The other day Mathis surprised me in the kitchen. I hadn’t heard him come in. He came up behind me.
“Are you talking to yourself, Mom?”
I was caught off guard.
“No, darling, I’m talking to the woman from downstairs, who’s here but you can’t see her.”
He was puzzled for a moment, then laughed. Mathis has his father’s sense of humor—when his father still had a sense of humor, that is. He opened some cupboards, looking for a snack, but he didn’t seem to know what.
A little later, after some beating around the bush, he asked if he could invite Théo for a sleepover next weekend. I didn’t know how to respond because on Saturday evening William and I have been invited out to dinner with friends and it would trouble me to leave the two of them alone. I said I’d think about it and talk to his father. I often say that: “I’ll talk to your father,” but today the full absurdity of this phrase resonated. What is a thirteen-year-old boy to make of such a stupid statement? That I’m a wife who is subject to the wisdom of her husband? That masculine trumps feminine? That William decides everything? That I hide behind this authority, real or fictional, to avoid responsibility for my own decisions? That his father and I share everything? I felt pitiful.
Anyone who is or has been part of a couple knows that the other person is a mystery. I know it too. Yes, some part of the other escapes us, decisively, because the other is a mysterious being who guards his own secrets and dark, fragile soul. The other conceals about himself some remnant of childhood, his secret wounds; he tries to repress his confused emotions and obscure feelings. The other must, as we all must, learn to become himself and devote himself to a sort of self-optimization. The unknown other cultivates his little secret garden. But of course I’ve known that for a long time; I wasn’t born yesterday. I read books and women’s magazines. Empty words, supreme platitudes that provide no consolation. Because I’ve never read that the unknown other—the very one you live, sleep, eat and make love with; the very one you believe you agree with, are in sync, even in harmony with—can turn out to be a stranger who harbors the vilest thoughts and utters words that spatter you with shame. What do you do when you discover that this part of the other who emerges from the void seems to have made a pact with the devil? What do you do when you realize that the back of your stage set is in fact immersed in a marsh that stinks like a sewer?
I shouldn’t have picked up that ball of crumpled paper. I know that. I should have stayed in my gentle, blind ignorance, and kept talking to myself—for lack of an alternative—to reassure, congratulate, calm myself.
But for how long?
The time of innocence is well and truly over. I can’t stop myself from going to look. Every morning, as soon as Mathis goes off to school and William to the office, I hurry to the computer. I start with his blog, where he posts irregularly, and then I make a tour of the sites and forums on which, by contrast, he posts comments almost daily. Sometimes even several times a day, when a discussion gets going and, in a vain display of competitive aggression, he reacts to others. On the web, Wilmor75 spreads his contempt and spews poison. In order to evade criticism, he uses contorted metaphors and clever insinuations. He knows how to tailor his words to suit the site he’s on and doesn’t ever seem to have been bothered.
I don’t know the man who writes these words.
My husband isn’t like that. My husband doesn’t use that kind of language. My husband can’t have within him the kind of stinking muck these lines exude. He’s well brought up. He comes from a well-off, educated background. My husband doesn’t spend his evenings spewing out torrents of filth to wallow in. My husband isn’t the sort of man who mocks, yells, and vomits on everything. My husband has better things to do. My husband isn’t the man who shuts himself away almost every evening to let the fetid pus ooze from his wound.
My husband was funny, clever and handsome. I loved his composure and gift for repartee. He was a fine speaker. My husband was a flamboyant, generous man. My husband would tell me lots of stories, large and small. My husband was interested in other people’s lives, including mine.
I try to explain to Dr. Felsenberg the feeling of betrayal that takes hold of me in the middle of the night. Yes, William has betrayed me. William has hidden from me this part of himself that was spoiling for a fight, ready to destroy everything, that writes the opposite of what he thinks, or what he pretends to think.
Dr. Felsenberg backs me into a corner. He asks if William knows everything about my life, my dark zones.
Of course not. But that’s not the same.
“Oh, really?” he says, looking surprised.
“I’m not talking about a secret fantasy or a secret garden. I’m talking about cartloads of filth poured into a public place.”
“But maybe he’s hiding them from you because he’s ashamed?”
“Or maybe he thinks I’m too stupid to understand. Before this, William never shied away from including me.”
“In what?”
“His little accommodations with reality.”
“Which ones?”
“The same sort that unite all couples, I imagine.”
“For example?”
He irritates me with his pretend questions. I answer him all the same.
“All couples abide by rules and customs, usually implicit ones, don’t they? It’s a sort of tacit contract that unites two people, however long that union lasts. I mean those more or less crude tricks that the two of you make without ever formalizing them. Accommodations with reality—for example, with truth itself.”
“Meaning?”
“Well, for instance, at a dinner party, the husband will tell an anecdote about something that happened to them as a couple or a family: the amazing stroke of luck by which they met, the airline strike that began the day before their honeymoon, the storm of 1999 when they were driving their new car on a highway somewhere in the north, or when they found themselves in a house with no water that was nothing like the one they’d rented from the travel website, or when their daughter fell off the big slide in the Parc de la Villette. So the husband is describing something they experienced together. And because he likes to make an impression, he embellishes a bit. Or goes further and adds some sensational details to make the story funnier, more gripping. He exaggerates, transforms. He assumes in doing so that his wife will make his lies her own. He assumes, rightly, that she will keep quiet and become his accomplice. And that’s what she does.”
“Really?”
“Don’t you? Do you contradict your wife in public when she tells a tiny fib?”
(I know Dr. Felsenberg is married because he wears a wedding ring.)
He smiles. I pursue my train of thought.
“I think this tacit contract exists between every couple. To different degrees. Let’s say the confidentiality clauses vary in length. And these exploits, revised to a greater or lesser extent, eventually construct a sort of family romance. An epic. Because after a time, you end up believing them.”
Dr. Felsenberg remained silent.
Then I added this sentence, without knowing if it was the conclusion of what came before or the beginning of an argument I was yet to make.
“In fact, a couple is a partnership of villains.”
He waited a few seconds before saying,
“The problem is that now you aren’t part of it. And moreover, you don’t want to be. Because this story is outside the contract. Ultimately, you could say that this time your husband didn’t want to compromise you. He didn’t seek your complicity.”
“That’s true. But the problem is, I’ve seen it.”
He decided we would end the session there.
I’m starting to be familiar with his expert interruptions and cunning strategies. He’s told himself that I’ll cope on my own with my third-rate aphorisms and their hidden meanings. That those will get me there.
Yes, we’re wrongdoers. Most likely. To one way of thinking. We negotiate relentlessly, practice concessions, compromise, we protect our offspring, obey the laws of the clan, we equivocate, simmer our little plans. But for how long? How long can you be the other person’s accomplice? How far can you follow them, protect them, cover for them, act as their alibi?
That’s the question Dr. Felsenberg didn’t ask. The one contained within my own words and which is bound to catch up with me in the end.
Yes, I love my husband. At least, I think I do.
But it has become so hard to love him.
Do people change that much? Do we all harbor something unnameable within us that is likely to reveal itself one day, as an ugly message in invisible ink would reveal itself in the heat of a flame? Do all of us hide a silent inner demon capable of leading a fool’s existence for years?
I watch my husband at the dinner table and wonder: did the monster within him give a hint of his smell, his ways and the echo of his rage, which I didn’t know how to recognize?
Am I the one who’s changed? Am I the one who has turned him into this bitter creature full of bile?