Enduring Love (11 page)

The curtains? I returned to the living room and looked. They hung as they always did. We never drew them. I pulled one aside, foolishly expecting to find a clue.

Then I sat again in my study, not working but brooding and waiting for Clarissa, and again my thoughts returned to how I came to be what I was, and how it might have been different, and, ridiculously, how I might find my way back to original research and achieve something new before I was fifty.

It would
make more sense of Clarissa’s return to tell it from her point of view. Or at least from that point as I later construed it. She arrives up three flights of stairs, bearing five kilograms of books and papers in her leather bag, which she has carried half a mile from the tube station. At her back, a bad day. First thing, the student she supervised yesterday, a raw girl from Lancaster, phoned her in tears and shouting incoherently. When Clarissa calmed her down, the girl accused her of setting her impossible reading tasks and of sending her up blind alleys of research. The Romantic poetry seminar went badly because the two students appointed to give discussion papers had prepared nothing and the rest of the kids had not bothered with the reading. At the end of the morning she discovered that her appointment diary was missing. All through lunch a colleague complained that her husband was too gentle with her in bed and lacked the necessary sexual aggression to overpower her and deliver the quality of orgasm she knew she deserved. For three hours during the afternoon Clarissa sat on a senate committee and found herself maneuvered
into voting for the least bad option, a seven percent reduction in the budget of her own department. She went straight from that to a performance and efficiency interview conducted by the management, where she was reminded that she had been consistently late in filing her workload quota schedules and that her teaching, research, and administration ratios were showing an uneven distribution.

As she lugs her bag up the stairs, she feels it is costing her more effort than it should, and she thinks she might be getting a cold. There’s a tenderness over the bridge of her nose, and her eyes are pricking. There’s also a widening ache in the small of her back, always a reliable sign in her of viral infection. Worst of all, the memory of the balloon accident is back with her. It’s never been far from her mind, but for a good part of the day she has kept it at one remove, anecdotalized, in its own compartment. Now it has broken out, it is right inside her. It’s like a smell on the end of her fingers. The image that has been with her since the late afternoon is of Logan letting go. The feeling that went with it, the horrified helplessness, has been with her too and seems to have generated the physical symptoms of a cold or flu. Talking the events over with friends no longer seems to help, because, she thinks, she has reached a core of senselessness. As she comes up the last flight of stairs, she notes that the ache is spreading to her knee joints. Or is this what happens to you when you haul books upstairs and you are no longer in your twenties? As she puts the key in the front door, she experiences a little lift of the spirits when she remembers that Joe will be home and is always good at looking after her when she needs it.

When she steps into the hall, he is waiting for her by the door of his study. He has a wild look about him that she has not seen in some time. She associates this look with overambitious schemes, excited and usually stupid plans that very occasionally afflict the calm, organized man she loves. He’s coming toward her, talking before she’s even
through the door. Without a kiss or any form of greeting, he’s off on a tale of harassment and idiocy behind which there appears to be some kind of accusation, perhaps even anger against her, for she was quite wrong, he says, but now he is vindicated. Before she can ask him what he’s talking about, in fact before she has even put down her bag, he is on another tack, telling her about a conversation he’s just had with an old friend in the Particle Physics Unit on Gloucester Road, and how he thinks that this friend there might wangle him an appointment with the professor. All Clarissa wants to say is
Where’s my kiss? Hug me! Take care of me!
But Joe is pressing on like a man who has seen no other human for a year.

He is for the moment conversationally deaf and blind, so Clarissa raises both hands, palms turned outward in surrender, and says, “That’s great, Joe. I’m going to take a bath.” Even then he does not stop, and probably has not heard. As she turns to go toward the bedroom, he walks behind her, and follows her in, telling her over and over in different ways that he has to get back into science. She’s heard this before. In fact, last time around, a real crisis two years ago, he ended by concluding that he was reconciled to his life and that it wasn’t a bad one after all—and that was supposed to be the close of the matter. He’s raising his voice over the thunder of the taps, back now with the harassment tale, and she hears the name Parry and remembers. Oh yes, that. She thinks she understands Parry well enough. A lonely, inadequate man, a Jesus freak who is probably living off his parents and dying to connect with someone, anyone, even Joe.

Joe is hanging in the frame of the bathroom door like some newly discovered nonstop talking ape. Talking, but barely self-aware. She pushes past him to get back into the bedroom. She would like to ask him to bring her a glass of white wine, but she thinks he would be likely to pour himself one too and sit with her while she takes her
bath, when all she wants now, if he is not going to take care of her, is to be alone. She sits on the edge of the bed and begins to unlace her boots. If she were really ill, she could say so. She’s a borderline case, no more than tired perhaps, and upset by Sunday, and it’s not her style to make a fuss, so instead she raises her foot and Joe drops to one knee, the better to ease off her boot—and he doesn’t stop talking all the while. He wants to be back in theoretical physics, he wants the support of a department, he’s happy to do whatever teaching would get him in, he’s got ideas on the virtual photon.

She stands in her stocking feet, unbuttoning her blouse. The exposure, and the sensation on her soles of thick carpet through the silk, excites her vaguely, and she remembers last night and the night before, the sorrow and the seesawing emotions and the sex, and she remembers too that they love each other and happen to be in very different mental universes now, with very different needs. That’s all. It will change, and there is no reason to draw significant conclusions, which is what her current mood is prompting her to do. She removes her blouse, touches the fastener on her bra, and then changes her mind. She feels better, but not quite good enough, and she does not want to give Joe a wrong signal, assuming he would even notice. If she could be alone in the bath for half an hour, then she could listen to him, and he could listen to her. All this talking and listening that’s supposed to be good for couples. She crosses the room to hang her skirt, then sits on the bed again to take off her stockings, and while she’s half listening to Joe she’s thinking about Jessica Marlowe, the woman who complained to her at lunch about her husband: too mild, too sexually bland. Who you get, and how it works out—there’s so much luck involved, as well as the million branching consequences of your unconscious choice of mate, that no one and no amount of talking can untangle it if it turns out unhappily.

Joe is telling her that it no longer matters that his math is far
behind because these days the software can take care of it. Clarissa has seen Joe at work, and she knows that like a poet, all a theoretical physicist needs besides talent and a good idea is a sheet of paper and a sharp pencil—or a powerful computer. If he wanted, he could go in his study now and “get back into science.” The department, the professors and the peers and the office he says he needs are irrelevant, but they’re his protection against failure, because they will never let him in. (She herself is sick of university departments.) She puts on her dressing gown over her underwear. He is back with this old frenzied ambition because he’s upset—Sunday is getting to him in different ways too. The trouble with Joe’s precise and careful mind is that it takes no account of its own emotional field. He seems unaware that his arguments are no more than ravings, they are an aberration and they have a cause. He is therefore vulnerable, but for now she cannot make herself feel protective. Like her, he has reached the senseless core of Logan’s tragedy, but he has reached it unaware. Whereas she wants to lie quietly in soapy hot water and reflect, he wants to set about altering his fate.

Back in the bathroom she stirs cold water into the hot with a back brush and adds pine oil and lilac crystals and, as an afterthought, an essence, a Christmas gift from a goddaughter, used by the ancient Egyptians, so the label claims, and known to impart to the bather wisdom and inner peace. She empties in the whole bottle. Joe has lowered the lid of the lavatory and is settling there. Theirs is the kind of relationship in which it is perfectly possible to ask to be left alone without incurring consequences, but his intensity is inhibiting her. Especially now that he is back on Parry. As Clarissa eases into the green water, she allows her concentration to settle fully on what he is saying. The police? You phoned the police? Thirty-three messages on the machine? But she saw it as she came in, the indicator said zero. He wiped them, he insists, at which Clarissa sits up in the water and
takes another look at him and he returns her stare full on. When she was twelve, her father died of Alzheimer’s, and it’s always been a fear that she’ll live with someone who goes crazy. That’s why she chose rational Joe.

Something in this look, or the sudden straightening of her aching back, or the way astonishment loosens the hinge of her jaw, causes Joe to stumble over a word—
phenomenon
—then slow into a short silence, after which he speaks in a lower tone. “What is it?”

She doesn’t take her eyes off him as she says, “You’ve been talking at me nonstop since I came in. Slow down a moment, Joe. Take a few deep breaths.”

It touches her that he is prepared to do exactly as she asks.

“How do you feel?”

Staring at the floor in front of him, he rests his hands on his knees and sighs loudly on the exhalation. “Agitated.”

She waits for him to go on, to go on being agitated, but he’s waiting for her. They hear the arrhythmic tick of the hot water pipe contracting behind the bath. She says, “I know I’ve said this before, so don’t get angry. Do you think it’s possible that you’re making too much of this man Parry? That he’s really not that much of a problem? I mean, ask him in for a cup of tea and he’ll probably never bother you again. He’s not the cause of your agitation, he’s a symptom.” As she says this, she thinks of the thirty-three messages that got erased. Perhaps Parry, or the Parry described by Joe, does not exist. She shivers and lowers herself back into the water, keeping her gaze on him.

He seems to consider carefully what she has said. “Symptom of what, exactly?”

There’s a warning chill in his last word that makes her lighten her tone. “Oh, I don’t know. This old frustration about not doing original research.” She hopes it’s only that.

Again he considers carefully. Answering her questions has made him seem suddenly tired. He looks like a child at bedtime, sitting there on the lavatory without inhibition while she takes her bath. He says, “It’s the other way round. There’s this ridiculous situation I can’t do anything about. I get pissed off and start thinking about my work, the work I ought to be doing.”

“Why do you say you can do nothing about it—about this guy, I mean?”

“I’ve just told you. After I spoke to him, he stood outside our place and hardly moved for seven hours. He was phoning all day long. The police say it’s not their business. So what do you want me to do?”

Clarissa feels the little cold thump to the heart she always gets when anger is directed at her. But at the same time she’s aware that she has done the very thing she wanted to resist. She has let herself be drawn into Joe’s mental state, his problems, his dilemma, his needs. She has been helpless before the arousal of her protective impulses. Her careful questions were designed to help him, and now she is being rewarded by his aggression while her own needs go unnoticed. She was prepared to look after herself, given that he was not up to it, but even that recourse has been denied her. She speaks quickly, deflecting his question with her own. “Why did you wipe the messages off the tape?”

This throws him. “What are you saying?”

“It’s a simple question. Thirty messages would be evidence of harassment you could take to the police.”

“The police aren’t—”

“All right.
I
could listen to them. They’d be evidence for me.” She stands in the bath and snatches a towel to cover herself. The sudden movement makes her dizzy. Perhaps there is something wrong with her heart.

Joe is on his feet too. “I thought we were coming to this. You don’t believe me.”

“I don’t know what to think.” She is toweling herself with unusual vigor. “What I know is that I come back from a terrible day and walk straight into yours.”

“ ‘Terrible day.’ You think this is about a terrible day?”

They are both back in the bedroom now. She is already wondering if she has gone too far. But here she is, prematurely out of her bath, looking for her underwear, and the aching in her back is still spreading. They rarely row, Clarissa and Joe. She is especially bad at arguments. She has never been able to accept the rules of engagement, which permit or require you to say things that you do not mean, or are distorted truths or not true at all. She can’t help feeling that every hostile utterance of hers takes her further not only from Joe’s love but from all the love she’s ever had, and makes her feel that a buried meanness has been exposed that truly represents her.

Joe has another kind of problem. His emotions are slow to shift to anger in the first place, and even when they have, he has the wrong kind of intelligence, he forgets his lines and cannot score the points. Nor can he break the habit of responding to an accusation with a detailed, reasoned answer instead of coming back with an accusation of his own. He is easily outmaneuvered by a sudden irrelevance. Irritation blocks his understanding of his own case, and it is only later, when he is calm, that an articulate advocacy unrolls in his thoughts. Also, it’s particularly hard to be harsh to Clarissa, because she is so easy to wound. Angry words leave an instant mark of pain across her face.