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In late 1985, she spent a month alone in a cabin in rural Vermont, then two weeks in Japan, though she took no photographs, and only a few notes, and brought nothing home with her. The only postcard she seems to have sent from Tokyo was back to herself: “I can’t understand why I made this trip, except in the hope that there is something good in being so unhappy—as if I might use up my large portion of unhappiness + have only joy left.”†
lol
When I moved into X’s loft in June 1989 it had seemed empty in a robbed way—bare nails on the wall, hardly any furniture—though I didn’t ask why. We spent nearly all our time at home, especially that first summer when heat waves made the city hellish. When we ventured out at night, everything seemed to be under her spell—private admission to empty museums, restaurants entered through hidden doors, taxis appearing when needed as if by her will. At home again she would read to me as I took a bath. She played the piano and sang. Many nights a week she rolled out a projector and screened films for us—classics I’d never seen, French New Wave, Italian romances, Hitchcock, and sometimes new ones—reels that arrived in big crates from studios or directors. She once mentioned that she’d worked as a projectionist long ago, but when I asked where or when, she didn’t say. She often left such questions answered; I never repeated myself.
cute
Of course, it isn’t my business, Olivia continued, and it was never my business, and anyway it doesn’t matter what she did to me—it’s so far in the past now, and I always believed she, of all people, she always had the capability to change. It was what attracted me in the first place, you know, how mutable she was, how she might become someone else right in front of you.
Shelley, in her flowery, uncertain voice, began to explain herself. I looked at her wavy blond hair, linen skirt, and pink tank top. It must be a kind of suicide to love a person like this, a person so edgeless. It must be like drowning. Shelley explained to me how they met, how close they were, how immediate that closeness was. She told me the places they went and the things they did, but her affair—like all such affairs—was simply boring; she was stupid enough to believe she is the only person who has ever known such a thing, as if she alone had discovered the intensity of deceptive love. I considered telling her.
“I want you to know I’m sorry. I’m sorry for what you’re going through,” she whispered.
But no one has any use for consolation from a young woman in love, a pretty young woman who is probably always in love, both with herself and with others who always return that love, always reflect it brightly back in her direction. Without thinking, I pushed a teal vase from the side table to let it shatter on the floor. A moment passed. I did not apologize.
I turned to Shelley, who was facing away from me as if I were a stranger getting undressed. The line dipped down sharply at the end of the graph for Depth of Love. I wanted to know why, but unlike the other points of ascent and decline there was no explanation, no paragraph detailing an inciting incident with a date and time. Perhaps it takes something to receive love, I thought as I felt my jaw lock and stay there. Perhaps your ability to feel it waned, perhaps you are the one who ruins things, it was you, you—and there it was again, that useless, human blame two people will toss between each other when they become too tired or weak to carry the weight of love.
I stalked down the road as if I had been physically beaten, stepping unevenly. A dreadful, deadly feeling. I have no choice but to put it here, to put it somewhere, to translate it into language so it won’t hang around my neck like a locket filled with poison.
In moments that year I thought I saw X relax a little, as if this achievement had really changed her, but I found several pages of handwritten notes picking apart a single essay that the writer Elvia Wilk published in Future Looks Magazine just weeks before the retrospective opened. One line in particular seemed to have driven X mad: “The problem with her oeuvre, which is also a problem with her personas—her oeuvre and personas cannot be dissociated—is that it fights a merciless battle against complicity with the existing culture, against the incomprehension that accompanies each social and professional recognition, beginning with X’s own.”* All her notes amounted to a single question that Wilk raised and X was unable to resolve—could she both disdain the state of this country’s culture as a whole and still reasonably desire or accept its approval?
the perennial question