At the Strangers' Gate

by Adam Gopnik

  The discreet bourgeois dispensation played out traditionally in two places—the bedroom and the dining room—and we had neither. The bedroom was, in proper nineteenth-century apartments, supposed to be the segregated place of married love—what they called connubial bliss—and the dining room the locus of family life: a piano, a long table, candles, and blank and baleful looks passing among the participants.

  The eighties loft was a blended space, one very big room, where our bed, under a mosquito net—put there for the most practical of purposes, as we had mosquitoes to go along with the mice, though the mosquitoes, we convinced ourselves, were coming from New Jersey—created the false air of an old Marlene Dietrich movie, where everything takes place with six or seven occluding veils. The little two-person dining table, carried over from the Blue Room, could become a big one for Thanksgiving, owing to a plywood extender with a Venetian tablecloth laid upon it.

  The blending of spaces, though, didn’t realize the old dream of modernist architects, a single space for living, where everything would blend seamlessly together and the old, cold middle-class dispensation, which unnaturally divided the organic unity of life into chilly compartments, would be warmed, and thaw—where we would eat and love and sleep and celebrate our flexible and open lives in a flexible open space.

  That can’t happen. The divisions of life are, if not natural, then necessary, and what actually happened in lofts, even still-childless ones, was a kind of strange construction of invisible walls. The area around the bed became “the bedroom.” Where you ate became, “Beauty and the Beast” style, magically, a dining room. Emotions and appetites flowed in neat, fixed currents around the spaces, stopping somehow right around the edges of the action. Visitors were reluctant to cross into the bedroom, even though it was five steps from the “living room.” Once the Thanksgiving table was up, we might have been living in Concord, Massachusetts, with the March family in the mid-nineteenth century. Even in more crowded and child-filled lofts than our own, the same strange rule applied: space, in a slightly Einsteinian way, curved around the activities chosen, closing them off in their own gravitational fields, rather than enveloping them all in one cozy blanket. When I visit friends—I almost wrote “younger friends”—today in their Cabinet of Dr. Caligari, diagonally cut spaces on the third floor of an old tenement in Crown Heights, I recognize that they are making the same accommodation. Life needs rooms, as love needs dreams, and makes them out of airy nothing when no other material presents itself.

  Bedrooms contain beds, and space wrapping itself around them, and, with Martha asleep on ours, I see that I have now the strange and slightly panicked duty of writing something about SoHo sex. This is an already much-sung subject, at least in its more obscure and aggressively original corners. Transgressive sex and substance-assisted sex in that time and place have all been beautifully memorialized, by Nan Goldin and Chantal Akerman and others. The duller and more familiar form of love—our form—though, has not.

  They sang “The Ballad of Sexual Dependency.” I sing that of “Sexual Domesticity,” a quieter number, though not without its own little tang of transgression. For married love, as I have written, is the last taboo, and talking and writing about long-married erotic love taboo even to the long married. Why it should be so is a mystery. Why is writing about wanting your wife too much so weird? That’s the question. Wanting your lover too much is romantic. And wanting someone else’s wife too much is the stuff of epic. Even a wife gone, the widower’s plight, moves us to license erotic memory.

  Perhaps it’s because you have your wife or husband. The happy ending is priced into the tale, and you are, so to speak, boasting past the point that the market will bear. You sold the stock at its peak; don’t make us watch while you count your profits. Lost love is longing, but long love is crowing. All tales turn toward “And they lived happily ever after,” but a single detail of what they so happily did for so long after ruins the fable. Uxoriousness is a form of hubris.

  And, then, we all know instinctively what science shows in fact: that those long in love are idiots of a kind. The best science we have about romantic love suggests that its perpetuation depends, to put it more bluntly than a scientist would, on stupidity. There is, we’re told, a region of the cerebrum known as the ventromedial prefrontal cortex, which is the bit of the brain that specializes in negative judgments of others. The ventromedial view is always that the others are all smelly and repugnant—it is a way of keeping the other tribe out of our tree. It’s why we ventromediate, so to speak, even our family members who stay for more than three days. “Natural selection has long favored those who responded negatively to the one malevolent intruder, rather than positively to myriad friendly guests,” one neuroscientist writes. In long-married couples, the ventromedial prefrontal just shuts down—you can see this on an MRI!—or fades out, and refuses to accept the (accurate) information, apparent after seven years to most normal people, that the spouse is a kind of malevolent intruder. We would like to believe that the long married see more; our instinct tells us what science confirms: they just see nothing.

  And to the normal embarrassments of long-married blindness are added, for a writer, the extra embarrassment that the subject of the misperception, far from being the lost love of another time, is still present—sharp-eyed and in possession of a querulous prose style of her own and the promise of a bitter memoir yet to be written. “I don’t want to be exploited and exposed,” Iseult says to Tristan after they have actually gotten away from King Mark and rented a little place in Brittany. (“It’s not too large, but cozy.”) And so: no poem.

  Well, out with it—I was infatuated with her, with the fact of her dressing and undressing so casually in my presence. I wanted her so much when we were in our twenties that if I could turn back the clock it would not be to make love to her again, but to make up for all the chances missed.

  My desire for her was the engine of all my ambitions. In fact, by an odd alchemy refined in New York, if not peculiar to it, anxiety, ambition, and desire had all compounded together into a kind of life fuel. I wanted to succeed to keep her coming home. I wanted to do well to continue to intrigue her. I wanted to bring her home the scalps of defeated enemies—even if the enemies, in this case, were no more than art critics with mildly differing (and just as hard to follow) views about the significance of this scribble, the historical potential of that appropriated ad. I wanted to succeed in order, in every sense, to keep my eye on her. (And, of course, the perpetual sadness of marriage, she really wanted none of these things. She was content for us to be at home, and happy, and sex for her was not a thing “earned” or “won” in any way but merely to be enjoyed—a participatory sport in which all must have prizes, rather than a competitive sport in which someone might triumph.)

  In the Blue Room years, as I’ve said, it was different. I can hardly recall her face, my eyes were so close to it. We were always on top of each other, in every sense. We became a blended person. Though we were as unlike as two people could be—one graceful and one awkward; one neat, one messy (no prize for guessing which); one sleepy and one insomniac—in that tiny compressed space, either we would come together or we would blow apart, and we came together.

  Only in the loft, our new room, did we step far enough apart for me to see her again, as I had seen her when we were teenagers. I was on a lazier schedule in those days—nowadays it’s all I can do to keep my eyelids from popping open at 6:00 a.m., but then, after a night’s insomnia, I would sleep for a few hours past 4:00 a.m., and my publishing, and later my magazine, employers were kind as to arrival hours. She would get up to get to the editing studio, and I would watch her get dressed—underwear and tights and asymmetrical Japanese tunic—with hooded eyes and dry mouth. The image stayed with me all day as I worked, and simplified my purposes to a needlepoint. The irony was that it was Martha who played the traditionally “male” role in our relationship—getting up every morning to go to work, and coming home exhausted after a da
y at the office, in this case the office of the Maysles film-editing studios—while I, transforming from hybrid editor-writer to full-time scribe, stayed home and, well, baked cookies, and braised short ribs, getting dinner ready every day for her exhausted return. (And it was up to me to say, “How was your day?,” since writers don’t have days, but always the same day, again and again.) Her being the daily wage earner also meant that she was, without willing it, the strip-tease artist in reverse, her getting dressed being as titillating as getting undressed, my rose gypsy rather than my Gypsy Rose.

  She was, in every sense, my learning curve. My learning curves. Sex in marriage, I learned, doesn’t exhaust itself, but it does mutate. When you start out in married life, sex goes from being an event, an arrangement, to being something always available. And so it becomes at once routinized and ritualized, with the two balanced on a knife’s edge: We can put it off, make it a pleasure we must choose. We can also put it on when we want to—perform it, like a play! The routine becomes…routine: the chances not grabbed because there will be another chance, the rest or reading indulged in place of sex because the 3:00 a.m. possibility is no longer the only possibility the week presents.

  And then I don’t know of a couple who have not, pressed to be honest, retreated—or is it advanced?—early in marriage into some kind of playful shared infantilism, where they inhabit a pair of hamsters, or become the family dog chatting with the local cat or impersonate imaginary children. And that I am more loath to confess this than I would be to confess group sex with a zebra is in itself proof of my point—that sweetness is the last taboo, and the universal truths of coupledom almost forbidden to speak.

  But the routine of sex, however it may be postponed by those who have the luxury of postponement, when it is finally engaged takes on some of the sacredness of ritual. The whispered fantasy, the girl at the end of the bed slowly (and a little unwillingly) undressing for show, the intoxicating combination of the touchingly ordinary care she showed (her eyes on her buttons, her head cast down, never flirtatiously looking out; the clothes counted for too much), and the extraordinary image she presented—the oyster-opening shock of her body, the curve of her hip and indentation of her waist, the surprising throw of her upper leg, the perpetual shock of nudity. (Over time and children, these hours become whittled down to mere moments: she comes into the study, where her dresser is, to dress, and I say, “My one good minute of the day.” And, sadly, it is.)

  In a very long marriage, lovemaking eventually gets to the point where you explore less than you enact. Eventually, you start to re-enact, so that the couple become a bit like those Civil War reenactors, the ones who put on Blue and Gray uniforms and fire disarmed old rifles. That they know the actions, the uniforms, the climax, and the casualties before they start the excitement doesn’t diminish the pleasure they take in the exercise. The pleasure of long-married sex, like that of a scripted reenactment of Gettysburg, lies in the combination of furious action and complete predictability.

  But in SoHo she still stands there at the edge of the bed and looks down at the buttons on her blouse, watches the snap of her jeans, studies it before she takes them off.

  Married lovemaking collapses into a pattern, so that what remains with me are not really moments in the loft—as I do recall the moments in hotels when we traveled in those years, the boats rocking outside our hotel near a gondola station in Venice, her breath quickening, and the transformation of her face above me, the sound of the boats playing behind her sound. No, what remains is the pattern, unvarying, as though Peter Pan threw his shadows, one after another, into a pile in the corner, and we made out one consistent shape through the occlusion of so many.

  Perhaps this is just a fancy way of saying that, though all I can recall from that time is unending erotic desire, I can’t recall a single erotic act. Or is it that I only care to try to recall them now? They weren’t subjects of memory then—just objects of life. Perhaps the true shape of desire only becomes apparent to us as we age. When we’re young, our ambitions are mixed in with our appetites, so much that we can hardly tell them apart. As we get older, our ambitions are either achieved or else permanently eliminated as possibilities: you ain’t never gonna be President now. So the anxieties of ambitions recede but the appetites remain, and have their way with us, and in our memory, perhaps, the appetite becomes simpler than it was. Lust, which seems like appetite in its constant recurrence, resembles anxiety even more in being anticipatory—our fears are much keener before things happen than when they do, and we desire a body much more than we can quite credit we did after the act is over. Thus one appetite consumes all the others, and is still standing and swooping after the other appetites and anxieties have been relieved.

  Afterward, I would always sleep. Perhaps it is because anxiety and appetite are so mixed together in your twenties and thirties that the momentary reassurance of love produces a beautiful self-induced bloom of poppies in the bloodstream. Anyway, that’s the way it was for me. It remains the only time in my life I have slept—after making love in SoHo—the way that people are supposed to sleep, the way the heroes slept in the spy novels that engrossed me as a boy: “he found himself helplessly slipping out of consciousness”; “suddenly, without warning, he was asleep”; “when he opened his eyes again, it was morning in Istanbul.” My sleep today is again pitifully fitful and light, sporadically aware of each night as it passes.

  But then I slept. Romantic love always ends with an exit, adulterous love with an exit and a murmured excuse. Married love alone always ends in sleep. The proof of its success is the silence it induces. Ah! Maybe that’s why you never hear about it.

  So this story opens with Martha asleep—sound asleep, for reasons pure or illicit or compromised, I’m not sure—when the phone rang. I snatched it up immediately, not wanting to wake her. As I say, it was nearly eleven at night.

  The man on the other end introduced himself as John, and then he said, “We’re all so looking forward to your keynote tomorrow morning at the Pluralism and Individualism conference.”

  Now, I had no memory of agreeing to giving the keynote at any conference, much less a Pluralism and Individualism conference, but it was entirely within my capacity to have totally forgotten something significant that I’d agreed to do. So I said, “Oh, of course, just a second, let me get my book”—I had no book—and then I said, “Oh yes, you want to run through the details with me one more time, just to make sure that they coincide with what I have written down?”

  He seemed more or less reassured by these signs of hyper-conscientiousness at the other end of the line. “Of course. It’s at the Doral Inn Hotel tomorrow morning at eight-thirty, Fiftieth and Lexington; we’re expecting a full house and, of course, keenly looking forward to it.”

  Of course, what I should have said is “Sorry, this just does not ring a bell”—but how can you say such a thing to someone who believes he’s a mere eight hours away from hearing your keynote on Pluralism and Individualism? So I said, “Great, see you then!” and I hung up the phone—Martha was still asleep—and I immediately began to weigh the consequences of my actions. Certainly, ambition might involve the simple urge to get attention—but there is always lurking in that urge the possibility of getting too much attention of the wrong kind. That’s a complicated way of saying: Seek attention stupidly and you will fail, and you will make a fool of yourself. In the early morning, no less.

  And then I realized that I was trained as an art historian—and if you have studied art history, you will know that all of modern art can be neatly slotted into one of two categories, pluralism or individualism. You have the alienated self-portraits of Van Gogh, and then you have the scary city scenes of Ensor. You have the isolated single figures of Giacometti, and you have the frightening crowds crossing bridges in Munch. You can pretty much grab a handful of slides of modern paintings at random and—bang—you have a lecture on pluralism and individualism. And so that was exactly what I did, grabbed a handful of sl
ides and put them together.

  I’m not sure what motivated me to do this. The sound, or sane strategy—“I’m sorry, I wasn’t aware of this engagement, and so can’t do it”—calls out to me now, as our follies of youth seem so simply corrected in middle age. Some part of it was the sheer embarrassment of absentmindedness—a reluctance to admit to my still-frequent amnesia about obligations—but some part, too, was about those scalps, those prizes, that engine of anxiety and appetite driving me forward. I loved the idea of doing things for her while she slept. It was a form of fictive sex, of extended eroticism. Her sleeping while I took the subway to go speak was another way of making love.

  The next morning, while Martha slept, at around seven o’clock, I got up and dressed, suit jacket, jeans—still jeans, no replacement suit trousers—and sneakers, my usual mufti, and I went off to the Doral Inn Hotel at Fiftieth and Lexington. I got on the subway, the 6 train at Spring Street, and went on up.

  You may remember the old Doral Inn Hotel; it was a little piece of Cincinnati in the middle of Manhattan. It had Cincinnati architecture and Cincinnati lighting, and it even had a place where you could pull the car up on a circular drive, the way you can in Cincinnati.

  I went in, and there, in the lobby, in the half-light of eight-fifteen in the morning, was a well-dressed, nervous-looking young man. John! I deduced quickly, and so it was.

  He shook my hand. “Oh, we are so glad you’re here,” he said. “We’re ready for you to go on.”