Laurie
Chekhov play
Starbucks, November 10, 2008
I am turning into a Chekhov play—the one where the women stand at the window of their provincial outpost and pine for Moscow. Moscow, Moscow, Moscow is all you hear about in The Three Sisters. Moscow is society, surprise, strangeness—all the things a great city is supposed to be. In a city like that, the streets are your arteries and veins.
“You have the look of the last Tasmanian,” Richard says, “the only speaker of your language.” Before I moved to Arizona, he said: “You’ll miss your life, your friends,” I said: “Don’t be ridiculous. I can work anywhere.” When has anything you thought about the future turned out right?
My friend Alan lives in my apartment; technically it’s still mine, but when I see his belongings all around, I’m restless and unhappy. I have traveled far and often but never so far afield and never without knowing I was coming back. Can you hear me Major Tom? Toby has been dead a year. We are all the only speakers of our language.
We visit Kierland Common, an outdoor shopping mall designed to look like a village with a square and fountain in the center. The stores are the usual suspects: Barnes & Noble, Banana Republic, Eileen Fisher. Scattered about are a few expensive restaurants and a place you can get a sandwich and coffee, but this is not a neighborhood where people live; they come and go by car. “It’s based on Main Street, Disney,” Richard says, “rather than an actual town square. It’s an evocation of village centers that in reality have been abandoned.” What a smarty-pants my boyfriend is. He’s wearing a carrot colored T-shirt, and his silvery hair spikes up. The streets are a break from the Valley’s dominant suburban sprawl, punctuated by strip malls and condo communities, and I’m trying not to live in my old patterns. But who am I kidding? Kierland is depressing and not all that different from other shopping sections of the Valley; all have been constructed by developers and aren’t attached in any network. There’s no urban area to get lost in.
Richard asks why I’m sighing, and I don’t know I am, and the air between us starts to get a black, funnel cloud look. I say this place, this place where we live is an indistinct fuzz ball and in it I’m a fuzz ball, too. I have one or two almost friends, but it takes an hour each way to drive to them. I talk about the difference between an urban facsimile and a city that isn’t planned, rather evolves as an emergent system, little by little, and is shaped by the language, and clothes, and art, and food of its neighborhoods. Richard says that all cities are constructed around commercial interests and that western cities and eastern cities are based on different models. He says what eastern cities have is a patina of use and wear. My head goes on fire and I raise my voice a little that sounds to him like shouting and I say: Are you suggesting that the difference between a mall and a city is soot? And he says: You like to fight, you just like to fight. You need to fight. It’s something about you and your mother. And we are thinking: Why did I throw over whatever the hell I had for this hidebound flame thrower, but I am also thinking: I would be just as lost in New York without my love. But my love is pissing me off with his crack about fighting, even though he’s right. I am just like my mother. I am just like my mother in order to fend her off. But why is he protecting Arizona? I say: What’s Arizona to you, huh? Every day when you write, you don’t situate yourself here. You’re in England, wandering down cobbled streets or trucking across wind blown moors. Or you’re in New York, listening to jazz or riding the subway and looking out for muggers. You have hardly any friends here, too! So what’s this defense of Arizona? And he says: There’s something to what you say, but I feel that badmouthing Arizona is snobbish and an easy target for outsiders, and I just hate snobbery. And I say: Well, I’m not a snob, and I want to talk about my experience without you thinking I’m attacking people who live here. And he shoots me a grumpy smile, and I see his even row of top teeth, and he says: What the hell am I defending? And it hits us we’re defending ourselves against being swallowed up in the other, and I think I could talk to this man for the rest of my life. It’s not that rash an idea. I mean, how much longer do I have?
Friday, June 26, 2009
Wednesday, June 24, 2009
Taking from nature
Richard
Taking from nature
Stabucks, April 16, 2007
We lope along beside coyotes with extra spring in their steps and quick brown rabbits, creatures who have learned to live in the desert. Laurie is not one of them. With her black umbrella and silk pants, she looks like a variety act in a Vaudeville show. The desert is alien to me, too, but I’ve lived here long enough to look local, kicking up red soil in worn boots, long cotton pants, and a straw hat.
Laurie steals wild-flowers, ocotillo branches, and rocks. She also makes deposits in nature: apple cores, olive pits, and lumps of bread, defying the maxim, “Leave no trace” that I learned from the Outward Bound, wilderness-loving folks I worked for some years ago. Laurie argues that human history is all about leaving a trace—indeed a great dirty, lusty slash.
She has a point. Ideas about the wilderness regularly flip. Up until the 19th Century, the heavenly city was the site of salvation and the wilderness the wellspring of temptation. Jesus meets the devil in the wilderness, and Hawthorne’s Puritans watch their their libidinal fantasies come to life in the forest. With the Romantics and the Transcendentalists, the holy place relocates to nature. People journey to mountains and woods to refresh themselves spiritually, which leads us to Thoreau, the righteous bastard, who throws around lots of cleansing imagery. These days we construct the wilderness in wildlife parks, preserve the pristine. This is just the sort of contradiction Laurie pounces on, and although I recognize the philosophical inconsistency, I’m against her interfering.
“What if everyone took rocks?” I pose.
“The rocks where we walk approach an infinite number. No amount of collecting can diminish the total.”
She has a point. Out here, a path is a place where the rocks have been cleared.
“So, we’re not exactly talking about untouched nature, are we?” She says she’s “relocating” rocks with arresting striations and smudges of desert varish in order to make something of the nothing of our patio. “This ‘don’t move the rocks’ doctrine is pretty essentialist, don’t you think?”
Walking ahead to mount my next argument, I look back to see her inspecting a large branch of dried ocotillo with its beautiful latticed chambers. She approaches me, beaming, and in her smile I see a wildness that sloughs off rules and wakes up a wildness in me. Instead of demanding she put back the branch, I suggest she hide it, thereby conceding the argument. She takes off her shirt (actually my shirt she’s stolen), wraps it around the branch and sticks it in her backpack. She looks like a woman carrying a large branch wrapped in a shirt.
My only victory is turning an open vandal into a furtive one. I credit Laurie with introducing nature rage into our relationship.
Taking from nature
Stabucks, April 16, 2007
We lope along beside coyotes with extra spring in their steps and quick brown rabbits, creatures who have learned to live in the desert. Laurie is not one of them. With her black umbrella and silk pants, she looks like a variety act in a Vaudeville show. The desert is alien to me, too, but I’ve lived here long enough to look local, kicking up red soil in worn boots, long cotton pants, and a straw hat.
Laurie steals wild-flowers, ocotillo branches, and rocks. She also makes deposits in nature: apple cores, olive pits, and lumps of bread, defying the maxim, “Leave no trace” that I learned from the Outward Bound, wilderness-loving folks I worked for some years ago. Laurie argues that human history is all about leaving a trace—indeed a great dirty, lusty slash.
She has a point. Ideas about the wilderness regularly flip. Up until the 19th Century, the heavenly city was the site of salvation and the wilderness the wellspring of temptation. Jesus meets the devil in the wilderness, and Hawthorne’s Puritans watch their their libidinal fantasies come to life in the forest. With the Romantics and the Transcendentalists, the holy place relocates to nature. People journey to mountains and woods to refresh themselves spiritually, which leads us to Thoreau, the righteous bastard, who throws around lots of cleansing imagery. These days we construct the wilderness in wildlife parks, preserve the pristine. This is just the sort of contradiction Laurie pounces on, and although I recognize the philosophical inconsistency, I’m against her interfering.
“What if everyone took rocks?” I pose.
“The rocks where we walk approach an infinite number. No amount of collecting can diminish the total.”
She has a point. Out here, a path is a place where the rocks have been cleared.
“So, we’re not exactly talking about untouched nature, are we?” She says she’s “relocating” rocks with arresting striations and smudges of desert varish in order to make something of the nothing of our patio. “This ‘don’t move the rocks’ doctrine is pretty essentialist, don’t you think?”
Walking ahead to mount my next argument, I look back to see her inspecting a large branch of dried ocotillo with its beautiful latticed chambers. She approaches me, beaming, and in her smile I see a wildness that sloughs off rules and wakes up a wildness in me. Instead of demanding she put back the branch, I suggest she hide it, thereby conceding the argument. She takes off her shirt (actually my shirt she’s stolen), wraps it around the branch and sticks it in her backpack. She looks like a woman carrying a large branch wrapped in a shirt.
My only victory is turning an open vandal into a furtive one. I credit Laurie with introducing nature rage into our relationship.
Friday, June 12, 2009
Johnny Folkes
Richard
Johnny Folkes
Starbucks, Jan. 12, 2008
Johnny Folkes was the most talented and graceful athlete at Humphrey Perkins. We were on the same teams for soccer and rugby in winter, cricket and athletics in summer, and basketball all year round. He had the well developed muscles of a man, not, like me, the slender physique of a fifteen-year-old boy. He was beautiful, too, with a fringe of curly blond hair that gave him the look of a Greek statue. The girls all eyed him, but he didn’t go out with any while we were school friends. Other people, even girls, hardly registered on him.
I don’t remember him bullying anyone off the sports field, but a streak of cruelty surfaced in competition. Playing soccer, he’d trip an opponent making a run, or grab a player’s shirt when the referee wasn’t looking. He’d attack the man not the ball. It was unnecessary. He had the skill and poise not to foul, but he liked to. He’d rise from a nasty tackle wearing a grin of malice, and it helped create a protective shield around him. No one wanted to be his target and wind up carried off on a stretcher. In the wilder game of rugby, he was even more dangerous. Routinely, he’d lead in points until the referee sent him off for gouging or stiff-arming. Mr. Williams, the sports master, would look despairing; he’d been handed the most gifted athlete he’d ever seen, but he was unable to reform him. Johnny couldn’t grant people space even in his reflected light.
He qualified in trials for the national teams in rugby, soccer, and cricket, but each time he’d miss the final pick or be dismissed early for unsportsmanlike conduct. I studied him, looking to carve a safe place in his proximity, and instead of giving him a wide berth as most did I became his friend. I passed to him so he could score. I specialized in events he disdained, among them, long jump and high jump. We were easy allies in sprint relays, and being Johnny’s friend meant I was protected, too. It wasn’t a calculation, rather a role I’d practiced while trailing my willful, older brother, Roy.
I didn’t question Johnny’s cruelty, rather treated it as a force of nature like his larger, stronger muscles. I would have avoided him if I could have, and my friendship, for that reason, felt inauthentic. I competed with him openly only in displays of wit, winning his confidence, in part, with fast putdowns of people he despised, i.e. everyone who appeared smarter than him, except me. Telling jokes about the teachers and talking out of turn earned me as many detentions as Johnny got. We bonded as kings of sport and fellow rebels, although I felt his cruel streak was a sleeping cobra that, once awakened, would strike. I was brought up in a family where physical violence wasn’t threatened. Even raising your voice was disapproved of. I was fascinated as well as repulsed by Johnny’s freedom to lose control.
It’s summer vacation, 1966, and out of the blue he invites me to spend the day in Loughborough, fifteen miles north of Syston. He’ll meet me at the bus stop by the market on Saturday morning. I feel flattered and obligated. I don’t wonder if he likes me, really, any more than I like him. I don’t wonder if he’s lonely. He has an impulse to reach out that matches mine to say okay. We’re boys, thinking with our reptilian brains.
He asks if I’ve got money when I step off the bus. I have a pound. It won’t be enough, he says, to buy beer and pie at the pub. We can go to his dad’s and he’ll ask for a fiver. It’s the first time Johnny has mentioned his family, the first I know he doesn’t live with his father. In the market, sellers hawk fruits and vegetables at open stalls. It’s colorful and noisy, a scene that has played in the square for hundreds of years. We turn onto a side street lined with red brick terraced houses. They lack gardens, and the front doors open directly onto the narrow pavement. Halfway down, Johnny stops and knocks loudly at a door, and after some time an angry looking man in his fifties appears. “What the fuck do you want?” The resemblance between father and son is unmistakable. This is how Johnny will look if a god in a machine doesn’t snatch him up to safety; Johnny’s looks were once squandered by the man with the blotchy face and body gone to flab. He wears a string vest. The fly of his trousers is unbuttoned. He’s been awakened from a drunken sleep, reeking of cigarettes and stale beer.
“I want a fucking fiver,” Johnny says, and their eyes lock.
“Fuck that.”
“You owe us, so ‘and it over.”
“I haven’t got it.”
“Don’t give me that, you bastard.” Johnny inches forward, his right hand balling into a fist. Next door a baby cries, and no one tries to soothe it.
The man looks back at his son and sighs. He’s too tired to fight, or he knows that Johnny could hurt him, or he has a change of heart. He digs into a pocket, withdraws a clip of bills, peels off a fiver, and hands it to his son. “Tell you what.” His voice is a bit softer. “Go down to the off license and get me some fags, and you can keep the change.” A half-smile crosses his face, or it could be a wince.
Johnny grabs the note and walks off, on his face the look of grim determination he wears on the sports field. He doesn’t turn as his dad calls, “Don’t forget. You promised.”
I’m invisible. Johnny doesn’t introduce me, and his father doesn’t ask who I am. I am a fly or a spy, and I’m excited and embarrassed, for I’ve never seen a father and son dare to speak to each other with so much raw emotion, and although part of my embarrassment is for having a dad who treats me kindly while Johnny has never known this, I can’t help wondering how it would feel to see my father in the grip of such emotion, to see him flare with feeling rather than stamping it out, like lit matches dropped on the kitchen floor, whenever someone cries or speaks with passion.
We don’t stop at the off license but spend the money drinking at the pub the next few hours before I board the bus back to Syston in a beer-infused haze. Thick as it is, I know that Johnny will never be picked for a national team—no god from a machine is going to lift him up. What will I become? Someone who neither shrinks back from violence nor feels entitled to explode. Along the way, I’ll encounter many violent people—Hell’s Angels, muggers, a pack of pub brawlers who follow me and a friend back to our flat—but somehow their full fury doesn’t come my way. Looking back at the boy on the bus, I see him discovering the unavoidability and poignancy of brutality in men’s lives—and finding a way to sail through it in one piece.
Johnny Folkes
Starbucks, Jan. 12, 2008
Johnny Folkes was the most talented and graceful athlete at Humphrey Perkins. We were on the same teams for soccer and rugby in winter, cricket and athletics in summer, and basketball all year round. He had the well developed muscles of a man, not, like me, the slender physique of a fifteen-year-old boy. He was beautiful, too, with a fringe of curly blond hair that gave him the look of a Greek statue. The girls all eyed him, but he didn’t go out with any while we were school friends. Other people, even girls, hardly registered on him.
I don’t remember him bullying anyone off the sports field, but a streak of cruelty surfaced in competition. Playing soccer, he’d trip an opponent making a run, or grab a player’s shirt when the referee wasn’t looking. He’d attack the man not the ball. It was unnecessary. He had the skill and poise not to foul, but he liked to. He’d rise from a nasty tackle wearing a grin of malice, and it helped create a protective shield around him. No one wanted to be his target and wind up carried off on a stretcher. In the wilder game of rugby, he was even more dangerous. Routinely, he’d lead in points until the referee sent him off for gouging or stiff-arming. Mr. Williams, the sports master, would look despairing; he’d been handed the most gifted athlete he’d ever seen, but he was unable to reform him. Johnny couldn’t grant people space even in his reflected light.
He qualified in trials for the national teams in rugby, soccer, and cricket, but each time he’d miss the final pick or be dismissed early for unsportsmanlike conduct. I studied him, looking to carve a safe place in his proximity, and instead of giving him a wide berth as most did I became his friend. I passed to him so he could score. I specialized in events he disdained, among them, long jump and high jump. We were easy allies in sprint relays, and being Johnny’s friend meant I was protected, too. It wasn’t a calculation, rather a role I’d practiced while trailing my willful, older brother, Roy.
I didn’t question Johnny’s cruelty, rather treated it as a force of nature like his larger, stronger muscles. I would have avoided him if I could have, and my friendship, for that reason, felt inauthentic. I competed with him openly only in displays of wit, winning his confidence, in part, with fast putdowns of people he despised, i.e. everyone who appeared smarter than him, except me. Telling jokes about the teachers and talking out of turn earned me as many detentions as Johnny got. We bonded as kings of sport and fellow rebels, although I felt his cruel streak was a sleeping cobra that, once awakened, would strike. I was brought up in a family where physical violence wasn’t threatened. Even raising your voice was disapproved of. I was fascinated as well as repulsed by Johnny’s freedom to lose control.
It’s summer vacation, 1966, and out of the blue he invites me to spend the day in Loughborough, fifteen miles north of Syston. He’ll meet me at the bus stop by the market on Saturday morning. I feel flattered and obligated. I don’t wonder if he likes me, really, any more than I like him. I don’t wonder if he’s lonely. He has an impulse to reach out that matches mine to say okay. We’re boys, thinking with our reptilian brains.
He asks if I’ve got money when I step off the bus. I have a pound. It won’t be enough, he says, to buy beer and pie at the pub. We can go to his dad’s and he’ll ask for a fiver. It’s the first time Johnny has mentioned his family, the first I know he doesn’t live with his father. In the market, sellers hawk fruits and vegetables at open stalls. It’s colorful and noisy, a scene that has played in the square for hundreds of years. We turn onto a side street lined with red brick terraced houses. They lack gardens, and the front doors open directly onto the narrow pavement. Halfway down, Johnny stops and knocks loudly at a door, and after some time an angry looking man in his fifties appears. “What the fuck do you want?” The resemblance between father and son is unmistakable. This is how Johnny will look if a god in a machine doesn’t snatch him up to safety; Johnny’s looks were once squandered by the man with the blotchy face and body gone to flab. He wears a string vest. The fly of his trousers is unbuttoned. He’s been awakened from a drunken sleep, reeking of cigarettes and stale beer.
“I want a fucking fiver,” Johnny says, and their eyes lock.
“Fuck that.”
“You owe us, so ‘and it over.”
“I haven’t got it.”
“Don’t give me that, you bastard.” Johnny inches forward, his right hand balling into a fist. Next door a baby cries, and no one tries to soothe it.
The man looks back at his son and sighs. He’s too tired to fight, or he knows that Johnny could hurt him, or he has a change of heart. He digs into a pocket, withdraws a clip of bills, peels off a fiver, and hands it to his son. “Tell you what.” His voice is a bit softer. “Go down to the off license and get me some fags, and you can keep the change.” A half-smile crosses his face, or it could be a wince.
Johnny grabs the note and walks off, on his face the look of grim determination he wears on the sports field. He doesn’t turn as his dad calls, “Don’t forget. You promised.”
I’m invisible. Johnny doesn’t introduce me, and his father doesn’t ask who I am. I am a fly or a spy, and I’m excited and embarrassed, for I’ve never seen a father and son dare to speak to each other with so much raw emotion, and although part of my embarrassment is for having a dad who treats me kindly while Johnny has never known this, I can’t help wondering how it would feel to see my father in the grip of such emotion, to see him flare with feeling rather than stamping it out, like lit matches dropped on the kitchen floor, whenever someone cries or speaks with passion.
We don’t stop at the off license but spend the money drinking at the pub the next few hours before I board the bus back to Syston in a beer-infused haze. Thick as it is, I know that Johnny will never be picked for a national team—no god from a machine is going to lift him up. What will I become? Someone who neither shrinks back from violence nor feels entitled to explode. Along the way, I’ll encounter many violent people—Hell’s Angels, muggers, a pack of pub brawlers who follow me and a friend back to our flat—but somehow their full fury doesn’t come my way. Looking back at the boy on the bus, I see him discovering the unavoidability and poignancy of brutality in men’s lives—and finding a way to sail through it in one piece.
Sunday, June 7, 2009
Sugar times
Richard
Sugar times
Coffee Plantation, March 16, 2007
I’m alone one night watching Field of Dreams on TV. As my blood sugar drifts down, the movie becomes more and more profound. Death isn’t the end! We’re too bounded by reason to catch the shafts of light all around! I look up from the screen and see the living room through a fish-eye lens. The bookcase is swaying, the arm chair mumbling quietly to itself. My hands are attached to extremely long, rubbery strips, and the hairs on my arms, light brown and silky, are beautiful and mysteriously meaningful. A drop of sweat runs down my forehead, splashes onto my thigh, and ripples like a droplet on the surface of a pool. And I think—very slowly and with a smug smile that signals danger—I’m having a really low blood sugar.
I find myself in front of the refrigerator with the door open. Cold air moves across my skin. I’m slick with sweat, just sweating all over, and I can’t remember what I’m supposed to eat. I bite off some cheese (bad idea, it has no effect on blood sugar), and I grab a container of orange juice and gulp (good idea, sugar galore). Ten minutes later, I feel normal again and watch Kevin Costner meet his dead father in a cornfield. He’s stiff, and James Earl Jones is a blubbery fool encountering dead baseball players. I, too, feel wooden and spent, ejected from my field of dreams.
In one rather precariously low sugar, while Suzanne, my wife at the time, was handing me a glass of orange juice and waiting for my jumbled speech to mean something, I was convinced that time was running backwards. I could swear that everything had already taken place—a sustained sense of deja-vu. I said, “I've just drunk the OJ” and “How come time is going in reverse?" If you've seen the film Memento you'll remember that the main character goes around without any operating memory and has to piece together what’s happened to him from notes he leaves on his body. As he constructs and reconstructs this knowledge, the story is revealed to him (and us) in reverse. My experience felt like this, and the odd sense that it engendered—you feel ahead of the game, hence the oily smile—stayed with me for days.
I understand these moments are tricks of blood sugars, but I see them, nonetheless, as special mental abilities. I'm not saying time was really running backwards, rather that I enjoyed the sights and sounds as you might a journey to the Arctic or the Amazon, even though you would not always want to live in these extremes. How many Richards am I? In the rhythm of sudden sickness and rapid recovery, I experience little deaths and rebirths many times, even in one day. The return to a sense of self not shaken in the fist of either a high or low sugar is sweet in the same measure as altered states are illuminating. I feel hopeful as I reassemble the fractured parts of me, languid on a couch, the littlest hairs on my body feeling air moving on them. I am small and excited, ready to evade repetition. Think on!
Sugar times
Coffee Plantation, March 16, 2007
I’m alone one night watching Field of Dreams on TV. As my blood sugar drifts down, the movie becomes more and more profound. Death isn’t the end! We’re too bounded by reason to catch the shafts of light all around! I look up from the screen and see the living room through a fish-eye lens. The bookcase is swaying, the arm chair mumbling quietly to itself. My hands are attached to extremely long, rubbery strips, and the hairs on my arms, light brown and silky, are beautiful and mysteriously meaningful. A drop of sweat runs down my forehead, splashes onto my thigh, and ripples like a droplet on the surface of a pool. And I think—very slowly and with a smug smile that signals danger—I’m having a really low blood sugar.
I find myself in front of the refrigerator with the door open. Cold air moves across my skin. I’m slick with sweat, just sweating all over, and I can’t remember what I’m supposed to eat. I bite off some cheese (bad idea, it has no effect on blood sugar), and I grab a container of orange juice and gulp (good idea, sugar galore). Ten minutes later, I feel normal again and watch Kevin Costner meet his dead father in a cornfield. He’s stiff, and James Earl Jones is a blubbery fool encountering dead baseball players. I, too, feel wooden and spent, ejected from my field of dreams.
In one rather precariously low sugar, while Suzanne, my wife at the time, was handing me a glass of orange juice and waiting for my jumbled speech to mean something, I was convinced that time was running backwards. I could swear that everything had already taken place—a sustained sense of deja-vu. I said, “I've just drunk the OJ” and “How come time is going in reverse?" If you've seen the film Memento you'll remember that the main character goes around without any operating memory and has to piece together what’s happened to him from notes he leaves on his body. As he constructs and reconstructs this knowledge, the story is revealed to him (and us) in reverse. My experience felt like this, and the odd sense that it engendered—you feel ahead of the game, hence the oily smile—stayed with me for days.
I understand these moments are tricks of blood sugars, but I see them, nonetheless, as special mental abilities. I'm not saying time was really running backwards, rather that I enjoyed the sights and sounds as you might a journey to the Arctic or the Amazon, even though you would not always want to live in these extremes. How many Richards am I? In the rhythm of sudden sickness and rapid recovery, I experience little deaths and rebirths many times, even in one day. The return to a sense of self not shaken in the fist of either a high or low sugar is sweet in the same measure as altered states are illuminating. I feel hopeful as I reassemble the fractured parts of me, languid on a couch, the littlest hairs on my body feeling air moving on them. I am small and excited, ready to evade repetition. Think on!
Thursday, June 4, 2009
Pee
Richard
Pee
Starbucks, November 12, 2008
Over the years I’ve completed scores of surveys about diabetes. How many pats of butter do I spread on bread? Do I hear voices? Can I feel my toes? I’m in San Diego for my annual checkup as part of the epidemiological study that’s now reached its 25th year. I’m in the white examining room at a small table, pen in hand, filling out forms between medical tests, when I come to a survey about peeing. Long-term diabetes can damage the nerves that control urination.
How often do I pee? How long does it usually take? Is my flow strong? Am I able to stop when I want to? I’m not sure. What’s a normal flow? How do you know how good you are at stopping? Do I dribble? Do I stop and start again? Do I really know when I’m finished?
I have lots of opportunity to ponder the questions, as I’m in the middle of a renal test which has me drinking a quart of water every half hour, peeing into a cup, and pouring the contents into a big plastic jug. The container, embedded in ice, has my name on it and looks like it’s filling with chardonnay.
If I can’t tell I have a problem, I figure, then I probably don’t have one, and so I check no to all peeing issues. During stints at the urinal, though, it crosses my mind that maybe I do have issues. Do I empty my bladder in the preferred-but-curiously-unstated way the survey hints at? Does my pee gush in a mighty torrent but one that can be halted sharply in mid-stream—and without residue? Oh my god, there is a bit of residue, I discover, when, toward the end of my visit, the clinical supervisor asks me to lower my trousers so she can measure my abdomen and compare the numbers to last year’s.
I undo my belt, unzip my fly, and let my trousers bag around my knees. I am holding my shirt up, so she can get the tape measure around, and I am looking down at Susan’s head, which is exactly at crotch level, when I notice a dark patch on my light blue knickers. The stain is about the size of a quarter and seems to be expanding. She is right there with it but doesn’t let on. I mean, what can she say? I keep silent as well, but I am aware now there is empirical evidence that I have a peeing issue, no matter what I’ve claimed on the form. Surely, she’ll be cross checking my answers when I’ve left.
Weeks later Laurie finds a particularly fine pair of pants in a sale at Macy’s. They are Alfani’s: 31 inch waist and 30 inch in-seam. They fit tight and look good, and we buy them, a light fawn color. I’m at work, unzipping myself in front of the urinal, when I discover that the zip is short, by which I mean I have to bring my penis up over the bottom of it to point my member, as they say, at the porcelain. It’s a bit of an effort to get a smooth flow, and as I push my dick back into my trousers and zip up, I suddenly feel a spurt of warm liquid around my middle. I look down with a certain horror: a large, dark shape is forming on the front of my pants, announcing to everyone who enters: This man has peed himself. Fortunately, no one enters. I splash water on the stain and duck into a stall to wait. Next time I fill out a form and come to the question: How long does it take your urine soaked trousers to dry? I will be able to answer: 20 minutes, even after you’ve blotted up the excess.
Do I have a problem controlling those last few drops, or do I merely lack technique? Where is the advice? It’s not as if you can solicit tips in public restrooms. Well, maybe you can, but I’m too shy, and I fear deportation. So I’ve improvised a solution: to dab a bit of toilet paper at the end of my dick after the pee. Since urinals lack toilet paper, I use a stall. Sometimes, I sit down. It’s restful, and the dribble matter, out of sight, is out of mind.
Pee
Starbucks, November 12, 2008
Over the years I’ve completed scores of surveys about diabetes. How many pats of butter do I spread on bread? Do I hear voices? Can I feel my toes? I’m in San Diego for my annual checkup as part of the epidemiological study that’s now reached its 25th year. I’m in the white examining room at a small table, pen in hand, filling out forms between medical tests, when I come to a survey about peeing. Long-term diabetes can damage the nerves that control urination.
How often do I pee? How long does it usually take? Is my flow strong? Am I able to stop when I want to? I’m not sure. What’s a normal flow? How do you know how good you are at stopping? Do I dribble? Do I stop and start again? Do I really know when I’m finished?
I have lots of opportunity to ponder the questions, as I’m in the middle of a renal test which has me drinking a quart of water every half hour, peeing into a cup, and pouring the contents into a big plastic jug. The container, embedded in ice, has my name on it and looks like it’s filling with chardonnay.
If I can’t tell I have a problem, I figure, then I probably don’t have one, and so I check no to all peeing issues. During stints at the urinal, though, it crosses my mind that maybe I do have issues. Do I empty my bladder in the preferred-but-curiously-unstated way the survey hints at? Does my pee gush in a mighty torrent but one that can be halted sharply in mid-stream—and without residue? Oh my god, there is a bit of residue, I discover, when, toward the end of my visit, the clinical supervisor asks me to lower my trousers so she can measure my abdomen and compare the numbers to last year’s.
I undo my belt, unzip my fly, and let my trousers bag around my knees. I am holding my shirt up, so she can get the tape measure around, and I am looking down at Susan’s head, which is exactly at crotch level, when I notice a dark patch on my light blue knickers. The stain is about the size of a quarter and seems to be expanding. She is right there with it but doesn’t let on. I mean, what can she say? I keep silent as well, but I am aware now there is empirical evidence that I have a peeing issue, no matter what I’ve claimed on the form. Surely, she’ll be cross checking my answers when I’ve left.
Weeks later Laurie finds a particularly fine pair of pants in a sale at Macy’s. They are Alfani’s: 31 inch waist and 30 inch in-seam. They fit tight and look good, and we buy them, a light fawn color. I’m at work, unzipping myself in front of the urinal, when I discover that the zip is short, by which I mean I have to bring my penis up over the bottom of it to point my member, as they say, at the porcelain. It’s a bit of an effort to get a smooth flow, and as I push my dick back into my trousers and zip up, I suddenly feel a spurt of warm liquid around my middle. I look down with a certain horror: a large, dark shape is forming on the front of my pants, announcing to everyone who enters: This man has peed himself. Fortunately, no one enters. I splash water on the stain and duck into a stall to wait. Next time I fill out a form and come to the question: How long does it take your urine soaked trousers to dry? I will be able to answer: 20 minutes, even after you’ve blotted up the excess.
Do I have a problem controlling those last few drops, or do I merely lack technique? Where is the advice? It’s not as if you can solicit tips in public restrooms. Well, maybe you can, but I’m too shy, and I fear deportation. So I’ve improvised a solution: to dab a bit of toilet paper at the end of my dick after the pee. Since urinals lack toilet paper, I use a stall. Sometimes, I sit down. It’s restful, and the dribble matter, out of sight, is out of mind.
Saturday, May 16, 2009
A setting you recall
Laurie
A setting you recall
Starbucks, February 9, 2009
After Bruce and I separated, I lived on Charles Street in a small townhouse, distinctive for its Tudor facing. It was a few blocks south of the White Horse Tavern, the bar where Dylan Thomas drank himself to his final death. Each month I handed a rent check for $200 to the friendly antiques dealer who owned the building and lived in a posh duplex in the basement and ground floors. Upstairs was an older couple who gave off a messed-hair, black-leather glamor; when I had a mouse in my place the man would help me catch it. Next door to the couple lived a gay hooker whose clients were up and down the stairs. No one minded, as long as people pulled the door shut after being buzzed in.
One night I went to meet George Dennison at the White Horse. He was a writer, a little famous for The Lives of Children, a chronicle of his experiences teaching poor kids in the free-school movement. He wrote fiction, too, and in the fall of 1972, at the memorial gathering for Paul Goodman, he evoked his teacher and friend with poignance and flair. They’d worked shoulder to shoulder in education reform, and in letters to Dennison Goodman confided his ambitions for his writing and fears about consumer culture. I was at the memorial with a man I taught with at Hunter College who would ask me to interesting events. He’d known Goodman, too, and after the memorial we went to a party in a large Village apartment thronged with artists and intellectuals who looked worldly and weathered. That’s where I spoke to George, who was good looking and charismatic. Bruce, my husband, had already met the woman he would marry next, and I was on my own in the tiny flat where only a mattress could fit on the wide planked bedroom floor. The apartment needed work, but I was in love with the tightrope feeling of my life. I was twenty-four and earned just enough money for food and rent from teaching two sections of English lit. I was keeping a journal but hadn’t published much of anything. I must have given my number to George.
My friend from Hunter seemed attracted to me, although he also had relationships with men. It wasn’t the first time I had met a man open to both sexes, and as I traveled on my own I was realizing how unpredictable people could be. I liked this, although it was unnerving. I didn’t know why I was so curious about sex. I still don’t know. But when I reflect on that time—the sexual revolution meets radical feminism—I see a wave of girls trying to claim for themselves whatever boys had considered theirs alone.
At Barnard I studied with Kate Millett, who invited me to join the women’s movement in 1966, when it was bubbling forth with abortion rights activism and bra burning antics. We were out on the streets as much as we could manage. We were attending consciousness raising groups to examine our relationships and the ways we conspired to stay small. But the world of artists and intellectuals I also gravitated to, the Village where I lived was still colored by the Beats and other strains of old Bohemia where feminism was unheard or resisted. It wasn’t so much whether you were gay or straight, vanilla or Boho that determined your openness to women’s equality. It was, for the most part, whether or not you had a penis.
Having read neither Goodman nor Dennison at the time of Goodman’s memorial—I’d only hopped on for the ride—I didn’t know the ways their ideas either supported or opposed the revolutions I was helping to make. I was in agreement with them about ending the war in Vietnam and championing equal justice for the poor, but it was possible then as it still is in some quarters to consider yourself progressive while disreguarding—and in some cases militating against—the rights of women.
Ironically, I would discover, Goodman advanced precisely this view in his most influential book, Growing up Absurd, where he dismissed girls from consideration: “The problems I want to discuss in this book belong primarily, in our society, to the boy: how to be useful and to make something of oneself. A girl does not have to, she is not expected to ‘make something’ of herself. Her career does not have to be self-justifying, for she will have children, which is absolutely self-justifying, like any other natural and creative act. With this background, it is less important, for instance, what job an average young woman works at till she is married. The quest for the glamour jobs is given at least a little substance by its relation to a ‘better’ marriage (1960, p. 13).”
For Goodman, an out homosexual, the goal of education is to make boys virile. He is saying, in a sense, that virility has to be constructed—while also saying that femaleness (about which he has no interest) is biologically determined. Michael Herr, in a conversation with Robert Stone quoted by John Leland in his book about Jack Kerouac, says something similar about the construction of maleness: “There are two kinds of things guys like to do: the things we do because we read Kerouac and the things we do because we read Hemingway.” (Growing up Kerouac, p. 5)
When I moved into my apartment, I pried up layers of smelly old linoleum from the bathroom and kitchen floors and laid down clean, black and white squares. I bought handmade ceramic tiles and set them in front of the fireplace I fed with packing crates scavenged from the streets. The wood floors were stained and uneven. My three windows faced north, and I built shelves on them for plants. Outside was sleepy Charles Street and across the way a wooden house set on a tiny triangular lot, a little country cottage with a fence and garden smack in the heart of the West Village. This was the setting for the life I wanted to lead.
It’s after eleven, and I’m already in bed when George Dennison calls me to come out. He’s sexy, a success, and more than two decades older than me. Maybe I say another time. Maybe he says please come now. I push back the covers, run to the bathroom mirror, and smile. I look at my feet on the bare floor, checking for water bugs, which I can’t get rid of no matter how much I clean. It doesn’t cross my mind to be insulted, or if it does I weigh it against what I want. At the White Horse, I order Campari with a twist. I don’t know how to drink and do not learn. We talk about writing. I’m good at reviewing books and plays, and that’s what I do when I begin to publish, but I’m not there yet. I’m working on my dissertation at Columbia, contriving essays about Charlotte Brontë, whom I love, although I do not want to practice the solemn, measured style of academic prose. George drinks Scotch. We sit at the bar, and his sleeves are rolled up, and we’re in this place suffused with literary history. Maybe he feels attached to the Dylan Thomas mystique, the world of men drinking themselves to tortured ends. I don’t see myself here. George wants to come to my apartment, and maybe he does. Maybe we kiss, but I don’t think more than that. That’s not what I want from him. I want him to show me how to become him, and he does a little. He pays attention to me, and he’s kind and not dismissive, and maybe we have a conversation about the women’s movement and other things I care about. I’m happy on my stool, sipping my red drink, feeling I’m inching toward something.
When I think about Charles Street and the other places I lived in the Village, I see the streets. It is one big neighborhood, stretching from 14th street to Soho, from the East Village to the Hudson River. I walk the streets day and night, and I know every bar and restaurant and shop and handkerchief-sized patch of green. It’s the streets that make me happy to remember, for I was anxious and hungry then, same as now. It was exciting to be published a few years after meeting George and to feel, finally, I belonged here.
A setting you recall
Starbucks, February 9, 2009
After Bruce and I separated, I lived on Charles Street in a small townhouse, distinctive for its Tudor facing. It was a few blocks south of the White Horse Tavern, the bar where Dylan Thomas drank himself to his final death. Each month I handed a rent check for $200 to the friendly antiques dealer who owned the building and lived in a posh duplex in the basement and ground floors. Upstairs was an older couple who gave off a messed-hair, black-leather glamor; when I had a mouse in my place the man would help me catch it. Next door to the couple lived a gay hooker whose clients were up and down the stairs. No one minded, as long as people pulled the door shut after being buzzed in.
One night I went to meet George Dennison at the White Horse. He was a writer, a little famous for The Lives of Children, a chronicle of his experiences teaching poor kids in the free-school movement. He wrote fiction, too, and in the fall of 1972, at the memorial gathering for Paul Goodman, he evoked his teacher and friend with poignance and flair. They’d worked shoulder to shoulder in education reform, and in letters to Dennison Goodman confided his ambitions for his writing and fears about consumer culture. I was at the memorial with a man I taught with at Hunter College who would ask me to interesting events. He’d known Goodman, too, and after the memorial we went to a party in a large Village apartment thronged with artists and intellectuals who looked worldly and weathered. That’s where I spoke to George, who was good looking and charismatic. Bruce, my husband, had already met the woman he would marry next, and I was on my own in the tiny flat where only a mattress could fit on the wide planked bedroom floor. The apartment needed work, but I was in love with the tightrope feeling of my life. I was twenty-four and earned just enough money for food and rent from teaching two sections of English lit. I was keeping a journal but hadn’t published much of anything. I must have given my number to George.
My friend from Hunter seemed attracted to me, although he also had relationships with men. It wasn’t the first time I had met a man open to both sexes, and as I traveled on my own I was realizing how unpredictable people could be. I liked this, although it was unnerving. I didn’t know why I was so curious about sex. I still don’t know. But when I reflect on that time—the sexual revolution meets radical feminism—I see a wave of girls trying to claim for themselves whatever boys had considered theirs alone.
At Barnard I studied with Kate Millett, who invited me to join the women’s movement in 1966, when it was bubbling forth with abortion rights activism and bra burning antics. We were out on the streets as much as we could manage. We were attending consciousness raising groups to examine our relationships and the ways we conspired to stay small. But the world of artists and intellectuals I also gravitated to, the Village where I lived was still colored by the Beats and other strains of old Bohemia where feminism was unheard or resisted. It wasn’t so much whether you were gay or straight, vanilla or Boho that determined your openness to women’s equality. It was, for the most part, whether or not you had a penis.
Having read neither Goodman nor Dennison at the time of Goodman’s memorial—I’d only hopped on for the ride—I didn’t know the ways their ideas either supported or opposed the revolutions I was helping to make. I was in agreement with them about ending the war in Vietnam and championing equal justice for the poor, but it was possible then as it still is in some quarters to consider yourself progressive while disreguarding—and in some cases militating against—the rights of women.
Ironically, I would discover, Goodman advanced precisely this view in his most influential book, Growing up Absurd, where he dismissed girls from consideration: “The problems I want to discuss in this book belong primarily, in our society, to the boy: how to be useful and to make something of oneself. A girl does not have to, she is not expected to ‘make something’ of herself. Her career does not have to be self-justifying, for she will have children, which is absolutely self-justifying, like any other natural and creative act. With this background, it is less important, for instance, what job an average young woman works at till she is married. The quest for the glamour jobs is given at least a little substance by its relation to a ‘better’ marriage (1960, p. 13).”
For Goodman, an out homosexual, the goal of education is to make boys virile. He is saying, in a sense, that virility has to be constructed—while also saying that femaleness (about which he has no interest) is biologically determined. Michael Herr, in a conversation with Robert Stone quoted by John Leland in his book about Jack Kerouac, says something similar about the construction of maleness: “There are two kinds of things guys like to do: the things we do because we read Kerouac and the things we do because we read Hemingway.” (Growing up Kerouac, p. 5)
When I moved into my apartment, I pried up layers of smelly old linoleum from the bathroom and kitchen floors and laid down clean, black and white squares. I bought handmade ceramic tiles and set them in front of the fireplace I fed with packing crates scavenged from the streets. The wood floors were stained and uneven. My three windows faced north, and I built shelves on them for plants. Outside was sleepy Charles Street and across the way a wooden house set on a tiny triangular lot, a little country cottage with a fence and garden smack in the heart of the West Village. This was the setting for the life I wanted to lead.
It’s after eleven, and I’m already in bed when George Dennison calls me to come out. He’s sexy, a success, and more than two decades older than me. Maybe I say another time. Maybe he says please come now. I push back the covers, run to the bathroom mirror, and smile. I look at my feet on the bare floor, checking for water bugs, which I can’t get rid of no matter how much I clean. It doesn’t cross my mind to be insulted, or if it does I weigh it against what I want. At the White Horse, I order Campari with a twist. I don’t know how to drink and do not learn. We talk about writing. I’m good at reviewing books and plays, and that’s what I do when I begin to publish, but I’m not there yet. I’m working on my dissertation at Columbia, contriving essays about Charlotte Brontë, whom I love, although I do not want to practice the solemn, measured style of academic prose. George drinks Scotch. We sit at the bar, and his sleeves are rolled up, and we’re in this place suffused with literary history. Maybe he feels attached to the Dylan Thomas mystique, the world of men drinking themselves to tortured ends. I don’t see myself here. George wants to come to my apartment, and maybe he does. Maybe we kiss, but I don’t think more than that. That’s not what I want from him. I want him to show me how to become him, and he does a little. He pays attention to me, and he’s kind and not dismissive, and maybe we have a conversation about the women’s movement and other things I care about. I’m happy on my stool, sipping my red drink, feeling I’m inching toward something.
When I think about Charles Street and the other places I lived in the Village, I see the streets. It is one big neighborhood, stretching from 14th street to Soho, from the East Village to the Hudson River. I walk the streets day and night, and I know every bar and restaurant and shop and handkerchief-sized patch of green. It’s the streets that make me happy to remember, for I was anxious and hungry then, same as now. It was exciting to be published a few years after meeting George and to feel, finally, I belonged here.
Tuesday, April 28, 2009
Pete
Richard
Pete
Starbucks, October 5, 2008
Pete was at the kitchen table, his back to me, as I entered, and I could tell from the look of concern on my dad’s face that something was amiss. I didn’t recognize Pete at first. We hadn’t seen each other since our twenties. He was a broad-shouldered man with a mop of greasy black hair, and he looked even bigger than usual in his rough, workman’s jacket, hunched over my mother’s china teacup like a giant at a children’s party. He stumbled awkwardly to his feet, and I placed my hand on his shoulder. “No need to get up.” I feigned friendliness I’d never felt.
It’s 1959 and our family has moved from Liverpool to Syston. My Dad is reopening his father’s tailoring business in a dreary street a mile from where they live now. “Go out and make friends,” my dad encourages, and as I wander the streets I come across a boy on an American bike I have not seen in England, the type with big handle-bars that thrust up like stag’s antlers, and it has fat tires with painted white-walls. He cycles directly at me, and I have to jump out of the way to avoid a crash. He has a crew cut, the first I’ve seen on a live human being. He looks like American kids we see TV, but he speaks Leicestershire and calls me “nipper” and adds “me duck” to the end of sentences to show who’s boss. He says he’s going down the brook and I can come if I want, but I have to run. He speeds off, and I follow. Running is what I do, and no one is faster. I am right behind as he turns onto the Melton Road and cruises into Wellington Street. He races across a scrap of open ground where trees have rooted by a stream that meanders beside an old stone wall and disappears into a narrow tunnel. I am there when he slams on his brakes. He turns, looking surprised. “What kept yer, nipper?”
Not waiting for an answer, he rests his bike against a tree and bolts down the banking where he squats on smooth rocks lapped by dirty water. “Come an take a look then, me duck.” I slide to where he is and squat beside him. He points into the water.
I peer in. “What?”
“Made you look! Made you look!” He stands and pushes my shoulder, and I lose my footing and slip into the wet mud, my shoes and socks disappearing into ooze from which an acrid smell bubbles up. What is being dumped here?
“Made you slip! Made you slip!” He runs back up the bank, jumps on his bike, and speeds away.
My dad says his mother is a good woman. They were neighbors growing up before the war. What is that to a nine-year-old? Dad says life hasn’t been good to her. I don’t know what that means, but in time I learn that Pete’s father is an American GI who’s taken off. Did he send the American bike? His mother works long hours in a shoe factory to support them, plus she looks after her disabled mother who has a cleft palette. Pete’s mum is a gentle woman, and she wants her boy and me to get along, but I avoid their place. I can’t understand his grandmother’s speech, which fills me with embarrassed dread that I might somehow find myself in such a conspicuous, helpless position. The other reason is that Pete’s mean streak doesn’t let up, and I am a person who doesn’t foget an insult. I store them like coals for a cold night ahead.
The night Pete came to my parents’ kitchen, Dad dispensed with the usual warm greeting and moved toward the door. “Your mother and I will be in the sitting room.” He was gone.
“How are you doing, Pete?”
“I’m s-sorry.” He sunk back in the chair. “I came to say summat. There’s been things I need to say.”
He’d been drinking. What did he want?
“So how’s Marylynn?” I asked. He had married her a year after our divorce, and it had come as no surprise. After a visit to see her and Trevor, I’d been waiting at a bus stop on my way back to Leicester when Pete came over to talk. He asked if Marylynn was “seeing anyone.” I said I didn’t know. The phrase sounded coy, or maybe delicate, and I could see he felt something for her, and I minded, even though I no longer wanted her myself. “I think she’s beautiful,” he said, his chin out, protective or challenging. “I’ve always thought she’s beautiful.”
“Yes,” I said. “She is.” That was ten years ago, and here he was again with something to say.
The year before, the phone rang in Leeds, and it was was Trevor. We hadn’t spoken since he was a toddler, and he was saying he was fifteen. He said my brother Roy had given him my number. Trevor wanted to know what color my eyes were, if I was any good at sport, whether I was right or left handed. I said my eyes were brown, that I’d been a fast runner, and I was a lefty. He said he was nearly six feet tall. He liked BMX-biking. He wasn’t working as hard as he ought to at school. His eyes were blue.
I tried to picture this boy. My boy. The possibility had always floated that I wasn’t his biological father, but I’d raised and loved him during his first three years, and I’d let him go to save myself. I’d tried to take him with me, but no one would rent us a room and I’d had nowhere to live and had squatted for a while with friends. I’d let Pete raise him. I’d left him to Pete. When I thought of my son, I was reminded of my failure, blame the messenger, and I felt stopped in my tracks, but now we were talking on the phone. We talked for an hour, my heart pounding. I could hear his beating, too. Finally, he asked if I’d missed him, if I’d ever thought of him. All the time, I said. It was the call I’d been waiting for, but I didn’t tell him that. He wanted to end the conversation but didn’t know how, so I said he should talk to his mother and Pete about coming up to Leeds for a visit and he should call me again. He said he would and rang off quickly. When I put the phone down I thought a dam had broken and that there was no telling where the waters might run.
In my parents’ kitchen that night, Pete stood and said, “Trevor tells me he played around on a piano at your place.”
“Yes, that’s right. I think he enjoyed it. It’s Kim’s. She’s very good, although she doesn’t practice enough. When Trevor came, they played for hours.” Kim was the woman I lived with after Meg and I split up. I liked seeing her with Trevor, thinking I might still be a factor in his life, not instead of Pete and Marylyn but in addition. Maybe the part of me that had raised him was still there and I’d be able to see it. I could when Kim played Satie, and Trevor sat, rapt. It was music he’d never heard before. I studied his profile, trying to find my face in his sharp features. He stole glances at me, looking for a physical connection it was hard to locate in my slender body and softer features.
“He’s my son now,” Pete said suddenly, slurring the word “son.” He was pained, and I liked it.
“I know,” I said, “he was just wondering about himself. He wants to know who he is.”
“He knows who he bloody-well is. He doesn’t need you telling him.”
“I don’t have any intention of telling Trevor who he is. I wouldn’t know how. I’m sure he’s just a teenager who wants to understand where he came from. I don’t have plans to interfere with his life. I think it’s up to him.”
“It’s up to me, if it’s up to anyone. Me and Marylyn, not you.”
“Whatever you think is best,” I said, wondering if he’d take a swing at me.
The day Pete walked over to the bus stop was the last time I saw Marylynn. I don’t remember if Trevor was home. I’ve told myself he was three when I took my last look, but memory plays tricks. I was about to get on the bus, when Pete said, “I’m going to marry her.”
“Good. She deserves to be with someone who loves her.”
I don’t know why I said that. I’d ceased to wonder about Marylynn. I was thinking of myself.
Pete got up from the kitchen table and slowly buttoned his jacket, mulling something over. He was at the back door, his hand on the handle when he turned, and I saw a tear in his eye. “Just don’t try to come between us.” He looked up. “I think I’ve always hated you.” Maybe he felt free to hate me now because I was a runaway father just like his had been. Or maybe he hated me now as he always had because I had a dad who was still in my life.
Pete
Starbucks, October 5, 2008
Pete was at the kitchen table, his back to me, as I entered, and I could tell from the look of concern on my dad’s face that something was amiss. I didn’t recognize Pete at first. We hadn’t seen each other since our twenties. He was a broad-shouldered man with a mop of greasy black hair, and he looked even bigger than usual in his rough, workman’s jacket, hunched over my mother’s china teacup like a giant at a children’s party. He stumbled awkwardly to his feet, and I placed my hand on his shoulder. “No need to get up.” I feigned friendliness I’d never felt.
It’s 1959 and our family has moved from Liverpool to Syston. My Dad is reopening his father’s tailoring business in a dreary street a mile from where they live now. “Go out and make friends,” my dad encourages, and as I wander the streets I come across a boy on an American bike I have not seen in England, the type with big handle-bars that thrust up like stag’s antlers, and it has fat tires with painted white-walls. He cycles directly at me, and I have to jump out of the way to avoid a crash. He has a crew cut, the first I’ve seen on a live human being. He looks like American kids we see TV, but he speaks Leicestershire and calls me “nipper” and adds “me duck” to the end of sentences to show who’s boss. He says he’s going down the brook and I can come if I want, but I have to run. He speeds off, and I follow. Running is what I do, and no one is faster. I am right behind as he turns onto the Melton Road and cruises into Wellington Street. He races across a scrap of open ground where trees have rooted by a stream that meanders beside an old stone wall and disappears into a narrow tunnel. I am there when he slams on his brakes. He turns, looking surprised. “What kept yer, nipper?”
Not waiting for an answer, he rests his bike against a tree and bolts down the banking where he squats on smooth rocks lapped by dirty water. “Come an take a look then, me duck.” I slide to where he is and squat beside him. He points into the water.
I peer in. “What?”
“Made you look! Made you look!” He stands and pushes my shoulder, and I lose my footing and slip into the wet mud, my shoes and socks disappearing into ooze from which an acrid smell bubbles up. What is being dumped here?
“Made you slip! Made you slip!” He runs back up the bank, jumps on his bike, and speeds away.
My dad says his mother is a good woman. They were neighbors growing up before the war. What is that to a nine-year-old? Dad says life hasn’t been good to her. I don’t know what that means, but in time I learn that Pete’s father is an American GI who’s taken off. Did he send the American bike? His mother works long hours in a shoe factory to support them, plus she looks after her disabled mother who has a cleft palette. Pete’s mum is a gentle woman, and she wants her boy and me to get along, but I avoid their place. I can’t understand his grandmother’s speech, which fills me with embarrassed dread that I might somehow find myself in such a conspicuous, helpless position. The other reason is that Pete’s mean streak doesn’t let up, and I am a person who doesn’t foget an insult. I store them like coals for a cold night ahead.
The night Pete came to my parents’ kitchen, Dad dispensed with the usual warm greeting and moved toward the door. “Your mother and I will be in the sitting room.” He was gone.
“How are you doing, Pete?”
“I’m s-sorry.” He sunk back in the chair. “I came to say summat. There’s been things I need to say.”
He’d been drinking. What did he want?
“So how’s Marylynn?” I asked. He had married her a year after our divorce, and it had come as no surprise. After a visit to see her and Trevor, I’d been waiting at a bus stop on my way back to Leicester when Pete came over to talk. He asked if Marylynn was “seeing anyone.” I said I didn’t know. The phrase sounded coy, or maybe delicate, and I could see he felt something for her, and I minded, even though I no longer wanted her myself. “I think she’s beautiful,” he said, his chin out, protective or challenging. “I’ve always thought she’s beautiful.”
“Yes,” I said. “She is.” That was ten years ago, and here he was again with something to say.
The year before, the phone rang in Leeds, and it was was Trevor. We hadn’t spoken since he was a toddler, and he was saying he was fifteen. He said my brother Roy had given him my number. Trevor wanted to know what color my eyes were, if I was any good at sport, whether I was right or left handed. I said my eyes were brown, that I’d been a fast runner, and I was a lefty. He said he was nearly six feet tall. He liked BMX-biking. He wasn’t working as hard as he ought to at school. His eyes were blue.
I tried to picture this boy. My boy. The possibility had always floated that I wasn’t his biological father, but I’d raised and loved him during his first three years, and I’d let him go to save myself. I’d tried to take him with me, but no one would rent us a room and I’d had nowhere to live and had squatted for a while with friends. I’d let Pete raise him. I’d left him to Pete. When I thought of my son, I was reminded of my failure, blame the messenger, and I felt stopped in my tracks, but now we were talking on the phone. We talked for an hour, my heart pounding. I could hear his beating, too. Finally, he asked if I’d missed him, if I’d ever thought of him. All the time, I said. It was the call I’d been waiting for, but I didn’t tell him that. He wanted to end the conversation but didn’t know how, so I said he should talk to his mother and Pete about coming up to Leeds for a visit and he should call me again. He said he would and rang off quickly. When I put the phone down I thought a dam had broken and that there was no telling where the waters might run.
In my parents’ kitchen that night, Pete stood and said, “Trevor tells me he played around on a piano at your place.”
“Yes, that’s right. I think he enjoyed it. It’s Kim’s. She’s very good, although she doesn’t practice enough. When Trevor came, they played for hours.” Kim was the woman I lived with after Meg and I split up. I liked seeing her with Trevor, thinking I might still be a factor in his life, not instead of Pete and Marylyn but in addition. Maybe the part of me that had raised him was still there and I’d be able to see it. I could when Kim played Satie, and Trevor sat, rapt. It was music he’d never heard before. I studied his profile, trying to find my face in his sharp features. He stole glances at me, looking for a physical connection it was hard to locate in my slender body and softer features.
“He’s my son now,” Pete said suddenly, slurring the word “son.” He was pained, and I liked it.
“I know,” I said, “he was just wondering about himself. He wants to know who he is.”
“He knows who he bloody-well is. He doesn’t need you telling him.”
“I don’t have any intention of telling Trevor who he is. I wouldn’t know how. I’m sure he’s just a teenager who wants to understand where he came from. I don’t have plans to interfere with his life. I think it’s up to him.”
“It’s up to me, if it’s up to anyone. Me and Marylyn, not you.”
“Whatever you think is best,” I said, wondering if he’d take a swing at me.
The day Pete walked over to the bus stop was the last time I saw Marylynn. I don’t remember if Trevor was home. I’ve told myself he was three when I took my last look, but memory plays tricks. I was about to get on the bus, when Pete said, “I’m going to marry her.”
“Good. She deserves to be with someone who loves her.”
I don’t know why I said that. I’d ceased to wonder about Marylynn. I was thinking of myself.
Pete got up from the kitchen table and slowly buttoned his jacket, mulling something over. He was at the back door, his hand on the handle when he turned, and I saw a tear in his eye. “Just don’t try to come between us.” He looked up. “I think I’ve always hated you.” Maybe he felt free to hate me now because I was a runaway father just like his had been. Or maybe he hated me now as he always had because I had a dad who was still in my life.
Monday, April 27, 2009
Desert zoo
Laurie
Desert zoo
Museum café, Tuscon, March 8, 2008
“Don’t disturb him,” the boy says to his father, as they stand shadowed beneath an awning of rock. Before them, a puma lies on a stone slab, his back to the window, his face turned toward his simulated canyon in the Sonoran Desert Museum. Above him a brilliant blue sky promises the same photograph of itself each day. The puma stretches his mighty haunches and shifts on his slab, exulting in his tan fur. His thick tail hangs straight over the edge like a plumb line, and you have to wonder at its power to thrash and at the violence of its containment. The tail doesn’t so much as twitch the way horseflesh does under buzzing flies.
The father is tall, his remaining hair scraggly, a camera slung around his neck. He bangs on the glass. “Stop,” the son says, mildly. The father says, “I want to wake him up.” The son says, “How would you feel if you were asleep and someone banged on the glass so they could take your picture?” The father does not understand the comparison. He leans toward the window. The son winces, as if his father’s failure to understand is a hand with missing fingers. He points to another wild cat further away. “That one’s waking up. Take his picture.” The father isn’t interested. He wants to get something from the creature that ignores him, as we all do. The son is thirteen, maybe, gangly, with a thick mop of hair and a bobbing Adam’s apple too big for a boy. He studies his father, trying not to impose himself over the form of his father, trying not to leave an impression.
Richards says the animals here have been rescued from harsher captivities. They are sacrificial representatives of wild life presented to people with the power to destroy or preserve them. In asking us to protect animals, are zoos suggesting we identify with their plight? What aspect: their cages, their ersatz environments?
In another display, an otter swims in the pattern of a star, criss crossing his watery world with unflagging energy, his webbed feet propeling his missile body across his pool with one push. In a third display, three wolves wander their cliff domain, their dog faces puzzled about the narrowing of their world. Around and around they loop: up an incline, along a ledge, then down to a stream, as if surely on one journey a door will open and release them into a dream forest where the path stretches out like a line and they forget about their past confinement, the way we do when we leave home.
Desert zoo
Museum café, Tuscon, March 8, 2008
“Don’t disturb him,” the boy says to his father, as they stand shadowed beneath an awning of rock. Before them, a puma lies on a stone slab, his back to the window, his face turned toward his simulated canyon in the Sonoran Desert Museum. Above him a brilliant blue sky promises the same photograph of itself each day. The puma stretches his mighty haunches and shifts on his slab, exulting in his tan fur. His thick tail hangs straight over the edge like a plumb line, and you have to wonder at its power to thrash and at the violence of its containment. The tail doesn’t so much as twitch the way horseflesh does under buzzing flies.
The father is tall, his remaining hair scraggly, a camera slung around his neck. He bangs on the glass. “Stop,” the son says, mildly. The father says, “I want to wake him up.” The son says, “How would you feel if you were asleep and someone banged on the glass so they could take your picture?” The father does not understand the comparison. He leans toward the window. The son winces, as if his father’s failure to understand is a hand with missing fingers. He points to another wild cat further away. “That one’s waking up. Take his picture.” The father isn’t interested. He wants to get something from the creature that ignores him, as we all do. The son is thirteen, maybe, gangly, with a thick mop of hair and a bobbing Adam’s apple too big for a boy. He studies his father, trying not to impose himself over the form of his father, trying not to leave an impression.
Richards says the animals here have been rescued from harsher captivities. They are sacrificial representatives of wild life presented to people with the power to destroy or preserve them. In asking us to protect animals, are zoos suggesting we identify with their plight? What aspect: their cages, their ersatz environments?
In another display, an otter swims in the pattern of a star, criss crossing his watery world with unflagging energy, his webbed feet propeling his missile body across his pool with one push. In a third display, three wolves wander their cliff domain, their dog faces puzzled about the narrowing of their world. Around and around they loop: up an incline, along a ledge, then down to a stream, as if surely on one journey a door will open and release them into a dream forest where the path stretches out like a line and they forget about their past confinement, the way we do when we leave home.
Wednesday, April 22, 2009
Christmas dinner
Laurie
Christmas dinner
Le Pain Quotidien, December 26, 2008
Catherine enters the Ryans’ apartment with her sun face and red jockey’s cap, while I am trying to prevent Carlos, the chef, from disappearing under a crust of resentment. Catherine, who will help serve, is my poet friend. Carlos and Robert, the captain, are from my catering world. The Ryans’ annual Christmas party represents some kind of continuity. And ahead is the path with Richard, looking like one of those paintings by Maurice Denis of French roads lined with plane trees that extend into the distance and into the future. I’ve told Carlos his flautas are tasteless and his empanadas greasy. He’s worked for days preparing food I toss. Richard understands the failure, but he feels for Carlos. He thinks Carlos is more important than the meal.
The guests are arriving in 2 ½ hours. Richard gathers the ingredients and equipment to prepare a madeleine batter from scratch. He is not a cook, not a baker, but he can put his shoulder to the wheel. Catherine whips cream to pipe on mini chocolate cakes. I concoct a barbecue sauce for the ribs, which turn out tender and crispy. Carlos knows how to brush and bake them. He knows how to time a meal for serve-out. Robert, a stage actor with a caramel voice, knows how to keep cool no matter what. I know how to make food taste good, but I have no recipes and I’m preparing dishes I have not cooked before. I make a sauce of orange and cloves for the lamb. The day before, Richard and I have stuffed three butterflied legs of lamb with layers of baby spinach, pancetta, olives, and roasted red peppers and we’ve tied them into beautiful roasts. A few times in the week leading up, I have thought I was crazy to be in Fairway two days running before Christmas. On the way back from Chinatown, Richard forgets the lobster tails and shrimp on the bus.
But we get it done. We serve six passed hors d’oeuvres, an appetizer course, a main course with three sides, a dessert course and Richard’s madeleines—golden little shells dusted with powdered sugar and presented in a lotus napkin nest. We’ve been on our feet for ten hours, cadging bites of food and drinks as we dart and plate, when the five of us sit around the kitchen table to share a toast. The Ryans are pleased, and everything is clean and shelved. Richard has said he doesn’t want to spend Christmas this way, and I say never again, but later he says maybe. The camaraderie is the hook, the group flowing together that you get in theater and the kitchen. Pocketing our checks, we embrace, and then Richard, Catherine, and I cab down to Lee’s apartment. I sit with the driver, who is from Ghana, and he translates the words on the CD he is playing, songs of passion and the ache of love. I feel it for my city. Soaring down Park Avenue aglow in lights, we laugh about Bernie Madoff, wondering where in thin air all the billions have gone.
Christmas dinner
Le Pain Quotidien, December 26, 2008
Catherine enters the Ryans’ apartment with her sun face and red jockey’s cap, while I am trying to prevent Carlos, the chef, from disappearing under a crust of resentment. Catherine, who will help serve, is my poet friend. Carlos and Robert, the captain, are from my catering world. The Ryans’ annual Christmas party represents some kind of continuity. And ahead is the path with Richard, looking like one of those paintings by Maurice Denis of French roads lined with plane trees that extend into the distance and into the future. I’ve told Carlos his flautas are tasteless and his empanadas greasy. He’s worked for days preparing food I toss. Richard understands the failure, but he feels for Carlos. He thinks Carlos is more important than the meal.
The guests are arriving in 2 ½ hours. Richard gathers the ingredients and equipment to prepare a madeleine batter from scratch. He is not a cook, not a baker, but he can put his shoulder to the wheel. Catherine whips cream to pipe on mini chocolate cakes. I concoct a barbecue sauce for the ribs, which turn out tender and crispy. Carlos knows how to brush and bake them. He knows how to time a meal for serve-out. Robert, a stage actor with a caramel voice, knows how to keep cool no matter what. I know how to make food taste good, but I have no recipes and I’m preparing dishes I have not cooked before. I make a sauce of orange and cloves for the lamb. The day before, Richard and I have stuffed three butterflied legs of lamb with layers of baby spinach, pancetta, olives, and roasted red peppers and we’ve tied them into beautiful roasts. A few times in the week leading up, I have thought I was crazy to be in Fairway two days running before Christmas. On the way back from Chinatown, Richard forgets the lobster tails and shrimp on the bus.
But we get it done. We serve six passed hors d’oeuvres, an appetizer course, a main course with three sides, a dessert course and Richard’s madeleines—golden little shells dusted with powdered sugar and presented in a lotus napkin nest. We’ve been on our feet for ten hours, cadging bites of food and drinks as we dart and plate, when the five of us sit around the kitchen table to share a toast. The Ryans are pleased, and everything is clean and shelved. Richard has said he doesn’t want to spend Christmas this way, and I say never again, but later he says maybe. The camaraderie is the hook, the group flowing together that you get in theater and the kitchen. Pocketing our checks, we embrace, and then Richard, Catherine, and I cab down to Lee’s apartment. I sit with the driver, who is from Ghana, and he translates the words on the CD he is playing, songs of passion and the ache of love. I feel it for my city. Soaring down Park Avenue aglow in lights, we laugh about Bernie Madoff, wondering where in thin air all the billions have gone.
Karen
Laurie
Karen
Starbucks, November 6, 2008
At Karen’s house, the nails of the golden retriever echo on marble floors. A winding staircase sweeps up to a balcony from which you can look down to the opulent foyer and living room below. A maid serves dinner. Her name is Irene, and her copious bosom plumps her chest like a large pillow. Karen has a lisp, and she is tall. She wears different colored Papagallo loafers every day. I don’t discover her sly intelligence until we graduate and, as yearbook editor, she predicts my future as a divorcée with seven husbands, and on my latest trip to Reno I’m decked out in leopard print Capris. When I read this I’m thrown and intrigued, as one always is, by the discovery of being watched and judged and understood.
Karen bows her head as if fending off a blow, like Princess Di. She’s a shy pony. Who knew she was yearbook editor? Who knew there even was such a publication to participate in? At her house, we are served by Irene, who is also the cook. We are served fried chicken or grilled steak, and Karen’s parents ask about my family. I know how to talk to parents or maybe I don’t. I see myself with a fake smile, a little oily, or maybe it’s not obvious I want everything other people have. I live in a small, renovated beach cottage in Long Beach. Karen’s house is hushed. I think it’s safe, I think it’s considerate. Karen has gotten something under control, although maybe I think that because she doesn’t eat her lunches. I tell Karen’s parents that my father manufactures coats. That doesn’t sound like much, and I feel disloyal. I feel disloyal at Woodmere Academy, because I don’t want to be from people who scream.
I sleep over once, although Karen and I are not that kind of friends. There must have been a storm. The roads must have been impassable. She will graduate from Woodmere Academy and attend an Ivy League college and work at a magazine or for a book publisher. She’s the kind of girl who knows her worth, who has been made to feel she’s worth something. I don’t gravitate to her. She seems a little dull and hazy, but I don’t think she was.
She is tall and the girls are fretful about weight. Karen doesn’t open the brown bags Irene packs with fried chicken, cookies, and fruit. A beautiful lunch. On other days there are sandwiches of grilled steak. Every afternoon around 4:30 when I return to the girls’ locker room before catching a bus to Long Beach or the train to Manhattan, I find Karen’s lunch on the window ledge or on top of the lockers, and after checking to see if anyone else is there I unwrap the contents. There is more food than I need, more than any girl needs, and I have had my own lunch at noon. I’m unable to leave this food alone. I’m a leftovers girl. Most of my classmates will follow paths laid out by parents with tender regard or handwringing fear or both. Boys call me. I don’t know who most of them are, so how do they know me? I smell Karen’s lunches though the bag. I put on weight. She wears pearls and sweater sets and straight skirts like a character out of The Group, although this is the ‘60’s. I study what the other girls wear, but I can’t afford their clothes. I am trying to project a style, although it doesn’t always work. I ghost over Woodmere, unable to concentrate. I’m flattered by the phone calls from boys, although I understand it’s not flattery.
Karen
Starbucks, November 6, 2008
At Karen’s house, the nails of the golden retriever echo on marble floors. A winding staircase sweeps up to a balcony from which you can look down to the opulent foyer and living room below. A maid serves dinner. Her name is Irene, and her copious bosom plumps her chest like a large pillow. Karen has a lisp, and she is tall. She wears different colored Papagallo loafers every day. I don’t discover her sly intelligence until we graduate and, as yearbook editor, she predicts my future as a divorcée with seven husbands, and on my latest trip to Reno I’m decked out in leopard print Capris. When I read this I’m thrown and intrigued, as one always is, by the discovery of being watched and judged and understood.
Karen bows her head as if fending off a blow, like Princess Di. She’s a shy pony. Who knew she was yearbook editor? Who knew there even was such a publication to participate in? At her house, we are served by Irene, who is also the cook. We are served fried chicken or grilled steak, and Karen’s parents ask about my family. I know how to talk to parents or maybe I don’t. I see myself with a fake smile, a little oily, or maybe it’s not obvious I want everything other people have. I live in a small, renovated beach cottage in Long Beach. Karen’s house is hushed. I think it’s safe, I think it’s considerate. Karen has gotten something under control, although maybe I think that because she doesn’t eat her lunches. I tell Karen’s parents that my father manufactures coats. That doesn’t sound like much, and I feel disloyal. I feel disloyal at Woodmere Academy, because I don’t want to be from people who scream.
I sleep over once, although Karen and I are not that kind of friends. There must have been a storm. The roads must have been impassable. She will graduate from Woodmere Academy and attend an Ivy League college and work at a magazine or for a book publisher. She’s the kind of girl who knows her worth, who has been made to feel she’s worth something. I don’t gravitate to her. She seems a little dull and hazy, but I don’t think she was.
She is tall and the girls are fretful about weight. Karen doesn’t open the brown bags Irene packs with fried chicken, cookies, and fruit. A beautiful lunch. On other days there are sandwiches of grilled steak. Every afternoon around 4:30 when I return to the girls’ locker room before catching a bus to Long Beach or the train to Manhattan, I find Karen’s lunch on the window ledge or on top of the lockers, and after checking to see if anyone else is there I unwrap the contents. There is more food than I need, more than any girl needs, and I have had my own lunch at noon. I’m unable to leave this food alone. I’m a leftovers girl. Most of my classmates will follow paths laid out by parents with tender regard or handwringing fear or both. Boys call me. I don’t know who most of them are, so how do they know me? I smell Karen’s lunches though the bag. I put on weight. She wears pearls and sweater sets and straight skirts like a character out of The Group, although this is the ‘60’s. I study what the other girls wear, but I can’t afford their clothes. I am trying to project a style, although it doesn’t always work. I ghost over Woodmere, unable to concentrate. I’m flattered by the phone calls from boys, although I understand it’s not flattery.
Monday, April 20, 2009
Woodmere
Laurie
Woodmere
Shelbourne Falls, VT, March 31, 2009
The promt is to write a story in four paragraphs. In the first paragraph you write the end, in the second a moment of revelation, in the third the beginning, in the fourth a moment of failure to understand.
Susan is sitting on my left, and we are facing the headmaster, Alan Bernstein. When I address the students, I refer to him as Alan. I’m wearing the black pants and red snake skin belt Lana gave me and a top that falls off the shoulders from my friend Rebecca. I’m in Hessel Hall, in other people’s clothes and holding a microphone like a standup, “How do you do ladies and germs.” After I speak, we repair to Alan’s office, and he introduces me to Susan, who is one of the English teachers. In a voice crackling with enthusiasm, she says she is advising the sustainability club and guiding students to New York. She recalls working at the Public Theater and how Joe Papp would come in every day with a new idea he’d make happen. I get a flash of Papp with his thatch of hair and big Jewish-uncle grasp, holding the world in his fist like a thick corned beef sandwich. Susan says she would like to write with her husband. She would like to go to a café and let words come and read them out loud. Her blond hair is swept up in the back, and her head is tilted to the side as she pictures the two of them in a café listening to Bing Crosby sing jazz. “I knew you two would like each other,” Alan says, ready to move on to his next appointment. Women have organized my visit, women in the outer offices. I embrace him and Susan in farewell, thinking about when I was a kid, sitting across from Miles K. Wren, the headmaster who wore hand-made, three-piece suits. The children of millionaires went to Woodmere Academy, the sons and daughters of doctors, lawyers, real estate developers, and Wall Street financiers. When I visit the office of Miles K. Wren, whose parents come from China, he looks over my head. He’s not interested in where I’m from.
I am holding the microphone like a comedian in a club, telling a sea of faces about Woodmere back in the day. I’m in Hessel Hall, and behind me is the stage with the set for Once Upon a Mattress. I’m looking at a sea of faces, and many are African-American and Korean, and there are South Asians in the mix, and I’m thinking how different this is from then. We were white. Everyone was white except for two black teachers, a woman who taught gym in the Middle School and Lawrence Oliver, who taught English my junior and senior years and liked to watch play rehearses. Hessel Hall is unchanged, the rows of dark, burnished oak pews, the vaulted ceiling, the two carpeted aisles leading to a marble lobby. I’m telling the students that these teachers taught me about the Civil Rights Movement. I’m saying that feeling recognized is more important than anything you learn, and I’m thinking this must have happened to me. I must have liked something about myself here, and I’m telling the students to do what they love and become artists if they want to and not care if it scares their parents. Their parents will get over it, and I’m surprised that all these years I have thought this place was an envelope for pain I see it wasn’t only that. I remember rehearsing You Can’t Take it With You, and Goodbye My Fancy, and Bell Book and Candle. I am waiting in the wings for my turn to speak.
I follow directions from Mapquest, and it’s not as easy as it looks, because you don’t know the order of the streets and when to get into the turning lane. But as I’m driving to Woodmere Academy I remember the roads. I remember driving with Jerry Needleman, the older brother of a girl in my class, and pushing him off me when he took me to a dark street somewhere near here. I’m remembering that night because I’d forgotten it had happened until suddenly it came back that I was sometimes afraid and had to beg. I turn onto Woodmere Boulevard and there is the giant, red brick mansion with its curving driveway. I park and walk up the Senior Steps, although there aren’t as many as I remember. Alan is waiting inside, a warm faced man with round cheeks, and he greets me with a hug. I’m ushered into offices, and a woman takes my coat. Another says she will print out documents for the class, and then I’m swept to a room in a library built after my time. The students are sitting in a semicircle waiting for me to entertain them, and I take a seat with them, and I’m in my comfort zone. I’m not at play rehearsals as a refuge from the rest of my life. I’m not living with my parents in Long Beach or Manhattan and commuting to Woodmere. I’m not afraid that my life has already been blighted, that people can sense my unfitness for happiness and that’s why Jerry Needleman drove me to that street. I’m speaking to kids who want me to distract them from the frustrating or nauseating or dizzying sensation of being fifteen or sixteen and peering over the lip of life.
I say that memory is the enemy of story and tell them about a memoir I wrote about my mother who died a year ago. I say I thought I’d nailed it but when I read it several months later I saw it was a my-mommy-didn’t-love-me-enough piece. I explain how I went back and invented love for my mother as a way of adding stakes and that in the process of inventing love I’d discovered it. It’s the damnedest thing, how the practice of the writer makes emotions more available to the author. The students are watching me, and they exchange lively remarks about their favorite scars, the subject of an exercize they’ve done. The question of whether I will win them is answered, and I begin to feel tired in my arms and shoulders. My legs feel heavy, and I look out the window at the sports field, and I remember being fifteen or sixteen and handing out slices of oranges to the boys who are playing football. Jerry Needleman is one, one of the rich boys with a red sports car, and he is slight and looks like a turtle in his shell of padding. I remember slicing oranges in the cafeteria, it is some kind of tradition, the girls giving oranges to the boys, and it’s a Saturday, and I am doing this thing, although I don’t really feel part of it. I am playing the role of someone who belongs here. I’m able to be here and not here at the same time, and I can enter this state at will and I think of it as becoming balsa wood, something light that when you bite it you leave teeth impressions in. In those days, I enter this state quite often.
Woodmere
Shelbourne Falls, VT, March 31, 2009
The promt is to write a story in four paragraphs. In the first paragraph you write the end, in the second a moment of revelation, in the third the beginning, in the fourth a moment of failure to understand.
Susan is sitting on my left, and we are facing the headmaster, Alan Bernstein. When I address the students, I refer to him as Alan. I’m wearing the black pants and red snake skin belt Lana gave me and a top that falls off the shoulders from my friend Rebecca. I’m in Hessel Hall, in other people’s clothes and holding a microphone like a standup, “How do you do ladies and germs.” After I speak, we repair to Alan’s office, and he introduces me to Susan, who is one of the English teachers. In a voice crackling with enthusiasm, she says she is advising the sustainability club and guiding students to New York. She recalls working at the Public Theater and how Joe Papp would come in every day with a new idea he’d make happen. I get a flash of Papp with his thatch of hair and big Jewish-uncle grasp, holding the world in his fist like a thick corned beef sandwich. Susan says she would like to write with her husband. She would like to go to a café and let words come and read them out loud. Her blond hair is swept up in the back, and her head is tilted to the side as she pictures the two of them in a café listening to Bing Crosby sing jazz. “I knew you two would like each other,” Alan says, ready to move on to his next appointment. Women have organized my visit, women in the outer offices. I embrace him and Susan in farewell, thinking about when I was a kid, sitting across from Miles K. Wren, the headmaster who wore hand-made, three-piece suits. The children of millionaires went to Woodmere Academy, the sons and daughters of doctors, lawyers, real estate developers, and Wall Street financiers. When I visit the office of Miles K. Wren, whose parents come from China, he looks over my head. He’s not interested in where I’m from.
I am holding the microphone like a comedian in a club, telling a sea of faces about Woodmere back in the day. I’m in Hessel Hall, and behind me is the stage with the set for Once Upon a Mattress. I’m looking at a sea of faces, and many are African-American and Korean, and there are South Asians in the mix, and I’m thinking how different this is from then. We were white. Everyone was white except for two black teachers, a woman who taught gym in the Middle School and Lawrence Oliver, who taught English my junior and senior years and liked to watch play rehearses. Hessel Hall is unchanged, the rows of dark, burnished oak pews, the vaulted ceiling, the two carpeted aisles leading to a marble lobby. I’m telling the students that these teachers taught me about the Civil Rights Movement. I’m saying that feeling recognized is more important than anything you learn, and I’m thinking this must have happened to me. I must have liked something about myself here, and I’m telling the students to do what they love and become artists if they want to and not care if it scares their parents. Their parents will get over it, and I’m surprised that all these years I have thought this place was an envelope for pain I see it wasn’t only that. I remember rehearsing You Can’t Take it With You, and Goodbye My Fancy, and Bell Book and Candle. I am waiting in the wings for my turn to speak.
I follow directions from Mapquest, and it’s not as easy as it looks, because you don’t know the order of the streets and when to get into the turning lane. But as I’m driving to Woodmere Academy I remember the roads. I remember driving with Jerry Needleman, the older brother of a girl in my class, and pushing him off me when he took me to a dark street somewhere near here. I’m remembering that night because I’d forgotten it had happened until suddenly it came back that I was sometimes afraid and had to beg. I turn onto Woodmere Boulevard and there is the giant, red brick mansion with its curving driveway. I park and walk up the Senior Steps, although there aren’t as many as I remember. Alan is waiting inside, a warm faced man with round cheeks, and he greets me with a hug. I’m ushered into offices, and a woman takes my coat. Another says she will print out documents for the class, and then I’m swept to a room in a library built after my time. The students are sitting in a semicircle waiting for me to entertain them, and I take a seat with them, and I’m in my comfort zone. I’m not at play rehearsals as a refuge from the rest of my life. I’m not living with my parents in Long Beach or Manhattan and commuting to Woodmere. I’m not afraid that my life has already been blighted, that people can sense my unfitness for happiness and that’s why Jerry Needleman drove me to that street. I’m speaking to kids who want me to distract them from the frustrating or nauseating or dizzying sensation of being fifteen or sixteen and peering over the lip of life.
I say that memory is the enemy of story and tell them about a memoir I wrote about my mother who died a year ago. I say I thought I’d nailed it but when I read it several months later I saw it was a my-mommy-didn’t-love-me-enough piece. I explain how I went back and invented love for my mother as a way of adding stakes and that in the process of inventing love I’d discovered it. It’s the damnedest thing, how the practice of the writer makes emotions more available to the author. The students are watching me, and they exchange lively remarks about their favorite scars, the subject of an exercize they’ve done. The question of whether I will win them is answered, and I begin to feel tired in my arms and shoulders. My legs feel heavy, and I look out the window at the sports field, and I remember being fifteen or sixteen and handing out slices of oranges to the boys who are playing football. Jerry Needleman is one, one of the rich boys with a red sports car, and he is slight and looks like a turtle in his shell of padding. I remember slicing oranges in the cafeteria, it is some kind of tradition, the girls giving oranges to the boys, and it’s a Saturday, and I am doing this thing, although I don’t really feel part of it. I am playing the role of someone who belongs here. I’m able to be here and not here at the same time, and I can enter this state at will and I think of it as becoming balsa wood, something light that when you bite it you leave teeth impressions in. In those days, I enter this state quite often.
Saturday, April 18, 2009
Corn
Laurie
Corn
Spotty Dog, August 25, 2008
I am an admirer of Julie Hecht, and having finished her latest collection of stories, Happy Trails to You, I tried a prompt using her deadpan delivery and technique of layered associations.
Lana asks me to collect corn, tossing over canvas bags. The sign above the bin says twelve, but she says, "Take thirteen.” She picks strawberries for the farm, so the extra corn is her tip. A baker’s dozen. I like the way she bends rules.
The canvas bags have seen better days. The straps are frayed, and bits of soil cling to the insides. Lana and I have seen better days. What would be a better day for a canvas bag? A picnic on a cruise. The times I’ve sailed I’ve gotten seasick. Once I floated up the Hudson with a man I had hopes for. We argued.
I pick out the fattest ears, although they unnerve me. Lana is having people to dinner, and she will make me eat corn. You have to eat it the day it’s picked. It’s a rule. You can’t bend her rules. Another is, you can’t bring your own food into her house unless it’s organic. Lana doesn’t care that organic food is more expensive than regular food, although she economizes with her share in the organic farm. When I see corn I think about gaining weight and slipping into fat, lonely, old age.
While I am sorting corn, Lana gathers lettuce, tomatoes, cucumbers, and string beans. I point to a crate piled with pumpkin colored winter squash. On the rinds are warty patches that look like the shins of old men. My shins probably look like that, too, although I’m too afraid to inspect them carefully. Lana says she doesn’t eat winter squash in summer. I take one of the pumpkin colored vegetables and place it in a canvas bag, thinking I can use it to fend off the corn, even though winter squash is high in carbs, too. I just want to bend one of Lana’s rules.
The man with whom I sailed up the Hudson used to serve winter squash, baked with brown sugar and cinnamon. Now he’s old with scaly shins. Many people appreciate being fed. I feel I have to eat what’s served, even if I don’t want to, although I’m not usually that accommodating. Recently the man with the scaly shins said that at this point in life, when nothing is going to last very long, maybe we should give it another try. I pretended he was joking.
Lana cooks the corn and sets it on the table. She pours gray salt into a little bowl from a box with a picture of a moody, turbulent sea. I once sailed on water like that in Greece and became so sick I rolled around moaning on the spray-soaked deck. Eventually, I laughed. I was young. Around the table are people Lana likes to feed with the food she gets from the farm. One is a young woman with a tiny boy Lana keeps a child seat for. The boy needs to have his corn sliced off the cob, and he eats the kernels one by one. Watching him makes me hungry, and I pick out the largest ear from the platter and sink my teeth into it.
I have never tasted anything so good. The sweetness, the crunch, the perfume, the Naples yellow color. I sprinkle on gray salt. How has corn come to taste so good? Is it me or the corn? I am making Lana happy, and it is not costing me anything. The corn is like heroin. I think it actually works like heroin. I remember reading a book that said corn is a weed encouraged to colonize the planet in order to feed cattle, whose methane gas emissions comprise a large percentage of dangerous greenhouse gases. You could say the same things about human beings.
The reason I can’t consider the offer of the man I sailed with up the Hudson is that he acts like he’s Noel Coward—not the gay part, the part where the world is a party filled with carefree rich people who don’t feel implicated in the life cycle of corn. They pack caviar and toast points in canvas bags. They probably don’t even use canvas bags. Someone else carries a wicker hamper for them. If I were the sort of person who could see myself as Gerty Lawrence in a clean white sun dress, I wouldn’t be thinking about greenhouse gasses while eating heroin corn. I finish two ears and part of a third, without forgetting I am going to die of something food cannot protect me from and that the Earth is on the way to becoming a garbage dump.
Corn
Spotty Dog, August 25, 2008
I am an admirer of Julie Hecht, and having finished her latest collection of stories, Happy Trails to You, I tried a prompt using her deadpan delivery and technique of layered associations.
Lana asks me to collect corn, tossing over canvas bags. The sign above the bin says twelve, but she says, "Take thirteen.” She picks strawberries for the farm, so the extra corn is her tip. A baker’s dozen. I like the way she bends rules.
The canvas bags have seen better days. The straps are frayed, and bits of soil cling to the insides. Lana and I have seen better days. What would be a better day for a canvas bag? A picnic on a cruise. The times I’ve sailed I’ve gotten seasick. Once I floated up the Hudson with a man I had hopes for. We argued.
I pick out the fattest ears, although they unnerve me. Lana is having people to dinner, and she will make me eat corn. You have to eat it the day it’s picked. It’s a rule. You can’t bend her rules. Another is, you can’t bring your own food into her house unless it’s organic. Lana doesn’t care that organic food is more expensive than regular food, although she economizes with her share in the organic farm. When I see corn I think about gaining weight and slipping into fat, lonely, old age.
While I am sorting corn, Lana gathers lettuce, tomatoes, cucumbers, and string beans. I point to a crate piled with pumpkin colored winter squash. On the rinds are warty patches that look like the shins of old men. My shins probably look like that, too, although I’m too afraid to inspect them carefully. Lana says she doesn’t eat winter squash in summer. I take one of the pumpkin colored vegetables and place it in a canvas bag, thinking I can use it to fend off the corn, even though winter squash is high in carbs, too. I just want to bend one of Lana’s rules.
The man with whom I sailed up the Hudson used to serve winter squash, baked with brown sugar and cinnamon. Now he’s old with scaly shins. Many people appreciate being fed. I feel I have to eat what’s served, even if I don’t want to, although I’m not usually that accommodating. Recently the man with the scaly shins said that at this point in life, when nothing is going to last very long, maybe we should give it another try. I pretended he was joking.
Lana cooks the corn and sets it on the table. She pours gray salt into a little bowl from a box with a picture of a moody, turbulent sea. I once sailed on water like that in Greece and became so sick I rolled around moaning on the spray-soaked deck. Eventually, I laughed. I was young. Around the table are people Lana likes to feed with the food she gets from the farm. One is a young woman with a tiny boy Lana keeps a child seat for. The boy needs to have his corn sliced off the cob, and he eats the kernels one by one. Watching him makes me hungry, and I pick out the largest ear from the platter and sink my teeth into it.
I have never tasted anything so good. The sweetness, the crunch, the perfume, the Naples yellow color. I sprinkle on gray salt. How has corn come to taste so good? Is it me or the corn? I am making Lana happy, and it is not costing me anything. The corn is like heroin. I think it actually works like heroin. I remember reading a book that said corn is a weed encouraged to colonize the planet in order to feed cattle, whose methane gas emissions comprise a large percentage of dangerous greenhouse gases. You could say the same things about human beings.
The reason I can’t consider the offer of the man I sailed with up the Hudson is that he acts like he’s Noel Coward—not the gay part, the part where the world is a party filled with carefree rich people who don’t feel implicated in the life cycle of corn. They pack caviar and toast points in canvas bags. They probably don’t even use canvas bags. Someone else carries a wicker hamper for them. If I were the sort of person who could see myself as Gerty Lawrence in a clean white sun dress, I wouldn’t be thinking about greenhouse gasses while eating heroin corn. I finish two ears and part of a third, without forgetting I am going to die of something food cannot protect me from and that the Earth is on the way to becoming a garbage dump.
Thursday, April 16, 2009
Venus
Laurie
Venus
Starbucks, April 20, 2008
Richard was researching the history of human exhibits, particularly the display of non-white bodies, for an essay he was writing. As recently as 1997, one document reported, a small natural history museum outside Barcelona finally removed a stuffed Bushman from its permanent display cases in response to international pressure. Richard shared material as well about Saartjie Baartman, a Khoisan woman orphaned in a commando raid and enslaved by Dutch farmers in Cape Town in the early Nineteenth Century. The brother of her owners took her to England to exhibit her because of her unusually large buttocks, a condition known as steatopygia. She was presented in a cage at Picadilly, and visitors were permitted to touch her ass for an extra fee. When offered an opportunity to free herself from display, she declined, saying she shared in the profits, although some witnesses doubted her account. She was intelligent, had an excellent memory, and spoke fluent Dutch. She toured France as well as England and was internationally famous by 1815 when, at 26, she died, possibly of small pox. After her death, a wax cast of her genitals was displayed. In my prompt, I wonder what Saartjie might have been thinking while appearing on stage. The history of human exhibit includes, as well, 500 years of human dissection in laboratories and operating theaters, a chronicle fraught with charges of heresy. I think about the subversive and in some ways liberating aspect of viewing the human body as a thing, rather than a repository of metaphysical properties, among them a soul. I reflect on the mixing of strangers with each other and our departures from safe and unsafe homes.
Candle wax drips from the chandelier, a second skin, for I am naked on stage, my breasts aloft, my waist circled with a string of pearls, my thighs thick tunas in a calm sea, and aft is my treasure, my clever monkeys: my backside so globular I am a world. When I walk, the earth thumps like a heartbeat.
Their eyes are suns with sharp rays. It’s the turn they wait for, so I extend the moment the way dawn stretches before seizing the morning sky. My ass. People steal glances for fear of being blinded. I am so much more than they have imagined. When they gasp, they are embarrassed for themselves.
They want to open it, my book, and as I stand on stage, their human exhibit, they see they are matter.
I am a charger whose heart and ribs they want to feel, and sometimes I’m overwhelmed. Isn’t that the way with intimacy? You fall in love with something you are missing. Words surround your throat, and you offer a chain to be tugged along by. Everything gets rubbed. You don't know what you can become.
I’m on stage in London, and a boy places his paw on my leg, and I cradle his blond head against my breasts, and he doesn’t squirm. His eyes are so blue they leave bruises on my shoulder, and I say in another life I was a lizard. He laughs. I show him my pointed tongue and tell him it’s impertinent to climb a mountain. He feels like my child in the light, and then a man with a mustache snatches him away. “I didn’t know you could speak English,” he says. “Do you know what I am?” I ask. He shakes his head, and I think: This is not just my problem.
It's that way with the theater. You leave home, the jungle, the village, and shortly the world enters you, and then you carry the eyes, the wax, the cage, the beauty, the chain, and it is a good thing you are built to travel, built to swallow, built to stay awake while studying the alien.
Venus
Starbucks, April 20, 2008
Richard was researching the history of human exhibits, particularly the display of non-white bodies, for an essay he was writing. As recently as 1997, one document reported, a small natural history museum outside Barcelona finally removed a stuffed Bushman from its permanent display cases in response to international pressure. Richard shared material as well about Saartjie Baartman, a Khoisan woman orphaned in a commando raid and enslaved by Dutch farmers in Cape Town in the early Nineteenth Century. The brother of her owners took her to England to exhibit her because of her unusually large buttocks, a condition known as steatopygia. She was presented in a cage at Picadilly, and visitors were permitted to touch her ass for an extra fee. When offered an opportunity to free herself from display, she declined, saying she shared in the profits, although some witnesses doubted her account. She was intelligent, had an excellent memory, and spoke fluent Dutch. She toured France as well as England and was internationally famous by 1815 when, at 26, she died, possibly of small pox. After her death, a wax cast of her genitals was displayed. In my prompt, I wonder what Saartjie might have been thinking while appearing on stage. The history of human exhibit includes, as well, 500 years of human dissection in laboratories and operating theaters, a chronicle fraught with charges of heresy. I think about the subversive and in some ways liberating aspect of viewing the human body as a thing, rather than a repository of metaphysical properties, among them a soul. I reflect on the mixing of strangers with each other and our departures from safe and unsafe homes.
Candle wax drips from the chandelier, a second skin, for I am naked on stage, my breasts aloft, my waist circled with a string of pearls, my thighs thick tunas in a calm sea, and aft is my treasure, my clever monkeys: my backside so globular I am a world. When I walk, the earth thumps like a heartbeat.
Their eyes are suns with sharp rays. It’s the turn they wait for, so I extend the moment the way dawn stretches before seizing the morning sky. My ass. People steal glances for fear of being blinded. I am so much more than they have imagined. When they gasp, they are embarrassed for themselves.
They want to open it, my book, and as I stand on stage, their human exhibit, they see they are matter.
I am a charger whose heart and ribs they want to feel, and sometimes I’m overwhelmed. Isn’t that the way with intimacy? You fall in love with something you are missing. Words surround your throat, and you offer a chain to be tugged along by. Everything gets rubbed. You don't know what you can become.
I’m on stage in London, and a boy places his paw on my leg, and I cradle his blond head against my breasts, and he doesn’t squirm. His eyes are so blue they leave bruises on my shoulder, and I say in another life I was a lizard. He laughs. I show him my pointed tongue and tell him it’s impertinent to climb a mountain. He feels like my child in the light, and then a man with a mustache snatches him away. “I didn’t know you could speak English,” he says. “Do you know what I am?” I ask. He shakes his head, and I think: This is not just my problem.
It's that way with the theater. You leave home, the jungle, the village, and shortly the world enters you, and then you carry the eyes, the wax, the cage, the beauty, the chain, and it is a good thing you are built to travel, built to swallow, built to stay awake while studying the alien.
The Piano Teacher
Laurie
The Piano Teacher
Starbucks, August 19, 2007
We watched The Piano Teacher last night, a film I had wanted to see since reading about its treatment of sexual violence when it debuted in 2001. Michael Haneke directs, based on a novel by Austrian writer Elfrieda Jelinek, who won a Nobel Prize in 2004. The title character, Erika Kohut, is in her 40’s and teaches at the premier music conservatory in Vienna. She stands at a window, trancing out on Schubert and Bach, as her students try to excite her with their passionate notes, touching the keys as if they can stir her to feeling. The misery in their eyes show they will fail, and when she turns to them, she indeed delivers scorn. She shares a musty beehive flat with her elderly, domineering mother, and the women buzz each other with practiced enmity. Erika’s mother roots in her closet for clothes she considers lewd—really only adult looking dresses and coats bought on the sly—and calls her a whore when she discovers them. Erika is seething and passive, and Isabelle Hubert, with her girl-woman body and inexpressive mask face, deftly embodies the character’s contradictions.
Between classes, she dons a little scarf like Riding Hood and ventures into a forest of sex shops. She watches violent videos and spies on couples at drive-ins. Seeing a man mount a woman and hearing the woman’s cries at climax, she squats beside the car and urinates quietly, her eyes squeezed tight in release. When she opens them, she is face to face with the man, who calls her a disgusting pervert as she scurries away, her expression cool and enigmatic.
Another day, she arrives home from work in her nunlike garb of white shirt and dark skirt, her hair secured in clasps, and goes directly to the bathroom, unable to postpone what she’s been planning. Out of her purse comes a small paper packet from which she removes a single razor blade. She hoists up her skirt and, holding a mirror, cuts her vagina, shutting her eyes and suddering slightly. Blood drips into the tub, an image of mayhem we’ve seen many times: Alex, the rejected lover in Fatal Attraction, attempting suicide and murder; sleepwalking Charlotte Corday stabbing Marat in his bath. The blood rouses Erika from her reverie, and she swishes it down the drain, slips a sanitary pad into her panties, and comes to dinner in a robe. She sits glumly across from her mother, who keeps the TV blaring while they eat. Suddenly her mother notices blood running down her daughter’s legs and complains it’s unappetizing.
It’s against a backdrop of stuffy parlors and chilly rehearsal halls that Erika’s brutal inner life unfolds, and into this warring existence comes Walter, a brash and beautiful 17-year-old boy-man who offers himself first as Erika’s pupil and then her lover. She’s nasty and belittling, but he breaks her down. Once they go to bed, she writes out instructions about the kind of sex she desires, topping from below. She asks to be tied up and beaten. What gives her pleasure is absent of tenderness. He says he loves her, although we don't know what he means. He is forceful in pursuit, wanting to get through the wall of her, but he can’t, really, and he tells her he’s disgusted by her demands. Once the power shifts, she becomes in thrall to him. He’s by turns contemptuous and passionate, but, finally fed up with her histrionics, he charges up to her apartment, shoves aside her mother, locks the door of her room, and beats and rapes her. He asks if this is what she wants, what she’s imagined. Lying on the floor, holding her bleeding lip, she says no. Something isn’t adding up. She doesn't fight him off. She isn't enraged, rather dazed by the disparity between her imagination and reality.
We’ve seen a companion to this scene earlier. Erika and her mother share a bed and before she takes Walter as a lover, in a moment of great frustration she throws herself on top of her mother's body, pins her hands, kisses her mouth, and cries out she loves her. Is she wishing for this to happen with Walter? Does she really want to join with the body of the only person, up until then, she has known so intimately? It’s as if the movie, itself, convulses here, as sleepwalking Erika slices through quotidian, bourgeois life.
The movie doesn’t comment on why Erika and her mother share a bed. We don’t know Walter’s motives, because the film isn’t interested in what attracts him to Erika. Here is all the roiling, repressed nuttiness of Freud’s Vienna in tact in the 20th Century, but Haneke’s approach is unanalytic. He’s not interested in reducing the characters’ actions to an understanding of them. The characters articulate no understanding of themselves, and we have Hubbert’s mask face across which flutter the merest fluctuations when she is bullied by her mother, hateful to her pupils, or desperately jealous of Walter’s attentions to other women.
This technique, skirting notions of bad behavior and sick behavior, frees the viewer simply to look at behavior. The lack of affect in the storytelling—as well as in Erika—harkens to the strategies of Georges Bataille’s novels, particularly Story of the Eye. In Bataille’s view, sex is not corrupted by Christian morality and the neuroses it engenders (and therefore can’t be “fixed” by psychoanalysis); rather, sex is deeper than neurosis, a behavior closer to the warring of chimps and the rutting of bonobos than to most other human activites. To Bataille, sex really is dangerous and difficult to wrap our minds around. The narrator of Story of the Eye relates scenes of absurd sexual activity busting through the fabric of ordinary life—a frisky girl suddenly thrusts her naked ass into a bowl of milk; a young man imagines the white buttocks of his paramour as two peeled hard boiled eggs and feels the impulse to piss on them, and so on. These events unfold as if they were ordinary life, without apology or interpretation. The narrator’s containment allows the reader to fantasize freely. The reader can enter the text as if the story is about the reader.
It is the same with Haneke’s horrifying, dreamlike film, and rather than turn away from the characters we enter their story, finding the parts of ourselves that connect. Richard remarked it was a model for how we should tell stories, letting go as much as possible of the impulse to protect ourselves.
The Piano Teacher
Starbucks, August 19, 2007
We watched The Piano Teacher last night, a film I had wanted to see since reading about its treatment of sexual violence when it debuted in 2001. Michael Haneke directs, based on a novel by Austrian writer Elfrieda Jelinek, who won a Nobel Prize in 2004. The title character, Erika Kohut, is in her 40’s and teaches at the premier music conservatory in Vienna. She stands at a window, trancing out on Schubert and Bach, as her students try to excite her with their passionate notes, touching the keys as if they can stir her to feeling. The misery in their eyes show they will fail, and when she turns to them, she indeed delivers scorn. She shares a musty beehive flat with her elderly, domineering mother, and the women buzz each other with practiced enmity. Erika’s mother roots in her closet for clothes she considers lewd—really only adult looking dresses and coats bought on the sly—and calls her a whore when she discovers them. Erika is seething and passive, and Isabelle Hubert, with her girl-woman body and inexpressive mask face, deftly embodies the character’s contradictions.
Between classes, she dons a little scarf like Riding Hood and ventures into a forest of sex shops. She watches violent videos and spies on couples at drive-ins. Seeing a man mount a woman and hearing the woman’s cries at climax, she squats beside the car and urinates quietly, her eyes squeezed tight in release. When she opens them, she is face to face with the man, who calls her a disgusting pervert as she scurries away, her expression cool and enigmatic.
Another day, she arrives home from work in her nunlike garb of white shirt and dark skirt, her hair secured in clasps, and goes directly to the bathroom, unable to postpone what she’s been planning. Out of her purse comes a small paper packet from which she removes a single razor blade. She hoists up her skirt and, holding a mirror, cuts her vagina, shutting her eyes and suddering slightly. Blood drips into the tub, an image of mayhem we’ve seen many times: Alex, the rejected lover in Fatal Attraction, attempting suicide and murder; sleepwalking Charlotte Corday stabbing Marat in his bath. The blood rouses Erika from her reverie, and she swishes it down the drain, slips a sanitary pad into her panties, and comes to dinner in a robe. She sits glumly across from her mother, who keeps the TV blaring while they eat. Suddenly her mother notices blood running down her daughter’s legs and complains it’s unappetizing.
It’s against a backdrop of stuffy parlors and chilly rehearsal halls that Erika’s brutal inner life unfolds, and into this warring existence comes Walter, a brash and beautiful 17-year-old boy-man who offers himself first as Erika’s pupil and then her lover. She’s nasty and belittling, but he breaks her down. Once they go to bed, she writes out instructions about the kind of sex she desires, topping from below. She asks to be tied up and beaten. What gives her pleasure is absent of tenderness. He says he loves her, although we don't know what he means. He is forceful in pursuit, wanting to get through the wall of her, but he can’t, really, and he tells her he’s disgusted by her demands. Once the power shifts, she becomes in thrall to him. He’s by turns contemptuous and passionate, but, finally fed up with her histrionics, he charges up to her apartment, shoves aside her mother, locks the door of her room, and beats and rapes her. He asks if this is what she wants, what she’s imagined. Lying on the floor, holding her bleeding lip, she says no. Something isn’t adding up. She doesn't fight him off. She isn't enraged, rather dazed by the disparity between her imagination and reality.
We’ve seen a companion to this scene earlier. Erika and her mother share a bed and before she takes Walter as a lover, in a moment of great frustration she throws herself on top of her mother's body, pins her hands, kisses her mouth, and cries out she loves her. Is she wishing for this to happen with Walter? Does she really want to join with the body of the only person, up until then, she has known so intimately? It’s as if the movie, itself, convulses here, as sleepwalking Erika slices through quotidian, bourgeois life.
The movie doesn’t comment on why Erika and her mother share a bed. We don’t know Walter’s motives, because the film isn’t interested in what attracts him to Erika. Here is all the roiling, repressed nuttiness of Freud’s Vienna in tact in the 20th Century, but Haneke’s approach is unanalytic. He’s not interested in reducing the characters’ actions to an understanding of them. The characters articulate no understanding of themselves, and we have Hubbert’s mask face across which flutter the merest fluctuations when she is bullied by her mother, hateful to her pupils, or desperately jealous of Walter’s attentions to other women.
This technique, skirting notions of bad behavior and sick behavior, frees the viewer simply to look at behavior. The lack of affect in the storytelling—as well as in Erika—harkens to the strategies of Georges Bataille’s novels, particularly Story of the Eye. In Bataille’s view, sex is not corrupted by Christian morality and the neuroses it engenders (and therefore can’t be “fixed” by psychoanalysis); rather, sex is deeper than neurosis, a behavior closer to the warring of chimps and the rutting of bonobos than to most other human activites. To Bataille, sex really is dangerous and difficult to wrap our minds around. The narrator of Story of the Eye relates scenes of absurd sexual activity busting through the fabric of ordinary life—a frisky girl suddenly thrusts her naked ass into a bowl of milk; a young man imagines the white buttocks of his paramour as two peeled hard boiled eggs and feels the impulse to piss on them, and so on. These events unfold as if they were ordinary life, without apology or interpretation. The narrator’s containment allows the reader to fantasize freely. The reader can enter the text as if the story is about the reader.
It is the same with Haneke’s horrifying, dreamlike film, and rather than turn away from the characters we enter their story, finding the parts of ourselves that connect. Richard remarked it was a model for how we should tell stories, letting go as much as possible of the impulse to protect ourselves.
Tuesday, April 14, 2009
A decisive moment
Richard
A decisive moment
Starbucks, May 2, 2007
It’s the summer of 1965, and an envelope arrives from the Oxford and Cambridge Schools Examination Board, informing me about my O-level exams. O is for ordinary. Every English child takes these tests at fifteen. Passing qualifies you to stay on at school and enter the sixth form. Failure means you have to start work. If you stay on, you prepare for A-levels—A for advanced. You need to pass several A-levels to qualify for university.
Most students at Humphrey Perkins have studied upwards of ten O-level subjects during the previous three years, but I have prepared in only six, having been thrown out of the other classes for poor performance and unacceptable behavior. I have been barred from Latin, French, and chemistry for being a joker. I act as if I don’t take learning seriously, and I distract others.
The minimum qualification for the lower-sixth is four O-levels. My mother is in the kitchen when I come down to breakfast, stirring sugar into her tea. She passes me the envelope and waits for me to read it. I am greatly relieved to learn I have scraped by with four passes in English, history, geography, and art. My first thought is: Thank god I don’t have to work. My second thought is: Won’t it be great to see Jenny Payne again and slip my hand down her knickers in the fields near the school. My third thought is: I’ll have to buy the special sixth-form tie with its distinctive white stripe. I like the picture.
Jenny Payne! My pretty girlfriend with the page-boy framing a button of a nose and keen brown eyes that follow me as if she is looking for understanding of herself, or me, or the way the world works. I’m a lanky, anarchic boy, fast on the playing field, and she, too, is good at sport. That’s how it starts. We train together. We train together although she is more than good; she’s ranking high in national long-jump meets, and I admire her dedication and skill. She performs in Gilbert and Sullivan shows, while I am all about American soul produced by Stax, the cooler, grittier label that competes with Motown. We train together, although Jenny’s in the A-stream and I am in the C. I despise my ranking, but I don’t yet know how much. Have I been slotted into the C-form, from which I’ve been told by Headmaster Dunn, M. A. that I can expect to get a job as a clerk or a salesperson, because I underperform, or do I underperform because authorities such as Headmaster Dunn, M. A. have determined that the children of tailors are best launched on their low-level courses in life from this modest track?
What is going on with me at school? I know I’m intelligent. Oddly, I don’t doubt that. But I’m not good at learning in those days, or a certain kind of learning. Classes require a lot of rote memorizing and try as I do to master it, my brain rebels, or it isn’t wired that way, or I rebel, thinking I am being found lacking. Certainly, I could try harder and settle myself more for study, but I am already depressed although I don’t know it. Headmaster Dunn considers me a troublemaker and takes as many opportunities as he can find to summon me to his office for a caning. I have been canned many times for walking on the paths reserved exclusively for teachers and prefects, for not wearing my cap when off school grounds, for talking in assembly. Innocent acts may lead to a caning; for the non-innocent, it is compulsory. Sounds like an Orwellian horror show, a page from “Such, Such Were the Joys,” Orwell’s portrait of the British class system as modeled after brutal, public school education. Humphrey Perkins, founded in 1717 “so poor boys could read the Bible,” although open to all classes, still parades the trappings of a tradition-bound institution with rigid rules for uniforms and where you can and cannot tread—all this while outside its walls the political and cultural revolutions of the ‘60’s are under way.
Humor is in part my “fuck-you” to it all. Around the family dinner table, you are rewarded for quick-wittedness. My dad is quite smart, but he has not been able to advance his education—his father, a tailor, having decided that his son would follow in his path. So maybe that’s part of it, emulating my father, whose philosophy is to circumvent confrontation with a quip—if you can make the enemy laugh with you, you can win him over. I’m a sly satirist, clever with words, although at school I use the talent to sabotage myself. At home I receive neither encouragement nor disapproval regarding my studies; my parents’ attitude toward my education—an expression of unknowing, low-level depression as well—is hands-off, unexcited, and accepting, amounting to a bland indifference that seems to reinforce the school’s vision of my future. It’s as if everyone has decided my destiny is to be a C.
With two exceptions. One is my English teacher, Mr. Roper, who has taken me under his wing and encouraged me to write. I am keeping a notebook and have already won the school’s poetry contest, to the disgust and disbelief of Headmaster Dunn, who has been required to shake my hand in congratulation at assembly and award me a boxed set of Ryder Haggard stories as a prize. The other exception is Jenny Payne, my first love. Those eyes! Who does she see? I want to be him, the poet lover. We meet at breaks to jog around the sports fields or snog beneath the shady beech trees edging the school grounds, my hand inching inside her shirt and under her cotton bra toward her pert breasts.
The summer days are dreamy and lush, and inside I am hatching an image of the creature shown to me by Mr. Roper and Jenny. I float, though less adrift now, in a state of excited anticipation. Each morning I set off on my bike and ride along the back roads from one sleepy English village to the next or I meander along footpaths traversing fields of golden barley, riotous rows of yellow and red tulips grown by local Dutch farmers, and deep green pastures by the river where herds of Friesian cows chew their cuds and stare as I pass. The summer is mine without a demand except to try on the new school tie and shirts that my mother, proud after all, has bought for me and the black jacket my Dad has cut and sewn from a length of barathea for my return to school.
A week before classes begin another letter arrives for me, this one from Jenny, who has spent the summer with her well-heeled family cruising the Mediterranean. I picture it as a blue expanse dotted with their ports of call. On a single sheet of note paper as blue as that water she writes that she has fallen in love with a young steward on the ship. They’ve made love! She isn’t returning to school. She’s enrolled in a private college to study Spanish (the language of her lover, I presume) with the goal of entering the tourist industry. She says, goodbye.
Seeing me fold the letter, my mother inquires after Jenny, and I mumble she’s fine but won’t be returning to school. I jump on my bike and stay out all day beneath an ache of cloud that has gathered in the September sky. I read and reread the note, and as I do I come apart as passionately and rapidly as I have constructed myself through her eyes. From a musty phone box on a deserted country lane, I call her house. Her mother answers and says she is sorry but Jenny isn’t able to speak to me and, in a gentler voice, adds that perhaps it will be best if I don’t call again. I don’t. I never see Jenny again. Have I been judged unsuitable by her parents? Has she really fallen in love? Why can’t she talk to me? Is she worried I’ll say something to change her mind?
The first day of school starts as it has the previous five years. We gather in the assembly hall, girls lined up on one side, boys on the other, an impenetrable barrier between them. Prefects shout for sixth formers to go to the back, then fifth formers in front of them, then fourth, and so on, down to the front rows where diminutive and bewildered first years look like lost mice in a tricky maze. They are ordered to stand in front of the stage where the teaching staff are arriving. Headmaster Dunn orders, “All those in form 1-A, follow Miss Walker,” and out they troupe, straggling behind her. A child delays the proceedings by forgetting his assignment, which irritates the testy Mr. Dunn. After consulting his master list again, he looks up at the offending boy. “Make sure you know where you’re going in future, Clithero, or you’ll be making a visit to my office,” he says with the not so veiled implication I know well of a caning.
Slowly, as the forms leave, the hall begins to empty and those left inch forward. I am in the group right at the back. We sport new blazers—mine is also trimmed with silver piping, denoting my house colors for sports—and I’m wearing my new lower-sixth-form tie, with the white stripe between the red and black bands. I look festive. I would be happy were my heart not shattered over Jenny. I’m not aware how sad I feel or the meaning—a sense of having been stopped in my tracks—I’ve attached to her withdrawal of love. I’m careful not to catch Dunn’s eyes, as they rake up and down the advancing rows, lest he clasp an opportunity to target me for abuse.
The hall is almost empty now. The upper sixth, Dunn’s attack dogs empowered to impose detentions, is insuring that no one is smoking in the bog, or walking on a forbidden path, or passing anyone on the wrong side of a corridor. Dunn announces that the lower sixth will be split into two sections with twelve students in each. One group will follow Mr. Russell, the Latin master, the other Mr. Roper, the English master. Dunn quickly recites names, pairing pupil and master. “Andrews, Russell; Arkwright, Roper; Bellows, Russell; Cuthbertson, Roper . . ..” Rusty Russell threw me out of Latin years ago and has had it in for me since, so of course I am hoping to be dealt to old Roper who somehow got me writing poetry. “Yeats, Russell,” Dunn concludes.
I’m not named. Neither is Johnnie Frear. Dunn looks up from the list and glares at us. “What are you doing, Toon?” he bellows.
“Don’t know, sir.”
“What do you mean you don’t know? Which group are you supposed to be in?”
“Don’t know, sir.”
“What about you, Frear?”
“Please sir, don’t know, sir.”
Dunn begins to take on an unhealthy glow.
Russel is leading his group away, but Roper tells his class to wait for him in the corridor and approaches Dunn, “Excuse me headmaster, if I might have word,” and he climbs to the stage where Dunn presides, and they whisper animatedly. I catch Dunn sputtering, “I don’t see how it’s possible,” and “Not school policy.” But in time Dunn stares down and announces loudly, as if the whole school is still present rather than only me and Johnnie Frear, “It appears there has been some confusion in our selection process for the lower sixth. The letter sent to your parents specifically stated that qualification for the lower-sixth requires four academic O-level passes. What are yours, Frear?”
“French, English, math, and cookery, sir.”
“You see, cookery is not an academic subject. What about you, Toon?”
“English, history, geography, and art.”
“Would you say art is an academic subject, Toon?”
“Don’t know, sir.” Of course I do, but I’m in a vortex of mortification and dejection, feeling my hopes drain.
“Don’t know much do you, Toon? Which, if I might say so, is precisely the issue before us. In my opinion, it is all quite clear, but Mr. Roper points out that the letter may have been innocently misinterpreted by your parents. For that reason, Mr. Roper has kindly invited you to join his group. But I will be keeping a very close eye on you. You may go.”
Johnnie walks out beaming. I do not beam, but I move off with Roper, knowing it’s prudent to escape from Dunn as quickly as possible. I remove my tie in the corridor, consequences be damned, although there aren’t any. In the classroom, Roper says we’ll be studying Hamlet in preparation for A-level English, and as we read through the opening scenes, set along haunted battlements, I lose myself in the images and the plight of a confused son enjoined to restore his father’s honor. After lunch I meet with Miss Jarvis to review the geography curriculum. It’s only when I’m leaving that Roper catches me near the school gate and says with kind eyes, “Don’t worry. If you work hard you’ll soon earn your sixth-form place.”
Looking back at the scene now, I see he is giving me a chance, not extending charity; he believes in my ability, and in his way protesting against snobs like Dunn. But I can’t see any of this. I feel pitied, and I come from foolishly proud people who double over with shame if they have somehow found themselves out of place and perceive they are being tolerated. Roper is saying, “You can have a place here,“ while I hear, “You don’t belong at school; you haven’t earned it.” And so instead of buckling down and swallowing my embarrassment, I bolt from the opportunity as I will many times in the future until, I suppose, I cease to care about how others view me—or don’t care as painfully and tragically as then. I determine to leave. I don’t discuss it with my parents. I don’t say anything to friends. I stay at school for a few weeks as autumn comes on, jogging around the track on my own at lunch, feeling like a ghost. One day I tell my parents about my decision; I’ll go to a community college or get a job. They don’t put up much of a fight, perhaps understanding my discomfort, perhaps feeling as confused as me. By November, when the leaves are dropping from the beech trees, I am gone.
A decisive moment
Starbucks, May 2, 2007
It’s the summer of 1965, and an envelope arrives from the Oxford and Cambridge Schools Examination Board, informing me about my O-level exams. O is for ordinary. Every English child takes these tests at fifteen. Passing qualifies you to stay on at school and enter the sixth form. Failure means you have to start work. If you stay on, you prepare for A-levels—A for advanced. You need to pass several A-levels to qualify for university.
Most students at Humphrey Perkins have studied upwards of ten O-level subjects during the previous three years, but I have prepared in only six, having been thrown out of the other classes for poor performance and unacceptable behavior. I have been barred from Latin, French, and chemistry for being a joker. I act as if I don’t take learning seriously, and I distract others.
The minimum qualification for the lower-sixth is four O-levels. My mother is in the kitchen when I come down to breakfast, stirring sugar into her tea. She passes me the envelope and waits for me to read it. I am greatly relieved to learn I have scraped by with four passes in English, history, geography, and art. My first thought is: Thank god I don’t have to work. My second thought is: Won’t it be great to see Jenny Payne again and slip my hand down her knickers in the fields near the school. My third thought is: I’ll have to buy the special sixth-form tie with its distinctive white stripe. I like the picture.
Jenny Payne! My pretty girlfriend with the page-boy framing a button of a nose and keen brown eyes that follow me as if she is looking for understanding of herself, or me, or the way the world works. I’m a lanky, anarchic boy, fast on the playing field, and she, too, is good at sport. That’s how it starts. We train together. We train together although she is more than good; she’s ranking high in national long-jump meets, and I admire her dedication and skill. She performs in Gilbert and Sullivan shows, while I am all about American soul produced by Stax, the cooler, grittier label that competes with Motown. We train together, although Jenny’s in the A-stream and I am in the C. I despise my ranking, but I don’t yet know how much. Have I been slotted into the C-form, from which I’ve been told by Headmaster Dunn, M. A. that I can expect to get a job as a clerk or a salesperson, because I underperform, or do I underperform because authorities such as Headmaster Dunn, M. A. have determined that the children of tailors are best launched on their low-level courses in life from this modest track?
What is going on with me at school? I know I’m intelligent. Oddly, I don’t doubt that. But I’m not good at learning in those days, or a certain kind of learning. Classes require a lot of rote memorizing and try as I do to master it, my brain rebels, or it isn’t wired that way, or I rebel, thinking I am being found lacking. Certainly, I could try harder and settle myself more for study, but I am already depressed although I don’t know it. Headmaster Dunn considers me a troublemaker and takes as many opportunities as he can find to summon me to his office for a caning. I have been canned many times for walking on the paths reserved exclusively for teachers and prefects, for not wearing my cap when off school grounds, for talking in assembly. Innocent acts may lead to a caning; for the non-innocent, it is compulsory. Sounds like an Orwellian horror show, a page from “Such, Such Were the Joys,” Orwell’s portrait of the British class system as modeled after brutal, public school education. Humphrey Perkins, founded in 1717 “so poor boys could read the Bible,” although open to all classes, still parades the trappings of a tradition-bound institution with rigid rules for uniforms and where you can and cannot tread—all this while outside its walls the political and cultural revolutions of the ‘60’s are under way.
Humor is in part my “fuck-you” to it all. Around the family dinner table, you are rewarded for quick-wittedness. My dad is quite smart, but he has not been able to advance his education—his father, a tailor, having decided that his son would follow in his path. So maybe that’s part of it, emulating my father, whose philosophy is to circumvent confrontation with a quip—if you can make the enemy laugh with you, you can win him over. I’m a sly satirist, clever with words, although at school I use the talent to sabotage myself. At home I receive neither encouragement nor disapproval regarding my studies; my parents’ attitude toward my education—an expression of unknowing, low-level depression as well—is hands-off, unexcited, and accepting, amounting to a bland indifference that seems to reinforce the school’s vision of my future. It’s as if everyone has decided my destiny is to be a C.
With two exceptions. One is my English teacher, Mr. Roper, who has taken me under his wing and encouraged me to write. I am keeping a notebook and have already won the school’s poetry contest, to the disgust and disbelief of Headmaster Dunn, who has been required to shake my hand in congratulation at assembly and award me a boxed set of Ryder Haggard stories as a prize. The other exception is Jenny Payne, my first love. Those eyes! Who does she see? I want to be him, the poet lover. We meet at breaks to jog around the sports fields or snog beneath the shady beech trees edging the school grounds, my hand inching inside her shirt and under her cotton bra toward her pert breasts.
The summer days are dreamy and lush, and inside I am hatching an image of the creature shown to me by Mr. Roper and Jenny. I float, though less adrift now, in a state of excited anticipation. Each morning I set off on my bike and ride along the back roads from one sleepy English village to the next or I meander along footpaths traversing fields of golden barley, riotous rows of yellow and red tulips grown by local Dutch farmers, and deep green pastures by the river where herds of Friesian cows chew their cuds and stare as I pass. The summer is mine without a demand except to try on the new school tie and shirts that my mother, proud after all, has bought for me and the black jacket my Dad has cut and sewn from a length of barathea for my return to school.
A week before classes begin another letter arrives for me, this one from Jenny, who has spent the summer with her well-heeled family cruising the Mediterranean. I picture it as a blue expanse dotted with their ports of call. On a single sheet of note paper as blue as that water she writes that she has fallen in love with a young steward on the ship. They’ve made love! She isn’t returning to school. She’s enrolled in a private college to study Spanish (the language of her lover, I presume) with the goal of entering the tourist industry. She says, goodbye.
Seeing me fold the letter, my mother inquires after Jenny, and I mumble she’s fine but won’t be returning to school. I jump on my bike and stay out all day beneath an ache of cloud that has gathered in the September sky. I read and reread the note, and as I do I come apart as passionately and rapidly as I have constructed myself through her eyes. From a musty phone box on a deserted country lane, I call her house. Her mother answers and says she is sorry but Jenny isn’t able to speak to me and, in a gentler voice, adds that perhaps it will be best if I don’t call again. I don’t. I never see Jenny again. Have I been judged unsuitable by her parents? Has she really fallen in love? Why can’t she talk to me? Is she worried I’ll say something to change her mind?
The first day of school starts as it has the previous five years. We gather in the assembly hall, girls lined up on one side, boys on the other, an impenetrable barrier between them. Prefects shout for sixth formers to go to the back, then fifth formers in front of them, then fourth, and so on, down to the front rows where diminutive and bewildered first years look like lost mice in a tricky maze. They are ordered to stand in front of the stage where the teaching staff are arriving. Headmaster Dunn orders, “All those in form 1-A, follow Miss Walker,” and out they troupe, straggling behind her. A child delays the proceedings by forgetting his assignment, which irritates the testy Mr. Dunn. After consulting his master list again, he looks up at the offending boy. “Make sure you know where you’re going in future, Clithero, or you’ll be making a visit to my office,” he says with the not so veiled implication I know well of a caning.
Slowly, as the forms leave, the hall begins to empty and those left inch forward. I am in the group right at the back. We sport new blazers—mine is also trimmed with silver piping, denoting my house colors for sports—and I’m wearing my new lower-sixth-form tie, with the white stripe between the red and black bands. I look festive. I would be happy were my heart not shattered over Jenny. I’m not aware how sad I feel or the meaning—a sense of having been stopped in my tracks—I’ve attached to her withdrawal of love. I’m careful not to catch Dunn’s eyes, as they rake up and down the advancing rows, lest he clasp an opportunity to target me for abuse.
The hall is almost empty now. The upper sixth, Dunn’s attack dogs empowered to impose detentions, is insuring that no one is smoking in the bog, or walking on a forbidden path, or passing anyone on the wrong side of a corridor. Dunn announces that the lower sixth will be split into two sections with twelve students in each. One group will follow Mr. Russell, the Latin master, the other Mr. Roper, the English master. Dunn quickly recites names, pairing pupil and master. “Andrews, Russell; Arkwright, Roper; Bellows, Russell; Cuthbertson, Roper . . ..” Rusty Russell threw me out of Latin years ago and has had it in for me since, so of course I am hoping to be dealt to old Roper who somehow got me writing poetry. “Yeats, Russell,” Dunn concludes.
I’m not named. Neither is Johnnie Frear. Dunn looks up from the list and glares at us. “What are you doing, Toon?” he bellows.
“Don’t know, sir.”
“What do you mean you don’t know? Which group are you supposed to be in?”
“Don’t know, sir.”
“What about you, Frear?”
“Please sir, don’t know, sir.”
Dunn begins to take on an unhealthy glow.
Russel is leading his group away, but Roper tells his class to wait for him in the corridor and approaches Dunn, “Excuse me headmaster, if I might have word,” and he climbs to the stage where Dunn presides, and they whisper animatedly. I catch Dunn sputtering, “I don’t see how it’s possible,” and “Not school policy.” But in time Dunn stares down and announces loudly, as if the whole school is still present rather than only me and Johnnie Frear, “It appears there has been some confusion in our selection process for the lower sixth. The letter sent to your parents specifically stated that qualification for the lower-sixth requires four academic O-level passes. What are yours, Frear?”
“French, English, math, and cookery, sir.”
“You see, cookery is not an academic subject. What about you, Toon?”
“English, history, geography, and art.”
“Would you say art is an academic subject, Toon?”
“Don’t know, sir.” Of course I do, but I’m in a vortex of mortification and dejection, feeling my hopes drain.
“Don’t know much do you, Toon? Which, if I might say so, is precisely the issue before us. In my opinion, it is all quite clear, but Mr. Roper points out that the letter may have been innocently misinterpreted by your parents. For that reason, Mr. Roper has kindly invited you to join his group. But I will be keeping a very close eye on you. You may go.”
Johnnie walks out beaming. I do not beam, but I move off with Roper, knowing it’s prudent to escape from Dunn as quickly as possible. I remove my tie in the corridor, consequences be damned, although there aren’t any. In the classroom, Roper says we’ll be studying Hamlet in preparation for A-level English, and as we read through the opening scenes, set along haunted battlements, I lose myself in the images and the plight of a confused son enjoined to restore his father’s honor. After lunch I meet with Miss Jarvis to review the geography curriculum. It’s only when I’m leaving that Roper catches me near the school gate and says with kind eyes, “Don’t worry. If you work hard you’ll soon earn your sixth-form place.”
Looking back at the scene now, I see he is giving me a chance, not extending charity; he believes in my ability, and in his way protesting against snobs like Dunn. But I can’t see any of this. I feel pitied, and I come from foolishly proud people who double over with shame if they have somehow found themselves out of place and perceive they are being tolerated. Roper is saying, “You can have a place here,“ while I hear, “You don’t belong at school; you haven’t earned it.” And so instead of buckling down and swallowing my embarrassment, I bolt from the opportunity as I will many times in the future until, I suppose, I cease to care about how others view me—or don’t care as painfully and tragically as then. I determine to leave. I don’t discuss it with my parents. I don’t say anything to friends. I stay at school for a few weeks as autumn comes on, jogging around the track on my own at lunch, feeling like a ghost. One day I tell my parents about my decision; I’ll go to a community college or get a job. They don’t put up much of a fight, perhaps understanding my discomfort, perhaps feeling as confused as me. By November, when the leaves are dropping from the beech trees, I am gone.
Sunday, April 12, 2009
Mind and body
Laurie
Mind and body
Starbucks, July 23, 2007
Deb Margolin said she was tired of mortality. “It doesn’t have poetry. It’s not like leaves turning colors. It’s about being sliced open and having parts cut out.” She’d had another surgery in June and learned she might have a deadly form of lymphoma, a bum roll of the dice without meaning but full of significance. She has lived with the diagnosis of Hodgkin’s as well as nonHodgkin’s lymphoma for fifteen years, and we have been friends all that time. She wasn’t going to submit to more chemo—other treatments but not that. “I want to die with a few hairs on my head, a spring in my step, and a curse on my lips. Let me at least go out like that if I have to go. But I want this life, this beautiful, awful life.”
I listened. That’s what people on the ropes want. That and not being compared to anyone else.
Richard and I read her new monologue, Oh Yes, I Will, inspired by the recent surgery, and I found it brilliant, funny, and drained of complaint—a fantasy about the twelve minutes she spent talking in the operating room under anesthesia. She imagined version after version of what she might have said, each one expanding our understanding of the plight of a woman in her fifties with two teen-aged children and a devoted husband, a woman in love with being embodied who might be dying. Richard observed a split in her between the mind and body: “She wants consciousness to have a means of existing independent of her physical form. She doesn't want to cease to be in the face of illness.”
It made him think about his own body chemistry—the high and low sugars, the hormone swings—and its effect on his mind. “More and more I feel there is only one me, and we are multiple.” He, too, has an incurable condition, although he isn’t ill. Do we think that people aren't themselves when they are reacting to drugs? Anesthesia?
Last night I read Spalding Gray's final, unfinished monologue, Life Interrupted, about the car crash in Ireland that wrecked him physically and from which he could not recover. His leg and hip damaged, he could no longer stride out on the long walks that ushered him into the world where things happened and stories were hatched. In the fragment, he is marveling at the bizarreness of the accident: the car he was riding in was hit by a van carrying a vet who had tended a sick calf, an animal only that day Spalding had remarked to the farmer needed to be treated or put out of its misery.
Spalding had become an artist of possibility, game for anyone's cockamamie notion, willing, one time, to go off to Williamsburg, Brooklyn to work as a janitor in an Orthodox synagogue—to see what would happen. Why couldn't he keep turning his life into an exhibit for contemplation? As a consequence of the accident, little pieces of his skull were embedded in his brain, and the damage could not be evaluated. He fell into a black depression, eventually ending his life by leaping from the Staten Island ferry.
Richard doesn’t know the sides of him that emerge during low sugars because the part of his mind that processes language and remembers events is oxygen deprived. He utters wordlike sounds, but they are gibberish. In a low sugar, he refuses to comply. Why does this side of him militate against his survival? He says he feels fine, although he isn’t okay. Does tension dissolve and euphoria set in as self-awareness becomes eclipsed? Does a person become like an animal, on the cusp of consciousness but not fully inhabiting it?
If you ask Deb what you can say or do to help her, she will answer: Read my work, come to my shows.
Mind and body
Starbucks, July 23, 2007
Deb Margolin said she was tired of mortality. “It doesn’t have poetry. It’s not like leaves turning colors. It’s about being sliced open and having parts cut out.” She’d had another surgery in June and learned she might have a deadly form of lymphoma, a bum roll of the dice without meaning but full of significance. She has lived with the diagnosis of Hodgkin’s as well as nonHodgkin’s lymphoma for fifteen years, and we have been friends all that time. She wasn’t going to submit to more chemo—other treatments but not that. “I want to die with a few hairs on my head, a spring in my step, and a curse on my lips. Let me at least go out like that if I have to go. But I want this life, this beautiful, awful life.”
I listened. That’s what people on the ropes want. That and not being compared to anyone else.
Richard and I read her new monologue, Oh Yes, I Will, inspired by the recent surgery, and I found it brilliant, funny, and drained of complaint—a fantasy about the twelve minutes she spent talking in the operating room under anesthesia. She imagined version after version of what she might have said, each one expanding our understanding of the plight of a woman in her fifties with two teen-aged children and a devoted husband, a woman in love with being embodied who might be dying. Richard observed a split in her between the mind and body: “She wants consciousness to have a means of existing independent of her physical form. She doesn't want to cease to be in the face of illness.”
It made him think about his own body chemistry—the high and low sugars, the hormone swings—and its effect on his mind. “More and more I feel there is only one me, and we are multiple.” He, too, has an incurable condition, although he isn’t ill. Do we think that people aren't themselves when they are reacting to drugs? Anesthesia?
Last night I read Spalding Gray's final, unfinished monologue, Life Interrupted, about the car crash in Ireland that wrecked him physically and from which he could not recover. His leg and hip damaged, he could no longer stride out on the long walks that ushered him into the world where things happened and stories were hatched. In the fragment, he is marveling at the bizarreness of the accident: the car he was riding in was hit by a van carrying a vet who had tended a sick calf, an animal only that day Spalding had remarked to the farmer needed to be treated or put out of its misery.
Spalding had become an artist of possibility, game for anyone's cockamamie notion, willing, one time, to go off to Williamsburg, Brooklyn to work as a janitor in an Orthodox synagogue—to see what would happen. Why couldn't he keep turning his life into an exhibit for contemplation? As a consequence of the accident, little pieces of his skull were embedded in his brain, and the damage could not be evaluated. He fell into a black depression, eventually ending his life by leaping from the Staten Island ferry.
Richard doesn’t know the sides of him that emerge during low sugars because the part of his mind that processes language and remembers events is oxygen deprived. He utters wordlike sounds, but they are gibberish. In a low sugar, he refuses to comply. Why does this side of him militate against his survival? He says he feels fine, although he isn’t okay. Does tension dissolve and euphoria set in as self-awareness becomes eclipsed? Does a person become like an animal, on the cusp of consciousness but not fully inhabiting it?
If you ask Deb what you can say or do to help her, she will answer: Read my work, come to my shows.
Secrets
Laurie
Secrets
Starbucks, December 13, 2008
Growing up, the secrets that come to mind involve André, the psychoanalyst who treated my mother, my sister, and me, as well as my uncle Zev, aunt Kate, and their two daughters, Phoebe and Lila. André was educated, cultivated, and he’d escaped the war. A Jew who’d survived, he knew what the world was made of from the perspective of the American Jews he treated, mingled with, used, taught. He spoke with a European accent that was guttural and meaty like the smell of his cigars. He was fat and pig-faced. He ate all the time.
Ellen told me our father loaned him money, which he invested in the stock market and lost. Murray didn’t ask for it back. He looked up to André, a doctor, a survivor. My father hadn’t gone past the ninth grade but had worked his way up through the garment business and become a coat manufacturer.
Ellen knows that André maneuvered me into his bed during a weekend at his country house. I was fourteen. He put his hands on my breasts and down my panties. He told me to touch him, and I said no. I said no eventually. At first I was stunned and hurt and afraid to step out of line, and I couldn’t think of anything to say.
Ellen is still grateful to André for protecting her from Toby. He paid for her abortion when she got pregnant with Pierre. He took her on a trip around the world. I asked if he had ever tried anything with her, and she, “He wouldn’t have dared.” I was impressed with her bravado. She is six years older than me. Maybe André knew she would have raised hell in the same way he knew I wouldn’t. She would have raised bloody hell because she felt secure she would have been believed.
In my thirties I told my father what André had done. He turned red and called him a bastard, but André was long dead by then. My mother was of the opinion that I encouraged sex, and I shared her view generally, but I didn’t encourage André to fetch me from the back garden where I was watching birds at a stone fountain and steer me to his bed.
My mother asked André to pay the money back to Murray. At the end of her session, he rose from the desk where he usually sat—between trips to the kitchen for dietetic snacks, such as hearts of palm—and wrote a check to Murray he gave to her.
Ellen was the first to see André after returning from college under mysterious circumstances she later revealed: She stole a wallet from a girl in her dorm and left it on her dresser in order to be caught and sent home. The next to visit André was Toby, and for several years my mother and sister commuted from Long Beach to Manhattan two or three times a week and whispered conspiratorially about the shrewd, wise council André dispensed. It was often epigrammatic. For example he might advise, “If someone insists that one and one equals three, then say, ‘Okay, one and one equals three.’ What’s the skin off your nose?” I wasn’t supposed to know he existed, although a lower primate could have pieced together the secret that grew in the air.
Finally, it was my turn to go, but the reality was bewildering. I had nothing to say, and he seemed aloof and impenetrable—not friendly and kind, as he was purported to be. I told myself I would grow to like him and he me. What I really enjoyed was taking the train to the city and navigating alone to 96th street and Madison Avenue, feeling Manhattan’s thrum as I rode the bus. I would wait for my appointment in the little café across from his office, drinking coffee at the counter and pretending I belonged in this sophisticated world. It made me feel special, although my mother instructed me to keep the visits secret.
On the train to Cold Spring, I imagined that André would suggest books for me to read, describe, as we walked on wooded trails, the life he’d lived in Europe before the war. He took me to his bed, first in the afternoon before my aunt and uncle arrived. It was so unbelievable, I left my body and from the ceiling looked down at the girl on her back with her arms at her sides and the corpulent man with thick white hair circling her nipples and asking if it felt good. I had to lie with him again at night after everyone went to sleep and my aunt and uncle acted as if nothing was strange. Did I see a muscle twitch in my uncle’s cheek when André announced where I would sleep? Zev didn’t protest, and neither did I.
Not then. What was happening was impossible, and I was disappointed as I would be later in life when a sexual advance was an insult instead of a caress. The second time André was bolder. He aroused my clitoris and spread the cheeks of my ass. He was skillful and I was stimulated, but I didn’t want to be touched by an old man. I said “Stop,” softly, in a child’s voice, in the voice of a sleepy child, because I was in a play and I couldn’t name what was happening. “I’m tired,” I said, “I want to go to sleep.” He got out of bed and left the room. He left the room and didn’t return.
Everything changed after that. He seemed angry the next day. I thought I had done something wrong. I thought I was the kind of person who spoiled things and that’s why I couldn’t be included. I was the kind of person who would point out that one and one equals two. Before I returned home, he whispered not to tell my mother, his head bent at an angle. He wasn’t looking at me but rather at a girl in the empty space beside me. He became small in that moment and I big, but I didn’t like the shift in size. I wondered if Long Beach would still be there when I got off the train, and when it was I thought, well now, you see life goes on. Life goes on as you remember it. You have a family and parents, and this is the world they have placed you in, this is the world you are part of, and you really have nowhere else to go.
I continued seeing André for a while longer, then I stopped for several years, and then I resumed when I was seventeen, for the glamour he represented, the knowledge, in order to get him to like me, to revisit the feeling of being soiled. We never spoke about what happened.
Secrets
Starbucks, December 13, 2008
Growing up, the secrets that come to mind involve André, the psychoanalyst who treated my mother, my sister, and me, as well as my uncle Zev, aunt Kate, and their two daughters, Phoebe and Lila. André was educated, cultivated, and he’d escaped the war. A Jew who’d survived, he knew what the world was made of from the perspective of the American Jews he treated, mingled with, used, taught. He spoke with a European accent that was guttural and meaty like the smell of his cigars. He was fat and pig-faced. He ate all the time.
Ellen told me our father loaned him money, which he invested in the stock market and lost. Murray didn’t ask for it back. He looked up to André, a doctor, a survivor. My father hadn’t gone past the ninth grade but had worked his way up through the garment business and become a coat manufacturer.
Ellen knows that André maneuvered me into his bed during a weekend at his country house. I was fourteen. He put his hands on my breasts and down my panties. He told me to touch him, and I said no. I said no eventually. At first I was stunned and hurt and afraid to step out of line, and I couldn’t think of anything to say.
Ellen is still grateful to André for protecting her from Toby. He paid for her abortion when she got pregnant with Pierre. He took her on a trip around the world. I asked if he had ever tried anything with her, and she, “He wouldn’t have dared.” I was impressed with her bravado. She is six years older than me. Maybe André knew she would have raised hell in the same way he knew I wouldn’t. She would have raised bloody hell because she felt secure she would have been believed.
In my thirties I told my father what André had done. He turned red and called him a bastard, but André was long dead by then. My mother was of the opinion that I encouraged sex, and I shared her view generally, but I didn’t encourage André to fetch me from the back garden where I was watching birds at a stone fountain and steer me to his bed.
My mother asked André to pay the money back to Murray. At the end of her session, he rose from the desk where he usually sat—between trips to the kitchen for dietetic snacks, such as hearts of palm—and wrote a check to Murray he gave to her.
Ellen was the first to see André after returning from college under mysterious circumstances she later revealed: She stole a wallet from a girl in her dorm and left it on her dresser in order to be caught and sent home. The next to visit André was Toby, and for several years my mother and sister commuted from Long Beach to Manhattan two or three times a week and whispered conspiratorially about the shrewd, wise council André dispensed. It was often epigrammatic. For example he might advise, “If someone insists that one and one equals three, then say, ‘Okay, one and one equals three.’ What’s the skin off your nose?” I wasn’t supposed to know he existed, although a lower primate could have pieced together the secret that grew in the air.
Finally, it was my turn to go, but the reality was bewildering. I had nothing to say, and he seemed aloof and impenetrable—not friendly and kind, as he was purported to be. I told myself I would grow to like him and he me. What I really enjoyed was taking the train to the city and navigating alone to 96th street and Madison Avenue, feeling Manhattan’s thrum as I rode the bus. I would wait for my appointment in the little café across from his office, drinking coffee at the counter and pretending I belonged in this sophisticated world. It made me feel special, although my mother instructed me to keep the visits secret.
On the train to Cold Spring, I imagined that André would suggest books for me to read, describe, as we walked on wooded trails, the life he’d lived in Europe before the war. He took me to his bed, first in the afternoon before my aunt and uncle arrived. It was so unbelievable, I left my body and from the ceiling looked down at the girl on her back with her arms at her sides and the corpulent man with thick white hair circling her nipples and asking if it felt good. I had to lie with him again at night after everyone went to sleep and my aunt and uncle acted as if nothing was strange. Did I see a muscle twitch in my uncle’s cheek when André announced where I would sleep? Zev didn’t protest, and neither did I.
Not then. What was happening was impossible, and I was disappointed as I would be later in life when a sexual advance was an insult instead of a caress. The second time André was bolder. He aroused my clitoris and spread the cheeks of my ass. He was skillful and I was stimulated, but I didn’t want to be touched by an old man. I said “Stop,” softly, in a child’s voice, in the voice of a sleepy child, because I was in a play and I couldn’t name what was happening. “I’m tired,” I said, “I want to go to sleep.” He got out of bed and left the room. He left the room and didn’t return.
Everything changed after that. He seemed angry the next day. I thought I had done something wrong. I thought I was the kind of person who spoiled things and that’s why I couldn’t be included. I was the kind of person who would point out that one and one equals two. Before I returned home, he whispered not to tell my mother, his head bent at an angle. He wasn’t looking at me but rather at a girl in the empty space beside me. He became small in that moment and I big, but I didn’t like the shift in size. I wondered if Long Beach would still be there when I got off the train, and when it was I thought, well now, you see life goes on. Life goes on as you remember it. You have a family and parents, and this is the world they have placed you in, this is the world you are part of, and you really have nowhere else to go.
I continued seeing André for a while longer, then I stopped for several years, and then I resumed when I was seventeen, for the glamour he represented, the knowledge, in order to get him to like me, to revisit the feeling of being soiled. We never spoke about what happened.
Levels of understanding
Laurie
Levels of understanding
Cupping Room, New York, December 28, 2008
Richard and I are in a café on 8th Street, and I’m arrested by a woman nearby. With her high cheekbones and smudge of charcoal hair, she looks like someone in my family. As Richard and I climb the stairs to our borrowed apartment, I see her speaking to the doorman below. She’s Emily, I realize, come with her photographer friend to shoot a picture of me for her anthology. I embrace her, feeling we know each other, although we have only talked on the phone. She wears a cape over a sweater and floppy trousers, the effect soft and elegant. She’s not a flasher, rather a flatterer. I look good, she says, and happy.
“I am happy.”
“Yes, of course you are. Your life has turned around. How could you not be happy? Nevermind.”
The photographer snaps my picture for an hour, and we all eat fruitcake.
After they leave, Richard reads aloud a story by Lydia Davis in which the narrator remembers her ex-husband when they were still together, a night in Paris when they are eating fish and a small bone gets caught in the man’s throat. I see the couple becoming fretful as their attempts to dislodge the bone with bread and water fail. The man’s throat becomes raw, and they move onto the streets in search of aide. Helpful strangers direct them to a hospital where they meet a skillful young doctor who guides them to a lonely section of the building where he keeps delicate instruments, and with a tiny hook lifts out the bone. The woman remembers that the doctor is Jewish and that he and her ex-husband, also a Jew, speak of this in French. I enjoy the vivid details of the story and its sense of suspense: will he or won’t he be relieved of the bone? But I have no idea what it’s about. Richard says it’s connection. The bone links the ex-couple to each other, propels them into the world, and forges a happy memory of their life together. The story is about the risk the narrator takes by recalling happiness during a time of loss.
How does he know this? Well, he’s looking for connections when he goes into the world: What are the demands people make on each other, the subtle clues they communicate with, your responsibility to their needs? Ha, I think, how topsy-turvey his perspective is from mine.
Earlier, he’s altered another understanding. After Emily and the photographer leave, he says that Emily may really have liked me, but that I thwarted her desire to capture a serious image. “Her book is about loss and change, after all, and here you are looking like the cat with cream on its whiskers.”
“She said I looked good.”
“She said not to smile so much.”
“I wish I could be more like you.” Maybe I do, maybe I don’t, but when he’s around it’s like having a second head.
Later, there is more to sort out. My friend Adam visits and he’s uncomfortable with us even for the hour or so he spends, squirming in his chair and losing the thread of his conversation. Before arriving, he’s called to ask if he can carry on reading Heidegger for another half hour. Carry on reading Heidegger! You god damn read Heidegger every day! Richard and I are hardly ever in New York! While he’s with us, he doesn’t share his intellectual pursuits.
“He’s decided I’m not smart enough,” I say to Richard after he leaves.
“No. Talking about ideas with you is his version of intimacy, and he won’t do it unless you’re alone.”
“Are you sure?”
“Yes.”
“I don’t think you’re right.”
“You and Adam have the weirdest, erotic, sexless relationship I have ever seen. It’s as obvious as Bozo’s nose”
“How come I can’t see these things?”
“Because you’re an idiot.”
Levels of understanding
Cupping Room, New York, December 28, 2008
Richard and I are in a café on 8th Street, and I’m arrested by a woman nearby. With her high cheekbones and smudge of charcoal hair, she looks like someone in my family. As Richard and I climb the stairs to our borrowed apartment, I see her speaking to the doorman below. She’s Emily, I realize, come with her photographer friend to shoot a picture of me for her anthology. I embrace her, feeling we know each other, although we have only talked on the phone. She wears a cape over a sweater and floppy trousers, the effect soft and elegant. She’s not a flasher, rather a flatterer. I look good, she says, and happy.
“I am happy.”
“Yes, of course you are. Your life has turned around. How could you not be happy? Nevermind.”
The photographer snaps my picture for an hour, and we all eat fruitcake.
After they leave, Richard reads aloud a story by Lydia Davis in which the narrator remembers her ex-husband when they were still together, a night in Paris when they are eating fish and a small bone gets caught in the man’s throat. I see the couple becoming fretful as their attempts to dislodge the bone with bread and water fail. The man’s throat becomes raw, and they move onto the streets in search of aide. Helpful strangers direct them to a hospital where they meet a skillful young doctor who guides them to a lonely section of the building where he keeps delicate instruments, and with a tiny hook lifts out the bone. The woman remembers that the doctor is Jewish and that he and her ex-husband, also a Jew, speak of this in French. I enjoy the vivid details of the story and its sense of suspense: will he or won’t he be relieved of the bone? But I have no idea what it’s about. Richard says it’s connection. The bone links the ex-couple to each other, propels them into the world, and forges a happy memory of their life together. The story is about the risk the narrator takes by recalling happiness during a time of loss.
How does he know this? Well, he’s looking for connections when he goes into the world: What are the demands people make on each other, the subtle clues they communicate with, your responsibility to their needs? Ha, I think, how topsy-turvey his perspective is from mine.
Earlier, he’s altered another understanding. After Emily and the photographer leave, he says that Emily may really have liked me, but that I thwarted her desire to capture a serious image. “Her book is about loss and change, after all, and here you are looking like the cat with cream on its whiskers.”
“She said I looked good.”
“She said not to smile so much.”
“I wish I could be more like you.” Maybe I do, maybe I don’t, but when he’s around it’s like having a second head.
Later, there is more to sort out. My friend Adam visits and he’s uncomfortable with us even for the hour or so he spends, squirming in his chair and losing the thread of his conversation. Before arriving, he’s called to ask if he can carry on reading Heidegger for another half hour. Carry on reading Heidegger! You god damn read Heidegger every day! Richard and I are hardly ever in New York! While he’s with us, he doesn’t share his intellectual pursuits.
“He’s decided I’m not smart enough,” I say to Richard after he leaves.
“No. Talking about ideas with you is his version of intimacy, and he won’t do it unless you’re alone.”
“Are you sure?”
“Yes.”
“I don’t think you’re right.”
“You and Adam have the weirdest, erotic, sexless relationship I have ever seen. It’s as obvious as Bozo’s nose”
“How come I can’t see these things?”
“Because you’re an idiot.”
Friday, April 10, 2009
Poor slob
Laurie
Poor slob
Starbucks, May 12, 2007
I am putting on makeup. Richard is on the floor outside the bathroom, his head resting on a mound of towels, his bare feet on the wall, when he asks what my mother said the day I pushed her chair to Columbus Circle. We move to the livingroom and sit on the couch.
“She called you a ‘poor slob’.”
He laughs. “That’s not so bad.”
“How can it not be bad, a sentence with poor and slob in it?”
“The expression is a bit ironic, sweetie.” He pronounces the t sharp.”
“There is no irony in my family. I do not come from a family of ironists. We’re buffoons and barbarians.”
“Exactly, poor slobs. The phrase comes from another time. It’s pity verging on empathy. You are grudgingly identifying with the person. You don’t want to be them, but you can almost see yourself in their place.” He touches my knee. “Let’s look it up.”
We do, and he’s right. “The Next Poor Slob is the next software developer working on your project,” a Google entry reads. Another is from Breakfast at Tiffany’s, Holly Golightly’s speech to her rain-soaked cat: “Poor slob! Poor slob without a name! The way I see it I haven't got the right to give him one. We don't belong to each other. We just took up one day . . .” A third entry reads: “Why would some poor slob on a farm want to risk his life in a war when the best that he can get out of it is to come back to his farm in one piece?”
“I think the phrase went into you because it rings true,” Richard says. “I do have a tendency toward self-pity. It’s comforting to set a low bar for yourself, like my mum saying, ‘You don’t have to go to school. Better to limit your expectations.’ It’s comforting and infuriating. I don’t have a lot of money. I can’t get any job I want. Your mother was saying I’m not worthy of you.”
“She was saying I can’t do better than a poor slob because that’s what I am. She was saying you’re a poor slob for loving me.”
“Yes, maybe, but the next poor slob suggests a line, and we are all in the line. There is no getting off.”
Richard is lithe and boyish at fifty-six, and he smells like fresh laundry, but we aren’t young, whether or not we know it. He is a type 1, insulin dependent diabetic. Every two days, he inserts a catheter into his abdomen that’s attached to a pump delivering insulin. So far there aren’t complications, but they are inevitable. I see my mother on a line, looking out for snorting horses that could step on her. The line is getting longer, and she is getting smaller.
Poor slob
Starbucks, May 12, 2007
I am putting on makeup. Richard is on the floor outside the bathroom, his head resting on a mound of towels, his bare feet on the wall, when he asks what my mother said the day I pushed her chair to Columbus Circle. We move to the livingroom and sit on the couch.
“She called you a ‘poor slob’.”
He laughs. “That’s not so bad.”
“How can it not be bad, a sentence with poor and slob in it?”
“The expression is a bit ironic, sweetie.” He pronounces the t sharp.”
“There is no irony in my family. I do not come from a family of ironists. We’re buffoons and barbarians.”
“Exactly, poor slobs. The phrase comes from another time. It’s pity verging on empathy. You are grudgingly identifying with the person. You don’t want to be them, but you can almost see yourself in their place.” He touches my knee. “Let’s look it up.”
We do, and he’s right. “The Next Poor Slob is the next software developer working on your project,” a Google entry reads. Another is from Breakfast at Tiffany’s, Holly Golightly’s speech to her rain-soaked cat: “Poor slob! Poor slob without a name! The way I see it I haven't got the right to give him one. We don't belong to each other. We just took up one day . . .” A third entry reads: “Why would some poor slob on a farm want to risk his life in a war when the best that he can get out of it is to come back to his farm in one piece?”
“I think the phrase went into you because it rings true,” Richard says. “I do have a tendency toward self-pity. It’s comforting to set a low bar for yourself, like my mum saying, ‘You don’t have to go to school. Better to limit your expectations.’ It’s comforting and infuriating. I don’t have a lot of money. I can’t get any job I want. Your mother was saying I’m not worthy of you.”
“She was saying I can’t do better than a poor slob because that’s what I am. She was saying you’re a poor slob for loving me.”
“Yes, maybe, but the next poor slob suggests a line, and we are all in the line. There is no getting off.”
Richard is lithe and boyish at fifty-six, and he smells like fresh laundry, but we aren’t young, whether or not we know it. He is a type 1, insulin dependent diabetic. Every two days, he inserts a catheter into his abdomen that’s attached to a pump delivering insulin. So far there aren’t complications, but they are inevitable. I see my mother on a line, looking out for snorting horses that could step on her. The line is getting longer, and she is getting smaller.
Spirit on the water
Richard
Spirit on the water
December 15, 2009
Today I find myself humming the Bob Dylan song, “Spirit on the Water,” from the Modern Times album. You know how it is; a song lodges in your head and you catch yourself singing snatches. Maybe it’s because of the big storm last night that brought flooding—unusual here in December.
For Dylan, the flood is an apocalyptic image—often, the levy broached—but at root it points to Noah and the flood. We remember the animals being led into the ark two-by-two and the rainbow representing the new covenant appearing afterward, but we forget the drowning of the wicked. Maybe because we don’t know where we’d stand.
A few years ago, Laurie and I lived further south beside the Indian Bend Wash, a flood-control device. In our part of the desert, which receives only eight inches of rain a year—mostly during monsoon season in July—water arrives in sudden bursts and the hard baked land cannot absorb it. Rain from mountains miles from here bores down into the Valley, sweeping everything before it. Engineers have forced it into grooves that slice the urban landscape, and the Wash is part of this engineering feat: a twenty-mile spindle allowing water to flow through when it needs to and the rest of the time functioning as a park.
Walking there, I’d think about the great parks of London, Paris, and New York where citizens of every stripe play sport and promenade in areas that are neither wilderness nor garden. Frederick Olmstead described the urban park as the city’s lungs. The Wash, too—a mere 100 yards across—eclipses the strip malls and condo developments that slap up against it. Languorous herons compete with human fishers at lakes that teem with birds feeding on bread scattered by the homeless. They congregate near the public toilets. Elsewhere along the way, Frisbee folk play a sort of golf game, aiming at poles with baskets for the discs.
Crossing the bridge to “Picnic Island,” densely planted with trees and filled with bird song, I’d also find myself wishing for a flood to wash away the efforts of local government. Here, increasingly, officials dice up public space for private use. A sign outside a nearby condominium warns against feeding the private ducks and catching the private fish in its private lake. Beyond it a private golf course elbows the public path off to the side. There are ninety-seven golf courses in the Valley. Was this one really necessary?
Presently, Laurie and I live beside a golf course and are relegated to paths that circle it. The Dylan song is in my head as we pass new lakes formed in sand-traps and under bridges where golf carts usually whisk along. “Spirit on the water, darkness on the face of the Earth,” I hum. The lines are a gloss on Genesis: “The earth was formless and void, and darkness was over the surface of the deep, and the Spirit of God was moving over the surface of the waters.” An instant river twists through the fairways, although the level has subsided enough to leave tree branches and human debris—cups and plastic bottles, the odd doll head and pair of knickers—along its sides like a ring around a bathtub.
The sun is brilliant again. A few white clouds billow near the horizon, gray and blackness drained out of them. The sparrows that had taken shelter are furiously sorting through the trash. It’s the moment when the dove returns to the ark with the olive branch, and I find myself turning over the idea of being “born again”—me, the natural world. The Christian take comes into my head when Jesus says to Nichodemus, “No one can see the kingdom of God unless he is born again,” and Nichodemus quite naturally asks, “How can a man be born when he is old? Surely he cannot enter a second time into his mother’s womb to be born?” And Jesus cites Genesis, “I tell you the truth, no one can enter the kingdom of God unless he is born of water and the spirit.”
What’s that? We we once little fishies with hands? I hum the next line, where Dylan jauntily juxtaposes earth’s fate to his immediate needs, “I keep thinking of you baby, And I can’t hardly sleep.” Oh yeah, sex and longing, that kind of being reborn. Laurie says she likes when nature gets the upper hand—when the golfers can’t play, and the animals—and us—can wander where we like. I like when nature gets the upper hand in me.
Spirit on the water
December 15, 2009
Today I find myself humming the Bob Dylan song, “Spirit on the Water,” from the Modern Times album. You know how it is; a song lodges in your head and you catch yourself singing snatches. Maybe it’s because of the big storm last night that brought flooding—unusual here in December.
For Dylan, the flood is an apocalyptic image—often, the levy broached—but at root it points to Noah and the flood. We remember the animals being led into the ark two-by-two and the rainbow representing the new covenant appearing afterward, but we forget the drowning of the wicked. Maybe because we don’t know where we’d stand.
A few years ago, Laurie and I lived further south beside the Indian Bend Wash, a flood-control device. In our part of the desert, which receives only eight inches of rain a year—mostly during monsoon season in July—water arrives in sudden bursts and the hard baked land cannot absorb it. Rain from mountains miles from here bores down into the Valley, sweeping everything before it. Engineers have forced it into grooves that slice the urban landscape, and the Wash is part of this engineering feat: a twenty-mile spindle allowing water to flow through when it needs to and the rest of the time functioning as a park.
Walking there, I’d think about the great parks of London, Paris, and New York where citizens of every stripe play sport and promenade in areas that are neither wilderness nor garden. Frederick Olmstead described the urban park as the city’s lungs. The Wash, too—a mere 100 yards across—eclipses the strip malls and condo developments that slap up against it. Languorous herons compete with human fishers at lakes that teem with birds feeding on bread scattered by the homeless. They congregate near the public toilets. Elsewhere along the way, Frisbee folk play a sort of golf game, aiming at poles with baskets for the discs.
Crossing the bridge to “Picnic Island,” densely planted with trees and filled with bird song, I’d also find myself wishing for a flood to wash away the efforts of local government. Here, increasingly, officials dice up public space for private use. A sign outside a nearby condominium warns against feeding the private ducks and catching the private fish in its private lake. Beyond it a private golf course elbows the public path off to the side. There are ninety-seven golf courses in the Valley. Was this one really necessary?
Presently, Laurie and I live beside a golf course and are relegated to paths that circle it. The Dylan song is in my head as we pass new lakes formed in sand-traps and under bridges where golf carts usually whisk along. “Spirit on the water, darkness on the face of the Earth,” I hum. The lines are a gloss on Genesis: “The earth was formless and void, and darkness was over the surface of the deep, and the Spirit of God was moving over the surface of the waters.” An instant river twists through the fairways, although the level has subsided enough to leave tree branches and human debris—cups and plastic bottles, the odd doll head and pair of knickers—along its sides like a ring around a bathtub.
The sun is brilliant again. A few white clouds billow near the horizon, gray and blackness drained out of them. The sparrows that had taken shelter are furiously sorting through the trash. It’s the moment when the dove returns to the ark with the olive branch, and I find myself turning over the idea of being “born again”—me, the natural world. The Christian take comes into my head when Jesus says to Nichodemus, “No one can see the kingdom of God unless he is born again,” and Nichodemus quite naturally asks, “How can a man be born when he is old? Surely he cannot enter a second time into his mother’s womb to be born?” And Jesus cites Genesis, “I tell you the truth, no one can enter the kingdom of God unless he is born of water and the spirit.”
What’s that? We we once little fishies with hands? I hum the next line, where Dylan jauntily juxtaposes earth’s fate to his immediate needs, “I keep thinking of you baby, And I can’t hardly sleep.” Oh yeah, sex and longing, that kind of being reborn. Laurie says she likes when nature gets the upper hand—when the golfers can’t play, and the animals—and us—can wander where we like. I like when nature gets the upper hand in me.
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