My Nemesis E-Book

Charmaine Craig

• Herausgeber: Grove Press UK
• Kategorie: Gesellschafts- und Liebesromane
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2023

Seitenzahl: 223

Beschreibung

Tessa is a successful writer who develops a friendship, first by correspondence and then in person, with Charlie, a ruggedly handsome philosopher and scholar. Sparks fly as they exchange ideas about Camus and masculine desire, and their intellectual connection promises more - but there are obstacles to this burgeoning relationship. While Tessa's husband Milton enjoys Charlie's company, Charlie's wife Wah is a different case, and she proves to be both adversary and conundrum to Tessa. Wah's traditional femininity and subservience to her husband strike Tessa as weaknesses, and she scoffs at the sacrifices Wah makes as adoptive mother to a Burmese girl, Htet. But Wah has a kind of power too, especially over Charlie, and the conflict between the two women leads to Tessa's martini-fueled declaration that Wah is 'an insult to womankind.' As Tessa is forced to deal with the consequences of her outburst, she wonders if Wah is really as weak as she has seemed, or if she might have a different kind of strength altogether. An exercise in empathy, an exploration of betrayal and a charged story of the thrill of a shared connection - and the perils of feminine rivalry - My Nemesis is a brilliantly dramatic and captivating story from a hugely talented writer.

Leseprobe

Also by Charmaine Craig

Miss Burma

The Good Men

With special thanks to Htet Htet for sharing her story; to Mimi, Catherine, Arthur, and Judy for the sanctuary; and to Andrew, Ellen, and Peter for all their help with this.—C.C.

First published in the United States of America in 2023 by Grove Atlantic First published in Great Britain in 2023 by Grove Press UK, an imprint of Grove Atlantic

Copyright © Charmaine Craig, 2023

The moral right of Charmaine Craig to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by her 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.

The events, characters and incidents depicted in this novel are fictitious. Any similarity to actual persons, living or dead, or to actual incidents, is purely coincidental.

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

Trade paperback ISBN 978 1 80471 022 7E-book ISBN 978 1 80471 023 4

Printed in Great Britain

Grove Press UKOrmond House26–27 Boswell StreetLondon WC1N 3JZ

www.groveatlantic.com

To Andrew

For there is merely bad luck in not being loved; there is misfortune in not loving. All of us, today, are dying of this misfortune.

—A.C.

Here there is sickness, beyond all doubt, the most terrible sickness that has thus far raged in man:—and whoever is still capable of hearing (but one no longer has the ears for it today!—) how in this night of torture and absurdity the cry love resounded, the cry of the most longing delight, of redemption in love, will turn away, seized by an invincible horror . . .

—F.N.

1.

WHEN I ACCUSED WAH of being an insult to women—“an insult to womankind” was my unfortunate phrase—we were sitting with our husbands at a fashionable rooftop restaurant in downtown Los Angeles. It was late, I’d made the mistake of starting in on a third martini, and straightaway I could feel the husbands begin to cower, whereas Wah confronted me with a look of hurt, almost to tell me that I’d betrayed some sort of feminine understanding.

“You’ve misunderstood me, Tessa,” she said, and I noticed that she was panting as though I’d shaken her physically. She cast around for help from her husband, Charlie, whose steady gray eyes were moving between us.

“I think not,” I said, before he could save her.

But, of course, she had a point.

I’d never been able to read Wah, and I still don’t believe that it was a matter merely of culture or ethnicity. True, as our current ethos would have it, she was a “person of mixed race,” something that might have contributed, beyond her unusual look, to the confusion of her submissive and queen-like demeanor. Though I don’t think even her relatives could have told you if her general mode of quietness was due to a timidity on her part or a righteousness that kept her at a remove from others; I don’t think anyone knew if she tended to smile courteously during conversations with that supple mouth of hers because she was incapable of keeping pace with our ideas or privately counting the ways those ideas were imbecilic. What I’m trying to get at is that I found her to be a tangle of both deference and hostility, if also some beauty, which is why, before the restaurant incident (and my unfortunately phrased accusation), I was sympathetic when Charlie suggested he wanted to leave her.

His first letter to me, routed by email through my publisher about nine months prior to all this, was a response to my essay on the question of Camus’s relevance. It’s not often that I allow myself to feel flattered by appreciative words from readers; I think, if you are honest with yourself, you will agree that flattery should be allowed to mean something primarily to the flatterer. But with the first lines of Charlie’s admiring letter, I understood that our minds could keep a certain, rare company. I soon broke my policy of not googling people whose work intrigues me, and after some searching I saw that he was a decently published philosophy professor at a research university near L.A. and, by any contemporary metric, practically invisible online. There was just one photo of him, on his department website: a candid-looking shot of an approachable, disheveled, frankly sexy man of middle age. Understand me: my swift response to his letter wasn’t a matter of loneliness, sexual or otherwise; my husband of seven years, Milton, and I still enjoyed various forms of camaraderie, but when a darkly attractive man from a similar desert of intellectual isolation comes bearing a cup of consolation, one drinks!

Because Milton was semiretired by the time Charlie came into our lives, and because the last of our children from previous marriages had long before left our Brooklyn home, Milton and I had come to enjoy a life of resolute drifting between the city and his family farmhouse upstate. It was at the farm, as we called it, that I tended to receive Charlie’s subsequent messages, which—for more reasons than I then understood—I began to share lavishly with Milton over our evening bottle of chilled wine. Any romantic union benefits from its share of excitements and threats; I suppose part of me thought it wise to remind Milton that others—in this case, a particularly eloquent, impassioned, and handsome man—could fall in love with, at least, my brain. But Milton found his own solace in Charlie’s letters, with their comedic disclosures and humbly put insights. Milton’s decision to phase out of the world of investment banking had been based largely on his desire to cultivate his passion for photography, a passion that was withering in inverse proportion to the amount of time he gave it, while, in his letters, Charlie complained of dying from a lack of scholarly productivity, a “sickness” caused by an inability to exorcise from his system everything he had come to understand yet couldn’t write. Soon enough, in my replies to Charlie, I was quoting Milton’s jocular retorts and bits of sympathetic advice, only occasionally feeling shouldered to the side by their developing male bond. We were three, to be sure, but none of us would have denied that I was the glue that made us three stick.

I see I’ve neglected to mention how the fourth among us fit into all this. Of course, from fairly early on in our correspondence, I’d learned of Charlie’s nearly twenty-year marriage to Wah, of her lectureship position in Asian studies at his university, and of her one book, a work of nonfiction that told the story of a girl sold by her Burmese family to Malaysian child traffickers before her eventual transfer to the United States as an adolescent refugee. I’ll admit that I frequently found myself violating my googling policy in those days, and I soon learned that Wah’s prose (ignored in the few critical reviews of her book that I found online) revealed a certain intellect, whereas her author portrait displayed all the features of dependency and insecurity that my feminism urges me to decry: the wide, wounded gaze; the helpless fragility. Other online photographs showed her clutching at a thin, lost-looking girl: this was Htet, the subject of her book and, as Charlie told me, their now fifteen-year-old adopted daughter, “the fixed point of Wah’s life.” In a sense, it was because of Charlie’s obligation to this relatively new familial arrangement, if not specifically to Htet or Wah, that I began to accept invitations to speak in California—that is, to give the kind of paid public readings and lectures there that since my marriage to Milton I’d had the privilege of generally turning down. You see, Milton and I were both eager to spend time with Charlie, who claimed to be able to get away only when a conference took him east. So it was that for a short period, Milton and I became regular houseguests at the Craftsman that Wah had meticulously restored in their rapidly gentrifying neighborhood in urban L.A.

Let me skip ahead, for a moment, to give you a picture of what life looked like then, when we were all briefly settled into this domestic scene; I mean, when Milton and I stayed at the Craftsman over the course of three or four visits, and Charlie and Wah took care to host various dinner parties for us, and Wah seemed always to be hovering at the edges of things, floating from room to room in one of her too-floral dresses while administering to our needs—unless she was attending to Htet, who only ever emerged to make some claim on her time. With all her capable subservience and her tolerance of the girl, it was almost as though Wah wanted to prove a point: that she was alone, not just in the production of hostessing or parenting, but in the production of their shared life, and that her aloneness both explained her tragedy as Charlie’s wife and ennobled her, for she was strong enough to bear it. But I’m getting ahead of myself, referring to Charlie’s difficulties with Wah and the girl, when what I want is to give a glimpse of how things looked before all the trouble between us got going.

There was one night when it could have gone another way—not Charlie’s situation, necessarily, but my own trouble with Wah, and no doubt her own trouble with me. It was after a party at the Craftsman, when the dinner guests had left. Everyone but Charlie and I had gone up to bed, and the two of us had embarked on one of the talks that typically stretched to dawn, talks that, though they left me decimated, I had come to crave, because through them we seemed to be nearing a precipice on the other side of which we might find the relief of having sorted out everything: the meaning of our marriages, of parenthood, of heartache and selfishness and all the rest of it. We were in the living room, sunken into the shabby armchairs that Charlie had made a point of telling me once belonged to his immigrant Jewish Romanian great-grandparents. It occurs to me that those chairs were the only part of that house that distinctly reflected and belonged to him. Well, he’d put on a single lamp—an old banker’s lamp, by the looks of it, something that I imagined Wah must have found at an architectural salvage shop and whose ivory glass shade imparted a milky quality to the scant light. The near darkness was conducive to what Charlie and I were doing, it seemed to me, as if the boundaries not only between but also distinguishing us had been blurred, so that I wasn’t always sure it was precisely Charlie whom I was addressing or precisely me, Tessa, chasing a perilous thought. We were discussing the question of whether a writer should still be read if in life he had proved to be a monster (should I still be read if with this confession I seem sometimes to be one?), and as the darkness enfolded us more completely, I felt Charlie retreat into a silence so absorbing I thought he might have drifted off. And for an illicit moment, I sat in the intimacy of that silence, imagining his awkwardly long body stretched out on the chair, so close to mine.

“I can’t write about him anymore,” I heard myself instructing the silence, as though to argue myself out of something. We had been speaking of Camus—or I had been doing so, while Charlie had fallen silent. “I think of his wife, his daughter, all the women he pledged himself to and yet misled and damaged.”

But even as I said this, a sensation came over me, that of being hounded like a small animal chased into a hole, or rather of being a small animal bounding for a hole in which was buried its own guilt, and the problem was to get to the guilt and bury it still deeper before my capture. What was this transference? Wasn’t I innocent, allowing myself only the freedom to flirt a bit with Charlie when we’d all had a few drinks, never transgressing on anything more than his time or his mind? I was a faithful wife to Milton, a competent (if flawed) mother to a daughter who was at that moment studying law in order to work for the social good. Why should I feel implicated by the very process of standing in judgment of my literary master?

It must have been three or four hours later when, with a jolt, I became aware of a noise in the kitchen: running water and a gentle clattering that told me Wah was cleaning up. Charlie’s chair was empty now, someone had tucked a blanket around me, and it was lighter out, near dawn. I had the thought to throw off the blanket and slip upstairs, but that same terrible feeling of guilt kept me in my chair, and another half hour must have passed.

When I finally gathered courage to go into the kitchen with the blanket wrapped around my shoulders, I found Wah doing the dishes in her robe. She seemed to have expected me and dried her hands, crossed to the small blue teapot she liked to use, and poured me out something hot and reedy. As I stood there awkwardly trying to sip it, she looked up at me as if wanting to say something, so that I wished I’d checked the mirror before exposing myself to her in my rumpled state.

“We’re a burden to you,” I said, to tell her that she was a burden, her stare, her sincerity.

“No,” she said quietly. “It’s better when you’re here. When you’re here, so is Charlie.”

The admission was so plainly put, and it brought up so many questions—it seemed to implicate Charlie so terribly and yet so passively—that I wanted to rebel against it. I set my cup down on the counter, whose vintage tiles Charlie had told me Wah had taken tremendous trouble to source. And I said something about the tea being too bitter for my taste, which caused Wah to laugh, not condescendingly, only as though she found me amusing.

But it was with an air of sadness that she picked up my cup and set it in the sink and stared down at the thing before saying, “I was just thinking about your conversation last night with Charlie—it’s impossible not to hear things when the house is quiet.” The thought that she had listened to our private conversation—that she had listened to me—was only slightly less appalling than what she proceeded to say: “I was thinking about how when Htet was little, if she didn’t come home with enough money at night, the traffickers beat her. Tied her up and deprived her of food. She had to sell trinkets on the street.”

I had the vague sense that I was being likened to human traffickers. “I’m not sure what that has to do with our conversation,” I said, not meaning to sound quite so cruel.

Wah squinted around at me from the sink. “I was thinking about your conversation in light of Htet,” she said, speaking very slowly. “I was thinking about Camus, his womanizing, and about Htet being strung up and whipped and sometimes raped. I’m not condoning what Camus did. I feel for his wife. It’s just that I worry we’re losing distinctions.”

Well, you could relativize away just about any crime with Wah’s reasoning, and hearing it, I should have regained my moral and intellectual advantage, not to mention salvaged some control over my facial expressions and racing pulse. But that senseless guilt rose up in me again, and stupidly I said, “I think you’re not quite understanding what Charlie and I were debating—the question of whether or not an evil cancels out a good. Or if the two can be reconciled, regarded as part of the same continuum that still merits consideration.”

Of course, that wasn’t really what Charlie and I had discussed, and Wah must have known it. A small, worried scowl marred her brow. She might have been doing something as earnest as fretting for my soul. “Htet has taught me so much about that,” she said. “When she was on the streets, an old man tried to get her to do things, ‘weird things’ is her way of describing it. He was rich, and whenever he approached asking for what he wanted, she would demand that he pay her up front. And as soon as she had the money, she would take off, and he’d just watch her escape. Over and over this happened—he gave her money, watched her escape. I’m telling you this because Htet says someday, when she makes enough money of her own, she’ll go back and find this man and return everything she stole from him.”

It was almost pleasurable, the indignation that coursed through my blood then. It seemed to absolve me, the little animal, bounding for my hole. “That’s a horrific thing to say,” I told her. “Horrific and misguided. And as her mother, you have a responsibility to correct her. To get her therapy instead of encouraging this harmful self-sacrifice.”

She looked like she could cry then. “I know you have your reasons, Tessa,” she said quietly. “But your reasoning is ordinary.”

2.

YOU HAVE ASKED ME to give an account of what transpired before Wah’s death. I realize there is little chance of me coming off as blameless. Maybe that is your intention: to make me see the cruelties—my cruelties—that exacerbated Wah’s hurt, if not caused it outright. But witness my little sketch of Wah in her kitchen, how cutting she could be. Witness how she delivered her blows as if it caused her physical anguish to wound me, as if the blows themselves were a form of self-sacrifice. Aren’t the actions of a bludgeoning victim as despicable, spiritually speaking, as the hardness of heart of which you have accused me?

I know I haven’t returned to the restaurant incident with which I started, yet there is nothing more painful to a writer than being accused of ordinariness of mind, and if this is also an exercise in reconcilement (as much as it is a confession of meanness), then I must defend the thinking that, after all, initially brought Charlie to me—brought him to me because he found such solace in it. I am a memoirist who doesn’t shy away from the political and theoretical subjects that I find preoccupying, and on the surface, Midlife, the rather philosophically minded book to which Charlie so strongly responded, repurposes some of Camus’s thinking in his The Myth of Sisyphus. As you might imagine, Camus’s book, like mine, addresses the absurdities of middle age, with death looming on one side, disappointment on the other, and nothing but a Sisyphean wheel of activities supporting the structure of one’s present. “Rising, tram, four hours in the office or the factory, meal, tram, four hours of work, meal, sleep and Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, Friday and Saturday,” is how Camus puts it, which roughly translates in contemporary (and yes, I know, Western, first-world, if not necessarily “privileged”) terms to: wake up, caffeine, harried morning interactions, work, meal, work, harried evening activities, inebriated consumption of screen media, (occasional) foggy sex, fitful sleep, repeat, repeat, repeat. Assuming one doesn’t have young children.

I am too cynical to reserve judgments, as you’ve no doubt noticed, and you could say that my essay was written from the perspective of a woman staring down into the abyss of a cynicism that had become too gargantuan to tolerate. There was the wreckage of my first marriage behind me. There was the damage I had caused my daughter—damage whose depths I was only beginning to fathom. There was everywhere the thickening atmosphere of hatred and injustice, in the face of which I could no longer claim to know the purpose of my writing, which broadly took aim at the ways men ensnare women (a preoccupation born of my first marriage), while solipsistically fixating on my own life. As Camus puts it, “One day the ‘why’ arises and everything begins.” One either returns in a stupor to the slog or awakens, the consequence of the latter being “suicide or recovery.” Now, the lure of wanting to blow up one’s life was something to which Charlie could also relate. And it turned out that his hour of crisis, like mine, had been brought on by the shocks and shames of parenthood, as much as anything.

This isn’t meant to be about my life—at least not apart from Wah’s—but, after disparaging my tendency toward writerly solipsism, I’ll take a moment to tell you about the daughter who led me to the precipice of my vertiginous abyss. Eleonore is brilliant, self-possessed, pleasant looking, preoccupied with justice, sometimes shy, moody, and self-isolating—all in a quiet, diminutive way. I think it’s fair to say that we share a certain regard for each other while never having been particularly intimate. I can’t remember a time when together we didn’t resemble two polite adults rather than mother and child, a strained self-consciousness blooming between us with the divorce when she was eleven and we began to live together half-time—then less than half—then much less. She was thirteen when I met Milton, fourteen when I yielded to her request that she be left alone whenever I decamped to the farm along with Milton and his college-bound boys; she was fifteen when she decamped full-time to her father’s place on the Upper West Side. I don’t want to get into the business of gender and parenting, but Milton’s brand of patience for adolescence had its influence on me. “Go ahead and leave her” was his general sentiment; for reasons selfish and feminist, I stifled my nagging counterargument that Eleonore was just a child, hardly more than a little girl, though I see now that it was also hurt that kept me silent when it came to her retreat. With Milton, I’d had the fantasy of starting a better, healthier period of motherhood. Instead, Eleonore had separated from me with an outsized independence that I told myself would serve her well in life.

My actual hour of crisis came when Eleonore was nineteen and spending her spring holiday from Sarah Lawrence with her father and his new, young family. We often corresponded by email, she and I, which was more natural to our relationship than the messiness of texting; I hadn’t been the least put off when I received by email her request that we find time soon to have lunch at our favorite ramen place near Washington Square. But even before she spotted me emerging from the cotton panels separating the dim restaurant from the rainy street, I felt panic digging its claws into me. Eleonore was seated at a table at the far end of the constricted, mostly vacant interior, her eyes trained on a menu, her shoulders stiffening under the reproachful tension of her delicate neck. All at once, she turned the menu over, so that I knew she sensed my presence and was silently conveying her refusal to reassure me that all was well—that we were well. You see, during her adolescence, in addition to increasingly refusing to stay with me, she had sometimes shut down all lines of communication between us. This was done, I should say, in her nearly silent, avoidant manner, such that it often took me weeks to grasp that her customary remoteness was now complete and that I had invariably wounded her, though how those wounds were caused she never proceeded to tell me.

I’m aware of having something of a problem with laying blame. When you spend your life in consideration of human relations and your thoughts unavoidably chase down networks of behavioral causality, it’s difficult to hold your tongue when your own blunders originate in others’. Still, even as I wielded my wet umbrella and rushed to the table where Eleonore persisted in her scrutiny of the menu, even as I planted myself down with a breathless “Nora?” and drew (not quite snatched) the menu from between her fingers, even then, I assure you, I was already chastising myself for doing harm to her willingness to see me—and harm to my own inner peace. I wasn’t quite yet aware of how perilous her ongoing rejection of me had become—perilous for me—but the pain was right there under the surface, threatening to ignite that Sisyphean why, if not to extinguish my remaining faith in love, in parenthood, in life.

For an unnerving moment, she stared into my eyes, though there was no meaning in her stare; she seemed to be deliberately stripping meaning from the light waves passing between us. Only then, as I searched her slight features, did I see that she appeared less pale than wan, dazed. It was the same way she had looked as a child when she was coming down with something.

“You look well,” I lied. I was so afraid of offending her.

Even this seemed to be an affront to her, as if it confirmed something tragic in her estimation of my being. She studied my face, her expression vacillating between resolution and hesitancy; she could have been deciding whether to forge ahead with whatever it was she meant to discuss or to give up on me forever.

I wasn’t pleased when the waitress intruded on all this. And it was almost hurtful, if not surprising, the way Nora lit up with a smile for the woman, whom I recall being more interested in the paper on which she scrawled our orders than in returning Nora’s courtesy. Yes, Nora was unstintingly polite, and something about her smile now—something about its innocence and generosity—broke my heart open. With it, I remembered the toddler in Prospect Park, eager to join in games at which she was never adequately adept, her already keen intelligence veering left where other children’s seemed invariably to turn right.

“I’ve missed you,” I said when the waitress departed. Which was true. “Terribly.”

An indefinable sadness rose in Nora’s eyes and, I imagine, a visible hope in mine. But a moment later her stiffness returned, and I saw that she was defending herself against another onslaught of disappointment in me. It had been stupid to say I’d missed her when I’d also been negligent about writing, visiting. Negligent and circumspect.