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Let me think of those awful spots on Richard's cheek. Let me see Henry's face with the tears falling. Let me forget me. Dear God, I've tried to love and I've made such a hash of it. If I could love you, I'd know how to love them. I believe the legend. I believe you were born. I believe you died for us. I believe you are God. Teach me to love. I don't mind my pain. It's their pain I can't stand. Let my pain go on and on, but stop theirs. Dear God, if only you could come down from your Cross for a while and let me get up there instead. If I could suffer like you, I could heal like you.
'To expect you to love a man with this.' He turned his bad cheek towards me. 'You believe in God,' he said. 'That's easy. You are beautiful. You have no complaint, but why should I love a God who gave a child this?'
'Dear Richard,' I said, 'there's nothing so very bad...' I shut my eyes and put my mouth against the cheek. I felt sick for a moment because I fear deformity, and he sat quiet and let me kiss him, and I thought I am kissing pain and pain belongs to You as happiness never does. I love You in Your pain. I could almost taste metal and salt in the skin, and I thought, How good You are. You might have killed us with happiness, but You let us be with You in pain.
I felt him move abruptly away and I opened my eyes. He said, 'Good-bye.'
'Good-bye, Richard.'
'Don't come back,' he said, 'I can't bear your pity.'
'It's not pity.'
'I've made a fool of myself.'
I went away. It wasn't any good staying. I couldn't tell him I envied him, carrying the mark of pain around with him like that, seeing You in the glass every day instead of this dull human thing we call beauty.
<3
[...] It seemed strange to me that she had taken so much trouble. I have never seen any qualities in me for a woman to like, and now less than ever. Grief and disappointment are like hate: they make men ugly with self-pity and bitterness. And how selfish they make us too. I had nothing to give Sylvia: I would never be one of her teachers, but because I was afraid of the next half hour, the faces that would be spying on my loneliness, trying to detect from my manner what my relations with Sarah had been, who had left whom, I needed her beauty to support me.
There’s something wonderful about drinking in the afternoon. A not-too-cold pint, absolutely alone at the bar—even in this fake-ass Irish pub. It’s new, built to look like old. Erin Go Bragh bullshit with its four flat screens silently flashing sports crawls for games I don’t care about. The generic Irish bric-a-brac they deliver by the truckload. Empty moving vans roaming the Irish countryside right now, I imagine, waiting for old Missus Meagher to drop dead into her black pudding so they can buy up the contents of her curio shelves. All of it shipped straight off to a central clearing house, where it’s divvied up between Instant Irish Pubs in New York, Milwaukee, Singapore, and Verona.
I’ve been at this bar before, of course. We all have. Yet I’m strangely, indefensibly happy here. Even the stink of Lysol from the too-clean floor, the fruit flies hovering over the garnish tray do not distract me from a general feeling of well-being.
The food, were I silly enough to ask … well, I know what’s on the menu without looking. Fried zucchini sticks, fried mozzarella, surely there’s calamari in red sauce. Look deeper and there will be indifferently prepared shepherd’s pie; a French dip with salty “gravy” made from canned base; a burger with a limp pickle, an unripe tomato slice, and Simplot Classic frozen French fries. “Bangers and mash” will be an Italian sweet sausage—and there might be a gummy approximation of Irish stew, containing too-lean lamb bits and lots of potatoes.
And what of the seafood options? You are on your fucking own there, boyo.
The bartender is Irish. Jumped a student visa about ten years ago but nothing for him to worry about.
lmao true
Treating despair with drugs and alcohol is a time-honored tradition—I’d just advise you to assess honestly if it’s really as bad and as intractable a situation as you think. Not to belabor the point, but if you look around you at the people you work with, many of them are—or will eventually be—alcoholics and drug abusers. All I’m saying is you might ask yourself now and again if there’s anything else you wanted to do in your life.
I haven’t done heroin in over twenty years, and it’s been a very long time as well since I found myself sweating and grinding my teeth to the sound of tweeting of birds outside my window.
There was and is nothing heroic about getting off coke and dope.
There’s those who do—and those who don’t.
I had other things I still wanted to do. And I saw that I wasn’t going to be doing shit when I was spending all my time and all my money on coke or dope—except more coke and dope.
I’m extremely skeptical of the “language of addiction.” I never saw heroin or cocaine as “my illness.” I saw them as some very bad choices that I walked knowingly into. I fucked myself—and, eventually, had to work hard to get myself un-fucked.
Norman Mailer described the desire to be cool as a “decision to encourage the psychopath in oneself, to explore that domain of experience where security is boredom and therefore sickness and one exists in the present, in that enormous present which is without past or future, memory or planned intention.”
lol
The little tuffets for ladies’ bags, the selection of steak knives to choose from, the waiters who put on white gloves to trim fresh herbs tableside. The fucking water cart. The even more painful array of Montblanc pens to choose from so that one might more elegantly sign one’s check. The dark, hideous, and pretentious dining room. All of it conspired to smother any possibility of a good time stone-dead in a long, dreary dirge. Nothing could live in this temple of hubris. The generally excellent food was no match for the forces aligned against it. And it just wasn’t, in the end, excellent enough to prevail against the ludicrousness of what surrounded it.
Like watching Bonfire of the Vanities or Heaven’s Gate—or one of the other great examples of ego gone wild in the movie business—there were so many miscalculations, large and small, that the whole wrongheaded mess added up to something that wasn’t just bad but insulting. You left ADNY angry and offended—that anyone, much less this out-of-touch French guy, would think you were so stupid.
New Yorkers don’t like to be treated like rubes. Tends to leave a bad taste. And the bad taste one left with after ADNY metastasized into something larger—feelings of doubt about the desirability—and even the morality—of that kind of luxury. Few in the hermetic world of Francophile New York foodies had ever really asked those questions before. Now, they were asking.
ick
“Remind me never to be pregnant in the summer,” said the first assistant. The pregnant woman did look quite uncomfortable. She was wearing a black dress.
“You have to make sure you plan it right,” said the second assistant. “The best time to have a baby is in the late fall.”
I was interested to learn that other young women had given this much thought to the then (to me) seemingly abstract ideas of pregnancy and birth. I mean, I suppose I did picture myself as a parent to some unimaginable infant in some ethereal future realm, but five, ten, fifteen years stretched out in front of me like some other kind of eternity.
“I wonder if I’ll ever have a baby,” said the first assistant. “Sometimes I don’t think it will ever happen for me.”
“All I want,” said the second assistant distantly, “is for someone to save me.”
lmao
My only important relationship in those years was with a much older married man. As a result of this situation, I learned that each unreal relationship is its own Prospero’s island and that dreaming and unreality keep you on your island. I learned, too, that the false dream is better enacted than actually lived.
But there were many real-world consequences for me, too: I became a rather weird, fatalistic individual about relationships and had, for a time, the idea that they needed to be conducted under a cloak of secrecy. I became used to thinking of myself as a vaguely illegitimate presence in the life of someone important to me, and I became accustomed to providing protection to brilliant, narcissistic, charismatic, fiercely ambitious men—men who never quite thought about extending the same protection to me, no, not quite.
had to look up the reference lol but i like this
Being a reviewer (Gore Vidal enjoyed reminding everyone of the distinction between a reviewer and a critic) is easy work, especially for a young person—you are always standing safely at a remove; nothing is risked, nothing is bloodied. Writing reviews can become your first little frisson of power, and if you’re not rigorous with yourself (you won’t be), your aesthetic judgments about a book can become moral judgments: this bad person—“bad” because he has such a minute understanding of the human experience—wrote this bad book. I also didn’t understand that while I had been given a modest platform, I had no innate authority.
And whatever I believed I was doing with these book reviews, it had nothing to do with cultivating appreciation.