Great House: A Novel - By Nicole Krauss Page 0,126

on them or giving them away too fully, and had managed at the same time to make clear to me that they were not subjects I should expect ever to be raised by her, nor should I attempt to raise them myself. That her sanity, her ability to carry on with life, both her own and the one we had forged together, depended on her ability and my solemn agreement to cordon off those nightmarish memories, to let them sleep like wolves in a lair, and to do nothing that might threaten their sleep. That she visited these wolves in her dreams, that she lay down with them and even wrote about them, however many times metamorphosed into other forms, I knew well enough. I was a complicit if not equal partner in her silences. And as such, they were not what one might call secrets. I should also say that despite my acceptance of these terms and my desire to protect her, despite the tender understanding and sympathy I aspired always to show her, and my guilt for having lived a life sheltered from such torment and suffering, I was not always above suspicion. I admit that there were times I am not proud of when I sank to imagining that she had kept something hidden from me in order to willfully betray me. But my suspicions were small and petty, the suspicions of a man who fears that his powers (I trust I can speak frankly to you about these things, I said to Gottlieb, that you are no stranger to what I’m trying to say), his sexual powers which are expected to last decade after decade, have diminished in his wife’s esteem, that she, whom he still considers beautiful, who still evokes in him a feeling of lust, is no longer excited by his sagging and dilapidated state revealed beneath the covers, a man who, to further compound the matter, has taken the example of his own lust for total strangers, certain of his students, or the wives of his friends, as incontrovertible proof of the lust his wife must feel for men other than him. You see, when I doubted her it was her loyalty that I doubted, though I would like to say in my own defense that it was not often, and also that to respect one’s wife’s right to silence as I tried to do, to muffle your own need for reassurance, to suffocate your questions before they rise up and escape through your mouth, is not always easy. A man would have to be better than human not to wonder, at times, whether she hadn’t smuggled into those greater forms of silence, the ones to which you both long ago agreed, other, cheaper, forms—call them omissions or even lies—to mask what amounts to a betrayal.

Here Gottlieb blinked, and in the peace of that sunny afternoon I heard his lashes, magnified many times, brush against the lenses of his glasses. Otherwise, the room, the house, the day itself seemed to have emptied of all sounds but my voice.

I suppose there was something else that laid the groundwork for my uneasiness, I continued, something from Lotte’s life before I knew her. Being part of her past, I felt I didn’t have the right to interrogate her about it, though at times I was frustrated by her reticence, and resented her unspoken demand for privacy on the matter, since as far as I knew it had nothing to do with her loss. Of course I knew that she had other lovers before me. After all, she was twenty-eight by the time I met her, and for many years she had been alone without any family in the world. She was an awkward woman in many ways, a woman unlike the sort many men her age would have encountered, but if my own feelings can be used as any example, I have to guess that this drew those men to her all the more. I don’t know how many lovers she had, but I assume there were enough of them. I suppose she kept silent about them not only out of a desire to contain her past, but also so as not to arouse my jealousy.

And yet, I was jealous all the same. Vaguely jealous of them all—of how and where they had touched her, and what she might have told them about herself, of her laughter given up for something they’d said—and agonizingly jealous of