Page 550 - A Little Life: A Novel

every relationship was something unfulfilled and disappointing, something
that had to be sought elsewhere. His friend Roman, for example, was
married to a woman who, while beautiful and loyal, was famously

unintelligent: she didn’t understand the films Roman was in, and when you
talked to her, you found yourself consciously recalibrating the velocity and
complexity and content of your conversation, because she so often looked
confused when the talk turned to politics, or finance, or literature, or art, or
food, or architecture, or the environment. He knew that Roman was aware
of this deficiency, in both Lisa and in his relationship. “Ah, well,” he had
once said to Willem, unprompted, “if I want good conversation, I can talk to

my friends, right?” Roman had been among the first of his friends to get
married, and at the time, he had been fascinated by and disbelieving of his
choice. But now he knew: you always sacrificed something. The question
was what you sacrificed. He knew that to some people—JB; Roman,
probably—his own sacrifice would be unthinkable. It would have been once
to him as well.

He thought frequently these days of a play he had done in graduate
school, by a beetley, plodding woman in the playwriting division who had
gone on to have great success as a writer of spy movies but who in graduate
school had tried to write Pinteresque dramas about unhappy married
couples. If This Were a Movie was about an unhappy married couple—he
was a professor of classical music; she was a librettist—who lived in New
York. Because the couple was in their forties (at the time, a gray-colored

land, impossibly far and unimaginably grim), they were devoid of humor
and in a constant state of yearning for their younger selves, back when life
had actually seemed so full of promise and hope, back when they had been
romantic, back when life itself had been a romance. He had played the
husband, and while he had long ago realized that it had been, really, an
awful play (it had included lines like “This isn’t Tosca, you know! This is

life!”), he had never forgotten the final monologue he had delivered in the
second act, when the wife announces that she wants to leave, that she
doesn’t feel fulfilled in their marriage, that she’s convinced that someone
better awaits her:

SETH: But don’t you understand, Amy? You’re wrong. Relationships
never provide you with everything. They provide you with some
things. You take all the things you want from a person—sexual