The Reinvention of Love

talk poetry to, then he would have no need to be constantly discussing it with me. I had initially been flattered that he valued my opinion so highly, but then I saw him have the same discussions with his friends, with my sister’s husband, with the fishmonger and the lamplighter. It was a discussion he was having with himself, except that it helped Victor to be able to have his inner conversations out loud. I, like all his other listeners, was required to hear his ideas, not to comment upon them. And if there was someone else willing to take my place in this, so much the better.
    Later, Charles remarked on my silence during that first evening, how I had said not a word to him when he came for supper. It was not that I intended to be rude, or uninterested in his company, but rather that I was so grateful he was engaging Victor in conversation, that I feared anything I said would snap that thread. For the first time since we had married, I could have my own thoughts, and not have to be reacting to Victor’s. I could sit over my needlework and muddle through my feelings,think about the events of the day, or of my life so far, anticipate the pleasures of the evening, when, after our guest had departed, my husband would take me to bed.
    I had nothing
but
desire for Victor in those days.
    The second feeling I remember having that night was curiosity. Who was this young man who wanted so badly to make a friend of my husband? I watched him out of the corner of my eye. He looked a little like a bird, with his hooked nose and high forehead – like a bird of prey. And, like a bird of prey, he was intent on his target. He wanted Victor to like him. He fawned and fussed, laughed a beat after my husband started laughing, repeated the same words back to Victor, a few minutes after Victor had said them. How agreeable he was being! How friendly!
    What did he want?
    I asked Charles this once, when we were lying in bed in our hotel room, limbs entwined. Be honest, I said, because I felt that around his own ambitions, he was not always truthful.
    I believed him a genius
, he said.
I wanted him to help me become a better poet.
    But this was not all. The feeling I had that first night was a feeling I sometimes had later on, once Charles and I were lovers. It was faint then, came to me like a whiff of stale perfume carried by the breeze.
    What I felt that night was that Charles did not just want to please Victor, but rather that he wanted to
be
Victor.
    Had I just exchanged one man for a lesser version of the same man? Was I merely a trophy to be flourished and fought over in this contest between Charles and Victor? Was everything really about literature after all?
    This is partly why I prefer Charlotte. She would not confess our affair to Victor. She would keep it secret. She would keep it sacred.

    The shouting has subsided. The voices are quieter. There is the clink of glasses. Now Charles and Victor are talking. They are drinking wine.
    I walk back along the hallway towards my bedroom, not caring if they hear the creaking floor. I push open the door, sit down heavily on the edge of my bed. There is the carpet bag with its precious sentimental cargo – all that hopefulness I felt, mere moments ago.
    Would life with Charles really be different from life with Victor?
    I put my head in my hands and weep.
    By the time I hear his heavy tread on the stairs, I have stopped crying. When he steps through my bedroom door, I am sitting up straight, composed, my hands folded demurely in my lap.
    Victor has had all his emotion with Charles. They have fought and talked and drunk wine, like lovers in a spat. By the time he comes to me, he is spent. He stands there in the doorway, a shadow framed by shadow.
    “You will end this,” he says. “I will not be shamed by your behaviour for one more instant.”
    He doesn’t wait for my reply, or even for my acknowledgement that I know what he is talking about. It is not a discussion. He takes it for granted that I have been eavesdropping. He turns and walks back down the hallway, back down the stairs. In a few moments I can hear the noises of his resumed packing.
    Once, when I was running towards Charles at the Luxembourg Gardens, he grabbed me, in full flight, before I collided withhim, and he asked me if I was running towards him, or simply fleeing Victor. Perhaps it was both.
    When I was a girl, I had the ambitions of a boy. I could run and jump and ride a horse. I was good at drawing, and good at