Lusaka International

Infidelity is inevitable for those who make up stories. I don’t mean infidelity of the flesh, I can’t see that we’re any more or less liable to that than anyone else. The problem is that in stories we can have a fling with whoever we like. I’ve written stories about me and women I knew or half knew or almost knew or women who never existed. These stories are always fiction, they recount events that never happened. But the emotions, the general circumstances, they’re real enough, in the sense that you’d say, or you might say, yes exactly, I know the very thing you’re talking about there, it’s happened to me, just that, or to us, or at least I’ve imagined that it happened; in that sense what goes on between me and the woman in the story is real, so it looks like infidelity. And often the infidelity looks like fun; and as I never write stories about J I never have that kind of fling with her. Sure she comes into things that I write sometimes but, as she says about whether to wake me up when I’m lying on my back snoring, “I too have a code of practice”. I only write about our mutually constructed public selves. The emotional, social, conversational, ideological part of our lives, I never get near any of that. With the other women, the women in the stories, those are the places where things go on, because that’s how you do sex in stories. If you just do sex with arching backs and frantic cries, it’s a cut and paste job, no more sex in it than in a description of putting out the bin. It’s through unusual behaviour, strange discussion, collision and distortion of attitudes that I try to make the sex particular, with a little intensity I hope, that’s what I aim at, not grand passion, you have to leave that to the great novelists and playwrights, but the kind of intensity that overcomes us all from time to time at the high and low points of our lives which have little in common with the lives of Anna Karenin and Count Vronsky or Elizabeth Bennet and Mr Darcy.
There are other aspects of life with a long term partner that make it unsuitable for story telling. The main one is its complication. Partners do tend to share large parts of their lives, both inside their heads and in each other’s company, so they have to deal to an extent with the whole other person and as there is no such thing as wholeness, the other person is bits of many people, many voices, many attitudes and emotions and styles of behaviour all bundled together in the physical environs of one body with sometimes more and sometimes less success at seamless integration, and we ourselves are the same sort of loose bundle; for one loose bundle of this sort to try to manipulate another with the deftness and economy demanded by the story would be doomed, only the novel can follow the unravelling skeins, and then only to a limited extent, we do after all carry infinity within us, I mean as an objective assessment of the universe, not any twaddle about souls.
Nevertheless here is a story about my partner, J, to show what that love is, as distinct from what goes on between me and the women in the stories.



But this is where it already becomes impossible. You cannot write another person, particularly a partner. Relatively, you know so much about them, and yet you cannot presume to know any one thing. They will immediately assert themselves, demolishing the pattern that forms beyond the words, a pattern that if not gazed at directly seems like life, like the reality of being a human being, just like the reality of being a human being, if not gazed at directly, seems something like a pattern, something durable and coherent; which indeed it is in that there is a huge consistency of getting up, going to school or work, eating meals, forming friendships, marriages, there’s a limitless flow of music, films, paintings, poems, novels, sports, religions, governments and industries; there is a stability out there; but if we now, this moment, gaze at the reality of life, the reality of being a human being, and put it to the test with the fact that that reality might at any moment stop - a minute blood clot, a meteoric impact that sets the earth’s core quaking - if we confront ourselves with the knowledge that the reality of being a human being can and always does go out like a light, or like a last ember, that that’s all it was, a finite process in that other universe the skull; then the most confident of us might realise that what we conjure up is no more than the pattern that seems to form beyond the words if we do not gaze too intently at our attempt to write another person, an actual person, one almost conjoined.
The story: