You Think It, I'll Say It(23)

She emailed me the next afternoon, with a link to a version conducted by Claudio Abbado (How great is the harpsichord cadenza in the first movement?), and I emailed back concurring and adding that I hadn’t realized she was such a classical music buff, to which she replied that she’d played viola from the age of seven to eighteen, that for years, her dream had been to attend Juilliard but that by the time she was in high school and entering competitions, it was clear she didn’t have the talent, and she applied only to liberal arts colleges, not music schools. You contain multitudes! I wrote. Good to know I better not try any classical music mansplaining. In the following five days, during which, as usual, I ran with Mark twice, didn’t lay eyes on Libby, and didn’t discuss her with Mark, my sister-in-law told me over email that for her sixth-grade living biography, she had been Bach, that she’d never enrolled either of her sons in music lessons because she’d ended up so conflicted about her own but now she wondered if she’d made a mistake, and that the other day she hadn’t been able to remember the word Q-tip and feared it was the first sign of early dementia; I told her that every year from third to seventh grade, I’d dressed as a so-called hobo for Halloween, that in grade school I had wanted to play the trumpet, but my mother had said I could either play soccer or take trumpet lessons but not both and I’d worried Mark would think I was lame if I opted for an instrument, and that sometimes descending stairs, I felt an intense, fleeting pain in my left knee that probably meant I wouldn’t be able to keep running indefinitely, but for now I’d decided not to do anything about it. Somehow this morphed into Libby describing the school meeting she’d just left, at which a colleague of hers had not only fallen asleep but begun snoring audibly, and how Libby would definitely have awakened him if she’d been sitting closer, but she was fifteen feet away and unsure of whether the very act of standing and approaching him was more disruptive than the snoring, and then the meeting ended before she could decide. I told her about a client from years before who always removed both his shoes and his socks when he came to my office, without comment, as if this were normal, and she told me how when Noah was in first grade, she was the mom in charge of buying pumpkins for the kids at Halloween, and the pumpkins she got from a farm over the Illinois border were so dirty she had to give all fifty of them a bath. She wrote, Does this affirm your choice not to reproduce? :) We exchanged these emails at all hours of the day, into the evening, and that weekend, on both Friday and Saturday, we sent about fifteen each—we were debating what the best 1980s movie was, in terms of both quality and being most quintessentially eighties-ish—and at eleven-fifteen on Saturday night, she wrote, I’m falling asleep so night night William. Where was my brother at that moment? In bed beside her? In another part of the house? Was she in bed? Honestly, at the time, I didn’t wonder. Less than twenty-four hours later, when I went to their house for Sunday dinner, Libby and I didn’t discuss the emails, and after I was back home, at nine-thirty P.M., she wrote, We can’t do this anymore.

I was genuinely surprised, and wrote back, Why?

Are you serious?

Before I could confirm that I was, another message from her arrived: Because I’m married to your brother.

I considered not responding until the morning; I wanted a chance to collect my thoughts. But it occurred to me that she might interpret my silence as hurt feelings. Libby, you’re a wonderful person, I wrote. I adore you. But there’s nothing remotely romantic about any of this.

She didn’t reply for forty-five minutes, which made me wonder if instead I’d hurt her feelings. Her response when it came: If that’s really what you think, I envy your ability to delude yourself.

For the following week, we didn’t communicate. It would be a lie to say I didn’t miss her emails, to deny how quickly I’d embraced the existence of another consciousness with whom to exchange observations and experiences. And it would be a lie to claim I didn’t feel some inner turmoil. But it wasn’t the jilted person’s turmoil; it was the uneasiness that accompanies a misunderstanding.

On Sunday, I went to dinner at their house with trepidation, and I suspect Libby and I were both straining to behave normally, which mostly took the form of avoiding each other; Finn and I played about thirty rounds of Horse in the driveway.

That Wednesday morning at ten o’clock, an email arrived, again sans greeting or sign-off. I’ve thought about it and I think you were right and I was wrong and it’s fine for us to email but let’s keep it confined to music, nothing else. Driving to work this morning, I heard Górecki’s Symphony no. 3. Do you know that one? So beautiful and devastating.

I never explicitly agreed to her terms; I simply complied with them. We exchanged four or five emails a day for two days; then she wrote, One more stipulation: We should only do this once a day. I’ll email you between 8 a.m. and noon. You email me back between noon and four. No weekends.

OK, I wrote.

This time, it lasted nearly a year, with neither of us deviating from the schedule, including when she, Mark, and the kids went to Aruba for Thanksgiving with her extended family. And it wasn’t that I hadn’t known there were certain gaps in my life; it was that I wouldn’t have expected the gaps to be filled by receiving and writing one email per day about classical music, or that confining the topic didn’t actually feel that different from the brief stretch when we’d been telling anecdotes; in some encoded, albeit not erotic, way, confining the topic felt more personal. I’d still found another consciousness; I still could experience the anticipation and satisfaction of contact, the mental absorption of composing a response in my head before sending it. Being in touch with her offered a cushioning to my days, an antidote to the tedium and indignity of being a person, the lack of accountability of my adulthood; it gave me stamina with Bonnie and willpower with Thérèse. I thought I’d achieved an equilibrium—one so eccentric as to be incomprehensible to most married suburban couples but, for me, one that could last. It felt sustainable in a way none of my relationships with girlfriends ever had.