advice/living

Women can endure things and keep going because our lives are made up of small practical physical tasks, and no matter how lonely or sad or humiliated you are you do the dishes, or wash the clothes, and you come to the end of a small task and see a small result.

Chen spoke first. He changed the direction of the conversation. “The work of the revolution is a life devoted to the people, that is to say, the public. It’s a public life. A man’s private life, one’s deep interior, must at times be forgotten or sacrificed.”

The young man shifted. We shifted too, wanting to avoid the weight of these words.

“Here.” Chen retrieved the book offered as a gift, searched the pages. “This is one of my favorite paintings. Twin peaches in a small basket. Peaches represent long life, but as you know they are delicate, bruise easily. If the tree lives long, the fruit is ephemeral. Picked ripe from a tree, there is nothing sweeter or more succulent. Here twin peaches sit together, sweetly and exaggeratedly red in color for a lifetime.” Chen reached up to touch the soft fuzz of the young man’s felt fedora and tugged it down in jest.

If we felt confused, it was also the young man’s turn to look with questioning, as well as sheepish, eyes.

Chen sighed. “Revolution is old, but older yet is the sentiment of this painting, of love and of poetry.”

Mailer’s talk, a stop in the publicity campaign for his latest novel, The Gospel According to the Son, was at a school on the Upper East Side. The typical Mailer loyalist out in the audience looked as if he’d died about ten years before. The novel: the “autobiography” of Jesus. Mailer as God. The jokes just wrote themselves, folks. Onstage, Mailer, who had a weirdly affected Brahmin (was it?) accent, held forth about God, Jesus, Christians, and Christianity as if he alone had the special wisdom monopoly on these topics—and all others. It seemed to me even then dangerous for a writer to come to regard himself as grandee; the writer’s concern should always be getting to the truth—and how can you get to the truth of the story if you are the story, not the one standing outside of it? (In his irritatingly excellent book The Spooky Art, Mailer in fact acknowledges his early fame as the central tragedy of his career.) Never get too comfortable in the temple: this was another message in a bottle I’d send my future self.

[...] 'And I'd bunker up all white-knuckled and stay straight. And count the days. I was proud of each day I stayed off. Each day seemed evidence of something, and I counted them. I'd add them up. Line them up end to end. You know?' Gately knows very well but doesn't nod, lets her do this on just her own steam. She says 'And soon it would get... improbable. As if each day was a car Knievel had to clear. One car, two cars. By the time I'd get up to say like maybe about 14 cars, it would begin to seem like this staggering number. Jumping over 14 cars. And the rest of the year, looking ahead, hundreds and hundreds of cars, me in the air trying to clear them.' She left her head alone and cocked it. 'Who could do it? How did I ever think anyone could do it that way?'

Gately remembered some evil fucking personal detoxes. Broke in Maiden. Bent with pleurisy in Salem. MCI/Billerica during a four-day lockdown that caught him short. He remembered Kicking the Bird for weeks on the floor of a Revere Holding cell, courtesy of the good old Revere A.D.A. Locked down tight, a bucket for a toilet, the Holding cell hot but a terrible icy draft down near the floor. Cold Turkey. Abrupt Withdrawal. The Bird. Being incapable of doing it and yet having to do it, locked in. A Revere Holding cage for 92 days. Feeling the edge of every second that went by. Taking it a second at a time. Drawing the time in around him real tight. Withdrawing. Any one second: he remembered: the thought of feeling like he'd be feeling this second for 60 more of these seconds — he couldn't deal. He could not fucking deal. He had to build a wall around each second just to take it. The whole first two weeks of it are telescoped in his memory down into like one second — less: the space between two heartbeats. A breath and a second, the pause and gather between each cramp. An endless Now stretching its gullwings out on either side of his heartbeat. And he'd never before or since felt so excruciatingly alive. Living in the Present between pulses. [...]

[...]

The look he was giving her was meant to like validate her breakthrough and say yes yes she could, she could as long as she continued to choose to. She was looking right at him, Gately could tell. But he’d also gotten a personal prickly chill all over from his own thinking. He could do the dextral pain the same way: Abiding. No one single instant of it was unendurable. Here was a second right here: he endured it. What was undealable-with was the thought of all the instants all lined up and stretching ahead, glittering. And the projected future fear of the A.D.A., whoever was out there in a hat eating Third World fast food; the fear of getting convicted of Nuckslaugh-ter, of V.I.P.-suffocation; of a lifetime on the edge of his bunk in M.C.I. Walpole, remembering. It’s too much to think about. To Abide there. But none of it’s as of now real. What’s real is the tube and Noxzema and pain. And this could be done just like the Old Cold Bird. He could just hunker down in the space between each heartbeat and make each heartbeat a wall and live in there. Not let his head look over. What’s unendurable is what his own head could make of it all. What his head could report to him, looking over and ahead and reporting. But he could choose not to listen; he could treat his head like G. Day or R. Lenz: clueless noise. He hadn’t quite gotten this before now, how it wasn’t just the matter of riding out the cravings for a Substance: everything unendurable was in the head, was the head not Abiding in the Present but hopping the wall and doing a recon and then returning with unendurable news you then somehow believed.

She looks up at him now, and he’s looking back at her, an intense silent look. She tries to laugh, and her laughter has a helpless sound. Margaret, he says, can I kiss you? She doesn’t know what to do, whether to laugh again, or start crying. Okay, she says. He comes over to where she’s standing against the fridge and kisses her on the mouth. She feels his tongue move between her lips. Drawing away slightly he murmurs: Sorry about my braces, I hate them so much. She tells him not to apologise. Then he kisses her again. It is, of course, a desperately embarrassing situation – a situation which seems to render her entire life meaningless. Her professional life, eight years of marriage, whatever she believes about her personal values, everything. And yet, accepting the premise, allowing life to mean nothing for a moment, doesn’t it simply feel good to be in the arms of this person? Feeling that he wants her, that all evening he has been looking at her and desiring her, isn’t it pleasurable? To embody the kind of woman he believed he couldn’t have – to incorporate that woman into herself, and allow him to have her. Pressed against her, his body is thin and tensed and shivering. And what if life is just a collection of essentially unrelated experiences? Why does one thing have to follow meaningfully from another?