But the game had some subtle refinements.
Peter pretended he was on edge, tortured by his memories. The writer pretended that he was rather too free and easy, a little too relaxed about it, because, after all, the strange situation was not entirely without stress for him either, since he would have felt guilty with Peter there, and that, precisely, was why he was being so loud and jovial. I “pretended” … but no, I wasn’t pretending, I just sat with them and stared, now at one, now at the other of these two grown, intelligent men who, for some reason I couldn’t begin to guess, were playing the idiot. I did slowly begin to understand the more subtle “rules of the game.” But I understood something else that evening too.
I understood that my husband, whom I had previously believed to be entirely mine — every last inch of him, as they say, right down to the recesses of his soul — was not at all mine but a stranger with secrets. It was like discovering something shocking about him: that he had served time in jail or that he had perverse passions, something that didn’t fit the picture I had of him — I mean the picture I had been painting of him in my own soul. I understood that my husband was only tied to me in certain specific ways, but that in others he remained a mysterious, unfamiliar figure, someone just as strange as the writer who had stopped him in the street and “brought him here.” I understood that what was going on was in some way against me but above my head; that, more than comrades, they were accomplices.
I understood that my husband inhabited worlds other than the one I knew. I understood that this other man, the writer, exercised a certain power over my husband’s soul.
Tell me — what do you think power is? … Because there is so much written and said about it. What is political power, what’s the cause of it, how does it happen that a man can exert his will over millions? And what does our power, women’s power, consist of? Love, you say. Well, maybe it is love. Myself, I have occasional doubts about the word nowadays. I don’t deny love, not by any means. It is the greatest earthly power. And yet sometimes I feel that men, when they love us, do so because they have no choice, and that they even look down on love — on us — a little. In every real man there is a kind of reserve, as if he had closed off some part of his soul, kept it away from women, and said, “You can come so far, darling, but no farther. Here is my seventh room. Here, I want to be alone.” It drives the more stupid kind of woman quite mad. They lose their tempers. The wiser sort are first sad and curious, then resign themselves to it.
But what kind of power can one person have over another’s soul? Why did this unhappy, restless, clever, frightening, and at the same time foolish, wounded person — this writer — exercise his power over my husband’s soul?
Because power he had, as I was to find out: a dangerous, even fatal power. One time, much later, my husband said that the role of this man was to be “a witness” to his life. He tried very hard to explain this. The way he put it was that there existed a witness figure of some kind in everyone’s life: someone we meet in youth, someone we recognize and consider stronger than we are, so that everything we do afterward is an attempt to hide whatever we are ashamed of from this witness-turned-merciless-judge. The witness-judge doesn’t readily believe us. He knows something about us that no one else does. We might become important people — we might be ministers of state, we might be awarded the Nobel Prize — but the witness simply stands by and smiles as if to say, “Do you really take yourself so seriously?” …
And he went on to explain that everything we did was, to some extent, done for this witness: it was he who had to be convinced, it was to him we had to prove something. Our careers, the great struggles of our individual lives, were all, first and foremost, for the witness’s benefit. You know that awkward moment when a young husband first introduces his wife to “the” friend, the great companion of his childhood, then stands by, anxiously watching to see if the friend approves his choice of partner and finds her attractive? … Naturally the friend is courteous and thoughtful, but secretly he is jealous, because, whatever he thinks of her, he is the figure the woman is replacing in a sentimental relationship. So, you see, that was the way they were both weighing me up that evening. The trouble was, they already knew a great deal, the two of them, much more than I could begin to guess.
Because another thing I understood from their conversation that evening was that these two accomplices, my husband and the writer, had their own thoughts about men and women and about human relationships in general, thoughts my husband had never discussed with me. This hurt, because it suggested that I was not worth talking to about such things — about things in general.
When the stranger left some time after midnight, I confronted my husband and asked him directly:
“Tell me honestly, do you look down on me, just a little?”
He gazed at me through cigar smoke, tired, his eyes screwed up, as though he were suffering a hangover after an orgy, and considered my question carefully. To tell you the truth, by the time this evening was over, by the time my husband had finished playing this peculiar game with the writer he’d brought home, I felt worse than if he’d been at a real orgy. We were both exhausted. Strange, bitter feelings were stirring in me.
“No,” he replied solemnly. “I don’t look down on you, not at all. Why should you think that? You are an intelligent woman with powerful instincts,” he added.
It sounded convincing but I didn’t quite trust him. I sat down opposite him at the cleared table — we had been sitting at the table the whole evening, not moving to the comfort of the parlor, because the guest preferred sitting and chatting among a heap of cigarette butts and empty bottles of wine.
“Yes, I am intelligent and have powerful instincts,” I answered, then hesitated. “But what do you think of my character, my soul?”
I was aware the question sounded a little pathetic. My husband gave me his full attention, but did not answer me.
It was as if he were saying: “That must remain my secret. Let it be enough that I acknowledge your intelligence and the power of your instincts.”
That might have been how it started. I remembered that evening for a long time.
The writer was not a frequent visitor. Nor did he meet my husband very often. But whenever they did meet, I felt like a woman who notices an unfamiliar scent on her husband, a scent that clings to his hands even though he has only shaken another woman’s hand. Of course I was jealous of the writer and for a while nagged at my husband to invite him to supper again. It embarrassed him and he dismissed the idea.
“He doesn’t lead much of a social life,” he said without looking into my eyes. “He’s a loner. A writer. He works all the time.”