murder an old woman to find some answer to questions in their life! But it offered a grand vision, a life so much larger than itself, as if it were projected onto an oversized, multiplex screen, though in her mind she didn’t see a static screen, but a sheet of white canvas rustling in the breeze. This way, parts of the image fell in and out of focus. The lesson she drew from the book was that suffering was a constant companion, however small or large your life was. Maybe necessity was the wrong word and, now she thought about it, she preferred companion. Yes, she said, that’s closer, the companionship of suffering . Look at Raskolnikov, he was an ass, a murderer, totally self-involved. Look what he had to go through just to have a glimmer of true feeling for Sonia! But she stood by him and the reason was not some outdated notion of a woman standing by her man, but because she saw that through him, they could together arrive at something essential. She thought it unspeakably romantic, and often while she was reading, she’d think of herself as Sonia. Would it be so terrible, she asked, to have been alive then under those circumstances?
I’d thought just that: myself as Raskolnikov. Not the murderer, except in a sort of way, the man who murdered the old woman, the Raskolnikov bewildered by the world, thinking it low, hypocritical, who believed himself set apart! There was something of that in me, I confessed. “I get the feeling somewhere, something went wrong. A sort of crazy mistake. This isn’t me, this world isn’t mine. I don’t know which.”
She raised her glass and offered in a funny, grave voice, “Then I will be your Sonia,” clinking glasses, “and you my Raskolnikov!”
That’s when I did a surprising thing, a surprise even to myself. I placed a hand firmly on her thigh and looked into her eyes, and said, “Will you be my Sonia? Will you marry me?”
III
Within months, we’d put a down payment on a four-bedroom on Long Island. Every morning, I promised, I’d commute in, reading on the LIRR and return home every night to write. Work on the dream study progressed rapidly. Knocking out a wall between two bedrooms opened a grand space where we installed bay windows overlooking not acacia and spruce but an aged and dying oak. Ceiling-high shelves lined the walls with sliding ladders along each section and I commissioned the pine table from a Japanese woodworker on West 17th. The table took close to a year to complete and arrived in time for our first anniversary.
The marriage, as rapidly, faltered.
We clashed over bills, cooking, chores, the diminished time we spent together, our deflated suburban lives. The commute offered me no peace. People barked into cell phones, others snored, the smell of breakfast burritos pervaded the cars, the train conductors clicked tickets incessantly. My work responsibilities expanded and soon I returned home later every night, tapping out not great stories on the train but memos on office etiquette.
Far into the evening, I would sit alone in the study, nursing a whisky and reflecting on my purposeless days and theincreasing strains with Christie. The broad, custom-built table scolded me. I had not written a word, not imagined what I might ever write. Recessed lights in the ceiling lit the room brightly but obscured the garden, painting the windows black and hiding the broad gloom beyond. Out in the suburban darkness, I sometimes sensed shapes moving, animals, prowlers, strange beings. Figures formed in the blackness and I gave to them my darkest imagination: something was out there, hunting me, drawing ever closer, a creature on the scent of my disorder, a monster of chaos, with only one thought in its head: my annihilation.
The plan first offered itself to me as a means to fend off this terror. It was a preposterous idea, and I brushed it away without thought. But there it was, nightly reappearing, and during those shapeless nights when I sensed the dim thud of a
I’d thought just that: myself as Raskolnikov. Not the murderer, except in a sort of way, the man who murdered the old woman, the Raskolnikov bewildered by the world, thinking it low, hypocritical, who believed himself set apart! There was something of that in me, I confessed. “I get the feeling somewhere, something went wrong. A sort of crazy mistake. This isn’t me, this world isn’t mine. I don’t know which.”
She raised her glass and offered in a funny, grave voice, “Then I will be your Sonia,” clinking glasses, “and you my Raskolnikov!”
That’s when I did a surprising thing, a surprise even to myself. I placed a hand firmly on her thigh and looked into her eyes, and said, “Will you be my Sonia? Will you marry me?”
III
Within months, we’d put a down payment on a four-bedroom on Long Island. Every morning, I promised, I’d commute in, reading on the LIRR and return home every night to write. Work on the dream study progressed rapidly. Knocking out a wall between two bedrooms opened a grand space where we installed bay windows overlooking not acacia and spruce but an aged and dying oak. Ceiling-high shelves lined the walls with sliding ladders along each section and I commissioned the pine table from a Japanese woodworker on West 17th. The table took close to a year to complete and arrived in time for our first anniversary.
The marriage, as rapidly, faltered.
We clashed over bills, cooking, chores, the diminished time we spent together, our deflated suburban lives. The commute offered me no peace. People barked into cell phones, others snored, the smell of breakfast burritos pervaded the cars, the train conductors clicked tickets incessantly. My work responsibilities expanded and soon I returned home later every night, tapping out not great stories on the train but memos on office etiquette.
Far into the evening, I would sit alone in the study, nursing a whisky and reflecting on my purposeless days and theincreasing strains with Christie. The broad, custom-built table scolded me. I had not written a word, not imagined what I might ever write. Recessed lights in the ceiling lit the room brightly but obscured the garden, painting the windows black and hiding the broad gloom beyond. Out in the suburban darkness, I sometimes sensed shapes moving, animals, prowlers, strange beings. Figures formed in the blackness and I gave to them my darkest imagination: something was out there, hunting me, drawing ever closer, a creature on the scent of my disorder, a monster of chaos, with only one thought in its head: my annihilation.
The plan first offered itself to me as a means to fend off this terror. It was a preposterous idea, and I brushed it away without thought. But there it was, nightly reappearing, and during those shapeless nights when I sensed the dim thud of a
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