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Who doesn’t want an adventure? Familiarity is all well and good, but predictable and humdrum in the long run. Who doesn’t dream about a life with no bills, no laundry, no mortgages or kids? Arnold does! A purely erotic space with a postgraduate or an undergraduate who admires him, her tutor, her professor, to be irresistible for a few hours, wise, fiery, invent yourself and present yourself at your most advantageous to this semi-stranger who swallows you raw. Who doesn’t need to be worshipped and admired like that? Arnold does! [...]
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This is the end. There is no mistaking it. But I’m not going to milk it, wallow in it, it bores me already, it seems so infantile, so banal, that even the pain it caused seems infantile, banal, embarrassing, a source of shame; with the little bit of common sense still active in her brain Ida realises how banal it is, yet still it hurts, perhaps it hurts even more because even the most stupid, most infantile action can cause pain, but I won’t wallow in it because I, too, know shame, even now as I sit here writing down only the most important insight: the pain was so all-consuming that only one remedy would do. End it so it can’t happen again. The only remedy that will help: making that decision. She has no choice, her entire body is telling her that it is over, it is enough, now it is just a question of survival, she will never, ever sleep with him again.
An avalanche has started where she is. She is caught up in an avalanche.
It is over. From now on it is a question of getting through it. Exist in it and survive. Rest, at times she finds it impossible to get up. Trust those who say that it will pass. It is impossible to believe, but some people say that the same thing happened to them and that time really is a great healer. Though that seems inconceivable right now. When she is able to get out of bed, she goes to another library to find better books about the grieving process, which could help her, surely there must be something. What can you do to accelerate it? Can you do anything at all to speed it up? Acknowledge your loss and mourn it. She lies on the sofa, acknowledges her loss and mourns it, screams over it, if it doesn’t ease she will kill herself, except he isn’t worth so great a sacrifice.
‘It will pass!’ says everyone she asks, she asks everyone, she asks the librarians, women in shops, the off-licence where she buys wine, shoppers in the queue at the supermarket, taxi drivers, they all say that it will pass, but can she trust them? How can it hurt so much now and not hurt in a few months, what if it goes on for ever? She calls the Samaritans at night and sobs. It’s all right, they say, just let it out, your calling us is a good sign. She starts to believe that it will pass. That it really is a matter of getting through it.
‘You’re not fighting for our relationship,’ he says on her answering machine. He had thought, perhaps he had expected her to fight, is that why he did it in the first place? To trigger her competitive instinct, to ensnare her? A rival, an undergraduate, now let’s see who ends up with Arnold Bush! Did he think that that would be her response, to fight to win him back and then gloat over the undergraduate: Look, I won! And while the battle is ongoing, the feted and desired Arnold Bush can stroll through the university corridors with a hard-on. Is that what he thought?
‘You may think you loved me,’ he says on her answering machine, ‘but you never loved me, you never loved me as I really am.’
Should she love his infidelity? Would hers not be a true love unless she also loved his infidelity and his need to control? Is it a weakness of her love that she can’t endure everything?
‘Tove Ditlevsen,’ he says on her answering machine, ‘could cope with much more than you. You’re a poor imitation of Tove Ditlevsen,’ he says. ‘What I have done is nothing compared to what Victor Andreasen did to Tove Ditlevsen.’ The Danish author Tove Ditlevsen and Victor Andreasen, the editor-in-chief of Ekstra Bladet, stayed together their whole lives, almost, no matter what one did to the other. Because they loved each other. ‘We love each other, Ida! You know that!’
Tove Ditlevsen, she answers in their imagined conversations, ended up killing herself. Tove Ditlevsen was admitted to a psychiatric hospital and Victor Andreasen couldn’t take any more and left her, she reminds herself. Perhaps Tove Ditlevsen should have left Victor Andreasen much sooner. Then she might not have ended up in a psychiatric hospital, she might not have killed herself, who knows. Tove Ditlevsen planned to write a book about her life with Victor Andreasen, whom she referred to as a highly intelligent psychopath, did you know that, the title of which would be The Woman Who Put Up With Everything, a bittersweet title, if you ask me, as if she might well have many regrets and would have done things differently had she had the chance, she tells herself quietly in their imagined conversations.
omg lol
He tries letters, but he writes the way he speaks and she can’t answer him. It would take a novel to explain to him what it was like for her, a completely different story to the one he would have written, she can feel it the few times she talks to him on the phone, before she gives up. He gets irritated, he says that she is wrong, that if she had changed then they could have made it work, whereas she believes that he was the one who had to change, but she no longer believes in change, she has lost her faith.
i get it
‘You never listened,’ he says on her answering machine. ‘You never took on board the things I struggled with in our relationship, which I tried to discuss with you repeatedly, but you just carried on doing what you always did.’
Does he mean that she should have stopped travelling, stopped spending time with other people because he had told her how anxious it made him feel? Should she have called him more often, done fewer of the many things he didn’t like her doing, would that have been to listen to him, to follow his prescriptions, put herself in a cage so that he would feel safer? Assume his contempt for everything he despised, his enemies and his points of view because not doing so would lead to sanctions and pain? She reads his letters and argues with them in the evenings, lies awake at night and argues with them, there is so much she wants to say, but even thinking about it is exhausting.
boundaries!!! lol
Whenever you felt uncomfortable, you let your discomfort rain down on me in the form of aggression and recriminations, you poured it over me rather than hold back, as if every uncomfortable feeling which my behaviour produced in you was my fault and my problem, never yours. And I let it happen, that was my fault, our tragedy. I love you, but we can’t be together because nothing is going to change, and everything that has happened, the things we did to take revenge, to survive, which bought us temporary relief, will tear us apart if we were to meet and talk, so it is the end, it really is over. I’m trying to understand it, not to be angry – not to hate you because you ruined it – you ruined it!
[...] Following this visual trail, you have forced your way through the shop past the thick barricade of Books You Haven't Read, which were frowning at you from the tables and shelves, trying to cow you. But you know you must never allow yourself to be awed, that among them there extend for acres and acres the Books You Needn't Read, the Books Made For Purposes Other Than Reading, Books Read Even Before You Open Them Since They Belong To The Category Of Books Read Before Being Written. And thus you pass the outer girdle of ramparts, but then you are attacked by the infantry of the Books That If You Had More Than One Life You Would Certainly Also Read But Unfortunately Your Days Are Numbered. With a rapid maneuver you bypass them and move into the phalanxes of the Books You Mean To Read But There Are Others You Must Read First, the Books Too Expensive Now And You'll Wait Till They're Remaindered, the Books ditto When They Come Out In Paperback, Books You Can Borrow From Somebody, Books That Everybody's Read So It's As If You Had Read Them, Too. [...]
god this is so good