Siri Hustvedt - The Summer Without Men

Willful ignorance disguises grim reality: You mean I’m stuck with you? But it’s different now, says the savvy reader. That was the old days. We are more enlightened than the Enlightenment, we of the twenty-first century, with our widgets and gadgets and high-speed winklets and no-fault divorce. Ho! Ho! Ho! is my response to you. The sorrows of sex are never-ending. Give me an epoch, and I’ll give you a sobbing narrative of conjugal relations turned sour. Can I really blame Boris for his Pause, for his need to seize the day, for snatching the pausal snatch while there was still time, still time for the old-timer he was swiftly becoming? Don’t we all deserve to romp and hump and carry on? Dr. Johnson’s own sex life remains under wraps, mostly, thank heaven, but we do know that David Garrick told David Hume, who told Boswell, who recorded it in his journal, that after witnessing Dr. Johnson’s pleasure one night at the theater, Garrick hoped aloue happy tohe eminent lexicographer would return often, but the Great Man averred he would not. “For the white bubbies and the silk stockings of your Actresses,” said the Sage, “excite my genitals.” We all have ticklers, adaptive or not, and it is our nature to use them. One can be sick with jealousy and loneliness and still understand that.

But there is another aspect of long marriages that is rarely spoken about. What begins as ocular indulgence, the sight of the gleaming beloved, which incites the appetite for around-the-clock rumpty-rumpty, alters over time. The partners age and change and become so accustomed to the presence of the other that vision ceases to be the most important sense. I listened for Boris in the morning if I woke to see his half of the bed empty, listened for the flushing toilet or the sound of him filling the teakettle with water. I would feel the hard bones of his shoulders as I placed my hands on them to greet him silently while he read the paper before going to the lab. I did not peer into his face or examine his body; I merely felt that he was there, just as I smelled him at night in the dark. The odor of his warm body had become part of the room. And when we had our conversations that often went on into the night, it was his sentences I attended to. Alert to the transitions he made from one thought to the next, I concentrated on the content of his speech as it unwound in my mind, and I placed it inside the ongoing dialogue between us, which was sometimes savage, but more often not. It was rare that I studied him. Sometimes after we had done the deed, and he walked naked across the room, I would look at his long pale body with its round belly and his left leg with its blue varicose vein and at his soft well-formed feet, but not always. This is not the voluntary blindness of new attraction; it is the blindness of an intimacy wrought from years of parallel living, both from its bruises and its balms.

* * *

During our penultimate call before she was to leave for the month of August, I told Dr. S. what I had never told anyone. A week before Stefan killed himself, the two of us were sitting together on our sofa at home in Brooklyn, waiting for Boris. My brother-in-law had been released from the hospital only two days before. He was taking his lithium, but he had been explaining that it made his mind flat and the world distant. He leaned back on the sofa, closed his eyes, and said , But even when my head is dead, I love you, Mia, and I said I loved him, too, and he said, No, I love you. I’ve always loved you and it’s killing me .

Stefan was crazy, but he was not always crazy. He wasn’t crazy then. And he was beautiful. I had always found him beautiful, worn and disappointed though he was. The brothers resembled each other, but Stefan was much thinner and far more delicate, almost feminine in his features. His manias starved him because he forgot to eat. When he was flying, he went on sex binges with floozies he stumbled over in bars and on book-buying sprees he couldn’t afford and, like my friend Nobody, he spouted mysterian philosophies that were sometimes hard to follow. But that day he was in a state of quiescence. I said something about his feeling being a mistake, about all the time we had spent together, that he had come to rely on me, stuttering in confusion, and then my sentences dwindled to silence, but he went on: I love you because we’re the same. We’re not like the Commander General . That was one of Stefan’s nicknames for Boris. In belligerent moods, Stefan sometimes saluted his older brother. Sister Life, Stefan said, turning his face to me and taking my cheeks in his hands and he kissed me long and hard and I let him and I loved it and I never should have, I said to Dr. S. Before Boris walked through the door I had told Stefan that we couldn’t and it had been stupid, all the usual claptrap, and he had looked so hurt. And it’s killing me. Sister Guilt. His terrible dead face, his terrible dead body.

I knew that I was not to blame for Stefan’s death. I knew that he must have decided in a moment of despair that he did not want to ride the dragon anymore, and yet I had never been able to reproduce our conversation aloud, had never been able to get the words out into those open fields under the vast sky. Hearing myself speak, I understood that by declaring our mutual weakness and anger at Big Boris, Stefan had bound himself to me with a kiss. It was not the kiss as such that had mortified me and kept me silent, but what I had felt in Stefan, his jealousy and vengeance, and it was this that had frightened me, not because the feelings belonged to Stefan but because they also belonged to me. The little brother. The wife. The ones who came second.

“But you and Stefan were not the same,” Dr. S. said, not long before we hung up.

Not the same. Different.

“In the hospital I felt like Stefan.”

“But Mia,” Dr. S. said, “you are alive, and you want to live. From what I can tell, your will to live is bursting out all over.”

Sister Life.

I listened to myself breathe for a while. I heard Dr. S. breathe through the telephone. Yes, I thought. Bursting out all over. I liked that. I told her I liked it. We are such strange creatures, we human beings. Something had happened. Something unbound in the telling.

“If I were there with you right now,” I said, “I would jump into your lap and give you a big squeeze.”

“That would be an armful,” said Dr. S.

* * *

Around the same time, give or take a few days, even weeks, backward or forward, the following events were taking place beyond my immediate phenomenal consciousness, not necessarily in the order presented. They cannot be unscrambled by me or perhaps by anyone, hence in medias res:

My mother is reading Persuasion for the third time in preparation for the book club meeting to be held in the Rolling Meadows lounge on August 15. She assumes a position of ultimate comfort for this task. Lying on her bed with three pillows behind her, a soft neck brace to cushion arthritic twinges, hot water bottle for h cold feet, reading glasses for the bridge of her nose to bring the type into focus, and a special-order lap desk that holds the volume in position, she immerses herself in the lives of people she knows well, especially Anne Elliot, whom my mother, Bea, and I all love and chat about as if Kellynch Hall is down the hall, and good, old, long-suffering, sensible Anne might knock on the door at any moment.

Pete and Lola are fighting, a lot.

Daisy, who is still Muriel every evening at the playhouse, becomes Daisy Detective post-performance and trails her sphinx of a father around the city. The man has taken to long nocturnal perambulations, the meaning of which she does not understand. True to her character, Daisy dons flamboyant costumes for her gumshoe expeditions, which (although I know nothing of them or of her life as a spy at the time) seem likely to make her more conspicuous rather than less: Groucho Marx glasses, eyebrows, nose, and mustache; long blond wig with spangly red evening dress; tailored suit and briefcase; bowler hat and cane. Of course, in NYC, where the naked, the nuts, and the outlandish mingle freely with the staid and the conventional, she might have passed hordes of pedestrians without receiving a single glance. At around three in the morning, every morning, Boris returns to the apartment on East Seventieth Street, lets himself in, and vanishes from our daughter’s sight, upon which she returns to her apartment in Tribeca, throws herself exhausted onto her bed, and, as she put it to me later, crashes.