8. Medical history tells us of the case of a man living under the peculiar delusion that he was a fried egg. Quite how or when this idea had entered his head, no one knew, but he now refused to sit down anywhere for fear that he would 'break himself and 'spill the yolk'. His doctors tried sedatives and other drugs to appease his fears, but nothing seemed to work. Finally, one of them made the effort to enter the mind of the deluded patient and suggested that he should carry a piece of toast with him at all times, which he could place on any chair he wished to sit on, and thereby protect himself from breaking his yolk. From then on, the deluded man was never seen without a piece of toast handy, and was able to continue a more or less normal existence.
9- What is the point of this story? It merely shows that though one may be living under a delusion (love, the belief that one is an egg), if one finds the complementary part of it (another lover like Chloe under a similar delusion, a piece of toast) then all may be well. Delusions are not harmful in themselves, they only hurt when one is alone in believing in them, when one cannot create an environment in which they can be sustained. So long as both Chloe and I could preserve the yolk of love intact, what did it matter quite what the truth was?
13
Intimacy
Watching a cube of sugar dissolve into a cup of camomile tea, Chloe, whose company I relied upon to make my life meaningful, remarked, 'We can't move in together because of my problem: I have to live on my own or else I melt. It's not that I don't want you, it's that I'm afraid of wanting only you, of finding that there's nothing left of me. So excuse it as part of my general screwed-upness, but I'm afraid I have to stay a bag lady.'
I had first seen Chloe's bag at Heathrow Airport, a bright pink cylinder with a luminous green shoulder strap. She had arrived at my door with it the first night she came to stay, once more apologizing for its offensive colours, saying she had used it to pack a toothbrush and a set of fresh clothes for the next day. I had assumed the bag would be temporary, but she never gave it up, repacking it every morning as though this might be the last time we would ever see one another, as though to leave even a pair of earrings behind created an unsustainable risk of dissolution.
Yet whatever her enthusiasm for independence, with time Chloe nevertheless began leaving things behind. Not toothbrushes or pairs of shoes, but pieces of herself. It began with language, with Chloe leaving me her way of saying not ever instead of never, and of stressing the be of before, or of saying take care before hanging up the telephone. She in turn acquired use of my perfect and if you really think so. Habits began to leak between us: I acquired Chloe's need for total darkness in the bedroom, she followed my way of folding the newspaper, I took to wandering in circles around the sofa to think a problem through, she acquired a taste for lying on the carpet.
Diffusion brought with it intimacy. The borders between us ceased to be strictly patrolled. Our bodies no longer felt watched or judged. Chloe could read in bed and slide a finger into her nostril to clear an obstruction, roll it into a ball till it was dry and hard, and swallow it whole – without needing to hide or apologize. We could risk intervals of silence, we were no longer paranoid talkers, unwilling to let the conversation drop lest tranquillity seem unfaithful. We grew assured of ourselves in the other's mind, rendering perpetual seduction (stemming from a fear of the opposite) obsolete.
I got to know not only Chloe's opinions and habits, but also the finer grain of her being: the sound of her voice when she spoke on the phone in the next room, the rumble of her stomach when she was hungry, her expression before a sneeze, the shape of her eyes when she awoke, the way she shook a wet umbrella, and the sound of a brush through her hair.
An awareness of each other's particularities gave us a need to rename one another. Chloe and I had met with names given to us by our parents and formalized by passports and birth registers and naturally found that the more private knowledge we had acquired of one another deserved to find expression (however oblique) in names that others didn't use. Whereas in her office, Chloe was Chloe, to me, for reasons neither of us ever quite understood, she became known simply as Tidge. For my part, because I had once amused her with talk of a word for the pessimistic outlook of German intellectuals, I became known, perhaps less mysteriously, as Weltschmerz. The importance of these nicknames lay not in the particular name we had landed on – we might have ended up calling one another Pwitt and Tic - but in the fact that we had chosen to relabel one another. Tidge suggested a knowledge of Chloe that Roy in accounts did not possess (the knowledge of the sound of a brush through her hair). Whereas Chloe belonged to her civil status, Tidge lay beyond the ordinary social realm, in the more secret and unique folds of love.
In each other's company, we spent a good deal of time discussing how awful other people were. Unable to express ourselves honestly in most of our daily interactions, we could between us aerate our lies and atone for the social niceties we had performed. Chloe became the final repository of my harsh verdicts on friends or colleagues. Things I had long thought about them but had tried to deny, I was free to share with a sympathetic and even encouraging audience. We frequently indulged in orgies of gossip. Whatever the pleasures of discovering mutual loves, nothing compares with the intimacy of landing on mutual hates. At times, we came close to concluding (though coyness prevented us from quite admitting this openly) that everyone we'd ever come across was deeply flawed – and that we were in truth the only decent humans left on the planet. Love nourished itself through perpetual criticism of outsiders. The finest proof of our loyalty towards one other was our monstrous disloyalties towards everyone else.
8. We retreated into each other's company to laugh at the hypocrisy demanded by society. We returned from formal work dinners and mocked the accents and opinions of those to whom we had politely said goodbye minutes before. We might in bed replay a conversation we had just had. I would impersonate a bearded journalist Chloe had spoken to, she would reply as she had done originally, all this while she masturbated me beneath the sheets. I would pretend to be shocked to find Chloe's hand where it was and ask her in the tone of a virginal parson: 'Madam, what on earth are you doing with my honourable member?' 'Sir,' she would reply like an aristocratic lady in a period drama, 7 have no idea how this dishonourable member ever came to be in my sight.' Or she would leap out of bed and scream, 'Sir, please leave my bed immediately, or I will have to call my manservant Bernard.' In our intimacy, social formalities found themselves rerun in a comic light, like a tragedy which is spoofed by the actors backstage, the actor playing Hamlet seizing Gertrude after the performance and shouting through the dressing room, 'Fuck me, Mummy!'
9. We even started to acquire a story. Love seems indispensably connected to stories. 'One day, a boy met a girl' is enough for an audience to start to want to know what happened next. Powering most love stories are obstacles. Paul and Virginie, Anna and Vronsky, Tarzan and Jane tend to struggle against odds that confirm and enrich their bond. In a jungle, on a shipwrecked boat or the side of a mountain, the classic romantic couple proves the strength of its love by the vigour with which it overcomes adversities.