Writers & Lovers

by Lily King

I always think of that Eliot poem, about the vision and the reality.’ ‘ “Between the idea and the reality/Between the motion and the act/Falls the Shadow,” ’ he says.

People change their mind. Between the idea and the reality falls the Shadow.

There seems no end to the procession of things that make my mother feel more dead.

I ache for them, people I also once felt were stiff and fake, but who now seem like the only people I could ever write about.

‘You don’t always want what you need,’ Dana says.

‘You spend enough time at the racetrack, you know your horse, okay? You always know your horse.’

I’m done with kissing that melts your bones followed by ten days of silence followed by a fucking pat on the arm at the T stop.

I wait for the idea to calm me down, but it doesn’t. Oscar asking me to move in doesn’t seem like a solution to Adam selling the garage. It seems like another problem. And the problems are mounting.

We’ve always had an understanding. I’m not sure what we understand exactly. We’ve never spoken about anything but apps and entrées. But it’s there. At least for me.

It’s my biggest fantasy at these terrifying moments, two EMTs in the doorway with a stretcher for me to lie down on.

So many years since I’ve felt naturally good at something, good in an empirical, undeniable way that is not reliant on anyone’s opinion.

‘I’m just saying that if you have that kind of talent you should use it from time to time.’

Darkness Visible is on the remainder table, and I pick it up. I’ve never read it before. ‘A Memoir of Madness,’ Styron calls it. Caleb is always giving it to his depressed friends.

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Nearly every guy I’ve dated believed they should already be famous, believed that greatness was their destiny and they were already behind schedule. An early moment of intimacy often involved a confession of this sort: a childhood vision, teacher’s prophesy, a genius IQ. At first, with my boyfriend in college, I believed it, too. Later, I thought I was just choosing delusional men. Now I understand it’s how boys are raised to think, how they are lured into adulthood. I’ve met ambitious women, driven women, but no woman has ever told me that greatness was her destiny.

Many of my favorites are there: The Evening of the Holiday, Beloved, Independent People, Troubles, Housekeeping, Woodcutters. In college, my litmus test for a bookstore was Hamsun’s Hunger.

Note!!!

After a few rounds, Vera turns to me. ‘What are you interested in?’ I look at her blankly, and she laughs. ‘I’m just trying to subvert the where-do-you-live-what-do-you-do line of inquiry.’ ‘Well, that’s refreshing. I am interested in—’ Feeling normal. Not having cancer. Getting out of debt. ‘Books, I guess.’

I should have wanted to be him, not sleep with him. I don’t seem to want to do that either, though.

At Iris, a woman takes a bite of her BLT and sends it back. She says she doesn’t like the spicy mayonnaise. The kitchen makes another, with a milder aioli. I bring it out to her, and a few minutes later she asks me to bring some of the spicy mayonnaise back. ‘I thought I didn’t like it, but I did,’ she says.

My throat has seized up, and I’m sipping small bits of air. I have a lot of crying in me, but not a tear comes out. I’m just trying to breathe. It’s starting again, that need to somehow get out of my body. My heart is hammering so fast it feels like one long beat on the verge of bursting. Death, or something bigger and much less peaceful, feels so close, just over my shoulder.

I want little girls. I haven’t gone back for the follow-up appointment Dr. Gynecologist suggested. Now I won’t have health insurance anymore. I don’t want to be infertile. I also don’t want to be pregnant. Fitzgerald said that the sign of genius is being able to hold two contradictory ideas in your head at the same time. But what if you hold two contradictory fears? Are you still some kind of a genius?

I’m scared of men at this time of night when I’m on foot, not on my bike. I’m scared of men in cars and men in doorways, men in groups and men alone. They are menacing. Men-acing. Men-dacious. Men-tal. I’m outside now. I’m circling the big tree. You hate men, Paco said once. Do I? I don’t like working for them. Marcus and Gory. Gabriel at Salvatore’s was an exception. My French teacher in eighth grade rubbed my neck during a makeup test, swaying hard against the back of my plastic chair. I actually thought he had an itch. And when I asked Mr. Tuck at the airport in Madrid why he hadn’t told someone about my father he said, I liked your dad but you know what happens to the messenger. I hate male cowardice and the way they always have each other’s backs. They have no control. They justify everything their dicks make them do. And they get away with it. Nearly every time. My father peered through a hole at girls, possibly at me, in our locker room. And when he got caught, he got a party and a cake.

‘I still have moments when I feel that, when it feels like she’s inside me, and there’s no difference between us or that the difference doesn’t matter.’

‘I think it is all that love. All that love has to go somewhere.’

And that love will always, always be inside you.’

Oscar told me once that the only good thing about these trips is flashing his headlights as he pulls in and watching the boys run past the windows and out the door to the driveway, their little bodies bright and glowing against the asphalt. But I have forgotten that.

It’s so much easier to cry when there are arms around you.

‘Be careful, Caleb.’ ‘That is not always my strength.’

I don’t like what’s going on. I want to call Mom. She wouldn’t like it, either.

‘You going to be okay?’ he says. ‘Yeah, and so are you. Call me when you get home.’ He nods. We hug each other tight. I feel like my mother, and I feel like my mother is hugging me.

There’s a particular feeling in your body when something goes right after a long time of things going wrong. It feels warm and sweet and loose. I feel all that as I hold the phone and listen to Manolo talk about W-4s and the study hall schedule and my mailbox combination and faculty parking. For a moment all my bees have turned to honey.

Gorgeous

NO IDEAS BUT IN THINGS. ‘William Carlos Williams. Live by that, I tell you.’

When I was a kid I used to expect to win tournaments and often did, but I stopped having expectations about achieving anything long ago.

‘I have no fears today,’ I scribble, fold it up and drop it in. I’m stunned by the truth of it.

‘All problems with writing and performing come from fear. Fear of exposure, fear of weakness, fear of lack of talent, fear of looking like a fool for trying, for even thinking you could write in the first place. It’s all fear. If we didn’t have fear, imagine the creativity in the world. Fear holds us back every step of the way. A lot of studies say that despite all our fears in this country—death, war, guns, illness—our biggest fear is public speaking. What I am doing right now. And when people are asked to identify which kind of public speaking they are most afraid of, they check the improvisation box. So improvisation is the number-one fear in America. Forget a nuclear winter or an eight point nine earthquake or another Hitler. It’s improv. Which is funny, because aren’t we just improvising all day long? Isn’t our whole life just one long improvisation? What are we so scared of?’

Afterward in Silas’s car our ears are blaring, and when I ask him in the driveway to come in, he doesn’t hear and I have to ask again. And when he comes in he flops on my futon like he belonged there all along.

Suggestions for Further Reading: A Room of One’s Own by Virginia Woolf Days of Distraction by Alexandra Chang Track Changes by Sayed Kashua Girls Burn Brighter by Shobha Rao My Name Is Lucy Barton by Elizabeth Strout Dept of Speculation by Jenny Offill Woodcutters by Thomas Bernhard Normal People by Sally Rooney Leaving Atocha Station by Ben Lerner Clever Girl by Tessa Hadley Commonwealth by Ann Patchett How Should a Person Be? by Sheila Heti Autumn by Ali Smith

A few months after that Q & A, I stumbled on Robert Olen Butler’s book From Where You Dream.

Look up

Experience comes to us through the senses, through emotion, and emotion comes to us through the senses. It doesn’t come in through thought. And you access the senses through what Robert Olen Butler calls the unconscious and what I call the blind worm on the ground.

He asked if I was still writing a novel and I said yes and he said, “It’s extraordinary that you think you have something to say.” I went back to my little room like I’d been shot. Of course I didn’t think I had something to say. He wasn’t trying to be mean. I think, like a lot of lawyers, he wanted to be a writer. But he was inhibited by this fear that he didn’t have anything new to say.

When you are writing your blank-page first draft, you don’t know what you have to say, and even if you think you know what you have to say, you end up saying something different. And you might think you are saying one thing and then someone who reads it thinks you are saying something else.

What you need to be true to, what you need to abide, is what you hear inside you, what wants to come out. Listen to that. It has a story to tell.