Seven Types of Ambiguity Read online

  This was the beginning of Simon’s decline. He was devastated by the little boy’s disappearance. He felt responsible for it. If anything, and you mustn’t take this the wrong way, he actually felt a certain relief when Carlo’s abduction turned out to be the first of that series of child kidnappings in Melbourne. In addition to the trauma and his sense of guilt, Simon was briefly, you might remember, the subject of some pretty tacky tabloid publicity. The other teachers even began to regard him warily. What had been initially regarded as admirable enthusiasm became an unhealthy pedagogic zeal.

  I found him very forthcoming about this whole period. It might have been at only our second or third session that he discussed it with me. I think he was rather hoping that this would be all that he had to tell me. It was very important to him, I’m not denying that, but I think he was, in a way, glad he had it to tell me about. Have you ever expatiated on a particular experience to give a new acquaintance the impression of instant intimacy? It is not an uncommon form of flattery.

  But I’m not so easily satisfied, and Simon is not so easily intimate. In addition to you, and the disappearance of Carlo, he spoke quite readily about his father. It’s fashionable. Simon rarely said anything much about May. One day I told him that I wanted him to tell me about his mother. He said there wasn’t all that much to say. We were at his place, which was not unusual during his housebound, curtain-drawn days, and I insisted that he speak about her for an hour before I would listen to anything else. Simon said I was being ridiculous and that I could leave immediately if that were the case. I ignored him and got us both another beer from the kitchen and started playing with Empson. I gave him his drink and sat down. Then Simon talked for three hours. I didn’t think it would work. My theatrics and feeble threats seldom work. I’m not much of a hypnotist either.

  As a child, Simon found what was happening to his mother very frightening. She could at one moment be very loving, gentle, and caring and then, seemingly quite suddenly, very angry. Or she would completely shut herself off. She just wasn’t available. She would go into her bedroom and stay there. Sometimes Simon would creep in and hide under the bed or in a closet while she was asleep and just watch her, keeping his breathing as low as possible. She would not speak at these times. Her silences could go on for weeks. What happens to a child born to a mother who is depressed?

  One woman in four becomes quite seriously depressed in the twelve months following the birth of a baby. But this went on well into Simon’s childhood. His brothers always seemed to be outside breaking something or training for some event or else out camping. They were away. Simon was always there. He remembered, and it amazed him to remember, one summer afternoon in Sorrento with the Osbornes. William and May had been arguing fiercely. He doesn’t remember what it was about. The older boys were on the beach playing cricket. William had stormed out. Simon had earlier slunk away from the screaming to take shelter in his parents’ closet. He had fallen asleep there and was awakened sometime later by the sound of May’s sobbing and heavy staccato breathing. He peeked through a crack in the doors and saw her lying on the bed in her half-opened robe, her face and hair being caressed by Diane Osborne. Did he ever mention this to you?

  He is amazed that he could have forgotten this. He remembers not understanding, being very frightened, but not being able to take his eyes off his mother and Diane. There was, in that small space, the extreme austerity of an almost empty mind colliding with something sweetly frantic and wrong between the many breaths, and an indifference to what would happen when the breathing was quiet again. After a while, he could hear William coming down the hall. The women were with each other and didn’t hear him coming. Simon didn’t know what to do. He wasn’t supposed to be there. He knew things were in some way wrong, but he was unable to speak. He didn’t know exactly what was wrong. Wasn’t everyone a friend? William pushed open the door and found the women together. He grabbed Diane by her hair, pulled her off the bed, and hit them both, May in the mouth and Diane in the stomach, knocking her to the floor. Then he picked her up as though she were a piece of furniture, placed her back on top of his frightened wife, who had fallen back onto the bed, and madly exhorted them to continue.

  Simon saw all this from the crack between the doors before he passed out and everything went black. As he fell to the floor, his body pushed open one of the closet doors. He had always felt vaguely that somehow none of this would have happened had he not fallen asleep in the closet. He wouldn’t have seen it, and it would not have happened. He wasn’t supposed to be there. It was never mentioned. Surely, he had thought, this was what you did with things that were never supposed to have happened. You don’t mention them. Simon was crying when he finished telling me about his mother. Then he asked me another one of those questions I’m never sure I am supposed to be able to answer.

  “What is it about men that makes women so lonely?”

  7. When a child feels in danger, he will defend himself, hold himself together, possibly withdraw. We do not spring fully grown into the world. We have to develop or create our own sense of self. When we have people around us who threaten us in various ways, perhaps by punishing us or leaving us, abandoning us, then our sense of self can seem to fall apart. That is the greatest, the most terrifying fear. We all experience it to some extent as small children and we grow up trying to defend against this fear. Some of us have to work harder at it than others. People won’t talk about it. They think they don’t have to and, unless it persists, often they’re right.

  Simon has tried on several occasions as an adult to reach May. He has done it as much for himself as for her. When the whole business with Carlo happened, Simon went to her. What could she say? A child disappears. It is so obviously a tragedy for those involved. But she couldn’t understand the full extent of Simon’s involvement. It wasn’t so much what she could have said as the fact of her saying it, saying anything. But she hardly said anything that showed even the thinnest empathy, and Simon felt rebuffed. Their relationship continued to consist of polite obligation fulfillment. One Mother’s Day he included a poem by Robert Lowell with his traditional card. Not long before this, May had confided to him that, with all her sons grown and gone, she was sometimes quite lonely. She said nothing about her marriage or about William directly, but he felt she didn’t have to. For Mother’s Day he copied out Lowell’s “To Speak of Woe That Is in Marriage” and gave it to her. Do you know it?

  The hot night makes us keep our bedroom windows open.

  Our magnolia blossoms. Life begins to happen.

  My hopped up husband drops his home disputes,

  and hits the streets to cruise for prostitutes,

  free-lancing out along the razor’s edge.

  This screwball might kill his wife, then take the pledge.

  Oh the monotonous meanness of his lust . . .

  It’s the injustice . . . he is so unjust—

  whiskey-blind, swaggering home at five.

  My only thought is how to keep alive.

  What makes him tick? Each night now I tie

  ten dollars and his car key to my thigh . . .

  Gored by the climacteric of his want,

  he stalls above me like an elephant.

  Of course the parallels are very imperfect. The husband of the poem is almost as much one side of Simon as he is William. But Simon was hoping it might touch her in a way that could clear a new path for some kind of genuine dialogue or exchange. May never referred to it. He regretted giving her the poem. He wondered how she could say nothing about it, even if it was just to say that the husband of the poem was not her husband at all. Simon would even have been heartened by some obvious and dutiful defense of William, some acknowledgment that William did not cruise the streets for prostitutes, that the lust of the poem’s husband was not William’s.

  Simon still has that boyhood reluctance to talk directly, even in a therapeutic situation, about his father’s sexuality. I think you might know something about this from Sorr
ento, from that time at the beach house. Do you? It was toward the end, early one evening. Simon had taken the car to buy a few things before the shops closed. May was in the kitchen. You had just taken a shower. It was almost sunset. Do you remember? You were in the midst of putting on a change of clothes for the evening and you looked out the window to watch the sunset. You were playing with a bracelet Simon had given you. There were problems with the clasp. Were you already planning to leave? Maybe that was what William was wondering as he watched you? The door wasn’t completely closed. We know you did not know this. Obviously it was an accident, not an invitation, but it enabled William to watch you there. And through the accident of the open door and the disposition of the light, the silhouettes of both of you were visible to Simon when his car pulled up. He saw you looking out of the window and he saw William watching you; everything was still, and no one hurried to see less.

  8. In the time I speak of as the time of Simon’s decline, there was a change of government. The new government decided to stimulate the economy by terminating the employment of thousands and thousands of teachers. You may remember this. Your husband and William voted for them. Perhaps you did too. Simon was stimulated out of his school. Given the size of the cuts, he would have stood a fair chance of losing his job even had he not stood out within his school. As it was, after Carlo’s disappearance, it was a certainty. His unemployment accelerated the decline. There were the bouts of drawn-curtain days in bed. He slept and listened to the street sounds. His friends, who had kept their jobs and were trying to keep their marriages, had nothing in common with Simon anymore. He didn’t have the resources to maintain these friendships. They stopped calling. May would call him occasionally, but William could no longer bring himself to talk to Simon on a regular basis.

  The sounds of his neighbors talking to each other, getting ready for the day, the sounds of their dinner parties where the guests arrived with several bottles and well-rehearsed greetings—these sounds hurt him. How do they know so many people? Can you imagine, there was nowhere Simon had to be at a certain time every day, or any day. There were no certain times except those marked by his neighbors’ sounds or by the birds announcing the end of another night he’d been unable to sleep.

  Things wore out imperceptibly until they broke, one by one: the clothes dryer, a heater, the collar of a shirt. And the neighbors would not shut up. He heard them, always laughing, as his bills came in, reformatted with their new corporate logos, the crowning achievement of microeconomic reform, and looking like invitations to a child’s birthday party when they were really the philistine calling cards of the new society; the standard form ones and then later, the threatening ones, threatening to withhold some or other service, or else to commence legal proceedings.

  You wouldn’t have wanted to see him this way. You don’t know anyone like this. Your husband has seen to it. In the morning Simon would add a little milk to the scotch and at first it all seemed ridiculous, staying in bed till anytime, watching TV on the couch. But there was no contrast, no friction, nothing to call for any resistance. Two bowls of cereal and scotch and ice per day can become one bowl, easily, and then just milk, scotch, and a sliver of ice before lunch. No one said a thing, and it wasn’t ridiculous anymore. It became unremarkable and surely that was false laughter, forced semi-hysterical laughter coming from next door. He thought about you. He thought of killing the people next door. He wondered whether you would hear that he was out of work? Would you ever be out of work? He decided that no matter how bad the economy became, you would never be out of work. When every last management consultant was trying to get work waiting on tables or mopping floors, you would still be many floors up in the city, surrounded by glass, perfectly pleated, going to meetings and making unfounded recommendations. Was he jealous? Certainly he was jealous but more than that, much more than that, he was lonely. He was one of the loneliest people you don’t see anymore.

  Again, it did not take long for him to blame himself. We spend our time watching things like this happen in other people’s lives and attempting to divine what it is they have done to bring it on themselves, what it is that we would never do. So when it happened in his life, Simon was ready to accept that he had brought it on himself but he didn’t know how he had done it.

  It may be said that, in some sense, we create our own reality through the way we choose to perceive the external world and, like anything that is created or constructed, it can collapse. Does this mean anything to you? You think you are happily married, and then you discover that you aren’t. Your whole perception of the outside world, as it pertains to you, just suddenly collapses. This is terrifying because our perception of ourselves in the outside world and our sense of self are the same thing. What was Simon in the world but a young man getting older on a couch, without a job, running out of time, running out of scotch, with all the cruelty of unrealized potential, and the bitter aftertaste of misplaced hope. Thus does he walk into furniture at two o’clock in the morning while outside the place next door there is a slamming of car doors and more wild laughter. Will they ever shut up? After a while you don’t mess around. No ice. And surely it didn’t have to be like this?

  I should say that at least in the early days of my association with Simon it was really Angelique who kept him from taking his life. She got involved. She breached the terms of their agreement, and he was in no position to enforce it. Angelique would visit him without an appointment, without an invitation. At first he would try to send her away, explaining that she should not take it personally but he could no longer afford to see her. How can anybody not take something personally? As soon as you take it, it’s personal. She didn’t listen to him. She brought him food and cooked for him. She would ask him to read to her, insisting it was a new deal. He had to read to her in return for her company, no credit. She asked him questions about whatever he was reading to her and in doing this she made him, in a small way, touch his former self. She held him when no one else was even calling.

  It might be easy for you to dismiss all this between them as simply Simon taking advantage of her, using her. But he had gone out of his way to institute those artificial procedures to stop her from falling in love with him, relenting only at her insistence, and so it would be unfair of you to characterize it like that. Whatever blindness or timely self-deceptions led you into your husband’s arms, you did not find yourself completely without hope of anything in your life ever changing for the better, and still you chose him or allowed yourself to be chosen by him. Your membership in society was never under any kind of review, and you never opened a newspaper to find the quintessence of your despair seasonally adjusted. Look at what was denied to him: love and work. It is asking a lot of a person to maintain a healthy self-esteem in the absence of both of these. And if his self-esteem is gone, how can you expect him to muster any reserves with which to make what are, after all, fairly subtle moral judgments, and then to act on them, harming himself, perhaps fatally?

  The period in a person’s middle years between, say, twenty-five and forty-five, is usually the period of greatest productivity. It is then one establishes oneself in a vocation, brings up a family, and creates a reputation in the community. The ability to work effectively, along with the ability to love, of course, is a sure mark of maturity, but Simon was living part of these prime productive years at a time when society denied him the opportunity to work at his chosen vocation, chosen, it must be said, with the most noble of intentions and in the face of his father’s profound derision. So, yes, he permitted her to cook for him and to hold him, to take him for walks. He never permitted himself to tell her the lie she wanted to hear more than any poetry or prose. Despite this, she kept him going anyway, single-handedly, at least until I earned his trust.

  One afternoon in bed, after a walk, she asked him how he could be so sure that he did not love her. Was she brave or stupid, do you think? Can you imagine you asking a question like that? Simon said that he did love her and that she should k
now it, but that he was not in love with her. You can forgive her, under the circumstances, for thinking he was off on another semantic frolic of his own. If he hadn’t been so forthcoming she might have taken comfort in the ambiguity.

  “In spite of all that I unfortunately am now, or more accurately all that I am not, I am still far too cautious, too careful with you, to be in love with you. That’s how I know, I suppose,” he told her.

  “You know you’re in love with somebody when you wake up next to them, comfortable despite your breath smelling like week-old water at the bottom of a vase, when you are terribly excited to see them, to talk to them again, having missed them after all that sleep. You can fall out of bed into the shower and, still comfortable, burp or even fart while trying out various keys in which to sing the theme to a Peter Greenaway movie that you both hated and have never seen.”

  When she asked who Peter Greenaway was, he could only say “Yes” more or less to the ceiling and run his fingers through her hair, all the way along her face and down until he had to alter his position in the bed. He would probably agree now that she saved his life. She loved him unconditionally, and there is nothing more sustaining than that. But for her there was nothing more dangerous. She was there for him no matter what he did and you were never there anymore, no matter what he did.

  All his warnings and strategies did nothing to protect her from falling in love with what was really just his need, and his diminished responsibility only exacerbated his diminished sensitivity to her feelings. If I have been starving I am in no fit state to consider the needs of the hand that feeds me unconditionally and forewarned. Maybe Angelique needed to save his life, but she could have done without much of the rest. Simon will admit this. I know her well now too, and we are agreed; with her strength, all her vitality, and that mix of almost naive optimism in spite of all she has seen and experienced, she is really a very special woman. Your husband would agree. I don’t doubt it. He has taken great comfort from her.