I LOVE YOU, WE SAID
Chapter 22: Round 3 — For Love
A serialised novel
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You could say the absinthe drove a wedge between Jessica and me.
By now we’d returned to SA — to buy a house in the suburbs, raise the children and get to know and love each other properly.
Except, nope; we fought non-stop, about everything.
And even when we weren’t, it was but a brief pause in the terrible flight of love’s pendulum, swinging between passion and passion, control and surrender, raging fire, trembling union, life, death…
I’d like to honour this time in our lives by naming it the third, in no particular order, of our top five totally bullshit battles of married life — and all for love.
And then she stopped fighting, and I found myself fighting all the harder to make things perfect, all by myself — like some demented fairy tale romance hardliner.
I didn’t know, you couldn’t fight to make things right.
And what was I so right about?
And how insane, to always be right when it meant she had to be wrong?
But I didn’t ask myself that. I was a believer in truth, and belief doesn’t alter its position without some change in the devotee.
And she, who didn’t see the need to fight, emerged victorious. By never being wrong, I’d been the worst kind of wrong, cancelling out whatever wrong I might have projected or imagined in her. Even when she was wrong, she was right.
And in the fullness of time, I found myself fighting to keep her.
I knew it, too, would drive her away.
But still I fought the fight of the righteous, tooth and nail.
I could see Jessica had tired of fighting. She was disengaging.
But I couldn’t let her. I was not a quitter, and neither, I was sure, was she. It wouldn’t be the first time I projected my own dreams of identical devotion onto a woman, and instead of being spooked by the troubling fervour of it, this one would be bored to tears with the dreariness of a life with such ponderousness of meaning, such fucking responsibility.
The promise of forever was the bedrock of certainty I had always wanted and was certain I had now found in marriage. But I knew I was the exception that proved the rule of sticking together, for better or for worse, in sickness and in health, till death do us part.
I was death to love. My devotion would us part.
I knew friends were supporting her in her hour of misery; strangers in bars, on seeing the change in their stars in her eyes, were waiting to move in…
I knew too, somehow, that when a certain kind of woman threatens to leave, she’s already left. Real men know what to do with this. They don’t argue and they don’t plead. They take control of their own fate and give up binocular sleep, or they let go. It’s really all a man has, fortitude or forfeiture. She was long gone, and I feared it would take more than I had or knew to get her back.
It was the grandest and most final nullification of a man, a woman.
And still I argued morning, noon and night.
I couldn’t give her up. I was as proud of her, of us — grown-ups now — as a kid. I was glad to show her off. I was drunk on her. On the nights we made love we flowed like rivers into each other. I loved having her missionary style, drinking all of her in. But she’d taken to turning her back on me and making herself come. Her back had two dimples above her buttocks, which were firm and hung, just a bit heavy and real, and I could grab her soft hips and ride her inside out, ram my cock into her wetness, slide in and out of her, roughing up her lovely tits and turning her head towards me, crushing her mouth against mine, enjoying the perfection of our natural sexes until we became one and I was swimming in God.
Our star, our star… It was receding.
We were at a work gala. Her boss welcomed us at the door, his eyes crinkly and Slavic and kind. In the pics she looked great: young and her cells plump and her veins covered in flesh, her fine-boned, lavishly turned limbs as elegant as wings, while the clothes hung off me poorly, my face feral and haunted and gaunt.
We were watching Watermark, on the brink of fame but sadly already at the height of their powers. She, Jessie, was having a good time and I was getting morosely, throat-achingly, ugly-sad drunk. Not only did the lead have a honeyed gravelly voice and played piano like an angel, but he’d been a Springbok hockey player in his salad days. The tight-curled, cardigan-wearing, gone-to-pot English fuck. She listened, rapt. Nothing I did could make her look at me like that. I knew she didn’t dig the music, really; it was nice but nothing to be rapt about, and I clapped too loudly in affirmation of the untrammelled genius. It should have made me happy to see her transported like that, but it really didn’t.
On seeing my game self-abandon: ‘You enjoyed that, didn’t you?’
Oh Jessica.
One evening she came out with the gem that we were really only using each other.
It was extraordinarily provocative. And designed to be, surely.
‘But I love you,’ I said, astounded. Whispered, ‘love you,’ before I could stop myself. Mind reeling. Hating having to plead the case for love; angry, after all that soul-baring, at having to indulge a cynic with a fresh avowal. Sick and certain that my jealously guarded, cheaply forced, eternally unprized, enormously ungracious declaration of vulnerability would go unanswered, having foolishly gone unarmed into an exchange with one who knew the cut and thrust of love as war.
‘Come on,’ she said reasonably. ‘We didn’t even know each other. We weren’t exactly head over heels.’ She spoke crisply in the way that I loved but now choked on as I was coolly shown my error of judgment. Where, when and how had she achieved such mastery over others during her upbringing? How was I so very out of my depth? Why was it a battle, beloved?
This from a man who knew only how to be right and judge others wrong.
‘I knew I wanted to be married,’ I said. ‘To you.’
Sick to the gills.
‘I did too. It was the very first time I wanted a man’s children.’
Now that wasn’t bad. I ought to have taken it.
‘So for that you married me? My ejaculate?’ I wanted to blame her. It was a game I could win, a loser’s game.
‘The time was right. For us both,’ she breathed, eyes affixed somewhere overhead.
My mind felt blank. I’d never before seen such an openly mercenary woman, so close up. I understood. We were bodies on separate trajectories through space and time; colliding, engaging, receding… Some called it fate. She called it coincidence. A suitable boy of her choosing or making. Whatever it was, it played like the very apex of Machiavellian amorality. Some fucked up shit.
Somewhere along this cosmic drift and avulsion she’d fallen pregnant, and — whether coincidental, fated or orchestrated — we’d tied the knot. To listen to her, it was the natural order of things. We were animals, our fates accident. Over a lifetime of places and choices and states of being, we’d ended up in our respective personal stations, fully matured, whereupon we turned to the passing crowd, picked out the likeliest or nearest mate for the next stage of our journey, and mounted that shit. Deliberately throwing caution to the wind and shucking any accountability for our ensuing choices. Which was totally hot, if I’m being honest. Unstoppable biological imperative and all that. The way she told it, we’d arrived, our eyes had met, our hands had clasped, and we had jumped off a cliff. Whether automation or destined pairing, it seemed universally meaningful to me. To her, a gap sweetly taken.
I should have let it go.
‘And the kid? The boy?’ I couldn’t say my son’s name. ‘Did we have sex or was that you pointing a fuck stick at your cervix?’
‘What?’
‘Did you get yourself pregnant on purpose?’
We’d had sex on the couch to beget Rosen, our second-born, back in our native South Africa. Before that, we hadn’t had any since the birth of his sister nine months before. Afterwards she hugged her knees to her chest, arse to the wind, letting my genetic information sink into her comeliness. My head still reels to think of it. It was the absolute bomb, I’ll be honest. But I hadn’t been given the memo. Instead I got the demo. Opiate of the asses.
Some called it desire. Burnt castles for it. She called it multitasking, probably. Birth, creation, death. I didn’t think it a thing of great sweetness, such a loveless stratagem with which to lure a child spirit into a callous, calculating world.
‘I didn’t want her to be alone,’ she said.
She meant Janie, two, my daughter. You couldn’t fault her for pragmatism.
‘I didn’t marry you because you were pregnant,’ I said.
I loved you.
What we had was holy or something.
But what did we have, just then? Not a very deep love, truly. A fiery sexual bond, no more. But, I thought, one I wanted to see through. I didn’t bet on it being precoded for dissolution, an investment of her time, a product partnership with an exit plan and every expectation of taking the kids away unchallenged, given the backward family law of the time. I was sorry she’d seen so much, so far off into the future. But the truth was, I’d be sorrier for her if she hadn’t.
And yet the signs had been abundant. We’d moved in together just two months after meeting in highly fluky and flaky circumstances. Alone, individually, after some sketchy decisions. I’d given up a position, prospects in a city I loved and moved to London, where I was sick with desolation. Before we knew it, she was pregnant, and we were married. And that had been the best of us, together. Game over.
Oh, didn’t I know we were just playing at the game of life?
Some called it romantic. But like me, they’d be embarrassingly unschooled in the reality of love; it had been a tacit arrangement, whether I’d known or not.
But there was a glitch, a safety valve. We had procreated. We were to be parents and we could re-set the relationship clock to a fresh beginning, rid of bygones.
Yes, it hurt to be someone’s puzzle piece. For a while I’d gone around saying “we” were pregnant but stopped when I saw it was beneath people’s dignity to more than half-smirk.
How ashamed I could be made of my great love; how silly their smallness made it seem.
But love, if I were brave enough to accept it, wasn’t great — it was everyday and practical and modest. It accepted being someone’s opportunity. What made me so special as to be exempt, to question our genetic imperative?
I’d waited my entire life to be ready for children and didn’t know it. And when I met her and felt the irresistible pull of attraction, it wasn’t fate. It was an auspicious time, carrying with it a mysterious and complex chemical energy. It was a time to have children.
A merciful time.
And a job, that of a parent, above all. How was I doing?
And in that moment, I understood. If I’d been honest, I’d have known that I hadn’t been ready for little Janie, just as I wasn’t ready for Rosen now either. Had I been selfless enough before, I’d have offered to care for our baby in London so Jessica could go back to work while I didn’t have a work permit. But it didn’t occur to me, and much less to her. And that really says it all.
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