by
Tessa Hadley
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[...] She was more used to her mother’s writing on shopping lists or birthday cards, or in contained, funny little postcard messages from holidays abroad. It was excruciating for her to see this turmoil exposed, garrulous and banally confessional as a teenager’s: like a mature person falling down in the street, all their accumulated self-possession turned to heaviness.
Of all things, Alex and Lydia had this in common – the loss of Zachary; there was some literal, physical sense in which their lovemaking assuaged their loss. Lydia was generous with herself, with her body – Alex took possession of her greedily, overwhelmed by the release and the relief of the sweetness they went seeking in the dark. There had been other women once or twice, in the years since he’d been married to Christine, but he’d backed off from something glib and counterfeit in those affairs. To his relief, Lydia wasn’t sexually athletic or competitive. Certain revelations of her character – reserves of her self kept back, like candles saved up to light a cellar or a cave – could only be had, he thought, through this sexual connection with her. He began to see how her intelligence was not wide-ranging but concentrated, and how she was remarkably without illusions, and stubbornly wedded to one or two ideas from her early youth. She was frank with him but never spilled over with self-doubt or asked for reassurance, nor did she want to know his secrets.
In the Campo Ghetto Nuovo the five of them sat drinking Campari in the last warmth of a May evening – the spring’s heat was still tentative, hadn’t consolidated yet into summer. The women pulled light scarves around their shoulders. The rosy, dusky air was filled with the effervescent spritzing of darting swallows; yeshiva scholars with sidelocks came in and out of lit rooms belonging to some American foundation. Too many tourists drifted through the square, breaking up the picture, disproportionate to the substratum of local life, which nonetheless maintained its steady purposefulness, pretending to be oblivious of them – men heading home swinging briefcases, old ladies gossiping indignantly on the bridges, children’s high musical voices glancing in rapid flight, like the swallows, against the water and along the walls of pinkish brick and stucco. A cake shop was open, selling dolci ebraici, thin rolls of pastry stuffed with almond paste. They felt the guilt of being tourists, of Venice unravelling at its edges – and for so many decades and centuries now – into something frayed and spoiled. But it was also all exquisite and exalting: they had come from the Madonna dell’Orto full of Tintorettos, and this was the second Campari. Where could one go in the whole world, seriously, and not feel guilty?
When finally they were standing beneath the famous ceiling in the Sala, she was exceptionally receptive not because she was prepared, but because she wasn’t. It caught her out in her passivity, the blank of apprehension she presented to it. A pale clear light came in through windows composed of rounds of glass like bottle-ends; voices in the street outside were remote as the swallows’ shrieking. Dizzily she turned round and round where she stood, staring up, making her neck ache, trying to disentangle individual figures – whose foot is that, whose legs are those? – from the billows of gorgeous drapery, masses of rich form soaring against empty skies. She seemed to experience these colours – sumptuous pinks and gold and pale green – on her skin, the bodies’ torsion in her own muscles. Every ordinary day, while their lives went on elsewhere, the Virgin presided in here, a superb queen – and the force of the angels’ strong wings was like great birds’, so that you felt the updraught of their movement. She was in the presence of what was momentous. And in one corner was an awful darkness – an open grave, bones, brown filth, suffering, two hands emerging from a cloud, forming between fingers and thumbs an O for nothingness.
Carefully she tried to steady her voice, as if she were warning him – or warning herself. — But I so love our London afternoons at home. When you come round and it’s raining and I make tea, Alex is at school, we sit and talk. I never even mind that you’ve interrupted my work: you’re the only one, I’m horrible with anyone else who bothers me.
— Well exactly, I love those rainy afternoons too, very much.
— I couldn’t want anything like that to change.
— Nothing would have to change. We could go on afterwards just as we did before. We’d never mention it, even to each other: as if it hadn’t happened. Except that it would have.
Above them on the ceiling an angel composed of creamy light was about to catch a man falling back with outflung arms from a high scaffold, swooping to scoop him up with such grace and lack of haste, and a long loving look – as if through this act every catastrophe could be held off, everything could be saved.
The other episode went further, yet was more ordinary. A teaching assistant had joined his class, she was pretty and flirted with him, and once, when the staff had drinks after school, they kissed lingeringly in the car park. Then he drew back from her, with some relief. After all he had Lydia now. It was both a thirst and a blessing, the late renewal of his erotic life. When he was young he’d been too absorbed in the problem of himself to appreciate possibilities blooming around him everywhere. Now, how long before the women only looked at him with distaste, or pity? He thought that he understood his father at last, how he had accepted this pursuit of women as if it were in lieu of every kind of outward honour. Sex looked like a cheap trick from the outside, but in its moment it burned up the world. You could not have everything: the whole wisdom of life amounted to that. Whatever you had, was instead of something else.
And then after all that fuss of anticipation she didn’t much like the paintings. They bored her: that possibility hadn’t occurred to her, it really was a surprise. There was no danger of her shedding tears. It wasn’t that she thought they were false or pretentious exactly: she could imagine the very authentic journey the artist had made towards these big pale canvases with their silver and grey and wheat colours, their painstaking exact grids and geometries, fine as quilting. In pursuit of some truth of the spirit she had refined away every intrusion of ugly life: all the dirty marks it made, all its aggression and banally literal languages. There were some beautiful effects of paint: Christine liked one work in particular, where the acrylic wash had run between grey stripes into denser forms, like rain clouds. But the end result, nonetheless, seemed to her puritanical, and too wholesome and homespun: even sentimental, in its conviction of the possibility of purity, like a sentimental mysticism. You had to be so vigilant, if you banished all obvious meanings from the front of your art, that they didn’t return unobserved by the back door.
I’d found someone for whom making art was central and being in a relationship was incidental. I loved sitting in a room with John, both of us on our laptops, working silently, fiercely. I could feel our energies awake and together. We didn’t need anything else from each other.
But by then I knew that John was often the one who arrived late to a party, overstayed his welcome, and forgot the gift. When I asked him if he’d be better off with a servant-wife than a human wife, he said, I get up and shower and have breakfast waiting for me, and nine times out of ten you do the laundry and think about dinner and remind me to mail things and make phone calls…I can’t imagine anyone being more helpful.
He gave me a look of love. I felt wonderful. Then I felt trapped.
And yet no married woman I knew was any better off, so I determined to carry on. After all, a person can be grandiose without being a clinical narcissist. And I was a control freak, a neat freak, a crazy person. A long time ago, in my twenties, I’d even spent ten days on a psych ward after a hospital-administered overdose of steroids for my autoimmune condition. John seemed awed by that hospitalization. He seemed to think it was cool, that I was a legitimately mad artist, touched with fire.
I decided to examine my rage, determine what I needed, and rely on John for no part of it. I imagined never needing to ask him for anything ever again.
I thought, If I had the energy I’d leave him, and then I folded up that little thought, wrapped it in gauze, and swallowed it.