The Art of Intimacy by Stacey D'Erasmo

Would we really call this love? And what of our pleasure—which surely can’t be that secret to us—in watching one man co-opt, dominate, and dispatch another into exile, if not death? Where do we really think Leggatt is going? The space between, in The Secret Sharer, is a transactional one in which the shadow side of one character is sewn, Peter Pan–style, to the heels of another. Our suspicions might be raised by how frequently our narrator insists that he and Leggatt are just alike, are twins, are doubles, nearly to the point of suggesting that there can hardly be need of two of the same man in the world. But so beguiled are we by the atmosphere, the dusk, the whispering, and the general air of exceptional, privileged intimacy that we don’t think to question why the captain is selling us on this so hard. We are lulled by the near-dark, seduced by our own cleverness in articulating what the captain refuses to articulate about himself, reading clues off of Leggatt’s body.
    But are we thereby overlooking the far more raw, more violent, more troubling truth hiding in plain sight? This is a tale that ends with the freshly reinscribed authority of one man and the disappearance of the other man. It seems less, at the end of the day, a story of identification than it is a story of psychological cannibalism. Mastery comes at a price: the price is Leggatt’s life and a state of permanent anonymity. The man who wanted to be seen will never be seen again.
    Published in 1929, not long after The Secret Sharer but grounded in a very different setting, is Nella Larsen’s Passing, which also concerns a troubled and troubling identification within a romantic friendship. The reader inhabits the point of view of one of the friends, Irene Redfield, an African American woman living with her husband and two sons in perfect respectability in a Harlem town house, patron and participant in a vibrant African American cultural scene. The object of Irene’s anxiety, envy, disapproval, and admiration is her childhood friend Clare Kendry, who disorders Irene’s adult life and troubles her ideas about race, identity, and desire. When the two women unexpectedly cross paths in a Chicago hotel tearoom after many years apart, their childhood friendship is reignited. Clare, Irene quickly discovers, has been passing as white for much of her life and is married to an unabashedly racist white man who doesn’t know Clare’s secret. At the same time, Irene begrudgingly admits to herself that she is fascinated by Clare, and Clare confesses to feeling lonely for the company of other black people, marooned, passing (she calls it “this pale life of mine”) in an all-white milieu. When Clare turns up in New York and insinuates herself not only into Irene’s life, but also into Irene’s marriage, emotional chaos ensues for Irene.
    In a highly ambiguous final scene at a party, Clare goes out a window to her death; did she fall, or did Irene push her? Neither the text nor Irene can say. “What happened next,” writes Larsen of the millisecond before Clare’s fall, “Irene Redfield never afterwards allowed herself to remember. Never clearly. One moment Clare had been there, a vital glowing thing, like a flame of red and gold. The next she was gone.” As with the unnamed captain and Leggatt, the main character, Irene, is fascinated, seduced, and profoundly disturbed by the intruder, and she can only reestablish her identity by the death, or perhaps the murder, of the one who causes her such ambivalence and doubt, the one who brings with her “the menace of impermanence.” Unlike The Secret Sharer, which closes on a moment that seems to be victorious, Passing ends with Irene passing out, overcome by a “great heaviness that submerged and drowned her. . . . Then everything was dark.” She has reconsolidated herself, and vanquished the menace of impermanence, at a high price both to herself and to Clare.
    Passing is a difficult novel to analyze, not