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
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.
nooo
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.
ack
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.
this KILLS me
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?
this always kills me
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.