Cynthia Robinson's Blog, page 7

The Path to Kurt-not-Kurt Leadeth Us Through the Alhambra, I

I know. You are here because you want to know what happened that night in the East Village bar when Kurt-not-Kurt (as in, Cobain—a dead-ringer lookalike, for those among you late to this little party) stuck his hand up my skirt and I dumped my date to leave the bar with him.

What do you think happened?

I will not narrate the a w e s o m e (because it was) sex that ensued—there are other places on the Internet for things like that, with much better pictures than I can supply (this was pre-cellphone, so there are no tapes or photographs of which I am aware).

I’m pretty sure I mentioned that Kurt-not-Kurt’s name was actually John, and I may have let drop that he was a first-grade teacher, or a first-grade art teacher, or a study-hall monitor, or something connected to the Brooklyn public school system (I’d had a lot to drink, and my focus was not exactly on conversation). I’m pretty sure, though, that I did not mention he was married. They were having problems (clearly, because of the several times I wound up in his really-really messy Brooklyn apartment, she was out of town for all of ‘em), so I got the windfall.

The non-judge-y among you are probably saying to yourselves, right on, the Kurt Cobain lookalike thing is justification aplenty, because, like, how many times in one girl’s life is a dead-ringer for the Sex God of Grunge going to just stick his hand up her skirt in a bar? (I know, #metoo, but I liked it. It’s different when we like it).

The more moralizing and judge-y among you are probably not forgiving me for the he-was-married thing. Maybe it will make you feel better to know I lost in the end, that I got treated like shit, etc., etc., and we’ll get to that part, I promise. This is, after all, the Bad-Bad-Love blog, where we throw love spaghetti against the wall in the service and for the good of my novel[s] in embryonic state. But first we have to do a few weeks of backstory dump, which is a total no-no for novels but I have never seen it written anywhere that you can’t do it on a blog.

So. John/Kurt-not-Kurt was not my first married dude. Or my first objet-de-lust in a committed relationship that I was absolutely certain I could bust wide open and claim the spoils for myself. Or maybe I knew all along I couldn’t (because I never actually managed to make the crack and make it stick), and that was the point. Getting what you want can be a curse.

You see, I think we all want this:

No estés lejos de mí un solo día, porque

Cómo,

Porque, no sé decirlo, es largo el día,

Y te estaré esperando como en las estaciones

Cuando en alguna parte se durmieron los trenes…

–Pablo Neruda

Which, in English, goes something like “Don’t go far, don’t go away from me even for one day, because, well, because, I don’t really know how to say it, but a day is a really long time, and I’ll be just standing there waiting for you, like someplace in a train station, where all the trains are stopped, asleep…”

You must, must, must listen to those words sung in the gorgeous, heartbreaking mezzo-soprano of Lorraine Hunt Lieberson, these songs adapted by her husband—they met in almost middle-age—Peter Lieberson, to music he composed, which she sang, as best as my deficient math skills can make out, when she already knew she was dying. Of cancer.

Love that knows its days are numbered can afford to take the brakes off.

So, yes, I think we all want to feel that. And only a few of us will ever be able to, and for those few, the high will likely be a very short one. Something to chase for the rest of one’s born days.

When we reach for impossible love—or its very acceptable substitute, lust—I think we are searching for that thing Neruda doesn’t quite know how to put into words (and if he doesn’t, then the rest of us are surely effed before we even try). Even as we know we will probably never find it, or at least that we will never get to keep it, and one way my brain helps me hedge my heart’s bets is by choosing people I know, in both head and heart, I will never get to have. At least not for breakfast every day, and that is probably—at least for me—a good thing. Because if I had breakfast every day with the love of my life, two questions arise:

How long would he continue to be the love of my life? (hint: not long)
What would I write about?

But, you see, it took me several decades to understand this about myself. It is only now that I get what I was doing when I look back on my twenty-nine-year-old self (an age when most responsible people are already married with a couple of kids; NB: I have never claimed to be a responsible person) and observe. She, sipping from her fifth glass of champagne as she wandered through the Alhambra at night, the palace lit by candles, ornate as a wedding cake—she was there because she’d been lackey to the person organizing the landmark exhibition of Islamic art in Spain, but she was there, so who cared why. She knew he’d been following her all the way from the Patio of the Myrtles, with its dancing reflections in the pond of the palace dancing for itself, and so she finally let him catch up. Allowed an unconventionally handsome blond guy with a tan and an English accent and a gap-toothed smile, a camera slung around his neck, to approach strike up a conversation.

And we will find out where that went next week, because your friend the Redneck Scheherezade here has to go make her rabbits some dinner.

The post The Path to Kurt-not-Kurt Leadeth Us Through the Alhambra, I appeared first on Cynthia Robinson.

Birthday Wish

“Knowing when you’re going to die. How cool is that?” Not from The Immortalists (haven’t cracked it; the bigger the hype, the longer I wait to read). No, that line is from someone best described as existing on the periphery of my life. But I spent a good part of the day thinking about it.

I got a Nor’easter for my birthday. Which means spending it alone with my two rabbits. And my books and my writing. Not something I mind, really, it’s just different than the plan—tonight was to be my novel’s launch party, so I was geared up to socialize, but the weather had other plans.

I did get roses, too, beautiful roses, red ones, and if this were a post about bad, bad love, or good-bad love, I’d talk about them, but they would take us off topic, so I will post a pic on Instagram. You can go look at them if you like.

I’d rather talk about that line—“knowing when you’re going to die, how cool is that?” The person who spoke it drives a taxi. I started using the taxi service around here because:

A) I wanted my second husband to go away so badly I let him take the car, even though it was almost paid off and I’d paid half of it; and
B) I am a terrible driver and worse in snow.

I’ve been a steady customer for twelve years now.

I’m going to call the person who spoke that line Alistair; his name does have a similarly antiquated, genteel ring. Alistair, a handsome man in a genteel, unassuming way, a pleasant person to look upon, was one of the first drivers I met, and we immediately discovered common ground. We are both from the south, transplanted to the northern tundra. We both love to read. The classical radio station is our default. We both love to garden. I’d see Alistair once every month or two, and we’d catch up. He’s been very encouraging about my writing.

He first spoke the line—“Knowing when you’re going to die…”—last summer, when he told me, in an almost offhand manner, that he’d been diagnosed with lung cancer. Which was weird, because he hadn’t smoked for nearly twenty years. I’d smoked too, though not as much as Alistair, and I’d quit about the same amount of time ago. He didn’t seem too bothered by the cancer, he was in great health, he ate organic, and he exercised. And meditated. They’d caught it early, they were giving him a good prognosis. He spoke the line as a joke—they hadn’t told him when he was going to die. They were going to make him better.

But the cancer came back, as it does. Almost always. Starting in the fall, when I’d ask Alistair how the treatments were going, they were always trying something new, but they were always encouraged.

Until Tuesday. This Tuesday.

Tuesdays are grocery days for me, and Alistair picked me up. He didn’t make the “how cool is that?” joke. Instead, he told me they’d taken him off chemo, weren’t going to operate again. They’d put him on an immunotherapy drug, one I’ve seen advertised on television (only in a country without a national healthcare system…). It shares its first syllable with words like opportunity, optimistic. Option. The commercials show attractive couples in late middle age (who definitely do not have cancer, they look too good), deliriously enjoying vacations in Europe. Or climbing mountains and fishing (the couples don’t have cancer, but they do have enough money to stop doing whatever they do to pay the mortgage and keep the lights on, long enough to go enjoy what’s left of time to one of them). The drug is meant to lengthen life, to make it better. The side effects are lethal, and there’s a whole raft of them.

Alistair did make a deadpan joke about the side-effects—lethal, sure, but then what isn’t, if you give it long enough? His nice eyes, behind their little round glasses, twinkled at me in the rear view mirror. He was giving me permission to laugh.

He told me his daughter had been to see him last weekend. “She’s in healthcare.” His eyes, in the mirror. Translation: She knows. Then he cracked a joke about his son, paid by his ex-wife to stay away from him. “He spends a lot of time in prison. So she can keep right on paying.” A chuckle, that he had to turn into a cough.

And then we were at the supermarket. Our usual “Good to see you” stuck in my throat. He tossed his side of it off with aplomb, the problem was me. I was wondering if I’d see Alistair again.

When the white cab pulled up to drive me and my purchases home, I opened the door and saw it was Alistair behind the wheel. Twice in one day, I felt like I’d been given an early birthday present. I felt joy.

During the drive, Alistair volunteered that he and his wife read aloud to one another, lying side by side in bed, every night. They’ve done so for twenty-two years. We talked about Louise Erdrich, we both love the way she so matter-of-factly weaves in the supernatural. We agreed: avoiding the newest one, the dystopian one, because we love Erdrich too much not to love what she writes, and we’re both afraid we might not love that. Alistair and his wife haven’t read LaRose yet, and I said they really, really should. And then I wanted to take that back, but I couldn’t.

He said maybe they would have time, and I had to choke back tears. His eyes in the mirror again. “It’s me who reads, you know. She loses her place.”

When I was in my twenties, and even my thirties, I threw wild birthday parties, in Spain or in the East Village, or wherever I happened to be. My living room cleared out for an enormous dinner table, specially rolled joints beside each plate. Or the tequila party, for my twenty-somethingth, maybe twenty-six, in west Philly. ONLY tequila was served. People puked in the tub and made out in the kitchen. I fell down the steep stairs while running to open the door, twice. The only thing that kept my neck from breaking was all the tequila I had in me—it made me limber. I rolled with the fall instead of resisting. The second time, I passed out. My friends laid me out on my bed in my room and staged a wake. They took pictures. Which got around.

Birthdays are more contemplative affairs for me now, even if I have a party planned.

And they are a privilege. My birthday wish for this year: that Alistair and his wife be granted the time to read LaRose, from beginning to end. And then again, from start to finish, and then all over again.

LaRose is a very long book.

The post Birthday Wish appeared first on Cynthia Robinson.

The Cruelest Mistress

She’ll get you hot and then stand you up. She’ll empty your soul and your wallet, and then kick you for having nothing left to give. She will turn you against your friends, make you lie to them and say you’re busy so you can spend every single minute of every single weekend with her.

And then it will suck. She will hurt you. She will make you cry.

But you will always forgive her. You will always come back for more. You will whisper her name to yourself like a mantra for the duration of any odious activity that removes her from your sight.

That name, her name, is Writing.

And she has good reason to hate me, we spent some time apart. In fact–true confession–it was my bad, not hers. You see, I did the unthinkable: after she’d deigned to choose me, to pay attention to me, to spend some time with me (when, as she likes to remind me, she could have been spending it with pretty much anyone else, she can totally have her pick) I forsook Writing. For fifteen years. Parked her in god-forsaken Albuquerque (after she’d left Manhattan for me, Manhattan), at the bleak little door to the Tenure-Track Black Hole (no one gives you tenure in an Art History department for writing novels, whether they get published or not). Then I turned my back, shut the door, and left her standing there. She called for a while, a lot. But I didn’t pick up. If there’s anything she hates, it’s being ignored.

Which I proceeded to do, for good long while.

It took a good while longer, but I did eventually regret it. Big time. And she did take me back, finally, but she humiliated me and made me beg first.

And pay. Oh, yeah, that.

On Tuesday, BIRDS OF WONDER was released, my debut novel, my tender little birdies, flying straight (or mostly…there are some distributor issues but those are being worked out, ehem: the perils of Indie publishing) into the hands, into the maws, of their readers. Possibly cruel ones. Readers who want to be pleased, who want to be thrilled, who want a certain thing, or set of things, from any book they pick up, and my birdies, my beloved little ones, might or might not deliver. To some, they inevitably will not. No book is for everyone, how many times I have said it, and heard it. And I do believe it. Except, of course, when it comes to mine.

I do not have children (by choice), and I have never given birth (for sure by choice). The closest I come to motherhood is my tenderness toward animals—rescued rabbits, to be specific; I even let them lounge on my bed. I feel as though my heart is being hacked from my chest with a dull axe when, inevitably, one of them must leave me (a rabbit’s lifespan is a decade at best, though in my experience the average is actually closer to half that). I don’t, though, have any direct experience, not really, of motherhood.

But I’d be willing to bet the entirety of my tax return–its hefty size is owed in no small part to the bleeding-out of my resources undertaken by that relentless bitch, Writing, over the last twelve months—that the feelings I have toward my newly hatched BIRDIES are not wildly dissimilar in quality and intensity to the fierce protectiveness a new mother feels for the warm, hungry, needy little bundle in her arms.

Mine was a hard pregnancy. A long one, and a complicated one: I began writing BIRDS OF WONDER in 2011. As I said, Writing and I had parted company a decade and a half earlier, possibly not on the best of terms. At first, she wasn’t in all that big a hurry to return my calls.

Then, one by one, people and opportunities began dropping into my life, seemingly randomly, and then too frequently and too numerous for their presence to be owed entirely to chance. Together the message they whispered was, it’s time to try this. If you don’t do it now—I was on the threshold of turning fifty—you never will.

So I tried. And things did happen.

Find perfect editor/mentor/trusted reader/writer/friend: check.

At her suggestion, try your hand at writing short fiction, which had never occurred to you before: check.

Get said short fiction published: check, check, check and check. Sure, I have enough rejections to paper the proverbial wall, but, all in all, I have been incredibly fortunate in getting a ton of stories published in record time, and this after having let the writerly muscles atrophy into cellulite-pocked flab. An argument could definitely be made that I was and am undeserving of my luck in the short fiction department.

Miraculously land top-flight agent. Check. Some days I wake up and remember that THAT PERSON is my agent and have to pinch myself all over again.

But—Writing Truth—a top-flight agent does not guarantee the sale of a manuscript. Aspiring writers, I’m sure you don’t believe me, and why should you, maybe it will be different for you. Hope so, but the odds are stacked against it.

The troubles started, in the fall of 2014, when we began to shop the novel out to editors. Six submissions, six rejections. Boom, boom and boom, it was all over in record time, less than two months.

That hurts, by the way. Six people telling you, in quick succession, all the reasons why they don’t want your baby. Some in kinder terms than others. It hurts, a lot.

After the dust settled a bit, Perfect Editor/Mentor/Friend, etc., offered herself up (along with her shoulder) for a coffee date. During which—via a long, protracted, meandering, tearful, and self-recriminatory conversation, you’re lucky you weren’t there—we decided it was time to kill a darling. That’s right, a character. He was charming and he was well-written and we loved him, but he was not helping the story get told. So out he would come, and his voice—one of the six through which the narrative of BIRDS unfolds—would be replaced by another. That of a character who would move the story along, because he was already an integral part of it. But whose voice had to be created from scratch.

The process took a year.

At times, it seemed like twice that, but the new manuscript passed agent-, agent-assistant, and agent-outside-reader muster, and by the following fall we were ready to go out again.

Then followed another year of heartbreaking near-misses with big-name publishing houses. Some very-very big, and one very-very near. Which would likely have hurt less—like ripping off a Band-Aid—if they’d happened all at once, and quickly. But they did not.

And then, as though to drive the message home, external circumstances conspired to further complicate things: this is not your moment. Writing, whisper-shouting: been trying to tell you for two effing years. Get it now? Not. Your. Moment. NOT.

So we made the gut-wrenching decision: we’d put BIRDIES on ice, in a drawer, choose your metaphor, and I would get on with a new novel I’d been working on. Writing Truth: there is no scenario in which doing that feels good.

But Writing, bitch though she was, was right. It was not the novel’s time. Because the novel was not done. I had not finished the digging, had not reached the bedrock. The problem was, had always been, Jes, my main character. She was too close to me, and I was protecting her, and I had to stop doing that (details on what I was protecting Jes from can be found in my post from two weeks ago, two prior to this one, entitled “Girls in Fields”).

Once I’d peeled all the layers away and found—or allowed myself to see—the kernel of truth, what That Bitch Writing had been bitching about for three solid years, what BIRDS was all about in the first place, Writing relented. She took the stiletto off my neck—she’d been happily walking up and down my spine in her heels for so long I’d pretty much forgotten how bad it hurt—and said, okay. Okay, yeah, now you can stand up. You can even have a publisher.

What? You think the work’s over because you found a publisher? Because I let you find one? Get real, honey. Unless your last name’s Tartt–by the way, she met me in college and she’s never tried to dump me–pull out that wallet and roll up those sleeves. You’re about to work your lazy ass off. You have never worked the way you’re about to. Are we clear?

Yes, mistress.

And you will like it, understand me? You will bend over, you will like it, and you will ask me for more.

My perfect writer/mentor/editrix friend has a saying: Writing is an inherently inefficient process. A wasteful one, even. Better get used to that.

Truer words were never articulated. I’d even take it a step further: gleefully inefficient. Wantonly wasteful. And capricious. Don’t forget capricious.

Yes, mistress. I like it. More please. Thank you.

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Finding Kurt, I: In Which the Narrator Behaves (Very) Badly

Some more Bad, Bad Love this week…with Valentine’s still in the air, no less.

It might have been him. Really, truly, might have been him. It was the 90s. Chronologically, maybe even geographically, it was within the realm of possibility.

It wasn’t. I knew that. It couldn’t be. Not in a down-at-heel dive bar just off Canal Street.

But there he was, it was him. Or close enough to him for me.

He sat at the bar with two equally scruffy buddies whose faces I instantly forgot, if I saw them at all, all of them swimming in a sea of empty Corona bottles, working on three more. The only one I saw was the blond one, in the middle. Honey-haired, square-jawed. He looked just like Kurt Cobain.

My heart-throb, at an age (very early thirties) when I was kind of too old to have one.

And Heart-Throb, NotKurtButMaybeKurt (hereafter, NKBMK), was looking at us. At me and at my witchy friend with her flat black hair and black velvet choker and vampiress nails. Her name was actually Wanda, true story. And she was a witch. Or at least she was really into santería, and she was very, very good at it, but that’s another story for another day.

At first, he was looking at us. A glance sideways, a turn of the head to take us in.

And then—I could feel it, shifting and then focusing, his gaze like little electric shocks pulsing throughout my entire body—just at me.

NKBMK was looking right at me. Like he’d like to rip my grunge-slut clothes right off. Right then, right there.

And that would have been fine by me. Clear the bottles from the bar and let’s get this done.

That night, that’s all it was. Looking. NKBMK left with his two friends, looking over his shoulder all the way. And I looked right back. I don’t think I even blinked until he disappeared around the corner.

Then we haunted that bar. I even haunted it a couple times by myself, without Wanda. Just being safe, taking necessary and prudent precautions. Wanda was cute, and unpredictable.

But the haunting was in vain, and the months went by. I started to think I’d imagined him. Or conjured a vision out of my beer bottle, and then he’d snuck back in there to hide. Out with the post-last-call recycling, never to be seen again.

Until. Until… You knew there’d be an ‘until.’

I’ve mentioned, in an earlier installment of this Bad Love blog that, in the 90s, edgy people did not trawl around on Tinder looking for love, because edgy people did not have cell phones. We put ads in the personals section of the Village Voice. I had a running one, a metaphorical revolving door of candidates. Because I was tired of not meeting anyone in bars worth taking home who wanted to come.

One or two I let love me, or lust me, or whatever, for a time, because it’s nice to feel wanted. I was catering and adjuncting for a living, and it was nice to have someone else paying for the drinks. So one night I was in an East Village dive with one of them, with whom I was planning, finally, to go home, because it was the fourth date, because I was bored, because why not. We were on our third drink, and the obstacles posed by the several reasons I wasn’t particularly attracted to him had begun to seem less serious. I could do this. He was a good-looking guy, definitely good-looking enough.

He wasn’t Kurt. But then, who was?

Answer: the guy sliding onto the stool next to me. There he was, Mr. NKBMK himself, revenant and sans friends.

I did a terrible, terrible thing that night. And it was terribly, terribly fun.

Of course I let NKBMK pick me up, right there in front of my date. Of course I left with him. You know that.

But what you maybe don’t know, is everything his hands got up to, one stool over—it was summer and the dresses were short—leading up to us walking out of that bar together. Went on for half an hour, maybe more, before the date started to get suspicious. Which, in my twisted little mind, meant that he deserved to watch, open-mouthed, as I turned around and left him with the bill. And with Kurt’s too–I think date was wondering if maybe NKBMK was really him (which was a much better story for the date, maybe he told it. Maybe he’s still telling it).

Any of the three of you who read my post from two weeks ago will be thinking you see a pattern here. A pattern of (bad) behavior, spanning at least two continents, and you would not be wrong.

If you read last week’s offering, you might be wondering about the order of events—people with unresolved trauma, like, say, a rape drowned inside a succession of vodka bottles and never examined by a therapist, often act out. Or up. A lot.

So yes, this was after—maybe you have a point. But let’s stick with the fun side of this. Because acting out (and up) is fun. That night being an excellent case in point.

This, by the way, is not the last we’ve seen of NKBMK. Whose name, it turns out, was John.

He’ll be back. Not likely next week, but he will be back.

The post Finding Kurt, I: In Which the Narrator Behaves (Very) Badly appeared first on Cynthia Robinson.

Girls in Fields

“For of course that’s what happened; you’ve known that all along; even if you don’t read the papers, you know what the world’s like, and the minute you heard my voice you knew I was going to tell a story you’ve heard a thousand times before. You duck your head and turn your collar up to deafen my voice. That’s all right; I’ll raise my voice.”

–Molly Giles, “Talking to Strangers”

A girl. Lying in a field. Should we write it? Should we? She was murdered. Of course she was, she’s in a field. Should we tell how? Goes without saying she was raped. How close should we zoom in? What little details blur? What others tell?

It’s a question for all writers, especially right now. And perhaps a particularly urgent one for women, when a man has just been slow-walked out of the West Wing (oh, so slowly) for (maybe, cautions Trump, remember, he says he’s innocent) giving one of his ex-wives a black eye.

It’s always a good day when someone comments thoughtfully on something I’ve written. Even when the comments are critical. Maybe especially then—careful, attentive reading earns you the right to tell me why you think I’m wrong. One particular set of comments, submitted to the Birds of Wonder Goodreads page by a reader named Allison, threw down a sort of back-handed gauntlet of a compliment—as well as you write, Cynthia, as good an observer as you are, Cynthia, did it have to be a girl in a field?

Allison has a point. A very good one. Her comments have made me think, a lot, about what writers do when we write about violence against women.

It’s a trope, I fully admit—the lifeless body of a beautiful young woman, naked, in a field. Many more novels, much more famous than Birds of Wonder will ever be, have opened, if not in exactly the same way, in a similar one. And countless others compel the reader to consider similar scenarios somewhere along the narrative thread; indeed, some of the most chilling depictions of lifeless and/or violated female bodies in recent literature were written by women.

Take Molly Giles’ gripping story, “Talking to Strangers,” in which the dismembered victim speaks, not to the stranger who opened up her skull, coconut-style, and peeled back her sternum like the roll-top on a can of sardines, but to us. We, who have been so immunized by our own media landscape against murdered-girl stories that we turn away rather than subject ourselves to yet another one. In a slightly different vein, Joyce Carol Oates has, for decades, been a steady churner-out of anti-heroines just silly enough to be deserving of their grisly fates; of recent note, Black Dahlia, though the one that will stick with me until my own final breath is young Connie, denying, desperate, and finally doomed, from “Where Are You Going, Where have You Been.” Alice Sebold’s Susie Salmon, sliced by her forcible deflowerer into pieces so small some disappear into the grass as her blood soaks the ground, will haunt us forever. As she should.

But should we, Allison asks, as women, (continue to) write (yet more of) these stories?

My answer to this question, it turns out, is a very personal one: I had to. I may never do it again, but this time I had to.

Like Maggie O’Farrell, whose haunting memoir, I Am, I Am, I Am, has just hit the shelves, I harbor a certain amount of survivor’s guilt concerning a young woman who didn’t live to tell about a disastrous encounter with a stranger: that young woman might just as easily have been me. In O’Farrell’s case a man who’d followed her along a deserted hiking trail later did to another what he’d almost done to her. In my life, a girl only a few years older than I, with hair the same shade of auburn as mine, was found naked, raped, and dead in a field beside a church only blocks from my house, by a woman walking her dog. In a nice little Southern town where Things Like That Don’t Happen. Until they do.

I was an obsessive, anorexic runner in high school. I’d run laps around that field for years, in the earliest of early morning hours, alone.

For a very long time, as I wrote Birds of Wonder, I believed I was writing that guilt away—that other girl, her life cut brutally short, while mine was fully lived. I was also aware that my rolling ball of narrative twine was accruing other bits of gender-exploitative detritus—sexual tourism, porn addiction, pedophilia—gleaned both from encounters in my own life (some merely glancing, others less so) and those of women who are, or have at some time been, close to me.

Only at a very late stage in the writing process did it dawn on me that at the novel’s literal and figurative core was a reckoning so brutal it’s a little bit amazing I didn’t see it coming. One afternoon at my desk I was assaulted by an unstoppable slide show of things I wish I’d never seen, let alone lived—my rape, my very own, reaching across nearly thirty years of assiduous forgetting, grabbing me from behind and knocking the breath out of me. Forcing me to face up to, to come to up-close-and-personal terms with, a violent sexual assault in my own past that I had buried so deep I’d been able to function, for decades, at least on the surface, as though it had never happened. At least not to me.

Unlike Alice Sebold, I didn’t begin with exorcism-through-memoir and then fictionalize toward the monstrous, which is of course much more reflective of the true nature of rape than the details—mundane in any other context—one tells the police. In fact, I never told the police anything. I never went to therapy. I was living in Egypt at the time, though the rape occurred somewhere else: a world away from a world away. I survived on a steady supply of vodka (thank God for my roommate’s embassy contacts), and prayed I wasn’t pregnant. Or venereally diseased.

And I was very good at forgetting. Just as in the novel, I boxed my rape up in unlabeled cardboard, pushing it so far into the black depths of oblivion that when it surprised me one day like a sharp slap in the face, demanding to be written about, I wasn’t even 100% sure it was mine.

In statistical terms, of course, my rape is just one more. One among the hundreds of thousands of such incidents that have occurred to hundreds of thousands of women across this country (let alone the rest of the world), many of whom aren’t yet shouting #metoo. They’re still whispering those words, if they’re saying them at all. Glad they’re alive, that they, like me, didn’t become bodies in fields. Shying away from the brush of memory if it dares come to close. Getting on with lives and marriages and children and the grocery store and their iPhones as best they can, on some days pretty well.

In 1996, Molly Giles dedicated the collection containing “Talking to Strangers” to her three daughters. With love. There are monsters out there, my darlings. You should know this, and walk always aware. My final answer to Allison—did it have to be a girl in a field?—would have to be yes. And until there are no more girls in fields, I’m afraid we’ll have to keep writing about them, at least some of us, at least some of the time, if only so that they may be seen.

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Alley Cat

I’m a ghost here, a cat with nine lives in this city, and most of them are past.

The place I stayed this time, in the 50s, had me walking through the theater district, remembering the first one. A brief, little one, that left a mark.

We saw Cats, the musical, the first time. 1979. Arriving on a bus with thirty other teenagers, from my church in Tennessee. Back when I went to church, at least open to the possibility that it might matter if I did. Must have taken us days, the drive, I don’t remember where we stopped. Or where we stayed when we got here. Or what we did with the church bus. Though we must have put it somewhere.

I remember this.

I remember the girl who disappeared from the Met on the last day, from among the imposing white statues of gods and men like gods, with their perfect bodies. The frenzied hours of payphones (there were no cells) and frantic counselors. Youth leaders packing bibles and guitars, suddenly with a missing girl on their hands. Or out of them.

The girl’s name was Kayla or Krysta, something with a “y” somewhere that made it sound cheap. She was someone’s friend, who sometimes came to Sunday youth nights in the basement, to sing songs and listen to the testimonies of the hard-core believers, and watch them cry together. I never testified because I had nothing to testify to. Jesus had never come looking for me.

The girl and I were both on the edges, but we were different.

She’d had trouble. She wore cherry lip gloss and too much eye shadow. She’d been in trouble. She wore tight, acid-washed jeans. She had feathered bangs, which she combed incessantly with a comb she kept in her back pocket. She had a chipped tooth and a tiny white scar on her chin. She painted her fingernails bright red and then bit them down to the quick, spitting little chips of polish. She was trouble.

I just wanted to be.

While they looked for the girl, the counselors tried to make the rest of the day normal for the rest of us. By sending us to Macy’s. They weren’t worried about us disappearing—fat Wendy with her bad case of acne. Responsible Leanne, who would knee anybody wanting to disappear her in the balls and leave him writhing on the ground, she’d just step over him and go on her way. And me. They weren’t worried about me.

I kind of wanted them to be.

At Macy’s I blew my babysitting money, a year’s worth. Eye shadow and lip gloss and an emerald green stretchy velveteen top that was tighter than anything I’d ever seen on anyone I knew. I changed in the bathroom. And put my makeup on.

Before Cats they took us to an Italian restaurant in a basement somewhere in the 40s, probably long gone now. I was anorexic, though I didn’t, at the time, have that word for what I was doing to my body. I ate salad with oil and vinegar and nibbled around the edges of olives, watched too hard as Wendy cleared three plates of pasta.

All the talk was about the girl. And we all agreed a man must have taken her. That’s what men did in cities, they took girls.

The counselors barely ate, because the police had come, and wanted to talk to them outside.

They had her. But she wouldn’t say where she’d been or with whom. She had a bruise on her neck. She looked at the adults like she hated them all, an alley cat who’d scratch their eyes out and give them rabies if she got half the chance. The police looked at her like they knew exactly what she was.

At Cats she sat between the two oldest counselors, women with boxy lady hair and mom jeans. She was their prisoner.

She looked around at the rest of us like someone who knew things. Sneering at us because we didn’t. The next day they did something no one did then—they put her on a plane. Back to Tennessee. Must have cost them, or someone, a fortune. Likely not her parents.

At Cats, I could feel one of the ushers noticing me—I’d layered on the new makeup, in my tight green shirt. A swarthy one with gummed back hair and a little flashlight for burgling, he looked like a criminal Colombo might hunt down, the hems of his trench coat flapping.

When we filed out for intermission I walked slow past him and he murmured that I was pretty in a tone I knew instinctively hid other things inside the words. Like neck bruises.

At the end, I was half hoping he’d grab me by the elbow and I’d have to pretend not to like it. But an older man showed us the way out, my criminal was gone.

The next day they loaded us into the bus for the long drive home. I wore my green shirt with my criminal’s look still imprinted on it, and eye shadow. Enough for the mom-jeans counselors to notice, but not so thick they’d make me wipe it off. The bus was full of Kayla or Kaytlyn or whatever her name was, bursting with her because she was gone. She was from another high school, so I never saw her again. I wonder what kind of lives she had.

As we headed south, the ugly gray outskirts of the city looked beautiful to me. They called to me as we passed. Speaking my new language.

I’d be back. I’d left some things unfinished. Pearls in my pocket to scatter before the swine.

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L’Amour Fou

More bad love this week. This time with me behaving badly. Because there has to be something wrong with the ones who want you, right?

I think I may have mentioned once or twice that, in my day job, I’m a medievalist. And one of my areas of specialization—if you know anything about my actual love life, this will make you howl—is courtly love. I know. I know. Call it a Princess Hangover from my days of growing up in Tennessee, where the only thing medieval were the Sunday sermons about the tortures of hell, and Dolly Parton in spangly boots was the closest we were going to get to courtly.

One of the things that most speaks to me about courtly love is the possibility that you—you, on any given day of your little life—might actually meet that person whose very glance liquefies your stomach and sends it dripping toward your shoes. Touch, you ask? Touch? Well, that’s the stuff of ecstasy. Physical, spiritual, the two combined if you believe in that or even if you don’t. Touch might just send you hurtling beyond the confines of the known universe, and you might not come back. But that would be okay, because your love would be of the amour fou—crazed love—variety, whose only possible outcome, sooner or later, is the love death. Wagner’s liebestod? Pure, unadulterated medievalism.

Asez me plest e bien le voil,

Del lai qu’hum num Chevrefoil,

Que la verité vus en cunt.

Pur quei il fu fet et dunt.

Plusurs le m’ung cunté et dit

E jeo l’ai trové en escrit

De Tristam e de la reïne,

De lur amur que tant fu fine

Dunt il eurent meint dolur,

Puis mururent en un jur…

—Lai de Chevrefeuil, Marie de France, 12th century

Basically, so as not to be pedantic, she is delighted to tell you of the tale of « Tristan and the Queen », a story of their « love so fine », which caused them such great pain, and which caused them both to die, on the same day. That, my friends, is love writ large, writ big and bad and nothing-else-like-it. Love that knows no forgetting of the milk, no dirty socks on floors, no spats about toilet seats and toothpaste caps. Tristan and Isolde had no offspring (which are really good at pulling fin’amour right down into the boue and toute de suite too). As far as I know, Tristan and Isolde didn’t want any offspring (and this in an age when sons were everything and daughters were for sale). Maybe it never even came up.

This was the love I wanted, during graduate school and the days immediately afterward, of loving badly in Manhattan. And maybe it’s still what I want (did I mention I live alone with two rabbits and keep my man in an overseas compartment? Like the old country song says, how can I miss you if you won’t go away…). But now I know it doesn’t exist, unless very particular conditions are imposed.

Those were pre-iPhone days. Even pre-cell-phone. Pre-Tinder and OkCupid and even Match.com. I am OLD, people. In those days, if you were really adventurous and edgy, you put a personal ad in the Village Voice.

I did.

Let’s just say it was…interesting. And could be summed up by stating that the ones I wanted didn’t want me, at least not the next day, and the ones that wanted me, I stomped on. Because why wouldn’t you? Humans might be part inherent goodness, but they’re also little and petty and mean, especially if they think they can get away with it.

I let one of them love me for a while, sometimes it’s nice to bask in adoration after a month or two of being kicked around. I even let him invite me to Ireland, to a friend’s wedding, and pay for…like…everything. Even the dresses I would wear to the ceremony and then to the party afterward.

And how is Marie de France relevant to this, you ask? Well, because most of the love tales she tells are Celtic in origin, and perhaps more importantly because I wanted to be pretentious and better-than-him (I could tell that my smarts and Ivy-League PhD got to him, even if at that particular stage I was slinging hash and tending bar). I packed this little book  under the thin pretext that I might be using it, sometime, for a class I might, one day, teach. But mostly to bust his balls even more than I was already in the habit of doing, by rubbing in the fact that I could read old French. It’s possible I overestimated the envy that skill might awaken in most other humans… but I knew it would get to him, so Marie came along.

As one or the other of you may know, weddings in Ireland are often week-long affairs, and there’s a lot of drinking involved. Weirdly, this was the self-same week that Princess Diana died, which, while not really related to anything I’m telling you, except maybe that she, too, was bitterly disillusioned by love, did add an air of the out-of-body to the whole experience. By far the most fun activity in which I participated was the Hen Party, which is when the women of the wedding party take the bride out for one last wild ride across the town as a single girl. These events are much more similar to our own Stag Parties than to a bridal shower, and I say good for that; why should women eat teacakes and open gifts for the kitchen while their men stuff dollar bills into a stripper’s G-string? And there’s always a bit of a competitive edge: who will crawl back the latest (or, the earliest—it will certainly be the next day), and the drunkest?

In this case, it was the women. Of course.

We were at a whole bunch of places, drinking a whole bunch of stuff and getting along like a house on fire, and then we were in a club, and I was being hit on by a soccer player from Leeds who looked like Kurt Cobain would if he’d had black hair. I’m pretty sure he was still around then, so maybe it even was him. Though I don’t think he played soccer. But, y’all, that is my type (I’ll have more to say about that type on another post sometime; the one who brung me looked nothing like Kurt Cobain). Really quickly we were upstairs in a nook or a cranny (he clearly knew the place) doing…well…lots of things. At which he was really good.

He wanted me to run away to Leeds with him, and I said I would.

And I was absolutely going to, I had no permanent ties to anyone or anything, least of all to the one that brung me, who had to help his friend the next morning setting up at the pub for the wedding reception. By the time he came back to the hotel to dress for the ceremony, I would be g o n e, disappeared into the smoke and mirrors of l’amour fou.

Of course Soccer-Player Kurt Cobain was a no-show. Who knows why, you couldn’t text people then. And he might not have texted back anyway. The crazy one was me.

After waiting for way longer than anyone should under those humiliating circumstances, I drained my fourth pint and made my devastated way back to the hotel just in time to dress for the ceremony, shoving my pub dress for later into my bag.

At the pub, I flat-out ignored my date, and paired up with a rowdy 70-year-old named Janet who must have been quite the girl in her day, still was. We made a game out of drinking one another under the table and seeing who could dance suggestively with more underage boys, who were queuing up in our general vicinity (their mothers hated us). Underneath, I was miserable. I wanted—oh, how I wanted, unreasonably, idiotically, desperately—my soccer player. What I would have done with him, I have no idea. But that was hardly the point.

Back at the hotel, with the sky already lightening, I refused my date’s sexual overtures, swatting his hand impatiently away. Instead, I had a confession to make. So we talked, or I did, til dawn, me watching the embers of unrequited love, or desire, or whatever, roast him to a crisp as I told him in great detail of the hen party, under the guise of an apology. He was trying to understand, trying to be on my side, which made me really cruel. I hate when people do that, that’s exactly how I tried to rationalize the barbs flung by the ones that didn’t want me.

I actually made him cry.

And then I promised never to do anything like that again. Which was a lie.

Of course I changed the ending. The one who hadn’t shown was I.

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Love in the Gutter

Now we’re going to talk about love. Not because Valentine’s Day is practically upon us, squeezing our throats and hearts (come on, you know Hallmark cards make you tear up), forcing us to stare our sad little love lives square in the face. More like in spite of that. No, we’re going to talk about love—good, sure, but mostly bad, indifferent, or missed-the-mark-entirely—because, unless one of the two of you reading this strongly objects, I need to. This is my blog, it’s (still, for the moment) a free country, and I need to fling some idea-spaghetti against the wall. I will do my best to be entertaining about it, though I offer no guarantees: you might get exactly what you pay for.

The reason I need to talk about love is that I am currently—True Confession—wrestling with the fourth draft of a bear of a novel. A novel about love. It’s probably true that all novels—all poems, all short stories, all essays, all graffiti—are, in some way, about love, but this particular novel is *really* about love. Its protagonist is a ghost. It happens mostly in a hotel. In London. Where lovers meet. And do what lovers do when they meet. And I probably shouldn’t say more about that, or about the plot: I believe in the evil eye, particularly potent when self-inflicted.

How about Neruda? Those poems, those poems. Either of you guys love Neruda? That makes two of us, three if you both do. A club, almost. Or at least a triumvirate.

He ido marcando con cruces de fuego

El atlas blanco de tu cuerpo.

Mi boca era una araña que cruzaba escondiéndose.

En ti, detrás de ti, temerosa, sedienta…

There’s a lovely, facing-page English translation by W.S. Merwin in the book I just consulted to type those verses, but I’d rather produce my own:

I’ve been marking up the pale atlas of your body

With little crosses of fire.

My mouth was a spider, crossing, hiding

Inside you, behind you, timid and thirsty…

I once burst into tears while performing the Spanish version of “He ido marcando” to a candlelit room full of very genteelly drunk men seated around a dining table in an unbelievably luxurious and gob-smackingly huge Upper East Side apartment. They were a foodie-and-wino club with wads of cash to spend, so they met once a month in someone’s crazy-extravagant apartment, hired caterers (I was the cater-waiter), farmed their wives, husbands, and sundry S.O.’s out somewhere, and got down to the business of high-end eating and drinking for, literally, hours.

That night I uncorked bottles of wine worth more than my monthly rent check (and this was Manhattan). I know both of you are hoping I’m going to recite the menu, but I’m afraid I can’t do that. Because I don’t remember it—by the second bottle, I was being invited to sip along with them. And yes, obscenely expensive wine really *is* better than that $18 bottle you just picked up for your weekend at home. I know there were ingredients like foie gras (sorry, animal lover, I know you’re reading, and I feel you) and fried Jerusalem artichokes and jamón serrano (the real kind, so much more exclusive than prosciutto), and caviar and miniature dim sum and brie-en-croute (not in the same course, these guys were foodies), but I don’t remember how they got combined into dishes, I just know they elicited guttural and inarticulate moans of pleasure.

By the fourth bottle, they were pretty much chugging, I was still sipping, and they wanted to hear Neruda, and since I speak Spanish, well…

Problem I: if there are verses in the universe likely to make you cry, well, Neruda’s your man.

Problem II: I was head over heels in love (or maybe just in lust, but sometimes I think that hurts more) with the guy prep-cooking in the kitchen. And his girlfriend owned the catering company (so in a way, she paid my rent). Said prep-cook and Yours Truly had had one very drunken, very hot, very divine one-night stand. And then the girlfriend came back from her gurls’ weekend in Bermuda. And still I worked for the catering company, because I needed her to pay my rent.

That’s pretty much how I loved in Manhattan. And I never wanted anyone who wanted me. Where’s the misery in that?

Standing there in my cater-waiter tux, bow-tie askew and hair escaping from its waist-length braid, before those twelve men (not the Last Supper—there were 13 men on that holy occasion—and definitely not Jesus H. Christ’s disciples, these guys were hedonists with the $$ to do it up right), correctly pronouncing words they could not, I felt worshiped. I felt like a goddess. I was giving them what they wanted and they were eating it up. They were in love with me, even the two gay ones. And for the length of time it took me to read “He ido marcando,” proudly rolling my r’s, I loved them back. All of them. And then I started to sob.

Obbbbbbbbviously I couldn’t tell them why I was crying, but they drunkenly gathered round to comfort me, a couple even wiping tears from their own eyes. They refilled my glass, and then they refilled it again. And they tipped me one of those one-month’s-rent’s-worth bottles, in addition to a nice, fat wad of bills.

What did the prep-cook do while all this was going on? I honestly cannot remember, which must mean that he, like most of the men I bedded during that season of my misspent youth, was worth a whole lot less than the price tag I’d stuck on him.

I used a couple of the bills from the wad to take a cab home instead of the subway, wiping tears and snot as we sped down 2nd Avenue.

Neither of you will believe this, but I swear it’s true. As I stepped out of the cab, tipping the driver handsomely, lo, even as I had been tipped before him, the month’s-rent’s-worth bottle slid from my open backpack, bottom-heavy with pricelessness, and shattered against the curb. I watched (and sobbed) as its contents mingled promiscuously with cigarette butts and piss before disappearing through the gutter into the city’s dark bowels.

Perfect metaphor for a whole lot of things. Especially for how I loved in New York.

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Happy Interstice Mushroom Soup in Dublin

We stayed in a quiet area this time, away from the rowdy bars—rows of Georgian houses, noble proportions and glowing fan windows. We walked along those quiet streets to get to restaurants, and wondered what the lit-up buildings were.

Once every five years, a city gets older.

We debated whether happiness is possible, after certain terrible things. We decided on intermittently. An occasion, rather than a condition. Interstitial. All coming down to understanding, and definition, which can be different. Most likely are.

We ate fish (different from the late-night seafood orgy in Oxford, more than a decade ago—we are more than a decade; maybe we drink slightly less). Cod and shellfish chowder in a BYO restaurant where there may or may not have been a scam running (we went back and forth, hoping yes rather than no). Hake and halibut and Sea bass with skins crisped, and delicate sauces hiding chili and saffron and dill and cardamom—your taste buds could find them if you were still long enough, and quiet, and concentrated. I want to emphasize that if there was skin, it was crispy, even if bathing in sauce; the skin keeps the fish taste in, and there should be at least some.

With the fish came global: little dots of fish eggs, cauliflower au gratin, steamed snow peas in piquant chili vinegar. With the fish came roast potatoes. Thin, crunchy skin, holding steamy secrets in. Not needful of butter, but not impossible. Feasty famine food.

That is us, one of us said—feast or famine. Though not of potatoes.

In Dublin, butter is a delicious sin, and bread is what my grandmother used to call soda bread : whole-meal and dense, sweet as cake.

The French have been in Ireland for centuries, in one form or another, and there are excellent French restaurants. I had crème brulée at one of them (rez de chaussée, fond d’escalier), and it was excellent: just a hint of burnt in the caramelized sugar (si non, ce n’est pas de la crème brulée).

Cheese boards (the real ones, not the scam): Irish goat’s, with membrillo from somewhere warm, and paper-thin slices of green Granny Smith apple that could come from anywhere. And French brie and manchego de España, and soda bread.

Coffee arrived in Ireland, some time ago. It’s no longer just tea, and the coffee is very good, not from Ireland, at least not originally (it keeps arriving), and I drank a lot of it. There are Starbucks, of course; I went to one. And Irish Insomnia, which I patronized rather than Starbucks, after the first, jet-lagged day. Insomnia gives you homemade soup for lunch—organic ingredients, all local, farm-to-table style. With soda bread.

Insomnia—there was a flower shop on my way there, from the hotel, with plants outside even on the cold, rainy days—was where I wrote. Tried to. And sometimes managed. There was a tower outside my window, innocuous during the day. At night, it looked like a Dracula thing. Especially on the rainy nights—there were two.

We drank a lot of wine—direct pipeline from France to Baggot Street, free-flowing Chablis. Which I don’t habitually drink, but I might start. The first night—room service and the parsnip soup was divine (with soda bread)—I splurged on a Montrachet, and was not sorry.

The best thing, the last thing: mushroom soup, the last supper. Earthy and creamy and thick, drizzled with truffle oil. One or three stray whole funghi, every other bite or so, keeping it real. Could probably have done without the second course (fish, divine) and just had more soup, the scrapings mopped up with soda bread. You only see French country bread here: we ate the soda.

In the interstice of mushroom soup, we were happy. We agreed on that.

Happy New Year, btw, my dear readers, all four of you. May it treat us all kindly. And if not, may it drown us, gently, in Chablis.

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Among Us

I discovered a cemetery this week, or the remains of one. In the complex where I live, its name reflective of common health and good: a relic of 70’s utopia, American hippie style. Set in the middle of Nature, the compact, energy-efficient dwellings are individually owned, while the grounds and surrounding woods belong to all.

I was on my way to a laundry hut (which also belong to all). Not my habitual one just across the parking lot, where the coin-operated washing machine is busted, has been busted since Thanksgiving: we’re obviously not high on their Important Client list. This particular laundry hut requires more of a walk.

Between snug rows of little homes, now blanketed in white. Beyond the sidewalk and onto the footpath where dry leaves still crunch, beneath the snow. The ground not quite frozen yet. Down a makeshift wooden staircase, the steps set directly into the steep hill, across a rickety footbridge strung over a mini-ravine (carrying laundry all the while—haven’t fallen yet; I’m actually getting pretty good). A thigh-punishing climb up the other side, toujours avec laundry, a glance over at the picturesquely down-toppling fence that makes you want to recite Robert Frost.

And then laundry.

I’ve been doing this for nearly three weeks, and it was only yesterday, on the way back, going downhill instead of up, the sun shining so bright on the snow it hurt my eyes, that I discovered the cluster of tombstones. Or, rather, I saw them—they didn’t need “discovering.”

Maria, her given name beneath swags of drapery. A child, deceased on All Souls’ Day, 1819. Aged 10 years, 7 months and 13 days. Every moment of her short life treasured, by someone.

The stones made me think of my mother. She liked to do grave rubbings. Mostly out in the country, in rural Tennessee or Kentucky. Whenever she traveled with my father—once even as far as England, three years before she died, before she knew she was sick—she took her supplies. One of the rubbings from that trip, she framed. My father kept it. I wonder where it is now. There was an estate sale—grandiose term—before he moved to an assisted living facility. I was far away at the time. I hope the right person bought it.

Close to the beginning of his most recent novel, Berta Isla, Javier Marías (Maria, Marías—entirely coincidental) mildly marvels at the way we all walk about the earth, never stopping to think about what might be beneath it.

That might not be true all the time, though. Yes, some of the stones were disturbed at some point, by someone. But they were also carefully replaced, grouped together, in a protected spot. Protected but not isolated—they’re right beside the path. They are among us. Someone, as this complex was being built by idealistic hippy naturalists in the late 1970s, made that decision, maybe thinking she was acting like a Buddhist, or a Native American, or…something. Or just being human, toward other humans.

As I write this, I receive a message from our property manager: “our” washing machine is fixed. I think I might continue to use my neighbors’ for a while, though. The ravine-bridge-hill routine is good for my thighs.

And the little cluster of tombstones—Maria; the child; others whose names have grown so faint I can’t make them out—are good for something in me.

To all y’all out there, Happy Holidays. This is my final post for 2017—this is a somber, solitary, reflective time for me. I’ll post next in early January, from Dublin. Till then, may your world be beautiful.

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