Thirteen Confessions

by David Corbett

  Veronica and I met at university—which school isn’t important, one of those giant Midwestern diploma mills attended by middle-class untermenschen on the cusp of discovering their utter ordinariness. I was finishing my doctoral studies in math, she was pursuing music.

  Veronica’s instrument was the viola. There’s a joke about violists, perhaps you know it. What is the difference between a coffin and a viola? With a coffin, the corpse is on the inside. Tasteless, I know, considering the circumstances. What I mean is that Veronica, for most of her life, lacked the expressiveness, the passion, to be anything but merely functional as a performer.

  She had an excellent memory and commendable dexterity, she fooled a great many people. But there was a wooden, colorless quality to her playing that no amount of practice could transform. She realized early on that she would be a teacher, like me—and yes, when I spoke of utter ordinariness, you didn’t think I was excluding myself, did you?

  We met the way most graduate students do—in the library. I wonder how many campus marriages find their beginnings in the stacks. Such a strangely erotic locale—the order, the stillness, it cries out for something heated and spontaneous, something messy. But we did not desecrate the library. Not Veronica’s style.

  By that point she was already recognizing her limitations. The company of other music majors only hammered that home, so she steered clear of the music building, holidayed over to the main library to study, and one day by chance took up position across the table from me. Luck is the heart of romance, they say, not fate. I cannot dispute that.

  I was torturing myself in preparation for my orals. Almost every great mind in mathematics did his most creative work by the age of eighteen. I was twenty-five at that point—a confirmed mediocrity, struggling with all my might not to become a joke.

  Veronica plopped herself down not three feet away, spread out her sheet music for compositional analysis—it was Bach, of course. Musicians uncertain of their talent always gravitate toward the Baroque: so dense, so artificial. Music to hide behind.

  I know I sound callous but that’s not at all my intent. The state in which you found Veronica is hideous. Perhaps you took the time to look at some of the pictures around the house. If so, you saw that she was quite lovely in her way, bigger than is considered fashionable, I suppose, but when has fashion ever understood women? I found her softness beguiling. I’m hardly svelte, obviously, but it’s different with men.

  Such a shy, defenseless smile—that’s what I noticed when I glanced up that first time and saw her across the table. Of course, like everyone else in that library she was frightened, overwhelmed, miserable with doubt, but she looked at me so sweetly. I wasn’t one to believe love could solve my life but I was overdue for a little kindness.

  We popped out for coffee, the ritual chat, feeling each other out, where we came from, where we hoped to go. The kindness, I learned, was genuine. Soon enough, we were inseparable.

  It’s hard to describe to people who’ve never known it, the pressure, the grinding isolation of graduate school. A great many campus marriages are formed from the simple need for companionship and commiseration. Ours was. We were lonely, we tended not to get on each other’s nerves, we respected each other’s privacy. The next thing we knew, five years had gone by. I received my position here at the college, she found herself a chair in the local chamber orchestra.

  Eventually, as all couples do, we had our problems. Veronica was too self-conscious to genuinely enjoy sex—that may seem overly personal, what my students refer to as Too Much Information, but I’d be surprised if you hadn’t been waiting for me to bring it up.

  What I mean is, abandon was not a quality she possessed or aspired to possess—that too showed in her playing. I won’t psychoanalyze her for you, drag out all the family trash, but shame factored heavily in her upbringing. She could pet and kiss and cuddle, I never felt a lack of affection, but—excuse me, again, if this sounds coarse—good old-fashioned fucking was simply too intrusive.

  To her credit she didn’t find my appetites perverse or unwholesome. She did not love me less because of what I wanted.

  So—a sister or an enemy. I suppose one could say Veronica became my sister, though that’s both too cynical and too superficial a way to put it. It was decided I would have my affairs, as long as they remained dalliances and not devotions. She would keep her home, which she suffered over as only a woman can. The marriage would remain intact.

  You may think me a monster at this point. But reflect on what I just said: We reached an understanding—how many couples fail or refuse to do that? Part of that understanding was that I would stay. I did. Right up until the end.

  You’re probably asking yourself: How did this man ever get anyone but his wife to so much as look at him? Trust me, I’m not unaware of my homeliness. I used to wear a beard as a sort of disguise, it gave me a bearish, rakehell appeal, or so I liked to think. But I’m not blind to what an unlikely Lothario I make.

  I’ve even talked about it with some of the woman I’ve been with, a few of whom were by any objective standard completely out of my league. And I’ve heard this response often enough now to consider it more than likely to be true: A great many men simply don’t like sex. They either find it a messy obligation involving smells and feelings they abhor, or a kind of athletic event at which their prowess must never be questioned.

  Well, I don’t share such inhibitions, and I’m not shy about my pleasures. It’s amazing how appealing that can be to a woman. Especially a woman who, like me, is cheating on her spouse.

  Now, I can imagine what you’re thinking. Anyone who walks away from the scene you discovered in my house, then talks about his sex life, his lack of inhibition, his pleasures—not to mention set theory and Descartes, for God’s sake—you have to wonder: Is he demented? Is he a sociopath? Or, on a far more rudimentary level: Is he lying?

  I assure you, I am not deranged, nor do I lack a conscience. As for lying—well, that’s always an interesting question, isn’t it?

  I’m sure you’re aware of the Liar’s Paradox. Consider the statement, “I am lying.” If the statement is true, it means I’m not lying when I say I’m lying, which is nonsense. Contrarily, if the statement is false, it means I’m lying when I say I’m lying and thus I’m telling the truth. Again, ridiculous. I can only imagine every cop in the world knows that one, not to mention the average nine-year-old.

  You may not know this, but paradoxes like that were the bane of mathematics at the turn of the last century. Damn near brought the whole field to a screaming halt. And paradoxes—or antimonies, as they’re now called—are always the sort of thing that most fascinate my students, which brings us at last to Aydin.

  The name’s Turkish. Curiously enough, it means “enlightened.” I told you his surname: Donnelly. A particularly intriguing American mutt—workaholic father of famine Irish stock, Turkish-German scold for a mother. All that unruly black hair, those Levantine eyes, the bucket-shaped head and nail-driver hands. Even his slump was oddly beguiling—he looked burdened.

  Aydin attended my course on the history of mathematics—an easy “A” for those in the humanities needing a science credit. I don’t fool myself regarding my function on campus. It’s a small liberal arts college of no particular reputation, a dumping ground basically for those with little promise beyond money. My job is to help them toward a degree so they don’t further embarrass their families. A little calculus, maybe an intro to stat, remedial trig for most of them—all topped off with a course on the history of mathematics, the philosophy of science. It’s about as much rigor as the poor darlings can stand.

  Aydin stood out to the extent he actually made an effort to pay attention. Believe me, that’s enough to endear a student to a teacher these days. I looked forward to his visits to my office. His conversation, if not exactly profound, at least displayed some fire.

  He developed a
fascination with what is known as the Axiom of Choice—I assure you this is relevant. It’s a fundamental principle that states we can create a new set by choosing one item from each of an infinite number of other sets.

  There, simple to state, but the idea is implicitly fantastical: Who would do the choosing? When would he finish? Never, of course, by definition the task is infinite. The physical universe would come to an end before the selection process was complete.

  But by assuming that the task can be accomplished, by acting as though we can step outside time and treat infinities like common objects, we find ourselves capable of constructing the lion’s share of modern mathematics. Deny ourselves this trick, we close the door to much of what we have accomplished for the past century—and these achievements are astonishing, not just in abstract mathematics but the applied sciences.

  All those little geniuses out on the quad, listening to their iPods or thumbing away on their ubiquitous phones—not even gizmos of that order would be possible without the Axiom of Choice, let alone recent progress in advanced circuitry and theoretical physics.

  It’s one of the great ironies of modernity. By turning a blind eye to an intellectual sleight of hand, we have created some of the greatest tools for understanding the physical world in human history.

  All of this fascinated Aydin, but he was inclined to fuzzy thinking—one of those easily distracted, poetic souls who get snarled in a confusion and think they’ve beheld the profound.

  For him the Axiom of Choice got all mixed up with other things, like the notion that real world success necessarily results from self-delusion. That appealed to him in a fundamental way, something to do with his father I think. The man’s a securities lawyer in Chicago, very connected, impressively rich. To Aydin, he was a pompous phony.

  My point, though, is that the young man obsessed over the ways we fool ourselves, and so the Axiom of Choice became a kind of a symbol for our inescapable self-deceit. We trick ourselves into believing in freedom, for example, when in truth everything’s preordained. We’re hormonal robots, he said, prisoners of biology. All of which is just warmed-over Platonism. And as Plato himself so deftly pointed out, the inescapable implication is that we’re all just shadows.

  But Aydin took it a step further. If choice is an illusion, then there’s also no responsibility. If you had him here in this chair, not me, that’s what he’d tell you. Even murder is nothing more than the turning of a page in some inscrutable book.

  And there’s the greatest paradox of all, he’d say: We convince ourselves we’re free in order to escape the terror of realizing it doesn’t matter. The game’s been over from the start.

  This sort of thinking is very common among the young. They worry themselves sick about authenticity because they sense themselves to be, at root, fundamentally artificial. For Christ’s sake, they haven’t lived yet, what is there to be authentic about? I try to tell them that. In particular, I tried to tell Aydin. But he was obsessively earnest the way only a twenty-year-old of middling intelligence can be, which is why he appealed so much to Veronica.

  Veronica felt a special devotion to wanderers. If you were lost, she found you. And Aydin was desperately, irretrievably lost. You could see from the scars on his wrists he’d made a hash of at least one suicide attempt. That too seems to be required for modern adolescence, like computers and tattoos. But it only stirred Veronica’s pity.

  They met when she stopped by my office late one day, picking me up for some dinner engagement with the director of the chamber orchestra—God, there’s something I won’t miss. She paid poor Aydin little mind, being preoccupied, but there was no mistaking his reaction. He stared at her as though she were literally incandescent.

  Here again, you may think me a monster, but I found Aydin’s infatuation the perfect solution to a problem. He could be the pet Veronica craved, a way to nourish her insatiable need to be involved. God knows Aydin was in desperate want of a woman’s involvement. Maybe I felt guilty—I was having a particularly heated liaison at the time, a woman in Veronica’s string section no less.

  How did I hatch my plan? I invited Aydin over to dinner—there, simple, like sin itself. And all I had to do was wait for him to reach for something, expose those tortured wrists—Veronica’s eyes popped like flashbulbs.

  After we cleared plates and put on the kettle for tea I feigned a need for some air to give them the necessary privacy. I knew Aydin would take care of the rest. He’d say it was predetermined.

  You’ll find this absurd but I honestly did not foresee their becoming sexual. Oh, I didn’t doubt they might come to exchange some tenderness, and I could well imagine poor sad Aydin planting his face between Veronica’s ample tits to weep. But sex?

  As I said, I recognized my wife but did not comprehend her. The shame surrounding her body, her uneasiness with anything untidy—well, apparently that had far more to do with me specifically than either of us realized.

  That wasn’t all I didn’t see coming. Veronica lost weight. Her playing improved dramatically—she gave a solo recital of the Sonata Pastorale and seemed a different person during the performance. She blossomed, became the woman she’d secretly wanted to be all along. And she had Aydin, not me, to thank for that. She calmed him down. He made her feel needed.

  Now, if I were you, I’d hear all this and be thinking: Here’s a man who thought he had life figured out, an understanding wife, a slice on the side—do people still say it that way?—every need gratified. Then he discovers that in fact he had it all wrong. Not just that, but his wife’s aversion to good old-fashioned fucking, as he put it, was really just revulsion for him. How humiliating. Must’ve royally pissed him off.

  I wouldn’t fault you for jumping to such a conclusion. But you’d be wrong.

  I loved my wife. I was happy for her. I was pleased she’d solved the riddle of her sexual indifference, even if it was less than flattering to me. As I said, I knew how to find gratification elsewhere. We should all be happy, the world being what it is.

  And no, this isn’t where my wife stopped being a sister and began life as my enemy. That would be ironic, yes, but what actually occurred was even more ridiculous: I lost all interest in other women. As a kind of penance, a way to own my faithlessness, I shaved off my beard. All of which, of course, was secretly a way to prepare myself for returning to Veronica’s affections.

  Like some character in a farce I began to long for her in a way I never knew I could. But she would not entertain my interests there—who could blame her?

  Even so, I wanted to be worthy of her when her liaison with Aydin finally ran its course. And yes, I believed that was inevitable. Veronica and I would rediscover each other. I knew that as certainly as I knew anything. What I didn’t anticipate was how it would occur, but I’m getting ahead of myself.

  We actually managed to live agreeably, the three of us, for nearly a year. I grew into my newfound humility, even as Aydin became prone to fits of indignation—he had rights, don’t you know. Talk about smug.

  Thank God Veronica put him straight on such nonsense. This is how it is, she said, you can behave or be alone. After a day or two of miserable fuming he’d come around. But honestly, episodes like that were quite rare. He wasn’t a bad young man. He was just so damn sentimental.

  Then Veronica began having these odd pains in her joints. She wondered if it weren’t some kind of arthritis, every musician’s nightmare.

  Soon her breathing became labored. The nurse at our doctor’s office referred her for a sonogram. The results indicated she had what was euphemistically described as a “complex mass” in her pancreas. A few tests later, and she was diagnosed with Stage IV pancreatic carcinoma. She already had tumors in her liver and lungs as well, and they were spreading to the lymph nodes and beyond.

  If you doubt my love for my wife, ask the doctors and nurses at the cancer clinic what sort of husband I was once Ver
onica fell sick. I’m not bragging—I can think of nothing more hideous than taking pride in being a commendable Joe when one’s wife is dying—but I need to make sure you don’t misunderstand the true nature of what happened. That’s very important to me. And my behavior stood in stark contrast to Aydin’s.

  Just when he could have done us all a favor and grown up, he reverted to the most grotesque childishness. Suddenly only he understood what Veronica needed. I was complicating her relationship with the nurses at the clinic. I was confusing her, confusing the doctors, all out of some perverse narcissism. I’ve no doubt he blamed the cancer itself on me, my neglect of her sexually all those years.

  Meanwhile, things at home grew increasingly hard. Veronica’s hair began falling out with the chemo and she decided to have it all shaved off. That, combined with the dark patches under her eyes, the grayish tint of her skin—I removed as many mirrors as I could. Then pile on the mental confusion, the lack of balance, the nausea, the pain—such a miserable, pitiless, degrading way to die.

  As for music, she wanted nothing to do with it, threw a fit if the radio was on. It reminded her of everything that would never be.

  Don’t get me wrong, there were also days when Veronica was incredibly heroic. She could be so outgoing, especially to other patients at the clinic. But yes, she could also be petty and bitter and scared. She was human, for Christ’s sake.

  Meanwhile, Aydin seemed to think the tragedy was his. I couldn’t keep him away from the house. Trying to explain that she needed rest only degenerated into screaming matches, so I invariably relented.

  Veronica, true to her nature, couldn’t refuse him. She was the one dying but he was the one who needed care. He’d finally become authentic.

  I will admit, yes, that infuriated me. But what came next cannot be laid solely at the door of my rage.

  Last night, about nine or so, Veronica started screaming suddenly from the bedroom. She’d been asleep and a nightmare woke her—she dreamed she was drowning from the fluid building up in her lungs. She was terrified: Don’t let me die like that, she begged.