by
Liv Ullmann
topic/heartbreak
Simone de Beauvoir,
Rachel Kushner,
Michael Ondaatje,
Taffy Brodesser-Akner,
Jay McInerney,
Helen Garner,
Catherine Lacey,
Liv Ullmann,
Jenny Erpenbeck
don't ask
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.
ack
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.
noooo
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.
<3 <3
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.’
nooooo