Enduring Love (12 page)

But now they seem cast in a play they cannot stop, and a terrible freedom is in the air. “The guy’s ridiculous,” Joe continues. “He’s fixated.” Clarissa begins to speak, but he waves her down. “I can’t get you to take this seriously. Your only concern is I’m not massaging
your damned feet after your hard day.” This reference to a recent tender half-hour shocks Joe as much as Clarissa. He had no resentment at the time; in fact, he enjoyed it.

She turns her head away but manages to hang on to what she was going to say. “You were so intense about him as soon as you met him. It’s like you invented him.”

“Right! I get it. I brought it down on myself. I made my own fate. It’s my karma. I thought even you were above this kind of New Age drivel.”

This
even
comes from nowhere, a rhythmic filler, a reckless little intensifier. Clarissa has never expressed the remotest interest in the New Age package. She looks at him, surprised. The insult has in turn set her free. “You ought to be asking yourself which way this fixation runs.”

The suggestion that it is he who is obsessed by Parry appears so monstrous to Joe that he can think of nothing to say but “Christ!” Motiveless energy impels him to stride across the room to the window. There’s no one out there. With such anger in the air it makes Clarissa feel vulnerable to be half dressed, so she takes advantage of the movement her remark has caused to snatch a skirt from a coat hanger. Two other coat hangers drop to the floor, but she does not pick them up as she usually would.

Joe takes a deep breath and turns from the window to exhale. He makes a deliberate show of calming himself, of starting again from a reasonable premise, of being a reasonable man refusing to be driven to extremes. He speaks in a quiet, breathy tone, exaggeratedly slow. Where do we learn such tricks? Are they inscribed, along with the rest of our emotional repertoire? Or do we get them from the movies? He says, “Look, there’s this problem out there”—he gestures to the window—“and all I wanted from you was your support and help.”

But Clarissa does not hear reason. The husky voice, the tense of
wanted
, suggest to her self-pity and accusation and make her angry. She does not need to tell him that he’s always had her support and help. Instead she comes at him from a new place, inventing a grievance and recalling it in a single mental act. “The first time he phoned and told you he loved you, you admitted you lied to me about it.”

Joe is so astonished he can only stare at her, and while his mouth is struggling to frame a word, Clarissa, unseasoned as she is in this kind of battle, feels a pulse of triumph that is easily confused with vindication. In that moment she honestly feels she has been betrayed and therefore is entitled to add, “So what am I meant to think? You tell me. Then we’ll see what kind of support and help you need.” As she says this she is slotting her feet into her mules.

Joe is beginning to find his voice. He has so many simultaneous protesting thoughts that his mind is fogged. “Wait a minute. Are you really suggesting …”

Clarissa, aware that her remarks might not bear up under discussion, is getting out while she’s ahead, leaving the room while it’s still delicious to feel wronged. “Well, fuck off, then,” Joe shouts to her departing back. He feels he wouldn’t mind picking up the dressing table stool and throwing it through the window. He is the one who should be walking out. After some seconds’ hesitation, he hurries out of the room, passing Clarissa in the hallway, snatches his coat from its peg, and goes out, slamming the door hard behind him and glad that she was close by to hear its full force.

As he leaves the apartment building, he is surprised at how dark it has become. It’s raining, too. He gathers his coat about him and tightens the belt, and when he sees Parry waiting for him at the end of the brick path, he does not even break his stride.

My impression
was that the rain intensified the moment I stepped out, but I wasn’t going back for a hat or an umbrella. I ignored Parry and set such a furious walking pace that when I got to a corner and looked round, he was fifty yards behind. My hair was soaked and water had already penetrated my right shoe, whose sole had a long-neglected gash. My anger came off in a cold glow, childishly undirected. Parry, of course, was to blame for coming between Clarissa and me, but my fury was for them both—he was the affliction she had failed to support me against—and for everyone and everything, especially this seeping rain and the fact that I had no idea where I was going.

There was another thing too, like a skin, a soft shell around the meat of my anger, limiting it and so making it appear all the more theatrical. It was a quarter-memory, a niggle, a faint connection rooted in a forgotten bout of reading, irrelevant to my purposes at the time but lodged in me like an enduring fragment of a childhood dream. It was relevant now, I thought, it could help me. The key
word was
curtain
, which I imagined in my own handwriting, and just as the rain on my lashes splintered and refracted the streetlight, so this word seemed to come apart, tugged this way and that by associations that lay just off the screen of recall. I saw a grand house in long perspective, reproduced in the smudged black and white of an old newspaper, and high railings and perhaps some kind of military presence, a security guard or sentry. But if this was the house where the significant curtain hung, it meant nothing to me.

I pushed on, past real houses, huge lit villas that rose above their high entryphone gates, behind which I glimpsed carelessly parked cars. Such was my mood that I could consciously and pleasurably forget our own half-million-pound apartment and indulge the fantasy that I was a poor down-and-out scurrying in the rain past the rich folks’ houses. Some people had all the breaks, I’d wasted what few chances came my way, and I was nothing and there was no one out here to care for me now. I hadn’t tricked my own feelings like this since I was an adolescent, and the discovery that I could still do it gave me almost as much pleasure as a five-minute mile. But then, when I felt for
curtain
again, there was no association at all, not even a shadow, and as I began to slow my pace, I thought how the brain was such a delicate, fine-filigreed thing that it could not even fake a change in its emotional state without transforming the condition of a million other unfelt circuits.

I sensed my tormentor closing on me just before I heard him half shout, half yodel my name. Then he called again. “Joe! Joe!” I realized he was sobbing. “It was you. You started this, you made this happen. You’re playing games with me, all the time, and you’re pretending …” He couldn’t finish. I picked up speed again, and I was almost running when I crossed the next street. His crying wavered with each jarring footfall. I was disgusted and frightened. I reached the other side and looked back. He had followed me and now he was
trapped in the center of the road, waiting for a gap in the traffic. There was just a chance he could have fallen forward under a passing set of wheels, and I wanted it, the desire was cool and intense, and I wasn’t surprised at myself, or ashamed. When he saw my face turned toward him at last, he shouted a series of questions. “When are you going to leave me alone? You’ve got me. I can’t do anything. Why don’t you admit what you’re doing? Why do you keep pretending that you don’t know what I’m talking about? And then the signals, Joe. Why d’you keep on?”

Still trapped in the center, his figure and his words obliterated at irregular intervals by the passing traffic, he raised his voice to such a hoarse screaming that I couldn’t look away. I should have been running on, for this was the perfect moment to lose him. But his rage was compelling and I was forced to look on, amazed, although I never quite lost faith in the redeeming possibility of a bus crushing him as he stood there, twenty-five feet away, pleading as he damned me.

He uttered his words at a screech, on a repetitive rising note, as though a forlorn zoo bird had become approximately human. “What do you want? You love me and you want to destroy me. You pretend it’s not happening. Nothing happening! You fuck! You’re playing … torturing me … giving me all your fucking little secret signals to keep me coming toward you. I know what you want, you fuck. You fuck! You think I don’t? You want to take me away from …” I lost his words to a house-sized removal truck. “… and you think you can take me away from Him. But you’ll come to me. In the end. You’ll come to Him too, because you’ll have to. You fuck, you’ll beg for mercy, you’ll crawl on your stomach …”

Parry’s sobs got the better of him then. He took a step toward me, but a car surging up the middle of the road forced him back with an angry blaring klaxon whose receding Doppler effect inverted his own sorry sound. At some point while he was shouting I felt almost
sorry for him again, despite my hostility and revulsion. But perhaps sorrow wasn’t quite it. Seeing him stuck there, raving, I felt relieved it wasn’t me, much as I do when I see a drunk or a schizophrenic conducting the traffic. I also thought that his condition was so extreme, his framing of reality so distorted, that he couldn’t harm me. He needed help, though not from me. This in parallel with the abstract desire to see this nuisance guiltlessly obliterated on the asphalt.

I benefited from a third current of thought and feeling while I listened to him. It was prompted by a word he had used twice:
signals
. Both times it caused the curtain that had troubled me earlier to stir and twitch, and the two words mated to spawn an elementary syntax: a curtain used as a signal. Now I was closer than before. I almost had it. A grand house, a famous residence in London, and the curtains in its windows used to communicate …

The struggle with these fragile associations brought to mind the curtains in my study, and then the study itself. Not its comfort, not the glow of its parchment lamps or the glowing reds and blues of the Bokhara or the submarine tones of my Chagall forgery (
Le Poète Allongé
, 1915), but the hundred feet or so of box files that filled five shelves, the whole of one wall, black labeled boxes jammed with clippings, and on the other side, by the south-facing window, the little skyscraper of a hard disk drive where three gigabytes of data waited to help me build a bridge between this mansion and these two words.

I thought of Clarissa with a sudden leap of cheerful love, and it seemed an easy matter to set right our row—not because I had behaved badly or was wrong, but because I was so obviously, incontrovertibly right, and she was simply mistaken. I had to get back there.

The rain was still coming down, but less heavily. The lights two hundred yards up the road had already changed, and I could see from the disposition of the advancing traffic that within seconds Parry
would have his opportunity to cross the road. So I left him where he was, with his hands over his face, crying. He probably didn’t see me as I turned and set off at a fast jog down a narrow residential road. And even if in his desolation he had had the heart to pursue me at this speed, I could have doubled round the block and lost him in a minute.

Dear Joe,

I feel happiness running through me like an electrical current. I close my eyes and see you as you were last night in the rain, across the road from me, with the unspoken love between us as strong as steel cable. I close my eyes and thank God out loud for letting you exist, for letting me exist in the same time and place as you, and for letting this strange adventure between us begin. I thank Him for every little thing about us. This morning I woke and on the wall beside my bed was a perfect disk of sunlight and I thanked Him for that same sunlight falling on you! Just as last night the rain that drenched you drenched me too and bound us. I praise God that He has sent me to you. I know there is difficulty and pain ahead of us, but the path that He sets us on is hard for a purpose. His purpose! It tests us and strengthens us, and in the long run it will bring us to even greater joy.

I know I owe you an apology—and that word is too small. I stand before you naked, defenseless, dependent on your mercy, begging
your forgiveness. For you knew our love from the very beginning. You recognized in that glance that passed between us, up there on the hill after he fell, all the charge and power and blessedness of love, while I was dull and stupid, denying it, trying to protect myself from it, trying to pretend that it wasn’t happening, that it
couldn’t
happen like this, and I ignored what you were telling me with your eyes and your every gesture. I thought it was enough to follow you down the hill and suggest that we pray together. You were right to be angry with me for not seeing what you had already seen. What had happened was so obvious. Why did I refuse to acknowledge it? You must have thought me so insensitive, such a moron. You were right to turn from me and walk away. Even now, when I bring to mind that moment when you started back up the hill and I remember the stoop of your shoulders, the heaviness in your stride that spoke of rejection, I groan aloud at my behavior. What an idiot! I could have lost us what we have. Joe, in the name of God, please forgive me.

Now at least you know that I have seen what you saw. And you constrained as you are by your situation and by your sensitivity to Clarissa’s feelings, have welcomed me in ways that no intrusive ears or eyes will intercept, by means that I alone can understand. You knew that I was bound to come to you. You were waiting for me. That’s why I had to phone you late that night, as soon as I realized what you had been telling me with your eyes. When you picked up the phone I heard the relief in your voice. You accepted my message in silence, but don’t think I wasn’t aware of your gratitude. When I put the phone down I wept with joy, and I guessed that you were weeping too. Now at last life could begin. All the waiting and loneliness and praying had borne its fruit, and I got down on my knees and gave thanks, over and over again until it was dawn. Did you sleep that night? I don’t think so. You lay awake in the dark, listening
to Clarissa’s breathing and wondering where all this was taking us.