Its source was an imbalance of want. Two people who want the same thing will never generate the same intensity as two people who want different things, or one person who wants into an absence, a void—as was in fact the case with Xavier, who wanted something from me that I could not give. More than that—he wanted something that I could not begin to fathom, a desire with which it felt dangerous to collude or to involve myself. Yes, there had been conflict in the air between us, conflict and intensity, and that had read as carnal interest, because the actual story, the reality of what was happening between us in that moment, was much less easily imagined.
There are always two stories taking place at once, the narrative inside the play and the narrative around it, and the boundary between the two is more porous than you might think, that is both the danger and the excitement of the performance. The air becomes thin, the senses keener, there is too much reverberation.
People always talked about having children as an event, as a thing that took place, they forgot that not having children was also something that took place, that is to say it wasn’t a question of absence, a question of lack, it had its own presence in the world, it was its own event.
I had always thought of Xavier as a voracious reader, as a child he was never without a book, although that might have been out of necessity as much as natural inclination, there were long periods of his childhood when he was waiting, in a dressing room, alone in the apartment, so that in some ways when I looked back on his childhood, he was at once there but also not there. Or perhaps it was that I was at once there but also not there, as if Xavier’s childhood had taken place in my vicinity, with the details somehow escaping me.
And I suppose in that sudden mood of expansiveness, I had the feeling or suspicion or revelation that our life together—it hadn’t been enough. For so many years there had been the tacit understanding that I contained the threat to the marriage, that it was housed inside me. And for all those years I had tamped down every impulse to stray, I had lived inside a straitjacket of my own devising, and I had remained true. But in the end, he was the first to tire of the marriage, he was the first to look outside, to open the door and taste the fresh and free air. He was the first, and he was always bound to be the first, because of course I needed him, I needed Tomas, much more than he needed me, and this had always been the case, whether I was able to admit it or not. It was him, and it was always going to be him.