by
Lauren Elkin
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Max went with me to see the maestro today, at the faculté de droit. He spoke before, I don’t know, a couple hundred people, mostly students training to be analysts, but also scholars in other fields, and even, I heard, some actors. He’s a man of science who speaks like a mystic. Every word has its weight, as if he were dropping iron plumbs into a sea to anchor his thoughts. He delivers his speech like he’s performing Molière at the Comédie-Française. It is often hard to follow. Today he talked about jouissance, and love, and the Other, and I stroked the inside of Max’s wrist with my finger, afraid to outright hold his hand, and then the maestro said there is no woman, and that it is the instinct of the mother that prevails in her, not her own sexual pleasure, which turns around the phallus, and that man cannot enjoy woman’s body because he is too busy enjoying his own enjoyment, and while I have known men like that, indeed sex with Henry has sometimes felt like that, it has not always been so, and I wrote it all down and put a question mark next to it and Max shrugged and I wanted to talk to him about it afterward but afterward he took me back to his office and I forgot all about the maestro and whether or not there are women with their own sexual desires because I was inside my desire, and soon Max was too.
jesus
I looked for Max in his office today at the usual time and he wasn’t there. I saw him at Lacan and we sat apart and we didn’t speak. He sat with another young woman, blonde hair, blue dress. Is he testing me? Lacan spoke about Plato, The Symposium, a text I’d heard about but never been taught, it seemed to hold an almost mystical significance for him, and for the other students. He was talking about the way that love serves as a border between two people, it is something they share, but also a delusion, and then he lost me. It made me wonder about Max, and about Henry. With Max we are forging something new, a new country, outside the bonds of a state-sanctioned relationship, but also engaged in something very old, the adulterous liaison, both of us escaping the official containers of our marriages, which are sometimes too small for all that we are, and feel ourselves to be. As for Henry, our love is the place where all the things we know about each other live, our histories, our common past, our hopes for ourselves, our shared projects. The border between us is composed of the stories we tell ourselves about what we are doing and hope to do. It is an illusion, not a delusion, and the container is as necessary as the overflow.
[...] But Max is there, strong shoulders, clean scent of soap, soft facial hair on my neck, his mouth, I seek it out, our exchanges, I know things, he talks to me, tells me things he says he’s told no one else, not even his wife, she doesn’t know anything about his childhood, she wouldn’t understand, he says, the arduous trip to Mexico, the hot sun and the stinging insects, the desert, the mystery of the Spanish language, the French school they sent him to, the priests, their hands and their robes, a local girl he loved, her parents who refused to let their daughter marry a Jew, his escape to Paris, the life he’d wanted to build here among books and intellectuals, the small chambre de bonne where he lived on eggs and ersatz coffee, the window through which he looked at Paris, his wife knows none of this, she is from here, good Catholic family, big family, wants kids, can’t have them, she blames it on him, they fight, she doesn’t know about the baby with the Mexican girl, the woman in the neighbourhood who took care of it, the girl’s stomach pains, Valentina was her name, Valentina’s blood, Valentina in the hospital, the guilt, Paris so soon after, he is talking in my ear now, he is telling me what he likes, he is calling me his little girl, I take his mane of hair in my hand, I hold his head back, away from me, I eye him down, I hold him there, I am in control, I am the one he talks to, I am the one—
i get it :/
I thought what I had with Henry was the sustaining love, and with Max just pleasure, self-abandon, time out of time. I was wrong on both counts. But everything I feel or have felt for both of them is this eros, this thing I want to make more of. More of it, more of us, all of us. This child that is the knowledge of beauty and of its shadows, to sustain us through the alienation of desire, the inevitable confrontation with danger and disease, and with the end.
[...] It really feels like things might be changing, like we might actually have a chance at changing the law. (The more he sits there, rigid, the angrier I get. It seems to me, with Henry sitting beside me, still angry that I dared to buy a paper he doesn’t like, that it is men like him who might actually be the problem: officially supportive, but inwardly seething.) I also haven’t forgotten the jokes he made about the three hundred and forty-three women who signed the manifesto saying they’d had abortions but no doubt about it if I got pregnant he’d waste no time finding out what we’d have to do to get rid of it. There is so much he shuts himself off to, because it threatens the way he understands the world; but even Max, who is worldly enough not to confuse ego and politics, is blinkered, doesn’t understand what women are telling him, the body of work we are founding. He doesn’t see that his revolution is incomplete as long as he and men like him are the ones writing it. (I brought this up at our meeting last week and we had to stay an hour later than usual, everyone had something to say about it. I came home late and Henry wouldn’t speak to me, lord knows where he thought I was. Some of the girls were talking about joining Halimi’s group Choisir, if I thought I could pay the dues without Henry finding out I would.)
One of the girls takes me aside later, as we’re putting our coats back on. Just don’t lose track of us when you have your baby, OK? Your friend too. Don’t lose yourselves in your little lives and forget that you still have to fight. Her eyes are round, her eye make-up smudged. I don’t remember her saying very much during the meeting. She’s holding my hand.
On the way home I think about my feelings of envy for Claude. I want a baby, but do I really want to be in her place? In her chic suburb with her asshole husband? Still, I do, I envy her. She’s secure enough to do it, in spite of her asshole husband, she is her own supporting wall. That is what I envy. It’s not that she has a perfect life or marriage, it’s that she feels sufficient unto herself. She says she’s going to keep studying, no matter what Jibé thinks, that even if it takes her longer she’ll finish her degree, she’ll do her internships, she’ll be a therapist. She’ll keep coming to our group. The answer is never the husband, she tells me, the group is the answer.
I think maybe I chose wrong, that I followed the heat of those early days into a marriage too quickly, without being sure we wanted the same things. Henry doesn’t want a baby. He is still a baby himself, he says. And I know I can’t argue with that. He goes off to the club with Jibé in Jibé’s hot little two-seater, I know all about it, it’s the source of much frustration for Claude, how are they supposed to get around with a baby when there’s nowhere to put it? He just laughs at her and says he’ll buy her a station wagon, and then she smacks him in the face, because he wants to turn her into a maman, in her unwieldy family vehicle, while he gets to zip around town, a single guy to all appearances, zip to work she says, zip to the club, unzip whatever it is he’s unzipping, zip home again, zip zip zip. He is so modern.
I don’t want a baby, Florence. I want to sit here and read. I want to go out for a drink. I want to listen to my hi-fi. I want to take the night train. I want to work as late as I want and spend my pay cheque on a sharkskin suit. I want to fuck you on the beach and take you to Australia, throw massive dinner parties and even do the dishes myself. I want to lie on the floor with the cats and listen to you play the piano and keep out of the way as your patients come through the door, I want to go to the theatre and the movies and out for lunch, and laugh at your jokes and your politics, and love you all the time. And you want to break all that, and you’re not even giving me a choice in the matter, and you’re pretending everything is fine. You say you want to build a new world but you just want to destroy the old one.
Henry is hosting his office poker game tonight, and they seem more than usually loud and swaggering, smoking around the table like something out of a movie. I hear Henry telling them about me as I walk out, hear him say consciousness, hear him say raising. How will I tell Henry my news, Henry who knows I have someone, and who is taking it exactly as I knew he would, like a little boy who has to be at the centre of everything, all the time, who wants to benefit from the liberations of the past few years without actually sacrificing anything for them, who likes to talk to his friends about his wife’s feminism, feminism, what a dirty word, like a disease I caught, to laugh about it with them, I hear them as I’m at the piano and he thinks I’m too involved in the music to hear what they’re saying, they’re joking about my feminism, he doesn’t understand it can liberate him, too.
<3<3
I tell Max about the baby. I think he should know. I’ve been offered a teaching job in London, he says. Just for a year. I think perhaps he hasn’t heard me; I say it again. I heard you. Come to London with me. I’m not going to London. Is it mine? It could be mine. Come to London and have the baby there and it will be ours. I will take care of you and the baby. Begging, almost. I’m not going to London. And it could be Henry’s. And what about your wife? Max makes a sound. She is with someone else now.
There’s no time to think; there is too much else to consider. A new life in London, with Max, a baby, him all to myself. All to myself? Do I want all of him, all the time? Do I want to wake up with him every day? Listen to him chew his food every night? Fight with him about money? Raise this child with him? Something tells me he wouldn’t even stick around for all of that. He is too generous with himself, with his time, his thoughts, generous in the sense of being unable to restrict himself to just one person. For all his faults, Henry would assume his responsibility.
I shake my head. You don’t want me, not full-time. You only want me because I’m not entirely yours. Because I’m needed elsewhere.
That’s not true, says Max. I want you all to myself. I need you here. Or, rather, in London. But he himself sounds unconvinced.
I’m sorry. I’m not going.
And that is how I know it will come to an end, when he leaves for London. But we still have time. And when the nausea is elsewhere, my pregnant body wants him so badly that I wonder if he is indeed the father, that my body has recognised him, or if this is simply my desire leading me astray, as usual.