They met on the third day of the Marriage Reconciliation Boot Camp, by the dumpsters where people smoked forbidden cigarettes, and it was love at first sight.
“I hate this place,” he said.
“Me, too.”
“Travers Houghton. What a miserable prick.”
“And he’s fat. If he wants to convince me he know the secret of life he should skip a few meals.” She blew out a tight cone of smoke.
“My wife made me come.”
She smiled at that. “Sounds like grounds for divorce, right there. Intolerable cruelty. Irreconcilable differences. Or whatever.”
“She’s having second thoughts, believe me.”
“Does she know you’re smoking?”
"Does your husband know you're smokin g?"
"We both know and pretend we don't."
"Sounds like you have come communcation problems."
"That's why we're here."
"No more secrets."
She shrugged. "I like secrets. So do you. Obviously."
“I was going to bring mouthwash but we never kiss anyway.”
“Which is all supposed to change now,” she said.
"Right."
He looked across the half empty parking lot to the woods. “I wonder what the statistics are, at this place. I mean, does this shit ever help anyone?”
“I don’t know. Now you’ve got me thinking about divorce. That would be a quick fix. Half of what we’ve got would set me up for life.”
“That’s the difference – you’d be getting half. I’d be losing half.”
She shrugged. “So what? You’ve got your share and you’re out.”
They smoked in silence for a few moments. Rain clouds were piling up at the northern edge of the sky. No spousal intimacy bag races today.
“So,” she said, dropping the last of her American spirit and stepping on the butt, “When was the last time you got laid?”
“Do infidelities count?”
“You’re telling me you cheated on your wife?’”
“Don’t you believe it?”
“You’re not the type.”
“Hey -- I take that as an insult.”
“Sorry, but it’s true. You would have made a move already.”
“Because you’re so attractive?”
“Because that’s what you’d do. People like you. Players.”
“Which I’m not.”
“So not.”
“Oh well.”
“It’s charming. It’s intriguing.”
“My aura of smug virtue doesn’t put you off?”
She laughed. “You’re not virtuous. You’re not even faithful, not really. Except by default. If an attractive woman came on to you that would be it, buddy. You’d be gone. One kiss and out. You’ve been standing on the brink for years.”
He dropped his own cigarette, crushed it with the toe of his shoe. He stared at her.
“Prove it.”
She took two steps and kissed him, mouth open, arms twined around his back. He fell into the kiss as he remembered falling into swimming pools on hot summer days when he was a kid: the bliss of submission, the thrill of immersion, the soundless splash into enclosing silence.
Finally he had to come up for a breath.
“I want to go somewhere and fuck you,” he said.
She smiled. “Pushover. I knew it.”
They wound up in an empty room on the third floor of an unused dormitory. The college rented out the campus during the summer to organizations like Travers Houghton’s Boot Camp. The bed was just a bare mattress on a plank. They didn’t care. They had no idea how long the Testimonial Assembly was going to last and they didn’t care about that either. As long as couples wanted to stand up and ‘speak their hearts’ to the crowd, they were safe. It could take all day.
Both of them were sure they wouldn’t be missed – especially by their spouses. This place made you glad for a few minutes to yourself – like trying to cure claustrophobia by trapping you in a stalled elevator.
After the first frenzied missionary style slam she rolled over and said “What does your wife refuse to do?”
He laughed. “We just did it.”
“She must have been willing to fuck you at some point. Did she give you blow jobs?”
“Yeah – no, not really. Sort of.”
“How do you sort of give a blow job?”
He propped himself up on an elbow, turned on his side to face her. She was alert, bright-eyed, gorgeous. And impossibly, supernaturally easy to talk to.
“She treated it like Mount Saint Helens. An interesting spot to visit, but make sure you get the hell away it before it goes off.”
“Oh. The blow job that turns into a hand job.”
He took a deep breath and nodded – more with his eye-brows than his chin, which was resting on his palm. “I only had one real blow job – some one night stand just before the girl got married. Those were my favorite one-night stands back in the day. No loose ends, no hurt feelings. You get to be the last fling. Anyway. She kept sucking as I came, harder even. Is this too …”
“No, no, I’m fascinated. Nobody tells us this stuff.”
“Well … they always talk about swallowing, as if that was some big deal all by itself, or some Male power trip or something. Turns out swallowing is incidental. If you’re sucking that hard you can’t help swallowing. And for the guy … the whole feeling is so much more intense. It’s insane, it’s like she was pulling my balls out through my dick, just convulsively draining everything and – I don’t know. I never tried to describe this before. It’s like crack, except I never tried crack. It’s what you hope crack would be like, what it ought to be like since people get so fucked up on it all the time. But I only had one time. That girl got married the next day and I never got a real blow job again.”
“Until now.”
“Are you serious?”
She slid down the bed. “It’s worth a try.”
“But what can I do for you? What won’t your husband do?”
“Well … you could take me to a Sandra Bullock movie.”
He laughed. “You drive a hard bargain.”
She paused. “But you promise”
“Anything. A double feature.”
“All About Steve? Miss Congeniality?”
“And Miss Congeniality 2 -- a triple feature, Ok? I’m begging you now.”
“You really are. And for some reason I find that incredibly sexy.”
So she slipped the rest of the way down and gave him the totally committed blow job he’d been longing for since he was twenty-two years old and it was everything he remembered and more and when they slipped back into the auditorium each of them stood up and gave heartfelt declarations of love for their spouses and they were so convincing the other couples gave them standing ovations.
The rest of the week was all sex and subterfuge: slipping out of bed when everyone else was asleep and making love on the lawn of the big quadrangle, pleading illness or (best of all) a headache for a secret rendezvous on the bird watching path behind the Chapel.
Once they walked down the steep hill into town and ate an illicit lunch at the bad Mexican restaurant on State Street, drinking 2-for-1 margaritas and ducking their heads when anyone they knew passed the big picture window.
“So what went wrong?” She asked him, over the second slug of crushed ice lime juice and tequila. He pushed his cooling enchilada across his plate. “I haven’t been able to give her the life she expected. She doesn’t get to live in the manner she wanted to become accustomed to. Like they say in celebrity divorces. When the woman is trying to explain why she needs ten thousand dollars worth of cut flowers every day.”
“So it’s just money?”
“It’s money and couches and new cars and a bigger condo and the freedom to travel, and no stress about her spending habits. I was supposed to take the price tags off the world for her.”
“So all you need to do is win the lottery.”
“Until she spends it all. And believe me, she can spend.”
“It’s just the opposite for me,” she said. “I just wish he could do what he wants. Really paint for a while try to get a gallery. Instead of the crap he does. Story boards. Free-lance art directing for d-list agencies. Drawing dancing teddy bears from some peanut butter account. They’re all going to cgi now, anyway. And he can’t even open his own e-mail.”
“So tell him to bail.”
“I’ve tried. He doesn’t listen. He doesn’t get it.”
“That’s why you’re here. Talk to him.”
“And say what?”
“Say – I don’t know. You want him to be better. Be all that he can be, that’s appropriate for boot camp. An army of one.”
“What a weird ad campaign. I was hoping for an army of two.”
“Whatever. You want him to be happy. Tell him that.”
“Or I could just send a Hallmark card.”
“I like mixing them up – sending a nice condolence card when people get married.”
She laughed. “Or a get well soon when they start a new job.”
“That’s the idea.”
“He never even tries to make love any more.”
“Maybe he’s given up. Seduce him. I know you can do it.”
She smiled. “Maybe all it takes is one good blow job.”
“Maybe you’re right.”
In between their assignations they duly played all the touching games and the trust games and the confessional games; they allowed themselves to be video-taped and sleep-deprived. They stripped naked in front of strangers, and cried in front of strangers and confessed their sins and and everyone forgave everyone else and said the worst thing they could think of and shared their most bitter regrets and most shameful secrets and then everyone got one good night’s sleep and they were on their way back home.
He met her on the steps of Dewey Hall. For a moment they were alone. No one was watching them. He set his suitcase down.
“Well, this is it,” he said.
“You’re my last fling and I’m off to get married?”
“Or vice versa.”
“What a shame.”
“I don’t know. It was a tough week but I think it worked.”
“Did you fall in love with your wife again?”
“Did you fall in love with your husband?”
They both nodded, smiling.
“So all that role playing actually worked,” she said.
“Just like Bev and Marty said it would.”
“—as long as we threw ourselves into it.”
‘”Yeah. That’s what they said.”
“I hate admitting they were right.”
“Me, too.”
Travers Houghton strode past and lifted one fist, his signature greeting. They returned the salute.
“Because he really is such a pompous asshole.”
“A rich pompous asshole. Thriving by word of mouth.”
“So we do have to tell them.”
“I guess. But first I want another sublime blow job or two.”
“And we’re going to have the complete oeuvre of Sandra Bullock on our netflicks queue.”
He bowed his head, nodding in mock defeat.
When he looked up she was smiling. “You’ll do some real painting, too, won’t you, Mike? I’ll model for you. Any pose you want.”
He pulled her to him and kissed her.
“I feel like marrying you right here and now, Houghton is an ordained minister.”
She put a finger to his lips, shook her head.
“Been there, done that,” she said.
Then she picked up her bag, took his hand and started lightly down the steps to their car.
Monday, November 16, 2009
The Homecare Diaries: Surreal Life
It looks like my mother is going to have to move in to the nursing home. We just can’t do what needs to be done any more. Every day we are faced with our own ineptitude and clumsiness and ignorance. I can read to her from Tim O’Brien and make her cry, I can tell stupid jokes and make her laugh. But I can’t adjust medications and do physical therapy and take care of her around the clock.
So I spend my days now trying to find cards I don’t recognize with information I don’t know so that people I’ve never seen can fill out forms I know nothing about … all to get my mother into a facility where none of us wants her to be in the first place.
It’s Kafla-esque. Kafka would actually be amused by this situation. He couldn’t read The Hunger Artist to his friends without cracking up. Meanwhile I feel like my entire nervous system is being peeled one layer at a time like an onion and someone seems to have attached lead weights to all my joints. I can’t even read at night any more: my eyelids secrete glue. The centrifuge of illness and misery sends the separate parts of my life flying in all directions. Some neurologist I’ve never met changes my mother’s medication and sends her into a tail-spin and he acts irritated when I call him up in a panic, after office hours. He’s not the doctor of record. “But you’re the neurologist,” I say, and I’m thinking, they haven’t passed tort reform yet, you miserable prick.
Meanwhile, my mother’s head floats above the dining room table, the spitting image of a younger self, and we discuss the nature of confidence and the rules of grammar and the failures of the president (“I have only one question for him: When are you going to end the war?”) and she instructs me in the best way to dredge the scallops (seasoned bread crumbs and white corn meal after a quick dip in the milk and egg mix). Then she stands up and her legs won’t hold her and all her features pull down in pain and she’s unrecognizable and I can’t adjust.
I’m changing my mother’s diaper and she has no modesty left and takes it in good humor, and she has no idea of the shock wave it sends through my nervous system, like gunshot wound, the sonic boom pulverizing the soft tissue ahead of the bullet. Why is this so disturbing? It should feel natural, tending to the flesh of a parent, as she tended to mine and I tended to my own children and they will tend to me. And yet every fiber of every nerve screams in protest.
But even that is changing. The most surreal part of the experience is that I’m actually getting used to it. I woke up this morning early (Annie had to catch a 6:30 boat). When I I came downstairs Mom was on the floor by the bed. She had slipped down. Her robe and pajamas were wet; so was the bedding. After a split second flinch response and a sort of snap clenching, of the spirit (Time to wake all the way up, buddy!), I performed some internal recalibration and saw the scene as a set of logistical problems to be solved: get her off the floor, seated on the walker, into the bathroom; then change the bed, get the laundry in, find new pajamas, get her off the toilet, get her dressed, cheer her up, tuck her in … and make coffee for us. Annie’s alarm was set for five, and she was just getting up when I finished. So I’ve crossed a strange new rubicon now, into a twilight world where finding my Mom on the floor and fixing the nighttime mess just feels like another part of my day, a mundane routine like walking the dog or brushing my teeth: the new normal.
Still, bizarre things keep happening. After days of being unable to stand, Mom woke up in the middle of the night last week, certain she was all alone in the grand foyer of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, in our old neighborhood in Manhattan. She made her way to the top of the grand stairway and then decided she had to get outside to hail a cab. She walked across the whole downstairs of my little house, looking for a way out of the museum – I know this because I left my sneakers near the front door and she was wearing them when I found her: giant reeboks on her tiny feet. She almost got the basement door open (that actual narrow stairway would have killed her) before she woke up enough to realize that she was at home. How did she do that? The basement door is hard for healthy young people to open. And why aren’t we figuring out some way to harness the over-riding power of that dream in her waking life?
I don’t know. No one knows. She can’t taste food but she loves to eat, she can’t move but she can tour the house in a dream. The people who know how to help her don’t seem overly interested and the people who care the most are helpless. Life is upside down but I’m getting used to walking on the ceiling, skirting the light fixtures and high- stepping the door jambs.
I haven’t been arrested for no reason, as Kafka described in The Trial. I haven’t been turned into an enormous roach and neither has my Mom. I’m not spending my days trying to penetrate the faceless bureaucracy of The Castle—though it all sounds a little too familiar. I’m not living in Kafka’s world.
But I’m starting to understand it.
So I spend my days now trying to find cards I don’t recognize with information I don’t know so that people I’ve never seen can fill out forms I know nothing about … all to get my mother into a facility where none of us wants her to be in the first place.
It’s Kafla-esque. Kafka would actually be amused by this situation. He couldn’t read The Hunger Artist to his friends without cracking up. Meanwhile I feel like my entire nervous system is being peeled one layer at a time like an onion and someone seems to have attached lead weights to all my joints. I can’t even read at night any more: my eyelids secrete glue. The centrifuge of illness and misery sends the separate parts of my life flying in all directions. Some neurologist I’ve never met changes my mother’s medication and sends her into a tail-spin and he acts irritated when I call him up in a panic, after office hours. He’s not the doctor of record. “But you’re the neurologist,” I say, and I’m thinking, they haven’t passed tort reform yet, you miserable prick.
Meanwhile, my mother’s head floats above the dining room table, the spitting image of a younger self, and we discuss the nature of confidence and the rules of grammar and the failures of the president (“I have only one question for him: When are you going to end the war?”) and she instructs me in the best way to dredge the scallops (seasoned bread crumbs and white corn meal after a quick dip in the milk and egg mix). Then she stands up and her legs won’t hold her and all her features pull down in pain and she’s unrecognizable and I can’t adjust.
I’m changing my mother’s diaper and she has no modesty left and takes it in good humor, and she has no idea of the shock wave it sends through my nervous system, like gunshot wound, the sonic boom pulverizing the soft tissue ahead of the bullet. Why is this so disturbing? It should feel natural, tending to the flesh of a parent, as she tended to mine and I tended to my own children and they will tend to me. And yet every fiber of every nerve screams in protest.
But even that is changing. The most surreal part of the experience is that I’m actually getting used to it. I woke up this morning early (Annie had to catch a 6:30 boat). When I I came downstairs Mom was on the floor by the bed. She had slipped down. Her robe and pajamas were wet; so was the bedding. After a split second flinch response and a sort of snap clenching, of the spirit (Time to wake all the way up, buddy!), I performed some internal recalibration and saw the scene as a set of logistical problems to be solved: get her off the floor, seated on the walker, into the bathroom; then change the bed, get the laundry in, find new pajamas, get her off the toilet, get her dressed, cheer her up, tuck her in … and make coffee for us. Annie’s alarm was set for five, and she was just getting up when I finished. So I’ve crossed a strange new rubicon now, into a twilight world where finding my Mom on the floor and fixing the nighttime mess just feels like another part of my day, a mundane routine like walking the dog or brushing my teeth: the new normal.
Still, bizarre things keep happening. After days of being unable to stand, Mom woke up in the middle of the night last week, certain she was all alone in the grand foyer of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, in our old neighborhood in Manhattan. She made her way to the top of the grand stairway and then decided she had to get outside to hail a cab. She walked across the whole downstairs of my little house, looking for a way out of the museum – I know this because I left my sneakers near the front door and she was wearing them when I found her: giant reeboks on her tiny feet. She almost got the basement door open (that actual narrow stairway would have killed her) before she woke up enough to realize that she was at home. How did she do that? The basement door is hard for healthy young people to open. And why aren’t we figuring out some way to harness the over-riding power of that dream in her waking life?
I don’t know. No one knows. She can’t taste food but she loves to eat, she can’t move but she can tour the house in a dream. The people who know how to help her don’t seem overly interested and the people who care the most are helpless. Life is upside down but I’m getting used to walking on the ceiling, skirting the light fixtures and high- stepping the door jambs.
I haven’t been arrested for no reason, as Kafka described in The Trial. I haven’t been turned into an enormous roach and neither has my Mom. I’m not spending my days trying to penetrate the faceless bureaucracy of The Castle—though it all sounds a little too familiar. I’m not living in Kafka’s world.
But I’m starting to understand it.
Sunday, November 01, 2009
The Homecare Diaries: Animating the Map
I spent half an hour this morning helping my mother put on her bathrobe.
The goal was to get her bundled up and across the ten feet from her bed to the kitchen table for breakfast. Like some hapless, out-numbered platoon trying to retake some anonymous numbered hill in Korea, ultimately we failed. We managed to get the robe on, with me bracing her trembling legs and holding her up from the back while we searched for the second arm hole – the second arm hole is the killer, elusive and maddening, always too high and too far back, so it seems as if she will have to dislocate her shoulder to fit her hand in. Suddenly in the closing hours of your life, you have to be a circus contortionist simply to get dressed. Still, we did it. But we couldn’t get to the dining room table because her legs simply couldn’t support her weight this morning. It’s particularly upsetting because she seemed to be making so much progress over the last week. Sometimes the physical therapy and occupational therapy and the exercises seem like nothing more than worry beads, a soothing distraction, a way to keep body and mind occupied before the next onslaught of the disease. Because when it happens, when the storm surge arrives, all the sand-bagging and levee building amounts to nothing, swept away by the greater force of an illness no one understands, not even the doctors.
We finally got Mom into her ‘cadillac’ walker – it doubles as an ad hoc wheel chair, and we maneuvered her to the dining room table where she ate cereal and drank coffee and talked the situation over. I remain awestruck by the tenacious ability of the human brain to accept an ever-narrowing world and inhabit it, accepting an ever shinking set of goals and small victories. Mom had hoped to start up her communications consulting business here, and go shopping, and move into the lovely assisted living home on Main Street. Now she takes it as a satisfying and hard won triumph when she can walk on her own to the bathroom late at night. I admire the stoicism with which she adapts to this contraction, but entering the claustrophobic world of her illness, living there with her even as an outside observer, takes a grim toll. It’s exhausting and frightening. At first I thought it was loosening and uprooting the structural supports of my own existence, but I realize now that I was mistaken. Instead, it’s revealing the structural supports of my existence, placing the realities of my life and life itself under the raw and unforgiving fluorescent lighting of mortal truth. It’s my illusions that have been torn up strewn about the ground: the illusion of immortality, the illusion of the ever-nurturing Mom, the illusion of a benevolent universe. I’m going to die as she is dying; I have to nurture her now and the universe, God-controlled or the product of random chance, really doesn’t care at all. The result is I feel old myself, inches not miles from my mother’s precipice, caught up and tangled in the same sticky web of decay and disorder.
It makes you understand how delayed stress disorders happen. During a car crash, or a wartime trauma, things happen too quickly to grasp the nature of the event. But here it’s all occurring in slow motion. You can feel yourself shoving your emotions aside, stamping them down, packing them like boxes into an overstuffed closet. You can feel the effect of looking down and pushing forward with each day, the stress building up like a toxin coating the nerve endings. It will take years to cleanse the blood of this sorrow, and it may never happen. I may not have enough time.
As a caretaker, the erosion of your world happens on so many levels at once – that’s what’s hard to grasp from the outside. Your time is shredded, days starting later and ending sooner and trimmed from the middle with new obligations. This means that money becomes an issue and even though the thought of a nursing home draining away a life’s savings feels grim and Dickensian, some fist inside me clenches and says “better her than me” I cannot go bankrupt here. I have to work. That’s not a debate point, it’s a fact. Having no choice simplifies decision-making. But I’m exhausted and that slows work down, also. I have no private time now; Annie and I have no time together except for a stolen cup of coffee or a brief talk in the car, parked in the driveway. I’m writing this as the visiting nurse works with Mom, tapping a few stolen sentences into the computer between consultations and conversations. The emotional wear and tear combines with my mundane practical worries and the inexorable presence of death, the grinning skull suddenly pushing out of the surface of everything, and the sadness and the pity, and the stupid childish anger and the guilt over that anger to create a separate disability that folds over and magnifies the effects of its own symptoms. It reminds me of baking bread, folding over the dough and kneading it, watching it double in bulk under a checked cloth on a warm window sill.
But no one wants to eat this loaf. No one.
Mom was in the hospital for a couple of weeks after a bad fall in the bathroom and we got the house back and dismantled her bed and tried to live normally. But of course life revolved around the hospital and we knew it was just the eye of the hurricane. The next storm wall was coming. I log onto Weather Underground a lot these days – the weather has taken on some mysterious new urgency. I see the blob but I have no idea what it means for me until I click on the ‘animate map’ button. Then I can see which way the weather is moving, caught in a half hour loop. I relax: it’s heading Northeast of us, despite the fact that the official forecast calls for rain. I need to click that same tab in my own life, in my mother’s condition. I see the blob, the angry yellow and orange of a harsh Nor’Easter. But what does it mean? Is this a brief setback, or just another bump in a bumpy road. Does it signify the beginning of the end, or is it the prelude to a miraculous resurgence? I have no way to tell.
But I take comfort in small things.
When I found my Mom on the bathroom floor that morning three weeks ago, and helped her to her feet, both of us thought it was all over.
She hugged me and said. “We had fun, didn’t we? Nobody had more fun than us.”
It was true. Some days, some part of each day, it’s still true.
So we hang on and hope for more of them. There’s nothing else we can do.
The goal was to get her bundled up and across the ten feet from her bed to the kitchen table for breakfast. Like some hapless, out-numbered platoon trying to retake some anonymous numbered hill in Korea, ultimately we failed. We managed to get the robe on, with me bracing her trembling legs and holding her up from the back while we searched for the second arm hole – the second arm hole is the killer, elusive and maddening, always too high and too far back, so it seems as if she will have to dislocate her shoulder to fit her hand in. Suddenly in the closing hours of your life, you have to be a circus contortionist simply to get dressed. Still, we did it. But we couldn’t get to the dining room table because her legs simply couldn’t support her weight this morning. It’s particularly upsetting because she seemed to be making so much progress over the last week. Sometimes the physical therapy and occupational therapy and the exercises seem like nothing more than worry beads, a soothing distraction, a way to keep body and mind occupied before the next onslaught of the disease. Because when it happens, when the storm surge arrives, all the sand-bagging and levee building amounts to nothing, swept away by the greater force of an illness no one understands, not even the doctors.
We finally got Mom into her ‘cadillac’ walker – it doubles as an ad hoc wheel chair, and we maneuvered her to the dining room table where she ate cereal and drank coffee and talked the situation over. I remain awestruck by the tenacious ability of the human brain to accept an ever-narrowing world and inhabit it, accepting an ever shinking set of goals and small victories. Mom had hoped to start up her communications consulting business here, and go shopping, and move into the lovely assisted living home on Main Street. Now she takes it as a satisfying and hard won triumph when she can walk on her own to the bathroom late at night. I admire the stoicism with which she adapts to this contraction, but entering the claustrophobic world of her illness, living there with her even as an outside observer, takes a grim toll. It’s exhausting and frightening. At first I thought it was loosening and uprooting the structural supports of my own existence, but I realize now that I was mistaken. Instead, it’s revealing the structural supports of my existence, placing the realities of my life and life itself under the raw and unforgiving fluorescent lighting of mortal truth. It’s my illusions that have been torn up strewn about the ground: the illusion of immortality, the illusion of the ever-nurturing Mom, the illusion of a benevolent universe. I’m going to die as she is dying; I have to nurture her now and the universe, God-controlled or the product of random chance, really doesn’t care at all. The result is I feel old myself, inches not miles from my mother’s precipice, caught up and tangled in the same sticky web of decay and disorder.
It makes you understand how delayed stress disorders happen. During a car crash, or a wartime trauma, things happen too quickly to grasp the nature of the event. But here it’s all occurring in slow motion. You can feel yourself shoving your emotions aside, stamping them down, packing them like boxes into an overstuffed closet. You can feel the effect of looking down and pushing forward with each day, the stress building up like a toxin coating the nerve endings. It will take years to cleanse the blood of this sorrow, and it may never happen. I may not have enough time.
As a caretaker, the erosion of your world happens on so many levels at once – that’s what’s hard to grasp from the outside. Your time is shredded, days starting later and ending sooner and trimmed from the middle with new obligations. This means that money becomes an issue and even though the thought of a nursing home draining away a life’s savings feels grim and Dickensian, some fist inside me clenches and says “better her than me” I cannot go bankrupt here. I have to work. That’s not a debate point, it’s a fact. Having no choice simplifies decision-making. But I’m exhausted and that slows work down, also. I have no private time now; Annie and I have no time together except for a stolen cup of coffee or a brief talk in the car, parked in the driveway. I’m writing this as the visiting nurse works with Mom, tapping a few stolen sentences into the computer between consultations and conversations. The emotional wear and tear combines with my mundane practical worries and the inexorable presence of death, the grinning skull suddenly pushing out of the surface of everything, and the sadness and the pity, and the stupid childish anger and the guilt over that anger to create a separate disability that folds over and magnifies the effects of its own symptoms. It reminds me of baking bread, folding over the dough and kneading it, watching it double in bulk under a checked cloth on a warm window sill.
But no one wants to eat this loaf. No one.
Mom was in the hospital for a couple of weeks after a bad fall in the bathroom and we got the house back and dismantled her bed and tried to live normally. But of course life revolved around the hospital and we knew it was just the eye of the hurricane. The next storm wall was coming. I log onto Weather Underground a lot these days – the weather has taken on some mysterious new urgency. I see the blob but I have no idea what it means for me until I click on the ‘animate map’ button. Then I can see which way the weather is moving, caught in a half hour loop. I relax: it’s heading Northeast of us, despite the fact that the official forecast calls for rain. I need to click that same tab in my own life, in my mother’s condition. I see the blob, the angry yellow and orange of a harsh Nor’Easter. But what does it mean? Is this a brief setback, or just another bump in a bumpy road. Does it signify the beginning of the end, or is it the prelude to a miraculous resurgence? I have no way to tell.
But I take comfort in small things.
When I found my Mom on the bathroom floor that morning three weeks ago, and helped her to her feet, both of us thought it was all over.
She hugged me and said. “We had fun, didn’t we? Nobody had more fun than us.”
It was true. Some days, some part of each day, it’s still true.
So we hang on and hope for more of them. There’s nothing else we can do.
Monday, October 19, 2009
The Truth About Ayn Rand
In this bizarre historical moment, when everyone on the right is quoting Ayn Rand and the sales of her books are sky-rocketing, something needs to be said to this resurgent mob of Atlas Shrugged enthusiasts: they’re missing the point.
When she died, in March of 1982, “All Things Considered” ran a lengthy obituary that made the same mistake. Listening to it, you would have thought she was a marginal philosopher whose tracts, formulated as ‘novels’ continued to exercise a baffling influence on the young, the ill-educated and the neo-conservative. Of course they mentioned her most famous acolyte, Alan Greenspan, and there’s no better refutation of her simplistic theories than the gaudy Mardi Gras of financial malfeasance and economic ruin that his stint at the Federal Reserve created. He even allowed himself an endearing moment of innocent surprise recently. He recently admitted to feeling honestly shocked that greedy people would behave badly in the presence of enormous amount of free money. It’s hard to have much sympathy for such globally catastrophic naiveté. But Ayn Rand spent her life constructing a free market utopia in which none of the recent events (like the housing bubble, the sub-prime mortgage debacle or the default swap swindles) could ever happen. Ayn Rand capitalists don’t even need unions – they treat their workers so well that a union movement would be pointless. This brings to mind the literal Greek definition of the word Utopia: “No place” – a world most essentially defined by its impossibility.
Rand’s impossible world is a sharply divided one, parsed into the geniuses, the drones and the Collectivists. Of course, no one who reads her wants to feel like a drone (The good-hearted self proclaimed industrial serf Eddie Willers is hardly a glamorous role model; neither is the hapless store clerk James Taggart dupes into marriage); much less one of the dread socialist villains with their icky names – Kip Chalmers, Balph Eubanks, Wesley Mouch. Who wouldn’t prefer to be a John Galt or a Francisco D’Anconia? This urge to pick sides and stand with the cool group -- ironically so alien to Rand’s stated goal of self-containment and indifference to other people’s opinions -- often led to “Any Rand Syndrome” among teen-age boys. After a thousand pages or so, the average teen-ager would start sneering at his old friends and at least trying to laugh silently with his head thrown back. I for one could never quite figure how Howard Roark pulled that one off.
But the sad truth is that most of us will never run invent a new kind of metal or a new engine that converts static electricity into kinetic power. Most of us will go on kicking things when they break and feeling vaguely ripped of by the Geek Squad at Best Buy. We’re drones not geniuses, and the real men and women who constitute the ‘fountainhead’ of human progress are anything but the lock-jawed, slogan-mouthing puppets that Ayn Rand convenes at the end of Atlas Shrugged in a hidden Rocky Mountain valley. Rand finally ‘jumps the shark’ here, all but her most loyal devotees admit. In his New Yorker review, George Steiner remarked, “The last third of Atlas Shrugged is positively Swiftian in its social satire. I refer of course to Tom Swift.”
So what can explain the enduring popularity of this simplistic, quasi-fascist, leave-everything-to-the-smart-people doctrine with its heartless steely contempt for the average person and its almost carnal worship of the exceptional? Is it just because Ayn Rand’s strident free-market money-is-the-root-of-all good diatribes play into the political agendas of each new generation of avaricious Wall Street swindlers and tax-cut corporate minions in Congress?
I don’t think so. The same bad ideas have been advocated by many other voices, long silenced and forgotten. People, the vast majority of people, do not read Ayn Rand for her philosophy, such as it is. Those are the parts they skip. John Galt’s speech? Come on: it’s an endless turgid re-hash of everything we’ve already read in the previous thousand pages. Even Francisco D’Anconia’s money speech drones on for far too long, until even the most dim-witted Young Republican is shouting “We get it! We get it!”
No, people read Ayn Rand for a much simpler reason: she tells good stories and she writes them in a unique and entertaining style. The craziness that taints her ideas makes her pulpy stories fun. Like her hero, Victor Hugo, she is infatuated with the heightened drama of grand gestures. These are the moments that remain with you, years after the droning cant of her Adam-Smith-on-steroids sermons has faded:
Pirate Ragnar Danneskjold (he only attacks collectivist ships!) risks life and limb to give industrialist Henry Reardon a single bar of gold – the down payment and what the sleazy socialist morons have stolen from him over the years. They meet on a deserted highway (Reardon likes walking home from the steel mill) and though Reardon refuses the gold an calls Danneskjold a criminal, he can’t bring himself to turn the man in when the cops roll by. The slab of precious metal lying on the asphalt in the moonlight, the split second decision to side with the bandit against the police … that’s what we remember.
Or this:
Dagny Taggart hears Reardon’s wife disparaging her husband for the clunky gift he gave her – a bracelet made from the first pouring of Reardon metal. This is at a their Anniversary party. She says “I’d gladly trade it for a diamond bracelet – somethingf really valuable.” Without a moment’s hesitation, Dagny pulls her diamond bracelet off her wrist and makes the scandalous trade. Gotta love her for that. Like when her brother James’ new wife (whom he has conned into thinking he’s the hero of the railroad) says to Dagny “I’m the woman in this family now,” and Dagny casually replies “That’s OK. I’m the man.” Or when Howard Roark’s arch-enemy in The Fountainhead finally meets him in the middle of the night at a deserted construction site and says “I have to know—what do you think of me?” and Roark says, casually bewildered, “But I don’t think of you.”
I wanted to feel that way about so many people when I was a kid.
I still want to feel that way, I might as well admit it.
And there are so many more:
When a workplace disaster interrupts an intractable difference of opinion between Francisco D’Anconia and Hank Reardon and they have to work together to save the steel mill; when John Galt instructs the people torturing him on how to fix their torture machine, which had broken down; or when a starving hobo taken into Dagny’s private railroad car and offered dinner while he tells the story of the mysterious John Galt engine, refuses to wolf his food and eats with a quiet decorum; when a college janitor unceremoniously erases a whole lecture-hall blackboard a young physicist has filled with futile equations and scrawls a simple formula that solves the problem … just like Good Will Hunting. I’m sure that moment in the Matt Damon Ben Affleck screenplay was intended as an homage to John Galt. Maybe their next script will feature an homage to Hugh Akston, the philosophy professor who winds up running a diner in the mountains after withdrawing from the world as part of the “strike” that defines the book. He makes burgers now, but they’re the best burgers Dagny has ever tasted, which somehow makes perfect sense.
Beyond these iconic scenes there remains the stubborn fact of the writing itself. Rand makes a unique sound, partly the product of English being her second language, but primarily a function of her unique, even batty sensibility. I realized I was in the presence of something original and fascinating when I opened The Fountainhead and read this on the very first page: “He stood naked at the edge of a cliff. The lake lay far below him. A frozen explosion of granite burst in flight to the sky over motionless water. The water seemed immovable, the stone – flowing. The stone had the stillness of one brief moment in battle when thrust meets thrust and the currents are held in a pause more dynamic than motion.”
A pause more dynamic than motion.
That blew me away at age seventeen. And I have to say -- it still sounds pretty good. One character in Atlas Shrugged greets another one he thought was dead with a “joyous anger of relief.” It’s odd and exact and wonderful, and there are sentences like that sprinkled throughout all her books. Whole sequences dazzle you – the trains taking two lovers to separate Siberian gulags in We The Living, the first run on the John Galt line in Atlas Shrugged, the ruin of Gail Wynant in The Fountainhead. Rand’s characters linger with you – doomed old architect Henry Cameron, abrasive Ellis Wyatt, self-destructive Leo Kovalensky.
It’s the writing that we love her for -- those of us who still love her, after our adolescent infatuations burned away to a doctrinaire contempt and were finally replaced by a stubborn affectionate admiration for the way she can rhapsodize the lit end of a cigarette or the sight of the New York skyline at night, for a character who calls his yacht “I Do” not to commemorate his many marriages (as the tabloids think) but to answer all the people who spent so many years telling him “You don’t run things around here”.
Like her hero Victor Hugo, her ideas are her weakness, her liability and her shame. Her greatness lies between the pronouncements and the opinions, the dogma and Doctoral fodder, the image she gives you of the harridan school teacher slapping your wrist with a ruler when disagree with her.
She was all of that, but she was also a writer, a wonderful, passionate utterly strange writer, and that’s the way I choose to remember her – especially now, when she’s becoming popular again with all the wrong people, for all the wrong reasons.
She deserves better.
When she died, in March of 1982, “All Things Considered” ran a lengthy obituary that made the same mistake. Listening to it, you would have thought she was a marginal philosopher whose tracts, formulated as ‘novels’ continued to exercise a baffling influence on the young, the ill-educated and the neo-conservative. Of course they mentioned her most famous acolyte, Alan Greenspan, and there’s no better refutation of her simplistic theories than the gaudy Mardi Gras of financial malfeasance and economic ruin that his stint at the Federal Reserve created. He even allowed himself an endearing moment of innocent surprise recently. He recently admitted to feeling honestly shocked that greedy people would behave badly in the presence of enormous amount of free money. It’s hard to have much sympathy for such globally catastrophic naiveté. But Ayn Rand spent her life constructing a free market utopia in which none of the recent events (like the housing bubble, the sub-prime mortgage debacle or the default swap swindles) could ever happen. Ayn Rand capitalists don’t even need unions – they treat their workers so well that a union movement would be pointless. This brings to mind the literal Greek definition of the word Utopia: “No place” – a world most essentially defined by its impossibility.
Rand’s impossible world is a sharply divided one, parsed into the geniuses, the drones and the Collectivists. Of course, no one who reads her wants to feel like a drone (The good-hearted self proclaimed industrial serf Eddie Willers is hardly a glamorous role model; neither is the hapless store clerk James Taggart dupes into marriage); much less one of the dread socialist villains with their icky names – Kip Chalmers, Balph Eubanks, Wesley Mouch. Who wouldn’t prefer to be a John Galt or a Francisco D’Anconia? This urge to pick sides and stand with the cool group -- ironically so alien to Rand’s stated goal of self-containment and indifference to other people’s opinions -- often led to “Any Rand Syndrome” among teen-age boys. After a thousand pages or so, the average teen-ager would start sneering at his old friends and at least trying to laugh silently with his head thrown back. I for one could never quite figure how Howard Roark pulled that one off.
But the sad truth is that most of us will never run invent a new kind of metal or a new engine that converts static electricity into kinetic power. Most of us will go on kicking things when they break and feeling vaguely ripped of by the Geek Squad at Best Buy. We’re drones not geniuses, and the real men and women who constitute the ‘fountainhead’ of human progress are anything but the lock-jawed, slogan-mouthing puppets that Ayn Rand convenes at the end of Atlas Shrugged in a hidden Rocky Mountain valley. Rand finally ‘jumps the shark’ here, all but her most loyal devotees admit. In his New Yorker review, George Steiner remarked, “The last third of Atlas Shrugged is positively Swiftian in its social satire. I refer of course to Tom Swift.”
So what can explain the enduring popularity of this simplistic, quasi-fascist, leave-everything-to-the-smart-people doctrine with its heartless steely contempt for the average person and its almost carnal worship of the exceptional? Is it just because Ayn Rand’s strident free-market money-is-the-root-of-all good diatribes play into the political agendas of each new generation of avaricious Wall Street swindlers and tax-cut corporate minions in Congress?
I don’t think so. The same bad ideas have been advocated by many other voices, long silenced and forgotten. People, the vast majority of people, do not read Ayn Rand for her philosophy, such as it is. Those are the parts they skip. John Galt’s speech? Come on: it’s an endless turgid re-hash of everything we’ve already read in the previous thousand pages. Even Francisco D’Anconia’s money speech drones on for far too long, until even the most dim-witted Young Republican is shouting “We get it! We get it!”
No, people read Ayn Rand for a much simpler reason: she tells good stories and she writes them in a unique and entertaining style. The craziness that taints her ideas makes her pulpy stories fun. Like her hero, Victor Hugo, she is infatuated with the heightened drama of grand gestures. These are the moments that remain with you, years after the droning cant of her Adam-Smith-on-steroids sermons has faded:
Pirate Ragnar Danneskjold (he only attacks collectivist ships!) risks life and limb to give industrialist Henry Reardon a single bar of gold – the down payment and what the sleazy socialist morons have stolen from him over the years. They meet on a deserted highway (Reardon likes walking home from the steel mill) and though Reardon refuses the gold an calls Danneskjold a criminal, he can’t bring himself to turn the man in when the cops roll by. The slab of precious metal lying on the asphalt in the moonlight, the split second decision to side with the bandit against the police … that’s what we remember.
Or this:
Dagny Taggart hears Reardon’s wife disparaging her husband for the clunky gift he gave her – a bracelet made from the first pouring of Reardon metal. This is at a their Anniversary party. She says “I’d gladly trade it for a diamond bracelet – somethingf really valuable.” Without a moment’s hesitation, Dagny pulls her diamond bracelet off her wrist and makes the scandalous trade. Gotta love her for that. Like when her brother James’ new wife (whom he has conned into thinking he’s the hero of the railroad) says to Dagny “I’m the woman in this family now,” and Dagny casually replies “That’s OK. I’m the man.” Or when Howard Roark’s arch-enemy in The Fountainhead finally meets him in the middle of the night at a deserted construction site and says “I have to know—what do you think of me?” and Roark says, casually bewildered, “But I don’t think of you.”
I wanted to feel that way about so many people when I was a kid.
I still want to feel that way, I might as well admit it.
And there are so many more:
When a workplace disaster interrupts an intractable difference of opinion between Francisco D’Anconia and Hank Reardon and they have to work together to save the steel mill; when John Galt instructs the people torturing him on how to fix their torture machine, which had broken down; or when a starving hobo taken into Dagny’s private railroad car and offered dinner while he tells the story of the mysterious John Galt engine, refuses to wolf his food and eats with a quiet decorum; when a college janitor unceremoniously erases a whole lecture-hall blackboard a young physicist has filled with futile equations and scrawls a simple formula that solves the problem … just like Good Will Hunting. I’m sure that moment in the Matt Damon Ben Affleck screenplay was intended as an homage to John Galt. Maybe their next script will feature an homage to Hugh Akston, the philosophy professor who winds up running a diner in the mountains after withdrawing from the world as part of the “strike” that defines the book. He makes burgers now, but they’re the best burgers Dagny has ever tasted, which somehow makes perfect sense.
Beyond these iconic scenes there remains the stubborn fact of the writing itself. Rand makes a unique sound, partly the product of English being her second language, but primarily a function of her unique, even batty sensibility. I realized I was in the presence of something original and fascinating when I opened The Fountainhead and read this on the very first page: “He stood naked at the edge of a cliff. The lake lay far below him. A frozen explosion of granite burst in flight to the sky over motionless water. The water seemed immovable, the stone – flowing. The stone had the stillness of one brief moment in battle when thrust meets thrust and the currents are held in a pause more dynamic than motion.”
A pause more dynamic than motion.
That blew me away at age seventeen. And I have to say -- it still sounds pretty good. One character in Atlas Shrugged greets another one he thought was dead with a “joyous anger of relief.” It’s odd and exact and wonderful, and there are sentences like that sprinkled throughout all her books. Whole sequences dazzle you – the trains taking two lovers to separate Siberian gulags in We The Living, the first run on the John Galt line in Atlas Shrugged, the ruin of Gail Wynant in The Fountainhead. Rand’s characters linger with you – doomed old architect Henry Cameron, abrasive Ellis Wyatt, self-destructive Leo Kovalensky.
It’s the writing that we love her for -- those of us who still love her, after our adolescent infatuations burned away to a doctrinaire contempt and were finally replaced by a stubborn affectionate admiration for the way she can rhapsodize the lit end of a cigarette or the sight of the New York skyline at night, for a character who calls his yacht “I Do” not to commemorate his many marriages (as the tabloids think) but to answer all the people who spent so many years telling him “You don’t run things around here”.
Like her hero Victor Hugo, her ideas are her weakness, her liability and her shame. Her greatness lies between the pronouncements and the opinions, the dogma and Doctoral fodder, the image she gives you of the harridan school teacher slapping your wrist with a ruler when disagree with her.
She was all of that, but she was also a writer, a wonderful, passionate utterly strange writer, and that’s the way I choose to remember her – especially now, when she’s becoming popular again with all the wrong people, for all the wrong reasons.
She deserves better.
Star Wars and the Surf Park: Waking Up from the American Dream
In early August 2006 I signed up for the waiting list at the Ron Jon surfpark in Orlando Florida. I was number 5166 on the list, with little chance of actually getting a membership in the first few years (only the lucky first 2000 could expect that); but I was thrilled anyway. It seemed like a kind of utopia to me. I toured the “Virtual Park” whenever I was on-line, giving new meaning to the concept of ‘surfing’ the net. I scrolled up from the learner’s pool (three foot waves, beginners only) to the advanced pool., where six to eight foot swells would be generated every six seconds, and the bottom could be re-contoured in a matter of minutes to imitate any break in the world, from the gentlest to the most radical. Along the way I paused to appreciate the restaurant, the bandstand (they were going to have concerts, too – maybe even the Beach Boys!) and the tiled channel that allowed you to paddle back out into the ‘line up’ at the far end of the pool, without bothering other surfers or struggling with the white water from broken waves. As someone who is frequently forced back to the beach on big days by wall after wall of churning water, this felt like the perfect final detail, the linen hankerchief in the breast pocket of a suit hand-tailored just for me. In the surfpark world you waited with the other five or six people in your group and took turns riding waves. I did the math --the longest you had to wait was 36 seconds. I’ve waited an hour for a wave, sitting in the ocean with all those jelly fish and sharks and kelp and other icky manifestations of the real world. The surfpark would get rid of all that. Clear water, lightly salted (served to order like a steak at Applebees); no sea life to squelch underfoot or bite or sting. I did more math. I could catch more waves in one session at the park than I’d caught in a year surfing the old fashioned way, in the ocean. My carpenter friend laughed at me. The whole point of surfing was appreciating the actual ocean – just being there. That was what made our sport unique. “No one ever sat around for hours staring at a baseball diamond,” he said.
Besides, there were to many moving parts, it was too complex, it would never work. He’d check the plans before he started building – any good carpenter would.
I ignored his Luddite cynicism. I dropped the subject. But I was still enthusiastic. The e-mail confirming my status invited me to keep track of the surfpark progress on their website, and I did.
It was slow. There were setbacks. The place was going to open in March and then June and then September; in 2007 and then in 2008.
Well, it’s 2009 now and the dream is dead.
The people who put millions into the place lost everything and it’s doubtful anyone else will try to build a surfpark for decades now. What went wrong? Everything went wrong. Water sloshing off the sides of the pool ruined every wave but the first one. The bottom contour-changing machinery was slow and cumbersome and made no difference, anyway. Most damning, the pool itself was only twenty yards wide. This fact sticks in my mind because even during my initial infatuation with the idea, the width of the pool set off a small alarm. But I figured I just wasn’t bright enough to fully imagine the set-up, even with the virtual tour. I forgot about it but I shouldn’t have, and neither should the park designers. For non-surfers, I’ll be brief: You don’t ride a wave straight in toward the beach. You slide parallel to the beach, across the face of the wave. Even an unsatisfying Nantucket shorebreak close-out takes you twenty yards. The pool would have to be as wide as the length of a football field to approximate a really good ride on the kind of waves they claimed they could manufacture.
So the whole enterprise was doomed from the start, but no one wanted to admit it.
I have to say, it all felt very familiar. In fact it felt like a classic American moment. So many of our big plans have come to nothing lately. The Bradley mini-tank,(twigs clogged the treads: no one took it off-road for a test drive?) the Star-Wars defense system (Ever trying shooting a bullet with another bullet?) that put our national security into the hands of computers (How often have the computers been down when you go to the bank? And that’s just for basic arithmetic). Or go bigger – The Iraq war we botched, the Afganistan war we’re botching., the Iran war we’re eargerly looking forward to botching in the near future with the same mixture of hope, hubris and blinkered, irrational optimism. We’re “can do” people! We watch Oprah. We build it and assume they’ll come. We believe in “The Secret” which boils down to wishing makes it so.
But it desn’t.
I haven’t mentioned any of this to my carpenter friend, but I know what he’ll say: They should have checked the plans. And his other mantra: measure twice, cut once.
But that stuff is for realists. And we haven’t been realists since the Eisenhower Administration. We’ll always go for the shiny treat, the quick fix, the cool gimmick that’s too narrow, too incapable of dealing with the chaos its orderly solution creates.
I feel it in myself, the national virus. I’m ready to sign up for the next surfpark right now (I’ll be higher on the waiting list this time), and no one has even been dumb enough to suggest it yet.
Besides, there were to many moving parts, it was too complex, it would never work. He’d check the plans before he started building – any good carpenter would.
I ignored his Luddite cynicism. I dropped the subject. But I was still enthusiastic. The e-mail confirming my status invited me to keep track of the surfpark progress on their website, and I did.
It was slow. There were setbacks. The place was going to open in March and then June and then September; in 2007 and then in 2008.
Well, it’s 2009 now and the dream is dead.
The people who put millions into the place lost everything and it’s doubtful anyone else will try to build a surfpark for decades now. What went wrong? Everything went wrong. Water sloshing off the sides of the pool ruined every wave but the first one. The bottom contour-changing machinery was slow and cumbersome and made no difference, anyway. Most damning, the pool itself was only twenty yards wide. This fact sticks in my mind because even during my initial infatuation with the idea, the width of the pool set off a small alarm. But I figured I just wasn’t bright enough to fully imagine the set-up, even with the virtual tour. I forgot about it but I shouldn’t have, and neither should the park designers. For non-surfers, I’ll be brief: You don’t ride a wave straight in toward the beach. You slide parallel to the beach, across the face of the wave. Even an unsatisfying Nantucket shorebreak close-out takes you twenty yards. The pool would have to be as wide as the length of a football field to approximate a really good ride on the kind of waves they claimed they could manufacture.
So the whole enterprise was doomed from the start, but no one wanted to admit it.
I have to say, it all felt very familiar. In fact it felt like a classic American moment. So many of our big plans have come to nothing lately. The Bradley mini-tank,(twigs clogged the treads: no one took it off-road for a test drive?) the Star-Wars defense system (Ever trying shooting a bullet with another bullet?) that put our national security into the hands of computers (How often have the computers been down when you go to the bank? And that’s just for basic arithmetic). Or go bigger – The Iraq war we botched, the Afganistan war we’re botching., the Iran war we’re eargerly looking forward to botching in the near future with the same mixture of hope, hubris and blinkered, irrational optimism. We’re “can do” people! We watch Oprah. We build it and assume they’ll come. We believe in “The Secret” which boils down to wishing makes it so.
But it desn’t.
I haven’t mentioned any of this to my carpenter friend, but I know what he’ll say: They should have checked the plans. And his other mantra: measure twice, cut once.
But that stuff is for realists. And we haven’t been realists since the Eisenhower Administration. We’ll always go for the shiny treat, the quick fix, the cool gimmick that’s too narrow, too incapable of dealing with the chaos its orderly solution creates.
I feel it in myself, the national virus. I’m ready to sign up for the next surfpark right now (I’ll be higher on the waiting list this time), and no one has even been dumb enough to suggest it yet.
Thursday, September 24, 2009
Scenes From a Divorce: The Private Salon
Maybe writers need their own social apartheid. We don’t really mix well with regular folks. They find it bizarre and disagreeable that we sit for hours in front of a computer screen, inventing gossip about nonexistent people. I spent one afternoon with the son of a woman I was dating, making up a story. The whole idea upset and disgusted her. Okay, it was a story about finding a magic stone that would make adults do anything he wanted, and he was asking his Mom to triple his allowance, make homework optional and sign a liability waiver for skateboard camp. But we were having fun. Incidentally, you should never read one of those liability waivers for skateboard camp -- they’re terrifying.
Another woman got annoyed when I complained about some film we’d just seen trashing the book it was based on. “Who cares?” was her final, exhausted verdict. “It’s only a movie.”
Only a movie? And the book they ruined was only a book. And books are what you read when the magazines run out. But they never do.
One girlfriend was furious because I used her in a story; another was mad because I didn’t.
Neither one of them understood that it wasn’t them, or wouldn’t have been … just someone who looked and sounded like them, with a few of their more annoying mannerisms Girl who over-filled every room she entered with show-off ballet moves, you know who you are. You, too, nail-biter who said “Totally,” every time you agreed with me and “Thank you” every time I agreed with you.
Other writers understand when you fade and stop paying attention because of some plot point you can’t fix; they shrug when some stray comment winds up in one of your characters’ mouths. They like to be alone just as much as you do, and need your critical attention when they read long passages of fresh-minted prose, just like you need theirs. They don’t mind if you eavesdrop in restaurants; they’re eavesdropping, too.
It’s a good set-up, if you can find a writer you respect that you actually want to live with. That’s the tough part, because let’s face it, writers are pretty much just as annoying as all those non-writers think.
Driving out to Annie’s cottage in Polpis on the night of our private salon, I couldn’t help wondering if she might be the one. But I had heard she was still wary after the break up with her crazy actor and I wasn’t quite as finished with her friend as I should have been. It felt like a potential mess waiting to happen, “a regular monkey’s tea party” as my grandfather liked to say. I thought of Edna St. Vincent Millay starting an affair with one of her readers after a particularly well-written fan letter. That was the way to do it: translating the love of words into a more urgent carnality without ambivalence or complications.
The drive from town settled my nerves. After the last grasp of commerce – a liquor store tucked into the trees on the right, a ford dealership on the left – vanished around a curve in the road, and the last ostentatious real-estate boondoggle fell behind me, Polpis Road turned into one of the most beautiful drives in New England. With the moors on one side and the grand old clapboard mansions allowing glimpses of the harbor between walls and hedges on the other, I could feel myself escaping the gravitational pull of the busy town and the crowded ‘mid-island’ with its convenience stores and gas stations. Much of the island had been spoiled – even despoiled – but the farther out you cruise along Polpis Road the less it seemed to matter. These old houses weren’t going anywhere, though the cars in the driveway had changed (more Minis and smart cars, now; fewer Hummers and Expeditions). The moors and the bogs were protected by the Land Bank and the Conservation Commission. This was old money country, shabby with a haughty indifference to the granite counter top and the sub-zero refrigerator: no one was selling, or moving, or installing a climate controlled wine cellar or a state-of-the art digital screening room. They’re just going to keep on fishing in Coskata pond, drinking Bloody Mary’s on the deck and complaining about the food at the Yacht Club.
It seemed fitting somehow that Annie had found a place for herself out here, surrounded by the wealthy, but living hand-to-mouth, tucked away in a four hundred dollar a month cottage among the wild blackberries and the poison ivy. It turned out years later that she was actually related to the owner, going back five generations of landed gentry. The thought terrified his family when she mentioned it over cocktails one evening, as if she was going to rise up with a cold-eyed gang of Boston lawyers and demand her share of the old man’s property. Nothing could have been further from the truth. She had been living out there for twenty summers and it just pleased her to find an ancestral connection to her cantankerous but affectionate landlord.
I pulled into the bluestone driveway, rolled past the main house and down to the cottage. The lights were on in the dusk and when I climbed out of the car the silence of the place closed over me like water, like a tropical ocean, and I was breathing it like a fish, a new creature in a new world.
This place is gorgeous,” I said when she came to the door. “I could feel my blood pressure dropping about ten points a mile as I drove out here.”
She smiled, stepping back to let me inside. “I know,” she said. “But the problem is, you never want to leave.”
Her hair was down, a frizzy blond cloud that softened her sharp features, as the grey cashmere cardigan buttoned over a flimsy t-shirt and loose jeans accented the girlish allure of her body.
She pushed at her hair nervously, pressing the wild mane to her scalp. “I’m sorry. I look awful. My hair gets insane when it’s humid like this.”
“I think it looks great.”
“It looks horrible. It’s Ok. You can say so. It looks like I just stuck my fingers in a wall socket. The Mad Scientist look”
“I like it.”
“You’e insane.”
“Lucky for you.”
She squinted at me. “We’ll see about that.” Then she noticed the bag in my hand. “What did you bring? I’m starving. I was fine until about five minutes ago then my blood sugar dropped. I was about to start eating shredded wheat out of the box.”
“Ugh. That would definitely have spoiled your appetite for the picked lobster, home-made red cabbage coleslaw, and potato salad I have here. Plus the baguette and the raspberries. Oh, and a bottle of Pinot Grigio. No wait a minute. Two bottles.”
“Sounds like a wild night you’ve got in mind.”
I lifted out one of the bottles. “Onward and upward with the arts.”
The cottage was a simple rectangle maybe fifteen feet by forty. I had stepped into a high raftered, open-stud living room, with yachting pennants, old quarter boards and fishing rods decorating the beams, 1920s Nantucket theater one-sheets (Rose Tremaine in Private Lives the ‘Sconset Casino), family photographs and equestrian prints tacked to the wooden walls. The cracked cement floor was softened by sisal rugs, set about with an old velour couch and some white wicker chairs. A dusty television sat on an antique desk between two windows, but it looked as though it hadn’t been used in years. Beyond the dining room table, a raised a step led to the kitchen, with doors leading into the bedroom and the bath. Annie had lit Candles and hurricane lamps. The place was cozy, lost in time.
I stood looking around, taking it all in.
“It’s like some relic of another era,” I said.
She smiled. “Just like me.”
We walked into the kitchen and I started unpacking the bags.
“And what era would that be?” I asked her. “The eighties?”
“Come on.”
“The seventies?”
She made a little puckered wince, as if she had just stepped into a cloud of gnats. “God no.”
“The sixties?”
“I kind of hated the sixties.”
“No Woodstock?”
“Too muddy.”
“But the bands! Jimi Hendrix and Joe Cocker and Creedence. Neil Young played with CSN for the first time ever that weekend.”
“I don’t know, My sister went and all she heard was crowd noise, Melanie and Iron Butterfly.”
I smiled. “Great band, Crowd Noise. Their older stuff was better, though.”
“The older stuff is always better.”
“What a drag though – I mean if you keep working, If you’re Coppola and all anyone wants to talk about is The Godfather. Or like – that scene in Cakes and Ale when Maugham’s unsuccessful friend is telling how great his crappy first novel was.”
“I love that book.”
“Most people have never even heard of it.”
“That’s why I didn’t invite them tonight.”
I put on my best English accent. “Most of us resent people when we treat them badly. Alroy Kear was far too big-hearted for such pettiness. He could treat you very badly indeed without afterward bearing you the least ill-will.”
“I love that. I always see him as George Sanders. That must be because of the movies.”
“They;lve made some pretty good ones. But they can’t seem to nail The Razor’s Edge.”
“That’s because they don’t understand that it’s really about Elliot Templeton, not that drippy woo-woo guy. I love Elliot Templeton. He’s so wonderful and so sad. Remember when he’s on his death bed and all he wants is to be invited to the Duchess’ party?”
“And Maugham lies to him and he dies happy.”
“Yeah. Poor Elliot.”
“Wine?’”
She handed me a cork screw and while I was working it she said, “I guess … the Fifties. No -- the late forties. Just after World War Two. Men wore hats and kids didn’t wear bike helmets. Cars had fins. People drank scotch out of little flasks at football games. The Giants played the Polo Grounds. Everybody smoked and nobody cared. John O’Hara world. That’s my era. Maugham was huge then, too.”
“He met my Dad once, at a party. He tottered up – that’s one of my Dad’s favorite words, ‘tottered’ …and he steadied himself and looked my Dad in eye and said, ‘Dear boy, I hear you are the toast of Broadway. I’m happy to say that I am too old and too rich and too drunk to give a shit.’ Then he turned and lurched off. One of my dad’s fondest memories. Meeting Maugham.”
“You must have had a cool childhood.”
“It was weird. I was a bi-coastal kid. I spent vacations in L.A. – enough time to get hooked on my Dad’s world, but not enough to really be part of it. I was always on the outside. Which was actually okay, because my Dad’s new family was seriously fucked up. My half-sister was over-dosing on LSD, my step-brother tried to drown me in the swimming pool and my step-mother was right out of Grimm’s fairy tales – the uncut German version. None of this smiley-face American shit. I think she secretly wanted to chop me up and stick me in a batch of cookies. But she wouldn’t be caught dead baking, and it’s not the kind of thing you can ask the Filipino chef to do, unless you’re planning to give him a really big bonus, which was not her style.”
She laughed. “It can’t possibly have been that bad.”
“That’s why I can’t write about this stuff. No one believes it. No one believed the Mary Tyler Moore character in Ordinary People and I was like … that bitch is Mary Poppins next to my step-mother.”
“Well, my parents stayed married and I sometimes wish they hadn’t. My Mom deserves a better life. She – I don’t know. She chose it, I guess. She chose him.But I don’t think she really knew what her choices were. She could have walked away. She almost did a few times.”
“But she came back.”
“My Dad writes a mean love-letter.”
I poured two glasses of wine, handed her one and made a toast.
“To our crazy families, which made us the writers we are today.”
I cut the lobster into bunch of mescal greens Annie had in the fridge and made an olive oil and vinegar dressing while she put the baguette in the oven and set the table.
While we ate I told her that I regretted missing her plays – she had done a lot of theater on the island: a solo turn in The Belle of Amherst, leads in My Fair Lady and The Glass Menagerie, Linda in Death of a Salesman. Apparently she was great; but the only local productions I had seen were terrible – a clumsily staged One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest and a teeth-grindingly inept Odd Couple with women in the lead roles. I had acted a little, but I found the stage fright debilitating.
“I’ve never had that,” she said. “I always feel comfortable on stage. I have life-fright instead.”
We finished eating – I noticed that she wolfed her food almost as fast as I did – and cleared the table. We got out our stories and settled in for the salon.
My story began this way:
The worst year of Michael Gersh’s life started with a morning of easy victories and good omens. There were bad omens too, but like most people, he chose to ignore them. The good stuff was just too distracting. At dawn, he finally managed to get a tube ride on a ten foot wave; at breakfast, he sold a screenplay about the Intifada to a pair of Egyptian bankers; and at lunch he closed a deal with the biggest star of the late twentieth century to make his best friend’s movie.
He could hardly wait for dinner.
Mike didn’t much care for irony, especially when it happened to him, but looking back at that sun-splashed March morning, he would have to admit it made perfect sense: he was riding high.
And a downfall is just a stumble, without altitude.
Annie’s started like this:
Alison was sitting in her old black Ford pick-up, peering into the rearview mirror, inspecting a smudge of yellow paint that ran along the left side of her nose, when he leaned over and stuck his head through the open window.
“Would you mind not parking so close to my fence? See, it forces people out into the street, and we've had some close calls, so could you please--?”
It was a ridiculously hot, sun-battering afternoon in early September and the last thing she needed was some Brooks Brothers rolled-up shirt sleeve leaning in, some thinning blonde going to gray-ex-Hotchkiss-ex-Taft-ex-Andover cum Harvard cum Yale Law School cum, beautiful wife cum Polaroid-perfect family back-drop, asking her to ease the margin of infringement on his self-important existence.
The stories were long and it was late when we finished.
We had an awkward moment at the door, as I was leaving. We were both a little drunk. She brushed against me, seemed to lose her balance. I caught her and held her for a second. The immanence of a kiss trembled between us. Then she slipped free of my arm and stepped back. We wound up shaking hands.
“Thanks for a great night,” I said.
‘Thanks for the picnic.”
“I liked what you said about the repetitions.”
She smiled. “You can say something fifty different ways. You just have the choose the best one and file the others away.”
“You said get rid of them.”
“I don’t think you ever get rid of anything. I bet you have lines you’ve been trying to stick into stories for years. Orphans left over from high school.”
“The problem is, most of them suck.”
“Tell me one.”
“It’s late. I can’t remember any of them, and besides-- ”
“It’s embarrassing.”
“Try mortifying. That was one of my favorite words in high school.”
She took my other hand, holding me in place. “Just one.”
“It would have to be a paraphrase.”
“I’m sure you’ll improve it.”
“I couldn’t make it much worse.”
She stared at me, eyebrows raised, head tilted down a little. Her posture said: Come on, let’s go. Spill it.
“I was really proud of this at the time,” I said.
“You’re killing me. I have to work tomorrow.”
“Okay, okay … let me set it up. The guy comes to the door, they haven’t seen each other in years, I was expert at true love tested by long separations in high school. I think I’d been on like one date at that point. Anyway, she doesn’t recognize him for a second, then she does.”
“Okay, so?”
“Ugh. Are you really going to make me do this?”
She just stood there, holding my hands.
“Okay, okay -- it was … ‘perception and response joined and separate: the lightning of recognition and then the slow thunder of a smile.’ Something like that.”
“It’s nice.”
“It’s awful.”
“I like it. Maybe you’ll wind up using it after all, now. When you write about tonight.”
She nailed me perfectly at that moment, as she always does. Of course I denied it at the time.
But here we are.
Anyway, it’s the next session I really want to write about.
And that night deserves a post to itself.
Another woman got annoyed when I complained about some film we’d just seen trashing the book it was based on. “Who cares?” was her final, exhausted verdict. “It’s only a movie.”
Only a movie? And the book they ruined was only a book. And books are what you read when the magazines run out. But they never do.
One girlfriend was furious because I used her in a story; another was mad because I didn’t.
Neither one of them understood that it wasn’t them, or wouldn’t have been … just someone who looked and sounded like them, with a few of their more annoying mannerisms Girl who over-filled every room she entered with show-off ballet moves, you know who you are. You, too, nail-biter who said “Totally,” every time you agreed with me and “Thank you” every time I agreed with you.
Other writers understand when you fade and stop paying attention because of some plot point you can’t fix; they shrug when some stray comment winds up in one of your characters’ mouths. They like to be alone just as much as you do, and need your critical attention when they read long passages of fresh-minted prose, just like you need theirs. They don’t mind if you eavesdrop in restaurants; they’re eavesdropping, too.
It’s a good set-up, if you can find a writer you respect that you actually want to live with. That’s the tough part, because let’s face it, writers are pretty much just as annoying as all those non-writers think.
Driving out to Annie’s cottage in Polpis on the night of our private salon, I couldn’t help wondering if she might be the one. But I had heard she was still wary after the break up with her crazy actor and I wasn’t quite as finished with her friend as I should have been. It felt like a potential mess waiting to happen, “a regular monkey’s tea party” as my grandfather liked to say. I thought of Edna St. Vincent Millay starting an affair with one of her readers after a particularly well-written fan letter. That was the way to do it: translating the love of words into a more urgent carnality without ambivalence or complications.
The drive from town settled my nerves. After the last grasp of commerce – a liquor store tucked into the trees on the right, a ford dealership on the left – vanished around a curve in the road, and the last ostentatious real-estate boondoggle fell behind me, Polpis Road turned into one of the most beautiful drives in New England. With the moors on one side and the grand old clapboard mansions allowing glimpses of the harbor between walls and hedges on the other, I could feel myself escaping the gravitational pull of the busy town and the crowded ‘mid-island’ with its convenience stores and gas stations. Much of the island had been spoiled – even despoiled – but the farther out you cruise along Polpis Road the less it seemed to matter. These old houses weren’t going anywhere, though the cars in the driveway had changed (more Minis and smart cars, now; fewer Hummers and Expeditions). The moors and the bogs were protected by the Land Bank and the Conservation Commission. This was old money country, shabby with a haughty indifference to the granite counter top and the sub-zero refrigerator: no one was selling, or moving, or installing a climate controlled wine cellar or a state-of-the art digital screening room. They’re just going to keep on fishing in Coskata pond, drinking Bloody Mary’s on the deck and complaining about the food at the Yacht Club.
It seemed fitting somehow that Annie had found a place for herself out here, surrounded by the wealthy, but living hand-to-mouth, tucked away in a four hundred dollar a month cottage among the wild blackberries and the poison ivy. It turned out years later that she was actually related to the owner, going back five generations of landed gentry. The thought terrified his family when she mentioned it over cocktails one evening, as if she was going to rise up with a cold-eyed gang of Boston lawyers and demand her share of the old man’s property. Nothing could have been further from the truth. She had been living out there for twenty summers and it just pleased her to find an ancestral connection to her cantankerous but affectionate landlord.
I pulled into the bluestone driveway, rolled past the main house and down to the cottage. The lights were on in the dusk and when I climbed out of the car the silence of the place closed over me like water, like a tropical ocean, and I was breathing it like a fish, a new creature in a new world.
This place is gorgeous,” I said when she came to the door. “I could feel my blood pressure dropping about ten points a mile as I drove out here.”
She smiled, stepping back to let me inside. “I know,” she said. “But the problem is, you never want to leave.”
Her hair was down, a frizzy blond cloud that softened her sharp features, as the grey cashmere cardigan buttoned over a flimsy t-shirt and loose jeans accented the girlish allure of her body.
She pushed at her hair nervously, pressing the wild mane to her scalp. “I’m sorry. I look awful. My hair gets insane when it’s humid like this.”
“I think it looks great.”
“It looks horrible. It’s Ok. You can say so. It looks like I just stuck my fingers in a wall socket. The Mad Scientist look”
“I like it.”
“You’e insane.”
“Lucky for you.”
She squinted at me. “We’ll see about that.” Then she noticed the bag in my hand. “What did you bring? I’m starving. I was fine until about five minutes ago then my blood sugar dropped. I was about to start eating shredded wheat out of the box.”
“Ugh. That would definitely have spoiled your appetite for the picked lobster, home-made red cabbage coleslaw, and potato salad I have here. Plus the baguette and the raspberries. Oh, and a bottle of Pinot Grigio. No wait a minute. Two bottles.”
“Sounds like a wild night you’ve got in mind.”
I lifted out one of the bottles. “Onward and upward with the arts.”
The cottage was a simple rectangle maybe fifteen feet by forty. I had stepped into a high raftered, open-stud living room, with yachting pennants, old quarter boards and fishing rods decorating the beams, 1920s Nantucket theater one-sheets (Rose Tremaine in Private Lives the ‘Sconset Casino), family photographs and equestrian prints tacked to the wooden walls. The cracked cement floor was softened by sisal rugs, set about with an old velour couch and some white wicker chairs. A dusty television sat on an antique desk between two windows, but it looked as though it hadn’t been used in years. Beyond the dining room table, a raised a step led to the kitchen, with doors leading into the bedroom and the bath. Annie had lit Candles and hurricane lamps. The place was cozy, lost in time.
I stood looking around, taking it all in.
“It’s like some relic of another era,” I said.
She smiled. “Just like me.”
We walked into the kitchen and I started unpacking the bags.
“And what era would that be?” I asked her. “The eighties?”
“Come on.”
“The seventies?”
She made a little puckered wince, as if she had just stepped into a cloud of gnats. “God no.”
“The sixties?”
“I kind of hated the sixties.”
“No Woodstock?”
“Too muddy.”
“But the bands! Jimi Hendrix and Joe Cocker and Creedence. Neil Young played with CSN for the first time ever that weekend.”
“I don’t know, My sister went and all she heard was crowd noise, Melanie and Iron Butterfly.”
I smiled. “Great band, Crowd Noise. Their older stuff was better, though.”
“The older stuff is always better.”
“What a drag though – I mean if you keep working, If you’re Coppola and all anyone wants to talk about is The Godfather. Or like – that scene in Cakes and Ale when Maugham’s unsuccessful friend is telling how great his crappy first novel was.”
“I love that book.”
“Most people have never even heard of it.”
“That’s why I didn’t invite them tonight.”
I put on my best English accent. “Most of us resent people when we treat them badly. Alroy Kear was far too big-hearted for such pettiness. He could treat you very badly indeed without afterward bearing you the least ill-will.”
“I love that. I always see him as George Sanders. That must be because of the movies.”
“They;lve made some pretty good ones. But they can’t seem to nail The Razor’s Edge.”
“That’s because they don’t understand that it’s really about Elliot Templeton, not that drippy woo-woo guy. I love Elliot Templeton. He’s so wonderful and so sad. Remember when he’s on his death bed and all he wants is to be invited to the Duchess’ party?”
“And Maugham lies to him and he dies happy.”
“Yeah. Poor Elliot.”
“Wine?’”
She handed me a cork screw and while I was working it she said, “I guess … the Fifties. No -- the late forties. Just after World War Two. Men wore hats and kids didn’t wear bike helmets. Cars had fins. People drank scotch out of little flasks at football games. The Giants played the Polo Grounds. Everybody smoked and nobody cared. John O’Hara world. That’s my era. Maugham was huge then, too.”
“He met my Dad once, at a party. He tottered up – that’s one of my Dad’s favorite words, ‘tottered’ …and he steadied himself and looked my Dad in eye and said, ‘Dear boy, I hear you are the toast of Broadway. I’m happy to say that I am too old and too rich and too drunk to give a shit.’ Then he turned and lurched off. One of my dad’s fondest memories. Meeting Maugham.”
“You must have had a cool childhood.”
“It was weird. I was a bi-coastal kid. I spent vacations in L.A. – enough time to get hooked on my Dad’s world, but not enough to really be part of it. I was always on the outside. Which was actually okay, because my Dad’s new family was seriously fucked up. My half-sister was over-dosing on LSD, my step-brother tried to drown me in the swimming pool and my step-mother was right out of Grimm’s fairy tales – the uncut German version. None of this smiley-face American shit. I think she secretly wanted to chop me up and stick me in a batch of cookies. But she wouldn’t be caught dead baking, and it’s not the kind of thing you can ask the Filipino chef to do, unless you’re planning to give him a really big bonus, which was not her style.”
She laughed. “It can’t possibly have been that bad.”
“That’s why I can’t write about this stuff. No one believes it. No one believed the Mary Tyler Moore character in Ordinary People and I was like … that bitch is Mary Poppins next to my step-mother.”
“Well, my parents stayed married and I sometimes wish they hadn’t. My Mom deserves a better life. She – I don’t know. She chose it, I guess. She chose him.But I don’t think she really knew what her choices were. She could have walked away. She almost did a few times.”
“But she came back.”
“My Dad writes a mean love-letter.”
I poured two glasses of wine, handed her one and made a toast.
“To our crazy families, which made us the writers we are today.”
I cut the lobster into bunch of mescal greens Annie had in the fridge and made an olive oil and vinegar dressing while she put the baguette in the oven and set the table.
While we ate I told her that I regretted missing her plays – she had done a lot of theater on the island: a solo turn in The Belle of Amherst, leads in My Fair Lady and The Glass Menagerie, Linda in Death of a Salesman. Apparently she was great; but the only local productions I had seen were terrible – a clumsily staged One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest and a teeth-grindingly inept Odd Couple with women in the lead roles. I had acted a little, but I found the stage fright debilitating.
“I’ve never had that,” she said. “I always feel comfortable on stage. I have life-fright instead.”
We finished eating – I noticed that she wolfed her food almost as fast as I did – and cleared the table. We got out our stories and settled in for the salon.
My story began this way:
The worst year of Michael Gersh’s life started with a morning of easy victories and good omens. There were bad omens too, but like most people, he chose to ignore them. The good stuff was just too distracting. At dawn, he finally managed to get a tube ride on a ten foot wave; at breakfast, he sold a screenplay about the Intifada to a pair of Egyptian bankers; and at lunch he closed a deal with the biggest star of the late twentieth century to make his best friend’s movie.
He could hardly wait for dinner.
Mike didn’t much care for irony, especially when it happened to him, but looking back at that sun-splashed March morning, he would have to admit it made perfect sense: he was riding high.
And a downfall is just a stumble, without altitude.
Annie’s started like this:
Alison was sitting in her old black Ford pick-up, peering into the rearview mirror, inspecting a smudge of yellow paint that ran along the left side of her nose, when he leaned over and stuck his head through the open window.
“Would you mind not parking so close to my fence? See, it forces people out into the street, and we've had some close calls, so could you please--?”
It was a ridiculously hot, sun-battering afternoon in early September and the last thing she needed was some Brooks Brothers rolled-up shirt sleeve leaning in, some thinning blonde going to gray-ex-Hotchkiss-ex-Taft-ex-Andover cum Harvard cum Yale Law School cum, beautiful wife cum Polaroid-perfect family back-drop, asking her to ease the margin of infringement on his self-important existence.
The stories were long and it was late when we finished.
We had an awkward moment at the door, as I was leaving. We were both a little drunk. She brushed against me, seemed to lose her balance. I caught her and held her for a second. The immanence of a kiss trembled between us. Then she slipped free of my arm and stepped back. We wound up shaking hands.
“Thanks for a great night,” I said.
‘Thanks for the picnic.”
“I liked what you said about the repetitions.”
She smiled. “You can say something fifty different ways. You just have the choose the best one and file the others away.”
“You said get rid of them.”
“I don’t think you ever get rid of anything. I bet you have lines you’ve been trying to stick into stories for years. Orphans left over from high school.”
“The problem is, most of them suck.”
“Tell me one.”
“It’s late. I can’t remember any of them, and besides-- ”
“It’s embarrassing.”
“Try mortifying. That was one of my favorite words in high school.”
She took my other hand, holding me in place. “Just one.”
“It would have to be a paraphrase.”
“I’m sure you’ll improve it.”
“I couldn’t make it much worse.”
She stared at me, eyebrows raised, head tilted down a little. Her posture said: Come on, let’s go. Spill it.
“I was really proud of this at the time,” I said.
“You’re killing me. I have to work tomorrow.”
“Okay, okay … let me set it up. The guy comes to the door, they haven’t seen each other in years, I was expert at true love tested by long separations in high school. I think I’d been on like one date at that point. Anyway, she doesn’t recognize him for a second, then she does.”
“Okay, so?”
“Ugh. Are you really going to make me do this?”
She just stood there, holding my hands.
“Okay, okay -- it was … ‘perception and response joined and separate: the lightning of recognition and then the slow thunder of a smile.’ Something like that.”
“It’s nice.”
“It’s awful.”
“I like it. Maybe you’ll wind up using it after all, now. When you write about tonight.”
She nailed me perfectly at that moment, as she always does. Of course I denied it at the time.
But here we are.
Anyway, it’s the next session I really want to write about.
And that night deserves a post to itself.
The Home Care Diaries, Part Two: Settling In
This is not a story anyone wants to hear. It violates the basic tenets of American optimism. It’s not Norman Rockwell picture; more like an Andrew Wyeth, with occasional torn fragments of Edvard Munch and Francis Bacon pasted over the canvas.
“How is it going?” everyone asks. And of course I say fine.
“Is it tough having your mother living in the house?” And I say no, of course not. Even to her.
Especially to her.
But the facts remain. That’s what facts do. There’s a mindless obstinacy about them. My mother is eighty-eight years old. She has a rapidly advancing case of Parkinson’s disease. She wants to go to the lovely assisted living place nearby, but she can’t really take care of herself, so I don’t see how that could happen. She works hard to improve her physical condition but the odds and the years are against her. Mortality mocks her optimism. Mortality mocks and diminishes everything. Its ruinous taint, the sheer poison of its proximity created every religion and philosophy on the planet. We forget that because we avoid it like the contaminating radioactive isotope that it is. Shunning death may be the one authentic human instinct beside the ability to suck. We come into life ready to take sustenance from the nipple, hardwired to travel forward ignoring the end of the trip. We build a culture based on youth, we shun the old, we spend a billion dollars on cosmetics and plastic surgery just to keep mortality at bay. I do it. I didn’t know I was doing it until my mother moved in and the awesome, appalling specter of mortality moved in with her.
So how does it feel to change your mother’s Depends undergarment? How does it feel to walk her from the bed to the bathroom, watching her legs tremble as she tries to find her balance? Well, first of all, it’s exhausting. It’s an illness itself, this new awareness of death looming everywhere, a leeching ailment like mononucleosis that saps the life out of your muscles and buries you in your bed. The fatigue is too complex to fight, and only certain parts of it can be solved by sleep. It’s spiritual as well as physical, emotional as well as mental. Part of it is about seeing someone you love so stricken, the penetrating unnaturalness (or so it seems, or so it feels) of your reversed positions, the upended role you have to play in the endgame of a parent’s life. In a way it’s like having a new baby in the house, without the sustaining thrill of a new life to protect. The needs are startlingly similar, but the joy is replaced with sorrow and dread. Of course I know I’m lucky in many ways. Things could be much worse. We have help during the week. And Mom is as sharp as ever, reading The New York Times and The New Yorker magazine from cover to cover, commenting on the news (“In this country we have Socialism for the rich and free market capitalism for everyone else”) dismissing her Doctors (“When you’re past a certain age, they just don’t care any more.”). She still loves life and her spirit is ferocious. Watching her do her physical exercises has shamed me into getting back into shape myself. She’s still herself, and she loves being here. She feels like she’s been sprung from prison. The used the term ‘evacuated’ the other day, as if we had plucked her from the midst of some natural disaster when we took her out of the “skilled nursing facility” where she had been living after a urinary tract infection almost killed her.
Annie is a huge help. Of course that has its downside also. Mom said something other days about being so grateful to me and my brother. I pointed out that some significant portion of that gratitude should be directed toward the one person in this situation who isn’t related to her. It’s an immense unfair burden for Annie, who provided hospice home care, spelled only by her two sisters, for the last six months of her mother’s life. The sight of a walker or a wheel chair, a bath seat or a bedside commode, brings back the most painful memories of her life, and that’s only part of the problem. My son is living with us now also, and he has dubbed the tiny, 200-year old apartment (Five rooms and two baths on two floors connected by a narrow stairway) the NoPrivacyHouse. The name made Annie smile, and she needed a light moment, but it’s another fact and it remains just like all the others: we have no privacy at all any more. Annie feels dislocated and displaced. The small comfortable life we had cobbled together for ourselves is gone. The disruption is temporary, but with no end in sight, some future restoration of our old routines seems far too abstract for comfort. For now this is our life. It’s constricted, as the lungs constrict during an asthma attack. It’s hard to breathe, impossible to relax. I found myself resting in a customers house for half an hour yesterday, just lying down in the quiet room, beyond the reach of obligation, feeling the vibrations of stress shiver out of my nerves like a struck piano string, wobbling to silence.
I needed that, but I couldn’t afford it. I need to work that job and I need to finish it. I can’t afford this new flimsiness, this swooning lack of energy. That’s scary. And my brother, to whom my mom feels such gratitude, is living five thousand miles away in another country, and generously sending an extra $300 a month to help out. That just about covers a week’s groceries in the most expensive town in America. Thanks for the gumball, Mickey.
So money is tight and living is tight; everything is tight, inside and out. A lot is happening just inside me, weird climate change in my frontal cortex and my limbic system. I feel simultaneously a wild howling sexual desire, the need to throw orgasms at death the way a kid might egg the factory owner’s house on Halloween. And at the same time a scrim of age and decay seems to cover both of us, making the whole idea feel creepy and repellent. The two feelings cancel each other out and nothing happens, which works well for us since sex is the last thing on Annie’s mind right now and we live in NoPrivacyHouse anyway.
So it’s grim and debilitating and the strange dark secret of it all is that I feel absurdly blessed and lucky to have this time with my mother, whatever the cost and however long the ordeal goes on. Because make no mistake, it is an ordeal and I can’t wait for it to be over and I hope it lasts and lasts, until I finally get enough of my mother to really remember her by, because soon enough the remembering will be all I have and I dread that day and I all have is the time until that day to prepare for it.
So we push forward, easing her end, taking the flickers of rest or pleasure when they present themselves, and hold her and hold each other and somehow make the best of it.
Maybe it could be a Norman Rockwell painting, after all.
“How is it going?” everyone asks. And of course I say fine.
“Is it tough having your mother living in the house?” And I say no, of course not. Even to her.
Especially to her.
But the facts remain. That’s what facts do. There’s a mindless obstinacy about them. My mother is eighty-eight years old. She has a rapidly advancing case of Parkinson’s disease. She wants to go to the lovely assisted living place nearby, but she can’t really take care of herself, so I don’t see how that could happen. She works hard to improve her physical condition but the odds and the years are against her. Mortality mocks her optimism. Mortality mocks and diminishes everything. Its ruinous taint, the sheer poison of its proximity created every religion and philosophy on the planet. We forget that because we avoid it like the contaminating radioactive isotope that it is. Shunning death may be the one authentic human instinct beside the ability to suck. We come into life ready to take sustenance from the nipple, hardwired to travel forward ignoring the end of the trip. We build a culture based on youth, we shun the old, we spend a billion dollars on cosmetics and plastic surgery just to keep mortality at bay. I do it. I didn’t know I was doing it until my mother moved in and the awesome, appalling specter of mortality moved in with her.
So how does it feel to change your mother’s Depends undergarment? How does it feel to walk her from the bed to the bathroom, watching her legs tremble as she tries to find her balance? Well, first of all, it’s exhausting. It’s an illness itself, this new awareness of death looming everywhere, a leeching ailment like mononucleosis that saps the life out of your muscles and buries you in your bed. The fatigue is too complex to fight, and only certain parts of it can be solved by sleep. It’s spiritual as well as physical, emotional as well as mental. Part of it is about seeing someone you love so stricken, the penetrating unnaturalness (or so it seems, or so it feels) of your reversed positions, the upended role you have to play in the endgame of a parent’s life. In a way it’s like having a new baby in the house, without the sustaining thrill of a new life to protect. The needs are startlingly similar, but the joy is replaced with sorrow and dread. Of course I know I’m lucky in many ways. Things could be much worse. We have help during the week. And Mom is as sharp as ever, reading The New York Times and The New Yorker magazine from cover to cover, commenting on the news (“In this country we have Socialism for the rich and free market capitalism for everyone else”) dismissing her Doctors (“When you’re past a certain age, they just don’t care any more.”). She still loves life and her spirit is ferocious. Watching her do her physical exercises has shamed me into getting back into shape myself. She’s still herself, and she loves being here. She feels like she’s been sprung from prison. The used the term ‘evacuated’ the other day, as if we had plucked her from the midst of some natural disaster when we took her out of the “skilled nursing facility” where she had been living after a urinary tract infection almost killed her.
Annie is a huge help. Of course that has its downside also. Mom said something other days about being so grateful to me and my brother. I pointed out that some significant portion of that gratitude should be directed toward the one person in this situation who isn’t related to her. It’s an immense unfair burden for Annie, who provided hospice home care, spelled only by her two sisters, for the last six months of her mother’s life. The sight of a walker or a wheel chair, a bath seat or a bedside commode, brings back the most painful memories of her life, and that’s only part of the problem. My son is living with us now also, and he has dubbed the tiny, 200-year old apartment (Five rooms and two baths on two floors connected by a narrow stairway) the NoPrivacyHouse. The name made Annie smile, and she needed a light moment, but it’s another fact and it remains just like all the others: we have no privacy at all any more. Annie feels dislocated and displaced. The small comfortable life we had cobbled together for ourselves is gone. The disruption is temporary, but with no end in sight, some future restoration of our old routines seems far too abstract for comfort. For now this is our life. It’s constricted, as the lungs constrict during an asthma attack. It’s hard to breathe, impossible to relax. I found myself resting in a customers house for half an hour yesterday, just lying down in the quiet room, beyond the reach of obligation, feeling the vibrations of stress shiver out of my nerves like a struck piano string, wobbling to silence.
I needed that, but I couldn’t afford it. I need to work that job and I need to finish it. I can’t afford this new flimsiness, this swooning lack of energy. That’s scary. And my brother, to whom my mom feels such gratitude, is living five thousand miles away in another country, and generously sending an extra $300 a month to help out. That just about covers a week’s groceries in the most expensive town in America. Thanks for the gumball, Mickey.
So money is tight and living is tight; everything is tight, inside and out. A lot is happening just inside me, weird climate change in my frontal cortex and my limbic system. I feel simultaneously a wild howling sexual desire, the need to throw orgasms at death the way a kid might egg the factory owner’s house on Halloween. And at the same time a scrim of age and decay seems to cover both of us, making the whole idea feel creepy and repellent. The two feelings cancel each other out and nothing happens, which works well for us since sex is the last thing on Annie’s mind right now and we live in NoPrivacyHouse anyway.
So it’s grim and debilitating and the strange dark secret of it all is that I feel absurdly blessed and lucky to have this time with my mother, whatever the cost and however long the ordeal goes on. Because make no mistake, it is an ordeal and I can’t wait for it to be over and I hope it lasts and lasts, until I finally get enough of my mother to really remember her by, because soon enough the remembering will be all I have and I dread that day and I all have is the time until that day to prepare for it.
So we push forward, easing her end, taking the flickers of rest or pleasure when they present themselves, and hold her and hold each other and somehow make the best of it.
Maybe it could be a Norman Rockwell painting, after all.
The Trouble With Rich People
What's wrong with them?
The question keeps coming up.
I’m surrounded by rich people; I work for them on a daily basis; I have wealthy family members and friends, as well as various in-laws and acquaintances who would be considered rich by any normal standard, though they deny it stridently, and act insulted if you mention … not the elephant – more like the 1955 Bentley S1 Continental touring car in the room. Or the Matisse cut-outs on the wall. Almost without exception they follow rigid protocols of behavior that I find baffling, mean-spirited, stingy and awful.
Years ago, I overheard a friend of mine, beseeching a wealthy patron for another cash transfusion to his struggling literary magazine. I listened, stunned by the tone of the exchange. At the time I thought it was a perverse anomaly. I know better now.
“ --perhaps the magazine ought to fail,” David, the benefactor was telling my friend Toby, when I happened on their conversation. I paused in the shadowed hallway to listen.
“Maybe,” Toby said. “But I can’t really deal with that idea right now. I have a staff of ten and a growing subscription base and I can’t let a two week cash flow problem ruin that. You have to see that I can’t just -- ”
“Toby.”
“I can’t just let everything – what?”
“You talk too much. You don’t listen. That may very well be one of the reasons your business ventures fail so consistently. You can’t always count on this kind of free ride. It’s making you lazy and careless.”
I almost laughed out loud at this comment: David had in the time I had known him, never let anyone slip more than a word or two between the cracks of his self-important monologues; he had never shown a speck of interest in anyone else’s life, their problems or their ideas. As to the notion of a free ride, David Barandes had been bequeathed a free ride unparalleled in the history of the human species. He had never worked a day in his life, never done a scrap of laundry, cooked a meal, or even paid a bill: the Barandes family domestic staff and accountants had always handled such petty details. I remembered the lovely Jaguar XKE that he totaled at Hampshire, skidding on some black ice, driving too fast one February night. The car had barely been towed away when an equally stunning 1964 Shelby Mustang appeared in the Merrill House parking lot.
After this life of anesthetizing privilege, he had the casual temerity to lecture Toby (who held down two jobs to support himself and the crazy dream of his little magazine) about a ‘free ride.’ Of course Toby let the comment strut past; you didn’t argue with David when you were pleading for his money.
“I understand that,” Toby said.
“It took you an extra year to pay me back last time,” David continued.
“I know. I’m sorry about that. It was just -- ”
“You’re talking again.”
“I – okay. Go on.”
“This is a relatively trivial issue. A magazine that no one really cares about, with the possible exception of you and my wife. But you may need money for some serious reason some day. You might find yourself with a real emergency on your hands. You might need medical attention. Or bail. Your credit is non-existent – I checked. In an actual crisis, you’d have nowhere else to turn. I’m your bank of last resort. So pay this money back on time, Toby. Every penny, including the low interest I’m charging so that I won’t have to pay a gift tax on my generosity.”
“I --”
“Because if you don’t, if you’re a day late or a penny shy, when that day comes you’ll get nothing from me. I’ll watch you go down and hope it teaches you a lesson.”
I tip-toed on to the bathroom, shaking my head in baffled wonderment: only David Barandes could turn a moment of generosity into a threat.
Or so I thought the time.
I’ve seen similar moments since, an experienced many of them myself. For example: the wealthy dowager (I’m talking about a personal fortune of close to fifty millions dollars, barely scathed by the recent financial crisis), blithely showing off some new extravagance to the niece who, with her sisters, was providing hospice care for their mother with no help from anyone. The work was exhausting, even traumatic, and the aunt could have provided round the clock nursing care just by dipping her gold-plated ladle into the limitless sea of money at her disposal. She wouldn’t even have noticed the expense. With literally no effort (her accounts could have handled the transaction), she could have made life bearable for her nieces and eased her sister’s dying immeasurably. But it never occurred to her. Instead she spent hundreds of thousand of dollars on some vain frivolity … and carelessly boasted about it to the sleepless, harrowed young woman who was working around the clock less than a mile away. This seemed impossibly cruel to me, but I was accustomed to this kind of behavior by then. The wealthy lawyer who contributes a pittance to his infirm mother’s living expenses (But never cancels a vacation); the billionaire who left his struggling kids nothing but a few sticks of furniture.
It all feels the same; the wealthy customers who assume everyone is trying to take advantage of them, the rich girlfriend who stuffed cash in my pockets before we went to dinner so that no one would suspect she was paying the tab. The guilt, paranoia and mendacity never seem to change.
So I started to wonder – is this nature or nurture? Do the rich people learn these defensive behaviors, this callous oblivion, from their parents? Or is it hard-wired into the lizard brain of the human species? Is it a mental illness, or an atavistic hangover from the cave-man days when an extra pelt hidden under a rock could mean the difference between life and death?
I’ve come to the conclusion that it’s a little of both. Old money and new money do have small variations in their behaviors. Generally old money people pretend they’re poor (“We’ve just been leveled by the taxes this year. I don’t know what we’re going to do.”) whereas new money people pretend you’re rich (“Come to Gstaad with us! We’ll have so much fun!). But the same strategy of dissimulation animates both tactics. The purpose is to conceal or elide the appalling gulf that separates them from the rest of the population. To admit their true status would be catastrophic. They would have to feel unbearable guilt or attempt unsustainable acts of generosity. They would be set upon by the jackals of the underclass and torn to pieces. Better to build walls and moats, live in gated communities, dress down and only speak the truth to other members of the tribe.
Much of this is learned behavior, and the exquisite tedium of their cocktail party conversations (A Nantucket fund-raiser sparkles with preening yacht comparisons, pompous wine recommendations and political hokum) testify to the fact that few of them have learned much else. The billionaire who made his brother-in-law split the tolls on the drive from New York to Connecticut, who called his party guests “free-loaders” because they were drinking his liquor, clearly learned that crass and small-minded parsimony at a parent’s knee. It might have been the same parent, in the same tight-fisted culture, that taught J. Paul Getty to install a pay phone in his house so that greedy guests wouldn’t run up his phone bill.
So perhaps there’s nothing inherent in us that drives this harsh and barbaric materialism. I was beginning to think so – and imagining new schools that would train the children of wealth to a new, open-hearted humanity – until I came into some money myself.
Actually, it’s better than that. I just thought I was coming into the money. I never actually saw a dime. The big deal fell through (Most Hollywood deals fall through –except the drug deals). But for a few weeks there, I had a vision--I finally saw the prospect of a windfall, a period of true a shining glimpse of authentic prosperity opening up on the horizon. No more debt! No more overdraft fees. No more punishing 60 hour work-weeks.
Instead: travel, freedom, peace of mind.
And what was the first thing I thought of? How to to hide my new fortune from my friends. How to protect it from my greedy ex-wife. How to use it without giving myself away, what story I could concoct to explain a new car or a flat screen TV (Small inheritance? customer cast off?).
I was acting exactly like all the rich people I hated – and I was still broke! Just he thought of money had poisoned my mind and kick-started all the same pathologies I’d been denouncing for years. Maybe those responses are actually instinctive. Or maybe I’m just another stingy jerk.
I can’t imagine how awful I’d be if I actually did get rich.But much as I hate to admit it, I’d really like to find out.
The question keeps coming up.
I’m surrounded by rich people; I work for them on a daily basis; I have wealthy family members and friends, as well as various in-laws and acquaintances who would be considered rich by any normal standard, though they deny it stridently, and act insulted if you mention … not the elephant – more like the 1955 Bentley S1 Continental touring car in the room. Or the Matisse cut-outs on the wall. Almost without exception they follow rigid protocols of behavior that I find baffling, mean-spirited, stingy and awful.
Years ago, I overheard a friend of mine, beseeching a wealthy patron for another cash transfusion to his struggling literary magazine. I listened, stunned by the tone of the exchange. At the time I thought it was a perverse anomaly. I know better now.
“ --perhaps the magazine ought to fail,” David, the benefactor was telling my friend Toby, when I happened on their conversation. I paused in the shadowed hallway to listen.
“Maybe,” Toby said. “But I can’t really deal with that idea right now. I have a staff of ten and a growing subscription base and I can’t let a two week cash flow problem ruin that. You have to see that I can’t just -- ”
“Toby.”
“I can’t just let everything – what?”
“You talk too much. You don’t listen. That may very well be one of the reasons your business ventures fail so consistently. You can’t always count on this kind of free ride. It’s making you lazy and careless.”
I almost laughed out loud at this comment: David had in the time I had known him, never let anyone slip more than a word or two between the cracks of his self-important monologues; he had never shown a speck of interest in anyone else’s life, their problems or their ideas. As to the notion of a free ride, David Barandes had been bequeathed a free ride unparalleled in the history of the human species. He had never worked a day in his life, never done a scrap of laundry, cooked a meal, or even paid a bill: the Barandes family domestic staff and accountants had always handled such petty details. I remembered the lovely Jaguar XKE that he totaled at Hampshire, skidding on some black ice, driving too fast one February night. The car had barely been towed away when an equally stunning 1964 Shelby Mustang appeared in the Merrill House parking lot.
After this life of anesthetizing privilege, he had the casual temerity to lecture Toby (who held down two jobs to support himself and the crazy dream of his little magazine) about a ‘free ride.’ Of course Toby let the comment strut past; you didn’t argue with David when you were pleading for his money.
“I understand that,” Toby said.
“It took you an extra year to pay me back last time,” David continued.
“I know. I’m sorry about that. It was just -- ”
“You’re talking again.”
“I – okay. Go on.”
“This is a relatively trivial issue. A magazine that no one really cares about, with the possible exception of you and my wife. But you may need money for some serious reason some day. You might find yourself with a real emergency on your hands. You might need medical attention. Or bail. Your credit is non-existent – I checked. In an actual crisis, you’d have nowhere else to turn. I’m your bank of last resort. So pay this money back on time, Toby. Every penny, including the low interest I’m charging so that I won’t have to pay a gift tax on my generosity.”
“I --”
“Because if you don’t, if you’re a day late or a penny shy, when that day comes you’ll get nothing from me. I’ll watch you go down and hope it teaches you a lesson.”
I tip-toed on to the bathroom, shaking my head in baffled wonderment: only David Barandes could turn a moment of generosity into a threat.
Or so I thought the time.
I’ve seen similar moments since, an experienced many of them myself. For example: the wealthy dowager (I’m talking about a personal fortune of close to fifty millions dollars, barely scathed by the recent financial crisis), blithely showing off some new extravagance to the niece who, with her sisters, was providing hospice care for their mother with no help from anyone. The work was exhausting, even traumatic, and the aunt could have provided round the clock nursing care just by dipping her gold-plated ladle into the limitless sea of money at her disposal. She wouldn’t even have noticed the expense. With literally no effort (her accounts could have handled the transaction), she could have made life bearable for her nieces and eased her sister’s dying immeasurably. But it never occurred to her. Instead she spent hundreds of thousand of dollars on some vain frivolity … and carelessly boasted about it to the sleepless, harrowed young woman who was working around the clock less than a mile away. This seemed impossibly cruel to me, but I was accustomed to this kind of behavior by then. The wealthy lawyer who contributes a pittance to his infirm mother’s living expenses (But never cancels a vacation); the billionaire who left his struggling kids nothing but a few sticks of furniture.
It all feels the same; the wealthy customers who assume everyone is trying to take advantage of them, the rich girlfriend who stuffed cash in my pockets before we went to dinner so that no one would suspect she was paying the tab. The guilt, paranoia and mendacity never seem to change.
So I started to wonder – is this nature or nurture? Do the rich people learn these defensive behaviors, this callous oblivion, from their parents? Or is it hard-wired into the lizard brain of the human species? Is it a mental illness, or an atavistic hangover from the cave-man days when an extra pelt hidden under a rock could mean the difference between life and death?
I’ve come to the conclusion that it’s a little of both. Old money and new money do have small variations in their behaviors. Generally old money people pretend they’re poor (“We’ve just been leveled by the taxes this year. I don’t know what we’re going to do.”) whereas new money people pretend you’re rich (“Come to Gstaad with us! We’ll have so much fun!). But the same strategy of dissimulation animates both tactics. The purpose is to conceal or elide the appalling gulf that separates them from the rest of the population. To admit their true status would be catastrophic. They would have to feel unbearable guilt or attempt unsustainable acts of generosity. They would be set upon by the jackals of the underclass and torn to pieces. Better to build walls and moats, live in gated communities, dress down and only speak the truth to other members of the tribe.
Much of this is learned behavior, and the exquisite tedium of their cocktail party conversations (A Nantucket fund-raiser sparkles with preening yacht comparisons, pompous wine recommendations and political hokum) testify to the fact that few of them have learned much else. The billionaire who made his brother-in-law split the tolls on the drive from New York to Connecticut, who called his party guests “free-loaders” because they were drinking his liquor, clearly learned that crass and small-minded parsimony at a parent’s knee. It might have been the same parent, in the same tight-fisted culture, that taught J. Paul Getty to install a pay phone in his house so that greedy guests wouldn’t run up his phone bill.
So perhaps there’s nothing inherent in us that drives this harsh and barbaric materialism. I was beginning to think so – and imagining new schools that would train the children of wealth to a new, open-hearted humanity – until I came into some money myself.
Actually, it’s better than that. I just thought I was coming into the money. I never actually saw a dime. The big deal fell through (Most Hollywood deals fall through –except the drug deals). But for a few weeks there, I had a vision--I finally saw the prospect of a windfall, a period of true a shining glimpse of authentic prosperity opening up on the horizon. No more debt! No more overdraft fees. No more punishing 60 hour work-weeks.
Instead: travel, freedom, peace of mind.
And what was the first thing I thought of? How to to hide my new fortune from my friends. How to protect it from my greedy ex-wife. How to use it without giving myself away, what story I could concoct to explain a new car or a flat screen TV (Small inheritance? customer cast off?).
I was acting exactly like all the rich people I hated – and I was still broke! Just he thought of money had poisoned my mind and kick-started all the same pathologies I’d been denouncing for years. Maybe those responses are actually instinctive. Or maybe I’m just another stingy jerk.
I can’t imagine how awful I’d be if I actually did get rich.But much as I hate to admit it, I’d really like to find out.
Wednesday, September 09, 2009
Scenes From a Divorce: Partisans
When I was younger I thought love was the great meal of life and friendship was just garnish – a nice chutney served with the shrimp curry.
Divorce changed all that.
Of course it taught me the volatility and fragility of love – it was more like a blown-glass Christmas ornament filled with nitro-glycerine. I was still shuffling through the burnt shards. But I also learned some lessons about friendship. My friends became my allies, my co-conspirators, my partisans … not to mention my patrons and my landlords. They offered moral support. I remember one them snooping my ex-wife’s house on his way out to a job in ‘Sconset. “It’s still a pig-sty in there,” he cackled. “She’s the slob, buddy! I even checked the basement. You can still see laundry mountain down there.”
One of them gave me not one but two places to live, both at impossibly low rents. I could never have stayed on the island without his generosity.
Then there was Byron Clark. I had seen him for years – at poetry readings, out surfing on big days, working on job sites. I hitched the occasional ride in his Cessna. But we only became friends after the divorce. He had just gone through his own, a much more harrowing separation than mine, complete with public tantrums and alcoholic blackouts. We went out to dinner and told our war stories (he could always top me); found me painting jobs, dragged me out in the ocean when he knew I needed it, gave me interesting new authors to read (Murakami, Bolano), loaned me small amounts of money when I was short.
When a customer went bankrupt owning me ten thousand dollars, Byron’s kindness was put to a more severe test.
I read about the bankruptcy in the local paper – the guy never even called. I had been checking my mailbox every day, measuring the time it would take the check to arrive and clear against the suffocating weight of my obligations. I had thought about calling him, but those phone calls were excruciating. I hated badgering people for money.
Well, now I wouldn’t have to.
But the obligations remained: car payment, rent, IRS, State tax, insurance, liability, workman’s comp., credit card bills, hospital bills from an emergency room visit … The ten thousand dollars would have barely covered it. I’d already sent the check to the State of Mass, crazily certain the check would arrive that day. But of course it didn’t. That one was going to bounce, there was nothing I could do about it. Over a thousand dollars was felony fraud in this state. I could wind up in jail.
I spent hours pawing through my circumstances, my jobs and customers, my family and friends, debts I could cash in, obligations I could stall, looking for a solution. It was like rummaging through the junk drawer in my kitchen for the car keys. The only real question was, how many times would you dump it out and sort through the putty knives and stamps and defunct cell-phone chargers before you accepted that the keys weren’t there? Still, the fact was, sometimes you did find them on the fourth or the tenth attempt, after looking everywhere else, after you’d already given up, doing it by rote, just to be doing something so you wouldn’t have to admit the truth and make the loss official. And there they were, under the stack of credit card offers and old shopping lists, behind the packing tape and the throwaway camera you never took in to get developed. There they were, somehow, as if someone was playing a trick on you, a practical joke they’d decided wasn’t funny anymore. There they were.
So I kept searching. An advance on the Keller job? But that wasn’t supposed to start until Spring. Or the Silverstein job? But they were living here and they’d expect me there every day. That was fine, but the money wasn’t enough. I’d have to start at least three jobs and lay off people at the same time. I couldn’t afford to pay anyone anything. I could conceivably get first checks from Foley and Landau but the Foleys were here all winter and the Landau’s caretaker would be checking up daily, and he’d be delighted to bust me with the owners if I wasn’t on the job.
Finally I got in the car and started driving, the trees on either side of Milestone Road tumbling by in a blur. I thought of Robin Hood, hiding in the forest. There was nowhere to hide here. What was I going to do? Live in a tent? I hated camping and I’d be busted the first night anyway. I thought of running away, just buying a boat ticket and driving west. But I’d thought that a million times and the answer was always the same. You couldn’t do it without money. You couldn’t start fresh somewhere with nothing. It was a child’s fantasy.
But I couldn’t make this work. I couldn’t be on all those jobs simultaneously, with just two guys. Still, I added it up: if I got all the checks this week, or next week at the latest, if I could convince the Kellers to let me start early, that would just cover my outstanding obligations. No, I’d still be about twenty-five hundred shy. And that was only until the first week’s wages were due; and then I’d have no more money from anyone until I got to the half-way mark on some job. Anyway, I was up to my limit on my charge at Marine; how was I supposed to buy the materials for three new jobs at once? That was around fifteen hundred bucks right there. I added it up. I needed six thousand dollars to survive this siege. Not even to survive it, just to get to the next onslaught. But if my crew would agree to wait for their checks until I got the next checks from the owners, and everyone agreed to let me start, and paid me quickly … no, no, no. No good, with the materials and the IRS and rent, you can’t forget about the rent, I was still at least a thousand dollars in the red. And I needed some money to live on – food and gas. Another grand? Would that do it? Say it would: that meant he had to find six thousand dollars -- by tomorrow.
I was all the way to ‘Sconset when the answer came to me, discovered like the keys in the junk drawer. It wasn’t even a surprise, as if some part of you knew they were there all along. There was only one place to go, only one person I could turn to at this moment.
I climbed into his car and started the long drive to Byron Clark’s house in Madaket.
Driving west, I remembered helping Byron clear out his parents’ house after they died. It was packed with thirty years’ accumulation of pack-rat trash: collections of animal skulls and fishing lures, mold-rotted books and antique jam jars, bales of twine and barbed wire, lobster pots and scallop boxes, check-books and unopened bills from the nineteen sixties, lampshades and chair cushions, broken radios, and unraveling wicker. After a week of ten hour days we were able to see the floor. When the Thomas Tompion grandfather clock and the Tony Sarg puzzles had been taken to the auction house and everything else had been carted to the dump, the cleaning had begun. The once-white walls were stained a toxic amber from decades of cigarette smoke; they were black from mold where the roof leaked. We wore vapor masks and rubber gloves and scrubbed the place for another week. Jack’s brother never volunteered to help; neither did anyone else.
It made sense: Byron and I were the real brothers. He’d probably already know about my situation, tonight – news moved across the island like strep throat through an elementary school.
I was rolling past the crowded subdivision of Tristram’s Landing, with its ugly houses packed tight together in concentric circles, cut by the creeks. I remembered when there was nothing but dune grass here. Change was always for the worse on Nantucket. The bulky shadows swept past. Most of the houses were dark. These were summer people, they showed up for a week or a month a year.
I had never borrowed this much money from Byron before. More importantly, I had never asked for a loan without knowing when I’d be able to pay it back. And I’d never been this desperate, driving too fast with rage and dread self-loathing climbing my throat as I took a turn too wide and the wheels shuddered against the jumbled dirty snow on the shoulder. These curves were deceptive. I eased back to forty miles an hour. Soon I was crossing Millie’s bridge, turning onto the ruts and craters of Vermont Avenue.
The lights were on in Byron’s beach shack. I parked and sat in the car, listening to the surf and the faint sound of Van Morrison from Byron’s house, carried on the wind. Blue Money; how appropriate. I had no idea what he was going to say, or how I was going to begin.
As it turned out, I didn’t have to say anything.
Byron came to the door in sweatpants and an old Toscana t-shirt. The wood stove was going and the little house was warm. There was a faint smell of varnish. Van was singing Cleaning Windows, now. Maybe it was a message; people always needed their windows cleaned.
Byron pulled me into a bear hug and said “Come in .Have a drink. Tell me how much you need.”
“No, look, I didn’t -- ”
He pulled me inside. “Hey, relax, check yourself out. It has to be money, unless you have something incurable, and I can’t help with that.” He kicked the door closed with his foot and stared at me. “You’re not sick?”
“No. I mean, I don’t know. I hope not.”
“Then I have an idea. Let’s get out of here. I’ve been working this bird feeder all night. I was just getting some sealer on it. If we move we can get to the Box before it closes.”
I explained the situation as we rode back to town. I was finishing as we turned away from the Stop& Shop into the Chicken Box parking lot: “So I need five thousand dollars and I have no idea when I’ll be able to pay it back.”
Byron laughed. “Don’t stop there – really sell me. Say you’ll gamble it all away at Mohegan Sun and then avoid me like I was contagious for the next five years.”
“No man, come on, you know there’s no way -- ”
Byron punched me on the arm, “I’m kidding. Relax. Gentleman’s rule: retain your sense of humor under duress.”
I let out a long breath. “Oh yeah – I remember those rules. Your Dad was great. Borderline psychotic – but great.”
“And he really was a gentleman, in his own way. He never broke his own rules. Don’t argue about politics. Pick up the tab. Notice small improvements. Remember birthdays. Call home. Walk the dog. “
“Help your friends.”
Byron nodded. “Treat them like family. Because they are.”
He leaned over and pulled his checkbook out of his pocket, pulled a pen from the ashtray, scribbled a check, tore it off, handed it over.
I was confused. “This is for seventy-five hundred dollars.”
“That was one of my Dad’s best rules: a gentleman never asks for as much as he needs.”
I felt a sudden surge of emotion burning my face, making my eyes prickle.
But that was another Clark rule: maintain your composure.
“Thank you,” I said
Byron cuffed me lightly on the head, “Come on. Let’s shoot some pool and have a beer. You’re buying.”
And so I survived another crisis; and I eventually paid Byron back. None of my old lovers would have been willing to help – most of them wouldn’t even have returned my phone call. But the friends stuck with me. Some helped with money, like Byron, some helped me move, some just listened -- and agreed with me.
“I always hated that bitch,” one of them said. “I thought you’d never get free.”
I didn’t point out that I’d been dumped; or that I felt more exiled than liberated. But it was good to have someone on my side. These were my allies, my unit, my comrades in arms, my partisans. Some well-meaning acquaintance told me “It takes a village to survive a divorce.”
And I thought to myself – keep your village.
I have a platoon.
Divorce changed all that.
Of course it taught me the volatility and fragility of love – it was more like a blown-glass Christmas ornament filled with nitro-glycerine. I was still shuffling through the burnt shards. But I also learned some lessons about friendship. My friends became my allies, my co-conspirators, my partisans … not to mention my patrons and my landlords. They offered moral support. I remember one them snooping my ex-wife’s house on his way out to a job in ‘Sconset. “It’s still a pig-sty in there,” he cackled. “She’s the slob, buddy! I even checked the basement. You can still see laundry mountain down there.”
One of them gave me not one but two places to live, both at impossibly low rents. I could never have stayed on the island without his generosity.
Then there was Byron Clark. I had seen him for years – at poetry readings, out surfing on big days, working on job sites. I hitched the occasional ride in his Cessna. But we only became friends after the divorce. He had just gone through his own, a much more harrowing separation than mine, complete with public tantrums and alcoholic blackouts. We went out to dinner and told our war stories (he could always top me); found me painting jobs, dragged me out in the ocean when he knew I needed it, gave me interesting new authors to read (Murakami, Bolano), loaned me small amounts of money when I was short.
When a customer went bankrupt owning me ten thousand dollars, Byron’s kindness was put to a more severe test.
I read about the bankruptcy in the local paper – the guy never even called. I had been checking my mailbox every day, measuring the time it would take the check to arrive and clear against the suffocating weight of my obligations. I had thought about calling him, but those phone calls were excruciating. I hated badgering people for money.
Well, now I wouldn’t have to.
But the obligations remained: car payment, rent, IRS, State tax, insurance, liability, workman’s comp., credit card bills, hospital bills from an emergency room visit … The ten thousand dollars would have barely covered it. I’d already sent the check to the State of Mass, crazily certain the check would arrive that day. But of course it didn’t. That one was going to bounce, there was nothing I could do about it. Over a thousand dollars was felony fraud in this state. I could wind up in jail.
I spent hours pawing through my circumstances, my jobs and customers, my family and friends, debts I could cash in, obligations I could stall, looking for a solution. It was like rummaging through the junk drawer in my kitchen for the car keys. The only real question was, how many times would you dump it out and sort through the putty knives and stamps and defunct cell-phone chargers before you accepted that the keys weren’t there? Still, the fact was, sometimes you did find them on the fourth or the tenth attempt, after looking everywhere else, after you’d already given up, doing it by rote, just to be doing something so you wouldn’t have to admit the truth and make the loss official. And there they were, under the stack of credit card offers and old shopping lists, behind the packing tape and the throwaway camera you never took in to get developed. There they were, somehow, as if someone was playing a trick on you, a practical joke they’d decided wasn’t funny anymore. There they were.
So I kept searching. An advance on the Keller job? But that wasn’t supposed to start until Spring. Or the Silverstein job? But they were living here and they’d expect me there every day. That was fine, but the money wasn’t enough. I’d have to start at least three jobs and lay off people at the same time. I couldn’t afford to pay anyone anything. I could conceivably get first checks from Foley and Landau but the Foleys were here all winter and the Landau’s caretaker would be checking up daily, and he’d be delighted to bust me with the owners if I wasn’t on the job.
Finally I got in the car and started driving, the trees on either side of Milestone Road tumbling by in a blur. I thought of Robin Hood, hiding in the forest. There was nowhere to hide here. What was I going to do? Live in a tent? I hated camping and I’d be busted the first night anyway. I thought of running away, just buying a boat ticket and driving west. But I’d thought that a million times and the answer was always the same. You couldn’t do it without money. You couldn’t start fresh somewhere with nothing. It was a child’s fantasy.
But I couldn’t make this work. I couldn’t be on all those jobs simultaneously, with just two guys. Still, I added it up: if I got all the checks this week, or next week at the latest, if I could convince the Kellers to let me start early, that would just cover my outstanding obligations. No, I’d still be about twenty-five hundred shy. And that was only until the first week’s wages were due; and then I’d have no more money from anyone until I got to the half-way mark on some job. Anyway, I was up to my limit on my charge at Marine; how was I supposed to buy the materials for three new jobs at once? That was around fifteen hundred bucks right there. I added it up. I needed six thousand dollars to survive this siege. Not even to survive it, just to get to the next onslaught. But if my crew would agree to wait for their checks until I got the next checks from the owners, and everyone agreed to let me start, and paid me quickly … no, no, no. No good, with the materials and the IRS and rent, you can’t forget about the rent, I was still at least a thousand dollars in the red. And I needed some money to live on – food and gas. Another grand? Would that do it? Say it would: that meant he had to find six thousand dollars -- by tomorrow.
I was all the way to ‘Sconset when the answer came to me, discovered like the keys in the junk drawer. It wasn’t even a surprise, as if some part of you knew they were there all along. There was only one place to go, only one person I could turn to at this moment.
I climbed into his car and started the long drive to Byron Clark’s house in Madaket.
Driving west, I remembered helping Byron clear out his parents’ house after they died. It was packed with thirty years’ accumulation of pack-rat trash: collections of animal skulls and fishing lures, mold-rotted books and antique jam jars, bales of twine and barbed wire, lobster pots and scallop boxes, check-books and unopened bills from the nineteen sixties, lampshades and chair cushions, broken radios, and unraveling wicker. After a week of ten hour days we were able to see the floor. When the Thomas Tompion grandfather clock and the Tony Sarg puzzles had been taken to the auction house and everything else had been carted to the dump, the cleaning had begun. The once-white walls were stained a toxic amber from decades of cigarette smoke; they were black from mold where the roof leaked. We wore vapor masks and rubber gloves and scrubbed the place for another week. Jack’s brother never volunteered to help; neither did anyone else.
It made sense: Byron and I were the real brothers. He’d probably already know about my situation, tonight – news moved across the island like strep throat through an elementary school.
I was rolling past the crowded subdivision of Tristram’s Landing, with its ugly houses packed tight together in concentric circles, cut by the creeks. I remembered when there was nothing but dune grass here. Change was always for the worse on Nantucket. The bulky shadows swept past. Most of the houses were dark. These were summer people, they showed up for a week or a month a year.
I had never borrowed this much money from Byron before. More importantly, I had never asked for a loan without knowing when I’d be able to pay it back. And I’d never been this desperate, driving too fast with rage and dread self-loathing climbing my throat as I took a turn too wide and the wheels shuddered against the jumbled dirty snow on the shoulder. These curves were deceptive. I eased back to forty miles an hour. Soon I was crossing Millie’s bridge, turning onto the ruts and craters of Vermont Avenue.
The lights were on in Byron’s beach shack. I parked and sat in the car, listening to the surf and the faint sound of Van Morrison from Byron’s house, carried on the wind. Blue Money; how appropriate. I had no idea what he was going to say, or how I was going to begin.
As it turned out, I didn’t have to say anything.
Byron came to the door in sweatpants and an old Toscana t-shirt. The wood stove was going and the little house was warm. There was a faint smell of varnish. Van was singing Cleaning Windows, now. Maybe it was a message; people always needed their windows cleaned.
Byron pulled me into a bear hug and said “Come in .Have a drink. Tell me how much you need.”
“No, look, I didn’t -- ”
He pulled me inside. “Hey, relax, check yourself out. It has to be money, unless you have something incurable, and I can’t help with that.” He kicked the door closed with his foot and stared at me. “You’re not sick?”
“No. I mean, I don’t know. I hope not.”
“Then I have an idea. Let’s get out of here. I’ve been working this bird feeder all night. I was just getting some sealer on it. If we move we can get to the Box before it closes.”
I explained the situation as we rode back to town. I was finishing as we turned away from the Stop& Shop into the Chicken Box parking lot: “So I need five thousand dollars and I have no idea when I’ll be able to pay it back.”
Byron laughed. “Don’t stop there – really sell me. Say you’ll gamble it all away at Mohegan Sun and then avoid me like I was contagious for the next five years.”
“No man, come on, you know there’s no way -- ”
Byron punched me on the arm, “I’m kidding. Relax. Gentleman’s rule: retain your sense of humor under duress.”
I let out a long breath. “Oh yeah – I remember those rules. Your Dad was great. Borderline psychotic – but great.”
“And he really was a gentleman, in his own way. He never broke his own rules. Don’t argue about politics. Pick up the tab. Notice small improvements. Remember birthdays. Call home. Walk the dog. “
“Help your friends.”
Byron nodded. “Treat them like family. Because they are.”
He leaned over and pulled his checkbook out of his pocket, pulled a pen from the ashtray, scribbled a check, tore it off, handed it over.
I was confused. “This is for seventy-five hundred dollars.”
“That was one of my Dad’s best rules: a gentleman never asks for as much as he needs.”
I felt a sudden surge of emotion burning my face, making my eyes prickle.
But that was another Clark rule: maintain your composure.
“Thank you,” I said
Byron cuffed me lightly on the head, “Come on. Let’s shoot some pool and have a beer. You’re buying.”
And so I survived another crisis; and I eventually paid Byron back. None of my old lovers would have been willing to help – most of them wouldn’t even have returned my phone call. But the friends stuck with me. Some helped with money, like Byron, some helped me move, some just listened -- and agreed with me.
“I always hated that bitch,” one of them said. “I thought you’d never get free.”
I didn’t point out that I’d been dumped; or that I felt more exiled than liberated. But it was good to have someone on my side. These were my allies, my unit, my comrades in arms, my partisans. Some well-meaning acquaintance told me “It takes a village to survive a divorce.”
And I thought to myself – keep your village.
I have a platoon.
The Home Care Diaries, Part One: The Prodigal Mom
Well, I did it.
My Mom is back on Nantucket, ensconsed in a new bed in our re-arranged dining room, settling in.
I'm happy, but I have to admit that my first response is to feel daunted and a little overwhelmed. Seeing my mother in tne assisted living home, and later on in the depressing skilled nursing facility, it was easy to say, “I’m busting her out of this place.” And in fact, it was fairly easy: just a matter of booking plane flights and hotel rooms and moving vans and boat reservations; buying suitcases and boxes and GPS units; and doing one long day worth of manual labor, broken up over four days of beach jaunts, restaurant meals and movies – almost a vacation. It was enjoyable working with my son, and we paced ourselves expertly. True the apocalyptic California sky – harsh cloudless blue tinged with forest fire smoke – made us uneasy, the streets of downtown long beach resembled a some police staute utopia in a bad science fiction movie, with cops everywhere (I saw one of them harassing an elderly gentleman waiting for a bus, as if he were a vagrant: “What are you doing here? Where are you heading? What’s your plan?”), and bizarre street signs posting a ten O’clock curfew for anyone under eighteen and forbidding a new crime called ‘cruising’, defined as driving by any spot in the city more than three times in four hours. But we ignored all that. We had a job to do and we did it.
The journey east was relatively easy, also, it turns out that there’s a use for all that politically correct, handicapped-friendly, wheelchair-accessible infrastructure. If you’re actually in a wheel chair, it makes life startlingly easy. A local clothing store had to install a wheel-chair elevator a few years ago after a fire, to meet our draconian building codes. It’s never been used. It always seemed absurd to me, before (especially since the second floor sells work clothes). But I’m starting to get the point. In fact, I may just walk Mom down there in her wheel chair, to give that elevator its maiden voyage.
Our flight was delayed by a tropical storm pushing up the North-East coast, so we wound up spending the night in the Logan Airport Hilton. The comfortable beds and flat-screen television smoothed over the convenience, and brought home to me with some force the very different world that rich people inhabit. The motel we stayed in during our time in Long Beach was a grim and utilitarian place by comparison. Walking down the dark, cement floored, cinder-block walled passageway to our room, I remarked to my son, “This is like Cabrini Green”. “But with no gang graffiti,” he pointed out. We were grateful for small favors.
For Mom and me,the Hilton was our last mooring: now we are launched on this unfamiliar sea. I’m getting my bearings quickly though. I knew we would need someone in the house during the day to take care of my Mom’s relatively minimal) needs – help getting to the bathroom, and reminders about her medication schedule. In case she needed me in the night, I put my cell on her speed dial. She had to go to the bathroom at 11:00, 1:30, 3:45 and 4:30. To call this grueling sleepless night a ‘wake up call’ seems both too obvious and wholly inadequate (there were four of them, after all). So now I know we need two shifts, if I’m going to be able to work and stay healthy while this adventure proceeds. The whole routine felt strangely familiar, and then thought occurred to me that this situation is in many ways like caring for a baby. You feel the same stress (Am I fucking this up?) the same lack of experience (You know people have done it before but it doesn’t seem that way), the same constriction of your life: any activity that leaves the person in your care alone has to be planned and organized well in advance. Life suddenly requires a lot more thought, as someone else’s needs take precedence over your own. Of course, the ‘baby’ in this case is a brilliant, entertaining and charming woman to whom I own an incalculable debt, which makes the comparison seem petty and petulant. But it maintains its traction, anyway.
I’ve spent the morning interviewing potential helpers, making initial doctor’s appointments and trying to get someone to fix our dryer -- swamped with details, trying to keep track of first impressions and phone numbers, while Mom chatted with the applicants for the job. She was very frank with them and she said something a few minutes ago that helped put the whole process in perspective:
“I’m happier here than I’ve been in weeks –in months. Years maybe, I don’t know. It’s just so good to be home.”
Well, that’s the point, that’s was why we did it, and that’s makes the whole extraordinary journey worthwhile.
My Mom is back on Nantucket, ensconsed in a new bed in our re-arranged dining room, settling in.
I'm happy, but I have to admit that my first response is to feel daunted and a little overwhelmed. Seeing my mother in tne assisted living home, and later on in the depressing skilled nursing facility, it was easy to say, “I’m busting her out of this place.” And in fact, it was fairly easy: just a matter of booking plane flights and hotel rooms and moving vans and boat reservations; buying suitcases and boxes and GPS units; and doing one long day worth of manual labor, broken up over four days of beach jaunts, restaurant meals and movies – almost a vacation. It was enjoyable working with my son, and we paced ourselves expertly. True the apocalyptic California sky – harsh cloudless blue tinged with forest fire smoke – made us uneasy, the streets of downtown long beach resembled a some police staute utopia in a bad science fiction movie, with cops everywhere (I saw one of them harassing an elderly gentleman waiting for a bus, as if he were a vagrant: “What are you doing here? Where are you heading? What’s your plan?”), and bizarre street signs posting a ten O’clock curfew for anyone under eighteen and forbidding a new crime called ‘cruising’, defined as driving by any spot in the city more than three times in four hours. But we ignored all that. We had a job to do and we did it.
The journey east was relatively easy, also, it turns out that there’s a use for all that politically correct, handicapped-friendly, wheelchair-accessible infrastructure. If you’re actually in a wheel chair, it makes life startlingly easy. A local clothing store had to install a wheel-chair elevator a few years ago after a fire, to meet our draconian building codes. It’s never been used. It always seemed absurd to me, before (especially since the second floor sells work clothes). But I’m starting to get the point. In fact, I may just walk Mom down there in her wheel chair, to give that elevator its maiden voyage.
Our flight was delayed by a tropical storm pushing up the North-East coast, so we wound up spending the night in the Logan Airport Hilton. The comfortable beds and flat-screen television smoothed over the convenience, and brought home to me with some force the very different world that rich people inhabit. The motel we stayed in during our time in Long Beach was a grim and utilitarian place by comparison. Walking down the dark, cement floored, cinder-block walled passageway to our room, I remarked to my son, “This is like Cabrini Green”. “But with no gang graffiti,” he pointed out. We were grateful for small favors.
For Mom and me,the Hilton was our last mooring: now we are launched on this unfamiliar sea. I’m getting my bearings quickly though. I knew we would need someone in the house during the day to take care of my Mom’s relatively minimal) needs – help getting to the bathroom, and reminders about her medication schedule. In case she needed me in the night, I put my cell on her speed dial. She had to go to the bathroom at 11:00, 1:30, 3:45 and 4:30. To call this grueling sleepless night a ‘wake up call’ seems both too obvious and wholly inadequate (there were four of them, after all). So now I know we need two shifts, if I’m going to be able to work and stay healthy while this adventure proceeds. The whole routine felt strangely familiar, and then thought occurred to me that this situation is in many ways like caring for a baby. You feel the same stress (Am I fucking this up?) the same lack of experience (You know people have done it before but it doesn’t seem that way), the same constriction of your life: any activity that leaves the person in your care alone has to be planned and organized well in advance. Life suddenly requires a lot more thought, as someone else’s needs take precedence over your own. Of course, the ‘baby’ in this case is a brilliant, entertaining and charming woman to whom I own an incalculable debt, which makes the comparison seem petty and petulant. But it maintains its traction, anyway.
I’ve spent the morning interviewing potential helpers, making initial doctor’s appointments and trying to get someone to fix our dryer -- swamped with details, trying to keep track of first impressions and phone numbers, while Mom chatted with the applicants for the job. She was very frank with them and she said something a few minutes ago that helped put the whole process in perspective:
“I’m happier here than I’ve been in weeks –in months. Years maybe, I don’t know. It’s just so good to be home.”
Well, that’s the point, that’s was why we did it, and that’s makes the whole extraordinary journey worthwhile.
Inglourious Basterds: Tarantino's triumph
I’ve just seen Quentin Tarantino’s Inglourious Basterds, and maybe it has to do with the fact that I haven’t seen an actual movie in a real movie theatre for far too long (Our one Nantucket theatre, the Starlight – formerly the Gaslight – has long been known by locals as “The Flashlight” for its primitive technology and general ineptitude); maybe it has to do with my unabashed love for Tarantino’s movies (Yes, I loved both parts of Kill Bill, though for purposes of full disclosure and credibility, I have to say that I was bored silly by his half of Grindhouse); but I thought the new one was just great. I love it. I’m still in a kind of cineaste’s swoon from it.
It was everything you expect a Tarantino film to be – over the top, movie-besotted, violent, hilariously funny, full of brilliant dialog with a lethal subtext and jammed with amazing actors you either never knew, had long forgotten about or totally written off.
But this film has a few things you might not expect – real emotional power and some almost psychotic imagery that will stay with you for a long, long time. The image of Shosanna Dreyfus’s big screen face – on the clip she cut into the Nazi propaganda film the entire High Command is watching at her theatre -- consumed by flame from the volatile nitrate film that her lover has just ignited, laughing, cackling, howling her pleasure as the men directly and indirectly responsible for the murder of he family are burned alive … it’s memorable. I’ll remember it. I’ll also remember Melanie Laurent, who plays the part, along with Michel Fassbender who does an impeccable Sean Connery as an undercover OSS agent and then dazzles us with his perfect German … and of course Christoph Waltz who basically steals the move as the fascinating, hilarious, malignant, two (or is it three) faced Nazi “Jew Hunter.”
Where did Tarantino find these people?
And how did he get such sublime performances from Brad Pitt (Whom I had basically written off after the snore-fest of Benjamin Button) and Diane Kruger, who’s most famous for being the eye-candy in the contrived and tedious National Treasure films?
Who knows? That’s just what he does. He did it for Pam Grier and Robert Forster in Jackie Brown; he did it for David Carradine and Daryl Hannah in Kill Bill. Most famously, he did it for John Travolta, in the career reviving Pulp Fiction.
The way he does it here has to do with a very disciplined approach to plot. That’s right – the plot makes sense. All the threads tie together, and if they don’t conform to actual history, even if the film is more of a wish-fulfillment alternate-universe dream than a realistic document, so what? It works. There are plot points based in details of cultural differences between Germany and England, that you can almost hear Tarantino jumping up and down howling with victorious glee when he found out about them (anybody would – they’re narrative gold). But the way he leverages those details, drawing out a scene -- like a ninth inning duel, with man after man loading the bases as the almost unendurable tension builds, finally shattered by a game winning home run – is spectacular, invigorating, masterful …and just plain extravagant movie theatre entertainment.
Tarantino has been working on this film for decades and it shows. Every scene lights up like a fireworks display, but leads into the next assault like an artillery barrage. The final convulsive climax delivers everything you hoped for and more. Parts of the movie recalls the horrific shoot-out of Reservoir Dogs and the superimposed visual exposition of Pulp Fiction, along with its excruciatingly tense un-spooling conversations at the brink of violence. But this movie is all its own, delirious and delightful, appalling and absurd and audacious.
This movie makes it clear: not so much that Tarantino is back, but that he never left, that he was and remains one of our greatest filmmakers, a video-store movie-fan who transcends his magpie, film-geek obsessions and melts his influences into an alloy that remains stubbornly original, crazily eccentric, and spectacularly, stubbornly fun.
You sit there thinking – how did anyone let him make this nutty movie? After the by-the-numbers, explosions-on-demand, heartless soulless summer of G.I. Joe and Transfomers, you watch this bloody violent film, this furious maniacal love letter to movies and movie-making, you can only feel grateful.You know it as you watch, despite all the mercenary, mediocre evidence to the contrary: movies are alive.
And Quentin Tarantino is making them.
It was everything you expect a Tarantino film to be – over the top, movie-besotted, violent, hilariously funny, full of brilliant dialog with a lethal subtext and jammed with amazing actors you either never knew, had long forgotten about or totally written off.
But this film has a few things you might not expect – real emotional power and some almost psychotic imagery that will stay with you for a long, long time. The image of Shosanna Dreyfus’s big screen face – on the clip she cut into the Nazi propaganda film the entire High Command is watching at her theatre -- consumed by flame from the volatile nitrate film that her lover has just ignited, laughing, cackling, howling her pleasure as the men directly and indirectly responsible for the murder of he family are burned alive … it’s memorable. I’ll remember it. I’ll also remember Melanie Laurent, who plays the part, along with Michel Fassbender who does an impeccable Sean Connery as an undercover OSS agent and then dazzles us with his perfect German … and of course Christoph Waltz who basically steals the move as the fascinating, hilarious, malignant, two (or is it three) faced Nazi “Jew Hunter.”
Where did Tarantino find these people?
And how did he get such sublime performances from Brad Pitt (Whom I had basically written off after the snore-fest of Benjamin Button) and Diane Kruger, who’s most famous for being the eye-candy in the contrived and tedious National Treasure films?
Who knows? That’s just what he does. He did it for Pam Grier and Robert Forster in Jackie Brown; he did it for David Carradine and Daryl Hannah in Kill Bill. Most famously, he did it for John Travolta, in the career reviving Pulp Fiction.
The way he does it here has to do with a very disciplined approach to plot. That’s right – the plot makes sense. All the threads tie together, and if they don’t conform to actual history, even if the film is more of a wish-fulfillment alternate-universe dream than a realistic document, so what? It works. There are plot points based in details of cultural differences between Germany and England, that you can almost hear Tarantino jumping up and down howling with victorious glee when he found out about them (anybody would – they’re narrative gold). But the way he leverages those details, drawing out a scene -- like a ninth inning duel, with man after man loading the bases as the almost unendurable tension builds, finally shattered by a game winning home run – is spectacular, invigorating, masterful …and just plain extravagant movie theatre entertainment.
Tarantino has been working on this film for decades and it shows. Every scene lights up like a fireworks display, but leads into the next assault like an artillery barrage. The final convulsive climax delivers everything you hoped for and more. Parts of the movie recalls the horrific shoot-out of Reservoir Dogs and the superimposed visual exposition of Pulp Fiction, along with its excruciatingly tense un-spooling conversations at the brink of violence. But this movie is all its own, delirious and delightful, appalling and absurd and audacious.
This movie makes it clear: not so much that Tarantino is back, but that he never left, that he was and remains one of our greatest filmmakers, a video-store movie-fan who transcends his magpie, film-geek obsessions and melts his influences into an alloy that remains stubbornly original, crazily eccentric, and spectacularly, stubbornly fun.
You sit there thinking – how did anyone let him make this nutty movie? After the by-the-numbers, explosions-on-demand, heartless soulless summer of G.I. Joe and Transfomers, you watch this bloody violent film, this furious maniacal love letter to movies and movie-making, you can only feel grateful.You know it as you watch, despite all the mercenary, mediocre evidence to the contrary: movies are alive.
And Quentin Tarantino is making them.
Scenes From a Divorce: Love and Literature
Things were going well when I met Annie. The machinery of divorce had been tooled to a frictionless precision. The kids didn’t like moving from house to house, and I often wound up sleeping on the couch when they were with me so they could have the privacy of separate bedrooms, but that was fine; I can sleep anywhere. I took care of Lisa’s dogs when she went off-island, helped the kids with their English homework and struggled with eighth grade arithmetic, a hell I had thought I would never have to revisit. Finally we found a tutor. Lisa was making good money, in those days. She paid for the lessons; I drove the kids and picked them up. We struck up an elegant and organic division of labor. Lisa cooked healthy vegetarian food and made the Halloween costumes, counseled Caroline on her first period while I handled pizza night and Laundromat runs, along with Tom’s puberty problems, bullies and puppy loves
Lisa and I never trash-talked each other, though both of were sorely temped and I know the kids caught the occasional sigh or raised eye-brow from me when Lisa bought another couch or contrived another dramatic break-up with the Hoosier; or from her, when I broke another dish or forgot another appointment.
I lived alone and I liked that too. I’d dreaded solitude at the beginning but it’s a kind of drug and I was getting addicted. I arranged the furniture and stocked the fridge just the way I liked, listened to the music I preferred, and took full control of the television remote. When I talked to myself, no one answered. When I read a book in bed at night, no one had to stay up. I dealt with no one but myself, and I got along with myself flawlessly, without a single argument or misunderstanding. Sometimes I would slip into the silence of my little apartment like a hot bath and just soak there.
It was a hermit’s utopia.
Why had I not seen this before? The way to achieve a perfect social order is to junk the ‘social’ part. People were the problem in a ‘people’s republic’ . I preferred the Kingdom of Steve.
Solo flights – that was my kind of flying. Solo cups – that was my kind of cup! Han Solo, that was my kind of corny outer space smuggler with a heart of gold! O Solo Mio – that was my kind of Mio.
And “An Army of One” was my kind of army: one where you don’t take orders.
Or so I told myself. In fact I was lonely and miserable. Like most narcotics, the drug of solitude loses its potency over time, etches its grooves into the nervous system only so deep, leaving you craving more. But what could that excess consist of? A lone world cruise on a sailboat? I get sea-sick on the ferry. A trek through the Hindu Kush? I never even make it to the ocean when I walk at Sanford Farm. No, the real solution was to go cold turkey. I needed to shower and shave and get out into the world and meet people. I needed to look into a woman’s eyes and make her laugh; I needed to hear an answer that surprised me. I needed to feel nervous and awkward and scared again.
I needed a night I couldn’t predict. You can’t live on cheap frozen food, expensive wine and bad TV forever. Even Han Solo wound up cranking the Millenium Falcon into a U-turn and pitching in with the Rebel Alliance. Not to mention planting one on the Princess.
About a week after I arrived at this embarrassingly obvious revelation, an opportunity to socialize appeared, like a boat out of the fog.
Emily Grimshaw was holding a reading at her cramped little apartment on Orange Street; or, as she liked to think of it, convening her salon. A few times a year, local writers and musicians gathered among the piles of books and shelves of trinkets, to perform their work. On the occasions when Emily was speaking to me (her bizarre feuds and imaginary grudges were legendary), I enjoyed these sessions. Even the bad writing was entertaining in its own way: squintingly intense, endearingly awful odes to someone’s embattled womb(“O, sacred source of life, pillaged for the pleasure of the patriarch)” or unappeasable father. (:“Daddy, Daddy, Daddy, why are your eyes so silent, why does your mouth refuse me, why are your broken hands fisted with grief?”) Anyway, I enjoyed reading my stuff aloud, a habit Lisa had always hated. She often quoted Heinlein on the subject: “Poets who read their verse aloud may have other nasty habits.” Maybe, but It was a nasty habit with a purpose – you could always tell when an audience was losing interest, if you paid attention, and I was always able to trim and sharpen things after one of those performances. When they went well, it was a nice ego boost. Of course the bar was set fairly low. The real danger was tripping over it.
I liked the Bohemian atmosphere in the cramped atelier, the congenial mess, the smell of incense. Emilymade excellent hors d’oevres, and served good wine. She was proud of her little salon and always had a few young writers around that she was mentoring; most of them strapping twenty-year-old boys. They adored Emily and did most of the heavy work, moving furniture and setting up the little apartment for the art installations and readings
Several of them were hauling the big lectern to the arched opening between the bedroom and the living room when I pushed inside. Emily, bulky and intense, was talking to a slim blonde woman I recognized from a few years before – her erratic boyfriend had acted with me in a local theatre production. He couldn’t remember his lines and tended to improvise. I remembered one moment vividly. She had brought him to the theatre just in time for a shouting match with the director.
When I turned the corner the boyfriend was shouting “Why don’t you take over the Part then?”
“No, I have a much better idea. Why don’t you take over the part! You’re supposed to be the professional actor!”
The woman had intervened. “Leave him alone,” she said. “This isn’t helping.”
“That’s my decision, Annie. I directed this play.”
“No. You blocked it. And you gave line readings to the amateurs. That’s not directing. A real director would be long gone by now.”
She had been fierce. I remembered that; and I admired it, though I was irritated with her boyfriend myself.
She was alone tonight. Apparently the boyfriend was long-gone.
“I expect a real poem to change my life,” Emily was saying to her now. She stepped back from the door. “Oh, hello Steven – You’re late, as usual. We’re just about to start. Shut the door after you and introduce yourself. There are some new people here tonight. I’m going to open some more wine.”
Then she was gone.
“Something had better change her life,” I said. “The sooner the better.”
Annie smiled. “I like her. Until Emily, I’d never met anyone who wore black as a life-style before.”
“There must be more to her life-style than that.”
“You’re right. I’m being unfair. I shouldn’t leave out the self-help seminars, the nuisance law suits and the continuous low-grade nervous breakdown. She feels the pain of the world -- which makes her better than you. Just ask her. She calls it Weltshmertz, basically because things sound smarter when you say them in German. She’s in court with her ex over custody of their Siamese cat. That’s been going on for six months. Last year she announced that she was the bride of Jesus. But apparently that marriage didn’t work out either.”
I shrugged, closing the door behind me. “Jesus, huh?,” I said, “Well, it makes sense. Another Nantucket carpenter with father issues.”
She laughed. This was what I came out for.
“Are you reading tonight?” I asked her.
“maye. If I have enough to drink first.”
“Are you nervous?”
“No, I just hate reading my stuff aloud. If there’s one person yawning or looking bored or something I just feel, you know – what’s the point, they all hate it. Which is pretty distracting. I guess I get distracted too easily. A drink or two helps. When I’m drunk I don’t care what anyone thinks. I get sort of hostile, in fact. I think stuff like, you know – oh, boy, they thought they were bored before! Wait until they hear this!”
“I bet no one is actually bored, though. Most people yawn because they’re tired. Especially around here. Most of these people worked a ten hour day today.”
“I guess. I shouldn’t pay attention to them, anyway.”
I didn’t see Annie again until she was picking her way through the people sitting on Emily’s floor towards the antique lectern. To say Annie was casually dressed somehow missed the point. It seemed to me that she had turned utter indifference to her appearance into a kind of high style that you’d have to work hard to copy effectively. Her jeans were a little too big on her; so was the loose white long-sleeved t-shirt. It was as if she’d recently lost a lot of weight and hadn’t bothered with a new wardrobe, though she told me at some point later that she’d worn the same sizes since high school. The clothes contrived to look as if they might just fall off her body at any moment. She slouched a little, as if she wanted to disappear into them. It was only when she stretched her back and squared her shoulders, preparing to read, that I noticed she wasn’t wearing a bra. The four buttons that descended from the crew neck were unbuttoned but once again, it seemed negligent rather than intentionally provocative: she was too busy and distracted to bother with them.
It was an old money look – I thought of Katherine Hepburn in baggy sweats tooling around New York on her bicycle. Later I found out that Annie’s family had burned through their money a long time before. But a certain residual elegance remained. It was the way she held her head, her hand gestures – there were generations of gracious hostesses lurking in there somewhere. She looked frail but he could tell from her handshake that she was strong, and her very awkwardness constituted a kind of self-effacing, light-footed physical grace.
I had never seen anyone quite like her before and I was glad to have the chance to just study her as she read her story aloud. She knew how to wait for people’s attention. There was complete silence in the room when she finally began. Here’s a snippet from the story (it was later published in The Chariton Review), to give you a sense of what caught my interest:
Sometimes it was more luxurious to have the offer of sex than the actual sex itself. Like money in the bank, you could spend it later or keep on hoarding, building up a larder of lust, gilding the peaked archways of desire, spinning gold from simple restraint.
“Maybe tomorrow?” she said, backtracking a little.
. “Nope, can’t make it tomorrow honey, but maybe I’ll see you over the week-end though.” He kept his voice friendly and firmly in neutral, but she heard the slight pick-up of anticipation in his breath, the liar’s rise in register at the end of the sentence.
What a fucking deadbeat he was really. What a loser.
Alison knew a loser when she saw one. Creep-allure: she’d always had it. First there had been Rasta-boy Rick. Fuzzy blond dreds and roller blades instead of feet. The guy didn’t even have a car. He lived in a tent and owned a wolf. He fixed computers for a living, but only when he felt like it. He attached flashlights to his skates for better night vision. He said he was a genius.
On deck there was Toby, a foreign car mechanic by day, a compulsive Keno addict by night. He was a beer-guzzling, chain-smoking, number-obsessed mess. But he knew a lot of funny jokes and he had a seductive five o’clock shadow and a lazy, criminal smile.
There were of course, after that, a string of unimportant others. Guys not worth mentioning. Guys with quirks and tics whose m.o.’s were a paragraph or two right out of Abnormal Psychology.
And then, just as she thought the situation was getting chronic, he showed up: the hall of famer. The one she’d put on the long white dress for. The first guy she could ever actually introduce to her parents. Bill.
The name said it all, because she was still paying for it.
When she was done she received what was obviously an excruciating round of applause, and then she faded back into the crowd. A little later I read some poems about Sophie. The essential quatrain:
This is tragic
This is why I rant –
I want words to do magic
And they can’t.
I slipped into the kitchen for a beer while some kid droned through a nightmarishly bad story about a fishing trip with his father (“He never let me bait a hook”). Annie was there ahead of me. She raised her eye brows in Grouch-like disdain.
“You were great,” she said.
“So were you.”
“Everyone hated it. I told you.”
“No – you told me you’d think that everyone hated it. Even if they didn’t. And they didn’t.”
She took a swig of her beer. “How about that girl talking about building fairy cloud bridges to the stars with her stories? What was that about?”
“I have no idea. I try to build actual bridges with mine. Something solid that takes you somewhere. With, like – rebar and cables. Interesting characters. A plot hat makes sense. Stuff like that.”
“Ugh. Sounds like work.”
“Exactly. What a drag.”
I grabbed the bottle opener off the counter and popped my beer. Emily would never stock twist-off cap, non-artisan brews.
“It’s different for me,” Annie said. “I feel like I’m building a bird’s nest. A twig from here, a leaf from there. Just bits and pieces really.”
“Well, they come together nicely. You make an excellent nest.”
“Come on.”
“What?”
“You’re just saying that because of Melanie.” It was true I had briefly dated a friend of hers; but that particular debacle was long-concluded.
“Melanie? You’re really reaching for it. You might try, I don’t know … taking a compliment some time? It’s easy. Just say thanks.”
“I can do that.”
“OK. You look gorgeous tonight.”
“I certainly do not! That’s ridiculous. I – Oh.”
“Thank you?”
“Thank you. That was very nice.”
We both drank. Someone else slipped out of the main room – a burly carpenter I knew by sight.
“Great reading, Annie,” he said.
She glanced over at me. “Thanks. I’m glad you like it.”
I shrugged, palms up in the air, as if to say “See? I told you.”
Two women, friends of Emily’s from off-island, cornered her and I drifted away for a piece of prosciutto and melon.
Annie found me a few minutes later. “This is fun. It’s too bad Emily doesn’t do it more often.”
I said the thought aloud without thinking: “We should do it ourselves. We could have our own private literary salon. You know … drink wine eat a little dinner, read each other stuff. I really do want to hear more of your work.” *
She narrowed her eyes. “Really?”
“Maybe we could help each other. Like a critique group.”
“Okay. I have wine. You bring a picnic. 286 Polpis Road – the cottage in the back.”
“Friday night?”
“Seven O’Clock?”
“Done.”
She extended her hand and I shook it – small and cool, delicate fingers with a strong grip. She sensed my surprise.
“Years of landscaping,” she said.
“So you’re one of those cute landscaper girls I see all the time.”
“I used to be. Now I just have the callouses.”
We were still holding hands. I let go, but the touch stayed with me.
I thought about Friday night as I walked home along the lively summer streets. Was this going to be a date? Or a seminar? Or a little of both? I wasn’t sure what was happening. But I felt giddy, light-footed and caffeine wired, though I I hadn’t had a cup of coffee for hours. I even smiled at the tourists and refrained from saying “Walk in any direction” when one of them asked for directions to the beach.
I look back at that night now and smile.
The big relationship had found me: w ithout fanfare or forseshadowing, the big love had arrived.
I just didn’t know it yet.
* If anyone feels the same way, Annie has a story in Lost Magazine on-line, called The Feast Of Stephen. Just go to Lostmag.com and click on the archives for the April issue. It was the lead fiction that month.
Lisa and I never trash-talked each other, though both of were sorely temped and I know the kids caught the occasional sigh or raised eye-brow from me when Lisa bought another couch or contrived another dramatic break-up with the Hoosier; or from her, when I broke another dish or forgot another appointment.
I lived alone and I liked that too. I’d dreaded solitude at the beginning but it’s a kind of drug and I was getting addicted. I arranged the furniture and stocked the fridge just the way I liked, listened to the music I preferred, and took full control of the television remote. When I talked to myself, no one answered. When I read a book in bed at night, no one had to stay up. I dealt with no one but myself, and I got along with myself flawlessly, without a single argument or misunderstanding. Sometimes I would slip into the silence of my little apartment like a hot bath and just soak there.
It was a hermit’s utopia.
Why had I not seen this before? The way to achieve a perfect social order is to junk the ‘social’ part. People were the problem in a ‘people’s republic’ . I preferred the Kingdom of Steve.
Solo flights – that was my kind of flying. Solo cups – that was my kind of cup! Han Solo, that was my kind of corny outer space smuggler with a heart of gold! O Solo Mio – that was my kind of Mio.
And “An Army of One” was my kind of army: one where you don’t take orders.
Or so I told myself. In fact I was lonely and miserable. Like most narcotics, the drug of solitude loses its potency over time, etches its grooves into the nervous system only so deep, leaving you craving more. But what could that excess consist of? A lone world cruise on a sailboat? I get sea-sick on the ferry. A trek through the Hindu Kush? I never even make it to the ocean when I walk at Sanford Farm. No, the real solution was to go cold turkey. I needed to shower and shave and get out into the world and meet people. I needed to look into a woman’s eyes and make her laugh; I needed to hear an answer that surprised me. I needed to feel nervous and awkward and scared again.
I needed a night I couldn’t predict. You can’t live on cheap frozen food, expensive wine and bad TV forever. Even Han Solo wound up cranking the Millenium Falcon into a U-turn and pitching in with the Rebel Alliance. Not to mention planting one on the Princess.
About a week after I arrived at this embarrassingly obvious revelation, an opportunity to socialize appeared, like a boat out of the fog.
Emily Grimshaw was holding a reading at her cramped little apartment on Orange Street; or, as she liked to think of it, convening her salon. A few times a year, local writers and musicians gathered among the piles of books and shelves of trinkets, to perform their work. On the occasions when Emily was speaking to me (her bizarre feuds and imaginary grudges were legendary), I enjoyed these sessions. Even the bad writing was entertaining in its own way: squintingly intense, endearingly awful odes to someone’s embattled womb(“O, sacred source of life, pillaged for the pleasure of the patriarch)” or unappeasable father. (:“Daddy, Daddy, Daddy, why are your eyes so silent, why does your mouth refuse me, why are your broken hands fisted with grief?”) Anyway, I enjoyed reading my stuff aloud, a habit Lisa had always hated. She often quoted Heinlein on the subject: “Poets who read their verse aloud may have other nasty habits.” Maybe, but It was a nasty habit with a purpose – you could always tell when an audience was losing interest, if you paid attention, and I was always able to trim and sharpen things after one of those performances. When they went well, it was a nice ego boost. Of course the bar was set fairly low. The real danger was tripping over it.
I liked the Bohemian atmosphere in the cramped atelier, the congenial mess, the smell of incense. Emilymade excellent hors d’oevres, and served good wine. She was proud of her little salon and always had a few young writers around that she was mentoring; most of them strapping twenty-year-old boys. They adored Emily and did most of the heavy work, moving furniture and setting up the little apartment for the art installations and readings
Several of them were hauling the big lectern to the arched opening between the bedroom and the living room when I pushed inside. Emily, bulky and intense, was talking to a slim blonde woman I recognized from a few years before – her erratic boyfriend had acted with me in a local theatre production. He couldn’t remember his lines and tended to improvise. I remembered one moment vividly. She had brought him to the theatre just in time for a shouting match with the director.
When I turned the corner the boyfriend was shouting “Why don’t you take over the Part then?”
“No, I have a much better idea. Why don’t you take over the part! You’re supposed to be the professional actor!”
The woman had intervened. “Leave him alone,” she said. “This isn’t helping.”
“That’s my decision, Annie. I directed this play.”
“No. You blocked it. And you gave line readings to the amateurs. That’s not directing. A real director would be long gone by now.”
She had been fierce. I remembered that; and I admired it, though I was irritated with her boyfriend myself.
She was alone tonight. Apparently the boyfriend was long-gone.
“I expect a real poem to change my life,” Emily was saying to her now. She stepped back from the door. “Oh, hello Steven – You’re late, as usual. We’re just about to start. Shut the door after you and introduce yourself. There are some new people here tonight. I’m going to open some more wine.”
Then she was gone.
“Something had better change her life,” I said. “The sooner the better.”
Annie smiled. “I like her. Until Emily, I’d never met anyone who wore black as a life-style before.”
“There must be more to her life-style than that.”
“You’re right. I’m being unfair. I shouldn’t leave out the self-help seminars, the nuisance law suits and the continuous low-grade nervous breakdown. She feels the pain of the world -- which makes her better than you. Just ask her. She calls it Weltshmertz, basically because things sound smarter when you say them in German. She’s in court with her ex over custody of their Siamese cat. That’s been going on for six months. Last year she announced that she was the bride of Jesus. But apparently that marriage didn’t work out either.”
I shrugged, closing the door behind me. “Jesus, huh?,” I said, “Well, it makes sense. Another Nantucket carpenter with father issues.”
She laughed. This was what I came out for.
“Are you reading tonight?” I asked her.
“maye. If I have enough to drink first.”
“Are you nervous?”
“No, I just hate reading my stuff aloud. If there’s one person yawning or looking bored or something I just feel, you know – what’s the point, they all hate it. Which is pretty distracting. I guess I get distracted too easily. A drink or two helps. When I’m drunk I don’t care what anyone thinks. I get sort of hostile, in fact. I think stuff like, you know – oh, boy, they thought they were bored before! Wait until they hear this!”
“I bet no one is actually bored, though. Most people yawn because they’re tired. Especially around here. Most of these people worked a ten hour day today.”
“I guess. I shouldn’t pay attention to them, anyway.”
I didn’t see Annie again until she was picking her way through the people sitting on Emily’s floor towards the antique lectern. To say Annie was casually dressed somehow missed the point. It seemed to me that she had turned utter indifference to her appearance into a kind of high style that you’d have to work hard to copy effectively. Her jeans were a little too big on her; so was the loose white long-sleeved t-shirt. It was as if she’d recently lost a lot of weight and hadn’t bothered with a new wardrobe, though she told me at some point later that she’d worn the same sizes since high school. The clothes contrived to look as if they might just fall off her body at any moment. She slouched a little, as if she wanted to disappear into them. It was only when she stretched her back and squared her shoulders, preparing to read, that I noticed she wasn’t wearing a bra. The four buttons that descended from the crew neck were unbuttoned but once again, it seemed negligent rather than intentionally provocative: she was too busy and distracted to bother with them.
It was an old money look – I thought of Katherine Hepburn in baggy sweats tooling around New York on her bicycle. Later I found out that Annie’s family had burned through their money a long time before. But a certain residual elegance remained. It was the way she held her head, her hand gestures – there were generations of gracious hostesses lurking in there somewhere. She looked frail but he could tell from her handshake that she was strong, and her very awkwardness constituted a kind of self-effacing, light-footed physical grace.
I had never seen anyone quite like her before and I was glad to have the chance to just study her as she read her story aloud. She knew how to wait for people’s attention. There was complete silence in the room when she finally began. Here’s a snippet from the story (it was later published in The Chariton Review), to give you a sense of what caught my interest:
Sometimes it was more luxurious to have the offer of sex than the actual sex itself. Like money in the bank, you could spend it later or keep on hoarding, building up a larder of lust, gilding the peaked archways of desire, spinning gold from simple restraint.
“Maybe tomorrow?” she said, backtracking a little.
. “Nope, can’t make it tomorrow honey, but maybe I’ll see you over the week-end though.” He kept his voice friendly and firmly in neutral, but she heard the slight pick-up of anticipation in his breath, the liar’s rise in register at the end of the sentence.
What a fucking deadbeat he was really. What a loser.
Alison knew a loser when she saw one. Creep-allure: she’d always had it. First there had been Rasta-boy Rick. Fuzzy blond dreds and roller blades instead of feet. The guy didn’t even have a car. He lived in a tent and owned a wolf. He fixed computers for a living, but only when he felt like it. He attached flashlights to his skates for better night vision. He said he was a genius.
On deck there was Toby, a foreign car mechanic by day, a compulsive Keno addict by night. He was a beer-guzzling, chain-smoking, number-obsessed mess. But he knew a lot of funny jokes and he had a seductive five o’clock shadow and a lazy, criminal smile.
There were of course, after that, a string of unimportant others. Guys not worth mentioning. Guys with quirks and tics whose m.o.’s were a paragraph or two right out of Abnormal Psychology.
And then, just as she thought the situation was getting chronic, he showed up: the hall of famer. The one she’d put on the long white dress for. The first guy she could ever actually introduce to her parents. Bill.
The name said it all, because she was still paying for it.
When she was done she received what was obviously an excruciating round of applause, and then she faded back into the crowd. A little later I read some poems about Sophie. The essential quatrain:
This is tragic
This is why I rant –
I want words to do magic
And they can’t.
I slipped into the kitchen for a beer while some kid droned through a nightmarishly bad story about a fishing trip with his father (“He never let me bait a hook”). Annie was there ahead of me. She raised her eye brows in Grouch-like disdain.
“You were great,” she said.
“So were you.”
“Everyone hated it. I told you.”
“No – you told me you’d think that everyone hated it. Even if they didn’t. And they didn’t.”
She took a swig of her beer. “How about that girl talking about building fairy cloud bridges to the stars with her stories? What was that about?”
“I have no idea. I try to build actual bridges with mine. Something solid that takes you somewhere. With, like – rebar and cables. Interesting characters. A plot hat makes sense. Stuff like that.”
“Ugh. Sounds like work.”
“Exactly. What a drag.”
I grabbed the bottle opener off the counter and popped my beer. Emily would never stock twist-off cap, non-artisan brews.
“It’s different for me,” Annie said. “I feel like I’m building a bird’s nest. A twig from here, a leaf from there. Just bits and pieces really.”
“Well, they come together nicely. You make an excellent nest.”
“Come on.”
“What?”
“You’re just saying that because of Melanie.” It was true I had briefly dated a friend of hers; but that particular debacle was long-concluded.
“Melanie? You’re really reaching for it. You might try, I don’t know … taking a compliment some time? It’s easy. Just say thanks.”
“I can do that.”
“OK. You look gorgeous tonight.”
“I certainly do not! That’s ridiculous. I – Oh.”
“Thank you?”
“Thank you. That was very nice.”
We both drank. Someone else slipped out of the main room – a burly carpenter I knew by sight.
“Great reading, Annie,” he said.
She glanced over at me. “Thanks. I’m glad you like it.”
I shrugged, palms up in the air, as if to say “See? I told you.”
Two women, friends of Emily’s from off-island, cornered her and I drifted away for a piece of prosciutto and melon.
Annie found me a few minutes later. “This is fun. It’s too bad Emily doesn’t do it more often.”
I said the thought aloud without thinking: “We should do it ourselves. We could have our own private literary salon. You know … drink wine eat a little dinner, read each other stuff. I really do want to hear more of your work.” *
She narrowed her eyes. “Really?”
“Maybe we could help each other. Like a critique group.”
“Okay. I have wine. You bring a picnic. 286 Polpis Road – the cottage in the back.”
“Friday night?”
“Seven O’Clock?”
“Done.”
She extended her hand and I shook it – small and cool, delicate fingers with a strong grip. She sensed my surprise.
“Years of landscaping,” she said.
“So you’re one of those cute landscaper girls I see all the time.”
“I used to be. Now I just have the callouses.”
We were still holding hands. I let go, but the touch stayed with me.
I thought about Friday night as I walked home along the lively summer streets. Was this going to be a date? Or a seminar? Or a little of both? I wasn’t sure what was happening. But I felt giddy, light-footed and caffeine wired, though I I hadn’t had a cup of coffee for hours. I even smiled at the tourists and refrained from saying “Walk in any direction” when one of them asked for directions to the beach.
I look back at that night now and smile.
The big relationship had found me: w ithout fanfare or forseshadowing, the big love had arrived.
I just didn’t know it yet.
* If anyone feels the same way, Annie has a story in Lost Magazine on-line, called The Feast Of Stephen. Just go to Lostmag.com and click on the archives for the April issue. It was the lead fiction that month.
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