Great House: A Novel - By Nicole Krauss Page 0,105

porcupine. How little I understood of him then, of how the more you hide the more it becomes necessary to withdraw, how soon enough it becomes impossible to live among others. I tried to argue with him, in my arrogance I thought that my love could save him, could prove to him his own worth, his beauty and goodness, Come out, come out, wherever you are, I sang in his ear, until one day he got up and left, taking all of his furniture with him. Was it then that it began for me? True loneliness? That I, too, started not to hide but to retreat, so gradually that I hardly noticed it at first, during those stormy nights when I sat poised with the little wrench in my hand, jumping up to tighten the window bolts, sealing myself in to keep out the howling wind? Yes, it’s possible that was the beginning, or nearly so, I can’t really say, but it took years for the journey inward to become complete, for me to seal up all of the routes of escape, first there were other loves and other breakups, and then the decade of my marriage to S. By the time I met him I’d already published two books, my life as a writer had been established and so was the covenant I’d made with my work. The first night I brought him home we made love on the shag carpet with the desk hunched a few feet away in the darkness. It’s a jealous beast, I joked, and thought I heard it groan, but no, it was only S, who at that moment perhaps foresaw something, or recognized the little grain of truth lurking inside the joke, how my work would always win over him, luring me back, opening its great black mouth and letting me slip in, sliding down and down, into the belly of the beast, how silent it was in there, how still. And yet for a long time I continued to believe it was possible to dedicate myself to my work and share my life, I didn’t think that one need cancel out the other, though perhaps I already knew in my heart that if it were necessary I would not side against my work, could not any more than I could side against myself. No, if my back were pushed to the wall and I had to choose I would not have picked him, would not have picked us, and if S sensed that from the start soon enough he came to know it, and worse yet, for my back was never pushed to the wall, Your Honor, it was less dramatic and more cruel, how little by little I grew lazy with the effort required to hold and to keep us, the effort to share a life. Because it hardly ends with falling in love. Just the opposite. I don’t need to tell you, Your Honor, I sense that you understand true loneliness. How you fall in love and it’s there that the work begins: day after day, year after year, you must dig yourself up, exhume the contents of your mind and soul for the other to sift through so that you might be known to him, and you, too, must spend days and years wading through all that he excavates for you alone, the archaeology of his being, how exhausting it became, the digging up and the wading through, while my own work, my true work, lay waiting for me. Yes, I always thought there would be more time left for me, more time left for us, and for the child we might one day have, but I never felt that my work could be put aside as they could, my husband and the idea of our child, a little boy or girl that I sometimes even tried to imagine, but always only vaguely enough that he or she remained a ghostly emissary of our future, just her back while she sat playing with her blocks on the floor, or just his feet sticking out of the blanket on our bed, a tiny pair of feet. What of it, there would be time for them, for the life they stood for, the one I was not yet prepared to live because I had not yet done what I had meant to do in this one.

One day, three or four years into our marriage, S and I were invited for Passover