The History of History - By Ida Hattemer-Higgins Page 0,107

way. But most of the time, her role as the other woman was quite different than anything she might have projected before it all began. She saw herself as completely helpless, so helpless, in fact, that her womanly status was accentuated and forced out like a pink flower blooming too early, with sadness and tragedy. She felt desperately, fatefully female, like a Titian Leda raped by the swan. And sometimes she knew it. Sometimes she would suspect, in very clear terms, that Amadeus’s marriage was the single most potent source of her happiness, for it was the strong arm that took all power out of her hands. This powerlessness lent her body femininity, her love fatality.

There are two kinds of passionate love. The first is when lovers collapse into each other. Two identities flow together. Oh, there are issues of autonomy to be resolved for a while. But later, after everything finds its balance, the slightest glance from the other is an encouragement, an enhancement of self, and both lovers become stronger than they would have been alone.

But this is not what Margaret knew. She knew the other kind.

In the second instance, one lover collapses under the other. The crusher sucks a bit of strength from every moment in power, and the crushed one becomes crazy with desire and thirst after lost ego. While this latter type is clearly a perversion and a misfortune, it is also somehow—can you understand this?—a pleasure for the one who is crushed. There is something about this crushed passion that suspends reality, and elevates a trance in its place. It brings the crushed one into contact with a divinity—and the bliss, the Rausch, comes in awesome spikes.

The peaks of these spikes were dear to Margaret, and they were pushed even higher by other aspects of their affair. Amadeus never spent any time with Margaret that wasn’t charged with the fullest secrecy and co-conspiracy. There were no sporty walks in the woods, no vacations to peaceful, pressure-releasing locales, only the thunder of city life with its heavy, woolen veil of architecture, its gin tonics and endless subway rides under the fluorescent lights. And at the beginning of the night neither of them ever knew whether they would end up in the same bed—never once—whether the game would yield happiness, and so every single evening was full of suspense—an elaborate game of chess in which his heart was his king—she was trying to knock it over, and her intelligence was her queen that she was using tactically, and pawns they were, the glasses of wine that he bought her and watched her drink, making soft contact with her knees. And when it was her king—which was the soft access to the place between her legs—that was eventually knocked down, for that was what he wanted and the point at which he considered himself the victor, she never minded. That was the release, the mysterious prize. Could this subway ticket, bought for a couple of deutsche marks in a sleeve of inebriation, longing, and electricity, be the ticket to bliss?

While she waited for Amadeus the evening of the Russian film, she read Gogol on the platform. But even after all the years of their affair, she was only pretending to read—in part because she would not have missed those first glimpses of him for the world, and in part because her heart still beat too hard. There had been times in the past when she had deliberately made herself late in order to be sure that he, instead of she, would be the one to stand forlorn and searching on the platform, but she had found that although this was a kind of victory, she had been the one to lose. Of course it was so. When she was late, the anticipation of meeting him was soured by worries that he would have already left, or that he would be offended by her extreme tardiness (she had to be very late in order to be later than he was), and most of all, she missed those sweet moments of joy when she first picked him out, as he neared her in the crowd.

Amadeus was not the kind to greet her with more than a pat on the head, a tousle of the hair. He gave her a wink and put his finger under her chin, not as if he would kiss her, but to bring her chin up.

That night they took the streetcar up the hill along