The Hours

by Michael Cunningham

Laura Brown is trying to lose herself. No, that’s not it exactly—she is trying to keep herself by gaining entry into a parallel world.

as if reading were the singular and obvious first task of the day, the only viable way to negotiate the transit from sleep to obligation.

First come the headaches, which are not in any way ordinary pain (“headache” has always seemed an inadequate term for them, but to call them by any other would be too melodramatic). They infiltrate her. They inhabit rather than merely afflict her, the way viruses inhabit their hosts. Strands of pain announce themselves, throw shivers of brightness into her eyes so insistently she must remind herself that others can’t see them. Pain colonizes her, quickly replaces what was Virginia with more and more of itself, and its advance is so forceful, its jagged contours so distinct, that she can’t help imagining it as an entity with a life of its own. She might see it while walking with Leonard in the square, a scintillating silver-white mass floating over the cobblestones, randomly spiked, fluid but whole, like a jellyfish. “What’s that?” Leonard would ask. “It’s my headache,” she’d answer. “Please ignore it.”

It seems she will be fine. She will not lose hope. She will not mourn her lost possibilities, her unexplored talents (what if she has no talents, after all?). She will remain devoted to her son, her husband, her home and duties, all her gifts. She will want this second child.

The trick will be to render intact the magnitude of Clarissa’s miniature but very real desperation; to fully convince the reader that, for her, domestic defeats are every bit as devastating as are lost battles to a general.

They are only choices, one thing and then another, yes or no, and she sees how easily she could slip out of this life—these empty and arbitrary comforts.

Going uninvited feels in some way like a minor demonstration of the world’s ability to get along without her.

That’s who I was. That’s who I am—a decent woman with a good apartment, with a stable and affectionate marriage, giving a party. Venture too far for love, she tells herself, and you renounce citizenship in the country you’ve made for yourself. You end up just sailing from port to port.

There is still that singular perfection, and it’s perfect in part because it seemed, at the time, so clearly to promise more. Now she knows: That was the moment, right then. There has been no other.

Why, she wonders, does it seem that she could give him anything, anything at all, and receive essentially the same response. Why does he desire nothing, really, beyond what he’s already got?

Her cake is a failure, but she is loved anyway. She is loved, she thinks, in more or less the way the gifts will be appreciated: because they’ve been given with good intentions, because they exist, because they are part of a world in which one wants what one gets.

What would she prefer, then? Would she rather have her gifts scorned, her cake sneered at? Of course not. She wants to be loved. She wants to be a competent mother reading calmly to her child; she wants to be a wife who sets a perfect table. She does not want, not at all, to be the strange woman, the pathetic creature, full of quirks and rages, solitary, sulking, tolerated but not loved. Virginia Woolf put a stone into the pocket of her coat, walked into a river, and drowned. Laura will not let herself go morbid. She’ll make the beds, vacuum, cook the birthday dinner. She will not mind, about anything.

“It’s cute,” Kitty says, and punctures Laura’s brash, cigarette self at its inception. The cake is cute, Kitty tells her, the way a child’s painting might be cute. It is sweet and touching in its heartfelt, agonizingly sincere discrepancy between ambition and facility. Laura understands: There are two choices only. You can be capable or uncaring. You can produce a masterful cake by your own hand or, barring that, light a cigarette, declare yourself hopeless at such projects, pour yourself another cup of coffee, and order a cake from the bakery. Laura is an artisan who has tried, and failed, publicly. She has produced something cute, when she had hoped (it’s embarrassing, but true) to produce something of beauty.

She thinks of the gifts she’s bought her husband; the gifts he will appreciate, even cherish, but which he does not in any way want. Why did she marry him? She married him out of love. She married him out of guilt; out of fear of being alone; out of patriotism. He was simply too good, too kind, too earnest, too sweet-smelling not to marry. He had suffered so much. He wanted her.

The world is already, subtly, beginning to leave her behind.

She sits the way one sits among strangers on a train.

“Darling,” says Virginia, holding her sister’s shoulders in her hands. “If I tell you I’m enchanted to see you now, I’m sure you can imagine how ecstatic I’d have been to see you at the hour you were actually expected.”

(Does he believe the bird has left a residue of death on his hands? Does he believe good English soap and one of Aunt Virginia’s towels will wash it away?)

Clarissa, she thinks, is not the bride of death after all. Clarissa is the bed in which the bride is laid.

“It’s a little complicated, though,” he says. “You see, I’ve fallen in love.” “Really?” “His name is Hunter. Hunter Craydon.” “Hunter Craydon. Well.” “He was a student of mine last year,” Louis says. Clarissa leans back, sighs impatiently. This would be the fourth, at least of the ones she knows about. She would like to grab Louis and say, You have to age better than this. I can’t stand to see you make so much of yourself and then offer it all to some boy just because he happens to be pretty and young.

The truth is that he does not love Hunter and Hunter does not love him. They are having an affair; only an affair. He fails to think of him for hours at a time. Hunter has other boyfriends, a whole future planned, and when he’s moved on, Louis has to admit, privately, that he won’t much miss Hunter’s shrill laugh, his chipped front tooth, his petulant silences. There is so little love in the world.

Is this what it’s like to go crazy? She’d never imagined it like this—when she’d thought of someone (a woman like herself) losing her mind, she’d imagined shrieks and wails, hallucinations; but at that moment it had seemed clear that there was another way, far quieter; a way that was numb and hopeless, flat, so much so that an emotion as strong as sorrow would have been a relief.

She wants to have produced something marvelous; something that would be marvelous even to those who do not love her.

There is surprisingly little to enter, in this immense bright smoky landscape, and what she wants—someplace private, silent, where she can read, where she can think—is not readily available. If she goes to a store or restaurant, she’ll have to perform—she’ll have to pretend to need or want

She has never lied like that before, not to someone she doesn’t know or love.

How could any of them recover from something like that? Nothing she might do as a living wife and mother, no lapse, no fit of rage or depression, could possibly compare. It would be, simply, evil. It would punch a hole in the atmosphere, through which everything she’s created—the orderly days, the lighted windows, the table laid for supper—would be sucked away.

And here, of course, is the dilemma: he’s entirely right and horribly wrong at the same time. She is better, she is safer, if she rests in Richmond; if she does not speak too much, write too much, feel too much; if she does not travel impetuously to London and walk through its streets; and yet she is dying this way, she is gently dying on a bed of roses. Better, really, to face the fin in the water than to live in hiding,

Leonard, who has clearly come out in a hurry, still wearing his leather slippers, and who looks exceedingly thin—gaunt—in his vest and corduroy jacket, his open collar. Although he has come after her like a constable or proctor, a figure of remonstrance, she is impressed by how small he seems, in slippers on Kew Road; how middle-aged and ordinary. She sees him, briefly, as a stranger might see him: merely another of the many men who walk on streets. She is sad for him, and strangely moved. She manages an ironic smile.

She imagines him searching the house for her, checking the garden. She thinks of him rushing out, past the body of the thrush, through the gate, down the hill. She is suddenly, immensely sorry for him. She should, she knows, tell him that his premonition was not entirely wrong; that she had in fact staged an escape of sorts, and had in fact meant to disappear, if only for a few hours.

It is like the first disinterested sigh a lover sends over the telephone wires, the sigh that signals the earliest beginning of the end. Has Oliver used that sigh in a movie? Or has someone else, somebody real, sighed like that into Sally’s ear long ago?

If anything happens to Clarissa she, Sally, will go on living but she will not, exactly, survive.

If they both survive long enough, if they stay together (and how, after all this, could they part?), they will watch each other fade.

Sally hands the flowers to her and for a moment they are both simply and entirely happy. They are present, right now, and they have managed, somehow, over the course of eighteen years, to continue loving each other. It is enough. At this moment, it is enough.

She is overtaken by a sensation of unbeing. There is no other word for it. Standing beside her ticking car, facing Mrs. Latch’s garage (the plaster squirrels throw long shadows), she is no one; she is nothing. It seems, briefly, that by going to the hotel she has slipped out of her life, and this driveway, this garage, are utterly strange to her.

She reminds herself: she has to retrieve her child, take him home, and finish assembling her husband’s birthday dinner. She has to do those ordinary things.

It’s the secrecy, she tells herself; it’s the strangeness of what she’s just done, though there’s no real harm in it, is there? She’s not meeting a lover, like some wife from a cheap romance. She simply went away for a few hours, read her book, and came back. It’s a secret only because she can’t quite think how she’d explain, well, any of it—the kiss, the cake, the panicky moment when her car topped Chavez Ravine. She certainly doesn’t know how she’d explain two and a half hours spent reading in a rented room.

Clarissa draws a breath, and another. She is surprisingly calm—she can feel herself acting well in a difficult situation—but at the same time is removed from herself, from the room, as if she is witnessing something that’s already happened. It feels like a memory. Something within her, something like a voice but not a voice, an inner knowledge all but indistinguishable from the pump of her heart, says, Once I found Richard sitting on a window ledge five stories above the ground.

“But there are still the hours, aren’t there? One and then another, and you get through that one and then, my god, there’s another. I’m so sick.”

“I don’t think two people could have been happier than we’ve been.”

She glances up at the ascending rows of windows, the hanging laundry, the perfect square of sky bisected by one thin blue-white blade of a cloud, and begins to understand that no one knows yet. No one has seen or heard Richard fall.

A spasm of fury rises unexpectedly, catches in her throat. He is coarse, gross, stupid; he has sprayed spit onto the cake. She herself is trapped here forever, posing as a wife. She must get through this night, and then tomorrow morning, and then another night here, in these rooms, with nowhere else to go. She must please; she must continue.

It seems he is always making a wish, every moment, and that his wishes, like his father’s, have mainly to do with continuance. Like his father, what he wants most ardently is more of what he’s already got (though, of course, if asked about the nature of his wishes, he would immediately rattle off a long list of toys, both actual and imaginary). Like his father he senses that more of this is precisely what they may very well not get.

Laura reads the moment as it passes. Here it is, she thinks; there it goes. The page is about to turn. She smiles at her son, serenely, from a distance. He smiles back. He licks the end of a burnt-out candle. He makes another wish.

She will go to the theater and concert halls. She will go to parties. She will haunt the streets, see everything, fill herself up with stories. …life; London… She will write and write. She will finish this book, then write another. She will remain sane and she will live as she was meant to live, richly and deeply, among others of her kind, in full possession and command of her gifts.

one kiss, like the singular enchanted kisses in fairy tales, and Clarissa will carry the memory of that kiss, the soaring hope of it, all her life. She will never find a love like that which the lone kiss seemed to offer.

Virginia stands in the doorway, watching the shifting patterns as she would watch waves break on a beach. Yes, Clarissa will have loved a woman. Clarissa will have kissed a woman, only once. Clarissa will be bereaved, deeply lonely, but she will not die. She will be too much in love with life, with London. Virginia imagines someone else, yes, someone strong of body but frail-minded; someone with a touch of genius, of poetry, ground under by the wheels of the world, by war and government, by doctors; a someone who is, technically speaking, insane, because that person sees meaning everywhere, knows that trees are sentient beings and sparrows sing in Greek. Yes, someone like that. Clarissa, sane Clarissa—exultant, ordinary Clarissa—will go on, loving London, loving her life of ordinary pleasures, and someone else, a deranged poet, a visionary, will be the one to die.

She might, at this moment, be nothing but a floating intelligence; not even a brain inside a skull, just a presence that perceives, as a ghost might. Yes, she thinks, this is probably how it must feel to be a ghost. It’s a little like reading, isn’t it—that same sensation of knowing people, settings, situations, without playing any particular part beyond that of the willing observer.

The flowers, of course, remain—brilliant and innocent, exploding from vases in lavish, random profusion, for Clarissa dislikes arrangements. She prefers flowers to look as if they’ve just arrived, in armloads, from the fields.

So Laura Brown, the woman who tried to die and failed at it, the woman who fled her family, is alive when all the others, all those who struggled to survive in her wake, have passed away. She is alive now, after her ex-husband has been carried off by liver cancer, after her daughter has been killed by a drunk driver. She is alive after Richard has jumped from a window onto a bed of broken glass.

Clarissa thinks of Richard on the windowsill; Richard letting go; not jumping, really, but sliding as if from a rock into water. What must it have been like, the moment he had irrevocably done it; the moment he was out of his dark apartment and released into air? What must it have been like to see the alley below, with its blue and brown garbage cans, its spray of amber glass, come rushing up? Was it—could it possibly have been—a pleasure of some kind to crumple onto the pavement and feel (did he momentarily feel?) the skull crack open, all its impulses, its little lights, spilled out? There can’t, Clarissa thinks, have been much pain. There would have been the idea of pain, its first shock, and then—whatever came next.