To the reproaches which I heaped upon her when Saint-Loup had left us, Albertine replied that she had intended, by her coldness towards me, to dispel any ideas that he might have formed if, at the moment when the train stopped, he had seen me leaning against her with my arm round her waist. He had indeed noticed this attitude (I had not caught sight of him, otherwise I should have sat up decorously besides Albertine), and had had time to murmur in my ear: "So that's one of those priggish little girls you told me about, who wouldn't go near Mlle de Stermaria because they thought her fast?" I had indeed mentioned to Robert, and in all sincerity, when I went down from Paris to visit him at Doncieres, and when we were talking about our time at Balbec, that there was noting to be done with Albertine, that she was virtue itself. And now that I had long since discovered for myself that this was false, I was even more anxious that Robert should believe it to be true. It would have been sufficient for me to tell Robert that I was in love with Albertine. He was one of those people who are capable of denying themselves a pleasure to spare a friend sufferings which they would feel as though they were their own. "Yes, she's still rather childish. But you don't know anything against her?" I added anxiously. "Nothing, except that I saw you clinging together like a pair of lovers."
Marcel Proust, Cities of the Plain, p. 889
"I never told you about this because I thought it would crush you, but now I could give a shit. I fucked Elizabeth. Before you broke up. Before you were having trouble, even. So you can stop making her into a saint. She was good in bed and she could keep a secret. And that's about all I can say about her." John (Peter Gallagher) to Graham (James Spader) in Sex, Lies and Videotape.
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As I was re-reading this passage from Proust several things popped into my head, one of them being the end of the brilliant film Sex, Lies and Videotape. Our insistence on lying to each other and to ourselves about love and sex - and our endless persistence and creativity in doing so - has to be one of the hallmarks of our species. We all lie and we all play roles, and I suppose the juxtoposition between our reality and our play-acting seems most dramatic in women mainly because society tries to force them into a smaller and more defined intellectual and moral window. Certainly there are women who cling to illusions of virginity with one hopeful and patient would-be lover while happily descending into casual depravity (if I keep repeating this term it will become a thing) with another more insistent or more knowing lover. Although, truthfully, it probably has very little to do with the patience or impatience, or skill or clumsiness, of her lovers, but rather her determination to choose her own role. Marcel had sold a version of Albertine to his friend Robert, and thus also to himself, and it was necessary to maintain that delusion, as much for himself as for Robert.
And speaking of Robert, maybe he's a better friend, and a better person, than he has seemed to be up to this point. Proust writes that he "was one of those people who are capable of denying themselves a pleasure to spare a friend sufferings which they would feel as they they were their own."
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