Latest / My Playful Wife — A Tender Literary Love Story / My Playful Wife — Season 1, Episode 59: The New Room

Transcript

My Playful Wife — Season 1, Episode 59: The New Room · My Playful Wife — A Tender Literary Love Story

0:00
I only just learned to see one person, I said.
0:03
Do you understand what I'm afraid of? It took
0:06
me six years, and almost losing you to learn
0:09
to keep my eyes open on a single human being.
0:12
Attention isn't infinite. My Playful Wife, Episode
0:18
59, The New Room, written by Mia. We moved, in
0:26
the end. to the larger flat we had been not quite
0:30
talking about for two years. The workshop having
0:33
done, after the collection and the slow good
0:36
seasons that followed it, well enough to allow
0:38
such a thing, and on the first evening in the
0:41
new place, with the boxes still taped and the
0:44
rooms still echoing and the smell of someone
0:47
else's life not yet aired out of the walls, I
0:50
walked through it counting, the way you do, and
0:53
found that there was one room more than the two
0:56
of us had any. Earthly use for. It was a small
1:00
room at the end of the passage, square, with
1:03
a single window that took the morning light and
1:06
a faint rectangle on one wall where a previous
1:09
family's something had hung for years. We had
1:12
not chosen the flat for it. We had chosen the
1:15
flat for the light in the main rooms and the
1:18
nearness to the workshop and the fact that we
1:20
could, finally, afford to stop apologizing for
1:24
where we lived. The extra room had simply come
1:27
with it, the way an unasked -for question sometimes
1:30
comes folded inside an answer. And I stood in
1:34
its doorway on that first echoing evening and
1:37
felt it look back at me, empty, expectant, swept
1:41
clean by strangers and waiting to be told what
1:44
it was now for, and felt, without yet having
1:47
words for it, that the next stretch of our life
1:50
had just been quietly handed its central problem.
1:54
I did not say any of that to Celonie. The first
1:57
evening. You do not announce, standing among
2:00
the taped boxes on the first night in a new home,
2:03
that you have just felt the floor of the next
2:05
several years shift under you. It sounds absurd,
2:09
overwrought, the sort of thing only a man who
2:12
fills notebooks would feel about an empty 8x8
2:16
room. But I have learned to trust those shifts.
2:19
The notebooks have taught me. if nothing else,
2:22
that the large turns in a life rarely announce
2:25
themselves largely. They arrive disguised as
2:28
small domestic facts, a spare room, a folded
2:32
photograph, an ordinary Tuesday, and the whole
2:35
art of staying awake is noticing the true size
2:38
of a thing while it is still pretending to be
2:40
small. This room was pretending to be small.
2:44
I could feel, standing in its doorway, exactly
2:47
how large it actually was. I am a man who has
2:54
built a whole second life on the discipline of
2:57
attending to what is actually there. That is
2:59
the entire teaching of the notebooks, the things
3:02
six years and five full books had drilled into
3:05
me. Look at what is in front of you, the real
3:08
and present thing, the wife in the doorway, the
3:12
cup, the festival, the ordinary face. An empty
3:15
room defeats that discipline completely because
3:18
an empty room is precisely not a thing that is
3:21
there. It is a thing that is not there yet. It
3:25
is pure potential, pure future, a question mark
3:29
built of plaster, and standing in it I felt the
3:32
particular unease of a man whose hard -won skill
3:34
suddenly does not apply, because you cannot attend
3:38
to what is absent, you can only wonder about
3:40
it, and wondering is the one mental motion the
3:43
awake years had taught me to distrust, being
3:46
so close to the daydreaming that is just sleep
3:49
by another name. So my first instinct, I am a
3:54
little ashamed to say, was to neutralize the
3:56
room. To give it a use as fast as possible and
4:00
make the question go away. I would make it a
4:03
study, I thought. I would move the desk and the
4:06
six notebooks in here, give myself at last a
4:09
proper room for the looking instead of the corner
4:11
by the window. It was a reasonable thought. It
4:14
was also, I see now, a small cowardice. The impulse
4:19
to fill an open question with the first available
4:21
answer simply because open questions are uncomfortable
4:24
to stand inside. I wanted to convert the future
4:28
into furniture. It is a habit of the frightened,
4:31
that conversion, and I recognized it in myself
4:34
even as I reached for it. We are forever turning
4:38
our open questions into closed objects, our maybes
4:41
into definites, because a definite thing, however
4:44
much smaller, can at least be lived with. while
4:48
an open question goes on quietly demanding something
4:51
of you every single time you walk past its door.
4:54
That was the study's entire appeal, I see now.
4:57
Not that the room wanted to be a study, but that
5:00
a study would let me stop feeling the future,
5:03
ask me something I was not ready to answer. Celonie,
5:06
I would discover, wanted to leave it a question
5:09
a while longer, because she already had a different
5:12
answer, a larger one, and she was waiting to
5:15
see whether I would arrive at it on my own. She
5:20
stood in the empty room differently than I did.
5:23
I noticed it the second evening, when I found
5:26
her in there alone in the last of the light,
5:29
not measuring it for anything, not planning,
5:32
just standing in the middle of the bare floor
5:34
with her arms folded, looking at the rectangle
5:37
on the wall. I stood with her, and I said something
5:41
about the desk, about making it the study, and
5:44
she did not answer for a moment, and then she
5:46
said, Is that what you see when you stand in
5:49
here? A study. And there was nothing sharp in
5:53
it, only a kind of genuine curiosity, as though
5:57
she were trying to understand the difference
5:59
between the inside of my head and the inside
6:01
of hers. Because that isn't what I see, she said.
6:05
I don't see a use at all. I see a person. I've
6:09
been seeing a person in here since the day we
6:11
got the keys. And she said it lightly, almost,
6:14
but I felt the floor of the next several years
6:17
shift very slightly under us. The way it does
6:20
when someone you've been awake to for a long
6:22
time says the quiet true thing they've been carrying
6:25
for a while and waiting for the room to make
6:28
sayable. I have noticed that this is how she
6:31
has always worked the most important things between
6:33
us. Not by announcing them, but by waiting with
6:36
a patience that can look from the outside like
6:38
passivity and is in fact its exact opposite for
6:42
the conditions to ripen until the true thing
6:44
can be said in its proper season. She had waited
6:47
years once. For me to wake up, never nagging,
6:51
only keeping her own lamp lit until I found my
6:55
own way to it. And she was doing a version of
6:58
the same thing now in the empty room, declining
7:01
to hand me her answer outright, waiting instead
7:04
to see whether I could be trusted to walk toward
7:07
it on my own two feet. It is a form of respect,
7:10
that waiting, though it can take you years to
7:13
learn to recognize it as one. She told me that
7:19
night, the boxes still half -unpacked around
7:22
us, what she had been carrying. That she wanted
7:26
to foster. That she had been thinking about it
7:29
for longer than she had let on. Quietly, privately,
7:33
the way she thinks about the things she means
7:35
most, and that the empty room had not created
7:39
the wish, but only, finally, given it somewhere
7:42
to stand. I want to record how she looked saying
7:45
it. because it mattered, because it was not the
7:48
look of a woman floating a whim. She looked the
7:51
way she looks at a length of cloth she has already
7:54
decided how to cut, certain, unhurried, a little
7:59
tender toward the thing she is about to make.
8:01
This was not an impulse the new flat had produced
8:04
in an idle hour. It was a conclusion she had
8:08
been quietly arriving at for a long time. down
8:11
in the part of her where the real decisions get
8:13
made long before the talking ever starts, and
8:16
the empty room had simply been the first place
8:18
large enough to set it down where I could finally
8:21
see it too. She did not want, she said, to fill
8:25
the room with our own late biology. We were past
8:29
the easy door for that, and she had made her
8:31
peace with it years ago, and this was not about
8:34
that old grief resurfacing. It was about something
8:38
the awake years themselves had grown in her.
8:41
We learned to see each other, she said. That's
8:44
what all your notebooks are. Six years of the
8:47
two of us learning to really look at one person.
8:50
And somewhere in the middle of it, I started
8:53
thinking, what is all this looking for if it
8:56
only ever points at each other? I've got more
8:59
of it in me than you need. I can feel it. I run
9:03
a workshop full of young people because I have
9:05
to put it somewhere. And there are children in
9:08
this city with no one looking at them at all.
9:10
Not one person. Going completely unseen the way
9:14
I went unseen in my own marriage for years. The
9:17
way you'd gone unseen your whole life until something
9:20
woke you. We know exactly what that costs. We
9:24
are the two people on earth who know best what
9:27
it costs to go unlooked at. And we have a room.
9:31
She looked at me. I think we're supposed to make
9:34
it for one of them. I think that's what the room
9:37
is for. I think it's what the whole of it has
9:39
been getting us ready for. And I did not say
9:45
no, because it was not a no kind of thing she
9:48
had said. It was too large and too true for a
9:51
no. But I did not say yes either, because I was
9:54
afraid, and we name the true things now, so I
9:57
named the fear. I only just learned to see one
10:02
person, I said. Do you understand what I'm afraid
10:05
of? It took me six years and almost losing you
10:09
to learn to keep my eyes open on a single human
10:12
being. Attention isn't infinite. Mine especially
10:16
isn't. I have a proven, documented talent for
10:20
going to sleep on the people I love, the best
10:23
documented case I know of. And you're asking
10:26
me to take the one thing I barely learned to
10:29
do for one person and divide it. What if I can't?
10:33
what if i split it and it goes thin and i end
10:36
up half seeing you and half seeing a child and
10:39
fully seeing neither and we go gray again all
10:42
of us in a bigger flat with more people in it
10:45
to go gray around and there's a worse one i made
10:49
myself say it i was a sleeper for 40 years that's
10:53
in me that capacity is in me to stop looking
10:57
at the people right in front of me is a man like
11:01
that safe to hand a child to A child needs exactly
11:04
the thing I'm worst at and only lately badly
11:08
learned. What if I fail a child the way I spent
11:12
years failing you, except a child can't wait
11:15
six years on a balcony for me to wake up? She
11:19
was quiet a long moment, in the dark of the unfurnished
11:23
room, and she did not rush to reassure me, because
11:27
she respects the true things too much to wave
11:29
them away. That is one of the rarest things about
11:32
her, and one I have only fully valued since learning
11:35
how rare it is. That when you hand her a real
11:38
fear, she does not rush to make it smaller. Most
11:42
people, offered another person's fear, reach
11:45
at once to minimize it, because another's fear
11:48
is almost as uncomfortable to sit inside as one's
11:52
own. She does not. She lets the fear be exactly
11:56
the size it is. takes its true measure, and only
11:59
then answers, which is the whole reason that,
12:02
when she does answer, you can believe her, having
12:06
watched her decline every cheap and easy version
12:09
of comfort along the way. Those are real, she
12:15
said at last. I'm not going to tell you they're
12:18
not, but I want you to notice something about
12:21
every single fear you just listed. She came and
12:26
stood close. Every one of them is a fear about
12:29
whether you can keep looking. Not one of them
12:32
is the old thing. Not one of them is you not
12:35
noticing there's a question here at all. The
12:37
old you wouldn't have been afraid of dividing
12:39
his attention. The old you would have said, sure,
12:43
fine, whatever you think, and not felt a thing
12:46
and gone back to his evening. You're standing
12:49
in an empty room terrified about the quality
12:51
of your attention. Do you know how far that is
12:54
from the man I married? The fear you're describing
12:57
is the fear of an awake person. Sleepers don't
13:01
have it. Only someone who knows exactly what
13:04
looking costs is frightened of being asked to
13:06
do more of it. She put her hand flat on my chest.
13:10
I'm not telling you it'll be easy, or that you
13:13
won't go gray sometimes, or that we won't get
13:17
it wrong. I'm telling you that the very fact
13:19
that those are your fears is the reason I think
13:22
you could actually do it. You're not afraid of
13:25
the work because you don't understand it. You're
13:28
afraid because you're the one person I know who
13:31
understands it completely. We did not decide
13:36
anything that night in the empty room. That is
13:40
not how the largest things get decided. They
13:43
do not turn on a single evening among the boxes.
13:46
We only stood in it together a long while in
13:49
the dark, two people not young anymore. looking
13:52
at a bare floor and a window full of city light
13:55
and the faint ghost rectangle of someone else's
13:58
life, and held the question open between us without
14:01
forcing it shut, which is, I have come to understand,
14:05
its own kind of awake. The discipline of not
14:09
converting a living question into dead furniture
14:11
just because the open version is hard to stand
14:15
inside. I put my arm around her in the dark of
14:18
the room that might be a study or might be a
14:20
child's or might stay, for a while yet, simply
14:24
a held and waiting space, and she leaned into
14:26
me, and we looked at the empty room the way we
14:29
had once, years ago, learned to look at each
14:32
other, as a thing whose meaning was not yet finished
14:35
and would only be found by continuing to attend
14:38
to it. There is a courage in that, I think, that
14:42
I had not quite managed earlier in the evening
14:44
with my study and my desk and my wish to settle
14:48
the matter fast. To stand inside an unanswered
14:51
question, on purpose, without rushing to close
14:55
it, to let a room stay empty, a future stay open,
14:59
a large thing stay large, is far harder than
15:03
it sounds and is, I am beginning to suspect,
15:07
Most of what love actually asks of two people
15:10
once the early certainties have all been spent.
15:13
Anyone can share a decision already made. It
15:16
takes something more to stand in a doorway together
15:19
in the dark and share. Instead, a question neither
15:23
of you can yet answer, and to find in the sharing
15:26
of it not anxiety, but a strange and steadying
15:30
warmth. I open the sixth notebook that night,
15:36
finally. its first clean page, and wrote in it
15:40
the first true thing of the new book. That the
15:43
awake years had taught me to see one person,
15:46
and that the empty room was now asking whether
15:49
the seeing could widen without going thin. Whether
15:52
attention, the thing I had spent six years learning
15:54
to give to a single face, was a fixed quantity
15:57
that divides and weakens when you split it. or
16:00
whether it was the other kind of thing, the kind
16:03
that grows by being spent, the kind that has
16:05
more of itself the more of it you give away.
16:07
I did not know the answer. Celonie believed she
16:11
knew it. She believed love and attention are
16:14
the second kind, the loaves and fishes kind,
16:17
that multiply in the giving, and that the proof
16:20
was the workshop and Terra and the whole widening
16:24
ring of the awake years already quietly spilling
16:27
past the two of us. I was not sure. I am a careful
16:31
man with my attention because I know how scarce
16:35
mine has been. But I noticed, writing it, that
16:38
the question itself was a volume three kind of
16:40
question, that the first book had been about
16:43
waking and the second about staying awake to
16:45
each other, and that this new one, beginning
16:48
in an empty room at the end of a passage, was
16:50
going to be about something harder and larger.
16:53
Whether two people who had finally learned to
16:55
see each other could turn and learn to see, together
16:58
a third. Then the working line, the first and
17:05
the sixth book, the empty room dark down the
17:08
passage, Saloni asleep among the boxes. An empty
17:13
room is not a void to be filled with the nearest
17:16
use. It is a question the future has set you,
17:19
and the awake thing is to leave it open long
17:21
enough to hear what it is really asking. Do not
17:25
convert it to furniture out of fear. of the open
17:28
space the next movement of a good life is almost
17:32
always larger than the last and it almost always
17:35
arrives as an empty room a held silence a question
17:40
you cannot yet answer and the only sin is to
17:43
fill it too fast to make it a study when it was
17:46
asking to be a nursery to shrink the future down
17:49
to the size of your present comfort stand in
17:52
the empty room let it ask the looking you learned
17:56
for one person was only ever the training. The
18:00
room at the end of the passage is the beginning
18:02
of the real test. I kept the pen, the first page
18:07
of the sixth notebook no longer blank, and I
18:10
walked once more down the passage to the empty
18:13
room and stood in its doorway in the dark, and
18:16
it looked back at me the way it had on the first
18:17
evening, but differently now, because a question
18:20
that has been spoken aloud between two awake
18:22
people is a different thing from one that is
18:25
only felt, larger, and more frightening, and
18:29
far more alive. I did not know what the room
18:32
would become. But I knew, standing there, that
18:36
we would find out together, with our eyes open,
18:39
and that whatever we made of it, we would make
18:42
it awake. And I went back to bed beside my wife,
18:45
in the new flat, at the start of the new book,
18:48
with a new question burning quietly down the
18:51
hall like a lamp left on in a room that was waiting,
18:54
with what I can only call patience, to be told
18:58
at last who it was for. To be continued in episode
19:14
episode 59 of My Playful Wife. If this story
19:18
is staying with you, the next episode is already
19:22
waiting. Subscribe so you don't miss it. The
19:25
complete book is on Amazon and early episodes
19:28
plus bonus chapters are on my Patreon. Links
19:32
are in the description. I'm Mia. Thank you for
19:35
listening.