Giving Up (17 page)

absolutely couldn't wait
, and he came up the stairs with that look on his face. ‘What's wrong?' he said. ‘Did you go to that new takeout place without me?' She immediately regretted putting it to him like that. She should've been more casual about it. He might've slipped up and revealed the real reason for the cover-up, instead of spitting out the first lie that came into his head. ‘Yeah,' he said, as if she'd just asked him something trivial that hardly justified breaking the rule about yelling down into the basement, ‘I went to try it out that night you met Veronica for drinks.' She thought back to their conversation from that night. She was certain that she'd asked him what he'd had for dinner, but she couldn't remember what he'd said. ‘Didn't I ask you what you ate when I got home?' ‘If you had,' he said, ‘then I would've told you that I got takeout.' ‘But I thought we were going to go there together,' she was thrown off by her memory lapse and felt like she had to accept his reply, even though she had the feeling that he was full of shit. ‘We always go to new places together. We had just been talking about going there last week. . . . Jesus,' she said after a sudden thought, ‘have you gone there before? Or was this your first time?' ‘Holy shit,' he yelled. ‘This is fucking ridiculous. It was my first time there. You were out. I felt like treating myself and I was bored with our usual places, so I went there. I'm sorry. We can order from there tomorrow if you want. Okay? Is the interrogation over now?' ‘Yes,' she said. ‘Fine.' But once he was back in the basement she obsessed over the night that she'd gone out for drinks with Veronica, and in particular what she had talked about with James when she got home. Maybe he wasn't lying. It's possible she hadn't asked him what he had for dinner, even though it is usually one of the first things she asked whenever they spent the night apart. She should've been more careful. Instead of asking up front if he'd been to the restaurant she could've worked up to it by mentioning that she was talking with a co-worker who'd gone the night before and wouldn't shut up about it all day, and then suggesting that they go there this weekend to finally see what everyone was talking about. She could've withheld the receipt and if he'd admitted to going a few nights ago then he'd never know that she had known. But if, worst-case scenario, he pretended at the restaurant that weekend that it was his first time there, she could bring it out, even though it made her sick that this is what she'd come to, catching him in a lie like some fucking TV lawyer. So because she forgot to be sneakier, he was able to get away with acting as if his trip to the new takeout place was of no significance, when in fact it signified everything that was wrong in their lives together. ‘Next time,' she said to herself, ‘I'll set things up so there will be none of this
he said/she said
horseshit. Either he'll be lying or telling the truth. None of this grey-area garbage.' Of course by now she knows that everything he says is a
potential lie
. If he went through the trouble of concealing something that was (in a certain sense) as insignificant and inconsequential as his trip to the new takeout restaurant (even though it was in another sense of major significance and dire consequence) then he must be lying and concealing all sorts of other banal facts about his life and events and people and basically everything that makes up a person's existence. It isn't the first time she has caught him lying about or trying to hide something that, when she found out what it was, struck her as so meaningless that she was at a complete loss as to why he would bother hiding it in the first place. At first, she saw these incidents the same way she did his occasional drinking binges (which came on without any warning and only happened once every year or so, when, out of the blue, he would get suddenly and spectacularly drunk for days, sometimes longer). The way that he would shift from having a good time with a few close friends over a couple of drinks to chugging back full glasses of whiskey and making a fool of himself was so out of character for him that she saw it as an aberration, like a freak storm, the sort of thing that is so rare and random that it's remembered for years afterwards as an alien event, the sort of thing that
never happens around here
, even though it did, and does. But as the number of lying incidents increased it became impossible to see his deceptions over petty events and details as something random, or
outside his normal behaviour
, when it was more than likely – this thought filled her with an intense anxiety – that this behaviour was systemic and deeply rooted. She used to think all this lying was maybe a temporary thing, that he'd eventually give it up and just be himself, but now she knows that the lying is his
true self
. And it isn't even the systemic lying that causes her creeping unease and even horror – what is really disturbing about all of this is that he is trying to conceal things about himself that she is perfectly aware of. No matter how many times he lies or withholds something, he never actually succeeds in hiding what it is he doesn't want her to see. In fact, it's the opposite, he reveals things about himself that she is aware of but that don't really bother her. Why go through so much trouble to keep things from her that were so ordinary? It was like a murderer who tries to defend himself by saying that he only meant to scare his victim. By trying to come up with an excuse, he makes everything worse. He is so worried that she might be upset with him for going behind her back and trying the new takeout restaurant without her that he doesn't even consider the implications of lying to her about something like that. ‘I don't want you to know me,' he is saying to her. ‘I don't want you to see me for who I really am. I want you to think I am something that I am not. Because what I am is someone who doesn't want to be what they really are. And what I really am is something much worse than what I appear to be.' Which is just a convoluted way of saying that all he really is, at the bottom of his heart, or at the end of the day, is what he doesn't want to be. And this, Mary suspects, is why he spends all his free time down in the basement pretending to work on something that both of them know he will never finish. He doesn't want to be who he really is, which is a mostly decent, sympathetic and altogether ordinary guy. He is terrified of the ordinary fate in store for him, the same fate that awaits millions of other people like him who lead quietly desperate lives that are by and large pleasantly uneventful. He is determined to escape the trap that he feels has been set for him since the moment he was born – to have just enough awareness to understand what he would never be capable of. The moment he set out on his life's work he knew that the whole thing was a sham. ‘Here I am,' he thinks to himself more or less every time he has a glimmer of clarity, ‘pretending to have faith in what I'm doing, when what I really believe I'm doing – instead of making incremental progress on my life's work – is ruining any chance of enjoying the normal life that is my true fate.' This is what his life's work really is, an elaborate denial of
what he really is
. So when he tells her that he thinks someone may have followed him home, what he's actually saying to her is, ‘I don't want to pretend anymore. I don't want to hide. From this moment on I'll never lie or conceal anything from you ever again.' And he really believes this – that it's possible, after years of distorting every aspect of his character, to make a complete break from this behaviour and become the sort of person who is at peace with who he is, who claims to be nothing else, who manages to somehow be at once of the world and completely out of it, entirely oneself and at the same time no one at all, instead of continuing as someone who – to justify (or at least excuse) his life – tries to set himself apart by pursuing his life's work, but only ends up pretending to work toward this life-affirming goal, which, instead of setting him apart, confirms his place in the undistinguished mass of people who never
make anything of themselves
, and live their lives in regret. Maybe, until now, the only reason that he hasn't given up these ridiculous pretentions is on account of a persistent and by now borderline superstitious faith that even though it is clearly impossible to escape his perfectly ordinary, and therefore terrifying fate, he still believes it might happen somehow. So maybe instead of always trying to keep some distance from what he is, and what Mary thinks he is, he gives up on trying to control her perspective. ‘I'll tell her everything that happened between me and the stranger, leave nothing out,' and just the thought of finally giving up so totally on the farce of the last decade of his life is so exhilarating that he starts to shake. So he tells her what happened when he took a break from his so-called life's work and went for a walk around the block. Even though he is only telling her about the encounter with the stranger, he feels as though he is confessing his innermost secrets, exposing everything that up until now he has kept hidden, basically because he was afraid of what they signified (i.e. the person he really is, instead of the person he thought he was). ‘That's all over with now,' he thinks, ‘Now I'm finally coming clean.' After keeping a distance from Mary for the last ten years – estranging himself – and refusing to acknowledge the very basis of their shared reality, he is all of a sudden in a hurry to close this gap, to obliterate this distance, so there would be nothing between them any longer, no obstruction between who he is and who she thought he was. He wants to tell her everything, not just about the stranger, but about his life's work and how he's been steadily destroying the little he has managed to accomplish, and about how he is relieved that she hasn't been able to get pregnant, even though he feels extremely guilty because he knows how devastating it is for her. He wants to tell her about the porn, his crazy money issues, all the lies, etc. He wants to tell her about the anguish he feels every day he goes to work, and how he's just been coasting along for years, but is starting to worry that he isn't going to be able to keep the act up for much longer. Most of all, he wants to confess to the absolute despair he feels whenever he is down in the basement and he stops to consider the mess that he's made of his life, how he has gradually and inexorably closed off every possibility until he's reduced himself to the singular goal of succeeding or failing at his life's work. He put off having a family because he thought it might distract him. He never seriously pursued a career since it would have got in the way of his true calling. He no longer has close friends and merely keeps up a few acquaintances to help fill out the scattered milestones he still bothers to commemorate. Family relations have dwindled down to holidays, a few tentative telephone conversations, and the odd, grudging visit. He has no other hobbies or enthusiasms, or even habits really, because every moment of his waking life is infected by his life's work. He'd made a bet, a colossal gamble. He'd gone
all in
. And increasingly he is convinced that it was a bad bet. He no longer believes in himself and his life's work and he is certain that instead of being the sort of person who struggles heroically in the face of ceaseless opposition, ignoring the pleas of their family and friends to listen to reason and give up their reckless and destructive pursuit, conquering the darkest moments of self-doubt, suffering through the most soul-sucking adversity and near-unbearable deprivations, only to ultimately triumph and prove everyone wrong by creating a work of enormous and lasting significance, he is actually the sort of person you never hear about or read about, who ends up wasting years of his life stubbornly ignoring the sensible advice of concerned loved ones, repressing the mounting suspicions that he has made a crucial mistake, that he should never have put any faith in his ability or talent, that instead of ultimately triumphing and proving everyone (including himself) wrong, all of his effort and sacrifice will amount to nothing, and he will end up disgraced and alone, tormented to the end of his days by thoughts of what he could have and should have done instead of devoting his life to a lost cause. All of this is racing through his mind as he tells Mary about his encounter with the con man, but instead of confessing these thoughts to her, he is giving an exhaustive account of the previous hour, describing the stranger's appearance (dishevelled
and
good-looking) and the street that they met on, what the stranger said and how he said it, what James said and what he was thinking about throughout the encounter. ‘In order for her to understand why I did what I did,' he thinks, as he's describing the con man's facial hair, ‘she has to know what was going through my mind.' He worries that she'll get hung up on the fact that he'd given away four hundred dollars to a complete stranger, and draw all sorts of misguided and cynical conclusions about why he fell for such an obvious and clichéd routine, the sort of scam that nobody, not even kids or old people, would fall for anymore. It's extremely important for him that she understand the
full context
behind what happened. He totally sympathizes with her. If he was in her place he'd have an equally hard time understanding how she could be so naive, and he might end up suspecting that she was keeping something from
him
, that she had been attracted to the stranger, maybe that she even went into an alley with him and in a moment of insane recklessness fucked him while hanging onto a chain-link fence, or leaning up against a red brick wall – why else would she hand over four hundred dollars to someone she just met unless she was hoping to profit in some way, whether it was an explicit exchange (i.e. money for sex) or something more ephemeral, such as the erotic charge from giving over such a large sum of money to a good-looking man who was potentially dangerous, but more likely just desperate and dishonest? It is simply inconceivable that she could be taken in by such a glaringly obvious con, so the only way she would fall for something like that is because she hoped to gain something, and that what she was hoping for was illicit, a betrayal that would no doubt be of a sexual nature. There is no way, if it had been Mary instead of James who had been so easily duped, that he wouldn't end up suspecting her of some form of infidelity, either actual or only potential. So he knew that the only way to deal with the suspicions that Mary would most certainly have was to make an exhaustive confession. If he explained his exact frame of mind leading up to his encounter with the con man, as well as his precise train of thought right up to the moment he handed over the four hundred dollars, then there would be no room for her doubts or anxieties or paranoid thoughts because she would be able to see that he had left nothing out. Even the most trivial and tangential digression would be included. This is the only way he could prevent her from getting the wrong idea. Only the most complete accounting of every thought that passed through his mind, every utterance, the tiniest gesture, would succeed in depicting what actually happened between James and the stranger, anything less than that would be a distortion, a misrepresentation, and a lie. ‘Everything is relevant,' he thinks. ‘Everything is significant.' There is no other way for Mary to understand what happened out there unless she has all the facts. People think they can get the gist of a situation if they are furnished with the outline of an event. ‘Just give me the broad strokes,' they say, ‘I can fill in the rest.' We think that we know what happened because we've seen it all before. One situation resembles the next, and there's nothing that can't be compared, and equated, with something that came before. ‘The same thing happened to me,' we say in order to be spared the trouble of listening to a story or an excuse that we feel as though we've already heard a million times before. ‘I know what happens next,' we say, because even as we claim to believe that each event is different, that every situation is unique, the reality is that there's nothing anybody can tell us that we haven't already heard in one version or another, at least a million times before. Mary sits there and listens impatiently as James recounts, in the most exhaustive detail possible, an anecdote that, although in literal terms is unique, and technically has never happened before, is nonetheless painfully familiar. She already knows, the moment he starts telling his story, what he is going to say and how it is going to end. His precise train of thought, the exact details of what he said and what he did, while absolutely fascinating to him, are so predictable that she would wince when she saw them building into a long, drawn-out story. What does it matter to her how he was feeling or what he was thinking when he handed over four hundred dollars to a complete stranger, if it's all the same in the end? The moment she hears him say, ‘A really good-looking guy approached me on the street and asked me to cash a money order for him,' she immediately knows that the story will end with him falling for this obvious scam, so that everything else he says, all the details he thinks are so important, are, for her, beside the point. She doesn't see his confession in the same way he does. He thinks he is shining a bright light onto his life, but all she sees is an embarrassing attempt to cast a shadow over the central truth of his story. ‘He's stalling,' she thinks. Instead of just coming out with it, he is trying to bury the truth under this endless preamble where he just keeps piling on the details, which, among friends, at parties, can sometimes be amusing, but at home, in a tense situation like this one, after she has just told him about the cat incident, is the sort of thing that would make her furiously impatient. But she knows if she tries to cut him off and force him to skip to the end, to