PASSION PLAY
In the beginning it was clearly what she wanted, precisely what she needed. Mostly it still felt that way, but as she separated from him this morning (they eased away from each other with a kiss, a touch and a soft kiss again, circling each other shyly, a little warily) she felt again this surprising new pain that parting now seemed to bring. Each good-by seemed a prelude to a major, final one. She always felt as though he might leave her life as suddenly, as dramatically as he had come into it, for behind his capacity for quick, relentless action must lie an instability as exploratory as her own, shunning guarantees.
Zipping up her coat against the rain, Nadine wished she could seal off these thoughts. Thoughts like the rain, which tried to wear her down, erode her confidence and make her forget that she had frequently been happy. That the sun had warmed her only yesterday, and would doubtless lighten life again. But for today she needed warmth and shelter, and the choice between library and home made itself as she thought of hot coffee and a gas fire. The only antidotes to this miserable London day. The rest of the town might have tea, but coffee was her prerogative as a tourist, a status she could not seem to shake in a month's short stay, though she steadfastly refused to tour anything but the Tower of London for its macabre appeal. Otherwise, she simply happened to end up in places, without much calculation. Back home she put her feet just beyond toasting distance from the fire and, somewhat soothed, gave in to the tick, tick, ticking that troubled her mind.
Thinking of Dirk, she could see him clearly. His features had lost their first foreignness. Their topography was now familiar, from the wild hairs of his eyebrows to his green eyes and stiff, abrasive beard. A very unrelenting beard, not the woolly, fuzzy-animal beard her former husband wore. That quality in him the beard hinted at was one of the first attractants. What had also surprised her in this near-stranger's face was how much like her own it was. In its colors--black hair, green eyes and freckled-olive skin--but also in its quality of being genuine. It seemed to Nadine that he was the most real person she had ever met, as real as her own self. He might have been one of her family, a brother. They felt like old, intimate friends. But the fact was that over seven years, they had spent, at most, seven days together.
His friendship was supposed to be with her husband, Jack, but when the three sat in what had been her home, those first days, it seemed as if she had been the one to go to school with him and to Europe. She felt that they had bummed around together, supersensitive and cynical, passing judgment on the less enlightened tourists. She felt they were friends, equals, a feeling not at all affected by her tentative new sense of femininity, of being mythically female.
Much champagne was drunk in those early days. Bubbling through their blood, it made the self-control needed to hide their new liking very difficult, and day by day pretense eroded further. The second night, Jack was up for a party. Nadine and K said no, on the very real grounds of fatigue, but encouraged him to go. His question, Will you two get along all right by yourselves? changed to Are you sure you won't get along too well? A facetious concession to the obvious. But he had no grounds for complaint, having had his own infatuations. In fact, for several months they had been talking about letting other people into their couple, and how to go about making room in their emotions for such a thing. Between Dirk and Jack there was a friendship that somehow held up against the sudden new threat, through the preliminaries, anyway.
In those very long days, they spent most of each twenty-four hours wide awake, excited, beyond the reach of natural fatigue. They all three talked indoors, against the constant soundtrack on the record player, or walked outside when the house became too close with tension. They spent one afternoon in the park, lying on a blanket (always with champagne) while Jack took pictures. Shot after shot (she found them later among some papers on his desk, while picking up her things for the last time). Still lives of this unstill love. Frames from a movie: Dirk and Nadine reclining, talking, resting, Nadine sleeping, Dirk gazing skyward. All against a leafy green stageset, bright with the full light of the high summer sun. Though never showing them touching, the pictures were intimate, private, with Jack the voyeur. That day Jack stepped on Dirk's glasses, breaking them, and they all winced at this Freudian slip, pained by the note of violence interjected in the softness of their friendship, their love.
Three days passed where only one should have. The first flight canceled, he missed the second by three minutes, while they fretted at his going at the airport. On the third day he left, his firm kiss a promise that they would meet again in two weeks time. That had been three months ago. Since then, they had met once in a nearby city, once in London, back together to the States for the infinity of two weeks. London again for him, then once more to the States. Back and forth, a week together, a week apart. In between, he wrote her words: love, need, only one. Taut, brief letters, explosively loving. For him she picked out careful metaphors that would decorate their love while defining it precisely. The last separation went too deep; they refused to be apart again, ever. Much to the chagrin of her husband, his wife, everyone's parents and the better part of their friends.
How they managed to overcome this vast and intimidating phalanx of society's infantry, they ever knew. But compulsion carried them through the tasks and scenes necessary to disengage themselves from their past lives, and left them with enough energy to think about their own, new one, together.
She remembered their first touching: the warmth and softness of him braced by strength. The unexpected feeling of falling from the precarious pedestal of her external self, back down into the most real she, the child delighted. The tension in his grip expressed her own. They peeled away the layers of growing-up's repression and, like children, felt and thought in wild bursts of emotion. All that had been buried, hidden for years, they brought out for each other's blessing and approval.
Never had she felt herself so tangible as when he touched her. He reached into her, through the warmth, to a place where mind and body fused, where the conscious and unconscious met along the margins of the nervous system. Happiness broke in her brain, obliterating the nervous tic of thought. At night, they slept intertwined, fraternal twins, lying in the womb. They were together, no dominance by one, no power bought or stolen. But a total exchange, freely given from both sides, eagerly taken, savored, and returned so that both remained intact. Or sometimes the gifts were kept, so that when they got up he had her cells in his muscles, while droplets of his blood flowed through her veins. A fair exchange.
The first days they told each other everything, overflowing with the stored-up past no one else had wanted much to hear about. They listened delightedly or interrupted sometimes to add a confirmation or to tell an analogous tale of a separate past. Their thoughts went up like tinder, the fire spreading with a great warm blaze through their heads. One word dragged out a linked one with it. They all wanted to be said after all those years of lying dormant, waiting to be whispered into a sympathetic ear. The most important thing they told was that they loved. Said without fear and often, it was the ruling truth they lived by. They felt it had been written in stone long before the commandments. Or perhaps spelled out in chains of nucleic acids in a primordial sea.
Together they went to Paris, moving briskly through the streets, dropping into bars for a quick coffee and a lung-numbing drag of black tobacco. Often going back to their room before they had gotten far, frantic to touch each other. Paris, with its attentiveness to human comfort in the form of good food, omnipresent bars and the grand lit, seemed to give its unconditional approval to their rapt condition.
Thinking back on this rich past, the undeniable good that had come their way, she neurotically felt again the temerity of their resolve to be together. Such hubris must be paid for; the threats were innumerable. Which of their respective mates would suicide? Whose parent would have a heart attack? When would his wife's powerful father use his influence to ruin Dirk's career.? She agonized over his journeys, reverting to childish bargains for his safe return with a god she only occasionally needed. She had no doubt that the price for all this illicit bliss would be astronomical. Not only that, she knew exactly what that price would be. That new wariness on parting. Any man who had left one wife so abruptly would sooner or later leave another.
Zipping up her coat against the rain, Nadine wished she could seal off these thoughts. Thoughts like the rain, which tried to wear her down, erode her confidence and make her forget that she had frequently been happy. That the sun had warmed her only yesterday, and would doubtless lighten life again. But for today she needed warmth and shelter, and the choice between library and home made itself as she thought of hot coffee and a gas fire. The only antidotes to this miserable London day. The rest of the town might have tea, but coffee was her prerogative as a tourist, a status she could not seem to shake in a month's short stay, though she steadfastly refused to tour anything but the Tower of London for its macabre appeal. Otherwise, she simply happened to end up in places, without much calculation. Back home she put her feet just beyond toasting distance from the fire and, somewhat soothed, gave in to the tick, tick, ticking that troubled her mind.
Thinking of Dirk, she could see him clearly. His features had lost their first foreignness. Their topography was now familiar, from the wild hairs of his eyebrows to his green eyes and stiff, abrasive beard. A very unrelenting beard, not the woolly, fuzzy-animal beard her former husband wore. That quality in him the beard hinted at was one of the first attractants. What had also surprised her in this near-stranger's face was how much like her own it was. In its colors--black hair, green eyes and freckled-olive skin--but also in its quality of being genuine. It seemed to Nadine that he was the most real person she had ever met, as real as her own self. He might have been one of her family, a brother. They felt like old, intimate friends. But the fact was that over seven years, they had spent, at most, seven days together.
His friendship was supposed to be with her husband, Jack, but when the three sat in what had been her home, those first days, it seemed as if she had been the one to go to school with him and to Europe. She felt that they had bummed around together, supersensitive and cynical, passing judgment on the less enlightened tourists. She felt they were friends, equals, a feeling not at all affected by her tentative new sense of femininity, of being mythically female.
Much champagne was drunk in those early days. Bubbling through their blood, it made the self-control needed to hide their new liking very difficult, and day by day pretense eroded further. The second night, Jack was up for a party. Nadine and K said no, on the very real grounds of fatigue, but encouraged him to go. His question, Will you two get along all right by yourselves? changed to Are you sure you won't get along too well? A facetious concession to the obvious. But he had no grounds for complaint, having had his own infatuations. In fact, for several months they had been talking about letting other people into their couple, and how to go about making room in their emotions for such a thing. Between Dirk and Jack there was a friendship that somehow held up against the sudden new threat, through the preliminaries, anyway.
In those very long days, they spent most of each twenty-four hours wide awake, excited, beyond the reach of natural fatigue. They all three talked indoors, against the constant soundtrack on the record player, or walked outside when the house became too close with tension. They spent one afternoon in the park, lying on a blanket (always with champagne) while Jack took pictures. Shot after shot (she found them later among some papers on his desk, while picking up her things for the last time). Still lives of this unstill love. Frames from a movie: Dirk and Nadine reclining, talking, resting, Nadine sleeping, Dirk gazing skyward. All against a leafy green stageset, bright with the full light of the high summer sun. Though never showing them touching, the pictures were intimate, private, with Jack the voyeur. That day Jack stepped on Dirk's glasses, breaking them, and they all winced at this Freudian slip, pained by the note of violence interjected in the softness of their friendship, their love.
Three days passed where only one should have. The first flight canceled, he missed the second by three minutes, while they fretted at his going at the airport. On the third day he left, his firm kiss a promise that they would meet again in two weeks time. That had been three months ago. Since then, they had met once in a nearby city, once in London, back together to the States for the infinity of two weeks. London again for him, then once more to the States. Back and forth, a week together, a week apart. In between, he wrote her words: love, need, only one. Taut, brief letters, explosively loving. For him she picked out careful metaphors that would decorate their love while defining it precisely. The last separation went too deep; they refused to be apart again, ever. Much to the chagrin of her husband, his wife, everyone's parents and the better part of their friends.
How they managed to overcome this vast and intimidating phalanx of society's infantry, they ever knew. But compulsion carried them through the tasks and scenes necessary to disengage themselves from their past lives, and left them with enough energy to think about their own, new one, together.
She remembered their first touching: the warmth and softness of him braced by strength. The unexpected feeling of falling from the precarious pedestal of her external self, back down into the most real she, the child delighted. The tension in his grip expressed her own. They peeled away the layers of growing-up's repression and, like children, felt and thought in wild bursts of emotion. All that had been buried, hidden for years, they brought out for each other's blessing and approval.
Never had she felt herself so tangible as when he touched her. He reached into her, through the warmth, to a place where mind and body fused, where the conscious and unconscious met along the margins of the nervous system. Happiness broke in her brain, obliterating the nervous tic of thought. At night, they slept intertwined, fraternal twins, lying in the womb. They were together, no dominance by one, no power bought or stolen. But a total exchange, freely given from both sides, eagerly taken, savored, and returned so that both remained intact. Or sometimes the gifts were kept, so that when they got up he had her cells in his muscles, while droplets of his blood flowed through her veins. A fair exchange.
The first days they told each other everything, overflowing with the stored-up past no one else had wanted much to hear about. They listened delightedly or interrupted sometimes to add a confirmation or to tell an analogous tale of a separate past. Their thoughts went up like tinder, the fire spreading with a great warm blaze through their heads. One word dragged out a linked one with it. They all wanted to be said after all those years of lying dormant, waiting to be whispered into a sympathetic ear. The most important thing they told was that they loved. Said without fear and often, it was the ruling truth they lived by. They felt it had been written in stone long before the commandments. Or perhaps spelled out in chains of nucleic acids in a primordial sea.
Together they went to Paris, moving briskly through the streets, dropping into bars for a quick coffee and a lung-numbing drag of black tobacco. Often going back to their room before they had gotten far, frantic to touch each other. Paris, with its attentiveness to human comfort in the form of good food, omnipresent bars and the grand lit, seemed to give its unconditional approval to their rapt condition.
Thinking back on this rich past, the undeniable good that had come their way, she neurotically felt again the temerity of their resolve to be together. Such hubris must be paid for; the threats were innumerable. Which of their respective mates would suicide? Whose parent would have a heart attack? When would his wife's powerful father use his influence to ruin Dirk's career.? She agonized over his journeys, reverting to childish bargains for his safe return with a god she only occasionally needed. She had no doubt that the price for all this illicit bliss would be astronomical. Not only that, she knew exactly what that price would be. That new wariness on parting. Any man who had left one wife so abruptly would sooner or later leave another.