by
Lauren Elkin
topic/infidelity
Simone de Beauvoir,
Lauren Elkin,
James Salter,
Jennifer Egan,
Miranda July,
Ingmar Bergman,
Lorrie Moore,
Jenny Erpenbeck,
Tessa Hadley,
Elia Kazan
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.
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.
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.
origin story