bodies

When the boy’s father thought of himself, on the other hand, the word that came unbidden first to mind was always “tortured.” Much of this secret torture—whose causes he perceived as impossibly complex and protean and involving both normal male sexual drives and highly abnormal personal weakness and lack of backbone—was actually quite simple to diagnose. Wedded at twenty to a woman about whom he’d known just one salient thing, this father-to-be had almost immediately found marriage’s conjugal routines tedious and stifling; and that sense of monotony and sexual obligation (as opposed to sexual achievement) had caused in him a feeling that he thought was almost like death. Even as a newlywed, he had begun to suffer from night terrors and to wake from nightmares about some terrible confinement feeling unable to move or breathe. These dreams did not exactly require a psychiatric Einstein to interpret, the father knew, and after almost a year of inner struggle and self-analysis he had given in and begun seeing another woman, sexually. This woman, whom the father had met at a motivational seminar, was also married, and had a small child of her own, and they had agreed that this put some sensible limits and restrictions on the affair.

Within a short time, however, the father had begun to find this other woman kind of tedious and oppressive, as well. The fact that they lived separate lives and had little to talk about made the sex start to seem obligatory. It put too much weight on the physical sex, it seemed, and spoiled it. The father attempted to cool things off and to see the woman less, whereupon she in return also began to seem less interested and accessible than she had been. This was when the torture started. The father began to fear that the woman would break off the affair with him, either to resume monogamous sex with her husband or to take up with some other man. This fear, which was a completely secret and interior torture, caused him to pursue the woman all over again even as he came more and more to despise her. The father, in short, longed to detach from the woman, but he didn’t want the woman to be able to detach. He began to feel numb and even nauseated when he was with the other woman, but when he was away from her he felt tortured by thoughts of her with someone else. It seemed like an impossible situation, and the dreams of contorted suffocation came back more and more often. The only possible remedy that the father (whose son had just turned four) could see was not to detach from the woman he was having an affair with but to hang in there with the affair, but also to find and begin seeing a third woman, in secret and as it were “on the side,” in order to feel—if only for a short time—the relief and excitement of an attachment freely chosen.

Thus began the father’s true cycle of torture, in which the number of women with whom he was secretly involved and to whom he had sexual obligations steadily expanded, and in which not one of the women could be let go or given cause to detach and break it off, even as each became less and less a source of anything more than a sort of dutiful tedium of energy and time and the will to forge on in the face of despair.

David Foster Wallace, "Backbone"