by Paul Theroux
At last he realized that he was an irritant to her and the whole relationship was unfixable, for she was unhappy, and she had been unhappy long before he’d met her. What she needed he could not offer her.
“It’s you but it’s not your fault.”
“Don’t patronize me.”
“Okay, I won’t. You’ve got a borderline personality disorder.”
“What about you?”
“Of course I do. Isn’t it the human condition?”
He had made her very unhappy. Her sadness was a great deal different from her anger. It was heavy and silent; it killed his desire. He did not think of making love to her now, not even in the drooling doggy way he had done just a week before. She was gloomy, and he left her to her unhappiness. It was either that or accommodate it.
Though she was still passive and low, she claimed she was angry, that she felt abandoned.
“You’re the same person,” he said. He meant: I don’t know you—you’re a stranger that emerged from the body of a friend whom I had found familiar and even beautiful. I was able to fuck the body but not the person inside it.
“You’re a bastard.”
Meaningless abuse; he was capable of the same. It was another stage in the disintegration.
But it seemed to him that she wanted to hold him responsible. It was almost as if she had been looking for a husband in order to find someone to take on the burden of misery within her, which had been part of her since childhood.
Dishonestly, he had wanted to sigh Women! as she had often shouted Men! But that was ridiculous. “We are not raccoons,” he had said to her one day. It was unfair to see her only as a woman, for she was different from any other woman he had ever known. She was Charlotte and sometimes Charlie. They had tried. They had failed.
Trying to analyze her didn’t help. The attempt made him insincerely sympathetic and seemed to obligate him. She talked about her parents, and it seemed like a weird parable of perverse and cruel people: hag of a mother, bully of a father, brute of a brother, who had done everything except love her. He hated listening, for whenever she talked of these people he saw damage. The worst of it was that since she really did not like herself very much, how could she love anyone else?
Yet she had friends, all of them women, none he knew well, for she kept them to herself and, he suspected, secretly complained about him to them. He could tell from the way they treated him—distantly, coolly, sometimes mocking, sometimes loudly contemptuous—that they were acting on her behalf.
Her closest friend was Vickie. In one of Charlotte’s low periods Vickie came to stay for a week. He suspected a week would be too long, that it might undo him, but he made attempts to be conversational.
“Have you ever been to the Vineyard before?”
“Years ago.”
“When was that?”
Vickie couldn’t remember. It had to be a lie. He asked her what sort of work she did.
“Depends on the day.”
She was being elusive. He knew Vickie was a marketing manager from Los Angeles. Charlotte had said so. They were both part of a business plan that was being written. Vickie had a long-term relationship with a man in New York. Steadman asked about him. “He’s delightfully eccentric.” Charlotte had told him the man was very wealthy and that Vickie was wealthy, too, but all Steadman saw was an aging sharp-faced woman who had a demented male friend and who had shown up empty-handed and contradicted nearly everything he said.
“Beautiful,” she said of a small santo on a pedestal, its gilt chipped. “I was going to buy one in Mexico.”
“This is from the Philippines.”
“Mexicans make the exact same things,” she said. “You’re limping.”
“Gout,” he said.
“Gout’s terrible. Sometimes you can’t get out of bed. You get gout in every joint.”
“That’s not it. Have you ever had it?”
“No, but I know quite a bit about it.”
Wondering why he was going to the trouble, Steadman explained 216 that you never got gout in every joint. He had been severely dehydrated on his travels and had fainted one day in Assam, before trespassing into Bangladesh. The resulting kidney damage had produced the gout. Gout was nearly always limited to one joint, often the podagra of the large toe of one foot.
“It’s like having a broken toe.”
“Oh, is that all?” Vickie said, and turned to Charlotte. “I had a broken toe when I was a dancer. It didn’t hurt at all.”
“This hurts.”
“If you’d drunk more water,” Vickie said, “you wouldn’t have gotten dehydrated.”
Steadman smiled, raging within.
“This was in India.”
“They’re starving in India,” Vickie said.
“Have you been to India?”
She averted her eyes. “Years ago.”
She stayed in the guesthouse; she whispered with Charlotte, whom she called Charlie; they shopped in town. Steadman saw them only at mealtimes. Though she was a snob about food—“Avocados are really fattening,” “Fruit juice is all sugar,” “You don’t have any soy milk?”—she didn’t cook. Vickie wouldn’t swim in his pool—she hated pools, all those chemicals. When he offered her blueberries in a bowl she said she hated blueberries, and so he followed up with raspberries and she shrieked, saying she hated them even more. “They’re so hairy.” She said she wanted to give up business and be a masseuse. She often massaged Charlotte’s neck as she talked. “You’re all tight here. Why are you so tense, Charlie? These knots. Feel them? Let me work on those.” Steadman wondered why he had never massaged his wife’s neck. Vickie said her ambition was to live in a deluxe hotel, preferably in Europe, maybe in Vienna. She had been there once, it was so clean, better than Italy, where they threw trash everywhere.
“The narcissism of minor differences,” Steadman said.
He had become fascinated by her disagreeable opinions and ignorant evasions. She believed she was delightfully eccentric, like her New York boyfriend, while he knew she was simply annoying. He realized that it was a relief for Charlotte to see someone else battling him, but couldn’t she tell how pathetic the woman was?
She looked up, though her fingers still clutched at Charlotte’s neck.
“Freud,” Steadman said. “He was from Vienna.”
“Everyone knows that.”
“And the quote’s from Civilization and Its Discontents.”
“I know.”
“You read it?”
With a wave of her hand, “So long ago.”
Harmless affectations, white lies; and if she always surrounded herself with people like Charlotte, she would never be found out. More serious was her continual gossip. She had gotten close to a mutual friend, a man Steadman had met a few times but who was closer to Charlotte, a business associate to whom she had introduced Vickie. And Vickie, the passenger, the floater, was now a friend of the man. He saw her regularly, he confided in her.
“I shouldn’t be telling you this, Charlie,” Vickie said, and giggled, and then told them both the secrets the man had divulged to her: of his wife’s past, his children’s problems, his financial worries, his weaknesses as a businessman—weaknesses, she suggested, that she and Charlotte might easily exploit.
She spoke in the tone a person might use when offering a special gift to a lucky, much-valued friend, giving them the secrets and letting them share the information, which made them powerful, too. The confidences were beyond gossip: they had the effect of reducing and emasculating the man, and created the illusion—as some betrayals did—of making the listener stronger.
Charlotte was delighted, rapt, as Vickie went on leaking.
“The key to his marriage? He married his mother. She makes all the decisions. You gotta wonder about their sex life.”
Steadman found himself more interested than he should have been. But pondering what was being divulged, he became wary, for here was the indiscreet woman in his own household, a conf
idante of his secretive and dissatisfied wife. At some point in the future he would be talked about that way. You gotta wonder...
Seeing Charlotte with this woman friend, he perceived aspects of her personality that had been hidden from him before. She laughed hard at Vickie’s small smutty asides. She was delighted by her confidences, her betrayals, her gossip; she asked for more. Vickie brought out a dismissive, philistine side of Charlotte, one that was also tinged with mendacity. She was untruthful because she was snobbish, aggressive, competitive, mean.
And Steadman noticed that half the time he was either ignored or belittled by the woman, whom he had begun to dislike as much as he disliked the weak aspects of Charlotte’s personality that the woman patronized.
The days of Vickie’s visit went by slowly, but it served to show Steadman a different, much more dismaying Charlotte: heartier, cruder, easily won over, more comfortable with this woman than she had ever been with him, a woman he could never love and yet one that seemed more self-sufficient than he had previously imagined. Now, having seen her together with her friend, he knew for certain that their marriage was over—was surer than if Vickie had been a man enjoying his wife in a week of adultery. Charlotte would be all right; for her, the break would be painless.
He was hurt, humiliated by the failure, felt deceived, yet he knew that the failure was as much his fault as hers. His pride was injured; he knew he looked conspicuous, a bit of a fool, someone people pitied or tried to ignore.
The marriage had been a straightforward declaration, a contract, the binding part of the ceremony lasting minutes, a simple affirmation. The divorce was a lengthy agony strung out over many months, a set of legal questions with no clear answers, a tedious and painful disentangling that was like major surgery after a car crash, a messy amputation.
In the first remorseful months of his divorce, a bitter time of private pain, Trespassing was published, with its dedication (“To my wife”) withdrawn. No acknowledgments page was included, though there were many times just before publication when he had fantasized writing a dense paragraph of small print to be inserted at the end of the text, under the title “No Thanks”:
To my ex-wife, Charlotte, who was too busy to finish reading this book in draft, eat me! To the many foundations that turned down my requests for financial assistance, fuck you! To the MacArthur Foundation, which did not consider me a genius but saw genius in a thousand preening mediocrities and rewarded their tedious efforts with absurd sums of money, eat my dust! Up yours! to my editor, who seldom returned my phone calls, and Piss off! to my bank, when at a crucial stage of the writing it refused me a loan. To all the people who told me not to go on my journey, or said they could not see the point of this book, or belittled the title, or said the text was too long, go fuck yourself!...
He had had no help at all, had only obstacles and stupidities to contend with. “Be careful!” people said when he set off. Were any words more unhelpful or antagonistic? The difficulty of writing the book had reflected the difficulties he’d had in taking the long, dangerous trip. Sometimes the imagining of such a list of no-thanks late at night had soothed his mind and helped him get to sleep in his empty bed.
The reviews were good, approving, and numerous. “A new kind of travel book,” and as something different in a market that craved novelty, the book’s sales were brisk, the film and TV rights sought after and bid upon, as the book itself became more widely noticed. His idea of trespassing from country to country without a passport was the basis of a “major motion picture,” a board game, a ghostwritten sequel, a licensed book by another author from the point of view of a woman, and a popular television series, which inspired the merchandising. The Trespassing line of outdoor clothing became a bigger brand than The North Face and Patagonia, because the catalogue also retailed the TOG line of luxury accessories. The high-end items were the moneymakers—titanium sunglasses, watches, and knives. The knives alone occupied one division in the company and seven pages of the catalogue—folding knives, camp knives, bowie knives, some with staghorn or abalone shell or mastodon ivory handles (one or two designs with the rubric “Limited to 50 Pieces”), and each, in the hollow of the guard, embossed with the Trespassing logo. People who did not know Steadman’s name and who had never read his book coveted the sunglasses and watches and knives. And the unexpected profits, fabulous even to his wealthy Vineyard friends, allowed him to buy and expand the up-island house, giving it the size and look of a chateau, complete with perimeter walls and orchards and garden statuary.
Although he had been careful to exclude any mention of her, Charlotte was associated with the book, and many people believed she had been partly responsible for it. That she was given some credit for it angered Steadman more than anything else, for he had conceived and written the book alone. The fact was that she had hindered him; he had overcome that and ignored her dismissals. The success of the book was a relief and a pleasure. He told himself—and for a long time believed this was true—that if he never wrote anything else, he would be happy being a one-book wonder. It was a good book, big and solid, that inspired a new generation of risk-taking travelers.
After Charlotte left, after the divorce was final and the property apportioned, after the early part of his success was established and he had gone to ground on a remoter part of the Vineyard, she wrote him a letter. It was apologetic and humble: she was glad for him, she wished him happiness. She complimented him, said she was sorry she had helped him so little. She said she was living in New York, which was much more expensive than she had imagined, and “I guess you know what’s coming next.”
He agreed to give Charlotte the very amount of money that she had asked for. Steadman’s only condition was that before he handed anything over, she sign a paper waiving any further claims, demands, or requests. She did this gladly, by return mail, notarized and witnessed. Then he was rid of her. She took the money, and was perhaps thrilled initially, before thinking (Vickie would have egged her on): I should have asked for more.
For his book kept rising, there was more money, enough to support him for the rest of his life. The amount she had asked for, which had seemed so much at the time, was a pittance compared with what later accrued to him. When his lawyer complimented him on his savvy, he was not pleased—it was petty to feel vindictive or triumphant. He knew the No Thanks page that he had imagined was mean-spirited and unfunny.
Reflecting on Charlotte later, as his ex-wife, his former lover, he was remorseful. He could barely believe that he had once vowed to love and protect her for life; he was astonished that he had desired her, ashamed that he had broken solemn promises made so publicly. He could no longer remember the color of her eyes or the shape of her face. But the beautiful swell of her buttocks as she lay on her stomach, crying out to be penetrated; the curve of her thigh; the brownish birthmark in the shape of Madagascar at the small of her back; the way she sniffed and blinked like a rodent when she was anxious—he could call up these images at will.
She probably hated him now, but why? Because the marriage had not worked? But she had made promises, too, not that the marriage would be easy, but the awful lie that she was simple, no more than she seemed. Now he knew that no one was. People might believe their own words, but it could be fatal for you to believe them. He did not distrust her, or the next women he met. He deeply distrusted himself for believing that Charlotte would be happy to be his partner, and hated himself for thinking that he wanted no more than that, when in reality he had expected her to do housework, and be witty, and help him with his book, and love him for being intelligent and hardworking and a hero.
Preposterous expectations—he was better off alone. He said, “Never again.”
2
NO WOMAN WOULD EVER console him in his distrust, he felt. The one he wished for did not exist, for he wanted a woman to lay a healing hand on him, bind a blood-pressure cuff on his upper arm and cinch it, touch his forehead, take his temperature, use her fingertips to tap for clues on hi
s back, peer into his throat, check his heart, perhaps only a tender physical examination, in a manner of speaking. But how could there be such a woman?
Years passed, girlfriends came and went. He shrank as his fame grew, that famous author of Trespassing resembling him less and less. Rather than leave his farm, he continued to enlarge it until it became an estate so vast, so productive, so valuable, that he would never need to leave.
The land was fertile. He grew much of the food he ate. The physical activity tired him and displaced his writing hours. He started stories, he sketched out ideas for novels, for plays, for an opera. The publishers wanted another Trespassing, but that book he knew was written and done, and he told them so: there would be no other. He took comfort in the fact that among his summer friends, the most secure and happiest were those who had done one thing well—a book, a movie, a play, a picture—the unique thing by which they were known.
Growing flowers, cultivating vegetables, gave him consolation and wearied him enough to ease the passage of time. Whatever he began to write on any given morning, doodling at his desk, he always ended up abandoning the effort and digging in his garden. And when he was not hoeing or watering, he would sit on the cast-iron love seat at the garden’s edge and peer at the plants and exult in their size, imagine that he was watching them grow. He put in a heated greenhouse, an enormous tent-shaped conservatory of glass, so the whole year was his for cultivation.
The labor of gardening was a gift. He spent days lifting heavy sacks of manure for his potato field, bending and straightening, heaving and slinging them over the high fence that kept out the deer and the rabbits. When that chore was done he lay inert in his bath, stewing his aching bones and muscles. And one day when he looked in the mirror he saw that his left eye was crimson where there had been white: the eye was full of blood, opaque and frightful.
What surprised him was that there was no pain in the bloody eye. Still, it shocked him enough that he overcame his hatred of hospitals. He drove himself to the Vineyard hospital, squinting, shutting the right eye, apparently using the gory but functioning left one. He registered, was told to wait—a Thursday night in early May, hardly anyone around. He found a mirror and marveled at his hideous eye.