Great House by Nicole Krauss Read Free Book Online Page B

hidden from others all my life, and, by writing, had kept, even, from myself. A deficiency that became larger as the years passed, and harder to conceal, making my work more and more difficult. What sort of deficiency? I suppose you could call it a deficiency of spirit. Of strength, of vitality, of compassion, and because of this, welded to it, a deficiency of effect. So long as I wrote, there was the illusion of these things. The fact that I didn’t witness the effect didn’t mean it didn’t exist. I made a point of answering the question I received with some frequency from journalists, Do you think books can change people’s lives? (which really meant, Do you actually think anything you write could mean anything to anyone?), with a little airtight thought experiment in which I asked the interviewer to imagine the sort of person he might be if all of the literature he’d read in his life were somehow excised from his mind, his mind and soul, and as the journalist contemplated that nuclear winter I sat back with a self-satisfied smile, saved again from facing the truth.
    Yes, a deficiency of effect, born of a deficiency of spirit. That is the best way I can describe it, Your Honor. And though I had been able to hide it for years, countering the appearance of a certain anemia in life with the excuse of another, more profound level of existence in my work, suddenly I found I couldn’t any longer.
    I didn’t talk about it with S. In fact, I didn’t even bring it up with Dr. Lichtman, whom I saw regularly during my marriage. I thought I would, but each time I arrived at her office a silence overtook me, and the deficiency hidden under hundreds of thousands of words and a million small gestures remained safe for another week. Because tohave acknowledged the problem, to have said it aloud, would have kicked loose the rock on which everything else rested, ringing in an emergency, and afterwards interminable months, years perhaps, of what Dr. Lichtman called “our work” but which was really just an excruciating excavation of myself with an array of blunt instruments while she sat by in a worn leather chair, feet on the ottoman, occasionally noting something on the legal pad she kept balanced on her knees for moments when I clawed up out of the hole, face blackened and hands scratched, clutching a little nugget of self-knowledge.
    So instead I went on as before, only not as before, because now I felt a creeping shame and disgust with myself. In the presence of others—especially S, to whom I was of course closest—the feeling was most acute, while alone I could forget it a little bit, or at least ignore it. In bed at night I recoiled to the farthest edge, and sometimes when S and I passed each other in the hall I couldn’t bring myself to meet his eyes, and when he called my name from another room I had to exert a certain force, a strong pressure, to goad myself to answer. When he confronted me I shrugged and told him it was my work, and when he did not press me on the subject, laying off as he always did, as I had taught him to do, giving me a wider and wider berth, I secretly grew angry at him, frustrated that he did not notice how dire the circumstances were, how awful I was feeling, angry at him and perhaps even disgusted. Yes, disgusted, Your Honor, I didn’t save it only for myself, for not noticing that for all these years he had been living with someone who had made a life’s work of duplicity. Everything about him began to annoy me. The way he whistled in the bathroom, and moved his lips as he read the paper, the way he had to ruin every nice moment by pointing its niceness out. When I was not aggravated with him I was angry at myself, angry and full of guilt for causing so much grief to this man for whom happiness, or at the very least gladness, came easily, who had a talent for putting strangers at ease and drawing them over to his side so that people naturally