Enduring Love

by Ian Mcewan

  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.

  But now they seem cast in a play they cannot stop, and a terrible freedom is in the air. “The guy’s ridiculous,” Joe continues. “He’s fixated.” Clarissa begins to speak, but he waves her down. “I can’t get you to take this seriously. Your only concern is I’m not massaging your damned feet after your hard day.” This reference to a recent tender half-hour shocks Joe as much as Clarissa. He had no resentment at the time; in fact, he enjoyed it.

  She turns her head away but manages to hang on to what she was going to say. “You were so intense about him as soon as you met him. It’s like you invented him.”

  “Right! I get it. I brought it down on myself. I made my own fate. It’s my karma. I thought even you were above this kind of New Age drivel.”

  This even comes from nowhere, a rhythmic filler, a reckless little intensifier. Clarissa has never expressed the remotest interest in the New Age package. She looks at him, surprised. The insult has in turn set her free. “You ought to be asking yourself which way this fixation runs.”

  The suggestion that it is he who is obsessed by Parry appears so monstrous to Joe that he can think of nothing to say but “Christ!” Motiveless energy impels him to stride across the room to the window. There’s no one out there. With such anger in the air it makes Clarissa feel vulnerable to be half dressed, so she takes advantage of the movement her remark has caused to snatch a skirt from a coat hanger. Two other coat hangers drop to the floor, but she does not pick them up as she usually would.

  Joe takes a deep breath and turns from the window to exhale. He makes a deliberate show of calming himself, of starting again from a reasonable premise, of being a reasonable man refusing to be driven to extremes. He speaks in a quiet, breathy tone, exaggeratedly slow. Where do we learn such tricks? Are they inscribed, along with the rest of our emotional repertoire? Or do we get them from the movies? He says, “Look, there’s this problem out there”—he gestures to the window—“and all I wanted from you was your support and help.”

  But Clarissa does not hear reason. The husky voice, the tense of wanted, suggest to her self-pity and accusation and make her angry. She does not need to tell him that he’s always had her support and help. Instead she comes at him from a new place, inventing a grievance and recalling it in a single mental act. “The first time he phoned and told you he loved you, you admitted you lied to me about it.”

  Joe is so astonished he can only stare at her, and while his mouth is struggling to frame a word, Clarissa, unseasoned as she is in this kind of battle, feels a pulse of triumph that is easily confused with vindication. In that moment she honestly feels she has been betrayed and therefore is entitled to add, “So what am I meant to think? You tell me. Then we’ll see what kind of support and help you need.” As she says this she is slotting her feet into her mules.

  Joe is beginning to find his voice. He has so many simultaneous protesting thoughts that his mind is fogged. “Wait a minute. Are you really suggesting …”

  Clarissa, aware that her remarks might not bear up under discussion, is getting out while she’s ahead, leaving the room while it’s still delicious to feel wronged. “Well, fuck off, then,” Joe shouts to her departing back. He feels he wouldn’t mind picking up the dressing table stool and throwing it through the window. He is the one who should be walking out. After some seconds’ hesitation, he hurries out of the room, passing Clarissa in the hallway, snatches his coat from its peg, and goes out, slamming the door hard behind him and glad that she was close by to hear its full force.

  As he leaves the apartment building, he is surprised at how dark it has become. It’s raining, too. He gathers his coat about him and tightens the belt, and when he sees Parry waiting for him at the end of the brick path, he does not even break his stride.

  Ten

  My impression was that the rain intensified the moment I stepped out, but I wasn’t going back for a hat or an umbrella. I ignored Parry and set such a furious walking pace that when I got to a corner and looked round, he was fifty yards behind. My hair was soaked and water had already penetrated my right shoe, whose sole had a long-neglected gash. My anger came off in a cold glow, childishly undirected. Parry, of course, was to blame for coming between Clarissa and me, but my fury was for them both—he was the affliction she had failed to support me against—and for everyone and everything, especially this seeping rain and the fact that I had no idea where I was going.

  There was another thing too, like a skin, a soft shell around the meat of my anger, limiting it and so making it appear all the more theatrical. It was a quarter-memory, a niggle, a faint connection rooted in a forgotten bout of reading, irrelevant to my purposes at the time but lodged in me like an enduring fragment of a childhood dream. It was relevant now, I thought, it could help me. The key word was curtain, which I imagined in my own handwriting, and just as the rain on my lashes splintered and refracted the streetlight, so this word seemed to come apart, tugged this way and that by associations that lay just off the screen of recall. I saw a grand house in long perspective, reproduced in the smudged black and white of an old newspaper, and high railings and perhaps some kind of military presence, a security guard or sentry. But if this was the house where the significant curtain hung, it meant nothing to me.

  I pushed on, past real houses, huge lit villas that rose above their high entryphone gates, behind which I glimpsed carelessly parked cars. Such was my mood that I could consciously and pleasurably forget our own half-million-pound apartment and indulge the fantasy that I was a poor down-and-out scurrying in the rain past the rich folks’ houses. Some people had all the breaks, I’d wasted what few chances came my way, and I was nothing and there was no one out here to care for me now. I hadn’t tricked my own feelings like this since I was an adolescent, and the discovery that I could still do it gave me almost as much pleasure as a five-minute mile. But then, when I felt for curtain again, there was no association at all,
not even a shadow, and as I began to slow my pace, I thought how the brain was such a delicate, fine-filigreed thing that it could not even fake a change in its emotional state without transforming the condition of a million other unfelt circuits.

  I sensed my tormentor closing on me just before I heard him half shout, half yodel my name. Then he called again. “Joe! Joe!” I realized he was sobbing. “It was you. You started this, you made this happen. You’re playing games with me, all the time, and you’re pretending …” He couldn’t finish. I picked up speed again, and I was almost running when I crossed the next street. His crying wavered with each jarring footfall. I was disgusted and frightened. I reached the other side and looked back. He had followed me and now he was trapped in the center of the road, waiting for a gap in the traffic. There was just a chance he could have fallen forward under a passing set of wheels, and I wanted it, the desire was cool and intense, and I wasn’t surprised at myself, or ashamed. When he saw my face turned toward him at last, he shouted a series of questions. “When are you going to leave me alone? You’ve got me. I can’t do anything. Why don’t you admit what you’re doing? Why do you keep pretending that you don’t know what I’m talking about? And then the signals, Joe. Why d’you keep on?”

  Still trapped in the center, his figure and his words obliterated at irregular intervals by the passing traffic, he raised his voice to such a hoarse screaming that I couldn’t look away. I should have been running on, for this was the perfect moment to lose him. But his rage was compelling and I was forced to look on, amazed, although I never quite lost faith in the redeeming possibility of a bus crushing him as he stood there, twenty-five feet away, pleading as he damned me.

  He uttered his words at a screech, on a repetitive rising note, as though a forlorn zoo bird had become approximately human. “What do you want? You love me and you want to destroy me. You pretend it’s not happening. Nothing happening! You fuck! You’re playing … torturing me … giving me all your fucking little secret signals to keep me coming toward you. I know what you want, you fuck. You fuck! You think I don’t? You want to take me away from …” I lost his words to a house-sized removal truck. “… and you think you can take me away from Him. But you’ll come to me. In the end. You’ll come to Him too, because you’ll have to. You fuck, you’ll beg for mercy, you’ll crawl on your stomach …”