The Tale of the End of a Marriage
and of a Torrid Toronto Affair
Here I am, Charade thinks. Night after night, his place again, nothing ever resolved.
“When,” Koenig asks, “does a marriage end?” He is, of course, fully dressed, while she hunches up beneath the sheet, her back against pillows, and watches him. Probably, she suspects, he has forgotten that he is not pacing between a blackboard and tiers of seats. And indeed, he pauses and leans for a moment on the high carved post at the foot of the bed as though it were a lectern. “It’s one of those endlessly absorbing conundrums,” he says, “like the moral philosophers asking ‘when does a life begin?’ Because a marriage has begun to end long before one partner moves out.”
Charade conjures up the mournful but haunting face of Rachel Koenig: the translucent pallor, the dark hair, the disconcertingly large eyes. She pictures a delicate scene: two women bowing to each other with wary respect. The older one hands over a torch. Actually, she says, it was hopeless from the start. It began to end, really, almost as soon as it began. It always does, she warns; it always does. The ending is curled up inside the first encounter.
And the younger woman, accepting the trust passed on, lowering her head in deference to a wise sadness (though nevertheless convinced that the race she is about to run will be altogether different) sets out on her leg of the relay. There is some bond between the two women that has nothing to do with the man.
“On the other hand,” Koenig says, “a marriage certainly does not end with the final decree of the divorce.”
In Charade’s vision, the younger woman finishes her lap and lo, here she is back where she began. In the starting blocks her predecessor waits, hand reaching back toward her future. My turn for the torch again, she says. I’ll always be around, she promises.
“I think,” Koenig muses, “that Heisenberg is relevant here: the wider philosophical implications of his uncertainty principle. Because it would be true to say that in a very real sense I was never married to Rachel Goldmann, that she was always inaccessible to me. And it would also be true to say that in another sense I am still married to her and always will be.”
Charade thinks of one of his physics lectures: projected onto the white wall at the front of the room is a transparency. Atomic and sub-atomic particles as such, Koenig is explaining, are merely idealisations, as Bohr has put it. They are useful abstractions. It is meaningless to speak of their existence or their non-existence. They have tendencies to occur. This slide is of various visual models of the probability patterns of the electron’s tendency to be in various regions of the atom.
She knows he said exactly this because she wrote it down and memorised it. She memorised it as though it were Greek or a nonsense rhyme. Its meaning tantalises and eludes her. But what is clear and dazzling and unforgettable are those visual models thrown onto the wall: patterns of light in the shapes of bones, butterflies, concentric circles, Rorschach blobs of illumination, the totemic configurations of a concept that the eye understands but the mind cannot grasp. The eye says: these remind me of the cave paintings of primitive peoples.
Koenig had switched off the projector; and the white wall had stared blandly and blankly at the students. “The pictures on the wall do not exist,” he said. He switched the projector back on: “And they also exist.”
“At any given moment,” he asked the class, “how would you characterise the existence of those shapes of light on the wall? Could you say, categorically, that they have a material existence? Could you say, categorically, that they do not have a material existence?”
In the bedroom of Koenig’s apartment, Charade closes her eyes and summons up (with dazzling clarity) the shapes of light which both exist and don’t exist; which represent, by their presence (or their absence), diagrams of an electron’s tendency to be either here or not here.
“And I subscribe, generally speaking, to the Copenhagen view,” Koenig says, leaving the lectern of the bedpost and pacing back and forth from dresser to door. “I think Bohr and Heisenberg won that argument over against Einstein, I think it’s past denying. The imprecision of all perception. The observer, by imposing a particular set of questions, also predetermines the answers he will find.
“So the best I can do is tell you a tale of the day that Kynge began to ask himself certain questions, knowing full well that they would lead to a certain kind of answer.”
Once upon a time, on a day like any other suburban day, Kynge packed his children into the car and kissed his wife goodbye and pulled out of the driveway of his house in Brookline, Massachusetts.
“Don’t forget,” his wife said, “to stop at the post office.”
Kynge dropped his daughter (four years old) at nursery school, and his son (six years old) at the playground where grades one to three were swarming over swings and climbers. At the post office he handed in the card and waited for the registered letter. To and from Toronto, where his wife’s mother lived (and where indeed his wife, between the ages of seven and eighteen, had passed the post-European and pre-Princeton years of her life) all postal communication was sent registered, and had to be signed for. His wife’s mother trusted no system to work without the taking of extraordinary additional precautions; nor did his wife. The desk clerk returned with a parcel and looked at Kynge strangely. “It’s the same parcel,” she said, “that your wife returned yesterday as undeliverable. Are you sure you want to take it again?”
Kynge frowned. The parcel was addressed to his wife’s father, whom he had never met; who had been presumed dead since 1945.
“Yes,” Kynge said, with a brisk confidence he did not feel. “Sorry about the confusion.” And instead of driving on to his office, he drove home.
From the moment his car turned into the driveway, he sensed that certain tendencies had suddenly reached intolerable levels. He imposed the first of several significant questions. How long can this go on? he asked himself. He could see that everything was abruptly and unalterably different. He could see, for example, that the hedge of cedars which he had planted on the weekend (the hedge which had been, just a half hour previously, a hopeful row of ten-inch baby-green saplings), was now bushy and overgrown with age, higher than the windows of the house. It was unkempt. It was brown with winterburn and
quite unsightly.
Inside the house, his wife Rachel was nowhere to be seen — although her immaculate, her fastidious absence was clamorous in the spotless kitchen counters, the dust-free surface of the furniture, the manicured house plants, the tasteful antiques. The inside of the house was her cocoon. She left it rarely. She curled herself up inside it like seaslick inside a nautilus shell. For as far back as he could remember, it had been getting
more and more difficult to entice her beyond the cedar hedge.
On his third tour of the house, Kynge became slightly frantic and irrational, checking the small and never used bathroom in the basement, the furnace room, opening the closets. This was against all logic, checking the closets. His wife, having been three years old when the box cars took her family from one kind of history to another, had both a passionate and inchoate fear of confined spaces and a fear of leaving them.
He found her in a section of their bedroom closet. In her half of their wall-to-wall wardrobe. All the clothes and hangers and shelves had been removed, and the closet resembled nothing so much as a cubicle in a university library. There was a desk, a lamp, a chair. Head bent over the desk, absorbed in her task, Rachel was writing a letter.
“What are you doing?” Kynge asked.
She flinched, but otherwise remained still. In a low voice (you could not have said its intonation was fearful, nor could you have said it was without fear), in a voice which intimated that an interminable wait was now at last over, a voice which almost seemed to express relief, she said: “I am writing letters.”
“To whom?” he asked.
“To a lot of people,” she said. “To Aunt Grethe, and to Frau Sachs, and to Malka — she used to play hunt-the-beetle with me — and to —”
“Rachel,” he said. “Rachel, all those people …”
But what was the point of saying that all those people were dead?
“Yes?” she said. She raised her eyes and looked at him then, looked at him with the eyes of an animal in a trap, the eyes of someone waiting to be carried off, to be arrested, to be mugged, to be stabbed, to be raped, to be committed to an asylum, to be burned at the stake. She was waiting for the end that had always been coming towards her.
“Rachel,” he implored, as though she could be cajoled into seeing herself from where he stood. “This is insane.”
“Is it?” she asked.
“You have to forget,” he said. “You have to put it behind you and forget. They are gone, those people, and nothing will —”
“For me,” she said, “they are not gone.”
And he knew only too well, of course, that time curves, that clocks in motion slow down, that a human heartbeat orbiting space runs more slowly and therefore returns younger than its twin on earth, that particles accelerated to the speed of light increase their life spans by seven times, that time is nothing more than a very imprecise word.
Nevertheless he sat on the bed with his head in his hands and asked her: “Rachel, how long can this go on?”
When he looked up she was calmly writing again, sitting there at her desk in the closet, dressed in the plain black smock that she had worn in the long-ago play.
There was nothing he could do, so he left. He drove to his office. He threw himself into work, his classes, his discussions with students. He worked late, and although he could not remember exactly why it had become essential to work long and obsessively that night, although the morning had dwindled to a sort of bruised ache just below the level of consciousness (the way a forgotten dental appointment can keep one anxious and uneasy), he succeeded in putting off until after midnight the return to his domestic life. He knew, as soon as he pulled into the driveway, just how intolerable that life had become. He knew by the sound of crying, by the way his little children sobbed and whimpered, by the way they cowered from him and followed him with their wide accusing eyes.
About some things, looking back, Kynge is uncertain. Did he forget to pick up the children from school? Was he at fault? Is his memory scrupulously accurate? He is willing to concede that Rachel might not have been wearing the black shift on that day. It is, in fact, almost certain that she was not. He will also acknowledge that the day the letter-writing came out of the closet as it were, the day it first manifested itself in this extreme form, was a day when some other severe disturbance had occurred to trigger it: perhaps it was the time their little boy was hit by a car and rushed to hospital; or it may have been the time that the local synagogue was firebombed. It is even possible that there was only one day in all the years of their marriage when she actually hid in the closet and wrote. As time goes by, he is less and less certain about the desk and about whether there was more than one letter.
But other facts are beyond dispute: the sense of a chasm opening, that was a fact. And a fact needs logical causes — which he has tried, with varying ways and scripts and successes, to provide. It is certain that as he fell, as he went freefalling through this chasm of nothing, as he clutched at its sides, shifting gears in the Toyota and pulling back out of the driveway, a cry escaped him. Out of the depths had he cried unto … And the cry was picked up.
On radio signals, on needy antennae, along nerve ends, in eye-to-eye contact, his cry kept being picked up. At the office one of his students was waiting, a flawless young woman, a woman unmarked by history, a woman whose understanding of the situation was instant and compassionate and total. And he did what any man in extremis would do. It is certain that this student, or another, or yet another, was later waiting in a restaurant in Harvard Square, and in a hotel room in New York, and at a conference in Miami. Sometimes, when he gave papers at international colloquia, she, they, one of the sympathetic young women, showed up in Zurich, in Paris, even Moscow. It is certain that she once leaned out of a taxi and beckoned, right in front of the courthouse in Toronto, and when he got in she said to the driver: Bristol Place Hotel, near the airport. She had no face and no name. She came and went and left him hungry.
And furthermore, it is beyond dispute that when he had left his house that morning, the morning of the dead letters in the closet, his children had worn the untroubled eyes of happy innocence. His son (six years old) had been dreaming of a Little League game, and his daughter (four years old) had been cuddling her teddy bear and singing a nursery rhyme to herself. But when he returned that midnight, they were frightened, they did not understand, they accused him, they turned against him. His son, suddenly tall as a beanstalk, announced that he was not going to college, that he wanted no part in the academic rat race, given what it had done to his parents’ marriage. His son said he was going out west to build log cabins and live on the land. His daughter was tearful. “Daddy,” she sobbed, “how could you do this?” How could he? she asked her brother, who gave her a daisy, who gave out daisies and leaflets at La Guardia airport.
What is certain is that whenever he looked at Rachel, she was sitting in the closet in her black shift, writing letters to all the people she had lost.
“How long can this go on?” he asked himself, knowing both the answers.
Charade sighs and runs an index finger lightly up and down Koenig’s chest. “Yes,” she says. “I see.”
The lace curtains in the bedroom, long ago chosen because Rachel would have approved, lift and fall as silently as mist; and the curved shells, the Cluny lace shells — embroidered in pure and heavy cotton — offer themselves in undulations, sink under their own weight, billow forward again. Charade keeps her eyes on the ruck of French knots that gleam like the eyes of molluscs. “After you moved out,” she says diffidently, “and Rachel, ah, moved back to Toronto … When you go there from time to time, to Toronto I mean, for weekends … actually, you’ve done it at least five times since I’ve known you …” But she decides not to pursue the question she is looking for, and instead says: “The Zundel trial. It’s difficult to see how, if she’d become agoraphobic …”
Koenig frowns. “It comes and goes, her bouts of it. And the trial, bearing witness, it was essential for her, essential.”
He stares at the curtains, leans out of bed to feel them. He seems to expect the nubby texture to speak clues to his fingers. “Still, the agoraphobia. It’s possible,” he concedes, “that some aspects loom larger in my mind than … than they would, for example, in the minds of my son or my daughter.”
He contemplates the possibility of other presents and futures. “I don’t know,” he sighs. “It might have been different. If I’d imposed different questions. It’s like theoretical physics. First the hunch, then the conviction, then the theory. Eventually some experimentalist, in a lab somewhere, finds the data to back you up.”
Charade contemplates the mole on her lover’s neck; the mole which is not star-shaped, not really, though if she squints a little it does seem to grow points. She touches it lightly, the mole which never marked the skin of Nicholas back in his Queensland mountain-climbing days, though now it does. At least in the mind of Aunt Kay. And it is difficult, now, for Charade to blink a twin mole away from her father’s neck. Could she say categorically that a star-shaped mole played no part in a fleeting erotic encounter at the foot of the Glasshouse Mountains and on Green Island? Could she categorically say it’s her father she’s searching for? Or is it someone or something else? And what? And why?
“The same holds when it’s the other way round,” Koenig says. “You can’t trust experimental evidence, you can’t accept it, until you have a theory that explains it. And one of the things that stands out is the way Rachel used to work fertiliser in around the cedars. She wanted them to hide the house.” This piece of evidence is extraordinarily convincing to him. Extraordinarily pleasing. He relaxes. “After she went back to Toronto to live,” he can now concede, “she wasn’t as bad. When I saw her just before the trial … she was doing very well, I thought.”
“I understand,” Charade says, “about the blur. Painful things, repression … all that.” She clears her throat discreetly. “I mean, all the nameless comfort, and so on. But still, Katherine did have a name, and you did remember … well, eventually you did.
And you claimed … you said some fairly startling things about the Royal Bank and the taxi … well, you know. I do think I’m entitled to something just a little more specific.”
“Yes,” Koenig says. The curtain, which he has been pleating between his fingers, floats back against its window. “All right,” he says. He hooks his hands behind his head. “Well, there’s really not very much to tell. She was sitting in the gallery at the trial. Your aunt, I mean. Katherine. She was as obsessed with my former wife as I was. That’s why I noticed her. There was something so intense, so … I don’t know. It was the way she was staring at Rachel.
“You know how it is,” he asks, “if someone behind you is staring at your back? How you somehow sense it, and turn? Well, she was watching the dock, and I was watching her profile, and then she turned and saw me.
“That’s all I can remember, really. She looked as though she’d seen a ghost.”
Charade thinks back to the first moment in Koenig’s office, the first time she sat in on his class. Do these cataclysms — beneclysms? — mean everything or nothing? Do they speak of entanglement forever after? Or have they no significance at all? And if they are just visual or glandular spasms, why this lodging like burrs in the memory?
“I think,” Koenig says, “there might have been some kind of blue flash. I think if you’d asked around, other people might have seen that too. It seems to me that there was a crackling sound.” The kind sparklers make, he thinks. That was the way the connection leaped across the room, a licking flickering thing. “And after a while — I’ve no idea, really, how long — we both stood up and left. Like sleepwalkers.”
Charade ponders the meaning of the wound that opens and closes faster than the shutter of a Leica. Charade, whose generation does not believe in love; Charade who despises the possessive, the exclusive, and the very concept of jealousy (outmoded as dinosaurs, the Books of Hours, clipper ships, handwritten business letters, ice chests, flappers, hippies, marriage), asks herself: Am I tormented by one obsessive fuck? Is it Rachel, or Aunt Katherine, or all the nameless students behind these little daggers?
The daggers sneak between one thought and the next; the daggers are ridiculous; the daggers are embarrassing; Charade does not, strictly speaking, believe they exist. The daggers hurt.
“I’m sure she was the one who hailed the taxi,” Koenig says. “I’m sure of that. Because I remember how she got in first and leaned out and held the door open.”
“It’s interesting,” he says, “how she didn’t want to tell you she’d gone to the Zundel trial. We couldn’t stop talking about it, I’m not sure who was more obsessed, her or me. I know I couldn’t shut her up. That was why I missed the last flight back.” He makes an effort to be done with that night and says lightly: “I’m doomed to go to bed with talkers.”
We inherit plots, Charade thinks. That’s the explanation. There are only two or three in the world, five or six at the most. We inherit them and ride them like treadmills.
“When we weren’t talking,” Koenig says, “it was pretty torrid, I do remember that.” He covers his eyes with his hands. “But I can’t remember anything much. Anyway,” he says, “she must have been the one who decided on the Bristol Place because I couldn’t remember its name.”