Is Anything Ever Really Over?

Very recently, Marcie Lucknow left her partner of 10 years, David Porter, for what she hoped would be the last time. They had intermittent fallouts, with periods of non-communication that stretched from one day (“oh, I am so sorry”) to one month (“I couldn’t bear movies without you”). Each longer period created deeper unsettling feelings of discontentment for her. David would ride those separations like a kid on a horse for the first time — not quite upright but desparate to hang onto the saddles’s pommel at all costs. He didn’t want to fall off. He was afraid of falling off and getting hurt. He didn’t think he would ever get back in the saddle if he did.

They had had an argument, silly really, about Swann’s Way. Marcie thought it was overwrought and overwritten and couldn’t take the lushness of the prose. David was outraged at her complete indifference to the language of amorous obsession, and the heavily sensual, perfumed headiness of the novel. “You are incapable of being swept away by any kind of beauty. You are hard, Marcie, very hard.” On her part, she sort of agreed with him, but had her passions that he didn’t care to acknowledge. And once again felt the gulf widening between them, echoing accusations careening from wall to wall. She would be brushing her teeth and would stare squinting in the mirror, mouth foaming from toothpaste, knife-edge sawing away in her brain — “is there anything you love apart from your cats? Is there anyone you care deeply for? Do you love me?”

When the final “no” was issued, they silently packed their things that had accumulated over the years — books, t-shirts, sweaters (his appropriated), coffee mugs, record albums. Everything went back into the original apartments, the memorabilia that neither wanted to stare at stuffed away in closets. Social Media accounts were cancelled, photos deleted. The only ghosts remained trapped inside dreams for David and teeth-brushing moments for Marcie.

Marcie got on with it, making dinner dates, upping her Pilates classes, and losing those five last pounds by starving herself. She no longer cooked the elaborate dishes that David would exclaim over and she wondered if he was just in it for the food. Now popcorn sufficed for dinner and sugar supplanted real food, while keeping caloric intake under 1200 a day.

While David, never a group person, stayed inside, reading his beloved 19th-century doorstop books on his Kindle. His eyesight was not that good anymore, so he enjoyed the large print type he could manipulate on his Kindle that made his reading effortless and deeply satisfying. He was a fumbler when it came to technology, computer-rage taking over at the smallest transgressions at the keyboard. But his Kindle was his only triumph over technology, and he kept purchasing new titles at an alarming rate, alarming to him as he was withholding when it came to spending anything on himself. His library was nearly up to 500 titles, ranging from ancient history tomes to political screeds against Trump, anything that had to do with WWI and WWII, the vast European Literary Canon from Shakespeare onward to the 20th Century, Orwell and Koestler being among his favorites. And then everything that Philip Roth and John Updike wrote. He tended to read passages and whole texts over and over, emblazoning his memory with dialogue and descriptions of wars, romantic relationships and betrayals piled up in his head like clean sheets in a linen closet. He knew every dramatic personae, every bend in the story, every memorable moment. His real life and his memory collided and bled together forming sustained imaginative scenes that took him from dawn to dusk. Who had time to mourn a relationship when life could be lit by a bright Paper White?

One rainy Saturday, David flopped onto his messy bed, and opened the Kindle to Location 9098 of War and Peace. He was 32% through the book, eager to commit to memory the next battle coming up. His heart beat a bit faster in anticipation of being led by Tolstoy through the battlefield, the foolish and endearing behaviors of the aristocrats in uniform, regaling each other with their bravery and courage in the face of Napolean’s relentless militia. Suddenly a window popped up reading “MOST RECENT PAGE READ. You are currently at location 9098. The most recent location read is 17296 from Marcie’s 4th Kindle today at 1:16 PM. Go to location 17496?”. He hit “Cancel” punching his index finger onto the screen over and over until his finger hurt. He shut his eyes, looking at the faded images of what he just saw dancing about his eyes. Closed, open, nothing changed the abrupt shift in his mood from cozy anticipation to a silent scream for mercy from God. Marcie was now everywhere he was, and twice as far along with War and Peace for that matter. How dare she contaminate the digital pages of, of, this (he kept mindlessly sputtering to himself) this pleasuredome, this elysian field of tranquility, my home, my hearth, my…

That night, deep in slumber, David dreamt that he was given a written exercise by a former boss, through an intermediary. He was eager to please both the intermediary, whoever he was, and the absentee boss. He started in on his thesis, believing he understood the mission and throwing everything he had at the page. Suddenly the intermediary said “time’s up” and David crammed a few last words into his work. Everything fell apart — the intermediary told him that he had warned him about time, and David felt bewildered. How could he have missed that? What else was he missing? And then he woke up, oddly drenched in sweat.

When he was a child, nothing was safe from his prying eyes and curious, almost greedy, need to know everything that was going on. Christmas packages were opened carefully prior to the main event, encyclopedia pages gobbled up before anyone else had a chance to read, food inhaled at a prodigious rate. While his brothers and sisters (some of them cried) complained about the greyish quality of Irish American cooking and protested by throwing scraps to the dog, David ate everything that was given him with gratitude. Who was he to refuse the food that was put in front of him? Even he knew that his father, a prosperous upright member of their community worked long, diligent hours to provide for his squawking siblings. David was not one to complain. Rather he took and read, read and took. It was all rather simple until that moment, many years later, that Marcie invaded his territory, like a wooly mammoth in sheep’s clothing. And so, for the second time in one day, he fearfully opened up his Kindle, only to find out she had progressed even further, gaining ground on him. He wondered whether she was reading the war parts as he knew well how many readers of the book tended to skip those long chapters to spend more time with Natasha and Pierre. Was there a moral component to this, he wondered? If she is trying to outpace him — for every ten pages he read, she read 50. Did she have a strategy? Was this reading for pleasure or reading for revenge? Was this all a lie, a way to stab him in the back for staying the course throughout their relationship? He tried to focus on the page, even increasing the type size so he could pretend he was catching up to her, but nothing was getting in. His mind couldn’t grab onto the words that have previously put him into a sweet delirium. Leaving her had ruined his serenity and now she had ruined his reading.

Marcie in turn was reading War and Peace with rapid deployment, an army of one on the move. She did with little remorse hastily consume the War parts, being more interested as a women of style in the clothing, manners and romantic habits of the Peaceful citizens of Moscow and St. Petersburg. Unlike her former partner, she had no vision of what it might be to be on the battlefields of the Napoleanic Wars. She had read, at her same brisk pace sometime earlier, The Charterhouse of Parma and was more interested in Stendahl’s origins then the dust and blood kicked up by the soldiers. Although, to be fair, she remembered as she was reading War and Peace how Napolean put in an appearance in Charterhouse and how indifferent he seemed to the suffering that was around him. He was having dinner, though, which made sense since he was French. For her part, she was also indifferent to David’s seemingly lackadaisical pace and was not waged in a competition herself. Or so she thought. Her reading habits were more spurious — more for show then tell. If you asked her where she was at any given point, she would stumble around in her mind, not clear where the current plot point had taken her. Bored and restless in general, she picked up her Kindle as a way to prove she was a serious person. In seeing that David had embarked on War and Peace, she decided to do so as well. She would mildly drop in, like a poached egg in water, the answer to questions from friends and dates (she was now dating again) “What are you reading these days?”. “Oh, um, well, War and Peace.” She would modestly lower her head a bit to show that she wasn’t bragging, merely stating a factoid about her present tense. Usually “Wows” followed by “I haven’t had the courage to read it” or “I read it in College” or “I read the Cliff Notes version”. Or. Marcie would think at those moments that she was a bit of a phony, but well, she was reading it after all, wasn’t she? She silently thanked David for raising her social status just a little bit. And on dates it worked quite well. Men would feel slightly inferior to her, which then raised her visual appeal, air-brushing her face with mysterious shadows and sparkling (just like Natasha!) eyes. She had yet to meet someone who had read War and Peace.

It was a bungee jump for Marcie — this foray into one of the greatest masterpieces in 19th century literature. She delighted in the initial sweep of the narrative — the big swings from the battlefield to the St. Petersburg salons, but soon got bored with the whole enterprise. After a few hundred pages or so she started to skip madly, looking at the first sentences of each page, darting down to the bottom like a seagull diving for a morsel, coming up on the second page and so on and so forth. That way she was in the 800’s in about a week. Along the way she had gathered a few talking points without having to read the synopsis yet. In a few months, however, it would fade away and she might have to take a Wikipedia refresher course to continue this fiction of fiction. How many times had she done this throughout her 44 years?

The unparallel course between the ex-lovers went on for about two months, until Marcie had come to an end. The window no longer popped up on David’s Kindle, and he felt a kind of low-level loss, somewhere in his gut, when he noticed the absence of the daily page accountings. He supposed that Kindle had a kind of digital portrait of him that would sketch out something like this: HUGE purchaser. But one caveat: SLOW READER. Do not forecast high numbers in the future. Has read 10.3 percent of titles, and is averaging about a book every three months or so. Likes long, tedious novels written in prior centuries that have nothing to do with anything relevant. Ok. Some 21st century writers, but only the Jewish ones. Would recommend all Jewish writers of any century to him, as well as any novels or titles exceeding 500 pages.

David also wrote Marcie’s profile in his head which would be roughly the opposite of his: Recommend anything that has been on the bestseller list. Also every last fucking book that is on every fucking elite Northeastern prep school absolutely must read list. And if possible short synopses to go along with the download to provide stimulating dinner conversation with other non-reading readers.

One soft spring evening in late May, Marcie met up with what seemed to be a promising first internet date. He was a full professor at Columbia and taught European History. How dull could he be, she thought? She was very fond of corduroy and had enough intellectual training from David to fake it through a drink. She knew when WWI and WWII happened, and who the Allies and Axis was, and how many Jews were slaughtered in the Holocaust. Anyhow, she reasoned, men like to be experts in whatever they choose to be experts in, so there wasn’t much point in overdoing it with him. She shook hands with him, although he had made a more intimate overture, trying to kiss her on the cheek.

“Marcie — how nice to meet you.” His face revealed a level of surprise, indicating perhaps that his resignation to another forgettable face sitting across from him was immediately overturned by Marcie’s practiced bright smile and flashing black eyes. She continued to smile, saying “Yes, thanks for meeting me. Thanks for, uh, liking me”. They then sat down and had a brief discussion about the superficiality of the latest dating site. What does “liking” mean, given that all you have to go on is a small photo or series of photos that is more art, less matter. The dyslexic quote came from the professor, assuming Marcie would understand the reference. She kept up her smile, and, speaking with conviction and undertone of pride, asked “It that Tolstoy? You know I just finished War and Peace.”

The professor, startled by the obvious and failed effort of appearing engage, and also the admission to having read War and Peace which, he assumed, was a way of impressing a scholar who has had every style and manner of academic mendacity thrown at him over and over. These observations hit him quickly, like buckshot. “Ah, well, good for you” he mustered. “I myself only read War and Peace once, although the Napoleanic era is of great fascination to me. I just was not that interested, frankly, in the decaying social order of the Muscovites. Which side of the seesaw did you prefer — War or Peace?” he asked as a kind of pop quiz, a way to further address this artful deceiver. Marcie quickly said “Why the War parts, of course. Doesn’t everybody prefer the War parts?”

Check, mate.