— 2016 —
Helpe me to seke for I lost it there
Thomas Wyatt
I have been known to tell too much before. I will probably show too much, and do so in an extravagant fashion. Too many details. The prose equivalent of the dance of the seven veils by a forty-year-old mother of two – embarrassing for all concerned. Confessions are dangerous, Anna Karenina’s husband said. By digging into our souls, we often dig up what might better have remained there unnoticed.
Telling a story through detail, though, is a way of avoiding other stories. Fixing on one thing can be a way of avoiding something else. Avoiding being fully present. Maybe I like things more than people. Maybe people remind me of death.
(Detail. I am a lover of small things – and of clutter.) I mind the gap. I could go on and on, looking at the fly on the strip light of the train, the way a fan moves a paper, the print on the carpet, the shadow that is made on the wall where the carriages join, the way you felt about shadows like this, until the quest for reality becomes a kind of madness. As I move forwards in a line of thought, the details to the left and the right distract and call to me. And the details of the self. The navel-gazing details. I have a weakness for them too.
Or a strength. Any attempt to sort life into a scale of mattering depends on who is doing the sorting. What, after all, is too small? Do we have to stick to one kind of story? Sometimes, perhaps, we are surprised that a certain kind of person is speaking or writing at all. This is something Tolstoy knew. Perhaps his wife Sofia knew it even more.
There is meaning in those defiantly elaborate doodles that we make when we hang on a phone line to a dominating speaker. (Detail: Nabokov’s wife, Véra, carried a loaded gun in her handbag.)
The unnoticed has a claim. Giving voice to the details can be an act of resistance. Embarrassment is a powerful hinge. It burdens the listener as much as the teller. It makes others conscious of worlds we would rather forget. It is Maggie Nelson’s wielding of the personal in public. It is consenting not to be a single being.
Which single being can police the riches of embarrassment I have to share? What is my soul, if not common ground to cultivate, fertilise, farm, capitalise? For some, there’s only the soul left to dig. Whatever else there was has been removed. (Detail: Tolstoy writes about how men sell off things that belong to women. Anna’s brother does it. A whole forest. The lost properties of love.)
Besides, the categories of public and personal are volatile. The boundaries are often arbitrary, often drawn by others. You are directed towards the laws of discretion as if into a lifeboat, but they can sink you. Women and children first.
I am beginning to float away, to create my own private public museum. Opening my bag. Exhibitionism. I curate the details of my inner world. My Loss drives me on, tapping one damp webbed foot on the ground, leaning over my shoulder, making sure that he gets enough space. He adjusts his skin, which falls in folds around the back of his neck, so thin in places that it is almost translucent. He must be seen. He must always be centre stage. He has no shame. But this is all my own work.
I keep a note in my purse, written on the back of a receipt for a taxi I shouldn’t have taken to I can’t remember where. I usually forget I have it, and pull it out by accident when I’m looking for something else, and its accidental discovery reminds me of something I can’t quite put into words.
The first half reads, in a rollerball scrawl, ‘I think I left the iron on’. The ink gives out here and there, and there’s a small smudge towards the end, caused by the shiny surface. I never iron, except when we are about to go to an important occasion like the one we were at when I wrote this – a friend’s wedding. I had ironed my top on a low setting, then gone to make a cup of tea. I had almost definitely turned it off. I even remember the unplugging bit, and placing of the snaky cord back on the board. But my mind began that loop of anxiety again, and was now circulating round the scenario like a hamster on a deadline, exacerbated by the fact that the bride was coming down the aisle, making it difficult to dash back to the church door in the other direction to phone our neighbour (who would probably be out anyway, and besides which I don’t think he had our spare keys as I’d borrowed them when I last locked myself out, and forgotten to return them).
The bride was smiling broadly, beautiful in strapless satin (no bolero), a troop of bridesmaids in a range of sizes following her. She was leaning on her stepfather’s arm, and looking from side to side at the congregation, who were leaning out at a thirty-degree angle, to glimpse the wave of white. The church was heavy with the scent of jasmine and eucaplytus. No pew or appliqué banner was left untrimmed. The groom shifted awkwardly from foot to foot as he tried to time when he should turn his head at the right moment, as practised in the wedding rehearsal.
We were probably not the only couple who felt ourselves hold hands as the about to be newlyweds exchanged their vows. I could see in the pew ahead, and in the one diagonally opposite, other pairs of people drawing imperceptibly closer, in an action both wondrous and knowing. As I dropped his hand for a moment to scratch my nose, then picked it up again, I thought about what it meant – especially what it meant to find holding someone’s hand such a familiar action that you barely register how it feels any more. It was a touch of hand on hand that spoke of memory and humour. A respect for the calluses on the tips of his fingers, and the slight rawness, a trademark of the regulation hand-washing that marks his days. It was a touch that remembered. A mutual recall of the time when we had shared that moment, that moment of first starting out, the moment before you’re really married, before you’ve stuffed it up, or completely disappointed each other. Before you’ve really known what you were getting yourself into. A tactile recognition that we were still holding hands despite it all. A renewed understanding that comes from the recognition of tetchiness, of witnessed miscarriage and childbirth. Of driving down the M4 while one half of the marriage removes the hair from her upper lip with a small metal torture device and the other negotiates a tailback. Of arguments about money and time and failures of tact. Of racing to the hospital to find his father in cardiac arrest, and standing there, watching helplessly, the doctors unable to resuscitate, while he was busy parking the car. Of knowing someone so well you know when he scratches his thumb in his palm, he’s trying not to cry. But also, somehow, of not knowing them at all.
Real marriage, the one with the white dress and the bridesmaids and the vicar, is a peculiar mirage. Marriage is not an event, but a process. It is an unfolding and refolding of two selves in time, and with all the ordinariness that time brings.
After marriage, Stanley Cavell writes, we must have what he calls the comedy of remarriage. By this, he means something other than a wedding blessing and eternity rings. More of a realisation. An accommodation – much like one might accommodate oneself to a too-small seat in the back of a car, squeezed in between two children’s car seats and a pile of suitcases, as your knees are bent up to your chin and someone is being sick. A becoming accustomed to scenes of breastfeeding a child in the back seat by kneeling backwards and hanging your boob into her mouth while she is still strapped into her child seat when there’s no lay-by and she won’t stop screaming. A screwball comedy of errors, which recognises the fact that we do not go to bed in satin nor wake up in a good mood. It’s not a million miles away from what Tolstoy writes about too. What mattered was what he called the family idea. For him, the entire movement of a novel was away from what we might understand as romance. For Tolstoy, in a marriage, love remains, but it is not the old love that one began with. Sofia writes about this too. Something in marriage has changed. It is always changing.
1940s Hollywood loved this idea. It Happened One Night, Bringing Up Baby, The Philadelphia Story, My Favourite Wife. They look like capers on the surface. People get drunk and chase lion cubs or turn up in their pyjamas and accidentally commit bigamy, but underneath the surface are stories of couples in which lives shatter into fragments, in order to be rearranged in different shapes. In these films, the point of the story is not to get down the aisle. The film wants not to get the central pair together, but to get them back together again … only those can genuinely marry who are already married. It is as though you know you are married when you come to see that you cannot divorce, that is, when you find your lives simply will not disentangle. If your love is lucky, this knowledge will be greeted with laughter.
The sermon in the church that day was a harsh one, and it seemed to have no natural shape or possible end. I fiddled with the clasp of my bag as I waited for my husband to write back. The flames would be just licking around the bedroom door by now, smoke beginning to build up a head of pressure at the front window. I wondered how long it would take for the fire to reach the ground floor. It was our fourth wedding that year, and the vicar had decided to dispense with the usual niceties about understanding and fallibility, and go for a full-on campaign in which marriage was compared to a battlefield, demanding courage, stoicism and a pith helmet. Marriage, he said, was like Afghanistan. A wave of suppressed laughter made its way round the congregation. A baby started to cry, and its sibling began to run into the vestry, hammering at the door. The organ creaked into action for the third hymn. ‘All Things Bright and Beautiful’.
Underneath my question are six words, written in his careful hand.
It’s probably ok.
Then a space. A pause. I remember watching as he wrote it.
I love you.