I’ve been a bad, bad girl
Monday 16 February 2004 | I like a cookie
I’ve been careless with a delicate man, pace Fiona (she of the hundred-word album title, probably an idea stolen from Finnegans Wake). Schießenhauer, as Holger and I used to say. At university we made up ridiculous faux-Teutonic swears. Schitzenmeister. (And his fiancée called him her Necktie, because to them the English word “husband” sounded like a kind of cummerbund.)
It’s about one-thirty am and I’m reeling from two days of sesshin (concluding with real live Paranirvana ceremony and the splendor of nenju!) and two protracted and relatively agonized conversations with M. (one pre, one post). He’s hurting so much and all I can say to mollify him is, I’m still trying, I’m not giving up yet, I’m so sorry, but please, my main point in that letter was to beg you to stop saying shit which is exactly like the shit you’re saying right this second because this is what’s killing me. He says, bitterly and painfully, you have terrible taste, I’m so much cooler and smarter and everything than these jerks you fancy and I can’t believe you don’t fancy me, I walk around town crying, but I always knew it, it’s been like this ever since I got here from England, and of course they’re not jerks, I’m sure they’re nice guys, I don’t want you to have to try to find me desirable…etc. In short he inevitably enacts the very insecurity I find so vitiating in the first place.
In a spurt of defiance, then, he bursts out with his own je refuse: I don’t want to act confident and try to impress you and engage in that witty bullshit banter. It’s a couple of hours before I manage to articulate to both of us that I’m less interested in witty bullshit banter than in his ability to get through a day without saying one self-lacerating thing. And I manage to reiterate the letter’s point: this is the one thing I need from you. If you keep doing this it sabotages all the things I’m working on within myself, it just kills me. I do believe in true love and in marriage; I believe one person can be all the beloveds to another; I believe you are—are—are—
Here the Un breaks down. Because she finds herself typing and frowning and then revising and rewriting and still not happy with phrases like “as good as it probably gets” or “the best I could ever do” which are not at all flattering and would probably cause M. to fall upon his sword, if he had or could procure one.
And anyway isn’t this all some big hand-wiping activity, designed to lay blame squarely on M. and distract me from the fact that, plain and simple, I’m just a slag, and it’s hurting him grievously? That I come home, brush my teeth and make my hot water bottle, listen to my messages and, pretending I only half-care who’s sent me email, log in to check, and am openly thrilled (dancing tiredly around casita) to have one from the Film Critic? (The same FC, by the way, who was subject of much contumely from M.)
The same Film Critic who, in relation to the Vegan Firewood Guy’s insistence on fearless communication, ruminates, “I think I can safely say fearful communication is far more interesting than any other kind.” The one who says, “I hope someday I will actually get to hear you say hmp.” And the one who, in response to my revelation that I bought a new used red is-it-a-midlife-crisis car: “Yeah, could be what the French (according to people who’ve actually spoken with them, and written about it) call le demon du midi.” He’s only about half or a third as brilliant and funny and loveable as Mandarin, but then he can’t help that, he’s just a mere guy. Unfortunately the Film Critic will never get to see me in person, to hear me say “hmp” or anything else, because it will take at least six to eight months for my hair to grow out presentably, by which time I’ll be in Britain struggling to swallow the bolus of adult responsibility and find the beloved where he presents himself, in my own precious Necktie. And the Film Critic will almost certainly have given up long before then.
Tonight’s marathon conversation did however end with M. reading me many sentences and paragraphs from the Martin Amis memoir Experience. Fucking brilliant, as M. told me it was, but I didn’t believe because I always thought I hated Martin Amis. Just sheer virtuosic genius. Did I just make up a word? Tonight the new tenzo said “analyzation” and I unobtrusively shuddered, thinking you will never see me naked, just as it was all over with the Vegan Firewood Guy when he told me I had “adventurosity.”
[Here’s Martin’s tender review of Iris; I adore the sentence, “The kitchen ate it.” And one can find practically all things Amis fils, including his blistering post-9/11 essays and contumely at In His Own Words.]
Of course M. is infinitely desirable for his fine literary interests if for no other reasons. Like Martin, he too is reading John Bayley’s Iris memoir. He informs me in no uncertain terms that he’s not interested in being anything like John Bayley. I eye him. “That’s fine, I don’t want you to be John Bayley either.” Nor do I want to sleep around on him. Do I?
Do I have bad taste? Am I a senseless slutty serial monogamist who’s attracted to unsophisticated jerks? (M. doesn’t even know the Young Monk, I nearly point out, but catch myself in time.) The shuso looked at me this morning and with great tenderness said, There is no perfect partner. He’s right. And I myself am a major fuckup in so many ways it makes me guffaw with great and hilarious humiliation. Maybe when M. says those things which to me sound self-lacerating, he doesn’t really mean them, as he says he doesn’t; he says he only means to say, that is, he…oh bollocks. I have suddenly lost confidence in this sentence and really I just want to be reassured I’m not an evil loser because I like having tea with my husband and hearing him read Martin Amis to me, and I also like getting in my freezing cold car at one a.m. and driving home, blasting Sheryl Crow to stay awake, then walking in the door and checking email to see if I have a witty silly letter from my latest crush, the most recent in a long prestigious line, to make me forget about everything and laugh, because I wrote:
If I were to come to the Alt Weekly party, which I won’t, because I am a snivelling gutless coward, I’d be the one standing in the corner bearing an uncanny resemblance to Edna Krabappel.
And he then replied:
Oh yes, the party. I really stretched my boundaries and somehow hung out there for about a half-hour. This involved getting the bartender to give me water twice, talking to the DJ (who I used to work with at Hasting’s about seven years ago), inhaling a lot of secondhand smoke, having my eardrums offended by some unappealing, generic bar-band type of musical act, and watching people clamber onto shoddily-constructed tables to have their strains and pressures relieved by so-called acupuncture students, who would feel them up, apparently free of charge. I looked for Edna, but no dice. For the record, she’s hot (Sideshow Bob: You only get one chance with Edna Krabappel).
I determine not to let it bother me that Hastings takes no aprostrophe, there’s no real reason not to have said “with whom I used to work,” and that the commas after “students” and/or “up” are unnecessary if not downright unappealing. Christ, I really am Edna Krabappel.
And is Edna wrong to want someone to kiss her silly without asking a courtly permission first? Is Edna even sillier to be writing about herself in some weird fictive third person?
I pause in all this to assure Mandarin that if she liked the movie, she would probably quite enjoy reading Girl, Interrupted, though depression is always painfuller when it’s about a real person and not Winona Ryder. Actually Susanna Kaysen is the Other fiction professor at BU (funny how every creative writing program has a main genre instructor and then Another one or ones) and I often saw her, gave her phone messages, sorted her mail, went to her readings, listened to fiction students bitch about her assignments, etc. She’s subdued, awfully smart, and most definitely not the kind of person who should have been locked up for years just because she had a pimple on her chin.
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