White Dialogues

by Bennett Sims

  However matters stand now, B’s email gives nothing away. Whether he has met someone else, or hasn’t—it does not say. It is almost conspicuously indirect. It is as if he is trying to tell her something, by not telling her anything. That description of the Scrabble game is so long, and so beside the point, that it has to be making some kind of hidden point. For example, the detail about the cell-phone coverage. Why had he included it? Was this the reason he hadn’t called? And his caricature of the woman. She is the only player at the table whom he bothers to describe in any detail. But why? Why, after a two-week silence, write to A about her?

  If A takes the email at its word, the woman is nothing more than a bête noire of B’s. He had found her amusing, and was describing her to amuse A. Throughout the game, B wrote, the woman kept pouting about jo and obi. There was no point in playing, she would pout, because B had already demolished them all, right out of the gate. She grew increasingly petulant, especially when it became clear to her that—among the four players—she had by far the lowest score, irrecoverably low. Do I really have to keep playing, she would ask. Oops, she would say, feigning to drop her beige tiles on the carpet, but in fact scattering them everywhere like a child. Things came to a head toward the end of the game, B wrote, when B—in the lead now by dozens of points—played za (the latest addition, evidently, to the Scrabble dictionary: slang for pizza). The woman had a field day over za. Za?!, she shrieked, B wrote. What is za?! Za is a word, B assured her: he could look it up in the Scrabble dictionary, if she wanted. But by this time the woman had had quite enough of the Scrabble dictionary. She did not bother challenging za. For the remainder of the game, she simply kept exclaiming to herself, at random: I still can’t get over za!

  A is disinclined to take B’s email at its word. Over and above his caricature of the woman, there is something B wants A to know. For one thing, A does not like the sound of all this pouting. It sounds to A as if the woman was flirting with B. Each indignant outburst seems to bear a double message: You cheat, you play fake words means You know such esoteric words. You demolished all of us means Your vocabulary ravishes me. B was not an idiot. Surely he was alert to these flirtations. But if he was alert to them, then why had he included them? Why had he sent them for A to read?

  Perhaps B thought nothing of it, or thought that A would think nothing of it. Or perhaps he knew that the anecdote would make her jealous, and had included it to let her know that strange women were flirting with him. Conversely, the anecdote might have been designed to allay her jealousy, and to reassure her: B might have been demonstrating his fidelity by skewering his would-be suitors.

  And there is another interpretation, too, A realizes: that the person B is reassuring is, not A, but himself. For it is always possible that he is skewering the woman for his own sake. If B had initially been attracted to her, and even considered pursuing her, then he might have felt pangs of guilt at some point during the Scrabble game. Out of remorse, he would have begun to resent the woman, and it would be for this reason—to atone for his mental or emotional infidelity—that he would have caricatured her so mercilessly, picking her apart, destroying her, then bringing her remains to A’s doorstep, with an almost feline fealty, like some bird he had slain.

  Of course, if this were the case, then B would doubtless be aware of what he was doing. At every step, the psychodynamics would be transparent to him. No component of the process (the guilt, the atonement, the reconciliatory spectacle of the caricature) would operate unconsciously. And if the psychodynamics were transparent to B, then he had to know that they would be transparent to A. Which left her with the same question, at the same impasse: why had he included the description in the first place? Either to make her jealous, to let her know that he was attracted to women there; or to reassure her, to demonstrate his fidelity by repenting for that attraction.

  Each time A rereads the email, B’s remarks about the woman seem less and less straightforward. Toward the end of his description of her, he makes a comment that consistently mystifies A: he had found the woman so deeply annoying, he wrote, that he began to imagine how awful it would be to be married to her. He fantasized about the passive-aggressive punishments he would have to concoct for her, whenever they were driving home from Scrabble games like this one. Za?, he would ask her, laughing bitterly to himself at the steering wheel, B wrote: You can’t get over za?

  A cannot stop returning to this section of the email. Why bring up marriage? What was he trying to imply? For whatever reason, B wanted A to imagine him married to this woman: driving her home, climbing into bed. Or else he wanted A to imagine him imagining himself married to this woman. It amounts to the same, either way: he is letting A know that he finds this woman, not only attractive, but marriageable. Marriage had entered his mind. Were it not for her Scrabble comportment, B might have made her his bride. That is what B wants A to be thinking—what he designed his email to make A think—A thinks.

  Unless—and this is also a possibility—A is misreading that comment. Unless the marriage that B was hinting at is, not with this woman, but rather with A. Then the comment would have an utterly different subtext: B would be preparing A for the kind of lover he is, for when he returns home. If you ever behave this petulantly in public, he would be warning her, you can expect passive-aggressiveness in return.

  A has to think. A has to think this through. But all that A can think about is B in bed with this woman. B is betraying A with this woman, and out of guilt he has embedded a confession in his email. Or maybe he feels no guilt, because there is no betrayal. A gave him, after all, her permission. Or maybe B is not sleeping with the woman, but still wants A to think he is. Maybe he saw straight through A’s so-called permission—recognizing it for the ploy that it was—and is punishing her for it. Who is to say that he hasn’t fabricated this entire email, concocting the Scrabble game out of whole cloth, simply to make A jealous? Perhaps this is just the kind of passive-aggressive punishment B had in mind. Now A begins to doubt that there ever was a Scrabble game, or else—if there had in fact been a Scrabble game—that this woman really existed, or else—if this woman indeed existed—that she had behaved so flirtatiously, challenging all of B’s words, or else—if she did happen to challenge all or some of B’s words—that these were the words. The words were too apposite to be real words. Clearly B was winking at her with these words: it was all a joke (a jape), A was still his sweetheart (his jo), he was just casting a spell over her, a little bit of witchcraft (obi) to make her jealous.

  On the one hand, she knows that she is reading too much into the email. But on the other hand, she knows that she can never read too much into B’s emails. In matters of love, they had both agreed, it is impossible to read too much into anything. This was one of the first conversations they had had together. Being in love, they had agreed in bed one night, meant being in a state of interpretive hysteria. Every detail was significant, polysemous, charged. That was why lovers had to be especially careful with one another, so as not to arouse suspicions. No literary critic in the world, B had claimed, was more vigilant than a suspicious lover. There was a kind of close-reading involved in cuckoldry. There was a whole hermeneutics of cuckoldry. The domestic space became alive with signs. If a wife came home at the wrong hour, in the wrong dress, by the wrong door, if she used a word she had never used before—the husband would notice. Where had she been? Who had taught her that word? If she started mentioning a colleague she had never mentioned, or stopped mentioning a colleague she used to always mention, or suddenly began rereading Madame Bovary, Lady Chatterley’s Lover, ‘The Kreutzer Sonata’: these were all signs. If she so much as put on Beethoven’s Kreutzer Sonata before dinner, that, too, constituted a sign. In each case the husband would ask himself: What does this mean? What was she trying to tell him?

  So B would be expecting A to read into this email. He would have had that conversation in mind while writing it. When he mentioned the cell-phone coverage, the woman, their marriage—he
would have known. When he neglected to mention the promise that they had made one another, he had to know that this omission would be more conspicuous—more charged with meaning—than the actual content of his letter. And it was likely for the same reason that he had not asked her about the promise. In deliberately refraining from asking whether she had met anyone, he was trying to tell her something.

  The absence of this question is the worst aspect of the email by far. Why didn’t he ask? She doesn’t know what to make of it. The implications are endless. It is like a blank Scrabble tile that A has been given, a wall of inscrutable smooth beige, onto which she can project any meaning whatsoever. Depending on what value she assigns it, the question’s absence could mean (could be made to mean) any number of things: that B trusts her; that B wants her to think that he trusts her; that B respects her privacy and autonomy (or wants her to think he does); that B is incurious, indifferent, could not care less whether she is seeing anyone (or wants her to think that he is); that B is, on the contrary, overly curious, jealous even, obsessed with the prospect of her seeing someone, but dreads ever actually asking her; or, finally, that B is simply delimiting the perimeter of their discourse, since by neglecting to ask A this question, he is as good as saying to her, ‘Never ask me this question,’ ‘We are not allowed to ask each other this question,’ ‘This question is banned from play.’

  If only B had asked the question, A thinks. Even in jest. Then A would be able to ask the question in return. But now she will never be able to ask the question. Unless she wants to be the first of them to break down and ask the question, she will have to somehow trap B into asking the question. And perhaps, A realizes, that is B’s tactic as well: perhaps he devised this description of the woman as bait for A, merely to provoke A into asking the question, so that B, in his follow-up email, could ask the question himself, without forfeiting his advantage or losing any face. Of course, two could always play at that game. A could deflect B’s stratagem, either by ignoring B’s Scrabble anecdote altogether, or else by responding to it with good-natured aplomb, with none of the expected jealousy. She could even commend his caricature of the woman: ‘How hilarious,’ she could write, ‘tell me more about your marriage fantasy.’ If deployed properly, A’s display of supreme indifference might rattle B into asking the question (‘Why doesn’t she care? Is she seeing someone?’). A would have reversed B’s own stratagem, turning it instantly against him, just as a Scrabble player can pluralize an opponent’s word, tacking an s onto it and siphoning its points.

  However A chooses to respond, one thing is certain: she must not reveal her suspicions about the woman. The last thing in the world she can write is, ‘Are you seeing this woman?’, or even, ‘Do you find this woman attractive?’ Such questions are sure to make B feel claustrophobic. Besides which, A would only be giving B ideas. If B wasn’t attracted to this woman already, A’s prying would surely put the thought into his head, inspiring him to pay closer attention in the future (‘Am I attracted to her?’). Then it would only be a matter of time before they slept together. That is the problem with jealousy, A thinks: it always ends by engendering the thing it dreads. By obsessing over your lover’s colleague (‘Are you attracted to her?’; ‘Was she at this party?’; ‘Did you email her?’), you only brainwash your lover into obsessing over his colleague. Although you had intended to repel your lover from the colleague, you end up driving your lover straight into the arms of the colleague. ‘It’s funny,’ your lover might confide to the colleague one day, ‘but she thinks we’re having an affair.’ ‘That is funny,’ the colleague might say, and then it is all over. Now the idea has taken on a life of its own. It is entirely too late to stop it. That is the prophetic power of jealousy, A thinks: it is eventually self-fulfilling, given a long enough period of time; it has a sibylline effect on the libido. You keep on telling the lover that he is doomed to sleep with the colleague, and he keeps on denying it with blind vehemence, until the day when finally your barrage of insistences and suspicions and auguries penetrates through to his unconscious, catalyzing an anagnorisis in him: then he is able to look at the colleague anew, noticing for the first time how beautiful she is, and he recognizes her at last as the woman with whom he is fated to betray you.

  A starts to reread B’s email. It is now two a.m. Soon, she knows, she will have to write B back. And she will need to exercise maximum caution when choosing her words. She thinks through all her options, all the questions she can ask or neglect to ask: about the Scrabble game, the woman, the cell phone. She rearranges the possibilities in her mind. She does not need to solve every problem now: once she emails, he will have to email back. That will give her another opportunity to respond, and then it will be his turn, and so on for the next four weeks, until he comes home. There will still be time for several more rounds, she reassures herself, as she types Dear B into the reply box.

  A Premonition

  It was late and I was beset by a black wind. I ducked into a costume store, the only business open at that hour. Inside I was glad to be warm, but the old man behind the counter looked me over suspiciously. There were slick dead leaves plastered to my greatcoat; beyond the shopwindow, trees whipped violently in the wind. I pretended to interest myself in the racks of masks. The racks were arranged in rows: rubbery faces, loose as flayed skin, hung from their hooks like clothing. The faces were frozen in dreadful expressions. I handled one after another. They were clammy to touch, and left a faint chemical smell on my fingers. Some were monsters, others the victims of monsters. Some had blades buried in their heads, for instance. None had eyes, only dark holes, ovals cut out of the latex. These, I understood, were where my own eyes would peer out from the mask. I took down three monsters of a species that I didn’t recognize. Two were hairy, with indeterminate snouts. They didn’t bare their teeth. Their ears were sharp, as if they could hear shrill sounds from far distances. The third was recognizably a man’s face, except totally white and hairless, and where its mouth should be, a seal of flesh. I brought them over to the old man at the counter. ‘And these?’ I said. ‘They are the souls of thieves,’ he said. Immediately I let out a loud laugh. But when the old man did not smile, I realized that he had been serious: I was holding the souls of thieves, these flimsy weights in my hands. Shoplifters who had been caught by the old man and transformed into terrible masks. ‘That’s fine,’ I said. I placed a bill from my pocket down on the counter, in fact the only bill I had—it was more than I could afford, but no matter. I slipped the white-faced mask over my head and left the other two on the counter with the old man, then departed from the shop still wearing the mask. I felt fine. Outside, the thief’s soul protected my face from the wind. My breath was trapped inside it, and my face grew quite hot even. Walking home I felt my neck dampen with sweat. Through the thief’s ragged eyeholes, everything that I saw was an ill-gotten good: the empty streets were mine, and lampposts mine; the dark clouds, too, dissolving off the moon like smoke, they were mine, and the moonlight mine, and the gleaming backs of leaves as the trees whipped. I stole a glance of the river N—, of the bridge rail, I stole a glance of my own hand. There was a great greediness in my looking. At the end of my street, still several blocks off from my house, I paused before a thick tree that I had never noticed before. It was short, not much taller than I, but it held its branches out wide, and they were heavy with leaves black as midnight. I peeled the mask from my head and propped it on the foliage. Its white face sagged, and I could tell that it would fall to the ground. Carefully I worked a branch up through the neckline of the mask, positioning one of its tridents of twigs inside the cavity of the nose. When the mask was secure I stepped back. A wind started in, and the tree swayed. Swaying also in its field of leaves was that white face, bobbing up and down with its branch, like a piece of trash on black water. It even became possible to regard the tree as a creature of fur, out of whose dark pelt a human face leered. ‘There,’ I said, feeling the tree’s gaze on me. ‘There, there.’ In the wind the
tree whipped more violently, like an animal heaving itself against the bars of its cage, and I no longer felt safe in its presence. My heart beat hard, I had difficulty breathing. As the leaves roiled, the white face tossed around in the foliage, rearing in what seemed like frenzy, and the whole time it kept its gaze on me. Finally I had to avert my eyes, for in that moment I understood. Everything grew clear, as in a premonition. This was the angel that Death would send for me.