The Rules Do Not Apply

by Ariel Levy

Sometimes our parents were dazzled by the sense of possibility they’d bestowed upon us. Other times, they were aghast to recognize their own entitlement, staring back at them magnified in the mirror of their offspring.

“A child, yes, is a vortex of anxieties,” Elena Ferrante wrote in her novel The Lost Daughter.

BUT SOMEHOW, IF YOU want to badly enough, you can always report a story. It feels like magic but it works like carpentry. You build a frame, and then you build on that, and pretty soon you have something to stand on so you can hammer away at a height that was initially out of reach.

As far as I could tell, there were two modes of cooking: festive and obligatory.

There was a corresponding orbit of moods this obligatory food preparation induced in my mother: no-nonsense competence, spunky pride, and seething resentment. From my mother, I learned that you can make your family feel a wonderful sense of protected indulgence by cooking them something with jolly care. I also learned that you can launch a powerful campaign of resistance by mincing garlic like a martyr.

He was a cloud of hedonism blowing into our household—which usually gloried in its own imaginary deprivation (in contrast to the indulgences all around us: Larchmont with its Lexuses). With Marcus’s coming, the rules and the ambiance and the cuisine changed.

Women of my generation were given the lavish gift of our own agency by feminism—a belief that we could decide for ourselves how we would live, what would become of us. Writers may be particularly susceptible to this outlook, because we are accustomed to the power of authorship. (Even if you write nonfiction, you still control how the story unfolds.) Life was complying with my story.

There were shadows I saw out of the corner of my eye that looked like problems waiting to become real, but you never know with shadows.

The fear of ending up like Tanya, cutting coupons in a one-room efficiency surrounded by strangers, made me vigilant like my parents, anxious that the poverty of our ancestors was always just one wrong move away.

John Updike wrote that marriage is like two people locked up with one lesson to read, over and over, until the words become madness.

But it was my vision of infidelity that turned out to be delusional. I thought I could be like a French man with a mistress in a movie . . . that I could step outside of my life for a few gleaming hours from time to time and then return to it, without consequence, or with the sole consequence being my own satisfaction (or reduced dissatisfaction).

Reason, language, gender—and also loyalty, morality, decency—simply aren’t currency in the carnal world. This world is value-neutral. This world is inside out.

It is not an easy thing to deny yourself once you know exactly where to get it.

I was struck by Joyce Carol Oates’s description of two fighters clutching each other in the ring: They form “a knot of sorts, tightly, cruelly knotted, there to be untied. You can’t, but you must, untie it. You must—but you can’t.”

It was awful having someone you loved swallowed up all the time. It was bad banging on the door for your mother while she dipped into her other life in the next room. But I knew now that it had been awful for her, too—that lurching between lives is hell.

Even if one life is manifest and the other is mostly hypothetical, the inability to occupy your own reality is torment, is torture. It is sin and punishment all in one.

“I think we both went into it understanding it was for life,” he told me. “I’ve always said, if you believe divorce is an option, you’ll take it.”

What peace it must be to know that someone is yours, no matter what—it is ordained, can never be otherwise.

You have an affair because you are not getting what you want from your loved one. You want more: more love, more sex, more attention, more fun. You want someone to look at you with lust—after years of laundry—transforming you into something radiant.

You want it, you need it, you owe it to yourself to get it. To live any other way is to be muffled and gray and marching meaninglessly toward death. You want what she gave you at the start (but what you had hoped would expand and intensify instead of shrinking until you find yourself so sad, so resentful, you can barely stand to be you). You have an affair to get for yourself what you wish would come from the person you love the most. And then you have broken her heart and she can never give you any of it ever again.

Addictions that are fed get worse, though, not better.

You have to be that way when you’re addicted to something. In order to finish your cigarette, you have to cordon off the knowledge that it’s killing you. (And if you are addicted, you will—it won’t even feel like a choice.)

Their family didn’t seem like a burden; it seemed like a party. The idea bloomed in my head that being ruled by something other than my own wishes and wanderlust might be a pleasure, a release.

“People are not perfect,” Yiota had said . . . and look at her. Bohemian but rooted, surrounded by children and cooking smells, out at all hours with her husband, drinking ouzo and watching plate-smashers dance. A spirited, sensuous matriarch who met human frailty with a redheaded shrug of broad-mindedness. The important thing was to love.

It is not a good feeling being right about something you have suspected when you finally gain undeniable confirmation that it’s true. It is not the satisfying sensation of everything slipping into place for which you have yearned.

TIME WOULD NOT MOVE. I thought of Simone de Beauvoir’s novel The Woman Destroyed. “Has my watch stopped?” she wrote. “No. But its hands do not seem to be going around.

Don’t look at them. Think of something else—anything else; think of yesterday, a calm, ordinary, easy-flowing day, in spite of the nervous tension of waiting.”

When I had no idea that all over the city, all over the world, there were people walking around sealed in their own universes of loss, independent solar systems of suffering closed off from the regular world, where things make sense and language is all you need to tell the truth.