by Susan Taubes
“I can’t,” she whispers.
His hand moving to caress her breasts, still laughing, “But Sophie. Baby. Are you crying? I know how you feel. It can’t be so bad. Pretend I’m a stranger. Don’t cry, please don’t cry...”
She gets out of bed. “What’s the matter? Come back, Sophie.”
“I can’t,” she says, putting on her coat.
“What can’t you?”
“I can’t forget that I loved you once.”
“Where are you going?”
She needs to take a walk, she tells him quietly. No, alone. She needs to be alone. It’s all right, she tries to soothe him. She’ll be back at seven in time for the children.
“Go back to bed. I’ll go. Take off your coat.”
She won’t take off her coat till he’s out. She wants to see him go. “Now. Right away.”
“I may put on my clothes. You really want me to go?” Maddening to watch—he can’t tuck in his shirt properly. He boohoos shamelessly like a child, the tears drop on his shoe. Wouldn’t it have been better to go to bed with him—for the hell of it, do anything, pull each other’s ears...“I’m going, I’m going,” he sobs while she is trembling with rage. But he does it very slowly. He is out. She latches the door. But he hasn’t really left. She can hear him crying on the next landing. “The only woman who really loved me...I know...I know...no woman will ever...” she hears Ezra howling up the stairwell. It’s how Ezra wants it. Ezra always wins. He leaves after a while. Of course. He is mad only so far. And he’ll be back in two weeks once again to die the old comic death.
─────
It has narrowed down to a lack of choice. Rereading the long letter from New York—not a love letter, she decides—and yet it’s clear he is as powerless as she to break off their relation. He does not accept her silence as a way of ending. A right ending is impossible under the circumstances, but no ending is intolerable. It’s maddening like an unfinished book, you know the missing last pages exist in someone else’s hands; at the address on the envelope before her—or, if in the hands of fate, all the more reason for her to take this trip. A folly...A necessity...She must make a trip if only to destroy the mythic personages that feed on human time, growing larger with each letter, created by a barrier of water, mere miles, that convert into flight hours, that convert into French francs...
Perhaps he simply wants to continue writing to her; wants her to continue writing to him...
What exactly was contained in the letter Sophie finally stamped and dropped in the slot of the blue CTP box is out of grasp. When Ivan’s reply came a week later she was climbing the dingy stairway with bottles of limonade, Vichy, vin ordinaire, baguettes, the envelope on top of the bulging bag of groceries steadied by her chin; resisting the temptation to lay down her load and read it, till on the fourth landing she yielded. Another letter from him in the next mail—with “...disregard the first, written in a fit of madness,” but saying essentially the same—she tore open on her way out and read striding down the boulevard. The first letter made her cry. The second made her laugh.
WHAT SENSE did Sophie make of her life on the plane bound for New York when she was heading there to arrange her affairs so that she might settle properly in Paris? None.
What sense did Sophie make of her life on the plane leaving New York after having had a happy love affair? None.
What sense did Sophie make of her life as she boarded the plane at Orly, going to see her lover again? What sense would she make of her life after she arrived, a week, a year, ten years after—?
Thinking about the sense of one’s life, trying to make sense of it, was an idle and useless preoccupation, Sophie had always believed. Worse than useless, it was positively unhealthy. In short, a bad habit. And like most bad habits, this one was foisted on you and fostered by other people, their judgments whether in asking or stating. Confronted with the senselessness of other people’s judgments, Sophie naturally preferred her own brand of senselessness. In time she learned that if she was to avoid arguments she must be more agreeable. There was no appeasement through keeping one’s peace, even nodding and smiling was not enough.
People wanted a statement. Mostly Ezra spoke for her. When he expressed her view in company, she thought it was just as well he did. She would never express herself in such a way, certainly not as artfully or persuasively as Ezra; she couldn’t have—she could never make a statement of this sort at all. When Ezra made statements for her or about her, he put them together from their conversations, her remarks on the books he had her read. The statement that came out of this would be neither true nor false; it was simply Ezra’s creation for a roomful of people who might otherwise have been offended by his wife’s silence.
It was strange, slightly embarrassing, to have Ezra speak for her and about her in her presence as if she were in a trance or absent. It is true she would not be listening—not even aware of not listening. She did not forget, however, that she was Ezra’s wife sitting in company; that it was under this cover that she could be anywhere or nowhere, anyone or no one. Perhaps she enjoyed it too much, as Ezra reproached her in private. He complained how she made him do all the talking, she who regarded talk so much shit, made him, poor fool—! Wasn’t it easy for her, wasn’t she fortunate to have a faithful servant and interpreter. What would the Delphic oracle be without an interpreter? Ein stinkendes Loch. While Ezra was parodying himself and her in these roles, Sophie may have wondered where she really stood.
Even when Sophie couldn’t bear Ezra, she loved the marriage. It was a many-layered shroud whose weight she relished. To carry it eased, simplified entering a room full of people, it justified her presence in the room. There it was, a costume ready-made for public occasions. Ezra’s wife; this was the answer to anyone who wanted to know her. She was the woman Ezra Blind married. It had weight and power: like an impermeable cloak it warded off the inevitable swarm of prying, talky, argumentative, interrogating people. The shroud served to receive the obligatory marks and tags, it absorbed unavoidable stains, its fabric wrinkled and stretched obligingly. It saved her skin. How not cherish a garment so serviceable?
As for Ezra, he may have joked and complained about his wife but he knew he had a treasure. She was not like any other woman. He told her about other women while they lay in bed, women he knew before her, or was just coming from—because he had lied, he hadn’t been in the library or taking a walk with Rabbi X; he could tell her the truth now in bed together because she was the only woman whom he loved. “I don’t know why,” he said, and gave a stream of reasons why he knew he ought to love her and yet it was unnatural for him to do so. “I really don’t know why I love you,” he said, because she was not like other women he had known or desired. She was difficult and impossible, yet not in the way other women were, with their nagging and clinging and demanding—except when she was in despair, then at least he knew what to do with her: mock her, beat her, screw her, flatter, abuse, comfort; then she was just like other women. But not enough, Ezra complained. He told her what other women did in desperation, depths to which they sank, obscenities, perversion; how they were ready to mortify, demean themselves, begging to be trampled on. She was not masochistic essentially, he sighed. The beatings were functional, not an erotic experience like with another woman who crawled around on all fours begging to be whipped, wanting to eat his shit; yes, she implored him. Sophie wasn’t impressed. She couldn’t even be properly jealous or offended. Her father had explained to her when she was a girl why men needed obscenity to get pleasure, why it couldn’t be simple. So now here it was. And if she still wanted it simple, it was, Ezra pointed out, because she was a child and hopelessly romantic. If Ezra’s practices did not appeal to her that was a matter of personal taste; to judge him by society’s rules, as a principle she refused. She hadn’t asked for a bourgeois marriage; and if ever the depressing thought took hold of her that she was trapped in a bourgeois ma
rriage, Ezra’s behavior assured her that she was not. What kind of marriage did Sophie want? She didn’t want to get married in the first place. Ezra wanted to get married. Ezra had been profoundly shocked when she had answered his first proposal with the suggestion that they live together in free love; and she had been surprised, amused and finally touched by his reaction, for he had presented himself as a cosmopolite, a free spirit, and they were in fact in bed together at the time; Ezra, still wounded by her frivolity, claimed he had deflowered her in the certain hope that they would marry. His insistence on this point, which he could not explain, intrigued her. Ezra did not believe in bourgeois marriage either, or in orthodox Jewish marriage. Was it the Jew in him? The man in him? Something she as a woman could not grasp? While she was trying to make up her mind about whether she liked or disliked Ezra, his solemn insistence on the marriage still preoccupied her most, and when she assented, it was to the marriage, before having quite made up her mind about Ezra. Once she was married she was thankful that it had happened so; who knows if she would ever have made up her mind whether she liked Ezra? And how unimportant that was! She didn’t fully realize till after they were married that it was the only respectable and natural way to be. Two people, a man and woman, living together was intrinsically right; and to have established this as a settled matter once and for all so you didn’t waste your time looking around or endlessly analyzing your feelings—this was the virtue of marriage. Thus Sophie found herself, while still frowning on marriage in principle, enjoying it in practice, enjoying the sheer twoness that endured independent of moods, likes and dislikes, that did not need reasons and that wouldn’t be destroyed by reasons; and was more baffled than hurt by Ezra’s running around, his need for distraction, which she knew did not arise from her insufficiency, just as her fidelity did not spring from any feeling for Ezra; they had different ways of being.
Her innocence was maddening, Ezra raved. He put her in obscene postures, but whatever she did she was hopelessly chaste. “A kouros—a chaste boy,” Ezra called her. It was maddening, maddening, and yet he adored it. “Nero would have been wild about you,” Ezra said. A dubious compliment, Sophie understood; and to perform the duties of wife to husband under these peculiar circumstances seemed most paradoxical.
“Why don’t you find yourself men—?” She asked him finally. “Buggering is between men, after all.”
“I thought of it,” Ezra admitted.
“Then why?”
“I am afraid I’d be the she,” Ezra confessed.
Didn’t want to be the she. The Jew in him.
“Why do I love you?” Ezra raved in the night. “Why do I always come back to you?”
And in his way of asking he gave the answer that he preferred to intone with a question mark rather than a period.
It was strange with Ezra. Ezra was always on stage: at one moment Sophie was up there with him speaking the lines, and at another she was like a street urchin peeping through the boards to watch the great comedian perform; so it went back and forth like a badly edited reel, and all the time there was a woman waiting, a woman already in bed, perhaps with the light turned off; a woman waiting for him to come to her wordlessly in the dark; a woman wanting something from this man, that he alone and no other man could give her and that he could give only to her. A woman waited for her husband. As for the comedy, she enjoyed that too, especially since Ezra was enjoying it enormously; perhaps she began to believe in the parts he assigned to them, perhaps she was living it and enjoying it, as Ezra reproached her.
Another woman waited and wanted reality. Sophie understood more clearly and hopelessly with time that all this clowning was the awful reality between her and Ezra, that it could never be otherwise, and perhaps she knew this all the years she was married to Ezra, knew it could never be otherwise with Ezra, and all the time she was another woman waiting for another man, however she denied it to herself because she wanted her life to be proper and decent. Ezra saw it, Ezra understood from the beginning that a man like himself couldn’t make Sophie happy and he was always teasing her about it. “I know the kind of man who would make you happy,” Ezra said, describing now mockingly, now solemnly, the kind of man his wife would like, some improvisations, others real men he invited to their house; and Sophie never showed the least interest because she wanted her life to be decent and proper, that’s all she wanted, and wanted all the more fiercely since Ezra laughed at decency and propriety.
She had accepted as part of marriage two people walking together in solitude and opposition. But that her faith and will and pride should be used up, this Sophie could not accept. And when it was used up she could not forgive Ezra or herself. However much she blamed Ezra for his foolishness, it was herself she blamed more strongly and endlessly for being defeated by Ezra’s foolishness. She tried to believe that she was leaving Ezra not because she was defeated, but refusing both her own and Ezra’s defeat in this marriage, even if there was nothing else left of her than the power of this refusal. But this didn’t really make sense; and finally she couldn’t explain to herself why she was leaving Ezra, why just now, not three years ago or next year. Now she had to explain to other people—Ezra, her lawyer, family, the children, friends in Paris and in New York. To herself she had nothing to say.
She did not wish to discuss her marriage with Ivan, whom she had just met. “A misadventure,” she summed up the matter, annoyed by the way he forced these statements from her, not so much by questioning as by cutting under her evasions and drawing his own conclusions, which she had to protest before he went too far. In the beginning it was simply annoying to have to fend against his oblique probing when they met to talk about his underground movie or her book, but as the discussion progressed from week to week and she realized that Ivan was better at this game—both in inventing evasions and building theories—she began to wonder why Ivan was so interested in understanding her relationship to Ezra. Was it to understand her? But it wasn’t her any more, not what she wanted him to know about her. Was it to understand why marriages broke down, what in particular a woman would not forgive a man; was it because of the future ahead of him, or for a movie he might make? And that she couldn’t answer either.
Whatever clarification for himself Ivan may have been seeking, he was really trying to make her see her own life differently, Sophie sensed from the beginning, touched by Ivan’s tone of jealous concern and his irreverent joking about Ezra. Her situation roused his anger. To see men like Ezra win, Ivan pursued (and he feared that she might in the end return to Ezra, sensing behind her evasiveness irresolution), this was what he could not bear to see happen. But why should it torment him?
And why did she continue to want to see Ivan? Even when these conversations unsettled her, and his company, so often gloomy, sullen, silent or speaking as if he occupied some space outside this world, made her uncomfortable. Only after they embraced did she know that this was what she had wanted to happen for the past weeks.
Now she would have liked to speak truthfully to Ivan and she didn’t know how; suddenly she had to question whether she had loved Ezra at all because of the way she loved now. Behind her will to love Ezra part of her was hiding and not caring. There was something that didn’t change in her by marrying Ezra and she had thought it a good thing at the time; only now that loving someone had changed her did everything have to be revised.
Realizing that she had merely loaned herself to Ezra for a life-term lease, but withholding part of herself—as to her unpremeditated, unthinking surrender to Ivan with whom she was prepared at most to enjoy a happy love affair of three weeks—she didn’t know what sense to make of it. Perhaps it was in the nature of the situation: marriage required a loan; the true and complete giving occurred only where there was no thought of continuation. But she couldn’t honestly believe this; even now her quiet happiness with Ivan was mixed with some falseness—accepted and sensed as wrong by both. What was simple had to be veiled; wa
nting to be more than her lover, he played being her lover with a touch of tender theatricality. The tenderness was true and she had to protect herself against it, escape in a false selfishness, making believe for both of them that she had left the real person behind even before she took the plane to Paris. And all the time their eyes continued to say: we are only pretending that we are pretending. True mixed with false, it couldn’t be otherwise they both knew without knowing where they stood; even if Ivan still tried to define their situation, he knew it was hopeless and that all statements between them were to protect the silences they had come to enjoy.
“What will you do in Paris? Why Paris?” Ivan asked. “And what are you doing here with me?”
...AT ORLY you’re equally remote from Paris and New York. Chimes follow you up the escalator, through glassed halls with shops and perfume counters, everywhere the two chimes prelude the same drowsy voice announcing passagers de destination —— passagers arrivant de ——. Peau Douce is playing at the Cinéma Orly. I shouldn’t be writing to you now. Terrified when I think of us in our different times. In your room the light is just changing. Here numbers roll through the slots on time indicators, a picture marking each minute, faster than on a clock...Must stop writing. They’ve announced the gate.
• •
...and now it’s over. We’ve boarded at last. Left my remaining eighty centimes on the plate in the ladies’ lavatory. FASTEN SEAT BELTS and NO SMOKING signs are on. The plane crawls along turning paths sentried by blowtorches; and waits, engines roaring, for its turn on the takeoff. I have made none of the usual preparations for this trip: the dress, thoughts, reading, proper for a sky journey. Packed away linen dress purchased two weeks ago specially to arrive in. Left behind volume of Heraclitus. Better so. Up alone without talisman. Good so. Tired of being on ceremony with God. Left everything behind. Even my memories are outside me, stored in boxes, burning in the incinerators of Paris. We’ve taken off. As we turn over the city, the captain’s voice points out Paris monuments. The plane climbs steeply and noses into a cloud bank. They’re announcing altitude and winds, flight time to —— didn’t catch the name of the city. Surprised the plane is so empty. A small party of businessmen, Bulgarians or Turks, have struck up a card game in front. Family across the aisle, young couple with three children; trying to quiet children. Americans.