A sucker's game?

"Here is a moral problem. My ex-husband had not so much committed adultery as rode out into the night, pumped with nicotine, shining with watery red eyes, brain cells floating in alcohol, his words swinging like ropes across the room, tying all the pretty women into a group from which he picked one to follow home, night after night. He also roamed the streets looking for prostitutes, when he was drunk enough. He had explained to me that this was necessary for his well-being. He had to do this. His nerves required it. He did have to do it and I understood. But as I waited for him to come home in the early hours of the morning, I had come to feel that I was a fool, a lady-in-waiting in a court that didn't exist. If other women had my husband, I too could do as I pleased. This was not so much a moral choice as an abdication of morality. Fidelity seemed like a sucker's game. I had been betrayed by fairy-tale myths of happily ever after. My conscience ached but I ignored it.

"My father, who did not love my mother, took to bed in downtown hotels, in uptown hotels, in apartments on the maid's day out, on the nanny's day out, on the cook's day out, my mother's friends, Dorothy, Sally, Helen, Honey, and others whose names I cannot remember. How did I know? I knew because my mother told me. Ice packs on her swollen eyes, a double scotch by the bedside, she told me. And I knew by the time I knew anything that the marriage vow was like the little boy's finger in the mythical dike, in the real world it wasn't going to hold. And so I understood, divorced lady that I now was, that I was a menace, a threat to someone else's hope for a reasonable ever after. I looked at Doc and detested him for what he would do to his wife. I also understood that I would not be an innocent bystander but, like Dorothy, Sally, Helen, and Honey, I would be both greedy and ashamed. I felt uneasy at how easy it was to become the other woman or one of the many other women. But then I believed or tried to believe that everyone should be free and every free act struck a blow against a world so cramped and sad that I could not endure it, would not pass it on to my daughter.

"In other words I was unmoored, uncertain, and violated the only religious precept I really believed: Do unto others as you would have them do unto you. But those untos in the phrase marked it as ancient news from an ancient world that couldn't survive the things we knew, the things we did, the terrible monster that was mankind. It wasn't so much desire that led me as my intention not to live like a coward. I was determined to take what life would offer. I didn't want to be the only woman of my generation to hold to standards everyone else had long ago abandoned. I do not excuse this because of youth or anger or past history. I think that no one knew, was really sure, whether it was better to snatch what sex one could from passersby or to remain faithful to a love and miss the party, miss the circus and grow old and bitter. I wasn't sure what was right or wrong or if it mattered. I considered Simone de Beauvoir. She was not impressed by the Lord's commandments.

"I had the morals of a four-year-old."

 

-- Anne Roiphe, Art and Madness: A Memoir of Lust Without Reason, pp. 18-20.

I wonder whether Wife ever thought through her infidelities with this level of discernment and exactitude. I think not. If she had, I think she would have been more of a libertine and wouldn't have tried to hide so much.  And in fact I have written here before that I would have liked that better than what she really did do. It might have been tough in it's own way -- Anne Roiphe's memoir makes it clear that this life was tough on her and her daughter -- but it would have been bracing, a challenge.

Right now I'm not sure what else the passage makes me think. But I'm certain it's important and I wanted to share it.