“We went to the Hermitage once, when she felt she could make the trip. She was in a lot of pain. Though the pills helped—helped enormously. The other days we just played these six-hour games of chess and listened to music. Sat together. Nothing much. I went to see the doctors to arrange things with the hospital.” He raised his glass but paused to speak before he drank. “They feel as if they were the best three days of my life. Just to be near her. She might have been going slowly mad all her life but, my God, that woman had so much raw courage.”
“Why didn’t you live together?”
“We did. For a long time. Until the 1990s. Until the children were gone.”
“And you were close?”
“Always.”
“Why? I mean, you say you were separated. So why do you feel you were always close?”
He had never asked himself this question, but now he was struck by its importance. And suddenly, at ease here in his soul’s only rest, he could see the answer quite clearly.
“Because my wife understood the geometry of things.”
“I don’t understand.”
“She understood how people are—how people are really. She understood what lies hidden beneath… and how our falsities are more eloquent than our truths.”
“This was the reason you loved her?”
“This was the intellectual reason, I suppose.”
“And in your heart?”
“If you are asking me the emotional reason… I would say because… because the shape of our needs always seemed to tessellate. To fit together, wherever they met.”
“Like crazy paving.”
“Exactly so.”
“Did she lie to you?” Chloe kept her eyes on his, a frown of sincere concentration on her brow, her glass pressed down onto the bed in the space between them, her little finger free and circling his thigh. “Did she deceive you as you deceived her?”
“We deceived each other throughout—from the very beginning. Yes, in a way she deceived me as much as I her. She did not realize, for example, that I knew she had a child before we were married. I waited for her to say something… but she never did. And so I assumed that the child was dead or that she simply did not wish to talk about it. I felt no need to pry. There were a thousand things I did not tell her in return—many, many things about myself, about what I was doing, more and more as time went on. But the lies never mattered—they often don’t. That’s what these psychologists will never tell you. Indeed, that’s what the new world will never understand about the old. She recognized mine, and I hers. And we both subtracted them from what was really being said. We could never remark upon this recognition, though. It could never be explicit. Instead we lived out our complexities and our mutual understandings, as if they were continual tributes to each other’s love and at the same time continual tests.”
Her finger circled. “So why did you split up, then?”
“She had become too mad for me—there was no meaning left in any of our conversations. Not mad—that’s not quite right. I mean obsessive and compulsive—obsessive in her need to repeat and repeat these prejudices and opinions, these fantasies about what was happening in the wider world. And yet… and yet she knew well that she did not have any idea what she was talking about—and worse, that the opinions she pretended to were not real either. She didn’t believe a word of what she herself was saying, but she was compelled to go on saying it. It’s a strange thing, Chloe, it’s… it’s very Russian.” He shook his head. “And somehow we just lost our route back. I found that my own sense of sanity was going in her presence. I could not listen to her anymore. Marriage is a generosity contest, and she won. Perhaps I was going mad in a different way. And I was… I was—”
“Mad… physically.”
“If you like.”
“Were there many others?”
“Yes.”
“The reasons for your lies?”
“Not the reasons. The occasions.”
Her knee found his leg. “The occasions.”
“I always felt the need to be free.”
“Why?”
“I don’t know. Perhaps this is what drove her mad. I couldn’t live with her in the normal way, I suppose. I… When my father died, I had the money and… after a few years of trying… I… I took my freedom.”
“You needed these others?”
“I needed them.”
“Because…”
“DNA.”
“No.”
Nicholas raised an eyebrow. “No?”
She moved her knee softly up and down a fraction. “You needed them because… if you believe that you can still make love with other women, then it feels as though not every issue is settled—that your life isn’t bound in iron.”
“Something like that.”
“That you are still alive.”
“Perhaps.” He wanted to drink and fuck and talk and drink and fuck and talk forever. And why could he not paint this pretty, ugly, pretty, ugly, ugly-pretty, pretty-pretty face? He would bet that Chloe had passed the first thirty years of her life entirely innocent of the damage those pale dreamy green eyes could do; rather, she had grown into this look, this manner. All the same, it worked. He wanted her, wanted physically to be inside her, to go and fetch her consciousness and compel her into the moment with him. Share the endless present.
“And you did not love these others?”
“Very few.”
“How many?”
“There were some I did love. Never as I regarded… as I loved my wife, though. But there are as many kinds of love as there are people. You know that.”
She finished her wine and smiled. “Do I? Some people would say that love and sex are one and the same. You are not loving your wife while you are sleeping with another.”
“Only the ignorant or the childish.”
“Unfair.”
“I have nothing against the ignorant or the childish.”
“And that’s another lie.” Her knee moved over his leg all the way so that he could feel her warmth against his hip.
“No, they are not half so bad as the dinner-party vermin who believe they are sophisticated and who claim to think that sex and love are separate things.”
“And you, Nicholas, what do you think?”
“Really what do I think?”
“Yes, really. Tell me.”
She bent to kiss his stomach, the base of her empty glass now cool on his chest.
“I would say that sex and love are like… like the two principal dancers of the ballet: sometimes they are magnificently, beautifully, indissolubly together, through the great centerpieces of the pas de deux—and make no mistake, this is what the audience pays to see; but sometimes the one will dance while the other watches in the wings; or sometimes they will dance in parallel, on opposite sides of the stage, together yet apart, a curtsey for a bow, an arabesque for a tendu; sometimes one is alone while the other is forgotten for long acts at a time; sometimes the one dances with the chorus to make the other jealous; sometimes one leaps on moments after the other has left; sometimes one dies while the other lives; and of course sometimes they go on separate exhibition tours.”
She laughed.
He took her glass, half turned away, let it fall noiselessly to the floor. He held a last sip of his own and reached for the tiny pill that he had already popped and readied discreetly on the walnut side table.