Adeline by Norah Vincent Read Free Book Online Page A

perfected in their soirées: Everyone must speak clearly and honestly always, saying precisely what he
or she
means, and only that. They—Bloomsbury, as they are called—have been abused by society’s dogs, branded as precious and self-indulgent aesthetes who are not in any way serious about real life. But this is untrue, philosophically and demonstrably untrue, and the lie of it makes him angry. Yes, they have had their sport, their fun-making, down-dressing and hoaxes, but they have never been frivolous or disinterested. They have always cared.
    What are people like him for, he has always said, if not for this? The effort, the attempt to work out in the closed room what has gone wrong in the trenches? Is this in no way laudable? He thinks of the many ifs this entails. Even if implementing all this higher good is just a dream, even if whatever paltry sand hill of progress he and his cohorts erect is sure to be swept away with the next war’s tide, and finally, even if entropy is the inescapable rule, who can live without illusion?
    He can’t.
    She can’t.
    For a moment, the thought of Virginia holds him suspended as he conjures up her face, with its looming-browed sleepwalker’s eyes, staring at him through the rushing hours of the day. No, she is not Lytton. She is not a man. She does not have a man’s conviction, his command, his stoic forbearance. But she has her own amalgamation—inventive, surprising, new—and he loves her for it all the same. It complements and comforts him in ways that Lytton and the others do not and cannot. Those eyes of hers have seen right the way through the kaleidoscope, well into the belly of illusion, but they have also seen too much of this world, which illusion cannot touch.
    Thinking this, he comes back to the day’s first notion—art as the beneficiary of businesses well run—and he adds to it something far more personal, the fruit of his current thinking. The role he plays in her life, and she in his. This morning, in the bath, he resented her privacy, her shutting him out, but now he asserts it in a different way, seeing that they are doing, each in his or her own idiosyncratic way, the same thing.
    Their life, their bond, their work and their circle of closely kept friends are about one thing: maintenance of the necessary illusion.
    It is what he does every day, for her and for himself, in order to go on. And she, in turn, does it for him and for herself for the same reason. And that is also why she falls so hard when she falls, because she, too, knows that when the scrim falls away, all of their pondering and their ponderous scribbling is futile. At those times, she knows it better than he. But sometimes, in denial, or in the fury of her dream, she finds the strength to go on with the charade. For how long he cannot say, nor can she.
    It is the most tenuous strand between them, as well as the staunchest, the one they cannot break, however tortuously they twist it. It is also the only real argument they have—managing this sustaining falsehood—in a thousand times and forms, the same tug of war where neither stands nor falls, but both are dug in to the waist, resisting. In this, theirs is a marriage like all marriages, he presumes, an embattlement of foxholes. And the tether between? Well, he can’t help invoking Lytton again: “That is the free means of torture doled out with the vows. One is given just enough rope to harangue, but not to hang by.” That is the sum of it, hilarious and difficult, though his own way of putting it is, as usual, more sedate. Together they uphold a fantasy that upholds them both.
    The subject is inexhaustible. Marriage. It is on everyone’s mind, even—he smiles fondly—the filthy minds of buggers. He, accordingly, has put a great deal of thought into it. Marriage is a black box. Someone said that once. He cannot remember who. But it is true. So very true. No one else can know what goes on inside a couple’s life together, or untwine