Gut Symmetries (4 page)

I hurled and hurled and finally stood alone in the Buddha calm of his empty room. Breathe in. Breathe out.

My fingers were sticky. Hate. Anger. Pain. The words would not fall. I was bleeding words. I went into the bathroom to try to wash them away but when I drew back my hand from the clear cold water, the words welled up again, red and liquid, danger words, broken words, the cracked vessel of my love for him.

It was then that I began to cry. I knelt down, my head against the basin, filling it up like an offering with no one to whom I could offer it. A salty sea and no boat on it.

Blood and tears and crumbled words and words not fit for human use. Without love what does humanness mean?

YOU: Of course I love you.

ME: And someone else.

YOU: Sex ...

ME: You talk as if it were an incurable disease.

YOU: Perhaps it is an incurable disease.

ME: I am the one who is suffering.

YOU: My feelings for you have never changed.

ME: How can you keep alive what is caught in its own death?

YOU: Words, words.

ME: Would you prefer I spoke in numbers? How many times have you slept with her? How many months have you been seeing her? How old is she? What are her measurements? Does she reach orgasm quickly?

YOU: Stop it.

ME: Or not at all?

YOU: Calm down.

ME: Wife as walking Valium.

YOU: Look at this place . . .

ME: All my own work.

YOU: So I see.

ME: But you don't understand.

YOU: Men and women are different.

ME: You think I don't desire other men?

YOU: Who?

ME: Who, who, for a theoretical physicist you have a solid concrete brain. I desire other men. I don't sleep with them because I love you.

YOU: You should have been born a Catholic.

ME: For comfort?

YOU: For ambition. You might have been the first woman Pope.

ME: Cruel man.

YOU: Sorry. Just a joke.

ME: My husband the bedroom humorist.

YOU: Let me go into my study for a •while. I have to think.

ME: Take a chair.

He frowned at me as though I were an inelegant equation; necessary but cumbersome, a bore to manipulate. I was no longer his living beauty of physical laws. No doubt he was telling her about the poetry of numbers. I looked in the mirror. Was that my face? I was gargoyled with grief. A stretched taunted thing. A waterspout of misery. He had poured his indifference down on me and I had let it out as dirty water. He thought I was the dirty water not himself.

Is it crazy to act crazy in a crazy situation? It has logic. It may even have dignity if dignity is what hallmarks the human spirit and preserves it.

I was not going to sink for him.

There was a noise from his study like a car that wouldn't start. A mix of roar and whine.

YOU: What have you done?

ME: I have thrown all of your things out of the window.

YOU: Why?

ME: To make me feel better.

YOU: You could have killed someone.

ME: I could have killed you.

YOU: This isn't making sense.

ME: There is no sense to what you have done. You didn't think about me when you were touching her. You threw me out of the window.

YOU: You jumped.

ME: What?

YOU: You have lived in your own world for years.

ME: You mean I haven't lived entirely in yours.

YOU: I don't expect that. I just expect . . .

ME: A little love and understanding.

YOU: Yes. Love and understanding.

ME: Then go and find it.

YOU: I'd better pack a bag.

He went into the exploded bedroom and returned with half a suitcase.

'What do you expect me to do with this?'

'Put it on your head.'

He flung it down and walked back through the doorway. Then he hesitated.

'What happened to the door?'

'It had an affair and left home.'

About half an hour later he came past me wearing three pairs of trousers, six sweaters, at least two shirts, his sports gear tied round his waist. In his arms he carried a bundle of assorted shoes and clothes.

'This is ridiculous.'

'Yes you are.'

I let him out of the one remaining door. He was going down the stairs when he seemed to remember something, or maybe something remembered him. He looked back at me as puddles of dirty water spilled round my feet.

'How did you find out?'

'She wrote to me.'

The morning mail. The sunny eight o'clock excrement of unasked for chances of a lifetime and unpaid bills. Buy a vibrating massage towel and win a trip to Iceland. Pay the electric company or spend the rest of your life in the dark. That morning I got a free gift of shampoo and an invitation to an introductory lecture on Transcendental dieting. Then there was a letter addressed to me. The handwriting was educated. The envelope was thick and square. I had no idea who it could be. I get a lot of letters. People like to write to writers. Now that poetry is fashionable again I have what might be called a following. I also have what might be called a leadering; the ones who write to tell me how to do it better. I thought the letter might be one of those.

I opened it. It was from a woman called Alice who said she was having an affair with my husband.

Cling. Pain upwards. Pain downwards. What corner of my insect world does pain not possess? The walls are smeared with it, sticky, slightly sweet. Pain is as total as a lover. I thought of those eighteenth-century engravings, German, where Death in his hood courts living flesh. This death is as obscene. The pictures in my head are sex and sex. I have become my own pornographer. His body. Her body. My body. Unseparated, twisting, dark. The grinning collusion of skulls boned in lust. The silent gravity-gone somersault of she on he on she. There we are, the infernal triangle, turning in the lubricious air, breasts, cock, cunt, oversized inflated parachutes of skin. I know we are falling, all three, but the ground is still a long way off. Until we grab each other like sky-divers. He was me I was him are we her? To vow yourself to someone else is to open a wound. From it blood flows freely, life of you to them. We call it blood brothers. We call it the dying Christ. The Fisher King's wound becomes him and will not heal. The vow of me to you and you to me is a red vulnerability on a grey shuttered world. We risk ourselves for each other, take the impossible step. Here is the knife that kills me in your hand. To prove it I let the blood myself. Monstrous, primitive, grand, divine, the one true extravagant gesture. The only thing I can claim to own is myself, and look, I shall give it to you, a ceremony of innocence made knowing in blood.

Don't say it was not so. We transfused each other. Now you want me to bleed to death so that no one can tell what wound it was we shared. It is not so simple. Vows can be broken; usually they are, but the wound tunnels deeper into the body one day to recur.

The Tower. Card XV of the Tarot deck. Two figures in identical dress explode from a shattered fortress.

Brick 1 Happiness. I love him he loves me.

Brick 2 Approval. I love him he loves me.

Brick 3 Security. I love him he loves me.

Brick 4 Time. I love him he loves me.

Brick 5 Complacency. I love him he loves me.

Brick 6 Indifference. I love him he loves me.

Brick 7 Apartness. I love me he loves him.

Brick 8 Refusal. I love him.

Brick 9 Lies. He loves me.

Brick 10 Danger. Love? Love?

Brick 11 One straw. One camel. Two backs.

The Tower. The safe walls are falling child.

I think back to Nimrod, the mighty hunter of Genesis, who built the Tower of Babel that God destroyed. Babel. Even when ruined, a man could walk for three days and still be in its shadow. What did I build that has called down such wrath?

I prefer to think of wrath on the outside and me on the inside. If I am a victim I cannot be the victimiser. The world is on my side here; rich and poor, sinner and saint, good man bad man, the murderer and the dead. I built a tower. I lived in it. Now it has been struck down. Did the lightning come like an indifferent god or did I draw it?

Don't imagine I torture myself with yesterday's washing up. A woman who slaves for a man does not have a marriage; she has a master. I don't want him at any price but I thought we had negotiated the price. Why did he go back to the market place looking for something cheaper?

When I lay down after reading the letter I could not speak or cry. My mind tried to force breathing pools under the dirty water. I seemed to find a bubble of air, and for a moment I could think clearly, then the waters closed again and I was back in the pain. Back in the sex. A stilted portfolio of anatomical drawings, genital insults pushed into my mouth and hair. Wherever I tried to rest my eyes, I saw the two of them making love. They were gessoed onto the walls and varnished into the floor. The chairs and tables that had belonged to my father were an Ottoman découpage of delicate limbs and flaming breasts. Their arms, their legs, her belly against his, here in my house, like dry rot. I crawled into the kitchen away from the horror and opened my eyes. The fridge rubbed itself against me. The floor tiles were hot. As I clung to the door it clung back. I wiped my face with a dishcloth and smelled their sex.

To betray with a kiss. The reek of Judas. I took the brush to clean my teeth and thought of his mouth. Kiss of life, kiss of death. Come kiss me so that I can read your lips, deceptions scripted and waiting to be staged. His lying heart is in his mouth. When I kissed him this morning I tasted his fear.

HE: What's the matter with you?

ME: Nothing.

Nothing slowly clotting my arteries. Nothing slowly numbing my soul. Caught by nothing, saying nothing, nothingness becomes me. When I am nothing they will say, surprised, in the way that they are forever surprised, 'But there was nothing the matter with her.'

Nothing. Ashes to ashes, dust to dust, love to love.

When I was a child I imagined love as a glass well. I could lean over and dabble my hands in it and come up shining. It was not a current or a torrent, but it was deep and at its bottom, flowing. I knew it was flowing by the noise of the water over the subterranean pebbles. Were there ships in there and ports that depended on it, and harbours where people naturally built their settlements? I saw the world beneath the water only by reflection. To enter it would have meant climbing into the well and letting myself drop away. My mother cautioned me against swimming.

Day by day I returned to the edge, watching what I could, dabbling my hands. Later, when I was grown up, I met a man carrying two buckets, who plunged them into the pellucid waters, took one for himself and gave one to me. I had never held so much water. Never found any container that could. I lost interest in the well, I had my bucket.

Other people envied Jove and me. We were clean, wholesome, sexy, together. We displayed our marriage like a trophy and we did think that we had won it well. We polished the trophy but forgot to polish ourselves. As it shone brighter we dimmed. Did it matter if we were a little dusty, a little worn?

Our marriage became a thing apart; that is, a thing apart from the two of us. Both of us had a touching faith in its talismanic powers of protection, and it is true that for a time a symbol can outlive the plain fact that the symbol makers have turned elsewhere.

We had built our safe tower, put the trophy on the roof and dared lightning to strike. He wanted to shut out temptation. I wanted to shut it in. I wanted to be tempted by him, re-tell the story of Adam and Eve. He wanted Paradise, a sacred temenos where he would be free of his own pain. My father used to warn me, 'Never turn your back on the serpent.' He was right that the enemy of Paradise is always already inside. Jove used to laugh at my Jewishness but wasn't the serpent under the foundations of our house even then? Once or twice I caught him drinking from the buckets.

Then my husband took what was left of the stale dirty water and threw it in my face.

No escape now. I stink of it. I smell like the sluicings from the abbatoir.

He said, 'If only you would try to understand.'

I understand that pain leapfrogs over language and lands in dumb growls beyond time. A place where there is no speech and no clock, no means of separating either the moment or its misery. Nobody comes and nobody goes. It is a place unvisited by civilisation. Civilisation has not happened.

Look up at the bloody clouds made angry by the sun. Cower back from them in your nakedness and in your fear. There is no one who will help you and help is not a cry, it is still the deep ache of millennia, before humanness, before love.