This again is from The Unfallen. This is the descant to my earlier countermelody, both referring back to Loving Cathleen, below. There is a good deal more in the book on the philosophy of love and its contraries — plus it’s a really sexy story about two people who deserve to have the best of life’s gifts. But these three breathe together, I think, to show what works and what never does.
“You love the wild and the innocent,” she said. “The unfallen — that’s another word you use all the time. Do you know what I love? I love sovereignty. Self-control. Self-responsibility. Self-realization. Self-reproach, even, should reproach ever be necessary. I love Ibsen too, but do you know what is my favorite play? It’s Cyrano. Not for Roxane. Who cares about another dumb blonde with too many boyfriends? No, what I love in that play is Cyrano himself. He says, ‘I stand, not high it may be, but alone’, and it takes my breath away, every time.”
Devin said nothing. He wove his fingers into her hair and combed down slowly, treasuring the silkiness of her tresses.
“Do you understand what you’ve done to me? You told me all about your silence and distance and lies. Do you understand that story from the other perspective? Do you know what those women are doing when their men are trying so hard to hide from them?”
“…I’ve always thought of it as two clams, one striving to be closed as tightly as possible, the other as open as possible.”
“That’s not half bad — as analogies go. A clam is either impervious to injury or it is totally vulnerable. Your men ‘clam up’, don’t they? They refuse to ‘open up’ and share with their women. Do you think the women are opening up as much as possible, making themselves completely vulnerable?”
“I’ve always thought so. I have virtually no first-hand evidence, of course.”
“That’s just what she says she’s doing. What she’s really doing is betraying who she is, in the hope that, by being someone different, he will treat her differently.”
“…You’ve lost me.”
“It’s the business I’m in, isn’t it? Fifteen days to a brand new you! The thirty-minute makeover! How to be the woman of his dreams! Reduce! Replace! Refinish! Renounce! Rejoice in your elemental nothingness! I don’t write that rubbish, I never have. But there’s plenty of it out there. It’s a simple enough syllogism: If I change myself, it will change him. If I lose these twenty pounds, if I try this new hair style, if I ignore my own interests and pretend to be fascinated by his, if I stand on my hands and applaud with my feet, then he’ll notice me, then he’ll treat me as I want to be treated, then we’ll be soul mates instead of just house mates.”
“Is it really that bad…?”
“Dear god! It’s so much worse. He doesn’t love me, not really, and I know that but I can’t say the words. So instead I will fold myself lengthwise along the spine. Who knows? Perhaps he’ll love me then. If he doesn’t, I will fold myself in half again at the waist. Then again at the knees and shoulders. Then again and again and again, making myself smaller and smaller and less and less demanding. Less needy, I hope. Less obtrusive. Less an annoyance to him. Less a curse, to speak the awful truth. He makes himself unavailable, so I strive with all my might to make myself unavailing. He wants to be uncompromised, and I do nothing but compromise myself, night and day, awake and asleep, always. This is my destiny. This is my choice. This is my life, a life composed entirely of absences and emptiness and nothingness.”
He said nothing and she wondered if he was listening until a tear dripped off his cheek and onto hers.
“Did you understand what I wrote on the mirror? ‘Be who you are.’ The most important thing I know. Feminism is such a stupid joke. Women in the boardroom? Women in the legislature? Women on top or women without men — what does that have to do with anything? Women subordinate themselves. By choice. They never really learn how to stand alone, anyway, and they think it’s what they have to do to get men. And the kind of men they get that way just make it all worse. They’re not very much to begin with, and they betray what little they are for a kiss and a promise, and they go on betraying themselves, year after year, with the sage guidance of all those allegedly feminist women’s magazines. Be who you are. You must be a sovereign, an individual, a soul unto your own. Until you can do that, you can’t have anything worth having — not love, not money, not things — and you can’t hang on to the things you get.
“‘Do what you want.’ What you want. Not what your parents want. Not what your husband wants. Not what the sisterhood wants. Do what you want. Follow your own mind, follow your own heart, follow your own star. Stand alone — not high it may be, but alone. Do you know who I respect? I respect divorced women who stay divorced. The ones who rush right into another disaster have learned nothing and probably never will. But the women who have subordinated and renounced and deferred and still wound up out in the cold, the ones who learned better, those are the women I respect. Self-control, self-responsibility, self-realization, all in abundance.
“‘Have what you love.’ It’s a procedure. An algorithm — is that the right word? You may not be able to have what you love. Probably it’s the rare case to have all that you love. But you can’t have any of it until you are fully you, until you have ceased to betray and renounce yourself, until you have given yourself permission to be.
“Permission to be… There’s a poem in there, isn’t there? ‘I am Ozymandias, king of kings. Look upon my works ye mighty and despair.’ Shelley was sneering at the frailty and mortality and futility of greatness, but I think he got it just wrong. Ozymandias was mortal, but he was proud of his enormity while he lived. That’s what I despise about women, that’s what I despise in the Not For Women Only woman. All she wants is an excuse to grow smaller still, to be less of herself, to be less a person, less an entity, smaller and less significant than a speck of dust. Devin, do you love me because I’m so terribly small?”
He laughed. “Hardly.”
“Do you love me because I’m so completely deferential? Because I’m so unassuming and self-effacing and pliable? Do you love me because I’m so diminutive, the perfect little pocket-sized helpmeet?”
He laughed harder. “You know better than that. I love you because you’re immense. I hadn’t known you for half-an-hour when I compared you to Prometheus in my mind. Does that answer your question?”
She smiled and even though her face was pressed into his chest he could feel her smiling. “I told you I’ve stopped editing myself for people. I was never a Not For Women Only woman. I never diminished myself or degraded myself or denounced myself. But I used to hide myself — most of myself. I stopped doing that because it was useless. In hiding myself, I was pretending for others to be someone I’m not. Not posing or acting, not portraying a lie. But forbearing to live the whole truth of my life. That had ugly consequences. First, it made me feel awful, made me feel there was something wrong with who I am, that I had to hide myself in shame. And second, it was horribly stupid strategically. Do you see why? The people you might attract being other than whom you are are not the people you would wish to attract. This is so stupid and so obvious, but it took me years to figure it out. To the extent that I wanted people in my life, I wanted people like me — people like you, Devin Dwyer. So how did I go about trying to find them? By being not like me. Very stupid. Very common, but very stupid.”
Devin said, “I’m glad you are who you are. I told you it’s you — the you of the inside — that I love.”
He felt her smile again. “Last Friday at the hotel, I thought about saying something smart like, ‘You’re the best man I’ve had in years.’ The joke of it is, you’re the only man I’ve had in years. I don’t even remember what love-making was like, before. I’d like to say that being with you is better than anyone, ever, but I can’t even make a comparison. Being with you is perfect, though, and not just when you’re within me. From the very beginning you said you wanted nothing but honesty, and I’ve been nothing but honest with you. I’ve been almost completely unedited with you, and I’ve liked it a lot.”
He said nothing, just pulled her more tightly to him and watched the children playing on the beach.
