by Susan Taubes
It was something else she wanted. They both struggled against their own dreams and inclinations. Ezra wanted to be different, she, perhaps, wanted simply to stop dreaming, waiting, virginal; he lying that he wanted her, still wanting what he could not wean himself from; wanting to believe himself, her to believe him: that he wanted her; lying himself into believing. She, silent, still holding truth dearest like a last coin in her palm—perhaps a worthless coin—in the twinkling of an eye she flung it away, leaving her so empty-handed that Ezra could.
Scenes from another life played over, of no value now, she thinks while sipping her tea. She lies in bed, quietly watching the window. In two hours the alarm clock will ring.
The deception is endless. To laugh. To cry. To curse. To breathe is actually most that she can manage. The night is paling. Soon it will be dawn. Day will be starting. The light dim, thick at first, clears till it is entirely weightless; there is only the pure surface of day, the city of streets and buildings, the walls inside and outside, all will be surface only, on which other surfaces cast precise shadows.
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Things couldn’t be so monstrous, or frivolous or senseless as they appear to Sophie in Paris. Nothing she does is serious. Even though she has finally unpacked and even fixed up one room with curtains for her daughter, bought an expensive sofa, not serious. Not her relationship with any of the men she is seeing. It’s simply in the nature of things; being the one-day-a-week mistress of a married man cannot be serious. As Roland keeps saying, if she were in love with him it would be catastrophic. He brings her bird-of-paradise flowers, limited-edition art books (he holds top position at a publishing house and can give her introductions); afterward they always have a feast of oysters with choice white wine, and he is a big man, and his expression when he speaks of his little boy, she likes that, but what is she supposed to do with it all between Tuesday and Tuesday? Better not be serious. Wasn’t it a mistake to take her marriage seriously? But it’s clear she was not cut out to be la petite maîtresse. No better at being the “other woman” as the “one woman,” just the other side of the same bad coin. Most men want deception. But an outright bastard and pervert like Gaston is positively refreshing. He wants a woman to be a whore, he pulls the paraphernalia out of his drawer, he is going to humiliate you, nobody talks of love or pleasing one another, there is a tussle, and curiously, contrariness results in pleasure. Perverse? Just coping with Gaston is an achievement, but certainly not serious. As for Alain, he is a bore, but she needs him for circulating. Then there is, among former admirers, Nicholas, now settling in Rome with his pregnant wife and twins, who fancies he’s still in love with her. He wants her for his Paris mistress and Sophie thinks it’s a revolting idea, but there are the old ties. And actually if she were going to settle in Paris for life, being his Paris mistress in the long run might be a nice steady sort of thing, like the annual Budapest quartet or the Russian ballet...To fill in her life. A revolting idea. As for that young man in New York, it’s not at all clear why she keeps up this strange correspondence, unless she is really in the grips of fate or the wildest folly. Absurd and maddening that his image continues to haunt her when she should be settling into her new life in Paris. It’s simply to survive, she keeps telling herself; to regain something of herself in the form of a letter. Because nothing can come of it. He is simply too young and crazy. She has to think about her children. It was ridiculous for them to talk about the future. They parted with that understanding. But now these letters stating his and her sorrow or resignation, the very fact that these letters are being written...It’s really demonic, because whenever she believes it’s over, that she will never hear from him again, invariably the first day she feels free of his phantom, a letter from Ivan arrives. She replies to it, of course. It’s a week’s job to put him together again from all the pieces, collating what he writes with previous letters and memories till she can send him on his way, in the sealed, stamped envelope in slot of the CTP box. Then the period of anguish, hopelessness, recovery. Till his next letter, the mere handwriting on the envelope sends the Chinese puzzle man flying, and once more she is in tears of bliss and misery and cursing him as she sits down to construct the ceremonial object making it seem like a letter.
And yet the letters to Ivan also are unserious. Each plotted elliptically between two impossible extremes of rushing to him and forgetting.
She must be practical, sensible. A woman needs money and a man. She needs a man to get started earning money. A man to manage her money. She has to know how to manage men.
She is really doing quite well. It’s only her third month in Paris.
She is really quite mad.
Is she serious about her book at least?
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It is not true, as their father claims, that Joshua is a mindless brute, or that her daughter is a cold fish or as Joshua describes his sister, a natural genius for making herself useless, why is there so little love in the family?
Jonathan is not stupid as his brother claims and screams at him or late in the evening alone with his mother, intimates with a tone of sadness and intimacy reminiscent of his father: I hate to say it, but I think YoYo is just dumb. He is not to call him YoYo; he is taking his time, that’s all, doing all right in school...Better than you did, if you must know. Well, he shrugs superciliously—his father’s professional gesture—he started at a progressive school, I had to go—if you hadn’t sent me to that—Enough is enough, now they’re all going to same school and it’s time to take his bath. Maybe by midnight, he says, testing the water heater, assuming the gas pressure stays constant. True, there are two inches of hot water, the rest of the water tank is ice cold. She continues ironing. He persists about his brother (not about his sister now—that’s an evening for itself): Confidentially (having suggested his meaning by mimicry), you know what I mean—He’s plump, she suggests. That’s part of it, the whole thing, his sloppiness, the way he smiles, lets people push him around. I really think he’s stupid. Sophie knows Jonathan is not stupid, or a ninny. Just quietly making up his mind, or trying to. And will he be able to with this older brother who is a combination bomb and Iago? Why do you look so mad at me? Joshua asks innocently. If you would worry half as much about yourself as about other people...And now go to bed, she cuts his next sentence. You can take a shower in morning. Hot shower before going out? Swedes do it all the time. So now we’re Swedes. And he displays his filthy feet creeping under sheets. He’s about to show the rash on his buttocks, but she prevents this with firm hug and goodnight kiss. Sleep well, darling. G’night, Mom, as she draws away, one eye opening slyly, I can tell when you’re angry.
Back in kitchen, Sophie paces muttering to herself before she resumes her tasks. A curse. A punishment. Upon her has fallen the ungrateful task to which Ezra Blind’s mother was not equal. Out of her womb another Ezra. But when she is done cursing and praying to God to prevent her wrath from falling on this innocent child—rather let another Ezra Blind come to her bed that she might strangle him if it must be—when she is done cursing and praying, she knows Joshua is not an evil reincarnation of his father. Knows, even if Jonathan does look a bit like Uncle Joske who became a bum...As for Toby, she knows she has spoiled and indulged her daughter. She is terrified she’ll end up being raped while riding on a white horse dressed in her Sunday best, like in that awful Swedish movie. But she knows all this is nonsense. She knows Toby is all right, knows—
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The notebook lies open on its first blank page—blank but for the speck of a mosquito-like insect, late survivor into autumn, that had dropped onto the sheet and stands trembling on its bent legs, near transparent, paler than its shadow. Obviously you can’t write with an insect on the page. Try blowing it off, shake the notebook, try with a deft flick of the finger—the moribund little ogre won’t be brushed off, it clings on, rooted fast, tiny claws invisible to the naked eye, gripping the porous pulp of the paper
. There is only one solution, slide a hand under the hard cover, raise it and slam down firmly. Hold it pressed down tight. Another ten counts. It happened so fast it didn’t feel a thing and you know it. As soon as it’s dry and set into the paper properly you can start writing. Well done. The blow has fixed the insect in a very graceful figure, legs hanging as in flight, one stretched out, slightly longer than the other, wings folded angel-wise. A nice golden brownish color like old prints.
•
...coming into consciousness, a lifelong struggle. For countless departures, few arrivals—mostly false. The beginning can be dated from the momentous, if unrecorded, event when for the first time a child’s hand wrote Sophia Alexandra Landsmann (actually, Landsmann Sophia Alexandra, as is customary for Hungarians) on the cover of her class notebook; or one of the first times the child’s hand wrote the name for without time there cannot be memory. A child writing its name on a class copybook marks the beginning of a struggle, not of coming into consciousness. The coming and going, not marked. No first time, no difference between coming and going. No count: drops from a faucet leaking in a deserted house. The struggle is in time and against time, that much is certain. The object is not so clear. To set up the start and finish lines. Chart a course. To salvage from the morass of memory and the diffusion of the present—what?
• • •
She remembers her happy love affair in New York.
•
His raining tongue laps under her eyelids herds of woolly mammoth, bison, leaping reindeer, a tusked wild boar. Her head fills till it’s so heavy it rolls away by itself.
•
How would you define our relation? he asks. Technically we are lovers, she says after a while.
And nontechnically? (She cannot think of the term that would cover everything.)
•
She has gotten quite used to the way he leaps about and walks on top of the furniture. I don’t ordinarily behave like this, he says, tossing up the blankets in the air with his feet. Don’t, she says in her sleep, you’re letting out all the water. And in protest has curled into a ball. Don’t you have any more covers? He has heaped on her everything in the closet. He teases her with a hairbrush. But she knows it’s not him, grabs his wrist and pulls him in. They realize all this is very silly. They will get up and read the newspaper.
•
The day hangs suspended—a dull golden weave on which an impressionist master’s brush has sketched, placed at random, the familiar furnishings of a New York City apartment: the whiskey bottle, jar of instant coffee, cans of soup and spices on the shelf, a torn bag of sugar, ashtrays, magazines and a bowl of fruit on the floor. A tropical garden painted on the air. At this moment the mind, which has sunk deep into the trunk, a migrating organ, passing through the clapping valves of the heart and the belly toward the bowels; the mind, especially lucid, observes with surprised amusement an old riddle unfolding into a simple demonstration. Irrespective of will or will-lessness, the arm plunges into space, the hand reaches out to seize a pear and as gratuitously arrested, lies still on the fruit. Movement and rest, irrespective of will or will-lessness. The mind, sunk comfortably in the liver, finds a wonderful significance in this. It would like to make a note of it; but does not, in fact, any more than a fat man submerged in a hot bath will make a note of his revelation. He cannot. The paper would get wet. Besides, to lift his arm out of the water is inconceivable: it would damage his insight.
•
What are you thinking, he asks; you are so silent. She smiles. All thoughts have been driven out of her head. Her face is only flesh. Outside her now, a little harpy perched on the bookstand or hanging from the ceiling, Worry wrings its hands.
•
She is laughing. Over her lover’s sunken shoulder she sees in a brief phosphorescent shimmer the smiling ornate head of the goddess whose whim has undone her, and laughs back. These visions are only to distract.
•
He promised to help her tie up the boxes today. Predictably, after a shower, they make love instead. She must finish packing. It’s terrible to be in love. He’s up again, taking another shower. Are you crying? he asks. He has just finished shaving, lies down beside her. Aren’t you getting dressed? he asks. And they lie gazing at each other in a silence that does not lengthen or gain weight. He composes her face of half-moons.
•
He doesn’t care. It’s obvious. All the chairs are broken. There is no place to put the clean dishes and laundry. She will put up shelves on her own...So that, at least—, she doesn’t finish the sentence. Everything depends on it, but she cannot explain. He is playing with a silver measuring tape; he pulls out the steel band. It springs back by itself, recoiling in its tiny metal case when he lets go. He stretches the steel ribbon across her shoulders: eighteen inches. She wants it now to measure his spine; then he winds it around their waists, then their necks. Giving the figures so fast it is impossible to record them. Why must it be like this?
•
He is measuring spaces, distances. Between his right elbow and her nose. Her belly button and his left pelvic bone, her right nipple and his left eye. The rest is conjecture, he says. Three, two, one. Zero. Minus four, minus six, minus ten:
•
I don’t care, she says. I don’t care either.
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Almost time to fetch the children and she hasn’t even made the beds. Can’t face thinking about what to serve for dinner. The effort of putting on her shoes is too much. She remembers how different it used to be—up at sunrise, on her bicycle, with baby in front, balancing laundry and groceries on each handlebar, another child strapped to the back. She remembers the young wife, stoical and innocent. It was beautiful to be always busy, harried; being used up, this was what life was all about, she was becoming almost transparent. But now she is stuck with herself, a grubby phantom that fattens on her days.
It’s like the unmarried girl, her hair all snarls, big as a house—the old shapeless woe, panting for a man to find some use for her. Rubbish. She was the best student in...She played Salome in...And if not for Ezra, she’d be...Rubbish.
•
“So what are we having for dinner?” Standing in line at the meat market on Place Maubert; trays heaped with glossy glands, hearts, brains and livers. The plucked chickens lined in rows all in the same coy posture: rumps pointing up, necks twisted and tucked under their breasts with the head peeping from under one wing. And rows of skinned rabbits laid out on their backs in furry boots, their forepaws tied over their heads, their flanks spread apart—“Well, Mum, what are you going to buy?” This is the way the world ends.
“Let Toby decide today...We’ll take turns deciding—” she manages to say, but the children won’t play this game.
“No, you have to decide, Mummy; we want you to decide.”
Can’t give them spaghetti again...“How about le Self-Service?”
“Oh, yes! There’s a slot machine there.”
“Then we can have spaghetti!”
“Yes! I want to play the slot machine.”
“No,” she announces. “I’m going to make a roast.” But they’re pulling her out of line, then dancing ahead, all excitement, and Joshua taking her arm, festive, kindly and superior, “Cheer up, Mum,” he says, “I know you think the slot machine is bad for my character. But you don’t realize it takes a certain skill...So, it’s really educational,” he concludes and adds, “C’mon Mum, don’t look like that. You should have more fun in life...”
─────
“But why?” Ezra gasps.
He stands stunned in the hallway, still in his galoshes, coat half unbuttoned, a night’s train journey written on his face.
“I don’t want to be married to you,” she repeats.
“But why, Sophie?”
His look of utter bewilderment belies the least suspicion of a rift between them. Hardening his face, biting on his pipe, he struggles to
maintain calm. A shattered man, he has not lost all pride. It is difficult not to be moved. Ezra has his moments of beauty: just now, staring expressionless, an animal dazed by a sudden blow, he seems so solitary and forlorn—a stranger, as if he were already deserted, the person she cast out into the street, cut out of her life. If he were to walk out now without a word, she could not bear it.
“So,” he says, and takes another deep breath. “So this is what I must hear when I come to see you. A twelve-hour trip.” He puts a small oblong jewelry box on the table. “A present. Please take it and don’t thank me. Na ja. I am a fool,” he says dryly, gnawing on a pipe stem.
“We have discussed this matter before,” she says, “and I have written you...”
“I thought the matter was settled, I thought—What has possessed you?” He speaks brokenly, tearfully, but with utmost composure, of how they had discussed and settled matters during the three days he visited her in Paris last spring—they had resolved matters, discussed their difficulties: Paris was the solution.
“I think I have been more than generous. How many husbands do you think permit their wives to live in Paris?” As for breaking the marriage, he did not take that seriously, of course, he never took that seriously, he says sternly, and with bitterness and superiority now; takes off his coat, his galoshes, and continues. A responsible man, under great strain, a reasonable man, a patient man, speaking to a woman undeserving of his patience, an irresponsible, childish woman, seething with spite and vindictiveness, driven by impossible dreams, lacking all sense of reality; a woman he once loved, against whose folly he must now protect the home, the family. A man cursed to perform this grim duty. “It’s bitter,” he says. She says nothing. One is never prepared for the queer, horrible way these things really happen. It’s unbearable.