She did not wish to discuss her marriage with Ivan, whom she had just met. “A misadventure,” she summed up the matter, annoyed by the way he forced these statements from her, not so much by questioning as by cutting under her evasions and drawing his own conclusions, which she had to protest before he went too far. In the beginning it was simply annoying to have to fend against his oblique probing when they met to talk about his underground movie or her book, but as the discussion progressed from week to week and she realized that Ivan was better at this game—both in inventing evasions and building theories—she began to wonder why Ivan was so interested in understanding her relationship to Ezra. Was it to understand her? But it wasn’t her any more, not what she wanted him to know about her. Was it to understand why marriages broke down, what in particular a woman would not forgive a man; was it because of the future ahead of him, or for a movie he might make? And that she couldn’t answer either.
Whatever clarification for himself Ivan may have been seeking, he was really trying to make her see her own life differently, Sophie sensed from the beginning, touched by Ivan’s tone of jealous concern and his irreverent joking about Ezra. Her situation roused his anger. To see men like Ezra win, Ivan pursued (and he feared that she might in the end return to Ezra, sensing behind her evasiveness irresolution), this was what he could not bear to see happen. But why should it torment him?
And why did she continue to want to see Ivan? Even when these conversations unsettled her, and his company, so often gloomy, sullen, silent or speaking as if he occupied some space outside this world, made her uncomfortable. Only after they embraced did she know that this was what she had wanted to happen for the past weeks.
Now she would have liked to speak truthfully to Ivan and she didn’t know how; suddenly she had to question whether she had loved Ezra at all because of the way she loved now. Behind her will to love Ezra part of her was hiding and not caring. There was something that didn’t change in her by marrying Ezra and she had thought it a good thing at the time; only now that loving someone had changed her did everything have to be revised.
Realizing that she had merely loaned herself to Ezra for a life-term lease, but withholding part of herself—as to her unpremeditated, unthinking surrender to Ivan with whom she was prepared at most to enjoy a happy love affair of three weeks—she didn’t know what sense to make of it. Perhaps it was in the nature of the situation: marriage required a loan; the true and complete giving occurred only where there was no thought of continuation. But she couldn’t honestly believe this; even now her quiet happiness with Ivan was mixed with some falseness—accepted and sensed as wrong by both. What was simple had to be veiled; wanting to be more than her lover, he played being her lover with a touch of tender theatricality. The tenderness was true and she had to protect herself against it, escape in a false selfishness, making believe for both of them that she had left the real person behind even before she took the plane to Paris. And all the time their eyes continued to say: we are only pretending that we are pretending. True mixed with false, it couldn’t be otherwise they both knew without knowing where they stood; even if Ivan still tried to define their situation, he knew it was hopeless and that all statements between them were to protect the silences they had come to enjoy.
“What will you do in Paris? Why Paris?” Ivan asked. “And what are you doing here with me?”
...AT ORLY you’re equally remote from Paris and New York. Chimes follow you up the escalator, through glassed halls with shops and perfume counters, everywhere the two chimes prelude the same drowsy voice announcing passagers de destination —— passagers arrivant de ——. Peau Douce is playing at the Cinéma Orly. I shouldn’t be writing to you now. Terrified when I think of us in our different times. In your room the light is just changing. Here numbers roll through the slots on time indicators, a picture marking each minute, faster than on a clock...Must stop writing. They’ve announced the gate.
• •
...and now it’s over. We’ve boarded at last. Left my remaining eighty centimes on the plate in the ladies’ lavatory. FASTEN SEAT BELTS and NO SMOKING signs are on. The plane crawls along turning paths sentried by blowtorches; and waits, engines roaring, for its turn on the takeoff. I have made none of the usual preparations for this trip: the dress, thoughts, reading, proper for a sky journey. Packed away linen dress purchased two weeks ago specially to arrive in. Left behind volume of Heraclitus. Better so. Up alone without talisman. Good so. Tired of being on ceremony with God. Left everything behind. Even my memories are outside me, stored in boxes, burning in the incinerators of Paris. We’ve taken off. As we turn over the city, the captain’s voice points out Paris monuments. The plane climbs steeply and noses into a cloud bank. They’re announcing altitude and winds, flight time to —— didn’t catch the name of the city. Surprised the plane is so empty. A small party of businessmen, Bulgarians or Turks, have struck up a card game in front. Family across the aisle, young couple with three children; trying to quiet children. Americans.
Keep dozing off. Oppressive dreams of other crossings. Pink lakes in the sky, flying over new volcano near Reykjavik. Wake up in a stupor. All the engines are on. Still trying to rise over cloud banks. Water streaks black panes, roar of motors drowns out speaker announcing altitude, speed, winds in four
