Elaine E-Book

Will Self

• Herausgeber: Grove Press UK
• Kategorie: Gesellschafts- und Liebesromane
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 395

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2024

Beschreibung

'Elaine is not just a serious work of art, but an unexpected act of filial generosity' Guardian Standing by the mailbox in Ithaca, New York, Elaine thinks of her child and husband, an Ivy League academic, inside her house and wonders...is this it? As she begins to push back against the strictures of her life in 1950s America, she undertakes a disastrous affair that ends her marriage and upends her life. Based on the intimate diaries Will Self's mother kept for over forty years, Elaine is a writer's attempt to reach the almost unimaginable realm of a parent's interior life prior to his own existence. Perhaps the first work of auto-oedipal fiction, Elaine shows Self working in an exciting new dimension, utilizing his stylistic talents to tremendous effect.

Leseprobe

Elaine

Also by Will Self

NOVELS

Cock and Bull

My Idea of Fun

The Sweet Smell ofPsychosis

Great Apes

How the Dead Live

Dorian, an Imitation

The Book of Dave

The Butt

Walking to Hollywood

Umbrella

Shark

Phone

STORY COLLECTIONS

The Quantity Theory of Insanity

Grey Area

Tough, Tough Toys for Tough, Tough BoysDr. Mukti and Other Tales of Woe

Liver: A Fictional Organ witha Surface Anatomy of Four LobesThe Undivided Self: Selected Stories

NONFICTION

Junk Mail

Perfidious Man

Sore Sites

Feeding Frenzy

Psychogeography

Psycho Too

The Unbearable Lightness of Being a Prawn Cracker

Will

Why Read

First published in the United States of America in 2024 by Grove Press, an imprint of Grove Atlantic

First published in Great Britain in 2024 by Grove Press UK, an imprint of Grove Atlantic

This paperback edition published in 2025 by Grove Press UK

Copyright © Will Self, 2024

The moral right of Will Self to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act of 1988.

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior permission of both the copyright owner and the above publisher of the book.

This novel is entirely a work of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the author’s imagination.

No part of this book may be used in any manner in the learning, training or development of generative artificial intelligence technologies (including but not limited to machine learning models and large language models (LLMs)), whether by data scraping, data mining or use in any way to create or form a part of data sets or in any other way.

A CIP record for this book is available from the British Library.

E-book ISBN 978 1 80471 048 7

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Pour Nelly . . .

A woman who cannot, or will not, accept the conditions of her servitude naturally and gracefully, deserves what has happened to me.

Entry from Elaine’s diary, February 1956

Elaine

.1.

November 1955

Standing in the roadway outside 1100 Hemlock Street, Elaine thinks to herself: I’m standing in the road outside my home—our home, one that I make lovingly brand-new every day for the husband and son I love . . . But is this . . . it? Her eyes travel from the buff envelope in her hand to the open mailbox she’s just retrieved it from—then drop: What’s the point in opening one or closing the other, there’s no money to pay the bill, or any of the others already winging in in its wake.

She doesn’t dare look up—yet even the immediate surroundings seem to Elaine an aching void: the vacant lot across the road seethes with ever-greenery—a sinister undulation. An overhead cable, long, low, and swinging between two far-flung posts, soughs in the freshening breeze. Beyond the sparse shrubbery and some isolate trees, the ground falls away, and she senses—rather than sees—the lake below.

Billy delights in telling her just how deep Lake Cayuga is, and how many millions of gallons of fresh water it contains. His mother wishes he wouldn’t—to her it’s only cold . . . and fathomless: an Aegean from which no Odysseus will ever return to claim his Ithaca . . . and his Penelope. While up above? Not only sky, but a metaphysical realm in which man’s fall is inverted so as to become . . . woman’s rise. She seeks the joints of the bricks the road is paved with through the soles of her slippers—and summons the silky touch of riverside sands from summer camps long since struck: With a step that is steady and strong, the Campfire Girls march alo-ong . . .

If only—if only she had skinny, prehensile toes, could cling securely to the earth. But she doesn’t—and she can’t, because the sky is sucking her up: she can feel her body twisting, as, with the assistance of her own whirling mind, she’s helicoptered into the chilly heavens.

You’re not playing in a cloudy playground anymore, she admonishes herself: you’re not in Ohio—and not in New York or Vermont, either, but buried alive here in upstate suburbia—from which the only way out is . . . further up.

Maybe the little house will ascend with her—the wooden cell within which she’s imprisoned. It’s a nice enough cell, at least from the outside—but what difference does that make? You can’t see what color it is when you spend all day inside. Suddenly, she howls aloud: Is this it? Is this fucking it?!

The obscenity is, she thinks, the hairy leg her husband inserted between hers the last time he wanted . . . to take me. And afterwards, he clung to her—although patently not for security, for there’s none of this to be found in the quicksand of her troubled being. Is this it . . . ? Moreover, do it and this refer to the same object: her life, which is full of things that must be wiped, dusted, and ordered. Plaited, plumped, and put out . . . ?

It doesn’t help to say it—but she does anyway, this time aloud, the full pack she smoked yesterday, plus the four or five cigarettes she’s already smoked this morning, muting her voice so it’s halfway between a wheeze and a scream: Can it be . . . that the acme of success . . . for me . . . is being able to do my job as a . . . a . . . housekeeper?

Her words—already damp and decaying—fly up into the fall sky. Evelyn Tate, who lives fifty yards along the street, and who—on no basis whatsoever, apart from her bottle-blondeness and her blousy looks—Elaine has decided is a slattern, has at this very moment arrived beside her own mailbox. She opens it and withdraws a manilla envelope with a glassine window: . . . her own overdue bill, then inclines a little in Elaine’s direction, her pale lips forming the shape associated with the sound hi.

Clearly, she didn’t hear me.

So, Elaine says it again: Can . . . it . . . be . . . that the acme of success for me . . . is being able . . . a-ble . . . to do m-my job as a housekeeper?

Her hysteria is mounting—and as Evelyn Tate’s screen door snaps shut, Elaine says it a third time: Can it be . . . that the acme of success . . . for me . . . is being able . . . to do my job as a housekeeper? Each phrase is separated by a troubled gasp—but it doesn’t matter how fast she babbles or deeply she breathes, the panic has the better of her: I’m going to collapse, she thinks, then be swept up into the sky with my goddamn nightie up around my shoulders . . . The last anyone will ever see of me is the first anyone did: my bare behind, waiting to be smacked.

From some studious and irrelevant part of her brain this spidery thought comes a-creeping: The great complex of associations that are meant to dissolve trauma no longer obtains . . .

And when it’s retreated to a crevice inside her, Elaine rediscovers herself standing in what they call the front room, thinking for the thousandth time, it’d be the drawing one if they could manage that degree of pretension, or the living one if they gave up any ambitions to better themselves.

She stares wildly about at the shopworn props among which they play out their senseless scenes: Billy’s beading lies on top of the pink leather pouf they’ve carried with them since Madison. Elaine remembers buying it in the little secondhand store next to the zoo, where she and John had gone to visit the badgers—because neither of them had ever seen these creatures before, or even knew what they looked like, and since the University’s mascot was a badger . . .

Anyway, they’d looked pretty damn miserable in their empty, cold cage—while the pouf, which John bought to cheer her up, had soon enough become a repository for his notes, when he sat beside it in an armchair, working. It still is—and peering at his crabbed handwriting, she thinks how funny it is he’s been preoccupied for so long, now, with an epic poem written three hundred years ago—one whose subject is a grand battle, fought clear across the cosmos between God and Satan, for the very soul of humanity—while down here in his own backyard . . . the serpent has come a-slithering.

Creatures slimy . . . small . . . hairy—quick and erratic in their movements. At best blundering—at worst quite determinedly aiming for eyes, mouth, hair . . . down there. If metaphors are inventions, poetry is delirium . . .

Which is funny, yes—but funny peculiar, not ha-ha.

Ha, ha! Elaine barks—bitter laughter, bitter as the cud . . . the poor housebound cow chews on as she does the housework.

She picks up the beadwork and puts it in a colorful Mexican bowl John bought for her in Poughkeepsie, the day when they were driving back from New York, and she had a crise de nerfs so bad, he had to stop the car in the main street and, badly panicked himself, ask first one passerby then several more before he could get the name and address of a local doctor.

Elaine remembers how she was curled up sobbing in the hollow beneath the dashboard, and her husband had to laboriously extract her. She recalls, also, the doctor’s waiting room, which had been the family’s parlor . . . for longer than a generation: a grandfather clock tut-tutted crisply in the corner—there were yellowing mezzotints on the striped flock wallpaper and cat hairs woven into the balding pile of the divan’s velvet upholstery. A detail she’d found reassuring—it takes a slattern’s husband to treat a slut.

When the doctor appeared a few minutes later, having interrupted his luncheon, he was carefully wiping his pudgy hands on a monogrammed linen napkin—and Elaine was already disposed to like him. Rosenbloom had been his name . . .

. . . and her tall frame folded into a little leather-covered easy chair, she’d choked and sobbed it all out to him—from time to time lifting her ugly face up from her ugly fists, tearing her ugly brown curls—until the doctor firmly but forcefully clasped her hands, and . . . the fight went out of me.

Kids had been playing ball in the empty lot behind the house, which was an impressive old pile of a place: its finials and a rooster-shaped weathervane surmounting turrets surmounting bay windows surmounting verandas. On any other occasion, Elaine might’ve made a sally along the lines of, say, The good folks of Poughkeepsie must be sick enough to require your services—but not so sick they can’t afford to pay for them!

Which is the sort of thing people do say, when they’re normal and normally sociable.

She remembers a sterilizer wheezing beneath the open window, and sending out puffs of steam to mingle with the kids’ cries. When Doctor Rosenbloom rolled up the sleeve of her blouse to give Elaine the shot, she swooned again from the very tenderness of his touch.

He’d said, You’re taking Miltown regularly, are you, Mrs. Hancock? In which case, it’s probably best you don’t take any more for a day or two—this is a pretty strong preparation . . .

Calmed, somnolent, Elaine slouched along behind her husband as they went in search of some memento of this queer episode: The red-and-yellow Mexican bowl? Oh, my parents bought that to celebrate the end of an attack of hysteria my mother had . . .

Doctor Rosenbloom’s fee had been four dollars—the bowl another two fifty. With a couple of coffees and sandwiches the unscheduled stop had cost them close to ten bucks . . . and as usual we couldn’t afford it, which was why when they were getting back into the Buick, John had snarled: Next time you bring the goddamn pills with you, right?

Standing in their sitting room, eighteen months later, Elaine looks at her son’s beadwork in the bowl and ruminates bitterly: I have an undistinguished family, and I doubt anything I’ll do will confer distinction upon it. As for my parents, whatever extra energy they’ve had to expend has gone into eradicating their distinctiveness, along with their Jewishness, as a housewife goes after brown and scummy patches in a goddamn pot . . .

Brown and scummy patches in a pot. There are pots waiting for her in the kitchen—ones that’ll have brown and scummy patches in them. And there’ll be bowls with cornflakes cemented to their sides with sugar—not forgetting the coffee cups, each with its staling, stinking residue. Is it the curse? Elaine muses—then, after a brief calculation: If it is, it’s far too early . . . red and scummy patches in a stainless steel kidney dish.

Karma the cat comes smarming from somewhere else—and panicky as she is, Elaine’s able to recognize the creature’s ineffable beauty. Because that’s the point, isn’t it: she may see it, but how can she possibly describe it? How can she describe anything but the self she’s sick of?

The cat is a small tortoiseshell, and caught in the low-angled autumn-morning sunlight streaming through the east-facing window, she’s finely etched: every hair of her fur can be distinguished. Finely etched . . . Elaine’s besetting problem is this: she can find a phrase quite as readily as she cracks wise, but it’s putting these phrases together into a passage of euphonious prose that altogether defeats her: the instant she sits down, pen in hand, some ghostly colleague of Doctor Rosenbloom’s shoots her brain full of novocaine, so everything becomes numbly mumbling and dumb.

There’s this—and also these vulgar scenes from her childhood that mock her pretensions, sliding between her smarting eyes and the page: At the age of two . . . maybe three, Elaine had taken to making watery protests by lifting up the rag rug in her bedroom, and peeing underneath it. She did it quite often, she thinks—which was completely crazy. Although she doesn’t, of course, do it anymore . . . that’s Karma’s job . . . and maybe the kitten’s, too.

After the Hucksackers’ party on Saturday night, they’d been so tight they went to bed with an old, half-full wine jug that had been moldering away in the back of the food cupboard for months. In the morning, Elaine’s bare foot, feeling for a slipper, knocked it over and the remains of these dregs spread under the bed. When she got down on hands and knees to mop the mess up, she discovered a cluster of the cat’s turds positioned in the exact center, as if the cunning little bitch had set out deliberately to show just how cursory her mistress’s housecleaning was.

During the night, Elaine had cried Ted’s name out—and also during that night, with dumb, drunken collusion on her part, John had taken her—but it wasn’t because of the latter that the former had occurred. She’d been far too tight for any fakery—and fakery it would’ve been to’ve pretended his caresses had undone her to this extent. No, there’d been no orgasm—there never is: only a crude animal relief.

What’s wrong with that? They are animals—they do need relief, and they’re practiced, if not at pleasuring each other, at least at providing this precious sort of balm. There have been rows and spats, cemented together with bickering so continuous it’s smooth—but on balance, she thinks, they’ve done well to stick together—and who knows, whatever the significance of her thing for Ted, without any actual adultery having taken place, surely they’re both capable of remaining that way—for Billy’s sake, if not their own.

This was waking wisdom, though: it was while asleep that she’d betrayed herself as much as her husband—who was sitting up in bed when she returned from flushing Karma’s turds down the can. Sitting up, and wearing the sleeveless undershirt that proves he’s quite as much a slut as . . . me. He puts on his pyjama bottoms no matter how far gone he is, but he doesn’t bother with his top half. And it was unshaven, reeking of stale sweat and staler booze, yet evincing a certain sly satisfaction—that he’d told her of her own . . . involuntary ejaculation.

Elaine knows he feels humiliated by the fact of Ted quite as much as by Elaine’s passion for him. She assumes John’s heavier-than-usual drinking, together with this dishevelment, is part of some blue-collar fantasy—a he-mannish pose that will make him a bigger, tougher fellow than Ted—and also explains why he’d screwed her through his pyjama bottom fly. Which explains, in turn, why she hadn’t detected any ardor—drunk as she’d been—only a desire to be workmanlike: get it out—stick it in . . . After all, since he’d been screwing her, it made sense to use . . . a screwdriver—or some other tool often employed for the practical jobs needing doing around the house, which he usually very much enjoys . . .

Not for the first time, figuring herself as only her husband’s vessel, Elaine is first revulsed—then convulsed: she lets her legs fold and collapses into a kneeling position, knees pressed deep in the pouf. She sees herself equipped with an erect penis that spurts obscenities all over the cream-painted walls of the sitting room: fucks and shits and dicks and cunts . . . because these are the only words . . . I have to freely give.

Whereas when she makes the necessary preparations—settling on an idea, devising an outline of the narrative, jotting down notes on characterization—and assembles the necessary equipment—pens and pencils, notebook and typewriter, paper and carbon—once she begins, everything becomes hopelessly hazy, as if thick smoke or gas were being pumped into both her eyes and the room, so the blank page is blanked out.

And if she persists? There are no better words to express how worthless and banal her writing is . . . than my own. Only in the past week she’d tried yet again, beginning a short story about a girl having an affair with a mysterious man in Manhattan . . . But when she’d read back the first couple of pages she was appalled: the prose so very much worse than clichéd—while there was no plot, as such, only a feeble gesture to her own . . . pitiful and self-pitying past.

Before that, a month or so ago, she’d been full of the brave intention to write something based on the biography of the composer Telemann, because she’d heard a beautiful piece by him played on WQXR. But what did Elaine know about Telemann and his times? Next to nothing—and now, remembering the dumb hash she’d made of describing Hamburg in the eighteen hundreds, she thinks: Why didn’t I go the whole way and show him screwing through his fly . . .

A dumb hash? No, an abortion—such that the poor cow who’s miscarried it looks blearily down at the fetus and its placenta, coiled slimily together . . . in the meadow grass. Perhaps it’s that she should’ve described—because she has at least witnessed this doleful sight. That summer in East Jamaica, when they were staying with Ken Durant, and she and John had taken turns having hushed conversations—albeit on quite different matters—with the much older man.

On the hottest day of August, Durant took her for a drive to see the overgrown plot and accompanying tumbledown buildings he was intending to turn into a summer camp for juvenile delinquents from the Boston slums. Standing, with the sweat trickling down between her thighs, her arms crossed to hide the damp patches spreading from her armpits into the red gingham of her blouse, Elaine had been as certain as she could be that he was about to make a pass at her—but he hadn’t.

He’d only stood there, in the tawny, thigh-high grass, a living frill of cabbage-white butterflies rippling about the neck and armpits of his own sweat-stained T-shirt. Stood there stock-still—even though there must’ve been scads of flies, because there, only a few paces away, in a chill cold blast of sunlight were the cow and its slunk. Ken had explained to her how unusual it was for a cow to miscarry at this time of the year—and Elaine had thought, Poor cow.

It had been an unusual sort of summer for the Hancocks anyway—Elaine was surging with all manner of unrealized passions, ones that affected her suddenly and physically—like cramps in my belly . . . my breasts . . . Billy had been a towheaded two-year-old, lithe as a monkey, who, during those interminable sizzling afternoons, lay alongside her on the couch where Genevieve Taggard had died only eight months before, while she listened to John and Ken’s two-power summit meeting in the next room.

They’d been talking—in a highfalutin fashion—about what could be said and what could be written, now that the jackboots were stamping on the faces of American activists. Even then—and even talking to someone like Durant, who was so much older, so much more of a man of the world, John’s tone—which Elaine reads pitch-perfectly, although, like Telemann, I’m self-taught—had been caustic, almost mocking. A manner that was also belied by his curiously baffled expression—which his wife also knows . . . all too well.

It’d been near impossible to persuade Billy to nap. He kept squirming about in her arms, breaking free to confront her with his bluer-than-blue eyes. Then, one afternoon when he’d at last fallen into an uneasy slumber, she’d disentangled herself from him, unstuck herself from the leather skin of the old chaise longue, and retrieved the grocery sack she’d hidden behind the row of city directories on one of the library shelves—for this had also been Genevieve’s study.

She’d make-believed . . . I made believe, that the sack’s contents, these quite dull, buff-card-covered exercise books, were hers . . . their host’s dead wife’s: the celebrated poetess. Clutching this trove of writings, her posthumous guest had then gone quietly upstairs in her bare feet, and entered a musty and unused bedroom, where flies lay dead on their backs on the windowsills. Kneeling on the warm floorboards before a cool iron fireplace, she’d first torn out, then fed into the flickery little fire she’d lit, page after page of her own clear cursive handwriting, trying to maintain that illusion—and with it the conviction that in destroying the record of her adolescence and young womanhood, she was somehow releasing her own muse . . .

But the truth was . . . I was all bitched up inside. Bitched up, and struck by this not particularly original observation, albeit one that’s remained revolving around her—a buzzing insistence that one is only a collection of mutinous selves, the coherence of which—if any—is made possible by skin alone, that singular organ at once thick and thin, smooth and dry to the touch—yet from which can be rendered . . . a quart or more of yellowy tallow. Skin . . . the thing we’re all in . . . because we’re wearing coveralls . . . made of ourselves.

Sometimes, when she’s transcribing one of John’s manuscripts—which he composes, insufferably, in pencil—Elaine picks up her own pen and traces outlines of his words, and as she does so, it feels as if she were wearing gloves made from the skin flayed from his hands, by this perverse act taking control of his writerly being: it isn’t he who came up with this sparkling little aperçu, linking the Areopagitica to Rousseau’s Social Contract, but moi . . .

The dead calf had been such a self, spontaneously aborted—and Elaine’s writings were also nonviable . . . as some obstetrician might say of an embryo. Whereas Genevieve’s poetry was of another order: she’d shelled out fresh selves for decades—they’d appeared in the little magazines and the larger journals—there’d been collections of them and some had made it into prestigious anthologies. Latterly, her several selves had been gathered together into the musty embrace of the Library of Congress. They were whispering there still in the stilled stacks: Over you, over you, over . . . I hang like a wave, like a lover . . .

At least some of them were—there’d been other Genevieves, who, as Elaine had burnt her own girlish journals, full of lousy poetry, screamed out loud and clear: What are you doing in my house? And with my husband?

Perfectly reasonable, if shrill, inquiries—because she hadn’t only been napping with her kid on Genevieve’s couch, she’d been cooking in her kitchen as well, and the poetess wasn’t yet dead a full year, although . . . the last few months it was as if she’d left us already, her widower had said in that poisoned paddock, with the aborted fetus and the ruffs of butterflies . . . she turned her face from everything in the world, me included.

A line Elaine had felt was at best disingenuous, and at worst: a line . . . not that he’d require any skill to reel her in, because Ken was one of those screwy, difficult guys she found it tremendously hard—if not impossible—to resist. So, she’d bobbed about in his wake that long, hot afternoon, as he’d driven hither and thither in his station wagon, so indifferent to her presence it’d been as if he were taking the automobile rather than her to these places.

Seven years later, standing still in her own sitting room, Elaine, savoring her gone mood, stares sightlessly at a meagre bookcase overflowing with this—for the most part—sterile congress: her and John’s poetry books, each volume . . . a leg wedged between two of its concupiscent companions. She stares sightlessly, remembering all those other captious selves, going to their deaths in the Durants’ fireplace.

In one respect at least, Elaine is indisputably a writer, since she diarizes compulsively—and even that terrible purge had failed to cure her of the habit: within days she’d begun again, summoning still more selves into existence by setting down the truth about her tumultuous feelings pell-mell, without troubling to dress them up in rhyme, or teach them a rhythm.

So, over the months and years, an undisciplined gang of them has been spawned—tens . . . scores . . . hundreds of little Elaines, all ranged in time the way the reflections of mirrors positioned opposite to one another are ranged in space, so: infinite Elaines, all of them falling for difficult, screwy guys—all of them being rebuffed, but still dogging these men’s footsteps as they try to escape her clutches. Now, she wrestles with her latest passions—which are a mere shadow play if she considers the stark ratio of touch to imagined touch. Yes—she has made an even more colossal fool of herself than ever.

How long had their troika of a family freeloaded at Durants’ place that summer? It had seemed like months—but can only have been a few weeks. Weeks during which John labored away at the paper he convinced her would be a major step towards his establishment as a serious critic, while his wife chased after the dead poetess’s widower, and measured herself against . . . the million reflections of her beauty and wonder.

There’d been a large, silver-framed studio portrait of the young Genevieve on Ken’s desk—one taken when she can only have been a little bit older than Elaine was in 1947. Despite the tubular dress and the lampshade coiffure, young Genevieve appeared simultaneously gamine, nubile . . . and intelligent. It’d been hard for Elaine—who’d only met her once, and who’d also had so little experience of death—to believe her truly and irrevocably gone when so much evidence of her remained, right down to the book full of her handwritten recipes that hung from a hook by the old-fashioned range.

Not that Ken had spared them the details—remarking more than once, when he was tight, that while her body wasted away, her once-pretty features had grown first coarse—then horribly swollen. It was, he said, as if her very body had been saying . . . there’s no poetry to be made out of this.

Stricken, or not, grieving, or not, her widower had taken a lover within weeks—or, quite possibly, had had one waiting in the wings. She came once to the Vermont place. A very feminine person, Elaine had thought—at once pretentious and infantile: I could never have played her role for him—any more than I could’ve Genevieve’s . . . Although back in the spring of that year she’d imagined she might, when Kenneth had written to her, saying he was coming up to New York—and . . . I waited all that day, while fantasizing about what it would be like to have him make love to her, with utmost tenderness, on the red plaid rug which Billy curled up on for his afternoon nap.

But he hadn’t come—and hadn’t even called. When they saw him again—and she got him alone—he’d had the perfect excuse: an unscheduled hospital visit . . . She did realize, didn’t she, the gravity of the situation?

Still standing—but now staring out the window and across the road to the overgrown lot on the far side, Elaine stops—stops what she’s doing, and realizes she’s been folding this selfsame rug with her shaking hands. Why the tremor? Is it the feverish alternation between brazen lust and chilly self-mortification—or a genuine malaise creeping up on her, insinuating itself between one unpalatable thought . . . and the next: there’s brackish saliva in her mouth, and she’s aware of a vein in her forehead . . . beating . . . beating . . .

And the following afternoon, when he’d taken her to the tumbledown property, what was it he’d said to her? Ugh. Ugh-upon-ugh—how could she have got herself into a position where any man could say to her: I was willing to take you, but now I see that you’re worthless . . .

Yes, shame as cold as ice, so cold she’d been compelled to burn first all the diaries she’d kept while John had been overseas . . . and then all the rest. In her abject condition she’d assumed she was entirely readable: a book with a transparent cover, through which the details of her infidelities were dreadfully legible: page after page of neurotic effusions about Joe . . . about Arty . . . Explicit jottings, too, about the supervisor at the Newark plant who she hadn’t spotted as any kind of suitor until he shoved her up against the corrugated wall of the Quonset hut where the fuses and bulbs were stored and, yanking up her skirt, grabbed at her vulva, his fingers pulling at the waist of her elasticized girdle so it peeled away from her sweaty skin then . . . snapped back.

And it’s happening again . . . again and again.

She’d torn two or three pages at a time from their spiral binding, then, carefully balling them up, placed each crinkly globe atop the velvety, petaline ash of its predecessors. Multiple immolations—multiple suicides . . . If she did, and she left behind these vivid accounts of her desperation, would John feel bad when he read them? Would her parents? Probably not—because if she’s entirely honest, it’s the self-pity that shines through . . . It’s the same now, when she thinks of the books with which she’s replaced them—more yammering on about the general crumminess of the human species, and her disaffection from it.

She’s seen herself, so many times, prostrate on the cot in the spare room—an unwanted guest . . . for all eternity, the pots emptied of pills beside her, the spiral-bound exercise books piled up on the bedside table—and on top of them a note, apologizing, of course, and also instructing John to send the books to Doctor Freudenberg, who has so firmly cast me off . . . Does Elaine really imagine he’ll make use of them to assist in his treatment of other poor and tormented souls? Or is it her way of remaining in analysis forever—a ghostly presence in the corner of his consulting room . . . plaguing his conscience?

In East Jamaica, in the big old creaky colonial, her motives had been equally idiotic: that by burning her diaries she’d also rid herself of any guilt . . . and all illusions. Henceforth—and for better or worse—she would live in the cold light of her reason. The men’s earnest voices had resonated in the hardwood body of the house. What had Kenneth and John been talking about? The same stuff Ted and John were discussing at the Hucksackers’ last Saturday, where their whispery seriousness—or so they thought—curtained them off from the other guests.

Why do they hang on to it so, this superior, mocking one-size-fits-all philosophy? Surely only because it confirms them in their own superiority . . . That, and because it gives them something to sit beside—the way they’ll sit beside a river, or on Ted’s boat, waiting for a bite or a revelation. Because that’s what even men like them—smug, superior, above all intelligent—do, in lieu of simply saying what’s on their minds.

With a start, Elaine realizes this with complete certainty: despite the conversations their inharmonious quartet have had—stilted to the point of suffocation—concerning their situation, and notwithstanding the hours spent talking and writing and implying—and then talking some more about these involved implications, each with the other . . . and God knows, whatever their terrible derelictions, howsoever their failings, each unto the other, John and she still talk—and talk deeply, she thinks, honest in the admission of how their deceits and disaffections nevertheless betoken respect not grudged but earned . . . Anyway, this she now apprehends with as great and terrible clarity as that with which she apprehends the shade of the woodwork in this room—a beige suggestive of surgical support hose, that has disgusted her on a daily basis for the full four years of their residence—neither man has ever uttered a word to the other about Elaine’s consuming passion for Ted.

Which is surely a further superior judgement on her husband’s part—and Ted’s, for that matter. But hasn’t he been as unfaithful to his beloved proletariat as she’s ever been to him? In her case, was it truly infidelity at all? With gauche little Joe there’d been more agonizing than lovemaking, although when the latter had occurred, well . . . You’ve only, Elaine thinks, to be taken somewhere heavenly once to yearn, ever after, for a return: Is it any wonder she maintains a sacrosanct memory of his humble room and the glorious things they did in it?

While with Arty there had been some excellent, if utilitarian, sex experiences—Elaine still feels his weight on her thighs, smells his cologne curdling in the coffee she’s only just burned—How can she really have been unfaithful to John, since to do so she would have had to be faithful to him in the first place, which she doesn’t believe . . . I ever was.

She moans—a guttural bovine sound. She shakes out the plaid rug and swirling it about her shoulders almost succumbs to dizziness . . . vertigo . . . and the suicidal thoughts that are its inevitable accompanists: because if you feel the yawning mouth of the abyss—it can only be because you want to . . . fill it.

This is, she thinks, a tremendous effort of will—tearing herself away from the edge of the precipice, pivoting from the sublime . . . to the ridiculous: John’s left her the Buick today, as Ted gave him a lift in to the campus, and she has to take the kitten, Maya—who she suspects may not be . . . as she seems—to the vet for confirmation. She might treat herself to a coffee and a chicken sandwich at the Brush & Palette—perhaps do a little window-shopping at Rothschild’s, if, that is, she gets her chores done.

On top of the daily dusting and tidying, the beds and the dishes, there’s the irony from two washes that’s built up—and who knows, it could be that today’s the day when Elaine finally empties out the cupboard under the sink and cleans the greasy shelves. She’s sworn she’ll do it . . . fucking sworn it. But first . . . she refolds the rug, lays it on the couch from which she lifts Billy’s Mad magazine . . . what, me worry? Her laughter is raucous, and bitter as the . . . burnt coffee she tastes swilling around in the back of her throat.

The truth is, she does worry—and it’s the same worry as it was in East Jamaica: that John will find her hiding place and read all these reams of girlish gush—cockeyed and coquettish it may be, but she’s carefully set down the particulars of every single one of her and Ted’s interactions, even those that occur . . . in fantasy. Set them down with such fidelity and attention to detail that this character, at least, leaps vigorously off the page.

Why does the textual corroboration of what she knows he already knows to be true so agitate her? It does, though: her heart beats so strongly it wobbles in her ribcage. He is, above all things, a scholar, a reader, a parser of texts—at times Elaine wonders if he’s ever lent any credence to the testimony of his senses at all.

Just as well and as it should be—because Ted is a real, live man: tall, athletic, and with an ugly-beautiful face, dark, beetling brows, and strong, square hands, the backs of which are covered in the same black hair as his head—although not, thank God . . . as thickly. She may be a lousy writer—one of the lousiest ever—nevertheless, throughout this long and frenzied year of surreptitious scrawling, she’s managed to surpass her limitations. Her evocation of his honking Midwest voice, his—when caught unawares—baffled, little boy’s expression, and his air of repressed—but powerful—sexual desire, has affected her only reader to this extent: Elaine has cast pen and exercise book aside on several occasions and . . . pleasured myself.

Which sounds better—albeit corny—than . . . masturbated. Ted would call it bias blindness rather than prejudice, pure and simple—but when Elaine wrote to Doctor Freudenberg in January and told him what was going on—that she’d fallen for another screwy, brainy guy—she’d admitted as much, and used the technical term favored by the psychoanalyst.

Why? Why does Doctor Freudenberg continue to exert such influence on Elaine? Writing to him months after she’d stopped making her weekly pilgrimage to the dull little office he rents in the nondescript building in downtown Syracuse, she’d transported herself right back to where, for nearly a year and a half, she’d done her best to tell him the truth. Or rather, just as with thinking about the disposal of her writing now, it was sufficient for the syllables of his name to be thought—Freu-den-berg—for the man himself to enter the room and take a seat, notebook and pen dandled on his corduroy knee . . .

. . . so summoning—since there’s doubting his manifest cleverness, or his latent screwiness—all manner of confessions: I peed under the rug when I was . . . I dunno . . . maybe two or three . . . and now I’ve masturbated over one of my husband’s colleagues aged thirty-four, and I have . . . sagging breasts and lank, thinning hair . . .

. . . you’ll never be a gamine girl, her own petite and gamine mother had said to Elaine a zillion times . . . near-infinite repetitions of an exasperation with her only daughter that, as Elaine grew older and yet taller, changed from still-hopeful sighs to grunts of a grim finality. At fourteen, Elaine had reached her full adult height of five feet ten inches—if she could be described as willowy, it was only pejoratively so, for her shoulders were permanently rounded, while her scoliosis was the result of her forever bending into the rising wind of social disapprobation.

To be tall was bad enough—to be awkward, worse still, but to be gawky as well, and moreover, to have a nose like a big blob of clay stuck in the middle of her ugly mug . . . ? At seventeen, she looked, she thought, like her father in a shirtdress—her father, that even more cut-rate Groucho—no greasepaint mustache, see—who cracked wise the whole time, while remaining, quite simply . . . vulgar and unfunny.

Freudenberg had replied to her letter a little too adroitly for Elaine’s taste—indeed, much to my chagrin: First he reassured her—an obvious finesse—that no, he didn’t think she was about to go to pieces, then he gave it to her straight: No, he didn’t believe it was the right course of action for her to resume sessions with him—there was no doubt she’d improved during the course of their work together . . . odious, onerous expression! but so far as he was concerned, she’d reached a kind of plateau—or impasse—one she’d have to surmount some other way. Besides, her regular Wednesday afternoon appointment time had long since been taken by another. If she found herself in a state of desperation, then yes, he would of course see her, and continue to do so on an ad hoc basis, but if she wanted to resume analysis properly . . .

. . . well, the treatment, having suffered considerable setbacks during the war, was now—rather ironically, because of it—enjoying a steady progress when it came to both training practitioners and attracting patients . . .

. . . Why, he was no longer the only psychoanalyst to be practicing in Syracuse—as he had been when Elaine first came to him—indeed, he was aware there were now two who’d hung up their shingles in Ithaca as well, one of whom—and here he veered closest, Elaine thought, to really revealing his hand—was a woman.

Elaine, as she’d read this self-serving dismissal, had wondered—as she wondered again, now—whether this strange beast, the female shrink, would say the same sorts of things to her as Doctor Freudenberg had about her inability to write being just another instance—pen/penis, get it?—of her all-consuming envy . . .

Beneath the Mad magazine is the local paper—an advertisement stares up at Elaine, and she peers down at it . . . why is everything so far away today . . . ? Three-piece snow suits for girls: $3.90. Two-piece ones for boys: $2.90. Is this something else to envy: the male creature’s simpler and cheaper garb, together with his lack not only of adornment but of even seeing the need for it?

Elaine snaps back to Ted with a small shock: the saggy seersucker suit he wore all summer, and which he’ll quite likely pack to take on their trip to Cuba. Betty has told Elaine she makes a studied point of not packing for him—it’s a demeaning task only movie spouses perform for their husbands. As so often, when she made judgements of this kind, Elaine had inwardly cringed, thinking that whatever else may’ve happened between them, she still packs John’s overnight bag for him—and is that so very wrong? Isn’t that a possible way forward for them—if there is any at all—rescreening the silent two-reeler of their intimacy?

Ted had suddenly floated the idea of this winter vacation as the last dying embers of the Hucksackers’ party were glowing . . . with our bourbon breath, kindling warm hope in Elaine’s heart again: In that case let us take Stella again—we so enjoy having her . . .

. . . she’d blurted out—then her bleary eyes cleared, and she saw John’s expression of dutiful compliance. A mask, she knows, beneath which burns his own inner conflagration, for a thief will just rob you and take all you save, but a false-hearted lover will lead you to the grave . . . such a fearful temper! we both have—and we fight . . . excepting when I’ve been too ill to.

Fights that begin fugally, as, both being past masters of the verbal put-down, their calls and responses ascend the scale to become full-scale screaming matches, that on more than one shameful occasion have gotten physical. But Elaine doesn’t want to dwell on such unpleasantness—not this morning, when right from when she woke everything has seemed half gone . . . An actual absence, as if half of the screen door, half of the side door, half of the mailbox, half of the goddamn world has evaporated.

Elaine thrusts down into her jumbled mind the trouble between her and her husband—as she does the Soviets’ widely reported detonation of their first hydrogen bomb. After all, she knows this much: her view of the world closely parallels her feeling about herself—the whole thing is likely to explode at any moment . . . and I’m also on the verge of disintegrating.

Now, the dishes in the kitchen sink she stands suppliant before appear not only sunk in cold, greasy water—but half immersed in an ulterior realm. The same one she sees when the surface of reality is itself torn, and out swirls dizziness, acute nausea, and a piercing headache—all decked in kaleidoscopic finery. This, the likely imminence of her monthly migraine, she ignores as well—which is something she often does, forgetting that forgetting never works.

Mounting the bare oak treads of the narrow staircase that rises precipitately from the small hallway, she listens to the familiar creaky concerto . . . as the little old wooden house stretches and tenses around her. There are all manner of houses in Ithaca—from modern ranch-style affairs to fretworked fantasias on the Gothic theme, plus quite a few solid old colonials. They’re painted all manner of colors, too: rusty reds, powdery blues, daffodil yellows. But the Hancocks’ house is pretty nondescript—a kind of half saltbox, painted a dirty cream color, its gable end-on to the street, and the single-story extension to the rear with only wire screens for walls and a concrete floor upon which is cluttered just about everything from Billy’s old stroller to a couple of cords of firewood in case they run out of coal for the furnace.

Upon reaching the top landing Elaine keeps her eyes down—sure, she was outside checking the mailbox only a quarter of an hour ago, but since then something at once insignificant and momentous has irretrievably altered: if she looked up, she’d see through the open door into Billy’s bedroom, and through the unshaded window of that room . . . nothing, only those invisible elements that, once jammed together in an unholy mush, can fly apart with the force of a million tons of TNT . . . or more.

She knows this because Billy also delights in such equations—between the powers of one superhero and those of another, or of this explosive and that one. One million, two million, three million . . . there is, in principle, no limit to the size of the bombs that can now be cooked up as the cold war simmers. When the irrepressible Billy marches about the house, banging his old tin drum and belting out, One million, two million, three million . . . whether it’s gallons or kilotons, his mother wants to slap his face—and one time . . . or more . . . I did.

So terribly unfair—and damaging, she knows this: he suffers from the same sorts of anxiety as she does, his drumming being surely his own way of pounding it back down into the unconscious. While she detonates hers with a spasmodic swipe, a fusion of hand and cheek . . . Elaine shuffles, shamed face heavy and red, across the landing and into the bedroom she still shares just about . . . with John.

Then shuffles over to the bureau, which is where she keeps her current diary: in her underwear drawer, under her underwear. If she inveighs against her husband’s straitlaced mien—which she does, finding inexhaustible irritation in the way he purses his lips . . . and casts down his chaste gaze—then there’s at least this benefit: it’s impossible to imagine John so much as looking in here, let alone rummaging around.

The other ones she’s already filled are in an old steamer trunk in the attic—together with defunct college textbooks and holey knitwear she has promised herself she’ll darn . . . forever. Elaine sees side by side the pale pine darning mushroom and the billowing cloud all flickery within. She pulls down the shade until there’s only a few inches of exposed windowpane, through which the winter light sidles. Seated on the bed, she opens the spiral-bound exercise book at a page full of . . .

. . . spirals and loops coalescing into patterns, some inked in or otherwise embellished. These cockeyed arabesques suggest idle versions of Matisse or Miro, and grow out from the written entries as if they were creepers, choking the life out of shopping and to-do lists—ones of party guests as well, both real and . . . ideal.

Fantasizing that takes a more shameful shape when she leafs back a few pages and finds repeated examples of her own signature: Elaine Hancock, Elaine Hancock, Elaine Hancock . . . interspersed with the names bestowed on as yet unborn daughters: Letitia Hancock, Lettice Hancock, Lalage Hancock, Lucy Hancock, Lisa Hancock . . . and those’re just the els!

Worse yet, bedizening the pages before this wordy birthing are the seals set on an unachieved and impossible union: Elaine Troppmann, Mrs. Elaine Troppmann, Elaine and Edward Troppmann . . . Mrs. Edward Troppmann. Unachieved—and unconsummated. What has been going on between them now for almost a year—twelve full months of drunken fumbles and liquorish kisses? The Troppmanns entered their circle at around the same time, Elaine recalls, as its rather more louche members began with this business of husbands necking with other fellows’ wives, and those other fellows’ wives necking with . . . well, with other fellows.

Necking parties . .