Why then don’t I shake her awake and force her to look at me? Have I tried hard enough? Why should I imagine that I am easy to get along with? Perhaps, all this time, she has been making a heroic effort to get along with a morose, over-sensitive, self-absorbed fool. She said the other day, ‘Imagine the strain of living with someone who doesn’t speak for hours, and then says vaguely, “Have you ever thought of joining a cult?”’ She has also complained about my scratching my arse almost continuously in bed so that it is a constant background noise, like the sound of crickets in a movie set in a hot place. There is no doubt that I have an aversion to shopping, housework, washing. Somehow I expect all that to be done without my having thought about it.
Nina, I remember, said I am inflexible. She called me a tyrant. Yes; my feelings are strong, my wishes imposing. Perhaps that is why I have had long periods, years in fact, of imposed indifference, as if nothing mattered. The dismissive shrug in a café was my most eloquent gesture. I was detached, having learned to be cold; intact, no one could touch me, particularly the women I let fall in love with me. I wanted them; I got them; I lost interest. I never rang back, or explained. Whenever I was with a woman, I considered leaving her. I didn’t want what I wanted. I found their passion repellent, or it amused me. How foolish they were to let themselves feel so much!
Now I can hardly bear the strength of what I feel. Some nights I could bang my head on the wall, particularly when I’ve lain here with Susan, knowing that my girlfriend – whichever one, but usually Nina – was out in the city. Perhaps she was missing me; probably she was with some young man. Aching at what I was excluded from, hating myself for my inability to live as I wanted, I have got up, dressed and left the house, walking a starlit misery until exhausted. I have returned to find that one of the kids has shit himself or vomited in his sleep.
Now, like Oliver Twist, I am asking for more.
In a few minutes I will wake her up and tell her some of these things.
How Nina tantalizes. She is aloof, feline, graceful. Everything she does has grace; some call it style. Others will say she knows who she is, and likes being herself. Her doubts don’t undermine her, but they do make her inaccessible at times. I must be in love with her. I have yet to find out why.
So?
When did the realization really happen? When did it occur to me to leave? I can remember passing the critical point during one of my meandering conversations with Victor in the bar we go to. I thought, looking at all the free people ordering drinks, what’s to stop me getting out and never coming back? But the idea was too cruel and subversive. Immediately I was filled with self-disgust, and saw myself from the back, running, a picture of all the other cowardly men who had fled.
That was eight or nine months ago. Nina and I would meet hurriedly before I had to be home with Susan. If there’s nothing more likely to make you feel abandoned, desolate and left out than sexual betrayal, perhaps the only way not to feel it, is to feel nothing for the woman. It seemed a kind of freedom to encourage Nina to see other men, to have her tell me about them and for me to laugh at them.
‘How many have you seen this week? And what did the last one do to you?’
‘He kissed me.’
‘And you let him?’
‘Yes.’
‘And then he puts his hands on you. And you, no doubt, put these hands that I’m kissing now on him. And –’
The more she told me, the more beautiful she looked. The more I removed myself, the more I hoped she would pursue me. Yes, I wanted her to follow me as I turned away, but I was also afraid of her feeling discouraged.
I have wavered, vacillated and searched myself for a reason to stay. But once the devil voice of temptation had spoken it wouldn’t retract. Yet still I waited! For what? To be absolutely sure. ‘Nothing’s gonna change my world,’ Lennon sang.
At home I made myself powerless and impotent. I could barely walk. What reason was there for putting one foot in front of the other? At night, when Susan was asleep, I couldn’t turn on the lights; in the dark I wore sunglasses and hoped to fall over. Nina saw me shrivelling. If I was powerless I would be innocent. I couldn’t damage anyone; blameless, I couldn’t encourage retribution. I wished to be wishless!
For a year Nina visited me every two or three weeks at the flat I was using as an office. It was a roomy place, owned by an actor who was working in America. She was living in Brighton, where all runaways and lost individualists end up, teaching English to foreigners, always a last resort for the directionless. I met her – or picked her up; I was in that kind of mood one Sunday afternoon, feeling magnetic or ‘on’ – in a theatre café in London. It was a place I never normally visited, except that a photographer friend had an exhibition there. She was with another girl and as I looked at them I recalled Casanova’s advice that it is easier to pick up two women at once than one on her own. After many smiles and a few words, I left. She came after me.
‘Join me for tea,’ I said.
‘When?’
‘How about in an hour?’
She stayed all evening. In a hurry for love after all this time, I behaved foolishly and, if I remember rightly, spent some time on my knees. She came back the next day.
She was a girl then, looking for someone to take the pressure off. She had run away from home when her mother’s boyfriend smashed through the glass in the front door with his hands, and she was forced to hide in a cupboard. She was an unhappy and changeable girl, who often lost herself in inexplicable moods. She had never much been cared for, and kept herself apart. She needed to think she could get by without anyone.
When I first met her, she wore cheap, light, hippie clothes, and hadn’t cut her hair. She still blushed and turned away her face. When she spoke it was in a voice so soft I could hardly make her out.
‘What?’
‘What is your situation?’ she said.
‘As regards what?’
‘Everything.’
‘Ah. My situation.’
‘Yes. Will you tell me?’
‘I will tell you.’
Unavailability can be so liberating. I asked to kiss her. She had to walk round the block to think about it. I waited by the window.
‘Yes,’ she said. ‘Yes, I will.’
Soon we were exchanging the most intimate caresses while eschewing personal questions. In those days my favoured form of contact was the anonymous. Who could blame me for being afraid of the pulsation of feeling?
She said that I studied her constantly. She liked me looking at her.
I’ve never known a woman who wanted so much to be wanted, or a woman who was more afraid of it. I’ve never known anyone make more arrivals and departures, not only on the same day, but within the same hour. I preferred her not to go out, and soon blamed her for having any life apart from me, which I considered an infidelity. This is what she shoved into her bag each time she left: hairgrips, slides and combs; little wooden boxes containing cheap Indian jewellery and hash; lip balm, nipple cream; tapes of the sound of the sea or perhaps of dolphins, birds or whales; camomile tea; a stuffed giraffe; postcards and photographs of cats; underwear, and other bits of the odd equipment necessary to mobile girls, as well as a certain amount of my wardrobe, including shirts, socks and my loafers.
Then, on her long legs, accompanied by a handful of good intentions and a head full of whims, she would make for the door as if pursued.
It made me fret about what it was out there she found so exciting – until I began to wonder about what it was in here that she found over-exciting. I learned that the more she loved me, the more she had to remind herself that she was separate. Understanding that nearly did me in as, from the window, I waved and watched her go. But at least I saw it.
I had just started to write a new film about an ageing and fragile couple whose children have grown up and done well. The parents go to visit them, only to find their marriages are breaking up. I was excited by the idea and talked about it a lot so as to have he
r understand what I was trying to do every day.
She would lie on the floor beside my desk and watch me work. She said she envied my having something important to do every morning; something that absorbed everything; something to live for. My sense of purpose made her feel left out. She didn’t believe I envied the fact that she woke up in the morning and wondered what she felt like doing that day. Would it be the dancing, pottery or a walk? She went to parties on the beach and in warehouses; she’d go any distance for a rave. She played guitar and sang in a group that I went to see. She dedicated all the songs to me. Not yet having acquired the glassy indifference of busy women in the city, she talked to people on the street and felt responsible for them. Her friends were dope heads in old clothes with woolly hats pulled down to their eyes. They were indolent and lacked the spark – like her and not like her. She drifted between boys. When she left them they suggested she considered herself too good for them. Too good for everyone but me.
I lay over her one afternoon. I had kicked off my slippers, and we had thrown the duvet down on the patio. She liked to make love outside, and I didn’t mind, provided I didn’t get a draught between my legs. The TV was on low. England were playing the West Indies. I was looking at her in awe and puzzlement, unable to understand how I could have such feelings for a girl I didn’t know.
She used to say, ‘You’re so neat and gentle, with a soft voice. I’ve never met anyone who so much wanted the best for me. You know how to speak to people. You make them feel they can tell you the deepest things.’ She seemed to trust me, as if she knew implicitly that she was safe, and that I would not let her down. But I did. In a strange way, she seemed to expect that, too. At least, then, she knew where she was.
There were mirrors in the bedroom we used. One afternoon, as I lay on the bed to wait for her, I caught a glimpse of myself. My body was thick and hairy, my stomach round, as if I’d swallowed a ball; my little prick stuck out merrily. I could have tied a pink bow on it. In celebration of Wimbledon, I had prepared a handful of strawberries beside the bed, which I intended to slot between her buttocks and guzzle with cream. I watched myself lean over, pick up a bottle of cold champagne and press it against my balls, before swigging from the bottle. She came into the room in high heels, a suspender belt, my mac, and the pearl earrings I’d bought her. I waved at myself in the mirror! How happy I looked, as if all my epiphanies had come at once!
I can’t say I wasn’t happy at that time. I liked to compliment myself on having everything in balance. I was also adapting a book for an American studio. I knew they would have the script rewritten, just so they would know they had been thorough. I was used to that and reckoned they’d try a couple more writers on it, before coming back to me. I had a tolerable partner and delightful children, as well as the perfect mistress who, when she became pouty and sulky, I could dismiss. I may have a hypocrite heart, but my vanity was satisfied. As satisfactions go, that is ample.
One day she said, ‘If you want me, here I am, you can have me.’
‘Thank you,’ I said and added, some time later, not wanting to take yes for answer, ‘Do you mean it?’
She seemed surprised and reminded me that the third time I met her, when she enquired after ‘my situation’ I had said to her, ‘You can do whatever you want with me. I am at your disposal.’ And, apparently, I added, ‘Don’t think that I don’t love you, because I do.’
I do.
Could I have done more with Susan? I mean, can I do more?
How little, when you think about it, can you will into being. Of what my parents and teachers tried to force on me as a child, little remains except a memory of abhorrence. I was never one of those kids who’d do things because they were compelled. All of me, along with the age, stood against compulsion. Such individualism has got me into trouble. You can, of course, will things for a while, but if you are alive you will rebel. You can protect and encourage the most delicate gifts – love, affection, creativity, sexual desire, inspiration – but you cannot requisition them. You cannot will love, but only ask why you have put it aside for the time being.
*
Susan and I cannot make one another happy. But the failure scars one, until it seems inevitable that such failure will attend all one’s endeavours – if it is indeed happiness that one wants, rather than success, say, or sanctuary. My robust instinct, therefore, wasn’t to give up but to persevere.
Susan had obviously been discussing our troubles with a friend. Therapy was recommended, as it always is to the minutely distressed. It saves friends the bother of attending to you. I refused to go. I imagined I needed my turmoil. I knew, too, that I didn’t want to love Susan, but for some reason didn’t want the clarity of that fact to devastate us both.
She made the appointment as briskly as always, giving the unexceptionable excuse that it was for the sake of the children.
I sat in the car feeling like a child being taken to the doctor by an impatient mother.
A few weeks before this, Susan and I visited a couple who had been married nearly a year. On the way I expounded my cheerful theory that people marry when they’re at their most desperate, that the need for a certificate is a sure sign of an attenuated affection.
That night I noticed that the husband made a particular, loose-wristed gesture, using both hands when explaining something. I noticed this because it was obvious the wife detested the movement. She even said, while we were there, ‘Can’t you stop doing that?’ In the car on the way home Susan and I laid bets on how long the marriage would last. We laughed for the first time in ages, and I wondered how much recognition there was in our mirth.
These days I think often of the couples I know or have met, and consider which of them is in love. There are some. It is tangible, you can see it between them, and feel the depth of their pleasure. Not long ago, at the kids’ open day, I noticed a couple who were not engrossed in one another – they had things to do. But they were continuously aware of one another. Then, as their child ran about, and she thought no one was looking, she couldn’t wait any longer, and she thrust her hand into her husband’s hair and he kissed her.
No wonder everyone wants it – as if they have known such love before and can barely remember it, yet are compelled ever after to seek it as the single thing worth living for. Without love, most of life remains concealed. Nothing is as fascinating as love, unfortunately.
I know love is dark work; you have to get your hands dirty. If you hold back, nothing interesting happens. At the same time, you have to find the right distance between people. Too close, and they overwhelm you; too far and they abandon you. How to hold them in the right relation?
It is beguiling how, in good relationships, even after years, formerly undiscovered parts of people are suddenly exposed, as in an archaeological dig. There is much to explore, and understand. With other people you can only turn away, bored.
I want to say: this is just the way things are.
I can’t have been at my best the first time Susan and I visited the therapist. Once you know it is over there is no comfort in the present. Everybody was irritating me. I shoved strangers on the street. In the tube I pushed someone down the stairs, hoped to be arrested by the police and charged with possession of an uncontrolled mind. I rushed around the flat where I worked from one thing to another. My doctor, a friend, delighted in telling me about the range of available tranquillizers. But I refused to give him the pleasure of witnessing whether they provided tranquillity.
I was surprised we got to the therapist’s at all without removing one another’s windpipes with our fingernails. Susan and I passed the journey haranguing one another over the correct duration for the immersion of a teabag. According to her I had no facility for making tea, though I drank it all day, even – quite successfully – adding a little milk, on occasions, and sometimes a slice of lemon. But this was not good enough for Susan. I was hoping that the tea question would not come up with the therapist, at least not immediately: I am leaving be
cause I cannot make her a cup of tea.
I could have poured hot water over her head, and Susan was ready to shove my testicles into boiling water, when we rammed the car into the therapist’s drive and ran for her door.
I would imagine that therapy has benefited Victor. It gives him the opportunity to think of himself more than he always did, but less gloomily. He knows something of himself now. Whether he has changed is another matter. I suppose it depends on whether one sees self-knowledge as a benefit, and believes in it as the central purpose of mankind. Also, I have wondered whether there’s a new class distinction emerging, between those who can afford to maintain their minds and emotions, cleansing themselves of toxic notions each week – and those who have to live with that which poisons them.
Yet despite my reluctance to go – to be coerced, once more – I had decided to confess all, to offer a few secrets without inhibition, such as they were. I wanted to be good at being helped. All the same, as we entered the room I stumbled, fancying I could hear the howls of pitiable couples trapped together for ever within the walls. I had to rest my face against the toilet wall and resist the idea of escaping through the window and absconding across the Vale of Health.
Susan and I sat side by side and six feet apart opposite a middle-aged and somewhat patronizing woman who had a ‘concerned’, if not pained, look. What a job, the harvesting of misery. She will never want for work.
Susan was soon into her second handkerchief.
The therapist, like me, appeared to sympathize with Susan, particularly when – in the attempt to get things started – I tried to define love as curiosity. I argued that unrest, disquiet, curiosity and the desire for more was at the root of life – you could see it in children. I said I had lost my curiosity about Susan. I said I had no passion to know her soul. She bores me; or I bore myself when I am with her. I said:
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