Complicity
The more things change… I find myself dog-earring the same corners. From "Complicity," the Julian Barnes story in a New Yorker last week:
I used the word "complicity" a bit ago. I like the word. To me, it indicates an unspoken understanding between two people, a kind of pre-sense, if you like. The first hint that you may be suited, before the nervous trudgery of finding out whether you "share the same interests," or have the same metabolism, or are sexually compatible, or both want children, or however it is that we argue consciously about our unconscious decisions. Later, looking back, we will fetishize and celebrate the first date, the first kiss, the first holiday together, but what really counts is what happened before this public story: that moment, more of pulse than of thought, which goes, Yes, perhaps her, and Yes, perhaps him.
I tried to explain this to Ben, a few days after his party. Ben is a crossword-doer, a dictionary lover, a pedant. He told me that "complicity" means a shared involvement in a crime or a sin or a nefarious act. It means planning to do something bad.
I prefer to keep the term as I understand it. For me, it means planning to do something good. She and I were both free adults, capable of making our own decisions. And nobody plans to do anything bad at that moment, do they?
The story reminds me of one I cut from Tribune's short-story contest 10 or 11 years ago and probably still have in a box somewhere — Sharon Wahl's "I Also Dated Zarathustra." I liked the story then but, then 18, didn't get much of it. Here are the two grafs I got and the subsequent one I didn't grasp, like the rest of the story, until rereading this week:
It was a warm night, with lots of neon. It was one of those nights when the world seemed to be made not of people, but of couples. Everywhere I looked bodies were paired together, connected at the hands or more tightly around the waist, awkward animals walking with a tilt and lean, off-balance, unsymmetrical. They reminded me of those children’s books with the pages cut in three, each section the top, middle, or bottom of an animal, so that the normal old heads and legs and bellies could be made into sillier creatures: a salamousowl, a girelephish, a pandazebrogator.
And yes, I wanted to be part of it all. Of course I did. Oh, to be damply interlaced at the palms. To be affectionately leashed, tethered in the crowded streets, appended. To make a wider obstacle on the sidewalk, a wandering self-absorption that others had to navigate, rather than this narrow thing that darts and slips politely by.
But Zarathustra understood nothing of this. He would walk between or duck under the arms of people clearly together, something I by instinct could not do. It was impossible to truly accompany him, to predict and accommodate his walking speeds or stopping places. He seemed to resent being tied down, even by gravity. He walked with high fast steps and frequently bumped into things. Really he couldn’t see very well; until he was at arm’s length he wasn’t completely certain what he was looking at. This meant that everything out of reach was immensely interesting, and the things close by merely obstacles.
