The Liberated Bride (30 page)

That was just her initial premise. For even (her theorem continued) had I never descended to the basement, eventually I would have guessed what was going on, since anyone joining a new family, no matter how blindly enthusiastic he may be about it (as I was about yours, if only because of my love for you), develops a sixth sense that in time becomes as sharp as a laser beam. Even without my unexpected discovery, I would have begun to wonder.

In fact (continued my shrewd Parisian), who could say that the building plans were my real objective on that awful Tuesday when I left the office and went to the hotel without you? (Wasn't the whole point to be there without you?) Perhaps the real reason was a vague suspicion in my subconscious or unconscious mind. (Here in Paris, those old ghosts are still believed in. . . . )

And suppose (my Parisian friend went on) I had said nothing to you and kept what I saw and understood to myself. The whole incredible story would have come out in the end anyway, because how long could I have held it in? I was raised and educated by my parents to believe in open dialogue
and in the need—no, the duty—to discuss even the most difficult subjects honestly. And although, superficially, my mother may seem the stronger of the two, my father, too, is no innocent and has his own shrewd sophistication. They were equal partners in a total intimacy—and since such intimacy, which we both believed in and wanted, was my model for our relationship, one that would only have grown stronger with the years, what chance would I have had of hiding something that was consuming me? Even in an ordinary quarrel, the most happily married couple can work itself up to a point, absurd but unavoidable, at which whole families—fathers, mothers, brothers, sisters, even aunts and uncles—are invoked in support of one person's virtues or the other person's vices. Could I have listened and said nothing, for example, if you had argued—as you sometimes did—that you were naturally generous like your father and easygoing like your mother, as opposed to my father's gloom-and-doom and my mother's prudery? Could I have resisted the temptation to shake you up with the hidden truth, which would have jumped out of me like an angry grasshopper? And then—yes, then—you would have been fully justified in regarding such a revelation, coming totally out of the blue, as not even a “pathetic fantasy” but quite simply a revolting lie invented in the heat of the argument. . . .

And let's suppose (let's!) that in spite of all this I not only tried but succeeded in keeping the truth to myself, in bad times as well as in good, without a word about what I saw that day. I still couldn't have forgotten it, especially not when it involved people I saw every day who were continuing their sordid behavior. And since I couldn't have relieved the burden by telling anyone, not even my own parents, since this would have totally estranged them from your parents, the truth would have gone on seething in me and so poisoned my love for you that in the end I would have suspected you too (why not?)—yes, you too—of knowing and hiding it from me, or even (for now that everything is possible, who knows?) of being involved in it yourself and—if only in your thoughts—even enjoying it.

I had to speak out. And immediately. The twenty-four hours that passed from the time I saw what I did until the time I told you about it seem unbearably lonely even now. And above all, you wouldn't have wanted me to keep quiet. Never, in all the harsh, bitter quarrels we had afterward—and I say this to your everlasting credit, Galya—never once did you say, “Why
did you go and tell me all this? What possessed you to do it?” You understood the obligations (yes, obligations!) of intimacy. And from your shock when I told you, and the scene you made (you may remember how my father was attending some conference in Jerusalem that day and turned up at our apartment and you refused to come out of the bedroom even to say hello), I knew that you, at least, were innocent. . . .

Which was a relief. . . .

And so (argued my Parisian), concluding this part of her theorem (there's another part still to come), the moment I realized what I had seen was the moment our marriage was over. After that, it was only a question of time.

Part Two

And now let's look at it from your point of view. My Parisian is a serious woman. Even without knowing what it was that I saw (as I say, I never told her), she managed to prove that our marriage was doomed from the opposite end, too—that is, starting from the assumption that it was all a “revolting fantasy,” as you claimed from the first. In the forty-two days that followed, in which you systematically demolished your love for me, you never budged from that position.

Five years have passed since then, and ultimately all will be forgotten and perhaps even forgiven except for one thing—the insult and even the contempt of your self-righteousness. I'll never forget you sitting tense and pale, although perfectly patient, your feet beneath you on the couch, listening stonily, without interrupting, without asking questions, without even turning off the radio. (Yes, I remember how grotesque it was to be telling you such a thing to soft background music.) When I finished, there was a moment (but too short, too short!) of silence before you reacted. I would have thought that something so incredible needed more than that. The fact was that, in my naïveté, I had expected only one of two possible reactions.

Either—

“
I'm stunned. Give me a minute to catch my breath.”

Or at the very worst—

“
It's none of your business, Ofer. I'm warning you. Stop opening doors in this hotel without knocking or asking permission. You don't own it or my family just because you're married to me.
”

But you took another line. Without hesitating, you chose to defend your family to the hilt, even if it meant destroying our relationship. You said—

word for word—

“
You have no idea, Ofer, of what you're getting us into. I'm asking you to drop this whole revolting fantasy of yours, to say you're sorry, and never to mention it again.
”

Word for word, right?

(Relax. This letter will never reach you.)

And now listen to the theorem of my Parisian (an ugly little bird, pecking away):

“
Let's assume that your ex-wife was right and that you concocted a fantasy for reasons of your own. Let's also assume that in the end you would have been forced to admit it. Then, too, your marriage was doomed. Because to judge by your anger and obsessive behavior, your case involved two different conceptions of love. There's first love and there's second love. The experts can distinguish between them, even if sometimes they're hard to tell apart, because each has a logic of its own. They can exist side by side, not without conflict, until something comes along to turn them against each other. And then it's good-bye.

First love (my Parisian explained) preserves throughout a marriage the bright, living kernel of the falling-in-love that engendered it, that outgoing of the heart by which the lover recognizes, sometimes instantly and sometimes by progressive stages, the human being who can soothe or satisfy his deepest desires—the one person with whom he can redemptively re-create the primeval love for a father, mother, sister, brother, or other family member that could never be fulfilled. And though, when he falls in love, the lover may know little about the beloved, whose soul may be a mystery and whose body may hide beneath its clothes an ugly defect or scar yet to be uncovered by his desire, still he is bonded to his beloved blindly and trustingly and is ready to die for her even before he has seen her nakedness. This is the meaning of the expression “falling in love,” found in so many languages, for the lover has as it were fallen into a deep pit (at the bottom of which may lurk a snake or scorpion), and there must build his love for himself.

And even after (my Parisian continued) the outward signs have yielded their inner promise in all its glory or poverty, its undreamed-of heights or insufferable depths, the glow of the first falling-in-love continues everywhere
and all the time. Yes, even when the beloved is in a wheelchair in an old-age home, diapered and connected to tubes, even then the flash of a smile in moldering eyes, the ancient movement of a veiny hand, the heard-again lilt of a dear voice, even a single sentence containing the right words, can resurrect the first falling-in-love in a twinkling—that love that unconditionally and in advance forgives every weakness and failing, if only for the reason that in advance it knew nothing about them.

Indeed (in my Parisian's opinion), nothing is more democratic than this total embrace of the beloved; for just as the state, or the republic, can never revoke the citizenship of a citizen, be he a spy, traitor, rapist, or murderer, so first love forbears in all things because the first, unconditional falling-in-love persists.

Such (thinks my wise Parisian) was my love for you. This is why I am still stranded in it, waiting for another falling-in-love to set me free. . . .

(And it will—)

And yet, says my Parisian, who is four years older than I am even though she's a class lower—because she has a rich father who periodically treats her to a new career—“your story makes clear that your ex-wife's conception of love is of the other variety.” And this is why, she explains, what happened to us was inevitable.

And that's precisely what I need: to understand calmly the necessity of our separation, so that I can say good-bye for good, graciously and with a light heart.

It seems, Galya, that your kind of love has to do with choice. That's the great difference. Perhaps yours is the more developed variety, skipping love's primitive and dangerous “fall” for what is deliberately and courageously chosen—not because it is the best choice, since there is always a better one, but because it has potential. (I once watched a nature program on television about a certain species of duck or swan that takes four years of painstaking investigation to choose a mate—the longest aptitude test on record.) Rather than marriage as a first flowering of feeling that lasts only until the next falling-in-love, the love of choice offers something less passionate but more stable: responsibility. In a moment of crisis the first kind of lover declares emotionally, “What's done is done—I fell in love with you, and so I forgive you,” but whereas the second kind says coolly, “Yes, what's done is done—I chose you, and I am responsible for my choice.” But—and here's the rub—while
love of the first kind can by its nature overlook what it doesn't like, love of the second kind is incapable of such evasions. And so when something bad shakes the foundations, “responsible love” is too weak to support it—and at that point the whole structure collapses, and all that's left to say is, “You'd better pack your things, Ofer, and go to your grandmother's.
”

Once, some two years ago, a month or two after I arrived in France, in a moment of deep sadness but also of intermittent hope (I didn't know you were about to remarry), I decided to write an itemized account of the horribly quick parting that you subjected me to after forty-two days of struggle. I bought a big yellow notebook, which went well with the yellow light of gray Paris in August '93, where I found myself after my expulsion from the Paradise in which you lived with your father, mother, and sister (who to this day can inspire in me, along with horror and revulsion, a good, stiff erection).

Anyway, you and your family, even your hotel, were cloaked by my imagination in the late-summer light that I remembered from the brambly little hill near the gazebo under which we were married. That's how I had imagined Paradise back in Bible class in grade school, perhaps so as to give it a Middle Eastern touch: a lush green oasis fed by springs and surrounded by soft, friendly desert.

And so I began to write the story of our separation, from the first moment: thoughts, conversations, facts, things we did, the weather, the political situation, even a dream or two that I remembered, such as one in which I forced your father to let me shave him with an old electric shaver found in a room of the hotel.

I wrote from the heart. The result was an indictment, a defense plea, perhaps even a proposal for an out-of-court settlement—but only on the left-hand page, because the right-hand page was for your use, so you could add your story to mine. I still hoped against hope that setting down our two versions in the same notebook might help us reach a new understanding.

I filled page after page, quickly, in less than a week. I wanted so badly to prove that you had acted rashly that I remembered all kinds of things I had forgotten. And I had insights I had never had before into the predicament of your making (for example, your insomnia, which started at that time and kept you up all night in my parents' home in Haifa). It was exciting to put everything down clearly on paper and give my suffering a form. I was
so involved in it that I went on writing during my French lessons at the Alliance Française, to the delight of the students from Japan, China, and Indonesia, who were happy to see that the brown and yellow races were not the only ones with languages that looked nothing like French.