would you look at miss ohio
Monday 24 May 2004 | I like a cookie
The health concerns shared by Mandarin and me are ill-concealed from Google, as revealed by today’s banner ads festooning our [old and now defunct] blog:
First Period: Kotex.com—Women’s Interests: Products, Really Good Information, and Personal Talk
Nausea, vomiting—Stomach discomfort, bloating: Novartis studies seek patients
The vet can’t see the cat until Wednesday, I’ve had two flax waffles and am eyeing my smoothie (peach strawberry banana and European yogurt) and wondering why my html tags are broken, and why bl•gsp•t won’t log me in to fix them. Z. let me burn her new Patty Griffin CD and I’m listening to “Love Throw A Line” and ignoring M.’s strained messages on my cellphone and nursing my right wrist which hurts from holding the phone too long last night and wondering what in the hell I’m doing. Again. Because after I got off the phone with Mandarin, N. called me back and we talked until four-thirty.
Another recovered addict, N. kicked speed last November (when the Irish Sensei asked him, so are you clean now, and he said yes, and then had to be and was, starting that day, and was surprised to be absolutely fine) and not only used but also sold, apparently—mostly the new college favorites like the boxful in Maman’s bathroom, Vicodin and Dilaudid and Percoset and Demerol (well, this should produce an entirely new and wonderful realm of banner ads)—and then was admitted to rehab after a post-seasonal-affective manic break of heroic proportions, left the caretaking girlfriend with whom he’d lived two years and started lithium and Effexor and gave up on undergrad and totalled his car in Raton with his best friend who’s now a Benedictine monk as they were driving to a poetry slam in Big Sur with copies of their literary magazine, and then walked out of the hospital after three days of skull fracture and concussion into the bright NM air and thought, well, this is beautiful and perfect; and, there has to be a better way to do this. And headed for the Beautiful Trench.
[And I had almost none of this chronology correct, which must be somehow significant.]
When’s your birthday, I asked. October 21, he said. What year, I asked. Don’t do this to yourself, he groaned.
[1980.]
His father is an insane domineering aristocratic Southern attorney (and Citadel alum) who tried to arm-twist N. into West Point. His mother is an insane burned-out hippie (N. got his name because of a dream with wolves and a clear pool of water in which his name appeared) who recently had his father arrested, claiming that he was trying to kill her. This was her way of saying that she wanted a divorce. Which they will now have, N.’s father insisting that he will represent himself on the attempted murder charge. N. tells me all this sitting in a kind of alleyway behind his dad’s new apartment, looking out at tennis courts, wearing pajama bottoms and a t-shirt and smoking Turkish cigarettes; I am in the bathtub drinking lemon and Gerolsteiner, the cat sticking her paw repeatedly into the cooling bathwater and then taking it out and licking it. For years now his father would deposit money into his bank account when he liked what N. was doing, and would take it out when he didn’t. Sums disappeared and reappeared alarmingly in the last week (during which N. was traitorously spending time with his mother) and N. closed the account yesterday, leaving him with nothing but the Trench stipend. You are very brave, but did you withdraw what was left in there, I asked. Yes, Miss Practicality, of course I did, he sighed. It’s enough for me to pay for the long-term airport parking. You primarily used that account to buy your plane tickets home, I divined, and you’re not going to go home any more. He was silent and then admitted I was right. His mother has colonized his younger sister and his father has colonized his younger brother and N. is sewing his rakusu with the Gay Maine Episcopalian and says he won’t leave the Trench for three years (God, how can people commit to residential life like that, or even pretend they can think that far ahead, the thought alone still terrifies me), and then wants to go to grad school in creative writing or psychology. His original intention was to go on to Mount Baldy after one summer in the Trench, but he got suckered in by all that Soto touchy-feely PD stuff.
At one point he spontaneously asked about Mandarin, worried because he went to her room one day to get my address, passed the spouse looking chipper (his word) and then knocked to find her sobbing (his word) and all she’d say was, He and I are not in sync. I was silent when he asked because I didn’t know what to say. There was a long pause, not uncomfortable. It’s a girl, isn’t it, he asked with quiet certainty. I, unnerved, said no, said no, No! God no, everything will be fine, it’s—it’s just—it’s just that—whereupon he absolved me from further adumbration, to our mutual relief. But said to say hello to her. Said he’s envious that she and I have each other the way we do, that we can love in each other what we can’t yet love in ourselves.
Finally, several hours into the call, we came out to each other as Victorian verbal fetishists, some of us submissive and some of us dominant, with a shared lifelong psychosexual cerebral itch which has never been properly scratched (or in my case not since the Republican sadist, and that came with a hefty price tag). This came up because he was telling me about the new book by Sallie Tisdale he’s reading, I think called Talk Dirty to Me. I told him about Secretary, I told him about Vox. He reluctantly confessed teenaged years of cybersex, passing as a forty-year-old and spending hours turning on strange women with his prose, refusing to meet them in person because he was only 14. [Reminding me of when the Film Critic admitted to writing his own pornography in high school, and thought this would shock and repel me. Of course I had a look on my face like it was Christmas.]
There’s always that heartsinking moment, I said gropingly, when all the verbal foreplay and seduction stops and people just—just— They go all quiet, he supplies, and you’re, like, hello, am I alone over here? It’s like being with a corpse. Later he confessed, I can’t believe that you’re really like me, you’ll do those impulsive stupid romantic things, and all my life I’ve been the only one to do them, and wondered, will anyone ever reciprocate—like how I’ve been sitting in my casita all winter, I volunteered, half-waiting for my husband— To come and knock on the door in the middle of the night, and say I can’t stand it any more, I have to be with you now, he finished. We freeze, paralyzed, dazzled by our terror and our hope, the ten thousand fears stalking amid the mouthwatering possibilities. There’s only one thing to do, he says: sit sesshin together. But you see, I told him, it’s hard, because not only was I supposed to be with the love of my life more than seven years, but because also then there was this Film Critic guy, and he said all these things, and he didn’t mean them. He said he didn’t care what I looked like, because I was where the words lived. That’s really beautiful, said N., astonished, I’d like to meet him. Yes, you would, I said sadly, but then he’d just ditch you, and it would hurt. Afraid afraid the many fears afraid.
He said, you must really terrify men. You’re so smart, and you don’t seem to be afraid of anything.
Yet while it might be supposed that I have so many more fears than he, about twelve years’ worth of additional trust issues to be precise, really the bulk of them date from March 23 of this year. Though some had their origin in September 1999 when M. called off our wedding for the first time—or from that spring, when he had his fiancé visa in hand and yet didn’t come to Boston, and didn’t come, and finally only came when Omar asked me out—and from the five interminable years since then when I tiptoed around our house on Watermelon Street trying to Do The Perfect Thing that would make everything be okay and get him to sleep in the bed with me instead of on the study floor, and get him to stop the daily litany of I have to go back to London and take care of my mum, and get him to stop wandering around the house in his pajamas listening to Democracy Now and tirading about US/Israeli foreign policy. I thought I was so pomo and feminist, I said, that I didn’t care about having a wedding, but then it turned out that there was this total girly-girl inside me. Was that really it, asked N.—was it really that? No, I said, abashed. It’s that vows are important, and intentions stated before the community of people who love you, and I told him about the kalyana mitta ceremony Mandarin and I planned to have someday, inspired by the two Trench teachers, and he was moved to tears by the beauty of the idea, and then I said but how could I have that with her when I couldn’t even have it with my husband. Another long pause. Oh my God, you’re not married at all, are you, he finally said with comprehension.
He listened intently as this and many other stories poured out. When I would apologize for wittering on almost nonstop about the great everything he would say, first, shut up, okay; and second, please just keep talking. Please. At one in the morning he was telling me about his insane aristocratic Southern family and what it feels like to be not insane in their midst, about fiction writing and This American Life and Rinzai koan study. At two in the morning I was explaining Maman and anorexia and Mandarin and how the Film Critic is really screwed up and my paranoids and the Nobel Prizes and the NEA. By three we had dissolved into a line-by-line comparison of translations of “Song of the Jewel Mirror Awareness” and a discussion of what it feels like to hold a sutra book when you don’t really need it, practicing with the conflict between your ability to memorize yardage of language without even trying and your need to be an insider, and what is it like to sit zazen and drop the story when you’ve been spinning narrative since you were three years old, effortlessly, like a spider shoots out silk; ending with a hilarious tantalizing contemplation of what it would be like to fuck while tangled in robes. By four it was nearly nonverbal, a kind of mutual stunned shock and mingled yearning and amusement at the ridiculousness of this, and eventually someone’s cordless phone hung up on someone else’s and we both presumably just passed out. He leaves for the Trench tomorrow and I’ll be in the hospital with Maman and we won’t talk again for months, which partially justified our telecommunications excesses. But only partially.
Fool me once, shame on you, fool me nearly a dozen times and where does the shame go then? We are ever-optimistic, extremely forgetful, and probably about to get the car door slammed on our fingers once again.
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