Gut Symmetries

by Jeanette Winterson

  The curious fact of love is that it overrides the body’s rubber-sealed selfishness. Sex and procreation easily fit in with the body’s plans for Empire; it wants to extend its territory, needs to reproduce itself. It resists invasion. Love the invader compromises the self’s autonomy. Love the rescuer is the hand held out across the uncrossable sea.

  Trust it? Perhaps. It may be the right hand or something more sinister. My body is unconvinced, my mind would like to throw down the keys. I am of the generation brought up on romance. Where is the one for me?

  Biologically there are thousands of ones for me. If I want to rut I can rut. I should be wary of ties that are chains and hands that are handcuffs. What should lead me out is very likely to wall me in. The bitterness of love is twin of its hope.

  Walk with me. What kind of a woman goes to bed with another woman’s husband? Answer: a worm? That might explain my invertebrate state. Boneless woman; heart breast and thighs, not the kind of woman I thought I was. If I am so ignorant of my own self, how can I claim knowledge of another human being?

  My body still damp with him I am afraid.

  ‘ “Even the hairs of your head are numbered”, isn’t that what God said?’ Jove was lying on his back smiling at me. He rubbed his temples and pulled a face. ‘In my case God need only count to twenty.’

  Then he was serious, which he hardly ever seemed to be and he took hold of the weight of my hair. ‘This is the mathematics of God.’

  Later, admiring his own erection, he said, ‘This is the physics of God.’

  Both statements should be read carefully because Jove did not believe in God.

  At the Battery I leaned on the rail and looked out at the water. There was a fog coming in and the lights of a tug blinking its coded message. The darkness and the water did not feel like a threat. Darkness-water felt like a response to the fluid place that had become my heart. As a scientist I try to work towards certainties. As a human being I seem to be moving away from them. If I needed any proof of the provisional nature of what is called the world I was beginning to find it. Of what could I be sure? Absolutely sure?

  And yet I tended towards him as light to a bright object.

  I realise that is an optical illusion.

  I started to walk back, away from the water, away from the dark. I would have to go back into the day just beginning.

  Love affair: amour honourable or dishonourable. Jove had a wife.

  The Tower

  My husband has started an affair. Cherchez la femme. Where is she?

  Ransack the bedroom. The master bedroom well named. In a rip of pillow and sheet I shall tear her stigmata off the mattress. Is that her imprint, faint but discernible? My radioactive hands will sense her. Whatever bits of hair and flesh she has left behind I will find and crucible her.

  Give me a pot and let me turn cannibal. I will feast on her with greater delight than he. If she is his titbit then I will gourmet her. Come here and discover what it is to be spiced, racked and savoured. I will eat her slowly to make her last longer. Whatever he has done I will do. Did he eat her? Then so will I. And spit her out.

  I am not seeking revenge.

  I am not a vengeful woman.

  I must proceed reasonably.

  Where is the screwdriver? I will have every hinge off every door. There will be no privacy in the bathroom. No place to read a billet-doux with one hand. Let him shave in front of me, shit in front of me, talcum powder his armpits under my stare. I will count the hairs on his razor and the rings around his tub. I will fact-find him as though he were a rare breed of insect.

  I will do all this sanely.

  Give me a drill. I will bore holes in his shoes and spy on him as he walks. Eyes beneath the pavement will be watching him. While he sleeps I will trepan the back of his head and with my fingers pull out his dream of her.

  I shall of course be quiet.

  Where is the chalk? I shall mark out a new Berlin Wall: two feet each in the hallway, his study he can keep, and the side of the drawing room that is furthest from the window. I will give him one lighted ring of the gas oven and the kitchen cold tap. Let him eat cake. I will mark the doorways as did the Jews on Passover and pray that the Angel of Death takes the male first born. Him.

  The sex bed the love bed the afternoon and night bed where I held him he held her bed the ripe rotting sly bed. Where is the saw?

  First sever the headboard. Second, disembowel the mattress. Third, gut the springs. Fourth, amputate the footboard. Fifth, neatly arrange the halves at either side of the room, one dazed blanket each.

  Blankets? Blankets? What has he to do with blankets? Warm enough in borrowed arms. His secret heat.

  At least I am still calm.

  Her address. He must keep it somewhere.

  I entered his study and began to go through his papers. What a pretty avalanche of white. I began to think of last year when we went skiing together and made love against the dunes of snow.

  Look away. Who wants to salt themselves into a Lot’s Wife of memory?

  Above all, now, do not give way to pain.

  My hands shook and the papers under them and the study under there and the stacked up lives below shook and the newsboy on the news corner grabbed his news sheets and felt a second’s agony and did not know.

  Where was she? Under the carpet? Pressed between the glass and window frame? I was breathing her. Her dust, her molecules, the air was fat with her, the droppings and gatherings of a living body.

  Purge the place, purge it.

  I opened the windows of his study and conducted an experiment in gravity. If I drop a CD player and a lap top out of the same window at the same time which one will hit the ground first?

  Let the words fall with them. Hate. Anger. Pain. I have been told that words are cheap. Words are light things that change nothing. Shuttlecock words raqueted between us. Nothing real only skill in the play.

  Why did the rubber and feather words not fall? Why did they stick to my fingers? Photo frames and files I discus-hurled, watching them hold the air for a second before they dropped. I felt Olympic. I was champion of the world.

  I hurled and hurled and finally stood alone in the Buddha calm of his empty room. Breathe in. Breathe out.

  My fingers were sticky. Hate. Anger. Pain. The words would not fall. I was bleeding words. I went into the bathroom to try to wash them away but when I drew back my hand from the clear cold water, the words welled up again, red and liquid, danger words, broken words, the cracked vessel of my love for him.

  It was then that I began to cry. I knelt down, my head against the basin, filling it up like an offering with no one to whom I could offer it. A salty sea and no boat on it.

  Blood and tears and crumbled words and words not fit for human use. Without love what does humanness mean?

  YOU: Of course I love you.

  ME: And someone else.

  YOU: Sex …

  ME: You talk as if it were an incurable disease.

  YOU: Perhaps it is an incurable disease.

  ME: I am the one who is suffering.

  YOU: My feelings for you have never changed.

  ME: How can you keep alive what is caught in its own death?

  YOU: Words, words.

  ME: Would you prefer I spoke in numbers? How many times have you slept with her? How many months have you been seeing her? How old is she? What are her measurements? Does she reach orgasm quickly?

  YOU: Stop it.

  ME: Or not at all?

  YOU: Calm down.

  ME: Wife as walking Valium.

  YOU: Look at this place …

  ME: All my own work.

  YOU: So I see.

  ME: But you don’t understand.

  YOU: Men and women are different.

  ME: You think I don’t desire other men?

  YOU: Who?

  ME: Who, who, for a theoretical physicist you have a solid concrete brain. I desire other men. I don’t sleep with them because I love you.r />
  YOU: You should have been born a Catholic.

  ME: For comfort?

  YOU: For ambition. You might have been the first woman Pope.

  ME: Cruel man.

  YOU: Sorry. Just a joke.

  ME: My husband the bedroom humorist.

  YOU: Let me go into my study for a while. I have to think.

  ME: Take a chair.

  · · ·

  He frowned at me as though I were an inelegant equation; necessary but cumbersome, a bore to manipulate. I was no longer his living beauty of physical laws. No doubt he was telling her about the poetry of numbers. I looked in the mirror. Was that my face? I was gargoyled with grief. A stretched taunted thing. A waterspout of misery. He had poured his indifference down on me and I had let it out as dirty water. He thought I was the dirty water not himself.

  Is it crazy to act crazy in a crazy situation? It has logic. It may even have dignity if dignity is what hallmarks the human spirit and preserves it.

  I was not going to sink for him.

  There was a noise from his study like a car that wouldn’t start. A mix of roar and whine.

  YOU: What have you done?

  ME: I have thrown all of your things out of the window.

  YOU: Why?

  ME: To make me feel better.

  YOU: You could have killed someone.

  ME: I could have killed you.

  YOU: This isn’t making sense.

  ME: There is no sense to what you have done. You didn’t think about me when you were touching her. You threw me out of the window.

  YOU: You jumped.

  ME: What?

  YOU: You have lived in your own world for years.

  ME: You mean I haven’t lived entirely in yours.

  YOU: I don’t expect that. I just expect …

  ME: A little love and understanding.

  YOU: Yes. Love and understanding.

  ME: Then go and find it.

  YOU: I’d better pack a bag.

  He went into the exploded bedroom and returned with half a suitcase.

  ‘What do you expect me to do with this?’

  ‘Put it on your head.’

  He flung it down and walked back through the doorway. Then he hesitated.

  ‘What happened to the door?’

  ‘It had an affair and left home.’

  About half an hour later he came past me wearing three pairs of trousers, six sweaters, at least two shirts, his sports gear tied round his waist. In his arms he carried a bundle of assorted shoes and clothes.

  ‘This is ridiculous.’

  ‘Yes you are.’

  I let him out of the one remaining door. He was going down the stairs when he seemed to remember something, or maybe something remembered him. He looked back at me as puddles of dirty water spilled round my feet.

  ‘How did you find out?’

  ‘She wrote to me.’

  · · ·

  The morning mail. The sunny eight o’clock excrement of unasked for chances of a lifetime and unpaid bills. Buy a vibrating massage towel and win a trip to Iceland. Pay the electric company or spend the rest of your life in the dark. That morning I got a free gift of shampoo and an invitation to an introductory lecture on Transcendental dieting. Then there was a letter addressed to me. The handwriting was educated. The envelope was thick and square. I had no idea who it could be. I get a lot of letters. People like to write to writers. Now that poetry is fashionable again I have what might be called a following. I also have what might be called a leadering; the ones who write to tell me how to do it better. I thought the letter might be one of those.

  I opened it. It was from a woman called Alice who said she was having an affair with my husband.

  Cling. Pain upwards. Pain downwards. What corner of my insect world does pain not possess? The walls are smeared with it, sticky, slightly sweet. Pain is as total as a lover. I thought of those eighteenth-century engravings, German, where Death in his hood courts living flesh. This death is as obscene. The pictures in my head are sex and sex. I have become my own pornographer. His body. Her body. My body. Unseparated, twisting, dark. The grinning collusion of skulls boned in lust. The silent gravity-gone somersault of she on he on she. There we are, the infernal triangle, turning in the lubricious air, breasts, cock, cunt, oversized inflated parachutes of skin. I know we are falling, all three, but the ground is still a long way off. Until we grab each other like sky-divers. He was me I was him are we her? To vow yourself to someone else is to open a wound. From it blood flows freely, life of you to them. We call it blood brothers. We call it the dying Christ. The Fisher King’s wound becomes him and will not heal. The vow of me to you and you to me is a red vulnerability on a grey shuttered world. We risk ourselves for each other, take the impossible step. Here is the knife that kills me in your hand. To prove it I let the blood myself. Monstrous, primitive, grand, divine, the one true extravagant gesture. The only thing I can claim to own is myself, and look, I shall give it to you, a ceremony of innocence made knowing in blood.

  Don’t say it was not so. We transfused each other. Now you want me to bleed to death so that no one can tell what wound it was we shared. It is not so simple. Vows can be broken; usually they are, but the wound tunnels deeper into the body one day to recur.

  The Tower. Card XV of the Tarot deck. Two figures in identical dress explode from a shattered fortress.

  Brick 1 Happiness. I love him he loves me.

  Brick 2 Approval. I love him he loves me.

  Brick 3 Security. I love him he loves me.

  Brick 4 Time. I love him he loves me.

  Brick 5 Complacency. I love him he loves me.

  Brick 6 Indifference. I love him he loves me.

  Brick 7 Apartness. I love me he loves him.

  Brick 8 Refusal. I love him.

  Brick 9 Lies. He loves me.

  Brick 10 Danger. Love? Love?

  Brick 11 One straw. One camel. Two backs.

  The Tower. The safe walls are falling child.

  I think back to Nimrod, the mighty hunter of Genesis, who built the Tower of Babel that God destroyed. Babel. Even when ruined, a man could walk for three days and still be in its shadow. What did I build that has called down such wrath?

  I prefer to think of wrath on the outside and me on the inside. If I am a victim I cannot be the victimiser. The world is on my side here; rich and poor, sinner and saint, good man bad man, the murderer and the dead. I built a tower. I lived in it. Now it has been struck down. Did the lightning come like an indifferent god or did I draw it?

  Don’t imagine I torture myself with yesterday’s washing up. A woman who slaves for a man does not have a marriage; she has a master. I don’t want him at any price but I thought we had negotiated the price. Why did he go back to the market place looking for something cheaper?

  When I lay down after reading the letter I could not speak or cry. My mind tried to force breathing pools under the dirty water. I seemed to find a bubble of air, and for a moment I could think clearly, then the waters closed again and I was back in the pain. Back in the sex. A stilted portfolio of anatomical drawings, genital insults pushed into my mouth and hair. Wherever I tried to rest my eyes, I saw the two of them making love. They were gessoed onto the walls and varnished into the floor. The chairs and tables that had belonged to my father were an Ottoman decoupage of delicate limbs and flaming breasts. Their arms, their legs, her belly against his, here in my house, like dry rot. I crawled into the kitchen away from the horror and opened my eyes. The fridge rubbed itself against me. The floor tiles were hot. As I clung to the door it clung back. I wiped my face with a dishcloth and smelled their sex.

  To betray with a kiss. The reek of Judas. I took the brush to clean my teeth and thought of his mouth. Kiss of life, kiss of death. Come kiss me so that I can read your lips, deceptions scripted and waiting to be staged. His lying heart is in his mouth. When I kissed him this morning I tasted his fear.

  HE: What’s the matter with
you?

  ME: Nothing.

  Nothing slowly clotting my arteries. Nothing slowly numbing my soul. Caught by nothing, saying nothing, nothingness becomes me. When I am nothing they will say, surprised, in the way that they are forever surprised, ‘But there was nothing the matter with her.’

  Nothing. Ashes to ashes, dust to dust, love to love.

  When I was a child I imagined love as a glass well. I could lean over and dabble my hands in it and come up shining. It was not a current or a torrent, but it was deep and at its bottom, flowing. I knew it was flowing by the noise of the water over the subterranean pebbles. Were there ships in there and ports that depended on it, and harbours where people naturally built their settlements? I saw the world beneath the water only by reflection. To enter it would have meant climbing into the well and letting myself drop away. My mother cautioned me against swimming.

  Day by day I returned to the edge, watching what I could, dabbling my hands. Later, when I was grown up, I met a man carrying two buckets, who plunged them into the pellucid waters, took one for himself and gave one to me. I had never held so much water. Never found any container that could. I lost interest in the well, I had my bucket.

  Other people envied Jove and me. We were clean, wholesome, sexy, together. We displayed our marriage like a trophy and we did think that we had won it well. We polished the trophy but forgot to polish ourselves. As it shone brighter we dimmed. Did it matter if we were a little dusty, a little worn?

  Our marriage became a thing apart; that is, a thing apart from the two of us. Both of us had a touching faith in its talismanic powers of protection, and it is true that for a time a symbol can outlive the plain fact that the symbol makers have turned elsewhere.