But the drops that were treading reality’s fantastic limits. . remained within the real and succumbed to melancholy.
JUNE 19, 2003
The All That Plows through the Nothing
THERE ARE TWO LADIES AT THE GYM who talk nonstop, occasionally to other people, but always to each other. They seem to be lifelong friends, with everything in common: the same dyed-blond hair, the same clothes, the same reactions, and no doubt the same tastes. Even their voices are similar. They’re the kind of ladies who, having turned fifty and reached middle age, feeling they should take care of their bodies, decide to start going to the gym together, because they wouldn’t go on their own. Not that these two need much extra physical activity; they’re slim and active and seem to be in good shape. They’re local housewives, with nothing to set them apart except for their chattiness, which is hardly an exceptional quality. It’s not as if the gym’s the only place they can talk, because they’re already talking when they arrive. If I’m on one of the bikes near the entrance, I hear their voices as they come up the stairs; they talk in the dressing room while they’re getting changed; then they work out together on the bikes, the treadmills, and the various machines, without interrupting their conversation for a moment; and they’re still talking when they leave. I’m not the only one to have noticed. Once when they were in the women’s dressing room and I was in the men’s, I could hear them talking, talking, talking, and I said to the instructor: “They sure can talk, those two.” He nodded and raised his eyebrows: “It’s scary. And the things they say! Have you listened to them?” No, I hadn’t, although it would have been easy, because they speak loudly and clearly, as people do when they have no secrets or concerns about privacy. They conform to a stereotype: housewives and mothers who are sure of themselves and their normality. Once, years ago, in a different gym, I came across a similar but different case: two girls who talked all the time, even when they were doing really demanding aerobic exercises; they were young and must have had tremendous lung capacity. One day when whey were on facing mats, doing the kind of sit-ups that take your breath away, talking all the while, I pointed them out to the instructor, who said, excusing them: “It’s because they’re good friends and they both work all day: this is the only time they get to spend together.” But it’s not like that for the two ladies, who are clearly together for a large part of the day: I’ve seen them shopping in the neighborhood, or looking in store windows, or sitting in a café, always talking, talking, talking.
I didn’t really think about this until one day, by chance — they must have been on bikes near mine — I heard what they were saying. I can’t remember what it was, but I do remember that it made a strange impression on me, and though I couldn’t articulate that strangeness at the time, I resolved in a half-conscious and somewhat halfhearted way (after all, what was it to me?) to get to the bottom of it.
At this point there’s something I should explain about myself, which is that I don’t talk much, probably too little, and I think this has been detrimental to my social life. It’s not that I have trouble expressing myself, or no more than people generally have when they’re trying to put something complex into words. I’d even say I have less trouble than most because my long involvement with literature has given me a better-than-average capacity for handling language. But I have no gift for small talk, and there’s no point trying to learn or pretend; it wouldn’t be convincing. My conversational style is spasmodic (someone once described it as “hollowing”). Every sentence opens up gaps, which require new beginnings. I can’t maintain any continuity. In short, I speak when I have something to say. My problem, I suppose — and this may be an effect of involvement with literature — is that I attribute too much importance to the subject. For me, it’s never simply a question of “talking” but always a question of “what to talk about.” And the effort of weighing up potential subjects kills the spontaneity of dialogue. In other words, when everything you say has to be “worth the effort,” it’s too much effort to go on talking. I envy people who can launch into a conversation with gusto and energy, and keep it going. I envy them that human contact, so full of promise, a living reality from which, in my mute isolation, I feel excluded. “But what do they talk about?” I wonder, which is obviously the wrong question to ask. The crabbed awkwardness of my social interactions is a result of this failing on my part. Looking back, I can see that it was responsible for most of my missed opportunities and almost all the woes of solitude. The older I get, the more convinced I am that this is a mutilation, for which my professional success cannot compensate, much less my “rich inner life.” And I’ve never been able to resolve the conundrum that conversationalists pose for me: how do they keep coming up with things to talk about? I don’t even wonder about it anymore, perhaps because I know there’s no answer. I wasn’t wondering how those women did it, and yet I was given an answer so unexpected and surprising that a terrifying abyss opened before me.
Suddenly, in the ceaseless flow of their dialogue, one said to the other: “They gave my husband the results of his analysis, and he has cancer; we asked for an appointment with the oncologist. .” I took that in and began to think. Naturally my first thought was that I’d misheard, but I hadn’t. I don’t know if I’m reproducing her words exactly, but that was the gist, and the other woman replied, in an appropriately sympathetic and worried manner, but she wasn’t overly surprised; she didn’t cry out or faint. And yet this was really big news. Too big to crop up casually in a conversation, as if it were just one among many other items. I was sure that the two of them had been in the gym for at least an hour, and they’d been talking all that time; also, they’d arrived together, which meant that their conversation had begun a fair while before. . So had they discussed ten, twenty, or thirty other topics before they got around to the husband’s cancer? I considered a number of possibilities. Maybe the woman concerned had been keeping this momentous disclosure in reserve, in order to drop it “like a bombshell” at a particular moment; maybe she’d been gathering the strength to tell her friend; maybe she’d been inhibited by some kind of reticence, which had finally given way. Or it could have been that the news was not, in fact, all that important: suppose, for example, that the man she was calling “my husband” (for the sake of convenience) was an ex-husband, and they’d been separated for many years, and there was no longer any bond of affection between them. More daring or imaginative explanations were possible too. Perhaps they were talking about the plot of a novel or a play that the woman was writing (for a writing workshop they attended together, just as they exercised together at the gym); or it could have been a dream that she was recounting (although the verb tenses were wrong for that), or whatever. And there was a further hypothesis, which was barely less improbable: that the women had been dealing with more important and urgent matters since they’d met two or three hours earlier and had just got around to the cancer when I overheard them. Absurd as it might seem, this was in the end the most logical and realistic explanation, or at least the only one left standing.
In the course of these reflections, I remembered the previous occasion on which I’d heard them talking and the vaguely strange impression it had made on me. Now I could bring that impression into focus and understand the strangeness retrospectively. It was the same thing, but to enter fully into my consciousness, it had to be repeated. The first time (now I remembered) the news had been less amazing: one of the women was telling the other that, the previous day, the painters had started on the inside of her house, and all the furniture was covered with old sheets; it was utter chaos, the way it always is “when you have the painters in.” The other woman sympathized and replied that, although it was terribly inconvenient, repainting was something that had to be done; you couldn’t go on living in a flaky old ruin, and so on, and so on. The little puzzle that I hadn’t been able to formulate was this: how could such an upheaval in the existence of a housewife simply crop up in the middle of a conversation, instead of being announced at the start or, indeed, discussed for days in advance? The matter of the husband’s cancer had opened my eyes because it was much more shocking, but the same fundamental mechanism had been at work in both cases.