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ALEXANDER CHEE |
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Further
praise for
HOW TO WRITE AN AUTOBIOGRAPHICAL NOVEL
‘Alexander
Chee is one of the best living writers of today. If he’s not already a
household name, he needs to be . . . powerful, powerful essays with powerful,
powerful words’ Isaac Fitzgerald, NBC’s Today
‘Urgent and insightful’ Viet Thanh Nguyen, Guardian Summer Reads
‘How good is How to Write an
Autobiographical Novel? It’s so good that I
could fill my word count just with quotations . . . Every essay, no matter the
subject, exhibits warmth, rigour, tact . . . The mask conceals and it reveals;
writing transfigures and it uncovers. That’s the gift that writing has given Chee,
and it’s the gift that his wonderful new collection gives its readers’ Boston
Globe
‘Profound and resonant ... A nimble study
in radical self-invention ... The revelations that follow crackle with the same
glowing, essential truths’ Wired
‘As profound as they are beautiful, Chee’s
essays impart wisdom from a life fully lived, and speak to what it means to be
a writer and reader in contemporary times’ Buzzfeed
‘How to Write goes well beyond writing. Alex shows how to not just write, but
live. How not just to live, but to heal’ Guernica
‘Two-thirds of the way through Alexander Chee’s How
to Write an Autobiographical Novel, I abandoned
my sharpened reviewer’s pencil in favour of luxuriating in the words. Chee’s
writing has a mesmerizing quality; his sentences are rife with profound truths’
NPR
‘A knowing and luminous self-portrait’ O,
the Oprah Magazine ‘Unique and powerful,
insistently itself’ R.O. Kwon, Electric Literature ‘Rarely does a book of essays come along so affecting, so brave and
bluntly honest, and so raw and poetic. I quit underlining my favourite
aphoristic lines by the time I reached that third essay: it was useless to try
to pick individual diamonds from a whole pile of them5 Interview
Magazine
‘As Chee’s gaze turns inward, he beckons
readers to experience his private moments with such clarity and honesty that
we’re immediately brought into his consciousness. At the same time, he asks us
to contemplate the largest questions about identity, sexuality, family, art and
war . . . [A] trailblazing collection’ Washington Post
‘An absolute
gift of a book for writers everywhere. Every single essay is a pearl’ Chicago
Review of Books
‘Chee explores the realm of the real with
extraordinarily beautiful essays. Being real here is an ambition, a haunting,
an impossibility and an illusion. What passes for real, his essays suggest,
becomes real, just as life becomes art and art, pursued this fully, becomes a
life’ Eula Biss, author of Notes from No Man}s
Land and On Immunity
‘A really moving (and sometimes devastating)
writing memoir of being young, of being someone and not entirely knowing it yet - all the while being so poetically
receptive to the fragrant and devastating strains of beauty and beauty’s harsh
wisdom that wind up moving and shaping a life. It’s a strangely romantic and practical book. It holds a skull lightly’ Eileen Myles, author of Chelsea
Girls
‘Poetic and utterly moving, this stunning
book attempts to get at the heart of how we not only create but defend out
identities, to ourselves and to the world’ Bustle
HOW TO WRITE >
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To my mother and father, who taught me how to fight
CONTENTS
The Curse The
Querent The
Writing Life 1989 Girl
After Peter My
Parade
Mr.
and Mrs. B
100 Things About Writing a Novel
 |
The
Autobiography of My Novel
The
Guardians
I spent the summer I turned fifteen on an exchange program in Tuxtla
Gutierrez, the capital of the state of Chiapas, in Mexico, some three hundred
miles north of the Guatemalan border. My host family was named Gutierrez, and I
never asked them if the town took its name from their forebears, but if it did,
they wore their fame lightly, though they were a powerful and prosperous
family. The father, Fernando, had been a stevedore, of the kind who worked for
him now, and the mother, Cela (pronounced Che-la), was a dance teacher. They lived like people who felt lucky to be
alive, and I loved them right away.
Their son, Miguel Angel, had lived the previous year
with me and my family in Cape Elizabeth, Maine. He had told his parents stories
of me, and so they greeted me like a child they’d always known but never met.
They had a handsome modern house of gleaming wood, glass, and stucco,
surrounded by high walls topped with barbed wire and trees with enormous
crowns, their leaves arrayed in stars, that I would learn were mangoes.
The first night, the family told me over a cheerful
and friendly dinner that they were not going to speak to me in English for the
rest of the summer, no matter how confusing it was. And that this was to teach
me to speak Spanish. I laughed as I agreed, in Spanish, to their terms,
intimidated but sure of my purpose and already wanting to please them.
That night, as I lay awake trying to sleep, I heard
the knock of ripe mangoes falling from the trees that circled the house and ran
up and down the street. The noise ranged, depending on the ripeness, from the
plop of a tennis ball to a pulpy sort of splash to the occasional smash when
one of them would crash through a car windshield.
We need to cut that tree down, my host mother said
the next morning. She would say it whenever this happened, but they never did.
It was as if they accepted the broken windshields as the price of the mangoes,
which we ate as fast as we could. They had their gardener collect the fruit
instead, and replaced the windshields as if they were changing a tablecloth.
And that would be among the first of my object lessons in the ways of the very
rich.
Years later, and only when I learned of the deep poverty in Chiapas 一 the reason they had those walls topped with barbed wire — did I
think to question whether it was really just mangoes breaking their windshields
— if mango season lasted as long as a summer.
I was one of twelve students in Chiapas from my high school that
summer, on what now seems like an odd program: we lived there with the Mexican
students who lived with us during the year, but unlike them, we did not attend
any classes. The summer itself was supposed to be a class. If my host family
had not made me promise never to speak English, I don’t know what I would have
learned. Our teacher came with us, as a chaperone, but he did not teach us.
Whatever else he did there, he also accompanied us on intermittent group field
trips to explore the mostly well-trodden ruins and to shop in places like the
nearby San Cristobal de las Casas, formerly the capital of Mexico, a quiet,
sun-struck city, cheated out of the prosperity of being the capital. These
trips were set apart for me by stretches of nameless, numberless days spent
wandering the empty, luxurious house while the Gutierrezes were either at
school or at work. I was fascinated by my host father’s many toupees, which
were kept on mannequin heads in his bedroom dressing room, and the life they
suggested, entirely alien, of hair that was public and hair that was private.
It was just one detail of many that I eagerly
collected that summer, and if it seems I was snooping, I was. I was lost in the
books I had brought with me, the Dune novels by Frank Herbert 一 the story of a young boy without playmates, suspected of being a
messianic figure, and undergoing training in the ways of the Bene Gesserit, a
secretive society of women with extraordinary powers, born in part through
their obsessive observation of detail. The boy was the latest iteration of a
series of heroes like this for me 一 Encyclopedia Brown,
Sherlock Holmes, Batman — who went from being ordinary people to heroes through
their ability to perceive the things others missed. I wanted to see if I too
could obtain these powers through observation.
And when I wasn’t reading those novels, I wrote my
own stories, stories no one has seen to this day, about mutants with psychic
powers who were running from a government that, of course, hoped to control
them. X-Men fan fiction,
essentially, before I knew what it was.
It was my greatest dream to live out this kind of
story, of power gained through either inborn abilities or persistence, and
though I couldn’t have said this at the time, this dream coming true would have
meant all of my struggles were worth it.
The closest thing I had to a routine that summer was
my time spent sitting with the cook, Panchita, in front of the kitchen
television, chomping on the fried tortillas she served me, spread with some
sort of light, fresh tomato sauce and sprinkled with white cheese. Together we
watched El Maleficio, a telenovela about a wealthy family of witches living in Oaxaca and the various
troubles they got into. I liked the look of that soap opera, those men and
women who seemed straight out of Dallas or Falcon Crest all
shouting at each other, casting spells, promising revenge, and lit by the
cheesy special effects that made their already spectral appearance even more
incredible. I couldn’t understand most of what was being said at first, having
had just two years of high school Spanish before this. But about a month into
my stay, while watching the show, I had the realization that I understood
everything the witches were saying. The ads came on and I understood those
also. The news came on and I understood that as well. It was as if the show had
cast a spell on me.
I had crossed over into
fluency. I said something to that effect to Panchita, and she smiled and
laughed, congratulating me. She herself spoke only a little more Spanish than
me, she joked, and made me the treat of an extra tortilla that day.
令
My host brother, Miguel Angel, snorted almost nightly at the
unfairness of my program when he came home from summer school to find me tanned
and reading. He was a tall, lanky seventeen-year-old with a sort of dreamy
teen-idol beauty gone slightly, if adorably, awry. He had large front teeth
that were endearingly crooked, and he wore the tightest, thinnest jeans of
anyone I knew, his hair cut in a Leif Garrett shag. At some point after
arriving home from school, Miguel would begin getting ready for the evening,
showering and dressing carefully for the disco. I found these preparations
alien and thrilling — the application of cologne being nearly mystical to
watch.
And I watched it all.
I felt sometimes like a camera, shocked when people
noticed me. I was a little in love with him and his friends, young men of
sixteen or seventeen, a year or two older than me, all beauties, and I wanted
to know everything I could, as if, per the Dune novels, all of this detail might confer some greater mastery over
the objects of my desire. There was a code to it all, it seemed, something
underneath the smooth rhythm of the day and night, and that was what I wanted
to crack.
Miguel and I would meet up with his friends at the
overlook of the town’s dump, a hillside where we parked and drank, tailgating
with brandy and Coca-Cola, mixed into a sticky-sweet and satisfying drink for
the hot summer nights, before they all went out to the discos. Drinking with these
young men left me a little drowsy from the liquor, and a sensual sort of
atmosphere took hold of my imagination, a sense that something was almost about
to happen.
These boys were all waiting for the girls, who took
longer to get ready, and we drank as they dressed and made themselves up. I
watched for the moment the girls would arrive, the way the group of boys at the
overlook would change when they did. I already knew at this point that I was
gay, and so I was forever looking for other signs of it in the landscape. What
I was looking for was what seemed to vanish then. The girls arrived in their
own cars, the headlights sweeping the scene where we stood, illuminated by
them. Out they’d step, confident, glamorous in their makeup, their legs
shining, lips flashing wet with lip gloss, their new manicures and pedicures
giving off sparks in the night. The boys would growl hellos, smiling like
cartoon wolves.
Two of Miguel’s friends in particular held most of my
attention. They seemed to be deeply in love with each other, in a kind of easy
masculine protectorate that we all respected without quite acknowledging it.
They weren’t what I thought of as macho per se, but they seemed manlier than I
could ever be, and they kept very close to each other, always. Before the
girls’ arrival, they would sit together, arms around each other, handsome and
easy, and from where I sat I could feel everywhere their skin touched, as if
the heat of it could be felt with my eyes. Sometimes, at the end of the night,
one would lay his head on the other’s shoulder, and I would ache for the rest
of the night from that sight. But on seeing the girls5 cars, they
lifted off each other, as if what was there was not there.
Everyone was friendly with me, but to my knowledge,
no one was flirting with me. I was too young. I was not stylish. I did not have
a gold chain. I did not have anything special about me, to my mind, except my
eyes, which I was proud of, and which people often said were beautiful. And
which I was using, sure that my dream of power was something they could make
come true. I was probably a starer, to be honest. I was from Maine, with my
ordinary side-parted brown hair cut in an ordinary way, jeans of an ordinary
cut, ordinary polo shirts.
Most of my notebooks
have a doodle in them of a staring eye. Sometimes as I drew it, I was staring
at myself. Sometimes I had the sense, as I finished the drawing, that I was
staring back at me. I still draw these. The eye a perfect talisman for a boy
who believed his watching both hid him and gave him power.
令
Something was happening, though it had, in a sense, already
happened. I felt at home in Mexico in a way I never had before.
My new fluency in Spanish was part of it. I was the
first of the twelve students in my high school group to accomplish this —
undeniably the main purpose of being in Chiapas. I was also the only Asian,
nonwhite student in the group. On field trips the other kids started asking me
what “they” were saying, or they’d ask me to speak for them. The only exchanges
the students had mastered were basic — ^Cuanto cuesta? How much does this
cost?— and so I felt a tiny contempt whenever I conceded and helped them.
As we were otherwise left on our own when the trips
were not happening, I kept to myself as much as I could and never knew how the
other Americans spent their time without me. Nick Stark was the only one of
these students I sought out. He was, like all of them, hopelessly bad at
pronunciation and with no memory for vocabulary, but I was friends with him
mostly because I found him very handsome. He had become my best friend out of
all the American students, by default. We often swam together in the
afternoons, after my television show hour, at the Tuxtla country club’s outdoor
pool, where our host families were both members, and in doing so, the sun had
turned us completely brown, except for the space barely covered by our
swimsuits. I went along with it because Nick never mocked me, and I enjoyed
looking at him. When he took off his Speedo or put it on, his tan line flashed
white in the changing room, so bright it was like a camera flash.
Nick had dark hair and eyes like me, and looked, with
his mouth closed, like many of the Mexican members of the club, most of them
from European backgrounds, and so when we swam there, by and large we attracted
little attention unless we spoke. But when Nick opened his mouth, he showed his
giant white, straight American teeth, the product of perfectly attended
orthodontist visits. Mine were also large and white, but a little crooked, like
my mother’s teeth, and like theirs — not enough to get fixed but enough to
assist me, along with my better accent, in passing. I had already noticed that
the Mexicans here in Tuxtla were less obsessed with braces than we were back in
America, even the rich ones I had met. Orthodontics, in the 1970s, was a very
American obsession. And I had noticed what Nick would now point out to me: that
I also looked Mexican. Or, really, it was a little more than that.
“You’re going native,” he said to me one day as we
changed after swimming. The smell of chlorine and rust hung in the cold green
lockers of the country club, and I closed mine carefully, which dimmed the odor
only slightly. I was pleased by him saying this and wanted more information,
but also the pleasure of watching him change clothes distracted me. By now I
was aware that I was attracted to him, and I had learned to modulate my
attention to him so that it seemed like I was no more interested in his beauty
than anything else around us. But that day, his penis swung up and down as he
spoke, as if his vocal cords were strung to it, and was a rosy pink in the
center of that blinding white border of skin between his beautifully brown top
and bottom halves. He looked like a very sexy Neapolitan ice cream treat.
He was waiting for me to turn and face him, holding
out his navy swimsuit, waiting to step inside of it.
“How exactly do you mean ‘native’？” I asked him.
Nick struggled with this for a moment. I think he had
hoped I’d know what he meant. “Uh, well, you know. You could, like, pretend to
be Mexican. Your Spanish is really good. You sound Mexican.”
“Yeah?” I sat down on the bench by the locker. Nick
stood as if waiting to be released from this conversation in order to put on
his suit.
In retrospect, he may have been flirting with me
also.
“Yeah,” he said. “I’m sure you could convince anyone
here. You could totally play Mexican.” His penis swung again, and now that I
was seated, it was at my eye level. I looked up at his face so he wouldn’t
notice me noticing it, but I could see it in and out of the edge of my vision,
tantalizing. I asked more questions. “Are you bored yet? Isn’t it weird that we
have no classes? Pablo’s a madman to have set the summer up this way.” Pablo
was our Spanish teacher, Mr. Castellanos, whom we always referred to as Pablo.
We never called him Mr. Castellanos.
“No,” he said. “I’m having a blast.” This produced at
least a few more swings. He finally put on his suit and smiled at me as he
settled the drawstring inside, as if he’d accomplished something quite
difficult. Then I stood and we went out to the pool.
At dinner that night, I
told my host family at last the news about my fluency, and they bragged to one
another about how I was the best of the American students, and how proud of me they
were. Each of the other Americans was brought up and dismissed as lesser than
me. “Lo mas bueno,” my host father said, pointing to me. Cela beamed as they
congratulated themselves on their plan of not speaking to me in English, and
confirmed that I sounded just like a Mexicano. As they said this, I saw a
change come over their eyes, as if I had been revealed as one of their own.
The Gutierrez family were bewilderingly rich to me. Miguel’s
youngest sister, for example, was away at a finishing school in Switzerland.
His older sister had also been to one, the same one. I’d never met a family
with this tradition. I understood that Mr. Gutierrez ran an import-export
business, but when I tried to imagine what that was, I could only picture bales
of cash being unloaded off of enormous ships.
They were the first family I ever knew to employ a
houseboy. His name was Uriel, and he tended the garden in the courtyard, washed
the three cars every other day, and picked the mangoes up off the ground, in
addition to whatever he did out of my sight. Uriel worked shirtless in the
heat, spraying the cars down, himself glazed by the water and the sweat, and in
a way, of all the boys I was in love with that summer, he was chief among them.
I had watched him for weeks from my window, too shy
to approach him, too unsure of my Spanish, but now that I was fluent — such
that I was — I went down at last and reintroduced myself. He had met me on my
arrival but we hadn’t really spoken since, just the occasional smile and nod.
He was shy too, and when he smiled it was as if we were in a movie and the
soundtrack changed. He was deeply tanned from working in the sun all day. I
knew his name was an angel’s name — an archangel, really. Which only made him
glow more in my eyes.
I was young enough, naive enough, to imagine we could
be friends, and I did eventually write a short story about a boy like me on a
trip like this, the two of us in love. But this was a fantasy. I was learning
there was a gulf between us that could not be as carelessly crossed by my
learning Spanish. For all I was trying to vanish into the surroundings, I was
still the American visitor, and he knew it well, whatever he also felt. He kept
our interactions polite and ordinary. If he was aware of my crush on him, he
did not let on. I did not yet understand how the class difference between us
was, at the time, a greater barrier than the language. He had to be polite to
me, no matter what he felt.
I wished I had asked
more questions. On the nights at the disco, or at home later, in my room, I
often found myself thinking of Uriel. Did he sleep in the house also, and if
not, where? Where did he go home to, and what was his life like? And, of
course, what was he thinking about? Which was only a way of hoping he thought about
me.
令
The field trip I remember best was the one to Palenque. At the time,
it was an archeological site, according to our guide, still very remote, full
of scorpions, and surrounded by what the guide said were cannibal tribes. For
several hours our bus took countless hairpin turns through the mountains, and I
remember the electric fear of feeling close to death as I looked out the bus
window and down a cliff. All along the roads were crosses and candles marking
where people had died in accidents.
Palenque was a Mayan ruin in the center of the
Mexican rainforest. This location, we learned, was thought to be strategic. The
stones were the color of the white summer sky. We exited the bus, and I was in
awe of the dense rainforest jungle as the guide led us into the single
excavated temple cellar.
There the other American students took pictures, the light bouncing
off the plexiglass erected between us and the discoveries, an aurora of camera
flash. “We know so little about the Maya,” I remember the guide kept saying, a
litany of a kind. Palenque then was a sliver of what it is now, which is a
sliver of what it once was — it is estimated that what we see of the ruin is
just 10 percent of what is still there, buried in the jungle. It was, for me,
both thrillingly new and ancient at the same time. I was young and impatient
upon learning that the world had not, in fact, been completely charted yet. Why
did we not yet know more about the Maya when they had been around for so long?
The entire summer’s program seemed like an education
conducted through gestalt experiences: take kids to a place where they don’t
understand anything, and then take them on tours with other people who
understand only a little more than they do. I was growing bored of these field
trips, and I was still the only group member with any fluency. Being around the
Americans, as I now thought of them, wore on me on that trip. Spanish, to me,
was quieter, with a different tone and volume level, and their English rang in
my head, discordant and forceful.
On the trip back to Tuxtla, Nick was gluey with
sleep, his head tipped over, lips apart. I sat next to him, awake with the
thrill of being close to him, and the knowledge I had of his body from all of
those hours of swimming. I wanted nothing more than to slip a kiss on his mouth
right then, but it was only pure lust, not affection, and the imagined scene of
it turned in my mind like a worry stone as we passed again along the road’s
dangerous curves.
It was a summer of
wanting impossible things.
令
The student i was then was puzzled by the lack of classes, but in
truth the program was so effective it almost recommended itself as a method. I
learned Spanish well enough to become fluent. The stories I was writing, which
I did to entertain myself when I ran out of things to read, were their own kind
of milestone, visible to me only much later: they were the first time I wrote
for myself, for my own pleasure. There was something I wanted to feel, and I
felt it only when I was writing. I think of this as one of the most important
parts of my writer’s education — that when left alone with nothing else to
read, I began to tell myself the stories I wanted to read.
And there was the story I was living. Whatever I
thought I was doing through my experiments in observation, I can see I was a
boy losing himself as a way to find himself in the shapes of others. The
classmates on this trip were kids I had grown up with since moving to town in
the first grade. I longed to be rid of them, but also to be rid of me, or of
the problem of me. This was not possible, but I tried.
Here, then, is that
summer’s last lesson.
令
The preparations for the celebration at summer’s end were strenuous.
A three-day party, the twenty-fifth wedding anniversary of my host family’s
closest friends. I’ll call them the Marquez family. Guests were flying in from
all over the world for the big event, and Cela, my host mother, would jump into
spontaneous dances in front of me as she described it. She taught salsa and
merengue, and now and then over the summer I would be drawn into dancing with
her; I remember the delight in her eyes at the prospect of dancing. She had
elegant legs, and her hips’ quick movement surprised me, which made her laugh.
“Merengue, salsa, merengue, salsa,” she would chant, like a little girl asking
to bake a cake, her hips shaking as she circled the dining room table, her
heels ringing on the tile floor. Miguel always blushed, and at some point her
husband would raise his hands and reach for his wife’s waist.
She gave me a few lessons, insisting I would have to
dance at the party.
The day of the party, we arrived at the Marquez house
to find a white Jaguar parked in the driveway, a red bow on top. It was so
clearly the senor’s present to the senora that it needed no explanation: Mr.
Marquez owned a luxury car dealership in town. I arrived with Miguel, and we
were greeted by his friend Javier, the son of the celebrating couple. Javier
wore a dry expression on his face, one I now know is common to those children
who parent their parents. His mother chose that moment to come outside, and her
diamond ring, the biggest I’d ever seen, flashed as she covered her mouth and
screamed in joy. It was the sort of ring you could use to signal for help if
you were ever lost on a desert island.
^Que onda? Miguel and Javier said to each other, and
I said it too, the greeting the boys all used with one another, and as I did
so, Miguel gave me a sidelong glance and a smile. You’re ready, he said. You’re
ready. Javier’s eyes glinted as Miguel set out the terms: I was to try to fool
their friends, who had come in from Oaxaca, into thinking I was Mexican. And if
I succeeded, I would win a case of beer.
Javier laughed. Yes, he said, you could be mestizo.
I knew what this word meant as soon as I heard it.
Mixed. I think of it as a Mexican word, a word for the Americas — the secret
self of the whole continent, north and south. And to me, it felt like the word
for what I was. In the United States, if I said I was mixed, it meant too many
things I didn’t feel. Mixed feelings were confusing feelings, and I didn’t feel
confused except as to why it was so hard for everyone to understand that I
existed. Living this way felt like discovering your shoe was nailed to the
floor, but only one of them, so that you paced, always, a circle of
possibility, defined by the limited imaginations of others.
I stared at Javier with love. His round head, his
bowl-cut black hair, his sly little smile. He led us through the house to the
friends in question.
They were a brother and sister, blond-haired,
green-eyed, pure Spanish Mexican, as Miguel explained. They looked more
American than I did. I don’t remember their names, but we shook hands, were
introduced, and began speaking.
I invented a past in Tijuana. Close to America but not
quite. I don’t remember the conversations that followed over the next three
days. I remember only the way my accent stood up to scrutiny. They suspected
nothing. When Miguel finally revealed the truth, their laughter and genuine
astonishment were my real prize. Miguel and I took the case of beer and drank
it with the boys, all of them there at the party also, and that was that. I may
have had one beer.
For those days, “Alejandro from Tijuana” was real and
happy. He was like me but more at ease in the world. Lighter. He didn’t spend
his days waiting to be caught out for not being whoever someone else thought he
was, though that was sincerely the condition of the bet; it had nothing like
the stakes of the life I lived back in the States. In Maine, my background —
half white, half Korean — was constantly made to seem alien, or exotic, or
somehow inhuman. In Mexico, I was only mestizo, ordinary at first glance. When
people looked at me, they saw me, and they didn’t stare at me as if at an
object, the way my fellow American classmates did, all of whom were white and
from the same small town in Maine.
After I won my bet with Miguel, the summer seemed to
go away, the trip ending in a week’s stay with my family in Mexico City, where,
after a summer spent eating everything from fresh fruit to street tacos in
Tuxtla, I finally got sick. I could only lie in bed, wishing that we’d skipped
Mexico City, that we’d left the country before this had happened. This last
evidence of my American constitution was a final reminder, not just that I was
leaving, but that I was not from there. I really was only an impostor. I would
never have this life. No life but the one I had. America now the exile of me.
In 1980, the parapsychologist Dr. Alex Tanous tested my
seventh-grade class for psychic abilities, an event so clear in my mind, and so
important to me, that I have questioned whether this actually happened, or
whether I simply invented him. Tanous was very real, though, as real as the
town I grew up in, a conservative Maine town of extraordinary beauty with a
population of about eleven thousand. I once heard Cape Elizabeth called a
semirural suburb, which seemed a good way to describe it while still also
misunderstanding it. This mix of public and private beaches, two lighthouses,
farms, a golf course, a tiny museum of shipwrecks, and empty, decommissioned
naval-base buildings together made the town feel at once prosperous and haunted.
Our public schools were good, and we excelled at
swimming and theater, competing regularly in the state championships for each.
And, at least during this period, we also excelled in psychic research. When I
asked my former classmates if they remembered these tests, not only did they
recall them, they described other tests I’d never heard about, earlier ones,
different from mine.
Tanous had just published a book of his research
titled Is Your Child Psychic? And it seems he had been using my middle school to test out his
theories for some time. I still don’t know whose idea it was. This was a
period, I would learn later, when psychic abilities enjoyed a certain level of
respectability with Republicans, due to the CIA’s involvement in trying to
develop them as a military tool, but this still doesn’t explain it. My memory
of the day begins only with the announcement that the doctor was coming, and
the level of seriousness with which the visit was proposed to the class. “Dr.
Tanous believes that all children are psychic naturally,” my teacher said.
“That it is just a matter of training your abilities. Tests and games that
anyone can do.”
For me, it was like a dream come true. My own private
belief — and my long-held dream, in fact — was that I was psychic. The idea that we all were, and that some of us were just
more aware of it than others, was news
I greeted gladly: I was already good at studying. All morning long,
as we waited for Dr. Tanous, I dreamed of being discovered as a prodigy and led
from the classroom as a valued psychic asset, to join a team of psychics who
would train me to use my powers, like in my X-Men comics. Together we would fight crime, of course. Or maybe, because
my psychic powers were so overwhelmingly strong, I would be taken away, studied,
for the protection of the town, as in my favorite Stephen King novel, Firestarter.
I was ready to be discovered, in other words, and for
my story to begin.
Most of my fantasies then were of having to leave. Or
they were fantasies of secret power. I felt trapped in this town, tired of my
all-white classmates, who couldn’t pronounce “Guam,” where we’d moved from six
years before. I still hoped someday we would move back.
Tanous, when he arrived,
was a handsome man — friendly, charismatic, yet strangely, utterly ordinary in
his carriage. He wore a blazer and tie, the knot a little too big, and looked
like any of our teachers. But he was not.
令
The test i remember best was a guided meditation in which we were
asked to close our eyes and imagine sinking through water, deeper and deeper,
and then rising out of the water into the sunlight, before sending our
consciousness under a magazine he had flipped open and laid out flat without
our being able to see what was on the facing pages.
He asked each of us what we saw — I saw people in a
canoe, on a river, with massive white columns rising behind them — and then he
flipped the page over. A cigarette ad. The white columns I had seen were
cigarettes, massive and rising above a canoe on a river.
The class turned and looked at me, suspicious. I was
the only one who’d gotten it right. And my vision hadn’t just been a close
call; it was pretty precise. Dr. Tanous was pleased, and smiling. He turned to
another magazine and asked that we all do it again.
My memory of the day is
that I did well: I passed two of the three magazine tests, well enough to
believe that I should have been rewarded with immediate admission into a
government-funded psychic warfare program. Or anything more interesting than
the seventh grade. Instead, Tanous left. But before he did, he taught us a game
with cards to improve our psychic abilities. He asked us to think of a playing
card and then run our fingers along the side of the deck, pulling the deck
apart when it felt hot. Was that the card we had envisioned? It often was. I
did this for years, until I lost interest in the game.
The beginning of the story I had hoped for did not happen. Another
beginning did.
I was, after all, a child. And like many children, I
had wanted to be more powerful than the world around me. I had read novels of
wizards and sorceresses, dragon-riding heroes and lost kings, hidden from their
enemies, raised as commoners to protect them, and I had imagined becoming one
of them. I had consumed first the mythology section of the town and school
libraries, and soon found myself checking out The Golden
Bough by Sir James George Frazer, a famous
anthropological work on magic. I’d hoped it was a spell book. What I found
seemed like instructions on how druids whistled up a wind, and any skill I have
now at whistling began then.
After Dr. Tanous’s visit, I began taking out books on
parapsychology as well. I developed a plan to go to the University of Edinburgh
in Scotland, where I would study parapsychology. The idea of studying
grandmothers who felt they had “the sight” was the best thing I could think of
for my life. And, of course, I would study me.
And then my world flew apart in just about every
direction. My father was severely injured in a car accident, the safety-glass
windshield blowing in instead of out during a head-on collision. The accident
left him paralyzed on one side of his body, with internal injuries. The man
driving the car he was in was injured less severely, but he died.
I was trying, I can see
now, to hold on. I was prepared to declare allegiance to any other reality. I
was thirteen at the time of the accident, sixteen when my father died of
complications related to his injuries. When I ask myself why, of all the forms
of the occult I’d found, the one that appealed to me most then was the Tarot, I
know why. After my father’s accident, I wanted to know how to tell the future.
I never wanted to be surprised by misfortune again. I wanted one of those
mirrors that could be used to see around corners, and for my whole life that’s
what I believed the Tarot could be. Given the results of my parapsychology
tests, the next step seemed as simple as getting a Tarot deck — Tanous’s card
game, but with more features. And so I did.
令
My family had given me what I think of as a whimsical approach to
fortunes at best, which is to say they were not something to be taken
seriously, or they were taken seriously in ways that seemed comic. I remember
my father, for example, reading palms while dressed as a gypsy for a Rotary
Club fundraiser: he stuck his head out of a tent — wrapped in a ridiculous
bandanna, an earring dangling off his ear — and winked at me. Or his sister, my
aunt, who wept in fury when her North Korean inventor husband quit his highly
paid chemical engineering job to try, unsuccessfully, to perfect a
fortune-cookie-making machine. On their visits, my uncle brought us trash bags
full of trial cookies, some with three fortunes inside, some with none. At
first my friends loved eating them, but we wearied of them as they grew stale,
and eventually used the trash bags they came in to throw them away.
Funny costumes aside, my father really did read
palms, though he never read mine. I wonder if he ever read his own. He didn’t
live long enough to teach me what he knew or for me to even ask him. When I
took to fortunetelling myself, in any case, I was serious. Too serious, in the
way that makes you foolish.
I did not go to the University of Edinburgh in the
end, but to Wesleyan University, a few hours south of Maine in the Connecticut
River valley. I could not major in parapsychology there, but it didn’t feel
necessary. Wesleyan was full of people who read Tarot cards, for example,
because it was full of people who believed everything. You could, in one week,
attend Mass and a Seder, stay up all night consulting a Ouija board, get a
Tarot reading, go to a Wiccan moon ritual, wake up and take Communion, and if
anyone looked askance, shrug it off. Contradictions were defended proudly, and
I joined in. I had left for college bristling still with grief after the death
of my father — the numbness and shock had worn off and I could feel everything
at once. The first thing I did with the trust fund that had been set up for me
by the state — my father had left no will — was go to an Alfa Romeo dealership,
pay for a new sedan with a check, and drive the car to college, where I called
it my Italian lighter. I affected a lighthearted disregard for money, as if I
was a character in Brideshead Revisited, even as I took a job, almost immediately, privately contrite,
making sandwiches at 7 a.m. twice a week at a deli near my campus apartment. If
some Wesleyan student ever looked at my car and told me I was privileged, in
the class harrowing that passed for hazing there, I would shrug and say,
“You’re right. I’m privileged. I’m so privileged that my father is dead.” And
then whoever it was would run away.
Which is what I sought with this behavior.
My first Tarot deck was the Crowley deck, the
brainchild of the famous early-twentieth-century occultist Aleister Crowley and
Lady Frieda Harris. Crowley was a bisexual, opium-using crush-magnet, feral,
fey, and floppyhaired, and Harris was his lover. At the time, men like Crowley
were always getting me in trouble, and he was no different. In retrospect, it
was the perfect deck for me, a great deal like buying an expensive sports car
and using it to light your cigarettes. Crowley and Harris had attempted to take
centuries of esoteric occult teachings and render them into a single deck of
cards, whose regular use would, for the adept, also work as a kind of mnemonic
exercise. While reading the cards you would also learn the relationships
between ancient gods and goddesses, astrological signs, planets, alchemical
sigils. Each card seemed to be one of seventy-eight windows into the secret
life of the world, hidden somewhere beyond the air, under the skin of
existence.
Much of what I love about literature is also what I
love about the Tarot —archetypes at play, hidden forces, secrets brought to
light. When I bought the deck, it was for the same reason I bought the car: I
felt too much like a character in a novel, buffeted by cruel turns of fate. I
wanted to feel powerful in the face of my fate. I wanted to look over the top
of my life and see what was coming. I wanted to be the main character of this
story, and its author. And if I were writing a novel about someone like me,
this is exactly what would lead him astray.
The deck was, per Crowley’s and Harris’s wishes,
published only after their deaths, a little in the way of E. M. Forster’s
famous decision to publish his novel Maurice posthumously, allowing only his friends to read it while he was
alive. Forster was hiding his sexuality; I haven’t been able to find out what
Crowley and Harris were hiding.
I’d been told that Tarot cards had to be given to you, but I wasn’t
prepared to wait. And so it was in my sophomore year that I appeared one day at
the Magic Shop, a little purple cottage not far from the deli, intent on
getting my Crowley deck. The dream catchers banged on the door as I went in,
followed by the friend whom I’d brought along to buy my deck for me. I wanted
my gift when I wanted it, which was right at that very moment. I felt exultant
when my friend handed me the cards — just the sort of power I’d hoped for. But
I also felt like I’d trespassed. Both feelings pushed at me as I took the deck
home and spread the cards out, eager to master them — both have stayed with me
ever since.
I never once thought to look into the history of the
Tarot. I never asked, Where did this come from? From the beginning, the cards
felt as if they’d always existed. But this is not true.
The conventional history given on most mainstream
Tarot study websites says that Tarot began as Triunfo, a card game popular
among the nobility in fifteenth-century Italy. It involved neither fortunes nor
heresies, though it was informed by esoteric occult knowledge. It did not
become what it is to us now until around the early twentieth century, through
the efforts of the Society of the Golden Dawn, the group of spiritualists that
Crowley and Harris belonged to, who were attempting to codify that esoteric
knowledge. They saw their deck as a tool for educating students in everything
from Egyptian mythology to astrology to kabbalah.
Tarot is thus said to be
an ancient system, but it is more a way of knowing ancient systems than an
ancient system itself. There are now many styles of decks, and our modern
version of the Tarot is only about one hundred years old.
令
In those first days reading the cards, I worked to learn the basics — in particular, the ten-card reading, the Celtic Cross, perhaps the
most common layout. It begins by showing the querent — the person who’s having
the reading done — at the edge of their fate, with cards representing the
querent, the situation, what crosses them, what crowns them, what their
foundation is, their recent past, their near future, their obstacles, allies,
hopes, and final outcome. To draw the cross, you shuffle the deck, cutting it and
either pulling cards from the top or spreading them in a fan, letting the
querent choose their cards, and laying them down in the spread as they are
handed to you.
My deck came with a guidebook of sorts, which
recommended that I quietly hold the cards in my hand and ask the querent for
guidance before drawing them. I remember tentatively closing my eyes and doing
so. It was an uncomfortable thing to do at first, but that probably says more
about who I was at the time than it does about the gesture. Now I find it
consoling.
In the occult, good manners matter, as they do in
life, and perhaps even more so.
A Tarot deck is composed of two kinds of cards, the
Major and Minor Arcana. There are 22 Majors, numbered from 0 (The Fool) to 21
(The World), and they take you step by step along what’s called The Fool’s
Journey, a journey to wholeness with 22 steps. The Fool passes from Innocence,
in the first card, to the mastery represented by The World, which is the last.
These cards typically have more weight in a reading than the Minor Arcana
cards. The Major Arcana can be thought of as the gods; the Minor, as the
mortals.
The Minors is divided into 4 suits: Pentacles,
Swords, Wands, and Cups being the standard types. Pentacles are money,
manifestation, bringing ideas into the world in a physical way, labor for which
you’re paid. Swords are the mind, the intellect, science, and plans. Wands are
the fire of the spirit — creativity, passion for creation, inspiration. Cups
are emotion, depths of the unconscious, and a way to measure sorrow and
pleasure. Each of the suits is numbered 1 through 10, and each has a court of
4: a Page or Princess, a Knight or Prince, a Queen, and a King. There are 56 of
these cards.
You turn the cards face-up as you lay them out, one
by one, and consider the symbolism of each, as well as the fleeting impressions
you get as you hold a card in your hand. Each card acts as a separate scene or
chapter within a larger story, and as you go through the reading, you create a
relationship between them. In that sense, it is, whatever truth it tells you, a
terrific narrative exercise.
The cards all have standard meanings or associations
— destruction, creativity, an affair, a lover, a fair-haired man, a dark-haired
one, moving on, and so on. But there are also worlds within worlds, and
patterns to learn: some suits are hostile to others, all of the cards mean
different things in different positions, and the numbers have their own
meanings too. And there are reversed-card meanings, provided you work with reversed
cards (some readers do, some do not).
The friend who’d bought me the deck was my college
roommate and best friend, Aaron, who, when we got home, asked me for a reading.
I agreed. I placed my hand on the deck and closed my eyes, silently making that
request for both truth and protection, described in the instructions for
reading the cards. When I opened my eyes again, Aaron waited. I shuffled,
fanned the cards out, and told him to use his nondominant hand to reach for the
cards that felt hot.
This was my version of the instructions I remembered
from the card game of my long-lost parapsychologist, Dr. Tanous.
We laid out the cards, and I did my best to interpret
them. The Tetragrammaton appeared.
“Whoa!” Aaron said, without his customary tinge of
irony.
The Tetragrammaton is a drawn symbol that replaces
the name of God for those who believe it cannot be spoken or written in any
language. Rendered in red and black, the card looked dramatic, even forceful.
The Crowley deck is the only one to contain this card. The card has no meaning,
according to the book accompanying the deck, and so it has no meaning within a
reading. And yet it was in the deck, and here in the reading. And it did feel
very much like it had meaning.
This, out of all of it, felt like a trick.
I don’t remember the details of the reading
otherwise. I just remember that at the end Aaron said, “Just for kicks, let’s
do another reading. See what we get.”
“To see if we get the same cards?”
“Yeah,” he said, and smiled.
I shuffled mightily and placed the deck down,
spreading out the cards in a long aisle from which he drew again, before I laid
them out.
Of the ten cards in the reading, seven were the same,
and five of those were in the exact same places on the table, including the Tetragrammaton,
which was starting to feel like the voice of God, if not His name, saying, “Go
no farther down this path.”
“Holy shit,” Aaron said.
I agreed. We put the cards away.
And then, much later, I brought them back out. And
did a reading for myself, for the first time.
The feeling of something coming true, or of something speaking to
you through the cards, is probably the hardest part of reading the Tarot. You
read it because you want contact with something greater than yourself. You have
questions, and you want the cards to answer them. The problem comes when they
do.
Generally, the cards seem most relevant when
describing hidden ambivalences or fears, things you normally hide from yourself
and that emerge in synchronicity with the cards. Psychic powers are not
required. They may even be in the way, or beside the point. Querents are not
required to say anything to you about what they are after in a reading, and can
spend an entire reading, for example, simply nodding as the reader describes
what he or she sees. Frequently, it’s better if the querent says nothing. If
the querent leaves out personal information, the reader can read unimpeded by
assumptions about the other person. Information from a querent creates an
opinion in the reader, which clouds what might otherwise have been a better
reading. This is because the reader is building meaning for the listener —
making available a story in which the querent experiences his own truth. The
real power in the Tarot is in the querent.
This is why, in my experience, you should never read
for someone you’re in love with, if you can help it. You may not be able to
relate the story without your interpretation, based on what you know about them
and what you hope will happen. And they deserve this distance, especially if
you really love them.
When Aaron and I saw those seven cards repeated in
his second reading, it was a shock to us both. I had shuffled the deck
thoroughly, he had picked the cards by hand, the cards were new, so they
weren’t marked in ways that would have identified them — it didn’t seem
possible. Their reappearance —more than a coincidence, like a repeated message — was not just
improbable, if you rely on statistics to guide you; it felt almost like a
snarl. As if whatever it was that I’d naively asked for guidance from a second
time had decided to mock our test even as it met it. When I put the cards away
I was scared by how, when I’d asked them a question, something had answered.
But when I finally took them out again, I was ready to speak again with
whatever had answered me.
With time, I became accustomed to drawing recurring
cards in readings, eventually thinking of them like weather that returned with
the season. I stopped being afraid of the cards that terrify: Three of Swords,
usually the card of a breakup or betrayal; Eight of Cups, which often tells you
to move on; The Tower, the card of an explosive change of state — the powerful
thrown down, the lowly made powerful; Nine of Swords, the card of mental
anguish; Ten of Swords, total defeat. These descriptions are, of course,
approximations. They lack the nuance you’d get in a reading, and much of Tarot
is about nuance.
But I became impatient with the cards, reading too
often, and then disappointed when whatever I thought was going to happen didn’t
happen. And so I put them away after a reading, as I always did, and years went
by. There was perhaps too much nuance, and this tool I’d meant to guide me
often left me confused. When I took the cards out again, I remember I was
surprised to see them, but also uninterested in them. But I kept them.
And then one day I
became a professional Tarot reader.
令
In 1999 I was working as a yoga teacher at a studio in SoHo, in
lower Manhattan. At a staff meeting the owner asked if anyone read the Tarot
and would be interested in reading for clients. I raised my hand. With this
began one of the more interesting ways I’ve ever made money.
In New York State, I learned, fortune-telling is
illegal, a class-B misdemeanor. Per Article 165.35 of the New York Penal Code,
it is legal only if you tell the questioner that the reading is for
entertainment. The owner of the studio, an affable Colombian mystic who seemed
indifferent to mortal laws, pointed this out to me once I volunteered. “Don’t
get us in trouble,” he said. I was incredulous, but when I looked up the law,
it was true. I tried then to think of what to say to clients. “This is just for
fun” seemed not quite the right note. My eventual disclaimer was sarcastic:
“Are you having fun yet? Because the State of New York requires me to tell you
this is an entertainment.”
Disclaimers about entertainment aside, reading for
someone else is a tricky thing. To do so for money is even trickier. I had
agreed to do it in a casual way because I needed extra cash, thinking it would
be fun, but I immediately found myself in too close contact with the lives of
others.
Their pain, their ambition, their lust for power, achievement,
money, or love —these can show up not so much in the querent’s cards as in the
questions they ask you about a reading, or their expressions as you answer. The
mask of the querent drops in their pursuit of an answer much of the time, and
you see them in ways they don’t generally share with others. And if they pay,
you can see in their face that this is not entertainment. They want real answers.
They pay hoping, even believing, it will make the difference between guidance
that is frivolous and guidance that is real. The best you can do, I think, is
stay focused on the cards and not on the person. To let the Tarot cards be
archetypes, impersonal metaphors, intimate experiences of an impersonal kind.
I learned to try to
offer readings as a portrait of the possibilities of the present. And to
receive them that way also.
It would be unethical to describe in any detail the readings I have
done. Luckily, I also can’t remember them, either. Sometimes friends will ask
if I recall a reading I gave them, especially if I predicted something that
came true, and I can’t. I don’t know why. I don’t even remember my own. I
document readings with photos now. I can say that love and money are what most
of my querents wanted to know about, and I think those topics are all that most
of us want to know about. Will I be loved, will the love last, is my lover
cheating? Will I have money, will it last, will I be cheated? Will I get the
new job, the new promotion? Will my book sell? It’s the shadow on every kiss
and every dollar, that it might not be there tomorrow. If there’s a demon
lurking when you read your cards, it is inside the querent when they ask about
love or money. And it is inside you too, as you read.
While training to be a yoga teacher, I learned about
the siddhis — the gifts, roughly translated.
They were an unexpected part of the literature, which said that the practice of
yoga could purify your body such that you’d experience abilities like
telepathy, clairvoyance, levitation. These same texts also warned that such
gifts were obstacles to enlightenment, challenges — because to have them could
make you feel like a god. Even being a yoga teacher could be an obstacle to
enlightenment. Anything, in other words, that suggests to you that you’d have
undue power over others, that you were somehow better than someone else — this
is an obstacle.
It was in this light, then, that I came to view what
I think of as the dark side of fortune-telling. I was not immune to wanting to
know about love and money, and the more people told me how much my readings
helped them, the more I heard from those I read for about how what I5d
read had come true — book deals, new jobs, new loves — and the more I wanted to
know for myself, and to be able to read for myself. This demon is so ordinary
that it is no demon at all. It is the part of you that is so very human.
For all that I wanted to be extraordinary, I was no
different from those I read for. I was sending my first novel out to
publishers, and wanted to know if it would be sold. I was dating a man I felt
seriously about for the first time in five years, and became obsessed with
knowing how the relationship would turn out. Was I really going to sell the
novel? Was the man really over his ex-boyfriend? Where was he the other night
when he didn’t want to come over? I might take the cards out to be reassured,
but midnight, when you suspect your boyfriend of cheating, or of still being in
love with his ex, is, shall we say, a bad time to draw the cards. I acted
badly, I suspect, because of the
cards, becoming more jealous or apprehensive than I might have if I’d only seen
things as they were, if I’d only stayed within the bounds of what we experience
of the world. I’d have false ideas by the time I spoke with the man again,
ideas that had nothing to do with what was happening. My interest, I can see
now, was in whether I could know the answers without asking questions regarding
my own insecurities. Instead of conducting some basic relationship emotional
hygiene — Is this working for you? Is this working for me? — I went to the
cards and returned with a mind full of fictions. If I had good news from the
cards, it made me lazy; bad news, and I couldn’t sleep.
And this, of course, is why you should never read for
yourself. You can’t give yourself the impersonal reading you need. It’s much
like writing an essay or including autobiographical content in fiction — to
succeed, it requires an ability to be coldly impersonal about yourself and your
state, so as not to cloud what is there with what you want to see. I think few
of us know enough about our lives to know our place in them — we can’t see
ourselves as we might a character in a novel, with the same level of detachment
and appraisal. We can’t, in other words, see ourselves as I wanted to that day
when I entered the store and bought my cards. We think this means this, and that
means that, and in the meantime the true meaning is somewhere else, and the
omen lies on the ground, face-down, as good as
mute. And the reader is sitting there
looking at the cards in front of him, trying to read for himself as his life
moves on in ways he can5t see.
If I could, I’d go back in time and tell myself: This is how it
turns out. You, sitting here, paralyzed by fear, alone in your apartment,
reading cards.
When I decided to write this essay, my editor suggested I get a
Tarot reading. I was in Spain at the time, on vacation, and pondered the
difficulties of locating one of the famous Galician witches, but Galicia was
too far away, and few things are as intimidating in Spain as witches that
Spaniards all swear by.
I wrote to my friend Rachel Pollack instead. Rachel
is one of the world’s foremost experts on the Tarot, the author of seventeen
books on the subject, including authoritative texts for the Salvador Dali and
Haindl Tarot decks, and she is the creator of a deck of her own, The Shining Tribe.
She’s also a superb fiction writer. Her novel Unquenchable
Fire is one I admire a great deal, a satire of
magic and suburban America, like Jonathan Franzen’s Freedom but with spells for green lawns. I met her as a colleague when I
taught at Goddard College’s low-residency MFA program for a year, where we
spent weeklong residencies each semester with our students, doing the in-person
part of the semester’s work during the day and hunkering down in the Vermont
woods together for cafeteria lunches. At those lunches, Rachel spoke elegantly
to me about the Tarot as a tool for creative writing — using the Celtic Cross,
for example, as a way to think about fictional characters. The questions of the
reading — what is leaving the querent’s life, what is about to enter, what is
the root of the situation, what is the crown, how do people perceive them, what
do they hope and fear? — these are all good things to ask yourself about any
character you are writing about. But when she drew cards to help shape a
graduation speech she gave, I understood just how differently, how powerfully,
she used the Tarot. The speech used the cards as leaping-off points for
different thoughts, which she then wove into a sense of the present moment, not
the future. She gave the graduating class a collective Tarot reading,
essentially. And they gave her a standing ovation.
What I understood, listening to her, is that the
mirror I wanted, back when I wished to see around corners into the future, was
never possible.
The only mirror to be found in the cards was something that could
show me the possibilities of the present, not the certainties of the future.
The level of mastery Rachel had of Tarot was of another order entirely. She was
an artist and I was a drunk. She could stand and speak through the cards’
symbols in ways that reached past them, bringing out soulful depths and
insights into the self and the world, while I had been addicted to the idea I
might glimpse the lower truth, a literal one, about what happens next.
After returning from our
second residency together, and finding myself in a particularly long episode of
trying to second-guess another of the men at the edge of my life, and whether
or not I should move to California, I got rid of my cards and made the decision
to move without a reading. I told myself I couldn’t have cards again until I
could read in the same spirit as Rachel. If I was going to get a reading for
this essay, I wanted Rachel. So I wrote and asked her if she was game for an
experiment, and she said yes.
令
I proposed to rachel that she read my cards before I finish the
essay. She asked if I wanted to draw my own cards or if she should draw them,
and I decided I would draw them and send them to her.
I have a deck again, a gift from a friend, given to
me honestly. She and I had gone with a group of friends to a restaurant where
the backs of the menus were adorned with various Tarot cards. During dinner, I
did a short reading based on the menu card each of us were handed. She was
sufficiently impressed with what I managed to tell her that she bought me a
deck.
The deck is the Blake Tarot, illustrated with William
Blake’s artwork and redefined by his philosophies. I shuffled and drew three
cards, a very simple reading layout sometimes called The Three Fates, with
cards for Past, Present, and Future.
First card: Ten of Science — also known, in a more
common deck, as Ten of Swords. Second card: Error, or The Devil. Third card:
Stars, or The Star.
It was a “good” reading for a querent to get, I noted
as I looked them over, with the querent rising out of his utter defeat, an
ascension. It was also, I noticed, like the conventional narrative of most
personal essays: an author struggles with his bondage to something he came to
as a result of a defeat in his past, and emerges with a better sense of his
present place in the universe. I didn’t let myself think of it as my future,
not in any way I could rely on. I thought of it as something to aspire to.
I sent these results to Rachel. I told her what I asked, for a
picture of my relationship to the Tarot, and she wrote back after a few days
with this reading:
Reading for Alexander
Chee: His evolving relationship to Tarot
10 of Science (Defeat)
15, Error 17, Stars
Alex drew these cards as a group
rather than with specific questions in mind. And yet, it’s hard not to see them
as a progression, with Defeat and Error representing a kind of dead end, or at
least a limited direction, and Stars as a kind of spiritual and metaphysical
breakthrough that opens up Alex’s perspective to Tarot and maybe larger issues.
10 of Science
These cards are from the William Blake Tarot, and
Blake saw science as the outgrowth of a mechanistic worldview that he believed
was not only wrong but led to misery and oppression. Thus the final numbered
card of the suit shows a scene reminiscent of Laocoon and his sons being
strangled by serpents for having offended the gods. In an overly dramatic way
the card suggests Alex has tried to analyze the Tarot, or study it in a
detached way, which can only lead to “Defeat.”
15, Error
In most decks
this card is called The Devil, and in fact we see a Lucifer-like figure
seemingly wrapping up souls in a kind of gluey web. This reinforces the
limitations suggested in the first card. The error is somehow in the approach
to Tarot, and the attempts perhaps to use it for information or analysis rather
than a spiritual guide. The previous card suggests the error is primarily one
of thinking, so Alex might ask himself just how he has looked at Tarot in his
mind. Remember, however, that “Lucifer” means “Light-Bringer” and he is
connected with the Morning Star, Venus, symbol of hope, and suggested in the
next card. Card 15 is the light of love trapped in darkness, but with the
energy of its own liberation held within it like a seed.
17, Stars
The central figure here emerges from darkness into
light and a wider vision of the wondrous magical world. With an image as
dramatic as the first two cards (this reading, and the Blake Tarot in general,
are not trying to be subtle!) the card shows a great breakthrough for Alex in
his understanding of the Tarot. The figures trapped in Error might be seen as
released into the sky in Stars. Or, Alex’s way of looking at people through the
Tarot becomes transformed. The large open book on the table might be the Tarot,
its mysteries now open to Alex’s greater consciousness. The original name for
card 17, The Star, probably referred to the Morning Star, Venus’s light of love
released from the Error of the previous approach.
Rachel’s reading felt true to me, and as for the third card, that
felt true to what I already hoped for.
令
There are two kinds of people, I think: those who want to know the
future and those who do not. I’ve never met anyone ambivalent about this. I
have been both kinds. For now, I think I know which one is better, but I’m
prepared to change my mind again. It may be I am like that drunk who tells
himself he can handle his alcohol now. But if I told you I could tell the
future, you would laugh at me. And I would laugh at me too.
In 2006, I had a lesson in knowing the future. My
father’s oldest brother, my Uncle Bill, was visiting from Seoul and staying in
New York’s Koreatown at the small but decent hotel where he always stayed in
New York. I went that night to come out to him and give him my first book.
Before this, I had acted as if the entire world could know I was gay except for
him, but this meant my career was hidden from him also. I wanted him to know I
had succeeded, as a writer and as an openly gay man. I didn’t want him to think
I was a failure, and I wanted him to know me as I really was. And as I’d been
doing Korean-language publicity in South Korea and
America, there was now a remote chance that he might read an article
about me. I didn’t want this to be the way he learned about me.
The conversation went well, given that, historically,
Koreans deny that gay people exist. But my uncle was a law professor who’d
dedicated his career to international boundary, was a man of the world, the
first one I knew who could wear tasseled loafers and look elegant, not silly.
And so there we were, in his room, seated on the hotel’s green club chairs,
close to saying good night. It was after dinner, I’d given him the book, and we
were now discussing the possibilities of my having a family as a gay man.
“Don’t you want one of these?” he asked, pointing
with energy at the photos of my siblings’ kids that I’d passed along to him.
I explained to him that I could still have a family
with another man, could still have a family if I was gay. As if to answer that,
Uncle Bill told me this story:
Before he left for graduate school in the United
States, he visited a fortune-teller in Korea. She told him that his younger
brother would die young, and he would take his brother’s children as his own,
as he would father no children himself. He would either not marry or not stay
married, the fortune-teller added.
Here Uncle Bill paused and looked at me. In his
expression was someone braced against his life, betting his whole life against
this fortune coming true. I saw him take the call with news of my father’s car
accident decades ago, saw him marrying late in life, in his forties, then
divorcing.
After my father’s foretold death twenty-seven years
before this night, Uncle Bill, of my father’s entire family, had stayed in
touch with us the most, and though it was not frequent 一 cards at the holidays, a visit every three years 一 it had meant a great deal to us. What would it be like to look at
the phone and think of calling us all those years, afraid even of this, taking
his brother’s children as his own, coming true?
As I hugged him good night, I wanted to stay, to
somehow walk him back through the days of his life and remove the fortune’s
long shadow, to return him to who he was in the moment before he heard his
future, or, to fulfill it all, at the very least to make true that he had
become my second father. Of all the things that hadn’t happened, this was maybe
the most bitter to consider as I said goodbye. And yet I understood. Here, at least,
was a choice to make. A way to feel free, even if that was all you felt.
On the subway home, I remembered the story of my own trip to a
fortuneteller as an infant in Seoul. All she would say, apparently, was “This
one, he has much to do.” If she said anything else, no one remembers. I think
sometimes of asking, but it seems to me now, after my uncle’s story, that you
only think you want to know the future, until you do. It would be like waiting
for a bullet to pace its way to your side across the years, watching as it
approached, knowing when it would hit, and not being able to move away.
Perhaps the only way to escape your fate is not to
know it. Now, when I think of not knowing the future, I think of when, in a
yoga class, my teacher had us begin our practice by doing sun salutations with
our eyes closed, for as long as we could stand it. “What can you trust of what
you can’t see?” he would ask as we moved slowly and then faster, trying not to
fall.
What can you trust of what you can’t see?
Dear Annie
Dillard,
My name is
Alexander Chee, and I’m a senior English major. I’ve taken Fiction 1 with
Phyllis Rose and Advanced Fiction with Kit Reed, and last summer, I studied
with Mary Robison and Toby Olson at the Bennington Writers Workshop. The
stories here are from a creative writing thesis I’m currently writing with
Professor Bill Stowe as my adviser. But the real reason I’m applying to this class
is that whenever I tell people I go to Wesleyan, they ask me if I’ve studied
with you, and I’d like to have something better to say than no.
Thanks for
your time and consideration,
Alexander Chee
In 1989, this was the letter I sent with my application to Annie
Dillard’s literary nonfiction class at Wesleyan University. I was a
last-semester senior, an English major who had failed at being a studio art
major and thus became an English major by default.
As I waited for what I was sure was going to be
rejection, I went to the mall to shop for Christmas presents and walked through
bookstores full of copies of the Annie Dillard boxed edition — Pilgrim
at Tinker Creek, An American Childhood, Holy the Firm — and The Best American Essays 1988, edited, yes, by Annie Dillard. I walked around them as if they were
her somehow and not her books, and left empty-handed.
I didn’t buy them because, if she rejected me, they
would be unbearable to own.
After I got into the class, I learned, at the first
meeting, that buying her books would have been premature. She told us not to
read her work while we were her students.
I’m going to have a big enough
influence on you as it is, she said. You’re going to want to please me just for
being your teacher. So I don’t want you
trying to imitate me. I don5t want you to write like me.
And she paused here. Then she said, I want you to write like you.
Some people looked guilty when she said this. I felt
guilty too. I didn’t know her work. I just knew it had made her famous. I
wished I’d had the sense to want to disobey her. I felt shallow, but I was
there because my father had always said, Whatever it is you want to do, find
the person who does it best, and then see if they will teach you.
I’d already gone through
everyone else at Wesleyan. She was next on my list.
令
I can still hear her say it: Put all your deaths, accidents, and
diseases up front, at the beginning. Where possible. “Where possible” was often
her rejoinder. We were always to keep in mind that it might not be possible to
follow rules or guidelines because of what the writing needed.
The accident at the beginning here is that in the
spring of my sophomore year, I fell asleep in the drawing class of the chair of
the art department and woke to her firm grip on my shoulder. She was an
elegant, imperious woman with dark, short curly hair and a formal but warm
manner, known for her paintings of clouds.
Mr. Chee, she said, tugging me up. I think you should
do this at home.
I felt a wet spot on my cheek and the paper beneath
it. I quickly packed my materials and left.
Before that, she had loved my work and often praised
it to the class. Afterward, I could do nothing right. She began marking
assignments as missing that she’d already passed back to me, as if she were
erasing even the memory of having admired my work. I left them in her mailbox
with her clearly written comments, to prove my case, but it didn’t matter: a
grade of B-minus from her put me below the average needed for the major. I was
shut out.
I spent the summer before my junior year wondering
what to do, which in this case meant becoming a vegan, cycling twenty miles a
day, working for my mother as the night manager of a seafood restaurant we
owned, and getting my weight down to 145 pounds from 165. I turned into a brown
line drawing, eating strawberry Popsicles while I rang up orders of lobsters
and fries for tourists. And then, in the last days of August, a school friend
who lived in the next town over called me at home.
Do you have a typewriter? he asked.
Yes, I said.
Can I borrow it? he asked. I need to type up this
story for Phyllis Rose’s class, to apply. Can I come by and get it this
afternoon?
Sure, I said.
After I hung up the phone, in the four hours before
he arrived, I wrote a story on that typewriter that I can still remember,
partly for how it came out, as I now know very few stories do: quickly and with
confidence. I was an amnesiac about my accomplishments. In high school, I won a
poetry prize from the Geraldine R. Dodge Foundation, and a play of mine was
honored by Maine’s gifted and talented program with a reading by actors from
the Portland Stage Company. But those felt like accidents, in a life next door
to mine. For some reason this first short story satisfied in me the idea that I
could write in a way that those other things had not.
I had made something with some pieces of my life,
rearranged into something else, like an exercise from that drawing class that
combined three life studies into a single fictional tableau. The story was
about a boy who spends the summer riding a bicycle (me). He gets hit by a car
and goes into a coma, where he dreams constantly of his accident until he wakes
(this happened to my dad, but also, the fateful art class). When the boy wakes,
he is visited by a priest who wants to make sure he doesn’t lose his faith (me
with my pastor, after my father’s death).
The writer Lorrie Moore calls the feeling I felt that
day “the consolations of the mask,” where you make a place that doesn’t exist
in your own life for the life your life has no room for, the exiles of your
memory. But I didn’t know this then.
All I could tell in that moment was that I had
finally made an impression on myself. And whatever it was that I did when I was
writing a story, I wanted to do it again.
My friend arrived. I closed the typewriter case and
handed it over. I didn’t tell him what I’d done. Somehow I couldn’t tell anyone
I was doing this. Instead, I went to the post office after he left, a little
guilty, like I was doing something illicit, and submitted the story.
I saw your name on the list, my friend said weeks
later, back at Wesleyan, with something like hurt in his voice.
Congratulations.
When I looked, I saw he wasn’t on the list. It felt
like I’d taken something essential out of the typewriter before I gave it to
him, and wanted to apologize.
I didn’t think I’d gotten in because of what I’d
written.
I went on to get an A in that class, which I didn’t
understand, not even when a classmate announced he’d gotten a B. I didn’t understand
because it didn’t feel as if I knew what I was doing. I did apply and get into
Kit Reed’s advanced fiction class for the next semester — twenty pages of
fiction every other week — and won from her another of those mysterious A’s. I
next applied for and was accepted at the Bennington Writing Seminars, where I
studied with Mary Robison and Toby Olson and met Jane Smiley’s editor at Knopf,
Bobbie Bristol, who offered to read a story of mine and then returned it with a
note that said if I could turn it into a novella, she’d buy it.
I had no idea what a novella was or how to write one,
and the excitement I felt as I read her note turned to confusion and then
sadness.
Great and enviable things were happening for me.
Another student in this situation would have gotten Mary Robison or Kit Reed to
help him understand what a novella was so he could write it, and would have
been published at age twenty-one, but that wasn’t me. I thought I could choose
a destiny. I wanted Jane Smiley’s editor to tell me, Go be a visual artist and
forget about this writing thing, kid. I was someone who didn’t know how to find
the path he was on, the one under his feet.
This, it seems to me, is
why we have teachers.
In my clearest memory of her, it’s spring, and she is walking toward
me, smiling, her lipstick looking neatly cut around her smile. I never ask her
why she’s smiling — for all I know, she’s laughing at me as I stand smoking in
front of the building where we’ll have class. She’s Annie Dillard, and I am her
writing student, a twenty-one-year-old cliche — black clothes, deliberately
mussed hair, cigarettes, dark but poppy music on my Walkman. I’m pretty sure
she thinks I’m funny. She walks to class because she lives a few blocks from
our classroom building in a beautiful house with her husband and her daughter,
and each time I pass it on campus, I feel, like a pulse through the air, the
idea of her there. Years later, when she no longer lives there, and I am
teaching there, I feel the lack of it.
The dark green trees behind her sharpen her outline.
She is dressed in pale colors, pearls at her neck and ears. She5s
tall, athletic, vigorous. Her skin glows. She holds out her hand.
Chee, she says, give me a drag off that.
She calls us all by our last name.
She lets the smoke curl out a little and then exhales
brusquely. Thanks, she says, and hands it back, and she smiles again and walks
inside.
Lipstick crowns the golden Marlboro filter.
I soon know this means there’s five minutes until
class starts. As I stub the cigarette out, I think of the people who’d save the
filters. At least one of them. I feel virtuous as I kick it into the gutter.
In that first class, she wore the pearls, and a tab
collar peeped over her sweater, but she looked as if she would punch you if you
didn’t behave. She walked with a cowgirl’s stride into the classroom, and from
her bag withdrew her legal pad covered in notes, a thermos of coffee, and a bag
of Brach’s singly wrapped caramels, and then sat down. She undid the top of the
thermos with a swift twist, poured coffee into the cup that was also the
thermos top, and sipped at it as she gave us a big smile and looked around the
room.
Hi, she said, sort of through the smile. One hundred thirty of you applied, and I took thirteen
of you.
A shadowy crowd of the faceless rejected formed
around us briefly. A feeling of terror at the near miss came and then passed.
No visitors, she said. Under no conditions. I don’t
care who it is.
The class had a rhythm to it, dictated by how she had
quit smoking to please her new husband. We were long-distance, she told me at
one of our longer smoke breaks. We met at a conference. He didn’t know what a
smoker I was until we shacked up. She laughed at this, as at a prank.
At the beginning of class she would unpack the long, thin
thermos of coffee and the bag of Brach’s singly wrapped caramels — the ones
with the white centers. She would set down her legal pad covered in notes and
pour the coffee, which she would drink as she unwrapped the caramels and ate
them. A small pile of plastic wrappers grew by her left hand on the desk. The
wrappers would flutter a little as she whipped the pages of her legal pad back
and forth, and spoke in epigrams about writing that often led to short lectures
but were sometimes lists: Don’t ever use the word “soul,” if possible. Never
quote dialogue you can summarize. Avoid describing crowd scenes, especially
party scenes.
She began almost drowsily, but soon went at a
pell-mell pace. Not frantic, but operatic. Then she might pause, check her
notes in a brief silence, and launch in another direction as we finished making
our notes and the sound of our writing died down.
Each week we had to turn in a seven-page,
triple-spaced draft in response to that week’s assignment.
Triple-spaced? we asked in the first class, unsure,
as this had never been asked of us.
I need the room to scribble notes in between your
sentences, she said.
The silence in the room was the sound of our minds
turning this over. Surely there wouldn’t be that much to say?
But she was already on her feet at the chalkboard,
writing out a directory of copyediting marks: Stet is Latin and means let it stand . . . When I draw a line through
something and it comes up with this little pigtail on it, that means get rid of
it.
There was that much to say. Each week we turned in
our assignments on Tuesday, and by Thursday’s class we had them back again, the
spaces between the triple-spaced lines and also the margins filled with her
penciled notes. Sometimes you write amazing sentences, she wrote to me, and
sometimes it’s amazing you can write a sentence. She had drawn arrows pointing
toward the amazing sentence and the disappointing one. Getting pages back from
her was like getting to the dance floor and seeing your favorite black shirt
under the nightclub’s black light, all the hair and dust that was always there
but invisible to you, now visible.
In her class, I learned that while I had spoken
English all my life, I actually knew very little about it. English was born
from Low German, a language that was good for categorization, and had filled
itself in with Greek, Latin, and Anglo-Saxon words, and was now in the process
of eating things from Asian languages. Latinates were polysyllabic, and
Anglo-Saxon words were short, with perhaps two syllables at best. A good writer
made use of both to vary sentence rhythms.
Very quickly, she identified what she called “bizarre
grammatical structures” inside my writing. From the things Annie circled in my
drafts, it was clear one answer to my problem was, in a sense, where I was
from,
Maine. From my mom’s family, I’d gotten the
gift for the telling detail — Your Uncle Charles is so
cheap he wouldn’t buy himself two hamburgers if he was hungry — but also a voice cluttered by the passive voice, which is in
common use in that part of the world — I was writing to ask if
you were interested — a way of speaking that
blunted all aggression, all direct inquiry, and certainly all description. The
degraded syntax of the Scottish settlers forced to migrate to Maine by their
British ruler, using indirect speech as they went and then after they stayed.
Add to that the museum of cliches residing in my unconscious.
I felt like a
child from a lost colony of Scotland who’d taught himself English by watching
Gene Kelly films.
The passive voice in particular was a crisis. “Was” told you only
that something existed. This was not enough. And on that topic, I remember one
of Annie’s fugues almost exactly:
You want vivid writing. How do we get vivid writing? Verbs, first.
Precise verbs. All of the action on the page, everything that happens, happens
in the verbs. The passive voice needs gerunds to make anything happen. But too
many gerunds together on the page makes for tinnitus: running, sitting,
speaking, laughing, inginginginging. No. Don’t do it. The verbs tell a reader
whether something happened once or continually, what is in motion, what is at
rest. Gerunds are lazy, you don’t have to make a decision and soon, everything
is happening at the same time, pell-mell, chaos. Don’t do that. Also, bad verb
choices mean adverbs. More often than not, you don’t need them. Did he run
quickly or did he sprint? Did he walk slowly or did he stroll or saunter?
The chaos by now
was with her legal pad and the wrappers, a storm on the desk, building to a
crescendo fueled by the sugar and caffeine. I remember in this case a pause,
her looking off into the middle distance, and then back at her pad, as she
said, I mean, just what exactly is going on inside your piece?
If fiction
provided the consolations of the mask, nonfiction provided, per Annie’s idea of
it, the sensibility underneath the mask, irreplaceable and potentially of great
value. The literary essay, as she saw it, was a moral exercise that involved
direct engagement with the unknown, whether it was a foreign civilization or
your mind, and what mattered in this was you.
You are the only one of
you, she said. Your unique perspective, at this time, in our age, whether it5s
on Tunis or the trees outside your window, is what matters. Don’t worry about
being original, she said dismissively. Yes, everything’s been written, but
also, the thing you want to write, before you wrote it, was impossible to
write. Otherwise it would already exist. Your writing it makes it possible.
Narrative writing sets down details in an order that evokes the
writer’s experience for the reader, she announced. This seemed obvious but also
radical — no one had ever said it so plainly to us. She spoke often of “the
job.” If you’re doing your job, the reader feels what you felt. You don’t have
to tell the reader how to feel. No one likes to be told how to feel about
something. And if you doubt that, just go ahead. Try and tell someone how to
feel.
We were to avoid emotional language. The line goes
gray when you do that, she said. Don’t tell the reader that someone was happy
or sad. When you do that, the reader has nothing to see. She isn’t angry, Annie
said. She throws his clothes out the window. Be specific.
In the cutting and cutting and the move this here,
put that at the beginning, this belongs on page six, I learned that the first
three pages of a draft are usually where you clear your throat, that most
times, the place your draft begins is around page four. That if the beginning
isn’t there, sometimes it’s at the end, that you’ve spent the whole time
getting to your beginning, and that if you switch the first and last pages you
might have a better result than if you leave them where they were.
One afternoon, at her direction, we brought in paper,
scissors, and tape, and several drafts of an essay, one that we struggled with
over many versions.
Now cut out only the best sentences, she said, and
tape them on a blank page. And when you have that, write in around them, she
said. Fill in what’s missing and make it reach for the best of what you’ve
written thus far.
I watched as the sentences that didn’t matter fell
away.
You might think that your voice as a writer would
emerge naturally, all on its own, with no help whatsoever, but you’d be wrong.
What I saw on the page was that the voice is in fact trapped, nervous, lazy.
Even, and in my case most especially, amnesiac. And that it has to be cut free.
After the lecture on verbs, we counted the verbs on
the page, circled them, tallied the count for each page to the side, and averaged
them. Can you increase the average number of verbs per page? she asked. I got
this exercise from Samuel Johnson, she told us, who believed in a lively page
and used to count his verbs. Now look at them. Have you used the right verbs?
Is that the precise verb for that precise thing? Remember that adverbs are a
sign that you’ve used the wrong verb. Verbs control when something is happening
in the mind of the reader. Think carefully — when did this happen in relation
to that? And is that how you’ve described it?
I stared comprehendingly at the circles on my page,
and the bad choices surrounding them and inside them.
You can invent the details that don’t matter, she
said. At the edges. You cannot invent the details that matter.
I remember clearly, in the details that matter to
this, going to the campus center on a Thursday morning before class in the
middle of that spring to pick up my manuscript from campus mail. This
particular essay I’d written with more intensity and passion than anything I’d
tried to do thus far. I felt I finally understood what I was doing — how I
could make choices that made the work better or worse, line by line. After over
a year of feeling lost, this new feeling was like when your foot finds ground
in dark water. Here, you think. Here I can push.
I opened the envelope. Inside was the manuscript,
tattooed by sentences in the spaces between the lines, many more than usual. I
read them all carefully, turning the pages around to follow the writing to the
back page, where I found, at the end, this postscript: I was up all night
thinking about this.
The thought that I’d kept her up all night with
something I wrote, that it mattered enough, held my attention. Okay, I remember
telling myself, if you can keep her up all night with something you wrote, you
might actually be able to do this.
I had resented the idea of being talented. I couldn’t
respect it; in my experience, no one else did. Being called talented at school
had only made me a target for ridicule. I wanted to work. Work, I could honor.
Annie felt the same.
Talent isn’t enough, she had told us. Writing is
work. Anyone can do this, anyone can learn to do this. It’s not rocket science;
it’s habits of mind and habits of work. I started with people much more
talented than me, she said, and they’re dead or in jail or not writing. The
difference between me and them is that I’m writing.
Talent might give you
nothing. Without work, talent is only talent — promise, not product. I wanted
to learn how to go from being the accident- at-the-beginning to being a writer,
and I learned that from her.
By the time I was done studying with Annie, I wanted to be her.
I wanted a boxed set of my books from HarperCollins,
a handsome professor husband, a daughter, a house the college would provide, teaching
one class a year and writing during the remainder. I even wanted the beat- up
Saab and the houses on Cape Cod. From where I stood, which was in her house on
campus during a barbecue at the end of the semester, it looked like the best
possible life a writer could have. I was a senior, aware that graduation meant
the annihilation of my entire sense of life and reality. Here, as I balanced a
paper plate stained by the burger I’d just eaten — I had given up on being a
vegan, it should be said — here was a clear goal.
If I’ve done my job, she said in the last class, you
won’t be happy with anything you write for the next ten years. It’s not because
you won’t be writing well, but because I’ve raised your standards for yourself.
Don’t compare yourselves to each other. Compare yourselves to Colette, or Henry
James, or Edith Wharton. Compare yourselves to the classics. Shoot there.
She paused. This was another of her fugue states. And
then she smiled. We all knew she was right.
Go up to the place in the bookstore where your books
will go, she said. Walk right up and find your place on the shelf. Put your
finger there, and then go every time.
In class, the idea seemed ridiculous. But at some
point after the class ended, I did it. I walked up to the shelf. Chabon,
Cheever. I put my finger between them and made a space. Soon, I did it every
time I went to a bookstore.
Years later, I
tell my own students to do it. As Thoreau, someone Annie admired very much,
once wrote, “In the long run, we only ever hit what we aim at.” She was
pointing us there.
What I remember first is our hands, raised in the air, waving and
punching like sea grass in a tide, the procession moving slowly for the AIDS-
and ARC-impaired, some of them in wheelchairs. At the beginning of the march,
down by City Hall, our police liaison was thrown to the street and handcuffed
as he tried to identify himself to one of the cops. He had stepped off the
sidewalk, where we were confined, into the street, where helmeted motorcycle
cops raced in figure eights and ellipses, in formation. Later, we will listen
to him tell us about how the police refused to give him water to take his AZT,
and taunted him with reports that some of us had been shot. But for now, he
vanishes behind a cloud of riot shields.
We keep moving, eager not to have the march called
off, as it is our bluff: at the end of it, we plan to block traffic to protest government
inaction in the face of the AIDS epidemic. It is October 6, 1989. A cold, gray
San Francisco day, the kind that replicates the mood of a flu, hot and cold,
sweaty and chilled. The sun hides. To the bystanders, I think we must look like
any theatergoers out for early tickets, except for the crowd of policemen in
armor following us, all of them wearing latex gloves.
They confine us to the curb nearly the entire way,
making sure we obey the stoplights and let the Friday tourist traffic through.
We chant, though fairly quietly, chastened by the early arrest, the weather,
and the flood of police: our count gives them two cops for every protester.
When we reach the Mint, we throw pennies painted red
over the sides of the fence: blood money was the idea, and the very innocence
of the gesture stings at me. I wonder if we are deranged, to be meeting these
police with arts and crafts. “Spend our taxes back on us!” yells a marcher next
to me, as if he suddenly remembers his anger.
At the Castro at last, the traffic makes a break in
the police line like a cut vein, and we spill out across the intersection into
a circle, linking arms and cutting off all four directions of traffic. Now the
chanting is sure and strong. “What do we want? Health care! When do we want it?
Now!” And the urgency of tone builds as the police whistle and gun their
engines, blaring through their horns that we must clear the intersection or
face arrest. In the back of the circle, away from the cops, we begin sitting
down. The protestors cannot see this yet, but a group of motorcycle cops sheers
off, headed to the side streets to make their way around to the back, an
ancient strategy. At the corner of Eighteenth and Castro, another crowd of
people billows out from the subway and finds it cannot cross the street. Some
of them recognize friends in our group and wave as they sit down also. It is
dusk, rush hour now, and it occurs to me that that corner of the sidewalk will
get very crowded.
The police round us up onto two corners, with the
exception of the sitting group, whom they start to haul off. Batons are out,
extended at arm’s length, batting hands to make them release, or barring our
exit onto the street. When I try to get through the police, one of them tells
me martial law has been declared. “Doesn’t the president declare that?” I ask.
He says nothing else, looking down, perhaps ashamed to be caught in a lie.
Behind us, another group of subway travelers arrives to find they are now
included with the demonstrators. Since I can’t leave, I climb up onto a
newspaper box, balanced against a lamp pole, just in time to see the last of
the protesters taken from the middle of the street.
The riot police are marching up and down the street
in twos. It’s comical, even pathetic. They are trying to look strong. They
begin to let traffic through. But there is another group prepared to replace
them, and those people run in and sit down in the street, arms locked. A man on
a motorcycle finds himself too close to a policeman, who whirls on him, whistle
blowing, and he is pulled from the bike by two others. The first kicks the bike
to the side. The biker bows his head slightly as he is thrown to his knees, and
then doubles over as the blows rain down, first fists and then a baton scything
through the air. “What are the charges?” a woman nearby yells. The crowd picks
up the chant. “What are the charges, what are the charges, what are the
charges!” She is small-boned, her hair woolly and red, and it rises into the
air where it is easy for the policeman to grab, and he turns from the beating,
pulls her hair, and throws her, face-first, to the ground.
Everyone is running now, and everywhere batons rise.
The screams lift out of the street, and in restaurants up and down the block
doors are locked and the diners are informed, You cannot leave, not right now,
sorry for the disturbance. On top of my newspaper box, the air feels very
still, but I am watching a boy I know walking backwards, his hands in the air,
almost crossed, as people run for the curb and the V formation of police
approaching them breaks as they charge. The point man swings and his baton
glances off my friend’s forearm to strike his forehead. My friend crumples, his
face already bloody, falling on the sidewalk he was trying to reach. The
policeman responsible keeps moving on, and the two coming from behind kick a
newspaper box on top of my friend’s legs, their legs rising slowly and in
unison, like awful showgirls.
I jump down from my box. I am afraid he will be
trampled. He is unconscious and not in view of the panicked crowd. I go to his
side and find someone already there, pushing the box off him. I bend down and
say his name softly. Mike, I say. His eyes open, and he is already crying. This
is his first police riot, mine too. The blood is always heavy on any head
wound, I say, remembering something random as I try to calm him. And I tear off
a piece of my T-shirt to press against his head.
People surround us, and soon a medic appears. I
follow them as they take my friend to the ambulance. “Are you with him?” they
ask me, and I say yes, because it is the best thing for me to do. “Put your
hand on the ambulance,” they tell me, “so the police won’t arrest you,” and I
do.
I stand there, my hand on the ambulance, and a
television news crew arrives and asks me to describe what I’ve seen. As I tell
the story, I keep my hand on the ambulance the entire time. After they leave, I
think about how, up to now, I have thought that I lived in a different country
from this. But this is the country I live in, I tell myself, feeling the metal
against my fingers.
This is the country I live in.
HAIR
The year is 1990. The place is San Francisco, the Castro. It is Halloween
night. I am in my friend John5s bathroom, alone in front of the
mirror, wearing a black turtleneck and leggings. My face glows back at me from
the light of twelve 100-watt bulbs.
In high school I learned to do makeup for theater. I
did fake mustaches and eyelashes then, bruises, wounds, tattoos. I remember
always being tempted then to do what I have just done now, and always stopping,
always thinking I would do it later.
This is that day.
My face, in the makeup I have just applied, is a
success. My high cheekbones, large slanting eyes, wide mouth, small chin, and
rounded jaw have been restrung in base, powder, eyeliner, lipstick, eyebrow
pencil. With these tools I have built another face on top of my own,
unrecognizable, and yet I am already adjusting to it; somehow I have always
known how to put this face together. My hands do not shake, but move with the
slow assurance of routine.
I am smiling.
I pick up the black eyeliner pencil and go back to
the outer corners of my eyes, drawing slashes there, and, licking the edges of
my fingers, I pull the lines out into sharp black points — the wings of crows,
not their feet.
I have nine moles on my face, all obscured by base
and powder. I choose one on my upper lip, to the right, where everyone inserts
a beauty mark. I have one already, and it feels like a prophecy. I dot it with
the pencil.
I pick up the lipstick and open my mouth in an O. I
have always loved unscrewing lipsticks, and as the shining nub appears I feel a
charge. I apply the color, Mauve Frost, then reapply it, and with that, my face
shimmers — a white sky, the mole a black planet, the eyes its ringed big
sisters. I press my lips down against each other and feel the color spread
anywhere it hasn’t gone yet.
The wig is shoulder-length blond hair, artificial 一 Dynel doll hair, like Barbie’s, which is why I choose it. The cap
shows how cheap the wig is, so I cut a headband out of a T-shirt sleeve and
make it into a fall.
The wig I put on last. Without it, you can see my
man’s hairline, receding faintly into a widow’s peak. You can see my dark hair,
you can tell I’m not a blond woman or a white one, or even a woman. It is a
Valkyrie’s headpiece, and I gel it to hold it in place. The static it generates
pulls the hairs out into the air one by one. In an hour I will have a faint
halo of frizz. Blue sparks will fly from me when I touch people.
John knocks on the door. “Girl!” he says through the
door. “Aren’t you ready yet?” He is already finished, dressed in a sweater and
black miniskirt, his black banged wig tied up with a pink bow. He has
highlighted his cheekbones with rouge, which I forgo. He is wearing high heels;
I have on combat boots. I decided to wear sensible shoes, but John wears
fuck-me pumps, the heels three inches high. This is my first time. It is
Halloween tonight in the Castro and we are both trying to pass, to be “real,”
only we are imitating very different women.
What kind of girl am I? With the wig in place, I
understand that it is possible I am not just in drag as a girl, but as a white
girl. Or as someone trying to pass as a white girl.
“Come in!” I yell back. John appears over my shoulder
in the mirror, a cheerleader gone wrong, the girl who sits on the back of the
rebel’s motorcycle. His brows rise all the way up.
“Jesus Mother of God,” he says. “Girl, you’re
beautiful. I don’t believe it.”
“Believe it,” I say, looking into his eyes.
I tilt my head back and carefully toss my hair over
my right shoulder in the way I have seen my younger sister do. I realize I know
one more thing about her than I did before 一 what it feels like to do this and why you would. It’s like your own
little thunderclap.
“Scared of you,” John says. “You’re flawless.”
“So are you,” I say. “Where’s Fred?” Fred is my
newest boyfriend, and I have been unsure if I should do this with him, but here
we are.
“Are you okay?” Fred asks, as if something has gone
wrong in the bathroom. “Oh, my God, you are beautiful.” He steps into the
doorway, dazed. He still looks like himself, a skinny white boy with big ears
and long eyelashes, his dark hair all of an inch long. He hasn’t gotten dressed
yet.
He is really spellbound, though, in a way he hasn’t
been before this. I have never had this effect on a man, never transfixed him
so thoroughly, and I wonder what I might be able to make him do now that I
could not before. “Honey,” he says, his voice full of wonder. He walks closer,
slowly, his head hung, looking up at me. I feel my smile rise from somewhere
old in me, maybe older than me; I know this scene, I have seen this scene a
thousand times and never thought I would be in it. This is the scene where the
beautiful girl receives her man’s adoration, and I am that girl.
In this moment, the confusion of my whole life has
receded. No one will ask me if I am white or Asian. No one will ask me if I am
a man or a woman. No one will ask me why I love men. For a moment, I want Fred
to stay a man all night. There is nothing brave in this: any man and woman can
walk together, in love and unharassed in this country, in this world — and for
a moment, I just want to be his overly made-up girlfriend all night. I want him
to be my quiet, strong man. I want to hold his hand all night and have it be
only that; not political, not dangerous, just that. I want the ancient
reassurances legislated for by centuries by mobs.
He puts his arms around me and I tip my head back.
“Wow,” he says. “Even up close.”
“Ever kissed a girl?” I ask.
“No,” he says, and laughs.
“Now’s your chance,” I
say, and he leans in, kissing me slowly through his smile.
MY COUNTRY
I am half white, half Korean, or, to be
more specific, Scotch-Irish, Irish, Welsh, Korean, Chinese, Mongolian. It has
been a regular topic all my life, this question of what I am. People will even
tell me, like my first San Francisco hairdresser.
“Girl, you are
mixed, aren’t you? But you can pass,” he said, as if this was a good thing. He
said this as he scrutinized me in the mirror, looking at me as if I had come in
wearing a disguise.
“Pass as what?”
I asked.
“White. You look
white.”
When people use
the word “passing” in talking about race, they only ever mean one thing, but I
still make them say it. He told me he was Filipino.
“You could be one of us，” he said. “But you’re not.”
Yes. I could be, but I am not. I am used to this
feeling.
As a child in Korea，living in my grandfather’s house，I
was not to play in the street by myself: Amerasian children had no rights there
generally，as they usually didn’t know who their father was，and they could be
bought and sold as domestic help or as prostitutes，or both. No one would check
to see if I was any different from the others.
“One day everyone will look like you，” people say to
me all the time. I am a citizen of a nation that has only ever existed in the
future，a nation where nationalism dies of confusion. I cringe whenever someone
tells me I am a “fine mix，” that it “worked well.” What if it hadn’t?
After I read Eduardo Galeano’s stories in Memory
of Fire, I mostly remember the mulatto ex-slaves
in Haiti，obliterated when the French recaptured the island，the mestiza
Argentinean courtesans — hated both by the white women for daring to put on
wigs as fine as theirs， and by the Chilote
slaves，who think the courtesans put on airs when they do so. Galeano’s trilogy
is supposed to be a lyric history of the Americas，but it read more like a
history of racial mixing.
I found in it a pattern for the history of
half-breeds hidden in every culture: historically， we are
allowed neither the privileges of the ruling class nor the community of those
who are ruled. To each side that disowns us，we represent everything the other
does not have. We survive only if we are valued， and we are
valued only for strength， or beauty， sometimes for intelligence or cunning. As I read those stories of
who survives and who does not， I know that I have
survived in all of these ways and that these are the only ways I have survived
so far.
This beauty I find when I put on drag， then: it is made up of these talismans of power， a balancing act of the self-hatreds of at least two cultures， an act I’ve engaged in my whole life， here on the
fulcrum I make of my face. That night， I find I
want this beauty to last because it seems more powerful than any beauty I’ve
had before. Being pretty like this is stronger than any drug I’ve ever tried.
But in my blond hair，I ask myself: Are you really
passing? Or is it just the dark， the night， people seeing what they want to see?
And what exactly are you passing as? And is that what
we are really doing here?
Each time I pass that night, it is a victory over these doubts, a
hit off the pipe. This hair is all mermaid5s gold, and like anyone
in a fairy tale I want it to be real when I wake up.
ANGELS
John and I are patient as we make Fred up. His eyelids flutter as we
try to line and shadow them. He talks while we try to put on his lipstick. He
feels this will liberate him, and tells us, repeats, how much he would never
have done this before. I realize he means before me.
“Close your eyes,” I tell him. He closes them. I feel
like his big sister. I dust the puffball with translucent powder and hold it in
front of his face. I take a big breath and blow it toward him. A cloud
surrounds him and settles lightly across his skin. The sheen of the base is
gone, replaced by powder smoothness. He giggles.
John pulls the wig down from behind him and twists it
into place. He comes around beside me and we look at Fred carefully for fixable
flaws. There are none. Fred opens his eyes. “Well?”
“Definitely the smart sister. Kate Jackson,” John
says, and turns toward me, smiling. “I5m the pretty one, the femmy
one. Farrah. Which one are you, girl?”
I shake my head and pull the lapels of my leather
trench coat. I don’t feel like any of Charlie’s Angels and I know I don’t look
like one. I look more like a lost member of the Faster,
Pussycat! Kill! Kill! gang. Like if Tura Satana
had a child with the blond sidekick. Or just took her hair out for a ride one
day.
“You’re the mean sister,” John says with a laugh.
“The one that makes you cry and breaks all your dolls.”
Outside John’s apartment, Eighteenth Street is full
of cars, their headlights like footlights for the sidewalk stage in the early
night. I can see my hair flashing around me in the dark as it catches the light.
Doing drag on Halloween night in the Castro is an amateur but high-level
competitive sport. Participating means doing drag in front of people who do
drag on just about every other day of the year, and some of these people are my
friends. I am most nervous at the thought of seeing them. I want to measure up.
According to the paper the next day, 400,000 people
will come into the Castro tonight to see us. They will all try to drive down
this street, and many will succeed. Some will have baseball bats, beer bottles,
guns. Some of them hate drag queens, trans women, gender queers. They will tell
you they want their girls to be girls. If they pick you up and find out the
truth, they will beat and maybe kill you. Being good at a blow job is a
survival skill for some of my friends for this very reason — though men are
unpredictable at best.
“Most men, when they find out you have a dick, well,
hon, they roll right over.” This is something a drag-queen friend tells me
early on in my life here. “Turns out, their whole lives all they ever wanted
was to get fucked, and they never had the nerve to ask for it.”
I think about this a lot. I find I think about it
right now, on the street, in my new look.
John, Fred, and I walk out in front of the stopped
cars. They are full of people I will never see again. John swivels on his
heels, pivoting as he walks, smiling and waving. He knows he is why they are
here from the suburbs, that he is what they have come to see. I smile at a boy
behind a steering wheel who catches my eye. He honks and yells, all excitement.
I twirl my hair and keep walking, strutting. In the second grade, the boys
would stop me in the hall to tell me I walked like a girl, my hips switching,
and as I cross this street and feel the cars full of people watching me, for
the first time I really let myself walk as I have always felt my hips wanted
to. I have always walked this way, but I have never walked this way like this.
The yelling continues from the car, and the boy’s
friends lean out the window, shouting for me. John is laughing. “Shit, girl,
you better be careful. I’m going to keep my eye on you.” Fred is walking
quietly ahead of us. From behind, in his camouflage jacket, he looks like a man
with long hair. His legs move from his thin hips in straight lines, he bobs as
he steps, and the wig hair bounces gently at his shoulders. He has always
walked like this also, I can see this, and here is a difference between us. I
don’t want him to be hurt tonight, however that happens — either for not being
enough of a girl or for being too much, not enough of a boy.
The catcalls from the cars make me feel strong at
first. Isn’t beauty strong? I’d always thought beauty was strength, and so I
wanted to be beautiful. Those cheers on the street are like a weightlifter’s
bench-press record. The blond hair is like a flag, and all around me in the
night are teams. But with each shout I am more aware of the edge, how the
excitement could turn into violence, blood, bruises, death.
We arrive at Cafe Flore, a few blocks from John’s apartment.
We run into Danny Nicoletta, a photographer friend. He sees us but does not
recognize me. I see him every day at this cafe; I have posed for him on other
occasions. He has no idea who I am. I wave at him, and as he looks at me, I
feel him examine the frosted blond thing in front of him. I toss my hair. I
already love the way this feels, to punctuate arrivals, announcements, a change
of mood with your hair.
“Hi, Danny,” I say finally.
He screams.
“Oh, my God, you look exactly like this girl who used
to babysit for me,” he says. He takes out his camera and snaps photos of me in
the middle of the crowded cafe, and the flash is like a little kiss each time
it hits my retinas.
We leave the cafe and I move through the Halloween
night, glowing, as if all of the headlights and flashes have been stored inside
me. I pause to peer into store windows, to catch a glimpse of myself. I stop to
let people take my picture, and wave if they yell. I dance with friends to
music playing from the tower of speakers by a stage set up outside the cafe. A
parade of what look to be heavily muscled prom queens in glistening gowns and
baubles pours out into the street from one of the gyms nearby. They glow
beneath the stage lights, their shoulders and chests shaved smooth, their
pectorals suitable for cleavage. They titter and coo at the people lining the
streets, affecting the manner of easily shocked women, or they strut, waving
the wave of queens. As they come by, they appraise us with a glance and then
move on.
This power I feel
tonight, I understand now — this is what it means when we say “queen.”
GIRL
My fascination with makeup started young. I
remember the first time I wore lipstick in public. I was seven, eight years old
at the time, with my mother at the Jordan Marsh makeup counter at the Maine
Mall in South Portland.
We were Christmas shopping, I think — it was winter, at least — and
she was there trying on samples.
My mother is a beauty, from a family of Maine farmers
who are almost all tall, long-waisted, thin, and pretty, the men and the women.
Her eyes are Atlantic Ocean blue. She has a pragmatic streak, from being a
farmer’s daughter, that typically rules her, but she also loves fashion and
glamour. When she was younger, she wore simple but chic clothes she often
accessorized with cocktail rings, knee-high black leather boots, dark
sunglasses with white frames.
I kept a secret from my mom, or at least I thought I
did: I would go into her bathroom and try on her makeup, looking at myself in
the mirror. I spent hours in front of that mirror, rearranging my facial
expressions — my face at rest looked unresolved to me, in between one thing and
another. I would sometimes stare at my face and imagine it was either more
white or more Asian. But makeup I understood; I had watched the change that
came over my mother when she put on makeup, and I wanted that for myself. So
while she was busy at the makeup counter, I reached up for one of the
lipsticks, applied it, and then turned to her with a smile.
I thought it would surprise her, make her happy. I am
sure the reddish orange color looked clownish, even frightening, on my little
face.
“Alexander” was all she said, stepping off the chair
at the Clinique counter and sweeping me up. She pulled my ski mask over my head
and led me out of the department store to the car, like I had stolen something.
We drove home in silence, and once there, she washed the lipstick off my face
and warned me to never do that again.
She was angry, upset, she felt betrayed by me. There
was a line, and I had thought I could go back and forth across it, but it
seemed I could not.
Until I could. Until I did.
I was not just mistaken for a member of other races,
as a child. I was also often mistaken for a girl. What a pretty little girl you
have, people used to say to my mother at the grocery store when I was six,
seven, eight. She had let my hair grow long.
I’m a boy, I would say each time. And they would turn
red, or stammer an apology, or say, His hair is so long, and I would feel as if
I had done something wrong, or she had.
I have been trying to convince people for so long
that I am a real boy, it is a relief to stop, to run in the other direction.
Before Halloween night, I thought I knew some things
about being a woman. I5d had women teachers and read women writers;
women were my best friends growing up. But that night was a glimpse into a
universe beside my own. Drag is its own world of experience — a theater of
being female more than a reality. It isn’t like being trans, either. It isn’t,
the more I think about it, like anything except what it is: costumes, illusion,
a spell you cast on others and on yourself.
But girl, girl is something else.
My friends in San Francisco at this time, we all call
each other “girl,” except for the ones who think they are too butch for such
nellying, though we call them “girl” maybe most of all. My women friends call
each other “girl” too, and they say it sometimes like they are a little
surprised at how much they like it. This, for me, began in meetings for ACT UP
and Queer Nation, a little word that moved in on us all back then. When we say
it, the word is like a stone we pass one to the other: the stone thrown at all
of us. And the more we catch it and pass it, it seems the less it can hurt us,
the more we know who our new family is now. Who knows us, and who doesn’t. It
is something like a bullet turned into something like a badge of pride.
Later that night we go to Club Uranus. John and Fred
have removed their wigs and makeup. I have decided not to. Fred was uncomfortable
— a wig is hot — and John wanted to get laid by a man as a man. I wasn’t ready to let go. As we walked there, we passed
heterosexual couples on the street. I walked with Fred, holding his arm, and
noted the passing men who treated me like a woman — and the women who did also.
Only one person let on that he saw through me, a man at a stoplight who leaned
out his car window to shout, “Hey, Lola, come back here, baby! I love you!”
My friend Darren is at the club, a thin blond boy
done up as Marie Antoinette, in hair nearly a foot tall and a professional
costume rental dress, hoopskirts and all. On his feet, combat boots also. He
raises his skirts periodically to show he is wearing nothing underneath.
Soon I am on the go-go stage by the bar. On my back,
riding me, is a skinny white boy in a thong made out of duct tape, his body
shaved. We are both sweating, the lights a crown of wet bright heat. The music
is loud and very fast, and I roll my head like a lion, whipping the wig around
for the cool air this lets in. People squeeze by the stage, alternately staring
at and ignoring us.
I see very little, but I soon spot Fred, who raises
his hand and gives me a little wave from where he is standing. I want to tell
him I know the boy on my back and that it isn’t anything he needs to worry
about, but he seems to understand this. I wonder if Fred is jealous, but I tell
myself he is not, that he knew what he was getting into with me — when we met,
he mentioned the other stages he had seen me on around town. Tonight is one of
those nights when I am growing, changing quickly, without warning, into new
shapes and configurations, and I don’t know where this all goes.
In that moment, I feel
more at home than I ever have, not in San Francisco, not on earth, but in myself.
I am on the other side of something and I don’t know what it is. I wait to find
out.
REAL
I am proud for years of the way I looked real that night. I remember
the men who thought I was a real woman, the straight guys in the cars whooping
at me and their expressions when I said, “Thanks, guys,” my voice my voice, and
the change that rippled over their faces.
You wanted me, I wanted to say. You might still want
me.
Real is good. Real is what you want. No one does drag
to be a real woman, though. Drag is not the same as that. Drag knows it is
different. But if you can pass as real, when it comes to drag, that is its own
gold medal.
But mostly I’m still too aware of how that night was
the first night I felt comfortable with my face. It makes me wary, even confused.
I can feel the longing for the power I had. I jones for it like it’s cocaine.
The little boy I used to be, in the mirror making
faces, he was happy. But the process took so much work. I can’t do that every
day, though I know women who do. And that isn’t the answer to my unhappiness,
and I know it.
When my friend Danny gives me a photo from that
night, I see something I didn’t notice at the time. I look a little like my
mom. I had put on my glasses for him — a joke about “girls who wear glasses” 一 and in that one picture, I see it all: the dark edges of my real
hair sticking out, the cheapness of the wig, the smooth face, finally
confident.
I send a copy to my sister and write, This is what I
would look like if I was your big sister.
I can’t skip what I need to do to love this face by
making it over. I can’t chase after the power I felt that night, the fleeting
sense of finally belonging to the status quo, by making myself into something
that looks like the something they want. Being real means being at home in this
face, just as it is when I wake up.
I am not the person who appeared for the first time
that night. I am the one only I saw, the one I had rejected until then, the one
I needed to see, and didn’t see until I had taken nearly everything about him
away. His face is not half this or half that, it is all something else.
Sometimes you don’t know
who you are until you put on a mask.
令
A few months after halloween, a friend borrows my wig. He has begun
performing in drag on a regular basis. I have not. I bring it to the bookstore
where we both work and pass it off to him. It looks like a burned-out thing,
what’s left in the wick of a candle after a long night.
I go to see my friend perform in the wig. He has
turned it into the ponytail of a titanic hair sculpture, made from three
separate wigs. He is a hoop-skirted vision beneath its impossible size, his
face whited out, a beauty mark on his lip. Who was the first blond to dot a
beauty mark on her upper lip? How far back in time do we have to go? It is like
some spirit in the wig has moved on, into him.
He never gives me the wig back, and I don’t ask for
it back. It was never really mine.
In memoriam, Peter David Kelloran 17 December 1961-10 May 1994
I slept but my heart was awake.
—Song of Songs 5:2
I am a minor character in Peter’s story. Peter David Kelloran —
Peter D. Kelloran, as he liked to appear in print — was a painter. He died in
his bed at the age of thirty-three on the afternoon of May 10, 1994, at the
Maitri Hospice in San Francisco, where he had been admitted after deciding he
could no longer care for himself in his apartment at the edge of town. There
was a solar eclipse that day, and his passing occurred during it. He had spoken
with his mother that morning on the phone. His dementia had parted enough for
him to tell her that he loved her. “And then he started to go,” his friend
Laura Lister says. The room was full of women friends of Peter’s and they laid
hands on him in a circle. Laura recalls the phone ringing, and she took her
hands off him to answer it. “He lunged up off the bed.” He went slowly. “I begged
him to go, begged him to let go at that point. He needed to go. He wouldn’t go,
though,” Laura says. “And then one of the male volunteers came in and he took
Peter’s hand in his. You could see the change. Like a light came over him. And
he was gone.”
“All the people there with him at the end, I can
never thank them enough. They were all so beautiful, so strong,” his mother,
Jill Kelloran, says from her home in Chicago. “They did what I physically could
not do. Peter’s death was tearing me apart and I literally could not be there.
They cared for him to the end. And I will always be grateful to them for that.”
“We were there until he
grew cold,” Peggy Sue, a friend who was present, says. “Maitri being a Buddhist
place, you lie in state. So we sat with him.”
|
|
I first saw him when I worked in the Castro at A Different Light, a
gay and lesbian bookstore that in those days doubled as a reference library and
community center. I was twenty-two years old then. Peter was twenty-eight, tall
and broad-shouldered and thin. He had a wide Irish frame and usually wore
leather: a motorcycle jacket, boots. A dyed blue tuft of hair glowed across his
forehead. I’d seen him walking through the Castro, and I’d seen him at
demonstrations. A year would pass before I’d hear his voice, speaking to me.
The store was the first in the country to have a
section devoted entirely to AIDS/HIV issues; it was located at the front of the
store, beside the cash register. I supposed, the first day I saw Peter, he’d
either seroconverted recently or had recently decided to do something about it.
I saw many people in this way, on their first few days, and I was forever
inventing some story about them, never mentioned to anyone, simply to fill the
hours. I was often the first person they had to deal with after being
diagnosed, a bookstore clerk who would show them the short shelf of books,
expanding weekly but still short.
That day he just ran through the books and selected a
few on strengthening the immune system, and then paid when someone else was at
the register. I saw him leave. His blue eyes had a searchlight intensity, and
it seemed clear what he saw and what he didn’t. He didn’t see me. I felt called
and commanded by him immediately, and to this day I cannot say why it was, only
that it was immediate, and thorough. I was surprised by how much I wanted to be
seen by him.
That day in the store, after he didn’t look at me, he
moved quickly back out onto the bustling sidewalk, the afternoon sunlight
making long, crowded shadows. I didn’t know his name or anything about him,
except that he was handsome in a way that made me lose my breath, and he was
hurrying away. And that he was possibly, probably, positive.
In fact, when I first saw Peter he had been positive
for three years. “He wrote to me from Morocco,” Laura says, of a trip he’d
taken in 1986. “And he could only write about how sick he had been. And after
he got back and he tested positive, that was when we figured out, that was his
onset.”
He would keep it a secret for years, not telling
anyone besides Laura, who kept his secret as well. “A lot of people were angry
at me for that,” she says. “But people thinking about your death, that’ll put
you in the grave. And besides,” she adds, “if you didn’t get your business
dealt with when someone dies, that’s your own fault. You had every day before
then to deal.”
I was not part of the group that was called when
Peter died. I found out three months after his death, in New York, with my
friend Choire, who had also moved east by now, and we were speaking about our
friends back in San Francisco when he said, “Well, after Peter died ..
I felt like he had been cleaning a gun and it had emptied
into me.
“Sorry,” Choire said.
“Thought you knew. Hate that, when people don’t know.”
令
When I arrived in San Francisco, there was no way to find the Castro
on any map. People were forever calling the bookstore for directions to the
neighborhood. In my group there was the sense that we were a wave arriving on
the West Coast from the East: postcollegiate youngsters seeking and finding a
paradise of cheap apartments and thrift stores bursting with the old athletic
T-shirts and jeans and flannel shirts we all prized. I remember when I put the
empty clothes together with the empty apartments, on an ordinary sunny
afternoon walking down the sidewalk to work: there on a blanket stood a pair of
black leather steel-toed boots, twelve-hole lace-ups. They gleamed, freshly
polished, in the light of the morning. As I approached them, feeling the pull
of the hill, I drew up short to examine the rest of the sidewalk sale. Some old
albums, Queen and Sylvester; three pairs of jeans; two leather wristbands; a
box of old T-shirts; a worn watch, the hands still moving; a pressed-leather
belt, western style; and cowboy boots, the same size as the steel-toes. I tried
the steel-toes on and took a long look at the salesman as I stood up, feeling
that they were exactly my size.
This man was thin, thin in a way that was immediately
familiar. Hollowing from the inside out. His skin reddened, and his brown eyes
looked over me as if lightning might fall on me out of that clear afternoon
sky. And I knew then, as I paid twenty dollars for the boots, that they’d been
recently emptied. That he was watching me walk off in the shoes of the newly
dead. And that all of this had been happening for some time now.
I lived in San Francisco for two years, arriving
right after I left college in 1989. When I say I was part of a group, I mean I
was part of a group of activists who divided our time and energy among a number
of organizations and affinity groups: ACT UP and Queer Nation were the seeds of
a great deal of what happened there, and what happens there to this day. We
engaged in direct-action protests, spent our free time discussing new protests
and the ways in which our past protests had been perceived. We thought about
politics and its relationship to our personal lives, to the point the personal
was political, because that was all there was. We had bitter feuds and
disputes, we had angry meetings, we had raucous celebrations. We had vigils and
parties, made mistakes and made amends. The average member was twenty-three,
HIV-negative, white, and college-educated, usually gay or lesbian and from
another part of the country.
I was twenty-two,
HIV-negative, Amerasian, college-educated, and from another part of the
country. Pictures of me at the time show a thin, darkhaired young man who
seems inordinately happy for someone who spent a good deal of his time wanting
to be dead. They all show me smiling. This young man I was drove a motorcycle,
worked at a bookstore, hung out with drag queens who didn’t attend meetings of
any kind, and was known to dance on a bar or two. He was a member of ACT UP/SF
before the bitter split of the group, a member of Queer Nation, and a pesky
intern at Out/Look, a queer
academic journal. He was on the media committee of ACT UP and had a reputation
at first for dating no one, and then for having dated everyone. He hollowed his
desire to die with the knowledge that other people were dying who wanted to
live, and this was the single strongest motive for his participation in
direct-action AIDS activism. Being an activist meant, among other things, never
being alone, and being alone was when he got into trouble. And so he made sure
he was never alone.
令
At this time in San Francisco, it seemed that the world might either
go up in flames or be restored in a healing past imagining. The world seemed
ripe for fixing and rescue. I think now, twenty years later, this feeling might
always be true. Those of us who were in ACT UP and Queer Nation then were
accused at one point of “gay Zionism,” and if it was true, I think it was true
only in that, in a way similar to Jewish thought, we believed we could repair
the world and do it by staying together, working together.
Why am I telling this
story? I am, as I5ve said, a minor character, out of place in this
narrative, but the major characters of all these stories from the first ten
years of the epidemic have left. The men I wanted to follow into the future are
dead. Finding them had made me want to live, and I did. I do. I feel I owe them
my survival. The world is not fixed, and the healing is still just past my
imagining, though perhaps it is closer than it was. For now, the minor
characters are left to introduce themselves, and take the story forward.
令
My next clear memory of Peter is seeing him at five in the morning
on Market Street, under the giant Safeway sign there in the middle of the city,
where our ACT UP activist affinity group had gathered in the parking lot for a
“non-ACT UP-related action,” which is to say, we were some of the same people,
just acting under a different name for this occasion — if you couldn’t reach
consensus on an action, an affinity group could do what the group itself would
not. I was a participant in a handful of these sorts of actions. This morning,
we were going to wrap false newspaper fronts over a thousand copies of the San
Francisco Chronicle. 9,000 dead in the city,
read the headline on the false front page we’d created. Clever group members
had imitated the font and layout, and the false front wore the name San
Francisco Chronic Liar. Anyone reading closely
would see that 9,000 was the number of people who had died thus far in the AIDS
epidemic, but the cover photograph, a shot of the city from the sky, was meant
to evoke a natural disaster or terrorist news story, which, to us, the AIDS
death toll story was. The action’s purpose was to increase the accurate
coverage of AIDS in the media.
About thirty or forty of us were gathered there, and
we split up into groups, dividing the bales of false fronts. Each team was
assigned a neighborhood. The plan was to wrap the false fronts over the papers
after sneaking them into our cars. Each car had a squad of three. One of us had
coins to get the newspaper boxes open, one of us drove, one of us was on
lookout. As we took the bales of papers from each box, we felt we were doing
something dangerous. But when we wrapped the fronts it only seemed tedious, or
silly, or funny. My team, after we wrapped the last one up, sat and waited for
twenty minutes to see the effect of our work. Finally a pedestrian came up to
the paper box, opened it, and read the headline. This person puzzled over the
paper and walked off to catch the train.
Was it all just for that
quizzical look? In the morning dark, the action seemed both ridiculous and
necessary. There’s nothing else you can do other than everything that might
work, I told myself that morning, and I often told myself that in those days.
These kinds of actions were about resetting long-standing frameworks, ways of
seeing the world that didn’t include us or our deaths. We had to be sure people
couldn’t ignore us. We knew ordinary ways of protesting — blocking traffic,
marching, getting arrested — were often misrepresented in the media, cost
taxpayers money in police overtime, and could result in criminal records and
police brutality. We weren’t vandalizing the boxes that morning, for example,
and even paid for one paper to open them. A quiet, quasi-legal way to do
something loud. We didn’t know what would work, so we tried anything we could
think of. That someone wouldn’t do any or all of this is what seemed
extraordinary to me then.
令
I did not meet peter that morning. Instead, I ached as he walked in
the parking lot, oblivious to me, his leathers shiny in the dark, his blue hair
flashing occasionally above the perfect white of his scalp. I asked my friend
Choire about him. Who was this man?
Peter Kelloran, he said. Dreamboat. Jason’s
boyfriend.
Jason was another member
of our activist family, and a friend. He also took part in the newspaper
action. He reminded me of a soldier in a poster from World War I, the same
ethereal good looks, but gone punk. Jason had always had what seemed an
enviable sexual success, but never more than that day. He felt to me like the
blond boy I was always losing out to, and it was hard not to resent him for it.
In any case, I drew a line through the possibility of ever getting Peter’s
attention then.
Peter felt beyond me for other reasons besides Jason: too handsome,
too adult, too cool to want me, and, certainly, unapproachable. But for all I
tried to believe I had no chance with Peter, my desire for him was like a
private horizon line, hidden inside every view I had of that morning. And after
that, it seemed there was nowhere I might not see him. His electric-blue
Mohawk, the blue eyes carrying the light like a filament, the way they flashed
through me every time they met mine. The sight of him on the back of a friend’s
motorcycle, or at the wheel of his VW Thing, his head settled low as he drove
by.
The next time I saw him, we were protesting the
filming of Basic Instinct. It
is not widely remembered that a leaked version of the script sparked protests
about the misogynistic antilesbian story line. We had no way of knowing, of
course, that in the future, the film would become a cult lesbian classic, and
Sharon Stone’s vehicle to fame. Peter joined me and Faustino, my boyfriend at
the time, under the overpass where the crew was filming, and together we let
out a discordant three-way yowl. Peter and I had both been in boys’ choirs;
Faustino couldn’t carry a tune, but he was quite loud. The resulting sound was haunting, but it also filled us with joy, and I remember Peter’s
smile in the San Francisco night as the tone climbed the bridge’s belly and
flew everywhere around us.
Our shriek apparently caused so much distress on the
set that Michael Douglas hit a bank of lights with his car. He was not harmed
but filming was halted. A few days later, another affinity group I was a part
of used fake passes and got on the set during filming. Riot police hidden
inside emerged, handcuffed us, and took us all down to the precinct house,
where we were held. Peter and Faustino both avoided arrest, I recall. They were
technically legal observers and waited for us as we left the police garage. I
remember sashaying out of the garage to the howls and whistles of my waiting
friends, and that may have been the first time Peter saw me. He was standing at
street level, talking to Jason. But I saw his eyes find me, smile, and go back.
Some weeks later, on a morning after we had eluded
arrest for a Gulf War street action, I was having brunch at the Baghdad Cafe
when Peter came to my table and asked for my phone number. He waited as I wrote
it, grinning a little. He walked off after I handed it to him, looking over his
shoulder and waving at me, more or less ignoring my table mates.
He never asks for anyone’s number, my friend Miguel
said. He’s still hung up on his ex.
People change, I said.
I said this with the bravado I often felt back then.
And Peter had asked in a manner so calm, so at odds with my reaction, it didn’t
seem like desire. It was courtly and calm.
I don’t know how Peter saw me. I’ll never know. How I saw him: Peter
at Cafe Flore, sitting in a sunlit window, surrounded by friends; Peter walking
a dark sidewalk, wheat paste in a bucket in his hand, putting up flyers; Peter
at meetings, standing in the back of the room, scowling slightly; Peter
shining, naked, in the reflection of the mirror in his apartment as he
approached his bed.
令
On our first date, Peter took me to see a concert. He picked me up
at my apartment on Market Street, we went to the concert downtown, and we drove
back to my place afterward. I don’t remember the music. That whole night I was
aware only of Peter. I asked him in, and he said sure. In my room he sat down
on my bed, a lumber-and-cinderblock affair that I’d made with a friend. I did
not turn on the light.
San Francisco nights are always more vivid than the
days. The sunlight, for all its color and clarity, added to my sense that the
city was an illusion, and the nights are when everything seems its true self
and color. Peter felt much older than me that night. He wore his leather
jacket, a coat I loved, and it was one of the few times when I knew him that his
hair was blond, his head nearly bare. All night he’d been taking drops of
astragalus, and he did again as we sat on my bed.
So, he said, as he tucked the dropper into his
jacket, I normally take boys home and tie them up and whip them. He smiled as
he said this.
Do you want to take me home and tie me up and whip
me? I asked.
Do you want to be tied up and whipped? he asked.
No, I said, not really. Part of me thought he was
joking. Part of me knew his reputation.
He lay down next to me. The two of us were in our
coats and boots, and I felt alone with him for the first time. That’s fine, he
said, we don’t have to do that. And he reached his arm around me.
Can you do me a favor? I asked him after we had lain
there awhile, silent and still.
Yes, he said.
Can you lie on top of me? Just, you know, lie there?
He rolled on top of me, in a light embrace, and the
weight of him pushed the breath out of me.
Am I crushing you? he asked.
No, I said. This was exactly what I had meant. The
weight of him pressed me out. I felt covered, safe; something dark in me
retreated and, for what felt like the first time in the arms of a man, I felt
safe. I was still me — the switch was not flicked, but the terrible feeling
haunting me then didn’t reach me. Which is one of the things that love can feel
like. Peter stayed there for some time. He may have fallen asleep at some
point. And so it is that when I hear stories of how thin he became, I can’t
reconcile them with the weight of the boy who pinned me to myself, made me feel
the place in me where I attached to the world.
Eventually he got up to go home. We made a plan to
see each other again. I was with him in a way that I had been with no one else,
and from what I understand, this was also true for him. It isn’t just that you
fall in love with someone — you each allow yourself new identities with each
other, new skins, almost like a cocoon to who you’ll be next. Strange to
ourselves and to each other; only the feeling of the room, the silence of it,
was familiar. All over the city, people were strung into slings, dancing on
tables, walking down alleys following strangers, but on my doorstep it felt
like we were a young couple out of Happy Days, out of the fifties, mild as milk. I watched him go and then turned
and went back upstairs to bed.
I wouldn’t know until
years later that he had just told his mother of his illness. He had shaved his
head after returning from his sister’s wedding, for which he had grown out his
hair. In pictures from that day, “he looked gorgeous,” his mother says. But his
grandmother Paula Morgan thought otherwise. “He’s sick,” she said after seeing
him. She knew before he had told them what was wrong. “He was a very special
young man,” she says of him now. “It seems to me this happens to special young men.”
I was breaking up with Faustino at the time I met Peter, or, really,
what we had was falling apart.
I was as in love with Faustino as I had ever been
with anyone. Once, when I told him I had trouble sleeping, he made me a ring
with zzzzzz circling the band — he was a
metalsmith. No one had ever made anything just for me. We both drove
motorcycles and used to cruise the long avenues at night, then lock them up
together at home. But once we were inside, undressed and in bed, it seemed like
a switch had been flicked, turning off the lights. I would freeze, and feel as
if I were replaced in the room by someone else. I didn’t know how to stop what
was happening to me; I didn’t know what the problem was. I was at the age, I
would one day learn, when memories and feelings related to childhood sexual
abuse usually return. I thought it was peculiar to me, but it was all too
ordinary; I just didn’t have anyone to explain it to me.
In any case, I’d asked Faustino for a break while I
figured it out. During that break, he found Jason.
This felt like another failure to me. It was not lost
on me that in our circle of activists, we were the only couple composed of two
men of color. All of the other gay men of color in our activist group were with
white men. All of them had a tendency to date white men and had even commented
on it with each other. I still remember one young white man at an activist
party who came up to me and asked what it was like to date his future husband.
Want to see the ring he made me? I said, and flashed
it at him.
Faustino had driven his motorcycle out of West Texas
for San Francisco. Shortly after, by his account, he had walked into the
bookstore where I worked. I remember it distinctly: the sunlight on the backs
of his legs, the shy smile on his face as we locked eyes and fell in love. Our
first kiss was at a Queer Nation kiss-in, at a straight bar downtown. Our whole
story together was, before this, about dreams come true and the pursuit of
justice. It was love at first sight also, but with someone who had fallen for
me, too. I didn’t want to lose it. But I didn’t have any way to stop what was
happening to me either, and I didn’t know how to explain.
It may be that Peter approached me that day because
he knew Jason had started seeing Faustino. This kind of drama wasn’t really
like him. But it doesn’t mean it wasn’t true. I could have been a point he was
making.
Jason and I were otherwise opposites of a kind, me
the dark to his light, or, as I experienced it, me the invisible to his
visible. That we would end up having not one but two men in common was strange.
That I would feel I had lost both of them to Jason — this was what I had always
feared would be the story of my life. That I would always lose in love to any
blond white man.
Faustino eventually asked me for the ring back, and I
did return it after I moved away to New York, by then in love with someone
else. And Jason and Peter got back together and had a commitment ceremony,
before breaking up again.
After their next breakup, Peter, in the grip of his
dementia, would sometimes believe, right up until his passing, that Jason, who
visited him regularly, was still his boyfriend. No matter what I’d said to my
friend Miguel, Peter had not changed: he still loved Jason, and would until he
died.
Peter would die first; Jason, shortly after I
interviewed him to write this. Faustino remains alive, but we don’t speak. I
hope someday we can.
I left this tangle.
Peter’s story continued without me, to its end.
Here is everything I never knew about Peter:
He was born in Albuquerque, New Mexico, and had grown
up in Washington, first on Mercer Island and then in Bellevue, where he went to
Newport High School. He was a skier and a swimmer in high school, but “not
competitive in that way people wanted from athletes,” his mother, Jill, adds.
Intelligent, quick-minded, he never had to study hard and school came easily to
him. “He used to love to bug me,” his sister Lisa says of him. She remembers
that when she would come downstairs in the morning in what he considered
inappropriate clothes, he would take her back upstairs to redress her. He
could get away with a great deal of mischief. “He used to leave the house
undetected all the time,” Jill recalls. “I didn’t know for years that he would
get out of the house through his window and go out all night. He started doing
it as a child.”
He graduated from the University of Washington with a
degree in graphic design and left for Europe, where he lived for a year in
Spain and Portugal. He had been a kind of art prodigy, good at ceramics,
drawing, design. In college he had made a ceramic relief so large there was no
kiln big enough to fire it, so the relief stayed at his home in Washington
until his father, Tom, sold the house. Jill still has a set of plates he made
in the shapes of fishes, and one Christmas, she recalls, he sent her copper
candlesticks that had once been table legs; he’d wrapped each one in brown
paper and arranged the group into the shape of a star. “I didn’t want to open
it,” she says. “It was like, that was the gift itself, it was so beautiful.”
He worked as a bartender at the Paradise Lounge in
San Francisco and made all its event posters, using a psychedelic style that
soon became its trademark. They were the kind of posters people stole to take
home. “So beautiful,” says his friend Laura, who bar-tended there with him.
Peter created images for ACT UP’s Marlboro boycott, and was proud to see
earnings reports that showed Marlboro had lost money in the quarter the boycott
began. He also wanted to be a musician, and before he became too ill to do so,
he had plans to record. “He had a beautiful voice,” Lisa says. “Yes, he had a
beautiful voice,” his mother says.
He is remembered as consistent by all who knew him,
steady with everyone, but still a study in contradictions. He was immensely
private, and yet he would say, without provocation, to anyone, “I’m a homo.”
Serious and grave, he would give in occasionally to a jig, a little hopping
dance. Extremely quiet, he could, when he wanted, be the center of attention.
“I was called to school by the principal when he was in the fifth grade,” his
mother recalls, “for a show. A talent show by the students. And out came this
little boy, my boy, so self-possessed. And he emceed the entire show from start
to finish, totally confident, a little Johnny Carson.” Peter attended his high
school prom in a black tuxedo he splattered with shocking-pink paint to match
his date’s pink dress and the pink shirt he wore with the tux.
In San Francisco, after college, he became part of a punk-rock
scene that centered on a place called the A-hole, where he befriended the
painter Pasquale Semillion, whom he and Laura cared for until his death from
AIDS. Peter had turned to photography but still painted abstract canvases. No
one is sure who has what pieces of his art now. His sister has three of the
Paradise Lounge posters framed in her home; his mother, the plates that he made
and paintings and a sketch he had titled Three Dogs and
a Pig, though it actually depicted four dogs.
Jill likes to remember this as an example of his humor. Laura has paintings and
pictures and tapes. Before he died, Jason had memories only, but only after he
became ill. “I can’t really remember him from before he was sick, don’t really
remember the art,” he says. “Isn’t that terrible?”
His favorite musicians: Yello, Adam Ant, and
Einsturzende Neubauten. His favorite article of clothing: a belt buckle shaped
like a bullet. His favorite author: Kurt Vonnegut Jr., in particular the story
“Welcome to the
Monkey House,” in which Billy the Poet, a lighthearted sexual
rhymer, stalks a futuristic America with plans to make Americans enjoy the sex
they now all deny themselves.
Jill has a picture of him, framed, that she looks at
regularly: Peter on the beach in Portugal, waving from the sand in front of a
tent he had made from debris — flags, old jeans, sails — where he lived for a
good part of his time there. His father has framed a five-page letter that
Peter sent from that Portuguese tent.
When an artist dies young there is always talk of the
paintings unpainted, the books unwritten, which points to some imaginary
storehouse of undone things and not to the imagination itself, the far richer
treasure, lost. All of those works are the trail left behind, a path across time,
left like the sun leaves gold on the sea: you can see it but you can’t ever
pick it up. What we lose with each death, though, is more like stars falling
out of the sky and into the sea and gone. The something undone, the something
that won’t ever be done, always remains unendurable to consider. A permanent
loss of possibility, so that what is left is only ever better than nothing, but
the loss is limitless.
I can’t help but long for Peter still, the sight of
him, as I once did, love- struck and young, a star in my eye. The top corner of
it dyed blue. My personal pantheon of heroes from that time — Peter, Derek
Jarman, and David Wojnarowicz — inspired me to be an artist, to protest, to
live as queerly, as confidently, and as openly as I wanted. Their deaths, from
AIDS, from intentional government inaction — we were not believed to be worth
saving — took them from me, from all of us, far too soon. They still inspire
me. And so I stand here and balance what I’ve learned from them on the tip of a
crush two decades old, the only communication possible.
In some strange way, more than my other heroes, and
more than my other boyfriends, Peter and I were alike. Both oldest brothers,
both with family money, both with a sense of political responsibility. Both of
us got away with all sorts of misbehavior as children, both of us liked to
shock with the way we dressed, both of us liked science fiction. Both of us
sang in boys’ choirs as children. Both of us studied ceramics in college. Both
of us skied and swam and eschewed team sports, competitive behavior in general.
But in the end I wonder if it is a mistake to think about what was lost. If it
isn’t better instead to think about what he gave me.
When I fell in love with Peter, I fell in love with what I wanted to
be next. Peter was a member of what was jokingly known at first as the BART 9,
a group of nine activists who had handcuffed themselves to the pole at the
center of a BART train when the doors were open, stopping the train in the
station. This same group had also disrupted opening night at the San Francisco
Opera and blockaded the Golden Gate Bridge. They’d done a lot of protests like
these over the years, and while many of them were in ACT UP, for most this was
simply another in a series of protests designed to draw attention to the AIDS
pandemic and the various ways in which companies were looking to exploit the
dying. The BART 9 protest had ended quickly, with the group arrested and taken
away. The train was delayed but still left the station. Peter missed his
medication that day as a result of his arrest, Laura recalls. “It was a
nightmare.” Missing their medication was a constant risk for AIDS activists who
had the illness. The police who denied them their pills, out of whatever rules
the jail followed, were murderous.
Peter felt the risk was worthy. We have nothing to
lose, the HIV-positive contingent of ACT UP would say in those days. We have
nothing to lose, having lost everything. Understand that in 1989 there was AZT
and that was basically it. Understand that those of us in my generation who
lived in San Francisco had to overcome the false impression that no one like us
had ever existed before, because the ones who might have greeted us when we
arrived were already dead. We lacked models for bravery and were trying to
invent them, as we likewise invented models for loving and for activism. While
writing an article about love and HIV, I interviewed many young gay people who
would say, I can’t imagine getting older. Most of the people who might have
shown them what it would be like to be gay and alive even at age forty or
forty-five are dead. What happened to me is happening again, ten years later.
In The Odyssey, Homer describes Poseidon Earthshaker as having blue hair. He is
alternately “blue-maned Poseidon” and “Poseidon of the blue brows.” Peter, now
returned to the sea, makes me think of that, his blue hair a mark across his
brow from the ancient god.
Peter D. Kelloran, resident of San Francisco, a town
ruled by earthquakes and inhabited by people who understood some of the value
of what the
Greeks left for us. Peter the blue-maned, now in the arms of
Poseidon Earthshaker — he belongs to a time that already we can’t imagine even
though we lived through it, when there was one drug, and hope was hidden so it
wouldn’t die.
I like to imagine him as one of the science-fiction
characters he favored, in flight through the sky, roaming the night in a nimbus
of blue light, a smiling rogue punk-rock angel, his wings dyed blue to match,
from a heaven where everyone dresses well and mercy means love and a man you
don’t know will hold your hand for you when you die. A heaven where, when
there’s injustice, you chain yourself to a train because you know that
somewhere someone feels it. Somewhere along the spirit-chain world-mind
oversoul. Someone somewhere who maybe thought there wasn’t a thing called
strength feels how you care enough to stand in front of the passage of a train.
As children, we thought
Superman was brave to stand in front of a train. That’s not brave, though.
Superman never stood before anything that could destroy him. Peter did.
令
During his last two years, when he was very sick, he became so thin
his pants would fall off him. He went in and out of dementia, regressing. He
started smoking again. He would ask Jason, “Does my father know we’re
boyfriends?” Or he would say, “I met you during high school, right?” One day at
the hospice he went out with Janet, his aunt, to get cigarettes and burgers,
and he looked around on the street and said, “These people, they’re all
homosexuals! Every one!” He was so thin at that point that even in the Castro,
where people were accustomed to the sight of wasting, Peter attracted
attention.
“He had wanted,” Janet says, “to be at Maitri. And so
we went and there was no room, and it looked like he was going to have to go
somewhere else, and then I called and found him a space there, which was good.
It was where he wanted to be.” Janet had rented an apartment for Peter to spend
Christmas with her down in Carmel, and it was shortly after, upon returning,
that Peter called her to say, “It’s time. It’s my time.” He had been living at
home until then, getting meals delivered and having home care, and when he
called Janet, he gave as his reason, “I can’t take care of myself anymore. Ifs
my time.”
Imagine yourself as a pool of light and sound
altering as all your days run through you, and they pass again and again. From
moment to moment, you are every age you have ever been, but in no particular
order. Time courses through you, the time you lived, a flume of your days. This
was Peter’s dementia.
“I always knew where he was,” Laura says of his
dementia. “God, he would say something and people would say, ‘He’s crazy,’ but
he wasn’t. No, people thought it was sad, and it was, but it was beautiful,
really, because he was back in the days that he loved, just all at once. I
remember he said once, ‘I have to give Laura a
baby!’ and the people at the hospice really thought he’d lost it, but I knew.
We used to talk about having a child, and then, well, he got HIV, and he never
talked about it again. And so he mentioned the baby again there, and I said,
‘No, remember? You got sick. And so we didn’t have it.’ And he got quiet
again.”
Jason remembered him saying, “I am supposed to tell
you something, Jason. They want me to tell you something.” So Jason waited, and
then Peter said, “It’s about love. I am supposed to tell you, they want me to
tell you, it’s about love.”
“He was so angry at the
end,” Laura recalls. “Before Christmas we went out to dinner for his birthday,
and he had chocolate. And it made him all warm, as he wasn’t eating any sugar
and hadn’t for a long time. And so we took him home, and I stayed with him and
it was then I knew, we’d lost him. That he was going to go. He was very lucid
then, very disappointed. He was talking about how he’d never been properly
loved by a man, and how he wouldn’t be now. He spoke of everything he wouldn’t
do, the music, everything. And when I heard him talk like that, I knew he
wasn’t going to make it.”
Before this Peter had wanted to live at least until 1995. Research
that he and Laura had done in astrology said that 1995 would be an important
year, and it would be. It was the year of the advent of protease inhibitors,
the year many people mortgaged their deaths. Laura had done so much research
into trying to keep Peter alive that she was awarded a full scholarship to
Mills
College to study microbiology. She received the letter notifying her
the Monday after he had died. “It got me out of bed,” she says. She had taken
to her bed for a week after Peter’s passing and would later in the year be
hospitalized for two weeks for severe depression. “I’ve had a number of
breakdowns since,” she says. “I just felt that I had failed him. That I wasn’t
able to keep him alive. And it hurt too damn much.”
Laura divorced her husband later, in part because
without Peter she felt her marriage reduced, and she likewise gave up her
research. She has lost more friends than Peter to the epidemic, but more than
that, she lost the one she loved best. “If I thought for a second,” she says,
“that I could love like that again . . .” Her mother and Peter’s mother both
had not so secretly wished the two of them would marry — Laura was a Lister, as
in Listerine, and Peter was a Morgan, of the banking family, on his mother’s
side — but eventually both accepted the situation for what it was.
Laura and Peter were closer perhaps than if they had
married. They had divined several important concordances in their astrological
charts, but for Laura the most significant was that he was Aries moon at
twenty-seven degrees, and she, Aries sun at twenty-seven degrees. “Your moon
sign is your relationship to yourself, how you talk to yourself,” Laura says. “The
way he talked to himself, that was me. And your sun, that is how you greet the
world.”
Peter was not buried. He was cremated and his ashes
were spread on a sunny day from a catamaran that sailed out under the Golden
Gate Bridge. “There’s no marker,” Jill says. “Just our hearts. We know where he
is.”
When I[1]
[2]
[3]
[4]
[5]m
identified as a fiction writer at parties, the question comes pretty quickly.
“Did you go to school for it?” someone asks. Yes, I say. “Where?” they ask,
because I don’t usually offer it.
I went to the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, I say.
Over the years, I’ve received two standard reactions
when I say this. The first is a kind of incredulity: The person acts as if he
or she has met a very rare creature. Some even challenge me, as if this is the
sort of thing people lie about (and some probably do, though that makes me
sad). Some ask if I mean the famous school for writers — and there are other
writing programs in the state of Iowa, excellent ones, but I know they’re
referring to the Workshop, and so I say yes, though instantly I feel as if I
have been made an impostor, hiding in the clothes of a great man.
The second reaction is condescension, as if I have
admitted to a terrible sin. To these people, I’m to be written off. Nothing I
do could disprove what they now believe of me. All my successes will be chalked
up to “connections”； all my failures will
prove the dangers of overeducation. If they ever like a book of mine, they will
say, “It’s okay as MFA fiction goes.”
I suppose this is just
part of the price I pay for having been one of those people, the doubting kind,
sure that it was all bullshit.
|
|
Even then I felt a vague premonitory knock that would
haunt me: Someday you,ll eat those words. But I pushed it away. It was impossible for me to go to Iowa. I
would never go, I told myself, and they would never let me in.
At Wesleyan, the college I’d left behind, I’d studied
fiction writing and the essay, and the three teachers I’d spoken to about my
future offered strong opinions. Mary Robison warned of studying writing too
much. “No one is doing anything like what you do,” she said. “You don’t want to
mess that up by taking too many classes.” Kit Reed was dismissive: “Don’t waste
your time. You just need to write, you don’t need the program. There’s nothing
there you need. Just go write.”
Only Annie Dillard made the case for an MFA. “You
want to put off the real world as long as possible,” she said. “You’ll write
and read and be around other serious young writers.”
Two against one.
The real world I moved to was San Francisco during
the AIDS crisis. My activist friends from college were all moving to the Bay
Area, getting apartments together, going to rallies, protests, marches, direct
actions, street theater. I saw the AIDS activism and queer politics movement emerging
as a response to the fight of my generation, and I joined with the seriousness
of a soldier. My friends and I were people who knew AIDS could kill us all, and
we were fighting against those who believed it would kill only gay people. To
this day, I can’t tell you if we were trying to remind them of our humanity or
their own. My time there felt more like a preview of the end of the world.
I would stay two years.
令
I moved to New York in the summer of 1991, for the love of a man who
lived there. I had a job waiting for me, courtesy of A Different Light, the
LGBT bookstore I’d worked at in the Castro. They had a New York store as well,
and arranged me an employee transfer. My new bosses set me to work cataloging
the contents of a warehouse in Queens that had belonged to a mail-order gay and
lesbian bookstore that A Different Light had acquired at auction. After the
chaos of San Francisco, New York wasn’t much quieter, but this job was: it was
like going to sit in a padded room every day — a room padded with books.
If I went to San Francisco with something of the
seriousness of a soldier, I left with a soldier’s bitterness. I had seen
friends beaten by the police and hospitalized, or arrested and denied their
AIDS medication under the pretext that they were taking illegal drugs. I had
been profiled by the police, baselessly suspected of plotting against them.
When one of the groups I belonged to had asked me to find out if my then
boyfriend was a police plant, and this hastened the end of our relationship, though
I don’t think he ever knew he was under suspicion — at least he never found out
from me —I knew I wanted to leave.
After all that, it was nice to sit alone in a quiet
room every day, surrounded by books. And there were thousands of them, books I
knew alongside books I’d never heard of, spilling off the shelves and out of
boxes. They ranged from pulp pornography paperbacks to Vita Sackville- West
first editions to the works of the Violet Quill group. My literary heroes were
mostly women writers and thinkers — Joy Williams, Joan Didion, Anne Sexton,
June Jordan, Sarah Schulman, Audre Lorde, Cherrie Moraga, Christa Wolf —
writers who were political as well as literary. Their work was in this room, as
well as that of their predecessors and teachers: Muriel Rukeyser, for example,
whom I discovered in that warehouse and whose poetry I still love. I hoped,
like them, to find a way to fuse my work with my belief in the possibility of a
better, more radicalized world.
Slowly I became aware that for me, a young gay writer
who wanted to write, well, everything — poetry, fiction, essays — this time in
the warehouse was an education I could never replicate. And that the catalog I
was creating was a catalog of what kinds of gay writing had succeeded and
failed — what the culture allowed and what it did not.
For every writer like Gore Vidal, Gertrude Stein,
James Baldwin, or Susan Sontag, there were so many others no one knew. The fame
of the well-known writers seemed to me a protection against the void, and thus,
worthy of study. How had they managed to survive against whatever it was that
had erased so many others? Two of my literary heroes, the artist David
Wojnarowicz and the filmmaker Derek Jarman, were quite publicly dying of AIDS
at the time, facing another, newer kind of erasure in the process, and I feared
increasingly, from the work I’d been doing, that nothing was likely to save
them except posterity. It was clear their impending deaths, the result of the
epidemic, were in some way welcomed, if not wanted, by the government. AIDS was
not God’s punishment, but the government inaction around it certainly was the
government’s punishment — a kind of de facto death squad composed of the
conservatives who were, incredibly, in charge of these public health decisions
instead of the medical establishment, though the medical establishment had its
own problems, in the form of for- profit health care. Those exposed, those in
danger of exposure, all seemed likely to die because it was too expensive to
save us.
Structural death: a preview of the approach
conservatives would take for the next thirty years.
Back in San Francisco, a certain Beat poet used to
come into the bookstore and move his books from the poetry section in the rear
to the new-books table up front. After he left, we’d move them back. Sometimes
I’d let them stay awhile; other times what I thought of as his pettiness
angered me. But here in this warehouse, I understood him. Fame seemed like a
terrible, even a stupid thing to want, but it also could protect you from
vanishing forever, especially if you were a gay writer, already disadvantaged
when it came to publication, much less posterity. Fame would push your book to
the front table whether you were there or not.
The question was, as always, how do you become famous?
The best and only honorable way, to my mind, was to
write things people wanted to read. I’d made some progress on that front since
arriving in New York. An editor at a publishing house invited me to lunch,
because he was interested in whether I had a novel, based on a travel feature
I’d written for a magazine.
I was also interested in this question of whether I
had a novel, and had shown up to that lunch cocky, with my hair in a blue James
Dean pompadour, wearing a ripped black T-shirt and black jeans. My tweed-
jacketed new friend smiled in the dark pub as he sipped his water, and we
somehow got onto the topic of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, which he had
attended. Underneath my performance of San Francisco queer punk cockiness, I
took mental notes as he told me stories about Michael Cunningham, one of the
few male writers I admired. His story “White Angel,” which had appeared in The
New Yorker, a part of his novel A
Home at the End of the World, was the stark
marker against which I measured my own ambitions. The dishy story I still
treasure from this chat is how
Cunningham would go running at Iowa and smoke Gauloises afterward by
the track, and how this led the other students to call him “French Cigarette.”
“After we graduated, we all moved back to New York,”
the editor said. This I especially stored away as important: all these writers
from New York heading to the Midwest to study writing, and then returning
afterward. I knew Cunningham had punctured what I thought of as the gay glass
ceiling, all too visible to me there in that book warehouse. I began to wonder
whether his going to Iowa was part of that — and if it was, if it would work
for me also.
Such were the
calculations of a young man who didn’t yet know that gay men had been
publishing in The New Yorker
before him. That it guaranteed nothing. That there was no guarantee except the
one possible if you wrote it, and got it in front of at least one other person.
Everything was possible then.
令
For years I had mocked the idea of applying to MFA programs, but
after that lunch, I became interested in a way I wasn’t prepared to admit. I
still made snide remarks about how no one was going to force me to write to a
formula. I still said I didn’t want to write fiction that said nothing about
the world for knowing nothing about the world (unspoken: like all those MFA
students), and so there I was, out in the world — wasn’t that better? I made a
point of saying, whenever possible, that I refused to spend two years being
made to imitate Raymond Carver.
This wisecrack about Carver was the supposedly
damning critique of the biggest criminal of them all, Iowa. If it sounds
familiar, that’s because the formula for making fun of MFA programs, and Iowa
in particular, hasn’t changed much in the past twenty years. The fantasy of the
haters is of a machine that strips away all originality, of people who enter
looking like themselves and emerge like the writerly version of Barbie dolls,
plastic and smooth and salable, an army of attractive American minimalists.
I was writing fiction without my MFA then and getting
along fine without it, and I’d just written a story I was pretty sure was my
best yet. I was also pretty sure it would never get published, for being a mix
of too many strange things, some of them gay. I did not feel like a New York
writer, despite being there and writing, and worse, I had to work a lot to
afford New York. My bookstore salary was so low I sometimes had to choose
between taking the subway and eating. A subway token cost as much as a bagel or
a slice of cheese pizza, and so it was always a question of which would win.
Some of my friends from college, whom I would see periodically, proceeded with
a self-assurance that I didn’t feel into careers that seemed beyond my reach. I
told myself I didn’t have the connections they had, to get jobs at The
New Yorker, the Paris Review,
Grand Street, the various publishing houses —
and I didn’t realize that, if I knew them, it meant I had connections too.
Wesleyan had been my entree into this world, but it was a world they had
entered eighteen years before, here in New York or somewhere nearby. I was from
Maine, the state where they had all gone to camp together, but I had never been
to that camp. “You’re not really from there, though, are you?” they used to
ask, incredulous, as if I’d told them I cut a canoe out of the woods and rode
it down the Connecticut River to college.
I was only subtly aware of getting an education in
social class in those moments, which usually just felt like embarrassment that
I had to hide. While I didn’t have their background, what I did have in these
social settings were my looks, a sharp eye, a sharper tongue, and a penchant
for making a spectacle of myself, which I would then use to observe people’s
reactions, learning about them and me at the same time. I could do this and be
amusing enough that most people didn’t mind. Also, the schools where all these
people who knew each other went to had at least a few people like me around —
which is to say, gay, political, and an activist.
When these connections I
didn’t know I had led to an offer of a job as assistant editor at a start-up
magazine called Out, I took it. The
job was the best way for me to take my mind off of obsessing about whether I
would get into an MFA program, because I had, by then, applied.
My reasons for applying were not particularly noble. My boyfriend,
the man I’d moved to New York for, had also applied. We’d met at a Queer Nation
meeting in San Francisco and begun an intense correspondence that turned out to
be our way of falling in love. He was a writer also, and I liked the thought of
us as two young, talented gay writers going it alone together outside the
system. But my talented boyfriend was working temp jobs he hated, and while he
made more money than I did, he didn’t feel as talented as I thought he was, and
he felt his education had gaps: he’d been a communications major, not an
English major like me, and he wanted to know more about novels, poems, and
stories. He’d never taken a writing class. He thought a program might help. And
so, one night after I finished a shift at the bar beneath his apartment, where
I worked to be able to afford to ride the train to my own apartment and still
eat, I went upstairs to find him on his bed, covered in MFA brochures.
“What are these?” I asked. I felt betrayed but didn’t
want to say so. I knew what they were.
He replied defensively — he’d heard me crap all over
MFA programs — and our short conversation made me understand how differently we
saw ourselves and each other. In his eyes, I had a future without an MFA
degree, and he wasn’t sure he did.
I was afraid this was his way of saying he was
leaving me, a sign of some secret dissatisfaction. In the end, I chose three
schools to apply to, three schools he had also applied to, based on which
schools had produced the most faculty appearing in the brochures — the schools
whose students were hired the most after graduation. These were the University
of Arizona, the University of Iowa, and the University of Massachusetts at
Amherst.
I applied as a cynic, submitting the story I was sure
was my best, the one I was sure wouldn’t be published, sure they would reject
me. “If they’re going to have me,” I said, “they need to know what kind of
freak I am.” In the story, a young clairvoyant Korean adoptee helps the police
find lost children and is the only actually psychic member of an ad hoc coven.
He has penetrative sex with his high school boyfriend, who’s also in the coven,
and is possessed by a ghost during an informal exorcism ritual. The plan was
that a program devoted to the creation of minimalist realism would have to
reject me and I could go on my way, my beliefs about everything confirmed. But
that’s not what happened.
My first letter of acceptance, to UMass Amherst, came
with an offer of a fellowship and a note from John Edgar Wideman. A day later,
I got a phone call at work from a woman whose voice I didn’t recognize. “It’s
Connie Brothers, from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop,” she said. “A letter is on
the way, but I’m calling to offer you a place in the fall class and a
fellowship.” She named a sum of money.
I was stunned.
“This is great,” I said, remembering to speak, and
then blurted out, “UMass Amherst is offering the same amount.”
“Did you say anything yet?”
“No,” I said, appalled at my indiscretion.
“Give me a day,” she said, and hung up. I hadn’t
intended to begin a negotiation — I wasn’t aware that negotiation was possible.
I was only meaning to be literal: how could I decide between fellowships of
equal amounts? I wanted to call back and apologize, but the next day she phoned
and offered twice as much, and seemed entirely unconcerned.
“Thank you,” I said into
the phone. “I’ll speak to you soon.” I hung up and announced the news, and my
coworkers cheered and shook my hand.
Before I gave notice at Out, I spent a night walking the East Village, thinking about my
decision. I ended up at Life Cafe, an East Village institution, where I
splurged and ordered an almond-milk latte and a veggie burrito. I had some copy
to edit, an asparagus recipe in fact. I was still not sure I would leave New
York. If I moved to Iowa, I thought, I would vanish forever, unrecognizable to
myself and others. And the amount of money in the fellowship, even after they’d
doubled it — was that really enough to live on? I wasn’t rich here in New York,
but if I stayed at the magazine, I knew I could get by. I could afford, for
example, this meal I was having. I could make my way up the New York
magazine-world ladder, a thought that instantly felt hollow.
At the next table, a conversation about the new
Versace leather skirts broke out, if a conversation is people all saying the
same thing to each other. They were so heavy, they kept saying. So
heavy.
I wanted out, I knew then. I wanted cheap rent and a
fellowship and people who were talking and thinking about fiction. A time would
come again when I would kill to hear people talk about Versace again, but it
was not then. Anything you did that was not your writing was not your writing,
and New York provided a lot of opportunities to write, but also a lot of
opportunities not to write, or to write the wrong things. There were things I
wanted, like being a contributing editor instead of an assistant or managing
editor, and you didn’t get there by working your way up. Contributing editors
swoop down from above, made fabulous by the books they’ve finished, which they
didn’t write while chasing after other people’s copy.
My boyfriend didn’t get accepted to Iowa, which
disappointed us both greatly, but him more than me — it was his first-choice
school. But he was offered a fellowship by the University of Arizona, which was
my first choice, the school where one of my heroes, Joy Williams, taught, and
where I’d really envisioned myself, until . . . they rejected me. We’d both
been accepted to UMass Amherst, but my boyfriend’s offer was without aid. We
drove up to Amherst as we thought about it and had lunch with John Edgar
Wideman, who was, well, John Edgar Wideman: a profoundly intelligent, decent
man, and a legend. But we knew, by the time we left, what we would do.
We had been
long-distance before, and were prepared to be so again. We each chose our
careers over being together, which seemed best for our relationship as well as
for our futures. We packed up our little apartments and had a last dinner,
where our friends sang “Green Acres” to us over a cake at Mary’s in the West
Village, and we made our way onto I-80 West, to drop me off first.
令
That year, I lived alone in an apartment that was once ROTC housing
for married officers at the edge of town, up by the graveyard and the Hilltop
Bar. This lent the whole project the air of a failed military mission. The
floors were linoleum, and a couch, desk, and table were part of the deal.
The Iowa I found was a gentler place than the one my
editor friend had described. Under Frank Conroy, the director when I arrived,
the list in the student lounge ranking students from 1 to 50 had disappeared,
and with it the fierce feuds the list’s posting engendered.
Conroy was said to reread the rejected stories first,
because he believed that real genius is often rejected at first. This rumor
endeared him to me when I eventually heard it, but in those days he was only
the legend, sitting in his peculiar way — he could double-cross his legs — in a
room full of the incoming class, giving the speech he always gave.
“Only a few of you will get to publish,” he said.
“Maybe two or three.”
I remember looking around the room and thinking, I
bet not. I had no way of knowing, of course, but
I was right: of the twenty-five students in my class, over half have published
a novel or collection of stories. But the talk was not meant to discourage us.
If anything, it was a bravura dare, like a whack on the shoulder the Zen
teacher gives to awaken a drowsy meditator.
I never studied with
Conroy, but he taught me one lesson I still remember. I was featured in Interview magazine that year as an emerging poet, and I showed him the page,
with my face huge and my poem tiny, almost hidden in my short hair. He smiled,
congratulated me, and then said, “You succeed, you celebrate, you stop writing.
You don’t succeed, you despair, you stop writing. Just keep writing. Don’t let
your success or failure stop you. Just keep writing.”
By now, I knew the Iowa City truck stop was not the town, and that
the town was a pretty university town away from the highway, populated with
Victorian houses that had been built from plans sent there from San Francisco,
the result being that I would experience occasional uncanny moments, passing
houses I knew first from that beloved place.
Not only did no one try to make me write like Ray
Carver, no one tried to make me write like anyone. No one even tried to make me
write. The only thing I really had to do was figure out whether my ideas were
interesting to me, and then, in workshop, I discovered whether those ideas were
interesting to other people. I was surprised to learn attendance was,
mysteriously, not mandatory. It’s an occasionally controversial part of the
Workshop. But the policy acknowledges a deeper truth: if you don’t want to be a
writer, no one can make you one. If you need an attendance policy to get you
through, then, go — don’t just skip class, go and don’t come back. Writing is
too hard for someone to force you into it. You have to want to run for it.
That year, the Workshop accepted 25 students from a
field of 727 — now the Workshop regularly receives over 1,100 applications. In
the fall of 2001, the numbers leaped upward — as did applications to MFA
programs nationwide — and they’ve never really dropped. This fascinates me
still, the idea that the September 11 attacks might have spurred people toward
the institutional study of fiction.
The lore around your admission becomes irresistibly
interesting once you get in, because it seems the odds are so shockingly
against you. You either suspect you do not deserve to be there, or you suspect
the others in your class do not deserve to be there. And whatever you think at
first, it doesn’t matter; at some point the projection flips. You go from being
suspicious of everyone else’s talent to suspicious of your own, or vice versa,
until finally you get over it. Or don’t.
Soon I was walking around town with people I barely
knew as if I’d known them forever. The conversations were long and passionate
and exhausting, punctuated by strong coffee and the huge, strangely fluffy
midwestern bagels. I was reading and writing, and doing a fair amount of
drinking, for the alcohol was very cheap, and we were writers in the bars of
Iowa City, bars that had been frequented by writers for decades. Something was
happening to us all, and it felt as if we were all a part of it, even the ones
who wouldn’t speak to each other. It was a little or a lot like a family.
My first professor for workshop was Deborah Eisenberg.
She often dressed in head-to-toe black clothes, familiar from my previous life
in New York City, and walked across campus in the impossibly high heels she
favored, an ocean of flip-flop-wearing undergraduates around her. She was the
kind of woman I had idolized in New York, and finding her here made me feel I’d
made the right choice. She was at once a walking memory of the life I’d left
behind and a vision of the life I wanted, and I fell head over heels in love
with her. I volunteered to drive her home from workshop after the first class,
eager to impress her in this puppy dog way I had, and when she asked when I’d
started writing, I answered that I’d started late, in college. She laughed a
little into the car door as I said this and then straightened up. “I didn’t
start until my late thirties,” she said. “I consider that starting young.”
Driving her became a regular routine for us, one that
thrilled me. I forgot my unhappiness about not getting into Arizona and dove
into her mind as much as I could, at first through the short stories — her two
(now four) collections. I took her seminar also, and read anything she
suggested, from Elfriede Jelinek to James Baldwin to Mavis Gallant, and like
all of her students, hung on her every word.
My first workshop with her was a revelation. I’d put
up my application story — most of us did at some point in our first year,
usually in the first term — still living with the idea that it was the best I
had. She saw straight through it, into the way it was a mix of the
autobiographical (I really had been in a coven in high school, with my high
school boyfriend) and the fantastical (I did not ever help the police find lost
children with clairvoyant dreams). I had tried, crudely, to make something out
of a Dungeons & Dragons group I’d been
in back in high school, but I hadn’t done the work of inventing a narrator who
was whole and independent of me. Deborah drew lines around what was invented,
and what was not, with a delicate pencil, and patiently explained to me how what
we invent, we control, and how what we don’t, we don’t — and that it shows.
That what we borrow from life tends to be the most problematic, and that the
problem stems from the way we’ve already invented so much of what we think we
know about ourselves, without admitting it.
She sometimes sat down at the beginning of class and
would look out at us, smile, and say, “I don’t know how you do it. I could
never stand it.” Unlike us, she had never attended an MFA program, and had
ideas about radicalizing it, like making financial aid a random lottery instead
of merit- based, or everyone getting the same amount. In our workshops, she
listened carefully to each of us talk about the stories, and then, as a way of
closing the discussion, delivered her very deliberate remarks, and it would be
as if everyone had been arguing about how to turn the Christmas lights on,
while she simply walked up to the problem bulb and fixed it and all the lights
would go on. She also gave us some of the best advice I’ve ever heard about how
to work with workshop advice. It was, approximately, as follows:
Listen to your classmates’ comments and try to listen
to them in the round. Someone will insist if you just fix X on page 6, all will
be better, and someone else will say no, it’s page 13 that needs your
attention, and then you will change something on page 10, give it back to them,
and they’ll all say, “It’s so much better, that’s exactly what I meant.” The
problems are not where they think they are.
This taught me a valuable lesson. It is a rookie
workshop mistake to go home and address everything your readers brought up
directly, and if there is a problem inherent to workshop, it is that some
people credulously do that. A reader experiencing what they called a pacing
problem could be experiencing an information problem — lacking information that
would make sense of the story for them about the character, the place, the
situation —and
problems with plot are almost always problems that begin in the choice of point
of view. I learned to use a class’s comments as a way to sound the draft’s
depths, and as a result had a much better experience of the workshop overall.
One common complaint about workshops is that the
people who take them end up in some way alike, and that the class enforces this
alikeness on one another’s writing in the workshop. But that was never what I
experienced. Instead, I think of a great line from one of Deborah’s short
stories: “You meet people in your family you’d never run into otherwise.” It’s
true of families, and true of workshops also: you meet people there you’d never
otherwise meet, much less show your work to, and you listen to them talk about
your story or your novel. These are not your ideal readers per se, but they are
ideal in that you can never choose your readers in life, and this is a good way
to get used to it. Listening to their critiques forces you past the limits of
your imagination, and for this reason, also past the limits of your sympathies,
and in doing so it takes you past the limits of what you can reach for in your
work on your own. Fiction writers’ work is limited by their sense of reality,
and workshop after workshop blew that open for me, through the way these
conversations exposed me to other people’s realities.
I will never forget the classmate who said to me in
workshop, about one of my stories, “Why should I care about the lives of these
bitchy queens?” It angered me, but I asked myself whether or not I had failed
my characters if my story hadn’t made them matter to someone disinclined to like
or listen to them — someone like him. A vow formed in my mind that day as I
listened to him, which has lasted my whole career: I will make you
care.
If his reaction sounds too harsh, well, the criticism
you receive in your workshop is as nice as it is going to get in your writing
career. I never tolerated abuse, racism, or homophobia in workshop back then,
and I was in Connie Brothers’s office so often that first year, she offered to
place the entire Workshop in sensitivity training. I turned this offer down. It
seemed to me the more reactionary people in the program would make me the
target, instead of their own racism or homophobia. I decided to focus on
confronting what I found, as I found it, regularly.
I now think of an MFA as taking twenty years of
wondering whether or not your work can reach people and spending two years
finding out. It is not an escape from the real world, to my mind, but a
confrontation with it, even if it also felt, in my case, like a fantasy in
which it was my good fortune to study with Marilynne Robinson, James Alan
McPherson, Margot Livesey, Elizabeth Benedict, and Denis Johnson, as well as
Deborah Eisenberg. I had left a job, and a man who loved me, whom I loved, to
be there. That’s as real as anything.
The man and I broke up
finally in 1994, the year I finished at Iowa. He’d applied to the Workshop
again during our first year apart, and when he was rejected a second time, it
ate at him, and he resented me. When he canceled our plans to spend the summer
together, saying, “You’re going to be the famous one, the one everyone
remembers,” I tried to give him room for his disappointment, but it felt like
he was punishing me. He’s since had a lot of success as a writer, so in that
sense he was wrong. I think disappointment, and the desire to revenge oneself
on that disappointment, can be an enormous motivator. Being rejected from an
MFA program can push you as much as getting in can.
令
The first thing my MFA meant to me, when I finished, was that I
seemed to have become unfit for other work, though this proved to be an
illusion.
I was fit for writing and for teaching. That I knew.
I also knew the only teaching job I wanted was the sort you could get if you
had published a book. As I was newly single, and as New York seemed like a good
place to be single and gay and a young writer, I moved back, the words of that
editor —After we graduated, we all moved back to New York — echoing as I did so.
That first summer, I went on interviews for jobs in
publishing, but everyone who interviewed me, on seeing that I’d just come from
Iowa, assured me I didn’t want to work there. “Writers shouldn’t hear the way
publishers talk about them,” one publishing friend said by way of advice.
“Also, the pay is crap.” I’ve since known several successful writers who had
publishing careers, but it takes a canniness that I couldn’t fake, to go into
publishing and act as if I had no interest in being an author.
I ended up being a waiter — first a cater-waiter, and
then I waited tables at a midtown steakhouse. Deborah Eisenberg had been a
waitress, I told myself when the possibility came up, and I remembered the
story she often told of her time as a waitress, and I even let it be something
of a guide. Joseph Papp, of New York’s Public Theater, approached her to commission
a play and was surprised to find her reluctant to leave her job. She didn’t
want to lose valuable shifts. He asked her what she made on those shifts, and
that was partly how the price of the commission was set.
I could live that way, I told myself. And sure
enough, a few months after taking my first waiting job, I set plates down
between an editor and a newly hired editorial assistant and overheard the
figure quoted as they discussed a promotion, almost half of my annual income. I
was waiter rich, as we called it then, and I stayed at that job for four years
while writing my first book.
During those years of waiting tables, I was not above
bragging about having gone to Iowa in moments of insecurity, but I always
reproached myself afterward. The white shirt, black bow tie, and apron came to
feel like a cocoon for the novel, or the writer, or both. I wrote that novel on
the subway, going back and forth to the restaurant, and sometimes I wrote it
while at work — I still have a guest check with an outline that came to me
while I waited for my section to be seated.
The year after that
novel was published, I was invited to teach at Wesleyan. I congratulated myself
on a completed plan on that first day of classes. I know some people condescend
to me when I mention that I was once a waiter, but I will never regret it.
Waiting tables was not just a good living, but also a good education in people.
I saw things I never would have imagined, an education in life out past the
limits of my own social class. Your imagination needs to be broken in, I think,
to become anywhere near as weird as the world.
令
It’s a strange thing to teach at your alma mater. I have done it
twice, at Wesleyan and at the University of Iowa. You learn that students and
faculty are kinds of insiders at such places, but within realms that keep each
hidden from the other. When you teach as an alum, then, gossip soon illuminates
the old myths — the gossip that only the faculty has combines in your head with
the gossip only the students had when you were a student, and your own students
add to that.
At Iowa I learned to talk about Raymond Carver,
because he so often comes up if I mention Iowa. He is part of the lore, but
not, as everyone seems to imagine him, as the so-called high priest of minimalism.
That is not — was not 一 him. He was not
especially celebrated for his writing while he was a student at the Workshop,
we learned as students there. And his famous minimalism grew out of his
relationship with the editor Gordon Lish — a very New York sort of story, not
at all a midwestern one. The extent to which Lish cut himself into Carver’s
work is a source of jokes now, a punch line. I am more concerned with what I
see as Carver’s real legacy, as a professor: Carver was known for being drunk
much of the time, at least in the stories I’ve heard. His generation of writing
professors 一
most of them literary writers given jobs because
of their published work alone — resulted in the reputation that all
writers are like this! That has followed all
writers now in academia.
The boom in the MFA, whatever you might think of it,
didn’t come about because young writers wanted to imitate Carver’s work, as is
sometimes alleged. It came about because too many of them imitated Carver’s
life, and administrators of writing programs began to demand some sort of proof
that the writer hired to teach have the skill and the will to teach, to be a
colleague, and to participate in the work of the department. You can sniff all
you like that a book is the only credential that matters, but chances are you
haven’t met a provost. In the aftermath of these unaccredited greats, the rest
of us are now required to present our degrees.
With this, ironically, comes the complaint that even
our sins are on the decline, that more and more we are too well behaved,
domesticated creatures writing domesticated fiction, and the MFA is also blamed
for this situation, created by, well, writers who don’t have MFAs.
It may be that you, like many, think writing fiction
does not require study. And not only that: that it is not improved by study.
That talent is preeminent, the only thing required to become a writer. I was
told I was talented. I don’t know that it did much except make me lazy when I
should have worked harder. I know many talented people who never became
writers, perhaps because they got lazy when they were told they were talented.
Telling writers this may even be a way to take them out of the game. I know
untalented people who did become writers, and who write exceptionally well. You
can have talent, but if you cannot endure, if you cannot learn to work, and
learn to work against your own worst tendencies and prejudices, if you cannot
take the criticism of strangers, or the uncertainty, then you will not become a
writer. PhD, MFA, self-taught 一
the only
things you must have to become a writer are the stamina to continue and a wily,
cagey heart in the face of extremity, failure, and success.
“I am taking this parade down the middle of the road,” I wrote in a
letter to a friend from San Francisco soon after arriving at Iowa. I had the
sense of being given a place inside an American tradition, and I decided I
would make the best of it. I would queer it.
A favorite photo from my time as a student in Iowa is
of me at a Halloween party, dressed in short shorts, fishnets, a black
motorcycle jacket, a yard-long blond wig on my head, applying lipstick in front
of a bull’s-eye, studiously not looking at the camera, aware that it was on me.
I was eventually crowned the Queen of the Iowa Writers5 Workshop Prom,
an event that saw me appear at the Veterans of Foreign Wars hall in that same
wig, wearing a red leather coatdress slit up the sides, makeup, and heels. I
remember the hush as I stepped into the bar area where the veterans sat, the
saloon doors swinging, to go to the restroom, and the pause as I realized I had
to decide which one to use.
I am still, I think, that prom queen, caught in the
doorway.
Going to Iowa was one of the best things I ever did
for my writing life. If the myth about the Workshop was that it tried to make
us all the same, my experience was that it encouraged me to be a writer like no
other before me. Whether I did that was up to me. I applied because I was
afraid of losing something I lost anyway, and I went because I got in. I hoped
to find some protection from oblivion, from my own shortcomings, from the
culture’s relentless attack on the stories of people like me. I don’t know if
I’ve found that, or if I ever will. I still fear those things. I still face
them. And for now, I’m still here.
How could you? my friends would ask when I told them. How could you work for someone like him? Do you ever want to just pick up a knife and
stab him in the neck? Poison his food?
You would be a hero, one friend said.
I did not want to stab him, and I did not want to
poison him. From our first meeting, it was clear, he was in decline. And as for
How could I, well, like many people, I
needed the money.
And besides, he didn5t really matter. I loved her.
|
|
Before I worked as a waiter for William F. and Pat
Buckley, I knew them the way most people did: from Page Six of the New
York Post and its editorial page; from Vogue, the New York Times, and
the back pages of Interview. When I
first moved to New York, in 1991, Pat Buckley was the preeminent socialite if
you were looking in from the outside — and I was.
Like many ambitious young New Yorkers, I had
ridiculous fantasies that involved how one day I would run into Pat Buckley in
the rooms I saw only in those pictures. Reading the Times on the train on my way to work, I imagined walking into the dimly
lit salons where the rich and powerful met and determined the fate of the
culture, if not the world.
When I say I really didn’t think of William F.
Buckley, I mean I didn’t read what was referred to by her friends at their
parties as “his magazine,” the National Review, though I sometimes read part or all of his column in the Post. I tried to read him when I did because I thought of him as the
opposition, and I wanted to know what the opposition said and thought, or I
thought I did, but too often it was too awful, too enraging, to finish. I knew
civilized people were supposed to read the ideas of people who disagreed with
them and at least think about them. In this way I was not so civilized.
When I met him finally, he was
not as vigorous as she was, perhaps from drink or cigars or both, though she
certainly drank and smoked as well. He
was shorter and more rumpled, as if one day he had
gotten tired and then never quite rested enough. She was very tall, tanned, and
animated, with a wild shock of carefully highlighted hair. She wore a painterly
face of makeup that at times resembled the portrait of her that hung in their
home. She had the habit of filling the room, and then you might notice him
somewhere in it, holding court in a quieter way. It was easy to imagine the
woman she’d once been, handsome though not manly, a natural leader. And for
those of us who worked in their house, it was her we watched, always. For it would
be her we answered to if anything went wrong.
令
In 1997, when I began working for the Buckleys, I was the picture of
a New York cater-waiter: five foot ten, 165 pounds, twenty-nine years old,
clean- cut. I liked cater-waiting because I looked good in a tuxedo and
couldn’t stand the idea of office work unless it was writing a novel. It was
the easiest solution to my money problems when I returned to New York after
getting my MFA at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop. Cater-waiting paid $25 an hour
plus tips and involved working everything from the enormous galas in the Winter
Garden at the World Financial Center to People magazine lunches to openings at the Guggenheim Museum. The tuxedo
and the starched white shirt — and the fact that each assignment was at a different,
often exclusive place — made me feel a little like James Bond. Sometimes my
fellow waiters and I called it the Gay Peace Corps for how we would go to these
places, clean them up, make them fabulous, throw a party, and leave. And I
liked that when I went home, I didn’t think about the work at all.
As part of my writer’s education, being a
cater-waiter allowed me access to the interiors of people’s lives in a way that
was different from every other relationship I might have had. When you’re a
waiter, clients usually treat you like human furniture. The result is that you
see them in unguarded moments — and that I liked. There was the Christmas
buffet dinner where the host and hostess served their visiting family wines
given to them by various friends that they considered unworthy of being
cellared. Or the Christmas party where the host took a friend into the
coat-room to beat him in private (so badly he had to leave), to punish him for
being a jerk to us, the waiters. Afterward the host handed out his friend’s
cigars to us and said, “My friend said to say he was sorry.” There was the
party on the Upper East
Side where we changed into our tuxes in a spare apartment we
jokingly called Daddy’s Rumpus Room: the walls were padded with gray flannel
and the windows frosted so that no one could see in or take a photo of whatever
it was our host did in there. And then there was the Upper East Side party for
some wealthy closeted gays and lesbians who, to hide their sexuality and
protect their fortunes, had paired off and married so they resembled straight
couples. They looked on with a placid mix of despair and happiness at their
sons and daughters, many of them openly gay and lesbian, who were there with
their same-sex lovers.
The best thing I’d done for myself as a waiter was to
have the cheap polyester tux we all had to wear tailored shortly after
starting. I soon caught the eye of a private-client captain, who eventually
brought me to the Buckleys. He was a funny, boyish, older gay man whose
expression could change from a warm smile to an icy stare in less than a
heartbeat. He had an English face and complexion, with a last name that didn’t
match. I interviewed with him and left, certain I’d failed. If he liked you, he
never let on right away.
He worked for some of the wealthiest clients in New
York City. I recall helping Martha Stewart pick out a favorite petit four in
the home of the entertainment lawyer Allen Grubman while the fashion designers
Vera Wang and Tommy Hilfiger looked on. I learned, as I washed up after the
party, that the plates had cost $3,000 a setting. “Don’t drop them,” the
captain said. “They’re worth more than you.” I became used to climbing, at high
speed, the back stairs at prominent homes up and down Fifth and Park Avenues,
and washing plates and glasses that cost more than my yearly rent.
The moment I describe next was not at the beginning
any different from any of those other jobs, but I remember it because of a
word: maisonette. It
started with a phone message on my
answering machine: “Come to_______________
Park Avenue. It’s a maisonette. Don’t go to the front, come around
the side. But don’t ring the bell. I’ll be in front and take you in the service
entrance. Tuxedo, plain shirt, bow tie. I want a fresh shirt — no stains on the
cuffs or collars. And be sure to shine your shoes, as she’ll know.”
And then, after a pause:
“When I say she’ll know, I’m talking Pat Buckley. You’re working at the Buckleys,. Look your best.”
令
I knew William F. Buckley in the same way that every gay man of my
generation knew him: as an enemy. On March 18, 1986, the New York Times published an op-ed column by him that advocated for the tattooing
of people with AIDS on their buttocks and wrists. He initially proposed
something more visible, but then rejected it as an invasion of privacy.
A part of my history made me an unusual figure in the
Buckleys’ home. I was a former member of the San Francisco chapter of ACT UP.
In 1991 I had driven to Maine along with thousands of other protesters to lie
down in the street in front of President George H. W. Bush’s house in
Kennebunkport, for a die-in protesting his inaction on AIDS. I still had
episodes of PTSD whenever I saw policemen, after being attacked by them during
a riot in San Francisco in 1989. I had been a committed member of the group’s
media committee and occasionally appeared on television, determined to make a
difference in the fight against a disease I was sure was going to devastate the
world. This was an era when it was still shocking to hear that ten thousand
Americans had contracted AIDS. But in just the six years between the die-in at
the Bush house and the day when I walked up to the Buckleys’ entrance, I’d
watched the number of infected grow exponentially each year, past all
imagining. The World Health Organization report for 1997 estimated that 860,000
Americans had HIV at the time of this story’s events, and 30.6 million were
positive worldwide.
So when I tell you that I thought of William F.
Buckley as the opposition, I mean specifically because he had given a powerful
public voice to the belief that the illness revoked your basic humanity and
placed you beyond help. The tattoo he suggested was to make sure you knew it.
Whatever you might think of my friends who joked of my killing him, you may
better understand the sentiment as a reaction to his denying that they were
even people.
On the day I arrived at the service entrance of his
Park Avenue maisonette with a waiter’s tuxedo on my shoulder, I knew that we
bitterly disagreed on the question of what it means to be human. I had never
imagined meeting William F. Buckley at all, and so when my first day in the
Buckley house began, the reality of what I was about to do set in. I walked to
Park Avenue from the subway and looked up at the enormous stone and brick tower
in disbelief. I wondered briefly whether they ran background checks on the
waiters, whether they knew of my past, whether someone like me could really
work there. I drew a breath and put all of that out of my head.
And then the door opened and I was let in.
A maisonette, if you don’t know, and I didn’t, is a house hidden
inside the walls of an apartment building. The owners share services with the
rest of the building but have their own door. In the entrance to the Buckleys’
maisonette sat a small harpsichord of the most delicate gold and brown wood. I
was told that Christopher, their son, could play it very well. A portrait of
him when he was young hung on the wall on the right, near the entrance, and in
it he looked preternaturally beautiful, like the child of elves. Next to the
harpsichord was a tree made of metal, with what looked to be cut glass or
semiprecious stones for leaves, set in a bed of rougher stones in a low vase.
There were trees like this all through the downstairs, chest-high, and the
effect was like entering a forest grove under a spell, where the elfin child
from the painting might appear and play a song. The forest was also populated
with expensive rugs, cigar ashtrays, lamps, and chairs covered in chintz. The
house gave the appearance of having been decorated once in a particular style
and then never updated again. Between the dark reds on the walls and the
glittering stone trees, it felt warm and cold at the same time.
I was being auditioned, the captain told me. If I
succeeded at this, one of his most difficult assignments, I would be a regular.
“Mrs. B will watch you like a hawk,” he said, “in general, but especially for
this first one. So you have to be on your very best behavior if you want to be
asked back.” As the door closed behind us, he said, “That’s what we call them:
Mr. and Mrs. B.”
I was then introduced to a kind older gentleman who,
in my memory, ran their household. I don’t recall his precise title or his
name, but if it had been a palace, I think he would have been the chamberlain.
He impressed me instantly as one of the sweetest and most elegant men I had
ever met, with a full head of white hair and a wry look in his eyes that stayed
whether he was regarding a martini or a waiter. He was busy with showing the
cooks around the kitchen. The waiters were brought upstairs to change in a
small room that sat at the end of a hallway near the entrance to the back
stairs, which led from the second floor to the kitchen. The room contained a
single bed, made up with a torn coverlet, and a treadmill covered in wire
hangers and books. Dusty sports trophies lined dusty bookshelves.
“Whose room is this?” I asked the captain.
“Mr. B’s,” he said.
I stared, waiting for him to laugh.
He said, “Oh, honey. Sure. She’s the one with all the
money, after all. Canadian timber fortune, I think. Her friends call her
Timberrr because of that and because she’s tall and when she’s drunk she falls
over, because she won’t wear her shoes.” I thought of Mag Wildwood in Breakfast
at Tiffany,s. I laughed, he laughed,
and then his face came over serious and flat, and we both stopped laughing at
the same time.
“Don’t you dare write
about any of this,” he said, “or I’ll have to hunt you down and kill you. With
my bare hands. Because I love them dearly.”
The parties the Buckleys had in New York were typically attended by
a strange mixture of her friends and his, which is to say, I remember holding
out a tray of scallops wrapped in bacon to the socialite Nan Kempner and the
conservative writer Taki Theodoracopulos, both of whom looked down at it as if
it had insects on it, and then I moved on to the magazine people, who swarmed
the trays quickly, eating everything. It was her very rich society crowd
mingling with the young writers Buckley was fostering, and they had very little
to say to each other, often drifting to different sides of the room, yet never
hostile.
Despite the way the writers condescended to me, I
knew I made more money than they did. But it wouldn’t matter. I was holding the
tray they were eating from. The food was always from another era: the terrines,
for example, which I never saw anywhere else I worked. The scallops wrapped in
bacon. Gravlax slices on Melba toast. The Buckleys did not go in for the new
trends in cooking. There was never going to be a piece of charred tuna, pink on
the inside, on those trays. The only pink was in the roast beef appetizers.
There would never be coconut-crusted shrimp. And dessert was often, perhaps
even always, rum raisin ice cream, a favorite of theirs. I found that
endearing.
On my first night there, when I was not supposed to
make a mistake, I did. I remember very clearly being in the dining room and
making my way through the thickets of chairs around the tables. Someone was
speaking to the room for some reason as the courses were being changed — we
waiters had to bring in one plate and leave with another, swapping them out
very quickly, working in rows. I cleared from the wrong side and served from
the wrong side, and while the guests didn’t seem to notice, I was helpless as I
looked up and saw Mrs. B glaring at me as if I’d personally done it to hurt her
feelings. Her dark, thickly lined eyes barely held in her fury.
I went to the captain immediately. He swore and
glowered at me. “Chee . .he said, trailing off. And then he said, “It’s okay. I
mean, you’re in for it now. But there’s only one thing for you to do.”
That one thing, it turned out, occurred at the very
next party, and it was a part of my probation. Instead of passing food or
drinks, I looked after her. Mrs. B typically sat talking to someone animatedly,
her cigarettes, lighter, lipstick, glasses, and cocktail beside her on a small
table. She drank Kir Royales, but with a light blush, not too dark. She would
take off her shoes, setting them to the side. And when she leaped up to speak
with someone she recognized on the other side of the room, she left everything
behind.
Your job at that moment — should you have screwed up
as I had screwed up — was to go immediately to the back and emerge with a fresh
Kir Royale, prepared as she liked it. You never brought her the one she’d just
abandoned. You then grabbed her lipstick, glasses, cigarettes, and lighter in
your other hand, bent down to retrieve her shoes, and went over to where, by
now, she was in conversation again. You did not interrupt, but waited until she
looked at you, and then you said, “Mrs. B, you left these,” and she would
exclaim, take them from you, and sure enough, if the color of the Kir Royale
was right and you were appropriately chastened in your manner, and you did all
of this exactly right each time she moved, you survived.
As I handed her shoes
over that first time, I blushed a little, like someone in love.
I hadn’t read Mr. B’s famous column on the AIDS tattoo before I
worked for him. After I began working for him, I still did not read it. I felt
it was somehow safer not to, because once that friend had asked me whether I’d
ever imagined stabbing Buckley in the neck, it then flashed through my mind
whenever I was in the house. I remember serving him and watching his neck as I
set the plate down. The single thing I forbade myself to think of became, of
course, impossible to ignore. I felt a little like the narrator in Chekhov5s
Story of an Unknown Man, who pretends to be
a serf in order to work in the home of the son of a politician he opposes. It’s
an act of political espionage that uncovers nothing, and soon the narrator
despairs of what he’s done. He eventually runs away with the neglected mistress
of his employer.
This is not what I did.
For as much as William F. might have done to
undermine the situation of people with AIDS, Pat seemed to do in their favor.
In 1987 alone, for example, a year after his famous column, she was involved in
raising $1.9 million for the AIDS care program at St. Vincent’s, a hospital at
the epicenter of the epidemic in New York. Today it might be easy to
underestimate the value of that gesture, but at the time, no one wanted
anything to do with people with AIDS. Pat was one of New York’s greatest fundraisers
for charity, and however many lives her husband may have put at risk, it seems
to me she may have saved many more. If it was ever glamorous to raise money for
people with AIDS, it was partly because she helped to make it so. And while the
finances of their family were known only to them, it seems to me that Mr.
Buckley would never have condoned the types of donations Mrs. Buckley made. If
there is a question as to whose money it was, perhaps the proof is there. She
could afford to go against him.
And if it seems strange to you that one of America’s
most famous homophobes was married to a woman who was a hero to many gay men,
if it seems strange to you that the household where she lived with him was
sometimes full of gay men serving food and drink to her guests despite his
published beliefs, well, it was strange. It was what we used to call complicated. And yet the times
were such that we, her waiters, experienced the millions of dollars she raised
for those who were abandoned to their fates as a kind of protection and
affection both. Money raised for people with AIDS was not for us per se, but it
could easily have been us next. For gay men in the 1990s, that thought was
never far from our minds. And so I think we could joke about killing him. But
never, not even a little, about doing even the slightest thing to hurt her.
I remember being in the back of the Buckleys5 limo,
headed to their home in Connecticut for a party there. Their driver, our
captain observed to me, kept a gun under the seat. A VW Cabriolet convertible
pulled even with the limo, and the driver gave three short honks to get our
attention. It was Nan Kempner, waving wildly, girlishly, her hair held back in
a scarf tied at her neck, the convertible top down. This was just a few years
before her death.
“She thinks we’re them,” one of the waiters said.
I didn’t think so. I was pretty sure she knew we were
the waiters. Why wouldn’t she know Mr. and Mrs. B were already in Connecticut?
She was a good sport, is the thing. It made no sense, of course, but it was
easy to believe she was happy to see the men who carried around the food she so
routinely ignored.
The Connecticut party invitation was a sign you’d
arrived, both for the guests and for the waiters. To be asked to work there
meant they trusted you the most. What I remember chiefly about the party is the
roses, everywhere, carefully maintained. I had a rose garden myself in
Brooklyn, and well- cared-for roses have always impressed me. I first pictured
Mrs. B tending them, before my imagination conceded to who she was and replaced
the image with that of a gardener. The Connecticut place was a large, if
somewhat unassuming house in Stamford, a city quickly becoming notorious for
gang activity across the tracks from seaside places like the Buckleys’. As Nan
Kempner had sped away earlier, I wondered if she knew to worry about being
carjacked in her convertible. Perhaps she had a gun under her seat too.
We changed clothes this time in an attic room with a
view of the grounds and the pool, before hustling down and attending to the
needs of the hundred or so guests swarming the lawns. The party passed in its
usual bustle, and was entirely unremarkable until the evening, as we went
upstairs and changed to go. From the window, I saw Mr. Buckley head to the pool
with a dark-haired young man we could see only from the back. I raised an
eyebrow, and one of the waiters said to me, “It’s a tradition. He always
invites a male staffer to a skinny-dip at the end of the night when there are
parties up here.”
“Really,” I said.
We heard the splashes. My coworker smiled. “Really.
That’s how they used to swim at Yale, after all,” he said. Before I could
absorb this, Mrs. Buckley appeared in the doorway.
She was, as I5ve said, very tall, and she
loomed there like a ghost. We all froze. We were in various stages of undress.
I had my pants on, but my shirt and jacket were hung up, and I wore just a
V-neck undershirt. She had never before come to where we changed. Her eyes were
half lidded as she looked down at me. I was nearest to the door of all the
waiters, who stared as she gave me a long, long look and walked slowly ahead
until she was right in front of me. “Thank you,” she said, very quietly,
looking at me. “Thank you so, so much.” And as she said this, she set her long
fingers down into the hair on my chest.
“Thank you,” I said. It was clear she couldn’t see me
very well. She didn’t have her glasses on, and she was drunk.
I could only think I was very good with a Kir Royale.
I wondered if perhaps Mrs. B had decided it was time for her to invite a male
staffer of her own. Why was she there that night, when she had never come to us
like that before? Was that party somehow unbearable, when all the others had
been bearable? Whatever the reason for her arrival in the room, all of us were
shocked to see her.
There was a terrible loneliness and sadness in her
expression, and then it was gone, and she seemed to come back to herself.
“Thank you, thank you all,” she said, and turned and left the attic.
We finished dressing and
started back to New York in the car before the swimmers returned.
令
In the days after, when I thought of this evening, I could barely
believe it. And then months went by, and years, and I could still barely
believe it. I knew that, yes, if I ever wrote of it, my captain would throttle
me — at the least. But more important, I’d lose my job. And for what? Waiters
and escorts both know that indiscretion is a career-ending move. You reveal a
secret only if you are never going back again. At the time, I knew I had
reached one of those accommodations one finds in New York — I had carved out a
little place I could make a living, in a city where finding and keeping a job
has always been an extreme sport. I was also supporting my younger sister with
this money as she made her way through college. I couldn’t afford, in other
words, to risk it — to become famous as a waiter who spoke of all this and then
be blacklisted by New York publishing in the process. They were monstres
sacres, and I was not. Everything in my life
would change, but nothing in theirs — I wouldn’t be a hero, just an example,
the briefest object lesson. And so it soon became a story that I told instead,
to which people listened in disbelief, and at the end we laughed as if it were
only funny.
All these years later, the moment itself has come to
represent some sort of peak, the climax of my life as a cater-waiter. It’s as
if I never did it again after that night, though of course I know I did. I’m
sure I was back at the Buckleys’ at least once more, for example, in New York.
But in the way of these things, there was no goodbye. I didn’t know in advance
the moment I would leave, and there was no presumption of intimacy such that I
would have written a note saying, “Thank you for the time in your service.” I
left the business, having finished and sold the novel I’d been working on. I
transitioned to living off a mix of grants, advances, and teaching writing. I
remember arriving as a guest at a party in Chelsea after the publication of
that novel and finding my captain holding a tray. He smiled at me, we spoke, he
congratulated me. Unspoken between us was that I still should never write of
that time and place.
And now Patricia Buckley is dead, William F. Buckley
is dead, and the Buckley maisonette has been sold by the beautiful son. Even
St. Vincent’s Hospital is gone. The building is being slowly converted into a
nest of luxury condos.
When I knew I would not return — could not return — I
finally did find and read the famous column. And when what he’d written was
there in front of me, contending that people with AIDS should be tattooed as a
matter of public safety — in the New York Times Book Review of all places —I had a number of reactions. I was surprised to see
he wanted not one tattoo but two, one on the forearm and one on the buttocks. I
wondered if he knew, before he died, that this column would be mentioned in his
obituary, along with the names of his wife and son and his place of birth —
that it would, in fact, tattoo him. And I couldn’t help but imagine him in that pool in Connecticut
with the young male staffer, swimming underwater, the walls glowing with light,
their naked bodies incandescent, just like at Yale, and — maybe — wishing there
was some mark on the boy he could easily see.
100 THINGS ABOUT WRITING A
NOVEL
Sometimes music is needed.
Sometimes silence.
A novel, like all written things, is a piece of
music, the language demanding you make a sound as you read it. Writing one,
then, is like remembering a song you’ve never heard before.
I have written them on subways, missing stops, as
people do when reading them.
They can begin with the implications of a situation.
A person who is like this in a place that is like this, an integer set into the
heart of an equation and new values, everywhere.
The person and the situation typically arrive
together. I am standing somewhere and watch as both appear, move toward each
other, and transform.
Alice through the looking glass, who, on the other
side, finds herself to be an Alex.
Or it is like having imaginary friends that are the
length of city blocks. The pages you write like fingerprinting them, done to
prove to strangers they exist.
Reading a novel, then, is the miracle of being shown
such a fingerprint and being able to guess the face, the way she walks, the
times she fell in love incorrectly or to bad result, etc.
The novel is the most precise analogy the writer can
make to what was seen in the rooms and trains and skies and summer nights and
parties where the novel was written, as the writer walked in moments with the
enormous imaginary friend, before returning to the others, which is to say, the
writer’s life.
Or you are at a party and you hear someone call your
name outside the window, and when you get there, a dragon floats in the night
wind, grinning. How did you know my name? you ask it. But you already know it’s
yours.
12.
You write the novel because you
have to write it. You do it because it is easier to do than to not do. You
can’t write a novel you don’t have to write.
13.
Typically, a novelist’s family
will not believe the novelist to be someone who does “real” work, even after
the publication of many novels.
14.
It is said that families should
try not to punish their writers. I am the one who said it.
15.
The family of the novelist
often fears they are in the novel, which is in fact a novel they have each
written on their own, projected over it.
16.
For the novelists in your life
I have heard it said that it is better if you pretend they do something else
and that it is always attended to, and doesn’t need your attention in the
slightest. And then when asked for support, muster an enormous enthusiasm.
17.
Attempts to find out what the
novel is about on uninvited occasions will meet with great resistance.
18.
If I do not answer the question
What is the novel about? or How
is the novel going?, it is because my sense of a
novel changes in the same way my knowledge of someone changes as I get to know
them.
19.
You are looking for an answer
you can rely on later, and so am I. But my answer will eventually be the entire
book, and I do not want to give any of it away.
20.
If I seem cagey, it is because
I am not a liar and hate being considered one, due to an accident of craft. But
also, if I tell you the idea, and the description disappoints you, the novel
can be lost.
21.
Novels are delicate when they
are being written, if also voracious. They move around my rooms, stripping
half-finished poems of their lines, stealing ideas from unfinished essays,
diaries, letters, and sometimes each other. Sometimes, by the time I get to
them, one has taken a huge bite from the other.
22.
There is usually no saving the
poem in these circumstances, or at least not yet.
23.
There is no punishing a novel
in these circumstances either, because hunger has its own intelligence, and
should be trusted. It is dangerous to be a new novel around another new novel
in the years they are each being written, but they know this.
24.
Once you have finished a draft,
revising it turns something like laundry into something like Christmas.
25.
The first draft is a
scaffolding, torn down to discover what grew underneath it.
26.
The first draft as a chrysalis
of guesses.
27.
Novels in progress have many
faces, like an actor playing all the roles in the film. The novel as jailer,
say — in a dark room with no answers to any of your questions and no one seems
to hear your pleas, not for days, months, years. Indifferent the entire time to
all requests for visits or freedom. Hard labor too.
28.
Or the novel as Champagne
Charlie. The limo pulls up, there’s a stocked bar and an entourage. A lover you
haven’t met yet already mad at you for not calling enough, arms crossed, pretty
face steamed.
29.
Or the novel as Fugitive,
arriving at night through an open window. Not quite a dream, it carries a work
order signed by you, your own handwriting insantly recognizable. The factory
address is your own.
30.
As the work proceeds, the
factory is near the roads leading back and forth to the jails, and the
Champagne Charlies can be seen heading in and out. Sometimes it is clear that
the prisoners and the party are trading places (the entourage fits in the
cell). Sometimes not.
31.
The Fugitive leans out the
window, watches, has guessed the limo and the jail cell are the same.
32.
Or the novel as Lover.
Impatient. It wants you to know everything. And it won’t stop until it’s done
telling you. Factory, cell, limo, it doesn’t matter where you are or with whom:
the conversation will not stop. It is not endless but is long, it is longer
than the writer can contain, and so it gets written down and is born that way.
33.
Thus you may discover the novel
is a thought too long to fit in your head all at once until after it is all
written down.
34.
Your hats still fit. But inside
you there’s more room.
35.
Think of a dream with the outer
surface of a storm and the inside like the surface of your days as you have
sometimes found them. The novel being the only way to lead anyone to the
entrance of those days.
36.
A stranger on the street,
walking up to you, grabbing you by the lapels, and walking away with you
quickly, with passports, money. You fall in love as you leave immediately,
together.
37.
The novel coming not from the
mind but the heart, which is why it cannot fit in your head. Why, when you hear
it, it seems to be singing from somewhere just out of your sight, always.
38.
For the duration of the
writing, your heart may believe the novel is a liberator. You will not deny it
this belief, as you do at other times in your life, because you are distracted
by the story. It is why you love novels more than you think you do when you
read them.
39.
You are in love with the unmet
ending — you long for it, sometimes you even know it from the start, the novel
one long path cut through the woods, right to the ending’s door.
40.
The heart’s ruse is nearly
over. This entire time, it has convinced the novel it was only following along.
41.
This game it has played with
the novel like the date that begins with love’s possibility but ends with the
memory of the other, the one you lost or who lost you and who you fooled
yourself into thinking was gone from your heart forever, but instead, reappears
in a mask, that of the stranger you kiss against the wall in the street at
night.
42.
Of course, a novel is also a
mask.
43.
Not for the novelist. Not for
the reader. But for something else the novelist brings in from the back of the
tent like a lion on a chain.
44.
Do not notice the slashes in
the novelist’s shirt, the welts along the arms and legs. Do not try to decipher
them. If the lighting is right you will see them only when you have the chain
in your hands and you are ready to let go. You will remember then. The cuts
will write another novel in you, about what the novelist went through. You will
not write it down, and it will leave on the wake of your next thought.
45.
Unless, of course, you are also
a novelist, and then sometimes it is your next novel. You wake to realize you
are in the back of the tent.
46.
I think of them like a visitor
from another planet, the sentences being like the circuits of a vast and
beautiful machine that communicates the creature. A creature of pure meaning.
47.
Or a distant relation I’ve
never met, from another country and with a language barrier between us. We try
charades. He tries on clothes and wigs I give him, hops on one leg, imitates
strange animal noises, and soon I have the wig. I am hopping, hopping, hopping.
48.
With my other hand I am taking
notes.
49.
Everyone has a novel in them,
people like to say. They smile when they say it, as if the novel is special
precisely because everyone has at least one. Think of a conveyor belt of infant
souls passing down from heaven, rows of tired angels pausing to slip a
paperback into their innocent, wordless hearts.
50.
If it is like the soul, it is a
soul you can share, like the gnostic one, externalized, with a womb.
51.
What if the novel in you is one
you yourself would never read? A beach novel, a blockbuster, a long, windy,
character-driven literary drama that ends sadly? What if the one novel in you
is the opposite of your idea of yourself?
52.
The novelist as a circus
attraction with many limbs, a horse with eight legs or three faces, or two
heads.
53.
Now we are back in a tent, but
another tent altogether, that of a circus.
54.
We discover we are the animal
made to learn tricks in order to please something with a whip.
55.
Kneeling in the sawdust,
juggling plates, we hope the crowd cheers, though we cannot see them past the
lights.
56.
All the while, we know in some
cultures we would be revered as gods. Others, put to death.
57.
Of course, this almost never
happens.
58.
And then sometimes, it does.
59.
The novel for which you can be
killed is a picture someone is trying to hide of what is inside whoever it is
threatening to kill you for writing it.
60.
You did not know this was what
you were doing, you were only trying to take a picture of the landscape. You
thought of yourself as a bystander, you saw something you thought you should
try to say this way. In the corner of the photo, something you do not quite
recognize, not right away.
61.
When you look closely at the picture,
in it is a map left behind by a stranger who says, This is the way to the
treasure, and then this is the way o —
62.
The piece that is missing,
hidden somewhere but calling, describing itself to you from behind the walls of
your days.
63.
Would it be beautiful or
devastating to write the one novel if it was the only one you had? And what
then, to discover that was the one?
Perhaps sometimes the angels are tired and out of their hands slips
not one novel but five, twelve, one hundred, one thousand. A library for a
soul.
They will never come back for them, but
when the novels appear, the tired angels will smile quietly instead, and pass
invisibly through the bookstore, remembering.
Remembering that in fact no one has only one.
The novel and God are always being declared dead.
Both are perhaps now indifferent to this, if either really can be said to
exist.
Imagine for now they pass the time in the Kitchen of Life, telling
jokes, each trying to tell if the other’s feelings are hurt.
God feels confident He is having a comeback. Also the novel. Each is
jealous, does not want to say this to the other, not directly.
The novel is being sold in vending machines in airports. God points
out there are no vending machines for God.
Are you sure, though? the novel asks. And then adds, I feel like you
could do something about that.
Tell me about it, God says. This being one of the
things the novel can do.
Sometimes it is the ship, sinking, and you, you are the captain,
running around the deck, having decided not to go down with it, but to save it,
to head for land all the same.
The ship, moved, returns from its fascination with the deep.
It would be easy to forget that sometimes the shipwreck saves the
ship or the captain. Sometimes one or the other remembers this at the touch of
the rock.
Think of Nemo in his submarine, touring the submerged treasures of
all of the failed voyages in all of history. A library of unfinished novels could
be like this.
Or like the buckle of a belt, worn by an islander who found it in a
reef, and seen years later by the original owner’s friend when he comes to
land. Where did you get this? the explorer asks, and then asks to be taken to
the wreck.
It is like the language the explorer must learn even to ask the
question. What is it you want from me? the novel asks.
What is it you want from me? the novel tells you.
Everything in here is about you, the novel says.
82.
This feels like a trick to keep
you reading it or writing it, a lie that is also true. And this is another
thing a novel is.
83.
In the novel, the true things
often run around like children under sheets, playing at being ghosts. Otherwise
we would ignore them. Not now, we would tell them if they arrived without their
sheets.
84.
Go to your room, we would say,
and wait for me. And then we sob when we get there, to see they are gone.
85.
Novels do not take orders well,
if at all. They are not soldiers, usually, or waiters. They do badly at
housework and will not clean silver.
86.
Novels do not wait. They are
poor chauffeurs.
87.
Novels are good with children
but are considered untrustworthy tutors for the young. And yet there we are, as
soon as we can crawl, pulling them off the shelves.
88.
Cheever said of the novel that
it should have the direct and concise qualities of a letter. To whom and by
whom, I wonder, as I think also of how I feel this is true. I want to argue
briefly — it is not a letter from the author to the reader — and then I stop.
It is not a letter, just like a letter. This being the kind of question — to
whom, from whom —that, if you sat with it, could begin a novel.
89.
For most, novels are accidents
at their start. Writers lining the streets of the imagination, hoping to get
struck and dragged, taken far away. We crawl from under the car at the
destination and sneak away with our prize.
90.
This is because the novel begun
deliberately is so often terrible, with the worst qualities of a bad lie, or a
political speech given during a campaign. The writer turned into something like
a senator.
91.
In your room after the
successful accident, you wake. Something is left in your hand.
92.
It is a letter. Or, like a
letter.
93.
Beside your bed is you, the one
who writes the novel, in disguise, funny hat and all. Hoping to understand. Do not
look too closely at the ridiculous mustache. Listen. Surreptitiously, against
your hand, write down what is said. In its elaborate disguise it acts out the
answers.
94.
The novel then a letter from
the novel to the reader, and dictated to the writer by the writer.
95.
But what is it about? you might
ask, and then the novel recoils.
96.
I just need to get a drink, I5ll
be right back, the novel says. Do you want anything?
97.
Days later the novel returns. I
wasn’t with anyone else, the novel says. There’s only you, the novel adds, even
as the writer fears it has taken up with others. Imagining pages across the
other desks of the neighborhood.
98.
There’s only you, the novel
says again.
99.
You are out in the street,
outside the novel’s window, screaming into the wind. Please, you say finally,
finally quiet, uncertain of how to go further.
100. The novel is already at the door. Waiting, but just for a little. It
is the lover again, impatient again. Wanting again for you to know everything.
In December of 1995, I am shown an apartment in Brooklyn by a broker
who apologizes for it as soon as she opens the door.
“It’s small,” she says, looking away, as if the sight
of such a small place offends her. We walk into a large studio and kitchen with
high ceilings, the wood floor buffed to a high gloss. Beyond that, a sliding
glass door shows a small wooden deck that leads to a yard at least as large as
the apartment, a mud slick striped by a stone walkway. Wooden seven-foot-tall
picket fences line the sides, and a chain link fence closes off the back.
I don’t respond to the broker right away, because as
I enter the apartment and the sun fills the back window, I see, like an
apparition, roses tossing in the air like a parade, pink, orange, red, white,
all lit up by the sun. They appear and then are gone by the time I am fully
inside the apartment, as if painted on a curtain someone drew back. As if an
entire garden could be a ghost, together, or a premonition, or both.
I follow the broker into the yard and back into the
apartment while she talks through the apartment’s qualities, a short list: The
rent is cheap. There is a garden. That’s about it. As she does so, the winter
mud, the dead grass, the snow, these all seem like lies after the strange
vision I’ve just had. I notice a rubble-strewn yard next door, visible through
three missing teeth in the wooden fence. A black-and-white mother cat nurses
black-and-white kittens on a board someone left in the sun.
The rent is so cheap. I ask why.
“Too many people moved in and out, raising the rent
too high, way above market, and so this lease has a rider attached giving it a
five-hundred-dollar discount,” she answers. This seems like a lie. She says
nothing else, and the silence is out of a horror film, a silence that tells the
audience, I will later discover, that anonymous, unspeakable murders have
happened here.
As the broker moves me to the front door, I don’t
want to leave. I feel like I am already home.
I go with her to see a second apartment, out of some
idea that it will make it less strange when I decide on the first, but am
nervous the whole time that I could lose the first to someone else. The second
apartment is a little larger, a little more expensive, on the second floor,
with four rooms. It feels large and lonely. “It’s too much room,” I tell her,
and she raises an eyebrow.
“Are you sure,” she asks me as I fill out the application for the garden apartment.
“Yes,” I say. Impatient
to move in and open that ground.
令
Previous to this, I had no talent for gardening that anyone knew
about, ever, including me. As a child I helped my mother garden, but recall
very little of it except for placing pine needles and Styrofoam cones around
her roses at our home in Maine, insulating them for winter. One winter, I
struck a buried rose with a shovel as I built a tunnel through the snow, and I
tried to see into the darkness where it slept, afraid I’d killed it. I felt so
terrible I was unable to tell her what I’d done, and covered the hole with
snow. When the spring came, I avoided finding out if it had survived.
The single clue that I had any future as a gardener
was the long hours I spent in the woods alone, so much so that my neighborhood nickname
was Nature Boy. I hunted for the wild orchids called lady’s slippers, sitting
and visiting with them, in awe of their beauty and their status as rare and
endangered. I picked bouquets of black-eyed Susans, lilacs, and Queen Anne’s
lace to bring home for my mother — whatever I found. But I did not grow
anything, which I think is why my sister said, “I would have thought you’d kill
anything you planted,” when I told her what I had planned.
In my family, I am not known for patience. I was the
one who yelled, slammed doors, who had confrontations. And at the time, I was
not known for living anywhere more than a year — usually six months.
The only explanation is that it was some gift of the
apartment’s, an otherwise unmystical, unmagical place. An ordinary, even
miserable apartment, renovated once in the eighties and then once more before I
moved in. It was a blank white box, with a small kitchen and a small bathroom,
that special lowered rent, that single window that was also a back door,
cross-ventilation possible only when I opened the front door as well.
And if not the
apartment, then it was a gift of the garden, given when I looked through that
window, into the space the garden would fill. Given before it existed at all.
In the first days after I move in, I read books on garden design.
They agree that proper gardens are planned to give something to the gardener in
each season, even in winter. The spring garden should have early color to
revive the eye after the long, colorless winter; in the summer, a circus of
full blooms; the fall, a harvest of deeper colors. The winter garden is a shape
under the snow, or evergreens and the occasional mahogany red of a rose cane.
Many gardeners try to match the colors and ground types and sun exposures,
others compose with the scents in mind as well, in the manner of a perfumer.
One book instructs on how to layer bulbs at different depths, so that the
crocus is replaced by the tulip, then the lily, iris, canna, and so on, with a
last set of lilies to emerge in the fall, a plot like a holster of bulbs. Some
are rarefied and planted to be seen at night, with white foliage and
night-blooming flowers, and fragrances that appear only in the evening. Too
much of a single variety of plants, the books warn, will make the garden dull
outside the season of the chosen variety’s blooming, and draw a dense number of
pests — as if the pests are drawn to dullness.
I begin to make my plan, sketching out the garden,
and then my original idea, of roses everywhere, asserts itself. I discard the
plan for a careful garden I do not want.
“I am planting a rose garden,” I tell a friend at
what I choose as my local bar, shortly after moving in, testing out saying it.
The month is January, dark and cold.
“Do you have a lot of sunlight?” he asks me.
“Yes,” I lie, unsure.
The next day I don’t have to work. I stay home all
day and watch the sun move across the ground. One of the books recommends
keeping a garden diary, tracking the sunlight exposures, the rains, the seasons
starting and ending.
The first sunlight hits my windows at seven-thirty
and touches the ground in the back around eight. The sun leaves the last patch
of dirt at four p.m. It is January, so the summer promises to have more. All
roses, a guidebook says, need a good six hours of sunlight. I have more than
enough.
The next morning, I turn back to my record of the sunlight and begin
another entry. And this is how this essay begins, on that day.
Each day I wake to the new apartment, still full of sealed packed
boxes and a scattering of furniture: a small table that I use as a desk, a
chair, and a futon. I take a few of my books out and pile them against the
wall, reading some, browsing others. I enjoy the silence. I worked extra jobs
like a demon in the previous months to get the money together to move, and it’s
as if the effort has burned off all conversation. I do not get a phone
installed immediately, as I do not know what I would say if it rang and I
answered. I make calls only when I need to, from a pay phone. When I am questioned
by police, who suspect I’m a drug dealer because of this behavior, I get a line
installed, but it feels like a concession.
The center of this block is an H of adjoining yards,
variously planted and tended or, as in the yard on my right, abandoned. By spring,
it will be clear the bare wintry trees in the back will remain like this all
year. The black branches pinch the sky like the trees in an Edward Gorey
cartoon.
“They were root-poisoned by the landlord,” my
neighbor tells me when she emerges one day and introduces herself. Their
taproots had endangered the pipes and foundations of the buildings as they made
their slow push through the ground below us. The trees will stay like this the
entire time I live here, branches occasionally falling into one or another
garden. My yard is full of the fallen limbs of the poisoned trees.
My neighbor is a young woman, roughly my age, living
off of SSDI due to AIDS, she tells me. I like her right away. She is new also,
and almost always at home. She has plans for a lawn and vegetable garden, and
keeps a compost pile in the back corner of her yard, but she worries about the
poison in the ground used to kill the trees. “I’m testing the soil,” she says.
“You should too.”
A beehive is back there also, wild but, as she points
out, useful: the bees will pollinate our gardens. She will not remove it. This
strikes me as both wise and foolish.
The only living tree remaining is a silvery magnolia,
still dormant and inexplicably alive amid its dead cousins.
The yard to my right is all trash bags of dead
plants, an old bicycle, and a smashed fence, and home to those feral yard cats,
the mother cat and her new brood. The three yards, when viewed together, my
young neighbor’s, mine, and the abandoned one, are like a declension, variations
on the theme of habitation: my neighbor’s yard is the neat one; mine, half
spoiled; the last, a ruin.
What appear to be metal ladders ascend from the
yards, several stories high, notched with pulleys to hold laundry lines, strung
over the yards with panties and sheets and towels hung to dry. Occasionally a
sock or a panty falls into my garden. No one ever comes to ask for them, and I
do not ever know whose these are, and inevitably I throw whatever the stray
item is away. The only other neighbor I see for the first few months is an
older woman opposite me, her hair a combed and brassy hat. She occasionally
appears and leaves large metal bowls of cat food for the yard cats, who tumble
nightly through my garden in yowling fights.
I have a dream of a
garden, my first ever, and in the dream there are grass leaves as thick as
sword blades, and flowers, indistinguishable by type, of the deepest red and
blue and pink. I walk through the garden and that is the entire dream.
In the
introduction to the British horticulturist Ellen Willmott’s The
Genus Rosa, a brief story:
The Persian poet Omar Khayyam, who flourished in the
eleventh century, has much to say about Roses. A hip from a Rose planted on his
grave at Nashipur was brought home by Mr. Simpson, the artist of The
Illustrated London News. It was given to me by
the late Mr. Bernard Quaritch, and reared at Kew. It proved to be Rosa
damascena, and a shoot from the Kew plant has
now been planted on the tomb of his first English translator, Edward
FitzGerald.
A rose travels from Omar Khayyam’s grave to Willmott
to the tomb of his late translator. Willmott declines to say if she is the
source of this planting, but her knowledge of it is such that I can only
imagine her digging the hole herself, smiling to think of the same bloom
watching over both men’s graves.
Willmotfs two-volume Genus Rosa is one of the grander dames of rose culture, published in between
1910 and 1914. Willmott walks the reader through the various mentions of roses
in classical literature and the Bible, always calling it the Rose, with a
capital R. She mentions rose garlands found in ancient Egyptian tombs dating to
ad 300, takes us to the aforementioned Khayyam anecdote, and duns Linnaeus for
his “scant attention” to the genus and the confusion that resulted from it for
those who came after, even somehow knowing, like a spy, that there were roses
in his herbarium that he neglected to mention: “Rosa mochadi,
Rosa agrestis (sepias) and Rosa
multiflora.” She then reels off the attempts to
gather the roses that have appeared between her and Linnaeus, concluding before
she fully begins, without fanfare, that “the Index Kewensis gives specific rank to 493 Roses, with additions in the first,
second and third Supplements amounting to about 50.” Around 543 roses, then, or
Roses, as she would put it.
David Parsons, in the revised edition of his Parsons
on the Rose, published about the same time as
Willmott’s book, in America, notes more than 2,000 varieties. At present there
are around 3,000, though there remain approximately 150 species commonly grown.
Every book on roses I have ever read begins in some
way like Willmott’s. For example, the Rosarum Monographia, a lovely and rare volume of roses, praised by Parsons as among the
finest and published in 1820 by a young Dr. John Lindley, who dedicates it to
one Charles Lyell, Esq.: “Although the number of publications on the present
subject is already too considerable, and their authors, in many instances, men
of established reputation; yet nothing is more notorious than the almost
inextricable confusion in which Roses are to this day involved.”
Lindley accuses some of the authors of the
aforementioned confusing works of having used dead and dried flowers as
specimens, and reveals his book to be inspired by the “considerable private
collection of living plants” that has occupied him for years. His new book is
meant as a corrective to those who haven’t had the advantage he has, which is
to say, the advantage of his own garden. And this is because all rosarians, I
think, find their own garden to be not just a wonder, but a messenger, from a
place of secrets that other rosarians cannot know.
From Lindley we learn the rose was a bribe given to
Harpocrates, the god of silence; that there is a custom in northern Europe of
hanging a rose from the ceiling above a table if what passed beneath it was
meant to be secret; that the red of roses comes from the blood of Venus, whose
feet were cut by roses as she attempted to protect Adonis from the rage of her
husband, Mars. Or, per Theocritus, the red is the blood of Adonis himself. Or
it is Cupid, who spilled a bowl of nectar while dancing, staining the rose red.
Or, per Ausonius, it is Cupid’s own blood. Or it is the sweat of Muhammad,
according to the Turks.
Perhaps all of it is true. The rose as love gift,
stained by the gods, no matter the god or the giver, the first secret of them
all.
In any case, the lesson
we can take, I think, is: Plant a rose, wait for a message. Be it earthly or
divine.
A good place to begin a garden is to undo whatever appear to be the
clear mistakes of previous owners.
I tear up the stone walk. It occupies patches of
ground feasting on sunlight, a feast of no use to a rock. The mother cat looks
at me skeptically as she nurses her kittens, as if she has seen this happen
before. I make a figure-eight path, irregular in the manner of handwriting,
hollowing out the spaces for the stones before I water them into place and hop
on them as they set, in a method I invent as I go.
I wander out to the chain link fence and back again.
Shattered glass and ceramic shards cover the ground in my yard, and I consider
using the larger pieces to make a mosaic of some kind, but discard that idea
quickly. Most gardens are palimpsests of previous gardens, and the first spring
usually has surprises, but it is already clear someone before me planted mint —
a newbie mistake, my neighbor points out, as mint spreads rapidly, choking out
everything else with long, fragrant rhizome ropes just under the surface of the
dirt.
The woman who lived here before me, according to the
neighbor, had vegetables, some herbs, some flowers. My neighbor and I have
conversations over our fence, each of us standing on benches; mostly we talk about
getting the yard cats adopted. The tomcat suitors of the mother cat pass
through the missing teeth of the fence at a high run, and we discuss whether
repairing the fence will slow them down. One tom seems to be the neighborhood
king: he has a giant head and is so heavy that when he climbs down the fire
escape and drops to my deck, he sounds like the full sack of a burglar.
My neighbor is concerned
about what pesticides and fertilizers I will use. I assure her I will not use
chemicals without consulting her. She tells me she has planted dandelions, and
I studiously do not laugh at her, instead quietly remembering summers spent
pulling them out of my mother’s yard.
令
I have two more dreams about gardening during my first year of
living in this place, and then never again to this day. In the first, I take a
train ride, much like the one I once took from London to Edinburgh, and meet,
at the station, my grandfather Goodwin, my mother’s father, a man who farmed
every day of his long life in Maine. He takes me in his pickup, quietly, and
shows me a beautiful forest of parti-colored leaves, each of them as big as the
shield of a Templar. Behind the leaves are flowers as big as faces.
It is the same garden, I understand after waking,
that I dreamed of when I moved in, though in the way of dreams, there is no
resemblance, just an inner knowing.
In the second dream, I
am walking through Brooklyn and flowers fill the streets like a river, roses
that climb several stories high, foxglove and lupine like missiles. So many
flowers that we Brooklynites must walk on catwalks set along the top stories of
buildings, built especially to accommodate those garden streets.
令
Roses, I discover in my research, appear delicate but have adapted
to most climates. They can be made to bloom all through the year until winter.
The more they are cut back, the faster they grow and the stronger they are. My
role models at last, I think, when I read this.
I will have the dull garden with just one type of
plant, I decide, but the variations on the theme seem enough.
I begin with just ten roses. Shrubs and climbers, a
few floribundas and everbloomers. All are chosen for being described with words
like “hardy” and “disease-resistant.”
As I wait for the order to arrive, I go into the yard
and gather all the dead wood and giant dead stalks left from the sunflowers of
the previous inhabitants. I bundle the wood branches with the idea I’ll use
them to stake the roses, until I remember they5re poisoned and take
them out.
The roses arrive, bare roots wrapped in a brown paper
bag, looking like the sticks I cleared from the yard, except, touching the bag,
I can feel they are alive, a fierce halo of living force against my fingertips.
I understand immediately why people speak to plants, as I draw a bath of cool
water for them per the instructions that accompany them. I set the roots in the
tub and step back, feeling crowded out of the bathroom.
People talk to plants because they’re alive.
I get into bed and can
feel them still, in there, drinking the water. In the morning, I rush to put
them in the ground.
令
Before the planting, I walk around the garden with the tags of the
various roses and set them in different spots as I try to decide on the final
design. I use the pictures and the projected measurements to imagine a sort of
ghost garden amid the straw-colored dead plants.
I then dig three of the holes in quick succession.
With the fourth, my spade hits cloth, and I put it down.
Briefly, I imagine the possibility that I am in a
very different story from the one I believed myself to be in. A murder mystery,
for example. This is perhaps the moment when I discover the murders that made
the rent cheap.
I go back and dig until I pull from the ground what
turns out to be a pale blue cotton housedress, flecked with a flower-bud print
and stained from the pale mud tea soaking the wet ground. It is light, the size
of a small pillow. I set it down gently and with the spade’s blade push the
folds of the dress back. At the center is a small crucifix and rosary, wrapped
around a pile of small, thin bones. Among them are sharp fang teeth, one still
attached to a piece of jawbone, reassuring me this was once a cat or small dog.
I place it all carefully into a trash bag, go to the corner bodega, and look
for a saint’s candle, settling on Our Lady of Guadalupe, the avatar of the
Virgin Mary, always painted surrounded by roses. I’ve
always liked this story: A campesino asked to prove he saw the Virgin Mary
returns to where he saw her, and she tells him to go to the top of a hill in
winter to collect flowers he can take back as proof. He arrives to find a rose
garden blooming in winter.
I light the candle, set it by the hole, and finish digging it. As I
go through the rest of the garden, I find more bones — it is like a boneyard —
ox tails thrown here after making soup? Some look to be birds, others, the
remains of a hundred feral cat feasts. A dead rat is under the deck — I use the
spade to remove it. I uncover piles of magazines that seem to have been put in
the ground as landfill and carry these to the curb. I let the candle burn for
hours, in the manner you’re supposed to, and when I put it out, I consider the
possibility I’ve disturbed some kind of spell. I’ve never heard of a cat being
given a Catholic burial — I imagine a small girl or boy doing such a thing. A
private religion, a child’s insistence on the animal’s soul. Much like me, the
nonbeliever who goes to the corner to buy a saint’s candle, just in case.
That night I go out for a beer and meet up with a friend, a Brooklyn
native and contractor. He tells me that in Brooklyn, as late as the 1950s,
Italian and Irish Catholic families buried their dead in their yards if they
were too poor to afford a grave site. The houses often had a room used only for
wakes, a dead room, which are now used as the small bedroom in apartments
shared by roommates. “You’re lucky it was just a cat,” my friend says, and he
puts his beer down.
“It was just a cat, right?”
I think of the fangs staring up at me, and nod.
4
The more I think
about the word “rosary,” the more I understand it must be related to “aviary,”
“topiary,” and so on. When I check the definition, I see the first meaning is
for the prayer and then, in italics, that it once meant “rose garden” in Middle
English.
How did a word for a rose garden come to mean a prayer? “Bimbo,” for
example, used to refer to a man. The French word rien, which
means “nothing” now, in ancient French meant “something.” But the story of this
word is not a journey from one meaning to its opposite.
“Rosary” was once a term for rose garden, until it was not.
The cultivation of the rose in gardens, as we know it
now, was firmly established in Europe by Empress Josephine of France in the
eighteenth century, and was further refined in the nineteenth century, until we
arrived at the tea rose type we all know today from all of those Valentine’s
bouquets. Rose tea is not derived from this rose, though, and predates it
considerably. The rose’s flower is the blossom of the rose hip fruit, a
relative of the blackberry and the raspberry, and is likewise edible. There are
recipes for cooking with roses, using chicken or chocolate. Tea can be made
from the fruit as well as from the petals, and rose tea is used in Indian
Ayurvedic medicine to calm the drinker’s constitution. But it was never grown
primarily for these uses.
The meaning of “rosary,” as we know it now, comes to
us from the thirteenth century. As the story goes, Saint Dominic, greatly
concerned for the future of the Roman Catholic Church in France, prayed at
Notre-Dame in Prouille for guidance. At the time, the Albigensian dissidents
were teaching an interesting heresy: that the body belonged to the devil, and
the soul to God. So there was no need to worry about the body’s sins, as they
belonged, with it, to the devil. The Albigensian heresy quickly spread, and
thirteenth-century France was soon in moral turmoil.
When Dominic prayed to the Virgin Mary, she appeared
to him and instructed him on what was first called the Angelic Psalter, and
told him he was to use this weapon against the heresy. At the time, a rosary
was only a rose garden, though in England, “rosary” was also the name for the
equivalent of a penny.
The turmoil of the Albigensian heresy was rivaled
only by the demand from the thousands of believers returning to the Church for
the Angelic Psalter, a popular spiritual practice, and Dominic, who had been a
studious young man given to ostentatious penances that made the older members
of his order nervous, was now a hero and eventually made a saint. The young man
who had once tried to sell all his books for money to feed the poor had
invented — or, say, was given, by the Virgin Mary — a system of memorized and
recited prayer, useful to a young man who’d sold all his books to feed the
poor.
It was Thomas of Cantimpre, a Dominican scholar in
Flanders and a contemporary of Dominic’s, best known for his multi-volume work Opus
de natura rerum, who, in a book he wrote on the
lives of bees, was moved to consider the Angelic Psalter within it, and described
it as being like a circlet of roses to be offered up to the Virgin Mary.
Shortly after the publication of Thomas’s book on bees, “rosary” earned and
kept its current meaning. So the story of the word “rosary,” coming to mean
prayer, is, in the end, a story of the power of metaphor.
Mary and roses have been linked since her death. On
the third day after her burial, mourners who went to her tomb were said to have
found her body gone and her shroud full of roses. The scent of a rose where
none should be is now formally one of the signs of Mary’s presence — in one of
her twentieth-century appearances, for example, the visitant’s mother said she
believed her daughter’s vision of Mary was manifest because of the scent of
roses in the surrounding air. One result of this connection is that
contemporary rose culture was for some time dominated by Catholics, who tried
to keep the number of varieties limited to 150, the number of beads on a rosary
and the number of psalms in the prayer.
I like the story of Mary’s
tomb and think of it sometimes in graveyards. I’m not a Catholic, but I like to
imagine a God moved to grief by her death, taking her from the tomb and filling
her shroud with roses as He left. In any case, the dead are often honored with
roses, either left at their graves or planted there, and the result is that
cemeteries are often home to some of the best of the heirloom varieties. It’s
an old rose gardener’s trick, one I haven’t tried yet, of taking cuttings from
these graveyard roses, but I still can’t allow myself to leave a cemetery with
anything I didn’t bring in.
During the first winter, at night, I sometimes feel as I imagine
they do, as if the part of me that is exposed is plain, stripped of all
ornament, and the part that isn’t seen is growing, spreading. Roots cast like a
net through an ocean of silt.
I now know this is also what it feels like to write a
novel. Which is exactly what I was doing.
“Your grandmother grew roses,” my mother tells me.
“Do you remember that?”
I don’t. I recall walking with her through her
canning garden in Maine, her pulling a potato out of the ground for me to eat.
She would rub off the dirt on her apron and bite hers like an apple as we
entered the house. If I
flinched at the dirt on the potato, she’d
say, “You’ll eat a peck of dirt before you die.” We spoke very little, she and
I, but we loved each other.
My grandfather showing me the garden in my dreams now seems more
like someone welcoming me to a place I could have found only by searching, as
in that test of virtue in every legend.
The rose I planted in the spot where I dug up the cat bones gives me
no flowers for the first two years. In the catalog it was listed only as
“special climber,” and so I wonder if it is a mutant dud sold on the cheap, but
I do not pull it up. I rename it, jokingly, the Voodoo rose, after its first
mute year. For two years it only grows stalky and huge, until it seems almost
demonic, whipping the wind with seven- and eight-foot canes. The absence of
blossoms feels like a sulk at the garden’s corner.
In the third year, when it finally buds, I feel
forgiven. Thick clouds of teacup-sized pink blossoms appear. My neighbor
stares. “They’re so beautiful,” she says. “What did you do?”
I shrug. I do not feel at all responsible.
The Voodoo rose soon
becomes the garden’s bully, beauty, alluring and cruel, often looking as if it
is reaching for the Climbing Blaze I planted at the garden’s center, or
whipping at the Therese Bugnet next to it. Its thorns are especially long, and
sometimes I find clots of cat fur on it. Occasionally, working in the garden,
it smacks my head lightly like it is mocking me, and sometimes draws blood.
令
The relatively mature garden, then, at age three years: When I stand
on the deck, the Voodoo rose is on my near left, and on my right, two Rosa
rugosas, the sea roses I grew up with in Maine,
their canes furred with thorns. A Therese Bugnet is in the near center. In the
middle, the Fairy is on the left and the Climbing Blaze at the center. Behind
the Climbing Blaze is the Joseph’s Coat, and behind that, another Therese
Bugnet. A Golden Showers climbs the far back left.
Together they are a slow concert. Each year, the twin
Therese Bugnets, planted at the back and front of the yard, push up first, and
though they are also delicate, the blossoms softer than eyelids and poor for
cutting 一 they belong in the garden, that is to say — these dress themselves
before the rest, like haughty sisters, head to toe in crisp green and, when the
blossoms come, pretty-girl pink, flashing at the top of new dark maroon canes.
The far one, at the center of the back wall, grows tallest first, and every
year offers a single pink blossom at the top, like the opening note of a song.
From there, the other blossoms open and spread down, like the slowest possible
flamenco dance, extending over several weeks. Her sister follows suit a few
days after that first blossom. Then the Joseph’s Coat lights up from behind the
far Therese, with golden blossoms tinged by red stains, as if someone has
touched them all with a brush. These blooms change color as they open.
In the center, the Climbing Blaze is a little fire
pit of red blooms, and if I prune regularly, I have roses until December. In
the winter, it often has frozen buds, as if surprised every year that there is
a winter. The Golden Showers never does very well, more like a well-meaning
trickle, though the blooms are nice when they arrive, a perfect bright yellow.
I think it needs a longer, hotter season — years later, I will see the variety
in Texas during the spring, massive yellow clouds everywhere I look. The Fairy
rose, the one I thought would be so delicate, blooms through the summer and
into the fall and winter, keeping the Blaze company, blithely tossing out a
froth of pink blossoms and shrugging off any mildew or fungus, heavy rain or
cat landings. The two Rosa rugosas
seem to have perpetual indigestion on the rich diet I feed them in my yard,
perhaps more accustomed to the briny stones of any beach in Maine: they have
long, woody, spiny stems, with a kind of hat of blossoms at the top. They
always seem to want to leave.
They are on my mind when I head to Maine by car at
the beginning of my first summer. I go back for a week with my brother and
sister and her husband, and they laugh when I poke the window, asking to stop
at plant nurseries. We are going to celebrate our cousin’s wedding and visit my
aunt, a lifelong gardener who has become a florist and landscaper in Rangeley,
near the border of Canada. My aunt’s yard is full of plantings, many vigorous
roses among them.
I explain to her what I’m doing in my garden and ask
for her help. She offers me a ten-pound bag of manure to take back with me.
“Roses love manure more than just about anything,” she says. My siblings refuse
to allow it in the car. “I’ll mail it,” she says to me, and laughs, and then
sends me home instead with something called seaweed tea, a noxious brew of
seaweed and what I grew up calling “gurry,” down on the Portland waterfront:
the remains of gutted fish.
“It has a smell too,” she says, “but not until you
put it in the pail. And this might be the one thing roses love more than
manure.”
We stop at the beach on our way back to New York,
near our mother’s new place in Biddeford. I stroll the boardwalk of
Kennebunkport, the beach lined with sea rose hedges. These are the sea roses of
my childhood, the ancient variety that seems to me the hardiest of them all. I
follow a line of greenery out along a spit of sand and rock to a sandbar, where
I come across a sea rose perched on, or really around, a granite boulder. The
roots wrap the boulder like the ribbon on a present and probe for chinks.
Erosion has taken away the ground around it and the rock has tumbled into the
beach, so the rose is growing at an angle, reaching for the sun, new buds
flourishing. They lift along the side of the rock and over it, as big as a
single bed. The ocean and the rose compete in a slow race to break the boulder
apart, though it looks as if the rose flew down to grab the boulder, and having
caught it, won’t fly off and won’t let go.
You might think a rose was something delicate, but
you’d be looking in the wrong place.
When I return from
Maine, home again, I open the door to my apartment, afraid my roses will be
withered, fainting, dead. No rain for four days. I rush to the back, where I
find them giddy, hurling color up from the ground like children with streamers
at a parade.
令
I try the seaweed tea my aunt gave me. It has the rank, terrible
smell of a fish left out in the sun not quite long enough to dry, but for
months. Not even the feral cats come to the yard while the scent is in the air.
I test everything I hear about a rose. I plant garlic
and onions at the feet of two bushes to try and make the roses too bitter for
aphids, and when the hot summer arrives they smell hotly of garlic and onions,
and the aphids continue eating them all the same. I use soda water for some of
the feedings, to aid the greening, and it seems to work. I take a pitchfork and
stab at the earth to aerate the roots. Every so often I pee into a pint glass
and take it outside to shake it along the garden’s perimeter, to keep the worst
of the cats at bay. Or at night, alone, or seemingly alone, I leave it there
myself.
The cats do seem to come less, as if this is a fence
they understand.
I pull weeds from the ground that grow a yard in a
single week. How did I not hear them pushing their way up? Afterward the earth
looks stark and bare. When I am done cleaning up, I walk around the corner and
come to a full stop in front of a white tea rose in front of a flower shop. It
is called Great Century and seems exactly right for the bare spot in my yard. I
had decided against tea roses, thinking them hard to grow. Tea roses are the
reason the rose has a reputation among nongardeners as being too difficult to
raise. But the bloom there on the bush is a pretty one, and the florist selling
it has no idea what it is worth, so the price is very low. The rose is too
large for the pot it sits in, and so this, in the end, this elegant creature’s
pinched feet, is the reason it comes home with me.
Come, I tell it as I carry it. Soon you’ll have a
place where you can stretch your feet.
At home, I pull and cut
at the balled gnarl of its roots. When, in late summer, it offers me roses,
despite being planted so late, it feels like a cat laying a catch by its
owner’s door.
My neighbor peers over my yard to check my progress. “Gorgeous,” she
says. I wonder if she really means it. Her yard is impeccably neat, whereas the
kindest thing you can say of mine is that it is an untidy cottage garden, a mix
of what I meant to plant and what was left behind by others. But she is really
amazed, like a child at the fair. Sunflowers have come up, also apparently hard
to grow, uninvited guests from the previous tenants, along with a miraculously
large phlox and peppermint flowers, pearly tines at the end of the hearty,
fragrant spirals of green I still have to pull from the ground every week. At
the back of the garden in midsummer, I smell what I think is cinnamon or clove,
and find lavender, roasting in the late July sun. There’s marjoram hanging
down, funny round flowers, a sort of ocher, that crumble to my touch, and
summer savory and hyssop, the savory blue, the hyssop blue-white. The hyssop is
strangely vigorous, and the rosemary planted near it shies away, as if afraid.
I planted a “wildflower” mix compulsively, scattering the seeds haphazardly,
and snapdragons, cosmos, and poppies grow from that, red, white, and pink.
From where I stand on the deck in the morning, I
admire the blossoms’ whirl. It is not yet as high as I’d like. I want to feel
surrounded by them, to feel that someone left me a hundred bouquets in my yard
while I slept. Still, I’m gratified by the second round of blooms appearing,
the summer blossoms after I deadheaded the spring ones — cutting off the fading
blossoms makes the rose grow more of them. I notice the Joseph’s Coat roses at
the back of the garden and decide it is time to see those new blossoms up
close. As I get near, the largest bloom quivers and the shiny backs of nine
Japanese beetles emerge, combing the petals with their horned mandibles, oil
black and oil green, chomping hard. I run to the house and return with my
pyrethrin spray, foaming the rose until the beetles slide to the ground.
Pyrethrin is my favorite bug killer. Nontoxic to humans, it is a paralytic
agent. The bug cannot move and dies as its metabolism burns its very spare
stores of energy, starving it to death.
I never had the urge to
kill a thing, it occurs to me as I sweep the beetles up from the ground, until
I started growing roses.
令
After the attack of the Japanese beetles, I am protective of the
garden in a whole new way. I take out my copy of A Year of Roses, by Stephen Scanniello, and read about all the terrible things there
are that seem to live just to eat a rose. Aphids, sure, and Japanese beetles,
but also rose mites and, worse, the cane borer.
The cane borer drills down into the cane to plant its
larvae, hollowing it as they emulsify the cane’s center and killing the rose as
they go. The borer leaves a tiny hollow tunnel behind, as if someone had taken
the lead out of a pencil.
I put the book down and with a growing sense of alarm
rush to the garden and begin inspecting it for borers. I check the far Therese
Bugnet first.
The hole is there.
I go to the hardware store and buy lop-handled shears
and then, at the pharmacy, nail polish, per Scanniello’s instructions. I am to
cut the stems back until the cane is smooth again and cauterize the wound with
the lacquer. I buy a pale, frosted green color, so it blends in with the
foliage.
Much of what I must cut off are the second-round blooms this rose
has given me, and what is left looks like the bush was prepped for surgery. I
walk inside to let the canes dry a little and then come out again, painting
each cut stem.
At the beginning of the second spring, as I prepare to leave for a
month at a writers5 colony in Virginia during the month of March,
when I would do much of the gardening preparation for the season, I go to wake
the roses from their winter sleep by pruning them. I have the proportions wrong
in my head, however, and I cut them back by two thirds instead of one third.
When I finish, I am startled at the sight of all the sticks, a picture of pain,
the cut stems wet with fresh sap. After I take the trimmings to the curb, I lie
down on my bed, horrified.
The trip to Sweetbriar, Virginia, is a long but simple
one. I arrive to a town with fields full of giant wild roses. They climb up
trees, spill down the other side, filling the grounds of the colony, where I
find rose bushes the size of cottages, bristling with thorns and buds.
Sweetbriar, I learn, is named such for the roses planted by cattle ranchers who
tried to save on cow fencing. It didn’t work — the cows ignored the roses — but
the town is surely the proof of what my aunt said about how much roses love cow
manure.
I am here to work on my first novel, and I do well. I
spend five weeks among these enormous roses, and write 120 pages.
On the morning of my departure, I discover a
black-snake skin, shed whole and without a tear. Its former owner had spent the
previous week sunning itself on the fence near my studio and left its coat
across the walkway to my door. I imagine the snake using the thorns to shed its
skin, but I see no holes in it anywhere when I hold it up to the light.
Instead, it glows in the sun, the scales light up, and blue sky shows through
the holes for its mouth and eyes.
I climb into the car of the man giving me a ride back
to New York, and show it to him. He laughs and tells me he has been writing
about the traditions of the area’s indigenous people, and that according to
them, this would be a powerful omen of good luck. The snake, he tells me,
leaves the skin with you as a sign of its respect and good wishes. I am awed,
but can’t imagine living with it, so I give it to him to give to his son, as
payment for my ride.
When I return to my garden, the roses I feared would
be dead or dying are instead huge, the canes thick and new, the leaves a sturdy
dark, and the buds firm to the touch. I can feel them surging under the
surface. My cutting them back by two thirds would seem to have made them more
powerful than ever.
Perhaps it was the gift
of the snake. The lesson for me at least — and this I think of as the gift of
the garden, learned every year I lived in that apartment: you can lose more
than you thought possible and still grow back, stronger than anyone imagined.
I stay five years more past that
spring.
In those years, I take roses with me to dinner
parties, usually the Voodoo roses, as the plant seems able to provide the vast
amounts of roses needed to make such gifts. A flower shop opens next door, and
when I go by with some, the owner is shocked, and asks me where I got them.
Soon I am providing her with a bucket of them to sell.
I throw my own parties, and the garden fills with
people drinking around the roses. I have affairs, boyfriends. One summer I
learn about garden feng shui, and map my body onto the garden. Shortly after,
an outbreak of cane borer seems to predict exactly a case of crabs. The feng
shui map like a fetish doll drawn onto the garden, one that had mapped its problems
onto me. Or vice versa.
I eventually take pity on the sea roses and remove
them. In an unscientific gesture that I also feel very sure of, I take them to
the beach in Maine and leave them out on the rocks to fend for themselves.
After I finish and publish my first novel, I become
restless, and when I talk about moving, I mention taking the roses with me,
because people say, What about your garden? They arrived by truck, I tell those
people. They can leave that way as well. In the end, though, when I do move, I
leave the garden there with the rest of its mysterious contents, deciding they
belong to the place and not to me.
I had come to this garden much
like what I found in it. I was a mess, a disaster in need of a reckoning. That
backyard was my perfect mirror, and
the dream of the garden was in its own way a dream of myself. I
arrived there after many years of self-abandonment, sure only that I did not
know myself, but certain that I needed to believe I had a future. I did not
know what the garden could do, and I did not know what I could do. If my garden
was a messenger, the message was in the silent moments when I was sure I could
hear it growing toward me through the earth. That more was coming. But I did
not know this then. I knew only that it was time for me to leave. I had done
what I came to do.
Whenever I am back in the neighborhood, I sometimes
pass my apartment from the street. I like to believe, stupidly, that if I were
to open the front door again, in the back I would find my roses, huge from their
seaweed tea and the many days of six hours’ sunlight, perhaps growing legs,
ready to push down the building and walk out to the street, striking cars out
of their way and slicing the blacktop to ribbons. I want to think that they
would miss me, their erstwhile tormentor, the one who pushed them so hard to
grow, cutting and soaking them in the blazing sun from spring to winter. From
the street, from across the river, where I live now without them, I can feel
them still, the sap pulsing in their veins, pushing their way to the sky.
But the creature that grew legs and walked away from
the garden was me. I was not their gardener. They were mine.
In 2000, I became, somewhat by accident, the director of All Souls
Unitarian Church5s Monday Night hospitality program for the
homeless, on the Upper East Side of Manhattan. The former director had a
medical emergency and had to leave her responsibilities immediately, and so the
next week when I went in for my volunteer shift, I was asked if I would
consider running the program, at least until someone else could be found. I
would be acting director for three years.
On my first day, I went to Western Beef, a low-cost
butcher shop and grocery store where the program did its shopping, the week’s
dinner budget in an envelope of cash. And even though I had previously gone
along with the director, as her assistant, I was nervous that first day on my
own. The program fed one hundred guests on a first-come, first-served basis —
more, if more showed up. Some diners even took leftovers back to their shelters
for those who couldn’t leave. This was a big responsibility. I planned the
meal, bought the food under budget, and returned to the church, and I did the
job for three years. Gradually the program expanded, especially after September
11, 2001. I was proud of the work we did.
The calm with which I did this every week was not
visible in the rest of my life. In the apartment I returned to after those
volunteer shifts, my closet was full of stacks of boxes of files and receipts
going back fifteen years. Many were unpaid bills, missed payments, or collection
notices. Letters from the IRS. A personal organizer I had hired a few years
before had said, looking them over, “Oh, wow, you don’t need these,” then she
laughed and told me to throw all the papers away. But I could not. When I
eventually moved out in 2004, I moved with those boxes.
In some way I wasn’t
quite aware of, I had imagined the problem was receipts. But I did not feel
that pain when I shopped for the church’s program and put the receipts in an
envelope before turning them over to the office. The more I kept a steady hand
on the program, the more I was aware I was in the presence of a revelation
about myself. The ordinary transactions contrasted with the pain I faced,
almost supernatural, every time the money was mine.
令
The pain was there in every transaction. Whenever the question came,
“Would you like a receipt?” I never wanted it. But I took it, knowing I should, and would put it quickly in my
wallet instead, until the wallet bulged like a smuggler’s sack.
I had no system for the next steps. The receipts
stayed in there, usually too long, sometimes fading to meaninglessness. Or I
emptied the wallet into the pocket of a backpack, or I stuffed them into an
envelope, always with the promise of getting to them later. Then I put them in
the boxes. There they fluttered around like some awful confetti, saved for a
celebration that never came.
I knew they represented,
in part, money that could come back to me, but for me they mostly represented
money lost. Pain is information, as I would say to my yoga students at the
time, and my writing students also. Pain has a story to tell you. But you have
to listen to it. As is often the case, I was teaching what I also needed to
learn.
令
The pain these receipts represented was not particularly mysterious
to me then. I had just never examined it. I hadn’t even felt I could. I simply
thought everyone had these difficulties. But this was a lie I told myself, a
way of accommodating the pain instead of facing it.
In a file I still have from 1989, there is a letter from
my sister, when she was fifteen and I was twenty-two, asking me to send my tax
form to my mother so she could give it to our accountant. This is in a folder
with the tax return from that year, completed after I sent the form. I can see
the earnings from the sandwich shop I worked at in Middletown, Connecticut,
while a student at Wesleyan; earnings from my first months at A Different
Light, the bookstore where I worked in San Francisco just after college
graduation; and the taxes paid on the stock certificates I sold from my trust
in order to pay off my tuition bill at Wesleyan.
Asking my younger sister to write and ask me to send
the tax form was my mother’s way of communicating, off-kilter and indirect. To
this day, she will ask one of us to communicate something to the other, though
she could just as easily call directly. I have tried my whole life to change
this in her, as I have tried to change my own relationship to money and pain,
which are forever twinned in my mind. The anxiety about receipts was anxiety
about money, but also much more than that.
Underneath that anxiety
was the belief that there would be an accounting demanded of me, one that I
would fail. After reading Joan Didion’s The Year of Magical
Thinking, where she describes keeping her late
husband5s things as if he might return for them, I understood it a
little better: I imagined someday having to tell my father about everything I
had bought with the trust fund I received after his death. And having to
explain how I’d failed him.
My father was so young when he died, forty-three years old, that he
hadn’t made a will, due in part to the faith the young have that a will can be
written and notarized at some later date, because surely death is far away. As
a result, the State of Maine divided my father’s estate four ways, among my
mother, myself, my brother, and my sister — my mother receiving, by law, the
majority. I was given a trust that would be vested to me when I reached the age
of eighteen.
Just three years earlier, at the time of his death,
three years after the car accident had rendered him paralyzed on the left side
of his body, my mother had confessed to me she was repaying his medical bills,
which totaled more than a million dollars, and this was after what was paid for
by medical insurance. He’d had repeated surgeries over those three years, home
care, physical therapy, and experimental treatments. My father’s family was
wealthy enough to have helped us out, and for one year they had, but they’d
held the cruelly contradictory belief that my mother should both be able to pay
the bills and also not have to work — to stay home and take care of my father.
I can only think they believed the money would magically appear out of my
father’s business, a mistaken notion born of a mix of sexism and parochial
privilege so extreme as to be laughable, if the price of it were not so steep.
My father’s father had worked very hard, but his family had mostly never
worked, or if they had, they did not understand the structure of my parents’
financial lives. My father’s family have been, in my experience, people who
believe something is wrong if the world is not the way they imagine it to be.
And so they treated us as if my mother was lying, or deceitful.
This was unexpected and difficult. My mother did the
only thing she could do. She put in fifteen-hour days to turn the assets of the
business, now the assets of the estate, into something that could meet the
scope of the problem, leaving me to cook for my siblings, to drive them to
sports practices, to grocery shop, and even to shop for her clothes while she
did this. She was soon able to pay off my father’s medical debts, and did.
And now we had arrived here.
My mother told me the trust was, first and foremost,
for my education and anything related to it, and I should spend it wisely.
“Your education is the one thing you can buy that no one can take away from
you,” she said portentously. Also: “I wouldn’t have given you control over that
much money at age eighteen.” But the state had decided it, and she had to allow
it. I rankled at the thought, but it was also true that for me to be presented
with money enough for college after years of worry over mortgages and my
father’s medical bills felt like an unearned luxury at best.
As a result, the first thing I did with my money was
part rebellion, part panegyric. My father had loved fast cars and expensive
ones, both, and so I bought what I thought he’d want for me, a black Alfa Romeo
— a Milano, the first year they were available in the United States — a sort of
cubist Jetta with a sports car’s heart.
I drove off to college with my younger brother
literally along for the ride —he wanted to see how fast it could go. He was the
king of auto shop in high school, and had saved up the regular gifts of money
given to him by our relatives over the years until he could buy the cars he
rehabbed in autoshop, and then he sold them for more money. He has always had a
gift for making more out of what he was given. He had taught me how to drive
stick shift on his red 1974 Corvette 454, a car so beautiful the police would
pull him over just so they could look at it.
My brother had been reading the Alfa Romeo manual,
and after he looked at the speedometer, he said, “It says this car tops out at
130 mph,” and he gave me a little smirk.
I nodded. The highway ahead of us was oddly empty,
and so I floored it. For a brief moment on the Massachusetts Turnpike, we flew,
pushing the speed as far as I dared, a 130 mph salute to our father.
I drove the car for the nine years the trust lasted, except for when
I lived in California, during which time my mother, despite her objections to
the purchase of the Alfa Romeo, drove the car and enjoyed it, in what amounted
to a truce on the subject. I used that money not just for my tuition costs, but
to turn myself from a student into a writer. I paid for my college and left
with no debts — an extraordinary gift. This gave me the freedom to intern at a
magazine that published my first cover story, and to take a job at an LGBT
bookstore that let me read while at work, meet authors, and even help with the
planning of the first LGBT writers’ conference, OutWrite. And while I went to
graduate school on a fellowship with a tuition waiver, I had no health
insurance, and so the trust money paid for my regular dental work and a trip to
the hospital back in New York, where I lived before and after grad school. I
know this freedom looks ordinary to many, but I also know all too well that it
is rare when the children of Korean immigrants are given this kind of latitude
from their family to pursue the arts.
Besides the car, what I thought of as my excesses at
the time now seem more or less pragmatic to me. My clothes were usually
secondhand, my books also, or purchased with an employee discount. I bought a
used Yamaha 550 motorcycle, which I drove while I lived in San Francisco, where
there were four cars for every parking space. I made a trip to Europe in the
fall of 1990, to Berlin, London, and Edinburgh, which I took to investigate
whether I could live somewhere other than the United States. And while I ended
up staying in America after all, the trip was its own education. My greatest
indulgences were probably during a long-distance relationship while in Iowa:
phone bills that regularly cost as much as the plane tickets for said
relationship, not otherwise affordable on a graduate student’s budget.
For those nine years, I felt both invulnerable and
doomed, under the protection of a spell that I knew to be dwindling in power.
The Alfa broke down finally while I was driving from Iowa to New York City. I
left it where it stopped, in Poughkeepsie, on a block in front of a friend’s
apartment. That summer, newly released from graduate school, with no job and no
prospects, I had no money to repair it or move it. Eventually the car, covered
in unpaid tickets, was impounded and sold by the state to cover the
towing and storage costs. My money gone, I surrendered to life
without either the trusfs protections or the car. I know it was all stupid, and
I was ashamed, and felt powerless in the face of the problem and ashamed of
that powerlessness. But I was also tired of being mistaken for someone who was
rich when I felt I had less than nothing.
I had believed I would
feel lighter without the money, free of the awful feeling of having it but not
having my father. And yet spending the last of it was not just like failing my
father. It was like losing him again.
令
We learn our first lessons about money as children, and these shape
much of our ideas about it. We learn these lessons from our parents, but from
others also. But I feel as if I have always been taught about money by
everyone, every day of my life a lesson, whether I want it or not, in what
money is and does.
The lessons my life had provided until the point I
describe were that money is conflict, strife, grief, blood. Money is necessary.
Money divides families. Even the promise of it, hinted at. And that nothing
destroys a family like an inheritance.
My mother likes to tell a story of me at age two. We
were living in my grandparents’ home in Seoul in 1968, and three of my father’s
siblings were still of school age — two uncles and an aunt. The three-story
house was surrounded by a high wall, covered with nails, barbed wire, and
broken glass, that I would later come to expect on houses like this all over
the world — the homes of the rich, living amid great poverty. The house is near
the Blue House in Seoul, the presidential residence, and the Secret Garden,
formerly a palace where the king kept his concubines, is visible from the third
floor. For years it was one of the most privileged of neighborhoods, exempt
from development.
The reason we were living in Seoul at the time this
story happened is that my parents could not afford me on their own. When I was
born, my father was a graduate student in oceanography at the University of
Rhode Island. A favorite photo I have of him from that time shows him posing
with his URI classmates, holding a whale rib. My mother taught home economics
at the local public school, and since women were not allowed to teach while
pregnant, married or not, when she started to show, she was dismissed, and the
economic crisis that I was began. My birth was unplanned; my parents were not
financially ready to start a family. In the first photos of my father holding
me in his arms, he looks tired and dazed, and the expression on his face is one
of amazement, love, and frustration. He seems ready to agree to his father’s
offer of a job back in Korea, which came soon enough.
My father’s siblings had lined up to ask for their
lunch money, and after the youngest had taken her turn, I went and asked for my
lunch money, as they had. My grandfather was so charmed — he was worried I
would never speak Korean — that he came downstairs, laughing, and gave me some
money, just the same as he did them. I was then allowed to spend the money
across the street at the small market, to get a treat.
I did the same the next day, and the next, as it made
him laugh, and he gave me money for treats. Soon he gave me the money daily.
My father’s siblings still resent me, I think,
because of it. I became just another sibling to compete with for attention,
approval, and money.
I was born slightly premature, and so at age two,
because I was underweight, I was allowed to use my daily allowance to buy a
chocolate bar at the snack stand across the street. This is the context for the
next story my mother likes to tell about me from this time: She decided one day
to punish me for something, and told me I could not go to the stand. Later, she
found me eating my chocolate bar. Confounded, even alarmed, she asked me how I
had done this.
The maid explained that I had sent her with the money
I’d been given.
My mother tells this story as an example of my
shrewdness in the face of an obstacle, also my devilishness. And I do like to
think the story is about my improvisational mind. But it also shows that even
at a young age, I understood how power worked. I was adapting to my sense of
the class I belonged to, as all children do. That this class would change, that
I would become a class traitor — as all writers are, no matter their social
class — was all ahead of me. Perhaps this was preparation for that change:
reading context clues for signs of how to get around the stated rules — how to
find the real rules, in other words, that no one ever tells you but that
everyone obeys.
However it happened, my relationship to money began
before I can remember it, and it seems it started that way.
I was a trickster child, whether by accident or fate. My first
Korean words were “Obi Mechu,” the name of a beer (the Korean Budweiser,
really), spoken as I sat on my mother’s lap and saw the sign over her shoulder
while we were driving in a car through downtown Seoul.
I am still someone who absent-mindedly reads aloud
from any signs I see, as if it is some way of learning where I am.
I was also a regular source of anxiety during my time
in Korea, most of which I was not aware of. Biracial Korean and white Amerasian
children in Seoul in 1968 were typically thought to be the children of American
GIs and Korean women, and were often kidnapped and sold, as, for some time,
your patrimony was your access to personhood. Put another way, if your father
was a white GI, no government authority automatically thought of you as a
citizen. My mother was warned never to let me out of her sight in public, and I
did have a knack for disappearing. My eyes had been blue when I arrived,
alarming my father’s family, my grandparents especially, but they quickly
settled into hazel, green coronas with brown rings, which was seen as more
acceptable. As the eldest male child, certain responsibilities and privileges
accrued with that status: during the first months I lived there, until my eyes
changed, the family struggled with the idea that a blue-eyed half-white boy
might become the jongson of the
forty- first generation of Chee.
My father liked to joke that, as a part of my status,
a house in Korea would be mine when I got older, and only as adults would my
younger brother confess to me just how unfair this had struck him. I used to
wonder sometimes if this was why he went into private equity. But in truth, his
first distressed assets were those cars he’d refurbished in auto shop. And
being the jongson was not
exactly a prize to be jealous of.
The jongson does typically receive a greater share of the inheritance. He does
not always get a house, but he often does, because when he becomes the jongga, the head of the family, he is supposed to care for his parents in
their old age, hold the jesa — a ceremony held annually to honor one’s ancestors — and tend the
graves of the family’s ancestors. In the most conservative families, he isn’t
supposed to live anywhere but Korea. He looks after the entire family, the
living and the dead. My brother and sister and I now joke that Korean
traditions like this exist only to create conflict and pain — and that has
certainly been our only experience of it. Brothers turn against each other;
sisters feel invisible and powerless. Most of what I know about my nonmonetary,
spiritual responsibilities came to me from people who were outside the family.
My father, the middle child, was forever settling
disputes between his siblings, and they were always over money and patrimony.
After he died, no one was left to settle these fights, and after the death of
their father, the siblings sued one another for a decade. I will forever
remember my oldest aunt, a respected translator and professor in Korea, when
she reflected on the long battle over my grandfather’s estate, saying, “My
sisters were so talented. And yet they did nothing with their lives except this
— this fight over money.”
She said this, though
she had joined in too.
My parents did not give me lessons in money so much as they enacted
them. My father spoke of money only rarely. He explained his absences from
church on Sundays by saying, “My church is the bank, and I’m there five days a
week.” He dressed for work in well-tailored suits from J. Press, wore handmade
shoes from England, and was uninterested in cutting a low profile. He was the
first nonwhite member of his golf club and the Kiwanis and Rotary clubs, and he
never looked less than sharp. That this sort of dapper dressing was something
he had to do — that his appearance, as an immigrant, required him to be
tailored, impressive, to project wealth or at least comfort, just to be treated
with respect — would not be visible to me until much later. I remember he said,
“I’m treated better when I fly if I wear a suit jacket,” and each time I put
one on to fly — and he’s right, I am treated better — I feel close to him.
Both of my parents had worked hard for what they had
— my father, with his older brother, had scavenged for food from abandoned army
supply trucks in Seoul during the Korean War. My mother had cleaned hotel rooms
during the summer for the money she used to buy the car she drove away from
Maine. My father believed money was for spending, and my mother believed it
should never be spent. Her clothes were handmade also — for much of her life,
she made them herself. She was as stylish as my father, but by her own hand.
The only time I recall hearing my parents speak of
money together was the day my father came home with an antique
eighteenth-century
Portuguese cannon, “the only one of its kind with a firing piece,” I
remember my father explaining. My mother was as angry as she5s ever
been. He had spent their savings on it: $750 at the time. The seller was a
marine who had, with his buddies, each taken one of these cannons back to the
United States from Korea at the end of the war. Or so he said. Part of my
mother’s anger then was that there was no certification of its authenticity,
but also, as she said that day, “What are we going to do with it? Declare war
on the Mullinses?” It was a strange, brute artifact, out of place, and after
the purchase, it stayed behind our blue corduroy couch alongside many of our
father’s rifles, by the entrance to our suburban two-story house. As if it were
hidden there in case we ever really did need it.
After my father’s death,
we considered having the cannon appraised, even selling it. We also thought of
selling his Mercedes. We did neither. The cannon sat behind our living room
couch for years and is now my brother’s. The car went into storage in Vermont
during the summer of the bankruptcy. My brother may have it still. The last
time I asked about the car, he never answered my question. He did recently
admit to having the cannon appraised by Christie’s; it is now worth $28,000.
Thirty-seven times its original price, thirty-seven years later, the lesson of
the cannon is at last visible: my father was right.
The eventual allowance I received as a child in America, from my own
father, the first allowance I remember, was given to me to soothe the pain of
the allergy shots I required, starting around age seven. There was the sharp
flash of the needle’s injection, and then, at the corner store near the
doctor’s office, my father would hand me a quarter, which I could use to buy
comic books.
The cycle was pain, then money, then power over pain.
A feeling like victory — if not over the pain, at least over powerlessness. And
one of my earliest experiences of fatherly love.
Pain, money, power over pain. My mistake being that
money is not power over pain. Facing pain is.
In the first years after the end of the trust, I had
dreamed of a payday as big as the trust had been, imagining it could save me,
because it was all I could imagine. I see now it never could. It was a dream
that the sacrifice of the trust could return to me as a payday the size of the
trust, a simple exchange that would clearly mean it had all been worth it, in
the primitive religion around money and self-worth that I had made for myself.
But this longing for a payday was really just a mix of two stories in my head,
turning the money from the father into something that both conquers the pain
and also stands in for it.
I was searching for new narratives with which to
remake my relationship to money. I had several identities, whether I was aware
of them directly or not: as the child of a scientist and schoolteacher; as the
child of entrepreneurs; and, as a friend of mine likes to say, as a lost
prince, far from his kingdom. My identity as a writer was the newest of these.
But to the extent that I identified these ways, it is
because I did not want to be a jongson, or at least not in the way it had been described to me. My
experience of that role was that it had made me a target. I wanted to belong to
myself, much as my father had, and the stories I had of him, as someone who had
worked multiple jobs in order not to rely on his father, inspired me also — and so, with my trust fund gone, I not only waited tables, but took
any work I could get. I followed the example of my father, and not his family.
I had been raised with the idea of writing as an
inherently unprofitable enterprise from which one derived token sums of money
while being supported by other means, and I had to teach myself to fight this
too. But my dream of a writer’s payday was just as unrealistic. My mother was
fond of asking me to get an MBA and write on the side. My grandfather, in our
last visit before his death, said to me, “You are a poet, which means you will
be poor, but very happy,” and then he laughed uproariously.
I laughed too.
These allowances, this trust, had taught me one
thing: money belonged to other people, not to me. I was trying to undo the
spell all of this had cast on me, beginning with the lunch money my grandfather
used to give me back before I could remember, which became the $100 bill he
would give me whenever he visited from Korea. This was something my father’s
oldest brother, my Uncle Bill, did as well. And while I could never imagine
myself being like my grandfather, the self-made millionaire with an
international fisheries conglomerate, and the seven children who would, after
his death, sue each other repeatedly for a decade, I could imagine all too well
being like Bill someday.
Bill was a well-dressed man who favored a uniform
that hardly ever varied: a chambray shirt with a paisley ascot, worn under a
navy blazer with gold buttons, khaki pants, tasseled oxblood loafers — he was
the man who taught me what paisley meant. When going outdoors, he topped this
uniform with a Burberry overcoat, Burberry scarf, and a beret that hid his
hair, a raffish comb-over that I always viewed tenderly, for even as a child I
knew it fooled no one. He loved us deeply and was forever smiling and impish,
so much so that when he was sad, it reverberated. A legal scholar, a lawyer, a
professor of law, Uncle Bill had pursued a distinguished academic career in the
United States before being summoned home by his father to be a good son. He
began teaching law in Korea, at Hanyang University in Seoul, eventually rising
to be a cabinet-level presidential adviser on international treaty law, and was
the first Korean elected to the United Nations International Law Commission. In
1994, as I was finishing my graduate degree, Bill asked me to copyedit a
translation of one of his books, which I still have, detailing his work on
behalf of stateless Koreans inside Russia and China. He lived, until his death,
in the home left to him, the house I had lived in as a child with my father’s
family. It was too much house for one man, but he insisted on it, despite the
punishing tax burden. His mother had always dreamed the family would gather
there, and he lived there in a lonely vigil, against the day the next in line
would take his place.
I have always suspected that this was the house my
father spoke of, the one I would have one day inherited. Bill, like me, had
been an eldest son. I visit the house whenever I am in Seoul. For years after
his death, it was a ruin, open to the weather, left to a cousin he’d adopted as
his heir. Now it is a Vietnamese restaurant, no doubt the cousin’s decision —
we do not speak, a product of the estrangement created after my father’s death,
when the family’s disagreements over money took aim at what my father had left
behind. The persimmon trees in the backyard still stand, taller than all of the
new buildings built around them.
I come here to see what
I know, without speaking to him, is true: that he is struggling to do, even to
be, that which was denied me.
令
In the years after the end of the trust,
which I still think of as the loss of the trust, I taught myself to do without
the idea of my being jongson,
except perhaps for the jesa. Two
years ago in October, I made my first, but my version. I made an altar in my
home with an elaborate Korean meal I made myself. I poured soju, wrote a letter
to my ancestors, telling them how angry I was with them, asking them to tell me
what they wanted from me. Then I burned the letter, to send it to them.
My father’s rebellion against his family became more
fully my own. I taught myself to live without so much as the idea that anyone
would help me but me. Someday I would learn how radical it was to have a Korean
immigrant father who asked only that his son become himself — with no
expectations that I be a lawyer, a doctor, or an engineer, like him. It felt
that I was learning to walk in a new world, in new gravity, and by the year
2000, when I was made the acting director of the All Souls Monday Night
hospitality program, I had been living in that world for six years. I had
joined the church with a boyfriend, and had stayed after we broke up. “We don’t
expect to see you on Sundays if you’re here on Monday nights,” the reverend had
said to me when I apologized once for missing the services — the church, on the
Upper East Side, was a long way from where I lived in Brooklyn. That idea of
acts of charity as service, as a way of offering something to God as well as to
others — the Monday service counting as much as or more than the Sunday one —
made me feel at home.
I did not cure myself entirely. I am still curing
myself. I am almost through those boxes of files. I let go of the fantasy of a
massive payday and taught myself instead to get by with the shepherding of
sums. I came up with rules I still live by: always keep your rent low, no
matter the city you live in; write for money more than for love, but don’t
forget to write for love; always ask for more money on principle; decide how
much money you must make per month and then make more than that as a minimum;
revise the sum upward year by year, to match inflation. Do your taxes. Write
off everything you can.
To the extent I have survived myself thus far, it
began there, when I realized I treated money emotionally. I decided that I needed
to treat myself as I would anyone else I was taking care of. It was just
ordinary thrift and self-forgiveness that I needed to learn, together with the
payday only I could provide, but this realization was the gift of that time,
and as close to a Unitarian grace as I think I’ll ever get.
These small things I did saved me when nothing else
could.
In the summer of 2003, a friend who knew I needed a place to live
asked me if I would be interested in subletting her apartment near Gramercy
Park in New York. She was trying to sell it, as it was too small for her and
her fiance, but the sale had taken too long, and in the meantime, she’d moved
out to Brooklyn, to Park Slope, to live with him instead. She wasn’t legally
allowed to rent, so the deal she offered was that I would pay only the
maintenance, a more than reasonable $900 a month, and in return I would keep
the place perfectly clean and organized for when the broker came by —and move
out once the apartment was sold.
I agreed, though I wasn’t sure I could hold up my end
of the deal — I’d never been regularly neat before. But once I moved in,
somehow, magically, I was. The broker would call, giving me as much notice as
possible, and I’d wash any dishes in the sink, straighten out the bedspread,
hang the towels, wipe down the faucets, and head to one of the cafes in
Gramercy until it was safe to return. My friends who visited couldn’t believe
it, and neither could I. But I’d have done much more if she’d asked.
It was the sort of apartment you dream you’ll have in
New York before you live there but that you usually don’t get: a one bedroom
co-op on the nineteenth floor, with views north up Third Avenue to where the
horizon cuts off and across the city west toward the Hudson. And I watched the
East River out my porthole of a window whenever I did those dishes.
Every day, the apartment felt like some just reward
after a long period of hard work. I no longer needed to wait tables. The
paperback of my first novel had just come out, and with that money, in addition
to my income from teaching, I felt rich for the first time in my life as a
writer. I knew I was not rich in a way that anyone else in the building would
recognize, but I was writer rich. I had money earned from writing that I would
spend on more time to write, and the cheap deal on this apartment meant the
money would last longer — it even felt like the beginning of more of that money
and more of that success. It was a beautiful moment, when the money and the
time it represented added up to a possibility for the future that felt as vast
as the edges of the known world. The apartment’s views resembled the way I
wanted to feel about my own future each time I looked at them.
The only sign of darkness was that I was trying to
begin work on my second novel and it was not going well. Each week I abandoned
it by Friday and returned to it on Monday, as if it was a bad love affair. I
think I suspected even then that the novel would take me over a decade to
finish. But the apartment made my despair easier to bear.
Whatever was happening
with my writing, I liked to sit and watch the clouds go by over the city. It
was like living in the sky. The windows were large and ancient, original,
framed in black iron, and they had old latches that needed looking after or
they’d rattle in the high winds and a pane might crack. There were two
balconies, one quite small, suitable for standing on alone or with one other
person, for a cigarette and a whiskey. The other was good for sitting down with
company. These were lined with a mix of plants, some dead, some alive, but as
the sun set you never saw them. Instead you saw the city, and you counted the
landmarks in the view. Which, I learned when I lived there, cost money. Each
landmark you could see added something to the price. It was funny to think of
the Empire State Building adding, say, $15,000 to the value of your apartment
if you could see it. Every time I watched the skyline light up at night, it
felt like counting money.
I had sublet often in this life, but this time was different. In
previous sublets, I’d been around other people’s things, but here I was with my
own, and I found I liked my things in this apartment in a way I hadn’t before.
I had never been much for furniture, and had never spent more than a few
dollars on any particular piece, because what was the point of having things if
you couldn’t write? You would only sell them in order to write, as I’d learned
early on in New York, standing in line at the Strand to sell a few used books
just to pay for lunch. The books on my shelf after all this time have withstood
at least a thousand moments when I scanned them, deciding which ones I could or
could not turn into money in order to eat, if this or that check failed to come
through. A library of survivors.
I think writers are often terrifying to normal people
— that is, to nonwriters in a capitalist system — for this reason: there is
almost nothing they will not sell in order to have the time to write. Time is
our mink, our Lexus, our mansion. In a room full of writers of various kinds,
time is probably the only thing that can provoke widespread envy, more than
acclaim. Acclaim, which of course means access to money, which then becomes
time.
If I could be said to like things, they were books,
but I had a few good things all the same, or not-terrible ones, and here they
looked stylish, even a little grand, in a way they never had in my previous
apartment in Brooklyn. I had a red leather couch and wingback chair that had
once been in my late father’s office, and that looked very rich here, alongside
an antique table with corkscrew legs, bought from a friend leaving for Los
Angeles. If I was going to act like a man who belonged in a co-op building, a
part of the charade of living here, apparently, was having the furniture of
such a man.
All of this was lit
lovingly by my friend’s Italian chandelier, decorated merrily with glass pears,
grapes, and apples. When the news came that fall that I had won both a Whiting Award
and an NEA fellowship, I began to call it my lucky chandelier. Either of these
awards would be enough to make you feel you’d had a good year, but winning them
together was to me a clear sign that the magic promise of the apartment was
real. Surely it will be easier now, I told myself. Surely this is what it means
to have made it. I think many writers pass through this. But believing trouble
is gone forever is the beginning of a special kind of trouble.
令
One Saturday morning a month after moving in, I went to the elevator
and, when the doors opened, there was Chloe Sevigny, standing against the back
wall.
I am not easily or often starstruck. But I had loved
her ever since Boys Don't Cry,
when in the course of a single movie she became, to me, one of the most
important actresses of my generation. Now here she was.
Her eyes were level, focused on some middle distance,
far from anything in the elevator shaft. She was wearing spectator pumps and a
white Burberry Prorsum trench coat, belted, the collar up. A hapless-looking
skinny boy, his arm covered in sleeves of tattoos, accompanied her. He was
dressed in a trucker hat, expensive jeans, and a wifebeater shirt, and he
looked around in dismay, as if there might be some hidden exit in the elevator
he could use, if only he could find it.
The elevator descended quietly, and somewhere around
the tenth floor she said, without looking at him, “Did you give them my name?”
He said nothing as the elevator descended. I
remembered it was Fashion Week; the Marc Jacobs show was that morning. She was
likely on her way, though it could have been anywhere, anything.
“Did you. Give them. My. Name?” As she spoke each of
these words, they were wrapped in fire, hanging in the air, perfectly timed to
the floors flying by, the last said just before the elevator finally stopped.
Her companion still said nothing. The doors opened and she flew off through the
lobby, those spectator pumps flashing and echoing on the marble floor as he
chased behind her.
I never saw him again. Her, however, I saw regularly.
The elevator became a little theater of her. The doors would open and she would
be there, sometimes dressed very elegantly, sometimes in a tank top and Daisy
Dukes, a bottle of Woolite perched on her hip, going to the basement to do a little
laundry. It was the best ad Woolite never had. She soon would nod when she
recognized me, before the doors closed again. But I never intruded on her,
never spoke to her.
We continued like this until one day in the lobby, as
I got my mail, the concierge, a sweet older woman who I think had decided she
didn’t care that I was living there illegally, said my name. I went over to
her. “Alexander, Chloe here is interested in seeing the apartment. She
understands it is for sale.”
I turned. There “Chloe” was, looking at me
expectantly.
I don’t remember what she was wearing then because my
mind went white. It still seems to me she is more beautiful in person, or on
film, than in photos. Something happens across moments with her that isn’t
apparent in a still. “Is it for sale?” she asked, her direct attention blinding
me.
I tried to stay calm as I answered. “Yes, it is.” I
remembered a warning from my friend: “Do not show the apartment on your own,”
she had said to me. “Only the broker shows it.”
But this is Chloe, I said to myself then. I decided
to disobey my friend exactly once.
I will always remember what happened next: her
walking around the apartment, saying, “I’m subletting from a friend upstairs
and I think she should just buy this place and just go through the floor. I
mean, it’s so cheap, don’t you think?”
We were both subletters, then. My affection for her
quickened. I didn’t think it was cheap, though, not at all. My friend was
asking $579,000 for it, about a thousand dollars a square foot. A few weeks
earlier, I’d stood in the bedroom of the apartment with a friend who’d asked
the price, and when I told him, he outlined a square foot in the air with his
hands. “Fill it with a thousand dollars and then do that five hundred
seventy-nine more times, and then it’s yours,” he said.
Here in front of me, Chloe was like an apparition, an
emanation of all of that money, ambition, and desire, glowing as she walked the
rooms. My impostor self wasn’t going to let her know that I was not just like
her, not now, not in the face of our idol. And so I felt myself nod at the idea
that it was cheap, like I agreed. But now the extent of my charade was apparent
to me, and the joy of her being there was tinged with shame.
“It’s a steal,” she said, looking out at the view and
turning back to me. “She has to buy this, don’t you think? I mean, the view is
so beautiful. She’d be stupid not to buy it.”
I nodded — I didn’t know her friend — and gave her
the broker’s card, and then she left.
She knew I couldn’t afford it when she said her
friend should buy it. This was also a way of saying she couldn’t afford it,
either.
There were lots of
reasons not to buy in the building at the time, another friend revealed later.
The maintenance fee was high. The building was brick, which can crack with age,
and the mortar would eventually need repointing, never good for a long-term
investment. The apartment eventually sold to a school administrator, someone
with family money. Someone who belonged there more traditionally. I miss it
still. But I would never move back, even if I could now. I would miss the way
it was with her upstairs.
令
I spent the rest of my stay there as I had
before, but now, when I was on my balcony I heard Chloe on hers, wishing I had
the nerve to leave a copy of my novel for her in the lobby with a note. But I
never did. It felt terrible and sad to do something like that, like a
compromise with someone I’d never agreed to be. Someone else would have found a
way to be upstairs, I think, but that was not me. And so it was I last spoke to
her, right before I moved out, in the lobby again, getting my mail. She passed
me and said, “Hey, Alexander,” and smiled. I paused, paralyzed by love, before
saying “Hey” back, like it was any other day.
The real me, it turned out, was too shy to explain I
was leaving. He was in charge again, he had his reasons, and he sometimes told
me them. But I left happy she knew my name.
The chandelier I took with me. It hangs in my kitchen
now.
The question came amid some more ordinary ones: How long did the
book take to write, and did you do any research? Seven years, and yes. And
then: Were you a victim of sexual abuse yourself?
Yes.
Why didn’t you just write about your experience? the
reader asked me. Why isn’t it a memoir?
I looked at him and felt confused for a moment. I
didn’t understand the question immediately. The questioner sounded annoyed, as
if I were deliberately hiding something from him. As if he had ordered steak
and gotten salmon. Had I chosen? I felt in the presence of conflicting,
confusing truths. I was talking with a book club in downtown Manhattan, on Wall
Street, a paper cup of coffee on the table in front of me. All of us were
seated around a conference table, blinking under a fluorescent light that felt,
along the skin and eyes, both thin and heavy at once. Like this question.
The questioner was an otherwise nice white man, a few
years older than me, I guessed. He would have been in high school when it all
happened to me, and I wouldn’t have told him about it then. That I could even
speak to him about it now was not lost on me.
The things I saw in my life, the things I learned,
didn’t fit back into the boxes of my life, I said. My experiences, if
described, wouldn’t portray the vision they gave me.
I saw the room’s other occupants take this in.
I had to make something that fit to the shape of what
I saw, I said. That seemed to satisfy them. I waited for the next question.
That afternoon, I tried to understand if I had made a
choice about what to write. But instead it seemed to me if anyone had made a
choice, the novel had, choosing me like I was a door and walking through me out
into the world.
I began in the summer of 1994. I had just finished my MFA and moved
into an apartment with my younger brother and sister off Columbus Avenue, on
the Upper West Side of Manhattan. My brother was starting his first job in
finance, at a stockbrokerage. My sister was beginning her studies at Columbia
University. I used to joke that we were a little like the Glass family from
Salinger’s novels and stories, except Korean American, and our mother was in
Maine, alone with her own troubles. But the truth was more complicated, and
more melodramatic, than the world of a Salinger novel. My mother had been
betrayed by a business partner who vanished, leaving behind altered partnership
agreements indemnifying her for his debts. When she declared bankruptcy, she
also sold our family home. She had mostly hidden her problems from us until
they could no longer be hidden, and to this day I think we three siblings moved
in together in New York at the same time she was forced out of our family home
because it was the single self-protective gesture we could make that was
entirely under our own control.
The means by which I had made my way in the world
prior to that summer were coming to an end. Grad school was over, as was my
accompanying stipend. My inheritance, a fund left to me after my father’s death
and meant for my education, was likewise almost spent — the move back to New
York would exhaust it. I had not won any grants or gotten into any of the
postgrad programs I had applied for. The despair I felt as each possible future
I had dreamed of dropped away with yet another rejection was the surface of me;
underneath that, on the inside, I could feel my family fracturing. Myself, too.
I kept seeing reports that summer of other writers,
some of them friends of mine, selling their novels, some of them, unfinished,
for what seemed like outlandish sums of money. I thought it was my turn when a
friend from college, who worked in the fiction department at The
New Yorker, asked me for stories, and I sent her
part of my then novel in progress, what was to be a book about AIDS activists
in the late 1980s in New York and San Francisco. While she found the excerpts
weren’t right for the magazine, she admired what I submitted enough to send the
pages to an editor she knew at William Morrow. The editor, in turn, liked the
pages enough to tell me he
wanted to have his house consider the unfinished novel for
publication. This interest quickened the interest of a friend5s
literary agent, who became my first literary agent, and I spent a happy ten
days hoping this was it. But the house eventually passed on the novel, thinking
it would be too large to publish based on my synopsis. “They fear it will be
six hundred pages long,” my new agent said. Her advice: “If you finish it, then
no one will be guessing how long it will be, because we’ll know, and we’ll just
send it out then.”
I tried to master my desperation at this news. What
happened next was a product of my cynicism, my youth, and my anger. By now, it
was clear our apartment was too expensive for us, at least based on the money
we actually were earning, and that my sister, due to our mother’s bankruptcy,
would have to leave Columbia.
I could have finished
that first novel already in progress. In just a year’s time, as if to mock me,
several novels more than six hundred pages long would appear, and the year
after that, Infinite Jest,
weighing in at 1,079 pages. Length was not the issue, though. I could have
tried even one other publisher. But I didn’t. Instead, I became obsessed with
the idea that I could sell an unfinished novel and that the money might be
enough to save my family. I began what would become my first published,
finished novel with the idea that autobiographical fiction was as easy as
writing down what was happening to me. I turned my back on the experimental
novel I’d put forward, and told anyone I knew, “I’m just going to write a
shitty autobiographical first novel just like everyone else, and sell it for
thousands and thousands of dollars.” And then I sat down to try.
令
The story of your life, described, will not describe how you came to
think about your life or yourself, nor describe any of what you learned. This
is what fiction can do — I think it is even what fiction is for. But learning
this was still ahead of me.
I knew what I thought was normal for a first novel,
but every first novel is the answer to the question of what is normal for a
first novel. Mine came to me in pieces at first, as if it were once whole and
someone had broken it and scattered it inside me, hiding until it was safe for
it to be put back together. In the time before I understood that I was writing
this novel, each time a piece of it emerged, I felt as if I5d received
a strange valentine from a part of me that had a very different relationship to
language than the me that walked around, had coffee with friends, and hoped for
the best out of every day. The words felt both old and new, and the things they
described were more real to me when I reread them than the things my previous
sentences had tried to collect inside them.
And so while I wrote
this novel, it didn’t feel like I could say that I chose to write this novel.
The writing felt both like an autonomic process, as compulsory as breathing or
the beat of the heart, and at the same time as if an invisible creature had
moved into a corner of my mind and begun building itself, making visible parts
out of things dismantled from my memory, summoned from my imagination. I was
spelling out a message that would allow me to talk to myself and to others. The
novel that emerged was about things I could not speak of in life, in some cases
literally. I would lie, or I would feel a weight on my chest as if someone was
sitting there. But when the novel was done, I could read from it. A prosthetic
voice.
令
Prior to this, my sentences were often criticized in writing
workshops for being only beautiful, and lacking meaning. I felt I understood
what they meant, and worked to correct it, but didn’t really think about what
this meant until the novel was done.
I’d once organized my life, my conversation, even my
sentences, in such a way as to never say what I was now trying to write. I had
avoided the story for years with all the force I could bring to bear —
intellectual, emotional, physical. Imagine a child’s teeth after wearing a gag
for thirteen years. That is what my sentences were like then, pushed in around
the shape of a story I did not want to tell, but pointing all the same to what
was there.
I have a theory of the first novel now, that it is
something that makes the writer, even as the writer makes the novel. That it
must be something you care about enough to see through to the end. I tell my
students all the time: writing fiction is an exercise in giving a shit — an
exercise in finding out what you really care about. Many student writers become
obsessed with aesthetics, but I find that is usually a way to avoid whatever it
is they have to say. My first novel was not the first one I started. It was the
first one I finished. Looking at my records, I count three previous unfinished
novels;
pieces of one of them went into this first
one. But the one I finished, I finished because I asked myself a question.
What will you let yourself know? What will you allow yourself to
know?
The idea of autobiographical fiction had always rankled me. Whenever
I told stories about my family to friends, they always told me to write about
my family, and I hated the suggestion so much that I didn’t write about
families at all.
Even so, most of what I wrote then, if not all of it,
was in some way autobiographical. My central characters were typically a cipher
to me — like me but not me, with one-syllable names. Jack Cho, for example, the
recurring character in four of my first published stories, all a part of that
rejected experimental novel. Jack was a Korean American gay man from San
Francisco, the only son of a single mother, who moves to New York for love and
becomes involved in ACT UP. His relationship to me was more than accidental,
but not so close that I couldn’t delineate his experiences from my own. Even
the name, Cho, was like Chee — a name that was Chinese and also Korean. I
invented Jack to help me think through my relationship to activism and sex.
Other stories I wrote at the time were investigations of various friendships,
relationships, and breakups. I was, meanwhile, struggling with a different
existential issue from the ones my writing peers from more normative
backgrounds simply didn’t have to address. Kit Reed, my undergraduate fiction
teacher, first identified it. She had told me that if I was fast enough, I
might be the first Korean American novelist. She wasn’t entirely right:
Younghill Kang was, in fact, that person, but he was, until recently, lost to
contemporary literary history. And when Chang Rae Lee published Native
Speaker, in 1995, she said, “Well, you’ll be the
first gay one.” And she would be right.
None of this was inherently interesting to me,
however, at age twenty, and felt strange, uncomfortable, to aspire to. I was by
now used to people being surprised by me and my background, and their surprise
offended me. I was always having to be what I was looking for in the world,
wishing that the person I would become already existed — some other I before me. I was forever finding even the tiniest way to identify
with someone to escape how empty the world seemed to be of what I was. My
longstanding love for the
singer Roland Gift, for example, came partly from finding out he was
part Chinese. The same for the model Naomi Campbell. Unspoken in all of this
was that I didn’t feel Korean American in a way that felt reliable. I was still
discovering that this identity — any identity, really — was unreliable
precisely because it was self-made.
When people told me to
write about my family, it felt like I was being told that my imagination wasn’t
good enough. But also that I could only write one kind of person, a double
standard in which as a fiction writer I was supposed to invent characters from
whole cloth and tattoo my biography onto each of them. I think every writer
with a noncanonical background, or even a canonical one, faces this at some
point. I was fighting with this idea, in any case, when I pulled out a binder I
had promised myself I would look at once I got to New York.
I had created the binder a few months earlier, in the spring, as I
was going through my papers, deciding what to save and what to throw away when
I left Iowa. I discovered some pieces of writing that initially seemed to have
no common denominator. There was a short story, written in college; several
unpublished poems, whose blank verse felt a little too blank, more lyrical
prose than prose poem; a fragment of an unfinished novel, with a scene in which
a young man kills himself by setting himself on fire; and a fragment of an
unfinished autobiographical essay about the lighthouses in my hometown at
night. I put them all in a binder and said, out loud, “When we get to New York,
tell me what you are.”
I think I knew all along the process of writing a
novel was less straightforward than it seemed. But thus far, it hadn’t seemed
straightforward at all. Perhaps out of a desire not to appear prescriptive, at
no point in my education as a writer had my teachers offered specific
instruction on the writing of novels and stories. We read novels and stories
copiously, argued about what they were constantly, but plot was disdained if it
was ever discussed, and in general I went through the MFA feeling as though I
had to learn everything via context clues, as if I had wandered into a place
where everyone already knew what I did not know, and I had to catch up without
letting on.
The one conversation I
can remember having about the conception of a novel had come indirectly, several
years earlier. In college, when I was at work on my first collection of short
stories for a senior creative writing thesis, I had the good fortune to be
classmates with the writer Adina Hoffman, who read my collection and delivered
this news: “I think that these all want to be a novel,” she said. “I think you
want to write a novel.” Hoffman’s idea that day challenged me at first — I had
been trying very hard to write stories and I felt as if I had failed. The
connections between the stories seemed at best remote to me. But over time I
understood: she saw the way each of them had roots that connected to one
another, and also the way I’d formed a narrative in my ordering of them. Even
the enjambments between sections gave the reader the pause you feel as you
understand a story is about to unfold. And when it didn’t go further, it felt
like a mistake. This vision of my own process, and the way it has informed what
I do, and even how I teach, continues to this day. That day when I asked my
fragments to tell me what they were when we arrived in New York, before I got
into my loaded car and drove there, I knew I was calling out to a novel. I knew
these pieces had their own desire to be whole. And as I opened the binder, that
summer in New York, and read through the fragments again, I could sense the
shadow of something in the links possible between them, and began to write to
the shape of it.
The first plot I came up with was drawn right from that summer. The
drama of my mother’s bankruptcy seemed, at the time, a good place to start: a
young man returns home to help his mother move out of their family home. She’s
been forced into bankruptcy after being betrayed by a business partner, and the
son finds her lost in depression and grief — still grieving her husband, his
father, who had died eight years earlier. The son plots his revenge on the
lawyer he sees as responsible for his mother’s current troubles, hoping at
least to find a measure of justice, and then a lightning strike burns the
lawyer’s house to the ground.
The main character was, of course, another cipher for
me.
At 135 pages, I sent it to my agent, who said, “It’s
beautifully written. But it’s a little hokey, in the sense that no one is going
to believe this many bad things happened to one person.”
I laughed. I had often found my own life implausible.
“Still, it really picks up after page ninety,” she said. “Keep
going.”
令
When I look at that first manuscript, I can see again how the plot
was, well, not a plot — it was only a list of things that had happened. I also
saw what she saw change on page 90. After the narrator visits his father’s
grave, the novel moves into the past, and into the present tense.
This is how I remember the summer of being twelve to thirteen: foghorn
nights, days on bicycles at beaches, lunches of sandwiches and soda. My mother
works to get recycling made mandatory, sends me off into parking lots with
hands full of bottle-bill bumper stickers as she does the grocery shopping. My
hair is long and wavy and I am vain about the blond highlights at my temples
that my father admires. Summer in Maine starts with the black flies and
mosquitoes rising out of the marshes to fill the woods, and they drive the deer
mad enough to run in the roads. The tan French-Canadians arrive in cars, wear
bikinis, eat lobsters, glitter in their gold jewelry and sun-tan oils. The New
Yorkers bewilder and are bewildered, a little cranky. The Massachusetts
contingent lords around, arrogant, bemused. They are all we have, these
visitors. The fisheries industry is dying, the shoe manufacturing industry, the
potato farms, all are dying. Our fish are gone, our shoes are too expensive,
the potatoes, not big enough. The shallow-water lobster was made extinct the
year I was born, quietly dropped into a pot, and now we serve the deep-water
brothers and sisters. The bay no longer freezes in winter and dolphins have not
visited us in decades. In a few years, cut-backs will close our naval- yards.
Soon a dough-nut shop will be a nervous place to be. We can only serve the
visitors and make sure everything is peaceful and attractive as we sell them
our homes, the furnishings inside them, the food we couldn’t think of eating.
A space break, and then:
The sun is hours from setting. I am sun-burned,
tired, covered in sand.
I go into the bathroom, lock the door and lay down on
the floor. On my
back the cool
tiles count themselves. I pull down my trunks, kick them across the floor to
the door. The only light a faint stream coming in under the door, a silver
gleam. I look into it and wait for time to pass.
I’d moved into
the present tense as I had the idea of making the novel into something like Cafs
Eye, by Margaret Atwood, a novel I loved, told
in alternating points of view from the same person at different times in her
life. An artist goes home for a retrospective of her work, and memories of the
scalding love of her best friend from childhood return and overwhelm her. The
novel uses past tense for the sections in the present, and present tense for
the sections in the past, and between the two, the reader senses what the girl
experienced that the adult does not remember.
I was interested in this idea of the self brought to
a confrontation with the past through the structure of the narration. I found
that writing in the present tense acted as self-hypnosis. Discussions of the
use of the tense speak often of the effect on the reader, but the effect on the
writer is just as important. Using it casts a powerful spell on the writer’s
own mind. And it is a commonly used spell. The present is the verb tense of the
casual story told in person, to a friend 一 So
I'm at the park, and I see this woman I almost recognize . . . — a gesture many of us use. It is also the tense victims of trauma
use to describe their own assaults.
The pages previous to this, in the past tense, shed a
little light on what my agent meant by “no one will believe this many bad
things happened to one person.” The draft included my father’s car accident and
subsequent coma, and the suicidal rage he emerged with, and which returned in
storms until his eventual death; my father’s family’s various betrayals of us,
ranging from stealing bank statements for my father’s business to suing for
custody of me and my siblings to accusing my mother of infidelity while she was
caring for my father; and my own suicidal feelings, and sexual abuse, which I
hadn’t told anyone about, because I feared becoming even more of a pariah than
I already was just for being mixed. And while it had never felt like love or
community, it had almost felt like not being alone.
These autobiographical events were not organized in
any way. When I was helping my mother move, I’d noticed she had not moved in;
she had just left everything where the movers had dropped it. I’d had the sense
of being in the presence of a metaphor, and I was: my novel draft was like
that.
Page 90 was where my narrator5s attention turned inward,
when he looked away from the crisis in his mother’s life to see his own.
I cut those first ninety pages and continued with the
remaining forty-five, using them as the new beginning. These pages took up the
problem of my narrator’s silence and his urge to self-destruct, and I saw it as
if for the first time.
The college story in the
fragments binder had been my first attempt to write about my abuse: a story
about a boy in a boys’ choir who cannot speak about what is happening to him,
and thus can’t warn away the other boys, and so the director continues his
crimes until he is arrested, and the boy blames himself for the role his silence
played in the ongoing disaster. The boy wants to kill himself once the crimes
are revealed — ashamed of his silence more than anything else — and is
prevented by the accidental intervention of a friend, a victim also, one of the
boys he was unable to protect. This, I understood, was where that story
belonged. I had written my way there. And as I continued on, this would happen
again and again: I would pause, find a place to insert a section from the
binder, and continue.
In an interview Deborah Eisenberg gave to the Iowa Review, she describes learning from Ruth Prawer Jhabvala that it is
possible to write a kind of fake autobiography, and that idea — as I understood
it — guided me next. I needed to make a “fake autobiography,” for someone like
me but not me, giving him the situations of my life but not the events. He
would be a little more unhinged, a little less afraid, a little more angry.
These inventions were also ethical and gave everyone else involved in the real
events some necessary distance. To begin imagining the memories that drew my
narrator into his past, I found I kept thinking of what that boy was looking
into, in the light under the crack in the door.
There’s a quote in my journals from June 4, 1998,
four years into the writing of the novel: “These stories are gothics, and have
in common a myth of a kind where the end result is the same paralysis.” I don’t
remember who said this to me. There is no attribution and no context. I think I
must have thought I would always remember the speaker — my hubris, and as such,
a common omission in my journals. But it succinctly describes so many of my
early attempts at fiction, even what I thought of as my life, and what I was
reading. And the primary challenge I faced next with the novel.
The boy needed a plot. I wanted to write a novel that
would take a reader by the collar and run. And yet I was drawn to writing
stories in which nothing happened.
My stories and early novel starts were often
criticized for their lack of plot. I was imitating the plotless fiction of the
1980s, but also, it seems, lost in a landscape where I was unthinkingly
reenacting the traumas of my youth. All of my stories lacked action or ended in
inaction because that was what my imagination had always done to protect me
from my own life, the child’s mistaken belief that if he stays still and
silent, he cannot be seen, and this was wrong. And yet I had believed it,
without quite knowing I believed it. In light of this insight, I knew I needed
a new imagination. I needed to imagine action.
The plots I liked best worked through melodrama, the
story’s heart worn on the sleeve before being bloodied up: rings of power,
swords, curses, spells, monsters and ghosts, coincidence and Fate. These were
safe to the person I had been, as all of them were imaginary and impossible
problems with imaginary and impossible solutions. They consoled, but they were
not choices, emotions, and consequences based on choices, people exchanging the
information they needed to live their lives. Finding a magic ring of power that
would allow me to face an enemy who had won all our fights before was not the
same as mastering myself for the same fight. And these stories did not often
require that the hero change. The plotless, literary fiction of the eighties
and the blockbuster science-fiction novels I’d read and loved until now both
had in common that they had consoled me and thrilled me, but they didn’t
inherently offer me a way to understand how to write this novel. I needed to
learn how plot and causality could be expressed in story — not one I read, but
one I wrote. Stories about the most difficult things need to provide catharsis,
or the reader will stop reading, or go mad.
I examined my favorite myths and operas, searching
for plots I loved, with explicit action, drama, and catharsis. Tosca, for example, where everyone conceals a motive in their actions, and
at the end everyone is dead. Or the myth of Myrrha, in which a daughter, in
love with her father, poses as his concubine, becomes pregnant, and is turned into
a myrrh tree. She gives birth and tree nymphs hear the crying child, cut him
loose, and care for him, raising him as their own. The tree weeps myrrh forever
after. Forbidden desire, acted upon, resulting in transformation, paralysis,
and then catharsis. I needed to learn how to make something like this, but not
this exactly. I needed to hack a myth, so it could provide some other result.
To use the structures of myth to make something that was not a myth, but could
be. I wanted this novel to be about this thing no one wanted to think about,
but to write it in such a way that no one would be able to put the book down,
and in a way that would give it authority, and perhaps even longevity.
Plots like these contained events so shocking or
implausible that the reader sympathized with the emotions instead, the
recognizable humanity there: loss, forbidden love, treachery. No one has ever
said they couldn’t empathize with Hera for her jealousy at Zeus taking lovers
just because they themselves had never lived on Mount Olympus. As I remembered
the way victims were met with condescension, disgust, and scorn, I knew if I
told our story, or something like it, I had to construct a machine that would
move readers along, anticipating and defeating their possible objections by
taking them by another route — one that would surprise them. They would want to
grasp for something familiar amid it all. Plot could do this.
Plot was also a way of
facing what I couldn’t or wouldn’t remember. The gothic story that led the
character — and the writer — into paralysis, that left me paralyzed and unable
to write. Annie Dillard, in my nonfiction class at Wesleyan, had warned us that
writing about the past was like submerging yourself in a diving bell: you took
yourself down to the bottom of your own sea. You could get the bends. You had
to take care not to let the past self take over, the child with the child’s
injuries, the child’s perceptions. “All of us were picked on, growing up,” she
said. “Come up before that happens.” I knew that my situation was different,
but also the same. I would need a way to descend and return safely. Turning
myself into a character, inventing a plot, turning that past into fiction, I
hoped, could solve for all of this.
Autobiographical fiction requires as much research as any other kind
of fiction, in my experience. I bought books about sexual abuse, the predatory
patterns of pedophiles, and a self-help book for survivors, which I needed more
than I knew. I bought a book about the flora and fauna of Maine in every
season. I took out my old sheet music from the choir. Whether or not I could
trust my memory, I was also writing across gaps, things I wouldn’t let myself
remember. While I had no choice except to invent my way forward, I relied on
material that contained the facts I needed.
I also bought a weathered copy of Aristotle’s Poetics at a library sale. I don’t know for sure when I purchased it. All I
know is that at some point, in deciding to address this need for story, for
plot, and catharsis, I turned to Aristotle. The book is remarkable for many
reasons, including the pleasure to be found in reading Aristotle on tragedy, as
if it has just been invented, speaking confidently about how no one knows the
origins of comedy, but that probably it is from Sicily. He notes that the root
of “drama” is the Greek verb dran, which means “to do” or “to act,” and this became one of the most
powerful insights for me. Memorable action is always more important to a story
— action can even operate the way rhyme and meter do, as a mnemonic device. You
remember a story for what people did.
Tragedy is a representation of an action of a superior kind — grand,
and complete in itself, presented in embellished language, in distinct forms in
different parts, performed by actors rather than told by a narrator, effecting,
through pity and fear, the purification of such emotions.
Here the text is
footnoted:
purification: the Greek word katharsis, which occurs only here in the Poetics, is not defined by Aristotle and its meaning is much controverted.
Pity and fear and grand action. And purification.
This was what I was after. I had reached for the right instructions.
Reading Aristotle to learn how to structure a novel
means reading at an angle, almost at cross purposes, but I understood him all
the same. And rereading him now, I still thrill to his descriptions of
beginning, middle, and end, or his casual mention, in the section on scale, of
“an animal a thousand miles long — the impossibility of taking it all in at a
single glance,” and understanding that, while he was speaking of scale in the
story, this was, in a sense, what a novel was: a thought so long it could not
be perceived all at once. His assured way of saying that a story “built around
a single person is not, as some people think, thereby unified” gave me an
understanding of both, and what it meant with regard to his description of the
way Homer “constructed the Odyssey, and the Iliad, too,
around a single action” — of the grand kind — was for me like watching lightning.
A single grand action unifies a story more than a single person, the characters
memorable for the parts they play inside it. Or it did, at least, for the novel
I was writing. And that is the thing that is harder to describe. Each of these
lessons meant something specific to me as I constructed the novel, and were not
necessarily useful to anyone else.
Also of great use to me was the very simple
explanation of “something happening after certain events and something
happening because of them.” I think of this as a chain of consequences, made
from the mix of free will and fate that only one’s own moral character creates.
But his description of poetry versus history struck me as precisely the
difference between fiction and autobiography. Or at least, fiction and life.
From what has been said it is clear that the poet’s
job is not relating what actually happened, but rather the kind of thing that
would happen —that is to say, what is possible in terms of probability and
necessity. The difference between a historian and a poet is not a matter of
using verse or prose: you might put the works of Herodotus into verse and it
would be a history in verse no less than in prose. The difference is that the
one relates what actually happened, and the other the kinds of events that
would happen.
For this reason poetry
is more philosophical and more serious than history; poetry utters universal
truths, history particular statements.
This was where my biggest problem lay. The
difference is that the one relates what actually happened, and the other the
kinds of events that would happen. Recounting
the way in which these terrible things had happened to me did not lead the
reader to the sense of a grand act of the kind Aristotle speaks of. A simple
recounting did not convince. The plot I needed would have to work in this other
way, out of a sense of what would happen to someone like me in this situation,
not what did happen or had happened to me. The story of my mother’s bankruptcy,
for example, even if it felt like one of the great tragedies of my life, would
not pass muster with Aristotle as something that would arouse the audience to
pity and fear in the way that finds purification. As a story, it was only the
account of good people undone by misfortune. And any poetic truth to it
belonged to my mother, to share or not share as she preferred.
I chose one of my favorite operas, Lucia
di Lammermoor, based on the novel The
Bride of Lammermoor by Sir Walter Scott, as a
model for my plot. A young man seduces and then betrays the daughter of the man
who destroyed his father, as an act of revenge, but he unleashes a terrible
murder beyond his control. I decided I would queer it: instead of the daughter,
there would be a son. And instead of a marriage, the doomed love of a student
for a teacher.
The choir director character in my draft thus far had
a son, age two at the time of his arrest and trial, and this was the clear
Aristotelian tragic line to draw: sixteen years later, he is the spitting image
of the best friend my narrator had been unable to protect, his father mostly
unknown to him for having been in prison. The narrator meets him when he takes
a job at his school, falls in love with him, and is seduced, unknowingly, by
the son of the man who molested him as a child, these many years later. Only
after they fall in love do they discover the truth about each other.
I set about making up someone like me but not me. I
brought the father back to life and restored the mother. The grandparents I had
never known well because they lived in Korea I moved into the narrator’s family
home, to live with him.
I turned my attention to my main character’s family
in greater detail, through the plot’s other parent: the myth of the kitsune, the shape-changing Japanese fox demon. When I read in the lore that
red hair was considered a possible sign of fox ancestry, I recalled the single
red hair my father used to pull out of his head and the benign stories he made
up for me at bedtime about foxes, and went looking for a more ancient fox ancestor.
I found the story of Lady Tammamo, a medieval Japanese fox demon who had come
to Japan from China. According to legend, she escaped her pursuers by leaping
from a rock that split from the simple force of her standing on it, just before
she vanished into the air. When I looked up where the rock was —said to emit
murderous gases until exorcised of her ghost — I saw she could fly in a
straight line to the island off the coast of Korea my father’s family came
from. I could continue Lady Tammamo’s story, braiding her, fantastically, into
the ancestry of my autobiographical narrator.
The foxes in these kitsune stories were said to be able to take the shapes of both men and
women, but the stories were only ever about foxes as women. I queered the myth
much the way I had the opera, making a fox story about a fox taking the shape
of a boy. I decided to give my cipher a life like mine but not mine, one in
which he was always made to feel uncanny, and then made that feeling literal:
he suspected himself to be part fox, a little alien in the way that makes you
entirely alien. A complex tragedy, then, as Aristotle calls it — with two
characters, my cipher and the director’s son, no single narrator, reversals and
discoveries, “fearsome and pitiable events,” my plot born of a Japanese legend,
hidden and in exile in Korea, and a Scottish novel turned into an Italian
opera. The original reason for the title Edinburgh was no longer in the manuscript — I had discarded my plan to send
the main character, Fee, to the University of Edinburgh — but I kept it because
it made sense to me for new reasons that had nothing to do with my life, a
symbol of this novel’s eventual separate life.
I made a world I knew, not the world I knew, and began again there.
Sometimes the writer writes one novel, then another, then another,
and the first one he sells is the first one the public sees — but mostly, the
debut novel is almost never the first novel the writer wrote. There’s a private
idea of the writer, known to the writer and whoever rejected him previously,
and a public one, visible only in publication. Each book is something of a mask
of the troubles that went into it and so is the writer’s visible career.
Edinburgh was almost that for me. I
finished a draft in 1999 and applied for the Michener-Copernicus Prize, a
postgraduate award of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop. That’s twenty dollars I’ve
wasted, I remember thinking as I mailed the application. I’d applied before
with unfinished excerpts of the same novel; this was the first time I sent the
entire thing. Frank Conroy called my agent a few months later to tell her I
would be getting the prize. She then called me and left the most thrilling
voice mail of my life. I remember listening to it in a phone booth on the
corner of Third Avenue and East Fourteenth Street. Conroy had picked up the
novel in the morning and read it all day until the end, when he decided to give
it the prize. He called my agent, alerting her in advance of the official
announcement, and told her he would do all he could to help sell the novel. It
seemed like publication was close.
Instead, the submission process would go on for two
years, and the book would be rejected twenty-four times. Editors didn’t seem to
know if it should be sold as a gay novel or an Asian American novel. There was
no coming-out story in it, and while the main character was the son of an
immigrant, immigration played no part in the story. “It’s a novel,” I said when
the agent asked me what kind of novel it was. “I wrote a novel.”
The agent eventually asked me to withdraw the
manuscript from submission.
The days of imagining that I could write a “shitty
autobiographical first novel just like everyone else” and sell it for a great
deal of money were five years behind me. The award, when I received it, came
with a monthly stipend for one year that allowed me to work less and write
more. It was meant to help a writer during what was typically the first year of
work on a novel, since debut authors often receive small advances. The grant
was more than twice the advance eventually offered by the independent press
that picked it up, when, after refusing to withdraw the novel from submission,
I left my first agent and found the publisher on my own. With a Korean American
editor from Maine, Chuck Kim. It was a coincidence out of a novel — my novel,
actually.
It’s the story of my life, Chuck said when we spoke
of it.
I really hope not, I said, hoping he had a happier
life than this one, the Greek tragedy I had made myself.
You’re my Mishima, he said, once I agreed to the
contract.
I really hope not, I said, wishing to have a happier
future than the Japanese writer and suicide Yukio Mishima.
I was the first living author for this house, the
now-bankrupt Welcome Rain, which I called “Two Guys in a Basement on Twenty-Sixth
Street.” Chuck and his boss. They were smart, ambitious men who made their
business publishing books, mostly in translation, mostly by dead authors. Chuck
frequently had me to his house for dinner with his wife and brother, and we
would speak of Korea and Maine equally. I had based my main character, Fee, a
little on someone I knew in childhood, a young woman who would always try to
kill herself, and fail every time, and who turned out to be a friend of Chuck’s
as well.
I feel as if you’re on a mission with this novel, and
I don’t think it’s in your best interest to complete it, my first agent had
said when she had tried to get me to let it go. No one will want to review
this, given how dark the material is, and they won’t want to tour you with it,
she said. One editor had rejected the novel with a note saying, “I’m not ready
for this.” I don’t want to say the entire problem was the whiteness of
publishing at the time, but it was not lost on me that the first editor to try
to sign it up was Asian American also: Hanya Yanagihara, who then worked at
Riverhead Books. She had ultimately agreed to submit it for the Pushcart Prize,
which allowed editors to nominate works they had tried and failed to acquire. I
was preparing my manuscript for this when I met Chuck.
With Chuck behind the novel, everything changed. His
enthusiasm for it was peerless. He got it in front of scouts, in front of
editors at The New Yorker, and
he hired a freelance publicist to pitch it to newspapers and magazines.
Eventually the paperback rights went up for auction and eleven of the houses
that had turned it down for hardcover asked to see it again. One editor even
sent a note: “I feel as if we let something precious slip through our fingers.”
The winner, Picador, had in fact turned it down for hardcover.
But the result that mattered most came when I
received a postcard from a friend of mine, the writer Noel Alumit, who also
works as a bookseller. He had enthusiastically pressed the novel on a friend,
who sent it to a prisoner he was corresponding with, a man serving time for
pedophilia: he’d been convicted of having a relationship with a teenage boy.
The card, written by the prisoner to the friend, described how he read the
novel in four days and didn’t speak the entire time. People thought he was ill.
“This is the only thing that ever told me how what I did was wrong,” he wrote.
I still didn’t know I had written it to do this, but
then I did.
I wish I could show you the roomful of people who’ve
told me the novel is the story of their lives. Each of them as different as
could be.
I still don’t know if I’d be in that room.
In 2004, a memory returned to me after twenty-five years. And with
the memory5s return, I understood that I had lived for a long time
in a sort of intricate disguise.
It was not so different, on reflection, from making
an autobiographical character.
This version of me was living the life of a
thirty-something writer in New York City, as if in a play. I had an apartment
on the nineteenth floor of a building at Sixteenth Street and Third Avenue, a
one-bedroom with a balcony and views across the top of the city in three
directions. The many landmarks were outlined at night by their lit windows, as
if in klieg lights, and I liked to stand with a scotch and a cigarette looking
north on Third Avenue and imagine that I had made it. This was only a sublet,
and I would be there for only six months, but it made me feel like either Batman
or Bruce Wayne, depending on whether it was day or night. I had spent so much
time in New York without a view, I looked at it almost as if I were hungry and
this was a feast. I was there with these thoughts from Sunday to Wednesday, and
then, every Thursday night, I left on a train for Middletown, Connecticut,
where I taught at my alma mater, Wesleyan University, as their visiting writer.
At Wesleyan, I rented a room in the apartment of an
art professor who was never there when I was, and so it was like having an
entire second apartment for the weekend, another fantasy I indulged. I often
stayed over on Friday night, after my class, and Saturday too, before returning
to Manhattan. The apartment was on the second floor of an old house on a corner
of the campus, done up a little like a summer home, barely winterized, and
painted dove gray. A darker, nubbly, Spartan gray carpet covered the floors,
dressed up by kilims, and the ceilings and floors were warped and thus changed
height from room to room, disorienting as I walked the apartment. I sometimes
banged my head on a doorframe. My
bed there was an antique with a flat, hard mattress, covered by an
old quilt, and the books in every room, on every shelf, were what I thought of
as the wrong books by the right writers, the books that had disappointed, and
they haunted me as I began my second novel.
Each week was a movement from New York to Connecticut
and back again, from light and air in Manhattan to darkness and enclosure in
Middletown, and I took to calling myself a Connecticut Persephone. This was a
joke, of course, as only occasionally did I feel as if I were descending into
the underworld upon returning to Wesleyan. I had a crew of student writers,
smart, ambitious, funny students who reminded me of myself at their age and the
friends I’d had then. Many of my former teachers were now my colleagues in the
English Department, along with a few younger faculty members who quickly became
friends. But every so often I would turn a corner in the night and feel as if I
had wandered across the years into my own past.
I was teaching stereoscopic narratives to my writing
students that fall: the same story told from two or more points of view. I had
used one in my first novel, but I employed the structure of Batman comics as my example, as I did not want to be the kind of professor
who taught his own book. Batman stories offered basic and effective versions of this dual narrative.
There is a mysterious crime, then Batman’s attempt to apprehend the criminal.
Typically the criminal, at one point or another, captures Batman and tells him
the entire story from his own point of view, and the crime is made knowable,
the criminal also. During the monologue, Batman manages to escape and bring the
criminal to justice, explaining his methods, and the reader then has the
complete story.
This was also how I felt about being back at
Wesleyan. I was faculty now, had been a student before. I was inside my own
story, looking at myself as I once was through the eyes of the professor I had
become. I was also seeing what my teachers likely had seen of me when I was
their student.
I thought this story of
my education was the only story to see this way. I was wrong. It was just the
beginning of the stories I would see this way.
令
Back in New York, I had a regular visitor to my apartment who was
like my own strange secret — a relationship so oddly closeted, it was as if it
wasn’t happening at all. He was a young writer who had set out, in his awkward
way, to seduce me, after reading my first novel when he was my student. I had
made him wait until he graduated before we even had a conversation about his
feelings, much less mine. I wanted us to meet again, away from the
circumstances of the class, and to see if the attraction was the same. I was
sure it wouldn’t be. That I would just be an ordinary older man, and not his
teacher.
This was something I had never, ever wanted. I had
always disdained it for what may seem the obvious reasons, but also, my whole
dating life until then had been directed toward men my own age or older. My
type was someone in his thirties or forties, even when I was in my twenties.
When the professor I’d rented my apartment from at Wesleyan had warned me
against sleeping with students, I found the whole thing so ridiculous, I held
the phone away from my mouth so he wouldn’t hear me laugh. But if he hadn’t
heard me, perhaps the gods had instead.
I could tell you that he was different from the other
students, but it would sound like the same excuse offered by the few professors
I knew who had crossed this line, the ones I had only contempt for. I was also
hoping to be relieved of what I felt for him. The state of things between us
was at least not a simple case of attraction. He was talented, and I had even
consulted him for his thoughts on my new novel draft. I had what I knew was a
crush, and feared I was in love with him, despite knowing that there was likely
little to no hope in the matter. He was not entirely out of the closet at the
time, and as my sense of how out he was kept changing, this was just one of the
reasons I was cautious. He would invite me to join his group of friends, for
example, at social events with all of them out in Williamsburg, but they were
not aware of his sexuality, and I could see they were often confused as to why
he had invited his thirty-something former writing teacher to hang out with
them.
It is hard to be with someone in the closet, because
you are never sure which version of the person you are with — the one who is hidden
or the one trying to be free. Despite his being closeted, after we left his
friends he would turn passionate and kiss me, often on the subway platform
while we waited for the L train to take me back to the city. I kept thinking he
would draw back, but he was at his most amorous in public, which confused me.
I loved him, in part, for what he might be someday,
which is never a good way to love someone. It was in fact a way of rejecting
him, a way of rejecting who he is now, and I think in some way we both knew
this.
One night in the middle of the fall, he was at my
apartment having drinks with me and some friends of mine. After the friends
left, I kissed him on the balcony, and he seemed less inhibited, more
passionate, and then his eyes flared, and he began gathering his things, nearly
running.
What is it? I asked.
I have to go, he said. I need to leave.
But why? I said, and leaned in and kissed him
goodbye. He kissed me again and drew back, his eyes still wild.
I have to go, he said. I’m afraid of me and I’m
afraid of you.
We didn’t speak for several days. They were some of
the loneliest days. I knew what he was trying to do, though. I had put together
his seemingly disparate stories, not included here, and I had seen this
expression on his face from the other side — this had happened to me when I was
his age.
It takes one to know one.
He was trying to face what he wanted, and it was also
what scared him away. His desire for men brought back memories and sensations
he didn’t want, pushed down so far he was sure they were gone, until suddenly,
there they were again. He eventually tried to tell me all of this. And I can’t
say any of what he told me, or what I guessed, because it belongs to him and
not to me, and his journey in that regard is his own. I just knew then that I
had become the man I ran from when I was having my own flashbacks. And so I was
patient as he fought whatever this was inside him, even as I knew how my own
relationships then had ended. I was in yet another stereoscopic narrative.
He could be as old as I am now when he is at last
ready to tell anyone about it all. He might also never get there. Based on my
own experiences with flashbacks, I developed a theory that he could only kiss
me in public places, because it made him feel safe to know he could leave if he
needed to. But I didn’t like it, and I didn’t understand why until the night we
were in the bar where we’d first kissed, in Brooklyn, a place we always kissed,
in fact, and he leaned in and kissed me again. I remember that people were
watching. That night, it made me strangely angry to be watched. And then for
the first time in over twenty years the reason why it made me angry came to me,
and the memory I am speaking of returned.
Watching him have his flashbacks, I had imagined I
was done with mine.
1
was wrong. Now I was the one
who had to make excuses, all these years later, and leave.
In Sleeping
Beauty, the handsome prince makes his way
through a forest of thorns and kisses the princess as she sleeps, awakening not
just her but the entire kingdom. The barren wilderness is transformed into a
paradise. This is not quite what happened here. I can say one kiss put me under
a spell. Another kiss woke me. And I was full of horror to see the devastation
around me.
We are not what we think we are. The stories we tell of ourselves
are like thin trails across something that is more like the ocean. A mask afloat
on the open sea.
There were moments
before the memory’s return when I experienced what I now understand as its
absence as not a gap but a whole other self, a whole other me. As if a copy of
me had secretly replaced me. An android of me moving through the landscape,
independent of the other me, exactly like me but not me. Every now and then, I
could see the distance between us. Three times, in particular, this other self
had appeared before me.
令
In 1993, the film Sex Is . . . , an independent documentary about gay men and their sex lives,
debuted at the March on Washington. As one of the interview subjects, I was
invited to attend. I went and watched in horror as I described the sexual abuse
I’d experienced in the boys’ choir I’d once been in, declaring it an education,
even a liberation, and that it hadn’t harmed me at all. The film sped along to
another interviewee. I said more things later, but could see, in the dark of
the theater, only my huge, lying mouth.
At the time I filmed the interview, my first
relationship with a man who loved me, and whom I also loved, was falling apart
because of my PTSD related to what I was describing. Worst of all was the smile
I had on my face on-screen as I said this lie, a smug sort of superiority that
I hated.
The film went on to win Best Gay Film at the Berlin
Film Festival and had a national, and then international, theatrical release.
By the time I moved to New York in 1994, I was regularly being recognized for
my role in it. I remember taking part in New York City5s Gay Pride
celebration that year, in Greenwich Village, walking against the crowd,
searching for my friends, when I noticed two teenage boys coming toward me arm
in arm. One lit up in recognition of me and his arm shot out. “You’re the guy
from the film,” he said.
I paused, terrified, but also curious. Yes, I said. I
asked where they were from.
“Saskatchewan,” they said, and then wished me a Happy
Pride, and were on their way.
I have to fix this, I remember thinking. Wishing for a solution as big as the mistake,
or as big as me.
In October 2001, I had my phone in my hand, about to call my mother.
My first novel, Edinburgh, was
about to appear in bookstores the very next day. The story is of the legacy
sexual abuse leaves in the life of a young man angry at himself about it, and
his apparent powerlessness over that silence. She’d complained that she hadn’t
seen the novel in manuscript, and I had pacified her by assuring her I wanted
her to have the bound book. This was partly true. I was proud to finally be
able to hand my mother the physical thing, to say, Here. IJm
a writer. But now the bound book was in my hand,
and I was preparing to send it to her, and I stopped, pulled up short by the
memory that I had never told her what had happened to me.
The scope of this gap terrified me. How had I let
this happen? I was thirty-four years old. I was about to publish a novel about
sexual abuse based on my own experiences, but had never told her one thing about
them. Not only that, but in all the time that had passed between when the
events had occurred and that moment right then, I could see I had been very
angry at her. A child’s anger. The child in me had wanted her to figure out
what had happened. I had hoped to avoid the humiliation of having to tell her,
wanting her instead to guess my thoughts. That adolescent wish that the mother
knows your pain without your having to describe it. But children have to learn
to say they are in pain. To name it. The naming even helps heal it.
Even at that moment, I was trying to stop myself. I
was frozen in the act. I wanted to put the phone down and never tell her. I
tried to imagine if there was even one way I could continue to pretend with
her. But I knew she would be deeply hurt to be surprised by what was in the
book. I could see how I passed myself off to others as someone who had gotten
over it all on my own, the disguise I had put on of being unhurt simply a way
for me to fix myself in private. I had never told her because I had hoped I
could heal in secret and she would never have to know. And yet here I was,
still in pain.
As I prepared to call and tell her, I did so knowing
it had taken me eighteen years to tell her. Almost as long as it had taken me
to tell myself.
And then I made the
call.
In the spring of the same year as the memory’s return, I was working
as a writing tutor to a graduate student in nonfiction who felt I understood
her better than her teachers did. She sent me a draft of her memoir, and as I
read through scenes describing how she had attempted suicide and then, in
therapy afterward, raged at her therapist for not knowing she had attempted
suicide, I wondered at the therapist’s reaction to the suicide attempt itself.
I sent her what I thought was an ordinary email: “I don’t see that you’ve
included scenes describing what it was like telling your therapist about your
suicide attempt, or how she reacted. If you could describe this, it would help
the reader know why you’re so angry here.”
I received an email
back, the letters in the tiniest possible font, smaller than she normally used,
such that I thought, at first, it was some strange mistake, or even a hacking.
I never told her. I’ve never been in therapy for it, either.
My immediate thoughts: How could she not have told
anyone? Did she not know how dangerous it was to just go around untreated? She
could relapse at any moment. And then I remembered: most suicides hope to die
without interference. Telling someone means allowing the person you told the
chance to stop you. I had discovered something like the back passageway she’d
left open.
Staring at those tiny letters, I realized I was
meeting the person she actually was, underneath her performance of competence.
All her life since then she had been waiting to see if someone would notice,
and I had. And then another cold truth came to me out of those tiny letters.
I was almost exactly like her.
All of my attempts at
therapy previous to this had been about the issues that moved above certain ruptures
in myself that remained undescribed. The difference was that I had never raged
that a therapist had not figured this out about me. If anything, I was proud of
it. I had endured, I told myself. I was so strong. But this is not strength. It
is only endurance. A kind of emotional or therapeutic anorexia. I was not
strong. Or if I was, it was the adrenaline of the wounded. I was really only
broken, moving through the landscape as if I were not, and taking all my pride
in believing I was passing as whole.
Prior to the memory’s return, if you asked me, I would tell you
there were things in my life that I couldn’t remember. I would allow you to
think that they were like your own missing memories, gaps made by pure human
fallibility and impressionistic thinking. Associations that didn’t associate.
And yet I recall feeling an empty confidence at those times, the hollow power
of a lie. When I began Edinburgh, I
knew there was something missing, something I wasn’t letting myself know. It is
just one of the reasons why I wrote it as a novel instead of a memoir. I had
written it as if the memory would never come back — as if this could stand in
for it. I had imagined the missing memories were gone forever. I thought of the
novel as the solution for what was lost.
Instead, it was a summoning. As if I had called and
it came back to me.
Even now, though, as I try to write this essay, it
dissolves in my hands. There is still a part of me that insists what I’ll tell
you cannot be told. That insists that if the truth were known I would be
destroyed. I try to write this essay and freeze, lose the path, lose my
thoughts, my drafts, my edits, all of my purpose. I look up at the ticking
clock in front of me and stop. My editor writes back, curious: What happened to
this? And I am also mystified to find what I thought was the careful draft full
of repetitions, mistakes, missing pieces.
My writing process is informed in general by my
relationship to this — a process with a deep mistrust of myself.
The impulse to hide this from myself and others
pushes at me. I change my sense of the structure again and again, moving events
around, until the document becomes a mass of repetitions and fragments,
elliptical, incomplete. A self-portrait.
Most people misunderstand the crime of sexual abuse.
They think of stolen youth, a child tucked under the arm and spirited away. But
it isn’t like someone entering your house and stealing something from you.
Instead, someone leaves something with you that grows until it replaces you.
They themselves were once replaced this way, and what they leave with you they
have carried for years within them, like a fire guarded all this time as it
burned them alive inside, right under the skin. The burning hidden to protect
themselves from being revealed as burned.
You imagine that the worst thing is that someone
would know. The attention you need to heal you have been taught will end you.
And it will — it will end the pain you have mistaken for yourself. The worst
thing is not that someone would know. The worst thing is that you might lay
waste to your whole life by hiding.
You could mistake your ability to go this far for
strength. So you go on. Strength is admirable, after all, and you are ashamed
of everything else about yourself. This endurance, at least — this you can
admire. You were too young to know what you believe is your complicity was
something taken from you, but in your silence, you have become complicit with
the continued pain, the wound that risks replacing you the longer you let it
stay. But among the things you cannot imagine is that anyone would understand,
or be kind. This is all you understand.
When I ask myself why it was so hard for me to let
this secret go, the answer is that holding on to it was the only source of my
self-esteem for years. It was all I thought I had.
I’m sorry, is what I would have wanted to have my
replacement say in that documentary. Sorry I was so lonely as a child. Sorry
that I was a child, with a child’s reasoning. Sorry I didn’t understand how
this man could be punished, as I had only ever seen children punished. Sorry I
dreamed of a kiss and then, when I accepted it, didn’t know how it would make
my mouth a grave. Myself living inside of it. Sorry that years later, for
having had that kiss, I would boast of avoiding the pain that was eating me alive
from the inside out, and that this would be said on film, and it
would go everywhere, around the world. Sorry for at least that, and more than
that. But I wouldn’t know this for years.
Edinburgh is a palinode. The gods, offended by a speech, require the speaker
to make another, its opposite. Phaedrus, quoted in Edinburgh,
is one example of this form. But there were no gods to make me do this, just
me. And after it was published, the work wasn’t done.
4
This is the
memory I put away.
In September 1978, I am eleven, asleep in a dream in which I am at a
lake with a boy who is a year older than me, a boy I know from choir. He lives
one town over from me. We sometimes carpool. He’s as beautiful as the elves are
supposed to be in the games I play about magic and wizards. He has blond hair
and incandescent blue eyes.
In the dream he swims toward me, his hair plastered dark against his
head. He chuckles and it echoes lightly. He reaches up from the water and gives
me a kiss, a spark in his eyes. An excitement that is just for me.
I wake up in the morning dark. The dream is so real, I expect my
mouth to be wet.
IJm
gay is the first thought. And I am in love with him.
The choir is my refuge. My secret kingdom, an escape from the
children who set traps for me at school. Classmates who have spent years
tricking me into humiliating setups — pretending to befriend me before turning
on me, or simply attacking me — situations that end with me being demoralized
and alone. I had never encountered racism before this — in Guam, I was just one
of many multiracial children in a diverse group of students. The intensity of
it leaves me full of despair. In photos of me as a child, you can see that the
light in my eyes at age six leaves my eyes in the photos of me at age seven,
just a year after the move to Maine.
My mother was called in for annual visits with my teachers, during
which she was told that I inhabited a dream world of fantasy, and that I would
have to live in the real world eventually. Afterward, she would come home and
tell me this, and each time I would say, I don’t have to live in the real
world. Coolly, flatly, as if she were telling me I had to live in Boston and I
could refuse. By the time I joined the choir at age eleven, it had been five years
of being called a flat-faced chink, or being made fun of because I like to play
with girls, who, yes, were all white, and soon joined in these traps organized
by the white boys at my school. My nickname at this time is Nature Boy, because
I like to go off into the woods alone, and part of the reason I like it is that
I don5t have to be with them, see them, think of them. But the choir
is made up of boys like me, and I soon enjoy a popularity there I’ve never had.
I have friends, finally. Now my mother warns me about too many sleepovers, or
of Dungeons & Dragons games
that go on too long.
The boy from the dream is a part of this, though not
entirely. He doesn’t like D & D as much as my
other friends do. I don’t see him except at rehearsals. He is one of the soloists,
and his voice is as beautiful as he is, if not more so. When I’m invited to go
on a section leaders’ camping trip with the director, I accept eagerly, knowing
he’ll be going also. The car is small for the four of us — a Pacer — and the
dream boy sits in my lap, laughing, relaxed. He seems not just to touch me, but
to meld, and I’m in a kind of bliss I didn’t imagine.
I remember my dream of the lake and the kiss, and it
seems certain to come true.
We park the car at the trail’s parking lot and set
off. During this hike to our campsite, the director jokes about how it is so
hot we should hike nude. This seems impossible to me. He frequently talks to us
about nudism, American prudery, sexual immaturity. How children should be able
to vote, divorce their parents, choose whom they want to have sex with.
At the campsite, after the tent is set up, he begins
to take off his clothes.
You don’t have to take off your clothes, he says to
me.
But the other boys do, and soon they are all swimming
together naked in the swimming hole we have chosen for our campsite. And so I
take off my clothes and jump in. He takes photos of us, but especially of my
dream boy, who is clearly his favorite, and who poses happily.
Soon it is evening and we are all in the tent. We are
all still naked. The director has told me he knew about the crush, and he wants
us to kiss. That the kiss is something he wants to see. The dream boy had told
him of my feelings for him, and they had used it to bring me here. The director
smiles as he tells me this, as if he hopes I will be amused, and also indulge
him. The dream boy is there in front of me, also smiling at me, kneeling,
naked, coming closer. There seems to be no way out, as if something is being
cut off from me even as it is offered, and I can5t prevent it. As
the kiss happens, I like it and hate it at the same time.
This is my first kiss.
After that night, the dream boy will never kiss me
again. I will still want it. It is as if I didn’t get it, not like I wanted,
and everything is wrong afterward.
I included something like this scene in the novel. I
describe looking at my face’s reflection, and how this is when I began wanting
to die.
I had, until that day in the bar in Brooklyn,
remembered most of it except for the dream and what the dream led me to do.
What I cannot, do not, let myself remember in that tent is the reason why I
despaired. I put away the dream that night, and any memory of how I believed it
was a dream coming true. I put away how I hated my silence, my inability to
act, my shame at being humiliated this way — to have my secret known by those I
thought were my friends, who then only used it against me. My despair was the
despair of realizing that this was just another trap, that there was perhaps no
end of traps. The boy from my dream was there to make everything the director
was doing to me and the other boys seem okay. This trip is the extent of the
director’s interest in me this way. He never tries to be alone with me again.
He only wanted to control what I wanted — access to his favorite — and when I
received it, and how.
As an adult, I understand my powerlessness. I can see
I was in the woods without access to a phone or a car or another adult. I now
know that the director chose me in part because my family was in crisis — he knew
my mother needed a place for me to be after school, and that I needed the
refuge the choir offered. Until the camping trip, the choir had been like a
paradise for me: other boys who were smart, who liked me, who didn’t mock me,
who wanted me as their friend, just for who I was. I can see that I was only a
tool to the director, and this display of power over my desires was done to put
me in my place. And that new place was to make everything seem okay to the
other boys, much like my own dream boy had done for me. But what’s new,
supplied by the memory, is how I gave up then, gave up believing my life could
ever be any better. I would never escape the people intent on humiliating me.
There was no place for me in this world, and there was nothing I could do about
it. The despair I have lived with my whole life overtook me then, and until
that kiss in the bar twenty-five years later, I had kept this secret, even from
myself.
I was twelve when I put this memory away. The force exerting itself
in my life was the power of pure childhood imagination, unmediated by any sense
of my own power to speak, to create understanding and compassion. Instead,
there was in me a dream of fear, so powerful I made a doll of myself to stay in
my place, and I ran away. The doll woke up, stretched, looked around, and
believed it was me.
Imagine walking into your apartment and finding someone ripping up a
piece of paper. You put your hand on his arm and this person turns to face you.
It is you.
You read the paper, and as you do, you feel as if you
are falling into it, endlessly, away from yourself and into yourself at the
same time.
In the months after the memory returned, I continued
with my life as best I could. But my recovered memory, for me, was like
receiving a telegram one morning and finding inside the answer to twenty-five
years’ worth of mistakes, twenty-five years of confusion and pain, and watching
as around me the day turned as black as night. There was a story I needed to
understand, the one I had tried to avoid, and it was all I wanted to listen to,
and everything else I had to do was in the way.
The young writer I’d been involved with eventually
moved on that fall. We never really spoke of what had happened, or whatever it
was we’d unsealed for each other — my attempts at such conversations did not
end well. Like me at his age, he did not seem ready to speak of it. We remain
friends.
There was one more story
I was inside of then, yet another stereograph. The one from the spring. The one
in which I was someone who had not told his therapist the story he needed to
tell.
令
The first new therapist I found had been recommended to me by a
friend. As her office was near where I was living at the time in New York, and
she had helped my friend to a remarkable recovery after a sexual assault, and
that friend had recommended her highly, I went. This therapist listened to me
for ten or fifteen minutes as I described why I had come to her, and then she
said, “I’m not sure I know how to help you. The people I work with usually can’t
even name what happened to them, much less write a novel about it.”
I was suddenly very aware that I was sitting on a
couch surrounded by stuffed animals and toys, as if I were visiting a nursery.
I wondered if the toys were for her other patients even as I knew they were,
and I fought the impulse to pick one up. She told me I seemed fine, perhaps a
little neurotic, at least not as damaged as others — not in danger. She agreed
to keep seeing me, and I did see her twice more. But inside the self performing
as someone who was fine was the self who was not, and the vision I’d had of my
life, the one that had me wanting to scream, was a vision of how living this
way, inside of this performance, had blighted my life. I felt like a tree
struck by lightning a long time ago, burning secretly from the inside out, the
bark still smooth to the end — the word fine painted on it.
I had even used this image of the lightning-struck
tree in the novel I’d written, and it was just one of the ways the novel
allowed that hidden self to speak in public. The novel that seemed, that day,
to have become yet another obstacle for me.
I thanked her and left. When I reached the dark
sidewalk, I told myself I would find another therapist. But I felt something
new. A wild fury of failing — no one believes I am not
fine; why does no one believe it?— thundered in
my head as I stood there. The one who knew he was still burning was trying to
say so. And the one who was determined to say nothing did not allow it.
I had told my story but I had not told my story. I
had written a novel and found catharsis, but I had not found healing, had not
found recuperation. I had read self-help books to research the novel about
sexual abuse, but I had not done the work, had not applied those books to myself
as much as I had used them as a map to a character. Through it all I kept
telling myself that nothing had happened to me, nothing had
happened to me, nothing had happened to me, nothing had happened to me. I was fine.
But I was not fine. It
would take me four years to try again. As I examine the reasons why, I first
find a strange little lie that does not add up when I examine it: an angry
feeling that the therapist did not believe me. But she did. She simply told me
she couldn’t help me. And the copy of me who believed I could be fine without
ever speaking of it took over again. No one believes you, the copy told me. A
last — last? — lie. For that night, at least. I am built for this terrible
pain, I told myself, and sent myself on my way.
令
I left the apartment in the sky when the sublet there ended and
moved back to Brooklyn briefly, to an ill-fated rental there, a one-bedroom
apartment with an unfinished wood floor my landlord tried to pass off as
hardwood — the carpet staples still in it. I did not complain, unable to tell
him he was lying to me. I didn’t bother to unpack, and three months later moved
out to Los Angeles — another sublet, this time with a friend in Koreatown, a
share in his 4,000-square-foot apartment in a building named for a silent-film
star, where I drove his borrowed white Porsche and tried very hard to be who I
thought I should be at parties filled with professionally beautiful people I
vaguely remembered or didn’t know at all.
I told myself I was
chasing pleasure after so much grief. That I was writing my new novel. But I
was desperate to escape the slow creep of deadness inside, the paralysis I felt
in the face of this memory and all that came with it. The grief at following my
dream of a boy into the woods, into what was just another trap in what felt
like an unending series of traps. That I was still doing this was lost on me,
though it came to me in moments, and I pushed the knowledge away each time. The
paralysis that had stopped me again and again, this was what I was trying to
kick away. I ran from myself by moving across the country, and even did the
move twice, once out to Los Angeles and then back again, to Maine. I told
myself I was making smart decisions, and sometimes I was — selling my second
novel, applying to the MacDowell Colony, applying for a job at Amherst College
— but that feeling followed me, the feeling of needing to stop and also to
scream, as if I thought I could stop what was freezing me from the inside out
by scaring it out of me. And there was always a new man, another
will-o’-the-wisp of desire that I followed into whatever woods I found. With
each move, a raft of boxes followed me, many never unpacked, joined by new ones
full of unanswered mail from the previous address.
令
Four years went by.
When I finally found another therapist, I picked him
by calling several therapists in the area and listening to their voices — I
chose him for his timbre and tone. I went to him for what I thought would be
triage after a breakup, something I’d done before. I had just moved to Amherst,
Massachusetts, to begin a new job, and I had broken up with my boyfriend
shortly after arriving, having discovered a sexually transmitted disease,
despite being in what was supposed to have been a monogamous relationship. As I
had caught him, the previous fall, trolling online for sex with strangers, and
after discussing whether we wanted new rules — nonmonogamy, specifically — or
an end to our relationship — we had continued, as he’d insisted he wanted
neither to be in an open relationship nor to end our relationship. This time,
however, after certifying I had gotten my little hygiene problem in the way I
believed I had — from him — I ended the relationship with no discussion. It was
a minor illness but an unacceptable risk. This was what I thought I would be
talking about with the therapist. And while it was where we began, we soon went
elsewhere.
I had been talking about the patterns in my ex’s
relationships, but the therapist kept turning me back to mine. He told me I had
to stop trying to understand my ex and just accept the fact of him. I needed
instead to understand myself. My habit of chasing after a fantasy. Do you know
this phrase, the therapist with the nice voice asked me after a number of
sessions, “In repetition is forgetting”？
I don’t, I said.
It’s Freud, he said. It refers to the Freudian
repetition cycle. We repeat something so that we can forget the pain of it. We
set out to get it right instead, to fix what went wrong. But we can never fix
the past, he said. We then only repeat it.
In repetition is forgetting.
He was a popular therapist in this town, and in
conversation with a friend who was also seeing him, he had mentioned that one
of our therapist’s specialties was treating gay men with a history of sexual
abuse. I had silently noted this.
We can only break the future, came the
thought.
There is something I should tell you, I said.
And there, on his office sofa, I remembered my
student who had never told her therapist enough, and began at last to try to
tell someone everything.
I am writing this from my future. The one I made from the one I
broke, possibly only after that day.
The therapist gave me an exercise. You can’t get rid
of the guardians who’ve kept you safe until now, he said. You have to give them
new jobs. The jobs they have, they’ve been doing since you were a child.
I had never thought of them as protectors. The liar
on the screen. The one who hid his wound from his mother in shame. The one who
kept his hurt secret from his other therapists, trying, alone, to fix himself,
unable to even think of saying the words. But finally able to write them. Of
course each one was doing what I’d essentially told them to do, even if I no
longer felt that way or wanted it done. They all were.
And then there was the one who’d left me the
fragments of that novel like a trail through the woods, from the land I was in
to this one. The one planning this world that the novel would make.
I had written a novel that, after it was published,
let me practice saying what I remembered out loud for years until the day I
could remember all of it. Until I could be the person who could stand it. The
person who wrote that novel, he was waiting for me.
HOW
TO WRITE AN AUTOBIOGRAPHICAL NOVEL
I will tell only the truth, you decide. Ifs
right there, after all. Like you could hold it, perfect, in one try.
This vision
of the novel you are sure you can write sits in your life like a gift from any
god you might be willing to believe in. As suddenly real as any unexpected
visitor.
You must write it, you decide. It would be so easy.
You watch each other, carefully, for years.
When you begin, you are like someone left
in the woods with an ax and a clear memory of houses, deciding to build a
house.
You decide
you will teach yourself to furnish everything with that ax. You are the ax. The
woods is your life.
And yet when you sit down to try, the perfection is
gone.
The beautiful symmetry, the easy way of it,
all of it is replaced by awkwardness, something worse than if your mind made
only noise.
When you
stop, dejected, you see it again, perfect again. As if it is mocking you.
Soon you learn that you see it only when you do not
try.
Thinking this may be its way of stopping you, but
either way, you stop trying. And then start. And then stop.
Perhaps you are unfamiliar with why you
would try to undo yourself. Why you would be your own worst enemy or best
friend, or that person who is
sometimes both. Now you try to live with what you
know.
You still see it, even if it eludes you
when you reach for it. What is the way into the place where it is? you wonder.
Perhaps it is like the Venetian towns built
to confuse pirates. You think you are headed toward the square with a fountain,
and instead find yourself in an alley, or out along the cliff wall. Another
life.
There is that
noise still in the mind, drawn over the surface of the entrance like
camouflage.
You find this only when you decide you must try
again.
You don’t know this yet, but gods, even when you
don’t believe in them, do not give something easily. Not even when the god is
you.
You didn’t
make this up, people say to you when finally you write it and give it to them
to read.
I did, you say, but you feel as if you have dropped
your disguise.
Is this me? they ask coldly. Their disguise, also
dropped.
You had hoped
they also would see how perfect it was. You wonder if it is them, and you forgot somehow, you are stupid in some way you didn’t
anticipate.
The living reside uncomfortably in prose. This
includes you.
You like the
child who believes they are invisible because they stood in a shadow.
This person, your reader, now says, There is no plot.
You see this also. The novel revealed now
as a string of anecdotes, and you cannot see what comes before or after. The
events of your life like an empty field and you there, shouting, “Novel!”
The writer who cried “Novel!,” yes. Yes, that was you.
Invent something that fits the shape of what you know.
To do this, use the situations but not the events of your life.
Invent a character like you, but not you.
You, in the forest of yourself with the ax,
building the house, sealing yourself within its walls.
You are the
ghost of the house you build and never live in, this house you make of your
life.
The space you occupy more like the space between the
wall and the paint.
This also the difference between you and the one you
have invented to be you.
This golem of the self, this house, now something
anyone could visit and understand. Unlike you. That is what you hope for now.
This golem
more or less careless than you, more or less selfish, more or less remorseful.
More or less you, but not you.
Or it is remorseful in exactly the same way
as you, but something else is what changes as you write it, until you
understand you and it are apart.
If you are a professor, then the character
is a professor. If you are tall, he is tall. Angry, then angry. But then change
other things that will make the difference.
Give the
character your name only if it will make this difference plain. Anything else
is museum theater.
Or choose a name with the same music.
Invent the other characters also, the same way.
Or change all the names. Change everything.
Use the names
of neither the willing nor the unwilling. Especially those who will change from
willing to unwilling once the novel is published and they understand what they
have given you.
Know that this may be anyone, even you.
You do this because you must betray this character in
the way all writers betray all of their characters, done to reveal the ways
they are human.
To do less than this is only PR.
You have invented this self because the
ways you are human are not always visible to yourself. All of this a machine to
make yourself more human.
For this
reason, be prepared, always, to stop and set the novel aside until you are
prepared to do what you must do.
Why is it not a memoir? people will ask.
I tell more truth in fiction, you might say. You hope this is true.
The memoir a kind of mask too, but one that
insists you are only one person.
All fiction
is autobiographical, people say. People who say this want to believe it more
than any novel itself, much less the one you wrote.
It is time to speak of the price.
The price is
you do not get it back after you write it, whatever you took from yourself for
its heart.
Give this over, then, only if you can make something greater than
what you had.
Anyone who unhappily saw themselves in your
characters will most likely see themselves, even if they were not described.
Those you do include will pass themselves by, seeing themselves in other
characters.
The legal
standard is that a stranger must be able to recognize the character in life
from the description in the novel before the person can sue.
You cannot sue yourself.
There is another standard for yourself, and
its demands and punishments will stand unrevealed until you find the book
finished, out in the world, waiting in the place where you once lived.
Anyone not in
your life will believe it is your life, and sometimes the people in your life
will too, despite what they might remember.
This price is paid until no one is left alive.
Here are the warnings, then, dressed as thieves.
You can5t stop me, you think. I must do this, you are
thinking.
I will not stop you and I don’t want to. You will
stop you. A hundred times. A thousand.
You lost in the trap of “that happened,”
and you struggle because “that is how that really happened,” and yet you cannot
make it convincing in fiction, cannot figure out what happens next.
Your novel only an anecdote, your plot a
series of aversions, dodges in disguises, trauma dressed as friends saying,
“Yes you can no you can’t yes you can.”
Ready to
steal as much of your life as you let them, more than what they already have
taken.
One last price, hidden behind the rest.
Write fiction about your life and pay with your life, at least three
times.
Here is the ax.
ON
BECOMING AN AMERICAN WRITER
How many times have I thought the world would end?
This was the question that appeared in my head the
morning after the election, the election that for now we all speak of only as
“the election,” as if there will never be any other. The question appeared like
a black balloon determined to follow me around, bobbing in and out of my
vision, a response to my first thought: This is the end of the
world.
I was standing in my kitchen, at the stove. I was
supposed to teach a class that morning. Canceling the class seemed out of the
question, though I did not know how to do all of the things that would get me
there. The coffee seemed impossible to make, as did breakfast. Going downstairs,
getting into the car, driving the twenty minutes south to the college where I
teach. Walking into the classroom. I couldn’t imagine any of that.
What I did imagine: a white supremacist, evangelical
Christian, theocratic, militaristic government. My Muslim friends rounded up
and deported. Being hunted by right-wing militias for being gay, or for being
mixed race, or both. Climate departure, the next step after climate change,
when the weather turns in violent shifts, monsoons and blizzards, floods and
freezing. The ocean a hot soup, empty of life. A government opposed to
environmental protections, labor protections, abortion, birth control, and
equal access to health care.
I was, I knew, in shock. The previous night, when the
results seemed final, my partner of three years had proposed marriage, and I
had accepted. We decided to marry before the laws could be changed, and I knew
it would help if we ever needed to seek asylum. Before this, my now husband had
expressed a deep antipathy to even the idea of marriage. My sister called
afterward, distraught, having just been able to put her children to bed — they
had begged her to move, to leave the country. That had all happened between
2:30 and 3:30 a.m.
My phone was in my hand. A tingling and numbness ran from
the top of my left shoulder all the way down to where my phone digs into my
palm, pushing on a nerve there when I scrolled with one hand, as I did, walking
from room to room in disbelief and horror. This is what I was doing just before
I came to a stop in the kitchen. The pain that began that day lasted almost a
year.
I checked Facebook, an autonomic response. What will
you teach, my friend the poet Solmaz Sharif had posted.
What will I teach? What do I know? This somehow brought me out of my trance. But I was still
motionless in front of my stove.
Can you make coffee? I asked myself. No. Can you buy
a coffee? Yes. Go buy a coffee, I told myself.
I put on a coat. I got
my coffee and a breakfast sandwich and drove south to the school. The views
along Interstate 91, of the White Mountains and the Green Mountains, usually
console me, but that day all I could think about on that drive was the death of
the world.
令
I arrived in the college’s town to find it as empty as if classes
were canceled. As I walked to my office, a young woman left the library and
crossed the strangely empty lawn. As she drew closer, I saw tears streaming
down her face. She did not look at me.
In my office, as I collected the materials for class,
I overheard another young woman crying as she described her anger to a
colleague about the future in a country that had elected a sexual predator as
president.
What will you teach?
It felt as if a president had been assassinated, but
the president was alive. Instead, the country we thought we would be living in
was dead. As if a president had assassinated a country.
I walked into my classroom. My students were all
present. The room was very quiet, and tense, as if they were trying to find a
way to tell me one of them had died. Many of them were crying or had just
stopped crying. I hadn’t been sure if any of them would be celebrating the new
president before this, but now it was clear none of them were.
“I’m not going to pretend last night didn’t happen,”
I said. “Let’s just talk about whatever it is we need to talk about.”
“What is the point,” one of my most talented students asked after
the shortest pause. “What is the point even of writing, if this can happen?”
令
The day the United States invaded Iraq in 2003, I was at my alma
mater, Wesleyan University, preparing to teach the next day. In the art
professor’s apartment I was subletting, I watched the news of the invasion on
his antique television, the screen the size of a paperback book. I was
surrounded by art as a segment aired declaring that the museums and antiquities
of the ancient Persian culture preceding Saddam Hussein would likely be
destroyed by American shelling. A country’s historic legacy lost, perhaps
forever. To these concerns, Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld was shown,
responding to this. He offered, “What’s a few less old pots?”
He was chipper, even affable, as he said it. He
thought he was funny. Yes, who wants them? Who wants any of it? A strange chill
dropped over me, the sort of shadow felt even in the night. How cheerful he was
as he consigned these parts of one of the world’s oldest cultures, the source
of so much of our art, literature, and science, to rubble. I turned off the
television and sat alone and angry in the cold apartment, a pile of manuscripts
to mark next to me.
What was the point? The task of being a writer suddenly felt inadequate. As
did I. That next morning at Wesleyan, I faced something entirely new in my
teaching career: I didn’t know what to say to my students. And I very much
wanted to know.
My generation of writers — and yours, if you are reading this —
lives in the shadow of Auden’s famous attack on the relevance of writing to
life, when he wrote that “poetry makes nothing happen.” I had heard the remark
repeated so often and for so long I finally went looking for its source, to try
to understand what it was he really meant by it. Because I knew it was time for
me to really argue with it. If not for myself, for my students.
Auden wrote this line in
an elegy for Yeats. And Yeats, it should be said, was a hero of Auden’s. To
read the whole poem is to know he meant, if not the opposite of what this line
is so often used to say, something at least more subtle: an ironic complaint.
This isn5t even the sharpest line Auden wrote on the subject. But
somehow, the line handed anyone who cared a weapon to gut the confidence of
over fifty years’ worth of writers in the West. As we faced the inexorable
creep of William F. Buckley’s intellectual conservatism that used
anti-intellectualism as its arrowhead, this attitude, that writing is
powerless, is one that affects you even if you have never read that poem, much
less the quote. Pundits, reviewers, and critics spit it out repeatedly, as
often now as ever, hazing anyone who might imagine anything to the contrary. I
don’t blame Auden or Yeats, who had both hoped to inspire political change with
their poetry earlier in their lives. His poem meant to express his
disillusionment. I don’t think Auden meant it as a call to stop trying. But
America was a young enough country, American literature was young also. It was
easier to believe that we were wrong than to believe what writers around the
world believe: that we matter, and that it is our duty, to matter.
令
Students often ask me whether I think they can be a writer. I tell
them I don’t know. Because it depends, first and foremost, on whether you want
to be one. This question is not as simple to answer as it seems. The
difficulties are many, even if you truly want to be a writer. What seems to
separate those who write from those who don’t is being able to stand it.
“I started with writers more talented than me,” Annie
Dillard had said in the class I took from her in college. “And they’re not
writing anymore. I am.” I remember, as a student, thinking, Why
wouldn,t you do the work? What could possibly stop you?
I began teaching writers in the fall of 1996, at a
continuing education program based on the Upper West Side of Manhattan. I
called it the MASH unit of creative writing, because you can’t turn anyone away
from your classes there. The program pays instructors what it has always paid
them, even now, twenty years later, and they do so because there is always an
MFA graduate like me who needs a first teaching job, and every other place that
offers writing classes in New York is more or less like this. But I loved my
students, and what I still value of this experience is that it was there that I
first discovered that good writing was, as Annie had said to us, very
teachable. Talent mattered less than it was made to seem to matter. I watched
in my first classes as I applied techniques I’d been taught to students who
seemed at first to be unlikely writers and they turned into excellent ones. I
learned a different kind of humility there in the face of their efforts, which
I think still serves me as a teacher: you don’t know who will make it and who
will not, and students’ previous work may or may not be an indicator of what
they can do, good or bad.
Most of what Annie had taught me was about habits of
mind and habits of work. As long as these continued, I imagined, so would the
writing. I will always want my students to know that if what you write matters
enough, it makes no difference where you write it, or if you have a desk, or if
you have quiet, and so on. If the essay or novel or poem wants to be written,
it will speak to you while the conductor is calling out the streets. The
question is, will you listen? And listen regularly?
Teaching these classes I also learned what could stop
a writer. So many of the students in my classes were stuck. Some were
struggling with a story they both wanted to tell and had forbidden themselves
from telling. Some were struggling with a family story that they believed, if
told, would destroy their family, or them, or their relationship to the family.
A close friend to this day will not write the novel he wants to write about his
late mother, who was closeted until he came out to her, and she then came out
to him. He is afraid of the reaction of a single cousin.
Why does the talented student of writing stop? It is
usually the imagination, turned to creating a story in which you are a failure,
and all you have done has failed, and you are made out to be the fraud you’ve
feared you are. You can imagine the story you might tell, or you can imagine
this other story — both will be extraordinarily detailed, but only one will be
something you can publish. The other will freeze you in place, in a private
theater of pain that seats one. These writers were — are, in many cases —
people who know how to write. What they don’t know is how to become unstuck.
How to leave that theater they made for themselves, how to stop telling
themselves the story that freezes them.
I discovered I needed to teach not just how to write,
but how to keep writing. How to face up to who you think is listening. Is the
person listening more important than you? Or is the story you would tell more
important than you? I was teaching how to stand up and leave that room in your
mind so you can go and write — and live. But the question after that, always,
is, Live with what?
And one answer was always
going to be America.
令
When I was a student of writing in college, I was guilty of
believing that I would have the sort of life of an author that proceeded along
lines that kept me well within the limits of the middle class. It is the
American art trap: make art but be a good member of your social class. A friend
of mine even has a belief that I think is worth testing — that the primary
deciding factor of whether a writer becomes a writer is their relationship to
being middle class. If they are working class or upper class, or even an
aristocrat, they are at least comfortable betraying that class in order to
write.
Put another way: Will you be able to write and also
eat, or even eat well? Will you have to work another job? Will you be able to
pay for health care, a house, dental work, retirement?
These fantasies frayed
and fell apart fast enough as the two places I chose to focus my career —
writing and teaching — have both met with extraordinary income destruction in
the last two decades. I learned quickly that if you stop writing, nothing
happens, but I also learned that I had nowhere else to go. I mastered my
diligence in the face of that, but I am still not free of the demon that can
stop me in my tracks and make me doubt my sense of my own worth and power. And
there isn’t just a single demon, nor are they only personal ones at that. You
are up against what people will always call the ways of the world — and the
ways of this country, which does not kill artists so much as it kills the
rationale for art, in part by insisting that the artist must be a successful
member of the middle class, if not a celebrity, to be a successful artist. And
that to do otherwise is to fail art, the country, and yourself. Should you
decide that writing is your way to serve your country, or to defend it, you are
almost always writing about the country it could become.
I read the first review of my first novel on the Thursday after
September 11, 2001, in the empty computer center of a dormitory at the girls’
school in Maryland where my sister worked. My brother and I had left the city
together. He lived seven blocks from Ground Zero, and I, with my history of
asthma, found that for the first time in decades, I was unable to breathe
easily even out in Brooklyn, where I lived, as long as the site continued to
burn. So we left for a week to take a break from the air. We were very naive to
think the fire would be out by then. I will always remember the cloud of smoke,
as long as the island of Manhattan, visible from the Verrazano Bridge.
As I read the review — a rave, the sort of review you
hope for as a debut author — I had the sense of being a character in a
science-fiction film, one in which the writer, who finally sees his novel
published, then watches as the world ends.
We did return to New York eventually. The world did
not end. Instead, all through that fall, people said things to me like, Ifs
too bad your book isn): about the war, and I
said nothing to that, because there was nothing to say. I taught my writing
classes at the New School, where I was teaching then, and each time I passed
through Union Square station, I consulted the thousands of flyers for missing
persons, in case one of them was someone I knew. I thought of how my own flyer
might read, with the details people who knew me would decide might be helpful
if you had to find me, and you might find only an arm, or the body but no head.
For one terrible moment, I resolved to acquire more distinguishing
characteristics in case this happened to me, though I discarded the idea as a
mania driven by fear. I boarded empty flights to the two readings my publisher
could afford to send me to, and ate the extra meals the nervous flight
attendants offered. I went and spoke on the radio, answering questions about my
book that was not about the war, and met readers, and more reviews appeared.
There were news reports of an epidemic of writer’s
block in New York City, and after those appeared there were reports of writer’s
block in many other parts of the world too. Writers known and unknown spoke of
how they couldn’t think of writing anything that approached the scale of the
attacks. As if this were the task.
I didn’t know anyone who was lost that day. When I
think of the lost, I think mostly of a man I heard speaking on the radio on the
morning of the attacks. He had called the station from inside the first tower
to describe what was happening. The host quickly thanked him for calling in and
then said, in a bit of a panic, Why are you on the phone with me? Why aren’t
you on your way down?
You don’t understand, the man said. The whole center
of the building is gone. I can’t go down. That’s why I’m calling.
I don’t know how to describe the feeling I had in the
silence that followed, except that it was approximately the length it would
take you to read this sentence aloud.
What do you mean the whole center’s gone? the host
asked, the panic in his voice no longer slight.
I mean, I can see down the center of the building, he
said. The stairs are just ... gone.
Then the line went dead, and the radio host was
weeping, asking us all to pray for the missing caller.
Later we would know for sure the towers had fallen.
In that instant, I did not know, though I felt certain. It was unbearable. I
turned off the radio. I was in my apartment, about to make coffee for myself,
but found I had none. The enormity of what had happened was not yet clear, but
I decided if the world was going to end that day, I was going to need coffee to
face it. I left to get some at the corner cafe where I knew a couple of my
friends would be working. I could get coffee and be less alone. In the hallway,
I saw people leaving the building as if it were an ordinary day. They did not
know what had happened. I didn’t know how to tell them. I blurted it out.
They looked at me as if I were insane. As if their
disbelief could make it not true.
At the cafe, I found my friends had scalded
themselves with spilled coffee when the first news of the attacks came on the radio,
and so I helped them do what they needed to do to close the store, and then, as
we prepared to leave, I noticed, outside the window, what seemed to be faint
grayish snow was beginning to fall out of the sky.
Is it snowing? one of my friends asked, incredulous.
I thought of a date I’d gone on two days earlier,
with a welder. I had been interested in his work. Can you burn steel? I
remembered asking.
Yes, he said. And he told me the temperature at which
steel burned like firewood, 2,000 degrees Fahrenheit.
It would be disputed later, all of it, all the
details of that day. Whether the steel had burned, the heat of the fire,
whether the planes had set off the destruction or the building had been rigged
to blow. A “false flag” operation, some said. I would, and still do, doubt
whether I heard the radio conversation I heard, though it is nothing I would
ever make up. All I knew in that moment was that this ash was from the towers,
a mix of the building and those who had died in it and the plane that had
struck it, and that we
could not breathe in what was falling, and yet none of us could
endure waiting to leave, because who knew how long it would be before another
attack?
Get some sort of wet cloth, I said. We each need one.
A napkin or a bandanna.
We bound wet cloths over our faces and heads. When
you get home, I said, take off your clothes and put them in a plastic bag and
throw them away. Then take a shower.
They stared at me.
This is the ash from the towers burning, I said.
And so my friends and I walked home this way, wet
cloths over our noses and mouths, through the falling ash in Park Slope, miles
from the site. We waved goodbye to each other, saying nothing.
After taking off my clothes and putting them in a
trash bag and showering, I went to make sure my windows were sealed. I had a
very specific fear: I did not want to breathe them in. It seemed disrespectful.
There was talk for months afterward of recovering the bodies of the missing,
yet I knew on the walk home that the ash that day held most of the remains. I
thought of the families, how they might react if they knew what the ash was.
Later that day I regarded the pale gray snow that had fallen over my garden
with the attitude of someone visiting a grave. When I returned from a trip to
Maryland a week later, rain had washed the garden clean. But I knew they were
still there.
Three years later, as I
prepared to leave the apartment, I found the trash bag on the floor of my
closet. I had never gotten rid of the clothes. I finally threw them away.
令
When writers in New York complained they could not write after 9/11,
it seemed to me they were frozen by writing for that audience, by writing for
the missing. Who we all felt, somehow, were watching. Waiting to see if we were
worthy of being alive when they were dead. Waiting to see the stories we would
tell about the life they would no longer have among us 一 waiting to see if it was worth it.
In the winter before the war in Iraq, I lost two friends, one old,
one new.
The first friend died of cancer in December 2002. She
was just thirty-six. She had been misdiagnosed by her doctor. First she was
told she had a rash, and then that she was imagining the severity of it. She
was told to take antidepressants. After further tests, she learned she had
non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma. A lifelong hypochondriac who always looked to be in the
bloom of health, she had finally fallen seriously ill and was not believed. And
when she eventually was believed, when the truth of her disease was
incontrovertible, there was not time enough to undo the damage, and she
succumbed. She had once been my boss at a magazine launched in the early
nineties. I had met her in San Francisco, when she was the girlfriend of my
boyfriend’s roommate. When I moved to New York to be closer to my boyfriend,
she and I sometimes spent whole days together. She herself dreamed of writing a
novel one day, and in the meantime wrote poems more or less in secret, showing
them rarely. When I was an editor of an experimental literary journal called XXX
Fruit, we asked her for poems, and published
some of them. I remember looking at the typeset page and thinking of it as a
picture of her secret self.
By then, she had moved on to a job at a national weekly
newsmagazine, which she loved, though the responsibilities often crushed what
energy she might have had to write. Or at least this was what she said. Most
writers I know say they don’t have enough time to write. It’s usually a feint.
Her lover, a poet and novelist, spoke at the memorial
service of how, during the eight months she was hospitalized, my friend would
tell her stories in the dark, lights out, late into the night, about their
life. The stories about them were set in the future but told in the present
tense. In that imagined life, it went without saying, she had been healed of
her cancer, and they had pets, a house in Woodstock, friends coming over for
weekends. She had thought through every detail, down to the burial of their
cats at the property’s edge.
She never liked to go to sleep.
Alone with her death’s approach, she had told stories
in her bed. She’d finally written her novel for the woman she loved, insisting
on something past what was allowed them.
What would you read to someone who was dying? Annie Dillard had asked our class. She wanted this to be the
standard for our work. There, at
the memorial
service for my friend, I thought of another: Dying, what stories would you
tell?
令
I think of this friend whenever I am reminded of the abandoned
projects I have in my office, going back for years. This essay was one of them.
Being a writer can feel a lot like writing and giving up on writing at the same
time. I wrote this paragraph in a small office I kept in my home in Rochester,
New York, in 2005, full of unfinished stories, unfinished essays, unfinished
novels. Twelve years later, I’m editing it on a plane back from Florence,
Italy, on my way to a conference at Yale, where my friend did her undergraduate
degree.
In the first decade after her death, each time I
would move, I would sift through the boxes, organizing the papers, and find,
again and again, the CD that was made for her memorial service, the picture on
it of her as a girl, sunburned, her auburn hair short, her eyes squinting in
the sun. Water wings on her arms. I keep it next to my bed now, where I sleep
with my husband. The boxes are in our cabin near Woodstock, where the ghosts of
my friend’s future twenty years ago are among my neighbors. The boxes still tell
me about myself, the writer I was and the writer I am and will be, the man who
once believed in their contents and the man who still struggles to do so. Until
now, when there’s no more waiting.
Consider, if you will,
the sin of despair.
令
Of the seven deadly sins, despair is the sin of hopelessness, of
believing there is no salvation. This sin can even be considered a heresy, as,
to quote The Catholic Encyclopedia on the topic, it “implies an assent to a proposition which is
against faith, e.g. that God has no mind to supply us with what is needful for
salvation.” It is a sin because it is the belief that grace — God — will not
provide.
I was not raised a Catholic, but rather a kind of
indifferent Methodist. I had no formal education in the sins, only the informal
one, which is life.
Who am I to despair? I remember a boyfriend who had
what could be called a depression problem, speaking with him about his despair
as he lay on my bed in the apartment with the garden, where I lived for seven
years before I began my years of moving. He was a Jewish lawyer from New York,
involved in progressive causes, working for a progressive law firm.
He began chastising himself in my presence. You
actually have a reason to be depressed, he said to me. Terrible things have happened
to you. But you’re still happy. What’s my excuse?
You represent the American Communist Party, I said.
We laughed, but only because it was true.
He was saying he did not think I was depressed,
despite my difficulties, and he was right, I did not think of myself as
depressed. I thought of myself as angry. Angry in the way of something held in
waiting, otherwise silent or invisible. During this time, for example, writers
would say in front of me, Nothing bad ever happened to me when I was a child. They
were complaining about someone like me. As if they had been cheated out of
being a person with the luck of terrible things having happened to them.
Terrible things I was then unable to include in a novel because no one would
believe them, or because I could not let myself remember. My therapist in Iowa
thirteen years ago said to me, “If you were anyone else, I’d say you were
paranoid. But you actually have been betrayed by many people in your life. You
still have to learn to trust, though,” she said. “It’s still going to hold you
back.”
To quote again from The Catholic
Encyclopedia entry on despair: “The
pusillanimous person has not so much relinquished trust in God as he is unduly
terrified at the spectacle of his own shortcomings or incapacity.”
I am sometimes unduly
terrified by my shortcomings, and I do not trust God. But at my worst, for now,
I remember that one thing I still control is whether or not I give in. And then
I go on.
令
The second friend I lost that year was a new friend, who died
suddenly at the end of February 2003. Tom was his name. He was slightly older
than me at forty, and healthy for a man as devoted as he was to good drink and
good food, gay and HIV-positive. He managed a cafe on Seventh Avenue in
Brooklyn, and for the two and a half years I knew him, I saw him almost
exclusively after sunset, him making coffee, me ordering it. He had met me in
the season when my first novel had appeared. He had read it and would praise it
loudly to anyone standing next to me in line. Soon most of his regulars knew
that I had published a novel, so I spent most of our friendship blushing. When
he died, I was returning from a short second tour for the paperback.
He met me, in other words, as the dream I’d had for
the previous seven years was coming true. And I felt nearly dead from the
effort of bringing it to fruition.
He knew me entirely as a writer. This was not how I
knew myself. It was why I blushed when he spoke of my book. He had never seen
me get coffee with a tuxedo in a garment bag on my shoulder, running up the
subway stairs in order to be on time to serve a formal dinner on Park Avenue.
He had missed the nights when, after waiting tables at the steakhouse in
midtown, I would arrive in the local gay bar in a starched white shirt, sleeves
rolled, and drink pairs of bourbon and beer until closing.
He mentioned that he sometimes wrote, and that he’d
just come into an inheritance. He kept his job, but left on a dream trip
through Europe, where he fell in love with a young man in Spain. It had almost
come to something, but then it didn’t, and he returned from Spain, relaxed and
tanned. Heartbreak seemed to have let him off the hook somehow. For something.
In our last full conversation he told me about the
novel he’d plotted and begun writing. When I arrived back from my book tour and
returned to the cafe, expecting to see him, I found a young South African man
with a mohawk pouring coffee in his place. I began to quietly panic. I knew Tom
was HIV-positive, and would be absent only if something was very wrong.
Indeed, the South African told me that Tom was in the
hospital. I decided I would wait two days for the cough I had to go away, not
wanting to risk infecting him. He died on the day in between.
So many of my friends had been living with AIDS, I’d
forgotten it could still kill them.
Tom died on a Thursday night. A wake was planned for
Sunday. I was asked to read something. I spent the next few days in a cloud of
apologetic prayer that eventually pointed me to the idea of writing an elegy. I
found myself in the odd position of doing what I often did, which is making a
poem for a friend, but in this case, one he would never read. All the other
times I’d written poems, for a birthday or a wedding, I’d written them with the
idea that the poem would be heard by the person it was written for.
I was able to write it only when I imagined him
reading it. When I imagined giving it to him. I gave it instead to the owner of
the cafe and his coworkers. They set it in the window, next to a picture of Tom
in his sun hat in Spain, where it stayed for a year.
The writing of elegies is something uncanny, and I
use that word with the sense that I’ve never used it before. You can’t help but
imagine the poem being observed by the deceased. You are even addressing it to
them, asking the dead in, not to speak but to listen. And you let nothing go
from your desk that wouldn’t meet their standard. It’s a kind of review you
perhaps couldn’t previously have imagined, and then after, it is a review that
can only be imagined by you.
In the days that
followed, whenever I got my coffee, I saw the picture of Tom next to my poem,
and I thought each time about how you could wait too long to write. I was
faltering with my second novel, but this stiffened my resolve. Tom had always
had a knack for telling me the one thing I needed to hear, and in this way he
told me this last part, again and again, almost daily, until the poem came
down.
What is the point? I have struggled with this question my student
asked that morning after the election for as long as I’ve been a writer and a
teacher.
In a comic about that morning after the election, I
would draw you a picture of me driving in my car, mountains in front of me and
behind me, the black balloon of my question — How many times
have I thought the world would end? — a thought
balloon as long as the drive, and revealed on the next page to be as long as my
life, a trip through all that has followed me since at least the fifth grade,
when I first learned to fear death by neutron bomb, or that I would have to
wear a special suit just to be outdoors as an adult because of damage to the
ozone layer.
I love summer. My worst nightmare is a world where I
cannot enjoy it.
In one panel is the time I learned that the empty
factories of my childhood meant new factories had been built in other countries
where labor was cheaper, and I understood those jobs would never return until
the long argument owners were having with labor — an argument longer than my
life — would end in Americans being paid almost nothing again.
In another panel, near the middle, would be the trip
I took in 2007, when I went to San Francisco to attend a week-long writers’
conference and took a taxi driven by a man who told me Republicans had a
thirty-year plan to take back the wealth of the country for the rich, and that
we were in the last decade of it. “Who told you this?” I asked, because it was
what I had thought was happening. “Some professor,” he said as he dropped me
off at the University of San Francisco. “I forget. He said it started with
Reagan. But Reagan didn’t start it,” he said. “The people around him did.”
I thanked him, tipped him, and went inside. I knew
this was a moment like any in a newspaper column I’d read all too often, the
pundit quoting the wisdom of his cabdriver to his audience. If I wrote about
it, people would mock the trope, or they would say I sounded crazy. This is
America, where you are allowed to speak the truth as long as nothing changes.
Somewhere near the end
of the balloon is my realization, the morning after the election, that this is
the last year of those thirty years the driver spoke of.
There’s another Alexander Chee in my mind, the one who I would be if
I’d only had access to regular dental care throughout my career, down to the
number of teeth in my mouth. I started inventing him on a visit to Canada in
2005 when I became unnerved by how healthy everyone looked there compared to
the United States, and my sense of him grows every time I leave the country. I
know I’ll have a shorter career for being American in this current age, and a
shorter life also. And that is by my country’s design. It is the intention.
I have been to convenience stores where I see people
working with untreated injuries, and when I leave, I get panhandled in the
parking lot by someone in a chain-store uniform who is unable to afford the gas
to get home on the last day before payday — someone with two jobs, three jobs.
Until recently, I struggled to get by, and yet I am in the top twenty percent
of earners in my country. I am currently saving up for dental implants — money
I could as easily use for a down payment on a house. But I’m not entirely sure
I’ll see the end of a mortgage, or that any of us will.
Scientists around the world were terrified before the
election about our chances for long-term survival on this planet. The
widespread death of coral in the Great Barrier Reef — called coral bleaching,
as if the coral were not dead, just blond — is something these scientists had
feared but they’d believed they would not live to see happen. Many of them
wept. Climate change denial is the product of an ExxonMobil campaign to prolong
the period of its profits as long as possible — the corporation was caught
spending millions of dollars to deny its existence, instead of openly working
to create energy solutions we could all survive. Exxon knew climate change was
real all along, has known for thirty years or more. Conservatism’s oldest con
is getting a voter to yell “thief” at someone the thief chooses, the thief they
voted for. And now we are in the final phase.
It’s a strange time to
teach someone to write stories. But I think it always is. This is just our
strange time.
令
Writing workshops inevitably circle around to conversations about
publishing, and I usually allow it at the end of a class. This way I can teach
my students the ordinariness of the profession as well as the radical
possibilities in their work first. And since sometimes, maybe every time, the
most radical thing to do with radical work is to treat it as ordinary, I make
sure to educate students on the procedures for submitting work to magazines,
journals, agents, and publishers. I try to pass along everything I know about
writing and publishing, and to avoid injuring their excitement for it.
There are the stories I tell the class. The stories I
don’t tell are about being paid last, after even the power bill, though your
book is the one under the lights. How your friends will think you’re rich, and
your family will think you’ve betrayed them, even if you didn’t write about
them. Reviewers will misunderstand your book and it will cost you everything
and no one but you will care. Or they will misunderstand it and it will still
sell thousands of copies and no one but you will care.
To write and finish my first novel had taken seven
years and three jobs, plus a fourth, the actual writing of the book. Sometimes
I worked on it on the F train from Brooklyn, going into the city for a shift at
the steakhouse where I waited tables. Sometimes I wrote it while I waited for
my section to be seated. One day I gave up on it, in pain from sitting wrong
for hours at a time. I won’t continue, I decided, until I have a typing table
at the right height. And then I left my apartment and within an hour found one
at a yard sale, as if the gods were mocking me.
Here is your table, they seemed to say. The tag read $3, but what I read in that price, the table sitting there right in my
way, was Get back to work.
The feeling I had when the novel finally came out was
not initially one of exultant enthusiasm. The feeling was You
want me to do this again?
I wasn’t just tired. I also needed money, and more
would be forthcoming if I could write. But I couldn’t seem to write then. I had
a novel I gave up on every Friday and began again every Monday, like a bad
relationship. It was something beautiful I’d fallen in love with years ago and
then talked myself out of, and then let myself back into, slowly. I had started
another novel as well, but I didn’t feel smart enough to write that one yet.
And the urgency of needing the money the writing could provide led to me
shouting quietly, in my head, at anything I was actually able to get down. For
failing myself.
One day in the fall of 2003, I had gone to Wesleyan a
little earlier for a ritual I wasn’t proud of, in which I would go to the
comptroller’s office and request an advance on my check. It was a futile
exercise, really, a way of delaying the day of the month when I would be out of
money. My publisher had gone into bankruptcy owing me what then amounted to a
year’s pay, and then they had sold foreign rights to my first novel, and I
would never see that money because of the way bankruptcy court works.
Afterward, as I headed to class, instead of going in, I stopped in my office to
collect myself, because I had the urge to go in and tell my students to stop
now. Don’t do it, it isn’t worth it, there’s nothing here for you.
I knew it wasn’t true. I didn’t believe it. And yet I
was tempted. But none of this would have reached those responsible. They didn’t
need to hear about the failures of a system. They needed to hear about how to
deal when the system fails.
I waited alone in my office, watching the time in the
lower right corner of my computer screen, until I felt I could teach from that.
And then I stood and went in.
What is the point? I was
asking myself that day. The problem can be not just who is listening, but who
is not listening. Who will never listen. The point of writing in the face of
the problem was the point of samizdat, readers and writers meeting secretly all
across the Soviet Union to share forbidden books, either written there or
smuggled into the country. The point is in the widow of Osip Mandelstam
memorizing her husband’s poetry while in the camps with him in the Soviet
Union, determined that his poems make it to readers. The point of it is in the
possibility of being read by someone who could read it. Who could be changed, out past your imagination’s limits.
Hannah Arendt has a definition of freedom as being the freedom to imagine that
which you cannot yet imagine. The freedom to imagine that as yet unimaginable
work in front of others, moving them to still more action you can’t imagine,
that is the point of writing, to me. You may think it is humility to imagine
your work doesn’t matter. It isn’t. Much the way you don’t know what a writer
will go on to write, you don’t know what a reader, having read you, will do.
令
Only in America do we ask our writers to believe they don’t matter
as a condition of writing. It is time to end this. Much of my time as a student
was spent doubting the importance of my work, doubting the power it had to
reach anyone or to do anything of significance. I was already tired of hearing about
how the pen was mightier than the sword by the time I was studying writing.
Swords, it seemed to me, won all the time. By the time I found that Auden quote
— “poetry makes nothing happen” — I was more than ready to believe what I
thought he was saying. But books were still to me as they had been when I found
them: the only magic. My mother’s most common childhood memory of me is of
standing next to me trying to be heard over the voice on the page. I didn’t
really commit to writing until I understood that it meant making that happen
for someone else. And in order to do that, I had to commit the chaos inside of
me to an intricate order, an articulate complexity.
To write is to sell a ticket to escape, not from the
truth, but into it. My job is to make something happen in a space barely larger
than the span of your hand, behind your eyes, distilled out of all that I have
carried, from friends, teachers, people met on planes, people I have only seen
in my mind, all my mother and father ever did, every favorite book, until it
meets and distills from you, the reader, something out of the everything it
finds in you. All of this meets along the edge of a sentence like this one, as
if the sentence is a fence, with you on one side and me on the other. When the
writing works best, I feel like I could poke one of these words out of place
and find the writer’s eye there, looking through to me.
If you don’t know what I mean, what I mean is this:
when I speak of walking through a snowstorm, you remember a night from your childhood
full of snow, or from last winter, say, driving home at night, surprised by a
storm. When I speak of my dead friends and poetry, you may remember your own
dead friends, or if none of your friends are dead, you may imagine how it might
feel to have them die. You may think of your poems, or poems you’ve seen or
heard. You may remember you don’t like poetry.
Something new is made from my memories and yours as
you read this. It is not my memory, not yours, and it is born and walks the
bridges and roads of your mind, as long as it can. After it has left mine.
All my life I’ve been
told this isn’t important, that it doesn’t matter, that it could never matter.
And yet I think it does. I think it is the real reason the people who would
take everything from us say this. I think it’s the same reason that when
fascists come to power, writers are among the first to go to jail. And that is
the point of writing.
令
I began this essay as an email I wrote to my students during that
first weekend of the war in Iraq. I had felt a sudden, intense protectiveness
of them. I didn’t want my students to go into the draft, rumored then to be a
possibility, and I was even more afraid of people like the secretary of
defense. Destroying art is practice for destroying people.
I wanted to lead my students to another world, one
where people value writing and art more than war, and yet I knew then and I
know now that the only thing that matters is to make that world here. There is
no other world. This is the only world we are in. This revisable country, so
difficult to change, so easily changed.
I wrote to them that weekend and told them that art
endures past governments, countries, and emperors, and their would-be
replacements. That art — even, or perhaps especially, art that is dedicated
somehow to tenderness, dedicated as a lover who would offer something to her
beloved in the last nights they’ll share before she leaves this life forever —
is not weak. It is strength. I asked them to disregard the cultural war against
the arts that has lasted most of their lives, the movement to discredit the
arts and culture in American public life as being decorative interruptions of
more serious affairs, unworthy of funding, or even of teachers. I told them
that I can5t recall the emperors of China as well as I can Mencius,
who counseled them, and whose stories of them, shared in his poetry of these
rulers and their problems, describe them for me almost entirely. And the
paradox of how a novel, should it survive, protects what a missile can’t.
The email I sent was not the only act, though; it was
just a beginning. It was when I turned my back on the idea that teaching
writing means only teaching how to make sentences or stories. I needed to teach
writing students to hold on — to themselves, to what matters to them, to the
present, the past, the future. And to the country. And to do so with what they
write. We won’t know when the world will end. If it ever does, we will be
better served when it does by having done this work we can do.
I have new lessons in not stopping, after “the
election.” If you are reading this, and you’re a writer, and you, like me, are
gripped with despair, when you think you might stop: Speak to your dead. Write
for your dead. Tell them a story. What are you doing with this life? Let them
hold you accountable. Let them make you bolder or more modest or louder or more
loving, whatever it is, but ask them in, listen, and then write. And when war
comes — and make no mistake, it is already here — be sure you write for the living
too. The ones you love, and the ones who are coming for your life. What will
you give them when they get there? I tell myself I can’t imagine a story that
can set them free, these people who hate me, but I am writing precisely because
one did that for me. So I always remember that, and I know to write even for
them.
I am, it should be said, someone who did lose his
faith. I may in fact be pusillanimous, even as a condition of my faith in
myself, and at times I despair. I do not write as much as I should. I do not
always think that when I die I will have the chance to see my dead again. But
for now, I live and work and I feel them watching me.
And so I leave this here now, for them. And for you.
I will begin by thanking my husband, Dustin Schell, who regularly
makes the value of my life and my work visible to me in ways large and small,
and whose love is the center of my world.
Thank you to my agent, Jin Auh, for her friendship
and fearless advocacy all these years, and to her associate, Jessica Friedman,
and the entire team at the Wylie Agency, who protect me and my work so well.
Thank you to my editor, Naomi Gibbs, for her thoughtful and demanding editorial
acumen, and to everyone at Houghton Mifflin Harcourt for their hard work on my
books. After fighting so hard for it, being in print is everything to me.
My thanks to my teachers in the writing of essays,
Annie Dillard and Clarke Blaise. My thanks to the editors of the published essays
here: Edmund White; Elizabeth Benedict; Rosecrans Baldwin and the entire Morning
News family; Hillary Brenhouse, Dan Sheehan, and
Michael Archer at Guernica; Chad
Harbach and n+1; Jesse Pearson,
at Apology; Aaron Gilbreath, Mike Dang,
Michelle Legro, and Sari Botton, at Longreads; Mark Armstrong, at Automattic; Yuka Igarishi and Mensah Demary, at Catapult; Isaac Fitzgerald, Saeed Jones, Karolina Waclaviak, and Jarry Lee,
at BuzzFeed. Your collective efforts have
helped make me the essayist I am, and I’m very grateful.
Friends who helped
especially: Garnette Cadogan, John Freeman, Melanie Fallon, Jami Attenberg,
Keiko Lane, Sandi Hammonds, Maud Newton, Gerard Koskovich, and Joe Osmundson —
thank you for keeping faith with me and this work. And my thanks to my writing
group, The Resistance: Mira Jacob, Kaitlyn Greenidge, Luis Jaramillo, Brittany
Allen, Julia Phillips, Tennessee Jones, and Bill Cheng.
|
|
This collection
began in part thanks to an invitation from Lis Harris to read in the Columbia
University Nonfiction Program’s series in the fall of 2014. I collected my
published essays to send to her students, and I am so grateful to her for that
prod. Some of the anecdotes central to my history here may have been described
by me on other occasions, in interviews or in other essays, and so I reserve
the right to effectively repeat those anecdotes, or plagiarize myself. The
names and identifying details of some of the living people described here have
been changed to protect their identities.
The following essays originally appeared in other
publications. All have been edited and revised for this collection. In
particular, “The Curse,” initially published as “Playing Mexican,” in the New
School’s literary magazine Lit, and “After Peter,” first published in Loss Within
Loss, edited by Edmund White (University of
Wisconsin Press, 2001), are greatly revised from their original versions. “The
Querent” was previously published at the Morning News. “The Writing Life” first appeared in the anthology Mentors,
Muses, and Monsters, edited by Elizabeth
Benedict, and was reprinted at the Morning News. “My Parade” first appeared in the n+1 anthology MFA vs NYC,
and was reprinted by BuzzFeed Books; “Girl” was first published in Guernica and was reprinted in The Best American Essays
2016, edited by Jonathan Franzen. “Mr. and Mrs.
B” was first published in Apology and was reprinted online at Longreads. “Impostor” was first published at Catapult. “How to Write an Autobiographical Novel” first appeared at BuzzFeed. “The Autobiography of My Novel” was first published in the Sewanee
Review.
Also
available by Alexander Chee
Twelve-year-old Fee is a shy
Korean American boy and a newly named
section leader of the first sopranos in his local boys5 choir. At
their summer
camp, situated in an idyllic and secluded lakeside retreat, Fee grapples with
his complicated feelings towards his best friend, Peter. But as Fee comes to
learn how the director treats his section leaders, he is so ashamed he says
nothing of the abuse, not even when Peter is in line to be next. When the
director is arrested, Fee tries to forgive himself for his silence. Yet the
actions of the director have vast consequences, and in their wake, Fee
blames only
himself.
In the years that follow he slowly builds a new life, teaching near
his
hometown. There, he meets a young student who is the picture of Peter -
and is forced to confront the past he believed was gone.
‘Every word makes me ache ... Written with exquisite
empathy and grace’
Roxane Gay
‘Singularly beautiful and psychologically harrowing ... One of the
best
American novels of this century’Boston Globe
http://www.bloomsbury.com/author/alexander-chee
https://www.bloomsbury.com/uk/edinburgh-9781526609137/
BLOOMSBURY PUBLISHING
Bloomsbury Publishing Plc
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This electronic edition published in 2018 by Bloomsbury
Publishing Plc
BLOOMSBURY, BLOOMSBURY PUBLISHING and the Diana logo are trademarks of Bloomsbury
Publishing Plc
First published in 2018 in the United States of America by Houghton
Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company
First published in Great Britain 2018 Copyright ©
Alexander Chee, 2018
Alexander Chee has asserted his right under the Copyright,
Designs and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as Author of this work
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced
or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including
photocopying, recording, or any information storage or retrieval system,
without prior permission in writing from the publishers
A catalogue record for this book is available
from the British Library
ISBN: PB: 978-1-5266-0911-3; eBook: 978-1-5266-0910-6
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