Saturday, April 19, 2025
the lover
When Terese gave me a copy of Duras’s The Lover to read ASAP, we were to soon “discuss” it at a café in the Castro (by her invitation) while her almost-husband Will was out of town (which his job required regularly, and Terese welcomed. They lived across the bay from S.F.: east of Berkeley).
I didn’t tell her I already owned a copy, though I hadn’t read it.
The sexual scenes are appealing, of course. But I flagged pages which were especially about the difficulties of Indochinese life. “You” hear about the sexuality of the book, but it’s really about a teen girl’s witness of colonial poverty exploited by wealthy colonialists.
That was fascinating. That’s what I wanted to praise and discuss: Duras’s writing. Duras was using the sexual story to bait awareness of colonial tragedy.
I suspected that Terese had different interests in mind, since she didn’t have to be home that evening, and the Castro has plenty of accommodations. (I, too, live in the East Bay. Terese and I worked at the same place.)
Terese had been with Will all through college and, by then, five years of living together unmarried legally. I knew she wanted new experiences before she got tied into a motherhood she didn’t wholly welcome.
Did she not really want to marry Will? He was pleasant, gave her lots of solitude, and made home management easy. One might think a writer wants that. Her parents adored Will, and her maternal aunt’s inheritance was a family factor.
We had been pals for months. I truly loved her, and she loved me. But it hadn’t gotten literally sexual. (Email and messaging, in and out of office, was something else.) I wasn’t going to be a toyed affair before she married. (My partner of many years died some years earlier. I have no children.) Terese was the first person in many years that caused me to want another lasting partner, the one who outlives me.
If her postponement of legal marriage for years had been a sign of desire to live independently as a writer (like Duras), I would have joyously gone to bed, to field with her.
I would have celebrated her freedom apart from me, with me, but for the sake of her own path, regardless that I’d be a transition for her launching into her ownmost life.
I would have loved that, like enjoying a brilliant daughter flourishing, flying, like a dove airily. That possibility was the heart of my love, truly: to see her loving to live her own way (but stay in close contact).
At the café, after a little too much wine between us, I shared by interest in the colonial story. But Terese soon lost interest.
Whatever! We loved our friendship.
We took our separate, secret frustrations to the sidewalk, melting into an intoxicated plan of skip town for Florida to track the lives of people who treasure plastic pink flamingos, as if we were living Jules et Jim, a film we each, in so separate lives, loved years ago.
You see, then, that novelizing life can be easy, especially when the reader welcomes the flow sparsely detailed, as Duras famously did. And especially if the reader doesn’t know what’s really autobiographical and what’s fabulation, as Duras liked to write.
Yes, don’t try to compete with film. And don’t risk your life in order to have
a good story to share.
Be the lover of narrating essential disclosure.
But don’t bring so much fabulation into actual life that your loved one becomes so conflicted, she leaves any room on your department floor you walk into where she’s talking with someone, but always “genuinely” finishes and “perkily” leaves, day after denouemental day, because she will marry Will, come what may.
So, let some lover’s story go on, whatever truthful way, including so loved fabulation in real times.
