5. It is no coincidence if, semantically speaking, love and interest are almost interchangeable, 'I love butterflies' meaning much the same as 'I am interested in butterflies'. To love someone is to take a deep interest in them, and by such concern to bring them to a richer sense of what they are doing and saying. Through her understanding, Chloe's behaviour towards me gradually became studded with elements of what could be termed ‘I’-confirmation. Contained in her understanding of many of my moods, in her knowledge of my tastes, in the things she told me about myself, in her memory of my routines and habits, and in her humorous acknowledgement of my phobias lay a multitude of varied ‘I’-confirmations. Chloe noticed that I was a hypochondriac, that I was shy and hated speaking on the phone, was obsessive in my need to get eight hours' sleep a night, hated lingering in restaurants at the end of meals, used politeness as an aggressive defence, and preferred to say 'maybe' rather than yes or no. She would quote me back at myself ('Last time, you said you didn't like that kind of irony . . .'), patiently holding in mind elements – both good and bad – of my character ('You always panic whenever. . .' 'I've never seen anyone forget petrol as often as you do . . .'). I was afforded a chance to mature thanks to the insights into my personality that Chloe afforded me. It takes the intimacy of a lover to point out facets of character that others simply don't bother with. There were times when Chloe would tell me frankly that I was defensive or critical, or more colourfully, 'a jumped-up twerp' or 'as nasty as congealed gravy' - and I would be brought face to face with areas of myself that ordinary introspection (in the interests of inner harmony) would have avoided, that others would have been too uninterested to highlight, and that it needed the honesty of the bedroom to reveal.
6. Happiness with other people seems bounded by two kinds of excess: suffocation and loneliness. Chloe had always felt the former to be the greater danger. Oppressed by the judgemental and controlling attitudes of her parents, at school she had dreamt of spending time wholly on her own - and in her year off before university, flew to Arizona on the proceeds of money she had saved up from years of holiday and Saturday jobs. She rented a cabin on the edge of a tiny town she had picked almost at random on a map. She acquired a shelf full of books that she'd always longed to read, and which she intended to work her way through as she watched the sun rise and set over the moonscape. But within a few weeks of arriving, she began to feel the solitude that she had longed for all her life start to work a disorienting and frightening effect on her. The sound of her own voice came as a shock when she heard it in the shops. Her books felt remote and unengaging. She took to staring at herself in the mirror to retain a sense of being. She felt paranoid and ethereal. After only a month, she abruptly decided to leave her cabin for a job as a waitress in a restaurant in Phoenix, unable to bear any longer the feeling of unreality that had descended on her. When she reached Phoenix, social contact was like water to a parched survivor. She launched into conversations whenever she could, delighting in the comfort offered by the simplest exchanges.
7. It was a long time before I was in any position to help Chloe to feel understood. Only slowly did I begin to unearth, from among the millions of words she spoke and actions she performed, the great themes of her life. In our knowledge of others, we are necessarily forced to interpret clues, we are like detectives or archaeologists who piece together stories from fragments, tracing the origins of a murder from a kitchen towel and a lemon squeezer or a civilization from a gardening implement and an earring. I often got it wrong. For example, it was a while before I quite appreciated the role of self-denial in her life. One morning in my flat, as we were having breakfast, she told me she had been ill in the night, had crept out of bed and driven to a chemist, all without waking me up. My first reaction was bewildered anger. Why had she not said something? Was our relationship really so distant that she couldn't wake me up even in a crisis? But my anger (only a form of jealousy) was crude, it failed to take into account what I only gradually learnt: how deep-seated and pervasive was Chloe's inclination to suffer in silence. She would have to have been near death before waking me, for everything about her wished not to place responsibility on others. Once I had located this strand in her nature, other aspects could be understood as related manifestations of it: her lack of acknowledged anger towards her parents (an anger that allowed itself expression only in savage irony), her self-deprecation, her harshness towards self-pitying people, her sense of duty, even her way of crying (muted sobs rather than hysterical wailing).
Like a telephone engineer sitting on the edge of a manhole with a jumble of cables in his lap, I slowly learnt to identify some key threads in Chloe's personality. I began to recognize her hatred of stinginess every time we were in a group in a restaurant. I began sensing her desire not to be trapped, the desert-escapist side of her nature. I admired her constant visual creativity, which showed itself not just in her work, but in the way she would lay the table or arrange a bowl of flowers. I began detecting her awkwardness with other women and her greater ease with men. I recognized her fierce loyalty to those she considered her friends, an instinctive sense of clan and community. With such characteristics, Chloe slowly assumed a complex coherence in my mind, someone with consistency and a degree of predictability, someone whose tastes in a film or a person I could now begin to guess without asking.
The problem with needing others to legitimate our existence is that we are very much at their mercy to have a correct identity ascribed to us. If, as Stendhal says, we lack a character without others, then the other with whom we share our bed must be a skilled intermediary or we will end up feeling deformed and misrepresented. But do not others by definition always distort us – whether for better or worse?
Everyone returns us to a different sense of ourselves, for we become a little of who they think we are. Our selves could be compared to an amoeba, whose outer walls are elastic, and therefore adapt to the environment. It is not that the amoeba has no dimensions, simply that it has no self-defined shape. It is my absurdist side that an absurdist person will draw out of me, and my seriousness that a serious person will evoke. If someone thinks I am shy, I will probably end up shy, if someone thinks me funny, I am likely to keep cracking jokes.
When Chloe had lunch with my parents, she was silent throughout the meal. I later asked her what was wrong, but she herself couldn't understand. She had tried to be lively and yet the suspicions of the two strangers facing her across the table had stopped her from expanding into her usual self. My parents had not been overtly nasty, yet their stiffness had prevented Chloe from rising above monosyllabicity. It was a reminder that the labelling of others is usually a silent process. Most people do not openly force us into roles, they merely suggest that we adopt them through their reactions to us, and hence surreptitiously prevent us from moving beyond whatever mould they have assigned us.