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“SO WHAT HAPPENED?” I asked Toby on the phone. I’d loved the Nahid story—this prisoner trying to gain freedom for herself through the random secret fucking of men in her apartment. It was like a dirty fairy tale.
“She just wasn’t who I thought she was,” he said.
“What was she?”
“She was just regular.”
I was heading into the city. My train was about to go into the tunnel. “I have to go,” I told him.
“Okay, talk later.”
“Have you ever considered that you’re kind of an asshole?”
yeah she's right
I watched a couple go by, burrowing into each other so that they were nearly facing each other but still walking forward, like on the cover of that Bob Dylan album. I pitied them. I saw the girl in the couple, who couldn’t have been more than twenty-four, and I knew now that in a few years, that girl would be just some guy’s wife. She would be someone her husband referred to as angry—as angry and dour and a nag. He would wonder where her worship went; he would wonder where her smiles were. He would wonder why she never broke out in laughter; why she never wore lingerie; why her underwear, once lacy and dangerous, was now cotton and white; why she didn’t like it from behind anymore; why she never got on top. The sacred organism of the marriage—the thing that prevented him from opening up to his friends about his marital woes—would be the last thing to go. The fortress where they kept their secrets would begin to crack, and he would push water through those cracks when he would begin to confide in his friends. He would get enough empathy and nods of understanding so that he would begin to wonder exactly what he had to gain from remaining with someone so bitter, someone who no longer appreciated him for who he was, and life’s too short, man, life’s too short. He would divorce her and what these divorces were all about was a lack of forgiveness: She would not forgive him for not being more impressed by her achievements than inhibited by his own sensitivities; he would not forgive her for being a star that shone so brightly that he couldn’t see his own reflection in the mirror anymore. But also, divorce is about forgetfulness—a decision to stop remembering the moment before all the chaos—the moment they fell in love, the moment they knew they were more special together than apart. Marriages live in service to the memory of those moments. Their marriage would not forgive them for getting older, and they would not forgive their marriage for witnessing it. This guy would sit with his friends and he would not be able to figure out how all this went so wrong. But she would know; I would know.
aaaahhhh
Rachel and I, we’d been raised to do what we wanted to do, and we had; we’d been successful, and we’d shown everyone. We didn’t need to wear apocryphal T-shirts because we already knew the secret, which was this: that when you did succeed, when you did outearn and outpace, when you did exceed all expectations, nothing around you really shifted. You still had to tiptoe around the fragility of a man, which was okay for the women who got to shop and drink martinis all day—this was their compensation; they had done their own negotiations—but was absolutely intolerable for anyone who was out there working and getting respect and becoming the person that others had to tiptoe around. That these men could be so delicate, that they could lack any inkling of self-examination when it came time to try to figure out why their women didn’t seem to be batshit enthusiastic over another night of bolstering and patting and fellating every insecurity out of them—this was the thing we’d find intolerable.
That summer, I treated poor Adam like a roommate. I came home late. I ordered Chinese food for dinner again and again. He mentioned once that I was ordering Chinese a lot and so I ordered Thai. I dared him in the mornings to ask me questions so that I could tell him about how I didn’t know how to live anymore. God, I wanted to say, how are you supposed to live like this, knowing you used to answer to no one? How is this the arc we set for ourselves as a successful life? But he’d never understand that. He had the life he wanted. So did I. And yet. And yet and yet and yet and yet and yet.
What were you going to do? Were you not going to get married when your husband was the person who understood you and loved you and rooted for you forever, no matter what? Were you not going to have your children, whom you loved and who made all the collateral damage (your time, your body, your lightness, your darkness) worth it? Time was going to march on anyway. You were not ever going to be young again. You were only at risk for not remembering that this was as good as it would get, in every single moment—that you are right now as young as you’ll ever be again. And now. And now. And now and now and now.
[...] I would try not to put too much weight on the moments that are the worst in marriage: when one of you is in a good mood and the other can’t recognize it or rise to its occasion and so leaves the other dangling in the loneliness of it; when one of you pretends to not really understand what the other person is saying and instead holds that person to a technicality they don’t deserve.
Something else keeps me from confessing that I’m writing: it’s the regret that I spend so much time doing it. I often complain that I have too many things to do, that I’m the family servant, the household slave—that I never have a moment to read a book, for example. That’s all true, but in a certain sense that servitude has also become my strength, the halo of my martyrdom. So on those rare occasions when I happen to take a nap for half an hour before Michele and the children return for dinner, or when I take a walk, gazing in the shop windows on the way home from the office, I never confess it. I’m afraid that if I admitted I’d enjoyed even a short rest or some diversion, I would lose the reputation I have of dedicating every second of my time to the family. No one would remember the countless hours I spend in the office or in the kitchen or shopping or mending but only the brief moments I confessed I’d spent reading a book or taking a walk. Michele is always urging me to get some rest, and Riccardo says that as soon as he’s able to earn money, he’ll take me on vacation to Capri or the Riviera. Recognizing my weariness frees him of every responsibility. So they often repeat, severely, “You should rest,” as if not resting were a whim of mine. But in practice, as soon as they see me sitting and reading a newspaper they say, “Mamma, since you have nothing to do, could you mend the lining of my jacket? Could you iron my pants?” and so on.
So, gradually, I, too, have been convinced of it. In the office, when we get a day off, I immediately announce that I’m going to use it to catch up on various projects and add that I’d already planned to do that. I make sure that I won’t stay home and rest, because, if I did, in the eyes of the family that one day would have the appearance of an entire month of repose. Years ago, I was invited by a friend to spend a week in a country house in Tuscany. I was very tired when I left, because I had arranged things so that Michele and the children would be entirely taken care of during my absence and, on returning, I found endless chores that had accumulated during my brief vacation. And yet, later that year, if I ever mentioned that I was tired, they all reminded me that I had been on vacation and surely my body must have benefited from it. No one seemed to understand that a week of vacation in August couldn’t keep me from being tired in October. If I sometimes say, “I don’t feel well,” Michele and the children fall into a brief, respectful, awkward silence. Then I get up, return to doing what I must. No one makes a move to help me, but Michele cries, “Look, you say you don’t feel well and you’re not still for a moment.” Shortly afterward, they resume talking about this and that, and the children, going out, urge me: “Rest, OK?” Riccardo gives me a threatening little wag of his finger as if warning me against going out to have fun. Only fever, a high fever, allows any of us in the family to believe that we’re truly ill. Fever worries Michele, and the children bring me orange juice. But I rarely have a fever; never, I would say. On the other hand, I’m always tired and no one believes me. And yet tranquility for me originates precisely in the tiredness I feel when I lie in bed at night. There I find a sort of happiness in which I feel peaceful and fall asleep. I have to recognize that, perhaps, the determination with which I protect myself from any possibility of rest is the fear of losing this single source of happiness, which is tiredness.
Again, tonight I stayed up wrapping packages for the children. Michele wanted to keep me company and I said, “No, thanks, you go ahead, go to bed.” But it was because, afterward, I intended to write. Now, under everything I do and say, there’s the presence of this notebook. I never would have believed that everything that happens to me in the course of a day would be worth writing down. My life always appeared rather insignificant, without remarkable events, apart from my marriage and the birth of the children. Instead, ever since I happened to start keeping a diary, I seem to have discovered that a word or an intonation can be just as important, or even more, than the facts we’re accustomed to consider important. If we can learn to understand the smallest things that happen every day, then maybe we can learn to truly understand the secret meaning of life. But I don’t know if it’s a good thing, I’m afraid not.
I didn’t have the courage to confess that, on the contrary, these things do happen to us; it seemed to me that it wasn’t true. I said weakly, hiding behind a smile, “Yes, you’re right, but let’s speculate, let’s suppose that Mirella’s attitudes become too free, that she stays out late and I don’t like her expression when she returns … ” He interrupted me, annoyed: “I don’t want to hear you say that, even as a joke.” “All right,” I continued, in the same tone. “Then let’s say she comes home with expensive gifts that a man gave her and explains them with a lie, like that night, you remember? When she said she went out with Giovanna and instead went dancing. Let’s imagine she says she wants to live an easy life, in whatever way, by whatever means … ” Michele replied that he would never allow her to speak like that in his house. I objected that the time is past when a father could say “I won’t allow it” and the daughter had to obey because he provided food, clothing, lodging. Now, whether it’s good or bad, I don’t know, but a girl like Mirella can say, “I’m leaving home and going to work.” Then Michele said he didn’t want to waste his time listening to this absurd conversation, I had nothing to do, evidently, if I got lost in these speculations, he had the paper to read, I was never interested in the international situation, I didn’t realize what was happening in the world. I said I am very well aware of it and in fact these problems don’t seem unrelated. He said, “What could they possibly have to do with each other?” I didn’t know what to say, but I feel that way.
[...] I’m afraid his determination to go to Argentina is a gesture of discouragement; maybe he thinks it’s a way of avoiding inner struggles, but I don’t think going to a new country is enough to avoid them. He brought home a brochure, an advertisement from a travel agency, that showed the mountains and lakes of Argentina. I pointed out that his trip wouldn’t be a vacation, the mountains and lakes have no importance, and Italy has plenty of mountains, too, but he wants to go anyway. Michele exhorted me not to dissuade him and, although my opinion differs from his, these decisions are up to the father, so I stopped saying anything. Michele and Riccardo often leaf through that brochure together and look at the mountains, getting excited. Michele said to him, “If you like it there, I’ll come, too.” I objected: “And us?” “You, too, of course,” he added, “we’ll all go.” Riccardo said, “You can get rich quickly over there.”