Notes On Another New Life #14

Pressing the Pause Button

The past few nights, I’ve been watching the latest version of Ripley (Netflix), starring Andrew Scott as a talented sociopath who robs, impersonates, and kills rich people. I found myself longing for the freedom of such an undivided inner life. This is partly the plan of Patricia Highsmith, who invented Ripley in a series of novels she wrote between 1955 and 1991. It was her plan we would identify with poor, seedy Ripley, who is suddenly invited into a world of gleaming gold rings and crystal ashtrays heavy enough to bash in a head.

Scott, who was the sexy priest on Flea Bag, plays Ripley with dead eyes. The rich people he preys on are tedious and snobbish, but still they are people, and Ripley feels no attachment or regret. That’s how his temperament allows him to chug along. But what about the rest of us, burdened with contradictions that can’t be resolved? On paper they sound wholesome and upstanding—complexity and all, being able to hold two conflicting ideas in your mind at the same time—but sometimes to live this way feels unbearable.

That is why, today, I’m inventing a new way to be, and I’m assigning myself the job of talking to you about failure. My failures with other people, or their failures with me. Split hairs, if you like. Everywhere I look, people are writing about their lifelong friendships and how they’ve been able to sustain them. By “people,” I mean women. These women are in a bookstore or at a restaurant, and they’re just beaming with their arms thrown around the shoulders of their lifelong friends. They are all wearing soft cashmere scarves, and they all have good haircuts. Who cuts their hair?

The thing I want to tell you is I have drifted away from my closest friends during the past eight years or so. Sometimes drift is the right word. Sometimes a heavy cyrstal ashtray (of the metaphoric kind) has come crashing down on our connection. It’s embarrassing to tell you this. I look awful in the picture. No cashmere scarf. No arms thrown around happy shoulders. No restaurants. My hair is bad. And I’m trailing behind me a series of dead bodies.

The lost friendships are not all with women. There are a few men thrown in. I think about them all every day. I think about them several times a day. A heavy, brown cloud will float into my heart, and Richard will say, “Why are you sighing?”

Yesterday on the phone, a friend was telling me she went to a party, and at the party was a group of women she had always wanted to be close to, something like that, and once again they didn’t open their wings to her or scooch over to offer her a perch on the branch, and she said that her heart sank. She said, “I will never understand what I want from these women.” I said, “I don’t know how to live, either.” Then I realized I didn’t think there was enough time left to fix relationships that were broken.

Andrew Scott in Ripley on Netflix.

I had always thought I could fix things. I would get another chance. Like in the movie Groundhog Day. That is a movie that can mess with your head. Unlike the protagonist of the film, we don’t die at the end of each day. And we don’t wake up every morning ready to apply new knowledge until we get life right. Today, my doctor called to report a compression fracture in my spine. It showed up by accident in a chest X-ray. He asked if I had fallen. I said, “Yes, five years ago.” It made me think about other things inside me that were broken and I didn’t know about but were detectable by other means.

I fell when Richard and I were moving into our house, and I was pulling a heavy mattress going backwards, while he was pushing it forward. I didn’t realize there was a step in the hallway, and it leg-checked me. I flew into the air and came down hard on my back, and for a few hours, I couldn’t really move. That should have been a clue something bad had happened. I didn’t consider it. I thought: bad things don’t happen to me, or if they do my body takes care of them. It knows how to heal itself. It has time.

In the past, I would have written to people who’d gone silent or following a fight. I would have sent an email or left a voicemail message to say I miss you or to say I was sorry if I’d done something to be sorry about. I’ve gone this route many times in my life, and with these very people, and what I can tell you honestly is this route is not available to me today.

It’s interesting to tell you that I have no stomach for it, and I think this is a change. It may be a change that comes with age. I don’t know, because I’m always capable of reversing course. Maybe now, it’s occurring to me, I don’t want to reverse course. Maybe I want to sit this one out. Inhale and exhale my sad brown thoughts, and then think about something else.

For example, I’m thinking about Ripley. I’m thinking about the cinematography by Robert Elswit and the direction by Steven Zaillian. The eight-episode series is not only shot in black-and-white, heightening its noir atmosphere and steep, German expressionist angles. Most effectively, it works as a silent film, telling its story with the interplay of camera shots alone: a drop of unnoticed blood, followed by a cat’s face, followed by “red” paw prints on a marble step.

The show’s most brilliant set pieces are long, purely cinematic stretches. One is Tom Ripley’s murder of Dickie Greenleaf in a boat. As Tom tries to plan his next moves, he’s accidentaly tossed into the water. He can’t swim. Of course, he can’t swim. He hasn’t had lessons. Social class is always the subject here. The next thing Tom knows, he’s pursued by the motor boat that charges him with a charmless and zealous determination that matches his own.

In another brilliant sequence set in Rome, Tom mops up the blood spilled in his apartment from the head wound of Freddie Miles, his second, even more obnoxious victim. Then Tom carries the body to a car, pretending on the street they are drunken lovers, even kissing the corpse on the mouth. As Tom drives Freddie past the Collosium, his body keeps flopping against his shoulder in a bit of ghoulish slapstick worthy of Hitchcock. Back in his apartment, Tom realizes he has to return to the car to take Freddie’s passport and wallet out of his pocket. On and on it goes, building tension that’s strangely enjoyable, because it’s such a relief from the wooden, insincere dialogue the characters exchange. No one says a word of what they really feel. Do we? Is that what language is between people, a curtain?

Order the book.

I’m also enjoying The Freaks Came Out to Write, an oral history of the Village Voice, made up of hundreds of comments from Voice writers interviewed by Tricia Romano—who’d had a stint at the paper. The book reads the way the past felt, and if you weren’t there to live it—and no one was there to live all of it—you can live in these pages the feeling of a great experiment in freedom. In the past, we didn't know that what was freakish was being able to impress a spirit of youthful love for things onto a whole society. We didn't know how rare it is to produce a vibration that can bend minds.

You can see how romantic I make it sound. I make everything in the past sound romantic. For one thing, I can’t see myself clearly and I imagine I looked better than I probably did. It’s only now dawning on me, at 77, I have no idea of what other people make of me now or did in the past. This is partly because I cannot read a room and have only the dimmest sense of what other people need and want. Richard, on the other hand, comes into a room knowing which way the wind is blowing. Standing near him, it’s like having an external hard drive.

In 2017, a few hundred Voice writers gathered for a reunion in a venue downtown. I was wearing a black dress. It was massively touching. Everything in me that could have been cowering or seething had been burned out, leaving only love for how life could sometimes go and admiration for the faces swimming past me. Not everyone was wearing a name tag. I had two long conversations with people I hadn’t seen in a long time and who in the past had pierced my heart. I could see how I had fallen in love with them, and it felt a little like falling in love again. One was a man. One was a woman. It was the beginning and end of nothing, just like every other moment in life is packed with yearning and confusion, except you don’t always stop to think about it.

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Read the whole ‘Notes On Another New LIfe’ series. Laurie Stone writes the Substack Everything is Personal.

Order Laurie Stone’s latest book, Streaming Now: Postcards from the Thing That Is Happening, which was long-listed for a PEN/Diamonstein-Spielvogel award. Use code LAURIE for free shipping.