The Beautiful Room Is Empty Read Online Free PDF Page A

talk too much about happiness and not enough about fairness in your discussions of Communism. In fact your airy disregard of what’s fair I find shocking. It’s almost as though you are lacking a whole critical faculty”).
    Without transition she wrote, “I’m considering breaking off with Sam. I don’t think he’ll even notice, he hasn’t called me or written in two weeks. I think I’m a much better friend than lover, anyway, at least I show more of my feelings to you than to him.”
    That was when I fell in love with Maria. I’m a nominalist; I believe only in what’s named. Until then Sam had seemed so superior to me as to belong to another species. He had the lazy smile of someone many women had loved.
    If Maria had been less elegantly reserved, I might have hashed out with her all my feelings of inadequacy and ended by losing her. But Maria didn’t want to get to the bottom of anything but ideas. Her feelings were all impulsive and uncritical. I once told her I thought love was a hoax and I repeated something I’d read, that love hadn’t existed in the ancient world and had only come in with the troubadours. She found this notion so absurd she’d often mention it to other people as a hilarious example of my gullibility. For her love was the one simple, painful or blissful fact in a world of shifting speculations. For her, love was as simple as Des Grieux’s cry to Manon: “In your deep eye I read my destiny.”The wonder is that when she laughed at my theory of love no one ever defended me, since my theory is certainly arguable. But no one wanted to contradict Maria. She made her ideas—no, her very being—appear so likable no one wanted to be unlike her.
    Because she’d been to the University of Chicago and had been converted to its Aristotelianism, she stripped every argument down to its starkest tenets and frequently asked, “What’s your point? Can you put that in a nutshell?” That habit made her unpopular later among New York intellectuals, who seldom feel comfortable in a shell and prefer expanding to contracting their arguments. All those intellectuals who rely on their own prestige or invoke the authority of others filled her with contempt. Name-dropping, except by social climbers, struck her as silly; she forgave the social climbers, since she found them touching, almost novelistic in their pursuit of frivolously minor gods. But those people who thought eloquence could replace logic and considered the essay a transition toward the novel drove her wild with impatience; she’d brush her face with her hand as though rubbing away a cobweb. Not that she disliked make-believe; she read novels night after night, propped up in her single bed, the lamp beating back the darkness, her free hand blindly reaching for the glass of red wine.
    My own habit of looking for a personal reason someone might have for holding a particular view (“Her idealism, of course, reflects her Christian childhood”) seemed to Maria a sneaky way of stealing a march. She said my approach was as shoddy and as insidious as gossip and she ascribed it to my early and continued immersion in psychotherapy. Freud she despised as a thorough charlatan and she insisted that none of his views—that there is an unconscious, that sex is a key to motivation, that childhood shapes the adult personality—had ever been proved, nor were they susceptible toverification. She said these bizarre notions had merely been repeated so often that the cowed public had ended by accepting them. But she forgave me most of my follies, stroked my hair, and told me what a genius-dumpling I was with my chewed-away nails, bobbing head, and surprising bits of knowledge.
    Maria read constantly but remembered little. At least she wasn’t very handy at serving things up. When I read I squirreled away tidbits I hoped I’d be able to repeat. I read more and more just to entertain her.
    She thought I was brilliant, but my only brilliance was my ability to