Divorce Is in the Air (18 page)

“I don't ever want to see her again.”

And when I did pick up the phone to confront my sister, ready to make her choke on her arrogance and meanness, it was with a sense of burning shame at how slow I'd been. I was ashamed by the stinginess of my first reaction when Helen told me the news: I'd been happy about the extra income.

“You listen to me, Joan-Marc, you married a sorry excuse for a human, so don't blame me. Dad went to great pains to teach us how to behave with people who go to shopping malls. You tell me how I'm supposed to deal with a creature who is 70 percent alcohol, and the rest a mishmash of lust, vulgarity, and resentment. Anyway, a job is a job.”

Helen stood firm. We cut my sister out of our lives, but in Helen's head the same tune was still playing:

“What I need is a job.”

“Find a job.”

“You have to find me a job.”

She wheeled out her defeated voice, and with her feet and arms and her chest tensed, she reminded me of a storm cloud gathering electricity. It was odd: Helen was a woman who would leave things in a half-done mess just to go out and drink with me, who would rather rob a costume-jewelry stall at the flea market than unload laundry from the machine, who always forgot to replace the toilet paper and reduced the kitchen sponge to a pulp before she'd buy a new one, a woman who'd seemingly be able to adapt to life in a Tuareg encampment; but her demands came nonstop. Helen didn't go out to hunt the buffalo for dinner; she demanded I do it, as if when she'd married me I'd taken charge of maintaining her. She kept her unrelenting mental torments to herself: it was as if she'd tied her body to an iron bar to keep herself tensed and alert in uncomfortable positions, poised on tiptoe.

And what job was I going to get for her? What could I find for a dropout from a university whose degrees almost certainly weren't compatible with European humanism? The only money she'd ever earned was her scholarship check for being a promising long jumper, and the fact that jumping earns precious little in the job market was not something I could fix. Helen didn't want to serve drinks, she refused to babysit, she felt faint at the very thought of improving her Spanish or learning Office for Windows; she wouldn't even consider trying her luck as a tour guide. Where did the pulse of her aspirations beat? And based on what secret talent? What ability had I overlooked? In Helen's world (the world of her diaries, her private conversations) all princesses are blonde and born in the UNITED STATES (the nitwit wrote both words in capital letters). And they were all named Helen! When you consider that, it makes sense that at the first job she got in Montana after a hip injury (which I later learned was really her pregnancy with Jackson) she managed to arrive three minutes late every day until they had the nerve to kick her out. What can I say—I understand her boss. The only qualification expected of a cashier at a baby-clothes shop is that she respect the set of basic social courtesies that include hygiene and punctuality. All because neither the first day nor the second did they ask her why she was late. Helen was fighting back against indifference. With her defiance, she was trying to make someone show an interest in her thoughts, her feelings, in the contours of her inner landscape. And there's the mistake that causes so many people to slide into bitterness: the brain buys cheap materials and uses them to build its dreams. In contrast, let's admire the foundations of my stupendous emotional equilibrium: I know what I'm worth, and I tailor my objectives to the capital at my disposal. Of course, you used to call this source of emotional solidity my “lack of ambition.” You used to hold it against me!

Helen had gotten used to just sitting there looking sour. That had been her winning strategy when she'd wanted to stay and live with me, when she'd wanted to change cities, and later when she'd wanted a bigger apartment. And since she combined a fantastical imagination with an exhaustive lack of knowledge about the concrete steps necessary to achieve something, she convinced herself that if a job didn't “turn up,” it was all my fault. Because I wasn't giving it the requisite attention, because to me the emptiness eating away at her was just one more passing complication—women's problems—and we only had to sweep it under the sofa and wait for the day a servant would vacuum it up. Only we didn't have any servants. And since she wasn't about to give in and I was incapable of resolving the issue, we started to fight in earnest, engaging our entire nervous systems.

Helen had certainly learned from my sister. She tried to combine the precise proportions of arrogance and ignorance to stay on top in the argument. She took advantage of my strategic pauses to remind me I'd been incapable of rebuilding Dad's business, or of starting something on my own initiative. She had the gall to accuse me of being unenlightened, just because she'd started taking refuge in the fashionable women's pastimes that were booming then: patchwork quilting and Swedish gymnastics. Just because she went to a guru who, in exchange for some money (of mine), attached names of mystical seasons to her absurd behaviors. None of that got her anywhere with me—Helen didn't have a rotten uterus, and I didn't feel at all sorry for her. In fact, I found it satisfying to put her down till she couldn't take it anymore and that cold mask of indifference thawed into stickier features.

Whenever I got the better of her, Helen would run away and hole up in our bedroom to pump her antistress balls or contort herself into a Pilates position. She'd stay quiet while my rage coagulated into streams of verbal garbage. I let her have the starring role: I was just a furious chatterbox while she, twisted up fakir-style, believed she was connecting to a pre-linguistic knowledge. But the only thing I got out of it was the handful of phrases she used to convey unfavorable and precise views on my value as a husband. I would have liked to tell her she was facing a Sisyphean struggle in trying to achieve an inner balance, because it was truly frightening to read the things she wrote on little slips of paper in her drunkard's handwriting, minutes before or after we got into a fight:

An action committed in anger is an action doomed to failure.

Nothing is so serious it can't be said with a smile.

Let your desires go.

I am an injured woman!

Once a problem is solved, its simplicity is amazing.

In the dew of little things the heart finds its morning and is refreshed.

Give me a lever long enough and I will move the world.

I don't know what things are like in the Himalayas, but among us Westerners, greedy for cars, houses, restaurants (which, incidentally, Helen was not willing to give up), and travel, that kind of harmony, that pluperfect serenity, is unattainable. Helen would paint a dot on her forehead and repeat in a fluty voice: “There is no greater relief than to start becoming what one is,” or “A philosopher who couldn't walk because he stepped on his beard, cut off his feet.” But it was the very same Helen who spent the week overusing a system of dirty looks to urge me on to a bigger apartment, far-flung vacations, a more glamorous job.

“You don't have a suitable life-vision, John.”

What I understood quite clearly now was that Helen had escaped from her family as if from a pool of boiling water, only to shack up in a series of bad relationships. Also that once we find ourselves wrapped in the delights of a responsible life, most of us are stunned to see the loathsome ways our friends have matured. If things go well for us, by the time we turn forty we've morphed into suspicious, deceitful, irascible, and lazy creatures, crazy to photograph ourselves, broadcast ourselves. And if things go badly, there's no need to add the burden of a perfect serenity we'll never come close to achieving. I would have rather had Helen accept that the fetid breath our parents passed on to us, and all the other debilitating things that make up our lives and backgrounds, are no reason to be bitter. If you take it with a little spice, you can make it all worthwhile. Why else do people mostly go out kicking and screaming when they get old? I can understand if women get a little hippy-dippy once their hips stop bringing action into the bedroom (a lot have trouble developing intellectual pursuits, and they have those estrogen problems, the hot flashes and dry vaginas). But Helen was too young to give up on the good stuff in life.

If things were so bad, why did I stay with her? Was it just the sex? What a low suggestion, unbecoming to your intellect. I can refute it in half a minute. It's not my fault that retinal cells can assess the possibilities of a woman's body in two seconds flat. It's not my fault my eye is perfectly adapted to calculate erotic maturity. I'll tell you something, it doesn't matter how smart you women think you are, how intelligent, cultured, sensitive, or pretty you are—most of you have no idea when it comes to the effect your fellow females provoke in men you desire. You're blinded by a fog that not even the most jealous man would succumb to.

Which doesn't change the fact that the bond of sex was still alive and well between Helen and me. You'd have to be a man to understand how hard it is to give up a woman who thinks like a man in the sack, who doesn't show the slightest hesitation about starting the day with a session that renews your nerves, that leaves your spirit with the unbeatable feeling that you are putting something truly unrepeatable between life and goddamn death. As if seeing Helen every day, caught up in one of her trivial schemes, weren't incentive enough to tie myself to the mast of a sinking ship. What Helen and I had wasn't about masks and feathers; the kind of understanding grew between us that demands something more than complicity of the flesh: an entire brain ignited in passion. And those daily free-for-alls conspired to reshape the relationship; it makes life worth living, the feeling of devouring the girl whose neck you were ready to break half an hour earlier. They weren't bad times: when the tenderness is still there, it takes a very deft touch to sodomize the woman of your dreams.

Helen made me feel alive, and without feeling alive I wouldn't know how to live. You spent long enough with me (and those were my best years) to learn that shades of gray are not my strong suit. Or don't you remember how you used to defend me, extolling the way I filled your days with light? How sad is a woman's offended dignity when the flesh is not your own, when the sensual one is someone else. What hypocrites you all are—if I remember rightly, you didn't exactly marry a mummy either, or some mama's boy hard at work on your orgasm. You never complained when it was our sheets I was twisting up, and you knew perfectly well how to turn all that energy to your advantage.

What's more, and to put an end to this lamentable dialogue once and for all, it wasn't just me. Ask anyone: sex was the key, sex was enough, sex was the thing. How simple life must have seemed back when we were convinced that all we had to do was satisfy our erotic urges and the hard edges of the world would soften into a serene landscape. I know that era existed, and it must have been something worth living through. Our bodies came of age at a time when sexual initiation came easy. Forget the myth of the seventies—it was during the boom of second homes, with parents who left us alone to study on the weekends, when the true sexual revolution began. Sure, it could take a few months to find the right companion, but then some daring little chubster would appear, a timidly precocious girl, a wild child, a sensualist; you could take them by the hand and leap into the void, calming the spasms of excitement as best you could. You'd feel cold, afraid, but it was worth it, because what no one can save you from is the terror, the frustration, and the servility that hound you if you don't lose your cherry on time. Believe it or not, it came as a shock for me too that sex was nothing like a cottony floating, that we'd hit bone against bone and plow on while breathing in that mixture of high and low aromas; in sum, that the cut separating pleasure from pain isn't a clean one. It took me a while to get used to the warmth of a woman's sex. The last thing you'd expect was that beneath the pubic fuzz that viscous texture would give off such a soft aroma. The first girls I was with didn't know how to position themselves, or what to do with their hands, or how to move. I never know why I talk as if there were hundreds, and not the three or four little bodies I came to feel the touch, the pull with. Even in our best moments, I knew I could cast them off like changing a shirt, although it was good to be enjoying an almost-mature living specimen for a few hours, making the most of the cosmic miracle—absurd, if you think about it—that girls even like boys' dry bodies.

I hadn't even known what was in store for me—the things life hides are so surprising. Plus, I know I was lucky: I had cool rooms, good people, and wide beds. Did I ever tell you about poor Porras? He misjudged the distance between his head and the wall, and when he was already inside his girl he banged his head with every thrust; but the setup was so impossibly delicate he preferred a cracked skull to pulling out and risking never getting back in again. Looking back, I think I behaved well with those girls during those opening skirmishes—more tactical than pleasurable—though in the aloof way of a kid who hasn't yet turned eighteen and is cutting himself the largest possible slice of life.

Helen was the girl I wanted, the one I opened wide and fucked during our bodies' most glorious hours, while our two minds spun wildly inside their skulls. But it was also the first time I'd been penned in with another body I had such easy access to, and we only had to be left alone in a locked room for her smitten little motor to make her strip. We had to change the code of signs and symbols for when we could and couldn't, when she was teasing me, when it was important I prevail and when it was better to let her win, when it was preferable to take a shortcut to a placid ending, when better to cross some arbitrary boundary, when it was nonnegotiable for Helen that we stop there, on the edge, if you like, not one step further. Because there are no rules, there never were, how would anyone enforce them when you're talking about two people alone together? Do you think Dad was watching over us, that Daddy Rupert could see us, that God sent angels to record the things that fleshly beings do to one another? Those threats have never kept teenagers from wanking in bathrooms, and they certainly wouldn't quiet the underground whisper of copulation that hums beneath society's chorus. We were too young, too chock-full of energy, of healthy blood and enviable lymphatic systems you could glimpse in the tissues of our armpits, our thighs, necks, and the knee pits that drained our toxins. Never more than during that year and a half did I believe that the only thing I needed was to watch her walk around with wet hair and all those grueling problems that have been so hard on me would melt away, and the indifferent universe would whisper to me that I was doing things right, really right. And I would feel like—I'd really be—a winner. The Madrid hotels, the Turret, that apartment stuffed with elephantine furniture, they all showed me sex's bracing energy, its true, essential depths that can't be cheapened, and it seemed the pinnacle of everything a guy like me could ever achieve. The ideas that burned in that young mind of mine were so different from today's: it's outrageous to have been there, to have even lived through those teeming hours, one by one.