in love, she begins to dream away rather than live her life.
So, proximity might bring about awareness and antipathy. Yet, it might also bring about a clouding of vision. This clouding of vision may bring about love. This in turn may induce dreams and a further clouding of vision.
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