There’s a strange light in Amsterdam. There’s no yellow in it, just a lighter grey behind dark grey clouds. It didn’t seem real to Emily. Like Nina and Anna’s fights. The three women were having tea together, and Emily was concerned to divide her attention evenly, while Anna was exhausted from crying, too tired to compete, and Nina kept things going with witty, nearly brittle conversation.
It didn’t occur to Emily that Nina and Anna loved each other, even though they were unhappy and sometimes hated each other. Unhappiness had to be escaped from or denied. When Emily finished having tea with them and was back in her room getting dressed to go out, to escape, she felt that Nina didn’t want her to leave, that she was deserting a sinking ship or betraying them by her happiness or eagerness to be elsewhere. The feeling reminded her of Christine, except this time she felt she was Christine deserting Emily, who was all alone at home. It surprised her to become Christine, it seemed too easy to be able to slip into one skin and out of another. She pretended to forget and concentrated on Hans. When she was with him other ideas were inconsequential.
She abandoned herself to this foreignness. Her passion was foreign too, and for it, for its truth, she could abandon lesser truths. She imagined that if, because of him, she could forget other people and problems, then there was a hierarchy, an order that she was falling into, that they fit into. Passion separated her from the world, it was her secret, a secret others knew but didn’t talk about, and she carried it in her heart, feeling ruthless rather than romantic. Emily saw romance as sweet and pretty and what she felt was hard and difficult, almost a burden to guard and protect; it could be taken from her. She would have to conduct her life as if in a secret war with the ordinary world that always misunderstands someone else’s passion. Passion and romance were different, she told herself, one was real, the other invented. Besides, she thought it would be good for her to be ruthless for a change.
Reading Madame Bovary gave all this credence. In the late grey afternoons she became all the characters at different times, passion being the book’s subject. Rodolphe was horrible and cold but when he was with Madame Bovary he caught her fire, her heat. He could turn away but she could not. Emily thought Nina could have been Madame Bovary, married to a man she didn’t love and whom she betrayed. Nina insisted too much that she loved her husband, and Emily pictured him like Monsieur Bovary, solid and dull, entirely devoted to his wife and despised by her. Reading this novel gave Emily the courage to go back and revise her story about Keith and Christine and herself and she ended it with paranoid fantasies taking over and the character Emily taking her leave of them and going to Amsterdam, where she meets a character not very different from Hans.
In a way the Hans character seemed as much a fiction as did her use of the paranoid fantasies, but Emily assumed it was because writing passion was writing the fantastic, sort of science fiction — which she hated — about love. With Nina sitting in front of her at the kitchen table, her reverie about love — fiction — was walked in on. Nina grabbed a wineglass and started talking. Emily made mental notes. “When I was eighteen, after we got out of jail, the Nazi soldiers would flirt with me on the street and I would look at them with contempt, but was flattered that they noticed me and thought I was attractive and then I hated myself for that. Vanity is our downfall, don’t you think?” And Nina’s hands fluttered in front of her face, almost hiding it. For emphasis she would clasp one hand in the other. When she talked about the Nazis’ desiring her she made that gesture. She said her husband had rescued her from men who were not as good or as respectable and had given her security and love. She didn’t say this all in one piece but over the course of months of kitchen-table talk. And this afternoon she said that although he was good, he was difficult too and that men are like that, jealous of their beautiful wives.
When Emily left the house Nina imagined she’d fly into the arms of her lover. Nina’s arms encircled her body, a reminder, and her wistfulness angered her. She threw her head into profile, as if she were being looked at and admired. She didn’t miss love, she almost hated it. She only missed being a scandalous flirt, for the men at work with whom she did flirt probably thought it improper or undignified for a woman her age. She resented it. As if her sexuality had lines like her face, was weathered like her hands, had stretch marks like her hips. And was less than a young woman’s, didn’t measure up, couldn’t satisfy, or worse, wasn’t allowed to think about itself, to think about pleasure. You’re too old for that. And there’s carefree Emily, testing her womanhood. She doesn’t know a thing. Anna called for Nina and the sound of that aged voice didn’t seem to be coming from the outside. She wondered if she had called after all, and decided to ignore the voice until she heard it again.
There was no one between them to separate them, and their big house surrounded them, held them, and though they fought the battle was over. They couldn’t live without each other. They survived together. Nina’s mother insisted on life, would not give it up, and she was the barrier that kept death from Nina. That, too, was childish but Nina had stopped criticizing herself for being childish. Life itself was unreasonable, and she for one was determined not to try to make sense of it. Only fools do, she thought to herself as she finished the wine begun with Emily. Emily was a fool. Young and foolish. She laughed to herself again. Wisdom isn’t comfort.
Emily wanted to abandon comfort, and had chosen to leave home so as to feel homeless. How far would she have to go to leave home? Could she bring herself back? And what would back mean? She indulged herself in a fantasy of orphanhood. She had been cast off, left to a fate that she by her own will must shape, grab as if from the air. But air is transparent, and she, she felt, was no visionary much as she had wished to have been a transcendentalist and escape the material world. I am escaping my parents’ world, she wrote in her notebook. Maybe certain things ran in the blood. Margaret Fuller was related to Buckminster Fuller, his great-great-great-aunt someone had once told Emily, and Margaret had proclaimed, “I accept the universe.” But Emily wasn’t sure she wanted to accept anything.
She caught herself crying for no reason on the street. She couldn’t pass another woman who was crying without pausing to look at that tear-stained face, wanting to know what was wrong, She read in one of the articles she proofread that crying had physiological benefits — the body wants to remove chemicals that build up as a result of stress. Tears prevent infection, one theory holds, by keeping the mucous membrane soft. She wondered if Hans ever cried and why. She supposed Nina cried a lot. She hated the way people’s faces looked as they cried. Faces contort, crumple. They compress as if protecting themselves, pulling themselves in. The eyes shut tight. What we take as the person’s personality seems to recede. People look as if they’re being hit even when they’re not being touched. There seemed to be something in this. You don’t have to get hurt to feel hurt. The imagination is also physical. Everything is physical and mental. Like homelessness could be being out on the streets or just feeling that. When Emily cried she couldn’t think, but she must be, she thought. People must be thinking all the time in some way. Christine wrote her that people also don’t think they dream, but people do dream, otherwise they’d die. Why do people die if they don’t dream. There again seemed to be a conjunction of physical and mental that Emily was fascinated by. She wanted to find reasons for her emotional life in her physical life, and vice versa. Some basic structures that would guide her or relieve her or allow her to do just what she wanted to do. If so she could be mindful and mindless at the same time. The phrase “words fail me” took on new meaning as she grew to distrust her thoughts, which were the same as her needs, she supposed. Words fail me. Words fail me. Words fail me, she wrote again and again in her notebook. Then, I fail words, I fail words, I fail words.