Portraits of a Marriage Read Free Page A

themselves to it.
    But what kind of power can one person have over another’s soul? Why did this unhappy, restless, clever, frightening, and at the same time foolish, wounded person—this writer—exercise his power over my husband’s soul?
    Because power he had, as I was to find out: a dangerous, even fatal power. One time, much later, my husband said that the role of this man was to be “a witness” to his life. He tried very hard to explain this. The way he put it was that there existed a witness figure of some kind in everyone’s life: someone we meet in youth, someone we recognize and consider stronger than we are, so that everything we do afterward is anattempt to hide whatever we are ashamed of from this witness-turned-merciless-judge. The witness-judge doesn’t readily believe us. He knows something about us that no one else does. We might become important people—we might be ministers of state, we might be awarded the Nobel Prize—but the witness simply stands by and smiles as if to say, “Do you really take yourself so seriously?” …
    And he went on to explain that everything we did was, to some extent, done for this witness: it was he who had to be convinced, it was to him we had to prove something. Our careers, the great struggles of our individual lives, were all, first and foremost, for the witness’s benefit. You know that awkward moment when a young husband first introduces his wife to “the” friend, the great companion of his childhood, then stands by, anxiously watching to see if the friend approves his choice of partner and finds her attractive? … Naturally the friend is courteous and thoughtful, but secretly he is jealous, because, whatever he thinks of her, he is the figure the woman is replacing in a sentimental relationship. So, you see, that was the way they were both weighing me up that evening. The trouble was, they already knew a great deal, the two of them, much more than I could begin to guess.
    Because another thing I understood from their conversation that evening was that these two accomplices, my husband and the writer, had their own thoughts about men and women and about human relationships in general, thoughts my husband had never discussed with me. This hurt, because it suggested that I was not worth talking to about such things—about things in general.
    When the stranger left some time after midnight, I confronted my husband and asked him directly:
    “Tell me honestly, do you look down on me, just a little?”
    He gazed at me through cigar smoke, tired, his eyes screwed up, as though he were suffering a hangover after an orgy, and considered my question carefully. To tell you the truth, by the time this evening was over, by the time my husband had finished playing this peculiar game with the writer he’d brought home, I felt worse than if he’d been at a real orgy. We were both exhausted. Strange, bitter feelings were stirring in me.
    “No,” he replied solemnly. “I don’t look down on you, not at all.Why should you think that? You are an intelligent woman with powerful instincts,” he added.
    It sounded convincing but I didn’t quite trust him. I sat down opposite him at the cleared table—we had been sitting at the table the whole evening, not moving to the comfort of the parlor, because the guest preferred sitting and chatting among a heap of cigarette butts and empty bottles of wine.
    “Yes, I am intelligent and have powerful instincts,” I answered, then hesitated. “But what do you think of my character, my soul?”
    I was aware the question sounded a little pathetic. My husband gave me his full attention, but did not answer me.
    It was as if he were saying: “That must remain my secret. Let it be enough that I acknowledge your intelligence and the power of your instincts.”
    That might have been how it started. I remembered that evening for a long time.
    The writer was not a frequent visitor. Nor did he meet my husband very often. But whenever