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Perhaps the conversation continued beyond my initial refusal. I mean my refusal to speak, so it was more of a monologue, John saying, Don’t you love me, and Shouldn’t we give ourselves a chance to fix this, and We were going to have a baby, and me not trusting myself to open my mouth. How animals, caught in a trap, will gnaw off their own limbs, maybe it was a little like that only I think the comparison gives me too much credit, it was John’s limb and I was the one chewing, him saying, I still think we can make this work, him saying, Here, do you want this leg, too.
Let me try to explain this another way. As a child, my interests, if you could call them that, were the highly regimented activities at which I immediately excelled. The fact that I’m one dissertation away from a PhD in English, this is at least in part because I read easily and early and because grown-ups, teachers especially, do love to compliment a little girl with a big book. If homework can be a hobby it was, throughout elementary and middle and high school, primary among mine. What I wanted was direction and praise for following it. As a child these were easy to find. As an adult I learned that the only people who seemed inclined to give out both were my professors, married men, almost all of them. But you can’t marry your married professor. So instead I married John. John, who was so kind and so supportive and emotionally generous and a good listener, who was everything a liberated woman is supposed to want. But then there was no one to pat me on the head for making the right choice. There was only John, who was so kind. Who was so kind and who wanted me to have desires of my own. Really it was a mean trick that the only one I developed was the desire to leave him.
What I’m trying to say, the theorem that must be accepted as a premise if any of my behavior is ever to make any sense, is that I have been, that I continue to be, best at being a vessel for the desire of others. And that this has made me good at exactly two things, school and sex. Also that you’re not supposed to use people as means to an end, you’re only supposed to treat them as ends in and of themselves, a very smart and famous man by the name of Immanuel Kant says so. Only I did want to be used as a means, and mostly it made me miserable and was evil besides, and in an attempt to fix this fundamental problem with me as a person I’d used John as a means and that, not questions like What are you going to do for money, and How are you going to find a job, and Have you opened the e-mail from your manager in response to the e-mail in which you quit without notice, and Is it irony to quit without notice i.e. in a very inappropriate way when the job you’re quitting is in HR, the fact that I’d used John, that was what was eventually going to bother me, when I allowed myself to feel things again.
ahhh
[...] And in line, in front of me, there’s this couple. A boy and a girl. I close my eyes and I can still see the backs of their heads at the moment I become aware of them. Two normal heads with normal hair, totally unremarkable. Kids, both of them. Well, kids to me, in fact they were probably in their early twenties. She has her arm around his waist and her head on his shoulder and she’s leaning into him like she’s trying to get every part of her body as close to every part of his body as she can. This kind of physical intimacy, that’s how I can tell they’re young. I mean, there’s the clothes and the pimples on his chin that he keeps poking at with his finger, and how smooth her skin is, but the thing I notice first is how she’s leaning into him, and only kids do that in public, little kids with their parents, wrapping their bodies around mommy’s leg, and big kids with their boyfriends and their girlfriends. Like if they’re together, doesn’t matter where, they’re not going to waste that time, that precious time, being even inches apart. It’s a little—I mean it’s a lot, sometimes, to look at, that kind of need, in public. It can be—well, it can be disgusting. Especially if they’re also kissing and usually they are. But there’s something, or, looking at these kids I felt also there was something, sacred isn’t the word, but they were treating this mundane moment, Sunday afternoon in a crowded Home Depot, waiting in line to check out, they were respecting this moment, they were insisting it was too good and special a moment not to honor with this display. There was a kind of, I don’t know, reverence to it. Gross as it also was. A kind of honesty.”
But the dating problem. My mother, it should by now be clear, chooses men poorly, and so do I, and this is why I was not dating, do not date. What was happening to me then, at the time when I sat in my mother’s kitchen and turned my sweating glass of lemonade on a damp coaster, was not unlike the problem that had driven my mother to analysis, to her analyst. I’ve said that I did want to date and that there was a problem preventing me, but this, too, is not quite accurate. The truth is I wanted to date and for a time I did, I went on dates with lovely men, men with advanced degrees and wit to spare and working definitions of the word feminism and shoulders just as broad as my mother’s GI turned analyst. And when they bent down to kiss me my entire body recoiled. Their lips fell on mine and it was as if every cell in my body began immediately trying to pull away. I could feel my pores shrink, the little hairs on my arms retract, anything my body could do to put even a negligible, an imaginary distance between itself, between myself, and these men. I mean, anything besides actually pulling away. Meanwhile at work, alone in an office with the oldest, the sweatiest, the baldest of our lawyers, I found myself blushing, found my knees growing weak, found myself backing toward the door, trying again to put as much distance between me and the decaying specimen before me—but this time it was to stop myself from jumping him. It was like I was being reminded that I could feel desire. But then also that desire was purposely being misdirected so that I wouldn’t have sex. And I didn’t know what to do with that. With my body telling me, You don’t want to fuck these men that you are—that you should be—attracted to. With my body telling me, You do want to fuck this eighty-five-year-old lawyer who thinks corporations should have the same rights as individuals and whose youngest granddaughter is just about your age. I didn’t know what to do with my body telling me You don’t want what you want.
lmao
The reader senses that the man’s promiscuity, his faithlessness, is to blame for his being repeatedly rejected. But this sense is overridden, and deliberately, by the anger the reader also feels toward the women he has called. He has driven so far. He’s been driving for days. Can one of these women not offer him a meal, a bed, the comforts of her flesh, if only for one night? I read once that violence onscreen, even if it is designed to appall, argues, inevitably, for itself. That the viewer is always inherently intrigued and therefore aroused by it. That the visual fact of violence is titillating, even if the intent is to disgust. And so one feels not disgust but pity for the lone driver. The writer who depicts an abhorrent male character still demands that the reader pay the abhorrent man his attention.
ahhh to be a hideous man
When I bought the house I did so in part because I had a romantic notion about the turn my life might take in such a town, so small and dead-ended. I imagined myself working at a diner, a diner frequented by truckers. I imagined one of them, kindhearted, modifying his routes so he could see me more often. Never staying longer than the time it took to drink two cups of coffee and eat a grilled cheese, but nevertheless, an understanding growing between us. I imagined myself in a long dress, in a backyard, hanging my sheets out to dry on a clothesline. Shielding my eyes from the sun. Instead I pay a woman to care for my son while I work as a legal secretary. All my skirts hit just below the knee. To clean these clothes, I use a washing machine and a dryer, both located in the basement. In the short story I read, the protagonist has a son, a son whom he leaves, with his wife, on the Eastern Seaboard. The author, the jeans-wearer, had a number of children. They are scattered about the country with the women who bore them. And though yes, it is true that the author never got sober, perhaps all this time I have been wrong about the story’s protagonist, the man who runs out of road. Because he hasn’t, not really. I mean, he can drive into the ocean. He can always decide to turn around.
Finally, the book is autobiographical in the sense that it reflects the changes I have gone through, emotionally and physically, over the years. When I was a young man I could be more easily seduced by the pure sensuousness of the visual: give me an Ophulsian camera movement and you had me in your pocket. Later, these blandishments affected me less, partly because a whole younger generation of Hollywood filmmakers came to power who had technique galore, who were masters of the gratuitously gorgeous shot, but whose knowledge of human nature sometimes seemed painfully thin. Over the years (perhaps because i wrote a few myself), I have become increasingly attuned to the screenplay [...] And what I want -- and am often stymied in getting -- is complexity, wit, nuance.
Whether the film had been glorious or dull barely mattered, so long as I could cross it off my list. The development of a taste of any sort requires plodding through the overrated as well as uncovering the sublime. If the movie had been genuinely great, I would leave the screening place inspired and pleasantly conscious of my isolation, and wander the streets for a while before taking the subway home. I came to love the way the gray city streets looked after a movie, the cinematic blush they seemed to wear. When the film had been a disappointment -- well then, all the more was it a joy to get back to the true world, with its variety and uncanny compositions.
I rushed to see L'Avventura. It was the movie I had been preparing for, and it came at the right time in my development. As a child, I had wanted only action movies. Dialogues and story setups bored me; I waited for that moment when the knife was hurled through the air. My awakening in adolescence to the art of film consisted precisely in overcoming this impatience. Overcompensating, perhaps; I now loved a cinema that dawdled, that lingered. Antonioni had a way of following characters with a pan shot, letting them exit and keeping the camera on the depopulated landscape. With his detachment from the human drama and his tasteful spying on objects and backgrounds, he forced me to disengage as well, and to concentrate on the purity of his technique. Of course the story held me, too, with its bitter, world-weary, disillusioned tone. The adolescent wants to touch bottom, to know the worst. His soul craves sardonic disenchantment.
<3
[...] By leafing through these magazines together we shared a mood of sweet latency, imagining the films we had in store, like provincials dreaming of life in the capital. Cinema was a wave originating elsewhere, which we waited to break over us. The waiting had something to do with the nature of adolescence itself; it also reflected the resurgence of European films at the time.
To be young and in love with films in the early 1960s was to participate in what felt like an international youth movement. We in New York were following and, in a sense, mimicking the cafe arguments in Paris, London and Rome, whee the cinema had moved, for a brief historical movement, to the center of intellectual discourse, in the twilight of existentialism and before the onslaught of structuralism.