The Counterlife (28 page)

I say, like Henry, “This is the most difficult thing that I've ever had to face,” and she answers, like the hardhearted cardiologist, “You haven't had a difficult life then, have you?” “All I mean,” I reply, “is that this is a damn shame.”

One Saturday afternoon she comes to visit with the child. Maria's young English nanny, with the weekend off, has gone to see the sights in Washington, D.C., and her husband, the British ambassador's political aide at the U.N., is away at his office finishing a report. “A bit of a bully,” she says; “he likes all sorts of people around and a lot of noise.” She married him straight from Oxford. “Why so soon?” I ask. “I told you—he's a bit of a bully, and as you may discover, since your powers of observation are not underdeveloped, I am somewhat pliant.” “Docile, you mean?” “Let's say adaptable. Docility is frowned upon in women these days. Let's say I have a vital, vigorous gift for forthright submission.”

Clever, pretty, charming, young, married most unhappily—and a gift for submission as well. Everything is perfect. She will never utter the no that will save my life. Now bring on the child and close the trap.

Phoebe wears a little knitted wool dress over her diaper and, with her large dark eyes, her tiny oval face, and curling dark hair, looks like Maria exactly. For the first few minutes she is content to lean over the coffee table and quietly draw with crayons in her coloring book. I give her the house keys to play with. “Keys,” she says, shaking them at her mother. She comes over, sits in my lap, and identifies for me the animals in her storybook. We give her a cookie to keep her quiet when we want to talk, but wandering alone around the apartment, she loses it. Every time she goes to touch something, she looks first to see if it's permitted by me. “She has a very strict nanny,” Maria explains; “there's nothing much I can do about it.” “The nanny is strict,” I say, “the husband a bit of a bully, and you are somewhat pliant, in the sense of adaptable.” “But the baby, as you see, is very happy. Do you know Tolstoy's story,” she says, “called, I think, ‘Married Love'? After the bliss of the first years wears off, a young wife takes to falling in love with other men, more glamorous to her than her husband, and nearly ruins everything. Only just before it's too late, she sees the wisdom of staying married to him and raising her baby.”

I go off to the study, Phoebe running behind me and calling, “Keys.” I climb the library ladder to find my collection of Tolstoy's short fiction while the little girl wanders into the bedroom. When I step down from the ladder, I see, inside the room, that she is lying on my bed. I pick her up and carry her and the book to the front of the apartment.

The story Maria remembered as “Married Love” is in fact entitled “Family Happiness.” Side by side on the sofa we read the final paragraphs together, while Phoebe, on her knees, crayoning a bit of floorboard, proceeds to fill her diaper. At first, seeing Maria's face flush, I think it's because of popping up and down so often to check on where the child is—then I realize that I've successfully transmitted to her my own inflammatory thoughts.

“You may have a taste for perpetual crisis,” she says. “I don't.”

I reply softly, as though if Phoebe overheard she'd somehow understand and become frightened for her future. “You've got it wrong. I want to put an end to the crisis.”

“If you hadn't met me perhaps you could forget it and lead a quieter life.”

“But I have met you.”

The Tolstoy story concludes like this:

“It's time for tea, though!” he said, and we went together into the drawing-room. At the door we met again the nurse and Vanya. I took the baby into my arms, covered his bare red little toes, hugged him to me and kissed him, just touching him with my lips. He moved his little hand with outspread wrinkled fingers, as though in his sleep, and opened vague eyes, as though seeking or recalling something. Suddenly those little eyes rested on me, a spark of intelligence flashed in them, the full pouting lips began to work, and parted in a smile. “Mine, mine, mine!” I thought, with a blissful tension in all my limbs, pressing him to my bosom, and with an effort restraining myself from hurting him.

And I began kissing his little cold feet, his little stomach, his hand and his little head, scarcely covered with soft hair. My husband came up to me; I quickly covered the child's face and uncovered it again.

“Ivan Sergeitch!” said my husband, chucking him under the chin. But quickly I hid Ivan Sergeitch again. No one but I was to look at him for long. I glanced at my husband, his eyes laughed as he watched me, and for the first time for a long while it was easy and sweet to me to look into them.

With that day ended my love-story with my husband, the old feeling became a precious memory never to return; but the new feeling of love for my children and the father of my children laid the foundation of another life, happy in quite a different way, which I am still living up to the present moment.

When it's time to give the child her bath, Maria goes around the apartment collecting the toys and the coloring books. Back in the living room, standing beside my chair, she puts her hand on my shoulder. That's all. Phoebe doesn't seem to notice when, furtively, I kiss her mother's fingers. I say, “You could bathe her here.” She smiles. “Intelligent people,” she says, “mustn't go too far with their games.” “What's so special about intelligent people?” I ask, “—in these situations it doesn't really help anything.” Outside the door each throws a kiss goodbye—the child first, then, following her example, the mother—and they step into the elevator and go back upstairs, my
deus ex machina
reascending. Inside my apartment I smell the child's stool in the air and see the small handprints on the glass top of the coffee table. The effect of all this is to make me feel incredibly naïve. I want what I've never had as a man, starting with family happiness. And why now? What magic do I expect out of fatherhood? Am I not making of fatherhood a kind of fantasy? How can I be forty-four and
believe
such things?

In bed at night, when the real difficulties begin, I say out loud, “I know all about it! Leave me alone!” I find Phoebe's cookie under my pillow and at 3 a.m. I eat it.

Maria raises all the questions herself the next day, taking up for me the role of challenger. If I wind up enjoying the persistence with which she won't permit me to be swept away, it's because her unillusioned candor is just another argument in my favor—the direct, undupable mind only charms me more. If only I could find this woman just a bit less appealing, I might not wind up dead.

“You cannot risk your life for a delusion,” she says. “I cannot leave my husband. I can't deprive my child of her father, and I can't deprive him of her. There's this terrible factor which I guess you don't understand too clearly and that's my daughter. I do try not to think about her interests but I can't help it from time to time. I wouldn't have believed it, but apparently you're another of those Americans who imagine they have only to make a change and the calamity will be over. Everything will always turn out all right. But it's my experience that things don't—all right for a while maybe, but everything has its duration, and in the end things generally don't turn out well at all. Your own marriages seem to have a shelf life of about six or seven years. It wouldn't be any different married to me, if I even wanted to do it. You know something? You wouldn't like it when I was pregnant. It happened to me last time. Pregnant women are taboo.”

“Nonsense.”

“That's my experience. And probably not only mine. The passion would die out, one way or another. Passion is notorious for its shelf life too. You don't want children. You had three chances and turned them all down. Three fine women and each time you said no. You're really not a good bet, you know.”

“Who is? The husband upstairs?”

“
Are
you sensible? I'm not sure. It's a little crazy to spend your life writing.”

“It is. But I no longer want to spend it just writing. There was a time when everything seemed subordinate to making up stories. When I was younger I thought it was a disgrace for a writer to care about anything else. Well, since then I've come to admire conventional life much more and wouldn't mind getting besmirched by a little. As it is, I feel I've practically written myself
out
of life.”

“And now you want to write yourself back in? I don't believe any of this. You have a defiant intelligence: you like turning resistance to your own advantage. Opposition determines your direction. You would probably never have written those books about Jews if Jews hadn't insisted on telling you not to. You only want a child now because you can't.”

“I can only assure you that I believe I want a child for reasons no more perverse than anyone else's.”

“Why pick on me for this experiment?”

“Because I love you.”

“That terrible word again. You ‘loved' your wives before you married them. What makes this any different? And it needn't be me you ‘love' of course. I'm terribly conventional and I'm flattered, but, you know, there might well be someone else with you right now.”

“Who would she be? Tell me about her.”

“She'd be rather like me, probably. My age. My marriage. My child.”

“She'd
be
you then.”

“No, you're not following my faultless logic. She'd be just like me, performing my function, but she wouldn't be me.”

“But maybe you
are
she, since you're so very like her.”

“Why
am
I here? Answer that. You can't. Intellectually I'm not your style and I'm certainly not a bohemian. Oh, I tried the Left Bank. At university I used to go with people who walked around with issues of
Tel Quel
under their arms. I know all that rubbish. You can't even read it. Between the Left Bank and the green lawns, I chose the green lawns. I'd think, ‘Do I have to hear this French nonsense?' and eventually I'd just go away. Sexually too I'm rather shy, you know—a very predictable product of a polite, genteel upbringing among the landless gentry. I've never done anything lewd in my life. As for base desires, I seem never to have had one. I'm not greatly talented. If I were cruel enough to wait until the wedding to show you what I've published, you'd rue the day you made this proposal. I'm a hackette. I write fluent clichés and fluffy ephemera for silly magazines. The short stories I try writing are about all the wrong things. I want to write about my childhood, that's how original I am—about the mists, the meadows, the decaying gentlefolk I grew up with. If you seriously want to risk your life to vulgarly marry yet another woman, if you really want a child to drive you crazy for the next twenty years—and after all that solitude and silent work, you would be driven quite mad—you really ought to find somebody more appropriate. Somebody befitting a man like you. We can have a friendship, but if you're going to go on with these domestic fantasies, and think of me that way, then I can't come down here to see you. It's too hard on you and almost as hard on me. I get childishly disorientated hearing that stuff. Look, I'm unsuitable.”

I am in the easy chair in the living room, and she is sitting facing me, straddling my knees. “Tell me something,” I ask, “do you ever say fuck?”

“Yes, I say it quite a lot, I'm afraid. My husband does too, in our marital discussions. But not down here.”

“Why not?”

“I'm on my best behavior when I come to see an intellectual.”

“A mistake. Maria, I'm too old to have to find somebody suitable. I adore you.”

“You can't. You can't possibly. If anything, it's the illness I've captivated, not you.”

“‘And as for my long sickness, do I not owe it indescribably more than I owe my health?'”

“I would have thought you were more hardheaded,” she says. “Those portraits you paint of the men in those books didn't prepare me for this.”

“My books aren't intended as a character reference. I'm not looking for a job.”

“There's quite an age gap between us,” she says.

“Nice, isn't it?”

She agrees, inclining her head to acknowledge that yes, it is indeed, and that our affinity is just about all she could ask for. Though you'd think a man who has been himself a husband on three occasions might know the answer, I cannot understand, when I see her like that, looking so wooable and so content, how to the husband upstairs practically nothing she does is right. As far as I can tell there's nothing she can do that's wrong. What I can't figure out is why every man in the
world
hasn't found her as enchanting as I do. That is how undefended I am.

“I had a very bumpy ride last night,” she says. “A terrible scene. Howls of rage and disappointment.”

“About what?”

“You continually ask questions and I keep answering them. That's really out of bounds. It feels like such a betrayal of him. I shouldn't tell you all of this because I know you're not to be trusted.
Are
you writing a book?”

“Yes, it's all for a book, even the disease.”

“I half believe that. You're not, at any rate, to write about me. Notes are okay, because I know I can't stop you taking notes. But you're not to go all the way.”

“Would that really bother you?”

“Yes. Because this is our
private
life.”

“And this is a very boring subject about which, over these many years, I have already heard too much from too many people.”

“It's not so boring if you happen to be on the wrong end of it. It's not so boring if you find your private life spread all over somebody's potboiler. ‘Twere profanation of our joys to tell the laity our love.' Donne.”