Adam Thirlwell - Lurid & Cute

given the obvious complications

And I think this was all the more difficult because Romy was my friend. Had she been an acquaintance unknown to everyone I might have felt a little more relaxed. Whereas to think of the many ways in which Candy might find out! — which would for instance involve Romy telling someone we both knew, but this would only happen if Romy hated me or wished me harm, which I found doubtful, but then another possibility was some tiny slip where I would mention some detail of blood or hospitals, or perhaps could have been seen at the hospital by someone else we knew who had perhaps overdosed or become involved in a stabbing or altercation, because it’s difficult to know who might be anywhere. So I stayed awake at night and imagined Wyman or Shoshana — although Shoshana, true, was no longer in the city — watching me from the cafeteria, just seeing me arrive bloodstained with Romy and noting this, like some Gestapo stooge. And in remorse I leaned over in the night and kissed my wife very softly. Those were the thoughts I possessed in this time, and it requires a certain character to cope with them — for lying is a talent like any other, like eating or happiness or drug-taking, it’s one of those things where you think you can just do it but in fact it takes training, intuition, physical stamina. And of course I do not mean at all that I did these things without guilt, it is guilt precisely that I am trying to describe, but especially for all my other selves, the selves I might be losing if I never continued into these adventures.

— You what? said Wyman.

— Listen! I said.

For what never gets said in these discussions of morality is the deeper problem of timing. If you have married so young, and Candy and I we did marry very young, in full innocence and sincerity, then what then?

— You stay together, said Wyman, — or you split up.

— Is not so simple, I said.

Because it really is true that everyone thinks they will not be there when someone dies, I mean when someone dies who is not their endless and married love. Or certainly I thought this was true about me. The only person I imagined ministering to at a deathbed was my adored wife, Candy, and even then I hoped I wouldn’t because my preferred option would be that the person who would be dying would be me and in her arms. In every possible future I ever imagine, my wife is there. That’s what I think inside although I know that on the outside it creates some difficult appearances, a possible carelessness about the feelings of other people — when in fact I think the opposite is true, I think too much about other people. If I can make anyone happy, I want to do that, however complicated the consequences, however much it leads to a way of thinking that expands itself in waves, or like the way the bees arrange themselves, inside their vibrating hives.

whose structure reveals a universal sadness

And sure, I said to Wyman, my most spiritual friend, as we smoked some preliminary chemicals in preparation for a night out, later on in this account, when I was nostalgic for such simple worries, I know that in human history the majority of sadness belongs to the dependent women. I know that the breakdowns have always been those of the bedridden woman — leaving the lunch table in hysterics, then setting up church bazaars and everyone pitying them. I totally know this but also now, I tried to argue, I knew what they knew. Me too I was the victim of my economic circumstances! I was like the heroine in the telenovelas. I was the woman cheating on her husband with her black gardener, and taking Valium or other pills while reading horoscopes in the tabloids. I don’t mean those examples are the only other examples of sadness in human history. In the annals of the Song Dynasty I’m sure there were husbands and wives who were also perplexed by their leisure time. I just mean that when you have this vastness at your disposal then it’s only natural to feel let’s say a little hopeless or unhappy even if, having said that, I can do the next part of the interview myself, as something like: But then what do you expect, kid, when you leave your place of employment? I know this is the one-dollar question. You also wanted meetings with your PA? You wanted to make art, sure, but also have a heavy schedule of appointments? Sure, I understood. But still, it was upsetting. Life! I wanted life! And really, was this so unusual? More and more I was convinced that the most urgent task, in every megalopolis, was how to use your time — how, in other words, will you reveal it as grander than it seems? It’s so easy to know what Beauty looks like in a statue or a painting, but what does it look like in a life? Me, I ask this question all the time and at least that’s an occupation like any other. Lethargy, I think, is a difficult accusation. For surely it’s possible to argue that the Zen master in his padded cell is doing more work than you. And if it is, well, sometimes so was I. I was very busy with my reflections –

the lost art of happiness

— like in particular one conversation with my friend Tiffany, who taught at the university, when she berated me for even hinting at the wish for other lives. You ask for this and then you hate us for it? Is that it? This was basically Tiffany’s argument. You want to be looked after and have this wife who brings home the roubles and rupees and then it makes you also feel aggrieved? Well, maybe, snooks, she was basically adding, as she looked at me in scorn, you could just grow up for a moment. I totally did see the justice of how she was arguing but also I really did not, for the values by which she seemed to be judging were both unimpeachable and not my own. In many ways I feel let down by my friends. It’s like that film which Tiffany loves, where the black and white people begin an affair and then go back to their husbands and wives. Why, she once said to me, when I was not at all talking about this, should a possible future happiness be worth more than the present happiness of two people? And I wanted to assert that I really could not understand it. About happiness I am often wrong but at least I would like to believe it is the only question. You want what, she then added — a life without regret, is that it?

ME

If I have a regret, it’s that coffee with condensed milk in the Vietnamese way is not something you can have every day, because it really does fuck up your diet goals. If I have a regret then that would be it.

TIFFANY

Is like you’re tyrannised, boo, by this fear of missing out.

She said it with this heavy wistfulness, as if just looking at me from far away and out of reach, an hauteur which I liked to think was possibly unjustified. In my defence I could imagine surely another perspective. I mean: lowdown, clumsy, sly, underhanded — can these not be values too, if happiness is at stake? And perhaps, OK, I therefore conceded to Wyman, my kind of listless paralysed atmosphere more usually happens in dictatorships and other totalitarian states, that’s where moods like mine tend to breed most colourfully, among the presidential palacios and tear gas and lampadas — but I would say that paralysed states can also happen in a number of other guises… There can be this sense of unreality, I said, while Wyman nodded — although he may not have been concentrating, it’s never easy to tell with anyone in any conversation — if things have just come to a gentle halt, like at the quietest country train station in the humid afternoon. Wyman, can you not feel this too? I’m only drawing a parallel, but I think in many ways my plight is similar to a lawyer or accountant from a bankrupt state who leaves everything to come and run a grocery store in a giant and clean city. The new identity is a shock, definitely, and in some ways a humiliation, but also it means that as you walk through the streets you do feel that you are walking in disguise, with all the hidden powers that a disguise might confer. You suddenly see meaning leaking everywhere — the way you might come back to some glamorous hotel in the late morning to see the used towels and sheets in formless damp piles in the otherwise perfect corridors.