Your daughter, solemn and big-eyed and possessed of a slyly wicked sense of humor, is twelve; just around the age you were when you started going off the rails. Does her twelve-ness fill you with anxiety? If so, you’re not quite admitting it to yourself. She grows more beautiful every day, even as you grow homelier, no matter how many chaturangas you perform. A friend discovered, at the health food store on your island, something called emu oil. As far as you can tell from the gnomic description on the tiny bottle, it appears to be secreted from the glands of emus. Which glands? Unknown. Whatever, it makes you and all the other ladies in your neighborhood look great. Glowy. Everyone goes for it in a big way for a month or so, but after a while it just seems too gross. Meanwhile your daughter appears to be coolly lit from within by some tiny inner moon. Does her comparative glowiness make you feel that your own mortality, your own youth, is drawing inexorably to a close? Again, not in any way you care to admit.

I confess his sinning was what interested me. He was so ridiculously, overtly on the make, it sort of took me aback and even impressed me. Here I was, being so good, trying to keep my shit together, trying to be better than the craptastic girl I’d been, and he was just running around being bad. I didn’t know anyone bad (or thought I didn’t—more on that later). I wanted to keep watching him in action. Maybe I would like to, um, receive some action.

He gave me a disbelieving look. “You’ve never kissed anyone besides your husband in—how long? How many years have you been married?”

“Fifteen years. But we were together for a year before that and I never cheated on him.” Fact. “So sixteen years since I’ve kissed someone else.”

“Just…Wow.” We gazed at each other over the crevasse that lay between our world views: his flagrancy, my virtuousness. My virtuousness, which on some level I knew was a veneer or an overlay.

“Well, what’s the worst thing you have done?” he asked, settling left ankle onto right knee, leaning forward, really interested.

“This,” I said. But I smiled at him. Love me, said my smile.

In the morning there was a funny e-mail from him. He’d looked up an article I’d written about Raymond Carver. He said he thought I was cool. I groaned, as if in pain. He knew how to get under my skin: looking me up, calling me cool. He was reading me as easily as I’d read him. Or maybe anybody and everybody would like these things; maybe I just wanted to be seen, to be read, to be pulled, to be kissed by someone new. Maybe the short-story writer was simply who was there; maybe anybody would’ve done.

“It’s a scrim,” I said.

“What do you mean, a scrim?”

“It’s like a scrim between me and anything I try to write. No matter what I’m working on. I’m not ever quite…touching it. There’s an obstacle.”

“A scrim.”

“Yes.”
“It’s a scrim,” I said.

“What do you mean, a scrim?”

“It’s like a scrim between me and anything I try to write. No matter what I’m working on. I’m not ever quite…touching it. There’s an obstacle.”

“A scrim.”

“Yes.”

She quoted from the Isaac Mizrahi documentary Unzipped: “I scrim, you scrim, we all scrim for the scrim!”

“Ha ha. It’s not funny. The scrim is ruining my life.”

She walked in silence for a bit, and then said, “I think I have one too.”

We walked on, thinking scrim thoughts, with chapped lips. Tundra everywhere.
She quoted from the Isaac Mizrahi documentary Unzipped: “I scrim, you scrim, we all scrim for the scrim!”

“Ha ha. It’s not funny. The scrim is ruining my life.”

She walked in silence for a bit, and then said, “I think I have one too.”

We walked on, thinking scrim thoughts, with chapped lips. Tundra everywhere.

I had been gazed at by men for so long, had craved it, hated it, recoiled from it, loved it. Then it went away. Now in this strange, utterly safe, long-distance way, I was being regarded by a stranger again. I became dependent on it, perhaps because I was, like Lucy, unsure of myself and of whom and what I was. The man regarding me was putting me back together again, as men had done so many times before.

But once we were back at home, nothing had really changed, except now I was morbidly self-aware about my pomegranate consumption. The moment I sliced off the top of the pom, a moment that used to be one of uncomplicated joy, now felt a bit fraught. Unless I happened to be the receiver of unsolicited hugs from my children, the pom was the brightest spot of my day. Except for the bourbon. My world had become very small, in the way of addicts. This island: I had chosen smallness, safety. What’s safer than an island? During this period, the children sometimes discussed the coming zombie apocalypse, and they and their friends agreed it was good that we lived on an island. An island is safe and contained and one’s choices are necessarily limited by living within its parameters. Like, um, what’s that other thing? Oh, marriage. I chose this constraint, the constraint of marriage. I had chosen it in part because I was afraid of what would happen in the absence of constraints. I was pretty sure such a life, for me, would lead to chaos. Without the order of family life, without the specific tender witness and deliberateness and sweetness of Bruce himself, I would spin into who knows what outer darkness. And his own nature, as a person who reflexively chooses constraint and opts for refusal, would turn him into a fatal isolato. Or so I thought. And yet—hadn’t he slipped the constraint? No biggie—only as far as, you know, Yap. It didn’t occur to me that he might be chafing a little too.

You are undeniably a genius. I wonder: Is your terrible history tied to your genius? Did your history make your work great? Does a genius get let off the hook? Are you great because you’re sick? What does it even mean to be a genius? And why are we so willing to call filmmakers geniuses? I suppose because the rest of us—diffident, confused, female—can’t conceive of setting so many other people in motion in service of our vision. Symphonies and films—these are often called works of genius simply because their makers ask so many other people to do shit for them. A genius is, by nature, bossy. He is the boss of the people who work for him, but also the boss of the people who consume his art. The genius—like the alcoholic—overwhelms you with his vision. He requires that you see things his way. You walk out of the theater and the world around you looks noticeably different. More brutal, more kind, more filled with light or menace or love or dogs. Whatever the genius fills his movie with.

A darkly baroque, extremely grubby bookstore owned by a grizzled roué who hired only beautiful young women. It was said he was sleeping with all of them—how’d he pull that off? They sat behind the counter looking ineffectual and sleepy-eyed—maybe he fed them opium? Anyway it was known as a great place for shoplifting.

North of the bookstore, a Santa Fe–looking stuccoed place to buy Birkenstocks and ponchos. A hangout for preppy bohemian girls, such as I was trying hard not to be. I wanted to be something more difficult, something other than what I was. I held a very deep misunderstanding about the world. I had this idea that if I wanted to be among people who were different from me, I should disguise my true self and become more like them. I perceived other people to be more authentic than me, and so in order to be more authentic, I became less what I was in the first place. I counterfeited in order to feel real or, more accurately, in order to hang around what seemed realer than the thing I started out as. You could call it class drag. But that was what the Ave was for, for some of us.