Biography of X

by Catherine Lacey

it just seemed like she wanted everyone to know how much she suffered. Of course, we’re all depressed—what made her depression so special? Why couldn’t she just hide it like everyone else?”

Other people’s memories of my wife had clouded my own by then, which perhaps had been the point all along—not to see her more clearly, but to understand I never knew her in full.

There are some times in grief when being witnessed is the only thing you need, and there are others, months and years in my case, when nothing suits but invisibility.

He bemoaned the idiocy of mass market books, all the dull submissions, and the riddle of how what sells is rarely good and what’s good rarely sells.

You are not your name, you are not what you have done, you are not what people see, you are not what you see or what you have seen. On some level you must know this already or have suspected it all along—but what, if anything, can be done about it? How do you escape the confinement of being a person who allows the past to control you when the past itself is nonexistent? You may believe, as it is convenient for you to believe, that there is no escaping that confinement, and you may be right. But for a period of years I, in my necessarily limited way, escaped.

I am asking you now to understand that those years, a period I will refer to as The Human Subject, are not to be understood to be years of my life but years that I exempted from my life. I was a part of my audience, just as those who spoke to, touched, listened to, or otherwise interacted with “me” were also a part of the audience.

He even attempts to diagnose X as a sex addict and manic- depressive suffering from extended delusions of grandeur; it should have been clear to him that X was able to complete this ten-year performance not through detachment from reality, but in a vivid grappling with its limits.

It seems that she and X were always straining toward and away from each other in uncertainty—never sure if the other was the cure for her pain or the cause of it.

I said to Bee—All pain enrages. Why am I not in contact with my anger? What do I feel? And Bee said—Depression. But that means I am “depressing” another emotion. Despair, then. But despair is a conclusion drawn from a history of pain (it’s happening again). And there’s no conclusion. I conclude nothing.

“I can’t think of anything more warping to one’s personality than liking one’s parents.”

“Rumor and hearsay are far more effective tools for advancing a nascent reputation than plastering one’s unwanted name all over the place,” X wrote in a journal years later.†

she knew about folk and rock and jazz, but pop music was simply too confident, that it was “the sound of only thinking one thought at a time.”

The sight of this pair gave me a feeling I often had when traveling abroad—a feeling that our country had gotten so much wrong, almost everything, all of it, wrong, and perhaps I had, too, that I was entrenched in my wrongness, that I had somehow committed myself to it and no longer knew the way out.

She possessed a kind of ageless nonchalance, one I felt was not uncommon among Italian women, as if time itself could not touch her, as if the years may pass if they so choose, but those passing years would have no ill effect upon her. After all, what was time but a series of afternoons, evenings, seasons—something to sprawl over and enjoy, something to possess?

‘Men create an attraction through their personality that gives an erotic halo even to their decay. Women realize brutally that the fading of their physical freshness awakens … a kind of tolerance…’ or something … ‘Men use myth, women don’t have the resources to create it. Women who have tried to do so endure so much stress … that their lives are cut short.’”

woman’s need for love was created by patriarchy to help men succeed in life. Women give love an independent value, while men give it an instrumental one.’

At the time I wanted to believe I still loved her, despite everything, and that I missed her terribly, and that the biography was a crucible for my grief, but already it had shifted into something else, something darker, something I knew to be doomed.

By the time I met with Bertha, I knew I wasn’t researching X’s life in order to simply dispel the falsehoods in Theodore Smith’s book, but I’d yet to fully accept I was compiling research for my own book, something I would have never elected to write if I had known, at the start, what I was actually getting into. Bertha’s question—was my book about how well X could pretend—it made me realize what I was doing, what my life had come to, and this realization brought with it a new, encumbering grief.

At St. Mark’s, in the middle of her reading, someone shouted, Life is too short for this! X replied, Oh, but what is it long enough for?

But the illogical stance of another’s sexuality being cause for anger was still an abstraction to me, and it was not until I became the subject of Zebulon’s repulsion that I truly felt its warmth. When he slammed down the phone I felt as if I’d been rejected by my own child. I never heard from him again.

You have to know what you’re leaving out in order for it not to be there. Otherwise, it’s not an absence, it’s just nothing.’

“I’m an art collector, so of course I love nothing more than swindlers, imbeciles, and low-key crime.”†

“The thing that still interests me about Catholicism is the number of saints. There’s no void, no distance between ‘person’ and ‘God.’ There are all those saints in between: every misfit, every problem has a patron saint attached. So you’re always part of a crowd, and there’s no abstraction, everything’s tangible.”

“For me, insanity would be like a vacation, or a belief in god; out of desperation, you let yourself fall into it,” she said.

I was driven to laughter, the only rational response I had; there was nothing else I could do.

I’d never seen such a thing—a man at the end of his life, who knew it was the end of his life, who looked back upon what he’d done with natural pride and peace over what had been completed. I’d never, ever reached the end of anything, even things I was glad to be done with, with any feeling other than grief.

As I was leaving, the woman at the front desk asked, How did it go? I told her he didn’t seem to be all there. Ah, well, she said, he has one sort of days, and he has another sort of days. Suppose we all do.

A loss tinged with shame, regret, or a sense of something unfinished is the most dangerous sort, a black-hole grief that pulls a person relentlessly toward its center, and when our lives come to one of these we are forced to either bow before it or detach completely.

“There is another world,” X often said. “I’m not satisfied with this world. And that’s why I’m onstage. To be nearer to the other world.”†

On live radio, a host asked X if she ever missed them, if she ever missed any of those women she used to be. “Well, do you miss them?” X asked in reply. “Now that we know they’re all gone and never coming back—do you miss them?” “Oh, but I didn’t know any of them.” “And neither did I.”*

I do not believe it is always morally wrong to act in a cruel manner, so long as you accept the burden of accurately calculating whether the object of one’s cruelty could stand to benefit from pain more than from pleasure.

In every family. Someone has to be the one thinking about death.

“What bothers me about writing is that I’m here and the page is there.”*

“I don’t care if anyone understands,” X repeated in almost every interview she gave during this time. “I don’t waste my time waiting around on anyone’s understanding. I’d sooner die.”*

Angrily, Schuster told me that this was it, that this was all I would get, that he was very busy, that he had more important things to do—very important things to do—and he had no patience for those who wanted to dwell in the past, because there was no such thing as the past, and it was only fools who tried to return to it.

“I believe the world—all parts of the world—I believe it is all logical, only there is not enough time in one life to locate every explanation, do you understand?” he asked. “We must live with the explanations we have, and respect the absences of those who are absent.”

We are, I know not how, double within ourselves, and as a result we do not believe what we believe, and we cannot rid ourselves of what we condemn.

He said—‘To write you have to allow yourself to be the person you don’t want to be (of all the people you are).’ I think I’d rather paint.”†

I like his face. It’s the face you see when you close your eyes and think of a face.

Democracy is only as good as the people can make it, and we’re a country of idiots, don’t you think so?” “I don’t think so,” Lehrer said. “That’s because you’re an idiot, too.”

“One realizes everything later. Sorrow always comes late. Sometimes sooner because it gives advance notice. Coming to find you at night, digging holes in your brain and stomach and veins with pain, wounds, something dark comes to you. But you still don’t know what it is.”†

She’d meant this as a warning about men—The wild ones seem like a good idea, she often said, but they never are.

Though I outgrew the habit, my ability to sit and write for hours led me easily into journalism; most of my colleagues believed the crime desk to be purgatory, a place to pay one’s dues, but I had been relieved to no longer be my own subject.

There was nothing to gain in asking her what she was doing. She did all sorts of things all the time for all sorts of reasons, reasons that were never for anyone else to know.

Where is the woman who went undercover in a cult? X asked. The woman who risked her life for no reason more than she had a life to risk? What was there to say? I had no life to risk anymore. She had my life. I didn’t know how she had it or what she was doing with it, but that’s what it felt like—she had my life and I had a home.

He can be such a child sometimes, I said to X as she came back inside. He is a child, she replied. That’s why I love him.

WALTERS: Well, a lot of people would like to know … Who are you? Who are you really? Under all the costumes. X: I never ask myself “who am I?” … I ask myself “who are I?” … Who can say who I are, how many I are, which I is the most I of my I’s? What is a human subject, Barbara, what is it that makes us live so well and so badly, so that after millions of years we still do not know how to die or what death is? A subject is at least a thousand people … Don’t you think so?

“The happiest years are the shortest. We only notice them after they’re gone,” X wrote in The Reason I’m Lost. “Therefore, the attempt to avoid suffering is the most suicidal impulse of all. It is to ask your life to go by so quickly that you never see a moment of it.”†

I’m sick of thought. I want something palpable and beautiful … But nothing a human can do is palpable. The history of art is women consoling each other in the face of this fact … The idea of getting somewhere with love is even more frustrating and futile than the idea of getting somewhere with art.

It was a dim diner, heavily fragrant with old oil, and I felt horribly sad that X and I had never come here together. It was exactly the sort of place that she would have loved, and it wasn’t so far from the cabin. How had we always missed it? What else had we missed?