In Which Things Are A Lot Worse In The Morning

Theater of the Absurd

by DAN CARVILLE

This rough-looking, pinned back challenge. You only laughed among your friends, those you knew for longer than you knew me. That is how I knew there was something dark inside you, and the laugh was a kind of easing.

There is a castle in a place we both know. Inside the tower, spaces oscillate between cramped and open. Part of me wanders from room to room there. I just wanted you to pose for one photograph. That was all. Candids aren't my style.

Rub a particular spot in concentric circles. Tell lies the whole time you are doing it. Tell truths afterwards.

Once I complained that you never asked me for anything. Then you demanded much that I never intended to give. You used my phone for a calculator, metaphorically. It was only good for that, I was only worthwhile to fill in some aspect of a desire. Sections of you, pieces of yourself never resemble the larger whole. I am so much more complete than you.

80, 50, 42, 10. Fold the rope so it burns at both ends. Near the castle, but not inside it, a little girl screams, "Take me with you."

There were much worse heartbreaks than this, much more awful people. Over time you start to admire the honest ones. Now I tell what exactly it was that made me feel nothing, so that the abscess never has to wonder about its removal. This is only kind: a ghost is a vicious kind of creature, the sort that never leaves well enough alone.

Meeting someone new feels impossible. So much of me is stuck behind somewhere. The only thing that takes my mind off the pain is reading. In one novel, a man visits the realm of Faerie. When he goes to leave, he sees the spectre of himself still resting on the beach. He says that he wishes he could spend the rest of his life there, in the dangerous and wild part of the universe. "Doesn't part of you remain there?" his friend asks.

One thing that bothers me in all the love stories I read is that they have such definite boundaries and strictures. Moving up and down on a wet point. Bending back the focus, rough at the base. Delight.

Fading out, the softness of your hands and shoulders. Light from the kitchen, the vastness of the pillows. The city stretched out behind us, everyone else planning for a future that was bound to come. I shook nervously, too far from home, and the refractions preyed upon me. We all become too much like one another, merely through proximity.

Let's be fully open. Even when you screamed at me in Bloomingdale's, I blamed myself. I always loved you, but I didn't bother saying it. You said that you loved espresso and popcorn, bedsheets and black boots. Those were all the things that can't really love you back.

In the mornings it is so much worse.

In my sorrow I go back to these old places. It is better than being taken by surprise, casually walking onto the grounds. I need to prepare myself for the fact that you will always inhabit this New York for me. I know you will never think about me within the walls at all. You have to be warm inside to notice the cold.

Putting my fingers in someone's mouth is never as intimate as I expect. Placing them elsewhere with the lightest touch. I try to be kind until I have a reason otherwise, but that reason usually arrives, coming up through the bedsprings.

Winter is the worst time to be alone. I received a letter from a woman I loved. Of course I never told her. It was an apology, an unneeded one really, since she at least had the courtesy to never promise me what she could not give. At the time I called her cruel, but now I think she was just being merciful to never give me a chance. She knew her heart better than I did: how small it was.

Dan Carville is the senior contributor to This Recording.

In Which We Don't Have The Energy For Another Flight

Give Everything

by B. H. DANSFORTH

Attachment is the great fabricator of illusions; reality can
be attained only by someone who is detached. — Simone Weil

By that time there were two of them, and I lived in a pointless fear that one would see me with the other.

Neither of them thought he was my boyfriend, but I knew in my heart one was.

I saw Michael with his dog in a park. She died, struck by a car, a few weeks later. You can imagine my surprise.

From New York, I moved to San Jose and back. Flights take too long.

Michael had this crest of hair, and when he touched silverware, he always turned it over in his hand. Are you good enough to touch my body?

See if you can figure out who is my boyfriend, I don't know.

OK, but so I imagined what would happen if Michael saw me with Luis. Eventually I thought of a proper solution: I would say that Luis was an attorney, I was making a will, and I would give him everything.

Some other shit was going on, too. I don't know if it is my fault, or maybe just the way the world is, but every single thing feels like a distraction from something else.

Luis did not feel that way, but I do not say it was a good thing. He had the straightest teeth I had ever seen, and he brushed them religiously. His dark hair was kept short, and he took vitamins every morning.

It took him so long to take them all.

Michael, perched on the edge of the escalator of some store he took me to. His family had money, and he never knew what it was to be without it.

The thing is, I always did like taking pills. This all happened after I stopped taking them, but I still liked them.

I never mentioned it to Luis, but Michael knew about my habit. He asked me what it was like, and I said that it was like I was a honeybee that finally found the nectar.

He said, "Did you know Russia doesn't have honeybees?"

He knew a lot of little things, like how to wear a scarf and where to eat on Tuesday night.

Luis was not like that, although he was far from the creative type.

You can probably tell I have moved on from both these men.

I liked the idea of one telling me what I did not like about the other, but I knew they would find out about each other eventually.

OK, so Luis' mother died. It was March, his hands were calloused from moving all the stuff out of her house and sanding down the floors. His mother was a smoker, and sometimes, but not all the time, she ashed on the floor.

I asked Luis how his mother could do that. Was there anything particularly difficult about an ashtray? Then I closed my mouth. 

I wasn't overly celebrating my sex life with either one of these men. That is not to say we did not have moments. They were both very serious people.

It is wonderful to think of life that way, like you are Anna Karenina or Hamlet, or both wrapped up into a sad package. I am not that type of person, so I aspire to be with someone who is like that, and stay nearby.

Michael's dog was named Rye. He said that she was a willful dog. I threw out the golden's collars. He didn't need them anymore, but he thought he did.

It took me awhile, maybe a few cross-country trips, to realize I am a judgmental person. I think most people evaluate others on their words and deeds, which is a fine way of doing things, I'm sure.

I prefer to focus on what people are not doing or saying.

Let me start with Michael. He did tell me he loved me, but he did not do it all the time. He did not introduce me to his family until much later. He never prayed, he never shot pool, he never rode the bus.

All the straight rows of houses out here. It bothers me sometimes. It is fun to observe normal things only if you are irregular, which is the attraction of such drugs. I could have taken them forever, and on some level I wish I was taking them now.

Luis' mother developed lung cancer. It progressed rather quickly.

He never held out much hope.

He did not know how to drive, he had a horrible sense of direction, he never wore jeans, never drank coffee after noon. He never said, "I love you," but honestly he did not have to, and it would have ruined things.

I don't have the energy for another flight. I actually still take drugs, just none that are any fun, except klonopin, which makes me feel like a bean bag.

I miss Luis, and probably the Michael I am writing about a bit more. I think they both knew they were not the only one, and that ruined things.

I admire people who can keep such things separate in their mind, discrete partitions of experience. I find myself going back there, stretching through the flimsy walls. I would not like to be a man.

B.H. Dansforth is a contributor to This Recording. She is a writer living in New Jersey.

In Which Narration Is Such A Crime At Times

photo by Molly Dektar

False Positives

by KARLA CORNEJO VILLAVICENCIO

Seeing the men in their dirty little tractors spray-paint the lawn green is how you know the tourists are coming. In college, we called any non-student with a camera a “tourist” though I know, in a vague statistical sense, that there must have been a lot of false-positives. I was born near the Galapagos Islands and went to high school in Times Square; I grew up knowing what it feels like to have to dust off the glitter in order to come to terms with a place. Harvard felt like a perfectly organic extension of Times Square, so it took some effort to not resent people who didn’t know the pristine grasses were painted-on. I sometimes played this game where I would spot them by the lanyards around their necks. (I wasn’t very good at this game.)

There’s a biblical sensibility to this resentment, a rallying against the golden calf. It made me uncomfortable to see buses of Japanese schoolchildren swarm around the John Harvard statue in their starched white shirts and navy blazers, rubbing the bronzed booted foot that my douchier friends drunkenly peed on some nights. They loved Harvard because they did not know it, but they could not love it until they did. Luckily, there’s no shortage of people who want to show them around.

The campus novel has been around since the 1950s and has, since its conception, introduced gentiles to the rituals and totems of the ivory tower. There is a lot of tenure-track malaise in these books, but that’s a niche concern. The genre’s real major draw is the sex — and there’s a lot of it. It makes sense. If you want to get to know place vicariously, what’s more fun than entering it through the bedroom door? Illicit sex is a respite from any monotony that the lifestyle might entail; in Willa Cather’s The Professor, the protagonist has a brush with death after a gas stove leaks in his study. I cannot think of a lonelier way to die.

photo by Molly Dektar

But the genre does more than bring outsiders behind the scenes. It allows insiders to engage in self-fictionalizing. Read solipsistically, “ethical” and “unethical” become null categories replaced by amoral aesthetic designations of beautiful and not-beautiful. If we are all characters in the campus novel, then anything we do can be contextualized, excused, forgiven. Bad behavior, so long as it is written well, is romantically metabolized into a tragic flaw.

Once, in college, a former professor unsuccessfully tried to hit on me by referencing an excerpt from a novel in which the protagonist, a humanities professor (and it is always, or almost always, humanities professors: the genre’s authors rarely place their men in the cold-shower carnal biome of hard science) close-reads what he calls “the podium effect,” a phenomenon whereby the “ugliest and most squalid, horrible, tyrannical, and despicable among [professors] arouse spurious and delusional passions… I’ve seen dazzling women barely out of their teens swooning and melting over some foul-smelling homunculus with a piece of chalk in his hand, and innocent boys degrading themselves (circumstantially) for a scrawny, furrowed bosom stooped over a desk.” 

The writer — Javier Marías — is being satirical here, but that’s the thing about satire, isn’t it? Some people don’t get the joke. Still, there is some nuance to Marías. (And an attempt to pretend there are loads of classic academic novels about boys “degrading themselves” for older women in power. There aren’t.) Other novels don’t even invite misinterpretation. Here are titles of the books in Philip Roth’s David Kepesh trilogy: The Professor of Desire, The Breast. You needn’t have read these books to guess what they’re about.

The third book, The Dying Animal, is my favorite. The novel’s protagonist, a literature professor, patronizingly describes a young Cuban-American student’s thinking (he’s already described her “gorgeous breasts”) in this way: “She thinks, I’m telling him who I am. He’s interested in who I am. That is true, but I am curious about who she is because I want to fuck her. I don’t need all of this great interest in Kafka and Velazquez. Having this conversation with her, I am thinking, How much more am I going to have to go through? Three hours? Four? Will I go as far as eight hours?”

Consuela has no interiority. Kepesh fetishizes her because he infantilizes her, and we spend the next couple hundred pages learning to find redemption in his character, because he has found her beautiful, the ultimate pronouncement. He is a professional aesthete and he's chosen her. She, and I, and you, should feel anointed. 

In n+1’s review of Elegy, the movie adaptation of The Dying Animal, Molly Young writes, “I do not speak for all women when I say this, but in reading the book it is possible to feel vicariously worshipped for nothing more than sheer femaleness." This is true. Roth’s descriptions of Consuela’s long, black hair made me feel an almost erotic appreciation of my own. This is the power of Roth’s writing (and maybe my vanity, a little bit). But in reading the book — in reading most of these books, The Dying Animal and Herzog and Disgrace and The Gold Bug Variations, it is impossible to not feel infantilized and essentialized and caricatured. It is impossible, in some way, to not feel completely devastated.

photo by Molly Dektar

F. Scott Fitzgerald once described falling in love as the dipping of all things into an obscuring dye. It consumes. His words have always seemed to me a more accurate description of depression, and I thought about those words often in the days after Javier Marías was used against me. That's how I remember the episode. The devil had cited Scripture for his purpose, and I was sad as hell.

It was made un-sad by one of my mentors at Harvard, a female professor who's read her share of academic novels and doesn't hide behind language to skew reality. She told me about a lot of hard things in the days following Marías' betrayal, about gender and power and bureaucracy and ethics and responsibility and foolishness and sexism and ego. She also told me some things about narration. She told me this: do not let men in power narrate you to you.

There were moving trucks outside the window when I started writing this essay. Student-led tour groups walk across campus, pausing before important-looking buildings so people can take pictures. My ID swipes me into majestic buildings that tourists cannot access, but on sunny days like this, I like to do my work outside, on the wide, grassy lawn. It is open to the public. It is almost winter now, and the green has faded. 

Karla Cornejo Villavicencio is the senior contributor to This Recording. You can find an archive of her writing on This Recording here.

photo by Molly Dektar