Читать книгу Surrendering Oz - Bonnie Friedman - Страница 10
ОглавлениеIn the years before I discovered how to think, I was lucky enough to have two best friends. They lived in opposite directions, and every day at three p.m. outside J.H.S. 141 in the Bronx we stood on a corner and they sang to me, “Walk my way.” “No, walk my way.” I always chose to walk with Stacy, who was mean, rather than Emily, who was understanding. Still, I would toss imploring looks over my shoulder at Emily as I vanished down the street as if to say, “I adore you, you can see I’m helpless, can’t you? Stacy’s an ogre, I have no choice in this, and you are my absolute favorite.”
And Emily was. She was a passionate, windswept, science-besotted only child always in the grips of a cold, and with hot-pink crumpled tissues tumbling out the sleeves of her sweaters, and innumerable missed days at school. Our emblem was Nostradamus’s prophesying, severed head lurching across a laboratory floor—we’d seen it on Creature Feature one Friday night when the rest of the world was asleep. First we’d turned off the bedroom lights and held aloft lit wands of sparklers—a seething fountain of stars and asterisks scorching into our gaze an instant before they wove into the air our names, and then, after a further spewing, blinding moment, divined the names of our husbands, the cities we’d visit, the artistic or scientific works we’d accomplish, the lolloping, incandescent skirts we’d wear someday, before the guttering nub scorched our fingertips. (Emily’s father had brought home the illegal silver stalks from New Jersey; her parents were divorced and he was always corrupting her with treats, for which she held him in resolute contempt.) After that, we’d eaten string cheese we frayed with our fingers, a sophisticated delectable “gourmet food,” a braid of caraway seeds and tangy fat, and watched, glaze eyed, from our beds, as across the rough-hewn Gothic lair came Nostradamus’s chopped-off head, still alive, jolting forward on its stump of neck, ranting its visions of the future.
“Nostradamus’s head!” we murmured to each other after that, and burst out laughing to ward off our horror of that unvanquished skull. In those days it was unknown what would become of us. Women intellectuals still had something of the mutant and pitiful about them: Madame Curie sickened by her radium, “She’s in the library!” a howl of horror rising out of It’s a Wonderful Life. Emily and I were bookish girls—she even more than I because she could indulge her passions, having no siblings and a bedroom of her own in which to pile her ever-increasing volumes.
She stayed up however late she pleased. As long as she was physically in bed by ten p.m., her mother didn’t monitor. The door to her room was solid oak. Emily read novels to her heart’s content under her black-light blanket. At last, losing the train of the story, she turned off the overhead and flicked a switch on a midnight bulb, and her blanket pulsed with phosphorescent hot-pink lines, whorls and carbuncles and exploded fingerprints, the insignia of the maze of existence itself somehow, a labyrinth burning the dark.
No such decoration in my own bedroom, which I shared with my sister. I taped up only the earth from space, a circle isolated far off in a sea of black; it had been given away at school. Anything else was mockable—likely to inspire my older siblings’ ridicule. I played no records of my own, hung no art of my own, certainly lit no incense of my own, all of which Emily did without a second thought. It was as if, instead of my being merely a Bronx daughter of a newly middle-class family, I were some orphan ward, beholden. I returned to Emily, still sealed, the album of Hair she’d given me as a birthday gift, with its acid green and sickly lemon color-fields clashing behind a young man’s backlit, luminous ’fro. We played Emily’s copy of that record over and over in her bedroom—“LBJ, IRT, USA, LSD,” the chorus dreamily harmonized—but my family’s stereo sat in our living room. I couldn’t possibly enjoy listening to those songs in my own house! Wasn’t that obvious to Emily?
And yet I craved what seemed her daring verve. We both fell in love with Tony Curtis in The Great Race, but she bought a chunky, toppling paperback that listed every picture he was in, and she spent her final year of junior high watching each and every one, even if it came on at three thirty or four a.m. She cranked her round neon-orange wind-up alarm that exploded with a firehouse jangle, and then set a checkmark beside each movie once it was seen. In contrast, my own passion remained flat, static, hidden within me like a wick engulfed in paraffin. She and I both prized self-forgetfulness but only she pursued it. And I found that aggravatingly admirable—that she did the thing, she did it, whatever anyone might think!
Whereas Stacy, in contrast, was worldly. She never dismissed what others might think. By “success” she meant precisely what most people meant. She was an impeccably groomed, ambitious, pragmatic figure sweeping down the street in a long coat that gave her the silhouette of a queen on a chess set. I was drawn to her because she too was a girl of imagination, a girl ablaze, although her focus was altogether different. She folded and stapled pretend bankbooks and induced me to invest my allowance dollars with her, and she took lessons riding English-style on horses in Harrison, New York, her hips hoisted aloft as the horse loped, her spine straight as our teacher’s wooden pointer. Her father was a corporate lawyer, and it was assumed that she, being the eldest, and clever, would triumph in life as well. He drove a low white Jag like the runabout on the Monopoly set, and they summered on Fire Island, where she wore low-slung bellbottoms streaked with bleach, and her mother shopped for clothes only at “boutiques.”
“Are skinny-legged jeans in, in Riverdale?” Stacy asked the last time we spoke. She’d finally moved to Harrison after years of riding lessons there, and now owned a horse, and planted an herb garden, and had a live-in maid. “A live-in maid, Bonnie!” she repeated when my response was insufficient. Her father had even made a postcard of their sumptuous Tudor house, which she’d shown me the last time I visited. The postcard was 1950s sepiatoned, with a scalloped edge—a campy artifact whose jolly façade and cool irony impressed me. And then she called with her question. She had a new set of girlfriends whom I heard laughing in the background. “I can’t stay on,” she declared. But, well, Harrison was ahead of Riverdale fashionwise, wasn’t it, she seemed curious to establish—by phoning me, her last contact in that old outpost, someone oblivious to the looks of things.
“Skinny-legged jeans?” I asked, racking my brain. “No, I don’t think I’ve seen anything like that.”
“I thought not,” said Stacy and hung up.
I hung up too, a moment later. Skinny-legged jeans. Obviously they were trivial—being mere fashion—and yet if they were completely trivial, then why were my cheeks blazing, why did my throat and chest sting?
I was lost within myself and remained so for a decade, unable to draw conclusions about anything, living as if my mind were a door I must hold open for yet more information, as if, if I came to a conclusion too soon, I would miss the crucial valence of things, the particular nuance that provided the key. Only when I had sufficient information could I determine what things meant.
In the meantime I sat for hours behind a curtain swept around my semicircular chair, a book open in my hands as my brothers and sister rampaged through the house. My parents had a multivolume set of Dickens, the type crimped into the binding so that the lines of text ascended, a rising mountainside I climbed, happiest when I’d disappeared entirely into a story. The more demanding the act of reading, the more thoroughly I disappeared. Even the heavy stamp of the print into the pulpy yellow paper made me happy, as if each letter were a sunken compartment in which I might hide.
“Bon-don-lonchikle!” my brothers often crooned to me, a name derived from some creepy old man on a public bench who had moaned that while pinching my cheeks. “Bon-don-lonchikle!” they laughed, but the strung-out moniker seemed to capture a truth: it identified my secret self, spazzy, twitchy, a girl! For in those days, the word that named my gender often curled like a lubricious smirk. “Here, girly!” said the pimply man who sold pizza slices for twenty-five cents. “Take it, girly,” said the man who offered six-cent candy. Something mortifying was all over me, something that inspired lewdness and condescension. And this something helped to explain, I believed, why I was stupid, carrying home barely passable grades from school on the Friday retest, having no idea of how to use the mind I possessed. How did the other children know the answers?
I believed that some of them—the most brilliant ones—managed to pick up the right answers from the general atmosphere of the schoolroom and that others came with the information somehow ambiently preinstalled from their homes, knowledge drifting in from the sea of conversation in which they’d grown. But even when a teacher called me to the blackboard and explained the lesson, I was like a stunned cat. I stared and swallowed, distracted by the glare of the teacher’s attention, the loudspeaker roar of her voice.
Released, I raced back to my chair, content to be stupid as long as I could be ignored. I truly believed I was mostly invisible, and passed my days with a novel held open under my desk, obliviously offering my teacher the wandering part in my uncombed hair. The bright boys, my classmates, plump children in button-down shirts so white they were blue, played the violin with a handkerchief pressed fussily under their downtucked chin like Haifetz and rallied their facts like a lieutenant. Some even flirted with me, but I found it merely mortifying. “Don’t look at me. Don’t notice!”
I was in a state of being uninvented, unseen, private. I didn’t know how to value my own observations. Sochial Studies, I wrote on my loose-leaf tab. When a boy sitting near me laughed at my spelling, I laughed, too. My pages tore at their unreinforced holes and their top right corners hatcheted down. As the months progressed I obliviously added more and more paper to the binder until the crammed wedge of pages balked when I tried to move from one tabbed subject to another. Almost instantly infuriated, I grabbed a recalcitrant heap and mauled it over the rings. The teeth of the binder sprang open, jagged, and out leapt a passel of pages to splay across the floor. I didn’t respect my own work. Why should I? I didn’t know that respecting one’s work was a trait that could be cultivated, and that respect actually often precedes achievement.
At the start of ninth grade it was announced that in October the tests would be administered for New York City’s specialized high schools. My father grimly said he would help me study for the Bronx Science exam. Both of my brothers were attending Science, and it was assumed that this would launch their futures (as indeed it did: one went into medicine, the other became an engineer at MIT Research Corporation)—but they were far more grounded in the world than I. They took apart toasters and assembled them again; they understood about vacuum tubes and electrical currents, and even laser beams. Nevertheless, on Saturday mornings I sat with my supplies—a battery of sharpened goldenrod Ticonderoga #2 pencils (specified by my father) and a kitchen timer that muttered “tsk, tsk, tsk,”—and worked my way through the mock exam. Occasionally I employed a desiccated eraser hard as a Jujube, leaving a shaming dark smudge. Once I didn’t use a #2, and my father, infuriated at the faintness of my handwriting (and, I suppose, my ill-disciplined, lassitudinous mind), grew red in the face and, yelling, snatched up that wrong pencil and threw it hard into the empty tin trash can, where it exploded like a cherry bomb. Other times he merely sighed, shoving his hand against his forehead. I was hopeless—and as surprised as anyone when Bronx Science accepted me.
I explained this to myself by recalling that, when I’d written my address on the index card that the proctor distributed, I’d printed the x in Bronx in a special way. My left-to-right stroke curved like a sine wave while the right-to-left stroke was strictly straight. This was how scientists inscribed the letter, my brothers had instructed me. An influential person must have noticed the secret insignia. Rationally I understood that there was likely more to my acceptance than this, but in the back of my mind I still saw that x.
The first day of high school it thrilled me to step through the doors of the school under the famous lofting Venetian glass mosaic (legend had it that the school had bought this rather than a swimming pool), and in fact over the years to come I never failed to enter without at least flinging a respectful glance up at Archimedes with his splayed compass taking the measure of the world, Charles Darwin dressed in street clothes of brown serge, and Madame Curie with her glittering test tube, charting the radiant realms. Madame Curie! There she towered dozens of feet tall, discovering an incandescent element that emitted gamma rays (I’d read a biography of her in sixth grade), and that occurred in minute quantities in the alchemical-sounding mineral pitchblende. Her notebooks were so radioactive they were stored in boxes lined with lead. Beneath these Olympians twinkled the words EVERY GREAT ADVANCE IN SCIENCE HAS ISSUED FROM A NEW AUDACITY OF IMAGINATION—JOHN DEWEY. Impressive phrases, and it required a humanist to write them! I walked in under that banner of poetry, not at all sure I belonged there, as at Bronx Science I still got terrible grades, but heartened by the shimmering vision nonetheless.
And then, one day in my second year, my American history teacher, Mr. Harrison, explained how to study, and my brain began to perform. Halleluyah! Facts stuck to it! I loved to practice this teacher’s method, which was to read through the textbook chapter while my hand scribbled notes, then to shut the book and set down all I’d retained. Apparently the path to my head was through my hand, for I swiftly recalled more and more, as if I were stocking the shelves of my mind. I did thrillingly well on tests, for the first time in my life. 98s. 97s. The glittering apex of the grading system. I cinched my belt tighter, having discovered anorexia at the same time, and walked home merrily from Bronx Science under the roaring elevated train. Perhaps I wasn’t worthless after all.
As my brain developed, my body dwindled. In junior high I’d obliviously plumped up on A&P jellyrolls and deep-fried knishes and French toast with maple syrup—treats I allowed myself right after school. One day when I was in high school, though, my mother beckoned me to look into the mirror, and suddenly I had a body, and it was one with knobby hips and a gaping shirt. I associated this pudgy body with my stupidity, and began to carve away at both. Each Monday evening I sat beside my mother on a metal folding chair at the local Y and listened to the Weight Watchers lecturer, a kind man with loopy hair and expansive gestures, and then I carried home with me a fresh blank food chart on which to write down all I ate.
I loved filling out the chart. I loved noticing what before had been invisible. I seemed to be extracting myself out of oblivion. And I loved best of all when, at the start of each meeting on Monday, I stood in my stocking feet on the scale and the lecturer nudged the wedge of iron along the bar to establish my new weight. 104. 103 and a half. I was presented a black round pin holding a diamond sliver that glinted like a drop of Curie’s radium. I grew so thin that a new hole needed to be gouged in my belt, and then another new hole. I was happier than I’d ever believed I could be. I’d found a power. I’d discovered I could influence my life.
Still, I didn’t confuse the high grades I got at school with actual thought. It was merely performing a good trick, like playing three-dimensional tic-tac-toe. Still, my grades got me accepted into a liberal arts college that had a library reference room lined with faded tapestries. Every night from six p.m. until midnight I sat in one of the creaky, black-painted Windsor chairs and read the assigned books, underlining, copying out, savoring the monastic existence, which felt like virtue incarnate. I sipped scalding coffee with chalky whitener dispensed from a machine in the basement, and, on study breaks ate so many carrots my skin tinged orange.
Then, junior year of college I fell in love with a droll senior, and the anorexia ended. I gave up the charts on which I wrote down everything that I ate. Happiness itself was a bleary drug. For lunch I bought kaiser rolls and fresh sliced provolone cheese at a corner deli and picnicked with my boyfriend on his bed. When I was awarded Phi Beta Kappa I learned the fraternity handshake but didn’t invite my parents to the initiation. I believed that secretly I was still that girl unable properly to add things up because I hadn’t yet kicked shut that door inside me. It was still hanging wide. I was awaiting the signal that I had taken in sufficient information to be allowed to come to my own conclusions, to be a separate person.
In the meantime I remained merged somehow with those around me, agreeable, compliant. I understood that my perspective was often distorted, and that such a person should not draw conclusions. It was as if I had one giant eye and one tiny one, one eye the size of a jar lid and the other the size of a sewing needle’s. I responded with too much enthusiastic intensity to some situations, and at other times missed the crucial ramification and responded with a mechanical, irresponsible nonchalance. At some point in the future when my eyes were the same size, which would happen because I’d taken in sufficient information and had acquired some kind of balance, then I would trust myself to form judgments. I was waiting to have sufficient information to warrant being allowed to come to conclusions. When was enough information enough?
“There’s a garbage-y smell in here,” announced a friend in graduate school, stepping into my apartment for a party.
Only in retrospect did that rankle. Why not take me aside to tell me that, I wondered the next morning. At the time I merely blushed hard, and ran out of my party with the trash.
I was, in my life, in a kind of coma. I believed, as many girls do, that the signals that came from inside were frivolous, half mad, silly, arbitrary, a blinding, burning fountain signifying nothing. I was estranged from myself, a kind of split-off Nostradamus head lurching my way forward in life without benefit of internal, and often bodily, signals. And then I was asked to teach. I was a second-year student at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, and assigned a literature class. It was late August, sweltering.
I stood before my first-ever session in the turquoise scratchy polyester frilled dress in which I’d attended my sister’s wedding. A pockmarked, smirking boy in the furthest row tilted back on the hind legs of his chair and clicked his pen. A girl in the first row with blonde, shellacked orange-juice-can curls peered at me, a blank notebook open on her desk. I was teaching Macbeth. I’d reread Macbeth.
“Macbeth is a man at war with his own conscience,” I suddenly announced to my students, and to myself. “There’s no feeling safe, for him!” Not knowing how to teach, I had anxiously abandoned my notes and begun to lecture, to conjure. Knives floating in the air, bloody hands that choke the throat of their own mistress, a ghost sitting silently at a party, a voice announcing, “Macbeth hath murdered sleep!”—“Why, this was just the Bronx!” I exclaimed, glimpsing it now for the first time. It was where I’d grown up. It was people disclaiming the meaning of their actions, constantly. It was the language of your inner reality divorced from what you were willing to acknowledge.
I recalled my sister pinching my cheeks so hard between pincerlike fingers that my skin throbbed for half an hour afterwards, even as she smiled the whole time in my face and I convinced myself this was love. And my mother fretting over Anita’s fleshiness with a fascinated concern that seemed to have a knife blade hidden inside it.
Shakespeare’s play was all about the disparity between the felt truth and the one publicly enacted, I heard my own voice say. It was the refused truth of things exploded outward. It was self-estrangement enacted on the world. It was another way of being a doofus. Of course the witches offered temptations! The world will do that. It will offer lots of glimmering rewards if only you will ignore what you know is true.
The boy clicked his pen, but less. The girl had taken a note or two, nodding slowly.
Walking uphill on Jefferson Street after class, I thought: So, in teaching literature, how you register the emotional valences matters. You can’t afford to be comatose. The institution—the university—values the felt sense of things! Has to! There’s no teaching English without it. “You’re beating a dead horse!” complained some students next class, those who could see nothing in rereading. You think this horse is dead? It’s panting! It’s sweating! It’s laid out before you but its heart is pounding! You think I’m beating it? Stories, I realized, were like McDonald’s wrappers to many of these students—to be emptied and tossed. And I could show them otherwise. I could show them lines to read between, with incandescent meanings clustered there, and sunken compartments in which spirits lay. For the first time in my entire life, I knew I knew something.
After that, I couldn’t help but become more attuned to my own internal signs. Was this the beginning of adulthood?—the signals finally making sense? Because the pangs of hope, the jolts of envy, the stinging rasp when mocked—now instead of seeming the nonsensical knocks and pings of life’s engine, they rapped out a pattern of obvious significance.
In November my students read the Metamorphoses, and walking along the deep green corridor after my class, it occurred to me that Nostradamus was an incarnation of the sacred poet Orpheus. My class had just read that the poet’s chopped-off head, floating down the river after he is slain, retains its mystic power: “his tongue, / Lifeless, still murmured sorrow, and the banks / Gave sorrowing reply.” Just like the physician/astrologer who continued to prophesy! So, a song is lodged in the body itself! I’d acted as if my own body were in fact a McDonald’s wrapper, useful just to keep me intact.
I’d always assumed that the Creature Feature prophet was a warning image of the hyperdeveloped mind—as if to be an intellectual, and especially a female intellectual, meant having to foreswear the other ordinary fulfillments: children, sensuality, a normal home life. I thought women had to choose. Now I saw the prophet as someone who traveled between the physical and the metaphysical, which were not unrelated, as I’d assumed. They might even be in communion, might even sometimes be the same. The body—might the body itself actually be a divining rod, of sorts, helping you to find where treasure was buried, help you to understand what things meant?
Still, despite these glimmers of awareness, it was a hard time, that first year I taught. My internal signals kept bringing me into conflict with those I loved. No wonder I hadn’t wanted to read them! Now I had to confront the friends who intimidated me, or at least my attraction to them. And I had to confront as well my tendency to put myself second, my assumption I didn’t need to be seen—I’d been wrong about that. Another mistake. I did need to be seen! I didn’t want a curtained life!
The tensions with my boyfriend, in particular, became acute.
“I hope you enjoyed buying those underpants,” he’d said with a rigid, panicked smile when I held up a purchase from a lingerie shop.
Because obviously they would have no impact on him.
I’d spent the afternoon among balcony brassieres and merry widows. No, I had not enjoyed it. I’d found the whole expedition mortifying. I’d found my own body mortifying. But wanted something to kindle us, to make what was dead between my boyfriend and me alive again. No go. “I hope you enjoyed buying those underpants”—he’d said, with a stricken, frozen smile.
“How awful,” remarked my best friend, in a restaurant the next day.
“Really?” I stared at her.
“Yes!”
But why was I surprised? Hadn’t I felt, at the time, awful? But then I’d instantly gone numb. Zoned out. Returned myself to a kind of docility—a refusal to draw conclusions. Which was much easier to endure than the crumpling, aching sadness at knowing I might have to leave my cherished boyfriend.
But that was the problem! Right there! Going numb.
I gazed into the candle flame. Well, so what if I left him? I shut my eyes and the candle still burned, although its orange was now green. Why did the thought of leaving him disturb me so much? Wasn’t it better to grow angry at his reaction—“I hope you enjoyed buying them!”—than to go dead? Or, wasn’t it better to whisper: “Really? Is that all you have to say?”
Anagnorisis is the term for an Aristotelian recognition. It marks the moment in a play when the hero comes to a realization about what he’s done, who he is. I read this the next day in the college library while studying Oedipus Rex. My study carrel was beside a Gothic window diamonded with chicken wire. The sky was a blue sword burning overhead. Can there be an anagnorisis involving underpants, I wondered, tears in my eyes. Is that too ridiculous?
The philosopher Stanley Cavell, I read on, says that anagnorisis occurs when the hero allows himself an emotional reaction to his intellectual understanding. The two functions had been kept apart during the hero’s quest. While Oedipus pursued the truth of his situation, he couldn’t allow himself to react. He needed to follow the evidence wherever it led—that great detective who in his youth had solved the riddle of the Sphinx itself. But then: the anagnorisis occurs when he permits the emotional reaction, the inner response to the facts he’s unearthed. That’s when he goes wild, blinding himself, gouging out his own eyes with the brooches. And it’s this very thing—allowing an emotional awareness of what he’s done—that Macbeth flees the entire length of his play, leaving a bloody path behind him.
I looked up from my book to the blazing blue arrow tip of sky. So: what changed a person was allowing yourself to feel what you knew. My stomach hurt. I didn’t like this answer one bit. My own emotions were still rabid, prone to exaggeration, incessantly misleading. And yet, what else did I have to go by if I ignored them? I’d been waiting for my feelings toward the man I was involved with to change for years, and they hadn’t. They only became sharper, more intense. My heart beat so hard, sitting in that library, that the stacks of books jumped away, came back. My moist palms clung to my tissue-thin Oedipus Rex. I would almost rather be numb forever than have to talk to my boyfriend about this problem.
I love him, I love him, I told myself as I walked across the battered campus toward home, and felt sicker and more frightened the closer I got to our apartment, but also somehow angrier, too. Had I really been so mysterious? Had he really been so unable to see my unhappiness? Or was he like Stacy somehow, the mean friend, ignoring what was obvious, which was the girl making faces over her shoulder, hurrying up the street both smiling and grimacing?
That night, in bed, I whispered to him, “No, I did not enjoy buying those underpants. And I feel worried about what’s wrong between us. I feel unloved, living with you. It’s so lonely.” Around three or four in the morning he woke me abruptly from a profound sleep, a sleep I’d been sunken so deeply inside it felt like being drunk. “There’s something I have to tell you,” he intoned in a dull, zombie voice, standing beside the bed, a look of horror on his face. His skin glowed silver in the streetlight. He wove in place, as if about to collapse.
“Tell me right away. You’re scaring me!” I said.
He revealed he’d been having an affair. He needed me to know. It was standing in the way of his feeling his love for me. And the words I’d said that night about feeling unloved—they broke his heart! He knew he had to tell me. It was the only way ahead, he felt. It was our only hope of real intimacy. He had to tell me what he’d done, who he was. He stood pale, shaking with fear.
I was shocked and furious—and relieved. At least I no longer felt insane. At least the world again made sense. At least I had all the information, or enough of it.
We sat close. We were both frightened. It was the dawn of something new. “I felt so awful,” he told me softly. “So far away from you.”
I nodded, sighing. How could I be angry at him (although I was)? For months I’d felt the bone-deep cold within myself. I’d known it without knowing it, his affair, his lack of attraction, the isolation, the sense of being unloved, and I’d swiveled my head the other way, not wanting to see. I’d ignored his secret. I’d kept my complaints weak, I hadn’t demanded more. I’d chosen calm and coma, as had he. Now we clenched hands hard across the space between us. We stayed up until the apartment buildings acquired tall peripheries, their rims brightening, sharpening, and the night began to fade to gray, turning the same color as the apartment buildings.
He sat before me, a young man, eager, energetic—as if he’d dropped a weight of years! How different he looked! A beautiful young man, a fawn, with gleaming large eyes and long eyelashes and pointed ears, excited, turned on to me, and I was shocked by my response. He was perfect—for someone else. Perhaps there was something wrong with me, but his eagerness, his freshness, his smiling, doe-eyed glance felt wrong for me. I didn’t want it. I felt like some sort of villain. How much he was bringing me! The banquet of his entire eager, undefended self. But he seemed a nubile boy. Oh, I needed to set him free. For it felt just like another kind of blackmail, his radiant eagerness, which asked me not to spoil it. It invited me to go mute again. In fact, his pliant, gentle lips, his doting, wet eyes, his tongue which lay in my own mouth like a sponge—inspired in me a kind of rage.
No more lying. No more zoning out, I told myself. Go with the twists and turns, the blazing maze. Trust that your truth will unlock the other person’s. And even if it doesn’t, at least it will unlock your own. The living room had grown larger, its corners swabbed with daylight. And, when I looked outside, the buildings no longer stood in hues of monotone gray. My heart beat hard in my chest.
“Oh, baby, I’m so sorry,” I began. “It just doesn’t work between us. Don’t you feel it?”
Soon we were weeping—terrified, and sad to inflict so much pain on one another. We’d been together for years. A sharp awareness of time itself swept in—I felt as if I were inflicting time itself on my boyfriend. “I’m sorry,” I said again. But color was seeping into things, the russet brick of the neighboring buildings, the silver zigzag cascade of the fire escapes, and I could finally see, closer, oh, the particular, killing handsomeness of this man before me.
I ultimately left, packing my green camp trunk, lugging down the stairs the old Smith Corona typewriter with its key the size of an eyelash at the end of a string. I drove away in my burgundy VW that had no heat, my body trembling. The windows of stores flashed a sea blue. The sun saturated the sky. Energy that had been trapped in our relationship seemed to have been let loose. I noticed a tree with acorns as big as plums and jagged leaves the size of handkerchiefs. A man on the pavement met my gaze as I waited for a light to change. He was walking a golden retriever. He seemed an intelligent, kind man, somebody’s husband. The light turned green and I sped on. When I become involved with someone else, I vowed, I will try not to zone out again, no matter the cost. The key on the typewriter case scratched as the car traveled, swinging and scraping against the nubbled-plastic case. My car took an abrupt turn. There was a moment’s pause. Then the little key struck hard before gradually resuming its steady, restless creak. Who was to protect me? I had to trust my own gut sense of things.
