Bookmarker tag: for/pq-maybe (28 notes)

“Don’t tell me,” Cheryl said. “That must be Peter Pan and his ma.” She said, “Jon’s personal Bonnie and Clyde.”

“Shut up.”

I had never said that to her before. She stared straight ahead, as if she hadn’t heard me. We went to the elegant restaurant with our elegant, articulate liberal friends. The food was excellent, the wines perfect. We talked about films and politics and law. Cheryl was charming; I was witty. Something terrible had happened between us.

Cheryl and I are divorced now. I think our marriage began to end because of those Friday nights, not because she began having an affair. She was furious because I never took her to meet them. I’m not sure why I didn’t want to, whether I was afraid she would dislike them, or they would dislike her. Something else … some part of me that I was ashamed to let her see.

Despite this wishful thinking, resentment constituted much of my reaction to the news. Roger’s progressively incoherent emails and the assertive, bitchy-feeling replies they warranted from me highlighted how siloed our lives were. I knew him well—maybe I knew more of him than his kids or his wife, or at least I knew him differently, because the version of him I knew was obscured from them and from everyone else. But I didn’t have his health history. I had his ATM card, but I didn’t have his home address. I couldn’t have arranged a doctor’s appointment for him no matter how badly he needed one. I couldn’t even visit him in the hospital. We’d played prominent roles in each other’s lives for almost a decade, but I couldn’t talk to anyone in his family. No one would recognize that I meant something to him excepting, maybe, the doorman at his condo building in DC.

It was easier to obsess over concrete factors, like money, than to confront my existential and actual helplessness. I thought a lot about other mistresses during those days, the ones in positions more precarious than mine because they were in love with their married men or completely relied upon them financially. When you’re the other woman, there’s no dignified way to announce yourself. You blast into his larger life like a bomb, or you don’t enter at all. What radical loneliness those women must feel in these situations. So much loss, including the horrible finality of being closed out of his life and public record of the same.

In retrospect, it was laughable for me to entertain the possibility that he would want to leave her for me after the diagnosis, since that was when he needed the stability and support of his family more than ever. But he’d just threatened to leave her when he thought he had decades of life left. I thought the shortening of the timeline might make seizing the day imperative, but it must have had the opposite effect; because he had less time left, there was no point in change. Maybe he was relieved that he’d not followed through with his ultimatum. Maybe he imagined what it would be like if he’d been separated from his wife when he discovered the tumor—living alone in a furnished local rental, buried in divorce paperwork, his children angry and confused, me dismissed from my post. I’m sure that vision would be almost too bleak to contemplate.

I’d like to say that I didn’t want Roger to leave his wife, but I don’t think that’s entirely true. I’m a relatively impatient person, and I can be short-tempered. I hated the new limits imposed by his illness. His marriage was an inconvenience, and one he explicitly framed as a financial obstacle for me, so I resented it. But I wasn’t in love with Roger, and I didn’t want to marry him, so I didn’t want him to leave his wife for me. I wanted for him to be the man he seemed to want to be: decisive and confident, unafraid of other’s opinions and willing to prioritize what mattered most to him. But maybe that was exactly what he did by staying with her.

I SUGGESTED TO ROGER that he tell his brother about me, about us, because his brother was coming into town to visit while Roger’s wife would be away. Enlisting his brother as our ally could have helped us arrange a lot of time together, at least doubling the length of the afternoons we’d contented ourselves with so far—and any visit could be our last. I also thought it might be a relief for Roger to finally have someone to talk to about me because he’d lamented that inability for years. I thought his brother might also be able to help us keep in touch near the end. His brother had been in an affair that broke his first marriage, and even if he weren’t able to relate, surely he wouldn’t deny his dying sibling this request.

I explained this to Roger when he asked why I would propose such a thing. He was quiet for a beat. Then he told me that his many siblings had all been in marriages that failed. Only he had married just once and stayed married. As far as his Irish Catholic family was concerned, he was a paragon of marital virtue, and that was a source of great satisfaction for him. He wanted his family, his coworkers, and everyone who knew him to continue believing he was a faithful partner in a sterling union.

I saw an aspect of him then that I hadn’t before: his satisfaction at having gotten away with the biggest deception of his life. “I’m so looking forward to seeing you that it’s hard to bear,” he wrote of the few hours we’d steal under his brother’s ignorance. “It’s the one light in my dark universe.” But it wasn’t really the only light. He would die proud of having hidden me. I didn’t know that about him before he got sick. I don’t know if he’d known that about himself.

I don’t think Roger wronged me once. I have no grudges, and I don’t think anything about our arrangement was unfair. In fact, it was one of the most honest and equitable and respectful relationships I’ve had. But Roger took away one of the biggest decisions anyone has ever taken from me when he kept me from his death.

That was his right. Even if he hadn’t been paying me, or if he hadn’t been married, that would have been his right. I know he did the best he could, and that it was better than most people’s best would be. But we didn’t get to say goodbye. It’s a wound that will last forever.

I began leaving home at nineteen and kept leaving until I was married in the living room at twenty-four in a noisy act of faith that announced the matter accomplished. My husband was small (my size); blond (‘insignificant-looking’, as Mama put it); foreign (he couldn’t defend himself in English). We were drawn to each other by a common love of the arts, but he was a visionary painter and in me literature had aroused the critical faculty. He was wordless, I was all words. In him repression was demonic, in me explosive. Most of the time he brooded, twice a year he drank himself into a stupor. I remained sober and a scornful tongue was my constant companion. All the differences were negotiable except one: I talked better than he did and I used words like a weapon. That knocked us hopelessly off balance. I opened my mouth and power was mine: I could slice, cut, and pin; thrust, batter, and storm. He was helpless before the amazing siege. To the very largest degree that must have been how I wanted it, although certainly I could not then see this simple reality driving me on in all my attachments to men. The course I had followed to lead me to this man and this marriage was not difficult to trace (any child analyst could have delivered a creditable description of the psychological terrain), but I remained deep in the woods a quarter of a mile from the road.

We flew down to the Caribbean on a Tuesday afternoon. That night we ate dinner on a terrace that hung out over a blue-green bay and made love in a whitewashed room with the night air coming through open shutters, soft and sweet. Bliss. Tuesday night bliss. Wednesday all day bliss. Thursday also bliss. On Friday morning we prepared to leave for New York. We packed up, checked out, and drove our rented car out to the airport. Suddenly I couldn’t bear the thought of going back. I laid my hand on Joe’s arm and pleaded, ‘Let’s stay over the weekend. Call your wife and tell her you need another day or two for the boat.’

Joe turned his head halfway toward me. I saw the frown forming on his forehead, and I saw his eyes narrow. ‘Sweetie, I’m not going back with you,’ he said. ‘My wife is coming down this evening.’

The monolith of his marriage, and my own solitariness and flimsiness by comparison. I feel very small, slight, impermanent. It is not too late for me to save myself.

During the wedding ceremony I asked myself why the simple hopes of these promises are so impossible when the complications of life fall on them like a collapsing wall. I do not understand marriage. V is always talking about symmetry but we are not symmetrical at all. I am offering everything and he is offering everything except the final thing, which in effect means that he is offering nothing. Is this true or is it just a smart crack? It is quite understandable to be stunned and even sick with fear when you’re heading for a brick wall at 100 miles an hour.

The urge to blame V. To say, ‘He is selfish. He wants to have everything, for the world to revolve around him. He will never choose me. He should never have begun this.’ The cowardice of this urge. The old longing to play the victim. What’s required here is a bracing of the self. After all, ‘we’ ‘love’ ‘each other’. These hackneyed words. Who’s we? What’s love? Do we know each other? Or is each of us only a screen for the other’s light show?

I heard a gospel song in the car and a rush of Christian moral scruples came over me: ‘If I gave him up I would be a more virtuous person, more correct, more calm, more blessed.’ This kind of thing, which attracts me at times, is almost a death wish, a nothing wish, a blankness wish—like wishing that we could all like each other’s work, that there should be no conflict. The LIFE of life. No laws apply.

Weird feeling, when I look at a photo of V that I took, that once again he does not exist, I have never met him, I have invented him, he is a FIGMENT. If a long enough silence should fall between us we would forget each other and slip back into our previous lives. Does he exist? No particular emotion accompanies these fancies. In fact it’s a breathing space between bouts of reality. I don’t miss him. How could I miss a flicker, a quick darkness. It would be easier if we never had any further contact with each other, but left each other’s lives alone. He won’t leave his wife, they’ll live out the rest of their lives together, side by side, without passion but with a strong familiarity, used to each other. What’ll I do? I’ll take up piano lessons again, learn to make plants grow, write novels. Summer will come. I’ll grow older. I’ll be happy. If I could be this calm, when we’re apart, then we could live it properly, honour it, without causing smash-up, pain, grief, humiliation. On the other hand, this state seems unreal to me, a kind of nothing state, an interim—or like sleep, or death. ‘First—chill—then stupor—then the letting go—’

By being decent, you only extend your own period of suffering. I said, ‘I’m not waiting for you to leave. That’s not what I’m doing.’ But the truth is more like: ‘Tell me whether you ever will, or whether I must accept that the rest of my life will involve this complicated, delicate balancing act. What hurts me is the suspense.’ I didn’t say this. But I must.

I never knew before the difference between sadness and sorrow. Sadness is general, broad, heavy, passive. Sorrow is sharper, more focused, more active, working hard. I could even say labouring. Labouring with sorrow. When I think of his wife’s unhappiness, my own ‘indignities’ almost vanish—because the reason he gives for requiring them is to save her from further pain. He does not see that this is unlikely to work, in the long run.

We will only see each other occasionally, he says, but each time will be like our first time — a celebration. She listens to him attentively and nods. I can only be a luxury for you, because I am a married man. I know, she says. Perhaps that won’t be enough for you, he says. I understand that. She looks him straight in the face, there is a ring of yellow around her pupils, he now sees. I’m not just married, I’m also in a relationship with a woman who works in radio. If you had a thousand women, she says, all that matters is the time that we get to spend together. How can he ever refuse her anything, if she doesn’t demand anything? The black velvet ribbon moves him, it makes her look like a schoolgirl. If he doesn’t manage to say quickly what he needs to say, it’ll be too late. And you can’t expect any sort of public acknowledgment — I know, and you know, and that will have to do. That’s fine, she says, and smiles. Where terms and conditions are set, there is a future. All yesterday and today she was afraid he would just toss her out.

When they part very early the next morning, he is instructed by her to buy pepper and breadcrumbs. Padlizsán, says Katharina, but she won’t tell him what it is in German, it’s to be a surprise. Tomorrow they are planning to cook together, Ingrid and Ludwig will be away at a summer party in the Uckermark. Ingrid knows her husband isn’t keen on such festivities, just stay home, why don’t you, she said. Who knows, maybe she’s planning to meet someone there herself. Years ago now, the couple made a joint decision not to watch each other too closely. Only they didn’t want to make it public, lest it seem too much of a slight to either party. Is there enough wine in the house? When he woke up this morning, he called her his darling, and she reciprocated.

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?

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.

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.

She had always wanted words, she loved them, grew up on them. Words gave her clarity, brought reason, shape. Whereas I thought words bent emotions like sticks in water.

She returned to her husband.

From this point on, she whispered, we will either find or lose our souls.

Seas move away, why not lovers? The harbours of Ephesus, the rivers of Heraclitus disappear and are replaced by estuaries of silt. The wife of Candaules becomes the wife of Gyges. Libraries burn.

What had our relationship been? A betrayal of those around us, or the desire of another life?

She climbed back into her house beside her husband, and I retired to the zinc bars.

I’ll be looking at the moon,
but I’ll be seeing you.

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.

[...] regardless of what happened to me or to her, in between, we never discussed anything, as we never thought of each other during the intervals in our destiny, so that when we met the pace of life altered at once, all its atoms were recombined, and we lived in another, lighter time-medium, which was measured not by the lengthy separations but by those few meetings of which a short, supposedly frivolous life was thus artificially formed. And with each new meeting I grew more and more apprehensive; no—I did not experience any inner emotional collapse, the shadow of tragedy did not haunt our revels, my married life remained unimpaired, while on the other hand her eclectic husband ignored her casual affairs although deriving some profit from them in the way of pleasant and useful connections. I grew apprehensive because something lovely, delicate, and unrepeatable was being wasted: something which I abused by snapping off poor bright bits in gross haste while neglecting the modest but true core which perhaps it kept offering me in a pitiful whisper. I was apprehensive because, in the long run, I was somehow accepting Nina’s life, the lies, the futility, the gibberish of that life. Even in the absence of any sentimental discord, I felt myself bound to seek for a rational, if not moral, interpretation of my existence, and this meant choosing between the world in which I sat for my portrait, with my wife, my young daughters, the Doberman pinscher (idyllic garlands, a signet ring, a slender cane), between that happy, wise, and good world … and what? Was there any practical chance of life together with Nina, life I could barely imagine, for it would be penetrated, I knew, with a passionate, intolerable bitterness and every moment of it would be aware of a past, teeming with protean partners. No, the thing was absurd. And moreover was she not chained to her husband by something stronger than love—the staunch friendship between two convicts? Absurd! But then what should I have done with you, Nina, how should I have disposed of the store of sadness that had gradually accumulated as a result of our seemingly carefree, but really hopeless meetings?

"Yes." A flicker over her stare was the facial equivalent of a shrug. "Now you have a wife to give you both."

They stood fronting one another. Paul removed his hand from the door. "Caro. For pity's sake."

The figure of speech appeared to move her, and for an instant it seemed she might laugh. Again he pressed what he took for an advantage: "Have a bit of mercy."

She herself leaned back on the chalky wall, and closed her eyes. "How should you hope for mercy, rendering none?"

"These walls are full of dirty quotations, one way and another."

There was silence while she leaned there, austere with her umbrella, sheathed and closed. She roused herself and did step past him, then, to pull at the heavy door.

From behind her, Paul said, "You've got white all over your back." And in the most natural way in the world brushed his hand down her coat. Then passed his arms about her waist and put his mouth to the nape of her neck, and said, "Almighty God."

Prince (suddenly turning, hand on door knob, pointing his cane at Stark and lowering his voice to a near whisper): Iceberg, listen ... why don't you come up and see the world, the sea gulls and the ships to Europe? (Coming back into the room.) When did you look at another woman last? The year they put the buffalo nickel on the market? Why don't you suddenly ride away, an airplane, a boat! Take a rocket to the moon! Explode! What holds you back? You don't want to hurt Belle's feelings? You'll die soon enough --

Stark: I'll just have to laugh at that!

Prince: Laugh ... But make a motto for yourself: "Out of the coffin by Labor Day!" Have an affair with -- with -- with this girl ... this Miss Cleo. She'll make you a living man again.

Stark: I thought of you all last night. I was walking on the boardwalk and I thought of you. Do you know what the waves are saying?

Cleo: What?

Stark: Your name ...

Cleo: Well, were you walking alone?

Stark: No.

Cleo: With your wife?

Stark: Yes ... (There is a pause; Cleo walks to the water cooler.)