One day, it doesn’t matter when exactly – nowish – she asks, ‘Do you love me?’
He replies, ‘More than that, I like you. Liking is rarer than love. Liking has its reasons. Liking is reason.’
‘But do you love me?’
‘I more than love you. I admire your character, I revere your intelligence, I venerate your being. I tremble in your presence.’
‘But do you love me?’
‘I find you endlessly, limitlessly, absorbingly interesting.’
‘I ask if you love me.’
‘You engross all my waking thoughts and nine-tenths of my sleeping ones. I am overburdened by what I feel for you, in the sense that you outweigh and occlude all else.’
‘So you don’t love me?’
‘I’m searching for a bigger word.’
‘The smaller one would have done just fine,’ Lily says.
One day he asks ‘Do you love me?’
‘I love you,’ she says. Her eyes say it too. Her skin says it. ‘I love you.’
He wonders if that means she doesn’t like or find him interesting.
Sam Quaid, a rationalist much given to superstition, feared that the concurrence of marital mishaps – his mysteriously keeping his distance from her in Bali, her tactfully keeping her distance from him now – was no coincidence. How to explain what had gone wrong other than as a punishment for their selfishness? So far, things had worked out altogether too well for them. This was the backlash. In a moral universe, you can’t just leave your spouse and seamlessly take up with your lover and expect to get away with it. Their success to date bred smugness, and in love the smug will always pay.
Lily, too, thought the fault was hers. She had let her guard down and thought she could be happy. She had taken another woman’s husband. Now, another woman could reach out and take him from her. He was a sitting target. If it came to a battle, Lily was bound to lose; she no longer had the weapons with which to fight back. I am an old lady.
At a further extreme of superstition, Quaid wondered if what had happened on his honeymoon was simply the love gods softening him up for a different life with Lily. In the not too far distant future he would need to be a lot less demanding and lo! – less demanding he was.
And Lily? Had she too been readied for the coming change by the slackening of her husband’s avidity, or weren’t the Balinese gods of love interested in women? In such matters, Lily had always been hard to read. For her, the company of a man surpassed all other considerations. No disrespect to Quaid, but he was a better talker than he was an anything else. There were worse things Umlaut could have told her. She might have lost her hearing. Her husband might have lost the power of speech.
The idea that Dr Umlaut’s diagnosis served to balance the books was not one Quaid was willing to entertain. No, these things happen – wasn’t that all there was to say? Something arbitrary happened to him; something arbitrary happened to her. Looked at one way, it was as it should be. To all things there is a season: as adulterers they had been as amorous birds of prey, who loved with their teeth; now that they were husband and wife they pecked each other’s cheeks like suburban garden birds. Except – well, let them find their own way to describe wherein they were different from the commonality.
In the meantime Quaid grew – even by his own lachrymose standards – ever more tearful. Retiring to his study where Lily couldn’t see him weeping for her, he reproached himself unremittingly. It was his fault. Don’t ask what. All of it. Could he have ‘worn her out’ in Dr Umlaut’s unlovely phrase? Had he been alpha male enough for that? He doubted it. But how else to explain what had happened? Besides, there was more than one way that a man could wear out a woman and, in the end, himself. He had loved her too demandingly. Wanted too much from her. Wanted her to take too much. Overburdened her with his lovingness. With his wanting to be loved.
He retired contrite, woke in contrition – but didn’t dare allow Lily to see it. ‘What is it, my love?’ she would ask and the concern in her voice would be too much for him.
Was such a condition as his consistent with happiness?
Yes. The mistake is to think that to be happy in love is to be forever smiling. Contrition too can minister to a soul’s contentment.
Quaid had increasingly come to rebuff the charge that he had no friends with the assertion that Lily was his friend. Had anyone said friends and lovers enjoyed a different order of intimacy – higher or lower according to your point of view – he’d have answered that that depended on the versatility of the lover. Lily moved effortlessly between both orders. The one disadvantage of Lily being his only friend was that he couldn’t discuss with her, as he could have discussed with male friends, the commonality of what ailed them. So he missed out on learning that everyone his age was as troubled as he was.
Lily was more fortunate in that she did have friends most of whom were unhappy and envied her for what they took to be the perfect union she enjoyed with her husband. She had no intention of disabusing them. Her married life was as private as her single life had been. And what would she have told her envious friends anyway – that while on honeymoon in Bali Sam had gone on a queer, somewhat mystical journey from which he had not yet returned, that he had begun to stare adoringly at her more than he used to, that he had taken to falling asleep touching her fingertips with his, and liked to wake to find the contact still intact, that (waking or sleeping) he seemed to be (and indeed described himself as) distraughtly happy, that one of the country’s most eminent gynaecologists had just advised her that her body was worn out by sexual overuse, but that otherwise, yes, yes, a thousand times yes, she did indeed have a perfect union? Truth to say, little of this would have changed her friends’ minds even had she confided in them. Compared to the hazards of the ageing marriage-bed they had to endure – depression, diabetes, low testosterone, high testosterone, nerve damage, hyperthyroidism, late-onset gender dysphoria, serial infidelity, not to mention such attendant marital malfunctions as shoplifting, making inappropriate remarks to other women, dressing like a child, getting tattooed and driving under the influence of drink – Lily’s life with Quaid was a stroll in the park.
‘Given how much remedial work my friends are having to do on their love lives,’ Lily told Quaid, ‘you’d think that half of London over the age of sixty was under the care of Dr Umlaut.’
‘Maybe if they stopped thinking of themselves as having love lives …’
‘Oh, Sam. Let people think of themselves as they choose.’
To the list of her own undeclared marital malfunctions Lily might have added the ponderosity of her husband which had been getting worse since he’d rearranged the vocabulary of their relations. If she missed anything about their old lovemaking – and don’t let Sam catch her using that phrase – it was the unpoliced directness of their desires. Now let us sport us while we may left no time for nice verbal discrimination. Come back to me, Sam. I don’t say take me. I will just as happily take you. But come back to me full of the old hunger. And joy. To devour or be devoured, I don’t care which. Your sadness is growing palpable. Am I the cause or the occasion of it? I know I am in no position to demand anything. But surely I too am allowed to look back in sorrow.
The remedies at which Dr Umlaut had hinted figured at some point or other in Lily’s conversations with her friends but the details were of a grossness that made her think twice before passing them on to Quaid, who found the most harmless of them insulting.
‘Has she been talking to Amaryllis? “Touch each other with tenderness.” What the hell do they think we did before?’
As for ‘touching oneself’, whether in private to obtain surreptitious relief or openly to excite a neglected partner, Quaid had little to add to the words the Lord spoke unto Moses and Aaron, to wit, ‘When any man hath a running issue out of his flesh, because of his issue he is unclean.’
Lily thought running issue sounded a mite torrential, to which Quaid retorted that to some ears an expense of spirit in a waste of shame sounded a mite cataclysmic, but you don’t get to be a moralist by judging an event by the quantity of fluid it spills or the chagrin it misspends.
Lily didn’t think Shakespeare meant expense of spirit to describe the act she dared not name. Quaid said he read it as he read it. Waste of shame? Come on!
‘Do you think you might be exceptionally odd about this?’ Lily wondered.
‘Well there’s God, Moses, Aaron, Shakespeare if you read between the lines, D. H. Lawrence, Jean Esquirol who diagnosed it as a cause of insanity, and me for starters. I would expect there to be millions more.’
‘Every one of you insane.’
‘Every one of us driven to insanity by the practice in question. Madness is bound to be the consequence of turning an outward act inwards. One might as well be ingesting one’s own being. The very language of it replicates the brutality – jerking, beating, whacking, spanking … As do the visuals. All acts of love find their celebration in art, except this one, which has nothing of love or beauty in it. Man crouched in an act of supplication to himself, like an ape at the water’s edge, worshipping his own reflection. It is the last resort of sex.’
Lily stared long at him. ‘So when did you finally abjure it?’ she finally asked.
‘Who said I’ve abjured it? But I long to every time. I’ve been trying to find the strength of character to abjure it and then cursing myself when I can’t for half a century.’
‘I hope you aren’t saying that to placate me. I am not made jealous by your doing it. Especially now.’
‘Nor should you be. You play a starring role every time.’
‘Who enjoyed that privilege before you met me?’
‘It was always you. You before I knew thy face or name. As an angel is worshipped in a shapeless flame.’
‘You make it sound so beautiful I can’t believe you hate doing it.’
‘Please don’t speak of me doing it. It does me. Now can we change the subject.’
The worst, unless it was the best, that could be said of these conversations was that they were good-humoured when something closer to desolation might have been expected. Was this because Lily and Quaid had not yet taken full significance of what they’d lost? Did they think that there was a chance they would somehow win it back? Or were they able to convince each other that they had resources enough to compensate?
Hubris?
Wisdom warns that mortals who think they can escape the routine fate of mankind are riding for a fall. Lovers, in particular, must expect to take a tumble. Among the great heroes of art and literature lovers hold the most estimable place because they are not individually ambitious. To love is to approach the self-abnegation of religion. But because lovers are not in fact divine, they need to burn. They cannot be allowed either to surpass the common or defy the gods. They must not have a happy ending.
Not everyone shares this vengeful predilection for censure. Some who study love think that, in a world of rage, lovers deserve all the encouragement they can get.
Happy endings should neither be begrudgd nor scattered like confetti. To the deserving, the laurels. What made Sam and Lily deserving?
Their gravity.