Выбрать главу

5

Mind and Body

Few things are as antithetical to sex as thought. Sex is instinctive, unreflexive and spontaneous, while thought is careful, uninvolved, and judgemental. To think during sex is to violate a fundamental law of intercourse. But did I have a choice?

It was the sweetest kiss, everything one dreams a kiss might be. It began with a light grazing and tender tentative forays that secreted the unique flavour of our skins. Then the pressure increased, our lips rejoined and parted, mine leaving Chloe's for a moment in order to run along her cheeks, her temples, her ears. She pressed her body closer and our legs intertwined. Dizzy, we collapsed onto the sofa, clutching at one another.

Yet if there was something interrupting this Eden, it was the awareness of how strange it was for me to be lying in Chloe's living room, my lips on hers, feeling her heat beside me. After all the ambiguity, the kiss had come so suddenly that my mind now refused to cede control of events to the body. It was the thought of the kiss, rather than the kiss itself, that was holding my attention.

I couldn't help but think that a woman whose body had but a few hours ago been an area of complete privacy (only suggested by the outlines of her blouse and the contours of her skirt) was now preparing to undress before me. Though we had talked at length, I felt a disproportion between my day-time and night-time knowledge of Chloe, between the intimacy that contact with her body implied and the largely unknown realms of the rest of her life. But the presence of such thoughts, flowing in conjunction with our physical breathlessness, seemed to run rudely counter to the laws of desire. They seemed to be ushering in an unpleasant degree of objectivity, like a third person who would watch, observe, and perhaps even judge.

'Wait,' said Chloe as I unbuttoned her blouse, 'I'm going to draw the curtains, I don't want the whole street to see. Or why don't we move into the bedroom? We'll have more space.'

We picked ourselves up from the cramped sofa and walked down a book-lined corridor into Chloe's bedroom. A large white bed stood in the centre, piled high with cushions and papers, clothes, and a telephone.

'Excuse the mess,' said Chloe, 'the rest of the place is just for show, this is where I really live.'

There was an animal on top of the mess.

'Meet Guppy – my first love,' said Chloe, handing me a furry grey elephant whose face bore no signs of jealousy.

There was an awkwardness while Chloe cleared the surface of the bed, the eagerness of our bodies only a minute before had given way to a heavy silence that indicated how uncomfortably close we were to our own nakedness.

When Chloe and I undressed one another on top of the large white bed and, by the light of a small bedside lamp, saw each other naked for the first time, we attempted to be as unselfconscious as Adam and Eve before the Fall. I slipped my hands under Chloe's skirt and she unbuttoned my trousers with an air of indifferent normality, like someone opening the post or changing a duvet.

But if there was one thing likely to check our passion, it was clumsiness. It was clumsiness that reminded Chloe and me of the humour and bizarreness of having ended up in bed together, I struggling to peel off her underwear (some of it had become caught around her knees), she having trouble with the buttons of my shirt – yet each of us trying not to comment, not to smile even, looking at one another with an earnest air of desire, as though oblivious to the potentially comic side of what was going on, sitting semi-naked on the edge of the bed, our faces flushed like those of guilty schoolchildren.

The philosopher in the bedroom is as ludicrous a figure as the philosopher in the nightclub. In both arenas, because the body is predominant and vulnerable, the mind becomes an instrument of silent, uninvolved assessment. Thought's infidelity lies in its privacy. 'If there is something that you cannot say to me,' asks the lover, 'things that you must think alone, then can you really be trusted?'

I wasn't thinking anything cruel while I ran my hands and lips across Chloe's body, it was simply that Chloe would probably have been disturbed by news that I was thinking at all. Because thought implies judgement, and because we are all paranoid enough to take judgement to be negative, it is constitutionally suspect in the bedroom. Hence the sighing that drowns the sounds of lovers' thoughts, sighing that confirms: I am too passionate to be thinking. I kiss, and therefore I do not think – such is the official myth under which lovemaking takes place, the bedroom a unique space in which partners tacitly agree not to remind one another of the awe-inspiring wonder of their nudity.

There is the story of a nineteenth-century pious young virgin who, on the day of her wedding, was warned by her mother, 'Tonight, it will seem your husband has gone mad, but you will find he has recovered by morning.' Is the mind not offensive precisely because it symbolizes a refusal of this insanity, seeming like an unfair way of keeping one's head while others are losing their breath?

In the course of what Masters and Johnson have called a plateau period, Chloe looked up at me and asked,

'What are you thinking about, Socrates?' 'Nothing,' I answered.

'Bullshit, I can see it in your eyes, what are you smiling about?'

'Nothing, I tell you, or else everything, a thousand things, you, the evening, how we ended up here, how strange and yet comfortable it feels.'

'Strange?'

'I don't know, yes, strange, I suppose I'm being absurdly self-conscious about things.' Chloe laughed. 'What's so funny?' 'Turn round for a second.' 'Why?'

'Just turn over.'

On one side of the room, positioned over a chest of drawers and angled so it had been in Chloe's field of vision, was a large mirror that showed both of our bodies lying together, entangled in the bed linen.

Had Chloe been watching us all the while?

'I'm sorry, I should have told you,' she smiled, 'it's just I didn't want to ask – not on the first night. It might have made you self-conscious.'

6

Marxism

When we look at someone (an angel) from a position of unrequited love and imagine the pleasures that being in heaven with them might bring us, we are prone to overlook a significant danger: how soon their attractions might pale if they began to love us back. We fall in love because we long to escape from ourselves with someone as ideal as we are corrupt. But what if such a being were one day to turn around and love us back? We can only be shocked. How could they be divine as we had hoped when they have the bad taste to approve of someone like us? If in order to love, we must believe that the beloved surpasses us in some way, does not a cruel paradox emerge when we witness this love returned? 'If s/he really is so wonderful, how could s/he could love someone like me?'

There is no richer territory for students of romantic psychology than the atmosphere of the morning after. But Chloe had other priorities upon stumbling out of sleep. She went to wash her hair in the bathroom next door and I awoke to hear water crashing on tiles. I remained in bed, encasing myself in the shape and smell of her body that lingered in the sheets. It was Saturday morning, and the timid rays of a December sun were filtering through the curtains. It was a privilege to be curled up in Chloe's inner sanctum, looking at the objects that made up her daily life, at the walls she woke to every morning, at her alarm clock, a packet of aspirins, her watch and her earrings on the bedside table. My love manifested itself as a fascination for everything Chloe owned, for the material signs of a life I had yet fully to discover but that seemed infinitely rich, full of the wonder the everyday takes on in the hands of an extraordinary being. There was a bright yellow radio in one corner, a print by Matisse was leaning against a chair, her clothes from the night before were hanging in the closet by the mirror. On the chest of drawers there was a pile of paperbacks, next to it, her handbag and keys, a bottle of mineral water and Guppy the elephant. By a form of transference, I fell in love with everything she owned, it all seemed so intriguing, tasteful, different from what one could ordinarily buy in the shops.