More weeks go by before the film is in any kind of shape for him to look at, or before she is in any kind of shape to look at him. They arrange for him to come to the cutting room. Take it as a sign or not, but three days before the due date he breaks an ankle falling over his own shoelaces outside a homewares store and cannot leave the house. On the phone, explaining it, he makes a joke in such bad taste it takes her breath away. ‘You seem to be having bad luck with men,’ he says. ‘Your partner breaks a ski pole, I break an ankle.’
She doesn’t ask him to consider what else he’s broken.
She has a portable viewing device she can bring to him. Not ideal but better than nothing. And so she returns to the house where she first saw him and went kerpow! It no longer feels daunting. Why did it ever? What had she been expecting? This? Had she known this was sure to be the outcome all along? Selena, prepared for the visit and dressed as though to bid at Sotheby’s, opens the door Lily should never have knocked on. You must be, yes; you must be, yes; and thus they are acquainted. Hmm, Selena thinks. I see, Lily says to herself.
The lubricious lovers of Albuquerque, Taos and Santa Fe embrace chastely, ear to ear. He is struck by how pale she looks. How lustreless her eyes. How narrow her mouth. As she puts her lips to his cheek, she tastes what is either the remnant or the forerunner of a tear. He loves me not, either way. Farewell, my lovely.
The film is no worse than Quaid feared and no better than he hoped. The pueblo looks grand and mysterious. She’s found interesting stills of what it would have looked like when Lawrence was there. The pieces to camera? Cut savagely.
‘You’ve got rid of most of my words,’ he complains.
‘You’ll thank me for it,’ she says.
She can barely speak. If she swallows, the sound will reverberate through the hated house.
He tells her what he would like her to put back. She tells him she won’t. ‘No one but you will miss that,’ she says. ‘No one else will ever know it was there.’
‘But I do.’
She is short with him. ‘I would never dream of telling you how to edit a play,’ she says. ‘Film editing is a ruthless business.’
Her words hang in the air. Is she implying his plays could do with some ruthless editing? Is she implying he could?
‘Without the clowns it’s a bit flat,’ she goes on, ‘but a good script will save it.’
What, though, Lily wonders, will save me.
I can hardly be surprised she’s angry, he thinks. I have not dealt decently with her. I love her, but that doesn’t excuse me.
So what explains his behaviour? Why does he treat a woman he loves less considerately than he would treat a woman he doesn’t? Must he punish a woman for loving him? What sort of sickness is that?
Who did what to him when he was a boy?
According to his reading of himself, psychology will get you nowhere. Only evolution can explain him; he is somewhere on the ladder, maybe not very high up the ladder, of emergence from the primal myth of men marrying their wrathful, all-consuming mothers in order to redeem their maleness in incest, perfidy and rape. Anthropologically, he’s work in progress.
‘My mother called me Sam to make up for my not being the Samantha she’d wanted after a run of three boys,’ he had confessed to Lily in those far-off days in New Mexico when they laid their naked anima on the table to prove there could be no way back for either of them.
‘Ah. She had a pretty frock waiting for you. And you think psychology will get us nowhere. Presumably you were a disappointment to your father too?’
‘Everything was a disappointment to my father. But if it’s all right with you I’ll give him a skip just now. One day when I am confident you will not hate me for who he is, I will tell you about him.’
‘Hate you for who he is? Why, what is he?’
‘A philosopher. Now can we drop him? Move me forward, not back. I am more yours than his. The way I am with you is the consequence of my being with you. Another time, with another woman, I may be someone else. The man you see before you is the man you have just made.’
In so short a time?
Lily, Lily, how long do you think it takes to make or change a man?
It’s a recurring theme in Quaid’s work that our sexual natures are not pre-fixed and immutable but, chameleon-like, find themselves anew each time they change their habitat. It’s partly on these grounds that his plays have been charged with immorality and even maculinism – they seem to scorn constancy and to justify infidelity on the grounds that regularly changing a wife (he leaves it to other playwrights to tackle regularly changing a husband) promotes personal growth. In fact Quaid subscribes to no such philosophy. He’s a playwright. He doesn’t have a philosophy. Philosophy was what his father did.
‘I don’t fight my corner as a man,’ he once said in an interview for Esquire, ‘I just retreat to it and cover up. In the late twentieth century, no man dare come out fighting.’
Does his belief that a man is who he’s with mean he ceased to be Lily’s the minute he once more became his wife’s?
That begs the question of whether he did indeed once more become his wife’s.
If it stirred old desires in him to see Selena at the airport – dressed as she knew damned well he liked to see her dressed – killingly and allusively, as though she could be all his heroines to him at once, Anna Karenina, Salome, Clytemnestra, the Wife of Bath, Molly Bloom, Miss Gore even, and a thousand more – the very fact of her coming at all stirred an old tenderness. How lovely of her to take the trouble to come to meet him. How sweet of her to show him that she’d missed him, and how courageous, too, given that she’d never been enthusiastic about his making this film – Lawrence in Taos for fuck’s sake! Who cared? – or his going away with another woman about whose existence she’d very pointedly chosen to express no curiosity. All forgiven, was what her presence at the airport announced. All doubts and suspicions hereby annulled.
That she was making up to him, when he had so grievously wronged her, wronged her still more.
He did not know what to feel or how to comport himself around her. He kept his head sufficiently not to beg her forgiveness, not to fall to his knees and kiss the hem of her coat. Some men, at such moments, confess everything. At least, Quaid thought, I am not so far gone in wretchedness as that. I will not trouble her head with the truth in order to lighten mine of guilt. The more honest the man, the more secrets he keeps. In marriage, if not in public life, only scoundrels admit everything.
They had been sleeping apart for years. That night – companionably, no more – he visited her bed. ‘Don’t say sorry,’ he reminded himself. So he said, ‘It’s good to be home,’ instead. She took his hand and put it to her mouth. He did the same to hers. Kissed her wedding ring. Neither wanted more than that. He would not tell Lily they had kissed hands. A confused consciousness of universal wrong stirred in the bed like an orphan looking for love.
So, Quaid wondered, must I learn to manage this for all time – the moral equilibrium from hell?