by
Dana Spiotta
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He smiled broadly. “This is the purity of capitalism. There is no judgment about content. You have to marvel at its elasticity, its lack of moral need, its honesty. It is the great leveler—all can be and will be commodified. Besides, what’s wrong with Emma Goldman being sold at the mall as a cool accessory? It is still Emma Goldman, isn’t it?”
“A confused context is the essence of alienation,” Miranda said.
“I’m not going back to New York with you,” she said.
He started to laugh. “It is true that I enjoy making money, I won’t deny it. Thing is, I feel the same. I don’t think I am a materialistic person, you know. I never wanted stuff.”
She leaned her head against the window. Conversations in cars are the strangest, because you don’t look at each other even though you are sitting close enough to touch.
“What it comes down to is I just don’t want to look at other people’s garbage my whole life. There is always garbage blowing around the street outside our apartment. Life is too short. All I want is a clean, quiet place. Beauty and order and peace. If Allegecom contributes—as it most certainly does—to the world’s degradation, undermining, at least in a global sense, order and peace, as well as multiplying garbage, and—let’s face it—suffering, then it also mitigates, quite directly, my own contact with garbage and suffering.”
This wasn’t the usual indifference, but then what was usual? She resisted her impulse to push his hair back from his forehead. He was in an awkward stage, slightly pudgy and spotty. She didn’t mind if he shrugged her off when she put an arm around him. She couldn’t comfort him through his adolescence, but she could stay out of his way. She believed that if she didn’t interfere, her talented, brilliant son would get everything he needed from the world. She also knew that the day would come when he would find her out, but she refused to think about it. Two weeks of his schizoid scrutiny unnerved her. When he finally confronted her, it shouldn’t have been a surprise.
First, at some point enough time will have gone by of not listening that I’ll listen again and it might sound fresh and new. It could again totally engage me, maybe in even deeper ways because I’ll be an older, and presumably deeper, person. I might find things in it I never was able to hear before in my younger life. I might become just as enchanted, just as joyously captivated. I could fall in love all over again. All of that could come to pass. It is possible, isn’t it?
The second reason I feel compelled to keep these artifacts is because of something I am quite certain will transpire. I need these records because one day, years from now, I will listen to this music and I will remember exactly what it was like to be me now, or me a year ago, at fifteen, totally inhabited by this work, in this very specific place and time. My Beach Boys records sit there, an aural time capsule wired directly to my soul. Something in that music will recall not just what happened but all of what I felt, all of what I longed for, all of who I used to be. And that will be something, don’t you think?
I’m rather good at concealing anger. Had to be in my old profession. But recently it’s begun to show through. What I’m mad at nowadays is, for instance, mortality. I’ve passed seventy-eight and have only recently found how to enjoy life. For one thing, I’ve stopped worrying about what people think of me—or so I like to believe. I used to spend most of my time straining to be a nice guy so people would like me. Now I’m out of show business and I’ve become my true grumpy self.
A writer, perhaps more than a filmmaker or a theatre director, lives off what he has stored up in the way of impressions and experiences. One thing we all learn is not to deny our violent feelings but to respect them. They are our material, as well as our bond with humanity. People generally try to forget the pain of the past, to lift themselves above it. They’re protecting themselves where it hurt most. Artists know that they have to live differently than their neighbors, and that hurt is part of the game they’ve chosen to play. Our weaknesses, our faults, our sins, are what make us understand other living creatures. We don’t look away when we look back.
On the day after our arrival, I received a cable from New York City, informing me, by a prearranged code, that I had a new son by a woman not my wife. I can’t remember that I was flustered. I went to a press conference and did my best to “push” my film.
Molly enjoyed the hotel, the excellent food, the service, our being alone together. She spent her afternoons playing solitaire and planning for the new apartment we’d bought, which was being prepared to her specifications. Since our children, all except the youngest, had gone their ways, Molly thought of this apartment as our last home and final resting place.
Molly, of course, knew nothing about the recent event in the city where our apartment was being prepared and what had led up to it. An expert dissembler, with a lifetime of practice, I’d covered my tracks perfectly. What had been most effective in the deception was that I no longer gave a damn if I was caught. The singular aspect of the situation was that I took it in stride. I’d become so accustomed to a life in layers that nothing could penetrate my indifference to personal danger and possible disruption. I’d anesthetized myself.
ahhhh
BUT MY misery those years was deeper. I was in revolt against my way of life, my respectability and that of the wife I loved. Against our orderly and proper way of living. I longed for what I can only call chaos. I kept feeling I was in the wrong place, doing the wrong things with the wrong people. I had to strain to sit still across from the good friends Molly would invite to dinner, and would chafe at the conversation on culture, politics, and the arts that followed the meal. By the end of the evening, my smile had frozen. I felt that all the conversation we’d taken part in was the same as all the other conversations we’d taken part in, that all our friends were in constant and inevitable agreement on any and all subjects. I could always anticipate what they were going to say. They were, each of them, “on the side of the angels,” and their views were fixed. No doubts were ever raised.
I, on the other hand, was on the side of the devil.
I’d drink too much and long for the taste of the streets again, of the gutter, the dark hotels, the cities where I was not known. Oh, to start over and live a totally different life! Some nights I’d break out of our home, looking for I never knew what, or where I might find it. More often than not, I’d end by calling my “girlfriend” (who was later to be my second wife), summon her out of her home. We’d walk the streets, sing and dance on the sidewalks, end by fucking in alleys, in the back rows of movie theatre balconies, and on park benches, in the summer on the roof of my apartment house, in the winter up against the radiator in the entrance of the building where she lived.
Was I hoping to be caught? I didn’t care. Something had to happen, something dramatic. And soon! I was trapped in my “success.” I hated the sound of cultured voices, heard them against the cries of anguished unrest within me.
I knew I needed help. I’d had the attention of one psychoanalyst a few years before, gone to him only because Molly said she’d leave me if I didn’t. He was cultured and cuddly, and his wife drank too much. When she had to be assisted up the stairs and to bed halfway through dinner at his apartment, it caused me to wonder how a man who hadn’t been able to help his wife could help me. I dropped out.
But now I knew I had to have help; my life was a mess. My second analyst was tall, grave, and austere and, as far as I knew, had no woman. At my urging, he was ruthless with me—that is, truthful. His observations sometimes reached the level of contempt. But I swallowed my resentment: I’d asked for it. “How the hell did I get into this mess?” I demanded. “And why don’t I like whom I’ve become? Tell me.”
He did. He exposed my dissembling, small and large, pulled off my masks and kicked over my poses. He said I lied to myself, constantly, even as I told others the truth. He said I was constantly betraying my true feelings to please others, that most frequently I didn’t say what I felt, only what was useful to say.
But he didn’t condemn me. That wasn’t his technique. He only did, and did thoroughly, what I’d begged him to do. He told me the truth as he knew it, and I accepted it.