Honesty
Honesty is either very funny, or else very grave. The former sentiment is the ambit of lovers, the latter of husbands. She was definitely of the first type, which isn’t to say she didn’t take love seriously, only that she found its truths amusing, and she liked to be honest about them with everyone she met—there was hardly a salacious detail or an invidious thought that she wouldn’t reveal after a glass of wine. So honest was she with more indifferent audiences that inevitably she shared what cannot be spoken of with lovers. She sent forth sheets of that overly invigorating truthy rain against which the amorous umbrella is unfolded. One could say that the warmth of her rare lies was one of the great emoluments of her affection.
It was always little things. He told me he would give me feedback on something I’d sent him, next week at the latest, but the feedback never came, and the subject was never again mentioned. He told me that he couldn’t drink alcohol with the medication he was taking, but two days later I saw him soused, without qualifications. Instead, that night he offered me a poignant tale about his sister, whom I hadn’t heard of before, and when at some later point I obliquely mentioned the story, he performed a subtle glissade around it, as if I were the confabulator and he well-versed in dealing with it. Why is one big lie so much easier to confront than a thousand fibs? Is it because, when I finally did it two years later, I had to reveal my own two-facedness, on the one side the smiling, confidential interlocutor, on the other the zealously skeptical scratcher, sniffer, weigher, testing for conversational counterfeits? It took him just as long to forgive me. Of course, nothing changed after we reconciled. He calls me sometimes and the conversations can be summarized like this: I ask, “How is twenty-five?” and he says, “Now it’s eighty-three” and I ask him how and he says, “I added ten plus four plus seventeen.” I used to wonder if he thought I was stupid. Now I see how a dishonesty performed long and consistently enough becomes, in a strange way, hopelessly honest.
Paradoxically, a culture of frankness can make us more skeptical of expressed affections. Dissembling restraints serve not only as the corsets and ties keeping earnest sentiment from spilling out, but also, like the chains in which a strongman wraps himself, as a test of that sentiment’s vitality. “She always dressed her act up,” thinks Amerigo of both Charlotte and (confident lover that he is) of women in general, “of course, she muffled and disguised and arranged it, showing in fact in these dissimulations a cleverness equal to but one thing in the world, equal to her abjection.” He’s sure, as sure as he is that the sun will rise, that he will hear the moment when Charlotte’s yearning for him rips a strap of her refined graces, and he watches her with prevenient pity. But he underrates her. She isn’t engaged in the hopeless task of disposing a body too tellingly predisposed—she’s putting on a show.
“Who,” “what,” “when,” and “where” brook honest answers, but “why” is a nest of lies. She could have answered him honestly (let’s suppose that possible) re: her reasons for leaving him, and said that she was not as happy with him as she could imagine being with someone else, but this would have seemed false, for being too vague and light, and so as not to seem false she came up with explanations as hefty and solid as paving stones, and that’s where the trouble is. Reasons are as useful for people as paved roads are for angels—at most pretty patterns to look at as they flit this way and that, at most somewhere to stand when they get dizzy.
When she married the priggish crusty old “Count” so-and-so, her ex-boyfriend gave her a copy of Middlemarch as a present. Even after the hymeneal staleness ended in divorce a few years later, the ex- refused to admit that he’d known what Middlemarch was about, saying only that he remembered her mentioning once (naturally he could not remember when) that she wanted to read it, which she was sure she never had. A painter, she equally was sure, would have been able to see the smirk that she imagined on his lips as he said this. Everyone wants to say that they knew all along, but no one wants to be suspected of it.
A smashed, bleeding bone-stump of a limb lacks the dexterity for caresses or subtler gestures. When we are wounded by our beloved, and when we have wounded them in turn, to try to speak honestly is to strike these imbrued appendages against one other—each one of our thoughts is both the throbbing nerve and the cudgel. Something curious, however, could happen after the scabs started to form, after that intermission during which we could nurse our wounds only with friends. We returned to one another. We spoke a little more softly. We laid our stumps side by side. Look, this is where your bone spears me. Look, this is the tender spot where I bleed. The honest diagnosis, we agreed, was that it was hopeless. And once we’d said that, we were able to pull one another closer. There’s something so beautiful about sharing in another person’s honest willingness to face a hopeless diagnosis, facing it, in other words, together, which feels like facing the worst of life, which must be, it just must be, the very best of love.