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Authors: Vivian Gornick

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Mama’s eyes danced with pleasure. Joe was always a holiday for her. She took the glass from him, and gulped at its liquid content.

“Oh nol” Sarah blushed furiously. “I can’t drink wine in the middle of the day.”

“Oh yes you can,” Joe said, handing her the filled glass. Reluctantly, she took it from him.

Joe and I raised our glasses to each other. Everyone drank. Joe chattered on while Mama and I made appropriate female noises [How wonderfull You didn’t
really!
That’s fantastic!], but Sarah became very quiet. I felt a twinge to see my voluble aunt so abruptly silenced.

When our glasses were empty Joe raised the bottle again and held it out, first toward me. I extended my glass to meet his raised arm. He poured. He then held the bottle toward Mama. She said, “No more.” Sarah waved it away in true alarm. “Ah, come on,” said Joe, pushing the bottle at Mama’s glass. “Oh well.” Mama giggled. He filled her glass, and turned to Sarah. In a firm voice she said, “No, thanks. I don’t want any more.”

“Ah, come on,” said Joe, tilting the bottle toward her.

Sarah put her hand over her glass. “No,” she said, “I can’t.”

“So tell me, Joe,” Mama said, “how did it go with the bosses this morning?” Joe laughed and began to tell her for the third time, but in a minute or so he turned back to Sarah with the bottle of wine once more in his hand.

“Come on,” he said.

Sarah was startled, but she placed her hand over her glass again and shook her head. “I really don’t want any more,” she said.

“Yes you do,” Joe said, “you’re just shy,” and he began to nudge her hand with the mouth of the bottle. “Come on, come on, come on.”

Mama looked down at her own glass. Sarah looked painfully confused.

I placed my hand over Joe’s. He looked at me. “She’s a grown woman,” I said. “If she says no, she means no.”

For a moment after I’d spoken we remained as we were, my hand over his, our eyes locked. Then Joe withdrew his hand, smiled, and said, “Gotcha.” He was a good-natured man, really. He didn’t know any other way to be.

At five-thirty the three of them rose to leave. Joe helped Sarah on with her coat, I helped Mama on with hers. I stood in the doorway as they walked to the elevator. Halfway down the corridor Mama stopped. “I left my keys,” she called out. When she got back to me I saw that she was holding the keys in her hand. She moved past me into the apartment, looking rattled. “Where could I have left them?” she said, as though speaking to herself.

“Ma, you’re holding the keys in your hand.”

“Oh, for goodness’ sake!” But she stood there looking puzzled. Then she put her hand on my arm. “Don’t get married,” she said, and fled down the corridor.

Joe’s wife did not die. She recovered and we were, after her illness, as we had been before, continuing on in our old explosive way from the fourth year to the fifth to the sixth. Ours was a primitive exchange of energies—the boiling-over talk, the blissed-out lovemaking—that never altered in its character. From time to time, through the noise and smoke, one of us glimpsed the way the other one put the world together and, for a moment, would feel the beating heart at the end of a long line of thought. But the moment was sure to pass. If either of us listened too long to what the other one actually said we found ourselves drifting. That crude energy between us was what we loved. The quarreling turned us on.

At the heart of this noisy, complicated, talk-filled affair, the connection remained erotic. We who talked so passionately together for hours, days, months, and years were sure to lose interest the moment one of us ceased to be aroused in bed. I knew this was the deeper truth between us, I said it out loud—often—and still it was as if I didn’t know what the words actually meant. Between the flash of insight and the imperative to act lay miles of anxiety to negotiate.

“Our connection is erotic,” I announced periodically.

“Yes?” Joe replied with interest in his voice.

“Neither of us responds to the specific shape or content
of the other’s mind or spirit. We engage only through sexual arousal.”

He laughed and laughed. I had invented the wheel.

“Yes, darling,” he said patiently. “That’s the way it is between men and women. The connection, as you say, is erotic. So what? What does it mean to characterize us that way?”

“I hate it,” I said. “I find it insulting. I have always found it insulting.”

“Well, then,” he said. “I guess you’re just going to have to go on being insulted by a few thousand years of history.”

I didn’t contradict him then. I subsided instead into a kind of lulled inactivity from which I’d struggle up only briefly when I felt myself pushed out of shape in conversation, or exiled in my thoughts, or generalized in my being (“you women …”). Then I’d quiet down again, and for months at a time let it all go. The erotic attachment had its advantages and these, inevitably, weighed in the balance.

To begin with, there was the enormity of sexual love itself. Desire ensured tenderness. Tenderness precluded danger. Once out of danger, I was free to retreat into the absorbing secret life of my own abandon. In bed I didn’t have to be myself. I could lose myself, and still I was safe. I’d come out of that lostness and there was Joe, holding on to me, never more trustworthy than when receiving proof anew of his own vital powers.

I didn’t have to be myself. With Joe, for the first time, I felt the allure of not having to be oneself: the sheer relief of it. All my life I had suspected I wasn’t interesting enough, special enough, talented enough to hold the attention of those who came toward me in friendship or in love. I could
attract people, yes, but could I hold them? I was never sure. Now, it seemed, I didn’t have to be sure. The erotic connection brought reprieve. I wasn’t under the gun to earn interest or respect daily. The deal was set: I could relax into it. I saw the strong appeal of marriage. To engage as oneself and oneself alone is no longer a requirement: the other half can do the work. Encounters on the open landscape of the world need never imperil one again.

It was interesting, all of it, but deep within myself I turned away. In the sixth year I began to repeat “Our connection is erotic” with monotonous regularity, and always now with a kind of dull anger in my voice. I meant, of course, I wasn’t making erotic connection. Our disputes had begun to weary me. Confrontation failed to arouse. I no longer flared with predictable speed or heat. Suddenly we’d have a bad week, wouldn’t sleep together. We’d meet then and I’d be sluggish, disoriented. Joe’s attention would wander openly. We were trudging uphill, making conversation for an hour and a half.

“We’re out of phase just now,” one of us said.

“In a dull period,” the other confirmed.

“Next week we’ll be as we’ve always been.”

And next week we would be as we’d always been: for a day or two.

Bit by bit we were coming unstuck, and we each knew it. The atmosphere was poisoned with confusion and regret. I turned coy: “We can’t go on like this forever, you know.” Joe turned tough: “Let’s quit right now.” But on we went.

One night I received a call from my friend Linda. “Everything all right between you and Joe?” she asked.

“Sure. Why?”

“He’s been calling me.”

“What do you mean, he’s been calling you?”

“He’s been asking to see me. And now I’ve received a disturbing letter from him.”

My heart knocked violently against my chest. “You mean he’s making a pass at you?”

“I’m not sure, but I think so.”

“That’s unbelievable. How could he make a pass at a friend of mine?”

“That’s what I thought, but the letter is so provocative I felt I should let you know.”

“Yes, of course. Thanks, thanks for calling.”

Linda was a labor reporter Joe had met often in my house. Perhaps his calls had something do with work. Yes, that must be it. It was something to do with his work. He was bound to mention it to me this week.

But he didn’t mention it that week, or the week after. In the interim I’d met Linda and seen the letter: it was an open invitation to an affair.

I told Joe that Linda had called and that I’d seen his letter. He was astonished. “She called you? I can’t believe it. What kind of friend is that?”

“A good friend, that’s what kind.”

“Not in my book.”

“You mean she should have kept quiet?”

“I mean just that.”

“Not that you shouldn’t have made a pass at her, but that she should have kept quiet about it, is that it?”

“Oh no you don’t. I’m not going to defend myself, and that’s that. I haven’t felt guilty toward my wife all these
years, and I don’t feel guilty toward you. You and I have been falling to pieces for a long time now. As far as sex goes, I consider myself a free agent.”

“But why a friend of mine? Can’t you see that’s out of bounds.”

“Not at all. Who else is one attracted to but the friends of one’s friends? My being attracted to Linda is not a sin; her telling you is. I don’t see why a friend would want to tell you something that might hurt you.”

I stared at him. He really didn’t see why.

“If Linda keeps silent,” I said, “the two of you share a secret. I immediately lose equal standing. I become the deceived wife. That’s the one without all the information. How could you so misread Linda as to think she’d do that to me? For what? A roll in the hay?”

“Bullshit. That’s not the way I see it at all. If she didn’t want to make it, fine. She keeps her mouth shut and we all go on as before. I’ve made passes at my friends’ wives all my life, and yes, at the friends of my own wife. In no instance did a wife run to tell her husband, or a friend run to tell my wife. It’s malicious nonsense to think ‘honesty’ is being invoked when a phone call is made to announce adulterous intentions.”

“You say that because you’ve lived your life among married people for whom marriage is paramount. The humiliations endured by the women and men inside the marriage are less important to all of you than the marriage itself. It’s so unfriendly! Why would Linda or I share such a value? What world do you think we’re living in?”

“I don’t know what the hell you’re talking about. This happens every day of the week, every hour on the hour.
It’s the way of the world, the most fundamental of drives, it has nothing to do with friendship.”

“I guess that’s it,” I said slowly. “We’ve come to the heart of it. I think it distinctly
un
friendly of you to make a pass at a friend of mine, but you feel fine about it, because you think love has nothing to do with friendship.”

“You’re such a fool,” Joe said softly. “With all you know, you still don’t know it’s an adversarial relation. There is no friendship in love.”

“I refuse that definition,” I said. “I absolutely refuse it. If love is only romantic attachment, fuck it.”

“You’re a child,” Joe said. “That’s what love
is.
There’s no other way to have it.”

“Then I’ll do without,” I said. “This way I cannot live.” He made no reply then. We faced each other across a long silent moment.

“I guess it was inevitable,” I said, “that I, too, would become the deceived wife.”

“Somebody always is,” Joe said. “Sometimes it’s even me.

And quite suddenly we had come to the end.

I wanted to put on my sneakers and take a walk across the world, from the Battery to the George Washington Bridge, but a sledgehammer of fatigue forced me down onto the couch where I lay staring into space. I felt real despair then. However much I sought to differentiate myself, I seemed always to end up like Mama, lying on the couch staring into space. And never more so than when I saw that sleeping with Joe
had
been like sleeping with my father,
not because he was older and married, but because he was a man whose view of life made inevitable the equation man-husband-papa, woman-wife-child.

I went reeling back over my life with men: Stefan, Davey, Joe. They had seemed so different, one from another, but I’d learned nothing from these attachments, I’d been hiding out with all of them. It was almost as though I chose men who would ensure I’d arrive back at this moment, depressed and paralyzed by the failure of love.

After a while I got up off the couch. I didn’t take a hike across the world—so far from touching firm ground, I felt myself adrift in a shipwrecked sea—but I did sit down at the desk. I clung to the daily effort: I couldn’t do it very well, either, but I never doubted the desk—not the satisfactory resolution of love—was the potential lifesaver.

I walked into an analyst’s office. I told her everything. I told her everything again. And then again. Whenever I told her everything she said: Why?

Why? I repeated blankly.

Yes, why, she replied calmly.

BOOK: Fierce Attachments: A Memoir

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