The Life of the Mind

by Christine Smallwood

  There was one night in particular that Elyse thought her ethics might totally collapse. Her friend was visiting family in Ontario, and Elyse and the boyfriend had gone out with some other mutual friends to see a band, the kind of thing the friend was always refusing to do with him. It was after midnight and the others had piled into a cab, but Elyse and the boyfriend said they would take the bus—“to save money.”

  “It was as if by some implied contract we wanted to be alone together,” said Elyse, “although of course we weren’t alone, we were in a very public place. But I think that was part of it, too. We wanted to extend our time together but we didn’t want to be isolated, in a situation where we might actually betray my friend.”

  It was a very long wait for the bus, which ran only once an hour at that time, and the longer they sat there, waiting on a dirty graffitied bench in the bus shelter, the more Elyse had the feeling that she and the friend’s boyfriend were already a couple—not a couple of long standing, perhaps not even a monogamous couple, but she could see how they must look from the outside, like a couple who should have taken a cab but for politics or economics or pathology had committed themselves to public transportation and were waiting for the bus home, where they would fall asleep, entangled or not, together in the same bed. In the morning one of them would bring the other one water, or coffee, and they would look at the headlines. Like couples do.

  “I don’t usually think people want to kiss me,” Elyse said. “I know I can come off as a snob, but I really don’t have a very high opinion of myself. But I was sure that at any moment my friend’s boyfriend was going to kiss me. I braced myself for it. I was ready. I swear his head moved toward mine. But then, all at once, after all that time, the bus arrived, and we got on it, and the moment passed. I felt it dissolving, time reorganizing on the other side of this kiss that never happened.”

  Shortly thereafter the friend discovered that the boyfriend had been cheating on her with his co-worker, and after many fights and tears and one doomed attempt at reconciliation, the relationship ended. Elyse was devastated that the boyfriend had been having an affair—on her friend’s behalf, yes, but also, if she was honest, she was devastated that the affair wasn’t with her. Now that she knew that the boyfriend was capable of that kind of deception, she felt like they had wasted a lot of time, and maybe their only chance. Then she found out that the affair with the co-worker had ended as soon as the relationship with her friend ended; it hadn’t been love at all, merely a breakup strategy. But by now of course she could not violate the trust of her friend, who she sat with, night after night, consoling her, analyzing her heartbreak. She stayed “friends” with the boyfriend, now ex-boyfriend, but she kept her distance, probably because she did not trust herself.

  “I never would have violated her trust,” Elyse said again, and then, suddenly, “Oh hi, Edward.” She jumped up and excused herself to greet an older man who had just come into the restaurant. Dorothy recognized him as a professor from Berkeley who would be delivering the keynote lecture, on a theory that emphasized “the episodic” as a virtue with radical political utility rather than a failure to achieve “continuity” or “coherence.” He was accompanied by several distinguished-looking men, and one young woman who Dorothy knew to be his former graduate student and current fiancée. Dorothy looked at her phone. No texts. She checked her email. A bill from the gas company. She refreshed it again to make sure nothing new had come in in the time it had taken her to open and close the gas bill without reading it. There was nothing. She then refreshed a third time, not expecting anything, just because she didn’t want to stare at the conversation she had not been invited to join and because her finger made the motion of its own volition, a step in a dance to music only the finger could hear, and then Elyse was back, adjusting the clasp of the thin gold chain she wore around her neck.

  “Do you know Ed?” she asked, and when Dorothy shook her head, Elyse said that she would introduce her next time.

  “Where was I?” she said, sounding as if she genuinely did not remember.

  “You never would have violated your friend’s trust…” Dorothy said, and Elyse agreed eagerly.

  “No, of course not,” she said. “Never.”

  Dorothy said that she would not have expected otherwise. At this reassurance Elyse looked a little disappointed, as if what she wanted was not to be found blameless but to be exonerated for having sinned in her heart.

  Because Elyse was still “friends” with the ex, insofar as they had not declared themselves enemies or unfollowed each other on the digital platforms where so much contemporary life transpired, some months later he included her in an invitation to a party at the place where he was living his bachelor life, a huge loft where the roommates projected films and skateboarded through the rooms they had built out of plywood. It was the kind of place that Elyse’s friends had lived in when they were in their twenties but had outgrown, and while it was fun to revisit, the atmosphere confirmed Elyse’s belief that she and the ex, no matter the thickness of sexual tension between them, were on different life paths and could have been no more successful as a couple than her friend had been with him.

  “I might as well tell you who the friend is,” said Elyse, draining her glass. “It’s so cumbersome to keep it shrouded. Her name is Alexandra. I think you both worked with Judith Robinson?” In addition to this drama that she was explaining, Elyse added, she had felt some professional tension with Alexandra, which they both suppressed admirably, concerning Elyse’s success. Alexandra’s book draft had received scathing readers’ reports, and the first press she was with had dropped it, but she had finally found the right publisher, which made Elyse, she said, “so happy for her.”

  “I had no idea she had trouble with her book,” said Dorothy, sitting up too quickly. She had been leaning on the bar with her head cradled in her hand and now something buzzed in her ears and darkness swam in splotches before her eyes and then the room went completely black; she blinked and her vision cleared. “That’s terrible.”

  If this came out more anguished than she meant it to, it was because while Dorothy was pleased to learn of Alexandra’s troubles, she was also dismayed, because if the system didn’t work for Alexandra, then she, Dorothy, was even more fucked than she had believed. This wasn’t to say that Dorothy believed that Alexandra was more deserving of a job than she was. It was just that Alexandra was more suited to a job than she was. She was cut out for it. She was what the world wanted. She was the way of the world.

  “She’ll be fine,” said Elyse, misreading the combustion roiling under Dorothy’s skin. “Her chair likes her.”

  Still, Elyse was always aware that jealousy and competition were buried deep in her relationship with Alexandra and probably always would be. The jealousy and competition had been compressed by time and pressure into a geological sublayer. Building on top of this layer was possible, but it was like building a swimming pool on a hillside; you needed a retaining wall.

  “It goes without saying,” Elyse said, “that you have to swear to put all this in the vault. The book stuff, too.”

  Dorothy put a hand on her heart and swore it.

  At this point the bartender came over and Elyse requested another glass of wine for herself and one for Dorothy.

  “I can’t handle it that you’re not drinking,” Elyse asked. “It makes me feel so ill-mannered, just talking on and on.”

  “No, no,” Dorothy said, but she didn’t know who she was saying no to—Elyse, to assure her that it wasn’t rude of her to talk on and on; the bartender, to say she didn’t want the wine; or herself, to say that it was fine to go ahead and have the drink. If her no was directed to the bartender it was too late. He was already pouring the wine. She and Elyse waited, as if by tacit consent, for him to lift the glasses over the transparent Lucite half-wall, and when he went away again, Elyse picked up the story. The wine was terribl
e: cloying and heavy. Dorothy drank a big gulp, and then another. If this was something she had to get through she might as well make a dent in it now, so as to take it easy later. The second gulp was slightly less terrible.

  Elyse explained that at the party she was feeling down in the dumps and ugly. It was around the time that she was finishing a big fellowship application, and she had been bingeing as a way of coping with the stress. Chocolate was her weakness. “What a cliché, I know.” She wound up talking for a while with the ex-boyfriend’s identical twin, who she knew slightly. The twin was an aspiring documentary filmmaker who worked for a branding agency, but the conversation wasn’t especially interesting; they didn’t have much in common despite their both being interested in culture and movies and things of that sort. Elyse had always found the twin to be better-looking than Alexandra’s ex, but in a subtle way, because, of course, they’re twins. Anyway, the twin had romantic drama of his own at the party, and at some point remarked morosely that his ex was leaving with another man.

  “Here I did something I’ve never done before. It truly shocked me,” said Elyse. “Which is that I looked right at him and said, ‘You can go home with me.’ ”

  The next thing she knew, she was in a cab, stopped in traffic, because it was a weekend night, which gave her and the twin plenty of time to silently and individually contemplate their decision while making idle chitchat about gridlock. They didn’t touch each other at all in the car but as soon as they were in the apartment turned to each other with starving mouths and had sex three times in a row.

  “Three times!” Elyse said. “I mean, that’s something my ex-husband never did.”

  Dorothy nodded sympathetically, hoping her nod communicated not that she identified with this particular complaint, not that she was revealing anything about Rog and what he was or wasn’t capable of, but simply that she was a woman and Elyse was a woman and she, Dorothy, was sympathetic to the plight of all sexually unsatisfied women, which they both, at various moments whose exact times were vague and whose exact causes unspecified, had been.

  The thing Elyse most remembered about the sex was that he liked to finish standing up, and she didn’t expect it to work, because he was shorter than her, but she sort of crouched into a standing squat and it was fine; by the third round, she joked, she was ready for the Olympic team.

  The real drama came the next morning, when Elyse had to figure out how to get the twin out of the building without running into Alexandra. “How psychotic would she think me,” Elyse said, sipping the wine with no indication that she found it unpleasant in her mouth, “to have slept with her ex’s twin?” It would have appeared she hated Alexandra, or wanted to steal her life, when nothing could be further from the truth. “I like my life,” Elyse declared. Elyse and the twin rose early, drank coffee, and ate frozen waffles. They had sex again. Elyse worried she would get a UTI, and in fact, she did.

  “Ugh,” said Dorothy. “I had one that lasted six weeks once.”

  “That’s horrible,” said Elyse.

  “I did it to myself. I didn’t go to the bathroom,” said Dorothy.

  “Sometimes you just don’t want to get up,” said Elyse.

  Around nine, Alexandra’s ex-boyfriend, who had seen them leave the party together, a fact not lost on Elyse at the time, texted his twin to ask if he was with Elyse, and the two of them leaned back against the pillows and laughed about it.

  “I’ve never had a threesome,” said Elyse dreamily. “But this text made it like a psychic threesome. It was obvious to the twin that I had slept with him as a way of sleeping with his brother, and obvious to me that he had slept with me as a way of bonding with his brother. And of course Alexandra’s ex knew everything. I should have found this disgusting but I didn’t, it felt almost familial, really sweet. Everyone had gotten something they wanted, even Alexandra’s ex, who got the confirmation that I believe he was always looking for, of how I had found him desirable. And I got the confirmation I wanted, because he was clearly jealous. It was all very romantic.”

  They decided the twin would leave after twelve, so that if he ran into Alexandra on the way out, he could say that he came by to borrow a record or something; it would be fishy, but it would be late enough in the day that it could somehow be explained away. So during the whole morning they sat around talking, and drinking more coffee, and watching clips on the Internet, and listening to music, and in general enjoying the decadent fortune of a slightly extended one-night stand. Elyse started to fantasize that this could work out, that the twin could be her boyfriend, that maybe the whole reason the ex had come into her life was to bring her to the twin. Over the course of the morning the twin told her that his—their—mother was a triplet, which made sense, seeing as multiples run in families, and that his mother had been adopted, separated from her siblings at birth and recently reunited with them.

  “I saw a documentary like this,” said Dorothy, and Elyse nodded.

  The twin wanted to make a short film about his family, had started shooting some interviews, just rough stuff, to test out the idea. He said he would show Elyse a clip of something he had shot on his phone, of his mother and her sisters—his aunts—talking about their favorite foods and vacation spots; it was, he said, uncanny how alike they were. But while he was swiping back to find the clip, he swiped through a photo, and it was Alexandra, and she was topless.

  “The thing I most remember is not her nipples,” said Elyse. “I would have guessed it would have been the nipples, since I’m always curious about nipples; they’re so different on everybody. But it was her face. She looked so free. She’s probably my best friend—not like my best best friend, not better than childhood friends, but she’s the person I spend the most time with day in and out—and I realized I had never seen her happy. It made me wonder if there’s something about me that makes her unhappy, like if there’s an observer problem, where if I’m looking, she’s guaranteed to be morose, or at least ambivalent.

  “It turned out that Alexandra had had a fling with the twin,” Elyse went on, “sometime just after she and the boyfriend broke up. It wasn’t serious, and the ex never found out, but that was the real reason he was afraid of running into her in the building—it wasn’t about me at all.

  “The problem,” she said, and here Elyse looked down and realized that the jumpsuit had slipped too low, so she stood up a little to tug it back over her shoulders, “is that ever since I found out that she slept with the twin, I’ve been consumed with hatred for her. It’s been a month and I keep making up excuses to not see her. I can tell that she’s upset about it, and confused, and I know she deserves an explanation, but I just can’t stand being around her; it makes me feel so guilty and ashamed. Not that I did anything wrong. I really don’t think I did anything wrong. But I could tell, from the way she looked in that photo, that they had a connection that I didn’t have with him. I thought the sex had been great, it had made me feel so good. But it was sort of…abstract. It was like it was happening to somebody else. Not in a bad or dissociated way, it just didn’t feel like real life. After seeing that photo of Alexandra, I know that my face never looked like that. I feel like she took something away from me that I can’t get back. And I miss my friend. I miss her so much.”

  With that Elyse reached for her wine and almost knocked it over but steadied it. She drank and grimaced, as if noticing the flavor for the first time. Dorothy wanted to tell Elyse that she deeply identified with her story, which she understood as a poignant, if slightly rambling, commentary on shame, on the interruption of a pleasure. Whether or not she knew it, Elyse’s story was a parable about academia and what it did to pleasure, how it took the most simple and innocent desires—to tell stories, and stories about stories—and made them ugly. Dorothy, who for so long had felt flattened and oppressed by Alexandra’s shamelessness, by her professional security and her easy assumption of achievement, was pleased to
have a comrade in her shame, a person who was, like herself, a victim of Alexandra—not a witting one, of course; Alexandra did not actively wish harm to Dorothy or Elyse; Dorothy was not paranoid. But there was a way in which Alexandra’s ease routinely put others into shadow, and in the case of Elyse’s story, Alexandra’s pleasure, which was so vital that not even a photograph could destroy it, had destroyed Elyse’s. Dorothy had heard of people whose pleasure existed free of concern with other people, whose lives were not dictated by comparisons, jealousies, and rivalries, and they seemed to her narcissists and sociopaths, completely out of joint with the social, which took as its participatory condition spite as well as joy. And yet just knowing that Elyse—beautiful Elyse, who studied clouds and flowers, who dressed fashionably and whose career was more ascendant than Alexandra’s own (Dorothy was still ingesting the news that Alexandra’s professional march had not been as unimpeded as she had believed)—just knowing that Elyse, too, was subject to having her happiness wrenched away by someone else’s greater, purer, and more coherent happiness, this somehow gave Dorothy comfort, like she was not alone in shouldering the burdens of life.

  “I’ve been reading about shame with my students,” Dorothy began. “You know that Tomkins defines it as the interruption of a pleasure—”

  Here Dorothy noticed that Elyse was smiling goofily at her phone.

  “Sorry,” said Elyse, texting. “It’s this guy I just started seeing.”

  She looked up again. “You were saying about…pleasure?”

  There were people who would have been angry at this obvious breach of etiquette, but Dorothy was mostly humiliated by her own pedantry. Why had she tried to turn this into a teachable moment? Elyse didn’t need her “reading” of the situation. She just wanted someone who also knew Alexandra to listen to her and tell her she wasn’t a bad person.