Notes On Another New Life #22
Time Travel
I believed Kamala would win because I wanted her to win. I didn't make a mistake. I still want her to have won. She was brilliant and beautiful and interesting. Imagine if the world looked at you and said: Come, now. Give it all you can. You will be tempted to become not you, and you will have to bear being looked at. You will have to hear what people think you are that you know is not who you are. You are a female human with brown skin, so you have spent your life experiencing this exact thing. I thank you, dear Kamala, and I love you. I love you without knowing you.
How are you getting through your days? If you can’t go through something, go around it? Or take the advice of the aliens in Stardust Memories (1980), in answer to the question of how to aid human suffering: “You want to do mankind a real service? Tell funnier jokes.”
For many years, I would pass a man on the streets of the Upper West Side of Manhattan. I would see him wheeling a cart at the supermarket, carrying a suit wrapped in plastic from the dry cleaners, standing outside the Korean market, carefully inspecting fruit. He had intelligent eyes and a small mouth. I imagined if we talked, he would have surprising things to say. His dark, wavy hair brushed the collars of his shirts, and he was always alone.
One day in London, outside a theater, I saw this man, and without hesitation, I went to where he was standing and greeted him smiling, like an old friend. He was an old friend, although we’d never met. I wanted to think the oddness of our being in the same place so far from our shared home was a portal through the customary curtain of urban privacy.
He heard a rustle in woods that weren’t there and instead of seeing a shiny fox come toward him, he saw a crocodile. His face went sharp and annoyed, and he moved away quickly.
How does this story make you feel? Richard thought maybe, all the time I was recognizing the man in New York, to him I was part of the blur of milling strangers. I said, impossible. Then Richard thought maybe, seeing me in London instead of New York confused him, and I appeared to be some sort of English lunatic. I said, impossible. I know no more about what happened with this man than how to live in the NOW.
Every time I experience acceptance or rejection, I imagine it determines how my life will go and also how my life has already gone. In this exercise, the future predicts the past. These thoughts feel like they have always been with me, and because they remain, I’m not aging. Richard and I are living on love we’re too old to run out of, we’ve decided. The hydrangea bush beside me looks the way it has always looked, fat with flowers and bees—and frozen in the moment you become aware of it. For the rest of my life, I’m going to miss people. I’m in a state of missing. A lost link. A lost chapter. I love what’s not there and I can still see.
This summer, my sister will have been dead for eight years, and I will have had two more years of life than she had. I find this unnerving and wonder if I’m supposed to have these years. It occurs to me I think of life as a cake, and as is typical with me, I take more cake than others. I take a piece that belongs to someone else, and now I’ve gone and killed them.
On Thanksgiving Day, I reunited with two friends I hadn’t seen in a number of years. Enough years for me to be living an alternate life. We gathered in a hotel. Richard was with us, and the whole time the four of us were together felt warm and easy. We were finding each other alive on a desert island or on a mountainside. No one had frostbite and had lost a few fingers. No one had eaten anyone in order to survive. (I don’t think.) Female friendship is one of the great loves that shape our lives, a bed you can slink down into and just lie there (when it’s working).
The meeting was beautiful, I thought. Afterward, I didn’t want to make too much of it. Often, I don’t know how much is the right amount to make of a person or an event. Imagine a dog that doesn’t understand the temperamental differences between dogs and cats, let’s say this miscalculation may account for the map of arrivals and departures one might draw of my life.
The other day on the phone, I told a young woman friend what sex was like in the period before AIDS. Before herpes, even. What sex was like when it was separate in our minds from dying of a disease or from getting pregnant if, as I did, you always used birth control. You thought about sex when you didn’t have to think about work, or family, or the relationships you were in. You thought about sex with people you knew, people you loved, people you would never speak to—a man I can still see standing in the door of a subway car. I wanted to know what people were talking about when they talked about sex.
I said to my young friend, “One year I had sex with 50 different people. Two had the same name, Jim Davis. One Jim Davis called politely to tell me he had the clap. I wasn’t sure which Jim Davis he was. I couldn’t think of a way to ask the question. I got tested and was fine. I never got an STD. Clap was maybe the worst thing you could get at that time, and it was easily treated.”
You felt you were living your life symbolically as well as personally, as a representative of freedom for women that had suddenly exploded—at the cross roads of the women’s movement and the sexual revolution. You were living on behalf of women in more restrictive cultures all over the world. It was a conscious awareness of ignoring traditional restraints and operating the way men did, without moral censure or at least dodging enough not to be stopped or get yourself killed.
My friend and I are nearly 50 years apart in age, and nothing I described felt alien or unfamiliar to her. I asked if she wanted to have a child. She said she didn’t know. She said she felt no pressure to know, and I thought that was a big difference between the experience she was having and the one I’d had at her age, when the pressure to know and declare to others where you stood was always weighing on you.
The other night, searching for something to stream, Richard and I stumbled upon Don Jon (2013), a sex tale from a period closer to now—and from the point of view of a man—written, directed, and starring Joseph Gordon-Levitt. Scarlett Johansson and Julianne Moore star, too. In the weirdest way, it’s a coming of age story about a young man, who is not that young and who is addicted to porn. The movie is kind of clumsy and wants to guide you to understandings more than surprise you, but we found the subject compelling and wanted to see where it would go.
Jon works as a bar tender on the Jersey shore, and his world is an Italian straight-jacket of meals with the family, Sunday mass, hanging out with his bros and hooking up with women in a club, and jacking off to porn several times a day. He doesn’t feel guilty. He feels nothing.
He’s also very tidy, and he works out in a gym. These aspects of his character make him interesting because, like watching porn, they are solitary enjoyments he prefers to what’s offered to him in his society. His solitary enjoyments, his ability to be separate, is his private little rebellion he’s not conscious of.
In the matrix design of his world, he’s supposed to meet a beautiful woman and live with her in happiness that to him looks like death because it is death, and he keeps this a secret. The beautiful woman is Scarlett with all the finger jabbing, and gum chewing, and princess facial expressions you could ever hope to see. She discovers his addiction to porn, denounces him, and leaves him. When he finds he isn’t sad, he’s ready for another way to live.
What the movie shows is that Scarlett’s assumptions about life—what she needs, who she thinks a man is, and the way she organizes men to service her vision—all this, too, is porn. It’s person A chopping up person B into parts to gratify things that have nothing to do with the other person’s wishes.
The movie shows that an ordinary life of received manners and traditions, including confessing your “sins” to a priest, involves the same, impersonal transactions as porn. “Are you the same guy I talk to each week, or do you change places with each other?” Jon asks in one scene. When Jon and Scarlett are together, when she mocks his interest in Swiffers, for example, and she’s appalled that he, as a man would clean his own floors, when she stands there scorning his interests and quirks, we entirely understand why he prefers videos that don’t lecture you.
What’s the next step for him? Julianne Moore, of course. He meets her in a night school class. She offers him what else there is in life that isn’t people chopped up into parts, and the movie becomes a different movie it could have become a lot sooner.
Several years ago, I did a DNA ancestry search and discovered I was half wolf and half Alpine goat. I forgave my parents. At a party, I once whispered into the ear of a man whose salmon colored feet I mistook for socks. I told a friend I would meet her half way. I meant in 1990. Time travel means you weren’t home when a sad feeling ended.
The other day, out of the blue, I made egg salad. I had to have it, and there were eggs in the house. Richard said he wasn't interested in eating any. He said, "It smells like eggs."
It's possible that egg salad is the only thing I've made in the 18 years we've been together he didn't want to eat. I knew I could have all of the egg salad, and I'm wondering if, at an earlier time, this would have made me happy. What was the feeling it stirred now?
My mother once said to me, "Daddy’s father had a wagon and a horse and went around as a peddler.” Where? When? What did he sell? Everyone is dead. I will never know. Just like I will never know what happened with the man in London.
Do I want Richard to like everything I prepare? Do I want us to eat the same food? Do I want us to be married in this sense? When I look at his face, is he standing between me and death. Maybe everyone I’ve loved has been doing this all the time, and I am more aware of it now. I like Richard’s independent food choices.
Today, I made egg salad again. Do you get into food kicks? I made a giant bowl of it. Richard said, again, he wouldn't have any. I said, "I know," and there again was that mixture of feelings.
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