Among Carl's friends were a pair of women who were each other's best friend, Marlene and Anne. Years ago, when Marlene had considered suicide, she hadn't turned to Anne for support: she had turned to Carl. He and Marlene had sat up all night on a few occasions, talking or sharing silence. Carl knew that Anne had always harbored a bit of envy for what he had shared with Marlene, that she had always wondered what advantage he held that allowed him to get so close to her. The answer was simple. It was the difference between sympathy and empathy.
Carl had offered comfort in similar situations more than once in his lifetime. He had been glad he could help, certainly, but more than that, it had felt right to sit in the other seat, and play the other part.
He had always had reason to consider compassion a basic part of his character, until now. He had valued that, felt that he was nothing if not empathic. But now he'd run up against something he'd never encountered before, and it rendered all his usual instincts null and void.
If someone had told him on Renee's birthday that he would feel this way in two months' time, he would have dismissed the idea instantly. Certainly such a thing could happen over years; Carl knew what time could do. But two months?
After six years of marriage, he had fallen out of love with her. Carl detested himself for the thought, but the fact was that she had changed, and now he neither understood her nor knew how to feel for her. Renee's intellectual and emotional lives were inextricably linked, so that the latter had moved beyond his reach.
His reflex reaction of forgiveness cut in, reasoning that you couldn't ask a person to remain supportive through any crisis. If a man's wife were suddenly afflicted with mental illness, it would be a sin for him to leave her, but a forgivable one. To stay would mean accepting a different kind of relationship, something which not everyone was cut out for, and Carl never condemned a person in such a situation. But there was always the unspoken question: What would I do? And his answer had always been, I would stay.
Hypocrite.
Worst of all, he had been there. He had been absorbed in his own pain, he had tried the endurance of others, and someone had nursed him through it all. His leaving Renee was inevitable, but it would be a sin he couldn't forgive.
Albert Einstein once said, “Insofar as the propositions of mathematics give an account of reality they are not certain; and insofar as they are certain they do not describe reality.”
Carl was in the kitchen, stringing snow pea pods for dinner, when Renee came in. “Can I talk to you for a minute?”
“Sure.” They sat down at the table. She looked studiedly out the window: her habit when beginning a serious conversation. He suddenly dreaded what she was about to say. He hadn't planned to tell her that he was leaving until she'd fully recovered, after a couple of months. Now was too soon.
“I know it hasn't been obvious—”
No, he prayed, don't say it. Please don't.
“—but I'm really grateful to have you here with me.”
Pierced, Carl closed his eyes, but thankfully Renee was still looking out the window. It was going to be so, so difficult.
She was still talking. “The things that have been going on in my head—” She paused. “It was like nothing I'd ever imagined. If it had been any normal kind of depression, I know you would have understood, and we could have handled it.”
Carl nodded.
“But what happened, it was almost as if I were a theologian proving that there was no God. Not just fearing it, but knowing it for a fact. Does that sound absurd?”
“No.”
“It's a feeling I can't convey to you. It was something that I believed deeply, implicitly, and it's not true, and I'm the one who demonstrated it.”
He opened his mouth to say that he knew exactly what she meant, that he had felt the same things as she. But he stopped himself: for this was an empathy that separated rather than united them, and he couldn't tell her that.