Seven Types of Ambiguity

  I didn’t stand at the window for long. It was just long enough for me to later remember that I had stood there watching Joe with the photographer beneath him but not long enough for me to remember what it was I was thinking or how my thoughts had traveled from there to the realization that, in his fury, Joe was going to kill him, and that Sam was going to see it happen.

  “Sam, upstairs to your room, right now!” I called to him, and when he didn’t move: “Sam, I’m serious. Upstairs, right now!” That is when he started crying again. And that is when I came to my senses. I rushed outside to stop Joe.

  “Stop it, Joe! Get off him. You’ll kill him!” I screamed.

  But it was clear he wasn’t stopping. My calling might even have infuriated him further. As I got closer I saw blood on Joe’s fists and then on the photographer’s face. I put my arms around Joe’s shoulders as if in a bear hug, to try to pull him away, and the photographer, taking the opportunity afforded by Joe’s temporary imbalance, managed to roll out from under him and get up. But then the idiot proceeded to reignite Joe’s rage by reaching down to the ground to retrieve his camera. I was unable to hold Joe back when he saw this and he lunged at the photographer again.

  “Joe, are you crazy?” I called out.

  He knocked the camera from the photographer’s hand and it fell again onto the stone paving. As the man, with blood streaming from him, took a few steps back, Joe started jumping on it, smashing it beyond recognition.

  “Joe!” I called out, now hoarse. The photographer got past Joe and ran into the street. He was gone. His camera lay smashed at Joe’s feet.

  “Have you lost your mind?” I asked him. It was entirely rhetorical. From the look on his face, which had gone from fury to a kind of sad exhausted bewilderment, it was clear that, at least for a moment, he had.

  I can understand that now: momentarily losing one’s mind. I am even learning to sympathize with it. How hypocritical is it of someone to claim to be perplexed by someone else’s momentary loss of himself, when you, yourself, might be said to have lost your mind not for a moment, but for years, not so much lost your mind as lost something else, the name of which is not immediately apparent—call it your “character.” After all, was not the life I’d been living a loss of character? And anyway, in attacking the photographer with such violence, as not Joe really giving free rein to part of what is his character?

  4. After almost two and a half years with Simon I was not the same person anymore. I had been spoiled. I had been educated. I had been programmed. After all the novels, the poetry, the music, the movies, the history, and the politics he’d fed me, I was able to anticipate his attitude to most things. I had absorbed his thoughts and feelings. Inevitably, many of them even found their way into my university essays. I must have sounded incredibly well read and intelligent all those years ago, at least to anyone who didn’t know Simon. But, in truth, I rarely had much to contribute that hadn’t come from him. It was all derivative. Perhaps that was it, the crux of it. Though it was never his intention, I wasn’t any longer feeling augmented by him but diminished. In the couple that was us, Simon and me, I was pretty much an expendable echo, as all echoes are. That’s how I was feeling by the end, by that last weekend at Sorrento.

  His parents were there that weekend. I had just finished reading Doctorow’s The Book of Daniel, a fictional account of what it would have been like to be the children of Ethel and Julius Rosenberg, the couple who were executed during the McCarthy era for conspiring to sell atomic secrets to the Russians. Simon had given it to me and there was some unspoken tension between us because I hadn’t liked it enough, not as much as he had. Simon’s mother was cooking dinner in the kitchen and had Billie Holiday turned up loud. We were reading on the bed with the door closed in the room we were always allocated whenever his parents were there too. When “Strange Fruit” came on, Simon got up and opened the door a little.

  “You know who wrote this song?”

  “Cole Porter?” I said, continuing to flick through the book, not looking up.

  “Cole Porter! . . . Are you serious?”

  “No, I thought that was funny.”

  “I suppose it is . . . in a way . . . Almost.”

  “I’ve got no idea who wrote it. Is he famous? Should I know him?” I asked, still thumbing through the book.

  “No, he’s not what you’d call famous. He was a high-school English teacher from the Bronx named Abe Meeropol. The story goes that sometime in the late thirties he saw a photo of a lynching and was so disturbed by it he wrote a poem that became ‘Strange Fruit.’ ”

  “It’s a good song,” I said, continuing to flick through the book.

  “A good song! It’s better than that.”

  “Oh shit, have I failed again?”

  Simon had the good sense to ignore that. Maybe he saw better than I did that I was spoiling for a fight, even if he didn’t really know why. He continued as though I hadn’t said it.

  “Not only is he the guy who wrote ‘Strange Fruit’—”

  “Don’t tell me,” I interrupted, “he’s also the guy that wrote ‘Anarchy in the UK’?”

  “No, that was Irving Berlin. Abe Meeropol and his wife, Anne, were the couple who adopted the children of Ethel and Julius Rosenberg after they were executed.”

  “Really?”

  “Yep . . . unless it was Cole Porter.”

  I closed the book and let it drop to the floor.

  “Have to say,” I began, “I really don’t see what’s so good about this book.”

  “You’re kidding. Weren’t you moved?”

  “Daniel was so horrible to his wife. And the father, the Julius Rosenberg character, he was guilty of conspiring to give atomic secrets to the Soviets. However naïvely humanitarian his motives, he did help them get the bomb. He wasn’t just another innocent victim of McCarthyism. You don’t find it convenient to remember that.”

  “They would have gotten it anyway.”

  “Maybe, but he helped them to get it sooner,” I said, getting bolder.

  “Even if that’s right, it doesn’t necessarily implicate his wife and, anyway, they were both electrocuted, for God’s sake. You can’t defend that.”

  “No, I don’t, but you’ve just subtly changed the subject to capital punishment.”

  “You’re right. You’re right, Anna, I have.”

  “Fuck off, Simon.”

  “What? What’s wrong?”

  I didn’t know exactly what was wrong.

  “You’re patronizing me,” I said. It felt good saying that, as if I were onto something.

  “How am I patronizing you?” he asked, but I ignored him and kept going.

  “It’s not just that book. I don’t see why you make such a big deal about Doctorow.”

  “What about Ragtime?” he countered. “It’s clever, it’s moving, it’s—”

  “It’s derivative.”

  “Whoa! I might have to ask you to step outside.”

  Here was Simon, ever the champion of skepticism and independent critical thinking free of the tyranny of intellectual fashion, and for around two and a half years I had been agreeing, accepting every word of his as gospel. And there lay my problem. It was a gospel, the gospel according to St. Simon. He had created his own orthodoxy.

  “What do you mean it’s ‘derivative’?”

  “You ought to know. You’re the one who put me onto Dos Passos. Ragtime is such a rip-off of USA. And what about Kleist’s Michael Kohlhaas? Doctorow practically uses the same name.”

  “For whom, Coalhouse Walker?”

  “Yeah. The character serves exactly the same purpose.”

  “Of course, that was intentional on Doctorow’s part. Why do you think I gave it to you? I can’t believe you’re saying this. You loved Ragtime.”

  “I read it before I’d read the other two.”

  “And now you think it was wrong of you to have enjoyed it so much.”

  “Simon, you’re afraid to take my opin
ions seriously. Deep down you don’t really think I’m bright enough for you.”

  “Where the hell did that come from?”

  At the time I didn’t know exactly where it had come from. I don’t even know if it was true. He was never patronizing, quite the opposite. If anything, it was me who didn’t think I was bright enough for him. But of course, that wasn’t the whole story by any means. There was, after two and a half years, the intermittent desire for the kind of excitement that only comes from the attentions and the flattery of strangers. But that, too, was only part of what was driving me away. There was somehow all the time a certain heaviness attaching to Simon, not just in his thoughts and interests, but in his pleasure, his humor. Even the sex—which I only much later realized was the best I’ve ever had—was never light. The earth often moved, but the curtains never swayed. It wasn’t something he could help. He carried this heaviness with him like a birthmark.

  It wasn’t just his intelligence. Sure, nobody I knew made the connections between things that he did. Nobody I knew even talked about the things he talked about. There was more to it than even that. All his heroes, all his cultural references, were born of oppression and, ultimately, defeat, be they people or ideas. The poets, the Billie Holidays, the Rosenberg kids, and all the sweet little Abe Meeropols in the world—they hadn’t stood a chance. But Simon was determined not to let them go. He had to save them all retrospectively, remember them all so that every day was All Saints’ Day for him. His whole life was one huge, private, quixotic struggle. He couldn’t even find common ground with the formal institutions of the political left. He was almost more scathing of the left than the right.

  “The right only do what they promise to do. It’s the left who are the hypocrites. They’re the ones who betray you,” he said.

  But they weren’t betraying me. I was only visiting the struggle. I didn’t want to be a part. It was exhausting. I didn’t identify with these people. Nobody else I knew did. I wanted to go back to being appealed to by advertisements. I liked knowing what people were wearing in glamorous places. I wanted to be free to ignore all the pain and suffering in the world.

  Once, in the middle of recounting Simon’s version of our history, his psychiatrist, Dr. Klima, asked me to think back to the time I started planning to leave Simon. I don’t remember exactly when I first began thinking about it but certainly by that weekend I knew I had to get out, the sooner the better. Simon’s mother interrupted our conversation by calling out to him from down the hall. He had forgotten he was supposed to have picked up some items she needed for dinner. I would have a shower to wash the beach off me while he took the car to do her shopping. He asked if we could continue later. It didn’t matter anymore. What was to happen next wasn’t what decided it for me. It only stopped me from explaining everything to Simon when I left him. I couldn’t.

  I met my husband within weeks, certainly within three months, of ending my relationship with Simon. I was going a little wild at the time. It didn’t last long, but it was uncompromising. I was staying out all night dancing at all sorts of places I’d never been to before, drinking too much, taking speed for the first time to keep me dancing, and sleeping with almost anything that asked. Joe asked. He was just one of many.

  It felt so great to be free, free of constraints and free from concern for the unnamed cast of thousands in Simon’s pantheon of saints and victims. Armed with big eyes, big breasts, and a pancake-flat stomach, the attention I received from men, even bit players, went as fast and as directly to my head as anything I ingested in those strobe-lit weeks. This was my brief incursion into the superficially glamorous world of what a social anthropologist might call the “bimbo.” Always with the wind in my hair during one or other mood swing, I found myself behaving appallingly to people, even to my parents, even to Sophie. When one night at 4 A.M. I tried cocaine with two much older men in the office of a nightclub, I got a little scared of my own reflection and decided I had to slow down. What scared me was how much I was changing.

  But I slowed down slowly, forgoing the illicit substances but not the men, at least not initially. The plan was to keep having a good time while gradually crossing names off the list of gentleman callers, one of whom happened to be Joe. It is astonishing to me now that Joe was the last man standing, the last name on the list. In retrospect, it probably speaks only to the quality of men I was dating, to my readiness to tolerate them, and to my parent-conditioned panic to transmute any half-decent boyfriend into a husband as soon as possible. And when I discovered that the penultimate gentleman caller on my list was bragging, lying about having “skewered” me—his term—up against a tree on St. Kilda Road not far from the Shrine of Remembrance, Joe was looking pretty good. My parents liked him because he was Catholic, although it hadn’t bothered them too much that Simon wasn’t.

  The night I agreed to see him exclusively I was momentarily touched by something he didn’t even know I’d seen him do. He had taken me to an expensive restaurant in the city. A waiter greeted us at the door and asked for our coats. Seated first by the maître d’, I turned to see Joe, who had just finished wrestling with his coat, hand it and an open bag of candy he’d dug out of a pocket to the first waiter. This struck me as disarmingly charming.

  When Joe reached the table and sat down, I asked him about the bag of candy, but he didn’t seem to want to talk about it.

  “That’s his tip then, isn’t it?” he said, and then went on with uncharacteristic nervousness to compliment me on my dress, a compliment I couldn’t return. Left to itself, Joe’s innate dress sense tends to make him look a little foolish, although this is masked by his usual confidence and physical presence when you first meet him. When I told him that night that I thought we should make the relationship exclusive, he surprised me by saying that he thought we already had. He then asked me who else I’d been seeing while I was seeing him. I had to think fast, and that’s when I invoked Simon.

  I told Joe that Simon and I had stayed in touch, but only as friends.

  “It’s only natural after two and a half years together, don’t you think?” I asked.

  “I don’t know about that. After two and a half years it’s only natural to wish your ‘ex’ had never been born,” he shot back. Then I asked him if he would prefer it if Simon and I were not in touch at all.

  “You can see who you like,” he said a little defensively. I responded with something so nauseatingly cloying and submissive that it misrepresented me, even then. I can’t imagine saying it now to anyone. Joe took me at my word. Now, ten years later, as he tries to work out whether Simon had my permission to take our son from school, he can’t shake the suspicion that I had been two-timing him with Simon, right from the start, before Sam, before we lost our first child, even before we were married. The nuns would say that I got what I deserved.

  I sat opposite him in the restaurant that night and saw how much he wanted to believe me. Instead of pausing to consider where this need of his had come from, I reflected on how badly he was dressed. Immediately I chided myself for the shallowness of the thought. This young man, who had hurriedly given away his half-eaten bag of candy to the waiter, was trying to hide his boyishness in a man’s clothes. If his sartorial sense is his only problem, I thought to myself, I can fix it. It was a moment of pity and I quickly got over it. I don’t think I’ve pitied him again in nearly ten years. Until now.

  I have felt so negatively about him for so long since then: anger and frustration chiefly, but also boredom, contempt, and sometimes embarrassment. The first time I was ashamed to be with him he had done nothing at all to deserve it. I should have pitied him then, recognizing the pity, I should have run for my life. Instead I went through various stages of kidding myself. First, that it, the embarrassment, was my fault, my problem, then that it was a one-off and it was unlikely I’d ever feel that way again, and finally, after a few weeks, that I hadn’t really felt anything at all anyway. But, of course, I had.

  5. Many marriages fa
il because the people in them don’t realize beforehand just how hard it’s going to be for them to make the compromises they are going to have to make. They know even before they marry that their spouses-to-be aren’t perfect. They can list the imperfections, though only some of them. They suspect there are others. Acceptance of them is the price they are prepared to pay for a lifetime with the countervailing virtues they impute to their partners, not the least of which is their partners’ acceptance of them and their weaknesses. Yes, people know they are going to have to compromise; their choice is already a compromise. What they don’t know is how much they are going to have to compromise. Even worse, they don’t know how hard for them it is going to be to make the compromises they will have to make. I don’t know that I’ve ever met anyone who has had the wisdom, the courage, to seriously consider how difficult it is going to be to live with the deficiencies of the person they are going to marry. That’s how people get it wrong so often.

  I was as blind as anyone else. Joe and I, not yet married, had just come out of a movie. It was a movie Simon would not have wanted to see and, had I still been with him, I would have pretended that I didn’t care much whether we saw it or not. I took Joe’s willingness to see it as evidence of a more relaxed attitude to these things, evidence of him being more broad-minded than Simon, more open to fun. The movie was inane. It should never have been made. I didn’t know what to say. I was the one who had chosen it, and I felt a little silly. Joe, on the other hand, though I wouldn’t have admitted it at the time, seemed to have really liked it. Mind you, had he said something positive about it I would probably have interpreted this as politeness.