Disappearing Act

Pages reproduced from a notebook found two weeks ago in a drugstore in Brooklyn. On the same table was a half-empty cup of coffee. According to the owner, that table had been unoccupied for more than three hours at the moment that he had noticed the notebook for the first time.

Saturday, early morning.

I shouldn’t speak of these things in writing. If Mary gets her hands on it? What then? It would be the final blow, everything gone. Five years scattered to the winds.

But I have to. I am too much in the habit of writing. Impossible to know peace without it.

To put my black thoughts on white, to externalize them, to simplify my mind. But it’s so difficult to simplify things and so easy to complicate them.

To think about the past months.

What was the beginning? An argument, of course. So many arguments during our marriage. And always the same, that’s what is horrible.

Money.

She said:

- It’s not a question of trusting your talent. It’s a question of bills and knowing if we do or do not have the means of paying them.

- And bills for paying what? Necessities? No. Nothing but luxuries.

- Luxuries!

And we would go at it again. God, how awful life without money can be. No other shortage is quite the same. How to write in peace with the chain of worries about money–money-money? Television, refrigerator, washing machine – nothing but payments until the end. And the new bed that she wanted …

And me, stupid, making the situation worse.

Why had I left the apartment that evening? The argument, yes, but there had been others. Pride, that’s all. Seven years – seven! – spent writing to earn a total of 316 dollars! And my evenings spent part-time with this blasted typing work, with Mary obliged to work as well. God knows that she had the perfect right to doubt me, the perfect right to want me to accept that job offered by Jim.

Everything is my fault. To admit my failure, make the required gesture – all would be resolved. More work during the evenings. And Mary at the house like she wanted. The necessary gesture, nothing else.

And I did that which was not necessary. That’s what’s sickening.

Mike and I were like idiots. The meeting with Jane and Sally. And the following months to continue behaving like idiots. To lose ourselves in what we called an ‘experience’. To make merry in forgetting that we were married.

And then the last night, both of use, with the girls, in their studio…

Scared of saying a word? Imbecile!

Adulterer.

Why was everything so tangled up? I love Mary. I love her. And in loving her I did that thing.

And what’s worse, I enjoyed doing it. Jane is tender, understanding, passionate. She is the symbol of lost happiness. It was marvelous. Useless to lie.

How can something so bad be marvelous? Cruelty as a source of joy? Everything is tainted, confusion, disorder, and anger.