The Life Room, page 9
I always knew I wanted to study literature, to become a professor, a writer, to marry and have children. I never imagined any further. What now? What does the middle passage hold?
The little china shop is on the same street that I walk daily from the hotel to the academy. Just today I’ve passed it twice and each time I see the pitcher in the window my body awakens to that invigorating feeling of almost becoming. If objects speak, the pitcher says be present. Question. Listen. Is it the foreignness and beauty of the city that awakens this heightened sense of life?
Later this afternoon a lecture on the great French masters-du Maupassant, Voltaire, Zola, Proust, and another called the “Moral Ideal in the Works of George Sand.”
May 7, 2002
It’s a warm day today in Paris, and as the afternoon descends, heat lightning penetrates the sky. Today I went again to the Louvre with John Cloud. We stood in line to see the Mona Lisa, and her queer, enchanting smile. How little the painting affected me. I had seen her image everywhere, on postcards, posters, in advertisements, on pens, and here she was in the flesh. I kept staring, wanting to be moved. I looked at the painting from different angles in the room, and the Mona Lisa’s mocking, self-satisfied eyes followed me. I kept hoping to find her enchantment, hoping to embody that sensation of having come upon the painting for the first time. Nothing. John says her name in Italian, La Giocanda, means a light-hearted woman. I looked into her mercurial eyes. It is antithetical to the human condition to expect wholeness. The best one can hope for is solace in the spiritual realm, not the carnal, she seemed to say as if ridiculing me with her roaming eyes. I told John and he understood what I was saying, without me having to explain it. I could hear Michael. A painting can’t talk, Eleanor.
I thought of the pitcher in the window of the china shop and those lines from Keats: “What mad pursuit? What struggle to escape?”
I don’t really miss Michael anymore, though I long to see the boys. Why? I miss Michael’s calm, steady voice, his soothing presence (of course I adore him), but lately he’s been on edge and I think the break is good for us. I’m freer, more myself without him. I’m glad to have the freedom to explore this city solo, in spite of my guilt for relishing this time on my own.
Phrases from yesterday’s lecture on Tolstoy echo in my mind. The scholar from Johns Hopkins quoted from Anna Karenina. “In order to know love one must make a mistake and then correct it.” His thesis was that only out of suffering comes transformation. When I look at the paintings all around me I think of the years that a painter might have spent toiling away on one masterpiece. Of the sacrifice of the lived life that is at stake.
I took a walk by the Seine and again experienced that peculiar feeling of traveling to places inside myself I’ve forgotten; it’s as if I’ve just awakened from a deep sleep. When I look at trees almost in bloom I see, instead of their entirety, the details, the nubs of buds on the crook of every branch, the underside of the leaves that have already sprung. The density of color in each flower.
We’ve already established our own clique. I’d heard about John Cloud—read a book he had written on the Romantics—and it was thrilling to finally meet him. He’s tall, over six feet, impeccably dressed, oxford shirts, blue blazer, and tie; he’s also possessed of a deadly sense of humor. He has piercing eyes that are like seeing through the depths of the ocean. During a reception last night we stood in the back of the room, sipping wine and laughing. I told him about the pitcher and how it reminded me of the Keats poem. He mentioned that Keats was orphaned by the time he was fourteen, his father died when he was eight; once he committed himself to poetry there was urgency about it, as if he sensed a foreboding of early death. John considers the poem “Endymion” Keats’s best work. He believes that it expresses the poet’s quest for an ideal feminine counterpart and a flawless happiness beyond earthly possibility. “That couldn’t be a romantic notion, could it?” I said, and we both laughed. We have the same sense of humor.
Dan Fineman, another new friend, teaches at Brown. He’s considered the young, handsome savant. He has blond frizzy hair to his shoulders. Wears blue jeans. Shirts it looks like he’s slept in. It makes sense that he’s a Hemingway scholar. In the same way that it makes sense that the Shakespeare scholar seems Faustian with his perpetual sighs and wiry gray hair. Dan wears a tweed blazer with leather pads at the elbow. He makes brief appearances at lectures and then disappears. John says he spends the rest of the afternoon flying a kite along the Champs-Elysée. John says he could have sworn Dan’s been drunk since he’d stepped off the airplane. He heard that Dan would pick out the girl before a party began, and by the end of the evening she’d be there at the exit waiting for him. I like John. He’s passionate about books. He’s distant and reserved. He grew up in a formal, uptight Connecticut family. But he has recklessness inside him, something untamed. I can see it when he looks at a painting or smokes a cigarette. There’s passion and pathos in him; things inside him waiting to be expressed. Perhaps that is why we’ve become friends.
Then there’s the poet, Phoebe Hogan, with her big owllike eyes and thick black mascara on her lashes. She talks from the side of her mouth. I can understand now why poets get a bad rap. She talks in nonsequiturs. The first night I met her she asked me if I happened to know anyone in Portland. When I told her I didn’t she explained that she’s giving a reading at the University of Portland and she thought perhaps I knew someone I could tell. She’s terrified that no one will show up at the reading. Are poets always that spacey or is it an act she’s putting on? Later at dinner she quoted lines from Szymborska, the extraordinary Polish poet. Something about how we cling to poetry like a banister.
Robert Nye is the youngest of the five of us. He’s in his late twenties. He’s assistant professor of modern poetry at Rutgers and is a father of a young son. Julie Hamilton teaches at Smith. She’s a good friend of Jordan’s. They met at the MLA when they were undergrads. She’s tall and sexy and has bleached blond hair and a deep, husky voice.
We stayed up late drinking and smoking at the hotel bar. John went through a pack last night. He says he never smokes at home; his wife won’t let him. I find myself smoking in Paris, too, though I rarely smoke at home. Again, it makes me feel slightly dangerous and reckless, not just the cigarettes but the feeling of anonymity and the endless possibilities it gives birth to.
At the bar John, who is rather reserved, at one point looked into my eyes. “One eye is light and the other is dark. They capture you.” The comment touched me and I smiled. “I’ve been thinking about ‘Endymion’ ever since our talk last night. Do you remember the first lines of the poem? ‘A thing of beauty is a joy for ever;/ Its loveliness increases; it will never/ Pass into nothingness.’”
“I studied that poem for an entire semester,” John said. “Can you imagine writing a poem that would require such concentration?”
“Yes,” I answered. It’s that kind of concentration I’ve always found stimulating.
After a few evenings with John, Robert, and Julie, I realize how much I miss being around people who are more like me. Maybe it hasn’t been such a good idea, sparing Michael dinners and parties with colleagues and old friends from graduate school. Michael says that most academics and artists are narcissists. But how are doctors and their egos any different? Our social world together has been mostly Michael’s friends. Brian and his wife, Marcia. Sally and Rick and all the kids. I love being around all of them. We’ve gotten close. But Brian and Rick are doctors. And Sally and Marcia don’t really read. We seem to have little in common except our kids. When I first met Michael it was such a luxury not to have to talk about my ambitions, about art, literature. Before, I spent all my time with my graduate friends or with Adam, having abstract discussions, talking about academic pursuits, and worrying about publishing, about whether I’d get an academic appointment. Having to bear the jealousies, the egos, the competition. When I met Michael it was like I was on a long vacation from myself. I liked experiencing the world from his more practical, sensible, down-to-earth eyes. His presence seemed to quiet my questing, unsettled nature. But here in Paris it is as if I’m resuming the life I led before I met my husband. I wonder if the other people in our group feel the same. Most of us are married except for Julie and Dan.
The pulse of the world and its sensuousness keep pressing up inside me—it’s almost like a physical pain. I realize I often feel so truly alone.
Confession: I caught Robert’s eyes at the hotel bar moving over my body, his look lustful and sexual. As he looked at me I felt a growing strangeness—a flower opening petal by petal, and underneath each petal was another layer.
Do women always feel exposed when men lust after them?
Time to get some sleep.
May 8, 2002, 4:00 A.M.
I slept for maybe an hour or two and now I’m wide awake. I can’t sleep. Something about Robert’s look has stirred me. I dreamed about William. I can’t remember the dream exactly, only the feeling it produced. In the dream William and I were together again. I sensed he wanted me. And that I wanted him, too, and it made me happy. And yet, once I moved toward him, he turned away from me and I felt humiliated, as if I had provoked both his desire and his rejection of me. The dream left me feeling frightened and strange.
There was something about the way he looked at me in the dream. Saw through me. The look was almost superior. The look said he knew I wanted him and that I had blown him off, that I’d had my chance. It was punishing and seductive and brutal. And made me feel ashamed for my desire. It’s as if he was in my dream to remind me that our time together so long ago has shaped me, has been buried under layers of other experience, and now must be brought to the surface. Understood. Is it the very fact that I remember him that leaves me unsettled? Perhaps it was that look in Robert’s eye that made me dream about William. He had the sinister look of someone who desires what he knows he cannot have. I remember having left the table to go to the ladies’ room to relieve the sensation. And yet I did nothing to provoke Robert’s attention. My eye caught his. The way he looked at me made me feel naked. As if I had invited his stare. And yet I kept looking back. Is it desire itself that makes me feel ashamed?
Now I must write it down, seal it on paper. Adam explained how a painter seals a canvas with a layer of gesso, that gesso used to be mixed with rabbit-skin glue and that it is used to prime a canvas before a painter begins to paint with oils. He explained that oil rots fabric, hence the reason for priming it. That always seemed an interesting irony. That oil paint, the material a painter uses to create beauty, has the capacity to rot the fabric it is applied to. As if all beauty is capable of ruin. Perhaps an idea for a story or poem.
I want to write down everything. Later I can sort it out. Louisa May Alcott kept serious diaries, and from passages in her journals novels were formed. Tolstoy kept them, too. I can’t imagine that the Brontës and Austen didn’t, as well. Given the narrowness of their experiences they would have certainly drawn from them. James did. His notebooks are often keys to his work.
It’s nearly dawn already. The light is peeking in through the curtains. Sleep.
May 8, 2002
I woke up tired and dark this morning. Barely made it to Julie’s lecture called “The Forlorn Mistress in Literature.” She opened with Marvell’s searing “To a Coy Mistress.” I thought she trembled. It was quite moving.
I went to the Louvre again after hearing Julie’s presentation. I stood in front of Woman with a Pearl by Jean-Baptiste Camille Corot. The painting is said to echo both Mona Lisa and Vermeer’s Girl with a Pearl Earring. There is the same enigma about the model, the same gaze, the same uncertainty as in da Vinci’s Mona Lisa. The pearl is a dark, leaf-shaped ornament attached to a light veil on the woman’s forehead. What captivates me about the portrait is not its nod to Vermeer or da Vinci but what Corot might have revealed to the model about herself she had not yet known.
I looked at myself in the mirror in the bathroom of the museum. My face was blurry and out of focus. I applied fresh lipstick. For a moment I couldn’t distinguish who I was.
May 9, 2002, 3:00 P.M.
Just listened to a lecture on Portrait of a Lady. Excruciatingly dull. But still, the lecture brought back the tragedy of the novel in its entire remarkable splendor. How little Isabel Archer knows herself at the onset; how in her desire to be free and independent she loses her freedom; how her lack of self-knowledge leads her into a marriage with the evil Osmond. Another complex yet doomed heroine whose sense of pride and duty traps her. I’ve read the novel a few times and the ending still devastates. Why does she return to the evil husband? James’s novels always have the feeling that life goes on beyond the pages. That we are only given a glimpse. The first time I read the novel I imagined that Isabel eventually leaves Osmond for Caspar Goodwood, and yet there isn’t one piece of evidence in the body of the novel—I’ve scanned it endlessly—that should have allowed me to think that way. James understood that people are trapped within themselves. We make choices that make sense at a particular instance, but why should we expect that those choices should withstand the passing of time?
Tonight I’m having dinner with John and Robert and Julie. I’m shattered. I long for just a few minutes of sleep but my mind won’t allow it.
May 10, 2002, nearly dawn
It is 4:00 in the morning. I can’t sleep yet. I’m thinking of the night, of my new friends. None of the three of us, the three of us that are married, talked about our spouses or our children all evening. It was as if we all wanted to be free of our responsibilities and our pasts, to inhabit a foreign city, to experience, at least for a few hours, the thrill of being alive. Phoebe, who had decided to tag along, said she had to leave to wash her hair. It was midnight. She recited lines from Midsummer Night’s Dream. She wears high-colored lace tops and velvet blazers, long swirling skirts, and lace-up boots as if she’s stepped out of a Victorian novel or a Shakespeare play. Once she left, John called her loopy and we all laughed. At the bar John decided to do an imitation of a poet giving a poetry reading where each line ended in a question. “This poem is about trees along the Seine,” he began. “It’s called ‘The Trees Along the Seine.’ ‘The Trees Along the Seine.’ It was inspired on my walk along the Seine through the trees. Here it goes. My poem called The Trees Along the Seine.’ He paused. “The Trees Along the Seine?’” We were howling. He’s right. Poets tend to read with that tic of ending a line with a question. Julie turned to me after the laughter died down. “It’s hard to believe you have kids, Eleanor,” she said. “I can’t picture you as a mother.”
The night seemed to move slowly, as if in slow motion, but I couldn’t seem to break away and retreat to my room. I remember tugging at the end of my skirt that had hiked up just slightly over my thighs, once I caught Robert looking at my legs. I told John and Robert an anecdote about Professor Reynolds, our chair, and while I was talking I was thinking about what it would be like to kiss John. Writing this down, sealing it into memory, feels like an act of betrayal. Perhaps writing always feels like a betrayal. The hair clip that held my hair seemed suddenly too tight, and I opened its clasp. I told everyone at the table that the greatest thrill of our chair is when he finds spelling or grammar errors in published papers. He came into my office and showed me an article with two or three spelling errors that a full professor in the department had published in a journal. He was gleeful. “What does it mean to want to humiliate others, to want to be superior?” I said to my friends. “Professor Reynolds went to boarding school, then Harvard, was raised in a privileged world. He thinks spelling errors mean you’re not intelligent.” Everyone laughed. Did I really want to kiss John, or was I a little lonely away from Michael and in need of attention? What if I had allowed it? What harm could it have done, here in Paris? Is it good to keep yourself in check? To be constantly in control of every thought, every feeling, every emotion? Jordan and I had a philosophical discussion about morality after she told me about her lover. She thinks it’s immoral to withhold. To deny oneself the possibility of love, no matter the cost. She’d prefer to take the risk than to live in the limitations of self-denial and regret. She pointed out how rare it is to truly connect with another person. I looked at John. Was I attracted to him? This is crazy. Would I feel the same way if Michael were here? Of course not.
We stayed up drinking until last call. We trashed our departments, gossiped about mutual friends, analyzed movies and books. There was an edge to the conversation, a charge, a current between us. After the bar closed, we drifted to the lobby and lingered at the landing, as if we were wondering in our collective unconscious what was going to happen, who was going to pair off with whom. Once I climbed the stairs to my room I even fantasized. John might be tender. Robert, shy and sweet. Dan had come into the bar later. He likes women who surround him and draw him out. I’m the opposite. I’m always waiting to be drawn out. He’s the kind of man you could easily sleep with for the night, and then shrug it off the next morning. But I have never been able to be casual about sleeping with men. I told myself to stop thinking about them. I brushed my teeth, poured myself a glass of bottled water, took two aspirins, and got into bed. But instead of making me sleepy the alcohol acted as a stimulant. I tried to sleep, but it was hopeless. Before I turned on the light and reached for my pen and notebook I was thinking that each person is like a puzzle, filled with different pieces, conflicting tensions and opposing characteristics shaped by particular events and experiences, and that our behavior is predicted by these pieces, lost in our memory or buried because we don’t want to remember them. My mind is filled with so many thoughts. Only in writing do I seem to be able to quell the anxiety that has overtaken me. Earlier in the day a scholar from Brown quoted from the child psychologist, D. W. Winnicott, that the poet, like the child, needs “a field of privacy to rest where the self cannot be exploited.” The idea of the lecture was about the tension between the need to communicate and the need to remain hidden. Fascinating.
