by Karine Tuil
PART THREE
1
Since Nina had told him that she was going to leave him, Samuel no longer had any reason to live. She had made the announcement in a solemn tone, eyes lowered as if she, not he, were about to be sentenced. She told him it was a matter of hours, days at the most; she was going to leave him because she was in love with Samir—and he was in love with her too, she explained, as if their love counted double, as if the figures spoke for themselves, amplifying their feelings, the reciprocity validating the love, whereas by withdrawing from her relationship with Samuel, she was reducing it to a singularity, a one-way street, a dead end; she was dividing, subtracting . . . it was scientific, mechanical. She had hesitated for a long time before making this decision; she had talked about it with Samir—and she left it to Samuel to imagine the endless discussions, the arguments for and against; she left it to Samuel to assume the consequences of this betrayal. They loved each other, let it be known, and what did it matter to them that a third party had to be sacrificed? Their love legitimized the destruction, justified the suffering. Love was a tyrant, a totalitarian state that brooked no opposition. She was leaving him in spite of their years of closeness, the two decades they had spent together; she was leaving him in spite of the worthless promises she had made, mere words that bore no weight when faced with what the future held; she was leaving him out of love for another/weariness/boredom, with determination and a few other moods quickly swept away by the power of the nascent passion, the once-in-a-lifetime opportunity; she was leaving him out of indifference, as if their shared memories had been frozen, mummified, melted into lead, as if they no longer had any use or meaning. Their love was over, it was dead: a slag heap to be incinerated with the touch of a lit match to a trail of the strongest, purest, deadliest alcohol. She had tried to reason with him, using specious arguments to explain to him that it was better this way: her and Samir on one side, him on the other, a strict application of the principle of the separation of the species. You don’t join one who loves with one who no longer loves. You don’t mix the pure and the impure, the profane and the sacred. She had always tried to help him, to support him, to accompany him; she had listened when he was feeling bad, loved him when he was suffering, pretended to sympathize when he expressed his impotence. She didn’t say this, but she thought it: she had been an exemplary partner; he had nothing to reproach her for. She had fallen in love with Samir without any premeditation or intent, because it was him—Samuel—who had wanted her to get back in touch with him, even at the risk of losing her. She had not betrayed anyone and it was pointless to blame anyone; these things just happen, there’s nothing you can do about them. She minimized everything, reducing their breakup to a banal minor news item. People break up every day—it’s nothing compared to a war, a disease. It’s nothing compared to death.
* * *
But no, don’t you understand, it’s a disaster! The aftermath of love, the generalized infection, the amputation, the gangrene! Look at him, a medical incongruity, incapable of breathing, of calmly and objectively analyzing the announcement. Quick—an oxygen mask, a ventilator, a fan! Quick—turn up the A/C, open the windows, can’t you see he’s suffocating! He can’t put things in perspective, can’t calm down. The tear-making machine is going into overdrive! I love you (he loves her). He tells you that he loves you, and his opinion is of no importance. His feelings are irrelevant and should not be taken into account. He will get over this—it’s fate—and he’ll end up accepting it. He’ll meet another girl in the street or he’ll sign up for a dating site or he’ll ask someone to set him up. He’ll get rid of her things without emotion. He’ll delete her from his address book . . . or will he continue to see her? What would he have to say to her? We can stay friends, she’d told him, we can remain on good terms. Or maybe it will be like “Helen’s Song” in the movie The Things of Life: I loved you so much . . . we had to break up . . . I don’t know how to love you anymore . . . it’s better this way, it was love without friendship . . . He won’t ask her out anymore. He won’t be able to hold her hand or kiss her in public, to make love to her without prior agreement. He won’t buy her perfume or books anymore—remember The Book of Disquiet, The Book of Imaginary Beings, The Book of My Mother, and The Book of Sand? He’ll no longer turn up at home without warning—à l’improviste—he loved that expression, with its suggestions of natural spontaneity and sudden urges. He would no longer phone her at any hour of the day or night to say, I love you, to ask her: Where are you? Who are you with? What are you doing? To spy on her: You’re not answering! Why don’t you answer? When are you going to answer? He will no longer ask her for advice or arrange to meet her in a sleazy part of town so that she’ll be scared and hold on tightly to him. He won’t invite her to spend the weekend in Rome, or anywhere else, as long as she’ll be with him. He’ll no longer be able to seduce her with rare words. He won’t perform any more magic tricks or take her on carousels. He will no longer provoke her enthusiastic remarks. He won’t create any more portmanteau words—like poustache—to make her laugh. (She used to love that.) He won’t get angry with her anymore for forgetting to put the lid back on the soda bottle so that the gases escape. (He is sure about this, irrespective of scientists’ denials.) He will no longer make her read his manuscripts. He will no longer ask her advice about where to put a comma or the future of the apostrophe. He will no longer dress up as Groucho Marx to surprise her as she comes out of the Métro, wearing a T-shirt on which he has written in black marker, “Your bed or mine?” He will no longer read her the poems of Yehuda Amichai. They will no longer argue over ideology. He will no longer wait for her in front of her agent’s building with two hot dogs (one without mustard). He will never again be able to hear the second movement of Mozart’s Piano Concerto No. 23 interpreted by Horowitz without thinking of her, without crying. He will no longer look at dark-haired women, because all dark-haired women will remind him of Nina. He will no longer think about finishing his degree. He will no longer go running every morning so that he can hear her say, as he gets undressed, “Wow, look at that body!” He will no longer choose which DVD to rent, wondering whether she will like it. He will no longer book “a table for two.” His dinner will be a pizza ordered from PizzaHut.com. He will double his consumption of cigarettes and alcohol. He will skim frantically through the pages of his dictionary, searching for the word that most precisely expresses that combination of melancholy and confusion that pierces him with the violence of an electric arc. But no word will articulate the feeling of failure and impotence, the pain, the rage of being left for another man; no word will translate the anger and the hatred, will express the fear of a future without her, of daily life without her, of love without her.
2
Moving into a large apartment on the top floor of an opulent-looking building in the heart of SoHo, chosen by Samir—a construction made in gray stone striped with green metal, with the fire escape attached to the façade in a perfect architectural shape. “If you ever want to leave me,” Samir jokes, “all you have to do is take the stairs.” She laughs, enters the building (“This place is unbelievable!”), and follows Samir to the elevator. In the spacious metallic car, he kisses her—they kiss—indifferent to the clamor of the outer world. “Close your eyes.” He takes her hand and leads her toward the apartment. When he has opened the door and she is standing at the threshold, he asks her to slowly open her eyes again . . . slowly, so she won’t be blinded by the rays of sunlight diffracted by the huge bay windows. He takes her on a tour of the apartment: Here’s the kitchen, this is the bathroom, and here is our bedroom. He pushes her, a little roughly, onto the bed and rips her clothes off. With her head buried in the hollow of his collarbone, she repeats to herself: Our bedroom.
His double life—that exhilarating period when the intensity overwhelms him. The feeling that he is living twice as fast, twice as fiercely, coming, going, running, loving, lying, hiding, pretending, inventing, manipulating, acting, overac
ting, dodging traps, never sleeping . . . the agony and the ecstasy. The incredible freedom of being able to live in two parallel worlds, each world knowing nothing of the other, each world ruled (so it seems to him) by King Samir, but without the risk of treason usually inherent in such power. Who would betray him? Ruth? She suspects nothing and is not one of those fragile women prone to spying: she is too sure of herself for that. As for Nina . . . he is giving her a lifestyle she has never even dreamed of before. He can see this in the way she marvels over everything: a gift, a restaurant, even places that he would describe as banal were it not for the effect he can see they have on her. She is constantly dazzled, and this is exactly what he likes. She is not one of those blasé, spoiled rich kids who has never been insulted outside of a bedroom. She is the very opposite of his wife. He needs both of them now, moving from one to the other with disconcerting ease. He has always dreamed of such an arrangement—a sort of accepted, bourgeois bigamy—and for him it represents a relief, a private reconciliation after so many years being torn apart, confined, in the grip of rules that he himself enforced for his own survival. His wife is over here, Nina is over there. On one side he has the serenity offered by the family unit—the perfection of his children’s education, the mental and material security provided by his marriage (and yes, he can admit it: every time he receives his bank statements and reports on the family’s assets, he is impressed)—while on the other, he has the delights of transgression and sexuality: everything he felt the absence of in America, everything he kept on a tight leash before and which he has now set free: wonderfully, shockingly free. He wouldn’t have believed himself capable of such liberty anymore, so incarcerated was he by duty, by the cage of his lie. Finally, at forty years old, he feels completely happy. When he is with Nina, in their apartment, he is Samir Tahar again. He allows himself to reintroduce elements from his childhood into his daily life: things as simple as a meal his mother used to make or some Arabic music that she listened to while she was pregnant. Little things, but perhaps identity is made up of such scattered, insignificant, inexplicable fragments.
This is undoubtedly the best he has ever felt: his life now is true to who he is, to what he wants, as if his childhood aspirations—all those daydreamed fantasies of a perfect future—have become real; as if he is now exactly the man he dreamed of being when, at eighteen years old, living with his mother and his brother in a run-down ghetto, he swore to leave that place and never to return. Is he aware that he has created an artificial world? A world where money is never a problem, never even a slight worry? No, probably not—this is the only world he knows now.
3
Samuel’s sorrow filled up his whole life. It was a dull, throbbing ache that moved in waves over his heart, with sudden sharp pains whenever he thought of her. He convinced himself that it was the end, that his organs would simply give up, one after another; that what he had was irreversible, terminal. He could not imagine there could be anything after this. Something was broken inside him. One morning he went to a medical bookstore, hoping to find a rational explanation in a book—a description of his symptoms, an answer to the question that plagued him: Was it normal, this pain he felt? Was it the herald of a ruptured aneurysm, or cancer, or a slow death by suffocation? Had Nina been temporarily insane when she left him? They were together for twenty years, and it has been scientifically proven that love lasts three years: Were they being punished for having defied science? He spat on medicine and the Arbitrary Laws of Love. In the Psychiatry aisle (because he was going mad), he opened a book at random, searching for the words that might summarize his case: emotional withdrawal syndrome, he thought. A sort of blinkered autism: without Nina, he felt nothing, cared for nothing.
* * *
He had spent years of his life listening to people tell him about their sufferings; he had suggested solutions, some of which had profoundly changed their lives; and now here he was, seeking reasons for the Inexplicable, crying over a woman he loved, trying to understand why she had left him: Was she really in love with Samir? Why did she want to keep her distance from him? And to what extent? Didn’t she feel the slightest desire for him anymore? He could open up the Book of Love whenever he wished, and for him it had become a sacred, mystical text. Nina had created his world and now she had withdrawn from it: Why? There were thousands of possible interpretations. But none of them soothed the pain he felt at having lost her. She left you—don’t you get it? She doesn’t love you anymore! Can you hear me? SHE IS NOT COMING BACK! He was talking to himself. It’s over. He repeated this to himself, learning it slowly by stumbling over each syllable as if it were a phrase in a foreign language that his mind refused to grasp. He read and reread the words of Cesare Pavese in The Burning Brand: She did that. She took me on an adventure during which I was judged and declared unworthy to continue.
* * *
Barely had he gotten back home before he began throwing away all the things she had left behind, all the presents she had given him: the red leather diary, a silver pen, the statuette she bought in an antiques store with one of her modeling fees, and any little sign of love—words scrawled on a paper napkin, postcards, letters, charms—that he had, until this point, kept as if they were treasures. Then, one by one, he removed from his library every single book that reminded him of her: there were more than thirty of them. He began the mourning process that evening. He respected all the rites: He tore his shirt, slept on the floor. His evening meal was two hard-boiled eggs dipped in salty water. He covered all the mirrors with white sheets so he wouldn’t have to see his reflection anymore. He stopped shaving. He stopped listening to music. He stopped washing. He recited the Kaddish for a dead love.
4
The realization of a happiness that, for Samir, had long seemed impossible. The possibility of a new beginning, of a rebirth. The possibility of being in love again. The ability to push back the deadline, refuse the inevitable, reject social conformism, to reinvent his existence by living in a different way, with a different woman, in different places: it was conceivable, it was “reasonable.” (“Life is not a rehearsal,” he told a friend once. “There are no second chances. This seems obvious, I know, but most people forget about it; they don’t live that way.”) At forty, he felt as if he had not only achieved his objectives—those determined by society and those he set himself during different stages of his life: adolescent hopes, adult dreams, modest or wild ambitions—but actually gone beyond them. He may have wanted to be a lawyer, but he hadn’t imagined being one of the most influential members of that profession in New York. He may have hoped to marry a charming, well-educated woman from a richer background than his own, but he hadn’t imagined seducing the daughter of one of the most powerful men in America, a girl who was both beautiful and brilliant. He may often have dreamed of starting a family, but never had he dared to imagine one like this: two perfect children, good-looking, well mannered, extremely intelligent, and already—at only four or five years old—with a highly developed social sense. Thanks to a favorable conjunction of disparate elements—good luck, hard work, influential friends, and his own audacity—he had possessed and experienced everything. What do you give to the man who has more than he can consume? The one thing missing from his life. The essential thing. The love of the woman he loved most in the world. And now he had it—he had conquered her.
* * *
He has never been as happy as he is now, with Nina. Everything seems extremely simple to him, as if people and events are moving forward calmly, in the right direction, without any danger or risk. He loves her; he is mad about her—and this is new for Samir, who has never been able to feel anything for anyone. It’s new, and that explains why he does not obey the will of Berman. It also explains why he lets his guard down. He’s no longer as careful as he was. He knows this could be fatal, but he tries not to think about it. He risks losing his wife, his position at the firm, but that is the price he pays for living life so intensely. It’s the price he pays for enjoying
this sexual tension—naturally, without any effort, without any artificiality—this quasi-animalistic communion whose workings are mysterious to him. People can tell him that it’s ephemeral, that it won’t last, that he is taking crazy risks for a passion that will fade in the end, but it makes no difference—he dives in anyway. He is possessed by her, haunted by her body, and all he wants is to be with her, inside her. With Nina, there is no need for cunning or the contrived creation of exciting situations. He thinks about her and he is excited. He looks at her and he desires her. It’s automatic. Sometimes he can hardly believe that she is with him, that she has given up everything for him, and that all he has to do in order to see her is cross a few streets or make a phone call. He has never had any difficulty recognizing that the one quality he values above all others in a woman is her sexual availability. And with Nina, he has exactly what he wants. Not that she is especially submissive—she is not one of those docile types, brought up to believe that a woman’s role is to satisfy her man (her father was not that reactionary)—but she has no problem with sex. She has no problem with orgasm. Does she have a problem with seduction, predation, social relationships? Yes, absolutely. She can’t stand being hit on/hassled/wolf-whistled in the street or at work or wherever else she goes. But in a bed, with a man she loves and desires, she has no inhibitions. And this is what unites them: this sexual intimacy, this genuinely joyous complicity. When Samir is with her, he does not feel responsible for anything—she is every bit as willing as he is. Guilt? What guilt? All they are doing is beginning again after their love was broken by emotional blackmail, by forces beyond their control, a kind of fatalism to which he had grown used—perhaps the time simply wasn’t right then. But now, he feels certain, there are no longer any obstacles to the course of their true love. What kind of life would they have now if Nina had stayed with him back then? He probably would never have gone to Montpellier, but he would have faced the same discrimination when he applied for work. Perhaps in the end he would have capitulated, would have settled for a lowly position in a two-bit law firm. By now they might well have divorced. But he no longer wants to think about those dark times. It’s all in the past. Remaining anchored in reality, living the present moment with intensity—this is what has meaning for him, and he surprises her, takes her on trips, responds to her every desire. With him, he thinks, she is no longer afraid, submissive, deprived. With him, she is able to shine: people notice her, she is the center of attention. And at last, what had always been his greatest fear has come true—this man who made discretion his watchword, who lived life in the shadows, now, on the arm of such a beautiful woman, is himself the center of attention.