"Intermezzo"
Feb. 9th, 2026 03:40 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
fiefoeSally Rooney
* Didn’t seem fair on the young lad. That suit at the funeral. With the braces on his teeth, the supreme discomfort of the adolescent. On such occasions, one could almost come to regret one’s own social brilliance. Gives him the excuse, or gives him in any case someone at whom to look pleadingly between the mandatory handshakes.
With love, irresistibly, Peter smiles, and to avoid the spectacle of smiling with irresistible love at Naomi herself, he smiles instead, as if humorously, at the inside of his own extended wrist. Oh, he’s doing— I actually have no idea how he’s doing.
* Hardly ever shaves anywhere except her legs, below the knee. He told her once that back in his day, the girls in college used to get bikini waxes. That made her laugh. She asked if he was trying to make her feel bad or what. Not at all, he said. Just an interesting development in the sexual culture. She’s always laughing. Those Celtic Tiger years must have been wild.
Stupid not to reply to her texts. Some of them very nice too. His fault. He wonders how badly she needs the money, and then he feels – what? Ashamed, or whatever. As usual. She lies face down with her head in her arms. Familiar choreography, rehearsed together and with others, both. What lips my lips have. There is no one else, he could say. Someone, but not.
Sylvia: And she is, to say the least, not stupid. He thinks sometimes the nature and extent of her suffering has lifted her free from the petty frustrations of mere inconvenience.
* Sylvia. Beyond him entirely. Not actually very good-looking, never was. Makes the beauty of others seem excessive. Her small plain face. Of course the clothes are always right. Gets ideas sometimes for gifts he could give Naomi – high-necked sweaters, coloured silk shawls, an ankle-length raincoat. Only to realise later how wrong they would look
* Had believed once that life must lead to something, all the unresolved conflicts and questions leading on towards some great culmination. Curiously underexamined beliefs like that, underpinning his life, his personality. Irrational attachment to meaning.
Never had a real conversation in our lives. Folds the tissue up and puts it in his pocket. Oh, you take conversation too seriously, she says. Life isn’t just talking, you know.
* Then imagine being an attractive woman and it’s not just one man you have to avoid, but almost all of them. Ivan accepts that it must be dreadful. At the same time, how to reach a mutually agreeable situation without one person making an advance on the other which may turn out to be unwanted? It’s like the problem with the chairs and tables. In a haphazard and inefficient way, without any fixed method, solutions can be reached, and evidently are reached all the time
The physical anxiety that accompanies chess events – exhibition games, tournaments – does not bear any meaningful relationship to the events themselves, except a chronological one: it arrives beforehand and goes away afterwards. His mind knows this, but his body does not. For this and other reasons, Ivan considers the body a fundamentally primitive object, a vestige of evolutionary processes superseded by the development of the brain. Just compare the two: the human mind weightless, abstract, capable of supreme rationality; the human body heavy, depressingly specific, making no sense at all. It just does things: no one knows why. It begins for some reason to attack itself or to proliferate cells where they don’t belong... The physical anxiety that accompanies chess events – exhibition games, tournaments – does not bear any meaningful relationship to the events themselves, except a chronological one: it arrives beforehand and goes away afterwards. His mind knows this, but his body does not. For this and other reasons, Ivan considers the body a fundamentally primitive object, a vestige of evolutionary processes superseded by the development of the brain. Just compare the two: the human mind weightless, abstract, capable of supreme rationality; the human body heavy, depressingly specific, making no sense at all. It just does things: no one knows why. It begins for some reason to attack itself or to proliferate cells where they don’t belong.
Ivan’s brother Peter, who is thirty-two and has a graduate degree in philosophy, says this school of thought on the relations between body and mind has been refuted. To Ivan, this is like when people say the King’s Gambit has been refuted.
* Why did she say the word ‘passionate’ to him when they were talking? And why did he repeat it so many times, three or even four times? Is the word ‘passionate’, or is it not, basically an obscene item of vocabulary? No, it isn’t. But is it like a small bandage placed over an item of vocabulary that is in fact obscene? Maybe, yes. A word with blood running through it, a red word. In casual conversation it’s better to use words that are grey or beige. Where did it come from, then, this word ‘passionate’? She knows where.
Not that he seems more powerful or domineering than a girl, not that at all: rather, that he seems to have taken on exclusive responsibility for what appears to him a very difficult task – the task, unless she is mistaken, of seducing an older woman he has just met – and he appears to feel frustrated with himself for not knowing how to accomplish this task, frustrated and guilty. These feelings would not arise in a young woman. Different feelings, equally unpleasant, but different.
She feels a strange, light, amused sensation at his words: as though, concluding that the negotiations have fallen through, he wants only to show how nicely he can take defeat. Well, not only elderly guys, she says. You also beat a ten-year-old girl.
* Then he kisses her again. It is, of course, a desperately embarrassing situation – a situation which seems to render her entire life meaningless. Her professional life, eight years of marriage, whatever she believes about her personal values, everything. And yet, accepting the premise, allowing life to mean nothing for a moment, doesn’t it simply feel good to be in the arms of this person? Feeling that he wants her, that all evening he has been looking at her and desiring her, isn’t it pleasurable? To embody the kind of woman he believed he couldn’t have – to incorporate that woman into herself, and allow him to have her.
Mm, she says. But that’s a nice normal thing to be concerned about, isn’t it? He laughs, hears himself laughing. Is it? he says. Okay. But still, I feel that. Like even if it is normal, I would still be concerned. She puts her hand down between their bodies, and with the palm of her hand, warm, she touches him, saying: It’s okay. And it is okay, he thinks. The story of human life. All of their ancestors, his, and hers also. Life itself, the passing mystery.
Now, in any case, her life will return, unexplained, to whatever it was before. But no, she thinks, because its shapelessness has been exposed to her now, the old values and meanings floating off unattached, and how can she go about reattaching them? And to what?
when the games were finished, and everyone else was leaving, the same look. Can I give you my number? he says. Like in case you ever think about me. I could just put the number into your phone and then it would be there, you wouldn’t even have to look at it again if you didn’t want to.
She has been contained before, contained and directed, by the trappings of ordinary life. Now she no longer feels contained or directed by these forces, no longer directed by anything at all. Life has slipped free of its netting. She can do very strange things now, she can find herself a very strange person. Young men can invite her into holiday cottages for sexual reasons.
She plays it out with such consummate skill that he does have to wonder sometimes if he’s even the only one she does this to. Which is funny. To be the only idiot showering her with money he has to work to earn: not much of a distinction, and yet preferable to the alternative.
* Someone just seems like they have to be exploiting someone here. But who, and how? He her, financially, sexually. Or she him, financially, emotionally. It can be exploitative to give money; also to take it. Money overall a very exploitative substance, creating it seems fresh kinds of exploitation in every form of relationality through which it passes. Greasing with exploitation the wheels of human interaction generally.
Remembering something embarrassing you did years ago and abruptly you think: that’s it, I’m going to kill myself. Except in his case, the embarrassing thing is his life. Doesn’t mean he wants to really. Or even if he does, not as if he would do it. Just to think, or not even think, but to overhear the words inside his own head. Strange relief like a catch released: I wish. Deepest and most final of desires. Something bitter in it too, luxuriously bitter, yes. And why not. Why doesn’t he, that is, if the idea is so consoling. Oh, for other people, of course: to protect them. Other people prefer you to suffer.
Inside, the open square: golden sunlight, autumn. Birds circling. The sky a glass bowl struck and resounding.
How do you guys know each other. Know of course what he’s talking about. One of her fans. Spent enough money maybe to level-up to real life. Girlfriend experience. What they must think, laughing. Actually we met in a bar one night after Christmas, he could say. She asked for my number.
* Love at times indistinguishable from hatred. What they represent to one another: unsatisfiable desires. And yet she held his hand through the funeral. And tomorrow at the hospital he’ll be there, bored, nervous, as always, checking his phone. Yeah, that’s me. I mean, no, sorry, not her husband. There isn’t. Like, I am with her, but we’re not. Relationship mutilated by circumstance into something illegible. Platonic life partnership. Living separately of course. That way he can chase after other girls, piss money up the wall, embarrass himself, get home drunk at four in the morning without waking anyone.
Of course, from Anna’s point of view, Margaret thinks, these years must have passed the other way: watching her, Margaret, growing older. Easier to perceive the way the years accumulate in others. For Anna there must be such a Margaret, who has been one thing and is now another, while Margaret looking at her own life sees only the onwardly flowing blur of all experience.
When she kills the engine and gets out, birds start from their branches and together flicker through the air as if mechanised.
* The dogs are coming from somewhere. But how to make his own dog one of them, Ivan still has no idea. How often in his life he has found himself a frustrated observer of apparently impenetrable systems, watching other people participate effortlessly in structures he can find no way to enter or even understand. So often that it’s practically baseline, just normal existence for him. And this is not only due to the irrational nature of other people, and the consequent irrationality of the rules and processes they devise; it’s due to Ivan himself, his fundamental unsuitedness to life. He knows this. He feels himself to have been formed, somehow, with something other than life in mind... For Peter, social systems are never confusing, always transparent, and usually manipulable to his own ends.
A lot of negative feelings could follow on from that: sadness, low self-esteem, anger at yourself and the other person, despair. People probably have lost their minds over less, and gone actually crazy from the misery. And yet, at the same time, it seems incredibly possible now, tantalisingly possible, that he might once again hear her voice murmuring his name in a low pleasurable satisfied tone while he makes love to her. And for this, he thinks, whatever: despair, heartbreak, even losing his mind and going insane later on, anything. Literally, anything, any price. Yeah, he says. I think it’s a good idea. I do.
Worse than suggestive: sordid. She, an older woman, approaching middle age, is waiting in her dusty overheated car in a poorly lit car park for the arrival of a young man, hardly past adolescence, on a night bus from Dublin. Not even the kindliest, most trusting and well-intentioned of passers-by, observing the scene, could conceive of a wholly innocent explanation for these events. The sexual element would simply leap forth with explanatory power.
But then Anna has a husband, and now even a baby, both of whom offer her in different ways the love and devotion that supersedes and makes irrelevant the pleasure of praise and compliments. It seems hard in Anna therefore to condemn Margaret’s vanity, which has been so painfully starved in recent years, when Anna’s own is fed by the incomparably hearty nourishment of unconditional love. In the short time since Margaret met Ivan, he has provided, why not be honest, the only mouthful of desirable flattery she has tasted in a very long time.
Paying people to make graphs, and the graphs could cost anything. The number comes from nowhere. It’s not related back down to any real resource value. You have— Not to get too politicised about it, because I’m not saying it from that side. But you do literally have people going hungry, I know that’s a cliché. Food shortages, it is a real thing. And then you have these tech companies paying me to make a graph. Why? It comes from the wrong distribution of resources. I mean, including the resource of labour, my labour in this case... In itself, I think profit is actually sort of an inefficiency.
Margaret smiles despite herself. I’m sorry, she says. My mother is never happy with me either.
He smiles back at her. It’s weird, he says. I feel like if I created a new human being out of nothing, I would be very happy with them. Just that they were alive, even. You know, that’s my dad’s attitude. Or it was. He was always happy with us.
Not nervous or hesitant his gestures now but slow and thoughtful. A feeling of pleasure this gives her that seems more than vanity. Deep sensation like an opening outwards, inside. He, this person – his braces, bitten fingernails, ideas about resources, the delivery job he quit, sadness he has been unable to express – he wants her, and she wants him.
the experience of mutual desire. To feel an interpenetration of thought between the two of them, understanding her, looking at her and knowing, yes, without even speaking, what she feels and wants, and knowing that she understands him also, completely. In her eyes, the look of warmth, the flickering kind of amusement, acknowledging: and this relates he thinks to her beauty, her thick dark hair in its loose unravelling braid, her full expressive mouth, the supple roundness of her arms, her breasts. Even her clothes, rumpled and softened, the careless way they drape over her figure, all of this is given life by her understanding, her complete personhood, which in a single look he senses and knows.
I’m sorry to hear about that, he says. About your ex-husband.
She lowers her eyes, saying quietly: It’s okay.
Well, I’m sure it will be okay. But it sounds— to be honest, pretty bad.
Whatever complicated circumstances may account for the situation, there is still this ultimate reality, that they are two people, a man and a woman, and the woman wants to lie in the arms of the man when she’s upset. And that reality has its own meaning.
Telling him about Ricky would be different. Contaminating his life, conscripting him into her own private misery. Pathetic, besides.
* It was obvious then that it was not going to be enough that he was too young and going through a bereavement. Those were solid sensible ideas, powerful enough for the surface of daily life, but not powerful enough for the hidden life of desire shared between two people.
* All as one the birds move together, a dark cloud beating with the loud muscular sound of wings, ascending towards the overhead telephone wire, and strangely it seems now the cloud parts, one half rising up above the wire and the other half falling below, cut cleanly, and then together the two clouds combine once more into an edgeless and mobile arrangement, which is called a murmuration,
Afterwards, television, cloud of steam from the kettle boiling. Nights he no longer has to spend trapped in claustrophobic solitude, self-medicated, panic attack or am I dying how to tell. Instead the deep replenishing reservoir of her presence.
But practically speaking, people have expectations about what an intimate relationship will involve. She breaks off here a moment, teeth at her lower lip, and then adds: I suppose it’s my personality as well. You know, if I can’t do something properly, I don’t want to do it at all. Maybe that’s part of the problem, I don’t know. I think I would find it humiliating, having to negotiate all that with another person. I would feel I was offering something very inferior... Quietly he says: But just from your own perspective, there are still certain things you find— pleasurable?
When they. Yes: the way she was. Perfect, everything. The life they wanted. Her pride in that remembrance worse than touching. Pity he feels and despises himself for feeling. Her pain, the impassable territory between their bodies. Sees her receding behind its monumental heights. Remember me the way I was. Hard to breathe thinking. Dashing tears from her eyes now, however she seems more angry than sad.
Back to his flat now, he thinks. Alone again in the claustrophobic silence of his failures. Why did he have to do it: deluded optimism, maybe. Thinking after all these years it could be smoothed over with a little conversation. Or just self-sabotage. His life in danger of becoming tolerable for a minute, why not go out of his way to aggrieve and distress the only person who could put up with him.
Pleasure of her own gorgeousness in the mirror. Deep complete joy she finds in being alive. No job, no family support, no fixed address, no state entitlements, no money to finish college. Owner of nothing in the world but her own perfect body. Men, and even other women, and systems, bureaucracies, laws, intent it seems on breaking her, forcing her to accept misery. And here she is laughing, drinking sugary coffee, begging to be fucked. He loves that in her. Wants to protect her at times even from himself. Her freedom, wild animal that she is.
* his new understanding of relations between women and men. How certain things can happen, resulting in such situations, even unintentionally, which is something he has always understood on a literal level, but now understands with personal sympathy and compassion for all involved. This particular weakness of women, in regards to their desire for men, strikes him as beautiful, moving, worthy of deep respect and deference. And these are probably the same feelings, really more sentimental than ideological, that have also motivated Peter through the years to care so much supposedly about the oppression of women: because Peter has always at any given time had at least one girlfriend he could imagine in the role of the oppressed.
Yeah, true. At the time it made me feel like debating must be kind of fake, compared to chess. How you would win all the time and never lose.
Well, there just wasn’t anyone good enough to beat us.
Ivan considers this, and then answers: I wanted my life to be like that.
Me too, says Peter.
Of course, he and his brother both wanted their lives to consist of winning all the time and never losing: this is presumably true of everyone. No one ever wants to lose. And yet for both Peter and Ivan, this particular feeling has perhaps been more important, more intense than for other people: the desire to win all the time, and also the naive youthful belief that it would be possible to live such a life, now soured by experience. There seems to have been in both their lives a period of exuberant repeated triumph,
The idea of borrowing money from Peter has never occurred to him before: maybe because Peter’s aura of wealth has always seemed more like a personality trait than a transferable item of property. Asking to borrow his money would be kind of like asking to borrow his sense of humour
Wading back slowly to the shore, lifting her stiff waterlogged limbs, Margaret feels immensely heavy and ancient, numb, exhausted: solid artefact dredged wet from the sea floor. Following after her, Ivan says nothing.
Margaret is reminded of the way she felt the night she first met Ivan: as if life had slipped free of its netting. As if the netting itself had all along been an illusion, nothing real. An idea, which could not contain or describe the borderless all-enveloping reality of life. Now, in her satisfied exhaustion, with her hand resting on the white linen tablecloth, the touch of Ivan’s fingertips, the candle dripping a slow thread of wax down its side, the glossy closed lid of the piano, Margaret feels that she can perceive the miraculous beauty of life itself, lived only once and then gone forever, the bloom of a perfect and impermanent flower, never to be retrieved.
I don’t really think of God in that way. In terms of beauty. I suppose my idea of God is more to do with morality. What’s right and wrong. She pauses, and then adds: It’s not something I feel very sure of. But I do take it seriously, at the same time, or I try to. I want to do the right thing.
While she speaks, she can sense in her peripheral vision that he’s watching her attentively. I get you, he says. To me, it seems like it might all be related. Like, I don’t know, to find beauty in life, maybe it’s related to right and wrong. But I haven’t thought it out too fully. Sometimes I just have a feeling. Like a sense of being loved by God, almost.
God is, on the contrary, the one who makes people sick, who condemns people to death, for incomprehensible reasons. Jesus the healer, the listener, teacher, friend of sinners, seems in Margaret’s mind to be practically on the brink of murmuring: Sorry about my dad . . . Jesus is easy to love and God much harder. Jesus also has his own reality, his place in history, whereas God is like a dim point of light in a dark room, visible only as long as you don’t try to look directly.
* She seems to feel obscurely that the day she met Ivan, they brought into existence a new relationship, which is also a way of being. And their fidelity to that way of being has taken on now a certain moral quality. Ivan’s grief, his extreme youth, his liking for her, these facts exert their own pressures on the situation, yes, but only because of the basis of this relation.
he felt tired all the time and depressed, and then he felt guilty for being depressed, since he should have been trying to make happy memories for his dad, not sad ones. Looking back, okay, maybe it wasn’t too surprising that his chess had suffered. All his friends had told him not to be so hard on himself, but he always thought that was just the kind of thing you had to say to someone who had lost almost one hundred rating points over three years.
Between himself and Margaret in that moment he felt a closeness that could never be joined by anyone else. Looking at her he wanted to say: I love you. Instead he swallowed and said nothing, not because it wasn’t true, but because he knew it would make things more complicated. What she wants is for the two of them to spend time together with no commitments, to have interesting conversations about life, to show each other affection and understanding. She doesn’t want to receive insane declarations of love from someone she only met a few weeks ago.
Highly sophisticated people, some of them. Practically raised on the Linz Symphony and the novels of Colette. Still there is something, just a little hard nub of something, underneath it all, which can never be smoothed away. They are what they are, and he is what he is. Work they get from friends while he has to look out for himself. Unwritten dress codes, rules of speech.
Compensating for his own failings, laziness, poor sleep hygiene, overuse of alcohol and drugs, irrational bitterness, directionless and therefore immobilising fury. No. Nice interesting case is all he needs. Somewhere to aim his outrage. Where’s a bit of sexual harassment in the workplace when you need it?... Feeling he gets when one of her colleagues puts their head round the door, asking for something, and he’s sitting with her, the two of them bickering together. What is that: to be witnessed, yes. To be mistaken for someone happier than himself, and better.
Sinful he always thinks her smile. I only wanted them to have fun, she said. You don’t have to worry about me, I’m a happy woman. Happy, yes. And if she is. In bed that night he wanted her to say it again. Sometimes wonders how much of his capacity for pleasure is just vanity.
She, the calculating liar, the exploited innocent, yes. Whole thing getting a bit fucking Marcel Proust. Waits until she’s out of the house to vacuum the carpet, wipe down the bathroom surfaces. Haul the laundry up and down from the basement. Not wanting her to see: and why. Awkward to make her thank him maybe. Or trying to maintain the fiction of his own dominance
he said it was the thing about looking at a woman for to lust after her being the same as committing adultery in your heart. Her hand on his arm, she was laughing, the lines around her eyes he thought so beautiful. Oh, I forgot that one, she said. That does seem hard on you. He too was laughing then. The inexchangeable pleasure of her conversation. Just to walk the streets saying things, anything, just the act itself, walking together at the same speed, and talking, purely to amuse and please one another, to make each other stupidly laugh, for no further accomplishment, no higher purpose
Unclear whether you’re cheating on me with her, or you’re cheating on her with me, she said. Absentmindedly he considered the proposition. Either option preferable he thought. Dignity of good old-fashioned faithlessness. Neither, he answered. Sylvia is a very dear friend of mine. And you’re just a homeless college student who lives in my house. That made her laugh.
Well, whatever, he says. His hand in hers still holding. You don’t want me to be grateful, you just want me to be happy, she repeats. I’m actually touched by that, like emotionally.
* The same ritual he thinks each time. She tries to extract from him some valuably hurtful information and he tries to conceal from her any aspect of his life in which he suspects she might gain a foothold. Her fake innocuous queries and his studied evasions. Screens her calls whenever Naomi is home. Why does his mother even want to know: why does he want her not to. Contest for dominance. Story of his life.
* it will definitely be me, he said. Getting my heart broken in the end, let’s be honest, it won’t be you. With a horrified laugh Margaret said that was no consolation at all, and that it made her feel terrible. Ivan smiled then, looking at her, and replied: Oh, well, okay. Maybe it will be you. I doubt it, but you can think that if you prefer.
* He shrugs his shoulders, wiping again at his nose. That Peter doesn’t love me? he says. He doesn’t show me respect. He’s not even nice to me.
Well, I’m sorry about that. But I think, as sad as it is to say, I think people aren’t always very nice to the people they love.
Ivan exhales now, a quick frustrated kind of laughter. Okay, he says. What does it mean to love someone, then? I’m curious. If you don’t care about the person’s feelings, and you’re not nice to them, and you don’t really want them to be happy, how is that love, in your opinion?
Does it relate to the girlfriend somehow, the one who was in an accident? And why did Margaret herself respond so strongly, with such a strong wave of emotion, on hearing that story? The hospital visits, the relationship destroyed, the terrible waste of it all. Dimly she wonders now whether she has been thinking somehow about herself, her own circumstances,
But rather than smiling this time he felt a kind of acute feeling, almost like pain, opening out inside himself, and his eyes were stinging. To love, and for his love to be accepted, yes. It was in fact painful, the relief of all that compression suddenly, to say the words aloud, and hear her saying them, to be loved by her, it was so needed that it actually hurt, and he started to cry. Not even tears of unmixed happiness, but of happiness that was strongly and confusingly mixed with many other feelings. Sadness, missing his father, and a kind of shame somehow, because each passing day seemed to bring Ivan further away from him and the life they used to have together, a life that was receding increasingly into the past, into the realm of childhood and adolescence. The realisation that his adulthood, into which he was entering now so definitively, and which would last all the rest of his life, would have to be lived without his father.
But if the liar just says that his ‘hat’ is green, does it mean he has to have a hat? Yes, by the same logic: it can’t be a false statement if he has no hat at all. And does that imply that it’s not a lie if you say ‘all my daughters are waiting for me’, as long as you don’t have a daughter? You can claim you’re telling the truth, albeit vacuously? And if it’s just one daughter instead? But why should it be any different? It goes to show, Ivan thinks, that the difference between truth and lying is complicated. You think you’re fitting language onto the world in a certain way, like a child fitting the right-shaped toy into the right-shaped slot. But at times you realise that that’s a false picture too. Language doesn’t fit onto reality like a toy fitting into a slot. Reality is actually one thing and language something else. You just have to agree with yourself not to think about it too much.
Though not, like Ivan, wary of Christine, Peter doesn’t really like her, and has often even sided with Ivan against her in the past, from a combination of specific filial antipathy and the sort of freewheeling belligerence he seems to have available to him at all times. In fact, Ivan thinks, if their mother had somehow found out about Margaret first, and had predictably tried to make life hell for Ivan as a result, the person most likely to take his side in such a scenario would be, there’s no doubt about it, Peter himself. Making arguments about personal liberty and the hard-won sexual freedoms of the post-Catholic era or whatever. Yes, Ivan thinks, one of the only consistent principles in his brother’s life is to become unbelievably partisan in every conflict he ever encounters and then to win the conflict using a barrage of extreme verbal force: a horrible personality trait, practically a disorder. But another of Peter’s principles is, admittedly, that he’s not a rat.
Dread again and deeper in the pit of his stomach. Messages unpunctuated. Why at the door, why leave it at the door. Resting in bed perhaps and forgets he has his own key: but how could she forget. Only a few weeks ago. When every night he... Why at the door. Because she doesn’t want him to come near, he thinks. Because of what happened. Everything. And has no one else to help her. Feels as if rather than breathing he is swallowing raw the dirty urban air. To think of her in pain. And what is that thought. A way of provoking in himself merely a familiar suite of bad feeling. Guilt, self-hatred, something else, worse. Nothing achieved, no solace provided. Only alternative however is not to think, not to imagine or even try. Leave her even in his own mind alone and untouched in her agony. Perform unfeelingly the various duties,
That’s what you call having a life. I can’t imagine that you think I’ve been happy. How many times have I come pleading with you to take me back? The other week, when I was staying here. Trying to get you to talk to me. Or trying to touch you, or kiss you, whatever. You know, I think in a way you actually like it, watching me humiliate myself like that. And you get to reject me all over again. I think there’s a part of you that enjoys it.
For you I would do the same: and isn’t that the basic problem, that he would do the same, wants to, and Christ in heaven, actually does. When civilisation is fundamentally premised on the exclusivity of such willingness. And why is it? Oh, who knows why,
the misted air of the night wreathes itself in majesty around his body. Crowns of luminous streetlight hanging weightless and silent over the heads of passers-by.
People can have affairs without exiting the sexual mainstream, surely, even if everyone agrees that affairs are wrong: wrong, of course, yes, but not suggestive of sexual deviance. That one might feel attached to both wife and mistress must be in limited circumstances, though not condoned, still basically accepted and understood. Certainly, when it comes to the question of his own self-esteem, he would rather be thought a cheater than some kind of freak. But then that would only be a case of borrowing someone else’s self-esteem: because whatever he might gain would be the woman’s loss.
Discretion he thinks can render almost any eccentricity acceptable, at least for a limited time. As if it’s not so much the tangled relations, but the desire for some transparency in one’s personal life that is after all perverse.
Attachment, the cause of all suffering, so the Buddhists say. To cling to what you have, what you have had, the life you have known, the handful of people and places you have ever really loved, to cling and not let go. Never relenting, never accepting, becoming all the time more enmeshed, holding harder, loving and hating more.
Remembering the way his father would write out on lined paper the doctor’s instructions, spidery handwriting, names of medications. His meek deference, yes, even in the face of certain death, with no hope he would be spared, when his obedience could buy him nothing. Peter meanwhile in a blind rage at everything: the consultants, registrars, the hospital vending machines.
Proliferation of inappropriate attachments. Holding hard, harder, clutching, not letting go. Well, if that’s suffering, he thinks, let me suffer. Yes. To love whoever I have left. And if ever I lose someone, let me descend into a futile and prolonged rage, yes, despair, wanting to break things, furniture, appliances, wanting to get into fights, to scream, to walk in front of a bus, yes. Let me suffer, please. To love just these few people, to know myself capable of that, I would suffer every day of my life.
Do you love me, she says.
And he answers: Yeah. I love you, of course I do.
Silence for a moment and then her tone thin and managed saying: But then why are you making me go away?
Without lifting his head he replies: I’m trying to explain. I don’t know what else to do.
Peter and Sylvia, who had been practically married before, were broken up, and Peter stopped coming home, stopped sending Ivan funny messages and chess puzzles, started taking holidays with his new lawyer friends. He didn’t like his family anymore, any of them, it was obvious. He avoided them, and in a way they avoided him too. You could tell their dad was relieved that Peter wasn’t coming home so often, not that he didn’t love him, but just that the situation had become so awkward. Ivan never told his parents about what happened that time, Peter crying and saying he was scared. He never even really thought about it again, in fact he deliberately avoided thinking about it, with a sense of embarrassment, and worse than embarrassment, something like shame, resentment, whenever it came into his head and he had to bat it away again. Peter was such a difficult person, always making life difficult. The two of them started getting into fights whenever they saw each other, about anything, nothing at all. Peter laughing, dismissive, rehearsing the most stale liberal talking points, calling Ivan a creep or an incel. I’m sorry, but you don’t relate to people on a normal level.
What happened between us the other day, I can see now, you did that because you wanted an exit strategy. Maybe not consciously, I don’t know, but in the back of your mind. You were looking for a way out with Naomi. I thought we were just— whatever, in that moment, and for you it was something else. We should have talked then, or we should have, I don’t know. I was in a lot of pain, I wasn’t feeling well. But whatever it was, I was not trying to help you get out of your relationship. Okay? You can’t use me like that. I’m a human being.
Sharp goring sensation, and he presses with his hand at his breastbone, feeling what, the bitterness of the accusation, and worse, that she is taking away from him the only right thing in his life.
* Fighting only amongst themselves, never with him. By using such cold critical words, it was as if Peter was intent on proving the absence of their father, in whose presence the words could not have been spoken, and Ivan himself seemed to leap energetically into this absence, shoving Peter against the fireplace. New things are possible now, which were inconceivable before, things like violence and certain forms of cruelty.
I hate him, Ivan thinks. It’s cathartic even to formulate these special words, I hate him. And yet in the moment of catharsis, Ivan senses there is something else beneath, moving in the opposite direction. As in fluid dynamics when the undertow moves counter to the surface current. What is that contrary direction, away from hatred of his brother? Hatred of himself, maybe. To remember himself pushing Peter, petulantly, weakly, like a child.
Ivan had seemed at first, she thought, like a way for her to leave the bad feelings behind, an open gate leading out into another kind of life, free of all the remorse and unhappiness she had accumulated before. Now she was beginning to see that he could also be a source of these same bad feelings, unhappiness, remorse, that he was not going to retain always the new fresh unencumbered quality he had presented to her when first they met. His life also was littered with difficulty, just as hers was, and these difficulties did not dissolve on contact, but rather seemed to coagulate and harden.
In his arms, to be given life, yes, and to give life also. Something miraculous, inexpressible, perfect. Impossible of course to think: and yet it happened all the time. May have been happening even then, concealed inaccessibly inside her breathing body. Each generation that had gone before, hundreds, thousands. The only answer to death, she thought: to echo back its name in that way, with all the same intensity and senselessness, on the side of life. Why not allow him, why not allow herself, at least the idea, the image, the future, at once impossible and not, enveloping them both in its mystery in the dark stillness of her quiet bedroom, descending with them both into the depths of sleep.
* I don’t know, says Sylvia. I think it might have been the shock of seeing us in the same room together. Allowing his eyes to close he lets out something like a groan hearing them both laughing. Help says Naomi. My girlfriends have unionised.
* talking about fascist aesthetics and the modernist movement. Neoclassicism, obsessive fixation on ethnic difference, thematics of decadence, bodily strength and weakness. Purity or death. Pound, Eliot. And on the other hand, Woolf, Joyce. Usefulness and specificity of fascism as a political typology in the present day. Aesthetic nullity of contemporary political movements in general. Related to, or just coterminous with, the almost instantaneous corporate capture of emergent visual styles. Everything beautiful immediately recycled as advertising. Sense that nothing can mean anything anymore, aesthetically. The freedom of that, or not. The necessity of an ecological aesthetics, or not. We need an erotics of environmentalism. Stupidly making each other laugh.
How to live up to all this: which seems at times the only question. Feels he has at once too much power and too little, enough to make a mess of everything, not enough to sort it out. Is he humiliating them both, she, the other, inflicting on them some terrible exotic pain, for his own selfish satisfaction. Is it shame he feels, that hot blood pounding in his ears, or only embarrassment: the minor trifling embarrassment of an awkward situation or the true shame of a moral wrong. How is it possible to know. What can life be made to accommodate, what can one life hold inside itself without breaking. For him they will make the grand attempt in any case, he thinks, yes, and maybe for reasons of their own, curiosity, pleasure, pride, desire, and also the principle, the possibility, the ideal of another way of life. An experiment bound almost certainly for one kind of failure or another, and yet attaining for these few hours and days to a miraculous success, a perfection of beauty, inexchangeable, meant not to be interpreted, meant only to be lived and nothing more.
Nodding his head, half-smiling, palms of his hands wiping his face. I’ll check in, he says, I’ll see what the plans are. Okay? I’m very grateful to be invited.
It would mean a lot to me, Ivan says. The first Christmas without Dad, and everything like that. But whatever you want, whatever you prefer.
---quotes:
Ludwig Wittgenstein’s Philosophical Investigations: On page X, I use the quote: ‘If a lion could talk, we could not understand him.’ On page X, I quote: ‘The decisive movement in the conjuring trick has been made, and it was the very one that we thought quite innocent.’ Later in the same paragraph, I quote: ‘Here saying “There is no third possibility” or “But there can’t be a third possibility!” – expresses only our inability to turn our eyes away from this picture’.
Finally, on page X, the line ‘Thou know’st ’tis common; all that lives must die’ is again from Hamlet, spoken by Gertrude in Act I, Scene ii.
* Didn’t seem fair on the young lad. That suit at the funeral. With the braces on his teeth, the supreme discomfort of the adolescent. On such occasions, one could almost come to regret one’s own social brilliance. Gives him the excuse, or gives him in any case someone at whom to look pleadingly between the mandatory handshakes.
With love, irresistibly, Peter smiles, and to avoid the spectacle of smiling with irresistible love at Naomi herself, he smiles instead, as if humorously, at the inside of his own extended wrist. Oh, he’s doing— I actually have no idea how he’s doing.
* Hardly ever shaves anywhere except her legs, below the knee. He told her once that back in his day, the girls in college used to get bikini waxes. That made her laugh. She asked if he was trying to make her feel bad or what. Not at all, he said. Just an interesting development in the sexual culture. She’s always laughing. Those Celtic Tiger years must have been wild.
Stupid not to reply to her texts. Some of them very nice too. His fault. He wonders how badly she needs the money, and then he feels – what? Ashamed, or whatever. As usual. She lies face down with her head in her arms. Familiar choreography, rehearsed together and with others, both. What lips my lips have. There is no one else, he could say. Someone, but not.
Sylvia: And she is, to say the least, not stupid. He thinks sometimes the nature and extent of her suffering has lifted her free from the petty frustrations of mere inconvenience.
* Sylvia. Beyond him entirely. Not actually very good-looking, never was. Makes the beauty of others seem excessive. Her small plain face. Of course the clothes are always right. Gets ideas sometimes for gifts he could give Naomi – high-necked sweaters, coloured silk shawls, an ankle-length raincoat. Only to realise later how wrong they would look
* Had believed once that life must lead to something, all the unresolved conflicts and questions leading on towards some great culmination. Curiously underexamined beliefs like that, underpinning his life, his personality. Irrational attachment to meaning.
Never had a real conversation in our lives. Folds the tissue up and puts it in his pocket. Oh, you take conversation too seriously, she says. Life isn’t just talking, you know.
* Then imagine being an attractive woman and it’s not just one man you have to avoid, but almost all of them. Ivan accepts that it must be dreadful. At the same time, how to reach a mutually agreeable situation without one person making an advance on the other which may turn out to be unwanted? It’s like the problem with the chairs and tables. In a haphazard and inefficient way, without any fixed method, solutions can be reached, and evidently are reached all the time
The physical anxiety that accompanies chess events – exhibition games, tournaments – does not bear any meaningful relationship to the events themselves, except a chronological one: it arrives beforehand and goes away afterwards. His mind knows this, but his body does not. For this and other reasons, Ivan considers the body a fundamentally primitive object, a vestige of evolutionary processes superseded by the development of the brain. Just compare the two: the human mind weightless, abstract, capable of supreme rationality; the human body heavy, depressingly specific, making no sense at all. It just does things: no one knows why. It begins for some reason to attack itself or to proliferate cells where they don’t belong... The physical anxiety that accompanies chess events – exhibition games, tournaments – does not bear any meaningful relationship to the events themselves, except a chronological one: it arrives beforehand and goes away afterwards. His mind knows this, but his body does not. For this and other reasons, Ivan considers the body a fundamentally primitive object, a vestige of evolutionary processes superseded by the development of the brain. Just compare the two: the human mind weightless, abstract, capable of supreme rationality; the human body heavy, depressingly specific, making no sense at all. It just does things: no one knows why. It begins for some reason to attack itself or to proliferate cells where they don’t belong.
Ivan’s brother Peter, who is thirty-two and has a graduate degree in philosophy, says this school of thought on the relations between body and mind has been refuted. To Ivan, this is like when people say the King’s Gambit has been refuted.
* Why did she say the word ‘passionate’ to him when they were talking? And why did he repeat it so many times, three or even four times? Is the word ‘passionate’, or is it not, basically an obscene item of vocabulary? No, it isn’t. But is it like a small bandage placed over an item of vocabulary that is in fact obscene? Maybe, yes. A word with blood running through it, a red word. In casual conversation it’s better to use words that are grey or beige. Where did it come from, then, this word ‘passionate’? She knows where.
Not that he seems more powerful or domineering than a girl, not that at all: rather, that he seems to have taken on exclusive responsibility for what appears to him a very difficult task – the task, unless she is mistaken, of seducing an older woman he has just met – and he appears to feel frustrated with himself for not knowing how to accomplish this task, frustrated and guilty. These feelings would not arise in a young woman. Different feelings, equally unpleasant, but different.
She feels a strange, light, amused sensation at his words: as though, concluding that the negotiations have fallen through, he wants only to show how nicely he can take defeat. Well, not only elderly guys, she says. You also beat a ten-year-old girl.
* Then he kisses her again. It is, of course, a desperately embarrassing situation – a situation which seems to render her entire life meaningless. Her professional life, eight years of marriage, whatever she believes about her personal values, everything. And yet, accepting the premise, allowing life to mean nothing for a moment, doesn’t it simply feel good to be in the arms of this person? Feeling that he wants her, that all evening he has been looking at her and desiring her, isn’t it pleasurable? To embody the kind of woman he believed he couldn’t have – to incorporate that woman into herself, and allow him to have her.
Mm, she says. But that’s a nice normal thing to be concerned about, isn’t it? He laughs, hears himself laughing. Is it? he says. Okay. But still, I feel that. Like even if it is normal, I would still be concerned. She puts her hand down between their bodies, and with the palm of her hand, warm, she touches him, saying: It’s okay. And it is okay, he thinks. The story of human life. All of their ancestors, his, and hers also. Life itself, the passing mystery.
Now, in any case, her life will return, unexplained, to whatever it was before. But no, she thinks, because its shapelessness has been exposed to her now, the old values and meanings floating off unattached, and how can she go about reattaching them? And to what?
when the games were finished, and everyone else was leaving, the same look. Can I give you my number? he says. Like in case you ever think about me. I could just put the number into your phone and then it would be there, you wouldn’t even have to look at it again if you didn’t want to.
She has been contained before, contained and directed, by the trappings of ordinary life. Now she no longer feels contained or directed by these forces, no longer directed by anything at all. Life has slipped free of its netting. She can do very strange things now, she can find herself a very strange person. Young men can invite her into holiday cottages for sexual reasons.
She plays it out with such consummate skill that he does have to wonder sometimes if he’s even the only one she does this to. Which is funny. To be the only idiot showering her with money he has to work to earn: not much of a distinction, and yet preferable to the alternative.
* Someone just seems like they have to be exploiting someone here. But who, and how? He her, financially, sexually. Or she him, financially, emotionally. It can be exploitative to give money; also to take it. Money overall a very exploitative substance, creating it seems fresh kinds of exploitation in every form of relationality through which it passes. Greasing with exploitation the wheels of human interaction generally.
Remembering something embarrassing you did years ago and abruptly you think: that’s it, I’m going to kill myself. Except in his case, the embarrassing thing is his life. Doesn’t mean he wants to really. Or even if he does, not as if he would do it. Just to think, or not even think, but to overhear the words inside his own head. Strange relief like a catch released: I wish. Deepest and most final of desires. Something bitter in it too, luxuriously bitter, yes. And why not. Why doesn’t he, that is, if the idea is so consoling. Oh, for other people, of course: to protect them. Other people prefer you to suffer.
Inside, the open square: golden sunlight, autumn. Birds circling. The sky a glass bowl struck and resounding.
How do you guys know each other. Know of course what he’s talking about. One of her fans. Spent enough money maybe to level-up to real life. Girlfriend experience. What they must think, laughing. Actually we met in a bar one night after Christmas, he could say. She asked for my number.
* Love at times indistinguishable from hatred. What they represent to one another: unsatisfiable desires. And yet she held his hand through the funeral. And tomorrow at the hospital he’ll be there, bored, nervous, as always, checking his phone. Yeah, that’s me. I mean, no, sorry, not her husband. There isn’t. Like, I am with her, but we’re not. Relationship mutilated by circumstance into something illegible. Platonic life partnership. Living separately of course. That way he can chase after other girls, piss money up the wall, embarrass himself, get home drunk at four in the morning without waking anyone.
Of course, from Anna’s point of view, Margaret thinks, these years must have passed the other way: watching her, Margaret, growing older. Easier to perceive the way the years accumulate in others. For Anna there must be such a Margaret, who has been one thing and is now another, while Margaret looking at her own life sees only the onwardly flowing blur of all experience.
When she kills the engine and gets out, birds start from their branches and together flicker through the air as if mechanised.
* The dogs are coming from somewhere. But how to make his own dog one of them, Ivan still has no idea. How often in his life he has found himself a frustrated observer of apparently impenetrable systems, watching other people participate effortlessly in structures he can find no way to enter or even understand. So often that it’s practically baseline, just normal existence for him. And this is not only due to the irrational nature of other people, and the consequent irrationality of the rules and processes they devise; it’s due to Ivan himself, his fundamental unsuitedness to life. He knows this. He feels himself to have been formed, somehow, with something other than life in mind... For Peter, social systems are never confusing, always transparent, and usually manipulable to his own ends.
A lot of negative feelings could follow on from that: sadness, low self-esteem, anger at yourself and the other person, despair. People probably have lost their minds over less, and gone actually crazy from the misery. And yet, at the same time, it seems incredibly possible now, tantalisingly possible, that he might once again hear her voice murmuring his name in a low pleasurable satisfied tone while he makes love to her. And for this, he thinks, whatever: despair, heartbreak, even losing his mind and going insane later on, anything. Literally, anything, any price. Yeah, he says. I think it’s a good idea. I do.
Worse than suggestive: sordid. She, an older woman, approaching middle age, is waiting in her dusty overheated car in a poorly lit car park for the arrival of a young man, hardly past adolescence, on a night bus from Dublin. Not even the kindliest, most trusting and well-intentioned of passers-by, observing the scene, could conceive of a wholly innocent explanation for these events. The sexual element would simply leap forth with explanatory power.
But then Anna has a husband, and now even a baby, both of whom offer her in different ways the love and devotion that supersedes and makes irrelevant the pleasure of praise and compliments. It seems hard in Anna therefore to condemn Margaret’s vanity, which has been so painfully starved in recent years, when Anna’s own is fed by the incomparably hearty nourishment of unconditional love. In the short time since Margaret met Ivan, he has provided, why not be honest, the only mouthful of desirable flattery she has tasted in a very long time.
Paying people to make graphs, and the graphs could cost anything. The number comes from nowhere. It’s not related back down to any real resource value. You have— Not to get too politicised about it, because I’m not saying it from that side. But you do literally have people going hungry, I know that’s a cliché. Food shortages, it is a real thing. And then you have these tech companies paying me to make a graph. Why? It comes from the wrong distribution of resources. I mean, including the resource of labour, my labour in this case... In itself, I think profit is actually sort of an inefficiency.
Margaret smiles despite herself. I’m sorry, she says. My mother is never happy with me either.
He smiles back at her. It’s weird, he says. I feel like if I created a new human being out of nothing, I would be very happy with them. Just that they were alive, even. You know, that’s my dad’s attitude. Or it was. He was always happy with us.
Not nervous or hesitant his gestures now but slow and thoughtful. A feeling of pleasure this gives her that seems more than vanity. Deep sensation like an opening outwards, inside. He, this person – his braces, bitten fingernails, ideas about resources, the delivery job he quit, sadness he has been unable to express – he wants her, and she wants him.
the experience of mutual desire. To feel an interpenetration of thought between the two of them, understanding her, looking at her and knowing, yes, without even speaking, what she feels and wants, and knowing that she understands him also, completely. In her eyes, the look of warmth, the flickering kind of amusement, acknowledging: and this relates he thinks to her beauty, her thick dark hair in its loose unravelling braid, her full expressive mouth, the supple roundness of her arms, her breasts. Even her clothes, rumpled and softened, the careless way they drape over her figure, all of this is given life by her understanding, her complete personhood, which in a single look he senses and knows.
I’m sorry to hear about that, he says. About your ex-husband.
She lowers her eyes, saying quietly: It’s okay.
Well, I’m sure it will be okay. But it sounds— to be honest, pretty bad.
Whatever complicated circumstances may account for the situation, there is still this ultimate reality, that they are two people, a man and a woman, and the woman wants to lie in the arms of the man when she’s upset. And that reality has its own meaning.
Telling him about Ricky would be different. Contaminating his life, conscripting him into her own private misery. Pathetic, besides.
* It was obvious then that it was not going to be enough that he was too young and going through a bereavement. Those were solid sensible ideas, powerful enough for the surface of daily life, but not powerful enough for the hidden life of desire shared between two people.
* All as one the birds move together, a dark cloud beating with the loud muscular sound of wings, ascending towards the overhead telephone wire, and strangely it seems now the cloud parts, one half rising up above the wire and the other half falling below, cut cleanly, and then together the two clouds combine once more into an edgeless and mobile arrangement, which is called a murmuration,
Afterwards, television, cloud of steam from the kettle boiling. Nights he no longer has to spend trapped in claustrophobic solitude, self-medicated, panic attack or am I dying how to tell. Instead the deep replenishing reservoir of her presence.
But practically speaking, people have expectations about what an intimate relationship will involve. She breaks off here a moment, teeth at her lower lip, and then adds: I suppose it’s my personality as well. You know, if I can’t do something properly, I don’t want to do it at all. Maybe that’s part of the problem, I don’t know. I think I would find it humiliating, having to negotiate all that with another person. I would feel I was offering something very inferior... Quietly he says: But just from your own perspective, there are still certain things you find— pleasurable?
When they. Yes: the way she was. Perfect, everything. The life they wanted. Her pride in that remembrance worse than touching. Pity he feels and despises himself for feeling. Her pain, the impassable territory between their bodies. Sees her receding behind its monumental heights. Remember me the way I was. Hard to breathe thinking. Dashing tears from her eyes now, however she seems more angry than sad.
Back to his flat now, he thinks. Alone again in the claustrophobic silence of his failures. Why did he have to do it: deluded optimism, maybe. Thinking after all these years it could be smoothed over with a little conversation. Or just self-sabotage. His life in danger of becoming tolerable for a minute, why not go out of his way to aggrieve and distress the only person who could put up with him.
Pleasure of her own gorgeousness in the mirror. Deep complete joy she finds in being alive. No job, no family support, no fixed address, no state entitlements, no money to finish college. Owner of nothing in the world but her own perfect body. Men, and even other women, and systems, bureaucracies, laws, intent it seems on breaking her, forcing her to accept misery. And here she is laughing, drinking sugary coffee, begging to be fucked. He loves that in her. Wants to protect her at times even from himself. Her freedom, wild animal that she is.
* his new understanding of relations between women and men. How certain things can happen, resulting in such situations, even unintentionally, which is something he has always understood on a literal level, but now understands with personal sympathy and compassion for all involved. This particular weakness of women, in regards to their desire for men, strikes him as beautiful, moving, worthy of deep respect and deference. And these are probably the same feelings, really more sentimental than ideological, that have also motivated Peter through the years to care so much supposedly about the oppression of women: because Peter has always at any given time had at least one girlfriend he could imagine in the role of the oppressed.
Yeah, true. At the time it made me feel like debating must be kind of fake, compared to chess. How you would win all the time and never lose.
Well, there just wasn’t anyone good enough to beat us.
Ivan considers this, and then answers: I wanted my life to be like that.
Me too, says Peter.
Of course, he and his brother both wanted their lives to consist of winning all the time and never losing: this is presumably true of everyone. No one ever wants to lose. And yet for both Peter and Ivan, this particular feeling has perhaps been more important, more intense than for other people: the desire to win all the time, and also the naive youthful belief that it would be possible to live such a life, now soured by experience. There seems to have been in both their lives a period of exuberant repeated triumph,
The idea of borrowing money from Peter has never occurred to him before: maybe because Peter’s aura of wealth has always seemed more like a personality trait than a transferable item of property. Asking to borrow his money would be kind of like asking to borrow his sense of humour
Wading back slowly to the shore, lifting her stiff waterlogged limbs, Margaret feels immensely heavy and ancient, numb, exhausted: solid artefact dredged wet from the sea floor. Following after her, Ivan says nothing.
Margaret is reminded of the way she felt the night she first met Ivan: as if life had slipped free of its netting. As if the netting itself had all along been an illusion, nothing real. An idea, which could not contain or describe the borderless all-enveloping reality of life. Now, in her satisfied exhaustion, with her hand resting on the white linen tablecloth, the touch of Ivan’s fingertips, the candle dripping a slow thread of wax down its side, the glossy closed lid of the piano, Margaret feels that she can perceive the miraculous beauty of life itself, lived only once and then gone forever, the bloom of a perfect and impermanent flower, never to be retrieved.
I don’t really think of God in that way. In terms of beauty. I suppose my idea of God is more to do with morality. What’s right and wrong. She pauses, and then adds: It’s not something I feel very sure of. But I do take it seriously, at the same time, or I try to. I want to do the right thing.
While she speaks, she can sense in her peripheral vision that he’s watching her attentively. I get you, he says. To me, it seems like it might all be related. Like, I don’t know, to find beauty in life, maybe it’s related to right and wrong. But I haven’t thought it out too fully. Sometimes I just have a feeling. Like a sense of being loved by God, almost.
God is, on the contrary, the one who makes people sick, who condemns people to death, for incomprehensible reasons. Jesus the healer, the listener, teacher, friend of sinners, seems in Margaret’s mind to be practically on the brink of murmuring: Sorry about my dad . . . Jesus is easy to love and God much harder. Jesus also has his own reality, his place in history, whereas God is like a dim point of light in a dark room, visible only as long as you don’t try to look directly.
* She seems to feel obscurely that the day she met Ivan, they brought into existence a new relationship, which is also a way of being. And their fidelity to that way of being has taken on now a certain moral quality. Ivan’s grief, his extreme youth, his liking for her, these facts exert their own pressures on the situation, yes, but only because of the basis of this relation.
he felt tired all the time and depressed, and then he felt guilty for being depressed, since he should have been trying to make happy memories for his dad, not sad ones. Looking back, okay, maybe it wasn’t too surprising that his chess had suffered. All his friends had told him not to be so hard on himself, but he always thought that was just the kind of thing you had to say to someone who had lost almost one hundred rating points over three years.
Between himself and Margaret in that moment he felt a closeness that could never be joined by anyone else. Looking at her he wanted to say: I love you. Instead he swallowed and said nothing, not because it wasn’t true, but because he knew it would make things more complicated. What she wants is for the two of them to spend time together with no commitments, to have interesting conversations about life, to show each other affection and understanding. She doesn’t want to receive insane declarations of love from someone she only met a few weeks ago.
Highly sophisticated people, some of them. Practically raised on the Linz Symphony and the novels of Colette. Still there is something, just a little hard nub of something, underneath it all, which can never be smoothed away. They are what they are, and he is what he is. Work they get from friends while he has to look out for himself. Unwritten dress codes, rules of speech.
Compensating for his own failings, laziness, poor sleep hygiene, overuse of alcohol and drugs, irrational bitterness, directionless and therefore immobilising fury. No. Nice interesting case is all he needs. Somewhere to aim his outrage. Where’s a bit of sexual harassment in the workplace when you need it?... Feeling he gets when one of her colleagues puts their head round the door, asking for something, and he’s sitting with her, the two of them bickering together. What is that: to be witnessed, yes. To be mistaken for someone happier than himself, and better.
Sinful he always thinks her smile. I only wanted them to have fun, she said. You don’t have to worry about me, I’m a happy woman. Happy, yes. And if she is. In bed that night he wanted her to say it again. Sometimes wonders how much of his capacity for pleasure is just vanity.
She, the calculating liar, the exploited innocent, yes. Whole thing getting a bit fucking Marcel Proust. Waits until she’s out of the house to vacuum the carpet, wipe down the bathroom surfaces. Haul the laundry up and down from the basement. Not wanting her to see: and why. Awkward to make her thank him maybe. Or trying to maintain the fiction of his own dominance
he said it was the thing about looking at a woman for to lust after her being the same as committing adultery in your heart. Her hand on his arm, she was laughing, the lines around her eyes he thought so beautiful. Oh, I forgot that one, she said. That does seem hard on you. He too was laughing then. The inexchangeable pleasure of her conversation. Just to walk the streets saying things, anything, just the act itself, walking together at the same speed, and talking, purely to amuse and please one another, to make each other stupidly laugh, for no further accomplishment, no higher purpose
Unclear whether you’re cheating on me with her, or you’re cheating on her with me, she said. Absentmindedly he considered the proposition. Either option preferable he thought. Dignity of good old-fashioned faithlessness. Neither, he answered. Sylvia is a very dear friend of mine. And you’re just a homeless college student who lives in my house. That made her laugh.
Well, whatever, he says. His hand in hers still holding. You don’t want me to be grateful, you just want me to be happy, she repeats. I’m actually touched by that, like emotionally.
* The same ritual he thinks each time. She tries to extract from him some valuably hurtful information and he tries to conceal from her any aspect of his life in which he suspects she might gain a foothold. Her fake innocuous queries and his studied evasions. Screens her calls whenever Naomi is home. Why does his mother even want to know: why does he want her not to. Contest for dominance. Story of his life.
* it will definitely be me, he said. Getting my heart broken in the end, let’s be honest, it won’t be you. With a horrified laugh Margaret said that was no consolation at all, and that it made her feel terrible. Ivan smiled then, looking at her, and replied: Oh, well, okay. Maybe it will be you. I doubt it, but you can think that if you prefer.
* He shrugs his shoulders, wiping again at his nose. That Peter doesn’t love me? he says. He doesn’t show me respect. He’s not even nice to me.
Well, I’m sorry about that. But I think, as sad as it is to say, I think people aren’t always very nice to the people they love.
Ivan exhales now, a quick frustrated kind of laughter. Okay, he says. What does it mean to love someone, then? I’m curious. If you don’t care about the person’s feelings, and you’re not nice to them, and you don’t really want them to be happy, how is that love, in your opinion?
Does it relate to the girlfriend somehow, the one who was in an accident? And why did Margaret herself respond so strongly, with such a strong wave of emotion, on hearing that story? The hospital visits, the relationship destroyed, the terrible waste of it all. Dimly she wonders now whether she has been thinking somehow about herself, her own circumstances,
But rather than smiling this time he felt a kind of acute feeling, almost like pain, opening out inside himself, and his eyes were stinging. To love, and for his love to be accepted, yes. It was in fact painful, the relief of all that compression suddenly, to say the words aloud, and hear her saying them, to be loved by her, it was so needed that it actually hurt, and he started to cry. Not even tears of unmixed happiness, but of happiness that was strongly and confusingly mixed with many other feelings. Sadness, missing his father, and a kind of shame somehow, because each passing day seemed to bring Ivan further away from him and the life they used to have together, a life that was receding increasingly into the past, into the realm of childhood and adolescence. The realisation that his adulthood, into which he was entering now so definitively, and which would last all the rest of his life, would have to be lived without his father.
But if the liar just says that his ‘hat’ is green, does it mean he has to have a hat? Yes, by the same logic: it can’t be a false statement if he has no hat at all. And does that imply that it’s not a lie if you say ‘all my daughters are waiting for me’, as long as you don’t have a daughter? You can claim you’re telling the truth, albeit vacuously? And if it’s just one daughter instead? But why should it be any different? It goes to show, Ivan thinks, that the difference between truth and lying is complicated. You think you’re fitting language onto the world in a certain way, like a child fitting the right-shaped toy into the right-shaped slot. But at times you realise that that’s a false picture too. Language doesn’t fit onto reality like a toy fitting into a slot. Reality is actually one thing and language something else. You just have to agree with yourself not to think about it too much.
Though not, like Ivan, wary of Christine, Peter doesn’t really like her, and has often even sided with Ivan against her in the past, from a combination of specific filial antipathy and the sort of freewheeling belligerence he seems to have available to him at all times. In fact, Ivan thinks, if their mother had somehow found out about Margaret first, and had predictably tried to make life hell for Ivan as a result, the person most likely to take his side in such a scenario would be, there’s no doubt about it, Peter himself. Making arguments about personal liberty and the hard-won sexual freedoms of the post-Catholic era or whatever. Yes, Ivan thinks, one of the only consistent principles in his brother’s life is to become unbelievably partisan in every conflict he ever encounters and then to win the conflict using a barrage of extreme verbal force: a horrible personality trait, practically a disorder. But another of Peter’s principles is, admittedly, that he’s not a rat.
Dread again and deeper in the pit of his stomach. Messages unpunctuated. Why at the door, why leave it at the door. Resting in bed perhaps and forgets he has his own key: but how could she forget. Only a few weeks ago. When every night he... Why at the door. Because she doesn’t want him to come near, he thinks. Because of what happened. Everything. And has no one else to help her. Feels as if rather than breathing he is swallowing raw the dirty urban air. To think of her in pain. And what is that thought. A way of provoking in himself merely a familiar suite of bad feeling. Guilt, self-hatred, something else, worse. Nothing achieved, no solace provided. Only alternative however is not to think, not to imagine or even try. Leave her even in his own mind alone and untouched in her agony. Perform unfeelingly the various duties,
That’s what you call having a life. I can’t imagine that you think I’ve been happy. How many times have I come pleading with you to take me back? The other week, when I was staying here. Trying to get you to talk to me. Or trying to touch you, or kiss you, whatever. You know, I think in a way you actually like it, watching me humiliate myself like that. And you get to reject me all over again. I think there’s a part of you that enjoys it.
For you I would do the same: and isn’t that the basic problem, that he would do the same, wants to, and Christ in heaven, actually does. When civilisation is fundamentally premised on the exclusivity of such willingness. And why is it? Oh, who knows why,
the misted air of the night wreathes itself in majesty around his body. Crowns of luminous streetlight hanging weightless and silent over the heads of passers-by.
People can have affairs without exiting the sexual mainstream, surely, even if everyone agrees that affairs are wrong: wrong, of course, yes, but not suggestive of sexual deviance. That one might feel attached to both wife and mistress must be in limited circumstances, though not condoned, still basically accepted and understood. Certainly, when it comes to the question of his own self-esteem, he would rather be thought a cheater than some kind of freak. But then that would only be a case of borrowing someone else’s self-esteem: because whatever he might gain would be the woman’s loss.
Discretion he thinks can render almost any eccentricity acceptable, at least for a limited time. As if it’s not so much the tangled relations, but the desire for some transparency in one’s personal life that is after all perverse.
Attachment, the cause of all suffering, so the Buddhists say. To cling to what you have, what you have had, the life you have known, the handful of people and places you have ever really loved, to cling and not let go. Never relenting, never accepting, becoming all the time more enmeshed, holding harder, loving and hating more.
Remembering the way his father would write out on lined paper the doctor’s instructions, spidery handwriting, names of medications. His meek deference, yes, even in the face of certain death, with no hope he would be spared, when his obedience could buy him nothing. Peter meanwhile in a blind rage at everything: the consultants, registrars, the hospital vending machines.
Proliferation of inappropriate attachments. Holding hard, harder, clutching, not letting go. Well, if that’s suffering, he thinks, let me suffer. Yes. To love whoever I have left. And if ever I lose someone, let me descend into a futile and prolonged rage, yes, despair, wanting to break things, furniture, appliances, wanting to get into fights, to scream, to walk in front of a bus, yes. Let me suffer, please. To love just these few people, to know myself capable of that, I would suffer every day of my life.
Do you love me, she says.
And he answers: Yeah. I love you, of course I do.
Silence for a moment and then her tone thin and managed saying: But then why are you making me go away?
Without lifting his head he replies: I’m trying to explain. I don’t know what else to do.
Peter and Sylvia, who had been practically married before, were broken up, and Peter stopped coming home, stopped sending Ivan funny messages and chess puzzles, started taking holidays with his new lawyer friends. He didn’t like his family anymore, any of them, it was obvious. He avoided them, and in a way they avoided him too. You could tell their dad was relieved that Peter wasn’t coming home so often, not that he didn’t love him, but just that the situation had become so awkward. Ivan never told his parents about what happened that time, Peter crying and saying he was scared. He never even really thought about it again, in fact he deliberately avoided thinking about it, with a sense of embarrassment, and worse than embarrassment, something like shame, resentment, whenever it came into his head and he had to bat it away again. Peter was such a difficult person, always making life difficult. The two of them started getting into fights whenever they saw each other, about anything, nothing at all. Peter laughing, dismissive, rehearsing the most stale liberal talking points, calling Ivan a creep or an incel. I’m sorry, but you don’t relate to people on a normal level.
What happened between us the other day, I can see now, you did that because you wanted an exit strategy. Maybe not consciously, I don’t know, but in the back of your mind. You were looking for a way out with Naomi. I thought we were just— whatever, in that moment, and for you it was something else. We should have talked then, or we should have, I don’t know. I was in a lot of pain, I wasn’t feeling well. But whatever it was, I was not trying to help you get out of your relationship. Okay? You can’t use me like that. I’m a human being.
Sharp goring sensation, and he presses with his hand at his breastbone, feeling what, the bitterness of the accusation, and worse, that she is taking away from him the only right thing in his life.
* Fighting only amongst themselves, never with him. By using such cold critical words, it was as if Peter was intent on proving the absence of their father, in whose presence the words could not have been spoken, and Ivan himself seemed to leap energetically into this absence, shoving Peter against the fireplace. New things are possible now, which were inconceivable before, things like violence and certain forms of cruelty.
I hate him, Ivan thinks. It’s cathartic even to formulate these special words, I hate him. And yet in the moment of catharsis, Ivan senses there is something else beneath, moving in the opposite direction. As in fluid dynamics when the undertow moves counter to the surface current. What is that contrary direction, away from hatred of his brother? Hatred of himself, maybe. To remember himself pushing Peter, petulantly, weakly, like a child.
Ivan had seemed at first, she thought, like a way for her to leave the bad feelings behind, an open gate leading out into another kind of life, free of all the remorse and unhappiness she had accumulated before. Now she was beginning to see that he could also be a source of these same bad feelings, unhappiness, remorse, that he was not going to retain always the new fresh unencumbered quality he had presented to her when first they met. His life also was littered with difficulty, just as hers was, and these difficulties did not dissolve on contact, but rather seemed to coagulate and harden.
In his arms, to be given life, yes, and to give life also. Something miraculous, inexpressible, perfect. Impossible of course to think: and yet it happened all the time. May have been happening even then, concealed inaccessibly inside her breathing body. Each generation that had gone before, hundreds, thousands. The only answer to death, she thought: to echo back its name in that way, with all the same intensity and senselessness, on the side of life. Why not allow him, why not allow herself, at least the idea, the image, the future, at once impossible and not, enveloping them both in its mystery in the dark stillness of her quiet bedroom, descending with them both into the depths of sleep.
* I don’t know, says Sylvia. I think it might have been the shock of seeing us in the same room together. Allowing his eyes to close he lets out something like a groan hearing them both laughing. Help says Naomi. My girlfriends have unionised.
* talking about fascist aesthetics and the modernist movement. Neoclassicism, obsessive fixation on ethnic difference, thematics of decadence, bodily strength and weakness. Purity or death. Pound, Eliot. And on the other hand, Woolf, Joyce. Usefulness and specificity of fascism as a political typology in the present day. Aesthetic nullity of contemporary political movements in general. Related to, or just coterminous with, the almost instantaneous corporate capture of emergent visual styles. Everything beautiful immediately recycled as advertising. Sense that nothing can mean anything anymore, aesthetically. The freedom of that, or not. The necessity of an ecological aesthetics, or not. We need an erotics of environmentalism. Stupidly making each other laugh.
How to live up to all this: which seems at times the only question. Feels he has at once too much power and too little, enough to make a mess of everything, not enough to sort it out. Is he humiliating them both, she, the other, inflicting on them some terrible exotic pain, for his own selfish satisfaction. Is it shame he feels, that hot blood pounding in his ears, or only embarrassment: the minor trifling embarrassment of an awkward situation or the true shame of a moral wrong. How is it possible to know. What can life be made to accommodate, what can one life hold inside itself without breaking. For him they will make the grand attempt in any case, he thinks, yes, and maybe for reasons of their own, curiosity, pleasure, pride, desire, and also the principle, the possibility, the ideal of another way of life. An experiment bound almost certainly for one kind of failure or another, and yet attaining for these few hours and days to a miraculous success, a perfection of beauty, inexchangeable, meant not to be interpreted, meant only to be lived and nothing more.
Nodding his head, half-smiling, palms of his hands wiping his face. I’ll check in, he says, I’ll see what the plans are. Okay? I’m very grateful to be invited.
It would mean a lot to me, Ivan says. The first Christmas without Dad, and everything like that. But whatever you want, whatever you prefer.
---quotes:
Ludwig Wittgenstein’s Philosophical Investigations: On page X, I use the quote: ‘If a lion could talk, we could not understand him.’ On page X, I quote: ‘The decisive movement in the conjuring trick has been made, and it was the very one that we thought quite innocent.’ Later in the same paragraph, I quote: ‘Here saying “There is no third possibility” or “But there can’t be a third possibility!” – expresses only our inability to turn our eyes away from this picture’.
Finally, on page X, the line ‘Thou know’st ’tis common; all that lives must die’ is again from Hamlet, spoken by Gertrude in Act I, Scene ii.
