My Secret History

by Paul Theroux

  On my own like this I closed my eyes and held my breath, like a man dropping into a well. I no longer asked myself whether I was happy. It hardly seemed an important question, and there wasn’t time to answer it with any clear reply. I inhabited this space, all this hissing air, going from one life to the other believing I was unchanged. I had lived like this for a long time. But today (I had no idea why it had not occurred to me sooner—perhaps it was the sight of my face in the glass) I had an intimation of another self within me, someone lurking, and I thought: Who are you?

  I was living two lives, and I knew I was a slightly different person with each woman—lied to each of them, or chose a different version of the truth for each of them; remembered what to include and what to leave out. We were lovers. They invented me; I invented them. But for each of us there was a more complete person beyond all that fiddle. Wasn’t I a new man when I was alone?

  I did not want to make myself conspicuous on the train by writing, and so I mumbled to myself: Maybe I am living my life like this not because I want to enhance it with the intensity of two of everything, but rather because I am afraid to be alone. I am fearful of meeting face to face and having to give a name to that odd solitary man; I am afraid to see him whole.

  But this rainy morning passing through Hounslow I saw there was a third person. He was the observer, the witness to all this, like the inspector who had just entered the coach to examine tickets: not a word, not a murmur, only the nibble and bite of metal punch. This third man was the one who stood aside and made the notes and wrote the books. His life was lived within himself. He was silent, he seldom gestured, he never argued, he dreamed, he saw everything, and so he was the one who suffered.

  He rode his bike in traffic, he watched from the top deck of buses, he sat in the corner seat of trains and his reflection never stared back at him—his eyes were always fixed on other people. He was the one who read items in newspapers entitled Bloody End to Love Triangle Riddle and Private Life of Jekyll-Hyde Writer Revealed on Piccadilly Line. He took long solitary walks. He made excuses about urgent meetings and hurried away from demanding friends to eat fish-and-chips in the park and feed the leavings to the ducks. He picked up discarded letters and read them, foraged in the wastebasket at the main post office for first drafts of telegrams that people threw away—all that passion in a few lines; and he stared intently at the way women’s clothes fit their bodies. If a woman glanced at him he went away; if ever he caught anyone’s eye he looked askance and moved on. He was a letter writer. He killed time at the movies. He went to museums. He sat alone at concerts. He loitered in libraries. In the early darkness of winter he paused at the lighted windows of houses and looked in. He ate lunch standing up and seldom went into good restaurants. If there was a fight on the street, or an argument in the next room, or a crossed line, or someone punishing a child, he was transfixed, and he listened. He was alert, he was alive—not an actor waiting in the wings for a cue that would bring him onstage. This was his real existence, and there was no time to waste, because his life was passing and it was no more than a bubble the size of a seed pearl rising to break at the surface of the liquid in a tumbler, and then it would be over.

  Being alive is being alone, I wrote, concealing my small notebook behind my hand. Being alone is being alive.

  The only way of his understanding the world was in this intense and lonely concentration, seeing the stations pass, as he had once seen the Stations of the Cross at St. Ray’s. But these were plainer and more misleading names, from Osterley to Boston Manor to Northfields. And did that man do the Times crossword every day and fold his paper in that same way? And what did that woman next to him feel when she read (as he could see, and it was still only eight-fifteen in the morning at Acton Town)—then, once on deck he embraced her and covered her mouth with his and heated her lips and she felt his hard manhood throbbing against her as the yacht heeled in the wind—when she read throbbing did she throb and what did she see?

  The train slowed and stopped. The doors rushed apart. Two passengers alighted, a man boarded—he stood. The doors shut. The train shuddered and resumed, gliding on the tracks, picked up speed, rattled, slowed, stopped, and that man alighted and four more people pushed in; and on and on.

  I had two lives but I had intimations today that because there were two they were both incomplete. I lived in the cracks between them—had only ever lived in that space. Outside it, among others, I was not myself, and so no one knew me. Was that everyone’s condition—that we were each of us unknown? I did not talk. I listened. I watched. And in my silence I became invisible.

  I thought: As soon as someone else’s eyes are on us we are diminished—made into ugly miniatures of ourselves—which was why when someone looked at me I turned away. When I was invisible I felt vast and efficient, and I sensed that I saw everything.

  And that morning, of all mornings, memorably, a young woman took a paperback of one of my books out of her bag, and flexed it and opened it and held it like a thick sandwich. A paperback that has been carefully read actually looks it—it swells and fattens and its spine wrinkles and cracks, and the reader’s interest has had a physical effect on it. This copy, I could see, had been enjoyed. I watched the woman read on and I took pleasure in it—not watching the book but her face, her eyes. She was wearing a black coarse-knit cardigan over a blue blouse, and a bluish pleated skirt and white shoes and pale tights. She had big soft curls and her lips were pressed together in concentration, and sometimes they relaxed in amusement, slightly parted, as though she had seen something or someone approaching from the page. Eagerly, she turned the page with a neat plucking motion of her fingertips.

  I could have watched her for twenty hours, and I might have missed my stop, except that at Earl’s Court a voice piped up. It was a voice that sounded as though it came from the squawkbox of a synthesizer.

  “Mind the gap … Mind the gap.”

  And then I changed trains.

  6.

  Jenny still had not woken. But the sky had mostly cleared, the high wind having pushed the thunderheads east and under the blue sky of an April morning the air had been freshened by the storm. The streets were damp and, rain-washed, looked blacker. And these few weeks were the only time of the year when London had any fragrance—the traffic fumes of the city were actually modified if not overpowered by the masses of pink and white blossoms—the flowering trees of an English springtime.

  The house stood tall and detached on the quiet Clapham road, its white windows looking bright against the soot-soaked brick, and the brick itself no recognizable color—not red or black or brown, but the hue of an old tree trunk, senile and scorched, with the texture of porridge or tweed. The laburnum at the front had just come into flower. I was fascinated by the beauty of a living thing I knew to be poisonous.

  I mounted the stairs but did not ring the bell. I used my own latchkey, quietly, and when I was inside I took off my shoes and some of my clothes and crept into the dark room and slid into bed with her.

  “I heard you come in,” she said, and kissed me.

  Her limbs closed around me, her body attaching itself to me like a sea plant to a stone. The sheets were warm and moist from her deep sleep: she slept motionlessly, glowing in her still slumber.

  “Your feet are cold,” she said, and pedaled with her legs, and yawned. “What’s the time?”

  I said I didn’t know, because if I told her she’d say It’s so late and would get up. I wanted to lie there with her for a while.

  “Are you glad to be home?”

  “Yes.”

  “Did you miss me?”

  “Yes.”

  “Did you have a good time?”

  I did not reply, I hummed equivocally, and finally said, “I might have to go back.”

  “Oh, God!” Jenny said and took a breath, and her body hardened against me.

  “You could come with me this time,” I said.

  She did not speak. She sighed and her body softe
ned again.

  “Yes, take me with you,” she said, and kissed me. “But I know what it will be like. All your trip. All your plans and arrangements. You’ll be big and bossy, and I’ll have to follow you around like your mistress.”

  She then clung to me.

  She said, “Do you have a mistress, Andy? No, don’t tell me—I don’t want to know. Listen, are you serious about taking me to India?”

  “This is the first proper meal I’ve eaten since you left,” Jenny said.

  I had made her an English breakfast—eggs and bacon, grilled mushrooms, porridge and—just to see her reaction—fried bread. She drank coffee, and I had brewed a pot of green tea for myself. We were sitting at the table by the window—Jenny dressed for work in a flower-patterned dress that resembled the clematis in the back garden, pinky white blossoms on a background of pale green.

  She said, “Did you notice I lost weight? I hardly bother to eat when you’re away. I eat cheese and biscuits, I watch telly and eat sausage rolls, I drink too much. Sometimes I think I’m turning into an alcoholic. You didn’t miss me, did you? Oh, never mind—it’s so good to have you home. Are you going to see Jack?”

  “I might meet him this afternoon for tea,” I said.

  “He’d love to see you,” Jenny said. “He misses you so much when you’re away. He gets pale and goes all quiet and he snaps at me when I try to be nice to him.”

  And she gave me the other news: the car was buggered and wouldn’t start, the skylight had sprung a leak, the charlady hadn’t shown up for almost a week, there was no food in the fridge—she said there hadn’t seemed any point in shopping, since Jack was home only at weekends, I had missed the best of the daffodils, and my messages and mail were stacked on my desk.

  “I couldn’t be bothered taking detailed messages,” she said. “It’s such a bore, and what’s the point? I told everyone I didn’t know when you’d be home.” She shook her head and frowned. “They feel sorry for me when you’re away. They treat me like a widow. I hate that. And some people get so obsequious when they find out I’m married to you. I had one the other day. I told him my name, and spelled it. ‘Like the author,’ he said. His mother reads your books. It’s pathetic. I’d like to change my name.”

  “Why—are you ashamed of me?”

  “No,” she said, “but I’m a person, too. I’m intelligent, I read books, I have opinions, I even have my own name.”

  “One would never know you have opinions,” I said.

  She smiled and then began to laugh, and stood up to go. “That was a lovely breakfast, but you’ve made me late for work.”

  I was still thinking about these obsequious people she met. I said, “You’ll see—travel is hard. India isn’t a vacation. It’s work.”

  “Don’t lecture me, Andy, please,” Jenny said. “I need a little time to think about this. And don’t think you can come back and start ordering people around. I’m not going to drop everything I’m doing to go to fucking India. I’ve got a job too, you know.”

  She had been putting on her coat and growing flustered and fiercer as she fumbled her arms into the sleeves. I just watched her, saying nothing.

  At the front door she said, “Oh, God, look at your face. I’ve said the wrong thing. Give me a little time, Andy. I got used to your being away. And now I have to get used to having you back.”

  She kissed me and snatched up her briefcase and was gone.

  I unpacked my bag. I took a shower. I made more green tea and opened my mail: friendly readers’ letters, invitations to seminars, requests for me to give lectures, demands for autographs, appeals for comments on bound proofs—four of them, with the sort of letters my publishers had once sent out soliciting endorsements, so how could I chuck them aside? And bills, Jack’s school fees, tax assessments, and seven more including a phone bill for £600—a grand’s worth of telephone calls to Eden in Marstons Mills. It would take two days to work my way through this stack, but that was another penalty of being away.

  The car was out of gas, which was why it wouldn’t start for Jenny. I bought a gallon for my gas can and then drove to the Station and filled the tank. Three light bulbs were blown in the house. I replaced them. I went shopping in Vauxhall and filled the fridge. I made more green tea.

  I sat by the window, looking out onto the Common, drinking Chinese tea. Clouds filled the sky and sank. I felt motionless and complacent—a sense of homely peace that was akin to inertia, as though in being at this house I was tethered to a slowly dragging sea-anchor, not at rest but steadied and safe. I had had this identical feeling in my other house. This was a lovely view and this was a comfortable chair; but I had treetops there, too, and a similar chair. I had a wide desk here and a wide desk there, a razor here and a razor there; books here and books there—two atlases of the world, two sets of Dickens, two Boswells, two Shakespeares, two Obras Completas of Borges. A bicycle here and one there; two canoes; two pairs of binoculars; two shortwave radios, two toothbrushes, two sets of clothes—a suit here, a suit there, and everything else, down to the bottle of Tabasco Sauce in each cupboard, in each house, in each country. This house was a different shape but its contents were an exact counterpart of my American house: two of everything.

  Except—and with that hesitating word I saw children on the Common and remembered Jack.

  The clouds now filled the sky, and a light rain was falling. I dressed for bad weather—a felt hat with the brim tugged down, a leather jacket and thick trousers. I wheeled my bike out of the garden shed and rode it downhill to the river, and along Chelsea Embankment to Pimlico, thinking how much better this bike was than my American one. The river was full and flowing backward with a spring tide, and a cormorant disappeared into it as I turned into Bessborough Gardens. I was shocked to see workmen tearing the houses apart, the ones that faced the square, because in one of them Joseph Conrad had written his first words as a novelist. And now that house was a stack of broken bricks. One of the greatest things that writers did, I thought, was to isolate an event, and light it with the imagination, to make people understand and remember; and not just events, but people and their passions. Forgetting was much worse than failure: it was an act of violence. For all writing aimed at defeating time. No one could become a writer—no one would even care about it—until he or she experienced the impartial cruelty of time passing.

  I cycled past the rubble of Conrad’s house, crossed Vauxhall Bridge Road and cut behind the Tate Gallery and took back streets to Smith Square and Great College Street. There I locked my bike against the railings of one of the school buildings, and I lurked.

  I was always reminded, waiting for Jack, of how I had helplessly waited for my girlfriend Tina Spector, when I was fifteen, near her house on Brookview Road. Lurking, I felt an obscure sense of guilt, as though I was about to be found out and accused. And with Jack I felt awkward and vulnerable, because I had been away so long.

  He seemed not to recognize me when he appeared from the doorway to the schoolyard, walking quickly to his house. He wore the school uniform—a black suit, a black tie, black shoes. His shoes were scuffed, his suit too tight—he was growing. His hair was spiky, he was pale. He looked tired and rumpled. He carried a briefcase. He looked like a serious little overworked Englishman.

  He made quickly for me but did not greet me—did not look at me. He stood near me, and he turned his head away, staring across the grass that was enclosed by the old school buildings.

  “Take that hat off, Dad. Take it off. Please take it off.”

  “It’s raining, Jack.”

  He had started to walk away. I was losing him. He said something more in that same desperate and insistent voice, but I could not catch it.

  I took off the hat, stuffed it into my jacket, and followed him.

  “And the bicycle clips,” he said.

  I had forgotten those. I removed them.

  “ ‘Hatless, I take off my cycle-clips in awkward reverence,’ ” I said.

  “We’
re doing him,” Jack said. “We’re doing that poem.”

  “Who else are you doing?”

  Now I had caught up with him. He was walking quickly, heaving his briefcase, and taking a roundabout back way towards Victoria Street.

  “Everybody—Chaucer, Jane Austen, Conrad. Two Shakespeare plays.” He spoke in a weary and almost defeated way. “Don’t ask me—I have so much work to do. I’ll never get A’s on these exams.”

  “It doesn’t matter if you don’t get A’s.”

  “It does, or else what’s the point of taking them?” He was disgusted at being forced to be logical because I was frivolous. “Besides, no university will look at me if I don’t get A’s.”

  “What Conrad are you doing?”

  “Heart of Darkness. Where did you get that stupid hat?”

  “Don’t forget to read ‘An Outpost of Progress’—that was the original of the story. And my favorite, ‘The Secret Sharer.’ When I was riding through Bessborough Gardens, I was thinking—”

  “Dad, why—?”

  “Listen to me. I was thinking—the first thing to understand is that time passes.”

  He had hesitated to listen. His face was pale, a smudge of ink on his cheek, raindrops clung whole to his hair. I could see in his eyes that he would remember what I had said.

  “Dad, why did you have to come on a bike?”

  “It’s quicker. I can never find a parking space around here for the car. Why—does it embarrass you, like my hat?”

  He said nothing, he continued walking, and then more softly he asked, “How was India?”