The Hours

by Michael Cunningham

if men were the brutes and women the angels—if it were as simple as that. Virginia thinks of Leonard frowning over the proofs, intent on scouring away not only the setting errors but whatever taint of mediocrity errors imply.

She would like to lie down in its place. No denying it, she would like that. Vanessa and Julian can go on about their business, their tea and travels, while she, Virginia, a bird-sized Virginia, lets herself metamorphose from an angular, difficult woman into an ornament on a hat; a foolish, uncaring thing.

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

What a remarkable thing, these genetic trip wires, the way a body can sail along essentially unaltered, decade after decade, and then in a few years capitulate to age.

After all that, Louis appears, and will be remembered, as a sad man complaining about love.

He blames Sally for the apartment. It’s Sally’s influence, Sally’s taste. Sally and Clarissa live in a perfect replica of an upper-class West Village apartment; you imagine somebody’s assistant striding through with a clipboard: French leather armchairs, check; Stickley table, check; linen-colored walls hung with botanical prints, check; bookshelves studded with small treasures acquired abroad, check. Even the eccentricities—the flea-market mirror frame covered in seashells, the scaly old South American chest painted with leering mermaids—feel calculated, as if the art director had looked it all over and said, “It isn’t convincing enough yet, we need more things to tell us who these people really are

Louis thinks of photographs of young soldiers, firm-featured boys serene in their uniforms; boys who died before the age of twenty and who live on as the embodiment of wasted promise, in photo albums or on side tables, beautiful and confident, unfazed by their doom, as the living survive jobs and errands, disappointing holidays.

She seems to look out at the aging world from a past realm; she seems as sad and innocent and invincible as the dead do in photographs.

She is, Louis decides, a handsome, ordinary woman. She is exactly that, neither more nor less.

She always surprises you this way, by knowing more than you think she does. Louis wonders if they’re calculated, these little demonstrations of self-knowledge that pepper Clarissa’s wise, hostessy performance. She seems, at times, to have read your thoughts.

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.

These spasms of emotion take him constantly. A song can do it; even the sight of an old dog. They pass. They usually pass. This time, though, tears start falling from his eyes almost before he knows it will happen, and for a moment a compartment of his being (the same compartment that counts steps, sips, claps) says to itself, He’s crying, how strange.

What he remembers with perfect clarity is sitting on a train headed for Madrid, feeling the sort of happiness he imagined spirits might feel, freed of their earthly bodies but still possessed of their essential selves.

Love is deep, a mystery—who wants to understand its every particular?

She wants (she admits to herself) a dream of a cake manifested as an actual cake; a cake invested with an undeniable and profound sense of comfort, of bounty. She wants to have baked a cake that banishes sorrow, even if only for a little while. She wants to have produced something marvelous; something that would be marvelous even to those who do not love her.

Her nervousness along with her anger and disappointment in herself are all perfectly recognizable to her but they now reside elsewhere.

It seems, somehow, that she has left her own world and entered the realm of the book.

It is possible to die. Laura thinks, suddenly, of how she—how anyone—can make a choice like that. It is a reckless, vertiginous thought, slightly disembodied—it announces itself inside her head, faintly but distinctly, like a voice crackling from a distant radio station. She could decide to die. It is an abstract, shimmering notion, not particularly morbid.

It could, she thinks, be deeply comforting; it might feel so free: to simply go away. To say to them all, I couldn’t manage, you had no idea; I didn’t want to try anymore. There might, she thinks, be a dreadful beauty in it, like an ice field or a desert in early morning.

We thought she was all right, we thought her sorrows were ordinary ones. We had no idea.

Still, she is glad to know (for somehow, suddenly, she knows) that it is possible to stop living. There is comfort in facing the full range of options; in considering all your choices, fearlessly and without guile.

It should be a greater mind than Clarissa’s; it should be someone with sorrow and genius enough to turn away from the seductions of the world, its cups and its coats.

It seems that some force of conventionality exerts itself, potent as the gravitational pull. Even if you’ve been defiant all your life; if you’ve raised a daughter as honorably as you knew how, in a house of women (the father no more than a numbered vial, sorry, Julia, no way of finding him)—even with all that, it seems you find yourself standing one day on a Persian rug, full of motherly disapproval and sour, wounded feelings, facing a girl who despises you (she still must, mustn’t she?) for depriving her of a father. Maybe when she’s finished with her cigarette, she’d like to come in and say hello

Clarissa Vaughan is not the enemy. Clarissa Vaughan is only deluded, neither more nor less than that. She believes that by obeying the rules she can have what men have. She’s bought the ticket. It isn’t her fault. Still, Mary would like to grab Clarissa’s shirtfront and cry out, You honestly believe that if they come to round up the deviants, they won’t stop at your door, don’t you? You really are that foolish

Fraud, Clarissa thinks. You’ve fooled my daughter, but you don’t fool me. I know a conquistador when I see one. I know all about making a splash. It isn’t hard. If you shout loud enough, for long enough, a crowd will gather to see what all the noise is about. It’s the nature of crowds. They don’t stay long, unless you give them reason. You’re just as bad as most men, just that aggressive, just that self-aggrandizing, and your hour will come and go.

Mary is almost overwhelmed by desire and by something else, a subtler and more exquisitely painful nerve that branches through her desire. Julia inspires in her an erotic patriotism, as if Julia were the distant country in which Mary was born and from which she has been expelled.

On her writing stand in an unlit room lie the pages of the new novel, about which she cherishes extravagant hopes and which, at this moment, she fears (she believes she knows) will prove arid and weak, devoid of true feeling; a dead end.

is enough, she tells herself. She strives to believe that. It is enough to be in this house, delivered from the war, with a night’s reading ahead of her, and then sleep, and then work again in the morning. It is enough that the streetlamps throw yellow shadows into the trees.

No, it’s the memory of the headache, it’s her fear of the headache, both of them so vivid as to be at least briefly indistinguishable from an onset of the headache itself.

She knows she will leave almost before she decides to leave. A walk; she will simply take a walk. She will be back in half an hour, or less.

She thinks of how much more space a being occupies in life than it does in death; how much illusion of size is contained in gestures and movements, in breathing. Dead, we are revealed in our true dimensions, and they are surprisingly modest.

The devil is a headache; the devil is a voice inside a wall; the devil is a fin breaking through dark waves. The devil is the brief, twittering nothing that was a thrush’s life. The devil sucks all the beauty from the world, all the hope, and what remains when the devil has finished is a realm of the living dead—joyless, suffocating. Virginia feels, right now, a certain tragic grandeur, for the devil is many things but he is not petty, not sentimental; he seethes with a lethal, intolerable truth. Right now, walking, free of her headache, free of the voices, she can face the devil, but she must keep walking, she must not turn back.

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.

She thinks suddenly of how frail men are; how full of terror.

There is no more powerful force in the world, she thinks, than fame.

This is a resigned and final sigh, running toward the nasal register, meaningful in its lack of drama. It is like the first disinterested sigh a lover sends over the telephone wires, the sigh that signals the earliest beginning of the end.

It’s Walter’s vanity that’s unbearable. It’s knowing that as he says the correct and respectful things—even as he quite possibly feels the correct and respectful things—he’s thinking, too, of how fine it is to be the semifamous novelist Walter Hardy, friend to movie stars and poets, still healthy and muscular past the age of forty. He would be more comic if he had less influence in the world.

Death and resurrection are always mesmerizing, Sally thinks, and it doesn’t seem to matter much whether they involve the hero, the villain, or the clown.

love you” is easy enough. “I love you” has become almost ordinary, being said not only on anniversaries and birthdays but spontaneously, in bed or at the kitchen sink or even in cabs within hearing of foreign drivers who believe women should walk three paces behind their husbands.

What she wants to say has to do with all the people who’ve died; it has to do with her own feelings of enormous good fortune and imminent, devastating loss. If anything happens to Clarissa she, Sally, will go on living but she will not, exactly, survive. She will not be all right. What she wants to say has to do not only with joy but with the penetrating, constant fear that is joy’s other half. She can bear the thought of her own death but cannot bear the thought of Clarissa’s. This love of theirs, with its reassuring domesticity and its easy silences, its permanence, has yoked Sally directly to the machinery of mortality itself.

She looks at Sally with a peculiar expression, more disoriented than stricken, as if she is not quite sure who she is, and Sally briefly experiences an intimation of the decline to come. 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.

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.

The weight and grain of life reassert themselves; the nowhere feeling vanishes.

He is devoted, entirely, to the observation and deciphering of her, because without her there is no world at all.

He will watch her forever. He will always know when something is wrong. He will always know precisely when and how much she has failed.

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.

“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 just feel so sad. What I wanted to do seemed simple. I wanted to create something alive and shocking enough that it could stand beside a morning in somebody’s life. The most ordinary morning. Imagine, trying to do that. What foolishness.”

He seems so certain, so serene, that she briefly imagines it hasn’t happened at all.