Paul Theroux - My Secret History

I was making progress on my work. I needed the routine, and Jenny’s indifference and Jack’s demands were part of that same routine. I needed to make meals, I needed to wash the dishes, I needed to stop. It was necessary that I feel like a prisoner; it was crucial to my wishing to free myself. I had fitted my writing into all of this.

The trip had taken four and a half months. The book took exactly the same length of time to write. I now saw that it was a book. I had never found that an easy word to say.

On the day that I wrote the last page I left the house earlier than usual and went for a long walk before meeting Jack. I was an alien, a stranger, but this city did not frighten me anymore. The ugly brick houses did not depress me any longer. It did not matter that there were no vistas and that I could not see farther than the end of the road. I stopped dreaming about dying here and being buried in a muddy hole in Catford, beside the tracks. It had been a hard winter, but I had come through it. I was not afraid anymore. My work was done.

“How’s your work coming?”

“It’s a book,” I said. But I was too superstitious to claim that it was all finished. “Almost done.”

“I’m sure it’s good,” Jenny said.

She had not seen a word of it; no one had. That secrecy made me strong.

“I don’t know,” I said. I liked it for being a new thing, but I could not say it was good. And yet I was not worried.

It did not matter to me whether the book was good or not, though I was sure it was funny, and I knew there was merit in that. I believed that comedy was the highest expression of truth. This traveling would not say everything to everyone but it had something for some people, I was sure. They were people like me. In the course of writing I had stopped seeing myself as special or different and began to think: There are many people like me. I had written the book in order to lose myself, and they would read it for the same reason, to get through their own Siberian winter.

There was one thing more that satisfied me. This was precisely the book I had in mind, the one I had set out to write. I wasn’t looking for praise, only a way of ending the trip; and had done what I intended. When the book was finished the trip was over. Now I was really and truly home.

I liked looking at the stack of paper. A book was a physical thing, and writing seemed to me like one of the plastic arts. I enjoyed holding the whole ream of it and bumping it on my desk and clapping it square with my hands. It was quite a bundle. I loved weighing it and then opening it at random, and squaring it up again.

It was unlike any other book I had written. And I had made it less out of my trip than out of my misery and disillusionment. I had been dying; and this was a way of living. For every reason I could think of, this was a strange and happy book. And now that it was done I could hand it over and go on living. In the course of writing it I had other ideas — for stories, for a novel. And never once did I think of a story that went: Once there was a man who returned from a long trip to discover that his wife had taken a lover. That was my secret, and not revealing it was the source of my strength. I saw that I had lived my whole life that way, drawing energy from secrecy, and feeding my imagination on what I kept hidden.

Jenny and I entered that emotional region that is past disappointment and fury, and beyond argument. We had arrived at a kind of peaceful aridity that is probably despair. Fury is life, but this was nothing like that. We had long since stopped arguing. She had given up on me, and I had retreated to my room and my book. Because she had despaired of me she hadn’t disturbed me. I had said hurtful things to her and she had replied with that utterly stupid formula, “I’ll never forgive you—”

It was the end of June, and warm. London had a sweet smell of new leaves and fresh flowers. I had the time now to take long walks and in these hours I felt lucky to be an alien: I could possess the city but the city could never possess me. Once I had been gloomy about not belonging, but these days I saw that it made me free.

Completing the book — that happiness — made me feel generous and calm. And bold, too. Nothing bad could happen to me, because I had proven that I could overcome the worst.

I did not really know how things stood between Jenny and me, but I felt strong enough to endure anything she might say: that she wanted to leave me or that she disliked me. I did not blame her any longer for what had happened. It had driven me crazy but I was sane again. I was prepared to forgive, even if I could never forget — forgetting seemed to me stupid and sloppy.

It was clear to me that in the course of writing the book I had lost touch with her. I decided to be deliberate.

“Let’s have lunch,” I said. “I mean, up in town.”

She was surprised, but tried not to show it. She said evasively, “The places near the bank are so crowded and noisy.”

I suspected that she was afraid of me. I might start screaming at her in a restaurant: You traitor! You whore! I’m taking Jack away and you’ll never see him again! The fury might come back. Wasn’t it better to continue just as we had been doing, in a mood of desperate resignation?

I said, “We could have a picnic in Regent’s Park. I’d bring sandwiches.”

“It’s so much trouble,” she said, which was one of her ways of saying no.

“I have nothing else to do,” I said. “I’ll meet you at the bank.”

She said, “I don’t know.”

She was uncertain of me. She knew I was capable of making a scene. I was the man who had conned his way into Wilkie’s house and, at gunpoint — well, at least it looked like one — had made the assistant manager eat a piece of paper. I had dripped on the floor. I had been crazy. I could be crazy again.

“Are you all right?” she said.

She was asking whether I was crazy, and would I make a mess of it, and perhaps what was the point?

I said, “It’ll be fun. Jack can have his lunch at school.”

She looked frightened, but said yes, probably because she suspected I might become violent if she said no.

There were stares at the bank, and slightly worse than stares, people looking nervously away, pretending they were not interested: the absurd and wooden motions of people trying to act normal.

“I have an appointment to see Mrs. Parent.”

“May I have your name?”

Surely they knew me? But they wanted to hear me say it. This was drama for them.

“I’m her husband.”

That produced a sudden silence that was instantly filled with a buzz. I was admitted to the inner office. Slee was at his desk, concentrating intensely on a piece of paper. He was frozen in that posture, just like a squirrel on a branch when humans appear below, hoping to be invisible and sticking out a mile.

Jenny hurried down the stairs as soon as she got the message. She was nervous and wanted to be away from these people and this place. The bank had become a theater, and Jenny and I the actors. Everything we did mattered, and even her fear that I might revert and go haywire was obvious in her movements and part of the plot.

Some of the people when I glanced at them suddenly seemed to be smiling at me. When I smiled back they looked alarmed.

In the taxi, Jenny sat back and said, “It’s a lovely day for a picnic.”

There was mingled exhaustion and relief in her voice. It had been an ordeal, my meeting her at the bank. But I had played my part well, and she was grateful.

She smiled and said, “When it’s hot in June that usually means we have a rotten summer.”

“Summer’s always beautiful in the States.”

She glanced at me, a question on her face.