In the Light of What We Know (59 page)

I felt better with the medication; I compared the man whose body was mine with the man who was there the day before, and this man felt much, much better than his predecessor did. When I was skeptical, whenever I’d considered the prospect of taking medication, I had not been comparing the deeply, dangerously depressed person I was with the healthier and more even person I could be helped to be. Rather, I was imagining that the medication would make it impossible for me to be fully the person I believed I could
conceivably
be, that it would irreparably blunt me somehow.

The mistake did not lie in thinking this true. The mistake was to think that it was remotely relevant. It is irrelevant simply because the imaginary ideal human being, the one I believed I could conceivably be, is an unreachable person whom I could only
wish
to be, unreachable in any circumstance. The real me was always the me I was at any given moment, and not the unattainable me I could fancifully call from my imagination.

And tell me what could be more humbling than to be lying in bed at two in the afternoon, without a shower in twelve days; to look across the room you live in and see in the corner a pile of pizza boxes; to be afraid of undrawing the curtains and opening the window, so removed from people so as not even to wonder who would care if you did or you didn’t do this or that; and to find that the day’s only scintilla of hope flickers in the moment you reach for the television remote control.

*   *   *

After five weeks I left the hospital. I stayed in Penelope’s home, in a spare bedroom at the top of the house. Emily joined me there. She herself had decided to move house and had sold her apartment. I never asked her if her decision had had something to do with me. You see, we never discussed anything that involved projecting ourselves into the future further than a week or two. While she was looking for something larger in Notting Hill, in an even more prestigious address—did she think I couldn’t see the endless aspiration?—she moved in with her mother.

Of course, by this stage I knew about the curious domestic arrangement in Penelope’s house. Penelope Hampton-Wyvern met Dudley Grange years ago, when she was still married to Robin, when Dudley’s building company had been contracted to undertake a renovation of her home. Before breaking out on his own, he’d been a site foreman for a large building conglomerate. Dudley explained to me once, rather proudly, that he’d worked on the construction of what was in its time the tallest building in London, the NatWest Tower—now called Tower 42 after its address, he pointed out—and described how the building was the first of its kind: It had a huge core of reinforced concrete, one piece of concrete poured in situ in a massive operation requiring a fleet of cement trucks running to the site continuously over many weeks, so that as the lower levels hardened, concrete for the next level would be piped up and poured into the shuttered forms that also went up at the same time. From this single solid backbone of concrete, the floors fan out on cantilevers, and, from above, he explained, his eyes widening, the building’s profile is three hexagonal chevrons arranged to resemble the logo of the NatWest Bank. Construction was only the beginning; my genuine interest in his field of expertise seemed to open the doors for Dudley to hold forth on plenty else. Dudley, by the way, was in the house that day when first I met Penelope Hampton-Wyvern. They were his steps I heard coming from the hallway, before the sound of a door being shut as quietly as a sturdy Banham lock would allow.

He seemed an unlikely consort to Penelope, shorter than her by an inch and far from the full six feet of Robin. He was a chain-smoker, and the stale odor of burned tobacco was always on him. Spiderwebs of broken blood vessels clung to each cheek.

I never grasped the sequence of events involving Dudley and the Hampton-Wyverns but learned only vaguely that certain things happened within a space of a few years: the demise of a marriage; the separation, before which the beginning of an affair between Penelope and her builder; Penelope’s hospitalization with depression; Robin, too, sneaking about with the woman who would become his second wife; and a divorce. All these things I learned but never with precise dates attached to them—why would anyone take care with dates? Or with conflicting dates attached, so that the events spoken of coalesced in my mind on a formless period sometime in Emily’s early teens when her family life, I understood, was a tempest of dishonesty and infidelities.

When Penelope once broached with me the topic of her divorce—a very short conversation that took on the character of confession, with its underlying intimation of guilt for the impact on her children—she described the new wife as the woman for whom Robin had left her. But when Dr. Villier described the same episode to me, later, he did not give me to believe that it was Robin who had initiated the breakup, but instead I gathered that Penelope’s relationship with Dudley was in full swing before Robin’s departure. It is remarkable to me, by the way, that Villier was prepared to discuss as much as he did. There were moments of hesitation, when circumspection seemed to give his eyes the look of someone editing himself, but in the end he shared so much that I must wonder, as I imagine did Villier, if Penelope had understood the scope of the license she had granted him.

I do know one story that has a date to it, related to me by Emily herself. It was her first year at Oxford, when she received word that her father was to marry again. Apparently, on the day of the wedding, she came down to London and staged a protest with her brother outside the Chelsea Register Office, raising a banner they’d both made bearing the words
DON’T DO IT, DADDY.
When Emily told me this story, the image moved me. We were lying in bed, we had made love, and we were exchanging affectionate chatter in the drowsy moments when people come closest to intimacy, never very much intensity in the conversation and perhaps that’s the nature of the thing, the reassurance of one mate to another that offspring will be tended together, which might also go some way toward explaining why Emily chose that moment to relate the story of her protest against her father’s remarrying and why, for that matter, I myself wondered if she was making a statement to me, too, a plea for reassurance. I’m not nearly as skeptical as some people are of psychoanalysis, but I certainly don’t need to wake up Freud for help—there’s nothing I detected that wasn’t visible on the surface. And perhaps this was Emily’s governing fear, I have thought: the fear of abandonment.

And yet—and yet, I ask again whether in fact there was also a manipulativeness about it. You might remember a TV commercial for
The Guardian
newspaper, in the nineties, I think it was, in which a young skinhead in bomber jacket, jeans, and Doc Martens boots is seen running full tilt toward an elderly man standing on the street. The skinhead was an icon of Britain in those years. The scene projects imminent violence; at least that’s what we’re lured into seeing. But the camera pulls back and the frame widens, bringing into view what is going on above the elderly man. As I recall, a pallet of bricks is tied by rope to scaffolding. But the rope is fraying, its threads unraveling, and the pallet of bricks, now sagging, threatens to come crashing down on the old fellow, who is oblivious of the danger looming overhead. It was rather a mischievous commercial, since the left-leaning
Guardian
reader, who sees the skinhead running toward the old man, is likely to fall for the misdirection—the viewer’s own misdirection—before the final reveal.

I
do
remember it, I said. Zafar was describing one of a series of commercials that all ran to the same theme: Things are not as they first appear, and you need to get the bigger picture in order to understand what’s going on—you need, presumably, to read
The Guardian.

It was a neat little commercial, he continued, rather good for its time, but quite aside from its political statement, it illustrates something about human motivation and action. In fact, it actually relies on the observation that the same action can be produced by different motivations, even opposite ones. You’re rather fond of Graham Greene?

I am, as a matter of fact, I replied.

Years ago, at Oxford, when I asked you who your favorite authors were, you said Somerset Maugham, Graham Greene, and F. Scott Fitzgerald. An interesting group. Do you remember?

Indeed they are—my favorite authors, I replied. I didn’t tell Zafar that I had no recollection of his having asked me. Nor did I share with him the fact that I’d actually read only one or two of each of their books; nor, to make my confession here complete, did I share the fact that I’d read so little fiction since my youth that my favorites, such as they were, had remained the same.

In
The End of the Affair
, continued Zafar, Graham Greene writes:
Hatred seems to operate the same glands as love: it even produces the same actions. If we had not been taught how to interpret the story of the Passion, would we have been able to say from their actions alone whether it was the jealous Judas or the cowardly Peter who loved Christ?
*

I think now, at the end, that Emily was not manipulative, not in a Shakespearean way, not like Iago, even if her actions were the same actions as those of a manipulative person. A different kind of motivation or disposition can produce the same actions, just as different situations can produce the same action. I think she told me about the protest because it would elicit sympathy and deepen the bond.

What’s wrong with that? I asked him, although I was unsure whether he was exonerating her or accusing her.

Zafar fell silent. He seemed distracted. What motivation did he have in mind? If I am truthful, I must admit that I wasn’t quite following him. And then the description of those authors was irksome. What did he mean when he said they were an interesting group? I had always suspected a condescension toward me in literary matters.

Why are they an interesting group? I asked.

Zafar smiled at me.

If those writers put themselves in their stories, they do so invisibly. That character, a narrator who’s in the story but not really
of
it, that’s an interesting character for you, no? I wonder if you like them because you know what it’s like to stand on the sidelines.

I had not read all of their works, but as far as what I’d read went, Zafar was right about the presence of a narrator—
in
the story but not
of
it, as he put it.

I might like those writers for other reasons, I responded; they might just all happen to have that feature.

Perhaps you like them because those stories bring you close to your own experience of experiencing the world. They don’t really get involved, people like Carraway, not just in the sense that the plot doesn’t turn on them but because they resist forming profound attachments to anyone and only stand silently and watch. They are not the authors of their own lives, so to speak. Carraway takes his detachment a step further by giving it a name. He calls it reserving judgment, but he fails completely. To reserve judgment is to maintain an infinite distance. But nothing is visible at that remove. Is it an act of kindness, which is an act of engagement, that calls forth tenderness, when there is presented before us a human being with all his flaws?

I did not follow what Zafar was getting at then and, to be honest, I cannot be absolutely sure that I’ve grasped it now. But I’ve had a chance to think. Writing this has helped, this effort of looking in while looking out. That is what it is to consider the life of another, someone who made an impression, and in the course of writing discover—no, not
discover
, not quite, not even
learn
or
understand
, but simply sit and listen and fully embrace the risk of disrupting one’s precious outlook on the world that such listening entails. Zafar was right. Every story belongs to the teller, and the teller’s lesson to himself lies in the very way he tells the story. Writing has helped in many ways, helped me to think about a lot of things, to do with work, to do with Meena and family, and to do with Zafar also. I don’t know now, for instance, if Zafar was quite as lost as I have thought him to be, quite as lost as at times he seemed even before he met Emily; perhaps I was the one who’d never really had much sense of bearings. It could all be just a midlife crisis: People who do the studies and run the statistics, they say that the so-called midlife crisis actually happens to men when they’re in their late thirties, earlier than convention has it, which would make mine right on time or even a touch overdue. But it’s more than that, or just different. It’s true that I’ve lived as someone who stands aside, choices determined by the sweep of ease and opportunity—and the corollary of standing by is not participating. At the very beginning of
The Great Gatsby
, the narrator, Nick Carraway, tells the reader about his father’s advice to keep in mind that others never had the advantages he had. Reserving judgment, be it heroically difficult, is what he should do. It becomes an ironic point, as one reads on, for the people Carraway meets who are most deserving of adverse judgment are, I think, people who had every advantage Carraway had—and then some. But as I again consider that opening statement, having just retrieved the book from my shelves and reread the passage, but with Zafar’s remarks in my mind, I see something else in it, which is that Carraway’s attitude keeps him one step removed. It keeps him one step removed from the play, in the mind of the reader—in mine, in any event—but it also keeps the man himself separated from the mess of life. In this light, his father’s advice actually reads like a statement of disqualification. I never studied literature, so there’s likely little store to be set in what I say about these things. But that is what the opening now says to me. And though I surprise myself not to have thought so before, for now it seems obvious, I wonder if our experience of a novel is enriched by our experience of life.