by
C.J. Hauser
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
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.
<3
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.’
argh
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.
aaaaahhh
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.