Divorcing

in a bourgeois marriage, Ezra’s behavior assured her that she was not. What kind of marriage did Sophie want? She didn’t want to get married in the first place. Ezra wanted to get married. Ezra had been profoundly shocked when she had answered his first proposal with the suggestion that they live together in free love; and she had been surprised, amused and finally touched by his reaction, for he had presented himself as a cosmopolite, a free spirit, and they were in fact in bed together at the time; Ezra, still wounded by her frivolity, claimed he had deflowered her in the certain hope that they would marry. His insistence on this point, which he could not explain, intrigued her. Ezra did not believe in bourgeois marriage either, or in orthodox Jewish marriage. Was it the Jew in him? The man in him? Something she as a woman could not grasp? While she was trying to make up her mind about whether she liked or disliked Ezra, his solemn insistence on the marriage still preoccupied her most, and when she assented, it was to the marriage, before having quite made up her mind about Ezra. Once she was married she was thankful that it had happened so; who knows if she would ever have made up her mind whether she liked Ezra? And how unimportant that was! She didn’t fully realize till after they were married that it was the only respectable and natural way to be. Two people, a man and woman, living together was intrinsically right; and to have established this as a settled matter once and for all so you didn’t waste your time looking around or endlessly analyzing your feelings—this was the virtue of marriage. Thus Sophie found herself, while still frowning on marriage in principle, enjoying it in practice, enjoying the sheer twoness that endured independent of moods, likes and dislikes, that did not need reasons and that wouldn’t be destroyed by reasons; and was more baffled than hurt by Ezra’s running around, his need for distraction, which she knew did not arise from her insufficiency, just as her fidelity did not spring from any feeling for Ezra; they had different ways of being.

Her innocence was maddening, Ezra raved. He put her in obscene postures, but whatever she did she was hopelessly chaste. “A kouros—a chaste boy,” Ezra called her. It was maddening, maddening, and yet he adored it. “Nero would have been wild about you,” Ezra said. A dubious compliment, Sophie understood; and to perform the duties of wife to husband under these peculiar circumstances seemed most paradoxical.

“Why don’t you find yourself men—?” She asked him finally. “Buggering is between men, after all.”

“I thought of it,” Ezra admitted.

“Then why?”

“I am afraid I’d be the she,” Ezra confessed.

Didn’t want to be the she. The Jew in him.

“Why do I love you?” Ezra raved in the night. “Why do I always come back to you?”

And in his way of asking he gave the answer that he preferred to intone with a question mark rather than a period.

It was strange with Ezra. Ezra was always on stage: at one moment Sophie was up there with him speaking the lines, and at another she was like a street urchin peeping through the boards to watch the great comedian perform; so it went back and forth like a badly edited reel, and all the time there was a woman waiting, a woman already in bed, perhaps with the light turned off; a woman waiting for him to come to her wordlessly in the dark; a woman wanting something from this man, that he alone and no other man could give her and that he could give only to her. A woman waited for her husband. As for the comedy, she enjoyed that too, especially since Ezra was enjoying it enormously; perhaps she began to believe in the parts he assigned to them, perhaps she was living it and enjoying it, as Ezra reproached her.

Another woman waited and wanted reality. Sophie understood more clearly and hopelessly with time that all this clowning was the awful reality between her and Ezra, that it could never be otherwise, and perhaps she knew this all the years she was married to Ezra, knew it could never be otherwise with Ezra, and all the time she was another woman waiting for another man, however she denied it to herself because she wanted her life to be proper and decent. Ezra saw it, Ezra understood from the beginning that a man like himself couldn’t make Sophie happy and he was always teasing her about it. “I know the kind of man who would make you happy,” Ezra said, describing now mockingly, now solemnly, the kind of man his wife would like, some improvisations, others real men he invited to their house; and Sophie never showed the least interest because she wanted her life to be decent and proper, that’s all she wanted, and wanted all the more fiercely since Ezra laughed at decency and propriety.

She had accepted as part of marriage two people walking together in solitude and opposition. But that her faith and will and pride should be used up, this Sophie could not accept. And when it was used up she could not forgive Ezra or herself. However much she blamed Ezra for his foolishness, it was herself she blamed more strongly and endlessly for being defeated by Ezra’s foolishness. She tried to believe that she was leaving Ezra not because she was defeated, but refusing both her own and Ezra’s defeat in this marriage, even if there was nothing else left of her than the power of this refusal. But this didn’t really make sense; and finally she couldn’t explain to herself why she was leaving Ezra, why just now, not three years ago or next year. Now she had to explain to other people—Ezra, her lawyer, family, the children, friends in Paris and in New York. To herself she had