Scaffolding

by Lauren Elkin

I have a funny memory like that. Things disappear until I happen to bump up against the right drawer in my brain and then it pops open and – there it is! The thing I was looking for.

We fetishise, of course, originality.

Do you ever think about the people who moved into the apartments you didn’t? she asks. Like if you’d taken the place, they’d be living somewhere else. Your decision has had an immediate impact on the lives of total strangers.

Where does this confidence come from? Is it innate? Is it money?

But she doesn’t know if she really likes girls or if she desires them because all the pornography is from heterosexual male perspectives so she’s been taught to desire women. What would our sexuality look like without the male gaze, she asks.

There’s so much to be done in here, it’s a minefield of other people’s choices, I feel like I’m fighting with the past.

As for the apartment itself, it had a weird feeling of gratitude, like a dog who has finally been adopted by owners it has a good feeling about. But there’s something else too, some presence. Maybe hers. At least that’s how it feels as long as the owls are still hanging out in our kitchen. She’s a kindly spirit, I think, but she has to go. There are too many people living in our apartment.

And you hear about this kind of thing driving couples apart, like they can’t deal with their unhappiness if they’re constantly faced with the other’s uncontainable sadness.

But when I wake up alone every morning, when I climb into bed by myself; when I prepare dinner for one and eat in front of my laptop, binge-watching whatever Netflix series is getting me through the week, I know that all I want is for us to get back to normal.

ready in the morning, or to go to sleep at night. Leaving aside the complicated network of decisions involved in putting clothes on, there are a nearly infinite number of products which must be employed in the ongoing campaign to appear young, thin, well rested, and, if I’m lucky, and all the potions have worked, pretty.

These are the tools that make me a human giving a performance of a certain kind of femininity, instead of a conglomerate of organs, bones, flesh, a former baby-house, now a neutral organism with no particular purpose except its own continuation. The elements of my daily refacing, and the first lines of defence against the inevitable.

I have patients whose sole reason for being in my office is that they are ageing. The mind frays like the body, sometimes with alarm.

Sometimes I wish I could reach out to the girl I used to be, and tell her something, though I have no idea what.

Alone in the apartment is my preferred state. I can eat what I want, when I want. Watch what I want, while I eat what I want. Clean up the next day. No longer having to organise my day around other people, David, patients. And there’s something more physical about the aloneness, as well. I feel the space around me differently. It’s not that it’s quieter; it is a bodily experience of quiet. I am in the air differently.

TU N’ES PAS SEULE

transference is the explanation for why we can never really know the people we live with – because we invent them for ourselves, instead of seeing them as they are. We cannot see each other plain, she says meaningfully.

Everyone I had loved, I had loved as much as him. And those I had lost, perhaps, although I would never admit it to him, I might even have loved more, because they were lost, because I had known I would lose them. But maybe that’s a different kind of love, the doomed kind, whereas we had the enduring kind, the don’t-have-to-work-too-hard kind.

The problem with being the last person a person will ever love is just that: you’re last. You come after a long list of desires and longings and carnal fits and temporary satiations. I found this fact almost unbearable.

I didn’t want to have another set of measurements to compare myself to. I wanted to keep the ghosts out of the bedroom. To come to each other new. How impossible that is.

Jealousy is about wanting to know more about the people we love, and knowing we’ll never be able to. Who is he when you’re not there?

it’s less about your coming up with a narrative that explains and cures your symptoms and more about what might be suggested during the therapeutic process, how the way we talk about our lives encodes the way we think about them, the things we want, our desires, how we might learn to live with them instead of being led by them. You’ll never be cured, so to speak. There’s no cure for being human.

Separation is one of the two things we fear most. The other thing is coming together.

desire is filtered through everything we have ever thought and heard and encountered, everything the culture has taught us about desire. Language isn’t innocent; the body isn’t innocent.

Spontaneous abortion. A better term than the English miscarriage, as though I had carried it badly, or wrongly, though the association with abortion seems misleading, given the weightiness of that term.

I have missed him for far longer than the time we actually spent together, not more than a year.

No one’s happy. And what’s with this thing about everyone having to be happy, anyway? An American import.

One of those dreams where I find a whole other wing to my apartment that I was previously unaware of. Great joy to find there is new space in which to be. Followed by anxiety: what am I going to do with it?

You have a failed pregnancy, a breakdown, you reach the point where you figure that if you’re going insane there’s a good chance it’s because of the wallpaper. At least it’s not yellow.

Stasis, she says. You are enjoying the fixation of your desire. You’re afraid to get it moving again.

I just don’t think it’s necessary to get married. It’s a form of discipline developed to keep society moving along like a big normative machine. And I don’t think married people should have special privileges unmarried people don’t have.

I can’t imagine what it would be like to be together without having children in front of you, it just sounds like a big blank. What are you going to do, travel? To see what? What would you be moving toward? What else would you be living for? Sex? Companionship? Being? Without the forward straining what is there to give you urgency? Just an inevitable end to everything?

Love isn’t about straining toward something, she says. Other people try to move you forward. And then I never think I love anyone enough to want to tie myself to them for all eternity,

About the point of love, where we want it to take us, what we want from it. Everyone I’ve loved, I’ve loved with obsessive focus. I need an object, any object. If they resist, or try to leave me, I dazzle them with the power, the never-before-encountered power of my love. They have never seen love like that before, been loved like that before. It is irresistible to them to be loved in such a way. I point everything I’ve got at them, I shoot it all, until, one day, it’s over. I can’t stand to be around them.

There is something exciting about him, but not threatening. I have sometimes wondered if finding him and being happy with him was just a question of calming down, of maturing. There are times when I wonder if I will remain this calm forever.

Monday comes and goes, and I do not go in to work. I do not look at my emails. I do not answer my phone. OK Bartleby, I think, what’s all this about?

I move very quickly at the beginnings of things. I can’t stand the beginnings of things.

It’s terrifying to accept the essential otherness of the people we care for.

it’s a nod to convention, it takes time and water and shampoo and plastic and chemicals to maintain it on my head like an exotic plant, why not shave it all off and be done with hair, femininity, the big beauty show?

David’s read Life a User’s Manual half a dozen times, it’s one of the reasons I gave him a second look,

The most interesting part of infidelity isn’t will they or won’t they, it’s everything else around it. What if it’s all fine?

Whatever disruption may come, in that sense, it has to be absorbed back into the relationship, and I think it was, I really think it was.

whether psychoanalysis ought to be socially transformative to justify its existence. I’d always assumed it was its own justification, that its capacity for change was baked in. Isn’t there necessarily potential for society if we work with people one at a time? The collective is comprised of individuals, after all. Or have I just been kidding myself, is it all just voyeurism?

In Judaism, I’ve learned that when someone dies they cover the mirrors with sheets. They tear their clothes and sit on low stools. But it’s the mirror-draping that resonates with me. It’s not only so you can’t see yourself, to ward off vanity. It’s to keep the self you were before the tragedy inside the mirror. Not to displace that self, that more-or-less intact self, with this torn, suddenly decaying self.

Even people we specifically eliminated from our lives are still there, lingering behind the curtain of the past. Some change in the air and the curtain lifts, exposes some memory, and resettles. I find this comforting. To think I’m still there, behind his curtains.

In fidelity there are never two of you alone together.

you make all your plans and build all your projects but how many of them are yours, and how many of them are fragments of someone else’s life?

Florence belongs to me and it’s bad enough to share her with her past, how can I share her with a child.

Florence, -rence, -rence c’est moi qui ai toutes les chances d’rester, rester, rester par terre avec tes jolis pieds. Florence, -rence, -rence je donnerai toute la France si un jour tu peux m’accorder l’honneur de t’faire prendre le pied.

there is enough leftover erotic charge that when he reaches for me, I respond to him, and with him enjoy the desire that was forestalled this afternoon. It seems to me that this is exactly how it should work, and exactly not how it is supposed to work. But why shouldn’t I? I think as I lie beside him. Why shouldn’t we all?

we are forging something new, a new country, outside the bonds of a state-sanctioned relationship, but also engaged in something very old, the adulterous liaison, both of us escaping the official containers of our marriages, which are sometimes too small for all that we are, and feel ourselves to be.