Latest / My Playful Wife — A Tender Literary Love Story / My Playful Wife — Season 1, Episode 53: The Fifth Notebook

Transcript

My Playful Wife — Season 1, Episode 53: The Fifth Notebook · My Playful Wife — A Tender Literary Love Story

0:00
You could read them, I said. You've always been
0:03
able to read them. I know. That's exactly why
0:07
I never have. She ran one finger along the soft
0:11
spine of the first one, the damaged one, without
0:15
opening it. It's enough to know they exist. My
0:20
Playful Wife, Episode 53, The Fifth Notebook,
0:25
written by Mia. On the third of the month, writing
0:32
late at the desk by the window with the city
0:34
gone quiet below, I came to the end of a page
0:37
and turned it and found that there were only
0:39
a few left, that the fifth notebook, which I
0:42
had been filling without quite noticing for the
0:44
better part of two years, was nearly done. I
0:48
sat with my pen held above the thinning sheaf
0:50
of blank paper and felt something I had not expected
0:54
to feel, which was a small grief. The particular
0:57
grief of a thing nearly finished that you had
1:00
not let yourself notice you were afraid to finish.
1:03
There were perhaps six pages left. At the rate
1:06
I fill them, a little most nights, a paragraph
1:09
or two, the days one true thing set down before
1:12
sleep. That was a week ten days, no more. And
1:16
then the fifth notebook would be full, and I
1:18
would have to decide whether to begin a sixth,
1:21
and the deciding, I understood, sitting there
1:23
in the low lamplight was going to be a larger
1:25
thing than it looked. Because the notebooks are
1:29
not a small matter in my life. They are, in a
1:32
way I have only lately let myself see clearly,
1:35
the spine of it. Four of them sit in the drawer
1:38
beneath this desk, filled, their spines gone
1:41
soft. Their pages slightly wavy now with the
1:45
humidity of four deli monsoons. And the fifth
1:49
is here under my hand, nearly full, and I sat
1:52
that night and did the thing I almost never do,
1:54
which is to take the four old ones out and lay
1:57
them on the desk in a row beside the fifth and
1:59
look, all at once, at the whole length of what
2:02
I've been doing with my evenings for six years.
2:08
I did not at first read them. I only looked at
2:11
them as objects, for notebooks and a fifth, the
2:14
plain physical fact of them, and even that told
2:17
a story before I had opened a single one. The
2:21
first one is the most damaged. Its cover is soft
2:24
as cloth now, its corners gone round and furred.
2:29
And when you open it, the handwriting inside
2:30
is not quite my handwriting. It is the hand of
2:34
a man writing too hard and too fast. The letters
2:37
pressed so deep into the paper that you can read
2:40
them with a fingertip from the back of the page.
2:42
Like braille. Like something written by a man
2:46
trying to make certain it would still be legible
2:48
after he had gone back to sleep. That was who
2:51
I was. The first notebook is the notebook of
2:55
the waking, and you can see the waking in the
2:57
very pressure of the pen, in the way the early
3:00
pages are nearly torn with the force of a man
3:03
who has just discovered, in a panic, that he
3:06
has been living next to a marvel for years with
3:09
his eyes shut and is terrified that if he stops
3:12
writing for even one night the eyes will close
3:14
again on their own. The fifth, the one nearly
3:18
full, the one under my hand, is written in a
3:22
script so level and unhurried that it could belong
3:25
to a calmer man entirely. The letters sit lightly
3:28
on the line. Nothing is pressed through to the
3:31
other side. It is the handwriting of someone
3:34
who is no longer afraid the lamp will go out
3:36
the instant he stops watching it, who has learned
3:39
that a flame tended long enough grows steadier.
3:42
and asks for less guarding. A man simply keeping
3:46
alight he has come, at last, to trust will still
3:50
be burning in the morning. I have come to think
3:55
of them now in two movements, the four and the
3:58
one. The four notebooks are the notebooks of
4:03
the waking. They hold the long, frantic, joyful,
4:07
ashamed clawing up out of the sleep I had been
4:11
living inside, The two years in which I learned,
4:14
sentence by sentence, to actually see the woman
4:18
I had married and then stop seeing so completely
4:21
that I had very nearly lost her without ever
4:24
once raising my voice. They are full of discoveries,
4:28
the four, and discoveries are loud on the page.
4:31
You can hear me finding things out. Hear the
4:34
shock of each small true thing as it landed,
4:37
the violent gratitude and the violent shame braided
4:41
together in a man learning, far too late, what
4:45
had been standing in front of him the whole time,
4:47
patient, waiting, going quietly gray from not
4:51
being looked at. The fifth is a different book
4:55
altogether. The fifth is the notebook of the
4:58
staying awake, and the staying awake does not
5:01
have discoveries in it. or not the same kind.
5:04
It has tending. It has the same woman, seen again
5:09
and again across a hundred unremarkable evenings,
5:12
with no catastrophe anywhere near to sharpen
5:16
the seeing, only the plain daily decision to
5:19
keep looking when nothing whatsoever is forcing
5:21
me to. The drama went out of the prose because
5:24
the drama went out of the project, and what was
5:27
left when the drama drained away was quieter
5:29
and, I have decided, far truer. The difference
5:33
between the man clawing awake out of a nightmare
5:36
and the man who has simply resolved, each ordinary
5:39
morning, not to lie back down. The first is a
5:43
rescue. The second is a marriage. And the second
5:47
is much harder to write well because nothing
5:49
is on fire and a man describing a thing that
5:53
is not on fire has to actually love it to find
5:56
the words. There is no genre, I have come to
5:59
believe, harder than the chronicle of an ordinary
6:02
happiness because happiness undramatized looks
6:06
on the page, like nothing at all, a man and a
6:09
woman, a cup of tea, an evening, then another
6:13
evening just like it. And the whole labor of
6:16
the thing is to make a reader feel what is actually
6:19
there underneath the apparent nothing. The enormous
6:22
quiet weight of a love that has stopped needing
6:25
events to prove it is real. Anyone can write
6:28
a fire. The waking very nearly wrote itself.
6:31
I barely had to hold the pen. It is the calm
6:35
that has to be earned sentence by sentence. by
6:38
a man who refuses to let the daily go dull on
6:41
him, which is the very same refusal the marriage
6:44
itself is built out of, so that the writing and
6:47
the loving turned out, somewhere in the fifth
6:50
notebook, to have quietly become the identical
6:53
act. And this was the thing the nearly full notebook
6:59
put to me that night, with its last six blank
7:02
pages waiting. Do I begin a sixth? Or have I
7:06
come, without noticing, to the end of needing
7:09
to? Because there is a question I have been quietly
7:13
avoiding for a while, and the thinning paper
7:16
forced it up into the lamplight where I had to
7:19
look at it. The question is whether the writing
7:22
has become a crutch. Whether I now need to set
7:25
the days truthing down in ink in order to have
7:27
properly seen it at all. The way a man with a
7:30
bad leg, after long enough on the stick, can
7:33
no longer cross even the short distance to his
7:36
own table without it, the aid having quietly
7:38
become the thing that the lack of strength is
7:41
built around. I do not want the notebooks to
7:43
be that. I do not want to be a man who can only
7:47
love his wife with a pen in his hand. I thought,
7:51
sitting there, of Saloni teaching Terra the order
7:55
of the Diaz on the balcony at the festival, how
7:58
the order is in no book, how it lives entirely
8:01
in Saloni's hands, below language, so deep down
8:05
in her that she could light them in the dark,
8:07
asleep, weeping. Anyhow, the knowledge gone all
8:11
the way into the body where it no longer needs
8:14
to be summoned because it has become the hand
8:16
itself. And I wondered whether the seeing could
8:19
ever go that deep in me, whether the awakeness
8:22
might one day stop being a thing I do, effortfully,
8:26
nightly, with a pen and a lamp and an act of
8:29
will, and become simply a thing I am, the way
8:33
the Order of the Diaz is no longer something
8:35
Selene knows, but something Selene is. I turned
8:39
it over for a long time, and I think I came,
8:42
that night, to an answer I can half believe.
8:46
The writing was never the seeing. The writing
8:49
was the school of the seeing. The discipline
8:52
I set myself when the seeing was new and weak
8:55
and could not yet stand on its own. The daily
8:58
exercise that forced the muscle to grow. And
9:01
the strange thing about a true discipline as
9:03
against a crutch is that you practice it precisely
9:06
so that one day you will not need it. The scales
9:09
are not the music. The scales are how the hands
9:12
learn the music until the music can come without
9:15
them. So perhaps the notebooks are a crutch and
9:18
perhaps they're a discipline. And the only difference
9:21
between the two, the whole difference, the entire
9:23
difference is whether you are using the support
9:25
to grow strong enough to one day set it down
9:28
or using it to make sure you never have to. I
9:31
would like to be doing the first. I am not certain
9:34
I am there yet, but I felt that night for the
9:38
first time that the day might actually come.
9:44
Celonie found me like that. The four old notebooks
9:47
opened in a row on the desk, the fifth beneath
9:50
my hand. The lamp turned low, and the night gone
9:55
deep. She came and stood behind my chair and
9:59
looked over my shoulder at the spread of them,
10:01
and she was quiet for a moment, doing some arithmetic
10:05
of her own, and then she said, Five. There are
10:09
five of them now. Nearly five. This one's almost
10:14
full. Five notebooks, she said, and she came
10:20
around and sat on the edge of the desk in her
10:22
nightclothes with her bare feet on the rung of
10:24
my chair and looked at the soft, battered spines
10:27
of them. All of them about me. Mostly about you.
10:32
Some about me being slow about you. But mostly
10:35
you. Do you have any idea, she said slowly, how
10:41
strange that is? But she was not frowning. There
10:45
was something opening in her face I had not seen
10:48
before, a kind of astonishment she was only now
10:52
letting herself feel. Five notebooks. Hundreds
10:56
of nights. I'm the most looked at woman in this
10:59
whole city and not one other person on earth
11:02
knows it. There are women who would give years
11:04
off their lives to be seen like that, properly
11:07
for years. by someone genuinely trying to get
11:10
them right, and they go their whole existence
11:12
and it never once happens, not from anyone, not
11:16
for an evening. And I get it in secret, in a
11:19
drawer, every night, from a man who can still
11:22
barely say the thing out loud but has apparently
11:25
written it down a thousand times in a hand I'm
11:28
not allowed to read. You could read them, I said.
11:33
You've always been able to read them. I know.
11:38
That's exactly why I never have. She ran one
11:42
finger along the soft spine of the first one,
11:45
the damaged one, without opening it. It's enough
11:49
to know they exist. It's enough to know that
11:52
whatever the day was, however ordinary, however
11:55
much I felt like the furniture, by ten at night,
11:58
somebody sat down here in the dark and found
12:01
one true thing about me worth keeping. You have
12:04
no idea what that does to a person. To be that
12:07
watched, most people spend their whole lives
12:10
starving for one -tenth of it. And then she did
12:14
the thing that undid me, the thing that turned
12:17
the whole night over. But you should know, she
12:22
said, looking up, that you're not the only one
12:25
keeping a record. I asked her what she meant.
12:31
though I think I already half knew, and she got
12:34
up and went to the Almora and came back with
12:37
the thing she had made the week after the morning
12:39
everything broke open, a small square of cloth,
12:42
scarcely bigger than a hand, that I had seen
12:45
a hundred times folded among her things and never
12:48
once understood. You think you invented the watching,
12:53
she said, sitting back down with it in her lap.
12:56
You think the looking only ran one way, you at
13:00
me. The pen and the notebooks. But I've been
13:03
making you the whole time. Every collar I cut
13:06
a particular way because of how you hold your
13:09
neck when you're tired. The bias I found. I found
13:13
it the season I was learning the exact grain
13:16
of you how you fall where you give. This. She
13:19
turned the small square of cloth in her fingers.
13:22
I made the week I realized you'd woken up. It
13:26
doesn't say anything. It hasn't got a single
13:29
word in it. But it's you, the week you came back
13:32
to me, held in the only language I've got. My
13:36
notebooks don't have letters in them. They've
13:39
got seams. I've been writing you down in cloth
13:42
for six years, in a hand you can't read either,
13:45
and I never told you because it was enough to
13:48
know it existed. I took the small square from
13:52
her and held it, and I could not read it, of
13:55
course, any more than she could read my pages
13:58
without opening them, and that was somehow the
14:01
entire point. Two people who had each, in secret,
14:05
in their own untranslatable language, been keeping
14:09
a faithful record of the other for years, neither
14:12
archive meant to be read, both of them simply
14:16
proof, laid down nightly, that the looking had
14:19
happened. I reached out and put my hand against
14:22
the side of her face, the lamp low and gold between
14:25
us, and she turned her mouth into my palm the
14:28
way she does, and for a while neither of us said
14:30
anything at all, because there was nothing either
14:33
notebook could hold that the quiet of that room
14:36
was not already holding better. I wrote it that
14:41
night, on one of the six remaining pages, in
14:45
the level hand of the fifth book. that the documenting
14:49
was never, in the end, about the document. The
14:53
record is very nearly beside the point. I do
14:56
not know if anyone will ever read these, and
14:59
I have decided I do not much mind. What the notebooks
15:02
were for, what they were always for, from the
15:05
torn first page of the first one to this thin
15:08
last gathering of the fifth, was the attention.
15:11
The notebook was only ever a way of forcing myself
15:15
to find, every single night, no matter how gray
15:19
and ordinary the day, one true thing about the
15:23
woman I love, and to hold it still long enough
15:26
to set it down. The finding was the whole of
15:28
it. The writing was just the net I used to catch
15:31
the finding so it could not slip past me back
15:34
into the dark. Five notebooks is something near
15:37
2 ,000 evenings, which is something near 2 ,000
15:41
true things found and kept about one single person.
15:45
And the man who has found 2 ,000 true things
15:47
about his wife is simply not the same man as
15:50
the one who, six years ago, asleep on his feet,
15:53
could not have troubled himself to find one.
15:56
The notebooks did not record the change in me.
15:59
They were the change in me. The pen did not describe
16:03
the waking. The pen was how I woke. That is the
16:06
thing almost no one understands about a tool
16:09
you use long enough. It does not stay a tool.
16:12
It reaches back up the arm and remakes the hand
16:15
that holds it. I took up a pen six years ago,
16:18
meaning only to keep a record. The way a man
16:21
takes up a hammer, meaning only to drive a nail.
16:23
And somewhere across the 2 ,000 nights, the pen
16:26
quietly went to work on the man at the other
16:28
end of it, taught my eye to go slow, taught my
16:32
attention where to rest and how long to stay
16:34
there, wore a deep groove into me along which
16:37
the noticing now runs almost by itself. I did
16:40
not, in the end. Write the notebooks so much
16:44
as the notebooks. Patiently, night after night,
16:47
wrote me. And I felt, closing in toward the last
16:51
pages, that the fifth notebook and I were going
16:54
to come to the end of something at about the
16:56
same time. Not the end of the marriage, God forbid.
16:59
Not the end of the looking, but the end of needing
17:01
to do it quite like this, by lamplight, with
17:04
ink, in secret. As though the scales were very
17:08
nearly learned. as though the music might soon
17:11
be able to come without them. Then the working
17:16
line, below it, for the front of the book, the
17:19
lamp guttering, Saloni already gone back to bed.
17:23
Keep the record until you no longer need the
17:26
record. The notebook is not the seeing. It is
17:29
the school of the seeing. You write the one true
17:32
thing down every night not so that it will be
17:35
remembered, but so that you will be made every
17:37
single night to go and find it. And one day,
17:40
if you are fortunate and you keep faithfully
17:43
at it long enough, the finding goes all the way
17:45
down into you. The way the order of the Diaz
17:48
went down into her hands and stops being a thing
17:51
you do and becomes a thing you are. Write until
17:54
then. Practice the scales until they vanish into
17:58
the music. And then, when the scene can finally
18:01
stand on its own without the pen to prop it,
18:04
close the book gently, leave the last pages clean,
18:08
and go on looking at her for the rest of your
18:10
life with nothing in your hands at all. I close
18:14
the fifth notebook with three or four pages still
18:17
blank inside it. The first time in six years
18:21
I have not filled a book to its very end. and
18:24
I left them clean on purpose, and I did not entirely
18:26
know why, except that it felt right to leave
18:29
a little room, a little unwritten dark, against
18:33
whatever was still coming. The four in the drawer,
18:36
the fifth on the desk, nearly done. The sixth
18:40
I may, or may not ever begin. I turned off the
18:44
lamp and went and lay down beside the most written,
18:48
most watched, least knowing of it woman in Delhi,
18:51
who was already asleep, who had been quietly
18:54
writing me in cloth the entire time I thought
18:56
I was the only one holding the pen, and I lay
19:00
there in the dark a long while, awake, looking
19:03
at the shape of her against the window, finding,
19:06
without writing it down, the day's one true thing.
19:10
To be continued in episode 54, The Old Sleep.
19:26
Playful Wife. If this story is staying with you,
19:29
the next episode is already waiting. Subscribe
19:33
so you don't miss it. The complete book is on
19:36
Amazon and early episodes plus bonus chapters
19:39
are on my Patreon. Links are in the description.
19:42
I'm Mia. Thank you for listening.