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I will fail in everything and Sylvia will go completely nuts.
We carried away visions of despair and boredom, but also thrilling apprehensions of this moment, in this modern world, where emptiness could be exquisite, even a way of life, not only for Monica Vitti and Alain Delon but for us, too. Why not? Feelings were all that mattered, and they were available to us.
It struck me as paradoxical that being gay didn’t mean you couldn’t be disapproving and intolerant.
I’d never believed writing stories was work. It was merely hard.
“I come from peasant stock. Nothing can kill me.”
“I’ll be as quiet as possible.” “It doesn’t matter. You exist.”
I’d been introduced to Ginsberg a few times before, in Berkeley, but he never remembered me. It was like meeting on the great wheel of existence, going on to other lives, then meeting again, and not remembering we’d met before. Except I remembered.
Our friends didn’t expect to survive, but didn’t stop imagining they might. None of them published anything. Eventually, one by one, they lay before their senior colleagues who, like ancient Mayan priests, cut out their hearts. To their credit, they tried to destroy themselves first with drugs.
They looked like words that rhyme.
Sometimes, after a fight, we went to the movies. It was like going to church. We entered with the people, found our seats, faced the light, and succumbed to the vast communal imagination. We came away feeling affectionate and good, wounds healed.
Even with good reason to leave, the leaver is in the wrong.
She returned to New York, and then I was wretched in a whole new way, because I wasn’t really wretched and I felt guilty about it.
I hadn’t felt my hand touch her nose, but I apologized again and again, and I studied her nose carefully, respectfully, almost hoping to see that it was broken. In her mind she had a broken nose and I had broken it. There was no other way of looking at the situation, and nothing to think about. Her nose was broken.
It wasn’t the moment to talk about divorce, but if I talked about anything else, it would be a lie. I was calm, listening to her, waiting for my chance to mention the serious matter, the one real thing, and put an end to this comfortable, mechanical, unreal domestic intimacy. Even if, somehow, I loved her and would always love her, our life together was hell, and could never be otherwise. I told myself to remember this.
I thought only in the most primitive manner. She’d always been right about everything. I’d always been wrong. I loved her. I couldn’t live without her. She’d proved it. I was convinced. No more proof was necessary, only that she open her eyes and live. I’d be what she liked. I’d do what she wanted and that would also be what I wanted. She would know that I loved her and always had.
I thought, If I were rich, I’d give a fortune to this hospital for the many who would receive its care, and the many who would cry. I was adrift on dreams of myself as a seer and immensely generous benefactor, and though I was sure I could run a fast mile or lift great weights if necessary, I was very tired.
My feet walked to her room. I didn’t remember what things I was supposed to collect. I saw a clean, white, empty bed. I saw emptiness. I left the hospital with nothing, nothing at all.
Everything came to me as sensations, not feelings. I had no feelings that I could name. I had no human feelings.
It didn’t seem strange to me that I’d wake up in the middle of the night feeling certain she had called my name, but I began to dread going to sleep. I was afraid I might dream. I stayed up late, reading until my eyes burned and I could no longer follow the sense of the pages. Then I’d go to sleep, and hope to fall quickly below the level of dreams into oblivion.
