It’s the secret life that’s the electric life.
Growing up, individuals are often led to believe they lead two distinct lives: a public or civic life, which encompassed the workplace, the economy, and mediated the relationship between individuals and the state, providing a forum for collective decision-making and political debate; and, then, a private life, behind closed doors, of individual subjectivity, family, and cosy domesticity.
It seemed an arbitrary distinction, and one liable to collapse at any moment. Victorian grand madames covering slender, suggestive table legs out of modesty remains the stuff of urban legend, but what happens when someone hosts a dinner party or a salon, and their house and home effectively become open to public display and scrutiny?
“Everyone has three lives: a public life, a private life, and a secret life.” These words once appeared on the front cover of a fashion magazine. It seemed to square the circle immediately, with its secret, third life, tucked away from public view and scrutiny, but also removed and more intimate than even one’s private life at home. Setting aside elite independent escorts in London, the secret life seemed to find its equivalence in the subconscious: if the public and private lives are indicative of a person’s conscious, egoistic ambitions and goals, the secret life is the life of the id, inarticulable, irrepressible, untethered even by social mores or expectation.
It’s not an entirely novel idea, of course. Oscar Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray casts a Gothic, fairy-tale horror from the matter, with its hedonistic anti-hero able to indulge and satisfy his amoral licentiousness and sensual desires without being ravaged by the physical effects of the same, which, instead, get transferred onto a mysterious, magical portrait, locked away from prying eyes. If that sounds like a cautionary tale, then J. M. Barrie’s Peter Pan pitches an alternative in the character of Wendy’s mother, Mrs Darling:
Her romantic mind was like tiny boxes, one within the other, that come from the puzzling East, however many you discover there is always one more; and her sweet mocking mouth had one kiss on it that Wendy could never get, though it was there, perfectly conspicuous in the right-hand corner.
There’s no up or down, right or wrong to the secret life. While it can be as diseased and twisted as the portrait of Dorian Gray, or as tantalising as the hidden kiss of freedom and youth that even Mrs Darling’s husband and children cannot touch, the secret life — for an elite independent escort or anyone living between selves — stands apart from worldly notions of morality, burning like fuel for the private and public lives that it supports.
Or maybe not, for the three lives quotation comes from the master of magic realism and linguistic illusion, Gabriel García Márquez and, if there’s one thing Márquez knows how to do better than anyone else, it’s making anything seem believable. The specificity of numbers is high amongst his arsenal of tricks. ‘If you say that there are elephants flying in the sky, people are not going to believe you’, he told one interviewer, ‘But if you say that there are four hundred and twenty-five elephants flying in the sky, people will probably believe you’. The question remains: assuming he’s casting one of his spells, why would Márquez even have us believe there were three lives?
The answer to that lies in context. More precisely, the three lives quotation comes from Márquez’s biography, in response to his authorised biographer, Gerald Martin, quizzing him about his affair with Spanish poet and actress, Tachia Quintana:
‘Can we talk about it?’ He said, ‘No’. It was on that occasion that he would first tell me, with the expression on his face of an undertaker determinedly closing a coffin lid back then, that ‘everyone has three lives…’
And there it is. To even raise the possibility of the secret life in conversation is also to simultaneously shut down discussion on the same. Secrets are just that – secret – and the secret life can only ever remain a barely-glimpsed enigma: impenetrable; unknowable; unspeakable.
Falling between the public life and the private life, the secret life is one that’s felt rather than evidenced, and intuited rather than analysed. That’s something a willowy, blonde bodyguard in a silk trouser suit, in a hotel bar, in Monaco, would already understand; with a trace of juniper on her lips from the last sip of Negroni before turning in; and killer fingers that, with the merest touch, shoot electricity into a balmy-cool and starless night.