If Chloe had now fallen ill, was it not perhaps because the present was catching up with her dissatisfaction? The present had, for a brief moment, ceased to lack anything the future might hold. But was I not just as guilty of the disease as Chloe? Had there not been many times when the pleasures of the present had been rudely passed over in the name of the future, love stories in which, almost imperceptibly, I had abstained from loving fully, comforting myself with the immortal thought that there would be other love affairs I would one day try to enjoy with the insouciance of men in magazines, future loves that would redeem my calamitous efforts to communicate with another whom history had set spinning on the earth at much the same time as me?
10. The future has some of the satisfactions and safety of the past. I recalled that as a child every holiday grew perfect only when I was home again, for then the anxiety of the present would make way for stable memories. I spent whole childhood years looking forward to the winter holidays, when the family took two weeks to go skiing in the Alps. But when I was finally on top of a slope, looking at pine-covered valleys below me and a fragile blue sky above, I felt a pervasive, existential anxiety that would then evaporate from the memory of the event, a memory that would be exclusively composed of the objective conditions (the top of a mountain, a fragile blue sky) and would hence be free of everything that had made the actual moment trying. The present was unpleasant not because I might have had a runny nose, or been thirsty, or forgotten a scarf, but because of my reluctance to accept that I was finally going to live out a possibility that had all year resided in the comforting folds of the future. Yet as soon as I had reached the bottom of the slope, I would look back up the mountain and declare that it had been a perfect run. And so the skiing holiday (and much of my life generally) proceeded: anticipation in the morning, anxiety in the actuality, and pleasant memories in the evening.
There was for a long time something of this paradox in my relationship with Chloe: I would spend all day looking forward to a meal with her, would come away from it with the best impressions, but find myself faced with a present that had never equalled its anticipation or memory. It was one evening shortly before we'd left for Spain, on Will Knott's houseboat with Chloe and other friends, when, because everything was so perfect, I first grew unavoidably aware of my lingering suspicions towards the present moment. Most of the time, the present is too flawed to remind us that the disease of living in the present imperfect tense is within us, and nothing to do with the world outside. But that evening in Chelsea, there was simply nothing I could fault the moment on and hence had to realize that the problem lay within me: the food was delicious, friends were there, Chloe was looking beautiful, sitting next to me and holding my hand. And yet something was wrong all the same, the fact that I could not wait till the event had slipped into history.
The inability to live in the present lies in the fear of leaving the sheltered position of anticipation or memory, and so of admitting that this is the only life that one is ever likely (heavenly intervention aside) to live. If commitment is seen as a group of eggs, then to commit oneself to the present is to risk putting all one's eggs in the present basket, rather than distributing them between the baskets of past and future. And to shift the analogy to love, to finally accept that I was happy with Chloe would have meant accepting that, despite the danger, all of my eggs were firmly in her basket.
13. Whatever pills the good doctor had given her, Chloe seemed completely cured the next morning. We prepared a picnic and went back to the lake, where we passed the day swimming and reading by the water. We spent ten days in Spain, and I believe (as much as one can trust memory) that for the first time, we both risked living those days in the present. Living in this tense did not always mean bliss. The anxieties created by love's unstable happiness routinely exploded into argument. I remember a furious row in the village of Fuentelespino de Moya, where we had stopped for lunch. It had started with a joke about an old girlfriend, and had grown into a suspicion in Chloe's mind that I was still in love with her. Nothing could have been further from the truth, yet I had taken such suspicion to be a projection of Chloe's own declining feelings for me and accused her of as much. By the time the arguing, sulking and reconciliations were over, it was mid-afternoon, and we were both left wondering what the tears and shouting had been about. There were other arguments. I remember one near the village of Losa del Obispo about whether or not we were bored with one another, another near Sot de Chera that had started after I had accused Chloe of being an incompetent map reader and she had countered the charge by accusing me of 'road fascism'.
14. The reasons behind such arguments were never the surface ones: whatever Chloe's deficiencies with the Guide Michelin, or my intolerance to driving around in large circles through the Spanish countryside, what was at stake were far deeper anxieties. The strength of the accusations we made, their sheer implausibility, showed that we argued not because we hated one another, but because we loved one another too much – or, to risk confusing things, because we hated loving one another to the extent we did. Our accusations were loaded with a complicated subtext, I hate you, because I love you. It amounted to a fundamental protest, I hate having no choice but to risk loving you like this. The pleasures of depending on someone pale next to the paralysing fears that such dependence involves. Our occasionally fierce and somewhat inexplicable arguments during our trip through Valencia were nothing but a necessary release of tension that came from realizing that each one had placed all their eggs in the other's basket – and was helpless to aim for more sound household management. Our arguments sometimes had an almost theatrical quality to them, a joy and exuberance would manifest itself as we set about destroying the bookshelf, smashing the crockery, or slamming doors: 'It's nice being able to feel I can hate you like this,' Chloe once said to me. 'It reassures me that you can take it, that I can tell you to fuck off and you'll throw something at me but stay put.' We needed to shout at one another partly to see whether or not we could tolerate each other's shouting. We wanted to test each other's capacity for survivaclass="underline" only if we had tried in vain to destroy one another would we know we were safe.
It is easiest to accept happiness when it is brought about through things that one can control, that one has achieved after much effort and reason. But the happiness I had reached with Chloe had not come as a result of any personal achievement or effort. It was simply the outcome of having, by a miracle of divine intervention, found a person whose company was more valuable to me than that of anyone else in the world. Such happiness was dangerous precisely because it was so lacking in self-sufficient permanence. Had I after months of steady labour produced a scientific formula that had rocked the world of molecular biology, I would have had no qualms about accepting the happiness that ensued from such a discovery. The difficulty of accepting the happiness Chloe represented came from my absence in the causal process leading to it, and hence my lack of control over the happiness-inducing element in my life. It seemed to have been arranged by the gods, and was consequently accompanied by all the primitive fear of divine retribution.