Intermittences of the Heart
The stories we tell are always too simple. I was a man in love with a woman, but how much of the mobility and inconstancy of my emotions could such a sentence hope to carry? Was there room in it for all the infidelity, boredom, irritation, and indifference that was often knitted together with this love? Could any simple account accurately reflect the degree of ambivalence to which all relationships seem fated? Chloe and I lived a love story stretching over an expanse of time during which our feelings gyrated so much that to talk of being simply in love was, though reassuring, a desperately crude foreshortening of events.
One weekend, we went to Bath. At work the day after, when someone asked what I'd been up to, I replied, "We had a great couple of days in Bath.' Even in my own mind, the story of what had occurred grew elementary and facile. I remembered a beautiful sandy-coloured town and a blue sky. I remembered being happy, I remembered Chloe saying that I was a better, different sort of person on holiday. And yet if I now force myself to think back, to tell more than a one-line story, then I start to recall a more complicated set of events pullulating beneath the surface of the trip, events which it might take four hundred pages to describe properly. To make a stab, I remember that shortly after our arrival, Chloe and I had an argument about what room we'd take in the hotel. I suggested we make a fuss about the one we were initially offered because I didn't like the curtains and there was a strange dripping sound in the bathroom. Chloe called me 'no longer endearingly insane'. On a walk around the abbey, I became preoccupied with my professional life and wished that I'd chosen a different career that paid more. When Chloe asked me what was wrong, I told her I was jealous of Will for all the attention he was getting among our peers. In the evening, Chloe declined to have sex, saying it was her period, though I suspected this had ended a bit earlier. The next day, in a restaurant called John Wood the Elder, I was drawn to a beautiful girl with glasses sitting near us and irrationally engineered an argument with Chloe about wildlife reserves to punish her for her inadvertent role in preventing me from kissing the stranger (who didn't seem sad about what she was missing out on), while on the way to the station, Chloe mysteriously flirted with a cross-eyed taxi driver, telling him that she loved showing off her belly-button in summer, which resulted in a sulk on my part that didn't end till we reached Paddington Station three hours later.
3. Perhaps we can forgive ourselves for telling simple stories which sum up weekends with the word pleasant, stories which thereby introduce order into events which are in fact made up of tissues of troubling and ambivalent feelings. Yet perhaps we also owe it to ourselves occasionally to face the flux beneath the abbreviations. I loved Chloe – and yet how much more variegated the reality was.
When her friend Alice invited us to dinner one Friday night, Chloe accepted and predicted that I would fall in love with her. There were eight of us around Alice's dining table, everyone jogging elbows as they tried to bring the food to their mouths over a table built for four. Alice lived alone in the top floor of a house in Balham, worked as a secretary at the Arts Council, and I had to admit, I did fall a little in love with her.
However happy we may be with our partner, our love for them necessarily hinders us from pursuing alternatives. Why should this constrain us if we love them? Why should we feel this as a loss unless our love for them has already begun to wane? Because in resolving our need to love, we do not always succeed in resolving our need to long.
Watching Alice talk, light a candle that had blown out, rush into the kitchen with the plates and brush a strand of blonde hair from her face, I found myself falling victim to romantic nostalgia, which descends whenever we are faced with those who might have been our lovers, but whom chance has decreed we will never properly know. The possibility of an alternative love story is a reminder that the life we are leading is only one of a myriad of possible lives and it is the impossibility of leading them all that plunges us into sadness. There is a longing for a return to a time without the need for choices, free of the regret at the inevitable loss that all choice (however wonderful) has entailed.
In city streets, I would often be made aware of hundreds (and by implication even millions) of women whose lives were running concurrently with mine, but who were fated to remain a mystery to me. Though I loved Chloe, the sight of these women occasionally filled me with such regret, it seemed like the only solution might be to tell them how I felt and thus alleviate the burden of sadness (I resisted the impulse). Standing on a train platform or in the line at the bank I would catch sight of a given face, perhaps overhear a snatch of conversation (the woman's car had broken down, she was graduating from university, her mother was ill . . .), and feel torn apart by being unable to know the rest of the story and kiss its protagonist.
I could have chatted to Alice on the sofa after dinner, but something made me reluctant to do anything but dream. Alice's face evoked a void inside of me with no clear dimensions or intentions and that my love for Chloe had somehow not resolved. The unknown carries with it a mirror of all our deepest, most inexpressible wishes. The unknown is the fatal proposition that a face seen across the room will always hold out to the known. I may have loved Chloe but because I knew Chloe, I did not long for her. Longing cannot indefinitely direct itself at those we know, for their qualities are charted and therefore lack the mystery longing demands. A face seen for a few moments or hours only then to disappear for ever is the necessary catalyst for dreams that cannot be formulated, a desire that seems as indefinable as it is unquenchable.
9- 'So, did you fall in love with her?' Chloe asked in the car.
'Of course not.'
'She's your type.'
'No, she isn't. And anyway, you know I'm in love with you.'
In the typical scenario of betrayal, one partner asks the other, 'How could you have betrayed me with x when you said you loved me?' But there is no inconsistency between a betrayal and a declaration of love if time is taken into the equation. 'I love you' can only ever be taken to mean for now'. I was not lying to Chloe, but my words were time-bound promises, a truth too disturbing for most relationships fully to take on board, or else couples would have little to talk about other than their fluctuating feelings.
I was not only imaginatively unfaithful, I was also often bored. As inhabitants of luxury hotels and palaces attest, one can get used to anything. For periods, I entirely ceased to notice the miracle that was Chloe's love for me. She became a normal and hence invisible feature of my life.
Then would come moments when I'd recover the ability to see her as I had done in the early days of our love story. One weekend, on a visit to Winchester, we broke down on the motorway and called the AA for help. When a van arrived a quarter of an hour later, Chloe went to deal with the mechanic (a primitive impulse had left me unable to talk to him, from a feeling of embarrassment that, though 1 was a man, I hadn't been able to repair the car, let alone work out how the bonnet opened). Watching her talk to this stranger (he was in leather from tip to toe, for reasons I hoped were strictly related to his professional role), by a form of identification with him, the woman I knew abruptly appeared foreign to me. I looked at her face and heard her voice without the dulling blanket of familiarity, I saw her as she might strike a leather-clad mechanic, I saw her stripped of the normalizing influence of time.