14

Something

A kiss from an unmarried man seems to have a future. A kiss from a married man can instantly be written off as belonging only to the past.

B. doesn’t believe in the future and doesn’t concern himself with the past. All he cares about is the present.

“You think so much about the future that it robs you of every pleasure in the present. That’s a shame, if not a crime,” B. said to me today. “Take, for example, Schopenhauer. He says, ‘Each day is a little life; every waking and rising a little birth, every morning a little youth, every going to rest and sleep a little death.’ It’s like Börne says, ‘Happiness is the best life preserver in the current of life.’ And even your Gorky says, ‘You must bear yourself with indifference toward everything, not spoiling your life with philosophy, and not putting questions.’”

“The same Gorky, my Gorky, as you call him, also says that ‘every minute of our lives must be dedicated to its highest purpose.’”

“Well?”

“What’s the purpose of a love with an end we’ve already settled on, a love that we are calling ‘nothing at all’?”

“There is something, though, between the beginning and the end.”

“Oh, you mean that something!”

“Better something than nothing.”

“Better nothing than the something you’re after.”

“I don’t agree with you.”

“I accept that you don’t agree,” I pontificated. “I mean, from your point of view. For someone who wants to stave off his boredom in the intermission between the acts of a humdrum family life, this something would be a good distraction. But for someone like me, for whom the something is not just a small episode, but an important event in her life, maybe that person should avoid it.”

“I look at you”—B. wrinkled his brow and spoke after a long silence—“but I can’t understand you. Does your platonic temperance come from a romantic perspective, or does it come from a pragmatic approach to life? What are you, really?”

“It’s your job to figure it out.”

“I can’t! We’ve been carrying on a love affair for three weeks already and you are more of a riddle to me than ever. You’re like the moon: the closer I get to you, the farther away you are. Instead of going forward with you, I’m going backward. What can be the end of such a path? I don’t know! I’m so confused!”

“You won’t get to the end of it, and you won’t come here either. You’ll go back to your own home.”

“But when I go home, I take the thought of you with me there too. I think about you very much.”

“But not too much.”

“Very much. I am afraid I’ll actually fall in love with you.”

“Are you capable of that?”

“More than you might think. And what would become of me then?”

“Why do you need to think about that now? But if you’re really so scared of what might happen later, you can tear yourself away now.”

“Do you want me to go?”

“No. What’s the alternative? After all, being with you is not as boring as being without you.”

“Thank you!”

“Thank you for saying thank you!”

There’s something about B. that makes me think about him and makes me want to see him again. I’m afraid I’ll start to love him because I hate being lonely.

If the man I love with my whole heart won’t come to see me, I’ll let the man who loves me come, the man who speaks words of love to me, beautiful and carefully chosen words of love. Yes, maybe I’ll start loving B. because he helps me forget A. for a while. If only B. were able to drive him from my soul forever.

But he won’t be able to do that. No one can extinguish the death he left me with when he tore himself away from me to pursue his “life”: a better, more comfortable, more certain life, from which I am excluded.

A letter from A. Just a few words: “I wanted to write and to visit you but I didn’t have time. I’ve been very busy.” He said he might come by one day when he’s in my neighborhood.

Very good. Next time he’s passing by he’ll come up to visit, find me with my “friend,” B., and take in the scent of the fresh flowers that B. brings to my room. Although I love A. when he isn’t around, when he’s here I’ll act as though I’m thinking about B. instead. When A. asks me what I’m thinking about I’ll tell him it’s B. That will be my revenge. A. is so ungenerous and calculating that he doesn’t want to give me his love. So I’ll take my revenge instead.