“I kept looking for explanations of what had gone wrong. Here were people I was convinced were once in love and, I believe, continued being in love draw so far apart from one another that such a drastic act as divorce began to make sense to the two of them? What happened? I kept asking myself. I was looking for the solution to a riddle that has plagued mankind for perhaps millennia. I could not find the solution then.
“When I was eighteen years old, I fell in love or thought I fell in love with someone who seemed also to love me. We got married. Almost immediately problems like those that had beset my parents beset me and my husband too. I hadn’t yet found the solution to the problem of my parents. That made my own very similar problem harder to face. I knew that something was wrong and that whatever it was that was wrong was nibbling away slowly and steadily away at the foundations of my then-husbands and my relationship. We drifted apart and eventually stayed apart and, just as my parents had done twenty years before, got divorced.
“The loneliness and confusion that followed the decline of my relationship and subsequent divorce were part of what led me to decide to become an astronaut. I thought that being alone in space as an astronaut sent out on a solo journey that would last for months or even years or even decades would be something I could handle after what I had been through. In fact, I thought I needed such a life for, in such a life, I would find consolation for my earlier suffering.
“Yet, even during the few months I spent alone on board the space ship on this mission, I realized that loneliness was not for me even though it might well be my lot in life. My experience inside of the ramp and then later among the creatures only reinforced my sense that being alone was not for me.
“But I had a lot of time to think about many things and one of the things I thought about time and again was how nice it would be finally to discover the solution to the problem of failed marriages between two people who once were and probably would remain at some level in love. Then, one night, the solution came to me.”
Though he did not say anything, he was listening closely. When she too stopped talking, he decided she wanted him to give her some indication that he was interested in hearing what she had to say. “Tell me,” he said. He was still worried that all of this was leading up to an announcement that their relationship would have to end.
“The solution has to do with how people organize their lives, especially that part that is called “free time,” that is, when they are not doing the work they do that a bureaucratic organization oversees and compensates. Working time is, of course, also organized but the organization is imposed and often regarded as a painful necessity rather than a thing that is capable of conferring a host of psychological and spiritual benefits (which it is capable of conferring).
“I tried to work out how two people (or some larger group of very close friends) could go about organizing free time. And the more I thought about that problem, the more ideas I got. I won’t lay it all out for you right now. It would take too much time. Because my separate ideas are part of a larger whole, I’d risk boring or confusing you. So instead of going over all of it right now, I’ll tell you one of my ideas and that one may give you an idea of where my thinking in general was going. My one idea was this: there is a need to think about presence and absence, to find room for both, and to make both part of a satisfying schedule.”
“I don’t quite understand,” he said from his position on the bed. He had scooted up towards the headboard and was half-sitting and have reclined against the headboard with the covers pulled up to his waist. “What do you mean by presence and by absence?” He was worried again about where all of this was leading.
She said, “I’ll make what I said clear to you by talking about our relationship rather than relationships in general.
“Take the life we lead, a life that is partly imposed on us by the creatures of this place and partly (because what they impose on us does not take up all of our time) freely chosen. “This life seems very good to us right now, partly because it has just begun and it is comfortable and the creatures seem to be interested in us and kindly disposed towards us.
“We are both elated because we found someone whose presence comforts us. Two hitherto lonely people are in love, a state that is new to them, not because they’ve never been in love before, but because so much time has passed since they last were in love. So love is new. And there is a sweetness in novelty that overrides any sense that it is important to organize free time. But novelty wears off after a while and then a void opens that, for people unaware of the need for organization, opens wider and wider and becomes the abyss which people first fear about falling into and then eventually do fall into.”
“Go on,” he said after she had stopped talking for a while. He still was worried about where all of this was heading.
“Look at us,” she said. For the next few months, up to maybe twenty months, we will be together every minute of every day and night. Furthermore, we have what amounts to servants doing the cooking and cleaning for us. We live the life of pampered guests staying for a long time at a kind of resort hotel that is also a good school.
“The fact that we are being taken care of makes organizing our free time all the more important. Because that part of our life that might otherwise be filled with shopping, cleaning, cooking, and getting about is taken care of, it becomes especially imperative that we recognize the importance of and put some effort into organizing our free time.
“I do not think that is a good thing to live purely spontaneously. It is especially not good for people like us who have been alone for a long time and therefore have acquired a kind of intimacy with loneliness. Having discovered that loneliness has its compensations as well as its pains, it will be tempting for us to think more and more of the compensations if anything goes wrong with our life together. Let us then anticipate problems before they come. And one thing we can do to anticipate and prevent problems is to work out how to organize that part of our lives that is our own. Part of that organizing has to include time we need to spend apart. What I mean by absences and presences has to do with time spent apart under circumstances when it would be easy to spend all of our time together. A lot more besides absences and presences has to be considered, but absences and presences have to be part of what we consider.”
“I know what you mean by presences. But what exactly do you mean by absences? How can we be absent from one another when, as you have said, the life we are leading now seems to entail necessarily that we are together all the time. Do you mean that we should each go to our own rooms after the soup every night and not see each other again until the next morning—each and every morning?” He asked her.
“No, I do not mean that,” she said. “Doing that would be contrary to the love I feel for you and that I believe you feel for me. Doing that would not be organizing our lives to suit our feelings and the natural progressions of our feelings; instead, it would be straight-jacketing our lives and feelings. It would be the opposite of what I have in mind. I don’t mean that.”
“What then do you mean?”
“Something like this: Let us decide soon, while we still relish the novelty of our relationship, to spend one night each week alone in our separate beds and one evening (after dinner but before going to bed) alone. Of course, we’d have to work out between the two of us the details of these self-imposed times apart and agree also to put times aside to evaluate and revise whatever decisions we reach. Maybe we would decide to spend two nights apart or maybe two evenings apart. Maybe we’d combine the evening we spend apart with the night we spend apart. Or maybe we would decide to separate the two things so that the night apart would be scheduled for, say, a Tuesday, and the evening apart scheduled for, say, a Sunday.
“We’d have to work out the details but once we reached a decision we’d stay with it for some minimum amount of time, say six months, before scheduling a time to evaluate and possibly revise what we once concluded. I think that, over the long term, that
and other ways of organizing the time that is our ‘free time’ would bring wonderful dividends.
“Being alone a little bit would help us better reflect on and appreciate the time we spent together. It would give us time to think about other things too. We’d look forward to being together after being apart just as we’d look forward to being alone even if only for a little while. It would be healthy. It would be good. It would be the kind of thing that might have saved my parents’ misbegotten marriage as well as my own.”
She didn’t say anything for a while after that, and he was about to say something, once again, just to show her that he still listened and was interested when she stopped him by asking him, “What do you think of what I’ve just said?”
“I like it,” he said. “I think it makes a lot of sense. When I am with you, I am so full of your presence that I actually need time alone to play back in my mind the special moments of my time with you so that the reservoir can empty and so that space is created in my mind to take in and appreciate whatever the next day and day after that will bring. I understand that you have more than what I just said in mind but still, for that one reason I mentioned and is now uppermost in my mind, it makes sense to me to make absence a part of our routine.”
He added, “And I suppose times of absence would serve other purposes as well including preserving the personalities we developed over time, the personalities that drew us together in the first place.” Thinking a bit more about the desirability of a schedule that includes absences, he added, “I suppose that, once the principle is accepted, the problem becomes fine tuning it. With regard to presence and absence, we have to be careful to strike just the right note—just enough absence but not too much or too little.”
She got up off her easy chair and crawled into bed beside him and kissed him full on his lips and nuzzled up against him and said in a low and husky voice, “You do understand. You really do. I hoped you would. I was worried, I have to admit, that you would take what I said the wrong way, that you would think that I was saying what I was saying as a prelude to rejecting you. But now I see that such misunderstanding will not occur. Instead, you understand. You really understand.”
Peter said, “Let us wait until tomorrow evening to work out the details. We can decide which nights and which evening or evenings each week need to be spent apart. In the meantime, between now and then, I can think about what you’ve said and therefore get a better understanding of what you said and perhaps even come up with some ideas of my own.
“I need some time to absorb what you said. I need some time so that what you said can sink into my mind and soul and mix with whatever is already there. You have to realize that you have solved a problem I haven’t tried to solve. I haven’t even, until now, recognized that there even existed such a problem. But now I see that, thanks to you, such a problem exists. It not only exists but needs to be taken seriously and ranked high on the list of problems people face.
“And I appreciate you for being wise enough to recognize the problem of organizing free time (a problem that has, as one part of it, the problem of allocating time for togetherness and time for privacy).”
He put his hand around her head and ran his fingers through her hair. He had an idea of what she might enjoy; and, with that idea in mind, he got up from the bed, went to the bathroom, and found a comb there. He returned to the bed and started combing her hair. He ran the comb down all the way to the ends of the strands of her hair. He did that over and over again, passing from one side of her head to the other. She sat up and kept her head erect enough so that it would resist the comb enough to get it to dig down to the roots of her hair. She closed her eyes and said, “This feels so good.”
He said, “If you like this as I thought you would, we’ll include this in our routine. Two times a week, on say a Monday and Thursday, before going to bed, I’ll comb your hair like this for, say, twenty minutes.” “Oh, wonderful,” she said. “I’ll have something wonderful to look forward to.” “One of many things,” he said. He was feeling very good because the thoughts she shared did not include her wanting to be rid of him. She wanted instead to be WITH him and to make sure that the two of them could be happy as a couple for a long, long time.”
She smiled and closed her eyes. She made a kind of cooing sound whenever he ran the comb down her hair. It was like the purring of a cat, he thought. He noticed too that running a comb through her hair produced static electricity, just as it would on Earth.
Chapter 46: Changing Places
While he was combing her hair, he remembered his promise to himself to ask her about the creatures’ behavior during the day that had just passed. He wanted to ask about those festivities. So, while he combed her hair, he said, “I promised myself I’d ask you about the way the creatures were behaving today. It looked like they were celebrating something. I felt you must know something about it. Were they celebrating something? If so, what and why?”
She did not answer right away. She was enjoying getting her hair combed so much that she had withdrawn into a kind of private ecstasy. Her eyes were closed. But, as he continued combing her hair, he noticed that she was coming out of whatever deep recesses of her soul she had entered. She opened her eyes just for a moment, closed them, opened them again, kept them open, turned her neck so that he saw her profile, and took the comb out of his hand.
“That was really nice,” she said. “Thank you. Let’s be sure to make that part of our schedule—every Monday and Thursday, as you suggested. I felt like I was getting the kind of treatment one gets in a high class spa. While you were combing my hair, I dreamed of hot and cold baths and of being massaged all over my body with oil and of being wrapped in a thick terry cloth towel and of being guided to one of many beds set against one of the walls of a tiled room. And, if you’d like, I can comb your hair, maybe every Tuesday and Friday night.”
“We’ll think of something else. Unless I let my hair grow long like yours, I won’t feel the same pleasure as you feel. Besides, I like combing your hair. Maybe I get as much satisfaction out of doing that as you get out of getting it done.”
“Okay,” she said. “We’ll think of something else. I owe you something.” He said, “The debt is mine and would be greater still if you’d let me add to this combing of your hair the covering of your body with oil followed by my giving you a massage.” He closed his eyes and smiled at the thought while continuing to comb her hair.” “That sounds really nice too. If we add that, I’ll be doubly in your debt.” “The debt would be mine,” he repeated, still smiling, and still combing her hair and not believing how fortunate he was to get so much pleasure out of something that she felt put HER in HIS debt.
After a while, he asked her, “Did you hear in that faraway place you entered my question about the creatures and what they were up to today? Do you mind my asking you about that now?”
She held the comb in her hand and lightly tapped the back of it against the palm of her other hand. She was evidently still coming out of her reverie. “No,” she said after a while, “I don’t mind. I’ll talk to you about it. This is as good a time as any to talk about it with neither of us being sleepy and it being so late at night.”
She said, “Your instincts are correct. Those were festivities but the festivities marked an important moment in those creature’s routine. All of the creatures who inhabit this place gathered together in the same large room as they do twice during each their years (which, as far as I can determine, comes to about 600 of our days) for the purpose of taking possession of or surrendering the motorized cars. Because possession of a motorized cart is so important to them, surrendering or acquiring one amounts to a universal switching of roles. And, because they all recognize the importance of occasional role changes, they celebrate.
“You see, the creatures greatly value being able to sit erect on an elevated mobile platform. It gives them height. It makes it possible for them to see what they would ordinarily not see. It makes it possible for them to mo
ve all eight of their limbs about for reasons other than for mere locomotion or food consumption. It makes it possible for them to make music and talk clearly because the eight slits on their chests no longer must touch the ground but are instead open to the atmosphere and available to have various things like the blow holes of musical instruments attached to the slits.
“Along with the advantages of sitting upright comes what they have come to recognize as dangers that they see as so imperiling their community as to make riding atop a platform a mixed blessing. The danger is that those who ride on the moveable platform begin to see themselves as superior to those who crawl along the floor or climb walls or dangle from ceilings. From seeing themselves as superior, they quickly jump to seeing themselves as a class apart. And, from there, it is a short jump to not caring about the ones who crawl on the floor—not even regarding them as fellow creatures.
“The solution they’ve come up with are what they call the ‘special days’ (she made the sound they use for it) or ‘exchange days’ (she made the sound for that phrase too). So, twice a year, everyone comes together and, while bands play, while everyone chatters excitedly, while groups break out in ceremonial chants, the ones that have been crawling around get moveable carts while those who had moveable carts surrender the carts. Then another exchange day is held three hundred or so days later; and, once again, the creatures switch places. Doing this, they say, promotes harmony and empathy. It lets the community stay united rather than become fractured.”
“So that was what it was all about, and I suppose I can see the wisdom of doing things that way even though another solution might be just to manufacture enough carts so that everyone could have one,” he said.
A Theory of Gravity Page 29
