The Right Intention Read online

  “What are you talking about? Of course I want to live with you,” he replied with false conviction, which did nothing to quell Diana’s solemnity.

  “Then show it,” she said, and walked into the bedroom.

  At that moment it struck him that he was selfish, maybe always had been, in the way he loved Diana. It was true: all too often he treated her as though she herself had no needs, as though her only job, her duty, was to attend to his happiness. This realization did not diminish the aversion he’d felt toward her since the wedding, but it did suddenly save her somehow, lend her some weight. From that day until the following Saturday, Diana became a creature who withdrew into a wounded yet expectant silence. Every time he got home and found her at the computer, every time they had dinner or breakfast, there came a moment when she couldn’t help but give him a languid look, a sort of love me entreaty made more uncomfortable by the silence, a look in which it seemed to him that the old Diana was hiding, as though suddenly embarrassed to reveal herself in his presence. She was like a long-distance runner who’s trying to feign exhaustion, he thought, but is betrayed by a quick move and, on being discovered, becomes vulnerable.

  And yet Diana’s weakness, despite how much it irked him now, had been one of the things he’d always found attractive about her. Or perhaps more than her actual weakness it was the way she displayed it, was unembarrassed by it. It had always given him a sense of superiority, like someone who, deep down, can see condescending affection as the only way to respond to a creature unable to survive without his help. It was the same sort of superiority that he now felt over Ernesto, whose simple mind was—with the exception of his love of running—as easily satisfied as that of a child.

  Ernesto was nothing but a pretty boy used to hitting it off with women, a dullard, a thin wiry kid whose optimism was so unassailable that at times it was impossible not to question his intelligence. The world, in Ernesto’s eyes, was simple and carefree: he ate if he was hungry, slept if he was tired, ran if he felt like running. It was like he’d never regretted anything. And yet his empty-headed happiness was no less happy than any other. There was no cliché Ernesto did not somehow embody; his judgments on serious topics were always others’ judgments, dim-witted but well-intentioned truisms—and yet this seemed enough for him.

  “I’m not too bright but I’m no moron,” he said, and that seemed the best definition of Ernesto, especially when he said it himself while they were running.

  Hearing this, and realizing that Ernesto was embarrassed to discuss certain things because he felt outsmarted, had given him a sense of superiority from the start. Seeing Ernesto on a covert run that morning (though it might not have been him), realizing, then that Ernesto might in fact be in better shape than he was, made him constantly search for ways to affirm his superiority over the wiry redhead who sometimes left him lagging slightly behind, who made him think (though not like this, not clearly) he wasn’t actually going to win without putting in some extra training, without running at night, too.

  Twenty-nine days until the marathon. That was what Ernesto had said before they started their run that evening, and he felt like he’d been beaten already. Not by Ernesto, or Diana, but by himself, by his everyday life, the image of himself in his everyday life was beating him in his real one, rendering it absurd. He ran furiously, desperately, that evening.

  “Why are you starting out so fast? You want some kind of prize?” Ernesto asked, his voice tinged with irritation, indignation almost. “We can’t keep up this pace for more than ten kilometers. Are you nuts?”

  “No.”

  “It’s not a fifteen-hundred, it’s a marathon. Remember?”

  He made no reply, feeling the silent satisfaction of passing the other runners in the park. Continuing to pick up the pace gave him an intensely powerful feeling, especially since Ernesto was behind, only by a foot or two, but it was a foot or two that he strived to maintain each time Ernesto tried to adapt to his pace.

  “You’re handling the pace just fine!” he shouted, trying to keep his breath. “Haven’t been training without telling me, have you?”

  “What?”

  “You heard me!”

  “No, I haven’t, but I wouldn’t be ashamed of it if I had.”

  They were flying, and almost shouting, which made other runners turn in surprise to stare.

  “Don’t lie; I saw you the other day, a couple weeks ago!”

  “Who, me?”

  Ernesto tried to catch up, to look him in the face, but he picked up the pace even more.

  “Yeah, you!”

  It was like a hundred-meter sprint.

  “Are you crazy?” Ernesto shouted. “I’m out of here, man.”

  “I’ll see you at the marathon!”

  “What?”

  “See you at the marathon!” he shouted, enraged, sensing Ernesto stop. He himself did not stop. In fact, he sped up slightly. He was alone again. Alone against his own time, against his own body. What if I didn’t stop? What if I never stopped running? he thought. Each stride, each sensation closer to fatigue, to exhaustion, seemed to pull him deeper into some nameless virgin territory, one that nobody but him could possibly understand, and yet it was also somehow frightening. He thought life would make sense if he could feel this way permanently, without resting or getting tired, thought If only I could never stop running, like it was the greatest wish, the greatest possible joy, and now that Ernesto was no longer there, the joy seemed even more pure. His knee began to hurt but he didn’t stop running. He had to plumb the depths of this satisfaction, to gulp it down if necessary, to die inside it. Exhaustion began to cloud his eyes but he tried to run faster still. And then he tripped. The fall was clean and white and left his hands bloody and encrusted with sand. His knee was bleeding too. When he got home Diana let out a frightened little cry.

  “I fell,” he said, determined to offer no further explanation.

  “Are you alright?”

  “Fine.”

  He went into the bathroom and locked the door. Standing in the shower, under a stream of cold water, without knowing why, he began to laugh.

  He didn’t see Ernesto again. He ran for four hours on Sunday with almost no rest—and then again on Monday, and Tuesday. Wednesday he realized he performed better late at night, so began running then too. Diana spoke only of trivial things—what they should have to eat, English words that meant different things in different contexts. She no longer asked where he was going, no longer suggested movies or weekends in a hotel in the north. It was as if, after having first tried locking herself in a prison of expectant silence, she’d thrown in the towel and now looked on her failure with no sorrow. She seemed not to weigh anything when she got into bed at night, not to move through the apartment, an apartment that now more than ever was but a extension of herself: wedding photos, the porcelain duck collection, the green-framed bathroom mirror, the encyclopedia on the bookshelf, all as unmoving as Diana at her computer. “How’s it going?” “Almost done,” but never really done because when she finished she’d go back to the beginning and edit, comparing her translation with the original. “Come on. Who cares about an ‘in’ instead of an ‘on’ when you’re talking about a kitchen appliance?” “I do.” And this response (more the tone than the words themselves) was the incontrovertible proof that Diana was also struggling, often unsuccessfully, to exclude him from a realm in which she was now perhaps starting to feel him unnecessary. The pang he felt for the Diana of old, however, the one who needed him, was not strong enough to keep him from training. The idea of the marathon now structured everything so rigidly that thinking of anything else seemed preposterous. Whether or not he sometimes felt guilty for neglecting Diana was a matter that lost absolutely all texture when he was getting ready for a run.

  Those days were like a return to adolescence, when air was nothing but a time to beat, his body a machine from which to extract optimal performance. He realized that he didn’t even think on runs, or if he did it
was in code, a code he couldn’t have explained: the irrationality of a perfectly conditioned machine. He thought of his body the way a racecar driver thinks of his car, as an object that both belongs to him and doesn’t, an object that could be dismantled piece by piece, one that, when assembled, he didn’t understand beyond knowing that it was not entirely his own.

  It was Wednesday when his knees began to hurt, and there were only twenty days until the marathon. He knew he should rest, knew that rest was often beneficial to performance, knew that knee pain, if ignored, could lead to serious injury; he knew all of those things and yet that night he ran even longer than usual—six hours. The following day when his alarm went off he was utterly spent. Couldn’t move. He told Diana, expecting her to lecture him, but she didn’t.

  “Do you want me to call the doctor?”

  “I have no strength, it’s like I have absolutely no strength,” he said, as though shocked by his own words, but Diana didn’t respond to his shock and he got out of bed and gave her a desperate look. “I can’t run like this. The marathon is less than three weeks away.”

  “Oh, the marathon.”

  “You must be glad. You must just be relishing this.”

  “Of course not. Is that really what you think?” He didn’t answer, because doing so would have meant acknowledging his guilt. And she said, “Well. Should I call the doctor or not?” in a different tone, a warmer tone, as though deep down she couldn’t help but pity him.

  “Yes.”

  The desperation he felt all morning waiting for the doctor to arrive, and then in the hours following his visit, was too profound to articulate. The doctor asked him about his runs, listened to his heart, and concluded that his state of weakness was simply due to the overtraining he’d put himself through.

  “Five days’ complete rest,” he declared. “Even muscle mass has its limit; if you subject it to too much intense stress, or to constant stress, it gets weaker rather than stronger. Not even professional athletes spend that many hours training.”

  He despised the doctor for his admonishing tone, his apostle-of-common-sense demeanor, despised Diana for blindly agreeing. He turned away as they spoke, so as not to have to see them.

  Spending those days at home was like discovering a new city within the one he thought he knew. The city, in this case, was Diana, and although he’d pictured her routines, actually seeing them all performed was completely new. The first day was the worst: he spent it waiting, all afternoon, for Diana to reprimand him, which she did not. This at first seemed a reprieve, but as the hours crept by, the fact that she didn’t reproach him for anything began to warp his outlook even more than not being able to train for the marathon. What was going on? Didn’t she care, or what? He, on the other hand, discovered the world his wife inhabited, a world of footsteps to the kitchen to get a soda before sitting down with her translation, of classical music, Tchaikovsky drifting in from the hallway.

  “Beethoven and Mozart are too distracting,” she said, and at times the sound of the piano was strangely beautiful, strangely melancholic, in a way that seemed gentle even at its most exalted, in the same way that not having known Diana did these things when she was alone seemed strangely sad or melancholic—not to have known she preferred Tchaikovsky, for example, or that she took a break to watch the news and smoke a cigarette, sitting down with the sort of pre-planned methodical pleasure a person like Diana surrendered to as if it were a haven she’d been looking forward to all morning. Being at home was, in a way, like being a spy, having access to a level of intimacy he didn’t feel entitled to, as though given that he’d excluded Diana from the intimacy of his running she were perfectly in her rights to now exclude him from her own, from her cigarette break while watching the news and Tchaikovsky accompanying the dull thunk of her enormous dictionary being closed on the table.

  Discovering his weakness left him wallowing in a world of melancholy. Hearing Diana’s music, hearing her fingers on the keyboard, brought him back to their dating years, when happiness was simple and acceptable, satisfactory despite following pre-established patterns imposed by others. He’d never been melancholic. Had always seen that territory of the soul as a burden surrendered to by the weak out of sheer indolence and found the pleasure others took in their own pain sick—especially the tender, mawkish sort of pain wrought by melancholia. So discovering that he, too, had these feelings was something he immediately chose to attribute—as the doctor had said—to overtraining, although it carried on for several more days, growing stronger with each passing hour, because there was something in Diana’s silence that resembled the desire to give him another chance, a sort of renewed expectancy that dared not be spoken.

  A photograph. He discovered it by chance, dismantling the picture frame on his nightstand out of boredom. Diana was working in the living room, as always, and his third day of immobility was starting to seem unbearable. The frame opened with a little click, revealing another, older photo hidden behind the one on display. He slid it out indifferently. He remembered the picture, it was one he’d kept on a bookshelf in his bedroom during their last year of courtship. A large patio, in Paris, beside a plant. His arm over Diana’s shoulders, pulling her in tightly. He was kissing her, and she was smiling. He felt strangely moved holding it up, bringing it closer to his eyes for a better look. It was from a trip they’d taken to visit one of Diana’s friends, a year before the wedding. Even if they seemed completely different now, the pulsating, almost violent truth of the snapshot, the discovery (not the memory but the discovery) that he’d been that man and Diana that woman, seemed to have no background. He called her. Shouted her name, Diana, as though it had changed. And she, from the living room, asked what he wanted.

  “Come here,” he replied. “Look at this.”

  She sat on the bed beside him and smiled on seeing the photograph.

  “Where was it?”

  “Right here, in the frame, behind the picture of you.” A look something like compassion flickered in Diana’s eyes and then disappeared suddenly, as though it had never been, as though she hadn’t even been aware of it when she turned to look at him.

  “What are you thinking?” she asked, but he didn’t answer, because answering would have been giving in to sadness, to the disappointment that had crossed Diana’s eyes, like a train passing a station where it’s best not to get off. He put one hand on her hip and with the other touched her breast. Her saliva tasted of Coke when she kissed him as she lay back on the bed.

  An obsession can have a woman’s shape and touch, contours into which a smell recedes, disappears for a moment, only to waft up again later, with a movement. Admitting its existence, saying it out loud, is not the first step toward recovery and serves only to make it visible. An obsessed man accepts his obsession before the naked body of his wife when he wishes she were not there, when he suddenly finds absurd the disarray wrought by excited lovemaking—the clothes strewn across the bed and floor—sets his gaze on one of her shoes, which has landed upside down by the door, and finds it absurd in the same way that his pajamas are absurd, balled into a shapeless mass beneath the sheets. There’s no use voicing this dissatisfaction; it’s there, in the breathing of a woman named Diana who turns to embrace him before putting her clothes back on, in the way she looks at him while fastening her bra, in the silence of a woman who suddenly feels cheated, or perhaps feels the shame of realizing she’s just done something ridiculous.

  An obsessed man cannot, in these circumstances, do anything but once again open the frame that was on his nightstand and hide the photograph that would have been best left undiscovered. He wishes he weren’t there, just as he wishes he weren’t causing the woman pain. On the other side of the window there must be another man, down there training. If only he could put into words what he feels it would be almost like thinking clearly, but he cannot think clearly. The man he has to beat in the marathon is an extension of himself, a prolongation of his previous life rising up against the absurdity of his
current life. If he could admit this perhaps it would all be easier. He cannot. The woman leaves without a sound and the man hears her turn off the music that, he only noticed then, had been playing. It occurs to the man that, like the music, the woman too is more noticeable by her absence. He feels anxiety constrict his throat, is anxious to run, to hear the rhythm of his feet pounding the ground in the park. He imagines the beginning of the marathon, the starting gun like a sound that instantly curdles his blood, electrifies it. The woman no longer exists. The world does not exist.

  He ran the following day and, though weaker than normal, could tell his body was regaining some of the strength from his early training. This made him feel better for a moment, and forget Diana’s silent recrimination for a few hours. The remaining two weeks before the marathon passed swiftly, in the way that identical days do. He worked until five, changed right at the office, and ran from there to the park; four hours later he returned home, ate copiously and went to bed. He doesn’t remember the Diana of those days; if he does it’s only with the haziness of something both necessary and invisible. It was as though, at the same time his muscles were regaining strength, something in her were permanently receding, and she were being ruled out, disappearing to the point that he now no longer remembered her although he knew she was there when he got home, that she got into bed at the same time he did, breathed the same air he did when going to sleep. He recalls Diana getting into bed the night before the marathon, recalls her perfectly ambiguous expression when he said that the following day was the big day, and the way she then got out of bed sadly on that Saturday.

  He remembers her saying “good luck” from the bathroom when she heard him open the door to leave, remembers thinking she was lying, that perhaps Diana could only lie those words, even if she truly wanted to say them.

  He had no trouble finding Ernesto among the small crowd forming with the hopes of obtaining a privileged spot at the start. They saw one another in line for bib numbers and waited for each other so they could start together, not a single word to misconstrue their silence. He felt strong, and excited, and his sense of strength and excitement only increased over the more than thirty minutes between the time the professional athletes took off and when they themselves were allowed to start. The pack of runners breathed like a single furious animal dangling from strings, and although this would seem a source of unity, they couldn’t even touch without becoming vexed; the brush of an elbow, a leg, was like the prick of a needle on hypersensitive skin. Ernesto murmured something he didn’t catch and they looked straight at one another for the first time. They sweated not from exertion but the expectation of exertion, a tense misshapen group in which no one spoke but everyone had the same look in their eyes, the same way of constantly wiping their hands dry, of breathing. The starting gun had signaled the beginning of something unreal, the screams of spectators at the barricades seemed to come from inside a cave, someplace far-off and incongruous. The mass of runners opened and closed and then opened again, like viscera ingesting. From time to time the barricades narrowed the course slightly and their fear of coming up on a slower runner made them run elbows out, for protection, occasionally knocking into one another for no real reason.