Bookmarker tag: topic/self-pity (3 notes)

“Keith is not good,” Wanda said, “but he is resting comfortably at home.”

“How bad is it?” Russ said.

“He is resting comfortably but I am told that he is very weak.”

Into Russ’s throat came the sadness of life’s brevity, the sadness of the sunless hour, the sadness of Easter. God was telling him very clearly what to do. He had to stay in Many Farms, where Keith had lived since 1960, so he could visit Keith and keep an eye on Perry. In light of Keith’s condition, his wish to enjoy sex with a person not Marion seemed even more trivial, and he’d been insane to imagine it happening in Arizona. He’d let himself forget how bleak the reservation was in late winter, how demanding it was to lead a work camp.

And yet, when he thought of doing God’s will, at the cost of his week with Frances on the mesa, he felt unbearably sorry for himself. It was strange that self-pity wasn’t on the list of deadly sins; none was deadlier.

Henri shrugged his shoulders. 'Brieux will film the play I wrote or nothing at all.'

'You aren't going to spit on two million just because they want you to bring a dead man back to life!'

'He pretends to scorn money,' Claudie said, 'But what with the price of butter nowadays, it certainly comes in handy. Even when the Fritzes were here, it cost less.'

'Don't talk like that in front of a resistentialist,' Lucie said.

This time they all laughed together, and Henri smiled with them. If they could have heard them, seen him, they would all have blamed him together- Lambert as well as Vincent, Volange as much as Lachaume, and Paula, Anne, Dubreuilh and Samazelle, and even Luc, and that whole anonymous throng of those who were expecting something of him. That was precisely why he was there, with those people - because he shouldn't have been. He was wrong, radically wrong, without reservations, without excuses. What a relief! Sooner or later, you get fed up with constantly asking yourself, 'Am I right or wrong?' That one evening at least, he knew the answer, 'I'm wrong, completely wrong.' He had made a clean break with Dubreuilh, the SRL had disavowed him, and most of his old comrades felt a shiver of shame when they thought of him. At L'Enclume, Lachaume and his friends - and how many others throughout Paris, throughout France - were calling him a traitor. In the wings of Studio 46, machine guns were rattling, the Germans were burning a French village, and anger and horror were reawakening in sluggish hearts. Everywhere, hate was flaring. Yes, that was his reward: hate. And there was no way of overcoming it. Drink. He understood Scriassine; he refilled his glass again.

“You’ll get ill. Or go off your head. As for me, I can’t help you because I’m part of it. But I beg you, do see a psychiatrist.”

I said no. He pressed me and pressed me. In the end he grew impatient. “How do you expect to get out of it? You do nothing to help.”

“Get out of what?”

“Out of this depression. Anyone would say you were sinking deeper into it on purpose.”

He shut himself up in his study. He thinks I am trying to blackmail him with misery, so as to frighten him and prevent him from leaving me. Maybe he’s right. Do I know what I am? Perhaps a kind of leech that feeds on the life of others—on Maurice’s, on our daughters’, on the life of all those lame ducks I claimed to be helping. An egoist who will not let go: I drink, I let myself slide, I make myself ill with the unadmitted intention of softening his heart. Completely phony through and through, rotten to the bone, playacting, exploiting his pity. I ought to tell him to go and live with Noëllie, to be happy without me. I can’t bring myself to do so.