A Separation(12)

Gradually, as Yvan described their brief friendship, I grew uncomfortable, disliking the versions of both men that emerged—Christopher’s manic charisma and compulsion to seduce, Yvan’s inexplicable passivity, neither accepting nor rebuffing Christopher’s advances. Yvan felt my discomfort, his suspicions had been correct, the intimacy between the two men was off-putting to me. There was no point to the story, Yvan said abruptly, they didn’t remain close. Christopher had dropped the friendship, as if his original pursuit had only been a cipher for another, more oblique kind of compulsion, although that had not prevented them from renewing their acquaintance when they ran into each other some years later.

That time, I had been there. It had been another chance encounter, not in the street this time but at a party, and had lasted only a few minutes before it was interrupted, the room was crowded with people. At the time Yvan had been just another one of Christopher’s acquaintances, of which there were so many, but I remembered that I had liked him at once: his laconic manner, his slight air of indifference to the parade of his surroundings and still, and in particular, to Christopher’s charm, to which so few seemed immune.

But as it turned out, Yvan was not a man of indifference—it was wariness, rather than indifference, that he felt toward Christopher, and not only because of their past. In some essential way Christopher was not a man to be trusted, and Yvan had intuited this. Once, I asked him when it had first occurred to him that we would end up together, in this arrangement—I made this odd choice of word, arrangement, as though it were a euphemism for something untoward—and he promptly replied, At once, from the very beginning, or at least so I wished.

Certainly, Yvan roused himself with surprising speed. I was still living in the apartment when we met and it was far too soon for a new relationship—Christopher had not moved out, he had merely made himself absent, the place was still filled with his things, intermingling with my things. The bedsheets had barely been changed. And although I was not very old, I was also not young. Moving onward so precipitously felt like the mark of a younger woman.

But Yvan asked me to move into his apartment right away, almost at the very outset of the relationship, so that the possibility of moving out of Christopher’s apartment and into Yvan’s presented itself as a very real scenario. It was undeniably convenient. And I was reminded of a biting and still unpleasant comment an acquaintance had once made over dinner: Women are like monkeys, they don’t let go of one branch until they’ve got hold of another. This man—a friend of Christopher’s first, but then also a friend of mine—had been seated beside me and across the table from his wife and Christopher.

When he spoke, he was looking at Christopher. He barely seemed aware of how clearly we—the women at the table, myself and his wife—could see his expression of frank contempt, or perhaps he didn’t care, he was addressing himself to Christopher and not to either of us. From where I was sitting I saw him in profile, so that his sneer, the curl of his lip, was especially pronounced. Presumably he was not speaking of his own circumstances, or of his relationship with his wife, who sat quietly beside Christopher, minutely examining the tablecloth and the cutlery that sat upon it.

But anything was possible. It was, for example, possible—that they had met under adverse circumstances, that she had been involved with another man and been reluctant to leave the shelter provided by this man until she had secured the patronage, the commitment, of her current spouse (it was true that for as long as we had known them she had not worked, she was always well dressed and groomed, the kind of woman who knew where to get your hair blow-dried and nails manicured, information that is sometimes meaningless, but that also sometimes tells the entire story).

It was not pleasant to imagine the relationship between our friends in these terms, and yet it was surprisingly easy, an involuntary movement on the part of the imagination, which has no sense of decorum. Perhaps, even after years of marriage, the memory of her caution was a cause of dispute—there are men and women who cannot forgive a slight, however long in the past—perhaps one of the terms of the contract that underlay their marriage was the understanding that the husband would make the wife pay for this insult, this hesitation, again and again, over the course of their life together.

Nonetheless, I was offended on her behalf. Whatever the circumstance, it seemed terrible to be married to a man who was capable of saying such things about women, and in her presence, before other people—or rather, before another woman, one suspects men say such things among themselves all the time. From that point onward, I avoided this man, making excuses whenever Christopher proposed some activity, dinner or a weekend away in the couple’s company, until Christopher accepted that I no longer wished to be friends with them. At least that was how he understood it, and I did not disabuse him of the notion, it was true that although my dislike had its origin in the husband, it had spread to the wife, in the milder form of discomfort—with her, I could no longer be at ease.

Several years later, the phrase still rankled—women are like monkeys, they don’t let go of one branch until they’ve got hold of another—and it returned to me again, as matters with Yvan progressed. I knew that at a certain point, it no longer sufficed to say that the situation was complicated, the phrase did not buy you any time (although it was complicated, I was married and not formally or even publicly separated, I was still living in the old apartment, Christopher having gone I did not know where, he was initially staying with friends, then at a spare apartment belonging to his mother, usually rented out but now conveniently empty, which he told her he was using as an office).