AUTHOR'S NOTES: As the little blurb indicates, this fic is based around The Hours. Honestly, I'm not really sure whether it's based around the movie or the book – I know both, and love both. It was prompted by seeing the movie; however, Clarissa's character here has more in common with the character in the book – I thought one of the few minor flaws of the movie was that it oversimplified her a little for the sake of the drama.
Anyway, this is from Sally's perspective; it's my version of her take on the Richard/Clarissa situation. I hope for this to be the first in a series of three. The second should deal with the Laura plot, and the third should deal with the Virginia Woolf one. I plan for all three to be told from the perspective of a secondary character observing one of the primary ones.
Feedback is very much welcome. Positive or negative, it makes no difference.
Waiting for Clarissa
"Sally, I think I'll go buy the flowers myself."
"Flowers? What –"
Oh, yes. Of course. The flowers for Richard. For Richard's party.
Naturally.
You know, it's taken me a lot of years to reach even this tentative peace with the Richard Situation. And yes, those caps are necessary. For ten years I've stood apart and watched those two. Sidelined only partly out of my own choice, but it's the choice that I've come to build up in my own mind over the years, trying to afford myself some dignity here. I've watched him decline over the years, watched his moods, his rages, his bursts of incredible creativity - watched the strange, compelling, anguished voice emerging from his poetry, forcing us to see the world the way he feels it must be seen. And I've watched her watch him. I've watched her nurse him and care for him and, yes, I suppose I've watched her long for him. But that phrase is subtly wrong. Too simple. Sometimes it feels like everything I say about the two of them is subtly wrong, that my words twist themselves to strike just off-center out of some kind of deliberate malice. It would almost be refreshing. Life might be easier if either one of them were behaving this way out of deliberate malice.
I love Clarissa, and she loves me. I know that's true.
She loves Richard, and he loves her, and it's a wildly different kind of love; and I know that's true as well.
It's enough to drive a woman crazy.
I've heard the story hundreds of times – don't think she's kept it from me. Clarissa is honest to a fault, at least about that sort of thing, and we have no secrets except the kind she tries to keep from herself. Richard's the one who claims to be able to see into her soul. Having been blessed with less genius than the aforementioned brilliant poet, I mostly listen to what she tells me and try to piece together the rest.
But I digress.
So of course I know the story. That day at Wellfleet. The morning. The youth. The joy. Richard. Life, love, that moment in June and all that. Personally, I never much cared for Woolf, but that's another story altogether.
Or maybe it's not. She is Mrs. Dalloway with him, after all. I suppose it's just one more piece to that world they share.
You know, it's not even really that I'm jealous? …oh, who the hell do I think I'm kidding? Of course I'm jealous. She has told me she was happier with Richard than she has ever been since. She was in one of those moods, the kind she always comes home in after she's been to see the man. Not that I didn't know it already, but it was a shock nevertheless, hearing her say it. She tried to explain – fumbling, halting, and oh, God, so unhappy. It kills me to see her like that. I always feel so futile.
So of course I'm jealous. She was happy then in a way that she isn't now. He was a part of that moment. I would love to see her that happy, just once. I see shadows of it, every now and then, and it takes my breath away. I envy Richard the chance to have seen that, the real thing, the full rush and force of it, more than I can say.
But I don't think it was his doing.
This is where I think Clarissa is hopelessly confused. She's tied Richard in with that moment in her mind, inextricably so; understandably so, I guess. He was there. She was sleeping with him. Granted, it wasn't great sex (it's pathetic, how I cling to that thought; that's one department where I've got him beat, or I had until this damned decline of his that's sucking the life out of her at almost the same rate it is him), but she loved him and that's really all that matters. She was fascinated by him. She's never stopped being fascinated by him. She likes to draw the dichotomy. Where she is ordinary, she claims, he is extraordinary. Where she is prose, he is poetry. Where she appreciates each day simply, loving in life what she can touch and smell and see and taste, he appreciates the Life itself pulsating just behind those simple sensations. I know she feels inferior to him, though she wouldn't phrase it that way. What he does, she would claim, is to make her strive for the same heights he's attained. And, honestly, it's such a load of bullshit. I don't need Life with a capital L. I've got laundry to do and bills to pay and a woman lying in my bed at night and all I want out of my personal life, lowercase l, is to be happy with her. And I swear we could manage it if he weren't always hovering in the corner, that ghostly apparition making her question her "simplicity." Frankly, I think that sort of simplicity's what makes life worth living.
It's interesting, the nickname he's given her, really. Mrs. Dalloway. Much as I hate to admit it, it suits her somewhat. That appreciation of the moment. That ability to love the minutiae of ordinary life, to be carried away in the details. I'm sure there are other comparisons as well, but like I said, I never liked Woolf. Nor do I like looking at Clarissa refracted through Richard's lens. No, what I remember about Clarissa Dalloway was that she was able to walk down the streets of London and love the rush of raw life pushing past her. Those small details of each day – they didn't mean anything to her except exactly what they were, and that was what she loved.
Richard, on the other hand, has to find the meaning in everything. I suppose somebody has to do it. I won't deny his brilliance. That would be petty of me, not to mention useless. The man is a genius in his way. But it's not a way I'd ever care to emulate. You see it best in his novel, which I really think was his own attempt to one-up Virginia Woolf. So she depicted the experience of life in its simple form. He was going to do it in its complex form. He was going to find the meaning behind everything that happens in everyday life – he was going to figure out what it Meant that Clarissa didn't happen to buy that plum nail polish on a certain Thursday on Twelfth Street, that she prefers navy blazers over black. What a train wreck. I mean, don't get me wrong. Poetry suits him. You're to assume there's meaning behind every detail in poetry, that's what it exists for. But for him to attempt to represent life as he sees it through prose… God, the poor, sorry bastard.
Well, I knew I wouldn't be able to avoid the guilt for long. He's dying. Slowly, excruciatingly. No one deserves that, no one, and I could never wish that on him. It's not even that he's not a nice person, although such adjectives are utterly beside the point where Richard is concerned. It's merely that I can't help blaming him for having swiped a significant portion of Clarissa's soul when she was eighteen years old and he was nineteen. I don't know if he did it on purpose, even.
She can't let him go. I can see that, too. I see more than she gives me credit for, really. I think he'd be gone by now if it weren't for her. And it would probably be for the best. I don't say this entirely out of self-interest. No one should have to live that way. She's been pulling him along for months because she can't bear to lose the last living remnant of that moment. I think she thinks that as long as she can cling to him she's still got something. Meanwhile, Richard has lost himself to the diseases. There is next to nothing left. Without her, he would be gone. I suspect he would be happier. Though that's one thing I wouldn't presume to say for sure.
Clarissa thinks that if she can hold him, she can hold that moment. Perhaps when she's gone I'll somehow find the strength to tell her that it doesn't work that way. Richard isn't what she lost, you know. She and Richard broke up, and there was a reason for it. He couldn't make her happy anymore – and frankly, I don't think he ever did to begin with. She was young. I think that about sums it up.
It's a hard thing to tell the woman you love that there is nothing she can do to regain that kind of joy. That even if Richard were to tell her he loved her, even if he were to offer to run away with her - even if he were to come awake one morning magically cured and ready to fly off to Wellfleet once more, it wouldn't make any difference. We feel things more, and differently, when we're younger. Life is more intense when we're younger. And for someone as devoted to the intensity of each moment as Clarissa is, it must be harder than I can ever imagine to accept that that's gone for good. Me – I'm different. I'm happy now, in this settled state, this stability. I was happier when I was young too, and sometimes I think if I could just find a way to tell her that it might make a difference. I know there's no one else for me out there, she is it for me - and yet nothing can compare with the delirious shock of a first kiss, a first orgasm, a first "I love you." That's gone. And the only way to be happy at all in the moment is to push it away, for the most part. I take it out every once and again. Clarissa brings it soup every day and a tasteful arrangement of flowers once a week.
So I sit here, in this house which she has vacated to go buy her flowers for Richard (and without so much as a goodbye), and wait for him to die. I should hate myself for this, but I'm beyond hatred. I'm just – suspended. Waiting for Clarissa to come around. Waiting, I suppose, for something to change. Like I said, I've sidelined myself because there is nothing I can do. She'll have to see on her own, or he'll have to die on his own. Or both. Probably both.