word for word—
“Perhaps in the end I’ll miss you so much that I’ll beg you to take me back. But if I ever find out that you told anyone, one single person, about your insane fantasy, there’s no chance of that ever happening.”
Word for word, right?
Not that it’s so difficult to figure out what I’ve been hiding. Women smart enough to realize that I need to be released from some horrible scandal should be able to use their imaginations. And in fact, among the many possibilities that have occurred to them (it’s amazing how fertile the imagination is when it comes to the sordid things people do), one or two of them, like little birds pecking at garbage, have come close to the truth. But even then I didn’t let on that they did. “The details don’t matter,” I told them. “I made a promise I’m not ready to break. Just convince me that I couldn’t have prevented my divorce and I can start thinking about marriage again.”
Not many women are prepared to deal with such a devious neurotic.
But there was one who rose to the challenge. Not as a prospective wife, but as a friend. She was a true Parisian, a class behind me in school, who tried to free me by means of that logical French mind that hones itself on the subtleties of sex. Without knowing the details of our case, which I never revealed to her, she constructed a psychological model proving almost mathematically that despite our great love (and that, at least, you never denied), our separation was inevitable. Her analysis concluded that whether I had actually seen something or just fantasized it, our marriage never stood a chance. Even had I not (she argued), by sheer coincidence, on a Tuesday morning at eleven o’clock, left my office to look for some old building plans in the basement of your father’s hotel, I was by then so involved in his project to expand the kitchen and dining room that sooner or later I would have gone down there anyway — if not to look for the plans, then, say, to check the foundations — and seen or fantasized the same thing.
That was just her initial premise. For even (her theorem continued) had I never descended to the basement, eventually I would have guessed what was going on, since anyone joining a new family, no matter how blindly enthusiastic he may be about it (as I was about yours, if only because of my love for you), develops a sixth sense that in time becomes as sharp as a laser beam. Even without my unexpected discovery, I would have begun to wonder.
In fact (continued my shrewd Parisian), who could say that the building plans were my real objective on that awful Tuesday when I left the office and went to the hotel without you? (Wasn’t the whole point to be there without you?) Perhaps the real reason was a vague suspicion in my subconscious or unconscious mind. (Here in Paris, those old ghosts are still believed in….)
And suppose (my Parisian friend went on) I had said nothing to you and kept what I saw and understood to myself. The whole incredible story would have come out in the end anyway, because how long could I have held it in? I was raised and educated by my parents to believe in open dialogue and in the need — no, the duty — to discuss even the most difficult subjects honestly. And although, superficially, my mother may seem the stronger of the two, my father, too, is no innocent and has his own shrewd sophistication. They were equal partners in a total intimacy — and since such intimacy, which we both believed in and wanted, was my model for our relationship, one that would only have grown stronger with the years, what chance would I have had of hiding something that was consuming me? Even in an ordinary quarrel, the most happily married couple can work itself up to a point, absurd but unavoidable, at which whole families — fathers, mothers, brothers, sisters, even aunts and uncles — are invoked in support of one person’s virtues or the other person’s vices. Could I have listened and said nothing, for example, if you had argued — as you sometimes did — that you were naturally generous like your father and easygoing like your mother, as opposed to my father’s gloom-and-doom and my mother’s prudery? Could I have resisted the temptation to shake you up with the hidden truth, which would have jumped out of me like an angry grasshopper? And then — yes, then — you would have been fully justified in regarding such a revelation, coming totally out of the blue, as not even a “pathetic fantasy” but quite simply a revolting lie invented in the heat of the argument….
And let’s suppose (let’s!) that in spite of all this I not only tried but succeeded in keeping the truth to myself, in bad times as well as in good, without a word about what I saw that day. I still couldn’t have forgotten it, especially not when it involved people I saw every day who were continuing their sordid behavior. And since I couldn’t have relieved the burden by telling anyone, not even my own parents, since this would have totally estranged them from your parents, the truth would have gone on seething in me and so poisoned my love for you that in the end I would have suspected you too (why not?) — yes, you too — of knowing and hiding it from me, or even (for now that everything is possible, who knows?) of being involved in it yourself and — if only in your thoughts — even enjoying it.
I had to speak out. And immediately. The twenty-four hours that passed from the time I saw what I did until the time I told you about it seem unbearably lonely even now. And above all, you wouldn’t have wanted me to keep quiet. Never, in all the harsh, bitter quarrels we had afterward — and I say this to your everlasting credit, Galya — never once did you say, “Why did you go and tell me all this? What possessed you to do it?” You understood the obligations (yes, obligations!) of intimacy. And from your shock when I told you, and the scene you made (you may remember how my father was attending some conference in Jerusalem that day and turned up at our apartment and you refused to come out of the bedroom even to say hello), I knew that you, at least, were innocent….
Which was a relief….
And so (argued my Parisian), concluding this part of her theorem (there’s another part still to come), the moment I realized what I had seen was the moment our marriage was over. After that, it was only a question of time.
Part Two
And now let’s look at it from your point of view. My Parisian is a serious woman. Even without knowing what it was that I saw (as I say, I never told her), she managed to prove that our marriage was doomed from the opposite end, too — that is, starting from the assumption that it was all a “revolting fantasy,” as you claimed from the first. In the forty-two days that followed, in which you systematically demolished your love for me, you never budged from that position.
Five years have passed since then, and ultimately all will be forgotten and perhaps even forgiven except for one thing — the insult and even the contempt of your self-righteousness. I’ll never forget you sitting tense and pale, although perfectly patient, your feet beneath you on the couch, listening stonily, without interrupting, without asking questions, without even turning off the radio. (Yes, I remember how grotesque it was to be telling you such a thing to soft background music.) When I finished, there was a moment (but too short, too short!) of silence before you reacted. I would have thought that something so incredible needed more than that. The fact was that, in my naïveté, I had expected only one of two possible reactions.