Chapter 3 #2
It saddened him, of course, that his sex life and his home life should have to be two distinct realms, but he was old enough now to know that within every relationship was something unfulfilled and disappointing, something that had to be sought elsewhere.
His friend Roman, for example, was married to a woman who, while beautiful and loyal, was famously unintelligent: she didn’t understand the films Roman was in, and when you talked to her, you found yourself consciously recalibrating the velocity and complexity and content of your conversation, because she so often looked confused when the talk turned to politics, or finance, or literature, or art, or food, or architecture, or the environment.
He knew that Roman was aware of this deficiency, in both Lisa and in his relationship.
“Ah, well,” he had once said to Willem, unprompted, “if I want good conversation, I can talk to my friends, right?” Roman had been among the first of his friends to get married, and at the time, he had been fascinated by and disbelieving of his choice.
But now he knew: you always sacrificed something.
The question was what you sacrificed. He knew that to some people—JB; Roman, probably—his own sacrifice would be unthinkable. It would have been once to him as well.
He thought frequently these days of a play he had done in graduate school, by a beetley, plodding woman in the playwriting division who had gone on to have great success as a writer of spy movies but who in graduate school had tried to write Pinteresque dramas about unhappy married couples.
If This Were a Movie was about an unhappy married couple—he was a professor of classical music; she was a librettist—who lived in New York.
Because the couple was in their forties (at the time, a gray-colored land, impossibly far and unimaginably grim), they were devoid of humor and in a constant state of yearning for their younger selves, back when life had actually seemed so full of promise and hope, back when they had been romantic, back when life itself had been a romance.
He had played the husband, and while he had long ago realized that it had been, really, an awful play (it had included lines like “This isn’t Tosca , you know!
This is life !”), he had never forgotten the final monologue he had delivered in the second act, when the wife announces that she wants to leave, that she doesn’t feel fulfilled in their marriage, that she’s convinced that someone better awaits her:
SETH: But don’t you understand, Amy? You’re wrong.
Relationships never provide you with everything .
They provide you with some things. You take all the things you want from a person—sexual chemistry, let’s say, or good conversation, or financial support, or intellectual compatibility, or niceness, or loyalty—and you get to pick three of those things.
Three —that’s it. Maybe four, if you’re very lucky.
The rest you have to look for elsewhere.
It’s only in the movies that you find someone who gives you all of those things.
But this isn’t the movies. In the real world, you have to identify which three qualities you want to spend the rest of your life with, and then you look for those qualities in another person.
That’s real life. Don’t you see it’s a trap?
If you keep trying to find everything, you’ll wind up with nothing.
AMY: [crying] So what did you pick?
SETH: I don’t know. [beat] I don’t know.
At the time, he hadn’t believed these words, because at the time, everything really did seem possible: he was twenty-three, and everyone was young and attractive and smart and glamorous.
Everyone thought they would be friends for decades, forever.
But for most people, of course, that hadn’t happened.
As you got older, you realized that the qualities you valued in the people you slept with or dated weren’t necessarily the ones you wanted to live with, or be with, or plod through your days with.
If you were smart, and if you were lucky, you learned this and accepted this.
You figured out what was most important to you and you looked for it, and you learned to be realistic.
They all chose differently: Roman had chosen beauty, sweetness, pliability; Malcolm, he thought, had chosen reliability, and competence (Sophie was intimidatingly efficient), and aesthetic compatibility.
And he? He had chosen friendship. Conversation.
Kindness. Intelligence. When he was in his thirties, he had looked at certain people’s relationships and asked the question that had (and continued to) fuel countless dinner-party conversations: What’s going on there?
Now, though, as an almost-forty-eight-year-old, he saw people’s relationships as reflections of their keenest yet most inarticulable desires, their hopes and insecurities taking shape physically, in the form of another person.
Now he looked at couples—in restaurants, on the street, at parties—and wondered: Why are you together?
What did you identify as essential to you?
What’s missing in you that you want someone else to provide?
He now viewed a successful relationship as one in which both people had recognized the best of what the other person had to offer and had chosen to value it as well.
And perhaps not coincidentally, he also found himself doubting therapy—its promises, its premises—for the first time.
He had never before questioned that therapy was, at worst, a benign treatment: when he was younger, he had even considered it a form of luxury, this right to speak about his life, essentially uninterrupted, for fifty minutes proof that he had somehow become someone whose life deserved such lengthy consideration, such an indulgent listener.
But now, he was conscious of his own impatience with what he had begun to see as the sinister pedantry of therapy, its suggestion that life was somehow reparable, that there existed a societal norm and that the patient was being guided toward conforming to it.
“You seem to be holding back, Willem,” said Idriss—his shrink now for years—and he was quiet.
Therapy, therapists, promised a rigorous lack of judgment (but wasn’t that an impossibility, to talk to a person and not be judged?), and yet behind every question was a nudge, one that pushed you gently but inexorably toward a recognition of some flaw, toward solving a problem you hadn’t known existed.
Over the years, he’d had friends who had been convinced that their childhoods were happy, that their parents were basically loving, until therapy had awakened them to the fact that they had not been, that they were not.
He didn’t want that to happen to him; he didn’t want to be told that his contentment wasn’t contentment after all but delusion.
“And how do you feel about the fact that Jude doesn’t ever want to have sex?” Idriss had asked.
“I don’t know,” he’d said. But he did know, and he said it: “I wish he wanted to, for his sake. I feel sad that he’s missing one of life’s greatest experiences.
But I think he’s earned the right not to.
” Across from him, Idriss was silent. The truth was, he didn’t want Idriss to try to diagnose what was wrong with his relationship.
He didn’t want to be told how to repair it.
He didn’t want to try to make Jude, or himself, do something neither of them wanted to because they were supposed to.
Their relationship was, he felt, singular but workable: he didn’t want to be taught otherwise.
He sometimes wondered if it was simple lack of creativity—his and Jude’s—that had made them both think that their relationship had to include sex at all.
But it had seemed, then, the only way to express a deeper level of feeling.
The word “friend” was so vague, so undescriptive and unsatisfying—how could he use the same term to describe what Jude was to him that he used for India or the Henry Youngs?
And so they had chosen another, more familiar form of relationship, one that hadn’t worked.
But now they were inventing their own type of relationship, one that wasn’t officially recognized by history or immortalized in poetry or song, but which felt truer and less constraining.
He didn’t, however, mention his growing skepticism about therapy to Jude, because some part of him did still believe in it for people who were truly ill, and Jude—he was finally able to admit to himself—was truly ill.
He knew that Jude hated going to the therapist; after the first few sessions he had come home so quiet, so withdrawn, that Willem had to remind himself that he was making Jude go for his own good.
Finally he couldn’t stand it any longer. “How’s it been with Dr. Loehmann?” he asked one night about a month after Jude had begun.
Jude sighed. “Willem,” he said, “how much longer do you want me to go?”
“I don’t know,” he said. “I hadn’t really thought about it.”
Jude had studied him. “So you were thinking I’d go forever,” he said.
“Well,” he said. (He actually had been thinking that.) “Is it really so awful?” He paused. “Is it Loehmann? Should we get you someone else?”
“No, it’s not Loehmann,” Jude said. “It’s the process itself.”
He sighed, too. “Look,” he said. “I know this is hard for you. I know it is. But—give it a year, Jude, okay? A year. And try hard. And then we’ll see.” Jude had promised.
And then in the spring he had been away, filming, and he and Jude had been talking one night when Jude said, “Willem, in the interest of full disclosure, I have something I have to tell you.”