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Things couldn’t be so monstrous, or frivolous or senseless as they appear to Sophie in Paris. Nothing she does is serious. Even though she has finally unpacked and even fixed up one room with curtains for her daughter, bought an expensive sofa, not serious. Not her relationship with any of the men she is seeing. It’s simply in the nature of things; being the one-day-a-week mistress of a married man cannot be serious. As Roland keeps saying, if she were in love with him it would be catastrophic. He brings her bird-of-paradise flowers, limited-edition art books (he holds top position at a publishing house and can give her introductions); afterward they always have a feast of oysters with choice white wine, and he is a big man, and his expression when he speaks of his little boy, she likes that, but what is she supposed to do with it all between Tuesday and Tuesday? Better not be serious. Wasn’t it a mistake to take her marriage seriously? But it’s clear she was not cut out to be la petite maîtresse. No better at being the “other woman” as the “one woman,” just the other side of the same bad coin. Most men want deception. But an outright bastard and pervert like Gaston is positively refreshing. He wants a woman to be a whore, he pulls the paraphernalia out of his drawer, he is going to humiliate you, nobody talks of love or pleasing one another, there is a tussle, and curiously, contrariness results in pleasure. Perverse? Just coping with Gaston is an achievement, but certainly not serious. As for Alain, he is a bore, but she needs him for circulating. Then there is, among former admirers, Nicholas, now settling in Rome with his pregnant wife and twins, who fancies he’s still in love with her. He wants her for his Paris mistress and Sophie thinks it’s a revolting idea, but there are the old ties. And actually if she were going to settle in Paris for life, being his Paris mistress in the long run might be a nice steady sort of thing, like the annual Budapest quartet or the Russian ballet...To fill in her life. A revolting idea. As for that young man in New York, it’s not at all clear why she keeps up this strange correspondence, unless she is really in the grips of fate or the wildest folly. Absurd and maddening that his image continues to haunt her when she should be settling into her new life in Paris. It’s simply to survive, she keeps telling herself; to regain something of herself in the form of a letter. Because nothing can come of it. He is simply too young and crazy. She has to think about her children. It was ridiculous for them to talk about the future. They parted with that understanding. But now these letters stating his and her sorrow or resignation, the very fact that these letters are being written...It’s really demonic, because whenever she believes it’s over, that she will never hear from him again, invariably the first day she feels free of his phantom, a letter from Ivan arrives. She replies to it, of course. It’s a week’s job to put him together again from all the pieces, collating what he writes with previous letters and memories till she can send him on his way, in the sealed, stamped envelope in slot of the CTP box. Then the period of anguish, hopelessness, recovery. Till his next letter, the mere handwriting on the envelope sends the Chinese puzzle man flying, and once more she is in tears of bliss and misery and cursing him as she sits down to construct the ceremonial object making it seem like a letter.
And yet the letters to Ivan also are unserious. Each plotted elliptically between two impossible extremes of rushing to him and forgetting.
She must be practical, sensible. A woman needs money and a man. She needs a man to get started earning money. A man to manage her money. She has to know how to manage men.
She is really doing quite well. It’s only her third month in Paris.
She is really quite mad.
Is she serious about her book at least?
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It is not true, as their father claims, that Joshua is a mindless brute, or that her daughter is a cold fish or as Joshua describes his sister, a natural genius for making herself useless, why is there so little love in the family?
Jonathan is not stupid as his brother claims and screams at him or late in the evening alone with his mother, intimates with a tone of sadness and intimacy reminiscent of his father: I hate to say it, but I think YoYo is just dumb. He is not to call him YoYo; he is taking his time, that’s all, doing all right in school...Better than you did, if you must know. Well, he shrugs superciliously—his father’s professional gesture—he started at a progressive school, I had to go—if you hadn’t sent me to that—Enough is enough, now they’re all going to same school and it’s time to take his bath. Maybe by midnight, he says, testing the water heater, assuming the gas pressure stays constant. True, there are two inches of hot water, the rest of the water tank is ice cold. She continues ironing. He persists about his brother (not about his sister now—that’s an evening for itself): Confidentially (having suggested his meaning by mimicry), you know what I mean—He’s plump, she suggests. That’s part of it, the whole thing, his sloppiness, the way he smiles,
