Free Reunion by Andrea Goldsmith Page B

and its equally numerous burn-outs. Whenever Ava wrote about Fleur, Jack could feel the compulsion that joined her to this woman. It was a type of love he recognised – explosive, unrestrained, addictive, irresistible, and totally unlike her love for Harry, which was useful like an electric kettle is useful, and ordinary. Yet as the affair with Fleur continued, it was impossible not to feel sorry for Harry; the poor man must have been mad with pain.
    Throughout the seven years of their affair, Ava and Fleur loved in cycles. It was all fire and fury for a time, a wild burn that consumed work, thought, body, health, each other – like Icarus flying towards the sun, Ava once wrote to Jack, andnothing to equal it. Two or three months were as long as they could tolerate, then they would break away and Ava would lodge Fleur somewhere safe while she returned to the rest of her life. Such a relief to settle, Ava would write in her letters to Jack. And her work would flow.
    Love is astonishingly immune to learning from experience. As Jack appeared unable to extricate himself from Ava, so it seemed Ava could not extricate herself from Fleur. Months might pass when the two women had nothing to do with each other. Ava would be hard at work in Oxford or travelling the world’s literary circuit, and Fleur would be hard at work in London and, as Ava would eventually discover, conducting a string of affairs. Then, inexplicably, a shift would occur, sometimes in Fleur, sometimes in Ava, a switch turned on, a tautness, an awareness, and one of them would seek the other out. They would always meet on the neutral ground of a café, where wrapped in eagerness and good intentions they would swap stories of their time apart. But even before the coffee was finished and the neglected food whisked away, the sizzling would have started again. And from there it was just a brief span before they were clawing at each other in a fume of emotions turned up to the level of pain.
    It was a love impossible to reject and impossible to maintain. As a means of protection, Ava would retract the boundaries of her relationship with Fleur, inadvertently concentrating the emotions and raising the intensity. Obsessive loves are never cool and neither are they open to cool reason. Just like Jack’s love for Ava. So many similarities but with two crucial differences. Despite the tumult with Fleur, despite the frequent bruisings and the sharp cut of the separations, Ava produced four new novels in seven years; far from Fleur hindering her work,Ava believed she was essential to it. In contrast, Jack’s writing and research dwindled and then stopped altogether as Ava came to occupy more of his time. In fact, all his other passions waned. There used to be other women, many other women, but there was little beyond sex with them and after a while he rearranged his sexual needs to minimise potential complications. By the time he returned to Melbourne to take up the NOGA fellowship, what intimate ties Jack had outside his relationship with Ava occurred mostly in cyberspace.
    And the other crucial difference? Ava had Harry. Rather than focus on the affair with Fleur, Jack would have done better to study her marriage. But he preferred not to look.
    Husbands and wives make pacts with each other, shared commitments about how they will conduct their relationship. They also make pacts with themselves as to what they will tolerate in their partner’s behaviour. The shared pacts and the private ones can be the same, but in the rocky terrain of most marriages there are disparities. So it happens that in a marriage in which both partners have committed to fidelity but one embarks on affairs, the marriage does not break down during the first affair, nor the second. But the third spells the end for the faithful partner, even if it was nothing more than a drunken fuck with someone never to be seen again. The personal limit has been crossed. If Fleur had lasted