Conversations with Friends(58)

Hi Frances. I’m not angry at you, I want you to know that. I’m just getting in touch with you because I think it’s important that we’re on the same page with this. Nick doesn’t want to leave me & I don’t want to leave him. We are going to keep living together & being married. I’m putting this in an email because I don’t trust Nick to be straight with you about it. He has a weak personality & compulsively tells people what they want to hear. In short if you’re sleeping with my husband because you secretly believe that one day he will be your husband, then you’re making a serious mistake. He’s not going to divorce me & if he did he would never marry you. Equally if you’re sleeping with him because you believe his affection proves you to be a good person, or even a smart or attractive person, you should know that Nick is not primarily attracted to good-looking or morally worthy people. He likes partners who take complete responsibility for all his decisions, that’s all. You will not be able to draw a sustainable sense of self-respect from this relationship you’re in. I’m sure you find his total acquiescence charming now, but over the course of a marriage it actually becomes exhausting. Fighting with him is impossible because he’s pathologically submissive, & you can’t scream at him without hating yourself. I know because today I screamed at him for a long time. Because I myself have ‘made mistakes’ in the past, it’s hard to feel truly cathartically wronged by the fact that he’s been having sex with a 21-year-old behind my back, & I hate that. I feel like any other person would feel in this situation. I’ve cried copiously, not only in fits & starts but also for sustained periods of over an hour each. But just because I once slept with another woman at a literary festival & then several years later while Nick was in psychiatric hospital began an affair with his best friend which continued even after I knew Nick had found out about it, my feelings don’t count. I know I’m a monster & he probably tells you bad things about me. Sometimes I find myself thinking: if I’m so awful, why doesn’t he leave me? And I know what kind of person has those thoughts about their own spouse. The kind of person who later murders their spouse, probably. I wouldn’t murder Nick but it’s important for you to know that if I tried, he would absolutely go with it. Even if he figured out that I was planning his murder he wouldn’t bring it up in case it upset me. I’ve become so used to seeing him as pathetic & even contemptible that I forgot anybody else could love him. Other women have always lost interest once they got to know him. But not you. You love him, don’t you? He tells me your father is an alcoholic, so was mine. I wonder if we gravitate toward Nick because he gives us a sense of control that was lacking in childhood. I actually believed him when he told me nothing had happened between you & it was just a crush. I felt relieved, isn’t that terrible? I thought oh well, he only met you during the summer, he still wasn’t really himself then, he’s been so much better since. And now I realise that you’re actually a function of the betterness, or it’s a function of you. Are you making my husband better, Frances? What gives you the right to do that? He’s awake during the day now, I’ve noticed. He’s started replying to emails & answering the phone again. When I’m at work he sometimes sends me interesting articles about leftists in Greece. Does he send you the same ones or are they personalised? I admit I’m threatened by your extreme youth. It’s very shocking thinking about your own husband being into younger women. I never noticed it before with him. 21 is young, right? But what if you were 19, would he still have done it then? Is he the kind of morbid guy in his 30s who secretly finds 15-year-old girls attractive? Has he ever used the search term ‘teen’? These are things I didn’t have to think about before you came into our lives. Now I wonder if he hates me. I didn’t hate him when it was me seeing someone else; in fact I think I liked him more, but if he tried to tell me that I’d want to spit at him. I think most of all I’m shocked that he doesn’t want to do the easy thing & leave you. That’s how I know I’ve been replaced. He says he still loves me, but if he doesn’t do what I say any more, then how can I believe him? Of course he never overreacted like this in my case, & I always thought I was so lucky that he didn’t. Now I wonder if he ever loved me at all. It’s hard to imagine marrying someone you don’t love, but actually it’s just the kind of thing Nick would do, out of loyalty & a craving for punishment. Do you know him that way too, or am I the only one? Part of me wishes I could be friends with you. I used to find you very cold & unkind, and at first I thought it was because of Bobbi, which I resented. Now that I know it was just jealousy & fear, I feel differently about you. But you don’t need to be jealous, Frances. For Nick you’re probably indistinguishable from happiness. I don’t doubt that he considers you the great love of his adult life. He & I never had a tempestuous affair behind anyone’s back. I know I can’t ask him to stop seeing you, although I want to. I could ask you to stop seeing him, but why should I? Things are better now, even I can see that. I used to come home in the evening & he’d be in bed already. Or else sitting in front of the TV having not changed the channel since he woke up. Once I came home & saw him watching some kind of softcore pornographic film where two cheerleaders were kissing each other, & when he saw me he shrugged & said ‘I’m not watching this, I just didn’t know where the remote was.’ At the time I actually pretended not to believe him, because I thought it would be less upsetting if he were really watching the cheerleader film rather than just sitting there reluctantly allowing the film to keep playing because he was too depressed to find the remote. Now I keep thinking about all the evenings I’ve come home this month & he’s been cooking & listening to something on the radio. And he’s always clean-shaven & asking me how my day was & his gym clothes are always in the washing machine. I see him looking in the mirror sometimes with quite an appraising expression. Of course, how could I not have known? But I always said I wanted him to be happy, & now I know it was true all along. I do want that. Even when it looks like this I still want it. So. Anyway. Maybe we could all have dinner together some time. (I’ll invite Bobbi too.)