became acute.
“I hope you enjoyed buying those underpants,” he’d said with a rigid, panicked smile when I held up a purchase from a lingerie shop.
Because obviously they would have no impact on him.
I’d spent the afternoon among balcony brassieres and merry widows. No, I had not enjoyed it. I’d found the whole expedition mortifying. I’d found my own body mortifying. But wanted something to kindle us, to make what was dead between my boyfriend and me alive again. No go. “I hope you enjoyed buying those underpants”—he’d said, with a stricken, frozen smile.
“How awful,” remarked my best friend, in a restaurant the next day.
“Really?” I stared at her.
“Yes!”
But why was I surprised? Hadn’t I felt, at the time, awful? But then I’d instantly gone numb. Zoned out. Returned myself to a kind of docility—a refusal to draw conclusions. Which was much easier to endure than the crumpling, aching sadness at knowing I might have to leave my cherished boyfriend.
But that was the problem! Right there! Going numb.
I gazed into the candle flame. Well, so what if I left him? I shut my eyes and the candle still burned, although its orange was now green. Why did the thought of leaving him disturb me so much? Wasn’t it better to grow angry at his reaction—“I hope you enjoyed buying them!”—than to go dead? Or, wasn’t it better to whisper: “Really? Is that all you have to say?”
Anagnorisis is the term for an Aristotelian recognition. It marks the moment in a play when the hero comes to a realization about what he’s done, who he is. I read this the next day in the college library while studying Oedipus Rex. My study carrel was beside a Gothic window diamonded with chicken wire. The sky was a blue sword burning overhead. Can there be an anagnorisis involving underpants, I wondered, tears in my eyes. Is that too ridiculous?
The philosopher Stanley Cavell, I read on, says that anagnorisis occurs when the hero allows himself an emotional reaction to his intellectual understanding. The two functions had been kept apart during the hero’s quest. While Oedipus pursued the truth of his situation, he couldn’t allow himself to react. He needed to follow the evidence wherever it led—that great detective who in his youth had solved the riddle of the Sphinx itself. But then: the anagnorisis occurs when he permits the emotional reaction, the inner response to the facts he’s unearthed. That’s when he goes wild, blinding himself, gouging out his own eyes with the brooches. And it’s this very thing—allowing an emotional awareness of what he’s done—that Macbeth flees the entire length of his play, leaving a bloody path behind him.
I looked up from my book to the blazing blue arrow tip of sky. So: what changed a person was allowing yourself to feel what you knew. My stomach hurt. I didn’t like this answer one bit. My own emotions were still rabid, prone to exaggeration, incessantly misleading. And yet, what else did I have to go by if I ignored them? I’d been waiting for my feelings toward the man I was involved with to change for years, and they hadn’t. They only became sharper, more intense. My heart beat so hard, sitting in that library, that the stacks of books jumped away, came back. My moist palms clung to my tissue-thin Oedipus Rex. I would almost rather be numb forever than have to talk to my boyfriend about this problem.
I love him, I love him, I told myself as I walked across the battered campus toward home, and felt sicker and more frightened the closer I got to our apartment, but also somehow angrier, too. Had I really been so mysterious? Had he really been so unable to see my unhappiness? Or was he like Stacy somehow, the mean friend, ignoring what was obvious, which was the girl making faces over her shoulder, hurrying up the street both smiling and grimacing?
That night, in bed, I whispered to him, “No, I did not enjoy buying those underpants. And I feel worried about what’s wrong between us. I feel unloved, living with you. It’s so lonely.” Around three or four in the morning he woke me abruptly from a profound sleep, a sleep I’d been sunken so deeply inside it felt like being drunk. “There’s something I have to tell you,” he intoned in a dull, zombie voice, standing beside the bed, a look of horror on his face. His skin glowed silver in the streetlight. He wove in place, as if about to collapse.
“Tell me right away. You’re scaring me!” I said.
He revealed he’d been having an affair. He needed me to know. It was standing in the way of his feeling his love for me. And the words I’d said that night about feeling unloved—they broke his heart! He knew he had to tell me. It was the only way ahead, he felt. It was our only hope of real intimacy. He had to tell me what he’d done, who he was. He stood pale, shaking with fear.
I was shocked and furious—and relieved. At least I no longer felt insane. At least the world again made sense. At least I had all the information, or enough of it.
We sat close. We were both frightened. It was the dawn of something new. “I felt so awful,” he told me softly. “So far away from you.”
I nodded, sighing. How could I be angry at him (although I was)? For months I’d felt the bone-deep cold within myself. I’d known it without knowing it, his affair, his lack of attraction, the isolation, the sense of being unloved, and I’d swiveled my head the other way, not wanting to see. I’d ignored his secret. I’d kept my complaints weak, I hadn’t demanded more. I’d chosen calm and coma, as had he. Now we clenched hands hard across the space between us. We stayed up until the apartment buildings acquired tall peripheries, their rims brightening, sharpening, and the night began to fade to gray, turning the same color as the apartment buildings.
He sat before me, a young man, eager, energetic—as if he’d dropped a weight of years! How different he looked! A beautiful young man, a fawn, with gleaming large eyes and long eyelashes and pointed ears, excited, turned on to me, and I was shocked by my response. He was perfect—for someone else. Perhaps there was something wrong with me, but his eagerness, his freshness, his smiling, doe-eyed glance felt wrong for me. I didn’t want it. I felt like some sort of villain. How much he was bringing me! The banquet of his entire eager, undefended self. But he seemed a nubile boy. Oh, I needed to set him free. For it felt just like another kind of blackmail, his radiant eagerness, which asked me not to spoil it. It invited me to go mute again. In fact, his pliant, gentle lips, his doting, wet eyes, his tongue which lay in my own mouth like a sponge—inspired in me a kind of rage.
No more lying. No more zoning out, I told myself. Go with the twists and turns, the blazing maze. Trust that your truth will unlock the other person’s. And even if it doesn’t, at least it will unlock your own. The living room had grown larger, its corners swabbed with daylight. And, when I looked outside, the buildings no longer stood in hues of monotone gray. My heart beat hard in my chest.
“Oh, baby, I’m so sorry,” I began. “It just doesn’t work between us. Don’t you feel it?”
Soon we were weeping—terrified, and sad to inflict so much pain on one another. We’d been together for years. A sharp awareness of time itself swept in—I felt as if I were inflicting time itself on my boyfriend. “I’m sorry,” I said again. But color was seeping into things, the russet brick of the neighboring buildings, the silver zigzag cascade of the fire escapes, and I could finally see, closer, oh, the particular, killing handsomeness of this man before me.
I ultimately left, packing my green camp trunk, lugging down the stairs the old Smith Corona typewriter with its key the size of an eyelash at the end of a string. I drove away in my burgundy VW that had no heat, my body trembling. The windows of stores flashed a sea blue. The sun saturated the sky. Energy that had been trapped in our relationship
