Between the Lines

Today a lawyer and his wife came to see me. A first session, and the things are still coming to me in a jumble, and I am writing them as they are, before they cool.

He is a handsome man, his language polished, branding his words like one accustomed to words doing the work for him. He began by saying: There is no betrayal here. God forbid. He has never betrayed and will never betray. But—and here he smiled the smile of one who trusts that the judge will understand—sometimes he lets his gaze linger. A client sits before him, and the gaze, instead of going to the file, lingers on her. A second, two. He said “lingers” and I heard another word, one that arose in me on its own and which I wrote down: settles. For a lingering is a guest, it comes and goes. And this does not go. Year after year, I understood from between the lines, he allows himself another second and another second, like a man who expands the border of his yard an inch and another inch, and is utterly bewildered that his neighbors mind, for he has taken nothing, he is only standing and looking.

And she sat beside him, upright and quiet, and only her fingers struggled with one another in her lap. And when she spoke, she spoke with complete politeness, and beneath the politeness, a tremor: She notices. For years she has noticed. And she points it out, and gets angry, and gets upset—and the word that finally came out of her, in a low voice, almost in shame: betrayed. I feel betrayed. She said it—and immediately looked at me to check if the word was an exaggeration, like a student afraid she has given the wrong answer.

And he, in response, laid out his doctrine, and it is an orderly doctrine, like that of a man who has prepared his notes: he asks for freedom. That coerced love is not love, and only one who is able to not love—his love is true. What is forbidden, he said, is no longer authentic. He wants to choose her every day with free will, and therefore the gates must not be closed on him. And I hear these things, which are seemingly reasonable things, and I see how he leans on them as on a wall—and I wonder to myself who built this wall and what is behind it.

And I wrote down for myself what they told me about their beginnings, for here, it seems to me, is where the whole story lies buried.

They met in academia, both studied law, both excelled. And she—as soon as they were married she put her career down, like placing a coat by the entrance to the house. Not with sorrow, she said, but with willingness. For that is how she was raised: a home of well-behaved children, who do what they are told, and for whom devotion is not a sacrifice but the form of love itself. And she devoted herself to him, and to the home, and to the children, to the bone—I have no other word, a devotion that is its own entity—and built beneath him ground than which there is none more stable.

And he told, inadvertently, the thing that made my ears prick up: before they met, he was not a flirt at all. He was shy around women, cautious. It was precisely after he married her, precisely after he had this safe ground—that his eyes began to wander. He is puzzled by it and does not understand. And I understand, or I believe I understand: The child who has no net beneath him does not walk a tightrope. Once the net was stretched—he got on the rope. She gave him the security, and with this security he creates—his freedom. It turns out that her gift is financing his gazes. And this, if there is an injustice here, is the precise injustice: not the betrayal that isn't, but this use.

And I saw another thing in her, and it touched my heart more than anything. I asked her when was the last time she was truly moved. Not happy—moved. A simple question, and she did not know how to answer. From so much giving to the family, this place in her had been forgotten, the delicate, fragile place where a woman is moved. Her devotion is to the bone—but the feeling, the stirring, the good tremor—these have been dormant in her for years, like a room in the house that has been closed off, its furniture covered with sheets. And she needs a lot of feeling, I saw it in the tremor beneath the politeness, a lot of being moved—and from whom will it come to her, if her husband’s gazes, the ones that should have been hers, are settling in other fields.

I do not yet know how I will treat them. I will write this honestly, to myself: I do not know. This relationship stands on iron—there is loyalty, there is devotion, there is a home—and it is dying of starvation.

But if I could tell them today what is in my heart, and I do not, for a first session is not the time for sermons, I would say this to him: You ask for freedom—take the freedom, but reverse its direction. This power in your gaze, the power you scatter a second here and a second there on strange women—gather all of it, and bring it home, and place it upon her. Move her to the bone. Settle in her. Devote yourself for her, to her, not like a soldier who surrenders—like a strong man who comes to devote himself, to give, to conquer for her a new path of love. For the free choice you demand—here it is: to choose her, with that long gaze, every day anew. This is the only freedom worthy of the name.

And to her I would say: Open the closed room. Remove the sheets from the furniture. Allow yourself to be moved—and first by him, by his gazes when they return to you, and do not answer them with the devotion of duty but with that old tremor, which still remembers.

This is the beginning of a therapy. They left, and the elevator went down, and I sit and write, and in my ears her word still stands—betrayed—and his word—freedom—and I reflect: They both asked, in opposite languages, for the very same thing. To be looked at. Another second, and another second.