Love in the time of COVID

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His crutch and mine.

It’s a warm day so I take my newborn son into the garden. I construct, with elastic bands, a sheet of fabric, and the pram and poles for support, a den-come-sun-shade. As sensory experiences go it’s not up to much but it’s the best I can do given current circumstances. We lie down. I shut my eyes. 

Our son was 12 weeks old when Boris announced the country-wide lockdown. Our lives had already changed dramatically in the three short (and long!) months since he’d been born. Already I didn’t get out much. Neither did my husband. Even on a good week we struggled to get to the supermarket. We were like lovers in their first flush; spending whole days in bed, unwashed. Many were the hours lost staring not at each other but at this new third person in our midst: the wonder of his little face. 

But there comes a time when even the most obsessed of lovers wants to throw open the windows, take a walk down the street. Alone. If only for the pleasure of returning, with renewed enthusiasm, to the nest. Before Boris’s bombshell my happiest moments were all about freedom and the chance, however fleeting, to reconnect with my old life: a cup of coffee and a chocolate biscuit in a too-narrow-for-prams cafe, consumed alone, high on my own damn self; the trip to a favourite restaurant to see dear friends, dressed in heels, in lipstick, making short work of three courses while my breasts filled up reproachfully. I feel like a bad mum for emphasising those moments which were spent without my son in tow. But we all need a break sometimes, right? A change of scene.

I know you understand. Six weeks into lockdown. The rising feelings of claustrophobia. A crawling sensation under your skin that no amount of rationalising can soothe. Yes perhaps if you could go out you might not want to. You might just carry on enjoying the activity in which you are currently engaged. And yes, of course you love them, you love them dearly, gratefully, you are really, terribly lucky, but nonetheless you find yourself wailing, like a child: “But I just…” “I just.”

And how small the “justs”. “Just a cup of tea in a cafe.” “Just a swim.” “A hug.” How small are the things we miss. And how big too.

This is not the maternity leave I imagined. I thought we’d be walking him all over this city that I love, and beyond. I thought we’d be exploring the world together. Hence splurging on membership for the national arboretum (now closed), the local swimming lake (ditto). We were on the verge of joining the National Trust. As I waddled about heavily pregnant I imagined taking him to these places, showing him the leaves of Japanese maples, pond weed, murky and black. Water lilies. High divers. Dragon flies. By way of antenatal classes money was spent, too, on friends with whom we might socialise after he was born. Who would understand what we are going through. I wonder now whether these already fragile, somewhat tennous, bonds will survive without the requisite play dates and hanging about in cafes. When we emerge from this perhaps we will feel we have the whole parent thing down and are in no need of others going through “the same thing”. Perhaps we won’t need other people at all. In the early weeks of motherhood I could not shake the feeling, as he stared unsmiling into my big eager face, that he didn’t like me. Now I worry that he will only like me.

For there is no one now, but his dad and I, to stimulate him. And no one else to stimulate, or relieve, us. No family to provide momentary respite. No friends to whom we might escape. The dear colleague who offered to babysit can’t come within two metres of our house. Much less take him from his tired mama while said mama naps or washes or attempts to clean the house. 

Though no one sees the state of our house now, of course. So swings and roundabouts.

Swings and roundabouts too that I don’t have to attend the many mother and baby groups that I paid for. That the stress of leaving the house with a newborn in tow is a stress no longer. But oh the waste, the waste, of all the paraphernalia purchased to facilitate leaving the house. The car seat. The changing bag. I always suspected that it was all a con. And now it is revealed to be so.  

On good days—and there are good days, aren’t there? Somewhat surprisingly perhaps there are good days—I think that if we survive this, parenting a newborn, mostly cheerfully, during a global pandemic, we will be better equipped for all of the other parenting challenges that follow. That the patience and resilience baked into this experience will stand us in good stead. How much more quickly we have learnt, as much as you can learn, how this parenting business works. How sharp has been the need to figure this out for ourselves. We have no choice, now, but to be enough for him. We are all he has. Which was always true. But is now literally true. 

I’m glad that he is the size he is. That I didn’t have to add COVID anxiety to labour anxiety: that our families got to meet him. Relieved too that he doesn’t understand what’s going on. I don’t envy friends with toddlers, school-age children, teenagers: their little (and big) hurts and disappointments. We don’t have to homeschool (though my husband is finding it hard to bring in the money with his son screaming in the background); we aren’t getting married or planning to go on a once-in-a-life time holiday. You tell yourself that you can’t be sad: that other people are sadder, and justifiably so. But the truth is that everyone has some grief in this, some disappointment. This is not how his grandparents imagined they would spend the first few months of my boy’s life, either.

Meanwhile my husband and I are getting into a rhythm. How to cook and eat. Wash. Dress. Shop. How to parcel out each hour of the day so that we both get a break and perhaps a moment or two where we might hold hands, or hug, or simply rest our heads on each other’s shoulders. It’s a dance of sorts. Leader becomes follower: follower becomes leader. On we go. And on again. 

And it was silly really. Spending money to see nature when we have a perfectly lovely garden. They were me those things. Not for him. So many are the lessons here. About doing more with less. Finding more in that less. Many and myriad are the lessons of COVID. Both bitter and sweet. 

In the make-shift den I open my eyes. Together we watch the fabric as it ripples when the wind catches it, and the cat cleaning her paws. A beetle makes slow progress towards our feet. A bird comes and goes. It’s a kingdom of sorts, with its own microclimate, its own entertainment; and the longer we stay the more expansive this kingdom feels. So it is a shock when we do finally climb out. How small the space we’d inhabited! How vast the garden. How bright the sun. 

I lie back down beside my son on the grass. The birds are singing their little hearts out. “The sky,” I say,  with wonder that I really feel: “Yes darling. It’s the sky.” 

 

All the tiny little rapes

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Three Women by Lisa Taddeo.

I read something recently—actually in relation to rejections from literary agents (but that’s another tale)—that gave me pause. The sentence was this: “Think about all the books you’ve read in the past year. How many blew you away so much that you had to call a friend and tell them all about the story?”

Now I don’t know exactly how many books I’ve read this year but trust me when I say I have a fairly sizeable habit. And on the whole I’m a chainsmoker-type reader—no sooner is one book finished then I start the next—and while I hope that I’m thoughtful, that I give each book I read due consideration and head space, to actually call someone: to stare at someone else reading it on a train, jealous, jealous, that they are getting to read it for the first time, that all its delights are still ahead for them? 

There has been just one book like that. Three Women by Lisa Taddeo. That book—her book—blew me away. And while it’s often fairly easy to say why you didn’t like something, why it “failed” for you on some fundamental level, I think it’s generally more tricky to dig down into why you fell in love. To do the difficult work of finding words beyond the gushing —brilliant, amazing, and the emphatic “I just loved it.”

It’s a useful exercise though—and a worthy one. How much better for one’s soul—for everyone’s soul—to restrict yourself to the positive. To comment only when you think that someone has done well, nay, excelled themselves. When you simply want to say to someone “I tip my hat to you madame.” Imagine, for example, what a different place Twitter would be.

I’m not advocating letting anyone off the hook here. I’m not saying we should say things are good when we feel the reverse (no one loves the letters page of the LRB more than me). No. What I’m suggesting is that it might be better, in these dark times, to write in a haze of love and joy and sheer gladness that something exists. 

And boy am I glad that Three Women exists. That Lisa Taddeo managed to pitch this one successfully (“um, it’s about the sex lives of three women”) and find a way to fund the extensive fieldwork that it involved and—above all—kept the faith, kept on keeping on, that here was a story (or stories) worth telling.

First we meet Maggie, who ended up in a relationship with her teacher and then in court. Next Lina, who is conducting an affair with a man she knew from high school. And finally Sloane, whose husband likes to watch her have sex with other people, experiences she likens to being “the only player on a badminton court, trying to keep the shuttlecock on both sides of the net”. These are our three women. And while they cannot ever be “everywomen” (if I take anything from this book it is that female desire is multifaceted and complicated) I  found a deep and sometimes uncomfortable resonance in each of their stories.

Like Maggie I have felt, in the throes of lust and love, small (“His superpower is that he can make her feel very stupid very fast” ) and unsure (“Like any young girl who has a crush on someone older, she doesn’t know what she wants to happen. She doesn’t know if she wants sex or no sex or just to undress in her room while he watches from the sidewalk”). Like Lina I have been reckless, hooked, “speeding, going eighty, ninety … the elation […] like a gushing feeling of wellness.” And like Sloane I’ve found that the emotional work of being a woman, “the tasks of the day unfurl[ing] themselves before her like a roll of celluloid […] Okay, tick spray and change of clothes and skating lesson and refill the toilet paper and need milk, onions, lemons and order more printer paper …”  leaves me too drained for much of a fantasy life.  

The particularities of each story, the power dynamics at play, are specific and compelling, but there are also intriguing commonalities: obsession; blindness (itself part of a delicious kind of oblivion); and the ability, perhaps peculiar to women, to contain both the fantasy and the reality of any given situation. Witness Lina, “Aidan is not the same in sex as he is in real life. He can be an asshole in life, a loser, but in bed he becomes something else entirely. A lord.” And Maggie’s mixed feelings about her first sexual encounter with her teacher: “It feels awkward, not entirely magical. […] Something about the orgasm made her feel cold, like something was taken from her.”

And then there is the delight of Taddeo’s prose, which is both graceful and muscular. “Even in love,” she writes, with characteristic insight, “ […] there is competition—a frantic need to be the one who will hurt less than the other.”

But for me the most unsettling resonance of all was each woman’s difficulty in owning her desires; their (our) tendency to pretend to “want things we don’t want so no one can see us not getting what we need.”

Maggie feels that her “stock” has risen simply by being chosen, deemed worthy. “She tries to figure out if she really loves [her teacher] or if her feelings are utterly reactionary … she feels that he cares more than he does and it freaks her out. It makes her feel sad for him and it makes her feel she will suffocate under the pressure to reciprocate.” 

We see the same absentism in Sloane, who “knows how to perform oral sex as if it’s an Olympic sport … She knows what to wear to every kind of dinner … It’s not about being sexy. It’s about being everything before the man thinks of what he wants.” Sloane’s husband likes “to watch her get fucked by other men [and] … he chose [such men] for a variety of reasons that, maybe, had nothing to do with what Sloane liked or wanted or needed.” Sloane goes along with it because she loves him, because she likes sex, because she is, mostly, happy. But you sense that this sex, like the clothes she wears, is not actually for her. 

In her interview with Elizabeth Day for the latter’s excellent podcast How to Fail, Taddeo talks about ”the tiny little rapes” that women experience on a daily basis. A statement that had me reflecting on all the tiny little rapes of my own life—the  train conductor who abandoned his quest for tickets so he could sit beside the thirteen year old me and ask whether my boyfriend was a good kisser; the frequent bus-user whose schtick it was to press his leg against yours and then get off at your stop and follow you home. The (bigger, more awful) incidents that have happened to friends. The knowledge—the knowing—that every single woman I know, and every single woman they know, and so on and so on, ad infinitum, has at least half a dozen or so (maybe more) of these sorts of stories and “anecdotes”, which we have so totally absorbed and normalised that we don’t give them air time. The hundred and one cat calls. The honks from white van drivers—and the rest. 

But what, I hear you ask, have these “tiny little rapes” got to do with women and desire? Well, in such a climate, is it any wonder that assessing one’s own wants and fantasies, owning them, isn’t easy? When you can be told, nay, instructed, that you wanted something that you didn’t by virtue of the clothes you were wearing, or the amount of drink in your glass. Isn’t it just bloody exhausting being on the defensive all the time: having to concentrate on what you don’t want rather than what you do? And all the while men’s desires, their fantasies, are still very much the loudest conversation in any room. Even with #MeToo we’re still, to a greater or lesser degree, talking and thinking about men: the problem of male desire or, perhaps more accurately, the problem of male power. Male misogyny. What men want and how they get it. What women want defined only in relation to that. 

So here is a book that is about women and what they want. A book in which women and their desire and their power (or lack thereof) are centre stage. In the twenty-first century this ought not to be such a game-changer. And yet it is. Because it is so rare. Because we have been trophies, prizes, because we have been shouted down and made to feel small (which are not so very different scenarios when you think about it, being at their heart, not about you at all). Because we have been told what we want, what we need, but we have not been asked. No one has taken the time. 

And is there any bigger indication of how insidiously patriarchal our society is than the fact that when asked, when forced, as I was over and over reading this book, to consider these questions, I found myself surprised to be asked at all? And after that, beneath the gratitude, a shameful sort of panic, because I didn’t know the answer, I didn’t know my answers to these important and deeply personal questions. There seemed, deep inside myself only to be a sort of silence (a protective silence), as thick and heavy as cream.  Wouldn’t it be great if that weren’t so? If talking about women and desire wasn’t such a big deal. If, as Taddeo posits, it wasn’t true that “With desire, nobody wanted anyone else, particularly a woman, to feel it.” 

For this reason Lina’s story was my favourite. Because she is so joyful, so unashamedly happy about getting to have sex with Aidan, her highschool sweetheart, again. Beyond the sense that she is reconnecting with her teenage age self, with a young, hopeful woman who could do anything and be anything, experiencing, for the first time, the rush, the dizzy all consuming rush, that is first love, there is this joy she takes in having sex, in performing sex acts, in being sexual, which is infectious. Which feels new and welcome. And a little bit revolutionary. 

For there is joy in desire expressed simply and without fear. In knowing what you want and saying it out loud. The same kind of joy to be found in reading a book that you love very much. I am reminded of a man (whom I very much wanted) for whom the happiness of finding a book that you love and a person that you desire were synonymous. “Oh to be reading Dombey and Son for the first time,” he said, when I told him I was busy with Dickens. “Or in bed with you.” 

The basics

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The most beautiful bookcases I’ve ever owned.

We moved house six months ago. And with every month that passes I miss our books, which are, as yet, unpacked. I miss them as a writer and I miss them as a reader. I long for them – individually and collectively – and yet when we first stepped over the threshold I dumped them in the spare bedroom without a second thought. 

When you move house you have the ‘essentials bag’, yes? The bag that doesn’t go in the removal van or hired van or back of someone’s else’s car. Our essentials bag contained: the kettle and some cups; our toothbrushes (because who wants to wake up on your first morning in a new place with a furry mouth) and loo roll; stuff for the cat (who eschewed the food we provided that afternoon in favour of mini cheddars, which she licked down to communion wafer-like slivers); passports, driving licences and various documents and photo albums I was terrified of mislaying. A jumble of oddments that were either basic or important, or both. The next day – and the one after that and the one after that – we unpacked. We got out all the kitchen stuff because we wanted to be able to eat and we got out all of our clothes because we wanted to be able to get dressed. We dealt with what was important. There was, I think, an inherent logic to our prioritisation. A common sense. Fast forward six months and what remains – in the room we don’t yet have a name or a purpose for – what we still haven’t unpacked, are the things that don’t (on the surface at least) fulfil a basic human need, that aren’t entirely essential to our day-to-day living: our photographs and pictures, and our books. 

How strange and unsettling moving is. For months and months – sometimes years if conveyancing is problematic or the chain strains with the weight of each participant – you daren’t imagine yourself in the house you are trying to buy. You are afraid to put yourself inside it. You say, ‘When we have the keys I will allow myself to believe that it is real.’ ‘When I have the keys I will relax.’ But all the while you are distancing yourself from the house  – the home – you are currently living in. That process has already begun. You have invited strangers inside. Perhaps you have begun to pack. You have put a price on what had been before priceless. A real and solid thing. Sanctuary. On the terrible holiday with the bed like a piece of concrete and the endless rain, on the work trip that drags on interminably, what you are longing for is ‘home’. A real and tangible thing. A destination. 

And yet how easy it turns out to be to pack up that solid thing: the ‘home’ that is all your furniture and your things arranged a certain way. Your home is now in boxes. It has been dismantled. And no one box contains the ‘home’ you know, you feel, as a solid, indestructible thing. And somehow the sum total of the boxes don’t either. Nor do the bare rooms. You cannot find yourself there. You are not living in the new house yet and you are not really living in the old house either. You are between places. Cut adrift. And no more so when it suddenly, finally, happens. You move. You leave the old house for the last time, holding the keys for the new house. And for the duration of that journey you don’t live anywhere at all. 

Our new house has been someone’s else’s house for fifty years. 

Fifty. 

For the first few months that we were living here I felt, as I wandered from room to room, the presence of the previous owners everywhere. I felt that this was not my house. What’s more, I did not know who I was in this new place. I had left myself behind in the old place, which I dreamt about often and woke up sad and sorry. In leaving I felt that I betrayed it somehow. That some unspoken pact had been broken. When old neighbours told me that there were different curtains in our old front window and a different light hanging from the old ceiling rose I felt an almost physical pain. (Though what choice did the new owner have? We had taken the curtains, the chandelier that had once hung there.) Even now I cannot walk down the street our old flat is on. I will take a long-winded diversion rather than drive past it in the car. My husband feels the same. 

Meanwhile the months go by (as months do), and yesterday I received a letter from Royal Mail  telling me that the redirection I set up in the throes of moving chaos (one more job in a list of hundreds) is coming to an end. From now on, unless we do the work of reaching out to banks, charities, utility companies etc. our post will go to our old house. Our names will appear on the mat there. I find this idea oddly comforting.  

Meanwhile people come to see us. Friends. Family. They bring plants and smiles and their kids. Seeing them here is like finally putting up a much-loved, long-stored painting on a hitherto empty wall. It feels right. And I feel better. I’ve begun, too, to get out the books that I need  – and some that I don’t. Outside the leaves fade and fall and the bulbs I planted in the Spring – bright pink gladioli, dahlias fat as sponges – make one last, triumphant stand while our books gather in little piles in the corners of rooms, on the arm of the sofa. The dining room table. 

I am reminded of my writer friend’s office. Walking in there once and seeing open books all over the floor. And I mean all over. You couldn’t see the carpet (and this was a big office). And my first thought was how wonderful, because here you are inside all these minds, moving from one to the other while making your own connections: your own walkway. And so I try to imagine leaving our books as they are, in little heaps all over the house. But I am, at heart, a tidy creature. I don’t like heaps. I like things to be where they belong. Where they make sense. 

But there are no shelves here, you see. And no book cases. In the old flat there remain the lovingly handmade built-in bookcases that my husband made  – easily the most beautiful bookcases I’ve ever owned – which we had to leave behind, along with a lot of other lovely things that we had either built or restored ourselves because they counted as fixtures and fittings; a part, now, of the in-built fabric of the flat that we were leaving behind (though they had not been part of the built-in fabric of the flat that we had bought four years before). In all the heartbreak and stress and general unsettlement that is moving I did not have much time to mourn these bookcases, which were made of ash and set between a marble Victorian fireplace, which we also restored, but I mourn them now. 

And not just because I’m tidy. And sentimental. No. What I want – what I really want – is for our books to sit next to each other  – to see, physically see (not just imagine) the great continuum and endeavour that is literature. That is art. Peter Carey next to Colette. Julian Barnes beside Charlotte Bronte. To make connections. To see how we all try – and fail – to speak of the universal in a new and particular way.

I want to look at a novelist’s books and be reminded of how different they are, or similar, the risks they took perhaps. Their bravery. For all we all need to see courage second-hand sometimes (and if we are writers we need it see it often). Sometimes, less charitably, I like to remember when I was disappointed. That can be comforting too, sometimes, in a different way. Often I want to be able to lay my hands  – literally – on that folded over page that is the perfect party scene or description of falling in love, the best beginning, the most perfect (to my mind) ending. I want to dive into a first person narrative that reminds me of the brilliance of that device. 

As a writer our books give me strength. Courage. And while I am my most essential self when I write  – my most alive, my most jangly – I am my most nourished, my most comforted during the act of reading. For books are friends, aren’t they? In tough times, lonely times. In times of joy. And somehow too, they remind you of what  – and who – you are. 

So today I’m not going to work on my next book. I’m not going to put a wash on or research which travel system we should buy. I’m going to get all of our books out of their many boxes and try to fit them into the only space in which there are shelves; a cupboard-come-entrance to our attic. There will be some doubling up. Some piles. There will be – isn’t there always? – some compromise. But it will be worth it. For when it is done, I will be able to go into this cupboard, torch in hand, and look at our books. I will go in, shut the door and find myself there, surrounded. At home.