The Counterlife (30 page)

“Do you get satisfaction yourself?”

“It's all complicated by my being so furious and resentful. We go to bed negotiating all sorts of degrees of hostility. In any case, it's very impersonal. As though it isn't happening. He never thinks of me.”

“Why don't you tell him no then?”

“I don't want that kind of trouble. Sexual tension like that is all we need to make it completely impossible to live together.”

“So you remain sexually available to a very nasty man.”

“You could put it that way if you like.”

“And still you see me every afternoon. Why do you continue to show up?”

“Because I wouldn't be anywhere else. Because I'm welcome. Because if I don't see you I miss you. Up here it's cold and we're always fighting and jarring each other's nerves. Either we're saying rather polite, friendly, icy things to each other, which each finds rather dull, and secretly thinking about someone else or something else, or we're not saying anything, or we're fighting. But when I come downstairs, I come into a lovely room with books and the fireplace and the music and the coffee and your affection. Who wouldn't go there, if they're given that? I don't think you give that to everybody, but you give it to me. I think that for
you
it's a vast frustration that you don't have the other as well and so I wish you had it. But for me it's almost enough.”

“But if everything were all right up here, you wouldn't be down there.”

“That goes without saying. We would have been acquaintances in the lift, that's all. There's always something wrong, otherwise why should one want to create such complications?”

“Do you have erotic fantasies about me?”

“Yes, I do, but I probably would have more had we had sex. As it is, I push them away. Because they would make me edgy and dissatisfied.”

“Is what we have at all exciting for you?”

“I told you—I think it's unusual and strange. When I lie on the bed naked, when you touch me—some women are deeply satisfied by that.”

“Are you?”

“Not always. Look, you're not a hopelessly unattractive man. We've had a few quite interesting conversations during the course of our acquaintance, we've talked so much, but I'm sure all this talk is quite secondary—one's sexual perceptions are still the most important thing about someone, however things may turn out. Even if we never get to bed together, there's some essential sexual tension that we've had. Whether at the moment you're able to fuck or not is not the point. Virility hasn't only to do with that. You're very different from my husband, which is really the background I've always wanted to get away from anyway.”

“If that's true, why did you marry him?”

“Well, we were young and he looked very manly. I'm very tall—well, he's even taller. He was so big physically—I equated that with masculinity. I've refined my ideas since, but then it was something I knew nothing about. We were three sisters and my father had left. How would you know what a man is, if you've never seen a grown one in action? I thought that this was the masculine force. He was my monument to the Unknown Man. He had that kind of athletic exterior, and he was very funny, very clever, and once we both had jobs in London, he
wanted
marriage so much. I don't think I'd have married so early if I had any sense that the world had a place for me. This was a time when marriage was right out, everybody was living together, but I was just so damn frightened, I thought it was sensible to get married. I've got over so many fears, and am so much less frightened now that it's really hard to recognize myself. But at nineteen and twenty I was pathologically frightened—ever since my father had walked out, I had felt my life on this huge, huge slide. You think I'm ‘sweet,' but, really, it's only the worst kind of weakness. I didn't find it easy to make friends. I had masses and masses of acquaintances and an awful lot of admirers then, but there were very few people I could express my real feelings to. That was not so stupid because everybody I knew was completely hung up on idiotic jargon in that period. People were just carried away with a wave of sixties sentiment that turned their brains to custard. They were very intolerant. If you dared to question some piety or dogma, they would give you a monstrous time that could reduce you to tears. Not that I would cry, but I was frightened of expressing anything I really felt intellectually. It seems to me so awful in retrospect—perfectly ghastly. And my husband was somebody who reacted very like me. He was extremely clever, he came from the same kind of background. Everybody else we knew, they were either philistines or intellectuals. If they were intellectuals they came from lower social backgrounds and they gave us hell for it. You cannot imagine the persecution. I was supposed to be privileged. If I had any guts I would have told them, ‘Do
you
have a father? Does he have a job? Are you going to be given any money this summer?' But then, even though they were rich and I was poor, because of my accent they would patronize me in the most awful way. So it was such a relief to find somebody who was intellectually very bright, and engaged with interesting things, and entertaining. Who's still entertaining when he wants to talk. And he came from my background, so there was no need to apologize. He had enormous charm and style and taste, and loved all kinds of things that I did, so it was a really tempting refuge. And I shouldn't have taken it. But sexually it was wonderful, and socially it was very suitable because it took all of that awful sixties heat off of everything, all this business about privileged-underprivileged, dropping your accents and all that crap. He was a refuge, a real one—and just so damn suitable. He's my age, my contemporary in every way, where you're a different race, a different generation, a different nationality—but he's not even a brother to me any longer. You're more of a brother—
and
a lover, really. He's not a friend. You're the adventure now and he's the known.”

“Judea, Judea.”

“I told you it was an obvious dream.”

“But you're going to stay with him.”

“Oh yes. All that's happened has been a classic tale that happens to a lot of women. I suited his needs, he suited mine—and after
x
years it's ceased to be true. We have done a lot of damage to each other, and I've become withdrawn and resentful and no fun, but divorce is still to be avoided. Divorce is a disaster. I'm not neurotic but I
am
fragile. The best thing is just to give up trying and give up fighting and go back to the real old-fashioned stuff. Separate bedrooms, a pleasant ‘Good morning,' and you don't cross him—you're as nice as you can be. Every man's dream is as follows: she is fantastically good-looking, she does not age, she's fun and lively and interesting, but above all,
she doesn't give a fellow a hard time.
I may be able to get by on that.”

“But you are only twenty-seven. Don't you think I'd be kind to your child?”

“I do. But I think if you had this operation for me and a family and all those dreams, you'd be putting such a weight on our relationship that nothing could ever, ever live up to your expectations. Particularly me.”

“But a year after, the operation would be forgotten and we'd be just like everybody else. You think I won't want you any longer then?”

“That's possible. More than likely. Who knows?”

“Why won't I?”

“Because it
is
a dream. I don't know, I can't see into a man's mind, but it is a dream, I know: everything will be made right, and the right woman is waiting. No, things don't ever pan out like that. I don't want you to have that operation for me.”

“But I am.”

“No, you're not. You're having it, if you have it, for you, for your own masculinity, for your life. But to make all of it contingent on whether I will marry you or not, whether you can fuck me or not—that's putting a weight on me
and
fucking that I don't think either could bear. I wasn't brought up to take chances. I wish I were more independent, but I can sort of see why I'm not. My whole experience growing up was clinging, clinging, clinging. This is what happens when you grow up as an intelligent child with only a mother. Careful, careful, careful—that was the message. It's unjust to put all this on me. Nobody, I don't think, in
history
has been asked to make a decision like this. Why can't we just go on as we are?”

“Because I want to have a child with you.”

“I think maybe you ought to go and speak to a psychiatrist.”

“Everything I'm saying is perfectly reasonable.”

“You're
not
reasonable. Because you
don't
have an operation that could kill you unless there's no choice. I have this vision sometimes when I wake up at night of you on the altar and the priest plunging this—is it obsidian, what did the Aztecs use, is that the word?—into your breast and tearing out your heart, for me and family happiness. It's one thing to say you lose your heart to somebody but another actually to do it.”

“So what you're suggesting is that we just continue like this.”

“Absolutely. I'm rather enjoying it.”

“But you'll go away someday, Maria. Your husband will be made boy ambassador to Senegal. What then?”

“If he's posted to Senegal I'll put the child in school and say I can't join him. I'll stay here. That I promise you, if you promise not to have the operation.”

“And what if he's called back to England? What if he goes into politics? That's bound to happen sometime.”

“Then you'll come to England too, take a flat, and write your books there. What difference does it make where you are?”

“And we carry on this odd triangle forever.”

“Well, until medical science bails us out.”

“And you think I'll like that. Each day you leave me and go back to him, and every night, not because he particularly likes you but because he's so powerfully oversexed, he comes home from the House of Commons and fucks you. How do you think I'll like that all by myself in my London flat?”

“I don't know. Not much.”

The next day, like the best of wives, she goes out to the airport to pick him up, and I go to the cardiologist to tell him my decision. There is nothing bizarre about my goals. This is the choice not of a desperate adulterer crazed by a drastic sexual blow, but of a rational man drawn to an eminently sane woman with whom he plans to lead a calm, conventionally placid, conventionally satisfying life. And yet I feel in the taxi as though I've become a child, given myself up to the whole innocent side of my being, and just when circumstances demand a ruthless coming to terms with my impairment. I have taken a fresh romance, with all those charming pleasures that anyone even half my age understands to be evanescent, and turned it into my
salto mortale.
To be doing this for an insane passion might actually begin to make some sense, but because I've been hopelessly charmed by the quiet virtues that she shares with her fiction is hardly sufficient reason to be taking such a chance. Can I really have been overcome by the wistful tones of the landless gentry? Is what's there so powerfully enticing, or
is
her allurement my disease's invention? Who is she anyway but, by her own description, the unhappy housewife who's moved in upstairs, continually cautioning me how unsuitable she is? Had we met and had a heated affair back before my illness, chances are we would never have had to do all this talking and it would more than likely be over now, another adultery safely contained by the ordinary impediments. Why suddenly do I want so passionately to become a father? Is it entirely unlikely that far from the latent paterfamilias coming to the fore, it's the feminized part of me, exacerbated by the impotence, that's produced this belated yearning for a baby of my own? I just don't know! What is driving me on toward fatherhood, despite the enormous danger it poses to my life? Suppose all I have fallen in love with is that voice deliciously phrasing its English sentences? The man who died for the soothing sound of a finely calibrated relative clause.

I tell the cardiologist that I want to marry and have a child. I understand the risks, but I want the operation.
If I can have this wonderfully bruised, supercivilized woman, I can be recovered from my affliction fully.
A truly mythological pursuit!

Maria is beside herself. “You may not feel this way about me once you're well. Nor will I hold you to it. Nor can I hold myself to it. Nor do I want to do it.”

“It wouldn't have been strange a hundred years ago, our being both in love and chaste, but by now the farce is even more intolerable than the frustration. We can't see anything about anything without the operation first.”

“It's too rash a thing to be doing! There's too much uncertainty about everything!
You can die.
”

“People make decisions like this every day. If you seriously want to renew your life, there's no way around taking a serious risk. A time comes when you just have to forget what frightens you most. Besides, it'll be a rash thing to do no matter how long I wait. Someday it'll be done anyway—out of necessity. All I gain by waiting is the strong probability of losing you. I
will
lose you. Without a sexual bond these things don't last.”

“Oh, this
is
awful. An ordinary afternoon soap opera and we've magnified it into
Tristan and Isolde! That's
the farce. It's all become so hopelessly tender just because we
don't
make love—because everything is always trembling just on this edge we can't cross over. This endless talk that never reaches a climax has caused two supremely rational people to entertain the most irrational fantasy until finally it's come to seem absurdly
tangible.
The paradox is that we've so overexamined this dream that we've lost sight of the fact that
it's an utterly irresponsible illusion.
This disease has distorted
everything!
”