A Separation

3.

I called Isabella the following morning and told her that I had not found Christopher, that he had not yet returned to the hotel. She asked me if I was not worried. I told her that I wasn’t. Christopher had come to Greece to do research, he might easily have arranged a short trip to a neighboring village, or returned to Athens to consult some archives. Research! She laughed. What kind of research?

Christopher had published his first book when he was still in his twenties, and it had been received with great enthusiasm by the publishing world and also the general public, briefly appearing at the bottom of the bestseller list. It had been an unusual book, even idiosyncratic, a work of nonfiction about the social life of music—its role in rituals and ceremonies, the way it demarcated public space, its function as a form of religious and ideological persuasion.

The book was wide-ranging and digressive, and the writing had much of Christopher’s personal charm. One moment he was comparing the relative intimacy of chamber music to the pomp of orchestral music, the next he was detailing his experience as a teenager frequenting various London nightclubs. He wrote about the music of the Third Reich, about the acoustics at the Gewandhaus, he went to King’s College chapel to listen to Handel’s cantatas (he had attended King’s as an undergraduate, I assumed the act, accompanied by the music and then the writing, was a recuperation of sorts).

True, the book was not especially well researched—the few critical reviews had pointed out some glaring errors and elisions, but by and large these dissenting voices could be comfortably categorized as such. After all, he was not an academic and the book had been written for a general readership. Christopher himself was something of a generalist. What he was good at—what the book had achieved with impressive and seeming ease—was drawing connections between an array of disparate sources, and making the material cohere in the prose.

I didn’t know Christopher at the time of the book’s publication. When I met him he was occupying the relatively comfortable life that is made available to relatively successful authors. He was invited to give lectures, to write reviews for various newspapers, his book had been translated into several languages. He was offered a teaching position at some university, which he declined—he didn’t need the money, he was writing a second book, which was under contract to his publisher, and which he was already late in delivering.

He was working on it when we met. A procrastinator, he was prone to talking about the project at length, almost making a little performance of it, and I soon realized that he preferred talking about the book to writing it. He described it as a study of mourning rituals around the world, a work of cultural and political science that would encompass both secular and religious ceremonies, delineating—I think that was the word he used—a landscape of cultural and historical difference.

It was a strange project for a man who had hitherto lost nothing of significance, whose life was intact in all its key particulars. If he had cause for grief, it was only in the abstract. But he was drawn to people who were in a state of loss. This gave people the mistaken impression that he was a sympathetic man. His sympathy lasted as long as his curiosity, once that had gone he suddenly withdrew, making himself unavailable, or at least less available than people might reasonably have expected, given the sudden and violent intimacy he had forced upon them in the first place.

But that was his manner, his way of being. He was a gifted writer but something of a dilettante in his approach to his career—in the five years we had been married, I had never known him to go to a library, even during the extended periods when he was preoccupied with his research. No doubt this was why Isabella sneered at his work; despite its relative success, she did not take it seriously, she would have preferred for him to have a career in law, finance, even politics, she liked to say that he had the wiles and charisma for it.

Still, as I have said, Christopher could speak on his subject with great authority. And although there is nothing essentially frivolous about mourning, he was able to talk about particular rituals and traditions in a manner that was wholly entertaining, his own interest in the subject matter was infectious. Christopher had almost certainly come to Greece in order to study its professional mourners, the women who were paid to issue lamentations at funerals. I had known this the moment Isabella told me he had gone to Greece, it was a matter of considerable interest to him, and was going to figure strongly in the book he was writing.

The ancient practice, he had explained to me, was rapidly dying out. There were only a few parts of rural Greece where it was still practiced, the southern Peloponnese, a region called Mani, was one of them. There, every village had a few mourners—weepers or wailers, as they were sometimes called—women who performed the funeral dirge at a village burial. What intrigued him about the practice was its externalization of grief: the fact that a body other than the body of the bereaved expressed its woe.

Literally an out-of-body experience, he had said. You, the bereaved, are completely liberated from the need to emote. All the pressures of the funeral, the expectation that you will perform your grief for the assembled crowd—imagine that you are a widow, burying your husband, people expect a good show. But the nature of grief is incompatible with this demand, people say that when you are grieving, when you have experienced a profound loss, you are impaled beneath it, hardly in a condition to express your sorrow.

Instead, you purchase an instrument to express your sorrow, or perhaps it’s less like an instrument and more like a tape recorder and tape, you simply press play and the ceremony, the long and elaborate production, carries on without you. You walk away and are left alone with your grief. It is a remarkably enlightened arrangement, of course the financial aspect is crucial, the fact that it is a monetary transaction makes the entire arrangement clean, refined. It’s no wonder that such a custom is native to Greece, the so-called cradle of civilization—it makes perfect sense.

He was half joking, I remember that he was actually laughing as he spoke. For a moment I was startled. It was if the man standing before me was splitting in two—on the one hand he spoke like a man who had never lost anything, not a wife or a lover or a parent, not even a pet dog, a man who had no conception of what real loss must feel like. And I knew this to be the case from a factual point of view, I knew the man’s history. But at the same time, I thought I could perceive the shadow of a man who had lost something or someone very dear to him, even a man who had at one point lost everything, in his voice—ironic and cool with distance—there was the intimation of some unseen depth.

But what such a loss could be—this escaped me. I asked him once why he was writing the book, it was more than a question of interest—the writing of a book cannot, in my experience, be sustained by simple interest, it requires something more, it is generally the work of years, after all. But he did not reply, not at once and then not at all, he merely shook his head and turned away, as if the answer was mysterious even to himself. He had spoken about the book with increasing frequency over the past year, it came up again and again in conversation, as if the unfinished volume weighed on him, and yet he could not explain his reasons for writing it.

That was why, no doubt, he was unable to finish the book. Christopher was a charming man, and charm is made up of surfaces—every charming man is a confidence man. But not even that is the point. What I am talking about are the natural failures of a relationship, even one that for a time had been very good. In the end, what is a relationship but two people, and between two people there will always be room for surprises and misapprehensions, things that cannot be explained. Perhaps another way of putting it is that between two people, there will always be room for failures of imagination.

As soon as I hung up the phone, it rang again. It was Yvan. I had called him from the airport in Athens but it had been a rushed conversation—I was looking for the driver, the arrivals terminal was chaotic, the tannoy making a constant stream of announcements in both English and Greek—and we had not spoken since. The time difference between England and Greece was minimal but the journey was long, causing a palpable lag in our communication, some kind of delay between us.

He asked how the journey had been, how I had found Christopher—he hesitated before he asked after Christopher, and I said at once that he was not here. That in fact he was nowhere to be found. Yvan was silent, and then said, What do you mean he’s not there, was Isabella wrong? It’s not like Isabella to be wrong. I said, No, she wasn’t wrong. He was here, but he’s not here at the moment, I’m waiting for him to return. Then Yvan was silent for a moment longer, before asking, How long will you wait?

I said, It makes sense to wait, doesn’t it? And after yet another pause, Yvan said, Yes, it makes sense. But I don’t like the idea of you there alone, I’m not going to lie, it makes me nervous. This was unusually blunt for Yvan, he was not the kind of man who liked to make demands. Even as he spoke his voice was mild, there was not a hint of reproach. There’s nothing to be nervous about but I understand, I said, it’s an awkward situation. Then Yvan said, Why don’t I come out and join you?

When I ran into Yvan three months ago—in the street, literally in the middle of a crossing—he suggested that we go into the coffee shop on the corner rather than stand in the cold. Even now, with the benefit of hindsight, I can’t say for certain that he made the invitation with anything in mind apart from the wind and light rain. Neither of us was dressed for the weather, the temperature had dropped out of nowhere, he said, in exactly the same tone he used to ask if he shouldn’t join me in Gerolimenas.

At any rate, I accepted the invitation. I had always liked Yvan, he was handsome but in a manner that was unassuming, there was nothing demanding about his good looks. In this sense he was different from Christopher, who was aware of his appearance and knew too well how to exploit its effect—toward the end of our marriage, only at the very tail end, it became clear to me that he knew the angles from which he appeared most distinguished, and that over time he had perfected a series of appealing looks, glances, expressions and gestures, a trait that was absurd and essentially unlovable.

Yvan was better-looking than Christopher, but almost certainly did not give that impression, you had to look quite hard to discern the handsome man behind the shambling exterior. I had never thought of him as handsome. And yet as we sat across the table from each other and he inquired, in his very kind manner, as to the facts of my life and how I was doing, it was evident that it was because I found him attractive that I told him, rather abruptly and in confidence, that Christopher and I had separated. He was the first person I told.

This was before Christopher had extracted from me the promise not to tell anyone about the separation. If Yvan was surprised, he didn’t show it, he only said that he was very sorry, that we had always seemed happy together, we had been one of the couples he had enjoyed spending time with. Then he laughed in a self-conscious way, he didn’t mean to speak about himself, regarding a matter that had nothing to do with him—but then, of course, it ended up having everything to do with him, his words presaged the arrangement that would follow, for which he did and would continue to feel guilty, perhaps he had a sense of it even then.

Yvan was a journalist and a friend of Christopher’s first, they had known each other very slightly at university. Christopher—Yvan later told me, Christopher and I had never spoken of Yvan as anything other than a present-day acquaintance, although I was aware that they had been at Cambridge together, I suspected that Christopher had only the vaguest memory of Yvan from those days, he was a born amnesiac—had been charismatic, a prominent figure on campus, one of those students of whom the entire student body is aware.

This was entirely in keeping with what I knew about Christopher, what was then more revealing was the manner in which Yvan described Christopher, as though he were recounting the experience of seeing an actor on a stage, observed not from the audience but from the wings. Yvan was in some ways still the same man, essentially shy, preferring to be on the margins rather than in the center of things. And yet he had been drawn into Christopher’s orbit, Yvan told me that for a time, Christopher had made a concerted effort to befriend him.

He hesitated a little before he told the story, perhaps he thought that it might not be in the best taste, it was early in what was to become our relationship and it was a strange intimacy to assert, a reminder of the fact that the two men had known each other before either had known me, that Yvan would always know this youthful version of Christopher better than I could. Experience accumulated in haphazard places, the wrong bits of knowledge residing with the wrong parties. But I insisted, I was amused and a little intrigued, I hardly needed to be protected from Christopher, whether in his old or current incarnations.

Although by Yvan’s own account he was not a popular student on campus—he did not come from good family, or display unusual wealth, nor was he exceptional in any obvious way, he did not possess charm or style or wit in externalized form—Christopher had pursued his friendship with the intensity that is particular to collegiate relationships, often between men, but also women. Perhaps he did so because he sensed that Yvan naturally possessed the one quality that Christopher respected, but lacked the discipline to truly seek out and embrace: that is, a genuine indifference to his charm.

Gradually, as Yvan described their brief friendship, I grew uncomfortable, disliking the versions of both men that emerged—Christopher’s manic charisma and compulsion to seduce, Yvan’s inexplicable passivity, neither accepting nor rebuffing Christopher’s advances. Yvan felt my discomfort, his suspicions had been correct, the intimacy between the two men was off-putting to me. There was no point to the story, Yvan said abruptly, they didn’t remain close. Christopher had dropped the friendship, as if his original pursuit had only been a cipher for another, more oblique kind of compulsion, although that had not prevented them from renewing their acquaintance when they ran into each other some years later.

That time, I had been there. It had been another chance encounter, not in the street this time but at a party, and had lasted only a few minutes before it was interrupted, the room was crowded with people. At the time Yvan had been just another one of Christopher’s acquaintances, of which there were so many, but I remembered that I had liked him at once: his laconic manner, his slight air of indifference to the parade of his surroundings and still, and in particular, to Christopher’s charm, to which so few seemed immune.

But as it turned out, Yvan was not a man of indifference—it was wariness, rather than indifference, that he felt toward Christopher, and not only because of their past. In some essential way Christopher was not a man to be trusted, and Yvan had intuited this. Once, I asked him when it had first occurred to him that we would end up together, in this arrangement—I made this odd choice of word, arrangement, as though it were a euphemism for something untoward—and he promptly replied, At once, from the very beginning, or at least so I wished.

Certainly, Yvan roused himself with surprising speed. I was still living in the apartment when we met and it was far too soon for a new relationship—Christopher had not moved out, he had merely made himself absent, the place was still filled with his things, intermingling with my things. The bedsheets had barely been changed. And although I was not very old, I was also not young. Moving onward so precipitously felt like the mark of a younger woman.

But Yvan asked me to move into his apartment right away, almost at the very outset of the relationship, so that the possibility of moving out of Christopher’s apartment and into Yvan’s presented itself as a very real scenario. It was undeniably convenient. And I was reminded of a biting and still unpleasant comment an acquaintance had once made over dinner: Women are like monkeys, they don’t let go of one branch until they’ve got hold of another. This man—a friend of Christopher’s first, but then also a friend of mine—had been seated beside me and across the table from his wife and Christopher.

When he spoke, he was looking at Christopher. He barely seemed aware of how clearly we—the women at the table, myself and his wife—could see his expression of frank contempt, or perhaps he didn’t care, he was addressing himself to Christopher and not to either of us. From where I was sitting I saw him in profile, so that his sneer, the curl of his lip, was especially pronounced. Presumably he was not speaking of his own circumstances, or of his relationship with his wife, who sat quietly beside Christopher, minutely examining the tablecloth and the cutlery that sat upon it.

But anything was possible. It was, for example, possible—that they had met under adverse circumstances, that she had been involved with another man and been reluctant to leave the shelter provided by this man until she had secured the patronage, the commitment, of her current spouse (it was true that for as long as we had known them she had not worked, she was always well dressed and groomed, the kind of woman who knew where to get your hair blow-dried and nails manicured, information that is sometimes meaningless, but that also sometimes tells the entire story).

It was not pleasant to imagine the relationship between our friends in these terms, and yet it was surprisingly easy, an involuntary movement on the part of the imagination, which has no sense of decorum. Perhaps, even after years of marriage, the memory of her caution was a cause of dispute—there are men and women who cannot forgive a slight, however long in the past—perhaps one of the terms of the contract that underlay their marriage was the understanding that the husband would make the wife pay for this insult, this hesitation, again and again, over the course of their life together.

Nonetheless, I was offended on her behalf. Whatever the circumstance, it seemed terrible to be married to a man who was capable of saying such things about women, and in her presence, before other people—or rather, before another woman, one suspects men say such things among themselves all the time. From that point onward, I avoided this man, making excuses whenever Christopher proposed some activity, dinner or a weekend away in the couple’s company, until Christopher accepted that I no longer wished to be friends with them. At least that was how he understood it, and I did not disabuse him of the notion, it was true that although my dislike had its origin in the husband, it had spread to the wife, in the milder form of discomfort—with her, I could no longer be at ease.

Several years later, the phrase still rankled—women are like monkeys, they don’t let go of one branch until they’ve got hold of another—and it returned to me again, as matters with Yvan progressed. I knew that at a certain point, it no longer sufficed to say that the situation was complicated, the phrase did not buy you any time (although it was complicated, I was married and not formally or even publicly separated, I was still living in the old apartment, Christopher having gone I did not know where, he was initially staying with friends, then at a spare apartment belonging to his mother, usually rented out but now conveniently empty, which he told her he was using as an office).

No, at a certain point, one had to move forward, either by untangling the situation or by learning to live with its complications, the latter being the more common solution—people’s lives grew messier as they grew older, then simplified again when they became truly old. Men were better at this, they were able to propel themselves through life, often a man was barely divorced before he was married again, it was merely a question of expedience, which was not cause for shame. Matters were different for a woman—women were more self-censoring, they excelled at it, having been taught to be so over a lifetime—and yet the emotions I felt for Yvan, so different from the man I had been married to, the man I was still married to, stubbornly failed to dissipate.

I did move into Yvan’s apartment, three months after Christopher and I separated. Yvan’s work as a journalist provided him with a comfortable but not lavish lifestyle. He had far fewer things than Christopher, but those things seemed to matter more, to be more accommodating, and I placed my own belongings in among them with surprising ease. We lived in the apartment, often we would work in the same room together, eat our meals and get into bed without parting company. Although it was much smaller than Christopher’s apartment, as a couple we seemed to require less; it was discord that had required all that space.

And soon enough, Yvan began encouraging me to finalize the separation from Christopher, or at the very least tell him that I was no longer living in the old apartment, at present Christopher did not even know this. At first Yvan was hesitant, he seemed uncertain as to what his rights were—the progress of a relationship, for good or bad, can always be described through the accumulation or the disbanding of rights—but as the affair continued, now that I was living in his home, he made it clear that I was putting him in an awkward position, he only wanted to know where he stood.

Which was a fair request, I knew that myself. From a merely logistical point of view, it was vital I tell Christopher that I had left the apartment. What if there was a leak, what about the mail that was accumulating in the post box? These were simple matters, practical ones. Why then did I hesitate to call Christopher and tell him what was unlikely to be a blow, was it because of the previous acquaintance between Christopher and Yvan? Or was it because Christopher had asked me not to tell anyone about the separation, a request to which I had agreed, despite the fact that I was already living in another man’s house, a man who was in fact his friend?

For obvious reasons this indecision—what might become for Yvan and me, as with the couple we had dined with, a fatal hesitation—had to be kept from Yvan. I told him that I would tell Christopher—precisely what I would tell Christopher, we never specified. He never demanded that I ask Christopher for a divorce outright, perhaps he sensed that this would be going too far, and in any case, it was humiliating to force a woman to ask her husband for a divorce, a woman should offer such a thing of her own free will, in order to be with the man she loves.

But the longer I stayed in Gerolimenas and waited for Christopher, the more the desire to actually confront him seeped away. I did not doubt the depth of my feelings for Yvan, but the issue began to feel like a question of administration rather than passion, a difficult thing to admit to oneself, much less to an impatient lover. Perhaps it was a question of age: You cannot say you did it out of love, since at your age romantic passions have grown weak, and the heart obeys reason.

And yet reason dictated that I could not be married to one man and live with another, at least not for very long. The heart obeys reason. What would be irrational would be to remain in this state of indecision, neither in nor out of the marriage, neither with nor free of this man. The sooner I was able to deliver myself from this situation the better, I could not remain beholden to two separate and antagonistic sets of expectation, I reminded myself that there were reasons why I needed to find Christopher, for my sake if not his.

Why don’t I come out and join you? Yvan asked again.

I don’t think that’s a good idea, I said.

I worried that he would hear the response as too aggressive, too hostile, I wasn’t trying to negate his anxieties, although I didn’t exactly want them to blossom either, that would do neither of us good. I continued, It would muddy the water, I don’t want to involve you in this, that doesn’t seem fair to anybody, and before I could go much further he cut me off, he said, Of course, you’re right, it’s only that I miss you. I miss you too, I said.

We talked a little longer, I told him about the hotel, about the girl Maria—he found the idea that Christopher might have seduced her immensely entertaining, that was, he said, exactly the kind of thing Christopher would do, he was thoroughly perverse, but in a way that was somehow—chic, he said, the inverted commas around the word were audible in his voice. We both laughed, it was a good moment, it was as though we were discussing a mutual friend, of whom we were both fond, and in some ways that was true.

I told him again, before we said good-bye, that there was no reason for him to worry, Christopher was unlikely to object to my request for a divorce, he had seemed indifferent the last time we spoke, mostly he had been in a hurry to get off the phone, as if he had somewhere he needed to be. It was the first time I had used the word divorce, and I felt rather than heard the explosion of Yvan’s happiness. It’s an awkward situation but nothing more, I continued, once Christopher returns I will tell him that I want a divorce and then it will be over, then it will be mostly a matter of paperwork. In that case, Yvan said, and I could hear that he struggled to keep his voice light, I hope he returns soon.