Writers & Lovers

by Lily King

‘You know,’ he says, pushing himself off his car, waiting for my full attention. ‘I just find it extraordinary that you think you have something to say.’

I don’t write because I think I have something to say. I write because if I don’t, everything feels even worse.

It’s strange, to not be the youngest kind of adult anymore. I’m thirty-one now, and my mother is dead.

My mother will be worrying about me, and I can’t tell her that I’m okay.

Conversations in foreign languages don’t linger in my head like they do in English. They don’t last.

I look back on those days and it feels gluttonous, all that time and love and life ahead, no bees in my body and my mother on the other end of the line.

They’re the eyes of someone very tired and very sad, and once I see them I feel even sadder and then I see that sadness, that compassion, for the sadness in my eyes, and I see the water rising in them. I’m both the sad person and the person wanting to comfort the sad person. And then I feel sad for that person who has so much compassion because she’s clearly been through the same thing, too. And the cycle keeps repeating.

It feels like that, like I’m sad for an infinite number of my selves.

And I like the mindless distractions, the way there is no room to remember anything about your life except that the osso bucco goes to the man in the bow tie and the lavender flan to the birthday girl in pink and the side cars to the student couple with the fake IDs.

who was giggling psychopathically, the way you do when you’ve exposed yourself through art.

All your life there will be men like this, I think. It sounds a lot like my mother’s voice.

It’s good to get whacked open at least once, though,’ she says. ‘You can’t really love from inside a big thick shell.’

men who wrote tender, poetic sentences that tried to hide the narcissism and misogyny of their stories.

It’s a particular kind of pleasure, of intimacy, loving a book with someone.

He gets the whole thing out of me, all the bits I know about her trip to Chile. It still burns a bit, coming out. He listens. He breathes into the phone. I can tell he lost someone close somehow. You can feel that in people, an openness, or maybe it’s an opening that you’re talking into. With other people, people who haven’t been through something like that, you feel the solid wall. Your words go scattershot off of it.

‘Don’t write Silas off.’ ‘I’m totally writing him off.’ ‘I’m going to show you a story he wrote.’ ‘Don’t. I do not want to see it.’

But I can’t go out with a guy who’s written eleven and half pages in three years. That kind of thing is contagious.

August is endless.

When I was visiting her a few years ago she hugged me and said, ‘Tomorrow after you leave I will stand here at this window and remember that yesterday you were right here with me.’ And now she’s dead and I have that feeling all the time, no matter where I stand.

For me and my true love will never meet again By the bonnie bonnie banks of Loch Lomond.

Look up

I sing to the geese. And I feel her. It’s different from remembering her or yearning for her. I feel her near me. I don’t know if she is the geese or the river or the sky or the moon. I don’t know if she is outside of me or inside of me, but she is here. I feel her love for me. I feel my love reach her. A brief, easy exchange.

It’s okay that it feels like a liquid not a solid, a vast and spreading goo I can’t manage, I told myself. It’s okay that I’m not sure what’s next, that it might be something unexpected.

I feel like kissing every step of the staircase as I climb up to the restaurant that night in my comfy black sneakers. I never have to go back to that office on Boylston Street again and sit in uncomfortable clothes and type in a windowless room. I get to move and talk and laugh and eat good food for free. And my mornings, my precious mornings, are saved.

Even in the chaos and clatter of brunch, I’m aware of the empty chair, the hole where a mother should be.

I have a problem with that sometimes, getting attached. Other people’s families are a weakness of mine.

A dustup down at the gazebo.

???

Like many parents, my father wanted to give me what he didn’t get, then he wanted me to get what he couldn’t reach.

My mother said he was hijacking my childhood with his own obsession; my father said she was afraid of my success because it didn’t fit into her proletariat fantasy of raising revolutionaries.

skinflint killjoys.

He gives me a lecture about SPFs and how I could never go out in the sun unprotected again. He tells me I should have listened to my mother when I was younger. I don’t tell him that my mother taught me everything I knew about frying my skin with baby oil and tinfoil reflection.

He repeats that I cannot expose my skin to the sun without protection again. He says, ‘I know you are drunk on youth and immortality, but this is how you die.’

I’ve never owned a planner or datebook. I keep everything in my head.

I squat there and think about how you get trained early on as a woman to perceive how others are perceiving you, at the great expense of what you yourself are feeling about them. Sometimes you mix the two up in a terrible tangle that’s hard to unravel.

‘It’s the whole reason for the book, this scene.’ ‘No, it’s not. Maybe it once was, but it’s not anymore. You have to let that go. It isn’t a short story with its one perfect culmination. It’s messy.’ ‘Yeah, I know. A novel is a long story with something wrong with it,’ she quotes. It’s a line that gets passed around and attributed to a variety of writers.

Sometimes in the past year or so this feeling would come over me, kind of like a rash, you know? I needed to be in motion. And this time I had the opportunity to really go and I felt like I had to take it even though I really did want to go out with you. Really. A lot. I just wanted to explain that. I thought it would be a better date with you if I’d gotten that feeling out of my system.’

‘Any glimpses of the sublime out there?’

I think of her in her office in Alexandria, playing the role of a lawyer for so many hours a day. I think of all the people playing roles, getting further and further away from themselves, from what moves them, what stirs them all up inside.

Boston is bright and bejeweled this morning, and my body feels buoyant, having given Muriel my book. I feel like taking off my shoes and sticking my feet out the window. Even if she eviscerates it, it’s movement. Forward motion.

Yes!!!

‘Man, Casey. That’s an accomplishment.’ He seems genuinely happy for me. You can’t always count on a guy for that.

It’s good to see art, to remember what a natural human impulse it has always been.

I don’t know why it’s so moving to me, and I could never explain. There’s a madness to beauty when you stumble on it like that.

We stand in front of Van Gogh’s Houses at Auvers then Matisse’s Vase of Flowers

Look up

On the stairs down to the café, Silas says, ‘I like coming here. It stirs me up and calms me down in all the right ways.’

I put my key in the lock. I’m in the mood to call my mother, that happy, shift in the wind mood. I calculate the time in Phoenix. Nearly noon. Perfect. The bolt retracts, and I remember she died.

On a busy night there’s no time for awareness of the mind or the body.

I can always lose myself in the rush. But that night I don’t. I stay apart. For the first time the stress of the job does not obliterate my awareness of the stress in my body. It enhances it.

Oscar tips the fish’s eye up toward the man. ‘Irises backed and packed with tarnished tinfoil seen through lenses of old scratched isinglass.’ ‘Bishop,’ the man says. ‘The great master of disaster.’ He’s old enough to have been her contemporary. ‘Indeed’ says Oscar.

She points out the places where I have described a character’s emotion instead of the reaction to the emotion. ‘Don’t tell us the girl is sad. Tell us she can’t feel her fingers. Emotions are physical.’

You don’t realize how much effort you’ve put into covering things up until you try to dig them out.

We don’t acknowledge that they’re happening or say what they mean. It all feels a bit haphazard and weightless, and to call attention to this might let out too much of the air.