A World in Us Read online

  “So you want us to move to England, then,” I stated baldly. The conclusion seemed inescapable.

  A glimmer of hope danced like a tiny flame in the pit of Elena’s eyes. Morten took my shoulders and tipped up my chin.

  “No one wants you to do anything you don’t want to,” he replied.

  I left the dinner table and went upstairs to the study. I didn’t know it, but this was the first of many huge choices coming my way. But first, I had to recognise it as such. Because I only saw a devil’s alternative. Either stay in Paris and lose this relationship, something that was inconceivable. Or move to England, the country to which I swore I would never return when I left seventeen years before, risk my career and give the relationship a chance. And there was no guarantee that it would work.

  “I’ve spent fifteen years of hard graft and strategic thinking to build up my persona into an international finance professional. I’ve lived and worked in six different countries, moving up the ladder to get to this point.” I spoke to the air in front of me, knowing full well that Morten was two steps behind.

  “You’ll still have all that international experience even if you move to London. It can’t possibly be a bad move for your career if you handle it right.”

  “And I left in the first place to escape the childhood memories bound up with my disastrous family and socially repressed world.”

  “Maybe it’s time that the grown-up Louisa dealt with them. And what better time to do it than with three people who love you?”

  I had no real arguments left other than the fact that I was giving up control of my life. I was being pressured into doing what other people wanted me to do, and just because of that I didn’t want to do it. I felt like screaming as loud as I could and getting him out of my head and out of my life. But I couldn’t. Because my love for him was already stronger than my ego. Everywhere I turned, it was a Catch-22. In order for us to live the dream, I would have to sacrifice the life and security I knew. It was too hard to deal with, so instead I burst into tears. He tried to reassure me.

  “Listen, Louisa, you can organise the entire thing. Take all the time you want.”

  But time was something we didn’t have. The more time that went past, the less chance there was of making it work.

  Spontaneity was needed before sanity caught our dreams.

  Elena said, “People move all the time. Nothing is impossible — love can move mountains. You should just stay here and not go back.”

  I felt my diaphragm grind against my ribs and force my mouth into a twist of instant hatred. For one second before I resumed my mask. I thought, How can she assume anything about my life? Doesn’t she know what I risk by moving back?

  To move or not to move to England, to be geographically close to my family…that was the question. Except that it wasn’t.

  Because the question really was How willing am I to put my money where my mouth is and enter into a polyamorous relationship that cannot be kept secret from my family? From my world?

  Discreet visits from couples could be kept secret.

  Relationships could be kept indoors, in different social circles. I could run parallel lives, parallel loves. But changing jobs, countries and living arrangements was too big to be hidden. Questions would be asked, and no matter how proficient a liar I could be for myself, I could not lie successfully for four people. And lying to my family about such an enormous decision was not, by any stretch of the imagination, white. It was pitch-black deception.

  And lo, my second demon appeared. His name was Rejection. Telling the truth to my family was tantamount to the battle between David and Goliath. Unarmed, I was staring Rejection in the face and inviting him into my life, saying “Come on in! I have your favourite dinner cooked, and while you’re here you can trash my house and my life.”

  In the deliberation that followed, the ultimate decider was this: I couldn’t spend my life wondering “what if…”

  So we would move.

  15

  “Did you read the articles I forwarded to you?” I asked.

  “Yes. If only that kind of thing were less pie in the sky. But I don’t see how it would be possible in real life.”

  She slowly exhaled. It wasn’t quite a sigh, because she tried her very best to be loyal. My mother’s marriage of twenty-three years had not been an easy one.

  I had called her one evening after locking the door to the bedroom and arming myself with a very large mug of tea. Tea was always my preferred weapon of defence. Which is why I was drinking from the supersized Wallace and Gromit mug she had given Gilles the previous Christmas.

  My mother, who had an ability to chat about curtain patterns for a full hour, would no doubt be vocal on our decision to open our marriage. She was the youngest of a traditional Victorian family of six children. All the family women of her generation had inherited the fascinated-with-fabric gene. I had recently felt it creeping up on me. They also operated according to a strict moral code. One family member may or may not have been a homosexual. The point was, we didn’t know. Or speak about it. Another may or may not have had extramarital affairs. We didn’t talk about that either.

  This phone call constituted one of the hardest parts of my new life. I had always been honest with my mother, and in the last three months I had struggled to have normal conversations with her. I couldn’t cope with talking about interior decorating when all I wanted was to let her know about the most wonderful and the most difficult discovery of my life. The roller coaster of love, pain and more love. I loved and was loved by two amazing men. My husband loved me and loved another. And I was so happy that he was happy. And me. And my boyfriend. And my sisterwife. Despite the prospective conflict.

  “Did you wonder why I sent them to you at all?”

  “What, the articles?” she asked.

  “Yes.”

  “I only got halfway through the first one before I replied. They were rather long, and I didn’t have time for something that was so obviously fantasy.”

  There had been much deliberation among us as to when we should let our families know about our relationship. And how we should let them know. My friends had, for the most part, been overwhelmingly supportive. But one or two of them had had reservations. Naturally, this was more or less the same reservation, and I had been well-versed in how to reply to it.

  My friends said, “Tell me honestly that you are not doing this because you are unhappy with Gilles.”

  “No. I can’t. That’s the point. I was unhappy with Gilles. But not because of him, because of me.”

  If there was one thing I’d learnt by that point, it was that my problems…were because of me. Not that this made a huge difference to my ability to resolve them.

  “What are you talking about?” my friends asked, more or less in one voice. “It’s not unreasonable to expect your man to work and to support you. You’re the one with the job, the ambition, the life.”

  “So you expect me to leave someone I love because he doesn’t match up to other people’s standards of what a husband should be? He’s a person. I love him and I want him in my life. He loves me and wants to be in my life. Sure, there are things we are working on, like in any relationship: balance, finances.”

  “But he doesn’t want children,” retorted Linda. Out of all my friends she’d been the one dreaming of children for years. Any relationship without children was inconceivable. Lit­eral­ly.

  “Right now. He doesn’t want children right now,” I said.

  “Louisa, you’re already thirty-two. Your biological clock is ticking. Maybe he will never be ready. What will you do then?”

  “Well, not have children with him,” I said. “Obviously. You can’t force someone to have children with you. You of all people know that.” I said it pointedly. It was a sore spot with Linda, whose boyfriend had had a vasectomy before they’d met. They were hoping to
reverse it. Or she would leave. “That’s the beauty of polyamory,” I continued. “I can still maintain our wonderful relationship with everything that we want together and have other partners who want what I want — like children, for example.”

  “I don’t see it working,” she replied.

  I accepted that a monogamous one-on-one arrangement worked for some people. But I also believed that people had great difficulty in challenging the norm and making a pro­active choice about it. I had inherited all my parents’ middle-class values. I had cared about appearances. I had cared about disguising the reality of the aging process. I had cared about how much money people thought we had. I had even cared enough to lie to myself about my faults so successfully that I was unable to acknowledge who I really was. I had been lying to myself for years about the motives behind my behaviour. So much so that I hadn’t even realised that I had been living a lie.

  “You can’t have it all!” Linda said, suddenly exasperated. “Are you suggesting that you would have children with someone other than your husband? How the hell would that work?”

  “Try to be a little less monogamous in your thinking, if you would,” I said peevishly.

  People were so convinced of their own position of being right that they thought I hadn’t considered any consequences of my decisions. But even in the worst-case scenario, I would be naïve. Hopeful. Hopeful of preserving my marriage despite our differing objectives in life.

  “Polyamory is about building a community of people who openly love and support one another. Gilles may not want to be a father, but he would never stop me from being a mother. In fact, he would actively support me.”

  “Someone who doesn’t want to be a father will never stay with you if you are becoming a mother of someone else’s child,” she said derisively.

  My patience was coming to an end.

  “What you don’t get is that it is already with his consent,” I said, “and as he would already give his love and support for the conception and pregnancy, why would he abandon me after­wards? Especially when he can enter into any relationship he wants. I have a higher opinion of Gilles than that.”

  My friends obviously did not, though. It’s not like the same questions hadn’t occurred to me. He would in some sense be agreeing to have a child in his life. Just not his child. But the same could be argued with any woman of my age because he wasn’t going to escape without any child contact at all. It was unnatural. The majority of women chose to become mothers.

  At my obvious and lengthy pause down the telephone my mother became suspicious.

  “Did you send them to me for a reason?”

  “Because you and I were talking about how marriage was an outdated concept,” I said to her. “And I consider that this is an amazing philosophy.”

  I used the word amazing a lot in referring to polyamory. Morten pronounced it “amay-sing.” I loved his accent. Along with everything else about him. And loving him gave me the courage to plough on.

  “And I wanted to let you know that Gilles and I do believe in this philosophy and we have decided to adopt it.”

  Bombshell number one. I could feel it dropping from my airplane onto the rigidity of her life and knew how much pain I was causing. But I couldn’t lie to her anymore.

  “Oh. Well you might agree with it, but I highly doubt you’ll be able to put it into practice,” she said dismissively. I girded up my loins.

  “Well, that’s why I sent it to you. Because we have put it into practice. We are going out with another couple. Their names are Morten and Elena. And they live in England.”

  Bombshell number two. I heard the roar of battle and the clash of swords between her unconditional love for me and her ferociously Victorian family ethics.

  “…”

  “…”

  “…”

  “Are you still there?”

  “Yes.”

  One word. My mother’s usually excessive vocal dexterity had been vanquished by my superior firepower.

  “It isn’t just sex. I’m in love with him. We’ve been with them for six months,” I said. Hoping to jolt her out of her state of shock. And adding an extra three months just in case it made a difference.

  “What…both of you?”

  “Yes.”

  She sighed. “Can you not keep this in the bedroom where it belongs?”

  “Maybe you didn’t hear what I just said. This isn’t about sex; this is about love. The most important thing in the world.”

  “But there is sex.”

  “Yes,” I said. “But there is also love.”

  Gilles and I were both superb examples of outwardly respectable, inwardly repressed middle class-dom. Both of our families cared much about keeping their lawns mowed and their cars washed; they had always paid their taxes and had “normal” professions. They kept up with the Joneses. But my mother was also compassionate, non-judgemental and intelligent. I had harboured a tiny hope that she might have looked at this radical solution in as positive a light as I did. More life, more growth and more love.

  “I always knew you weren’t conventional. And that your path wouldn’t be either. And I love you as I love all my children. Unconditionally. I respect your right to choose. Even if I don’t agree with it.”

  My mother, ladies and gentlemen. My mother said these words. Lucky. The word repeated itself in my head as if a mini- Kylie were in there: “Lucky, lucky, lucky…” But I hadn’t finished yet.

  “We’re also planning to move back to England to be closer to them.”

  Not so much of a bomb, more of a jarring clanger in this as-yet adult, reasoned conversation. As if someone with a rather large posterior had sat on a piano. But she needed to know. I would be an hour away from her doorstep, and there was no way of “keeping it in the bedroom,” as she had put it.

  “Are you intimate...” I could feel her choosing her words carefully, “together?”

  “No. But it’s a very open household. Because we are all in the same relationship.”

  With every disclosure I could feel her pain multiplying, and my joy, as strong as it was, couldn’t inspire my mother to any kind of happiness. I felt her despair starting to keen, like a mother who had lost her cubs. She was scared. And I was also scared, but I couldn’t let it show.

  “People will fight you,” she said. “You’re choosing such a difficult way.”

  “It is a choice, I agree. But it is a choice to be true to my nature. Unless you think that my life should be about acting according to society’s definition of how we ‘should’ act. Isn’t that the same philosophy that stigmatised homosexuals?”

  “I don’t have anything against homosexuals, you know that. But I wouldn’t choose that way for my boys. Your brothers. I don’t want them to experience unnecessary pain.”

  “Then that’s the difference between us. I think being true to yourself is more important.”

  After our phone call, I had run out of tea. I put on Linkin Park, opened the Jack Daniel’s and sang along, crying.

  “Can’t you see that you’re smothering me?

  Holding too tightly afraid to lose control,

  ’Cause everything that you thought I would be,

  Has fallen apart right in front of you…”

  Gilles found me before I had finished even one drink and said to me, “Don’t associate drinking with unhappiness, darling. Happy drinking, remember?”

  “I’m hurting her, Gilles. What are we going to do if every­one rejects us?”

  “Clearly, we’ll have to be unhappy and live according to others’ values,” he said.

  He took me to the sofa and put on an episode of Friends. Our equivalent of comfort eating. And we landed on the one where Chandler goes out with a woman who has a husband, a boyfriend and several lovers. It’s funny how the implications of it had totally skipped me by on t
he first hundred viewings.

  “She’s polyamorous!” I marvelled.

  “So we’re not the only ones,” he replied, hugging me close. “See, we’re even represented in Friends!”

  Telling my father…well, that was harder in many ways…but in the end it didn’t require wine or Friends.

  Gilles and I called him Clint Eastwood, for his notorious impatience with ideas that could not pass muster, his habitual use of the term “goddammit” and his Midwest American accent. Born in Indianapolis, he had left the US aged twenty, but fifty years on his accent was undiminished. Now he was seventy-seven, and I was aware what an impact my revelations might have…I had irrational thoughts about my news causing him to have a heart attack. Death by polyamory. So I put it off as long as I could.

  Since he was a pragmatic economist and not much of a speaker, I decided the best approach was by email. His response:

  “Your announcement was quite a shock — but the main thing I am interested in is that you are healthy and happy; as I said, the rest is marginal.”

  Economic language. Economists’ language.

  “I’m not hung up on morals, but I have noticed that many morals are based on past experience and that they have been associated with the ‘best’ long-run solution for society. Utilitarian ethics. But best for most people in the past is not best for everyone and times change. If you and JR have been open with each other and you accept the risks — then it’s your risk and your life.”

  My father remembered figures, conceptual models and anything based in algebra. Names were not his forte, and Gilles in my father’s head at that moment was JR, which happened to be my cousin’s name. But even if he couldn’t remember names, he was fair. Logical. And above all, he was not rejecting me.

  This was as close to a blessing as I could hope for. And it was lucky…for the wheels were turning, and we were about to make our move…

  16

  The letter “L” stood for a lot of things. Love. Lust. Limbo…before my big move to another “L.” London.