by
Lauren Elkin
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Since that day at his apartment, we have found each other as often as we can. He comes over right from work, or in the middle of the night. The house is a mess, dust everywhere, the kitchen barely usable, we fuck in the ruins of what used to be my apartment, and then we get takeaway. Some days Clémentine comes and spends the evening with me, and goes home, and a little while later Jonathan turns up on my doorstep. Then he, too, is gone by morning. It’s so absurd, I really should move in with them. One weekend he tells Clémentine he’s going out of town, but he spends the entire weekend in my apartment. Miraculously, she doesn’t drop in. That it is all very complicated doesn’t dampen our desire. Obviously, obviously, it only builds up the need to see each other. I don’t understand why it should be this way for him, he says so little about his own life, but I feel the urgency between us. It is like something we both need to go through, to reach the other side of. I know there will be a time after this, when I will again live in the after. But we aren’t there yet. I hope, in having him again, to make the after more bearable, this time.
He comes, every night. He doesn’t text me during the day or give me any notice. I text him if it’s not a good night. If David is in town. He always comes even if just to tell me he can’t come, that Clémentine is staying home. Usually this is just after she has come over herself, so I already know, and he’s come straight from work. I don’t want to ask too many questions, about how this works for him, or for them, lest I should lean on it too heavily, and make it collapse. I try to remain open, open to whatever there is, in this strange parabola in my life, this pocket, in which so much is held.
His hand in mine again is like the closing of a gap in the floorboards I’ve been stumbling over for years.
<3
Being with Jonathan doesn’t entirely feel like infidelity to David – in a way, it feels like fidelity to some younger version of myself. And yet I’m also meeting a new self in this infidelity, and she is the one I want. Far from feeling guilty or shameful I feel myself, I feel calm.
I have decided not to talk about Jonathan any more to Esther. I am cutting off the chain of associations, because if I try to account for what is happening, anywhere I start might take me further than I intended. And even if I invent a neat explanation for what happened, the part of me that loved him won’t let me reduce it like that. Any summary of Jonathan will sound lifeless and exterior. I will sound like I don’t know what I’m doing, worse, like I don’t know what I know.
Is it a problem of telling? What should I tell? What can I tell? Who can I tell? What can be told? What account could I give that would stand up to it? What form could it take? What order could I give that wouldn’t force it into disorder?
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When it comes to the ethical ramifications of desire, Lacan thinks: no. You don’t give in. You’ll just want something else later, so why indulge something that could prove harmful to other people? But I think it’s reinforcing an imprisoning structure to phrase it in terms of giving in or not giving in. You’re only creating more desire by making something forbidden. We need desire to live, but there are different kinds, and it’s the forbidden kind Lacan worried about, without realising it was his own moralising that was feeding it.
Yeah. That’s what I remember you saying. Basically telling my father, with me right there, that you don’t believe in monogamy.
But I do. I did. It’s just that I see it as something you practise, rather than some kind of law, which you can violate, and for which you should be punished.
But you’re not practising it now.
I’m not.
My father, Jonathan says, is a womanising bastard. I love him but it’s true, he’s a bastard. He doesn’t see it that way, he says he loves easily and well, but he’s a serial cheater. He cheated on my mother, he cheated on my stepmother, he cheated on his first wife, and he invented a whole intellectual framework to justify it. He’s slept with his students his whole career. He’s completely unethical.
I let this sink in. But I’m not sure that what I’m doing – what we’re doing – is unethical. My instinct is that it isn’t. That something about living ethically together is bound up in not judging our desires, or controlling and punishing them. But maybe that’s just me justifying it.
So you think it has to be justified.
I’m not sure. Do you?
I’m not sure either.
Is it possible that infidelity isn’t something you commit but something that creeps up, a series of inoffensive doors you open, so by the time you find yourself in front of the one that counts, the one that matters, that changes everything, you are too far gone? You are so deep in it but you got so deep in a kind of innocence. I think for a moment. Maybe the problem is the word. Infidelity. I never noticed before but it makes you an infidel, believing in the wrong god. But really it’s another kind of fidelity – to yourself, to your dream of yourself, to the other people you love. I get out my phone and look up the etymology. See? it’s an Old French word, that has to do with a lack of faith. But I have so much faith. I am full of faith.
ahhhh
[...] David doesn’t know anything, and I’m not going to tell him, it would be an act of selfishness. But do I want him to guess, do I want to be found out, do I want to scare him? These are the things I would suspect of a client. But of myself? Am I hiding from myself? I look back through my journals, I see anxiety, strange dream imagery, I can’t self-read, it all goes sideways. Journal, Esther would say. I journal. Am I trying to escape my own fear that David will leave me by leaving him? Am I thwarting him, Lacan, my own father, patriarchy? What is it exactly all this is tending toward? The way we accept certain ways of being with people in the world and can’t accept others. About trying to break the bounds that society has woven between sex and ethics. About desire, trying to understand it and live it out, rejecting the ways in which it is monitored and moralised and contained. Asking what happens if we dive in to it, knowing that it will always leave us wanting more. How can we live with each other, and enjoy our bodies, and each other’s bodies, when we know that desire is part of an endless chain? And that it is being in this chain that makes us alive? How do we live out our desire without hurting other people? What do other people need to know about our desire?
Where we run into trouble is the idea of futurity. As long as it’s one day after the next, a perennial present, all is well, but when it comes to looking down the road a little bit, there things fray.
On Clémentine’s last night we go to see a French band we both like play at a little venue near Old Street, dark with people smoking the occasional illicit cigarette, the kind of place where the owners don’t care, and everyone misses the days before the ban, when we couldn’t see each other clearly through the smoke, but perhaps we felt things more intensely as a result. It is a sit-down-and-listen kind of place, and we grab a table not too far from the front and drink our beers in the close, companionable heat. The lead singer has a voice like a woodwind, a warmly timbred alto, and when the band begins to play a Cowboy Junkies cover of a Velvet Underground song I dissolve into some liquid version of myself mixed with world, with the warm bentwood chair I’m sitting in, with the scuffed mosaic floor, with the French singer who is slightly out of place in London, dépaysée, with the husky insistent bass guitar, with Clémentine, who slips an arm around the back of my chair. Her arm isn’t touching me, but I am encircled by her, by the music.
By the time the singer reaches that heart-healing end of the song, as the guitarist slides through the never not surprising chords of the bridge, notes of bright acidity in the otherwise warm liquid of the music, I have, quite simply, arrived elsewhere, gone further than Old Street, been transported back to a place I haven’t been in a very long time, felt feelings of safety and origin I thought had escaped me forever. Or maybe, in fact, I am somewhere I have never, ever been.
Clémentine comes over every day, and some days we sleep together, and some days we try not to but end up fucking anyway. It has happened; we need each other now. I need her, I am able to say, but I don’t understand this need, I have never been with a girl before, never knew I wanted a girl, until I wanted her, her body in her mesh bra, her mesh panties, my fingers on her, in her, learning what to do, afraid of being wrong, letting myself be led, it feels right, we keep going. Her hipbone in the morning light. Her body contracting under mine. My body one muscle that contracts and releases and contracts again, under her tongue, her fingers, her thighs. I think fleetingly of Jonathan, wonder is this a way to be close to him again, or was it always about Clémentine, this whole time? I try to turn my questions off. No what does this mean. It means in and of itself; alone it has meaning.
We don’t say things like I am yours and you are mine, we don’t make plans beyond the following weekend, where we’ll eat, where we’ll walk. We are each pinned in our situations; we couldn’t afford to run away together and we know it without discussing it. All her radical politics, her Deleuzian critique of psychoanalysis, can’t spring us free.