A foray into the audience’s responsibility… Is the instigator always the sole culprit? Or are his followers liable too? If only for believing?
“Connivence” [kɔ(n)nivɑ ̃:s] is one of those words which, pronounced in French, sounds so beautiful, but it’s actually not.
It’s really a very sharp, three pronged fork that will, not surprisingly, stab you right back in the butt when we’re not looking one day.
Connivance, whether feigning ignorance or dissimulating knowledge, is really assenting to wrongdoing that should be prohibited, not applauded. Especially, but not only, by the courts.
I now know, because I believed Ted as well for the whole of our marriage. And it had never even hit me, until the day I walked into our emptied apartment, that although Vestalle may have been our last name, Connivance must have been Ted’s middle name too.
I remember the first time he said the word, early on in our relationship. It was in the afternoon, late in his living room, one spring, after our day at the beach. Ted told me that, even though he loved our “connivences”, he was leaving me to go back to his ex-girlfriend… and I was floored.
When I asked him what he meant, he referred to our complicity and our connection. I thought he was talking about how well suited we were for one another, but I guess I really wasn’t listening or rather, I was hearing selectively.
Because he didn’t go back to her in the end. He stayed and we were partners for close to 12 years, with me somehow believing “connivences” meant that we loved one another the whole time.
So the fork’s first prong belongs to story telling, for which I realized too late, Ted is undoubtedly a master. He even made it his profession. So, Duh!
He possesses this gift for creating a certain sort of complicity, a unique kind of collusion with those around him that turns his contact into an almost guilty pleasure, like a good drug : hard to avow, but too formidable to refuse.
The fact that he’s a wealthy-white-suit-wearing-male makes his little lies even easier to swallow, his schemes that much more impossibly attractive, his whole set up nearly inconceivable.
He’s an ace at the spinning the tales around too, turning things upside down to make himself appear upright and confusing the details of what really happened with his own special interpretation of the truth.
And in our case, Ted’s just been so damn charming and plausibly packaged himself as the victim, been so credible sounding, that it’s close to impossible not to give him full credence. Demanding any evidence for his arguments would seem almost criminal, somehow.
The second spike of that fork, is the scam itself though, and Ted doesn’t mince his words.
He’s taken the tallest and the oldest tale in the books. The dirty little immemorial lie, the one everyone has known underneath since Eve, the one man’s been telling forever, that needs no proof whatsoever…
“Les Femmes sont toutes des salopes.”*
Ted bragged that he really meant it as a compliment, but he’s actually honed several versions on the same theme, which he interspersed regularly to portray the women in his life. Spinning horrendous, though dubiously detailed accounts of how he’d been obliged to cheat and lie and steal to get away from them all, with more than the lion’s share of what they’d built together as couples. Each saga dramatically framed with vague recollections of how they’d schemed to abandon him first… But all tinged with that time-honored truth.
So ours was not Ted’s first rodeo you see and seemingly the whole region knew it too.
The third pick, dear reader, is the most prickly to admit however, because the final prong of this pitch fork is you, the believer.
A lie can never exist without an audience.
The depth of any deception depends upon devotees.
With no followers, a ring leader’s naught.
Without collusion, there’s nothing to close our eyes to.
Without his lackeys, a liar, like Ted,
should just disappear… in a ploof,
but he never does, does he?
He’s always still around!
My father used to laughingly tell me, in our cross-Atlantic conversations, how Balzacian my life sounded.
I’d never read Balzac before moving abroad, but my divorce from Ted turned out to be my first official experience with The Human Comedy… which you see, I’ve obviously found very far from amusing, whereas the folk in Ted’s town seem duly entertained by his renditions each time.
Like they have a vested interest in staying on the good side of the dominant, turning the other cheek to the injustice of the powerful and using the weak to their own advantage… Somehow, not surprisingly, the very same reactions documented by the author in his pieces.
But I don’t think the people profiting from hoaxes and hustles, those bending the rules and selectively colluding with one another for their own benefit, are unique just to France. Ted is, for certain, not the first nor the last of his kind. Take Epstein or Madoff or Weinstein or Trump, just to name just a few…
But it’s the acceptation of those old social mores without doubting a man’s version, that unveils the uncomfortable truths about our shared cultural misogyny. By not avowing our gullibility, we’re not only confirming our participation in this system, we’re admitting to the fact that… the same system actually owns us all.
So I’m hoping our divorce judge realizes Ted’s scam...
And hope she’ll finally don her thinking cap too!
“Les Femmes sont toutes des salopes.”* translates loosely from French to English as “Women will screw you every time!”
