The Rules Do Not Apply

by Ariel Levy

Until recently, I lived in a world where lost things could always be replaced. But it has been made overwhelmingly clear to me now that anything you think is yours by right can vanish, and what you can do about that is nothing at all.

Writing is communicating with an unknown intimate who is always available, the way the faithful can turn to God.

I got married a few years later—we all did. As we reached our thirtieth birthdays, my friends and I were like kernels of popcorn exploding in a pot: First one, then another, and pretty soon we were all bursting into matrimony.

To become a mother, I feared, was to relinquish your status as the protagonist of your own life.

Daring to think that the rules do not apply is the mark of a visionary. It’s also a symptom of narcissism.

I would not kick the door off its hinges. I would not choose the muffling comforts of home. I would be the explorer, not the mummy.

an amazing recipe for pork tenderloin and a set of green Depression glass dishes on which to serve it. (You marinate the meat overnight in equal parts orange juice and soy sauce with a few smashed garlic cloves, some brown sugar, and a teaspoon of ginger. Then you put it in the broiler for twelve minutes on each side, and smear apricot preserves all over it while it’s cooling—people think it’s a complicated glaze and get very impressed.)

For years, I would resent that Lucy had chosen not to hear me when I told her—from the very beginning!—that I did not really value monogamy. Eventually, it would occur to me that I had chosen not to hear that it was important to her.

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.

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.

“Gay marriage and gays in the military? That’s what you guys have come up with?” Lamar asked me at one point, incredulous, disheartened. “Your generation wants to fit in,” she charged (not, I felt, unfairly). “I want to be just like you—that’s your deal. That’s the last thing I want.” She shook her head. “We didn’t sit around looking at our phone or looking at our computer or looking at the television. We didn’t sit around looking at screens. We didn’t wait for a screen to give us a signal to do something: We were off doing whatever we wanted.”

“Look at Grandma,” my mother would say. “You never want to be dependent on a man.” 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.

After the initial thrill of the many kinds of panty liners, the sprouting breasts and blossoming hips, we were faced with the Sisyphean task of managing our fertility. Pregnancy—we were taught, if we were privileged—was something awful that went with sex, just as AIDS and genital warts went with sex, unless you used condoms (and even then, be really careful). It was made clear that sexually transmitted diseases and teen pregnancy were simply not for us: We were to use birth control and go to college and if we somehow got pregnant too soon or with the wrong guy, we were to abort. There was no mention of the possibility that we might want to get pregnant too late.

THE DIFFERENCE BETWEEN LUCY’S affair with me, and my affair with someone I was sure I’d never love, is that Lucy thought I was a ladder to a new life. I thought I was having a smutty daydream. It is Lucy’s vision that sounds like fantasy—like midlife crisis, when you consider that she was in her forties, and I was in my twenties, and that we fell in love the first night we met. But it was my vision of infidelity that turned out to be delusional.

wanted what she had wanted, what we all want: everything. We want a mate who feels like family and a lover who is exotic, surprising. We want to be youthful adventurers and middle-aged mothers. We want intimacy and autonomy, safety and stimulation, reassurance and novelty, coziness and thrills. But we can’t have it all.

(People sometimes tell me that they’re baffled by bisexuality: They are convinced that having sex with women is totally different from having sex with men. But it isn’t. No more than having sex with anyone is totally different from having sex with anyone else.)

I began to feel claustrophobic in my own house. I shared our cat’s fevered desperation to find an open window, a door left ajar, a precious opportunity to escape and go…where? I am afraid that I will pull this house apart, I wrote in my journal. And then it will be winter and I’ll be outside, freezing. The thought of leaving Lucy made me feel physically ill. To abandon my best friend in the world? Unbearable. But then I was already gone. The parallel narrative of my secret, imagined other life was always swallowing my attention, the life in which I was single, vibrant, liberated.

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.

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.

A wild feeling from the deepest part of me, as deep and dark as the will to survive, for someone whom I alone had known during his whisper of a life. We were blood. Grief is another world. Like the carnal world, it is one where reason doesn’t work. Logically, I knew that the person I’d lost was not fully formed, that he was the possibility of a person. But without him I was gutted. If my baby could not somehow be returned to me, nothing would ever be right again. This bitter winter would go on forever.

The information was all in and it was all terrible and there was nothing to be done to fix any of it. My competent self—so strong, since childhood, so perspicacious, always looking for opportunities, adventures, glory, always trying to protect me from defeat—had been crushed. The wide-open blue forever had spoken: You control nothing.

Nature is wasteful, he had said. That’s why there are so many pinecones on the forest floor—his mother had pointed them out to him once when he was a child, and explained that nature starts many more projects than she can ever finish.

When I was young. 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.

She had her own pain. She had her own reasons. That was something I never saw clearly before motherhood flashed in front of my eyes, impairing and intensifying my vision. Nothing has looked entirely the same since.

Only much later did I see that it had never mattered which questions I had asked her or how shrewdly I had scrutinized her answers. Addicts lie. (This should not have been so difficult for me to understand: When I was addicted to lust, I lied all the time, sometimes to cover my tracks, and sometimes purely out of habit.)

The reason she was friends with David was that he’d moved to the suburbs, where he didn’t know anyone. The reason he didn’t know anyone was that his best friends (his real friends) had grown up with him in those same suburbs and vowed never to return, because even though Westchester is tranquil and wonderfully vegetated, there is an empty stillness that falls there every day from New Year’s until the crocuses come up that can suck the joy right out of life. Was

my life had collapsed. Unlike the people at the party, with their homes full of spouses and children, I was as alone and unmoored as I’d been twenty years ago, in these same suburbs, hanging out with the same boys. In the intervening decades, I’d thought I was going somewhere. But I had just been driving around.

For some reason, I still have Matt. I still have Emma. I still have New York, and I am still a writer. And the truth is, the ten or twenty minutes I was somebody’s mother were black magic. There is nothing I would trade them for. There is no place I would rather have seen.

she stops speaking to me and I don’t think that I can bear it. I feel severed and deprived, though I’m the one who said I wanted out.

My job is to interpret, and to communicate my interpretation persuasively to other people. The idea that in life, unlike in writing, the drive to analyze and influence might be something worth relinquishing was to me a revelation.

I asked if she’d ever wanted children. She told me, “Everybody doesn’t get everything.” It sounded depressing to me at the time, a statement of defeat. Now admitting it seems like the obvious and essential work of growing up. Everybody doesn’t get everything: as natural and unavoidable as mortality.