For seven dedicated years after this it was flat-out sex—a game of volume and frequency in which he balanced his requirements for deviation with the overwhelming need to get as much as possible of any sort.
Then came the mercy of beautiful, dark, endlessly enchanting Masha and the only years of his respite. In the early thick of his marriage, he thought he might move on, he thought he might be past the worst, he thought he might be just as others were—the oats proverbially sown (wild, wild, wild) and the ensuing happy reconciliation to a life of monogamy and fulfillment in other areas. (What were they, these much-vaunted other areas?) And certainly Masha’s influence was strong. The more so perhaps when they had only each other, totally without money, two exiles in Paris, talking late into the night, stealing food, he painting, she writing her pamphlets, hurrying through the awakening streets together, fervently believing that no other man and woman in the whole history of men and women had ever made love with such pure intensity as they.
And then the deal was done. And with it came the children and London and Highgate and domestication in its truest sense. The change was shocking and absolute. Within a fortnight the man was no longer a man but a servant—at the beck and call of the infant-rearing righteousness of his wife and every cry or whim of the two helpless infants themselves. Desire’s flame began to sputter, the eye to cheat upon the heart.
Even so, Nicholas continued to steer through the gathering swell by the red star of his remarkable wife. And for a while longer he thought that perhaps he might make it, that what interested him most of all in life was trying to understand the exact shape and weight of other people’s inner selves, the architecture of their spirit. Perhaps Masha herself led him to this conclusion. Certainly they agreed that this was the nub of things. This was what fascinated them. Perhaps they could march together into their middle age with this in common. Man, woman, children: the old happiness formula. After all, it was true. A certain very particular form of honesty did obsess Nicholas—just as it did Masha. Not a person’s honesty in the prosaic sense of telling the truth about this or that, but rather that a person should inhabit his or her humanity truthfully, fully, with commitment. This was the quality that they both sought out and responded to in other people. As he moved into his mid-thirties, Nicholas found that what he wanted to do (more and more with each passing year) was duck beneath the usual farragoes of “I do this” or “I do that” and get as quickly as possible to the quick… Yes, but. Yes, but. Yes, but. What sort of human being are you? What do you really think, feel, want, fear, like? How is life for you? Any insight? Any new thoughts? Any new feelings? Any feelings at all?
And, curiously, he became very good at eliciting due response, charming some and offending others in roughly equal measure. But he found no name for this preoccupation. Neither medical nor social. Neither did he find an occupation—a job—that required such abilities. (That his bloody father must have been in counterintelligence struck him around this time with the renewed force of sudden certainty; what else could you do with this particular skill set? Oh, it was all in the genes—here was the proof; his own existence seemed to be entirely about counterintelligence.)
Such inquiries did not save him, though. They merely led him back to the same path by another, longer route. For sometime in his mid-thirties he realized that merely asking people these questions was not enough. Partly because they lied, but mostly because the revelation of this kind of detailed truth (had he not always secretly believed?) was to be found only… in bed.
Hitherto unformulated suspicions now crystallized into a firm conviction: that in order truly to understand the essence of another human being, it was necessary to make love. Because sex was the only vantage from which to view the whole truth, all at once. The central act of coition was the only time that body, mind, spirit came out and showed themselves all together.
The vows gave way.
And now he went at it as if in a frenzy. Men, women, husbands, wives. He had money. He had no job. He had time. Masha was at work on the paper all day long. Masha was on the night shift. Masha didn’t mind if he stayed away for the odd weekend with friends.
There were years of rush and flurry. There were years of danger and caution. And there were years of relative stability—a steady uncomplaining mistress for eighteen months, a fond youth up between university terms on whom to squander the money his father sent, a bored sub-Bovary of a wife desperate to feel the prickle and blush of romance again, a needy American dancer, a famous actor stuck in a bad run and a worse marriage. There were even one or two professionals with whom Nicholas struck up sexual friendships. A beautiful Chilean man whose dark eyes occasioned the only lines of poetry his soul ever permitted to the page. A plump little Estonian whom he visited for three years, taking her books and teaching her English via Russian between the epic mania of their lovemaking. But there was never any peace.
Indeed, since he had left the city more than three decades ago, these last few years, living on the river back here in Paris, were the closest to contentment that Nicholas had come. And, a little to his own surprise (aside from Alessandro), Chloe Martin was the only person Nicholas had slept with for the past eighteen months.
Thus his journey so far.
“Nearly, very nearly.” Chloe’s coy finger traveled the short distance between their sweating bodies, parted his lips, passed between his crooked teeth, and so was greeted warmly by the object of its target. “As close as it has ever been.”
And he let himself lie back, his heart calming beneath the white hairs of his narrow chest. Her intention was sincerely to pay him a compliment, but of course she could not be aware of the true grotesqueness of his complaint. Nicholas had heard this kind of thing many times before—the it’s-not-work-with-you assurances from all the professionals, the best-lover avowals from all the lovers, and the when-you-use-your-tongue declarations from all the wives of his friends that he had taken great care to satisfy well and truly by way of compensating them for the unforgivable ordinariness (sexual, mental, spiritual) of their variously defeated husbands—had heard it so many times, in so many beds, and in so many states of mind that he had long ago decided that he, and he alone, would be the judge of whether or not any of it was really, empirically true. An extra dimension of his madness, this: that he trusted nobody but himself as the true pleasure-level arbiter of any encounter—not only on his own account, but on behalf of his sexual partners as well. Not without reason, though, as always with madness, as always with Nicholas. Not without reason. For the fact was that he knew exactly how close she had been—knew it through every soft fingertip he had touched her with, could hear it trapped like stifled song in the deep well of her breathing, could smell it rising like rare musk in her pores, could taste it in the salt-shiver of her skin, could see it in the pleasure-ache of her face, the dig of her heels, the clench of her womanly fist.