project/secret-life

I said I had not gone to New York to be a model, and I hadn’t. I’d gone there for life and sex and cruelty. Not something you learn in community college. Not something you write in a notebook. The city was so big and bright that for a moment my terrible heaven paled, then went invisible. I thought it was gone, but what I couldn’t see, I felt walking next to me in streets full of vying people. I felt it in their fixed outthrust faces, their busy rigid backs, their jiggling jewelry, their creeping and swagger. I felt it in the office workers who perched in flocks on the concrete flower boxes of giant corporate banks, eating their lunches over crossed legs and rumpled laps, the wind blowing their hair in their chewing mouths and waves of scabby pigeons surging at their feet, eating the bits that fell on the pavement. I felt it in the rough sensate hands of subway musicians playing on drums and guitars while the singer collected money with his cup, still singing like he was talking to himself in a carelessly beautiful voice while riders streamed down concrete stairs like drab birds made fantastic in flight. I felt monstrous wants and gorgeous terrors that found form in radio songs, movie screens, billboards, layers of posters on decayed walls, public dreams bleeding into one another on cheap paper like they might bleed from person to person. I took it in and fed on it, and for a while, that was enough.

AFTER THEY MARRIED SHE learned to feel their skin as double-sided. They felt a pause. Theirs was too much feeling to push through the crack that led down to the dim world of time and stuff. That world was gone. They held themselves alert only in those few million cells where they touched. She learned from those cells his awareness and his courtesy. Love so sprang at her, she honestly thought no one had ever looked into it. Where was it in literature? Someone would have written something. She must not have recognized it. Time to read everything again.

Serious fiction could respond to the accelerated world; but serious poetry couldn’t. Naturally it couldn’t. A poem, a non-narrative poem, a lyric poem – the first thing it does is stop the clock. It stops the clock while whispering, Let us go then, you and I, let us go and examine an epiphany, a pregnant moment, and afterwards we’ll have a think about that epiphany, and we’ll…But the speeded-up world doesn’t have time for stopped clocks.

Meanwhile the novelists subliminally realised that in their pages the arrow of development, purpose, furtherance, had to be sharpened. And they sharpened it. This wasn’t and isn’t a fad or a fashion (far less a bandwagon). Novelists aren’t mere observers of the speeded-up world; they inhabit it and feel its rhythms and breathe its air. So they adapted; they evolved.

In your misty bedroom, the sunlight, having penetrated the lowered Venetian blinds, formed two golden ladders on the floor. You said something in your muted voice. Outside the window, the trees breathed and dripped with a contented rustle. And I, smiling at that rustle, lightly and unavidly embraced you.

Looking back I can see that I always knew what I would have done. I once knew that my husband was so completely mine, and so every choice that followed was only another version of that knowing. I would do it all again, which is not the same as saying I will. When I think about everything I can remember—as many memories as I can hold at once, and then the ones that come up later, surfacing when I least expect them—I know I would do it all exactly the same, with all the same answers. I would say yes, say more, say never, say no.

I don’t know, he says. The one thing I said to myself in the car was, if she comes inside with you, don’t start talking to her about chess. It takes up too much of my life already, to be quite honest. Like to say the absolute truth, I spend too much time on it, because I’m not even that good. Although it makes me really sad to admit that. You know, a lot of people told me I was letting it take up too much time, and I just thought they didn’t understand. But now I think, maybe I’ve really wasted a lot of my life. Like when other people were out having fun, getting girlfriends or whatever, I was at home basically reading. You have to read a lot of opening theory – that’s the beginning of a game, the first moves. Which have all been played before, so you just have to learn them. It’s not even that interesting, but it has to be done. So you have all these openings that come from books, and you have all these endgame strategies, which can be honestly kind of formulaic. And you’re learning all this for what? Just to get to an okay position in the middle game and try to play some decent chess. Which most of the time I can’t even do anyway. Sometimes I think, if I could go back to age fifteen, I would just give up. I was already pretty good then, I haven’t gotten much better. And I could have used that time to get more of a social life. I don’t lie in bed every night just thinking about chess, you know. I won’t go into detail on what I do think about, but I can tell you it’s usually not related to chess at all.