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.
Tuesday, April 28, 2009
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.
Thursday, April 9, 2009
"Barry Lyndon" and "Brief Encounter"
Richard
Barry Lyndon and Brief Encounter
Starbucks, June 3, 2008
Barry Lyndon is riding through a shadowy glen that Constable might have painted. A melancholy Irish tune, performed by the Chieftains, plays in the background, and we hear bird song and the echoing snort of his horse in the cold morning air. He stops. Ahead on the path is a silhouetted figure with his back to Barry, and then the man turns with two pistols drawn. We have seen him in the previous scene at an inn, looking on as Barry withdraws coins from a little leather pouch in his vest.
“Good day, young sir,” says the highway man, who introduces himself as Captain Feeney, a notorious and much feared scoundrel, affecting the manners of a gentleman. Another man on horseback enters from the bushes, also with raised pistol, and is introduced as Feeney’s son. In a soft voice but a steady grip on his weapons, Feeney says he will have to relieve the young gentleman of his possessions. Barry pleads with him not to take his money—his inheritance from his mother. Feeney refuses. Barry then asks him not to take his horse. Again he’s politely declined though with the counter offer he may keep his boots. The exchange has the formal structure of a fairy story.
The violence that’s threatened doesn’t disturb the surface of manners and measured argument. A penniless Barry, played by Ryan O’Neil with an expression of permanent confusion, tramps off to the next town, a little more experienced but otherwise unchanged. He enters a scene because he’s compelled to exit the previous one. Before being robbed, he flees a duel fought over a young woman, mistakenly believing he’s killed his rival. After being robbed he feels his only option is to join the army. And so it goes from meticulously etched set piece to set piece, a life forming with little sense of choice or plan, Kubrick suggesting that our choices are framed by inevitabilities. Michael Hordern, striking the ironic notes of Thackeray, reminds us in voiceover that we are molded by our disappointments in a world indifferent to our fate. How could I not be drawn to such a philosophy and such a bewildered character?
At dinner the other night, I told Suzanne that I’d watched the movie again, and she remembered our seeing it in my little house in Old Poole Bank outside Leeds. She said we’d also watched Brief Encounter there and that I'd made a connection between the films. She couldn’t recall it, and neither do I, but I’m wondering how I would compare them now: Kubrick's film (1975) about innocence corrupted, based on Thackeray's 19th Century novel set in the 18th Century, and David Lean's 1946 adaptation of a stage play by Noel Coward (1935) in which a man and woman fall suddenly and desperately in love.
What connects them for me is the strangled emotions in both and the way the main characters struggle with their passions in the contexts of social decorum. In both movies, passion sets people in motion. In Barry Lyndon, we watch a man survive by practicing the deceptions and compromises of those around him. In Brief Encounter, the lovers, played by Celia Johnson and Trevor Howard, forfeit the possibility of being truly known for the sake of their honor and to protect those around them: Laura returns to her dry, unimaginative husband who reads the paper by the fire in their drawing room, while their son is tucked upstairs in his little bed. Alex, a doctor, journeys to Africa with his children and unloved wife.
The films appear to go in different directions, but the characters in both blend into the morals of their surroundings. To Thackeray, the puny individual, battered by life, has little recourse than to become jaded. In Brief Encounter, the couple’s plan to spend the night together is foiled when Alex’s friend innocently returns to his flat to discover their tryst. His disapproval becomes theirs.
No wonder these themes were resonant when I first watched the movies with Suzanne. Only a few weeks earlier I'd left Kim, the woman I spent two years with after Meg and I broke up. Sitting with Suzanne, I was contemplating leaving England to go to the US. What to do? Leap like Ryan O’Neil into the tide of circumstance and risk everything, or swallow my desires like the ill-fated couple? I have always been a Ryan.
Barry Lyndon and Brief Encounter
Starbucks, June 3, 2008
Barry Lyndon is riding through a shadowy glen that Constable might have painted. A melancholy Irish tune, performed by the Chieftains, plays in the background, and we hear bird song and the echoing snort of his horse in the cold morning air. He stops. Ahead on the path is a silhouetted figure with his back to Barry, and then the man turns with two pistols drawn. We have seen him in the previous scene at an inn, looking on as Barry withdraws coins from a little leather pouch in his vest.
“Good day, young sir,” says the highway man, who introduces himself as Captain Feeney, a notorious and much feared scoundrel, affecting the manners of a gentleman. Another man on horseback enters from the bushes, also with raised pistol, and is introduced as Feeney’s son. In a soft voice but a steady grip on his weapons, Feeney says he will have to relieve the young gentleman of his possessions. Barry pleads with him not to take his money—his inheritance from his mother. Feeney refuses. Barry then asks him not to take his horse. Again he’s politely declined though with the counter offer he may keep his boots. The exchange has the formal structure of a fairy story.
The violence that’s threatened doesn’t disturb the surface of manners and measured argument. A penniless Barry, played by Ryan O’Neil with an expression of permanent confusion, tramps off to the next town, a little more experienced but otherwise unchanged. He enters a scene because he’s compelled to exit the previous one. Before being robbed, he flees a duel fought over a young woman, mistakenly believing he’s killed his rival. After being robbed he feels his only option is to join the army. And so it goes from meticulously etched set piece to set piece, a life forming with little sense of choice or plan, Kubrick suggesting that our choices are framed by inevitabilities. Michael Hordern, striking the ironic notes of Thackeray, reminds us in voiceover that we are molded by our disappointments in a world indifferent to our fate. How could I not be drawn to such a philosophy and such a bewildered character?
At dinner the other night, I told Suzanne that I’d watched the movie again, and she remembered our seeing it in my little house in Old Poole Bank outside Leeds. She said we’d also watched Brief Encounter there and that I'd made a connection between the films. She couldn’t recall it, and neither do I, but I’m wondering how I would compare them now: Kubrick's film (1975) about innocence corrupted, based on Thackeray's 19th Century novel set in the 18th Century, and David Lean's 1946 adaptation of a stage play by Noel Coward (1935) in which a man and woman fall suddenly and desperately in love.
What connects them for me is the strangled emotions in both and the way the main characters struggle with their passions in the contexts of social decorum. In both movies, passion sets people in motion. In Barry Lyndon, we watch a man survive by practicing the deceptions and compromises of those around him. In Brief Encounter, the lovers, played by Celia Johnson and Trevor Howard, forfeit the possibility of being truly known for the sake of their honor and to protect those around them: Laura returns to her dry, unimaginative husband who reads the paper by the fire in their drawing room, while their son is tucked upstairs in his little bed. Alex, a doctor, journeys to Africa with his children and unloved wife.
The films appear to go in different directions, but the characters in both blend into the morals of their surroundings. To Thackeray, the puny individual, battered by life, has little recourse than to become jaded. In Brief Encounter, the couple’s plan to spend the night together is foiled when Alex’s friend innocently returns to his flat to discover their tryst. His disapproval becomes theirs.
No wonder these themes were resonant when I first watched the movies with Suzanne. Only a few weeks earlier I'd left Kim, the woman I spent two years with after Meg and I broke up. Sitting with Suzanne, I was contemplating leaving England to go to the US. What to do? Leap like Ryan O’Neil into the tide of circumstance and risk everything, or swallow my desires like the ill-fated couple? I have always been a Ryan.
Wednesday, April 8, 2009
A photograph of yourself you like
Richard
A photograph of yourself you like
Starbucks, May 29, 2007
I’m five. My face is round, and I’m beaming at the camera, one milk tooth missing. It’s 1955, and the picture is a grainy black and white, three inches square, snapped at the infants’ school where each child sits for the camera. You can see my wrinkled shirt with one side of the collar askew. I sport a tie I am too young to do up myself. Mum slips the plaid strip around my upturned collar and with a mysterious swirl brings it up under my chin into a perfect knot. I love her simply.
You see my head and upper body, but I can reconstruct the 1950’s school-child clothing I’ve got on: the woolen jumper, knitted by Auntie Tiz, you can make out, but below are grey shorts, long grey woolen socks, and brown crepe-soled sandals with difficult buckles an adult has to fasten. The day of the photograph I jump up to grab a steel pipe jutting into the playground. Some girls are watching, so I pull myself up and twirl over the top like an acrobat. I fall and hit my head and in the afternoon go home feeling dizzy. I am dizzy for two days with mild concussion, although nobody sends for the doctor.
I go to school and come home, and the world, close to the house, is where I run. We have a typical, 1950’s suburban garden with large tulips whose heads I peer into, sensing that the long, pollen covered stamens relate to things continuing in time. The neighbors have is a monkey-puzzle tree in their front yard with dark, viciously jagged leaves. I picture monkeys scratching their heads. How do I climb it?
Two years earlier, our family has joined a group of neighbors to watch the Queen’s coronation on the only TV on the road. It’s a party. Roy has a metal die-cast model of the coronation coach, and I wonder if it’s real gold. I run after him, toward him, away from him, still. Little sister Lynn is in line after me, and I enter her world with pleasure and a sense of responsibility, an alternative to Roy’s model planes and stamps. I botch up his kits, and in the future I will steal and sell his collection of stamps. I drink tiny cups of tea with Lynn set on tiny saucers.
We’re called Bevin’s babies, post-war children brought up with the helping hand of the welfare state, masterminded by Ernest Bevin, Minister of Labor in the Socialist government that succeeds Churchill after the war. The people long for full employment and an end to rationing. We are weighed by the visiting nurse, who drives up to our house in a little Morris Minor. She checks to see if we’re taking cod liver oil, concentrated orange juice, and rosehip syrup.
The unions are strong, the railways nationalized, and we play in the scrap heaps of the war, still not cleared ten years after its end. Dad remembers being cut off behind enemy lines in the Battle of the Bulge and sharing his last piece of chocolate with his friend Jack. Mum took the train down to see him before he was demobed at Netherwalop on the south coast. The coziness of this time is already draining. Long miner’s strikes, which will mean no coal for the fires that heat our house and many like ours, are just around the corner. We are witnessing the last dismantling of the British Empire. It is perhaps the reason that the adults—far from seats of power and influence—welcome the new Queen, symbol of domestic tranquility and a return to old values. But this world be swept away. And there I am, grinning on that photograph, ready to run.
A photograph of yourself you like
Starbucks, May 29, 2007
I’m five. My face is round, and I’m beaming at the camera, one milk tooth missing. It’s 1955, and the picture is a grainy black and white, three inches square, snapped at the infants’ school where each child sits for the camera. You can see my wrinkled shirt with one side of the collar askew. I sport a tie I am too young to do up myself. Mum slips the plaid strip around my upturned collar and with a mysterious swirl brings it up under my chin into a perfect knot. I love her simply.
You see my head and upper body, but I can reconstruct the 1950’s school-child clothing I’ve got on: the woolen jumper, knitted by Auntie Tiz, you can make out, but below are grey shorts, long grey woolen socks, and brown crepe-soled sandals with difficult buckles an adult has to fasten. The day of the photograph I jump up to grab a steel pipe jutting into the playground. Some girls are watching, so I pull myself up and twirl over the top like an acrobat. I fall and hit my head and in the afternoon go home feeling dizzy. I am dizzy for two days with mild concussion, although nobody sends for the doctor.
I go to school and come home, and the world, close to the house, is where I run. We have a typical, 1950’s suburban garden with large tulips whose heads I peer into, sensing that the long, pollen covered stamens relate to things continuing in time. The neighbors have is a monkey-puzzle tree in their front yard with dark, viciously jagged leaves. I picture monkeys scratching their heads. How do I climb it?
Two years earlier, our family has joined a group of neighbors to watch the Queen’s coronation on the only TV on the road. It’s a party. Roy has a metal die-cast model of the coronation coach, and I wonder if it’s real gold. I run after him, toward him, away from him, still. Little sister Lynn is in line after me, and I enter her world with pleasure and a sense of responsibility, an alternative to Roy’s model planes and stamps. I botch up his kits, and in the future I will steal and sell his collection of stamps. I drink tiny cups of tea with Lynn set on tiny saucers.
We’re called Bevin’s babies, post-war children brought up with the helping hand of the welfare state, masterminded by Ernest Bevin, Minister of Labor in the Socialist government that succeeds Churchill after the war. The people long for full employment and an end to rationing. We are weighed by the visiting nurse, who drives up to our house in a little Morris Minor. She checks to see if we’re taking cod liver oil, concentrated orange juice, and rosehip syrup.
The unions are strong, the railways nationalized, and we play in the scrap heaps of the war, still not cleared ten years after its end. Dad remembers being cut off behind enemy lines in the Battle of the Bulge and sharing his last piece of chocolate with his friend Jack. Mum took the train down to see him before he was demobed at Netherwalop on the south coast. The coziness of this time is already draining. Long miner’s strikes, which will mean no coal for the fires that heat our house and many like ours, are just around the corner. We are witnessing the last dismantling of the British Empire. It is perhaps the reason that the adults—far from seats of power and influence—welcome the new Queen, symbol of domestic tranquility and a return to old values. But this world be swept away. And there I am, grinning on that photograph, ready to run.
Tuesday, April 7, 2009
Chosen
Richard
Chosen
Starbucks, June 21, 08
It’s 8:30 in the morning, and I’m leaving my doctor’s office on York Avenue and 70th Street, briskly walking north toward the 86th Street subway, plenty of time to arrive downtown by nine. It’s late spring. The light is bright, the air unusually mild, and I’m lost in the bustle. Cabs trawl for passengers close to the curb. Ambulances stream toward New York Hospital, where workers in scrubs stand outside smoking. Amid the swim of New Yorkers on their way somewhere, I’m in my head, where I prefer to be, separate and anonymous, when a man suddenly steps in front of me and bars my way. I move to one side, and so does he. He’s wearing a heavy, soiled grey overcoat and a black knitted cap pulled close to his eyes. He’s young, early thirties, with the burnished tan of a street person. I catch a wild look in his eyes as he stretches an open hand toward me. “Change,” he says, more a demand than a request. I try to step around him, but again he matches my moves. I feel targeted, but it’s not my training or temperament to react publicly. I’d rather not be confronted, but I’m living in New York, so that’s like wishing for a field of heather to materialize on a traffic island. I left behind the English village where I grew up because I felt protected from what cities tell you, but I don’t want to be reminded of these things now.
“No thanks,” I say, looking straight at him, my illogic a sort of bravado. He stands his ground. “What the fuck does that mean?” Again and louder he says, “Change!” I’m impressed by his crazy resolve while I slide into my inevitable surrender. I feel in my pocket for change and put it in his damp palm, feeling as if I’ve forfeited some part of myself by complying, in the same measure he has contorted his character by begging. What has brought him to this place? That is one of the urban questions I don’t want to think about. As he looks down to count the money, I make my escape into the shoal of fish swimming toward jobs while the beggar stands apart.
Five minutes later, I am moving north on Park when I feel a sharp pinch on the back of my neck. I duck and turn. The beggar has followed me. He has grabbed my neck with his thumb and fingers. “What are you doing?” I yell, my heart beating furiously. “Fuck you, fuck you,” he shouts back. I turn and walk away, leaving him ranting, and it looks as if I’ve made another escape, that I’m free. But I’m shaken that he has chosen me, not once but twice. We have a relationship. Those fingers, his hands, intimate and terrifying. Why is he so angry? Because I looked him in the eye and at first said no? That I speak with a foreign accent and wear a clean coat? Do his actions have anything to do with me?
In the subway, I feel his pinch on my neck. At work I can’t concentrate and leave after lunch. I smell his greasy fingers. When Suzanne gets home, I ask her to see if there’s a mark on my neck, and I’m surprised when she says there isn’t. I awake in the night, sensing his presence in the room. I turn on the light and search. If he could follow me up many blocks, he can find my home. Suzanne says, “It’s nothing. Please come back to bed.” For days, I rub the spot he has touched, expecting to find the smear of him on my fingers. I remember his indignation and catch a whiff of myself. He doesn’t want to be ignored. Exactly like me, except he’s on fire and I’m, well, smoldering. Isn’t it always that way with the doubles who seek us out? Why aren’t I him and him me? I keep asking people, “Do you smell something funny?”
Chosen
Starbucks, June 21, 08
It’s 8:30 in the morning, and I’m leaving my doctor’s office on York Avenue and 70th Street, briskly walking north toward the 86th Street subway, plenty of time to arrive downtown by nine. It’s late spring. The light is bright, the air unusually mild, and I’m lost in the bustle. Cabs trawl for passengers close to the curb. Ambulances stream toward New York Hospital, where workers in scrubs stand outside smoking. Amid the swim of New Yorkers on their way somewhere, I’m in my head, where I prefer to be, separate and anonymous, when a man suddenly steps in front of me and bars my way. I move to one side, and so does he. He’s wearing a heavy, soiled grey overcoat and a black knitted cap pulled close to his eyes. He’s young, early thirties, with the burnished tan of a street person. I catch a wild look in his eyes as he stretches an open hand toward me. “Change,” he says, more a demand than a request. I try to step around him, but again he matches my moves. I feel targeted, but it’s not my training or temperament to react publicly. I’d rather not be confronted, but I’m living in New York, so that’s like wishing for a field of heather to materialize on a traffic island. I left behind the English village where I grew up because I felt protected from what cities tell you, but I don’t want to be reminded of these things now.
“No thanks,” I say, looking straight at him, my illogic a sort of bravado. He stands his ground. “What the fuck does that mean?” Again and louder he says, “Change!” I’m impressed by his crazy resolve while I slide into my inevitable surrender. I feel in my pocket for change and put it in his damp palm, feeling as if I’ve forfeited some part of myself by complying, in the same measure he has contorted his character by begging. What has brought him to this place? That is one of the urban questions I don’t want to think about. As he looks down to count the money, I make my escape into the shoal of fish swimming toward jobs while the beggar stands apart.
Five minutes later, I am moving north on Park when I feel a sharp pinch on the back of my neck. I duck and turn. The beggar has followed me. He has grabbed my neck with his thumb and fingers. “What are you doing?” I yell, my heart beating furiously. “Fuck you, fuck you,” he shouts back. I turn and walk away, leaving him ranting, and it looks as if I’ve made another escape, that I’m free. But I’m shaken that he has chosen me, not once but twice. We have a relationship. Those fingers, his hands, intimate and terrifying. Why is he so angry? Because I looked him in the eye and at first said no? That I speak with a foreign accent and wear a clean coat? Do his actions have anything to do with me?
In the subway, I feel his pinch on my neck. At work I can’t concentrate and leave after lunch. I smell his greasy fingers. When Suzanne gets home, I ask her to see if there’s a mark on my neck, and I’m surprised when she says there isn’t. I awake in the night, sensing his presence in the room. I turn on the light and search. If he could follow me up many blocks, he can find my home. Suzanne says, “It’s nothing. Please come back to bed.” For days, I rub the spot he has touched, expecting to find the smear of him on my fingers. I remember his indignation and catch a whiff of myself. He doesn’t want to be ignored. Exactly like me, except he’s on fire and I’m, well, smoldering. Isn’t it always that way with the doubles who seek us out? Why aren’t I him and him me? I keep asking people, “Do you smell something funny?”
Monday, April 6, 2009
The Way We Were
Laurie
The Way We Were
Starbucks, December 31, 2007
In The Way We Were, frizzy-haired Barbra Streisand longs for golden Robert Redford. It’s 1944, and she sees her college crush at El Morocco, dashing in a white naval officer’s jacket and dead asleep on a bar stool. The film, lushly photographed and scored, is schmaltzy in an unusual way: the lovers don’t mesh.
In Sex and the City, Carrie Bradshaw is similarly in thrall to Big, who resists her, and in one episode she replays the last scene of The Way We Were where Streisand’s Katy spots her ex-husband, Redford’s Hubble, in front of the Plaza Hotel, where he’s just married a pretty, young double of his Waspy college girlfriend. She smooths his hair saying, “Your girl is lovely,” and Carrie says the same thing to Big after he marries a Park Avenue socialite.
The Way We Were explores love that doesn’t end because it can't be gratified, and by centering on female desire it broke ground in 1973. Instead of floating moodily through male fantasies, the movie centers on a knowable female character. Hubble is the Garboesque figure: iconic, mysterious, and unable to articulate himself. Sex and the City goes a step further by suggesting that Carrie loves Big because he isn’t knowable or present; the blank of him offers space for the renewal of fantasy, a state she prefers to the unsexy repetitions of domesticity. Katy and Carrie try to discover what’s inside aloof men, but it’s impossible because the men are unknown to themselves.
The eros of unfulfillment is hope, these works show. Watching The Way We Were, we like to believe that the blue-eyed American will adore the passionate Jewish girl. We like to think that America will tuck the huddled masses into its voluminous coat. We liked to imagine that the brains and compassion of the funny-looking girl will outstrip her large nose and unsensual mouth and that she will stop proving and schlepping and melt into the beautiful man. We want to believe he will want her. That's all he needs to do. But he wants less from life and from himself. Her attraction to him makes him interested in himself, and he’s attracted to her attraction more then to her. Her belief in his talent makes him think he can be a writer, but writers need something they burn to say, and Hubble doesn’t want to speak. Redford is a fascinatingly frustrating presence on screen. As he paces silently, looking sideways at anything but the situation he finds himself in, his bottled emotions peek out of his eyes like hostages in a bank robbery before they are corralled out of sight.
The Way We Were
Starbucks, December 31, 2007
In The Way We Were, frizzy-haired Barbra Streisand longs for golden Robert Redford. It’s 1944, and she sees her college crush at El Morocco, dashing in a white naval officer’s jacket and dead asleep on a bar stool. The film, lushly photographed and scored, is schmaltzy in an unusual way: the lovers don’t mesh.
In Sex and the City, Carrie Bradshaw is similarly in thrall to Big, who resists her, and in one episode she replays the last scene of The Way We Were where Streisand’s Katy spots her ex-husband, Redford’s Hubble, in front of the Plaza Hotel, where he’s just married a pretty, young double of his Waspy college girlfriend. She smooths his hair saying, “Your girl is lovely,” and Carrie says the same thing to Big after he marries a Park Avenue socialite.
The Way We Were explores love that doesn’t end because it can't be gratified, and by centering on female desire it broke ground in 1973. Instead of floating moodily through male fantasies, the movie centers on a knowable female character. Hubble is the Garboesque figure: iconic, mysterious, and unable to articulate himself. Sex and the City goes a step further by suggesting that Carrie loves Big because he isn’t knowable or present; the blank of him offers space for the renewal of fantasy, a state she prefers to the unsexy repetitions of domesticity. Katy and Carrie try to discover what’s inside aloof men, but it’s impossible because the men are unknown to themselves.
The eros of unfulfillment is hope, these works show. Watching The Way We Were, we like to believe that the blue-eyed American will adore the passionate Jewish girl. We like to think that America will tuck the huddled masses into its voluminous coat. We liked to imagine that the brains and compassion of the funny-looking girl will outstrip her large nose and unsensual mouth and that she will stop proving and schlepping and melt into the beautiful man. We want to believe he will want her. That's all he needs to do. But he wants less from life and from himself. Her attraction to him makes him interested in himself, and he’s attracted to her attraction more then to her. Her belief in his talent makes him think he can be a writer, but writers need something they burn to say, and Hubble doesn’t want to speak. Redford is a fascinatingly frustrating presence on screen. As he paces silently, looking sideways at anything but the situation he finds himself in, his bottled emotions peek out of his eyes like hostages in a bank robbery before they are corralled out of sight.
In two days we leave for New York
Richard
In two days we leave for New York
Starbucks, December 17, 2007
I feel trepidation and joy.
1. Laurie’s apartment is on the Upper West Side where Suzanne and I lived some twenty years ago. I expect my ghost is still at the Three Brothers Diner on Columbus Avenue, pressing waiters to deliver the sandwich I actually ordered.
2. We'll be staying in Laurie's place where I’ll visit her life before I arrived in it. I’ll see Gardner’s furniture and the rest, and like an archeologist interpreting the hieroglyphics of another time, I’ll try to decipher their meanings.
3. We’ll be moving in on Alan, with whom Laurie has shared a sexless though oddly eroticized friendship for many years. He will be strange with me and I with him, and we will both think the other strange, and Laurie will have the bother of making the best of it.
4. I have never felt myself to be an object of beauty or any sort of object of contemplation, but Laurie will exhibit me to her friends, and I will do my best to be an object. I want to behave well and be beautiful enough for her to be proud.
5. And I will remember my old life in the city and miss it. I will remember the subways, and I will want to run away from Arizona and be an artist, but I am not an artist. I cannot be an artist, and I cannot run away.
6. I fear meeting old friends in the streets. The fear I have here of bumping into Suzanne everywhere we go will be transferred there, and I will have to confront what this really means. I have no idea, and if I had one, I wouldn’t mention it.
7. I want to go to museums and see "ground zero." The differences will creep up on me.
8. I imagine all sorts of fears in meeting Laurie's mother. When I do, it will be as if Laurie and I are married and I am the inscutable son-in-law, regarding the frail and formidable Toby, a person I can’t wrap my head around, despite the many descriptions of her Laurie has spoken and written.
9. I will be frozen, my blood having thinned in the scorching desert air. My blood hasn’t really thinned. I perspire on a larger percentage of my body than the average New Yorker, and therefore feel cold more intensely. I will be wrapped up, and I will love the city at Christmas.
10. I will be tired and won't be in good shape to meet Laurie’s sister. But she will be nice and ease my awkwardness.
11. I want desperately for Laurie and I not to fight, but I worry we will. I have not come up with a way out when we do.
12. I have decided not to be neurotic and enjoy the ride. Ha.
In two days we leave for New York
Starbucks, December 17, 2007
I feel trepidation and joy.
1. Laurie’s apartment is on the Upper West Side where Suzanne and I lived some twenty years ago. I expect my ghost is still at the Three Brothers Diner on Columbus Avenue, pressing waiters to deliver the sandwich I actually ordered.
2. We'll be staying in Laurie's place where I’ll visit her life before I arrived in it. I’ll see Gardner’s furniture and the rest, and like an archeologist interpreting the hieroglyphics of another time, I’ll try to decipher their meanings.
3. We’ll be moving in on Alan, with whom Laurie has shared a sexless though oddly eroticized friendship for many years. He will be strange with me and I with him, and we will both think the other strange, and Laurie will have the bother of making the best of it.
4. I have never felt myself to be an object of beauty or any sort of object of contemplation, but Laurie will exhibit me to her friends, and I will do my best to be an object. I want to behave well and be beautiful enough for her to be proud.
5. And I will remember my old life in the city and miss it. I will remember the subways, and I will want to run away from Arizona and be an artist, but I am not an artist. I cannot be an artist, and I cannot run away.
6. I fear meeting old friends in the streets. The fear I have here of bumping into Suzanne everywhere we go will be transferred there, and I will have to confront what this really means. I have no idea, and if I had one, I wouldn’t mention it.
7. I want to go to museums and see "ground zero." The differences will creep up on me.
8. I imagine all sorts of fears in meeting Laurie's mother. When I do, it will be as if Laurie and I are married and I am the inscutable son-in-law, regarding the frail and formidable Toby, a person I can’t wrap my head around, despite the many descriptions of her Laurie has spoken and written.
9. I will be frozen, my blood having thinned in the scorching desert air. My blood hasn’t really thinned. I perspire on a larger percentage of my body than the average New Yorker, and therefore feel cold more intensely. I will be wrapped up, and I will love the city at Christmas.
10. I will be tired and won't be in good shape to meet Laurie’s sister. But she will be nice and ease my awkwardness.
11. I want desperately for Laurie and I not to fight, but I worry we will. I have not come up with a way out when we do.
12. I have decided not to be neurotic and enjoy the ride. Ha.
New Year's Eve
Richard
New Year’s Eve
Westin Hotel, December 31, 2008
It’s 1984, and I’m in New York City, and Alex, a friend of Suzanne’s, invites us to the top of the Paramount Building on Times Square. It’s where he practices entertainment law. The windows are thrown open and we gaze down on a million people below, huddled in the frigid air inside police barriers. You need passes to get in, and like VIPs we’ve been escorted by a policeman through the crowd.
The music swings, the food is opulent and abundant, and looking down at the people below I remember The Third Man, the scene when Orson Wells is on the ferris wheel and he says to Joseph Cotton, “Look down there. Tell me. Would you really feel any pity if one of those dots stopped moving forever? If I offered you twenty thousand pounds for every dot that stopped, would you really, old man, tell me to keep my money, or would you calculate how many dots you could afford to spare?”
Which character am I, and how have I arrived here? Here’s the sort of New Year’s celebration I remember as a kid. It’s 1955, and I am five and allowed to stay up late to watch the White Heather Club on the BBC. On the show dour Scottish people dance in formation to wailing bag-pipes and an announcer in kilt explains the traditions of Hogmanay, including the practice of “first footings” when a friend beats everyone else across your threshold with the gift of a herring. My dad leaves the house inexplicably and returns with a lump of coal. He and Mum top off the evening with a small glass of Ruby Sherry, and then we all go to bed.
Alex is handsome and generous, and he wants to impress me. Later, he will have an affair with a woman who has desired me, another friend of Suzanne’s whom I will decline, although she is beautiful and sexy the way New York feels to me. People jam the party, and Alex says to a small group of us, “Come on. Let’s go to the clock.” And we take the elevator up a few more floors and climb a stairway, Alex leading, egging us on and looking back over his shoulder with a daring sneer. It’s a few minutes before midnight, and we proceed in darkness along a mesh gang-way toward the giant clock, and the wind catches the roar of the crowd and sweeps it to where we stand in the freezing currents. It sounds like the ocean, and I lean over the railing as if on a bowsprit, feeling dizzy and elated, trapped and invincible.
I write this story in the Westin Hotel near where we live in Scottsdale. It’s New Year’s Eve, 2008, and Laurie wants to celebrate with strangers. We’re working on our prompts as revelers anticipate midnight’s arrival. Michael Buble croons “Just the way you look tonight” on the sound system, and a few feet from where we sit on arm chairs a couple with fixed smiles, hired to infuse an atmosphere of romance into the proceedings, are twirling with the carved moves of contestants on Dancing wth the Stars. Overweight men in their sixties wear tuxedos with plaid cummerbunds and patent leather shoes. The women on their arms, unsteady and self-conscious in stilettos, totter along in sparkling gowns. My sexy New Yorker and I are amused to find we’ve stumbled into a future that looks like the past, not quite the cheerless formality of my Scottish/English family party, more like the New Year’s Eve episode of Mad Men. It’s the time travel strangeness I recognize as myself, and looking across at Laurie who is writing, I feel our practice together connects me to this time and place.
New Year’s Eve
Westin Hotel, December 31, 2008
It’s 1984, and I’m in New York City, and Alex, a friend of Suzanne’s, invites us to the top of the Paramount Building on Times Square. It’s where he practices entertainment law. The windows are thrown open and we gaze down on a million people below, huddled in the frigid air inside police barriers. You need passes to get in, and like VIPs we’ve been escorted by a policeman through the crowd.
The music swings, the food is opulent and abundant, and looking down at the people below I remember The Third Man, the scene when Orson Wells is on the ferris wheel and he says to Joseph Cotton, “Look down there. Tell me. Would you really feel any pity if one of those dots stopped moving forever? If I offered you twenty thousand pounds for every dot that stopped, would you really, old man, tell me to keep my money, or would you calculate how many dots you could afford to spare?”
Which character am I, and how have I arrived here? Here’s the sort of New Year’s celebration I remember as a kid. It’s 1955, and I am five and allowed to stay up late to watch the White Heather Club on the BBC. On the show dour Scottish people dance in formation to wailing bag-pipes and an announcer in kilt explains the traditions of Hogmanay, including the practice of “first footings” when a friend beats everyone else across your threshold with the gift of a herring. My dad leaves the house inexplicably and returns with a lump of coal. He and Mum top off the evening with a small glass of Ruby Sherry, and then we all go to bed.
Alex is handsome and generous, and he wants to impress me. Later, he will have an affair with a woman who has desired me, another friend of Suzanne’s whom I will decline, although she is beautiful and sexy the way New York feels to me. People jam the party, and Alex says to a small group of us, “Come on. Let’s go to the clock.” And we take the elevator up a few more floors and climb a stairway, Alex leading, egging us on and looking back over his shoulder with a daring sneer. It’s a few minutes before midnight, and we proceed in darkness along a mesh gang-way toward the giant clock, and the wind catches the roar of the crowd and sweeps it to where we stand in the freezing currents. It sounds like the ocean, and I lean over the railing as if on a bowsprit, feeling dizzy and elated, trapped and invincible.
I write this story in the Westin Hotel near where we live in Scottsdale. It’s New Year’s Eve, 2008, and Laurie wants to celebrate with strangers. We’re working on our prompts as revelers anticipate midnight’s arrival. Michael Buble croons “Just the way you look tonight” on the sound system, and a few feet from where we sit on arm chairs a couple with fixed smiles, hired to infuse an atmosphere of romance into the proceedings, are twirling with the carved moves of contestants on Dancing wth the Stars. Overweight men in their sixties wear tuxedos with plaid cummerbunds and patent leather shoes. The women on their arms, unsteady and self-conscious in stilettos, totter along in sparkling gowns. My sexy New Yorker and I are amused to find we’ve stumbled into a future that looks like the past, not quite the cheerless formality of my Scottish/English family party, more like the New Year’s Eve episode of Mad Men. It’s the time travel strangeness I recognize as myself, and looking across at Laurie who is writing, I feel our practice together connects me to this time and place.
Your blood wrong
Laurie
Your blood wrong
Starbucks, November 26, 2007
I found the phrase, “your blood wrong,” in a poem by Catherine Wing, my friend, and I experimented with her technique of word associations. After a while I saw that, unconsciously, I was evoking Richard as a diabetic and as a prodigal son about to visit his family in England.
You are lying on the pavement, and your blood is green. You are a tree on the lam, a karate chop. The sidewalk is paved, the pavement blindsided. You skateboard down the fire escape, past the door jamb and the jambon. No one thinks about the lamb.
You are lying on Madison Avenue on one of the busiest shopping days. People step around you in ankle boots. “Pull up to the curb or pull a fast one,” they say. “Come to the Casbah or come clean.” You shiver. A chalk outline rings the crime scene, and you feel recognized—Lana Turner in Schwab’s Drugstore, thumbnailed and fingered.
Your blood is mint while your father’s voice is a crowbar. The house is burning, but you only now smell smoke. “To be honest,” you say, “I have a plan.”
You always wanted to be wrong blooded. Brando and Belmondo and Bogart splayed out on the street. You can't get out of your way you are so straight as the gate, so gates of hell, so hell of a guy. You so innocent as a bug, so bumblebee making money honey, and as your throat clears the buzz and as you lift your bag and brush off your tail, the crowd parts. It’s warm for December because the past is burning. You inhale New York with a sense of occasion, asking for tea. “It was the sugar,” you say, “a little high, a little low.” It's hard to adjust when you’re day for night, when you’re wrong for right, and you shoot a smile of surrender, feeling your tree limb and your pavement pound. “What’s in your blood,” your father says, “is out of our hands.”
Your blood wrong
Starbucks, November 26, 2007
I found the phrase, “your blood wrong,” in a poem by Catherine Wing, my friend, and I experimented with her technique of word associations. After a while I saw that, unconsciously, I was evoking Richard as a diabetic and as a prodigal son about to visit his family in England.
You are lying on the pavement, and your blood is green. You are a tree on the lam, a karate chop. The sidewalk is paved, the pavement blindsided. You skateboard down the fire escape, past the door jamb and the jambon. No one thinks about the lamb.
You are lying on Madison Avenue on one of the busiest shopping days. People step around you in ankle boots. “Pull up to the curb or pull a fast one,” they say. “Come to the Casbah or come clean.” You shiver. A chalk outline rings the crime scene, and you feel recognized—Lana Turner in Schwab’s Drugstore, thumbnailed and fingered.
Your blood is mint while your father’s voice is a crowbar. The house is burning, but you only now smell smoke. “To be honest,” you say, “I have a plan.”
You always wanted to be wrong blooded. Brando and Belmondo and Bogart splayed out on the street. You can't get out of your way you are so straight as the gate, so gates of hell, so hell of a guy. You so innocent as a bug, so bumblebee making money honey, and as your throat clears the buzz and as you lift your bag and brush off your tail, the crowd parts. It’s warm for December because the past is burning. You inhale New York with a sense of occasion, asking for tea. “It was the sugar,” you say, “a little high, a little low.” It's hard to adjust when you’re day for night, when you’re wrong for right, and you shoot a smile of surrender, feeling your tree limb and your pavement pound. “What’s in your blood,” your father says, “is out of our hands.”
Sunday, April 5, 2009
Impulse
Laurie
Impulse
March 9, 2009, Pain Quotidien
I am standing on the curb outside the Atlanta airport when a black car pulls up and a bald man with a paunch gets out and pops his trunk. I look for the curly-haired, 16-year-old Danny Schwartzberg in his face, the boy I sat with on the lawn at Woodmere Academy. He’s a senior, and I’m a junior, and he makes me laugh. He’s sarcastic or cynical. Smart, not flirty. I don’t try to attract him. Maybe we're not attractive. I’m fat. He’s kind. I feel a little separate from the others, a little bored, but the boredom is with myself. I’ve moved from the suburbs back to the city and I’m wandering the Village, pretending to be a flanneur—a fancy word for a lonely, awkward girl.
Danny lifts my suitcase into his trunk and as he sets my computer next to it shoots me a sideways grin. “You’re brave, aren’t you?” On the phone he has said he drives a Mercedes, but I don’t know one car from the next. I think: “You really come from Woodmere. You really are a doctor.” I slip into the passenger seat and ask why he thinks I’m brave. Bach is playing. “Well,” he says, “you call a stranger and get into his car.” It’s 46 years since we sat on the grass. It’s 1963 and Kennedy has been shot and Marilyn has died the summer before. I don’t know anyone in the Village as I nose around the cafes and sit in the park, studying beatniks with limbs entwined and folkies strumming guitars. I want to wear black tights and eyeliner and swing along with twig arms. I think these black-garbed girls know a way for me to slip out of my family.
On the van to Atlanta I meet an Indian man who does brain research. He loves his lab, his zebra fish, his kids, his wife. He wears a jaunty wool cap, and his front tooth is chipped, making his goofy smile winning. He is doing what he has chosen to do, and he thinks I have done the same, and we talk for two hours about how brains are emergent systems, how they create themselves, and he describes the protein he is studying that is either turned on or turned off, allowing the brain to differentiate its functions. I like him so much that I’m a little worn out by the time I meet Danny, who sits across from me in the retro restaurant we go to, and for another two hours we discuss mirror neurons, consciousness, and tumors, for Danny is a neuroradiologist who has earned enough money to retire and teach. We order eggs and sausage, but Danny is still hungry after the meal and eats a second breakfast. He doesn’t ask about writing, says he’s never married, explains he went to medical school after discovering he didn’t have the chops for math.
On the phone before we meet, establishing how to recognize each other, he says, “I’m gigantically obese and have no hair and a fat neck, and there are tufts growing out of my nose and ears.” He’s being funny, but I think he believes this. We drive past his house in a little wooded ravine, and I don’t know what to make of his life. Maybe it’s foolish to phone someone out of the blue and imagine they will be what you remember or want—someone as easy as the scientist on the van who pleasingly reflects me back to myself. Maybe I’ve made up the memory of Danny and me on the grass. He has a different recollection I’ve forgotten. After college, we cross paths in New York, and I say I was a “schmuck” at Woodmere Academy. Would I ever use such a word? I’m rubbed that he’s preserved a sour-sounding person, while I’ve retained a laughing, generous boy. But the real Danny is spending two and half hours entertaining a stranger, and I appreciate the meal, the conversation, the drive. What does he make of choices that have cast me far from the rewards of professional success? I’m glad I didn’t worry about the meeting, just let it play through, and as he stands beside his car, the lanky kid with a mop of dark curls emerges behind the scrim.
Impulse
March 9, 2009, Pain Quotidien
I am standing on the curb outside the Atlanta airport when a black car pulls up and a bald man with a paunch gets out and pops his trunk. I look for the curly-haired, 16-year-old Danny Schwartzberg in his face, the boy I sat with on the lawn at Woodmere Academy. He’s a senior, and I’m a junior, and he makes me laugh. He’s sarcastic or cynical. Smart, not flirty. I don’t try to attract him. Maybe we're not attractive. I’m fat. He’s kind. I feel a little separate from the others, a little bored, but the boredom is with myself. I’ve moved from the suburbs back to the city and I’m wandering the Village, pretending to be a flanneur—a fancy word for a lonely, awkward girl.
Danny lifts my suitcase into his trunk and as he sets my computer next to it shoots me a sideways grin. “You’re brave, aren’t you?” On the phone he has said he drives a Mercedes, but I don’t know one car from the next. I think: “You really come from Woodmere. You really are a doctor.” I slip into the passenger seat and ask why he thinks I’m brave. Bach is playing. “Well,” he says, “you call a stranger and get into his car.” It’s 46 years since we sat on the grass. It’s 1963 and Kennedy has been shot and Marilyn has died the summer before. I don’t know anyone in the Village as I nose around the cafes and sit in the park, studying beatniks with limbs entwined and folkies strumming guitars. I want to wear black tights and eyeliner and swing along with twig arms. I think these black-garbed girls know a way for me to slip out of my family.
On the van to Atlanta I meet an Indian man who does brain research. He loves his lab, his zebra fish, his kids, his wife. He wears a jaunty wool cap, and his front tooth is chipped, making his goofy smile winning. He is doing what he has chosen to do, and he thinks I have done the same, and we talk for two hours about how brains are emergent systems, how they create themselves, and he describes the protein he is studying that is either turned on or turned off, allowing the brain to differentiate its functions. I like him so much that I’m a little worn out by the time I meet Danny, who sits across from me in the retro restaurant we go to, and for another two hours we discuss mirror neurons, consciousness, and tumors, for Danny is a neuroradiologist who has earned enough money to retire and teach. We order eggs and sausage, but Danny is still hungry after the meal and eats a second breakfast. He doesn’t ask about writing, says he’s never married, explains he went to medical school after discovering he didn’t have the chops for math.
On the phone before we meet, establishing how to recognize each other, he says, “I’m gigantically obese and have no hair and a fat neck, and there are tufts growing out of my nose and ears.” He’s being funny, but I think he believes this. We drive past his house in a little wooded ravine, and I don’t know what to make of his life. Maybe it’s foolish to phone someone out of the blue and imagine they will be what you remember or want—someone as easy as the scientist on the van who pleasingly reflects me back to myself. Maybe I’ve made up the memory of Danny and me on the grass. He has a different recollection I’ve forgotten. After college, we cross paths in New York, and I say I was a “schmuck” at Woodmere Academy. Would I ever use such a word? I’m rubbed that he’s preserved a sour-sounding person, while I’ve retained a laughing, generous boy. But the real Danny is spending two and half hours entertaining a stranger, and I appreciate the meal, the conversation, the drive. What does he make of choices that have cast me far from the rewards of professional success? I’m glad I didn’t worry about the meeting, just let it play through, and as he stands beside his car, the lanky kid with a mop of dark curls emerges behind the scrim.
Stacks
Richard
Stacks
Starbucks, March 31, 09
Two or three books arrive daily in stiff brown envelopes, none addressed to me. Publishers are appealing to Laurie as if she’s an old friend they’re waiting to hear back from. They seldom do. I stack the books beside her desk in columns that mark the time she’s been gone on her latest trip. There must be eighty by now, neat as bricks.
Suzanne is warm when we meet. As she brushes hair from her face, I notice gray streaks that weren’t there when I left. She slips off her jacket to reveal a flowered dress she bought at a yard-sale for three dollars. “They wanted five.” She laughs. “But I made the lower offer because I wasn’t sure it would fit.” She’s proud it does. She’s shapelier these days, no longer shy to show herself. She asks, “Do you say, ‘I love you’ to each other?” She knows I won’t volunteer details about my life but will answer a direct question. I feel I’ve fallen into deep water, and the pressure makes me heavy. “Yes,” I say, and see her wince. She’s plunged in, too.
Laurie calls to download her day. Suzanne would call, too, when she traveled, although she’d rarely fill me in with as much detail as Laurie does. I don’t always know the people Laurie mentions, but I piece together their stories. Her friends are becoming characters in my life.
I go to bookstores to write, although I no longer buy many books nor read as much as in the past. It’s ironic, since advance galleys and bound copies flood in. I see the book as a dodge against death. Fat chance. Among the people I know, I’ll be the last to produce one.
Suzanne gave me a copy of her latest book when we met, a history of the Tonto National Monument in which she chronicles the majestic and ingenious cliff dwellings built by the Sinaguans, agriculturalists and traders who settled in Arizona and built vertical villages around 1000 A. D.—hundreds of years before the first Europeans arrived. No one knows why the Sinaguans abandoned their homes around 1400. I edited some chapters of the book, and we traveled for her research. Back home, I read the first and last sections, pleased she’s produced it and sad for myself. That I don’t have a book? That I’m no longer part of her process? I looked for a dedication, but there wasn’t one.
Laurie asks me to deposit a check for her in the bank. She asks what mail has arrived but not what books. When she returns, maybe a handful will interest her. She’ll pack off some to the garage, give others to the mail carrier, sell some. Millions of words and thousands of pages headed where?
Suzanne wants me to prepare our taxes—a story about our shared property that omits our separation. We’ll file jointly again. She’s planning to refinance the mortgage that I pay, and she speaks about the steps as if we are a regular couple. “Okay,” I say, “good idea,” because these dogs are the first to charge from my mouth. I feel uncomfortable; we’re not partners apart from paper. The next time we meet, I will give her a check for the expenses.
At the artists’ colony where Laurie will stay for a month, she’ll work on our prompt book. We’ve talked about including one hundred and fifty entries, but I forget if this is from each of us or in total. We read to each other on the phone. Laurie asks me to type up and send her my best pieces, and she edits them, sifting away dust and sand until they are stacked, clean and ready. She fantasizes our success. “We’ll give workshops. We’ll go to Greece and take walks and eat fish.” Is it possible? This fall at ASU, we’ll teach a workshop together on our practice.
Suzanne is writing about other national monuments in the Southwest, and her next project profiles Tuzigoot, a giant pueblo spanning forty-two acres and comprising 110 rooms, including second and third story structures, built by the Sinaguans on a desert hilltop. Suzanne’s focus is the reconstruction, beginning in the 1930’s when a group of young Arizona archeologists discovered the layout of the original site on a hillside of scattered stones. Brick by brick, or rather stone by stone, they gathered enough to build up the walls a few feet and construct several rooms. Enough stones were left to build offices and a small museum. Suzanne says it’s all a fiction, passing as the real thing.
Publishers have taken to sending quantities of slim poetry books to Laurie written by authors I haven’t heard of. I dip in here and there, not knowing what I’m looking for or how to read them. I slip back to my favorites: Wodehouse, Graham Green, Borges—books that change, because I have changed, with each rereading. By the time Laurie returns, I will have stacked a hundred and fifty books in columns that will reach the height of her glass desk. They will take to leaning together for support. Laurie says she has a complicated next few days, and she names friends she will visit before settling at the colony. “I love you,” she says, ringing off. She prompts, “Say it,” and I do.
Stacks
Starbucks, March 31, 09
Two or three books arrive daily in stiff brown envelopes, none addressed to me. Publishers are appealing to Laurie as if she’s an old friend they’re waiting to hear back from. They seldom do. I stack the books beside her desk in columns that mark the time she’s been gone on her latest trip. There must be eighty by now, neat as bricks.
Suzanne is warm when we meet. As she brushes hair from her face, I notice gray streaks that weren’t there when I left. She slips off her jacket to reveal a flowered dress she bought at a yard-sale for three dollars. “They wanted five.” She laughs. “But I made the lower offer because I wasn’t sure it would fit.” She’s proud it does. She’s shapelier these days, no longer shy to show herself. She asks, “Do you say, ‘I love you’ to each other?” She knows I won’t volunteer details about my life but will answer a direct question. I feel I’ve fallen into deep water, and the pressure makes me heavy. “Yes,” I say, and see her wince. She’s plunged in, too.
Laurie calls to download her day. Suzanne would call, too, when she traveled, although she’d rarely fill me in with as much detail as Laurie does. I don’t always know the people Laurie mentions, but I piece together their stories. Her friends are becoming characters in my life.
I go to bookstores to write, although I no longer buy many books nor read as much as in the past. It’s ironic, since advance galleys and bound copies flood in. I see the book as a dodge against death. Fat chance. Among the people I know, I’ll be the last to produce one.
Suzanne gave me a copy of her latest book when we met, a history of the Tonto National Monument in which she chronicles the majestic and ingenious cliff dwellings built by the Sinaguans, agriculturalists and traders who settled in Arizona and built vertical villages around 1000 A. D.—hundreds of years before the first Europeans arrived. No one knows why the Sinaguans abandoned their homes around 1400. I edited some chapters of the book, and we traveled for her research. Back home, I read the first and last sections, pleased she’s produced it and sad for myself. That I don’t have a book? That I’m no longer part of her process? I looked for a dedication, but there wasn’t one.
Laurie asks me to deposit a check for her in the bank. She asks what mail has arrived but not what books. When she returns, maybe a handful will interest her. She’ll pack off some to the garage, give others to the mail carrier, sell some. Millions of words and thousands of pages headed where?
Suzanne wants me to prepare our taxes—a story about our shared property that omits our separation. We’ll file jointly again. She’s planning to refinance the mortgage that I pay, and she speaks about the steps as if we are a regular couple. “Okay,” I say, “good idea,” because these dogs are the first to charge from my mouth. I feel uncomfortable; we’re not partners apart from paper. The next time we meet, I will give her a check for the expenses.
At the artists’ colony where Laurie will stay for a month, she’ll work on our prompt book. We’ve talked about including one hundred and fifty entries, but I forget if this is from each of us or in total. We read to each other on the phone. Laurie asks me to type up and send her my best pieces, and she edits them, sifting away dust and sand until they are stacked, clean and ready. She fantasizes our success. “We’ll give workshops. We’ll go to Greece and take walks and eat fish.” Is it possible? This fall at ASU, we’ll teach a workshop together on our practice.
Suzanne is writing about other national monuments in the Southwest, and her next project profiles Tuzigoot, a giant pueblo spanning forty-two acres and comprising 110 rooms, including second and third story structures, built by the Sinaguans on a desert hilltop. Suzanne’s focus is the reconstruction, beginning in the 1930’s when a group of young Arizona archeologists discovered the layout of the original site on a hillside of scattered stones. Brick by brick, or rather stone by stone, they gathered enough to build up the walls a few feet and construct several rooms. Enough stones were left to build offices and a small museum. Suzanne says it’s all a fiction, passing as the real thing.
Publishers have taken to sending quantities of slim poetry books to Laurie written by authors I haven’t heard of. I dip in here and there, not knowing what I’m looking for or how to read them. I slip back to my favorites: Wodehouse, Graham Green, Borges—books that change, because I have changed, with each rereading. By the time Laurie returns, I will have stacked a hundred and fifty books in columns that will reach the height of her glass desk. They will take to leaning together for support. Laurie says she has a complicated next few days, and she names friends she will visit before settling at the colony. “I love you,” she says, ringing off. She prompts, “Say it,” and I do.
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