statement of purpose
Monday 13 December 2004 | I like a cookie
part one
I don’t like Mondays, all the way from the Boomtown Rats to Tori Amos, the soundtrack to another self-destructive, self-hating sesshin, my boyfriend tries to be helpful and give me a mantra and breathing exercise and I clutch the phone and just want him to materialize from down the other end.
I’m in San Francisco with Mandarin.
I drop and break a water glass on the floor as yesterday I broke a coffee mug, Jon Davis, Greg Glazner, and Jill McDonough all got NEAs, Mandarin’s housemate looks at me smoulderingly and I shrink away from him, I don’t know if I’m imagining it, a Zen intensity perhaps and nothing more. Then I talk on the phone with the Umbrella for forty minutes and we discuss some strange Wittgensteinian notion he’s concocted, about truth and the body and levels of honesty, which he also relates to Kafka’s prose; the Housemate speculates maybe he’s talking about “the truth of objects.” My wrists are going to protest if I keep this up, he’s reading Jhumpa Lahiri, T.C. Boyle, and the new McSweeney’s edited by Chris Ware which is all graphic narrative and dedicated to Art Spiegelman and Françoise Mouly. I am ashamed of my emotional need and the sheer physical need I have for N., and don’t want to admit to friends in their thirties that I’m going out with him, and am about to move in with him.
The Zen Priestess says she doesn’t know if she wants to be friends anymore, if she has the energy. She says she feels tired and frustrated and when she says this I feel sympathetically: Of course she does, of course, I’ve neglected our friendship horribly and deserve nothing other than this. The Housemate comes in the door fatigued with a garment bag and a carrier bag holding a box of takeout chicken salad and I introduce myself, this strange brunette sitting at his dining table using Mandarin’s G4, and he says incredulously No! you’re not the Un?! and I say Oh yes, I am the Un. Pause. Um, I just want to say, I heard about what pulled you out of sesshin, and I’m so very sorry. He thanks me graciously. Pause. Do they know any more about what happened yet? He says with a small surprise at his own bluntness, You know what, I really don’t want to talk about it, and I say Of course you don’t! Because you just walked in the door! mentally smacking myself on the forehead. Mandarin who said she’d give me her grandmother’s $200 now backing off this, I can’t spend money without hyperventilating, it’s becoming like a George Gissing novel, or Sense and Sensibility, the amounts, adding them up and removing them, $40 she spent for sushi last night which I now owe her, she does want to be generous in these smaller ways, It’s the least I can do since you came all the way out here, when what I need is half the ticket paid back. Then there’s the ticket on which she came to Texas and I would have used that to see N. at the Beautiful Trench, I know she did it to help me but it’s another $237 and then there’s the three hotel rooms, $60-80 each, the ticket on which he came to Texas another $235, the dinners out, and sure my godmother’s godmother and my mom unwittingly paid for all that but then there’s his $500 loan, $250 rent, $35 gas/electric, the $20 I left him with when I got on the plane. And I know this bothers N. as much as or more than it does me.
part two
N. and I talk and argue and fume in silence. Whole Foods does not want to hire him and he says plaintively What are we going to do about rent and I say Do you mean, will I let you live in the casita if you can’t pay rent and this is apparently The Wrong Thing to Say. We hang up, I leave a half dozen messages in the silence of his having gone to talk to his advisor at the College of Santa Fe. I call the property management company and they say I can go month-to-month if I put that in writing. I call the Arts Editor who starts wiggling out and saying he’ll only give me one review a week at $75 (can I review A Very Long Engagement for Sunday night). I call the Editor to rat on him and to whine and say I’ll do anything to get the whole schmeer, why doesn’t he want me. I call the tribal college and try to get my transcript. I call one of my recommenders and leave a long weird message about the online application process. I call the courthouse and find out I’ve missed the divorce clinic yet again; the next one is January 13. I call N. again and ask for my GRE scores and the phone number for the doctor’s office. I call Z. who gives me the rundown (she’s taking the GRE tomorrow, Maman wasn’t welcome for Thanksgiving dinner and is back in Texas now, Z. heading that way next week, in the middle of her application to Stanford) and makes a brunch date with us on Friday, me forgetting that Mandarin has to work.
I meander disconsolately into the public space and encounter the Housemate who is going to the grocery store. He still looks smoulderingly at me and I compensate for this by dropping things and babbling about losing my job and laughing stupidly at nothing. He gazes at me unblinkingly, I like crazy women, and says if I need to go back he’ll stay with Mandarin. N. says he can’t understand why I’d find him attractive. I look at my email (same three things: Zen Priestess, Anzan, sangha newsletter, three things from Herself) and then at the Housemate’s website, him being an illustrator and marketing guy. He draws with the eerie beautiful delicate grim lines of Daumier, the faint vivid washes of Odilon Redon or maybe Rembrandt in darker moments, and the twisty sexual faery baubles and curves of Aubrey Beardsley. He also has four Emmys and an Academy Award, and was somehow able to support himself through being a poet for several years. My cellphone rings and I ignore it. It’s the Librarian. On the message he says lots of things but the only one that sticks is that Ms. L. can’t get over it, still trembles when she hears my name, and that he wishes we could work together and in some alternate universe we could but not this one. He says other things, about my Brown application and about the two saint poems; he misses nothing.
part three
I dream we’re having closing council and everyone’s to read something they like. I want to recite Gerard Manley Hopkins’ sonnet beginning My own heart let me more have pity on, but I can’t remember more than just the one line, and I’m trying to borrow an Oxford or Norton anthology from someone, feeling frustrated that I don’t have my own (in the storage unit!) and feeling ashamed and angry with myself that I haven’t memorized the poem, and can’t seem to catch anyone’s eye or attention to ask if I may borrow theirs. Herself and her sister are there, older women laughing together and ignoring me; the one woman who will let me look in her anthology doesn’t have that poem.
We’re in an enormous villa with clay roof tiles and courtyards and water fountains, colorful flowers and women’s gauzy clothing. I ride my bicycle through, feeling garishly dressed and wrong, inappropriate, wearing blue, orange, red (like my many scarves/hats/mittens, and I’ve just typed “hate” twice for “hats”). (Maybe related to the time I rode my cycle in Trinity or whichever college and the porter came out and put his shoe under my front tyre, to my tearful bewilderment and sobbing hurt? Ridiculous but true.) And I either enter some place where people are dancing—I remember parting colorful curtains and stepping through—or ride my bike where I shouldn’t, or don’t have a dance partner because N. isn’t there—somehow I transgress or tresspass. And I’m crying but stoic and either someone strikes me, Herself, or I strike myself, to show them that I don’t care, that I’m not as stupid as they think, that I know I did something wrong and I can punish myself, I don’t need them to shame me. But all that happens is they view me with even more contempt for doing something so sick and stupid, and I run out in tears.
The power of words to curse, to curse the self. Pam hates me and I hate me / I would give my life for Pam. A perfect alexandrine, with a caesura caused by the page break, because my letters were written an inch high in pale blue highlighter. Mandarin and I had money problems long ago, N. observes; says, So you don’t feel seen. I think to myself, No, I’m not seen, but there’s nothing I can do about it. I find myself thinking, everyone else in my life has a negative balance and so they keep thinking of me as wealthy, but I’m not. I don’t want her to give me the whole amount but something would be helpful, would help me feel respected and like my situation was understood. And same with N.; just something. The Zen Priestess speaks in her dana talks about losing the bookkeeping mentality, but I haven’t lost mine. Mandarin was victim of this in 1995 when she went to Texas with me and then I held her to paying me back when she couldn’t. Why did she have less money than I, then? Why does she have less money than I, now? Why do I feel I have to care for those who have less than I do? Why in the world should N. keep staying with me if he can’t pay rent? What am I missing? I don’t want to make the same mistakes again and again, as I did in the nineties.
When N. said to me bitterly in November, Well what the fuck do you do all day long, why did I not just say levelly, I live off the money that I worked for. Five years, staying up until one in the morning, getting up at five, setting my alarm and standing up in the dark weeping, paying back the loans.
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