From Scaffolding, which will be published this month by Farrar, Straus and Giroux.
One day, with nothing else to do, I go back to my old journals, rows and rows of black-leather notebooks I filled up for years, the neat graph paper covered with my tight, uniform writing. All the things I wrote about Jonathan, all the pages he took up, until, eventually, his name stopped appearing.
We met soon after I started grad school. I was twenty-five; he was twenty-two. He quickly took over the journals. Rereading them, I remember how intense it was between us; no one had ever looked at me that way before; the word I put to it was “smolder,” and it felt like overwriting, something from a romance novel, but that was the only word that captured it. I was addicted to the way he looked at me, and though I was wary at the outset—he was younger, unsure of himself—I let myself be drawn in. Why are you here, why are you with me, I remember asking, and he said, I fell for you. I keep falling for you. Thinking back to the restaurant we had been sitting in when he first smoldered at me, I can recall with great precision the look in his eyes, and it occurs to me that there was more in it than burning, that there was also—and maybe this is just with the benefit of hindsight, but I think I knew it then too—his own wariness, a sense that he was trying to figure something out. How do you burn for someone and look askance at them at the same time?
At the start, what I wrote most about was his family. Jonathan’s father was Max Weisz, a prominent psychoanalyst, the kind who writes books for an impressive publishing house alongside well-known philosophers and sociologists. No one I knew growing up wrote books. I was dazzled by this provenance, Jonathan’s proximity to greatness, to a real intellectual life. I knew his father’s work before I met him, had read his books and some of his articles.
Max Weisz was born in Budapest, but when they passed the racial laws in 1938, the whole family—aunts, uncles, cousins, the whole lot—emigrated to France along with little Max, who was about five then. Everyone settled in for the long haul, except for Max’s parents; they felt something in the air and decided to chance it in Mexico. It was a decision that saved their lives; most of the rest of the family weren’t as lucky. After the war, Max returned to France for university, stayed to do his doctorate, went on to teach. He had been married several times, I knew. Jonathan’s mother, his second wife, was English. I never met her; she died of cancer when Jonathan was a toddler. Max remarried to a Frenchwoman, a shiksa, when Jonathan was sixteen, not long before we met. He was hostile toward his stepmother and generally had as little to do with her as possible, which was difficult when he still lived at home.
It was Max Weisz who made me a Lacanian. One of his books, a classic, the one everyone has to read in grad school, is about sex, desire, and infidelity. L’Indisponible, it was called. The Unavailable. He published it in the Eighties, when Jonathan was a little boy. In fact, he shares some adorable anecdotes about his son in the introduction, as a way of laying out his ideas about wanting what we can’t have. Like Freud describing his little grandson’s fort/da game, in which he hid his toys (gone!) so that he could find them again (there!), putting himself in control of the trauma of loss and the pleasure of rediscovery, Max describes Jonathan’s imitation of his father’s authority, his echoing of the particular tone of voice with which his father said no as a searching for a means of controlling his own disappointment when things are denied him and turning his father’s authority against him. “My son is affectionate but domineering,” Max writes, “claiming all of his mother’s attention, and eager to assume the role of the father, dictating who can do what in our small kingdom. Desire,” he says, “can only exist by virtue of its alienation.” Drawing on Freud, but also on theories of love going back to Plato, Kierkegaard, and Goethe, Max describes how the loved one becomes an object of desire only when lost.
I go to my bookshelves. I haven’t had a chance to organize them yet; there are general sections, but no order within them. After a while, I finally put my finger on the spine of the thin paperback I bought so long ago, with Bernini’s Ecstasy of St. Teresa on the cover. I flip through its pages, noticing where I have placed neat little crosses in the margins to indicate a significant point. Heady stuff. To speak of love is in itself to experience pleasure. And then quickly thereafter—a tiny bomb going off amid so many other pyrotechnics—the part where he says that the female orgasm is proof that God still exists. Ah, this is where he talks about history with its big axe. And that final line—the real, I would say, is the mystery of the speaking body, it’s the mystery of the unconscious. That line is why I became an analyst. We say and say but can never convey any kind of whole truth, only half say it. What we think we know we understand unconsciously, or with our bodies. For me, Lacan is a philosopher of desire.
Near the Lacan books I spot Max’s and take it down, remembering vividly the nights I spent underlining it, copying out passages to get them into my body. His book changed so much for me, helped me to understand Lacan to begin with, and I don’t think it’s an overstatement to say that it saved my life after Jonathan left me. In it, Max wrote something about desire and original loss, and it stayed in my mind—le fait de jouir n’étanche pas le désir original—the fact that we come does not quench the initial desire. Desire stems from foundational loss, the moment of separation from our mothers, from being cast out of that oceanic dyad into our own distinct individuality. Mother becomes other, and we are from that point on forever adrift; but it is this loss that triggers desire, all our desires forever after. In those early days after the breakup, it was consoling to think that it wasn’t just him that I missed, and that if he were to return to me, the void would remain. Jonathan was the malady. Max’s book, and Lacanian psychoanalysis more generally, was the remedy—though not an absolute cure.
I think I was a little in love with Jonathan’s father, and with his family, their culture, their story. We used to talk about going to Budapest together, or Mexico City, to see his elderly grandparents. But we never did. We went to Brittany, Cornwall, and even once to Prague, but never Budapest, and never Mexico. I thought about him in terms of places that were a part of him and places that were a part of us, places we went and places that without him would be forever impossible to access, even if I were to visit them myself. I found a journal entry from the January after he left me:
I mourn summer, England, Saint-Malo, even Budapest, with Jonathan. Things I love like the heat of the sun on my hair and in my eyes and buzzing cicadas and an expanse of gray river are all tied up in wanting him. And not being able to have him—not being able to so much as talk to him—is like not being able to have summer.
These connections we feel to places we’ve never been through the people we love.
He was jealous, I remembered, looking through the notebooks. If I spoke to another guy at a party he would instantly be at my side. He’d ask if I remembered our first date, and I’d pretend to confuse him with someone else. More wariness, I can see now. I don’t know what I thought I was doing at the time. He would wax romantic, and I would wisecrack, ill at ease with his intensity. We were often on the same frequency, but when we weren’t, we weren’t. I was jealous, too, of course, but it was easier to let go of my jealous tendencies with him. He was so young; he hadn’t had any meaningful relationships yet. A girl at lycée. A few girls in Cameroon, where he’d gone to volunteer with a youth group on some kind of environmental-protection program. Nothing serious. I was older, had already lived with a boyfriend, was living on my own, while he still lived with his parents; I’m not surprised he felt there were things about my life he didn’t know and couldn’t understand.
There were things about his life, too, that he had trouble grasping. His mother’s absent presence in his life—we talked about that a lot. His struggle to understand his father’s womanizing. Jonathan hated him for doing it, and he hated his stepmother for coming into the picture and stopping his doing it; she destroyed the patterns through which he understood his father. He refused to go to therapy; to go would have been to acquiesce to his father’s wishes, Max’s way of seeing the world. Instead, there was me. Not his father’s student but someone who knew his work; I was, I thought, perhaps some kind of go-between for Jonathan, a way of working through all these difficulties without confronting them head on. I didn’t mind; I could be whatever he needed me to be. But then he eventually placed what I thought was an arbitrary limit on my role in his life.
A few pages on, I notice that I wrote down something else he once said: “Jonathan said today that he could never be with a French girl.” I remembered the conversation. I told him I’m only half French, but it didn’t matter. People who’d lost people were told they had died for France, he said, but it was the French who’d rounded them up and delivered them to the Germans.
“Who deported our parents?” he’d repeat from time to time, like a litany, like it was something he’d overheard. No one, actually, had deported his parents. But he spoke for an entire people. “The French. Who drove the buses? The French. Who drove the trains? The French. Who ran the camps at Drancy, Beaune-la-Rolande, Pithiviers, Gurs? The French police. Who came to arrest our parents at dawn? The French police.”
He felt an intractable sense of betrayal, and I agonized over the fact that he had condemned me along with the country of my birth. What can you say to someone who rejects you for a fault you didn’t commit? But he had nightmares, he ground his teeth when he slept, he was as traumatized as if those things had actually happened to him. I thought it was more likely that his mother’s death, his father’s infidelities, his difficulty forming a protective shell of masculinity were the cause of his teeth grinding—but no, he said, it was history, avec sa grande hache.
One day, he told me we had no future because of our different religions. I never found out what had shifted in him. We were in completely different stages of our lives, I told myself. I never heard from him again.
My husband, David, appears infrequently in these journals. We met, we fell in love, that was that. There was nothing to worry over or analyze. He was a fact, whereas the journals were full of speculation. Sometimes I think about throwing them away—I honestly don’t know what purpose they serve.
