In Which We Direct All Attention Upwards

Necessity

by LINDA EDDINGS

Since attention is inclined to direct itself upwards and remain fixed, special provisions are necessary to ensure the effective compatibility of equality and hierarchy.

– Simone Weil

At the top there is a lancing. Of the spring's ghastly storehouse of agendas, all my feelings about what I tell you float down to the bottom of the glass. I am empty with this. 

Q: Give an example of a time when you sacrificed your needs for his. 

A: It would be easier to say the times I did not. 

Christmas, 2014. He is the brother of my friend's boyfriend Tom. He wears these incredibly soft sweaters, and draws his curly hair straight back. Of his little brother, Tom says, "Imagine a bird with something in its mouth. You can see what it has captured in flight, but the bird can only taste it."

The week before Christmas I threw out all the bad evidence of my last love affair, Chris. He moved to Barcelona. You should see the woman he is with now; she might have come out of a pinata. She is so surprising she comforts you in how much she rubs against him. I miss Chris, but it was time to remove the pictures of us together. I burned it all. That's the kind of gesture I don't generally find therapeutic, but seemed required for me to move on. 

I vaporize my diary too, but not with fire. I drown the ideas in it. 

Q: You say he is brilliant. That is a value judgment. 

A: It is wonderful to be with someone truly intelligent, I think, better and more satisfying on every level than treating with the kind. 

What should I call Tom's brother? This is not the only account of him – there might be one on Vox – but even though I have little faith in my descriptive abilities, I am already sure it is the finest account of him. 

Tom tells us that his brother was engaged to a woman from Kentucky. He had bought a ring for the girl, even, but her family did not approve of the speed of the romance and forced her an end to it. "Did you meet her?" I asked Tom. He said no, but he showed me a picture of her with no pants on. 

Tom breaks up with the woman, Ellen, he has been seeing that precluded my meeting Tom's brother. I ask what happened, realizing that Tom is probably more of my friend than Ellen ever was. Ellen looked in the mirror too much, Tom says. He can't stand that; it makes him want to claw his eyes out. "There was nothing different," he squeaks, "to be staring at yourself again and again!"

Q: Did you feel some sort of attraction for Tom?

A: I think I feel some sort of attraction for most people. 

February 2014. Tom's brother and I stay on an isolated island on a great lake. His best friend lived there since he was a kid. The man is a garbageman now, with angry eyes. Tom's brother tells me not to worry about him, or anything. When I go to the grocery store locals are fascinated by me the entire time. It is freezing, which is fine, since we are forced to warm each other. 

It is a smell surrounding me for years. Fresh soap, and a natural musk which feels like it is radiating inside, precipating the act. Shell game. Tulips touching the glass, bending the function of the abbatoir. What I gave to Tom's brother was in its own way never ending, slightly spiteful. At times I sense that if I ever received exactly what I wanted that I would die of shock. 

Q: What kind of man are you typically attracted to?

A: The kind that uses the expression "riddle me this," before an explanation. A lot of men do that, even ones you think won't. 

Tom's brother convinces me, one night when my resistance to his animal intensity is at its very lowest, not to use a condom. If you are reading this you maybe cringed, or you want to know if I got pregnant. I didn't, but I was scared as hell along the way. 

Chris e-mails pictures of a boxer pup he has adopted. In one of the snaps a woman's hand rests on a pillow. Chris' fat paw offers a bone. Tom says, "He sends you that shit because he knows it makes you scream. The question is, do you like the sound?" Tom is always kind enough to pretend he doesn't know me or my type, but I fear that he probably does. 

Q: What is your type? Not your type of guy, but what kind of person do you classify yourself as?

A: INTJ

Tom's brother actually wrote a personality test, for one of his degrees. It featured a variety of ethical decisions, all centered around the concept of altruism. He believes that when we do something for other people, a part of ourselves remains. It is another way of instructing servants to choose their masters. In order to believe in such transference, you must put your faith entirely in the idea that enslavement is only possible with permission. 

Tom's brother left academia, but he still talks about it a whole lot. I did not mind listening to his stories about it – isn't it so revealing what people tell you no matter the subject? "I wanted to work with my hands," Tom's brother often says, with his mouth. Use the tools you are given, I guess.  

Q: Picture me. 1994. I was having the same problem with a boy. You break out of it. You lose the recipe. 

A: Which of them are you talking about?

A friend of mine has a lavish country home outside the city. There is always work to do on it, improvements to make. Small things, like a lamppost or a division of a larger garden. These projects never become all-consuming for them. I was never much for hobbies. 

May 2014. Chris is in Vienna, then at a conference in Leipzig. They sent the dog to stay with Chris' mother until they get back to the U.S. I picture it flying all alone, at the whim of its owner. He tells me the dog cost 550€. "I thought he was a rescue," I write back. It is the first thing I have said to him since we broke up. You can erase something from your mind, but that is all you did. Don't ask me where it lives now. 

European cities are ancient compared to us now, but when you have lost your sense of history, does it matter just how much has vanished? "The Egyptians had working plumbing centuries before it was rediscovered. A great civilization." I don't admire the people of the past, I told him. I don't admire anyone who cannot receive my admiration. 

It is wonderful that these people take such a gainful pleasure in visiting the places of the world. I don't deny them their accomplishments, I only wish that the opposite of wanderlust was given a similar affectation. "That is all my brother is," Tom's brother tries to convince me. "A series of affectations."

Q: I say this with no pleasure, but you need to talk things over before you destroy them. Not everything is so final. 

A: I know.

Chris catches an eye infection and stays in a German hospital. Eventually they fly him back like his dog. He only has partial vision in the eye now. When he views it in the mirror it does not look lazy, but it never focuses. His new girlfriend is on writer's retreat in California for the next six months. He is miserable. 

Back on the island, I had someone to be around, which was itself a relief. It is all right to use people, Tom says, if you use them for the right reasons. He has gone for coffee.

Linda Eddings is the senior contributor to This Recording. She is a writer living in New York. You can find an archive of her writing on This Recording here.

Paintings by Peter Sculthorpe.

In Which We Calmed Down After The Screaming In The Sky

Second Person

by DAN CARVILLE

I like a girl with personality. I have a lot of personality myself, and when I see someone else that has it, my heart goes out to them. – Ross Macdonald

The thing about the second person that is a mistake is that writers like you think it is the only form of address. Maybe your ex will feel it is him or her you are really saying this all to, and when they realize that, they will come to their senses. Only if you had ever become important enough to be addressed in the medium of literature, most likely you never even took the time to read about all the people whose hearts you tore up, stomped on, and drowned off the dock at Pacific Point.

There are other modes of address, and I will tell you about them after I get through this. There is a way of writing that is therapeutic, sure. Afterwards, this bracing feeling floods me, like my body is filled with nature, if I am in nature. Coleridge said that you see the beauty if it's inside you, otherwise the viper thoughts are all that's left in the remarkable scene. Then again the man was addicted to opium. After he wrote, he did some more, so each feeling was artificial and he could no longer discern what was therapy, and what was trauma. I don't do drugs anymore: you made sure of that.

Well, the first month we were dating, I was not so sure it was going to last. I told you I was going to Oregon for the weekend and the phone service might not be the best. You said, "You'll get a lot of writing done." You said, "Isn't it beautiful up there?" I had taken a lot of pictures on my phone from another time I was in Oregon. If you really look at a picture you can tell the time it was taken, but I knew you weren't going to go to all that trouble, and that you believed me. I was in Oregon.

I guess it's not really cheating, only I wasn't going to tell you or anyone else about it, and I never have until now, because it is so far past making a difference to anyone. Her name was Patricia, I mean was it really? No, but what do I get out of saying her true name. We already established that I lie. She had this vitality that was something apart from her, feeding off who she was. For that reason Patricia could never get whole. I gave her some Valium I had – I don't remember where I got it, and we went to the museum down here.

It was the exhibition that they have every two years, and she told her friend to come. The friend was a local who was very frumpy and obviously in love with Patricia. She also dated some guy who had been in prison and I think this made her interesting to Patricia, because Patricia's boyfriend was also something of a bad guy for other reasons, not like he went to jail but he had very specific sexual requirements and yelled at her when he drank. In contrast, I realized after listening to their discussion, I must be the most milquetoast fucking person in the world.

I never let myself love Patricia, because I knew nothing would ever come from it. She was a tourist in my life, and that only gives you a sad feeling if you let it. If you (and I don't mean the editorial you) shut down your emotions at the first moment they occur, then they have only happened once, and are unlikely to repeat themselves. That kind of emotional control is priceless, only I do not have it anymore.

I may end up going east for school. That's one of the things I wanted to tell you. I decided it would be better not to have to walk around this place getting reminded of where we got ice cream, or I took you to some dinner on your birthday. Those are sad details now, and the park across from your apartment (that you never went to) is not so bad either. It is quite painful to think of all the misapprehensions I have had about the world, because they make me realize that I see people in that mistaken way as well. For God's sake I trusted you.

When I write 'you', I feel like there is another you, waking up somewhere. That's all I need to get by. But there are other forms of address — more indirect ones.

I visited one school the other day. The students are noticeably younger than I am, but not so much that they will know I have had a hard time up until now. I plan to pretend I am like them: full of this contained grace. It is an asset, as we enter middle age, not to be soured by what we have experienced, but I do think I needed to be touched by the world in order to claim it. Standing at a distance will not help in your writing, or any profession you select. It only means you will not get to pick the moment you are drawn into things.

After the museum, when her friend had gone to sit shiva for her grandmother, Patricia and I fooled around on the beach. It felt like I was alone because you were not there, so I sent you a picture of Oregon. Later I called to hear your voice. I did not like to talk on the phone much before then, but I remember the first time I called you. Outside, a plane was streaking across the sky and I took a picture, since nothing ever seems that close to the moon. We told each other what we knew about ourselves. I know you liked what you heard. I barely even knew you to say hello at that point, but I hoped you did. And those marvelous months together. How did I screw up that up? Oh well.

Dan Carville is the senior contributor to This Recording. He is a writer living in Manhattan. You can find an archive of his writing on This Recording here.

In Which This Was Not Going To Be Roses

Sex By Other Means

by LINDA EDDINGS

for E.

Sleep's our disease, the heart's adagio. – William Logan

That season with the yardarm, the scrupulous derrick, reaching low into the marsh. Reminders call back the dressings around us, opaque. Another option is the reservoir, draining inaudibly whenever I am near. Stupid to find any consolation in the rejoinder, hankerous, insincere. A metaphor never suffices in such situations, but the mouth will have to do.

E. 3rd and Bowery could be strewn with tumbling bags of garbage or easy women at one time. Now a failing bookstore and a nail salon bookend the cuisine of the Himalayas. Molten is the precipitation, the wind simply a frugal exhale. Arrival in a warm place, departure on one knee. Taking things into your body is a fool's errand. Best practice is a few furtive licks and a jangle at the seam. This could take all day.

Two years later it is sex I never planned or imagined. There is such thing, time persists in informing me, as pleasure that is too virulent. It almost always leads to conception; in the rare case that it does not blue balls are likely to ensue.

Duty to recall these dark moments: the proper thrill of a morally fervent eroticism is that it can always be retrieved.

I think it was Elias Canetti who said the thing he found most repulsive about people were their plans. I called the rest of my contacts first. During the act, weakness is a pause the stronger participants feeds on, attacks, makes use of. At such moments, the tongue is akin to a dangling preposition, with the feet and toes to match. Never asking to leave, a named orifice loses all value as a point of repose. Lines along the face mete out all the demarcation. A rogue emotionality is of no consequence among the salt.

For when the man is on top, you can draw a straight line. Her phone is nearly always in portrait mode. I have noticed the more appealing the person, the less likely they are to have a protective case on their device. This is an analogy that stretches through the eons.

Better to think of the leftovers as a happy bunch, who sampled all you could provide. Not only did they survive it, but they managed you the dignity of never bringing it up again. The fairness of the world overwhelms the moral sense of any one individual. The more decisive any sexual act is, the less likely it is to be ethical. I know that when someone misses you, that is never enough in itself. They have to want you inside them, or them inside you.

These strange words are written on top of a building at 141st street. Roof access is for everyone, makeshift ashtrays congregate like coral. This vantage offers the rear view of everything that once mattered. At times I sense how useful it remains to not be alone. Practically, when you put someone's ass in your face, the smell is never going to be roses. I realize I may have an oversensitive nose, and I freely admit I may have scented worse in the marsh.

Let's talk more about sex, and what it means when we have it.

The first eddings as scurrilous toes in my old bed. Winter was always the wrong part of the year, a smelting could have eradicated what was once thought permanent. I am new to being atop, but it does seem best to guide the flow of events from up there.

Yes, a man could determine the flow of penetration from a great height, and the larger his member the less he actually has to effect. Averting his eyes simply means he pictures someone fairer, who would not even imagine begging for breakfast.

Reaching back to that place reminds me of all who overhear my proclamations without wishing to do so. On the street a light beam enables swift movement through crowds, eddy and rock formation. Inside my clunky and obstreperous, oversized shoes. From dawn, avalanche. At sunset, liminal. If I knew how to talk another way I would do so, sparing this indignity. For that is what it to be written to in such a cloaked fashion, scribed around the echo of allegro.

What I wanted for us beggars this form.

I am new to provisional attitudes, an uncertainty flashed like a badge or cameo. After mere kindness evaporates, better to have something there, between the two, which feeds on more than blithe engagement. After this intimacy, we tiptoe through an altered prism, searching through time to reclaim it.

Linda Eddings is the senior contributor to This Recording.