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In the morning there was a funny e-mail from him. He’d looked up an article I’d written about Raymond Carver. He said he thought I was cool. I groaned, as if in pain. He knew how to get under my skin: looking me up, calling me cool. He was reading me as easily as I’d read him. Or maybe anybody and everybody would like these things; maybe I just wanted to be seen, to be read, to be pulled, to be kissed by someone new. Maybe the short-story writer was simply who was there; maybe anybody would’ve done.
“It’s a scrim,” I said.
“What do you mean, a scrim?”
“It’s like a scrim between me and anything I try to write. No matter what I’m working on. I’m not ever quite…touching it. There’s an obstacle.”
“A scrim.”
“Yes.”
“It’s a scrim,” I said.
“What do you mean, a scrim?”
“It’s like a scrim between me and anything I try to write. No matter what I’m working on. I’m not ever quite…touching it. There’s an obstacle.”
“A scrim.”
“Yes.”
She quoted from the Isaac Mizrahi documentary Unzipped: “I scrim, you scrim, we all scrim for the scrim!”
“Ha ha. It’s not funny. The scrim is ruining my life.”
She walked in silence for a bit, and then said, “I think I have one too.”
We walked on, thinking scrim thoughts, with chapped lips. Tundra everywhere.
She quoted from the Isaac Mizrahi documentary Unzipped: “I scrim, you scrim, we all scrim for the scrim!”
“Ha ha. It’s not funny. The scrim is ruining my life.”
She walked in silence for a bit, and then said, “I think I have one too.”
We walked on, thinking scrim thoughts, with chapped lips. Tundra everywhere.
I had been gazed at by men for so long, had craved it, hated it, recoiled from it, loved it. Then it went away. Now in this strange, utterly safe, long-distance way, I was being regarded by a stranger again. I became dependent on it, perhaps because I was, like Lucy, unsure of myself and of whom and what I was. The man regarding me was putting me back together again, as men had done so many times before.
But once we were back at home, nothing had really changed, except now I was morbidly self-aware about my pomegranate consumption. The moment I sliced off the top of the pom, a moment that used to be one of uncomplicated joy, now felt a bit fraught. Unless I happened to be the receiver of unsolicited hugs from my children, the pom was the brightest spot of my day. Except for the bourbon. My world had become very small, in the way of addicts. This island: I had chosen smallness, safety. What’s safer than an island? During this period, the children sometimes discussed the coming zombie apocalypse, and they and their friends agreed it was good that we lived on an island. An island is safe and contained and one’s choices are necessarily limited by living within its parameters. Like, um, what’s that other thing? Oh, marriage. I chose this constraint, the constraint of marriage. I had chosen it in part because I was afraid of what would happen in the absence of constraints. I was pretty sure such a life, for me, would lead to chaos. Without the order of family life, without the specific tender witness and deliberateness and sweetness of Bruce himself, I would spin into who knows what outer darkness. And his own nature, as a person who reflexively chooses constraint and opts for refusal, would turn him into a fatal isolato. Or so I thought. And yet—hadn’t he slipped the constraint? No biggie—only as far as, you know, Yap. It didn’t occur to me that he might be chafing a little too.
You are undeniably a genius. I wonder: Is your terrible history tied to your genius? Did your history make your work great? Does a genius get let off the hook? Are you great because you’re sick? What does it even mean to be a genius? And why are we so willing to call filmmakers geniuses? I suppose because the rest of us—diffident, confused, female—can’t conceive of setting so many other people in motion in service of our vision. Symphonies and films—these are often called works of genius simply because their makers ask so many other people to do shit for them. A genius is, by nature, bossy. He is the boss of the people who work for him, but also the boss of the people who consume his art. The genius—like the alcoholic—overwhelms you with his vision. He requires that you see things his way. You walk out of the theater and the world around you looks noticeably different. More brutal, more kind, more filled with light or menace or love or dogs. Whatever the genius fills his movie with.
A darkly baroque, extremely grubby bookstore owned by a grizzled roué who hired only beautiful young women. It was said he was sleeping with all of them—how’d he pull that off? They sat behind the counter looking ineffectual and sleepy-eyed—maybe he fed them opium? Anyway it was known as a great place for shoplifting.
lol
North of the bookstore, a Santa Fe–looking stuccoed place to buy Birkenstocks and ponchos. A hangout for preppy bohemian girls, such as I was trying hard not to be. I wanted to be something more difficult, something other than what I was. I held a very deep misunderstanding about the world. I had this idea that if I wanted to be among people who were different from me, I should disguise my true self and become more like them. I perceived other people to be more authentic than me, and so in order to be more authentic, I became less what I was in the first place. I counterfeited in order to feel real or, more accurately, in order to hang around what seemed realer than the thing I started out as. You could call it class drag. But that was what the Ave was for, for some of us.
At first it was boys the same age as the subject, or only a bit older. The boys were brainy classmates from her progressive prep school, with Guatemalan spreads on their beds and climbing gear stashed in their closets and calculus textbooks on their neat desks. By the time the girl was sixteen, though, she had branched out. Her school was small, and she’d run through anyone of interest. It was easy to be picked up by men in coffeehouses—almost as if they were there waiting to be picked up by a teenage girl, which would have been terribly wicked of them. Though the subject was experienced beyond her years, she was too innocent to believe that wickedness like that could exist—though it was in fact exactly what was happening to her. The subject loved the power she held over the men. She loved the Moment: when the grown-up would turn to kiss her for the first time, and his eyes would go soft with lust, and she wouldn’t be feeling lust in return, just as she hadn’t with her first boyfriend. But now that emotional inequity felt like power, felt like control: to make a grown man go soft (and also: hard) like that! It made her feel kind of crazy with power. She saw it as a specific power unto herself, and didn’t or wouldn’t see that any ardent young girl would’ve sufficed. (There should be a specific name for this fallacy, the fallacy where you fit another person’s sexual proclivities very well, and feel that it’s because of some quality inherent solely in you, when of course it could easily be satisfied by anyone of vaguely similar shape and form. And age.)
All of these factors contributed to the subject’s sluttiness. But this study feels the most useful explanation, perhaps, is mythological. A mythology of sex itself. The subject infused the act of sex with unconscious mystical power. Why did she put that power into sex and nothing else? She wanted sex to achieve something for her, something outside of itself. This something could have a name: connection, redemption, purpose, pleasure, pure feeling. But really what she wanted was for sex to make her known. You have edges, you are something, you are here, you exist, defined by these hands, this mouth, this penis. Sex was supposed to do all that. It didn’t.
We take a package of Manner wafers from the case and throw it on the floor. The Seven Gables sells Manner wafers because they are European. “Oops!” we say. “Broken!” We put the cookies in the back room to eat later and get back to the business of scooping and selling.
But hush now, the previews are over and the film is starting. We pour some coffee and push through the maroon curtains into the theater.
cute