On an evening in late spring, she sat down at her desk and wrote, “Never again will he ask me, ‘What do you want?’” She paused, frowned, passed her fingers over the ink as it dried. The syntax sounded archaic, though she normally made a point to avoid writing sentences with archaic syntax. Still, she could not imagine having written the sentence any other way, nor could she imagine rewriting it.
But who was “he”? Why had he once asked “What do you want”? And why would he never ask again? Or, rather, why would he “never again ask”? All she knew about him, from the sentence she had just written, was that he had asked this question before. She also knew, from a twinge of embarrassment felt upon completing the sentence, that the “me” speaking was not an imagined person, but she herself. She had lately made it a point to avoid writing about herself in her fictions, and she had long made a point to avoid using archaic syntax. Still, the sentence was there.
She wondered if “he” was some specific he out in the world, a person that she had known, just as “me” was she herself. She thought over the various he’s of her more recent and more remote experience, but could not dredge up any particular memory of any particular he asking her, “What do you want?”, though of course several he’s must have asked her this very question at one point or another.
She felt strongly that “he” was a lover, and upon reflection she attributed this conclusion to the archaic syntax. Lovers, when writing about one another or speaking to one another, tend to use archaic syntax, she thought. She could not recall any times that she had used archaic syntax when writing about one of her own lovers, but she could recall several times when several of them had done so when writing about her.
These lovers had also been writers, and they had, like herself, studiously avoided writing such sentences in their fictions. She recalled one particular lover, the one who had most studiously avoided using archaic syntax in his fictions, who had avoided it more studiously than any of the others. She recalled that this particular lover had broken from his stylistic principles and used archaic syntax when writing about her and about the love between them. She even recalled him using precisely the same kind of faux-nineteenth-century inversion that she had used in the sentence she had just written: Phrases like “Never again will she…”, “It was I who had been…”, and so on.
She hated the fact that he used archaic syntax when writing about the love between them, because she felt that it made his feelings appear affected and fake, she thought. She accused him, on more than one occasion, of having only “affected and fake feelings” for her. But each time she accused him, he accused her of an equal and opposite offense, of never using archaic syntax when writing about her love for him. He would say, she recalled, “You are afraid to use archaic syntax when writing about your love for me, because you think that it makes your feelings appear ‘affected and fake.’ But you’re wrong about that. To speak about love archaically is not to be ‘affected and fake.’ It’s the most natural thing in the world. Lovers have always used archaic syntax when writing about one another, from Petrarch on down. Petrarch’s syntax was as archaic in his own time as my faux-nineteenth-century prose is when I write about you today.”
These conversations infuriated her, to the point that she could not even bring herself to laugh derisively at her lover comparing himself to Petrarch. Once, she had attempted to force such a derisive laugh at his infuriating comparison, but the laugh stuck in her throat like a bone, and emerged as a dry cough.
When she finished coughing, he accused her of writing about their love, when she did so, in “rigorously contemporary prose,” prose so “contemporary” and “unaffected” that it “insisted upon its unaffectedness” to the point of “begging the question.” “Your rigorously contemporary prose doesn’t express anything about our love,” he said. “It only expresses its own unaffectedness, its own naturalness, its own contemporaneity, to the point of begging the question.”
“What question is my prose begging?” she asked. She hated when he used phrases like “begging the question,” because they were affected phrases and because he never used them correctly. She had often told him this, and had even tried to explain the proper use of the phrase “begging the question” and the situations in which its use would be appropriate, but he only persisted in using it more and more often, and in ever more incorrect and inappropriate situations.
For a moment she wondered, sitting at her desk, passing her fingers over the words she had written, if he had asked her that night, the night of the argument and the derisive laugh that emerged as a dry cough, the night he had accused her of writing “rigorously contemporary prose” and “begging the question,” if he had asked her that night, in anger or in supplication, “What do you want?”
But she knew that he had not, because he never asked her questions like that. Of all the lovers she had ever known, he was the only one of whom she could say with absolutely certainty that he had never asked her “What do you want?”, neither in those precise words, nor in any other words, nor even in gestures.
Not that he was incurious about what she wanted. He had simply never needed to ask. He had always assumed that if she wanted something from him, she would ask for it. And she had always assumed the same of him. They had lived in this way, asking and giving, through an autumn and a winter.
It ended in late spring, on an evening like this one, almost exactly like this one.