The Cost of Living

by Deborah Levy

  I slammed the chicken into the oven and wondered if I should open the bottle of wine that had been a gift from the man who cried at the funeral. At the same time, I glimpsed the lone sprig of rosemary I had bought at the supermarket, the barcode stamped on the sealed bag. Rosemary was the herb for remembrance, but all I wanted to do was forget. At the family house, I had planted rosemary in the sunniest part of the garden. It had grown into a lush flowering shrub with violet-blue flowers. The solitary sprig in front of me was a bullet to the past.

  I decided to open the wine and texted my friend Lily to come over and share it with me. She arrived with a box of strawberries and ran me a bath while she talked about her day. My daughter and her teenage friends laid the table. They wore big hoop earrings and lip gloss. They were crazed by life and crazed for life. Their conversation was interesting, astute and hilarious. I thought they could save the world. Everything else fell away, like the flesh from the run-over chicken, which my daughter and her friends and Lily and I devoured with relish.

  EIGHT

  THE REPUBLIC

  To separate from love is to live a risk-free life. What’s the point of that sort of life? As I wheeled my electric bike through the park on the way to my writing shed, my hands had turned blue from the cold. I had given up wearing gloves because I was always grappling in the dark for keys. I stopped by the fountain, only to find it had been switched off. A sign from the council read, This fountain has been winterized.

  I reckoned that is what had happened to me too.

  To live without love is a waste of time. I was living in the Republic of Writing and Children. I was not Simone de Beauvoir, after all. No, I had got off the train at a different stop (marriage) and stepped on to a different platform (children). She was my muse but I was certainly not hers.

  All the same we had both bought a ticket (earned with our own money) for the same train. The destination was to head towards a freer life. That is a vague destination, no one knows what it looks like when we get there. It is a journey without end, but I did not know that then. I was just on my way. Where else was there to head for? I was young and lovely, I boarded that train, opened my journal and began to write in the first person and the third person.

  Simone de Beauvoir knew that a life without love was a waste of time. Her enduring love for Sartre seems to have been contingent on her living in hotels and not making a home with him, which in the 1950s was more radical than I believe even she realized. She remained committed to Sartre being the essential love of her life for fifty-one years, despite their other attachments. She knew she never wanted children or to serve his breakfast or run his errands or pretend she was not intellectually engaged with the world to make herself more loveable to him. She was appalled by middle age, in ways I did not completely understand. All the same, as she had written to the writer Nelson Algren, in the flush of their new love, ‘I want everything from life, I want to be a woman and to be a man, to have many friends and have loneliness, to work much and write good books and to travel and enjoy myself …’

  When I was on a book tour in America and landed in Chicago, I was assigned a driver by my publisher. His name was Bill and he knew everything about Chicago. The first thing Bill did was drive me to see where Nelson Algren had lived when Simone de Beauvoir made the long journey from France to be in his arms. It was a leafy road, lined with spacious houses built from red brick, with verandas and gardens. Bill told me that in Algren’s day it was a rough, grimy neighbourhood and that Algren hung out with whores, boxers and junkies. I thought of Simone, one of the leading intellectuals of her era, arriving in Chicago, as different from Paris as it could possibly be, and how she found love on the third floor of that old red-brick house. For a while, Algren had emotionally and sexually freed her from Sartre.

  What was it like to not wake up in a hotel? To be a guest in her lover’s home? Presumably he had chosen some furniture and bought his own light bulbs. He was her host. Algren had written to her when he feared their transatlantic love affair was ending, to tell her the truth about the things he wanted: ‘a place of my own to live in, with a woman of my own and perhaps a child of my own. There’s nothing extraordinary about wanting such things.’

  No, there is nothing extraordinary about all those nice things. Except that she knew it would cost her more than it would cost him. In the end she decided she couldn’t afford it. When Algren begged her to leave Paris and live with him in Chicago, she wrote, ‘I could not live just for happiness and love. I could not give up writing and working in the only place where my writing and work may have meaning.’

  Surely she could write and have happiness and love and a home and a child? She didn’t think so. I had found it quite tricky myself. All the same, I did know from a young age that if I chose to, I could take authorial control of my books. This is not as obvious as it sounds. How was I going to do that in my twenties if I was supposed to please everyone all the time in a bid for approval, home, children and love?

  And what about the men who, like Algren, wanted home, children and love? In my Boston hotel, I had glimpsed a man sitting with his female companion at a café table overlooking the harbour. He was in love with her, attentive and gentle and kind. She had taken off her sandals and jacket and sunglasses and the gold bracelet on her wrist. While he pressed his lips against the glowing skin of her bare arms, she looked into the distance, and then walked away from his lips and from the sunshine. After a while, he gathered up her sandals, bracelet, sunglasses and bag, his camera, sun cream and phone, and made his way to the table in the shade. Something or someone in his life had made him brave enough to do all the carrying and all the kissing. If he wanted her more than she wanted him, how would she begin that conversation in a way that did not destroy his courage?

  While I sat on the stone steps by the winterized fountain, I saw one of my students walking through the park. She was wearing a red coat and red woollen gloves. She was speaking to someone on her phone. After a while she took the glove off her right hand to better grip the phone, reaching with her left hand for the few leaves left on the tree.

  She had recently given me some of her writing to read. It was clear that she feared her emerging voice would be mocked. Every time she wrote something she really meant, she followed it with a self-deprecating joke to undermine the truth she had struggled to untangle. Perhaps this was a bid for approval, or a bid for love? Yet what sort of love would demand that she conceal her talent? Among her influences were Claude Cahun (born Lucy Schwob, poet, artist and resistance fighter in the Second World War), and a book she carried with her at all times, Black Skin, White Masks, by the psychiatrist and revolutionary Frantz Fanon, who was born on the Caribbean island Martinique. She had torn the wallpaper off the walls of her family house and slipped her hand inside the naked bricks to reach for something she knew was there. A feature of her story involved two caged singing birds. After I had read it a few times, I questioned these singing birds – to which she was very attached. The traumatic events in her writing occurred during the months of the monsoon in southern India, between July and September. I suggested she work with the rain instead of the birds. She rewrote the story and it came to life. It was both nuanced and furious – a hard combination to pull off. She had used the last line of a Langston Hughes poem as an ironic and sad refrain, which she had repeated throughout the story.

  And I love the rain.

  Now that the birds no longer screamed over her own powerful voice, the student told me it was hard to own up to its force. It scared her. When I told her that I believed she had an abundance of talent, she began to cry. And then she said, ‘Sorry, I haven’t had breakfast.’ She fumbled in her rucksack and took out two tiny samosas. When she unravelled the napkin they were wrapped in and used it to wipe her eyes, she was nervous and her hands were shaking a little. Later in the day, I saw that she had left the samosas on my office desk. I’d had to run down two flights of stairs to find her, and when I placed them in her hand she looked at
me and said, ‘Oh, but I left them for you.’

  ‘Well, thank you,’ I replied. ‘But you don’t have to give me things for letting you know you’re a genius.’

  Marguerite Duras did not have the ‘fatal patience’ that de Beauvoir rightly thought women who were mothers had learned to their detriment. After Duras wrote Lol Stein, she made a curious remark – she said that she gave herself permission to speak ‘in a sense totally alien to women’. I know what she means. It is so hard to claim our desires and so much more relaxing to mock them.

  The student saw me standing by the switched-off fountain and waved. After we had exchanged the usual small talk – What are you doing here, do you live near by ? – I showed her the sign that said the fountain had been winterized. She asked me if that was a real word? I hadn’t heard of it either. Was it a new verb? We looked it up on our phones and saw that it meant ‘to adapt something for winter’. In that case, I wasn’t winterized after all. I identified with Camus, who declared he had an invincible summer inside him, even in winter. I was still exploring the idea that the Holloway Road resembled the Adriatic Sea. I hadn’t done with that notion yet, but it was hard to pull it home. The student told me that she had recently seen an exhibition by the American photographer Francesca Woodman. Woodman had made a series of self-portraits, often naked, in which she had found a technique to blur the female form. She was always trying to make herself disappear into walls and behind the wallpaper and into floors, to become vapour, a spectre, a smudge, a blur, a female subject that is erased but recognizable.

  ‘Yes,’ she said, ‘I often feel like that.’

  ‘At least you’ve got yourself some gloves,’ I quipped. ‘That way, you are winterized.’

  After a while I asked her where she was heading.

  It turned out that she was going to have breakfast with her friend Nisha, who happened to be a photographer.

  ‘We’re broke so we order one full English. Nisha takes the bacon, sausage and one egg, I take the mushrooms, tomato and the other egg, we share the beans and hash potato.’

  ‘That sounds like a good arrangement,’ I said, ‘but isn’t the hash potato American?’

  ‘Yeah, it’s a full English with a special relationship with America. But to be honest I prefer a hash brownie to a hash potato.’

  We wished each other a good day and I made my way down the hill to my writing shed.

  The shed was winterized. It was now warm. I had laid down two kelim rugs on the floor, but I had no desire to domesticate my workspace. So far, apart from ten books, my computer and various journals, there was not much else in my shed.

  A candle in the shape of a cactus.

  The ashes of Daisy the Dog of Peace.

  A Mexican mirror framed with small ceramic tiles.

  A blue wooden chair.

  A green writing chair covered in two sheepskins.

  The freezer.

  A long lamp with a concrete circular base and a silver-tipped bulb.

  A green and yellow striped umbrella.

  A packet of nuts and raisins.

  A radio.

  The gardener who came once a month to look after the apple tree and plants was an actor in his mid fifties. He had a deep calming voice and the bluest eyes. We often spoke about books we were reading and his various acting jobs and why we had chosen such precarious occupations. He seemed concerned that the shed was a stern, austere place to work in winter. Sometimes he’d pick a small bunch of herbs and winter flowers from the garden and bring them to me in the shed. I could not tell him that it was flowers that triggered some of the most painful flashbacks to my old life. How can a flower inflame a wound? It can and it does if it is a portal to the past. How can a flower reveal information about minor and major characters? It can and it does. How is it that a flower can resemble a criminal? For the writer and criminal Jean Genet, the striped uniform of convicts reminded him of flowers. Both flowers and flags are required to do so much of the talking for us, but I am not really sure I know what it is they are saying.

  A gardener is always a futurist with a vision of how a small, humble plant will spring up and blaze in time. Do futurists have flashbacks or do they just flash-forward? I liked to think that the past, as I experienced it, came to the same end as Ziggy Stardust. I saw it off and then rose from the dead in a number of incredible outfits. Yes, I was with Ziggy and I was with Kierkegaard all the way: ‘Life can only be understood backwards; but it must be lived forwards.’

  In our various breaks from writing and gardening, he’d walk me around the different kinds of mint he was growing in pots, or talk through why he was so severely pruning the apple tree. I had become fond of this tree, not least because of the inspiring way the squirrels who scampered up and down the trunk would suddenly turn their gaze towards me, as I sat alone in the shed. Although they appeared to be startled, I knew they knew I was there before they turned to look. This had been my theme in Things I Don’t Want to Know, in which I speculated that the things we don’t want to know are the things that are known to us anyway, but we do not wish to look at them too closely. Freud described this wish to unknow what we know as motivated forgetting.

  I was pleased to share this garden with the squirrels. I had spent two decades finding plants that would be hospitable to birds and bees and butterflies in our family home, but in this time of rupture, I just wanted a writing desk and a chair in the solitude of my hut.

  This gardener had the knack of appearing to give everyone he spoke to all his attention, as if he was tending to a plant, assessing how it would respond to weather, to soil, to coexisting with other plants. I could tell from his intense blue gaze that he was an actor. He was curious about everything and everyone. Acting is a strange job in which the actor takes up residence inside someone else.

  In my shed I was researching the Medusa myth and she had taken up residence inside me. I wasn’t too sure I liked her being there. The Medusa was a woman who was both very powerful and very upset. It was a peculiar myth about a woman who returns the male gaze instead of looking away, and it ends with her cruel beheading, the separating of the head of a woman (the mind, subjectivity) from her body – as if its potency is too threatening. Robert Graves speculated that the reason for this decapitation was a bid to end the threat of female power and assert male domination. To my surprise, the Medusa had started to walk into my new novel.

  At the time I was thinking about a woman who told me that her husband never looked at her. ‘Never. Even when he speaks to me, he always looks somewhere else.’ When I was in their company I began to look at him never looking at her. This woman who lived in a large house with her husband and two fierce dogs (perhaps to guard them from risking a more intimate exchange with each other) was being subjected to a curious kind of passive violence. She began to take on more responsibilities at work because she did not want to live more hours in the day at home with him. They lived in the same house but they lived separate lives and slept in separate bedrooms. When she returned home from her challenging professional life, she was pleased to have someone to watch films with in the evenings. But when they discussed the film afterwards, she said his eyes remained on the screen while he offered his opinions, long after the credits had stopped rolling. She wanted to leave the room and find somewhere else to be, but then she remembered she lived there and it was her home.

  The moody politics of the modern home had become complicated and confusing. There were many modern and apparently powerful women I knew who had made a home for everyone else, but did not feel at home in their family home. They preferred the office or wherever they worked because they had more status than being a wife. Orwell, in his 1936 essay ‘Shooting an Elephant’, noted that the imperialist ‘wears a mask, and his face grows to fit it’. The wife also wears a mask and her face grows to fit it, in all its variations. Some women who were the main earners in their family were being slyly punished by their men for any success they had achieved. Their male partners had become resentful,
angry and depressed. As Simone de Beauvoir had told us, women are not supposed to eclipse men in a world in which success and power are marked out for them. It is not easy to take up the historic privilege of dominance over women (with a modern twist) if he is economically dependent on her talents. At the same time, she receives the fatal message that she must conceal her talents and abilities in order to be loved by him. They know they are both lying to save his face, which has also grown to fit the mask. His eyes stare through the peepholes, fearful the world will find him out. It is also the false head the caterpillar presents to predators. He knows the mask of the patriarchy is abnormal and perverse, but it is useful to protect him from being wounded. At its most decorated, the mask is there to help him appear to be rational while he intimidates women, children and other men. Above all, it is there to protect him from the anxiety of failure in the eyes of other men. If a man is considered successful because he succeeds in suppressing women (at home, at work, in bed) it would be a great achievement to be a failure in this regard.

  The pain of the contemporary middle-aged male who, having failed to entirely suppress women, perceives himself as disempowered is a delicate matter. Their women lie delicately for them. Adrienne Rich has written a whole pithy chapter on the art of lying in her book Arts of the Possible. She points out that when we stop lying we create the possibility for more truth.

  So, when I was next in the company of the man who never looked at his wife, I in turn began to look at him never looking at her – at the dining table for example, or in the car, or wherever it was he never looked at her. I wondered what his lack of looking was supposed to communicate. I had a go at trying to figure it out because the male gaze is supposed to work the other way – it is women who are looked at, we are not supposed to do the looking.