Aftermath: On Marriage and Separation

X Y Z

Every week I drive for forty-five minutes along the coast to see Y. I go in the morning, when my children are at school. The journey out of the city is fast at first, then slow once the road passes out into the countryside and narrows to a single lane, where the traffic constantly crawls without stopping or ceasing, a turgid metal river creeping through deserted green banks.

Y lives in a suburban cul-de-sac on the outskirts of a town that I never see, for I reach his house first and have no reason to go any further. I have been instructed not to park in the cul-de-sac itself: I have to leave my car on the road at the bottom and walk up. The black tarmacked surface winds among houses and many trees; except for the noise the wind makes in the foliage it is always silent there, and rarely do I pass another living being on the road, though sometimes I glimpse dim forms through windows set back behind lawns, on whose glass the green canopy of trees makes rippling primordial patterns of shadow and light. At the entrance to Y’s property there is an apple tree. The first time I saw it there was blossom bursting from the branches. The explosive white startled me, frothing out so wildly and yet staying so still, like a white wave frozen in the moment of its breaking. Beyond it are the gates to his driveway. His house has two entrances, one at the front and one at the side, and it is at the side door that on my visits I ring the bell, and stand listening to the wind soughing in the branches, and wait.

At a party in London I meet Z.

A room that is too warm and full of people, with plush fitted carpet underfoot in which we all seem somehow mired. There are waiters circulating with trays of canapés. There is a viscosity in the atmosphere, a thickness in which everything becomes slowed. I watch people’s faces, watch their mouths moving. I seem to hear everything and nothing. Though it is evening the sun comes hot through the city windows. I had to walk around the park across the road for an hour before I could bring myself to go in. I don’t want to talk; I have nothing to say.

Z is a man. What am I to a man, and what is he to me? I haven’t thought about it: I don’t go out very often. I feel like a soldier come back from a war, full of experiences that have silenced me. I cannot return to innocence, the innocence of the first encounter of female and male. It becomes clear that Z is a veteran too; he too is full of the swarming silence of experience. But we have fought in different wars.

I don’t know him. We talk about cities, about Bangkok and Los Angeles and Moscow. We are strangers and this conversation is a kind of rocket, fast-moving and airborne, keeping us up above the surface of things. It is as though we are orbiting the earth from a great distance and observing its landmarks, its populous centres. There is a freedom to it that at any moment could become terror. Every few minutes a waiter comes past and stops with a tray. After a while I become familiar with these rotating offerings, can begin to anticipate their sequence and character. I begin to know the tray of celery sticks standing in a glossy mound of mayonnaise, the tray of little pastry cups with something yellow and sticky inside, the tray of shiny brown cocktail sausages: when they come round I notice that the mayonnaise has formed a kind of crust, that the pastry cups have become so steeped in rejection that it is impossible to do anything but reject them again. I begin to anchor myself in this familiarity as a weed anchors itself in the merest thimbleful of soil, but then, when the waiter appears at the expected moment with his tray of cocktail sausages, Z waves him irritably away. He has had enough of these interruptions. A feeling of anxiety grips me. The waiter retreats. I feel, somehow, bereft. I feel that nothing might ever come my way again, that I am destitute, like a child lost in a hectic foreign city, in Los Angeles, in downtown Bangkok. As the waiter passes me I put out my hand and snatch a sausage from the tray and I put it in my mouth.

X calls. Our conversation is like chewing on barbed wire, like eating ground glass. Our talk is a well that has been poisoned, but all the same I drink from it.

In Y’s room I sit in the armchair. It is a stiff old-womanish chair, though like everything else in Y’s room it feels solid and clean and as if it doesn’t quite belong to anybody. Y sits in a beige leather swivel chair with a sparkling steel skeleton and a deep padded seat. He is tall and what used to be called rangy. He has a beard, grey. I see him as an assemblage of joints and rods, like a large mathematical instrument; his big straight limbs pivot in their sockets with a mechanical ease and alignment in the clear morning light of his room. He is dressed in the manner of a Christian missionary or an aid worker, in clothes whose insignificance almost constitutes a significance of its own. Other than in this room his maleness has no context for me, and so like the chair he sits in he appears to be made of steel. I don’t mind it. I am broken, and steel might repair me.

I say, I don’t ever want you to tell me that I think too much. If you say that I’ll leave.

Y is silent for a long time. When he begins to speak, it is to outline for me the codes of conduct pertaining to his consulting room. He talks about timescales, the longer view, the inflexibility of the fifty minutes that is both its weakness and its strength. He goes on to discuss the general import of our relationship, the symbolism of its contractual essence, its politics of transference, seduction and blame. I begin to feel like a horse struggling while a harness is put over its head. He refers to himself in all this rather frequently, as though he were an established landmark in my life, and I feel a spasm of vulnerability on his behalf. He is like a priest who has forgotten to check that his congregation believes in God before he sermonises them. Y’s religion is psychoanalysis, and I have not come to worship: I need to be converted first.

I say, I’m not sure this will work. I’m not sure this will do any good.

I feel jealous of Y’s beliefs. They seem to take up all his attention. I want to attack them, to damage them. I want to humiliate them by not believing in them myself.

Y looks slightly startled, but only like an actor would. He cocks his head to one side. Then tell me why you’re here, he says.

It is strange to discuss my marriage in this room; its neutrality is almost chastising, makes the story both more lurid and more sombre, like the orderly courtrooms in which suited committees analyse war crimes, carefully dissect individual acts of thoughtless brutality and havoc over matching coffee cups. It is aftermath, the thing that happens once reality has occurred. Will I ever find reality again, bloodied and pulsing, find my way out of this room and back down the road along which I came? Y listens, stroking his large knuckles. I talk and talk, as though I am on the stand. I talk in expectation of a judgement, for or against me I do not know. Finally he opens his mouth to speak.

We have to stop now, he says.

Z comes to see me. We take a walk in the countryside. I expected him to bring something — I don’t really know what — but he comes empty-handed. He is quiet, nervous, taller than I remembered. He seems different every time I look at him. His face and form change by the minute. I don’t know him. If he had brought something at least I’d know that. But he seems not to want to make himself manifest. He is mysterious.

As we walk we talk. In our conversation I keep missing my footing. It is as though I’m expecting there to be a step down and there isn’t one. I’m used to talking to someone else. Z walks quickly; I have to run to keep up. He says, narrative is the aftermath of violent events. It is a means of reconciling yourself with the past. He says, the violence in the Odyssey is a story told afterwards, in a cave.

I want to live, I say. I don’t want to tell my story. I want to live.

Z says, the old story has to end before a new one can begin.

We are in a downland valley, where warm tousling winds roll across meadows of long grass and wildflowers. A silver river runs through it in slow skating curves to the sea. It is quiet here, but there is a clamour in my head. I feel charged with tension, as the sky is charged with electricity before a storm; I feel the approach of some great disturbance. The mechanism of life is jammed, the way minutes and hours and days knit themselves, gather in the separate strands and knit them fast together into life, into being — it is jammed, blocked, broken. The clamour is like a maniacal orchestra, crashing and clanging its gongs and cymbals. I can’t process what I see or hear or feel: impressions, sensations pour in but they can’t get out again; they mount and mount in the silent valley until I feel that I will burst with them.

Z and I drive without speaking back to the city.

That night I call X. I don’t know why I call him. I just want to talk, like a climber trapped in a snowstorm on a mountaintop calling home. It is rescue she hopes for, but perhaps she is stranded too far and too high to be rescued. Perhaps she just wants to say goodbye. The roaming itch that drove her away from home, away from ordinary satisfactions, away from the life at sea level, remains mysterious even as it devours her in that cold and lonely place. She calls what she left, calls home.

X answers. Our conversation is like chewing on razor blades, like eating caustic soda. Our talk is a well that has been poisoned, but all the same I drink from it.

I say to Y, marriage is a mode of manifestation. It absorbs disorder and manifests it as order. It takes different things and turns them into one thing. It receives chaos, diversity, confusion, and it turns them into form.

Y strokes his knuckles.

I say, marriage is civilisation and now the barbarians are cavorting in the ruins.

Yet we find ruins exquisite, Y says.

He seems to be accusing me of sentimentalising. He seems to suspect me of nostalgia.

People overthrow their governments and then they want them back, I say. They evict their dictator and then they don’t know what to do with themselves. They complain that everything is chaos now, that there is no law and order any more.

Y raises his eyebrows at the word ‘dictator’.

I tell him about the walk with Z. If I was looking for a new dictator, Z didn’t get the job. I tell him of the way I showed him around my house, bought flowers, made him a beautiful lunch, like a small country advertising itself for invasion. I tell him of the valley I took him to, the loveliest place for miles around with its band of silver running through it, the way I showed it to him as proudly as if I’d made it myself.

Yet the mechanism had jammed, the very knit and weave of life knotted into madness.

Is it male attention I want, or male authority?

Is there a difference? Y says, rummaging pleasurably in his beard.

Z attended to my vision but he wouldn’t take possession of it. He backed away and was silent; it remained my house, my valley.

X talks. X is a talker. He is like a well signposted museum: it’s easy to find your way around, to see what he chooses to display. There are new things there now, new people, new opinions, new tastes in evidence; the old ones have been taken down to the archive, I suppose, shut away in darkness, left to the mercy of rot and floods.

But he doesn’t like me to visit, doesn’t want to talk to me any more. The museum guards follow me closely; perhaps they suspect I’m going to steal or deface something. I keep enquiring after what is no longer part of the collection. X furrows his brow, as though he has difficulty recollecting it, this past to which I insist on referring. As soon as he can, he shows me out. The big institutional door, so handsome and polished, so reassuringly heavy, closes in my face.

Z comes to the house with a bag of tools. He fixes the broken shower, the rusty bicycles, the pipe that leaks water into the kitchen wall.

Are all these pieces of paper bills? he says.

I don’t know, I say. I don’t want to open them. I want to live.

Z opens one and reads it. He raises his eyebrows, gives a small smile.

It’s a speeding fine, he says.

There is at first a feeling of deceleration, of a panicky loss of power, as though the fuel tank has run dry. I feel as if I’ve broken down in the middle of nowhere. It’s so quiet here, and so unfamiliar. I don’t know where I am. I hear a whisper, see a gleam of light, a faint ripple on the surface of water. The silver river moves quietly in its courses; the bulrushes stir and shift, the meadow dissolves in the blur of advancing dusk. Darkness is coming, night, and I am far from home. In the distance the sea is soft and calm. It glimmers and grows pale as the day leaves it. The blue dusk deepens; the darkness falls. Along the shore there are other places, houses and towns, but only when the darkness comes can I see them. Distant lights, mounded like embers in the blackness, and they are there and I am here.

The tree at Y’s front gates has apples on it. They are as startlingly abundant as the white blossom was, yet they are round and hard and heavy, the pregnancy after the white bridal whirl of romance. Y wants to know where my cruelty comes from and why I am so wedded to it. Cruelty is an aspect of civilisation, I say. Cruelty is part of power; it’s like the army; you bring it out when you need to. But all your cruelty is against yourself, he says. I laugh. He is displeased. Why do you laugh? he says sharply. I tell him I don’t have much time for the doctrine of self-love. I see it as a kind of windless primordial swamp, and I don’t want to be stuck there. What he calls cruelty I call the discipline of self-criticism. A woman who loves herself is unprotected. She will be invaded, put in chains, left there in the primordial swamp to love her heart out.

Y looks at his watch. We need to stop now, he says.

I go with Z to the cinema and when we come out I say something about the film that he doesn’t understand. I say it again, then I say it in a different way, but he still can’t see it, can’t grasp my meaning. I feel, suddenly, that I’ve lost my power of communication. The loss feels as tangible as if I’d boarded an aeroplane and flown to a country whose people didn’t speak my language, nor I theirs.

Z lives alone. His flat is simple and of modest size. In my own house I am never still; I charge from top floor to bottom and back again, from room to room, like a dynamo revolved and revolved by some elemental feeling of dread. I’m trying to keep the house alive. I worry that if I stop I’ll forget, that I’ll look up again to find that it has become a ruin. Sometimes it feels as though I inhabit a mirage, a projection; that the real house has gone but the children don’t know, don’t realise that I’m behind the curtain like the Wizard of Oz, frantically turning knobs and adjusting microphones to keep the illusion going. In Z’s flat I don’t move. I can’t: there’s nowhere to go. I watch the light moving and changing through the rooms. I listen to the dim sounds from outside. I become aware of myself, too close, like a stranger sitting down right next to me in a train carriage full of empty seats.

Z waits for the cloud of the cinema trip to pass over, waits for the clamour to die down. He cooks, runs a bath, gives me a book to read. He is as sensitive to events as the bulrushes are to the stroking wind. His flat is quiet. Nothing ever changes there: when I visit, I find everything exactly where it was the time before. He says, sometimes you say things before you’ve understood them yourself. For you the saying is a kind of working out, he says, like doing a sum on a bit of paper. You can’t always expect people to grasp it. But I want you to know what I mean, I say. So do I, he says. I want to know what you mean.

It’s late at night, too late to run away from something whose nature I can’t in any case discern. It’s just a shape in the darkness, understanding or its opposite, I can’t tell.

Y says that my relationship with him — Y — is helpful because it can’t ever become sexual. He claims that I find this relieving. He says this is why, with him, I feel safe.

I talk a lot with Y about X but increasingly I find I am reluctant to mention Z. In the neutrality of Y’s consulting room the whole bloodstained past has been unravelled, the war with X, its causes and key battles, its moments of drama and shame, but of Z very little is said. I find that I am protective of the silence around Z. The old war can be turned into words, but a living silence ought not to be disturbed. Things might be growing there, like seeds under newly ploughed earth. Week after week Y and I sit like Odysseus in his cave, processing the violent past in reams of talk. The present is a talking present; but of the future what can be said?

The apple tree outside has shed its leaves. It has started to rain, after the long dry clanging days of summer. The drive to Y’s house is slow, the windows wet with condensation, the lorries sending up sprays of muddy water, the sky overhead sagging with iron-grey clouds. When I walk up the cul-de-sac the wind buffets and whirls among the trees and houses. Sometimes I wonder why I come here when the coming is so iterative, so forced. Having to come here sometimes feels like the biggest problem I have. I feel like a lonely man visiting a brothel, the money changing hands, paying for understanding as some people pay for love. And just as that is not love, so this cannot be understanding. What, then, is it?

I am certain Y will say that my feelings of rebellion against psychoanalysis are predictable and meaningful; that my rebellion can be encompassed by that against which I am rebelling. Occasionally we have discussed the ways in which a therapy might be brought to an end, but it always sounds to me rather like dying, long and drawn-out, a matter not of choice but of some greater law of genesis and cessation of which we are, apparently, at the mercy.

I don’t say these things aloud: perhaps unwittingly, Y has alluded from his web of talk to the existence of the nonverbal universe, and I intend to go and live there.

Love, Z says. Do you want to use that word?

Make me something, I say. Give me something. Bring me something. Not love, or at least, not only love.

Z sighs, shakes his head, reminds me to pay my speeding fine. I lean against him. His skin is always so hot. When I get close enough, it feels like sitting next to a fire. Yet when I am further away he is a purely reflective surface, like the sea in certain moods. I watch him, watch the light move across him, watch the rippling surface. The clocks go back; the days get darker, but the sea retains its light. I buy a coat, because it’s winter now.