Siri Hustvedt - The Summer Without Men

* * *

Boris, I replied. I have missed you, too. Your letter is oblique, however, as to who left whom? You can understand that from my point of view, this matters. If the Pause threw you onto the street, and this act caused a reconsideration of our marriage, it is very different from an alternative, which is that you decided to leave her, after reconsidering your relationship with her because of your former relationship with me. Those two are also distinct from a mutual decision to part ways. Mia

(If he wasn’t going to write “Love,” I sure as hell wasn’t going to stoop to that devilishly tricky noun.)

* * *

Excitement usually comes at a clip. Agitation in one corner is often mirrored by a similar hubbub in another. There tleo rhyme or reason to this. Correlation is not cause. It is just “the music of chance,” as one prominent American novelist has phrased it. Long, lazy, uneventful periods are followed by sudden bursts of action, and so it was that the very morning after Pete’s screeching exit from his wife and children, another equally dramatic departure was taking place over at Rolling Meadows, which I discovered when I paid my daily visit to my mother. Regina had gone to the beauty parlor to have her long hair “professionally put up,” packed two suitcases, called the three Swans to announce that she couldn’t bear her incarceration in the Home any longer, and then, after slamming the door to her apartment, had made a speedy march down the hall (or as speedily as was possible for Regina with her delicate leg). My mother and Peg (Abigail was indisposed) had followed the fugitive to the front door, where they cross-examined her about what in heaven’s name she was up to. Her three daughters had counseled her to stay. She had ended it with Nigel, hadn’t she, after the story about the gold watch and the buxom barmaid? Within seconds, they concluded that Regina had no idea where she was going. Her flight was pure flight, that is to say, flight without a destination. Moreover, she had rambled on about Dr. Westerberg, whom she claimed had threatened her, and said that if she didn’t “get away” she was convinced he would “put her away.” After a quarter of an hour, my mother and Peg had cajoled Regina back to her apartment. A tearful scene had followed, but in the end, she had seemed resigned to her fate and had promised her friends to stay put.

Chapter 2: Only a couple of hours before I arrived, my mother had knocked on Regina’s door to check on her state of mind. Regina had refused to let her in. Not only that, she had claimed she had pushed the furniture up against the door as a barricade against enemies, especially Westerberg. When my mother reported this, she shook her head sadly. I could only sympathize. When paranoia arrives, it does little good to tell the paranoiac that the fear is unfounded. I understood. My brain had cracked, too. And so, after trying to reason with her unreasonable friend, my mother had gone to the nurse to report on the developments in No. 2706, and the medical staff had been summoned, including the diabolical Westerberg, and the door had been unlocked, and the furniture had been removed from the doorway, and after that Regina herself had been removed to a hospital in Minneapolis for “testing.”

When she finished this story, my mother appeared to gaze straight through me. She looked sad. Sadness was chasing us all, it seemed. I was sitting beside her and took her hand but said nothing.

“I don’t think she will come back,” my mother said. “She won’t come back here, anyway.”

I squeezed my mother’s thin fingers and she squeezed mine in return. Through the window I saw a robin alight on the bench in the courtyard.

“She had spunk,” my mother said. I noted her use of the past tense.

Another robin. A pair.

My mother began to talk about Harry. All losses led back to Harry. She had often spoken of him, but this time she said, “I wonder what would have happened to me if Harry hadn’t died. I wonder how I would have been different.” She told me what I already knew, that after her brother’s death, she had decided to be perfect for her parents, never to give them any grief, ever again, that she had tried so hard, but it had not worked. And then she said what she had never said before, in a barely audible voice: “Sometimes I wondered if they wished it had been me.”

“Mama,” I said sharply.

She paid no attention and continued talking. She still dreamed of Harry, she said, and they weren’t always good dreams. She would find his body lying somewhere in the apartment behind a bookshelf or chair, and she couldn’t understand why he wasn’t in his grave in Boston. Once in a dream, her father had appeared and demanded to know what she had done with Harry. When Bea and I were children, she said, she had had periods of terror that something would take us from her, an illness or accident. “I wanted to protect you from every kind of hurt. I still do, but it doesn’t work, does it?”

“No,” I said. “It doesn’t.”

My mother’s melancholy didn’t last, however. I told her Boris had been in touch, which both cheered and worried her, and we weighed several possible outcomes and discussed what I wanted from my husband, and I discovered I didn’t exactly know, and we went over Daisy’s acting life and how precarious it all was, but how damned good the kid was, after all, and then Bea called while I was still there, and I listened to my mother laugh at some witticism of my sister’s, and over dinner she laughed again, hard, at one of my own. She embraced me tightly when we parted, and I sensed that her earlier gloom had been dispelled, not forever, of course, but for the evening. Twelve-year-old Harry would always be there, the ghost of Mama’s childhood, the empty figure of her parents’ hopes and of her guilt for having lived. I imagined my six-year-old mother as I had seen her in an old photograph. She has red hair. Although it is impossible to see the color in black and white, I add the redness in my mind. Little Laura stands beside Harry, a head shorter than he is. They are both wearing white sailor suits with navy trim. Neither child is smiling, but it is my mother’s face that interests me. By chance, she is the one looking ahead, into the future.

* * *

Below, without commentary, an epistolary dialogue made possible by racing twenty-first-century technology that took place the following day between B.I. and M.F. on the scenarios A, B, or D, and so on.

B.I.: Mia, does it really matter what happened? Isn’t it enough that it is over between us, and I want to see you?

M.F.: If the story were reversed, and I were you, and you I, wouldn’t it matter to you? It is a question of the state of your heart, old friend of mine. Heart dented by rejection à la française, unhappy and surprisingly helpless alone, Husband decides it may be better o begin reconciliation proceedings with Old Faithful; or, Seeing the error of his ways, Spouse penetrates his Folly (ha, ha, ha) and has revelation: Worn Old Wife looks better from Uptown.

B.I.: Can we dispense with the bitter irony?

M.F.: How on earth do you think I would have made it through this without it? I would have stayed mad.

B.I.: She broke it off. But the thing was already broken.

M.F.: I was broken, and you came to the hospital once.

B.I.: They wouldn’t let me come. I tried to come, but they refused me.

M.F.: What do you want from me now?

B.I.: Hope.

I couldn’t answer “hope” until the next day. The reversal I had dreamed of had come, and I felt as hard as a piece of flint. My answer to the big B. arrived in the morning: “Woo me.”

And he, in high Romantic style, wrote back, “Okay.”

* * *

Mr. Nobody had not written in some time, and I began to worry. We had been lobbing balls back and forth on the subject of play, that is, playing with play. He threw me a Derridian fastball first, the endless play of logos, round and round we go without end and without resolution, and it’s all in the text, the doing and the undoing, then I threw back Freud’s “Remembering, Repeating, and Working Through,” in which the esteemed doctor tells us that transference, the spooky place between analyst and patient, is like a spielplatz, a playground, a terrain somewhere between illness and real life, where one can become the other, and then he hurled back a beautiful quote from the great mountain himself: “If anyone tells me that it is degrading to the Muses to use them only as a plaything and a pastime, he does not know, as I do, the value of pleasure, play, and pastime. I would almost say that any other aim is ridiculous.” I fired back with Winnicott and Vygotsky, the latter dead since 1934 but a brand-new love of mine, and after that, my spouting phantom went silent.