Bookmarker tag: topic/heartbreak (99 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.

Harris walked into the kitchen as we were finishing up. He paused, watching us smooth on the monkfruit-sugar frosting. I held my breath.

Almond cookies with jam in the middle, grain-free banana muffins, carrot custard—even when they turned out all wrong Harris always gobbled them up, which was the highest praise. Praise I maybe couldn’t live without. I was suddenly united with a long lineage of women who fixed everything through food; terror can really strip you of your modernity.

If he eats a cupcake we’re going to be okay.

He paused.

“There’s cream in the middle,” Sam said with great urgency. We were both praying.

But Harris was only looking for something and it wasn’t in the kitchen after all.

“We went back to her place.”

“Okay.” I stood up. “Okay then.” I sat down. I put my hands to my cheeks and then clasped them in my lap. “All right. All right then.”

He watched me, braced for whatever was coming. I crossed my arms and looked away. So, this was the cost of that free feeling each morning. Brutal. But there was enough hypocrisy built into life, one shouldn’t choose it.

“I think this is good,” I rasped.

“Yeah?”

“Yeah.”

We looked at each other in shock, like two people hovering in the air with nothing holding them up. No scaffolding, no strings, no wings—but not falling.

There was a lovely woman with whom, as a young man, I was smitten. She seemed to have similar feelings for me. We flirted in a harmless way at work (we were concierges at a well-known upscale New York boutique hotel, I won’t say the name but you’d have heard of it). I was married at the time, too young and unhappily, but we’d had an accidental child and I was doing the responsible thing. This is me in a nutshell. I am responsible. I am a good man. I always do the right thing. But is doing the right thing the right thing? Or is doing the right thing the cowardly thing? The thing that doesn’t make waves? The thing with which others cannot find fault? If romantic films have taught us anything, it is that by being responsible we are being irresponsible—to ourselves. To the cosmos. To the narrative. Even to those we need to wrong terribly by leaving them. Because is not it better to be honest with her, him, thon? I think perhaps it is. In the end, my marriage fell apart anyway. She became smitten with an art critic, a mediocre one at that. But it was too late. My Concierge to Merge (as we once jokingly referred to each other) also married an art critic. A separate art critic, although equally mediocre. One marvels at the accidental symmetry of life. And she was happy, ecstatically so, she told me, although I always felt she sounded a tad defensive. And my life was ruined. And I aged. And I look unhappy, ecstatically unhappy. And I don’t sleep at night. And I take pills to help me cope. And it’s not only her, although if I had her, I feel certain I would be fine with every other disappointment, but I don’t, so my professional failures come to the fore. In a sense, the same brand of cowardice that kept me from pursuing my true love kept me from pursuing my true chosen profession. Oh, I made one movie. I made it on a shoestring with money I had borrowed from my wealthy-by-marriage sister. It didn’t do for my career what I had imagined it would, what to this day I believe it should have. It is, and I say this as an objective professional critic with a PhD in the cinema of postwar Europe, perhaps the single most brilliant film of the last twenty years. Certainly, there were problems with it. I won’t say there weren’t. For one thing, it was decades ahead of its time. For another, I concede, it was perhaps too emotionally draining for audiences. Most goers are not looking for an experience that unrelentingly intense, that devastatingly heartbreaking, an experience that will change them forever. And then there were the critics, who were, in a word, jealous. They all want to be filmmakers themselves but do not have the talent, so they expressed their rage with a slew of moderately negative reviews. In some cases, they refused to review it at all.

When he awoke he found that night was falling, one of those melancholy sunsets at the close of a lovely winter's day. He sat up on his bed. still undecided as to what he should do. Often he used to study at that hour, but now his books looked down from their shelves in vain. All those titles spoke of something dead and gone and quite incapable of making him forget for a single instant the painful life-struggle which was still being waged in his breast.

I repeated that I was leaving, but he scoffed, almost laughed. Not just like that you’re not, he said, and we walked in silence for several blocks and I wondered whether there was any ideal criteria for this, whether there was a correct way to end a marriage on nothing more than an amorphous sense of another life just out of reach, a life that might kill me, it seemed, if I didn’t live it. Once inside our apartment again, he asked me to at least keep living with him for another month, to accompany him to his cousin’s wedding, to give him a chance to make the case for our life together, and I agreed to it, hoping that it would make sense, that the simpler course—staying together, staying the same—would come to seem to be the correct course.

On Bleecker Street you catch the scent of the Italian bakery. You stand at the corner of Bleecker and Cornelia and gaze at the windows on the fourth floor of a tenement. Behind those windows is the apartment you shared with Amanda when you first came to New York. It was small and dark, but you liked the imperfectly patched pressed-tin ceiling, the claw-footed bath in the kitchen, the windows that didn’t quite fit the frames. You were just starting out. You had the rent covered, you had your favorite restaurant on MacDougal where the waitresses knew your names and you could bring your own bottle of wine. Every morning you woke to the smell of bread from the bakery downstairs. You would go out to buy the paper and maybe pick up a couple of croissants while Amanda made the coffee. This was two years ago, before you got married.

The sound of the tumblers in the locks of your apartment door puts you in mind of dungeons. The place is haunted. Just this morning you found a makeup brush beside the toilet. Memories lurk like dustballs at the backs of drawers. The stereo is a special model that plays only music fraught with poignant associations.

It is a warm, humid afternoon. Spring, apparently. Late April or early May. Amanda left in January. There was snow on the ground the morning she called, a whiteness that turned gray and filthy by noon and then disappeared down the sewer grates. Later that morning the florist called about the bouquet you ordered for her return. Everything becomes symbol and irony when you have been betrayed.

“Things happen, people change,” is what Amanda said. For her that covered it. You wanted an explanation, an ending that would assign blame and dish up justice. You considered violence and you considered reconciliation. But what you are left with is a premonition of the way your life will fade behind you, like a book you have read too quickly, leaving a dwindling trail of images and emotions, until all you can remember is a name.

I AM IN PARIS FOR THREE DAYS. IT IS NOT MY FIRST TIME, and the circumstances of my earlier visits have always been a little odd.

When I was quite young I came with a Norwegian theatre company. I was unhappily in love and only wanted to lie on my bed and read old letters from him. He went on a walking tour in the mountains to forget me. He ran up and down and around all the peaks he could find, timed himself, beat his own records, and after a while couldn’t remember why he had begun running. While I dragged myself to Sarah Bernhardt’s old theatre and acted out my suffering on the stage.

I didn’t even bother to see the Eiffel Tower.

SO MUCH HAS BEEN WRITTEN ABOUT OUR LIFE AT FARO. People who have never been there and never known us have written chapters.

But I remain dumb when someone asks me to talk about it.

I was young and had so many ideas about what life should be.

Pictures—which are fragments of our life together: walks on the beach, ‘when like children we buried coins in the sand so that we could find them again many years later. In case we were poor or war had come. A small pile of stones in memory of a summer day and of two people who knew how to play together.

Nights, when we lay close to each other and he whispered that I must be quiet, so that he, in the stillness, could long for me and ask me to talk to him again.

Our boundless need for each other, for what the other one should represent. The powerlessness when something went wrong. ’

We entered into each other’s lives too early and too late.

While she still has him, they go away to a warm country. She holds his hand while he reads, and she feels a tranquillity because everything is ordinary. She can afford the knowledge that there are long periods when he doesn’t think about her. But she also knows that the hand resting in hers will soon give it a quick hard squeeze to show that she exists for him.

Sometimes he turns and looks at her with happiness, and once in a great while there is uneasiness in the eyes. Then she knows he is thinking of his wife and children and she realizes with an icy clearness that he both loves her and is going to leave her.

As if he reads her thoughts, he puts away his book. “I can never live without you,” he lies to her in the sun.

She believes him until he falls asleep, holding her close to him.

She knows when he wakes his sense of guilt will also awaken his need for security and order, his loyalty to what he feels is his responsibility. What he owes to another. Beloved man.

I put the book down and looked out the window. I heard wind, and no truck driving up the road.

Part of attraction is the unpredictable nature of everything, the manner in which you wait, and want.

Good for you, I thought at René, for reducing me to those who wait. But also, go to hell.

Having decided he was not coming, I finished the final two cans of my six-pack and went to sleep.

“You wanted the kids. You wanted this life.”

“You didn’t?”

“If it had been up to me, we’d be devoted to service. You wouldn’t be a housewife, and I damn sure wouldn’t be giving sermons to bankers and the bridge club.”

“You’re saying that I’m the one who dragged you down? That you’re the one who sacrificed? That you’re doing me a favor with this marriage?”

“At this point? Yes. That is what I think. If you want to know why, take a look at yourself in the goddamned mirror.”

It was the cruelest thing he’d ever said.

“That hurts me,” she said quietly, “but not as much as you wish it did.”

“I—apologize.”

“You don’t have the faintest idea who you married.”

He looked at her eyes, and knew that what was falling inside him would not stop falling till it broke. He said: “No.”

“No what? I’m not pregnant? Did you think you were shooting blanks?”

“No, don’t do it.”

“I’m twenty-two years old, I’m going to New York, and you want me to have a fucking baby?”

The falling thing in him hit and broke and he trembled and said: “Not a fucking baby. Our baby, Susan. Our baby.”

He had to look away from the death of everything he saw in her eyes.

When my husband told me he was leaving, we were sitting in our den. I looked around at the polished shelves, the TV and VCR, piles of The New Yorker and Business Week. The accumulation of ten years of marriage, mostly his.

“I’ve made the arrangements,” he told me. “I’ll rent an apartment.”

I ran my eyes along his encyclopedias, photos he’d taken of whitewashed churches in Greece, a crusty turquoise horse from some ancient dynasty. “All this is yours,” I said.

“We can settle that when the time comes …”

“You stay here,” I told him. “I’ll go.”

This took him by surprise. “Do you want that?”

A terrible feeling had taken hold of me. I searched the room for things of my own and found nothing but things my husband had given me: a kimono pinned to the wall, The Complete Works of Shakespeare, a set of Greek worry beads.'

“What have I got to lose?” I said.

He sighed. “Don’t be a martyr.”

Her objection is to Polytope's strategy for getting people to spend that time. Blue Gamma's strategy had been to make the digients lovable, while Polytope was starting with unlovable digients and using pharmaceuticals to make people love them. It seems clear to her that Blue Gamma's approach was the right one, not just more ethical but more effective.

Indeed, maybe it was too effective, considering the situation she's in now: she's faced with the biggest expense of her entire life, and it's for her digient. It's not what anyone at Blue Gamma expected, all those years ago, but perhaps they should have. The idea of love with no strings attached is as much a fantasy as what Binary Desire is selling. Loving someone means making sacrifices for them.

Now, of course, the evidence is weighing heavily against me. This man and I had met at a journalists’ conference. Desire had flared quickly, and then happiness had taken us both by surprise. We had spent a month together. Now we had separated, I back to New York, he to the Midwest to finish an assignment. Our plan had been to meet in New York in six weeks. Meanwhile, he was to call the day after I got home. Two weeks have now passed: no phone call. He’s on the road. I have no way of reaching him. It’s been two weeks of concentrated misery. It’s the first thing I’m aware of when I wake, the last thing before I sleep. I sleep so badly that often I’m awake in the night, whereupon I remember and the pain is dazzling. By now I’m not a character in a Doris Lessing story, I am a Doris Lessing story. The world is a framed space filled in by obsession. I move through the space grim and staring-eyed, a modern woman condemned to the knowledge that the experience of love will be played out repeatedly on an ever-diminishing scale, but always with a full complement of fever and sickness, intensity and denial.

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.’

[...] anyone who has ever been to just one session of couples therapy could tell you that beyond your point of view lies an abyss with a bubbling cauldron of fire, and that just beyond that abyss lies your spouse’s point of view. If he were to be a real scientist about this, would he be able to find empirical evidence that Rachel had a point in rejecting him? That Rachel was right to hate him this much? Yes, right then, for the first time, he could see it. He could make his way across the abyss, and just for a minute, he could see that he was the same vile, fat, needy piece of shit he always was.

[...] This was fair? That he would smile and take it up the ass during mediation so that they could present their children with a peaceful and amicable thing, and then the minute it was almost done, she would do the worst thing she could possibly do—a thing so bad that it wasn’t even close on a list of horrible things she had done prior to this? That was fair? If it were fair, and you weighed Toby’s sins against his punishments, you would find that he’d gotten some real kind of raw deal. What did he do so wrong but be devoted? What did he do so wrong but try? But love? But come home on time? But figure that his wife would be a partner to him the way he was to her? But maybe throw a few glasses and maybe say the wrong things?

God, he was so tired of trying to figure out how it had been wrong, what the micromaneuver that set Rachel free from him was. She had abandoned him. She’d been cruel to him. She had denied him love and respect and self-esteem. She had diminished him to become someone who nearly disintegrated into suspicion and then sorrow at the mere affectionate touch of someone. She’d been cruel to their children—their children! She’d left them! She knew what it was to be without parents and still she’d left them!

“I never misrepresented myself,” he’d say.

That was a favorite, as if people weren’t supposed to evolve and change and make requests of each other to bend and grow and expand.

At some point, she accepted it. It was up to her to make the kind of living that would allow them to participate in the life they’d signed up for. He accepted it, too. He pretended to be apathetic to the money, but you should have seen how he liked the car. You should have seen how he liked the club—the pool on the rooftop, way above the city, both metaphorically and actually. So Toby adjusted his schedule to be home a little early to relieve Mona, the babysitter. He stood back and allowed her to try for this big thing she wanted to do. She did it, not out of bravery, but out of two parts no choice and three parts because to see Matt Klein again would have been to commit a failure she couldn’t have come back from.

So she did her work and Toby made the noises of someone who was stepping back, but he didn’t really do it. He came home on time, sure. He made dinner when Mona didn’t. But he didn’t adjust his expectations of her, or leave room for how tired she could get or how harried or busy. He loved taking those long walks. No matter how late they were, he wanted to walk. Across the park, across the city. She kept trying to explain to him that time functioned in units. For all his love of physics, he never quite grasped that one: If you use this time to walk to dinner that is thirty-five blocks away instead of letting me finish this email in a cab on the way there, I will be finishing the email at the table. The email isn’t optional. The email is the entire thing.

[...] Somewhere, deep down, he had chosen her because he knew that meant he could do what he wanted with his life and not be obligated to do anything exclusively for money. And somewhere deep down, maybe she chose him because she knew that absent the hunger he clearly didn’t have, she would be permitted to be the animal she always was.

And still: “You’re always angry,” he’d say to her. And then finally she could admit that she was, particularly after those therapy sessions where she saw just how disgusted both Toby and the therapist were by her annoyance at even having to be there. As if you had to celebrate going to couples therapy! As if you had to rejoice over the time and money you were spending not to make things better, but to get them back to bearable. It always struck her as ironic that the revelation of her anger would come not from the therapy itself but from the fact of it. Still, after all those accusations, Toby never wondered why she was angry. He just hated her for being so. The anger was a garden that she kept tending, and it was filled with a toxic weed whose growth she couldn’t control. He didn’t understand that he was a gardener to the thing, too. He didn’t understand that they’d both planted seeds there.

[...] I would try not to put too much weight on the moments that are the worst in marriage: when one of you is in a good mood and the other can’t recognize it or rise to its occasion and so leaves the other dangling in the loneliness of it; when one of you pretends to not really understand what the other person is saying and instead holds that person to a technicality they don’t deserve.

On the train back from Marseille I read a passage from Calvino’s If on a Winter’s Night a Traveler, the passage about the “Japanese book on a carpet of leaves,” etc., and all at once I’m filled with burning desire, an incredible longing to make love, though since S left, I’ve been all but frozen. I could weep from the memories, the lack, all the vanished sweetness. To lose a man is to age several years in one fell swoop, grow older by all the time that did not pass when he was there, and the imagined years to come. This desire also means I might be ready to fall back into the same kind of favola with someone else.

'And then all of a sudden it's like he suddenly wasn't there.'

'At this point she'd bring up how I seemed suddenly distant. I would explain in response that I had gotten, suddenly, over champagne, an idea for a truly central piece on the application of state variable techniques to the analysis of small-signal linear control systems. A piece that could have formed the crux of my whole senior year's thesis, the project that had occupied and defined me for months.'

'He went to his Dad's office at the University and I didn't see him for two days.'

'She claims that's when she began to feel differently about things. No doubt this new Statistics person comforted her while I spent two sleepless, Coke-and-pizza fueled days on a piece that ended up empty and unfeasible. I went to her for comfort and found her almost hostile. Her eyes were dark and she was silent and trying with every fiber to look Unhappy. She practically had her forearm to her forehead. It was distressed-maiden/wronged-woman scenario."

[...]

'She regarded the things that were important to me as her enemy, not realising that they were, in fact, the "me" she seemed so jealously to covet.'

The weekend her father left – left the house, the town, the country, everything, packing so lightly I believed he would come back – he had said, ‘You can raise Nickie by yourself. You’ll be good at it.’

And I had said, ‘Are you on crack?’

And he had replied, continuing to fold a blue twill jacket, ‘Yes, a little.’

Did I want children, David? I know I always told you I didn’t, but did I, secretly? If not, why did I continue sobbing all the way back to the hotel, all the way through the dose, to the point of addressing the question to you, imaginary you? Are you glad we didn’t? Are you going to do it with . . . Philippa? Can that really be her name? Are you going to have a little Silverlake family? Are you going to wear a Baby Bjorn at the co-op? Are you going to name the girl Hyacinth and the boy Elderflower? Is there any way to reclaim the time we’ve lost? Is there a place where our days aren’t numbered? What is your worst fear? What is mine? And are you even reading this?

In the kitchen, the water in the kettle shakes, creaks toward boiling, and outside the wind blows. Somewhere, in another street, a roofslate slides and falls. Roger has taken Jessica's cold hands in to warm against his breast, feeling them, icy, through his sweater and shirt, folded in against him. Yet she stands apart, trembling. He wants to warm all of her, not just comic extremities, wants beyond reasonable hope. His heart shakes like the boiling kettle.

It has begun to reveal itself: how easily she might go. For the first time he understands why this is the same as mortality, and why he will cry when she leaves. He is learning to recognize the times when nothing really holds her but his skinny, 20-pushup arms. ... If she leaves, then it ceases to matter how the rockets fall. But the coincidence of maps, girls, and rocketfalls has entered him silently, silent as ice, and Quisling molecules have shifted in latticelike ways to freeze him. If he could be with her more ... if it happened when they were together— in another time that might have sounded romantic, but in a culture of death, certain situations are just more hep to the jive than others—but they're apart so much. . . .

That is the story! Who could live up to it? Not me, certainly. In the years between meeting and dating her, I had lost my heart a few more times, and I had learned the miraculous healing powers of irony, of laughing at your old selves so you could take the current one very seriously. Every several months, like a computer emptying a cache, I trashed my old selves. Ashley forced me to take seriously the sharpest and deepest experience I’d ever had of falling in love, an experience I had spent years ignoring or deprecating. (“Ah, to be emo again.”) It undid me. A man who is being undone is not always fun to be around. So many of our entanglements, in our twenties, are about the joy of being intimate, being intense, without having to be known; was I ready to be done with that most delightful form of self-harm? It’s a miracle that I didn’t break up with her in that first year—not because she was wrong but because she was so right that if I stayed with her, I would have to start to care what happened to me, and then to the embarrassing series of silly men that I lived in flight from having been.

Only a man distracted by love will get up from the dinner table and return with a single glass of water; will barge first out the heavy front door of the building and let it slam in his wife’s face. The sick power of knowing something he thinks I don’t know; of knowing that he’s lying to me. The clumsiness of the lies, the humiliation of being clumsily lied to.

I stayed a night with friends at Mona Vale. V wouldn’t come. Ashamed to be sleepless, to be in this much pain. And yet this is life. The toughness of life. People’s utter, bottomless selfishness. This is what people do. The fact that I’ve been faithful to V for ten years has no weight, in the big scales of what will become of us. No ‘virtue’, no ‘self-control’ can save us, or protect us from each other. We can’t make room for each other. We push each other into the most extreme versions of ourselves, and then with a gritty determination we fight.

Everything fine in our bodies, but no emotional contact. No eye contact, no sound, not a word spoken. He turned his head sideways on the pillow so as not to look at me. In a small rush of courage I took hold of his chin and gently turned his head towards me: ‘Hello? Are you there?’ He opened his eyes. I said, ‘Hello? It’s me. I’m here.’ ‘Eh? What’s the matter?’ ‘I had a feeling things were happening only from the neck down.’ We both laughed. He said, ‘Of course they weren’t.’ But they were.

Eventually he admitted it. She had flown down to Melbourne after I’d left, he’d met her at the airport and they’d set out straight away. When I got home from the lunch party yesterday and found him all hot and flustered, he’d just dropped her off at her place. I flung myself on the couch and wept and howled, doubled up, holding a hanky over my face. He kept trying to get a grip on my arms and I kept shouting, ‘Don’t you touch me! Don’t you dare touch me! You lied! You lied!’ ‘I didn’t lie!’ ‘You did lie! You lied and lied! You lied all year! And five minutes ago you were still telling me she wasn’t with you on the drive! In the motel! At Gundagai!’

V: ‘I didn’t want to tell you.’

H: ‘Why? Why?’

V: ‘Because it would hurt you and make you upset.’

H: ‘For Christ’s sake! Nothing is worse than being lied to! No pain is worse than that!’

The bitterness and disgust, the self-disgust for having been a fool. I kept groaning and crying out, ‘I can’t bear this pain.’

I got calmer. He went out to the kitchen and got a cloth and began to clean up. I sat on the phone chair, slack and stupid, beyond speech.

You said this could go on as long as I want, and now I don’t want. That’s what Katharina will say when he finally gets through to her when she’s back in Berlin, he’s almost certain of it now. Can you help me?, the damned cork broke off. No, he can’t help Ingrid with her cork just now, he needs all his concentration to keep the inaudible sentence in check, the one that goes: and now I don’t want. You’ll manage, he says, and stays in his seat by the window. He senses the silence suddenly thickening in the room, but he doesn’t care, his desire hasn’t sounded like Mozart for days now either. Why are you in such a bad mood? And now I don’t want. Or the phone rings, and no one picks it up. Sorry, what? Why are you in such a bad mood. I’m not in a bad mood. And now I don’t want it. He can think of three to five reasons why it should be that way. Why would she even bother picking up his letter from the post office? Well, as long as you’re sitting pretty. He needs to get through one more week on the Baltic, while the girl readjusts to a life in Berlin in which he no longer figures. Would you stop quarreling please, says Ludwig. We’re not quarreling, says Hans.

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.

Her life. Even when she’s not to pick up the telephone when she’s alone in the apartment, in case it’s Ingrid on the other end. Last Monday, for instance, when Hans was at the ophthalmologist’s, it kept ringing and ringing. And she sat there, pretending not to exist. And for all that: her life. Is she happy at Ingrid’s expense? Or just happy? Is it always in relation to someone else, is it a zero-sum game? Or is it random and disassociated, one here, one there? Then in the evening, when Hans was back, he picked up and he spoke to Ingrid. Katharina took herself out to the balcony, but she could still hear every word. He spoke to his own wife as to a stranger. Katharina should have been pleased, but in fact it depressed her. Is that all that’s left of a thirty-year marriage? When she’s old, will she too have a husband who speaks to her on the phone, while his lover is on the balcony, waiting to be waved back in? If one knew the whole truth about everything, could hear what was unsaid, and see what was parked in the shadows — then would there be any sense in wanting anything at all?

He realized then, as she sat there, a woman in his apartment at night, a woman he knew he loved, that she was really giving him one last chance. He knew he should take it.

— Ah, Noreen, he said.

After that night, she vanished. Not suddenly, but it did not take long. She married Bobby. It was as simple as a death, but it lasted longer. It seemed it would never go away. She lingered in his thoughts. Did he exist in hers? he often wondered. Did she still feel, even if only a little, the way he felt? The years seemed to have no effect on it. She was in New Jersey somewhere, in some place he could not picture. Probably there was a family. Did she ever think of him? Ah, Noreen.

That was how she and Walter came to part, upon being discovered by his wife. They met two or three times afterward, at his insistence, but to no avail. Whatever holds people together was gone. She told him she could not help it. That was just the way it was.

It was like those moments in your most intimate relationships when you look over and are startled to remember: that other person is not you and is not yours to define. He or she suddenly seems to be some alien whom, inexplicably, you have decided to trust. Even as the two of you lie wrapped in each other's arms, you know that he or she can exist without you, and does just that now and again, in moments, and sometimes over longer stretches of time: sheds you. Yet you continue on, together. And that, too, I think, is an imperative of love.

“You don’t love me as I love you,” she murmured.

“Oh, why do you say—”

She interrupted him, saying, “No, in me you love, as you put it so well before dinner, a woman who satisfies the wants of your heart, a woman who’s never caused you pain and who’s managed to put a little happiness into your life. That I know, that I feel. Yes, I have the consciousness, the deep joy of having been good and useful and helpful to you. And you’ve loved, you still love, all that you find in me: my solicitude for you, my admiration, my desire to please you, my passion—the complete gift I’ve made to you of myself. But that’s not me you love, don’t you understand that? Oh! I feel that the way you feel a cold draft. In me you love so many things—my beauty, which is fading, my devotion, the wit people say they find in me, the opinion the world has of me, the opinion I have of you in my heart—but that’s not me, that’s nothing of myself. Can’t you understand that?”

[...] And so begins what I see as his slow fade from me. We talk less and less, and since we both grew up in houses schooled to letting people vaporize into their own internal deserts with alacrity, we each let the other get smaller.

Marshall and I found a bench on the sidewalk, old and abandoned. We brought it home, where I sprayed it with Simple Green until it was almost white, then tied two blue-patterned cushions to it.Seven years of marriage and our home is coming together in bits and pieces like the bench, or the curtains I sewed even though I can’t really sew. At the same time, it is all falling apart, in monstrous, heavy clumps. An avalanche. A tidal wave. I don’t know how much is left to rebuild.

Before Marshall fled the house tonight, before I began pacing, before I drank the wine, we sat on the porch. He stared at me, waiting for signs of life. I sat hunched on the new bench, staring at the floorboards. It had been days since we’d spoken to one another, except for me saying, “I’m having trouble being in this house with you,” and “I can’t talk. You won’t like what I have to say.” So we stayed silent instead.

But tonight he sat on the rocking chair next to the bench. The breeze that blew between us was warm. And I thought about how it couldn’t have been a more perfect summer night if it weren’t for this rot between us. He stared at me until I had to look at him.

There is no right or easy or good way to say that maybe you don’t want to be married. So I spit out tiny fragments of sentences followed by quiet sobs and shallow breaths that rattled in my chest. I talked about being a better parent when I’m alone, about disappointment, about resentments that have been coming and going then jolting me so hard that I know, at least in that moment, I’ve given up.

When the kids are sleeping, we sit and stare at each other again, this time from different chairs in the living room. I say that deep down, I think it makes sense to separate, but I don’t want to because it’s too horrible. I say I won’t let myself be unhappy for years upon years either. If something, or everything doesn’t change, I have to end it and we have to find a way to go on living. I make him promise that he won’t fall apart completely, that he will be there for the kids. He puts his head in his hands and nods. “I know, I know,” he says.

“Maybe we can go back to therapy?” I suggest, and he likes this idea. I say that I’m not sure it will help because I’ve already told him everything I know. I’ve already cried and begged for a marriage that works and for fleeting moments, when I’ve unloaded all I can, it does. But then he forgets to call again. And I’m slamming the oven door, putting his cold dinner back in, and taking the kids up to bed alone. I’m screaming into the phone when his voicemail picks up, but never leaving a message. He looks at his phone instead of looking at my face, a tiny act that is not meant to cut me. But it does. And then, without my even noticing, everything falls back into its misplaced place. It always reverts, and part of me knows it will keep reverting until it’s so ingrained that all I can remember about my life is how to be someone’s angry wife.

It was the longest abstention of his adult life, excepting the five years when he hadn’t drunk at all, five years that had included (it was true) the period when he’d courted and married Mimi. But the present abstention had come a year too late. A year ago, without warning—or rather, after a warning that had seemed no different from the thousands of other warnings Mimi had delivered—she had stopped loving him. It amazed Anthony how distinct that feeling had been, like someone leaving a room.

[...] When I left Lussinge the most dismal time of the day would begin for me. I went, in that year's great heat, to seek the shade and a little coolness beneath the great chestnut trees of the Tuileries. 'Since I can't forget her, wouldn't I do better to kill myself?' I'd think. Everything was burdensome to me. I still had in 1821 that residual passion for painting in Italy which had made me write on that subject in 1816 and '17. I'd got to the Museum with a ticket that Lussinge had procured for me. The sight of those masterpieces merely reminded me all the more intensely of Brera and Metilde. When I came across the corresponding French name in a book, I would change color.

A pretty adult situation, no, wouldn’t you think, with Selina now tightening the belt of her sheer negligée (and gazing down disclaimingly – even she won’t forgive me), and Martina fixed in the frame of the doorway, in a suit of light-grey worsted, black shoes together (and what did she see? Brute hard-on, gut, the frightened face) – and me, the decked joke, flummoxed, scuppered, and waving his arms? I’ve had some naked travel but never quite as naked as this, not even in the Boomerang off Sunset Boulevard, sprawling under the pimp’s bat.

A pretty adult situation, and yet Martina looked like a child. She looked like a child who has suffered more reverses in a single day than ever before in living memory, and is now poised between refusal and acceptance of the fact that life might be significantly worse than she thought, that life was unkinder in its essence, and no one had given her fair warning.

There wasn’t a particular night when we finally broke up, just as there wasn’t a particular night when we began going together, but it was a night in fall when I guessed that it was over. We were parked in the Rambler at the dead end of the street of factories that had been our lovers’ lane, listening to a drizzle of rain and dry leaves sprinkle the hood. As always, rain revitalized the smells of smoked fish and kielbasa in the upholstery. The radio was on too low to hear, the windshield wipers swished at intervals as if we were driving, and the windows were steamed as if we ’d been making out. But we ’d been arguing, as usual, this time about a woman poet who had committed suicide, whose work you were reading. We were sitting, no longer talking or touching, and I remember thinking that I didn’t want to argue with you anymore. I didn’t want to sit like this in hurt silence; I wanted to talk excitedly all night as we once had. I wanted to find some way that wasn’t corny sounding to tell you how much fun I’d had in your company, how much knowing you had meant to me, and how I had suddenly realized that I’d been so intent on becoming lovers that I’d overlooked how close we ’d been as friends. I wanted you to know that. I wanted you to like me again.

[...] I have frequently tried to get my husband to listen to the National, but before this, it had never stuck. His only comment last summer, when I put all their albums on shuffle on Spotify and played it in the car was, “Is that guy going to apologize again?”

But last week, he texted me that he couldn’t stop listening to “Day I Die” on repeat, compared the band to the Cure, and then went face-down in the band’s back catalogue, texting me a running commentary of exclamation and discovery and new love that I remember from seven years and two albums ago. Then, I was just barely 26 years old when High Violet came out, and I had just gotten out of a very bad relationship. On the other side of that breakup, the world felt saturated with oxygen, like an abundant holiday table when you haven’t eaten all day, everything for grabbing. I was so profoundly, disgustingly grateful for the world, for each next day, for each new thing. I listened to “Bloodbuzz Ohio” for the first time, and I wanted to put myself inside its majestic, wallowing, self-mocking sound, the floor-dragging baritone of the lead singer whose voice sounded like a car driving with the brake on and the unreasonably optimistic backbeat pulling it forward all the same.

Something about the National has always felt like an escape, which is at face value an odd thing to say about a band whose subject is mainly sadness and anxiety. It’s both easy to and fun to make jokes about this band being the saddest band, the saddest dads, a band full of sad dads who really love being sad. All of these jokes are accurate: The National is a band whose form and content is sadness. But the reason this band’s music seemed to act as an opening of a pressure valve on my own sadness and anxiety and that of my friend is that it’s about sadness rather than grief. Their music is the difference between the two, the luxury of sadness versus the hard edges of grief.

Sadness spreads like a stain, sadness feels bodied and over-sensitized and ringing, like the first time you got high when you were a teenager, when you lay down on the carpet and nothing had ever been better or more important than the carpet. Sadness often acts as a temporary escape from grief. There are lots and lots of things worse in human reality than a broken heart or an unfaithful lover, and all of them are absent in the National’s music. That’s so much of what’s wonderful in it. Its sadness is a reckless, obliterative escape from the larger griefs of the world, focusing in on the overwhelming, petty, selfish concerns of the privileged heart. This music is enjoyable, squishy, and opulent in all its bad-hearted moping. Nothing in this music howls; everything oozes, everything has another drink and swoons into bed, sad and horny.

[...] When eventually I got Chrysta on the line I told her everything about our predicament, said that we were lost somewhere in the mountains, that there was a terrible storm, that the children were frightened and covered in mosquito bites and that I doubted my ability to cope in such a crisis. But instead of responding with sympathy and concern, she was absolutely silent. The silence was only a few seconds long, but in that period, while she failed to come in on time and to take up, as it were, her part in our lifelong duet, I understood, completely and definitively, that Chrysta and I were no longer married, and that the war we were embroiled in was not merely a bitterer version of the same lifelong engagement, but was something far more evil, something that had destruction, annihilation, non-existence as its ambition. Most of all it wanted silence: and this, I realised, was what my conversations with Chrysta were all leading towards, a silence that would in the end remain unbroken, though on this occasion she did break it. I’m sure you’ll manage somehow, was what she said. And shortly after, the conversation concluded.

[...] She found herself wondering how they had got here. There had been, she remembered, once, an intimacy – one that had existed in the very space they now used as a forum of harm. She remembered how they used to text each other at parties, even when they were standing side by side, maintaining a closeness right under the gaze of the people they were speaking to; how, for a long time, they’d sustained a cautious flirtation over Twitter, each of them thrilling a little at what was both concealed and suggested in that tentative public affection. When, she wondered, had a channel of affinity become a vector of hostility? Text messages and tweets had become open-ended, all-night conversations in bed. Then the bed had become a place for sleeping, and the dinner table a place for talking about what happened online, until finally the internet was a place to work out what happened at the dinner table, in bed, between minds that now couldn’t reach each other. Now, here they were, yards apart in a public place, dealing each other deeply private, deeply personal wounds.

You are, you know, you were the nearest thing to a real story to happen in my life.

Yet here I am, for the first time and yet again, alone at last on Orcas Island.

Did I throw the most important thing perhaps, by accident, away?

We returned to New York determined to make our own Sicilian-style spaghetti with fried eggplant and tomatoes, a dish so delicious that we wanted to eat it twice a week. Which we did, for several months. And here was the thing: I didn't get sick of it slowly. I got sick of it suddenly, radically, and permanently while eating a plateful whose first bites I'd enjoyed as much as ever. I set down my fork and said we needed a break from fried eggplant and tomatoes. The dish was perfect and delicious and not to blame. I'd made it poison to me by eating too much of it. And so we took a monthlong break from it, but Anabel still loved it, and one very warm evening in June I came home and smelled her cooking it.

My stomach heaved.

"We overdid it," I said from the kitchen doorway. "I can't sand it anymore."

Symbolism was never lost on Anabel. "I'm not spaghetti with eggplant, Tom."

Love affairs with their energy and hope do not arrive again and again, forever. So, you no longer play tennis, no longer move from place to place in the summer, no longer understand what use you can make of the sight of the Andes or the columns of Luxor.

I don't remember the last time I saw the ashtray we made in Brighton Beach, but I think it was right before the breakup. Neither of us was crying, but the touches between us had become rote and glazed, we already knew. It was spring, and the exhaust fan blowing the cigarette ash out your living room window was half broken; it spit back sooty chunks. I was sitting on your lap. Ash all over your pink shirt. The yellowing cigarette stub in my hand. It was all turning my stomach. But I looked down at us on the ashtray, smiling and plump, the plaid of your scarf in its bright primary colors, my hair in two sensible braids, and the way my heart sweetened seemed true.

Whatever, reality can never be objective. [...]

"If I was flirting, I'm sorry. I didn't mean to. I didn't realize I was."

"Okay."

Her "okay" was so flat, so distant, so blaming, that it actually did make me angry, and so I said nothing else. Instead I fought the urge to say something mean under my breath,not that I could have come up with anything, and stared through the open window until I believed I was asleep.

I was so intent on watching her eat that I barely touched my own food. After a while, I got up and turned on the radio and there was that song again, the one we’d heard coming home the night before, and we both listened to it all the way through without saying a word. When the d.j. came on with his gasping juvenile voice and lame jokes, she got up and went to the bathroom, passing right by the bedroom door without a thought for the cat. She was in the bathroom a long while, running water, flushing, showering, and I felt lost without her. I wanted to tell her that I loved her, wanted to extend a whole list of invitations to her: she could move in with me, stay here indefinitely, bring her cats with her, no problem, and we could both look after the big cat together, see to its needs, tame it, and make it happy in its new home—no more cages, and meat, plenty of meat. I was scrubbing the frying pan when she emerged, her hair wrapped in one of the new towels. She was wearing makeup and she was dressed in her Daggett’s outfit. “Hey,” I said.

In the year leading up to calling off my wedding, I often cried or yelled or reasoned or pleaded with my fiancé to tell me that he loved me. To be nice to me. To notice things about how I was living.

One particular time it was because I had put on a favorite red dress for a wedding. I exploded from the bathroom to show him. He stared at his phone. I wanted him to tell me I looked nice, so I shimmied and squeezed his shoulders and said: “You look nice! Tell me I look nice!” He said: “I told you that you looked nice when you wore that dress last summer. It’s reasonable to assume I still think you look nice in it now.”

Another time he gave me a birthday card with a sticky note inside that said BIRTHDAY. After giving it to me, he explained that because he hadn’t written in it, the card was still in good condition. He took off the sticky and put the unblemished card into our filing cabinet.

I need you to know: I hated that I needed more than this from him. There is nothing more humiliating to me than my own desires. Nothing that makes me hate myself more than being burdensome and less than self-sufficient. I did not want to feel like the kind of nagging woman who might exist in a sit-com.

Since having people I loved in the house made it feel better, I decided I might try love again. I let myself fall for a funny, handsome man I’d had a crush on for many years, since the first moment I saw him, really, even though I knew he lived abroad. I went and found him in Paris and we climbed all the steps of Montmartre to hang out in Moroccan bars, and eavesdrop on the singing inside the Lapin Agile, and to sit outside the Metro station sipping beers, watching the tides of people coming and going. When he came to stay with me in my house it was midwinter, and it snowed so hard there was nothing for us to do, and I worried about how my house was not as good as Paris. But the snow bucketed down and we played guitar and had sex all day and it was perfect. And then my house was a house where I had feelings again, where I had sex again. And after he left, I cried, but a house where you have cried over multiple heartbreaks is infinitely better than a house where you’ve only cried over one, defining, bad thing.

The minute she turns away from him in the lobby of Groppi’s bar after he greets her, he is insane. He knows the only way he can accept losing her is if he can continue to hold her or be held by her. If they can somehow nurse each other out of this. Not with a wall.

Sunlight pours into his Cairo room. His hand flabby over the Herodotus journal, all the tension in the rest of his body, so he writes words down wrong, the pen sprawling as if without spine. He can hardly write down the word sunlight. The words in love.

They are in the botanical garden, near the Cathedral of All Saints. She sees one tear and leans forward and licks it, taking it into her mouth. As she has taken the blood from his hand when he cut himself cooking for her. Blood. Tear. He feels everything is missing from his body, feels he contains smoke. All that is alive is the knowledge of future desire and want. What he would say he cannot say to this woman whose openness is like a wound, whose youth is not mortal yet. He cannot alter what he loves most in her, her lack of compromise, where the romance of the poems she loves still sits with ease in the real world. Outside these qualities he knows there is no order in the world.

He suspected she had replaced him with another lover. He interpreted her every gesture to others as a code of promise. She gripped the front of Roundell’s jacket once in a lobby and shook it, laughing at him as he muttered something, and he followed the innocent government aide for two days to see if there was more between them. He did not trust her last endearments to him anymore. She was with him or against him. She was against him. He couldn’t stand even her tentative smiles at him. If she passed him a drink he would not drink it. If at a dinner she pointed to a bowl with a Nile lily floating in it he would not look at it. Just another fucking flower. She had a new group of intimates that excluded him and her husband. No one goes back to the husband. He knew that much about love and human nature.

He bought pale brown cigarette papers and glued them into sections of The Histories that recorded wars that were of no interest to him. He wrote down all her arguments against him. Glued into the book – giving himself only the voice of the watcher, the listener, the ‘he.’

You think you are an iconoclast, but you’re not. You just move, or replace what you cannot have. If you fail at something you retreat into something else. Nothing changes you. How many women did you have? I left you because I knew I could never change you. You would stand in the room so still sometimes, so wordless sometimes, as if the greatest betrayal of yourself would be to reveal one more inch of your character.

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.

Everything I have loved or valued has been taken away from me.

I stayed with her. I discovered three of her ribs were broken. I kept waiting for her wavering eye, for her broken wrist to bend, for her still mouth to speak.

How did you hate me? she whispered. You killed almost everything in me.

Katharine … you didn’t –

Hold me. Stop defending yourself. Nothing changes you.

The phone was ringing. Now there was a huge mangled stain on the sidewalk, with still-moving parts, long, wispy antennae swiping around for signs of its own life. A second ring of the telephone. Mythical Chris Kelly. Third ring. I was rehearsing what I would say. An explosion echoed from down the block. An M-80 in a garbage can. The key sailed from a window, inside a tube sock, and landed near the garbage piling up because of the strike.

A voice came through the phone: “I’m sorry. The number you have dialed is no longer in service.”

It was true: I didn’t move here not to fall in love. That night, I watched from my roof as the neighborhood blew itself to smithereens, scattering bits of red paper everywhere, the humid air tinged with magnesium. It seemed a miracle that nothing caught fire that wasn’t meant to. Men and boys overturned crates of explosives of various sorts in the middle of Mulberry Street. They hid behind a metal dumpster as one lit a cigarette, gave it a short puffing inhale, and then tossed it onto the pile, which began to send showers and sprays and flashes in all directions. A show for the residents of Little Italy, who watched from high above. No one went down to the street, only the stewards of this event. My neighbors and I lined our rooftop, black tar gummy from the day’s heat. Pink and red fireworks burst upward, exploded overhead and then fell and melted into the dark, and how could it be that the telephone number for the only person I knew in New York City did not work?

I had asked Giddle if she knew an artist by that name and she’d said, “I think so. Chris. Yeah.”

We were on Lafayette, outside the Trust E Coffee Shop.

“I can’t believe it,” I said excitedly. “Where is he? Do you know what he’s up to?”

She tugged the foil apron from a new pack of North Pole cigarettes and tossed it on the sidewalk. I watched it skitter.

“I don’t know,” she said. “He’s around. He’s on the scene.”

The wind blew the discarded foil sideways.

“What scene?” I asked, and then Giddle became cryptic, like, if you don’t already know, I can’t spell it out. That was when I first sensed, but then almost as quickly suppressed, something about Giddle, which was that there might be reason to doubt everything she said.

Rain fell. Every day, heavy rain, and I sat in my apartment and waited for sirens. Just after the rain began, there were always sirens. Rain and then sirens. In a rush to get to where life was happening, life and its emergencies.

Do you understand that I’m alone? I thought at the unnamed friend as I stood in the phone booth on Mulberry Street, the sky gray and heavy, the street dirty and quiet and bleak, as a woman’s voice declared once more that I’d reached a number that had been disconnected.

It was just one night of drinking and chance. I’d known it the moment I met him, which was surely why I was enchanted in the first place. Enchantment means to want something and also to know, somewhere inside yourself, not an obvious place, that you aren’t going to get it.

Flushed from the hot bath and sleepy, I looked out the window. Two kids leaned against a car, an Italian boy and a Puerto Rican girl who lived in my building, one of the girls who practiced dance routines in the breezeway. She was on roller skates, and as she and the boy talked, she rocked silkily from side to side on her skates. Sandro was gone. I didn’t really expect him to stand there all night, and yet, at twenty-two years old, part of me was buoyant with silly fantasies, capable of disappointment that he had actually gone home.

I thought of the girl in the photo in Ronnie’s studio, the one on layaway. She was probably waiting for him this very moment, somewhere downtown. Checking the clock, applying lipstick, concentrating herself into an arrow pointed at Ronnie. Doing the various things women did when they had to wait for something they wanted.

“The woman toweling her hair. She… it could have been me and you know it. Tell me the truth.”

“It could have been you, yeah. And then what? You think you want to be with me? Act on some desire you felt long ago, that we both felt?”

I bit my lip.

“Look,” he said, and petted my hair. His expression held something like pity. “I have no problem carrying around a small curiosity about lying down with you again. About more than that, okay? Okay? About looking at your cake-box face and your fucked-up teeth, which make you, frankly, extra-cute. About some kind of project of actually getting to know you. Because I honestly don’t think you know yourself. Which is why you love egotistical jerks. But I’ll tell you something about us, about me and about you, and what happens when two people decide to share some kind of life together. One of them eventually becomes curious about something else, someone else. And where does that leave you?”

My heart was pounding. I felt an ache of sadness spreading through me, down to the ends of my fingers.

“You want another Sandro, and I can just screw whoever I want, to keep myself entertained? Because it wasn’t just Talia that he was gifting himself with. It wasn’t just Giddle, either, who, well, see Giddle is like a piece of furniture, necessary but ultimately insignificant, something to lie down on occasionally. And it wasn’t merely Gloria, who has been Sandro’s leftovers for at least a decade, picked up and discarded when he wants. In fact, gee. Name a woman you have met through Sandro, or that he has met through you, and you’ll find that—”

“Stop it,” I said, tears rolling down my face. “Stop. Why are you doing this?”

“To show you the uselessness of the truth,” he said.

He said: She just kept looking at me. I said What do you want me to do? She started to cry—it was dreadful to see her like that. I said What do you think I can do? You must be aware of the implications. I said—these things torment you later but at the time I had a terror of being swept along, of not thinking clearly—I said What is your estimate of our fossil fuel reserves? What kind of science do you think people will be able to do without petroleum by-products? How much longer do you think people will be able to do the kind of science we do? Can we be sure they will be so brilliant they will be able to do what we do without petroleum by-products?

I must have been in a state of shock myself, I realised that later, but at the time it seemed desperately important to get her to make some kind of statement about fossil fuel reserves, it used to come back to me later. It would have come to the same thing in the end, but why wasn’t I kinder? I could have comforted her and instead I kept going on and on at the poor girl about petroleum by-products—it seemed desperately important that one of us should keep a clear head. She just kept crying. But what could I do? Colossus was at a stage where I couldn’t possibly go through the disruption of a divorce—and anyway the financial parameters were impossible. Academic salaries in this country being what they are I couldn’t possibly support two families—well, I’d had some offers from the States over the years, I might have swung it financially but the disruption of switching institutions, not to mention countries, there was simply nothing I could do.

She kept crying and looking at me. She said George—I said Why are you looking at me like that? Did I make the world? Am I a magician? Do you think I like this?

Paula came down the stairs with soft, silken steps. 'You uncorked all the bottles!' she exclaimed. 'That was sweet of you.'

'You're so positively dedicated to violet!' he said, smiling.

'But you adore violet!' she said.

He had been adoring violet for the past ten years; ten years was a long time.

'You don't like this dress?' Paula asked.

'Yes, of course,' he said hastily. 'It's very pretty. I just thought that there were some other colours which might become you. Green, for example,' he ventured, picking the first colour that came to mind.

She looked at herself in one of the mirrors. 'Green?' she said, and there was bewilderment in her voice. 'You really think I'd look well in green?'

It was all so useless, he told himself. In green or yellow he would never again see in her the woman who, that day ten years earlier, he had desired so much when she had nonchalantly held out her long violet gloves to him.

She walked towards the bathroom. It was impossible not to weaken from time to time and speak a few kind words to her, smile gently at her. She stored those treasured relics in her heart and extracted miracles from them whenever she felt her faith wavering. 'But in spite of everything, she knows I don't love her any more,' he said to himself for reassurance. He undressed and put on his pyjamas. She knew it, yes. But as long as she didn't admit it to herself it meant nothing. He heard a rustle of silk, then the sound of running water and the clinking of glass, those sounds which once used to make his heart pound. 'No, not tonight, not tonight,' he said to himself uneasily. Paula appeared in the doorway, grave and nude, her hair tumbling over her shoulders. She was nearly as perfect as ever, but for Henri all her splendid beauty no longer meant anything. She slipped in between the sheets and without uttering a word, pressed her body to his. Paula withdrew her lips slightly, and, embarrassed, he heard her murmuring old endearments he never spoke to her now.

The man and the two women stopped and smiled broadly back at him. A moment later I found myself sitting with them at a table in a dreary cafeteria; they were all speaking very rapidly and I understood nothing of what they were saying. Brogan was laughing a great deal, his face was animated; he seemed relieved to have escaped from our long tete-a-tete. It was only natural: these people were his friends; they had a lot of things to talk about. What, after all, did he and I have in common? The women seated opposite him were young and pretty. Did they please him? I realized that there must certainly have been young, pretty women in his life; but how could I experience so much anguish over that thought when we hadn't even exchanged a single real kiss? And I was suffering. Far off, very far off at the end of a tunnel, I saw one of the emergency exits that had made me feel so secure that morning. But I was much too tired to reach it, even on my knees. 'What a to-do about not getting kissed!' I tried to tell myself. But cynicism didn't help. It was no longer important if I was being more or less ridiculous, worthy of my own approval or deserving of my own blame. I had no control over what was happening; bound hand and foot, I had put myself at the mercy of another. What foolishness! I no longer even knew what I had come looking for here; certainly I must have been out of my mind to imagine that a man who was nothing to me could do something for me. When we were out on the street again, and Brogan had taken my arm, I made up my mind to go right back to the hotel and go to sleep.

I felt a need for distractions; those too-intense hours had tired me. In the streetcar, I dozed on Lewis's shoulder. I didn't try to figure out where I was in that city; it didn't seem to me as if it had fixed arteries and precise means of transportation like the others. It was necessary to conform to certain rituals that Lewis knew, and then places would surge up from nowhere. The Delisa Club surged up from nowhere, crowned with a mauve halo. There was a full-length mirror just inside the door and together we smiled at our reflections. The top of my head was on a level with his shoulder; we looked young and happy and I said gaily, 'What a handsome couple!' And then I felt a wrench in my heart. No, we weren't a couple, we'd never be a couple. We could have loved each other, I was sure of that. But at what point in time, at what place in the world? Nowhere on earth, in any case, and at no point in the future. 'We'd like to have dinner,' Lewis said. A- very dark-complexioned maitre d’hôtel, who looked like a heavyweight boxer, led us to a booth near the stage. Baskets filled with fried chicken were set before us. The musicians hadn't arrived yet, but the place was full - a few whites and many negroes, some of whom were wearing fezzes on their heads. 'Why are they wearing fezzes?'

I knew. I turned my head away; I could retreat no further. 'Lewis,' I murmured, 'I haven't told you enough about myself. There are things I've got to explain to you ...'

'Yes?' There was an apprehensive look in his eyes, and I thought, 'It's all over!' One last time, I looked at the stove, the walls, the window, at that room in which I would soon be nothing but an intruder. And then, blindly, the words tumbling over one another, I began spouting sentences. In the mountains one day, I fell headlong down a ravine. I thought I was going to die and I felt nothing but indifference. Once more I recognized that feeling of resignation. Only I wished I could close my eyes!

'I didn't realize your marriage still meant so much to you,' Lewis said.

'It does.' He remained silent for a long moment.

'Do you understand me?' I murmured.

But then, why wasn't I able to remain in peace in it? Why those tears? It was a very lovely springtime, I was in good health, I lacked nothing. And yet while walking in the woods, I would stop from time to time and feel like crying, as if I had lost everything. Softly, I would call out, 'Lewis!' What a silence! From dusk to dawn, from dawn to night, I had had his breath, his voice, his smile. And now: not a sign of them. Did he still exist? I listened: not a murmur. Hooked: not a trace. I no longer understood myself. 'I'm crying,' I thought, 'and yet I'm here. Don't I love Lewis enough? I'm here, and yet I'm crying. Don't I love Robert enough?' I admire people who can contain life in definite formulas. 'Physical love is nothing,' they say. Or, 'A love which isn't physical is nothing.' But I was no less attached to Robert for having met Lewis; and Robert's presence, all-embracing as it was, couldn't make up for Lewis's absence.

'Have you seen him again?' I asked.

'Oh, no! And I won't see him again,' she said spiritedly. 'He took unfair advantage of the situation.'

I kept silent. I was quite familiar with the kind of explanations Mardrus had used; on occasion, I myself made use of similar ones, and I valued them for what they were worth. Yes, to release Paula it was necessary to reach back into the past in order to destroy her love. But I thought of those microbes which can't be exterminated except by destroying the organism they are devouring; Henri was dead for Paula, but she, too, was dead. I didn't know that fat woman with the sweaty face and the bovine eyes who was swilling Scotch beside me.

When I found myself back in Paris, in my house, with things to do, I thought, 'I've got to pull myself together.' Pull oneself together the way one salvages a sauce that has turned - it can be done, it's feasible. You step back and, with the knowing eye of a connoisseur, you look at your worries, your troubles. I would sit down beside Robert and we would talk; or I would drink Scotch with Paula and pour out my heart to her. Besides, I was quite capable of studying my lesson, all by myself. Lewis was merely an episode in my existence, an episode to which circumstances had made me attach an exaggerated value. After years of abstinence, I had been hoping for a new love, and I had very deliberately brought this one about. I had magnified it out of all proportion because I knew my life as a woman was drawing to a close. But actually, I could get along very well without it. If Lewis should give me up, I could easily return to my old austerity; or I could seek other lovers — and they all say that when one looks, one finds. My mistake was to take my body so seriously; I needed an analysis that would teach me to be more easy-going. Ah, it's difficult to suffer without giving way! Once or twice, I tried to tell myself, 'One day this affair will end and I'll be left with a beautiful memory; I might just as well make up my mind to it straight away.' But I rebelled. What a ridiculous farce! To maintain that I alone hold our affair in my hands is to substitute a puppet for Lewis, to transform myself into a ghost and our past into anaemic memories. Our love isn't a story I can pull out of the context of my life in order to tell it to myself. It exists outside of myself; Lewis and I bear it together. Closing one's eyes isn't enough to do away with the sun; disavowing that love is only blinding myself. No, I rejected cautious thinking, and false solitude, and sordid consolations. And I realized immediately that that rejection was still another sham; the truth is I was in no way master of my heart. I was powerless against that anguish which gripped me each time I opened one of Lewis's letters, and my sensible speeches would never fill the emptiness inside of me. I was without recourse.

He walked away and disappeared into the bathroom. It was always that way: as soon as I tried to approach him, he would run off. Doubtless, he was afraid I might demand warmth from him or lies or promises which he was unable to give me. I began undressing. I had known in advance that that little tete-a-tete would be disappointing; I was, however, no less disappointed for having known it. At least I had one small bit of luck: my body was so precisely attuned to Lewis's that it had no trouble matching his indifference. We slept in our twin beds, separated by an icy crevasse, and I didn't even understand the meaning of the word 'desire' any more.

Apparently Seneca believed widows should be permitted to mourn their husbands for ten months maximum, a precept meant to counteract the stubbornness of female grief, but what had any ancient man ever really known about any female anything? How could any of them have been so sure that it wasn’t all an act, that she wasn’t a bit pleased, that it wasn’t just relief that led a widow to dwell in her black? What says leave me alone better than a veil?

Still, sure, I could see how there might be value in putting time limits—though not prohibitions—on mourning:

For to be afflicted with endless sorrow at the loss of someone very dear is foolish self-indulgence, and to feel none is inhuman callousness. The best compromise between love and good sense is both to feel longing and to conquer it.

I tried to watch the flight attendant explain what to do in case of an emergency, but I had seen it too many times to see her. The oxygen masks, the exit rows, the seat cushion that can float. We know this. We all know this by now.

The pandemic was still drizzling on, so there were not many on that flight, just the people who really needed (or wanted or were being forced) to go somewhere, to leave somewhere, to flee. None of us were listening.

We know more about how to attempt to survive an aerial disaster than we know about meeting the end of love, the former being highly unlikely while the latter is close to certain.

Over lunch on a quiet street a married friend told me that her husband had asked her for a postnuptial agreement. It seemed humane, perhaps, but too late, as they were already getting separated, trying to read the informational brochure in the seat-back pocket as the plane was hurdling down in flames.

But she was not alone in being willing to prepare for imaginary disasters while refusing to imagine the commonplace ones.

She told me about American men who wanted Asian wives. If I can cook, clean, and take care of my American husband, he’ll give me a good life. It was the only hope I had. And that was how I got into the catalog with all those lies and met your father. It is not a very romantic story, but it is my story.

In the suburbs of Connecticut, I was lonely.  Your father was kind and gentle with me, and I was very grateful to him. But no one understood me, and I understood nothing.

But then you were born! I was so happy when I looked into your face and saw shades of my mother, my father, and myself. I had lost my entire family, all of Sigulu, everything I ever knew and loved. But there you were, and your face was proof that they were real. I hadn’t made them up.

Now I had someone to talk to. I would teach you my language, and we could together remake a small piece of everything that I loved and lost.   When you said your first words to me, in Chinese that had the same accent as my mother and me, I cried for hours. When I made the first zhezhi animals for you, and you laughed, I felt there were no worries in the world.

You grew up a little, and now you could even help your father and I talk to each other. I was really at home now. I finally found a good life. I wished my parents could be here, so that I could cook for them and give them a good life too. But my parents were no longer around.  You know what the Chinese think is the saddest feeling in the world? It’s for a child to finally grow the desire to take care of his parents, only to realize that they were long gone.

Son, I know that you do not like your Chinese eyes, which are my eyes. I know that you do not like your Chinese hair, which is my hair. But can you understand how much joy your very existence brought to me? And can you understand how it felt when you stopped talking to me and won’t let me talk to you in Chinese? I felt I was losing everything all over again.

Why won’t you talk to me, son? The pain makes it hard to write.

As I say, it was a relief to my sister and me that my parents still loved each other. But one way of seeing the problem is that their loves no longer had to do with each other in the right way. My dad didn’t have the strength to conceal from us for long that he hadn’t wanted the divorce. One morning, I don’t remember exactly when, on his bed, with, again, his now baggy arm draped over his eyes, he told me he was still in love with her. Meanwhile he plunged precipitously into needing help. When he got this help from her, he did not have his own love’s homecoming, an answered appeal and arousal. Instead he just had her real compassion. He just had her heartfelt care and commitment, forthcomingly.

This is one way in which two people can be unwed. His love was meant for hers, and hers was merely meant for his well-being; and all his red blood leaked out of that asymmetry.

[...] I think it was then that everything ended between Arturo and me. At night we used to write. He was writing a novel and I was writing my journal and poetry and a movie script. We would write facing each other and drink lots of cups of tea. We weren’t writing for publication but to understand ourselves better or just to see how far we could go. And when we weren’t writing we talked endlessly about his life and my life, especially mine, although sometimes Arturo told me stories about friends who had died in the guerrilla wars of Latin America, I knew some of them by name, because they’d been on their way through Mexico when I was with the Trotskyites, but most of them I’d never heard of. And we kept making love, although each night I distanced myself a little more, involuntarily, without meaning to, without knowing where I was going. It was the same thing that had already happened to me with Abraham, more or less, except now it was a little worse, now that I didn’t have anything.

And yet of course it was also at the same time a scene of carnage. (Why do I so much enjoy writing this down?) I told her from the start that I had no conception of marrying her. Was it blind stupid hope nevertheless which made her so infinitely kind to me? An ungrateful thought: I am sure she had no hope. I told her that the affair was temporary, that my love for her was temporary, and doubtless her love for me was temporary. I spoke of mortality and the fragile and shadowy nature of human arrangements and the jumbled unreality of human minds, while her large light brown eyes spoke to me of the eternal. She said, I want to be perfect for you so that you can leave me without pain, and this perfect expression of love simply irritated me. She said, I will wait forever, although I know … I am not … waiting for … anything. What a love duet, and how much I enjoyed it although in her suffering I suffered a little too. Certainly she concealed her pain as much as she could; but towards the end it was impossible. She cried before me with wide open eyes, not staunching the tears. Her tears fell on my sleeve, on my hand like storm rain. And when at last I told her to go she went like a shadow, with silent swift obedience. After that I went on my second visit to Japan. The taste of sake still makes me remember Lizzie’s tears.

I wanted a wife once when I was young, but the girl fled. Since then I have never really seriously thought of marriage. My observation of the state never made me fancy it. The only happily married couples I know at all well are my Cambridge friends Victor and Julia Banstead, and, in the theatre, Sidney and Rosemary Ashe; and even they, who knows … People are so secretive. I might also count Will and Adelaide Boase, but they only survive because she gives in all the time, which I suppose is one method. What suits me best is the drama of separation, of looking forward to assignations and rendezvous. I cannot prefer the awful eternal presence of marriage to the magic of meetings and partings. I do not even care for sharing a bed, and I rarely want to spend the whole night with a woman I have made love to. In the morning she looks to me like a whore. Marriage is a sort of brainwashing which breaks the mind into the acceptance of so many horrors. How untidy and ugly and charmless married people often let themselves become without even noticing it. I sometimes reflect on these horrors simply in order to delight myself by thinking how I have escaped them!

[...] With an unbearable force, I relived (or so it now seems to me) all that had ever been between us beginning with a similar kiss; and I said (substituting for our cheap, formal “thou” that strangely full and expressive “you” to which the circumnavigator, enriched all around, returns), “Look here—what if I love you?” Nina glanced at me, I repeated those words, I wanted to add … but something like a bat passed swiftly across her face, a quick, queer, almost ugly expression, and she, who would utter coarse words with perfect simplicity, became embarrassed; I also felt awkward.… “Never mind, I was only joking,” I hastened to say, lightly encircling her waist. From somewhere a firm bouquet of small, dark, unselfishly smelling violets appeared in her hands, and before she returned to her husband and car, we stood for a little while longer by the stone parapet, and our romance was even more hopeless than it had ever been. [...]

Caro lay in her frozen bed and stared at the skylight, which was a sheet of clotted ice. She lay in darkness or in moonlight, remembering how, one evening of the previous year, she had come in from work to find Paul sitting at her table writing; and that he had got up and embraced her and asked, "How does it strike you, to find a light on and someone waiting for you?" He had put his mouth to her hair and said, "I have wished that Tertia did not exist." Now it was Caro whom, for his convenience, he wished away.

Love had not been innocent. It was strange that suffering should seem so.

Passing through decreed phases, Margaret Tice was first a bride, next a young housewife, and then an expectant mother. Later, would be constrained to talk of schools, join a tennis club and a committee. Would hear herself say, as if it were some other woman, "I never use cornstarch" or "I clean up as I go along." She felt this happening to her like symptoms of mild illness, and did not resist. But, with unintelligible nostalgia for a life she had never lived, knew that all would have been subtly and profoundly different had her husband greatly loved her.

“The worst thing you did,” I said, “was to let me lull myself in a sense of false security. Here I am at forty-four, empty-handed, with no occupation, no other interest in life apart from you. If you had warned me eight years ago I should have made an independent existence for myself and now it would be easier for me to accept the situation.”

“But, Monique!” he cried, looking astonished. “I urged you as strongly as I possibly could to take that job as secretary of the Revue médicale seven years ago. It was right up your street and you could have reached a worthwhile position. You wouldn’t!”

The suggestion had seemed to me so untimely that I had almost entirely forgotten it. “I couldn’t see any point in spending the day away from the house and the children just for a hundred thousand francs a month,” I said.

“That was your answer then. I pressed you very hard.”

“If you had told me your real reasons—if you had told me I no longer meant everything to you and that I too should stand off a little myself, I should have accepted it.”

“I suggested your getting a job again when we were at Mougins. And again you refused.”

“At that time your love was enough for me.”

“It is not too late,” he said. “I can easily find you something to do.”

“Do you suppose that that would console me? Eight years ago I might have thought it less ludicrous—I should have had more chance of getting somewhere. But now.…”

It was rather pleasure that held aloof from me. I hope Maurice did not notice it. He had booked a table at the Club 46. Magnificent supper, excellent cabaret. He was lavish with his money and his kindness. I had on a pretty new dress and I smiled, but I was in an unbearable state of distress. All those couples.… These women, all well-dressed, well-jeweled, well made up, their hair well done—they laughed, showing their well-tended teeth, looked after by excellent dentists. The men lit their cigarettes for them, poured them out champagne: they exchanged affectionate looks and little loving remarks. Other years it had seemed to me that the bond that joined each him to each personal her, each her to each personal him, was positively tangible. I believed in unions, because I believe in ours. Now what I saw was individuals set down by chance opposite one another. From time to time the old illusion came to life again: Maurice seemed welded to me—he was my husband just as Colette was my daughter, in a way that could not be undone: a relationship that could be forgotten, that could be twisted, but that could never be done away with. And then there was no current between him and me anymore—nothing passing whatever: two strangers. I felt like shouting, It’s all untrue, it’s all playacting, it’s all a farce—drinking champagne together does not mean taking communion. As we came home Maurice kissed me. “That was a good evening, wasn’t it?”

[...] There is not a single line in this diary that does not call for a correction or a denial. For example, the reason why I began to keep it, at Les Salines, was not that I had suddenly recovered my youth, nor that I wanted to fill my loneliness with people, but because I had to exorcise a certain anxiety that would not admit its own existence. It was hidden deep under the silence and the warmth of that disturbing afternoon, bound up with Maurice’s gloom and with his departure. Yes: throughout these pages I meant what I was writing and I meant the opposite; reading them again I feel completely lost. There are some remarks that make me blush for shame.… I have always wanted the truth; and the reason why I have had it is that I desired it. Is it possible to be so mistaken about one’s life as all that? Is everybody as blind as this or am I an outstanding prize half-wit? And not only a half-wit. I was lying to myself. How I lied to myself! I said that Noëllie did not amount to anything and that Maurice preferred me; and I knew perfectly well that was untrue. I have taken to my pen again not to go back over the same ground but because the emptiness within me, around me, is so vast that this movement of my hand is necessary to tell myself that I am still alive.

Then one night Ed with his scientific face rejects her for the hundredth time and she looks at her calendar and she sees that the last time they had sex was about a month and a half prior. Forty days of nothing, not kissing or touching. If it had been near Lent she might have hoped it was a quiet Christly sacrifice. But it was October and he had not touched her for all of that month and most of September. But the house went on and the chores went on and the doctor’s appointments went on. Everything else went on. She felt life slipping. She felt that her body was being wasted, that her heart was resting like a steak on a cutting board. And that’s when the panic attacks began. She started to have about two a day. One right when she wakes up when she feels she can’t breathe, and the second at lunchtime because it means there’s a whole second part of the day to live. She started to pick at her face. She would have a nervous moment and walk into the bathroom and press her torso up against the Corian lip of the vanity so she could get her skin up close to the mirror and she would excavate tiny moon craters on her soft, pretty face.

“I’m pretty tired,” she said instead. She faced Mitty and gave her a painfully polite smile. “Give me a hug?” She opened her arms and Mitty, unable to muster an argument, stepped into them, resting her chin on Esme’s shoulder. She swallowed, attempting to drown out her urge to cry. Esme pulled away while Mitty was still holding on. And though the time in which Mitty’s arms were wrapped around her waist was brief, those few seconds felt like everything Mitty needed to know. It was suddenly too obvious, their asymmetry, one of them trying to stay and one already letting go.

Olga’s youth, like that of many intelligent women, was marked by contempt for her sex. In the early days of her abandonment she recalls a figure from her childhood in Naples, a neighbor who lost her mind with grief after her husband left her. Every night the neighbor sobbed loudly. Olga’s mother and her friends whispered in pity, calling her “the poverella” — the poor thing. “The poverella was crying, the poverella was screaming, the poverella was suffering, torn to pieces by the absence of the sweaty red-haired man.” As a child Olga was disturbed, disgusted, by this woman. “A grief so gaudy began to repel me. I was eight, but I was ashamed for her.” Girls — imperious, unforgiving, not yet women — still believe in the choice to be otherwise. In high school, Olga reacts similarly to a novel assigned by her French teacher:

I made an arrogant statement: these women are stupid. Cultured women, in comfortable circumstances, they broke like knick-knacks in the hands of their straying men. They seemed to me sentimental fools: I wanted to be different, I wanted to write stories about women with resources, women of invincible words, not a manual for the abandoned wife with her lost love at the top of her thoughts. I was young, I had pretensions. I didn’t like the impenetrable page, like a lowered blind. I liked light, air between the slats. I wanted to write stories full of breezes, of filtered rays where dust motes danced. And then I loved the writers who made you look through every line, to gaze downward and feel the vertigo of the depths, the blackness of inferno. I said it breathlessly, all in one gulp, which was something I never did, and my teacher smiled ironically, a little bitterly. She, too, must have lost someone, something. And now, more than twenty years later, the same thing was happening to me.

A couple’s ambivalence can be held between two people: we both feel a little of each side, but one person is yes, and the other one no. When we first started dating, we said, We’ll date for a long time, and then we started on that long time right away. Back then, we thought maybe we would get married on our fifth anniversary. That was tonight, and neither of us brought marriage up. This is part of why I was silent, but I gave myself away by crying. When we left the restaurant, I still hadn’t clearly said why.

My friend Timothy has a genius way of teaching his students to write. He assigns them three hundred words about something or other and writes alongside them, in class. One student writes a particularly lame essay. It’s written very neatly, sentence after sentence with no cross-outs. Unrevised sentences are like molecules of ice; they form a suit of armor by being recited, one after another, holding experience in. Timothy shows the student his own copy, which has a million cross-outs and carrots and a doodly diagram in one corner. “Make it look like this,” he says, waving his hand around his own piece of paper, and the student automatically becomes a better writer. The stiff bonds holding the sentences in neat order are dissolved, and the student’s writing flows like water to fill the cave of the reader’s imagination.

I keep going back and revising this story, hoping that the tensions that hold us still in our relationship will dissolve. I walk past the restaurant a couple weeks later to see the orange color of the light again. If I can understand the things in myself that make me prefer silence to talking, I think, things will change of their own accord. This piece of writing is not meant to preserve a moment for posterity, but to take a memory of a dead moment and make the timbre of that experience speak through it, like a microphone.