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1 We are reading the story of our lives which takes place in a room. The room looks out on a street. There is no one there, no sound of anything. The tress are heavy with leaves, the parked cars never move. We keep turning the pages, hoping for something, something like mercy or change, a black line that would bind us or keep us apart. The way it is, it would seem the book of our lives is empty. The furniture in the room is never shifted, and the rugs become darker each time our shadows pass over them. It is almost as if the room were the world. We sit beside each other on the couch, reading about the couch. We say it is ideal. It is ideal. 2 We are reading the story of our lives, as though we were in it, as though we had written it. This comes up again and again. In one of the chapters I lean back and push the book aside because the book says it is what I am doing. I lean back and begin to write about the book. I write that I wish to move beyond the book. Beyond my life into another life. I put the pen down. The book says: "He put the pen down and turned and watched her reading the part about herself falling in love." The book is more accurate than we can imagine. I lean back and watch you read about the man across the street. They built a house there, and one day a man walked out of it. You fell in love with him because you knew that he would never visit you, would never know you were waiting. Night after night you would say that he was like me. I lean back and watch you grow older without me. Sunlight falls on your silver hair. The rugs, the furniture, seem almost imaginary now. "She continued to read. She seemed to consider his absence of no special importance, as someone on a perfect day will consider the weather a failure because it did not change his mind." You narrow your eyes. You have the impulse to close the book which describes my resistance: how when I lean back I imagine my life without you, imagine moving into another life, another book. It describes your dependence on desire, how the momentary disclosures of purpose make you afraid. The book describes much more than it should. It wants to divide us. 3 This morning I woke and believed there was no more to to our lives than the story of our lives. When you disagreed, I pointed to the place in the book where you disagreed. You fell back to sleep and I began to read those mysterious parts you used to guess at while they were being written and lose interest in after they became part of the story. In one of them cold dresses of moonlight are draped over the chairs in a man's room. He dreams of a woman whose dresses are lost, who sits in a garden and waits. She believes that love is a sacrifice. The part describes her death and she is never named, which is one of the things you could not stand about her. A little later we learn that the dreaming man lives in the new house across the street. This morning after you fell back to sleep I began to turn the pages early in the book: it was like dreaming of childhood, so much seemed to vanish, so much seemed to come to life again. I did not know what to do. The book said: "In those moments it was his book. A bleak crown rested uneasily on his head. He was the brief ruler of inner and outer discord, anxious in his own kingdom." 4 Before you woke I read another part that described your absence and told how you sleep to reverse the progress of your life. I was touched by my own loneliness as I read, knowing that what I feel is often the crude and unsuccessful form of a story that may never be told. "He wanted to see her naked and vulnerable, to see her in the refuse, the discarded plots of old dreams, the costumes and masks of unattainable states. It was as if he were drawn irresistably to failure." It was hard to keep reading. I was tired and wanted to give up. The book seemed aware of this. It hinted at changing the subject. I waited for you to wake not knowing how long I waited, and it seemed that I was no longer reading. I heard the wind passing like a stream of sighs and I heard the shiver of leaves in the trees outside the window. It would be in the book. Everything would be there. I looked at your face and I read the eyes, the nose, the mouth . . . 5 If only there were a perfect moment in the book; if only we could live in that moment, we could being the book again as if we had not written it, as if we were not in it. But the dark approaches to any page are too numerous and the escapes are too narrow. We read through the day. Each page turning is like a candle moving through the mind. Each moment is like a hopeless cause. If only we could stop reading. "He never wanted to read another book and she kept staring into the street. The cars were still there, the deep shade of trees covered them. The shades were drawn in the new house. Maybe the man who lived there, the man she loved, was reading the story of another life. She imagine a bare parlor, a cold fireplace, a man sitting writing a letter to a woman who has sacrificed her life for love." If there were a perfect moment in the book, it would be the last. The book never discusses the causes of love. It claims confusion is a necessary good. It never explains. It only reveals. 6 The day goes on. We study what we remember. We look into the mirror across the room. We cannot bear to be alone. The book goes on. "They became silent and did not know how to begin the dialogue which was necessary. It was words that created divisions in the first place, that created loneliness. They waited they would turn the pages, hoping something would happen. They would patch up their lives in secret: each defeat forgiven because it could not be tested, each pain rewarded because it was unreal. They did nothing." 7 The book will not survive. We are the living proof of that. It is dark outside, in the room it is darker. I hear your breathing. You are asking me if I am tired, if I want to keep reading. Yes, I am tired. Yes, I want to keep reading. I say yes to everything. You cannot hear me. "They sat beside each other on the couch. They were the copies, the tired phantoms of something they had been before. The attitudes they took were jaded. They stared into the book and were horrified by their innocence, their reluctance to give up. They sat beside each other on the couch. They were determined to accept the truth. Whatever it was they would accept it. The book would have to be written and would have to be read. They are the book and they are nothing else.
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