Idiopathy

having adequate feelings. She said what he couldn’t understand was that he regarded her feelings and responses as odd and inappropriate only because he was so bound up in his stupid ideas of what
most people normally did
(here she waggled her fingers with such scorn that Daniel could hear them flapping like little birds) and was so keen to keep his own responses and reactions in line with these broad and basically quite misguided notions of normality and conformity that the minute anyone had any kind of genuine, from-the-gut response he rejected it out of hand. Furthermore, she suggested, Daniel’s whole concept of what she should or shouldn’t be feeling was itself bound up in his apparently relentless insecurity, meaning that her happiness, or the appearance of her happiness, was of concern to him not because he cared about her happiness but because he cared about the way her happiness reflected on him. He needed her to be happy, was the basic gist, because that way everything, namely
them
, was OK, and this was, she said, a pretty oppressive and dictatorial pressure to live with. Sometimes she couldn’t be happy, it was as simple as that, and if he was going to set off down some spiral of concern and doubt every time she appeared to be unhappy or expressed unhappiness in any way then clearly everything was going to fall apart because the very pressure of being happy was itself making her unhappy, just as the very pressure of building towards the ending of a book which was supposed to be great would in itself not only ruin the book because she’d be overly hasty in rushing through it to get to the supposedly great ending but would also utterly ruin the ending because it could only ever be a disappointment. (Katherine was highly skilled at bringing arguments back to their original frame of reference, a tactic that had the double effect of making everything she’d said seem to lead back to some central point, meaning her entire argument was, in terms of its interior logic, bulletproof, while at the same time implying that Daniel had forgotten what they were arguing about and so had unwittingly constructed an argument that was untenable and made no sense.) And anyway, she said, Daniel didn’t even care if they were happy, he just cared if people thought they were happy, because happiness, to Daniel, was a way of showing off and feeling successful when in the company of others. So, she said, if Daniel wanted her to be happy and, in turn, wanted them to be happy or at least wanted them to appear to be happy the simplest thing to do would be to just leave her alone and let her be unhappy or happy or whatever the fuck she wanted to be without his needy and emotionally domineering and, when you got right down to it, actually pretty pathetic ongoing attempt to control her every fucking thought and feeling.
    Daniel paused before responding in order to shape his face into an expression of combined pain and courage which he felt served the dual purpose of making him look invincible while also implying that Katherine had
really gone too far this time
.
    Daniel then said, OK, yes, that was as maybe (which was his way of saying OK, no, that’s not as maybe), but what about his happiness? Wasn’t it perfectly natural that if you loved someone you wanted them to be happy and that in consequence a big part of your ability to be happy and relaxed was tied up in their happiness? It seemed to him, he said, that this was in fact perfectly normal and not something he had to justify in order to answer her frankly fairly predictable arguments about normality. He used the word predictable deliberately because he knew that a great part both of Katherine’s self-image and insecurity was founded on the notion that she was different-slash-better-than everybody else, meaning he could very easily pick away at the things that made her feel good while simultaneously inflating the things that made her feel bad – a tactic he almost always felt guilty about afterwards because he knew that making Katherine feel bad could often lead to her feeling very bad indeed, but in the heat of the argument he was somehow never able to resist. Moreover, he said, did she have any idea how selfish her argument sounded? What if he was happy, and enjoying something, and either wanted to share that with her or didn’t, whichever, and her non-enjoyment or general unhappiness impeded
his
enjoyment and happiness? Because that was, he said, how he felt, every