Intermezzo

A lot of the time when I try to talk to someone, I feel like I must be really boring. Because I’ll notice that whoever I’m talking to is just zoned out and not interested in what I’m saying at all. That’s why I don’t talk a lot usually, I guess. I mean even with my friends, I don’t. Something might come into my head to say, but then I’ll just imagine how boring it would be from the perspective of everyone else, and I won’t say it. But when I’m talking to you— I guess, to be honest, you seem kind of interested. And then I probably get carried away a little bit, wanting to tell you things.
Well, I am interested, she says.
He’s nodding, looking down at his water flask on the countertop, saying: Honestly just being near you, I feel really good. Or— I’m sorry, maybe that’s weird.
Quietly she answers: No, it’s not.

About the crying, however, he feels calm, not panicked. Perhaps because as soon as her tears began, she came to him and put her face in his shoulder. And whatever she’s crying about or thinks she’s crying about, this still seems to mean something: that she wants to feel his arms around her, which is the same thing he wants. Whatever complicated circumstances may account for the situation, there is still this ultimate reality, that they are two people, a man and a woman, and the woman wants to lie in the arms of the man when she’s upset.

This is what you get, Bridget seemed to be saying, for being different. Well, it’s true, after all, Margaret thinks. This is what you get. To work in a nice place with a few interesting people, to have friends with whom to discuss life and ideas. To attend the theatre, to hear live music, to arrange the use of the studio room on Monday nights for the local philosophy reading group. Oh, Kierkegaard, that’ll be interesting. To exercise once again, for a little time, who knows how long, the power to charm and fascinate, to be the object of an intense and searching desire. And to feel inside herself the reciprocating force of desire, this is what she gets, a life of her own.

No, Margaret didn’t need anyone’s sympathy, she could look after herself. It was weak people who needed compassion, weak men especially, like Ricky, the unfortunate soul. Margaret was strong, everyone always said so, a fine strong woman. For that alone, how many people hated her. And would relish her humiliation now at last it had come. Indecent, sordid, making a show of herself. No wonder that husband of hers took to the drink. Who would defend her now, speak up for her, take her side? Of all those who had relied on her, complained to her about their own sorrows and received her sympathy in return, her family, her friends, who among them now would come to her defence? What loyalty had she purchased with her lifetime of good behaviour and self-sacrifice? None, nothing. There would be no one to speak out, no one to take her part, nobody.

Remembering their father in the ICU, in terrible pain then, and they had to give him morphine. Ivan sometimes wished it would happen. Yes, because he thought of death as an event, something that would happen and then be over. And indeed, when it came to be over, there was relief, there was a certain freedom with that, to be free of the anxiety of waiting. In the months since, Ivan has embraced this sense of freedom, he can see that now. He has made impulsive decisions, he has fallen in love, his life has been transformed, in an uncontrolled rush of energy and feeling. To live, he has needed to live, to overcome the terrible event, yes, it was needed. But now that the event has come and gone, the funeral, the various rituals, only the loss remains, which can never be recuperated. The event is over, the event has been overcome, and yet the loss is only beginning. Every day, it grows deeper, more and more is forgotten, less and less really known for certain. And nothing will ever bring his father back from the realm of memory into the reassuringly concrete world of material fact, tangible and specific fact: and how, how is it possible to accept this, or even to understand what it means?

Life, after all, has not slipped free of its netting. There is no such life, slipping free: life is itself the netting, holding people in place, making sense of things. It is not possible to tear away the constraints and simply carry on a senseless existence. People, other people, make it impossible. But without other people, there would be no life at all. Judgement, reproval, disappointment, conflict: these are the means by which people remain connected to one another. Because of Margaret’s friends, her former marriage, her family, colleagues, people in town, she is not entirely free to live the limitless spontaneous life that she has imagined for herself. But because of Ivan, because of whatever there is between them, she is, on the other hand, not entirely free to return to her previous existence either. The demands of other people do not dissolve; they only multiply. More and more complex, more difficult. Which is another way, she thinks, of saying: more life, more and more of life.