They made the desired advances. Caroline finished her Ph.D. and became an instructor, which meant more courses to teach and more money. More respect, too, than she had anticipated, being one of the few women in a man’s field, and even a small reputation for her research, she noticed when she attended conferences. Still fewer women ventured into the esoteric theory of knots. The older professors, especially, looked at her askance, but in the end had to offer a grudging approval. She undertook a new project in elementary transcendental functions, and also supervised graduate students, whom Ivan liked to refer to as her boys. When she came home drained and fell into a chair after four hours of conferences, he would bring her a Scotch and say, “What’s the matter? The boys give you a rough time?” Besides working at the Institute, Ivan published two chapters of his book in architectural magazines and was asked to serve on the Mayor’s Advisory Council for historic preservation. He wrote occasional articles for The Nation. He might have taught at one of the universities had he wished to, but he thought that would be taking on too much.
At each of these advances, after the celebrating, Caroline was left with a hollow, vertiginous feeling, as though someone had punched her lightly in the stomach. Happenings were spinning and spinning in a widening orbit of which she was the center. It dizzied her to watch them spin, yet she seemed to possess the stasis of a still center. She could not trace how she had gotten to that point. How she had become that point. Somewhere along the way she had relinquished something—motion, life. The more that happened, the more inert she felt.
Ivan’s mother asked a funny question when she telephoned every week. She asked, “Are you making each other happy?” Had she not known Ivan’s decorous mother, Caroline might have found it intrusively intimate. But Ivan’s mother was not referring to sex. Depending on her mood, Caroline smiled or frowned, but always said politely, “Yes, of course.” Ivan never answered it directly. If he was in good spirits he teased and said, “Tell me what happy is and I’ll tell you if we’re making each other it.” But if he was feeling sullen, as he often was these days, from overwork, he said, exasperated, “Mom, really!”
“What does she literally mean by that?” Caroline asked him one night after they hung up.
“God only knows,” he said, pouring a drink.
“Are married people required to make each other happy? Besides everything else?”
“I wouldn’t know,” said Ivan. “It sounds like too great a burden to me.”
Many evenings they spent together in the extra room they had fixed up as a study, with the desks against facing walls so that they worked with their backs to each other. She liked to imagine that although their heads were bent in opposite directions on separate endeavors, a current of warmth and connection pulsed between them. One night she raised her head and felt nothing, the absence of the current. A current needed to be fueled: the fuel was depleted, sucked away, she didn’t know how. She turned. Ivan’s head was bent over and he was writing. He did not feel her stare. She walked around the room.
“Do you want to stop and have some coffee?” she asked.
After a long while he answered, “No,” without looking up.
That was all right; she understood what it was to be absorbed. Later he would seek her out, in bed. There he was absorbed in her. The air in the room became suddenly thick and stifling. She opened the window wide. Ivan’s papers fluttered and rattled.
“Could you lower that a little, please?” he said without looking up.
She shut the window and fled to the bedroom. Waiting in bed, she read back issues of The Nation, mostly articles Ivan had written, because she enjoyed his style, which was epigrammatic yet fluid and complex. He analyzed the social causes of the deterioration of urban spaces with an unyielding lucidity not always displayed when he spoke. The lucidity reminded her of the novels of Jane Austen, favorites of her youth, and she recalled unhappily how, in them, all action comes to an abrupt end with marriage. Satisfying as Jane Austen was, Caroline used to sit up wondering, at the last page, what happened then, and then, and after that? What would happen to her, now, that could move her? Anything? Irritated, she began smoking, though Ivan hated the smell hanging over the bed. Hers were foolish, childish complaints. The trouble was only in her expectations. Her naïveté. The trouble was only that before, she had looked forward to a future of large and unimaginable changes, twists and turns, and now the future was mundanely imaginable and linear: professional advancement, a larger apartment, vacations. A reasonably good time. She took off her plain wedding ring and revolved it between her fingers. Was it only a trick of language that in topology the circle is called a trivial knot? When Ivan came to bed she greeted him with a savage passion, but it was partly sham. She was restless. She wanted it, not him.
Their connection was fading, losing its vibrancy, as a print hanging on the wall too long loses the vigor of its colors, and indeed the prints he had brought back from Italy, of splendid old buildings and terraced countryside, were losing their color, hanging for several years in the unrelenting sunlight of the east windows. Caroline understood now what their friend had meant about their being disgusting: at parties they circulated. They talked to other people, they flirted. Dancing with some man, she drifted off into a dark corner in a tight erotic embrace. It was interesting, he had an interesting body. Different from Ivan’s. Of course Ivan, with his contacts, would take in everything. She and the man unlocked; fifteen minutes later she saw Ivan kissing his wife. That was all right too. They were even. It would never be mentioned, except maybe months from now, as a joke.
They went to the movies a lot, but she liked films about love and family bonds, films of desire and strife, betrayal and sacrifice, while he liked films about politics—struggle and power, strategy and intrigue. They sat through each other’s films patiently, but Ivan usually found Caroline’s favorites to be oversimplifications, with earnest good people aligned against devious bad people. In his favorites she found good and evil washed together in a spreading amoral gray, and she argued that such a high degree of ambiguity destroyed all distinctions. Life was like that, he replied; things were not as distinct as they had been taught in school. She could forgive a good deal of grossness so long as there was not emotional dishonesty, but he required aesthetic purity and was harsh about lapses in taste. He said that if something was shoddily executed it had unquestionably been shoddily conceived and insufficiently felt. This rigor in him, especially when directed at a well-meaning movie, gave her a sinking, hopeless feeling. Yet she knew that it was so in her own work: everything true and useful proceeded from a clear statement of the premises.
They agreed that power corrupts, but Caroline believed it corrupted so absolutely that there was no hope of improvement through sanctioned channels. The problem, as she sketched it out for Ivan one afternoon in the park, began with the social contract, when more than three or four people gathered together and made rules. Then they felt important and set about policing the observance of their rules, and from this feeling of importance flowed all social ills. It was very simple. It could happen even to good people, with good rules. So, she was an anarchist, she told Ivan, but added laughingly that he must not tell anyone at the university or she would lose her job. Of course she would not throw a bomb into an occupied building, but in her heart she was an anarchist. Ivan thought this sequence of logic was ineffectual. Perhaps he thought it was funny too, but he did not laugh at her opinions—he was unfailingly respectful and courteous. What good is a closet anarchist, he asked courteously, pulling petals from a daisy. If she really believed as she said, she should take the shuttle down to New York and bomb the stock exchange. She said he was not being fair. Anarchism was far more than throwing bombs and he knew it; he knew she was referring to freedom from superimposed social restrictions, freedom to become. That was all very well, said Ivan, everyone wanted freedom. Ah yes, personal freedom. Especially those members of the more privileged classes wanted it, who had never known the lack of mone
y. And he gave her a curiously detached look. However, if she had any practical commitment she should do as he suggested, bomb the stock exchange; even though his father had finally acquired some small holdings, he would testify on her behalf. But she should do it at night, when no one would get hurt. For his part, he preferred to make small, incremental but tangible improvements through the existing system. You could never dismantle the entire corporate structure, so you might as well do what you could in your own small way. In either case you were not going to get very far. Therefore he loved enduring beauty, and chose to spend weekend afternoons looking at paintings in galleries and museums. Well then, she wanted to know, if he felt that way about incremental change and enduring beauty, why did he subscribe to the National Guardian, whose self-righteous, unbeautiful hysteria made her laugh? Because they had something to say, he replied, tearing another daisy, and it was important to hear all sides, particularly those the popular press ignored. She had no answer for that, but she muttered that she didn’t relish being referred to as a member of the privileged classes merely because her father had been a high school teacher, and moreover, she had no intention of apologizing for being born too late to appreciate the Depression.
But months later, walking on the wet sand of the beach on Cape Cod, where they rented a summer place for three weeks, each one confessed, in a rare moment of closeness, that they believed the other more intelligent. They were mutually surprised, after all the thrust and counterthrust of debate, and demurred with embarrassed modesty, then clasped hands and continued on, with the mild surf lapping at their feet. The only disparity, thought Caroline, was that her compliment to him was tinged with candid admiration, and his to her with shadowy resentment.
“Well, you’re prettier, anyway,” Ivan said. “At least we can agree on that.”
“Oh, I don’t know,” she teased. “I’m not so sure.”
She looked at him, tanned and rested, still younger than his thirty-three years, and he did appear beautiful. She embraced him and urged him to a nook of the beach behind some rocks, for though they still made love all the time and with a new restless energy, it was seldom that they could make love with a fullness of heart, as they used to.
In her spare time Caroline read novels and poetry, while Ivan read books about social issues or the history of art. If he read a novel it was something she had never heard of, like Elective Affinities, or The Last Puritan, or The Man Without Qualities, novels which, she found on leafing through them, treated reality in a large and unsparing way that made her uneasy. The titles themselves, alluding to life’s absences, intimidated her. Because Ivan himself, who picked those books, seemed absent. Present to the touch but absent to the more discerning senses. His desire for her had become a conundrum. Why had he wanted her to be always with him, if he was absent himself?
While she felt herself and Ivan fading away from each other, receding like figures in a thick fog, she read book after book by Henry James. They were the perfect mental nourishment: pungent but safely digestible. Everyone renounced what they wanted most, and never had to face the worse pain of getting what they wanted most. Sometimes she worried that Ivan, with his books about issues and his brilliant but neglected novels, was getting an ever firmer grip on reality, while she, with her daily forays into the equivalences of non-trivial knots as well as into Henry James and his more fey contemporaries, was losing hers. But perhaps they did not both need such a firm grip on reality. Perhaps Ivan could do that for her. The principle of any organization was a suitable division of labor. Lately, in fact, with both of them so busily engrossed in work foreign to the other, it had seemed wasteful to cook together and clean up together, so they had devised a system of alternate nights. It was lonesome in the kitchen, but more efficient.
There was a woman at his office, he told her one night at dinner, who did the same kind of research as he did. They were working on a project together, a plan to take museum holdings out on loan in city vehicles so that people in poor neighborhoods who didn’t go to museums could see beautiful things. Of course, the security problems were overwhelming—the project might never get off the ground. This woman had an unusual name, Chantal. She also had an unusual life. Her father had been in the diplomatic corps, so she spent her childhood in foreign parts, and went to the Sorbonne. She was about forty, Ivan would guess, and had no children. She was married to a painter named Joe who lived in New York. One week out of every month Joe came up to Boston to stay with Chantal in her rehabilitated brownstone.
“And that’s how they’re married?” said Caroline.
“Yes.”
“That’s kind of odd. I mean, do they want to be together or not?”
“I suppose they want to be together for one week a month. He’s involved in something down there, a cooperative gallery or something, and anyhow, he likes it. She prefers it here.”
“How convenient. I suppose she has…other men, for the three weeks that Joe is not around?”
Ivan gave her his sideways critical look and shrugged. “I don’t know anything about that part of her life. She’s very nice, though. Very interesting. I thought maybe we might have her over for dinner one night.”
“Hm,” said Caroline, taking more spaghetti. Ivan had cooked tonight, superbly. Spaghetti al pesto, green and grainy. His best efforts were in foreign, exotic dishes. He could cook the night Chantal came over too. Caroline did not plan to like her. It seemed unjust that Chantal should have the advantages of both the married and the single states. She knew already what this Chantal would look like: she would wear long dark flowered skins and long earrings and have dark eyes and long dark hair. Everything about her would be long and dark and rather droopy, but she would have broad shoulders and broad hips. She would look like an elegant peasant.
Chantal did not come over for dinner, since Ivan did not suggest inviting her again. Her name came up when he talked about the Artmobile, and once in a while he mentioned having lunch with her, either with a group of people or alone. He became even busier at work and had to stay late nights at the office once or twice a week. Not for the Artmobile, he said; it was something else—the architectural competition for the new city hall. On one of those late nights Caroline lay in bed reading The Golden Bowl. The name of the character who came between the young couple in the novel was Charlotte, and when she saw this name on the page she thought of Chantal. She raised her eyes from the book. The tableau before her—dresser with comb, brush and bottles of perfume, strands of beads hanging from nails in the wall, bookshelves, print of Degas dancers bending over stiffly to tie their shoes—was suddenly unfamiliar. She was a stranger in her own bedroom. Right at this moment Ivan might be screwing Chantal. Maybe Chantal was moaning with pleasure. Or screaming—maybe she was the type who screamed. Or no, maybe she was having a hard time getting there. Oh yes, she liked that notion very much, Chantal straining fruitlessly for an orgasm, under Ivan. Maybe she never came at all. But then Ivan wouldn’t be sprawled on top of her—Ivan required a response. Some men’s self-esteem resided in having an erection, but Ivan’s, conveniently, resided in eliciting a response. It might be his first time with Chantal, though. He would soon catch on and never go back, unless he thought she was worth saving from such perdition. No, Ivan hadn’t the soul of a missionary. Maybe he was having trouble himself. Maybe Chantal was coaxing it along. Probably not; that was not his sort of trouble. Still and all, a new person, the secrecy, the guilt. Even so stalwart a man as Ivan…
She realized in shame that all her fantasies were of crude mechanical failure. But in all probability it was nothing like that. Ivan was magnetic and irresistible, Chantal was a dark, passionate gypsy. She put aside her book, and closing her eyes to the alien room, acknowledged hollowly that despite the vivid pictures in her mind, she was feeling nothing.
That was horrible, to feel nothing. Neither revulsion nor jealousy nor desire, only irritation, as if some stranger had borrowed an essential household article and would surely return it in a dete
riorated condition. Was this what her promising life had become, sitting up alone in bed while her husband was off fucking a woman of eccentric habits, and feeling nothing except a niggardly irritation? She tried to imagine what would make Ivan go to this woman: loneliness, boredom, restlessness. They were what she felt too, except her mind would not fix on any of them—they formed a turgid medium she had moved into so insensibly and drifted in for so long. What she could readily imagine, and with a small stirring of tenderness, was how he would approach Chantal: his diffidence, the pained longing and dread he had had when first approaching her. What drew him? Her name, first of all. A romantic name, Chantal, he would love to say it. She could share his pleasure in the beauty of the sound. He would use the special tone of voice to say, “Chantal,” the tone he used when he was moved by love and desire, and which she heard less and less of late. And then, his touch on Chantal. Her skin, her hair. She was feeling for Ivan, who was so close to her, after all, feeling for Ivan’s pleasure in the touch. Let him have that wonder with Chantal, if he no longer had it with her. Everyone should have that. She thought of the ways he made love, of gestures and caresses of his that had grown into being on her body, shaped and tailored to envelop her like a second skin, and returned in kind, so that in the dark they still found a sustaining presence, despite the absence so visible in the light of day. But what if these ways did not fit so well on Chantal? Chantal was a different body; maybe she needed a different sort of lover. Past all sense, she wished that Ivan should please Chantal, for the sake of his pride, so that the lover that he was would be truly recognized. For the sake of her own pride as well, for the lover that he was, was hers. And at last she was with them, neuter and unaroused, but partaking of his giving and of her receiving, that it should go well.
Rough Strife Page 8
