Portraits of a Marriage Read Free

instructions as if he were master of the house. He addressed me using the informal
te
. Naturally, the maid thought we had all gone mad and was so frightened she dropped the salad dish. They didn’t explain the game to me that evening and that, in fact, was the point of the game. I should be told nothing. They had planned it, the pair of them, while waiting for me, and they acted it out perfectly, like professional actors. The game was based on the idea that I had divorced Peter some years ago and had moved in with the writer, my husband’s friend. Peter was so upset by this—in the game, that is—that he had left everything to us: the house, the furniture, the lot. In other words the writer was now my husband. Peter, so went the game, had met the writer in the street and the writer had taken him by the arm—by “him” I mean my offended, divorced husband—and said: “Look, let’s have no more of this. What’s happened has happened, come and have supper with us.” And Peter had accepted the invitation. And now we were together, all three of us, in the house where I had “previously” lived with Peter, having a friendly supper, the writer now “being” my husband, sleeping in Peter’s bed, taking his place in my life … You understand? That was the mad game they were playing.
    But the game had some subtle refinements.
    Peter pretended he was on edge, tortured by his memories. The writer pretended that he was rather
too
free and easy, a little too relaxed about it, because, after all, the strange situation was not entirely without stress for him either, since he would have felt guilty with Peter there, and that, precisely, was why he was being so loud and jovial. I “pretended” … but no, I wasn’t pretending, I just sat with them and stared, now at one, now at the other of these two grown, intelligent men who, for some reason I couldn’t begin to guess, were playing the idiot. I did slowly begin to understand the more subtle “rules of the game.” But I understood something else that evening too.
    I understood that my husband, whom I had previously believed to be entirely mine—every last inch of him, as they say, right down to the recesses of his soul—was not at all mine but a stranger with secrets. It was like discovering something shocking about him: that he had servedtime in jail or that he had perverse passions, something that didn’t fit the picture I had of him—I mean the picture I had been painting of him in my own soul. I understood that my husband was only tied to me in certain specific ways, but that in others he remained a mysterious, unfamiliar figure, someone just as strange as the writer who had stopped him in the street and “brought him here.” I understood that what was going on was in some way against me but above my head; that, more than comrades, they were accomplices.
    I understood that my husband inhabited worlds other than the one I knew. I understood that this other man, the writer, exercised a certain power over my husband’s soul.
    Tell me—what do you think power is? … Because there is so much written and said about it. What is political power, what’s the cause of it, how does it happen that a man can exert his will over millions? And what does our power, women’s power, consist of? Love, you say. Well, maybe it
is
love. Myself, I have occasional doubts about the word nowadays. I don’t deny love, not by any means. It is the greatest earthly power. And yet sometimes I feel that men, when they love us, do so because they have no choice, and that they even look down on love—on us—a little. In every real man there is a kind of reserve, as if he had closed off some part of his soul, kept it away from women, and said, “You can come so far, darling, but no farther. Here is my seventh room. Here, I want to be alone.” It drives the more stupid kind of woman quite mad. They lose their tempers. The wiser sort are first sad and curious, then resign