Another Love Discourse, page 8
Mad
True urban legend: a con
artist perpetrated
a twenty-year
-long fraud on lonely
men by speaking as
a woman to thousands
in xeroxed letters. He had
a computer fill text-fields with
personal names—
to Bob, Rick, Bill, Jeff, Ryan—
all signed by angel
Pamela or Vanessa.
The con man’s
gift: brilliance in reflecting others’
wounds of narcissism.
This particular trick
seemed key to survival in
my early years. People like us
see the good in life, darling,
the con artist would say,
people like us want to care and love.
To love is to want
to belong to the realm of
people like us.
If you speak right,
maybe you find that
exact bridge
between longing and
belonging.
The con artist spoke
in sympathy
with his demographic (lonely
older men), saying, essentially: you are
like me. Your innards are no
different than mine.
I recognize how you began
and now choose to
operate within the universe.
We like each other.
Oddest: once the con
was revealed, the artist confronted,
the men turned
angry, yes, about being
fooled, but stayed wistful:
yearning still for the
(writer as con artist)
one who had seemed
to recognize (uniquely) them.
Catastrophe
So, my father said, some months before, you’re going to graduate from your fancy school and be a waitress in Los Angeles? We stood like awkward ibex shunted to the side of what he believed was my college graduation.
Okay, fine, I’d understand if you were the manager or owner sorry but waitress sorry, yes. He didn’t like the choice; he felt no affinity, it made no sense to his cosmogony. We were not alike. The prole intelligentsia might make some sense but I failed the family’s religion: a workaholic, fine, but retreat a generation in class?
You don’t care you’ll end up with your brain bored not sure so what, your highest hope to write about your Roland and splash a little paint on canvases and take photos yes so you can become—what, a waitress with a fancy degree yes or what’s that called, a sonographer or tutor like what’s-his-face’s kid, what’s that called, a doula, a masseuse I don’t know selling vegetables at the farmer’s market like that pregnant girl from your school who was a drug addict or what, a chiropractor? Really not sure no exact plans you got to think about your choices anything but your hands will be there cracking spines in the afternoon is that the end of the world? but your brain will be bored. What will you be thinking freedom from the brain catching babies? Autonomy.
My father never knew the babies well. Vita interrupta. He stopped reading my first monograph on Roland after the epigraph. He died before I got to answer any bunch of things.
For one, consider this deadlock: I never truly graduated from that fancy school. Sign, symbol, syntagm snarled in my performance.
During the actual ceremony, mother east of the field, father westerly, I lurked south, as if we were forever a family destined to hold down the points of the flyaway parachute meant to save us.
What I held: a heavy giant spattered tempera-on-cardboard puppet, its mouth an eternal paroxysm, an O. All the other students, some sincere, useful activists and others like me just in the moment’s flummery, continued marching north toward the dais with huge processional puppets, protesting, glee smug, knowing that no puppets would keep anyone from grasping their degree once they embarked onto that stage of life called next.
No such certificate awaited. I too (was and) had a grinning puppet, but in contrarian spirit was determined not to be one as I had done college wrong.
How? Mix equal parts anxiety and avoidance, late-night popcorn, coffee, and canvases, poetry, brain fog.
My father and mother never understood why I avoided marching to get my nonexistent degrees. The puppet had broken.
At certain ages, it becomes harder to get clear of puppetry. To make a puppet look lifelike, first replicate breathing pattern, gaze, and stance—first line of the literature-as-puppetry manual I began writing as senior project and then abandoned.
Because whose puppet did I most want to be? How to save your own life: a manual this probably might not become. How could I break free?
Long before, I had lost all chance of really learning whatever I could at that fancy school for which I had gotten a scholarship. Telephone wires twisted in the storm: the signified swallowed all, my hunger endless as anyone’s, even the mean film producers in Los Angeles who nibbled from plates of cheese and olives at that outdoor restaurant where I would soon lose my first job.
One benefit of an undegree from that fancy college: when I returned west to the family, as if a farmboy gone east and returned, no dirt under the nails, just fine accents and collars, (mother’s) sienna-burnt eyes glowed: what is it to become a person of interest?
The name of my college alone! Signifying I might know a thing or three about books and writing, her new and atavistic obsessions.
She—like what Roland says of his, the one he mourned—had in her own way made herself transparent so that I could write. Serving needs in the one case, absent in the other. What have I to lose now that I’ve lost my Reason for living—the Reason to fear for someone’s life, says Roland, a few days into his mourning, the entry of April 2, 1978. All parents have ambitions: the single greatest influence on a child are the unlived dreams of the parent (says Jung).
In taking these notes (continues Roland, bereft) I’m trusting myself to the banality that is in me. Never be left and work hard; these sole mottos I trusted, banal yet what others can you believe?
Connivance
Both my parents could never be sick—they attended just about any outside pomp: the school concert or city spelling bee, liking the gilt others might slap upon my name. Certain people get this destiny: to live from doing not being, our culture rewarding the trait until the person can no longer do.
You’re such a three (Uncle Rick, quoting the enneagram, would often say to me).
Reader, I also confess: long after my parents’ hearth lacked a single ember, I find myself returned to their tribe: the ergomaniac, hoping not to spread disease to daughters.
While therefore I found it no miracle that my father showed up at graduation, I found it amazing that two parents could even stand breathing the same air, exchanging molecules and talking amiably—so long divorced, they no longer even lived together.
Part of their rapprochement or détente may have been due to the civilizing presence of Uncle Rick, north by northwest, mother’s black-sheep friend, an odd bohemian character who gargled as if post-tracheotomy, wearing trademark fedora and long black leather overcoat, belted, his chestnut mustache curled as if unduly influenced in formative years by the image of Salvador Dalí.
In best get-up, Uncle Rick had sacrificed the cool opera ambience of North Beach cafés to smile blindingly fake teeth on a day made of gray eastern humid May. He forgave my father all crimes of absentee trespass, clearly, yet how hard for me still to forgive him all his incursions on me.
Some eleven years earlier, my father had gotten divorced from my mother, or she from him—stories differ—partly to save his financial skin, a bankruptcy of marriage and soul.
Yet on our father went living at home, only moving downstairs to the basement apartment. A family trait, this habit of being messy with time (my father hocking past for the future). Because of such miscreancy, we had detectives snooping around our home just to poke holes in their circumstance.
Did signifier fit signified? (As Vegas mate used to say about communication’s own crapshoot, you with me here?)
Undo a marriage, you unfasten the signs like a wily coyote hellbent on making sure everyone stays confused: until death do us part? Until death does its part?
For months, mother and father could not emerge in public together. Skull and bones descended. Into that vacuum, our mother invited her brotherly friend to live upstairs. Between jobs, in permed-hair used-car salesman apparition, mustache copying one era’s screenstars, Uncle Rick made a joke of blowing out all the candles on my seventh-birthday cake.
That cake still makes me sick, now and forevermore. Carrot with frosting, neon candy studding rim, but Uncle Rick had been the adult who remembered to wangle something birthdaylike, a little over-attentive.
My mother hovered, eyes lit from below, pleased at how quickly our unfunny unblood uncle made himself useful tending to kids, their needs and squalor. At his side stood my father, risen from the sepulcher, a person hanging from his shoulders. He wished me happy returns before sinking back to the lower depths.
When I retreated to my room to cry—is it any surprise?—it was Uncle Rick who comforted me. And more besides, starting the pattern.
My mother was at work, my brother with friends, my father in the grotto, or traveling to do good somewhere, and I had the luck of a house companion.
Important to make promises to your future you will keep (said Rick, witlessly setting the pace as we strode to College Avenue and its old-style stationery store). Use this planner—selecting slimline morocco for me. See how good it feels to keep promises. To yourself, he added (as if I could not see).
When, years later, I visited him in prison, in Marion, Illinois, I did not bring up the planner and all its promises. Because by then, Rick was on another kick: stealing vitamins on lunch rounds, I’m light-fingering healthy years the feds want to steal from me. (Hocking present for future due to past.)
Through a grille, he fed a mafia boss burgers, having gotten to be server for good behavior.
As ever, I lacked words to say; his monologue filled the therapist-prepared speech I had wished to shunt his way. If Rick stole years from me, that ends up not the full point of this story (though it may be a baseline). The point: mother is dead and without confession, Rick has become executor number two. Who knew mother would have appointed, along with sassy dancing shaman, this former tyrant to dispense worldly possessions to her children and granddaughters?
The idea of my parents’ bankruptcy-cum-divorce? That, after a decent time, my parents—like those multiply marrying celebrities off Elizabeth Taylor Road—would reunite. That theirs was a divorce in name only. That they would rewed: one of those recommitment ceremonies of California, puffs of sage, everyone wreathed in flowers and hugs of deep feeling.
Both so wed to work, they never saw that recommitment day, furthering themselves in separate cultural seas, their parties boisterous and celebrated, filled with animated ottomans of octopi reaching out for hugs and my parents sailing by, happy schooners. They made a gift: a whole community of people who saw one another only amid their spray, Uncle Rick forever lurking nearby.
Occasionally my mother would bellydance and invite my father up to move his hips with her, loose, like a sheikh, and her Sunday-morn students would ululate, hands covering flicking tongues, all of us peeking into a performance of supernal passion, my parents smiling, their hearts seeming something grand, my father the abstracted scientist and my mother a carnal brilliant polymath.
Having met teaching folkloric dance, they carried this element of courtship forward but what hidden part of love deepened and what became pure operatic display?
And how did this message translate to my young mind? To be authentic, better not join forces with anyone? Desire leads you to the edge of the known universe (and then withers)?
Her death has changed me, I no longer desire what I used to desire (says Roland to his mourning). How can life redeem love?
Behavior
At the faux college graduation, as in the divorce, the two parents did not understand why I wished to walk apart from everyone, while Uncle Rick ended up with great urgencies every half hour involving bathrooms—his needs kept derailing others. Because Rick had a talent for making most events about (the great globe circling) him.
Accordingly, his biology overcame us, the rite become a map of his intrusive body, a detailing of available release, undoing plans for meals with friends and their parents—but why whine? Change was fortuitous: no one would press me about plans.
With relief, everyone from each cardinal direction retreated to our usual quarters.
Before that moment, quite high on early-adult alienation, I didn’t wish to walk with either parent. I wasn’t picking sides: I lived in pure lizard-brain survival.
My tongue knotted; the effect of fancy college hadn’t shown up yet. So when they asked what I had studied, I could not explain how I had fallen amoureuse with one special figure from my school of specialness, one alienated figure twirling these themes: the progenitor of Os, Roland.
Have you ever known someone endlessly charismatic whose core you
never quite reach? Impossible: Roland’s words, their shocking contemporaneity.
Anyone who wishes can land upon this trick of the entitled, to wit: draw out your professors with dire incompletes, promises of summer work, apologetic emails. The white-glove establishment understands noblesse oblige. Many imploring notes later, make up credits in night school, and, if you wish, enter graduate school, and still you will get to start your career as a dedicated freelancer.
Only make promises you both care about and fear enough to keep (said Rick). And so on Roland, I have rested my entire career.
Why? Passionate and forgetful systematizer, impatient and whimsical, an improviser. Ravenous, revelatory, hidden, angry, refined, ready to theorize away feeling, leading whatever parade I wished to follow, his words behaved as I wished to be. Quiz for the alert reader: have you not wished to divorce body from mind, that particularly western paradigm? And follow someone who has navigated the distance with some elegance?
On this island, my longtime friend, a torn copy of my favorite Roland work, leans against the windowsill, against the utter consuming dark of this moment before dawn overtakes the slap of waves on rock. Could you be misled into thinking stray moments of exalted existence might stitch up something resembling coherent life?
To understand
What do you say of
someone who reads
a life and then thinks she
must go live it?
One fine melancholic acquaintance in grad school helped me move into a new room, carrying my few belongings, and, once we rested, revealed herself as a literalist. I will never forget what she said (was the name Kate?—her short sparse lank brown hair, pale heart face, friendly brown moon eyes shifting under horn-rimmed glasses, seen before me still):
I made a mistake (said Kate) reading Henry Miller too young. He writes that girls with wide hips become whores, and so I followed that career path for way too long.
(The signified leads the sign.)
Some people have found such literal paths. Not becoming authors but instead following destinies prescribed by their heroes’ shadow imaginations: Achebe, Baldwin, Bukowski, Darwish, Faulkner, Kingston, Lee, Malcolm, Morrison, Narayan, Paley, Plath, Rilke, Rimbaud, Rumi,
Rupenian, Salinger, Shōnagon, Tanizaki, Winterson, anyone.
Is it questionable that given the winds of my time I found it in Roland?
So restless (like my parents). Repudiated the old, and then, once established in the avant-garde, he went on to create a forward-looking science of literature so as to extol old heroes. (Hocking future for past.)
That enterprise he also abandoned. Carried an outsider’s contradictions: successful, he didn’t like meeting new people, so stayed in comfortable boîtes, the habits and cafés of Parisian environs. His truest shadows: also feeling himself to be blue trash, fallen from rightful inheritance, an overlooked kingly son contending with poverty, bouts of illness, the camaraderie of a sanatorium (health in drag, with its masqued habits an alt-academe).
From its vantage, he filled the coin-shaped hole in his psyche: envy toward the great and lesser gods of higher ed, Marxism his whetstone.
To have a chip on the shoulder: this a phrase I learned from Vegas mate: this badge of resentment, the chip for Roland a flaneur-warrior’s epaulet.
Reading is a form of writing, writing a form of reading, understanding a form of cruising, dare to follow me if you will, I am on the sidelines of the expected, I will pop out and you will understand me if you dare. This (essentially) Roland crooned. How can an adolescent (and later) not love the song?
Sontag says: he is the one French theorist we will remember from the war. (Or the one we will recall from theory.) Suffering lets you find the best, he vamped, as if Christian or Buddhist. The clean air of the sanatorium let him avoid the occupation. Imagine you had youthful and repeated tuberculosis and a mother who worked so hard, cut from her vain salon-keeping mother’s wealth: imagine you felt triply sidelined.
