Inner Light

Frans Snyders, Still Life with a Wine Cooler (1610–1620). Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons.

There is enormous pleasure to be had in maintaining at least two, if not several, parallel lives. Of course, there are the pleasures of concealment and control, but the true indulgence is in occupying the vast reaches of interior space, populated by all the aspects of yourself that don’t end up in any social circle, any relationship, any reputation, and so don’t really get expressed at all; a big, sumptuous, light-filled nothing, the real you. You find it especially at the age of, say, twenty-five, on an airplane between two major cities, one in which you live and the other in which your girlfriend lives, the latter being where she carries on flings she takes little trouble to conceal, and the former being where you’ve discovered the cover afforded by being mistreated and have decided to carry on a fling of your own. Up there, between clouds, the contradictions don’t really clash, they just float beside one another. It’s useful to float along with them, becoming comfortable with the illogic and the fabrication, particularly when, for example, you are seated beside your new fling at a dinner party, trying not to let on.

“Are you having an affair with ——?” Someone had put the question to me the day before the party, and the word affair had rung so hollow that when I answered in the negative it didn’t even feel like a lie. I was mostly struck by the use of the word itself, which gave the whole thing a certain sophistication. But still, I chafed. “Why are you asking?” “I wouldn’t care if you were.” “Why would you?” “I said I wouldn’t.” In those days, I would snap at questions or laugh them off. How badly I must have wanted to be found out.

Back then—all of us in grad school—we met weekly for dinner. It began as a way of observing Shabbat as my roommate rediscovered his Judaism, or rediscovered himself in relation to Judaism, or else rediscovered everything, concluding that within the world as it existed there was no way to disentangle himself from his religion. I am not Jewish but Catholic, by then more or less totally lapsed, and while spending most of my time around this brilliant, intense religious seeker certainly shunted me along toward my own reckoning with faith, what these dinners really inspired in me was a taste for dinners. But then, maybe there was something irrepressibly if obliquely religious about even this. Around a ruined table, confessions can be offered or extracted at will, friendships forged and sundered, and the truth, or what you believe to be the truth, can be loudly declared only to be shrugged off the next morning as drunken enthusiasm. You can fake it, and have it count, or you can mean it, and have it not count.

The Friday gatherings soon swelled to two-part binges: the first, small group who came early to eat matzo soup and drink blessed wine; the second, smoke-filled blowouts with whoever happened to drop by, filling our large apartment and terrorizing our anonymous neighbors with late-night shouting, nearly everyone disastrously drunk by the end. The first group would remain secretly intact throughout the second half of the party even if we dispersed physically among the larger party, silently faithful to the privacy we had shared before everyone else had arrived. I prided myself on always remembering to turn on a lamp when I went to bed, so that my roommate could read on Sabbath morning as I slept off the hangovers to which he seemed miraculously immune.

Before long, it became clear that we needed a change. Our time together was coming to an end—graduations, far-flung fellowships, simple drifting were all in the offing—and the intimacy that inner circle had known at the beginning of the year was fading amid the revelry. We needed a dinner, with just a few of us, to restore the center that increasingly failed to hold. So, one Saturday, once Shabbos was out, we met at a different apartment to find one another again.

It was a mess from the start. In my memory, the air was stifling. Something on the stove had burned, or else it was just one of those nights when spring is wearing out and summer makes an early appearance, impatient to oppress. There were seven or eight of us. Some arrived early, some late, and it was immediately apparent that each of us had a different idea of what this meeting of the inner circle would be. One or two wanted quiet conversation, didn’t even plan to drink (well, drink much). Another pair brought drugs. Curiously, someone else brought cigars, I think, though not enough for everyone; they went unsmoked.

—— and I had spent the hour before the dinner in a terrible argument about nothing, probably because we couldn’t admit to what we wanted, and wouldn’t even know how to get it if we could—how do you put an end something that barely exists? And how do you start something, knowing it will have to end almost at once? And there we were, and no one knew, or no one admitted to knowing, and the deception filled up the spaces between the tectonic plates of incongruous desires and expectations, and before long I was sure that everyone felt lied to, even if they didn’t understand why.

I was doing the lying, so I felt responsible. I overcompensated by spouting off, holding forth, cracking jokes in general and at others’ expense. A few played along, but the tension mounted. I noticed sidelong glances, backhanded remarks, pointed silences. Finally, one friend leaned across the table, looked at me steadily, and said in a calm, firm voice: “You need to stop talking. For five minutes, just stop talking.”

That was the end of the evening’s politeness. I shouted with forced laughter that I wanted to talk for every minute that remained in the night. She shouted that I was taking up all the air in the room. Of course she was right, though she was wrong in the sense that talking was hardly the source of the trouble.

The night we had hoped for was pretty much over following this exchange, though everyone stayed until the small hours, feeling restless and unnerved and increasingly sloppy, trying half-heartedly to regain the high spirits that had never been there to begin with. By the next day, the catastrophe of the dinner was a laughable mystery, except to —— and me, who both knew, or felt we knew, the source of the tension that sent us out onto the porch for slightly shaking cigarettes, or into the kitchen for ill-advised refills, or else simply into the bathroom for a quiet breather. I swear I remember someone returning to the table wiping tears from their eyes.

Years have passed between then and now. Everyone’s over it. Still, when I think back on that time, I think of that dinner, when I wanted intimacy, would have settled for confrontation, and could only offer evasion. I want to know: Why all the deception, the withholding? Now all I see is time squandered.

Recently, I reunited with a friend who had been at the dinner, and we were able to speak honestly, admitting to everything. “You were such a mess back then,” she said, and for the briefest moment, I felt relief. Somehow, despite all my efforts to keep things hidden, something of myself had slipped through and made itself known to someone else. Then she said, “But we were so young. It doesn’t matter,” and wiped it all away. The person I had been, who had for that moment become solid, legible, irrefutably there, vanished, once again a blank space of wind and passing weather.