project/secret-life

I had wearied of my bohemian existence and married Ka’bi Laretei, an up and coming pianist. We moved into a handsome villa in Djursholm, where I intended to live a well-organized bourgeois life. It was all a new and heroic production which rapidly turned into a new and heroic disaster, two people chasing after identity and security and writing each other’s parts, which they accepted in their great need to please each other. The masks quickly cracked and fell to the ground in the first storm and neither had the patience to look at the other’s face. Both shouted with averted eyes: look at me, look at me, but neither saw. Their efforts were fruitless. Two lonelinesses were a fact, failure, an inadmissible reality. The pianist went on tour, the producer produced and the child was entrusted to competent hands. Outwardly, the picture was of a stable marriage between successful contracting parties. The decor was tasteful and the lighting well arranged.

It's not easy. There was a time I did see him from a distance, but I was too young. I looked at him from too far off. Friends had pointed him out to me at the Sorbonne; they spoke of him a great deal, with a mixture of admiration and disapproval. It was whispered that he drank and frequented brothels. If that had been true, I think it would have attracted rather than repelled me; I was still rebelling against my pious childhood. In my mind, sin was a touching manifestation of the absence of God, and if someone had told me that Dubreuilh raped little girls I'd have taken him for a saint of sorts. But his vices were minor and his too-well-established fame irritated me. When I began taking his courses, I had already made up my mind that the 'great man' was a charlatan. Of course, he was different from all the other professors. He would come rushing into the room like a gust of wind; he was always four or five minutes late. He would survey us for a moment with his large, crafty eyes, and then he would begin speaking in either a very amiable or a very aggressive voice. There was something provocative in his surly face, his violent voice, his bursts of laughter which sometimes seemed to us a little insane. He wore very white shirts, his hands were always carefully manicured, and he was impeccably shaven; it was impossible, therefore, to attribute to negligence his zipper jackets, his pullovers, his clumsy shoes. He preferred comfort to decency with such an obvious lack of restraint that I thought it affected. I had read his novels and didn't like them at all; I expected them to bring to me some inspiring message, and all they ever spoke to me of were indifferent people, frivolous sentiments, and a lot of other things that didn't seem to me the least bit essential. As for his courses, they were interesting all right, but he never really said anything worthy of a genius. And he was always so cocksure of being right that I had an irresistible desire to contradict him. Oh, I was convinced, too, that the truth was to the left; ever since my childhood I had sniffed an odour of stupidity and lies in bourgeois thinking, a very foul-smelling odour. And then I had learned from the Gospel that all men are equal, are brothers; that's one thing I continue to believe in with an unshakable faith. But spiritually, after I had been for so long crammed full of absolutes, the void left in the heavens made a mockery of all morality I had been taught. But Dubreuilh believed there could be salvation here on earth. I let him know where I stood in my first essay. 'Revolution, fine,' I said, 'but what then?' When he gave me back my paper a week later as we were leaving the classroom, he ridiculed my efforts. According to him, my absolute was the abstract dream of a petty bourgeoise incapable of facing reality. Of course I couldn't hold my own against him, and he won every round. But that didn't prove anything, and I told him as much. We resumed our discussion the following week and this time he tried to convince me, rather than overwhelm me. I had to admit that in private discussion he didn't at all seem to feel that he was a great man. He began chatting with me, rather often after classes, sometimes he walked home with me occasionally taking a longer route than was necessary. And then we began going out together in the afternoons, the evenings. We stopped talking about morality and politics and other lofty subjects. He told me about the people he knew and the things he did, and most of all he would take me for walks, show me streets, squares, quays, canals, cemeteries, suburbs, warehouses, vacant sites, little cafes, and a hundred corners of Paris that were completely new to me. And I began to realize that I had never really seen things I believed I had always known; with him everything took on a thousand meanings — faces, voices, people's clothing, a tree poster, a neon sign, no matter, what. I reread all his novels. And I soon realized I had completely misunderstood them the first time. Dubreuilh gave the impression of writing capriciously, for his own pleasure, completely without motivation. And yet on closing the book, you felt yourself overwhelmed with anger, disgust, revolt; you wanted things to change. To read certain passages from his works, you would take him for a pure aesthete; he has a feeling for words, and he's interested in things for themselves, in rain and clear skies, in the games of love and chance, in everything. Only he doesn't stop there; suddenly you find yourself thrown in among people, and all their problems become your concern. That's why I'm so determined for him to continue writing; I know through my own experience what he can bring to his readers. There's no gap between his political ideas and his poetic emotions. Because he himself loves life so much, he wants all men to be able to share it abundantly. And because he loves people, everything that's part of their lives interests him deeply.

“Did you ever see the green flash,” she asked him after class, “down at Ocean Beach?”

He had not, he told her. She explained that it was an optical effect at sunset, when rays from the top of the sinking sun turned green. She had never seen it either, she said.

“Are you sure it isn’t a story cooked up by the Irish drunks who live out there?”

She laughed. They were standing outside the school trailer. It was a June evening when the sun sets late. The light was gold from valley haze and low, slanting into her eyes, filling the irises.

Looking at someone who is looking at you was a drug as strong as any other.

“Move it, Hall!” an officer yelled. It was time for evening count. “Move your ass, now! I said go!”

AFTER THEY MARRIED SHE learned to feel their skin as double-sided. They felt a pause. Theirs was too much feeling to push through the crack that led down to the dim world of time and stuff. That world was gone. They held themselves alert only in those few million cells where they touched. She learned from those cells his awareness and his courtesy. Love so sprang at her, she honestly thought no one had ever looked into it. Where was it in literature? Someone would have written something. She must not have recognized it. Time to read everything again.

What will you think about this from your deathbed? My husband’s wants had been consistent—to get married, to stay married, to have a child—while mine had become clear the hard way. I had, like so many fools before me, gotten right up to the edge of one life in order to learn I had to run in the opposite direction. If I had been more like him, maybe the deathbed question would have made me stay, but I wasn’t, so I left.

She and Peter had begun dating at nineteen. She’d broken up with him twice in college. Both times, he’d convinced her to take him back, saying he couldn’t live without her. She didn’t really believe him capable of such extreme emotion. He’d always be stable and predictable, she felt.

She’d seen from the beginning that he was very ambitious. When she thought the worst of him, she thought that everything in his life⁠—⁠his friendliness, his interests in children’s charities and golf, every single one of his acquaintances⁠—⁠was in fact only his ambition in all its various forms, as if he were just one thing, really, like a little mechanical device clacking its way upward.

In his own way, Peter could be distant, simply because he was so focused on his work. But in his distance he assumed the best of her. So he seemed to have no sense that she was having an affair, once she was. She continued to sleep with Eleu after they returned to New York.

Secrecy is the number one organizing principle of an infidelity. An affair always lives in the shadow of the primary relationship, hoping never to be discovered. The secrecy is precisely what intensifies the erotic charge. “Sex and subterfuge make a delicious cocktail,”7 writes journalist Julia Keller. We all know from childhood the glee of hiding and keeping secrets. They make us feel powerful, less vulnerable, and more free. But this dark pleasure is frowned on in adulthood. “I’ve always been a what-you-see-is-what-you-get kind of person,” says Angela, a punctilious Irish American paralegal who realized, through her affair with a client, that she enjoys sneaking around. “Discovering that I could act in total breach of my own long-held values was both bewildering and exciting at the same time. Once I was speaking with my sister, who was rattling away about the wrongdoing of cheaters, all the while smiling inwardly at my own secret. Little did she know that she was looking into the face of the ‘villain.’”