Enduring Love

by Ian Mcewan

Parry spoke immediately into my threat. His voice was pitched higher and his words came faster. He had to get this out before I cut him off. “Look, I’m making you a promise. Just see me this once, just once and hear me out and you’ll never have to hear from me again. That’s a promise, a solemn promise.”

  Solemn. More like panicky. I calculated: perhaps I should see him, let him see me and let him understand that I was distinct from the creature of his fantasy world. Let him speak. The alternative was more of this. Perhaps I could muster a little detached curiosity. When this story was closed, it would be important to know something about Parry. Otherwise he would remain as much a projection of mine as I was of his. It crossed my mind to make him bring down his god to underwrite his solemn promise. But I did not want to provoke him.

  I said, “Where are you?”

  He hesitated. “I can come to you.”

  “No. Tell me where you are.”

  “I’m in the phone box at the end of your road?”

  He said it, he asked it, without shame. I was shocked, but determined to conceal it. “Okay,” I said. “I’ll be along.” I hung up, put on my coat, took my keys, and left the apartment. It was a comfort to discover that Clarissa’s scent, Diorissimo, still hung in the air on the stairs, all the way down.

  Seven

  Outside our apartment building, running straight on rising ground, was an avenue of plane trees just coming into leaf. As soon as I stepped out onto the pavement I saw Parry standing under a tree at the corner, a hundred yards away. When he saw me he took his hands out of his pockets, folded his arms, then let them droop. He began to come toward me, changed his mind, and went back to his tree. I walked toward him slowly and felt my anxiety dropping away.

  As I went closer Parry retreated further under his tree, leaned back against its trunk, and tried to look nonchalant by hooking a thumb into his trouser pocket. In fact he looked abject. He appeared smaller, all knobs and bones, no longer the sleek Indian brave, despite the ponytail. He wouldn’t meet my eye as I came up, or rather his eyes made a nervous pass across my face and then turned down. As I put out my hand, I was feeling quite relieved. Clarissa was right: he was a harmless fellow with a strange notion, a nuisance at most, hardly the threat I had made him out to be. He looked a sorry sight now, cringing under the fresh plane leaves. It was the accident and the afterwaves of shock that had distorted my understanding. I had translated farce into indefinable menace. His hand, when it shook mine, exerted no pressure. I spoke to him firmly, but with a little kindness too. He was just about young enough to be my son. “You’d better tell me what this is all about.”

  He said, “There’s a coffee place …” and he nodded in the direction of the Edgware Road.

  “We’ll be fine right here,” I said. “I don’t have a lot of time.”

  The wind had got up again and seemed sharpened by the thin sunlight. I drew my coat around me and tightened its belt, and as I did so I glanced at Parry’s shoes. No trainers today. Soft brown leather shoes, handmade perhaps. I went and leaned against a nearby wall and folded my arms.

  Parry came away from the tree and stood in front of me, staring at his feet. “I’d rather we went inside,” he said, with a hint of a whine.

  I said nothing and waited. He sighed and looked down the street to where I lived, and then his gaze tracked a passing car. He looked up at the piles of towering cumulus, and he examined the nails of his right hand, but he could not look at me. When he spoke at last, I think his sight line was on a crack in the pavement.

  “Something’s happened,” he said.

  He wasn’t going to continue, so I said, “What’s happened?”

  He breathed in deeply through his nose. He still would not look at me. “You know what it is,” he said sulkily.

  I tried to help him. “Are we talking about the accident?”

  “You know what it is, but you want me to say it.”

  I said, “I think you’d better. I have to go soon.”

  “It’s all about control, isn’t it?” He had flashed a look of adolescent defiance at me and now his gaze was down again. “It’s so stupid to play games. Why don’t you just say it? There’s nothing to be ashamed of.”

  I looked at my watch. This was my best time of day for work, and I had yet to get into central London to collect a book. An empty taxi was coming toward us. Parry saw it too.

  “You think you’re being cool about this, but it’s ridiculous. You won’t be able to keep it up, and you know it. Everything’s changed now. Please don’t put on this act. Please …”

  We watched the taxi go past. I said, “You asked me to meet you because you had something to say.”

  “You’re very cruel,” he said. “But you’ve got all the power.” He inhaled deeply through his nose again, as though preparing himself for some difficult circus feat. He managed to look at me as he said simply, “You love me. You love me, and there’s nothing I can do but return your love.”

  I said nothing. Parry drew another deep breath. “I don’t know why you’ve chosen me. All I know is that I love you too now, and that there’s a reason for it, a purpose.”

  An ambulance with a whooping siren went by and we had to wait. I was wondering how to respond, and whether a show of anger might see him off, but in the few seconds that it took for the din to recede I decided to be firm and reasonable. “Look, Mr. Parry—”

  “Jed,” he said urgently. “It’s Jed.” His interrogative style had deserted him.

  I said, “I don’t know you, I don’t know where you live or what you do or who you are. I don’t particularly want to know, either. I’ve met you once before, and I can tell you now that I have no feelings for you either way—”

  Parry was speaking over me in a series of gasps. He was pushing his hands out before him, as though to repel my words. “Please don’t do this … It doesn’t have to be this way, honestly. You don’t have to do this to me.”

  We both paused suddenly. I wondered whether to leave him now and walk up the road to find a taxi. Perhaps talking was making matters worse.

  Parry crossed his arms and adopted a worldly, man-to-man tone. I thought perhaps I was being parodied. “Look. You don’t have to go about it like this. You could save us both so much misery.”

  I said, “You were following me yesterday, weren’t you?”

  He looked away and said nothing, which I took as confirmation.

  “What possible reason would you have for thinking I love you?” I tried to make the question sound sincere and not merely rhetorical. I was quite interested to know, although I also wanted to get away.

  “Don’t,” Parry said in a whisper. “Please don’t.” His lower lip was trembling.

  But I pressed on. “As I remember it, we spoke at the bottom of the hill. I can understand if you felt strange after the accident. I certainly did.”

  At this point, to my great surprise, Parry put his hands over his face and started to cry. He was also trying to say something, which I could not hear at first. Then I made it out. “Why? Why? Why?” he kept on saying. And then, when he had recovered a little, he said, “What have I done to you? Why are you keeping this up?” The question made him cry again. I moved from the wall where I had been standing and walked a few paces away from him. He stumbled after me, trying to regain his voice. “I can’t control my feelings the way you can,” he said. “I know this gives you power over me, but there’s nothing I can do about it.”

  “Believe me, I have no feelings to control,” I said.

  He was watching my face with a kind of hunger, a desperation. “If it’s a joke, it’s time to stop. It’s doing us both damage.”

  “Look,” I said. “I’ve got to go now. I don’t expect to hear from you again.”

  “Oh God,” he wailed. “You say that, and then you make that face. What is it you really want me to do?”

  I was feeling suffocated. I turned and walked away quickly toward the Edgware Road. I heard him come running up behind me. Then h
e was plucking at my sleeve and trying to take my arm. “Please, please,” he said in a gabble. “You can’t leave it like that. Tell me something, give me one little thing. The truth, or just a part of the truth. Just say that you’re torturing me. I won’t ask the reason. But please tell me that’s what you’re doing.”

  I pulled my arm away and stopped. “I don’t know who you are. I don’t understand what you want, and I don’t care. Now, will you leave me alone?”

  Suddenly he was bitter. “Very funny,” he said. “You’re not even trying to be convincing. That’s what’s so insulting about it.”

  He put his hands on his hips, and for the first time I found myself calculating the physical danger he presented. I was bigger, and I still worked out, but I’ve never hit anyone in my life and he was twenty years younger, with big jointed knuckles and a desperate cause, whatever it was. I straightened my back to make myself taller.

  “It hadn’t occurred to me to insult you,” I said. “Until now.”

  Parry moved his hands from his hips and presented his open palms. What was so exhausting about him was the variety of his emotional states and the speed of their transitions. Reasonableness, tears, desperation, vague threat—and now honest supplication. “Joe, please, look at me, remember who I am, remember what moved you in the first place.”

  The whites of his eyes were exceptionally clear. He held my stare for a second before looking away. I was beginning to see the pattern of a tic he suffered when he spoke. He caught your eye, then turned his head to speak as though addressing a presence at his side, or an invisible creature perched on his shoulder. “Don’t deny us,” he said to it now. “Don’t deny what we have. And please don’t play this game with me. I know you’ll find it a difficult idea, and you’ll resist it, but we’ve come together for a purpose.”

  I should have walked on, but his intensity held me for the moment and I had just sufficient curiosity to echo him. “Purpose?”

  “Something passed between us up there on the hill, after he fell. It was pure energy, pure light?” Parry was beginning to come alive, and now that his immediate distress was behind him, the interrogative inflection had returned to his statements. “The fact that you love me,” he continued, “and that I love you is not important. It’s just the means …”

  The means?

  He addressed my frown, as though explaining the obvious to a simpleton. “To bring you to God, through love. You’ll fight this like mad, because you’re a long way from your own feelings? But I know that the Christ is within you. At some level you know it too. That’s why you fight it so hard with your education and reason and logic and this detached way you have of talking, as if you’re not part of anything at all? You can pretend you don’t know what I’m talking about, perhaps because you want to hurt me and dominate me, but the fact is I come bearing gifts. The purpose is to bring you to the Christ that is in you and that is you. That’s what the gift of love is all about. It’s really very simple?”

  I listened to this speech, trying not to gape. The fact was that he was so earnest and harmless, he looked so crushed, and he was speaking such nonsense that I felt genuinely sorry for him.

  “Look,” I said, as pleasantly as I could. “What is it you want, exactly?”

  “I want you to open yourself up to—”

  “Yes, yes. But what do you actually want from me? Or with me.”

  This was difficult for him. He squirmed inside his clothes and looked at the thing on his shoulder before saying, “I want to see you?”

  “And do what, exactly?”

  “Talk … get to know each other.”

  “Just talk? Nothing else?”

  He wouldn’t answer or look at me.

  I said, “You keep using the word love. Are we talking about sex? Is that what you want?”

  He seemed to think this was unfair. The whining note was back in his voice. “You know very well we can’t talk about it like this. I’ve already told you, my feelings are not important. There’s a purpose you can’t be expected to know at this stage.”

  He said more along these lines, but I was only half listening. How extraordinary it was, to be standing on my own street in my coat, this cold Tuesday morning in May, talking to a stranger in terms more appropriate to an affair, or a marriage on the rocks. It was as if I had fallen through a crack in my own existence, down into another life, another set of sexual preferences, another past history and future. I had fallen into a life in which another man could be saying to me, We can’t talk about it like this, and My own feelings are not important. What also amazed me was how easy it was not to say, Who the fuck are you? What are you talking about? The language Parry was using set off responses in me, old emotional subroutines. It took an act of will to dismiss the sense that I owed this man, that I was being unreasonable in holding something back. In part I was playing along with this domestic drama, even though our household was no more than this turd-strewn pavement.

  I also wondered if I was going to need help. Parry knew where I lived, but I knew nothing about him. I interrupted him and said, “You’d better give me your address.” It was a remark he was bound to misinterpret. He took a card from his pocket, which had his name printed on it and an address in Frognal Lane, Hampstead. I put the card in my wallet and set off at a quick pace. I had seen another taxi turning my way. I still felt sorry for Parry in a way, but it was clear that talking to him was not going to help. He was hurrying at my side.

  “Where are you going now?” He was like a curious child.

  “Please don’t bother me again,” I said as I raised my arm for the cab.

  “I know what your real feelings are. And if this is some kind of test, it’s completely unnecessary. I’d never let you down.”

  The taxi stopped and I opened the door, feeling slightly mad. I went to pull it shut and discovered that Parry had hold of it. He wasn’t trying to get in, but he did have one last thing to say.

  “I know your problem,” he leaned in and confided over the diesel’s throb. “It’s because you’re so kind. But Joe, the pain has to be faced. The only way is for the three of us to talk.”

  I had decided to say nothing more to him, but I couldn’t help myself. “Three?”

  “Clarissa. It’s best to deal with this head on—”

  I didn’t let him finish. “Drive on,” I said to the cabbie, and I used two hands to wrench the door from Parry’s grasp.

  As we pulled away, I looked back. He was standing in the road, waving to me forlornly but looking, without question, like a man blessed in love.

  Eight

  I told the driver to take me to Bloomsbury. As I settled back to calm myself, I recalled my incoherent feelings the day before when I had run out into St. James’s Square looking for Parry. Then he represented the unknown, into which I projected all kinds of inarticulate terrors. Now I considered him to be a confused and eccentric young man who couldn’t look me in the eye, whose inadequacies and emotional cravings rendered him harmless. He was a pathetic figure, not a threat after all but an annoyance, one that might frame itself, just as Clarissa had said, into an amusing story. Perhaps it was perverse, after such an intense encounter, to be able to drive it from my mind. At the time it seemed reasonable and necessary—I had wasted enough of my morning already. Before my taxi had covered a mile, my thoughts had drifted to the work I intended to do that day, to the piece that had begun to take shape while I had waited for Clarissa at Heathrow.

  I had set aside this day to start on a long piece about the smile. A whole issue of an American science magazine was to be dedicated to what the editor was calling an intellectual revolution. Biologists and evolutionary psychologists were reshaping the social sciences. The postwar consensus, the standard social-science model, was falling apart, and human nature was up for reexamination. We do not arrive in this world as blank sheets, or as all-purpose learning devices. Nor are we the “products” of our environment. If we want to know what we are, we have to know where we c
ame from. We evolved, like every other creature on earth. We come into this world with limitations and capacities, all of them genetically prescribed. Many of our features—our foot shape, our eye color—are fixed, and others, like our social and sexual behavior and our language learning, await the life we live to take their course. But the course is not infinitely variable. We have a nature. The word from the human biologists bears Darwin out: the way we wear our emotions on our faces is pretty much the same in all cultures, and the infant smile is one social signal that is particularly easy to isolate and study. It appears in !Kung San babies of the Kalahari at the same time it does in American children of Manhattan’s Upper West Side, and it has the same effect. In Edward O. Wilson’s cool phrase, it “triggers a more abundant share of parental love and affection.” Then he goes on, “In the terminology of the zoologist, it is a social releaser, an inborn and relatively invariant signal that mediates a basic social relationship.”

  A few years ago, science book editors could think of nothing but chaos. Now they were banging their desks for every possible slant on neo-Darwinism, evolutionary psychology, and genetics. I wasn’t complaining—business was good—but Clarissa had generally taken against the whole project. It was rationalism gone berserk. “It’s the new fundamentalism,” she had said one evening. “Twenty years ago you and your friends were all socialists and you blamed the environment for everyone’s hard luck. Now you’ve got us trapped in our genes, and there’s a reason for everything!” She was perturbed when I read Wilson’s passage to her. Everything was being stripped down, she said, and in the process some larger meaning was lost. What a zoologist had to say about a baby’s smile could be of no real interest. The truth of that smile was in the eye and heart of the parent, and in the unfolding love that only had meaning through time.

  We were having one of our late-night kitchen table sessions. I told her I thought she had spent too much time lately in the company of John Keats. A genius, no doubt, but an obscurantist too, who had thought science was robbing the world of wonder when the opposite was the case. If we value a baby’s smile, why not contemplate its source? Are we to say that all infants enjoy a secret joke? Or that God reaches down and tickles them? Or, least implausibly, that they learn smiling from their mothers? But then, deaf-and-blind babies smile too. That smile must be hard-wired, and for good evolutionary reasons. Clarissa said that I had not understood her. There was nothing wrong in analyzing the bits, but it was easy to lose sight of the whole. I agreed. The work of synthesis was crucial. Clarissa said I still did not understand her, she was talking about love. I said I was too, and how babies who could not yet speak got more of it for themselves. She said no, I still didn’t understand. There we had left it. No hard feelings. We had had this conversation in different forms on many occasions. What we were really talking about this time was the absence of babies from our lives.