Bookmarker tag: topic/infidelity (50 notes)

“Do you want to be with him instead of Harris?”

“No.” That was still easy and true. “He’s not a rock like that. I love him as my lover. I just want to dance with him, I don’t want to raise a child together.”

“So maybe it’s okay.”

“And fuck him. And kiss him. And lie in bed in his arms all day.”

“If you were a French man this would all be perfectly acceptable,” Jordi said.

She was a really good friend.

“It’s just being cleaned right now, if you can wait a few minutes.” Skip had handed me the receipt already and now gave me a look like, Is there anything else I can help you with. The couple also now looked at me. I opened my mouth to say something about the suite, about it really being mine—but it wasn’t. If you wanted to own property you went about it in a completely different way. Escrow, things like that. I wheeled my bags out to my car, tears openly running down my face. Helen was carrying clean, folded towels to room 321, but she paused to watch me load up.

“I don’t regret what I did,” she suddenly called out. I was startled; my weeping paused. “If I could go back, I wouldn’t do anything differently. I would do it all exactly the same.”

It seemed like she had committed a terrible crime and somehow thought I was the right person to hear she was unrepentant. I nodded as if I understood and, now somewhat self-consciously, got in my car and began backing out.

Her affair. She didn’t regret cheating on Claire’s uncle. I looked back at her in the rearview mirror. With the towels clutched to her chest, she watched me drive away.

“Okay, here’s my take,” she said. “Just ride it out. A lot of women destroy their lives in their forties and then one day they wake up with no periods and no partner and only themselves to blame.”

That had the ring of truth to it.

“So, you think I should just smooth things over?”

“I know that’s not the hip thing to say, but yes.”

“I don’t know if I”—I gasped—“can physically do that. Swallow my desires like that.”

Cassie sighed.

“Remember the Simone de Beauvoir quote,” she said, “ ‘You can’t have everything you want but you can want everything you want.’ ”

On the day after our arrival, I received a cable from New York City, informing me, by a prearranged code, that I had a new son by a woman not my wife. I can’t remember that I was flustered. I went to a press conference and did my best to “push” my film.

Molly enjoyed the hotel, the excellent food, the service, our being alone together. She spent her afternoons playing solitaire and planning for the new apartment we’d bought, which was being prepared to her specifications. Since our children, all except the youngest, had gone their ways, Molly thought of this apartment as our last home and final resting place.

Molly, of course, knew nothing about the recent event in the city where our apartment was being prepared and what had led up to it. An expert dissembler, with a lifetime of practice, I’d covered my tracks perfectly. What had been most effective in the deception was that I no longer gave a damn if I was caught. The singular aspect of the situation was that I took it in stride. I’d become so accustomed to a life in layers that nothing could penetrate my indifference to personal danger and possible disruption. I’d anesthetized myself.

Catherine wasn’t laughing anymore, but looked as if she might start again at any moment. “It’s funny,” she said, narrowing her eyes. “There are things you’re just positive will happen to you. Then there’s that second when you realize, Jesus Christ. Maybe they won’t.”

She was watching me closely. Her eyes, I noticed, were bloodshot. I shifted the ski pole under my leg.

“Have you ever had a feeling like that?” she asked.

“Not exactly,” I said, uneasy. “I guess I have most things I wanted.”

“You’re lucky.”

I felt her envy, sharp as the tang of her cigarette smoke on the cold air. We were far apart, I realized then, and this filled me with relief.

Catherine flicked her half-smoked cigarette into a snowbank. “Of course,” she said, “getting what you want is only the beginning. The hard part is holding on to it.”

I was annoyed. “How do you know?”

Catherine took a while to answer. She seemed deep in thought. “I just know,” she finally said.

I am telling myself that I did what I was told. Claire told me to stay. Jane wanted me —she pulled me towards her. Why am I being so weak? Why am I blaming the victim? I ask myself, did you ever think you should stop yourself or someone else but in the moment you couldn’t or didn’t? Now I understand the meaning of — it just happened. Or — it was an accident.

She trips fussing about the dormitory, bothering other girls for puffs off of stale Woodbines, nylon-repair kits, sparrow-bright war-wisecracks passing for sympathy. Tonight she'll be with Jeremy, her lieutenant, but she wants to be with Roger. Except that, really, she doesn't. Does she? She can't remember ever being so confused. When she's with Roger it's all love, but at any distance—any at all, Jack—she finds that he depresses and even frightens her. Why? On top of him in the wild nights riding up and down his cock her axis, trying herself to stay rigid enough not to turn to cream taper-wax and fall away melting to the coverlet coming there's only room for Roger, Roger, oh love to the end of breath. But out of bed, walking talking, his bitterness, his darkness, run deeper than the War, the winter: he hates England so, hates "the System," gripes endlessly, says he'll emigrate when the War's over, stays inside his paper cynic's cave hating himself. . . and does she want to bring him out, really? Isn't it safer with Jeremy? She tries not to allow this question in too often, but it's there. Three years with Jeremy. They might as well be married. Three years ought to count for something. Daily, small stitches and casings. She's worn old Beaver's bathrobes, brewed his tea and coffee, sought his eye across lorry-parks, day rooms and rainy mud fields when all the day's mean, dismal losses could be rescued in the one look—familiar, full of trust, in a season when the word is invoked for quaintness or a minor laugh. And to rip it all out? three years? for this erratic, self-centered—boy, really. Weepers, he's supposed to be past thirty, he's years older than she. He ought to've learned something, surely? A man of experience?

Barbara is the name of the waitress at the Arkade. She’s tall, and taller when she puts her hair up. Two coffees and two glasses of Rotkäppchen, please, Barbara. A celebration. It’s their third 11th day, their trimensual anniversary, and if Katharina had a wish, then she would wish that fate never ran out of elevens. Nine years, three years. How long will she and Hans be good for? Is what they have nothing but a so-called affair? Will he be sitting with someone else in ten years’ time, showing off a snapshot of her, Katharina, and saying: that was Katharina, she was my lover? How to endure the way that the present trickles down moment by moment and becomes the past? So why did he show her the photos? Of course he’s been with other women, he’s been around that much longer. Even she’s had three or four others, plus Gernot. What makes her so jealous is the secrecy around the other women, the trouble Hans must have gone to to keep each relationship going: rubbing the lipstick off a wineglass after a meeting in his apartment, or telling Ingrid, we were working late in the office, using her hairdresser’s appointment for a phone call or taking advantage of a moment at night when the wife’s gone to bed to whisper into the telephone: O darling, O beautiful, O sweetheart. The way he does now, with me. Little Ludwig was revolted by it, she recalls. And isn’t he right to be? And now she’s a part of this tissue of deceit. And even thinks of these little treacheries of Hans’ as a distinction. Not long ago, when Hans went to the cinema with Ludwig, she sat three rows behind them, just to have some proximity to the man she loves. In the general crush when everyone filed out, Hans brushed against her hand.

Two weeks ago, when Ingrid was taking Hans’s jacket to the dry cleaner’s, she found a passport photo of Katharina in the inside pocket and wouldn’t talk to him for three days. He didn’t tell Katharina. In October Katharina cried for the first time about the fact that he was married, and in November for the second time, and since then he’s avoided mentioning Ingrid’s name. And if Katharina now sometimes looks deadly earnest, he knows she’s making an effort and is repressing something she ought really to talk about. Anything the matter? No. Because everything is avoided that might make one or other of them sad, sadness suddenly comes to occupy a lot of space between them. He is old enough to know how the end likes to set its roots first imperceptibly, then ever more boldly, in the present. Without my marriage I wouldn’t be the man I am. That’s what he told Regina as well, the newscaster, and Marjut, the Finn. They went along with it until he’d had enough. Where Katharina is concerned, the sentence carries a different meaning, but she would deny it if he were to write it to her. Without his marriage, there wouldn’t be the danger, the secrecy, the circumstances that give rise to yearning. Not the content of their love, but factors that energize and quicken it. Just as if/ in a gallop/ an exhausted mare/ thirsted for the nearest well. Thirsting. Another one of those dead words. The marriage that threatens and attenuates their affair is also the ground that nourishes it. And probably, if Hans were honest, the other way around as well. Wasn’t Ingrid — when at the end of three silent days she started to speak again, and during the ensuing scene to cry, and when the makeup ran down her face and she picked up the nearest thing that came to hand, which happened to be a clothes brush, and threw it out of the window into the yard — wasn’t Ingrid in her desperation more beautiful and desirable than she’d appeared to him in a long time?

None of them could know, none of them could visualize Mexico City and the first unbelievable year, driving down to the coast for the weekend, through Cuernavaca, her bare legs with the sun lying on them, her arms, the dizziness and submission he felt with her as before a forbidden photograph, as if before an overwhelming work of art. Two years in Mexico City oblivious to the wreckage. It was the sense of godliness that empowered him. He could see her neck bent forward with its slender nape. He could see the faint trace of bones like pearls that ran down her smooth back. He could see himself, his former self.

— I talk to her, he admitted.

— And your first wife?

— I talk to her. We have three kids.

— He left her, Adele said. Casanova here.

— Some women have minds like cops, Phil said to no one in particular. This is right, that’s wrong. Well, anyway . . .

He stood up. He had done everything wrong, he realized, in the wrong order. He had scuttled his life.

— Anyway there’s one thing I can say truthfully. I’d do it all over again if I had the chance.

She had told them she had a doctor’s appointment and needed extra time for lunch. She told him that. As she entered the hotel elevator he could not help but notice her fine hips. Then, incredibly, they were in the room. His heart was uncontrollable and everything was prepared for them, the sleek furnishings, the chairs, the thick fresh towels in the bath. There had been four murders in Brooklyn the night before. The brokers were going wild on Wall Street. On Fourteenth, men stood in the cold beside tables of watches and socks. The madman on Fifty-seventh was singing arias at the top of his voice, buildings were being torn down, new towers rising. She rose to draw the drapes and for a moment stood in the space between them, in the light and looking down. The splendor and newness of her! He had known nothing like it.

Her apartment was borrowed, from someone on assignment. Even at that, it was sparsely furnished. He wanted to give her something every time he saw her, a gift, something unexpected, a chrome and leather chair that he showed her in the window before he ordered it delivered, a ring, a rosewood box, but he was careful to keep nothing that came from her— note, e-mail, photograph—that might betray him. There was one exception, a picture he had taken as she half sat up in bed, from over her bare shoulder, breasts, smooth stomach, thighs, you would not know who it was. He kept it at work between the pages of a book. He liked to turn to it and remember.

In those days of desire so deep that it left him empty-legged, he did not behave unnaturally at home—if anything he was more loving and devoted although Lily, especially, was beyond increased devotion. He came home filled with forbidden happiness, forbidden but unrivalled, and embraced his wife and played with or read to his children. The prohibited feeds the appetite for all the rest. He went from one to the other with a heart that was pure. On Park Avenue he stood on the island in the middle, waiting to cross. The traffic lights were turning red as far as he could see. The distant buildings stood majestic in the monied haze. Beside him were people in coats and hats, with packages, briefcases, none of them as fortunate as he. The city was a paradise. The glory of it was that it sheltered his singular life.

— Am I your mistress? she asked one day.

— Mistress? No, he thought, that was something older, even old-fashioned. He knew of no word to truly describe her other than probable downfall or perhaps fate.

Isobel, softening, said she couldn’t imagine how bad Lydia must be feeling. Christine could imagine it. She knew Lydia better than Alex ever would or could, she thought; Lydia would always be performing for him. — She tells herself it was fated, it was bound to happen. And also that passion is always selfish and amoral, but can’t be resisted, only submitted to. She thinks what a selfish person she is, but thinks it luxuriantly.

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.

Hansen stayed three weeks, and after he left, I experienced a modified version of my prior despair. I missed him bitterly, but with each day the bitterness abated and another set of possibilities began to assert itself, like shifting my weight from one foot to the other. A week after he left, I had dinner with a young playboy, dark-haired and light-skinned like the Carravagian boys Hansen and I had observed so recently. Again, as with Henri, the desire that I felt for this man was like a blanket tossed over my head. We went back to his house, a house in the middle of Paris with tall shuttered windows, and I spent the night without making love all the way, but the next morning I relented, and we began an affair. I felt exactly two opposite ways: gripped by the feverish eroticism of my new circumstances, and devoted to Hansen in a way that made the other feeling outrageous, inconceivable. In moments, I clutched at the notion of some larger “me” that could contain and justify my contradictory behavior, but more often I simply felt like the scene of two irreconcilable visions, two different people, one unerringly loyal and faithful, the other treacherous and greedy. My affair with Henri had pushed something open in me, and now I felt ravenous, in constant danger of going hungry. Hansen alone would never be enough.

“That guy has been writing you. It sort of hurts my feelings.” He paused, figuring out what to say. “People like you, you know, Claire,” he said. “They love you.”

“I know,” I said. Even though I didn’t really believe him.

“It’s okay to have secrets,” he said. “Just be careful.”

I cried a little, in a pro forma sort of way, wondering as the tears leaked out: Did he have secrets? We had been gone from each other so much, traveling alone. I knew it was dangerous, but I also intuited it was the only way for us to be married right now. We were each giving the other a long lead. I was so mired in my own despair it was hard for me to see that Bruce was undergoing something or other as well. We were sort of trundling along, in our separate orbs, next to each other. I didn’t know what to do about it, except hope we were headed in the same general direction. I often had an obscure feeling that I wanted to figure out a different way to be married; it had never before occurred to me that Bruce and I were in the midst of inventing it.

When you were six you thought mistress meant to put your shoes on the wrong feet. Now you are older and know it can mean many things, but essentially it means to put your shoes on the wrong feet.

You walk differently. In store windows you don’t recognize yourself; you are another woman, some crazy interior display lady in glasses stumbling frantic and preoccupied through the mannequins. In public restrooms you sit dangerously flat against the toilet seat, a strange flesh sundae of despair and exhilaration, murmuring into your bluing thighs: “Hello, I’m Charlene. I’m a mistress.”

It is like having a book out from the library.

It is like constantly having a book out from the library.

Whisper, “Don’t go yet,” as he glides out of your bed before sunrise and you lie there on your back cooling, naked between the sheets and smelling of musky, oniony sweat. Feel gray, like an abandoned locker room towel. Watch him as he again pulls on his pants, his sweater, his socks and shoes. Reach out and hold his thigh as he leans over and kisses you quickly, telling you not to get up, that he ’ll lock the door when he leaves. In the smoky darkness, you see him smile weakly, guiltily, and attempt a false, jaunty wave from the doorway. Turn on your side, toward the wall, so you don’t have to watch the door close. You hear it thud nonetheless, the jangle of keys and snap of the bolt lock, the footsteps loud, then fading down the staircase, the clunk of the street door, then nothing, all his sounds blending with the city, his face passing namelessly uptown in a bus or a badly heated cab, the room, the whole building you live in, shuddering at the windows as a truck roars by toward the Queensboro Bridge.

Wonder who you are.

Shave your legs in the bathroom sink. Philosophize: you are a mistress, part of a great hysterical you mean historical tradition. Wives are like cockroaches. Also part of a great historical tradition. They will survive you after a nuclear attack—they are tough and hardy and travel in packs—but right now they’re not having any fun. And when you look in the bathroom mirror, you spot them scurrying, up out of reach behind you.

His name is Weisz, like vice, and he is that, a wicked indulgence and something that grips me. I’ve never had such big hands on my body. We sit together in his office and he plays me his records and then he puts his hands on my body.

I am in love with him, I am in love with his shirt, with the way that it sits just so lightly on his torso, his collar that sits away just so from his neck. I’ve never actually wanted to rip someone’s clothes off before. He has a wife at home so I have to be careful or she’ll be wondering why all the buttons on his shirt popped off at the same time.

Desire makes us others to ourselves, the maestro says, and he is right, I am not myself when I desire Max, I am myself-with-Max, quite another person from myself when I’m without him.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

[...] 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.

I’m aware that, in the telling, my love affair with Janna is hopelessly clichéd—its components so familiar from life, or Lifetime TV, that it could be written out mathematically. How to explain the enthrallment of living it? My family and work —so long the crux of everything I did—became thin topsoil over a deep, bitter root system where my real life took place. Once I’d entered that system, it was all I cared about. As with Damon (whom I patronized on an accelerating schedule), there was no pretense with Janna, no restraint. The thing itself. Seven kids and two spouses between us were nothing against our mutual longing, and we fucked in bathrooms, on cold sand by the lake after dark, and in Janna’s basement rec room during the small hours when neither of us could sleep. I adored her with a heedlessness poor Trudy had never glimpsed in me; I’d never seen it in myself. I told Janna I would die for her, and I think I assumed I would have to; for all the fervor of our passion, it was death-infused from the start.

[...] Almost every Sunday she took the cheap slow proletarian combo of SEPTA and New Jersey Transit to New York. She put up with Ed Sterling's paranoid one-way telephone communications and his last-minute postponements and his chronic distraction and his jaw- taxing performance anxieties and her own shame at being taken to cheap ethnic restaurants in Woodside and Elmhurst and Jackson Heights so as not to be seen by anyone Sterling knew (because, as he told her often— running both hands through his mink-thick hair—he knew everybody in Manhattan). While her lover teetered closer to utter freakout and inability to see her anymore, Denise ate Uruguayan T-bones, Sino-Colombian tamales, thumbnail crayfish in red Thai curry, and alder-smoked Russian eels. Beauty or excellence, as typified for her by memorable food, could redeem almost any humiliation. But she never stopped feeling guilty about the bike. Her insistence that she'd chained it to the usual post.

If I were to write this novel, the main theme, or motif, would be buried, at first, and only slowly take over. The motif of Paul's wife-the third. At first Ella does not think about her. Then she has to make a conscious effort not to think about her. This is when she knows her attitude towards this unknown woman is despicable: she feels triumph over her, pleasure that she has taken Paul from her. When Ella first becomes conscious of this emotion she is so appalled and ashamed that she buries it, fast. Yet the shadow of the third grows again, and it becomes impossible for Ella not to think. She thinks a great deal about the invisible woman to whom Paul returns (and to whom he will always return), and it is now not out of triumph, but envy. She envies her. She slowly, involuntarily, builds up a picture in her mind of a serene, calm, unjealous, unenvious, undemanding woman, full of resources of happiness inside herself, self-sufficient, yet always ready to give happiness when it is asked for. It occurs to Ella (but much later, about three years on) that this is a remarkable image to have developed, since it does not correspond to anything at all Paul says about his wife. So where does the picture come from? Slowly Ella understands that this is what she would like to be herself, this imagined woman is her own shadow, everything she is not. Because by now she knows, and is frightened of, her utter dependence on Paul. Every fibre of herself is woven with him, and she cannot imagine living without him. The mere idea of being without him causes a black cold fear to enclose her, so she does not think of it. And she is clinging, so she comes to realise, to this image of the other woman, the third, as a sort of safety or protection for herself.

I do not recognize the person I was forty years ago. My distress is so profound and the suppression mechanism functions so effectively, I can evoke the picture only with difficulty. Photographs are of little value. They simply show a masquerade that has entrenched itself. If I felt attacked, I snapped like a frightened dog. I trusted no one, loved no one, missed no one. Obsessed with a sexuality that forced me into constant infidelity, I was tormented by desire, fear, anguish and a guilty conscience.

So I was alone and raging. My work at the theatre provided some alleviation of a tension which only let go for brief moments in orgasm or drunkenness. I knew I had persuasive powers, that I could make people do what I wanted them to do, that I had some kind of surface charm which I could switch on and off at will. I was also aware that I had a talent for being frightened and acquiring a guilty conscience, because ever since childhood I had known a great deal about the mechanics of fear. In brief, I was a man with power who had not learnt to enjoy power.

[...] The film, entitled To Joy, was to be about a couple of young musicians in the symphony orchestra in Helsingborg, the disguise almost a formality. It was about Ellen and me, about the conditions imposed by art, about fidelity and infidelity. Music would stream right through the film.

I was left completely alone, speaking to no one and meeting no one. I got ‘drunk every night and was helped to bed by la patronne, a motherly woman who worried about my alcoholic habits. Every morning, however, at nine o’clock, I was sitting at my worktable, allowing my hangover to help intensify my creativity.

Ellen and I started writing careful but tender-hearted letters. Under the influence of a dawning hope of a possible future for our tormented marriage, the portrayal of the film’s leading female character turned into a miracle of beauty, faithfulness, wisdom and human dignity. The male part, on the other hand, became a conceited mediocrity; faithless, bombastic and a liar.

I was being courted, shyly but intensively, by a Russian-American painter. She was athletic but well-proportioned, dark as night with bright eyes and a generous mouth, a statuesque Amazon radiating uninhibited sensuality. My fidelity to my marriage stimulated us both. She painted and I wrote, two loners in unexpected creative fellowship.

The end of the film became terribly tragic. The female character was blown up by a paraffin stove (possibly secret wishful thinking), the last movement of Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony was shamelessly exploited and the main character realized that there was ‘a joy greater than joy’. (A truth I did not understand until thirty years later.)

I had my thirty-first birthday during that summer of 1949. Hitherto I had worked hard and relentlessly in my profession. So coming to this autumn warm Paris was an experience which had the effect of knocking down barriers. Love had both time and opportunity to grow freely, opening closed rooms and knocking down walls. I could breathe. My treachery to Ellen and the children existed somewhere in a mist, ever-present but strangely stimulating. For a few months, there lived and breathed a bold production that was incorruptibly true, so therefore priceless, although it turned out to be horribly expensive when the bill came.

[...] another year or two later, I was in Paris on business; and one morning on the landing of a hotel, where I had been looking up a film actor fellow, there she was again, clad in a gray tailored suit, waiting for the elevator to take her down, a key dangling from her fingers. “Ferdinand has gone fencing,” she said conversationally; her eyes rested on the lower part of my face as if she were lip reading, and after a moment of reflection (her amatory comprehension was matchless), she turned and rapidly swaying on slender ankles led me along the sea-blue carpeted passage. A chair at the door of her room supported a tray with the remains of breakfast—a honey-stained knife, crumbs on the gray porcelain; but the room had already been done, and because of our sudden draft a wave of muslin embroidered with white dahlias got sucked in, with a shudder and knock, between the responsive halves of the French window, and only when the door had been locked did they let go that curtain with something like a blissful sigh; and a little later I stepped out on the diminutive cast-iron balcony beyond to inhale a combined smell of dry maple leaves and gasoline—the dregs of the hazy blue morning street; and as I did not yet realize the presence of that growing morbid pathos which was to embitter so my subsequent meetings with Nina, I was probably quite as collected and carefree as she was, when from the hotel I accompanied her to some office or other to trace a suitcase she had lost, and thence to the café where her husband was holding session with his court of the moment.

[...] Throw him out, I repeated, when Nino tried to come near me. Franco kept him away, said calmly: Leave her alone, leave the room. Nino obeyed and I told Franco everything in the most confused way. He listened without interrupting, until he realized that I had no more energy. Only at that point did he say, in his refined way, that it was a good rule not to expect the ideal but to enjoy what is possible. I got mad at him, too: The usual male talk, I shouted, who gives a damn about the possible, you’re talking nonsense. He wasn’t offended, he wanted me to examine the situation for what it was. All right, he said, this man has lied to you for two and a half years, he told you he had left his wife, he said he didn’t have relations with her, and now you discover that seven months ago he made her pregnant. You’re right, it’s horrible, Nino is an abject being. But once it was known — he pointed out — he could have disappeared, forgotten about you. Why, then, did he drive from Naples to Milan, why did he travel all night, why did he humiliate himself, accusing himself, why did he beg you not to leave him? All that should signify something. It signifies, I cried, that he is a liar, that he is a superficial person, that he is incapable of making a choice. And he kept nodding yes, he agreed. But then he asked: What if he loved you, seriously, and yet knew that he could love you only in this way?

“Don’t be inimical.” He looked at me with a rather saddened gravity, and I melted as I always do melt when he envelops me in that dark, warm light. Gently I asked, “Tell me why you have come home so late.”

He made no reply.

“Were you drinking? Playing poker? Did you all go out? Did you forget the time?” He went on being silent, as it were emphatically silent, twirling his glass between his fingers. I flung out nonsensical words to make him lose his temper—to jerk an explanation out of him. “What’s the matter? Is there a woman in your life?”

Looking at me steadily he said, “Yes, Monique, there is a woman in my life.”

(Everything was blue above our heads and beneath our feet: on the other side of the strait loomed the coast of Africa. He squeezed me against him. “If you were to deceive me I should kill myself.” “If you were to deceive me I should have no need to kill myself. I should die of grief.” Fifteen years ago. Already? What do fifteen years count? Twice two is four. I love you, I love you alone. Truth cannot be destroyed: time has no effect upon it.)

Anger woke me early. How innocent he looked lying there, with his hair tangled over a forehead that sleep had made young again. (In August, when I was away, she woke up at his side: I can’t bring myself to believe it! Why did I go to the mountains with Colette? It was not as though she very much wanted to—I was the one who insisted.) For five weeks he had been lying to me. “This evening we made an important step forward.” And he had just come from Noëllie’s. I felt like shaking him, insulting him, shrieking. I took myself in hand. I left a note on my pillow: See you this evening. I was sure my absence would affect him more than any reproaches: there is no possible reply to absence. I walked through the streets, wherever chance led me, obsessed by the words: He lied to me. Mental images pierced me through—Maurice’s eyes set on Noëllie, his smile. I dismissed them. He doesn’t look at her as he looks at me. I did not want to suffer; I did not suffer; but I choked with bitterness. He lied to me! I had said, “I should die of grief”: yes, but he had made me say it. He had been more eager than I in drawing up our pact—no compromise, no deviating. We were driving along the little road to Saint-Bertrand-de-Comminges, and he pressed me: “Shall I always be enough for you?” He blazed up because there was not enough ardor in my reply (but what a reconciliation in our room at the old inn, with the scent of honeysuckle coming in at the window! Twenty years ago—it was yesterday). He has been enough for me: I have lived only for him. And for a mere whim he has betrayed our vows. I said to myself, I shall insist upon his breaking it off, right away.… I went to Colette’s apartment; all day long I looked after her, but inside I was boiling. I came home, quite worn out. “I’m going to insist upon his breaking it off.” But what does the word insist mean after a whole life of love and understanding? I have never asked anything for myself that I did not also wish for him.

I had too much to drink; but Maurice laughed and told me I was charming. It’s funny: he had to deceive me for us to be able to revive the nights of our youth. There is nothing worse than the daily round: shocks wake one up again. Saint-Germain-des-Prés has changed since ’46: a different sort of people go there. “And it’s another era,” said Maurice, rather sadly. But I had not set foot in a nightclub for nearly fifteen years, and I was delighted with everything. We danced. At one moment he squeezed me very tightly and said, “Nothing has changed between us.” And we talked of all sorts of things at random: but I was half-seas over, and I have rather forgotten what he told me. Generally speaking it was just what I had imagined: Noëllie is an outstanding attorney and she is eaten up with ambition; she is a woman on her own—divorced, with one daughter—with very free and easy ways, fashionable, very much in the swim. Exactly my opposite. Maurice had wanted to know whether he could be attractive to a woman of that kind. “If I wanted to.…” I had asked myself that question when I flirted with Quillan: the only time I ever flirted in my life, and I soon stopped it. Slumbering in Maurice, as in most men, there is a young man who is far from certain of himself. Noëllie reassured him. And obviously it is also a question of direct desire—she is appetizing.

Taking into account the number of evenings he spends at the laboratory and the number of lunches he skips, he is giving Noëllie almost as much time as me. I flared up. He bewildered me with calculations. If the actual number of hours is counted, all right, he is more often with me. But during a great many of them he is working, reading periodicals—or else we are seeing friends. When he is with Noëllie he gives himself entirely up to her.

In the end I gave way. Since I have adopted an understanding, kindly attitude I must stick to it. No head-on collision with him. If I spoil his affair for him distance will make it seem charming—he will regret it. If I let him “live it decently” he will soon get tired of it. That’s what Isabelle assures me. I repeat to myself, Patience.

Still, I must realize that at Maurice’s age an infatuation means a good deal. At Mougins he was thinking of Noëllie, obviously. Now I understand the anxiety in his eyes at the Nice airfield—he was wondering whether I suspected anything. Or was he ashamed of having lied to me? Was it shame rather than anxiety? I can see his face once more, but I cannot make it out properly.

I was not watchful enough. I thought Maurice was aging, that he was overworking, that I ought to adapt myself to his lack of warmth. He took to thinking of me as a sister, more or less. Noëllie awoke his desires. Whether she has any sexual appetite or not she certainly knows how to conduct herself in bed. He has rediscovered the proud delight of fully satisfying a woman. Going to bed does not mean only going to bed. Between them there is that intimacy that used to belong only to me. When they wake up does he snuggle her against his shoulder, calling her his doe, his honeymouth? Or has he invented other names that he says in the same voice? Or has he found himself another voice? He is shaving, smiling at her, with his eyes darker and more brilliant, his mouth more naked under that mask of white foam. He appeared in the doorway holding a great bunch of red roses in his arms, wrapped in cellophane: does he take her flowers?

My heart is being sawed in two with a very fine-tooth saw.

“It’s not a very pleasant situation for her,” he replied.

Anger seized me again. “That’s the limit! She knew I existed when she went to bed with you.”

“She doesn’t forget it: indeed it is that which she finds so painful.”

“I’m in her way? She wants you all to herself?”

“She likes me.…”

Noëllie Guérard, that frigid little on-the-make climber, playing the lovelorn maiden—that was rather much to take!

“I can vanish, if that would make things easier for you two,” I said.

He laid his hand on my arm. “I beg of you, Monique, don’t take it like this.” He looked unhappy and tired, but I—I who go out of my mind if I hear him sigh—I was in no compassionate mood. I said coldly, “And how would you like me to take it?”

“Without enmity. All right, so I was wrong to begin this affair. But now it’s done I must try to manage things so as not to hurt anyone more than I can help.”

“I’m not asking you for pity.”

“It’s not a question of pity! From a completely selfish point of view, hurting you tears me to pieces. But do understand that I have to consider Noëllie too.”

And now, this evening, I tell myself that perhaps Maurice is in the act of repeating this conversation to Noëllie. How can it be that I had not thought of that before? They talk about themselves, and so necessarily about me. There are complicities between them, as there are between Maurice and me. It is not merely that Noëllie is a nuisance in our life: in their idyll, I am a problem and an obstacle. As she sees it, this is not just a passing thing: what she has in mind is a serious relationship with Maurice; and she is clever. My first reaction was the right one—I ought to have put a stop to it right away; to have said to Maurice, “Either her or me.” He would have been cross with me for a while, but then no doubt he would have thanked me. I had not been able to bring myself to it. My longings, wishes, interests have always been identical with his. On the few occasions when I have stood out against him it was for his own sake, for his own good. Now that I ought to rise up in direct opposition, I have not strength enough to enter into this battle. But I am not sure that my forbearance may not be a mistake. The bitterest thing about it is that Maurice scarcely seems to be grateful to me for it at all. I believe that with that splendid male illogicality he holds me responsible for the remorse he feels—holds it against me. Should I be still more understanding, more detached, more full of smiles? Oh, I can’t tell anymore. I have never hesitated so long about how I ought to behave. Yes, I have, though: about Lucienne. But then I could ask Maurice’s advice. The most staggering thing is my loneliness now that I am confronted with him.

Before going to bed I told him that on consideration I was sorry for my reaction—I should leave him free. He did not look happy about it: on the contrary, I thought I saw distress in his eyes. “I know very well I am asking you a great deal: I ask you too much. Don’t think I don’t feel remorse.”

“Oh, remorse! What’s the good of that?”

“No good, of course. I just said it, that’s all. Maybe it’s cleaner not to have any.”

I stayed awake a long while; so did he, it seemed to me. What was he thinking about? As for me, I was wondering whether I had been right to give way. Going from one concession to another, where should I end up?

And for the moment I am not getting anything out of it at all. It is too early, obviously. Before this affair can go bad it must be allowed to ripen. I tell myself that over and over again. And sometimes I think myself sensible, and sometimes I accuse myself of cowardice. In fact I am defenseless because I have never supposed I had any rights. I expect a lot of the people I love—too much, perhaps. I expect a lot, and I even ask for it. But I do not know how to insist.

But it was raining outside, and he did not have his raincoat with him; he was not wet. He had been to telephone Noëllie. She had insisted upon his telephoning: she didn’t even have the generosity to let me have him all to myself even for one wretched weekend. I said nothing. The day dragged along. Each realized that the other was making an effort to be pleasant and cheerful. We both agreed to go back to Paris for dinner and finish the evening at the cinema.

I shan’t struggle. But fear touched me all at once. Could it conceivably be that Maurice does prefer her to me? The idea had never occurred to me. I know that I possess—all right, let’s leave that word authenticity out of it: maybe it is a trifle priggish—a certain quality that she does not. “You have real quality, my dear,” my father used to say to me, proudly. And Maurice too, in other words. It is this quality that I value above anything else in people—in Maurice, and in Isabelle: and Maurice is like me. No. It is impossible that he should prefer someone as bogus as Noëllie to me. She is “cheap,” as they say in English. But it worries me that he should accept in her so many things that I consider unacceptable. For the first time I see that a gap has come into being between us.

I telephoned Quillan the day before yesterday. Oh, I’m not at all proud of it. I had to make sure that a man could still find me desirable. That has been proved. And where does it get me? It has not made me any more desirable to myself.

I did not listen for long; sobs rose in my throat; the music was now merely a refuge. We no longer had anything to say to one another, haunted as we were by this affair that he did not want to discuss.

“Why are you crying?” he asked, in a longsuffering voice.

“Because you’re bored when you’re with me. Because we can’t talk to one another anymore. Because you have built a wall between us.”

“It’s you who built it: you never stop going over and over your grievances.”

I irritate him a little more every day. I don’t mean to. And yet there is a part of me that does. When he seems too cheerful and unconcerned I say to myself, This is too easy. And then any excuse is good enough for me to destroy his peace of mind.

Speaking quietly, he said, “I want those ten days with her.” The words held a scarcely concealed threat—if you deprive me of them I will make our stay in the mountains hell. The idea that I was going to give in to this blackmail made me feel sick. No more concessions! It gets me nowhere, and it disgusts me with myself. One has to look things in the face. This is not a mere affair. He is cutting his life into two, and I don’t have the larger part. I’ve had enough. Presently I shall say to him, “Her or me.”

“But you didn’t want to admit that Maurice was a swine, either,” I said.

She protested. “No. Maurice is not a swine! He’s a man caught between two women: no one is a very shining light in cases of that kind.”

“He never ought to have got himself into that position.”

“It happens to very decent creatures.”

She is indulgent with Maurice because she has put up with a great deal from Charles. But their relationship was a completely different story.

“I don’t believe Maurice is a decent creature anymore,” I said. “I am discovering small-minded aspects in him. I wounded his vanity by not going into ecstasies over his successes.”

“There you are unjust,” she said, with a kind of sternness. “If a man likes to talk about his work, that is not vanity. It has always surprised me that you care so little for what Maurice does.”

“I’ve nothing of any interest to say to him about it.”

“No. But he would certainly have liked to tell you about his difficulties, and the things he had discovered.”