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They burrowed into a conversation that skimmed over the present, then tunneled back through the five years since they’d met in a proofreading booth, where exhausted, languid Connie would sleep on the floor beneath her desk, using Franklin’s balled-up sweater as a pillow. They had nested in that booth every weekend for months, surrounded by literary supplements, plastic take-out containers, boxes of cookies and notebooks in which they furiously scribbled between jobs. It was where they had staged their lengthy, horribly detailed conferences about their sexual relationships. “The nightmare of the two thousand and one dates,” Franklin called it—or maybe she’d invented the nightmare part, she couldn’t remember. The tunnel deepened as they entered a thickly populated realm of old friends, acquaintances, scandals and memories that appeared like frail, large-eyed animals that paused to look at them, then blinked and ran away.
awww
They moved on, but from that point, Constance sat uneasily in her chair, no longer feeling like a woman entering a potentially successful phase in her career, happy in love and socially secure. She was, for several unpleasant moments, the isolated, lonely, insecure person she had been just three years earlier, a social blunderer, a locker-room towel for the maladjusted, unable to sell an article or figure out what to wear. Pull yourself together, she thought; it wasn’t so bad.
oof
“Well, we wanted to see it because the actress had silicone implants and we wanted to see what they looked like. Anyway, Alice was so upset by this movie. She kept saying, ‘That girl was so stupid, she deserved to die. You couldn’t have any sympathy for her, she was so weak.’”
“That’s not such an unusual reaction, you know.” Deana plucked another slender red rib from its white box and began to delicately strip it of meat with her teeth.
“Okay, maybe not, but she got so obsessed about it, it was as if she was terrified at the mere idea that somebody could be a victim.”
me i guess lol
In confusion, she withdrew from all these things, which were, after all, only the substance of her life, and viewed them from a distance. Job, social life, relationship. Could these really be the things she did every day? What place was she in now, what was this distance from which they all looked so appalling? It felt like a blank space, silent and empty, so lonely that if she hadn’t remembered it was all nitrous oxide–induced, she might’ve cried.
She slept on the couch in the den every night. At first it just happened that way. She’d be sitting before the TV with her glass of Scotch when Jarold would kiss the top of her head and go upstairs. She’d go into the kitchen and get a bottle and drink from it. She’d watch the chartreuse-and-violet people walk around the screen. It was sometimes a comfort.
She fell asleep on the hard little throw pillow. She always woke up with sweat around her collar and a stiff neck.
One night Jarold took her hand and said, “Come on, honey. Come to bed. You’ll fall asleep on the couch if you don’t.”
“I want to fall asleep on the couch,” said Virginia.
“No, you don’t,” said Jarold. He tugged her arm. “It’s unhealthy. Come into your nice warm bed.”
She yanked her hand out of his. “I don’t want to sleep in the bed.”
It was true. She couldn’t bear the thought of lying next to him. He could see it in her eyes and it wounded him. He walked away. He said nothing about it again.
They had egg sandwiches and fruit for lunch. Virginia had cleaned the kitchen and put a vase of pink and white carnations on the table. The fruit was cut up in a large cream-colored bowl. They helped themselves at a leisurely pace, sometimes eating the wet, lightly bruised fruit straight from the bowl with their fingers. The afternoon sun came in, lighting up a sparkling flurry of dust flecks.
Magdalen put the steaks on the plates. Anne and Virginia arranged servings of salad and pasta. They all sat in lawn chairs and ate from the warm plates in their laps. The steak was good and rare; its juices ran into the salad and pasta when Virginia moved her knees. A light wind blew loose hairs around their faces and tickled them. The trees rustled dimly. There were nice insect noises.
Jarold paused, a forkful of steak rising across his chest. “Like heaven,” he said. “It’s like heaven.”
They were quiet for several minutes.
He must have twenty years on me, I decided, coasting on his calm and fine lines both.
A trauma surgeon. What does it take to push someone that way? You don’t avoid the most unexpected tragedies; you invite them. What is there to fear. You know you will see the worst. You have control. Resurrecting lives. Setting up stories. Dealing with pain.
I thought about how my father once told me that he found coolness as an old man. The story I’d always heard was that he’d lost it. No, he said, cool came to him when he decided to no longer go after things. He set it up so that everyone would have to find him. And they did. He went full detachment. I think my mother caused this desire of his to withhold. He gave her more effort than he’d ever given anything, but that didn’t make her stay.
He changed himself when it was already too late to become what he thought the person who abandoned him wanted. So much character development happens this way. Self-cancellation. Don’t love me. You’ll get no results.
Graves told me there is a thing, like the cinéma du corps, called the cinema of attractions. A term coined by a guy named Tom Gunning. Something like you present a series of images to tell a story, without worrying too much about the words. “Exhibitionist confrontation rather than diegetic absorption.” He brought up a short movie on YouTube with his phone: “How It Feels to Be Run Over,” shot in 1900 by the Hepworth Manufacturing Company. A motorcar crawling towards imminent collision with the screen.