In Which We Dismiss An Impossible Idea

Letter to the Father

by RUBY BRUNTON

I realize now that all that time he wanted me. And that’s really hard for me to say, because I never think anyone wants me.

I see people I want everywhere, on the train, in a café, at a bar, riding their bikes down the street craning their necks to check for oncoming traffic (I love necks. I run my fingers down the backs of necks, bite into them, watch the little hairs standing up.) I stare at these objects of lust, hoping they’ll stare back with a look in their eyes that says, “I want you too. I want you so bad, I dream about you.”

But it never happens. They remain preoccupied with their phones, coffees, beers and bikes and don’t even notice me staring. So it is only after years of reflection that I am able to state that what he wanted was me. For so long, I couldn’t believe someone like him would even look at me in that light. Or I thought that only happened to other girls, those self-assured femme fatales or whatever. But maybe that’s what got him going, my naiveté, my lack of prowess, my obliviousness to his desire. Maybe he liked that I was delicate, that if he lay me down I might shatter. Maybe, just maybe, he really did care. But how many girls have fallen for that. How many had fallen for that.

I remember the second class I had with him. I don’t remember the first. I think we just went over the necessary formalities. Grades, deadlines, dates and downloadable resources. The humdrum admin of academic life. Later, he talked about the constitution. I didn’t know Australia had a constitution so I guess that’s why it stuck in my mind. During the second class, he stated the specifics. He talked about indigenous law and land rights. I had a head full of questions. How could the foundational legal system result in one group getting everything of value while the other was stuck with arid land? After the lecture I approached the front to ask him what would require a long and complex to answer. Before he tried, he asked my name. “Ruby.” He said, turning it over and over on his tongue. “Ruby. That suits you.” He began to answer, but realizing the time - about 9:30 - suggested I come back the next day during his office hours.

I had a full time job and was trying to complete a Master's degree with a full-time load of three evening classes and countless assignments and group projects. There was little chance of me making it up the hill to the university during his office hours. It was almost impossible to finish all my teaching paperwork in time to be a student in his class. I was wrecked from the insomnia. I would lie awake at night, unable to sleep, my brain so full and churning. Night after night. I would doze off sometime before dawn and, an hour or two later, rise to splash cold water on my face.

In his third class, I fell asleep. Not a deep, head down on desk, faint snores emitting kind of sleep. I was listening intently, and then I just drifted away. When I came back to the room, I saw him staring at me and I felt embarrassed. When he’d finished the lecture I walked down the front to apologize. I explained that I was an insomniac and he said he was an insomniac too. He hadn’t slept properly in over ten years, he crept downstairs after his wife was asleep and read, watched movies, went online. He mentioned his cellphone was always on and he would always answer.

“Are you in theater as well?” he asked.

“As well as…?” I asked.

“As well as your parents," was his response.

“H-h-how did you know my parents were in the theater?” I stammered.

“I googled you.” And then, seeing my expression of surprise, he added, “I do it to all my students,” as though to put me at ease.

I thought it was strange, but not suspicious. Not then. Besides, I had other worries occupying my brain. The lack of sleep was dangerously altering my work mode, my position at my school had come up for review. Teaching jobs are not good for insomniacs anyway, the requirement to be switched on and lucid at all times, the expectation to be charming. I was close to flunking one of my evening classes and I didn’t care about the other. I began to seriously question if an advanced degree was going to help me. I had borrowed thousands of dollars in the hope of escaping teaching for a “career” which was such a vague concept at the time it seemed laughable.

Still, something continued to draw me to his law lectures. There was a formula, and at the time my brain required stability. The case studies were engrossing. Copyright law intrigued me. I was set on writing my final project on sampling in hip-hop. He was very supportive, finding book and journal titles for me in his spare time.

During his lectures, he kept his eye on me, making sure I was awake, enjoying seeing that I was fully engaged. Afterwards we would go straight to his tutorial, where he took relish in repeating my name. “And what do you think, Ruby?” He’d ask in front of all the other students, not caring that he said my name the most. “Surely Ruby has some thoughts on this.” And he’d catch my eye and smile. The day of his sixth lecture I took off from work. I had an appointment with the university counselor who advised me to drop two of my classes. The workload was too much for my fragile, sleepless body, my fragile, sleep-deprived mind. “You should keep going to one of your classes,” He said, “It’s very important that you maintain an attachment to the university. Or you may fall into the abyss.” I weighed up the options. I felt I could drop the film module, I felt it would hardly be relevant to my vague future career. Besides, the instructor hadn’t seen one film I’d describe as decent. That left Public Relations, where I had a 100 percent pass rate, but could not stomach the thought of another group project on how to minimize a media disaster for major oil companies accused of spills. I wanted to keep going with Law, but I was so far behind. The counselor advised me to take the easier option.

I went to his sixth lecture anyway, and afterwards made my way to the front, one last time. His face sank: “Are you not enjoying my lectures? It can be a bit of a boring subject at times, but I do my best to make you laugh.” I tried to smile.

“I love your lectures" I said. "But we’ve only completed 10% of the final grade. I’m sinking and I’m fairly sure I’m going to fail.” He said I was one of the smartest students in the class and with a little help would pass easily, with merit, even. He said we should talk about it, outside of the confines of the classroom. He took out his business card and wrote his cellphone and personal e-mail address on the back. “Don’t bother with my office line,” he said. “I rarely answer it. Try my cell. And remember you can call anytime. I’m awake through the night.” He gave me a smile that seemed nervous, rather than suggestive, but if it had been the opposite I wouldn’t have noticed. Sleep deprivation is a strange hallucinogen; I walked around with a veil over my eyes, never knowing if what was happening was actually happening.

I sent him a message that read, “Ruby”, and he replied with a smiley face. We agreed to go for a coffee the following day. I didn’t go to his seventh lecture, or eighth, or ninth. The tenth lecture was the final one, and there was supposed to be a party after, but I wasn’t there. I had reached a stage where words on a page no longer sat neatly next to each other. I had attempted to search the library database for articles but drowned in a sea of titles that hurt my eyes. I finished 75 percent of my final Public Relations grade and stopped going to classes after that.

I got a one-year grace period from the department, one year to pull my act together and re-enroll. But a year later, I had abandoned this project all together, turned my back on my accumulated debt, my half complete degree, the school where I hated teaching anyway. I moved to New York City, had a string of strange part time jobs, made new friends, began to sleep. He was all but forgotten. Even now, I can barely remember what he looked like. What his voice sounded like. How his inelegant accent butchered the two syllables of my name.

Years later, a scandal slash publicity stunt exploded over every social media outlet. A Toronto lecturer professed his undying allegiance to great male authors. All the sexual radicalism he needed could be found in books written by men. The most sexually explicit novel to garner his praise was The Dying Animal, which naturally piqued my curiosity. A condensed version told the story of a 62-year-old male professor who knows exactly how to seduce his 24-year-old student, having done it successfully countless times before. I didn’t suddenly view my own lecturer as a predator, but the blinders fell from my eyes. He was not some lame séducteur falling on every female that walked through his door.

But he had wanted me. He had attempted to solidify his presence in my life by offering me the fatherly support I had been missing for the previous ten years. He had wanted to take care of me.

I arrived at the café late, and he had already found a table. He stood up when I arrived, and kissed me on the cheek. I had been advised by my doctor not to consume alcohol or caffeine and so I ordered a chamomile tea. He ordered a glass of wine. I told him more about my research topic, the articles I’d read, the cases studies that related to my thesis. He asked me about my family, where I grew up, my plans for the future. As I spoke, his eyes bore into me; his toes touched mine under the table. I grew distressed, thinking of how much money I already owed the university, how I may have been about to lose my job, how impossible the idea of producing 5,000 coherent words on copyright law seemed. He placed his hand over mine, and it stayed there until it was time to leave. His fingers stroked the back of my hand. I don’t know why I didn’t pull my hand away.

The café was closing. He had office hours, I had decisions to make. The last words he spoke to me were, “I’m here for you, Ruby. Anytime. For anything.”

I never saw him again.

Ruby Brunton is a contributor to This Recording. She is a New Zealand-raised, NYC-based poet, writer and performer. You can find her twitter here and tumblr here.

Sketches by Tracey Emin.

In Which We Slow Down Now For Your Benefit Alone

Everyone Says They Know You

by DAN CARVILLE

There is a hike I do every so often, when I am feeling up to it. It is good to take in the air and see something of the world I live in. Maybe this sounds incredibly stupid to you, but sometimes I forget that people are not the only thing in the universe. This self-aggrandizing attitude perpetuates and feeds upon itself until days like one a month ago, when I found myself examining every part of my body with the flashlight on my phone.

On the hike you can still see humanity. Families dot the trail, sometimes carrying a cooler which means they won't be going very far. Divorced parents abound; their children looking overfed and undernourished. There is a man-made part of the path that suggests a sandbar, and you can see things submerged on either side of you. You can't go down and touch them, but you know they're there. That, someone with brown hair once said to me, is what being in love feels like.

I only tell women I love them when they meet the following requirements: they have no idea that I will say it, they are unsure of how to respond, they are unclear on whether I even believe in love in general, and they have made no serious commitment to me or anyone in a long time. Once those givens are established, we move past a sandbar to a small inlet where a little boy found a body when I was in middle school.

Coming back home makes my moods inelastic. This is a good thing, because otherwise I will miss the one I used to be with. You know that echoing part of mourning, when you just feel a twinge and nothing more? I wish for that, but it never comes. In the first gust of September, I had to close the curtains because the trees have lost their leaves.

On a regular basis everyone I know and trust feels insatiable for a certain element of their personality, which if they embraced fully would manifest itself as insanity. What I want to avoid is the panic I feel at waking in a strange place, with a person I love but worry it is not entirely or not enough. Panic fills my lungs then, and each individual action feels irrevocable. The biggest difference between people now and a decade ago is how forgiving they are in the light of day. Secrets that we keep from ourselves or others subsist in a stasis that belies the seasons.

A clean, sweaty smell akin to sidewalk after a rain. Oblong erasers sharpened to a small, thin point. Magnets oriented away from the most of them, praising whoever is in the vicinity. I have been to many natural formations, but none so fine as this, in the place where you said the only sense in turning back is to make sure your head is still on a swivel.

Now I can articulate what I could not before – more than acceptance I desire an understanding completely sexual in nature, simply of bodies intersecting. Once that is achieved, beyond the railroad tracks where boys more zany than me found the juiciest cigarette butts, there is a sort of serendipidity that should flagellate itself on self-worship. It is loving yourself, but it is also loving through someone else's eyes. They are not yours, the lenses merely borrowed, the irises ground into a ceramic paste that is fed to dogs. I loathe falling in love again.

You can go off the path. These two girls in Panama wandered away from their maps. One hurt her leg, and the other took a fall when she went for help. All they discovered of the women was a pelvis. My only thought upon reading that was that at least they found something. Alone here you can come across nothing valuable, since everything in the forest has been abandoned, multiple times. I think you know the metaphor I am drawing, but I miss her too much to explicate it if you don't. I drew a parallel reminiscent of Herodotus at the gates; let that be enough for you.

What bothers me most in isolation is how much I tried to reach out and explain my mistakes. On a long enough timeline, we can experience regret for any one of our actions. I cringe thinking about this. Once when I was a boy I ran into my grandmother's arms accidentally. Another time I laughed when I meant to cry. Vice versa.

You might think me cruel or vain, but you're wrong. It's the opposite. You only believe that because it's what you come to expect, in this year of our lord.

What if I could take back some of it, all of it? Then I would retract without analysis, all of it. Experience of love is pointless without a happy ending. There is no learning experience. Read a memoir of an alcoholic – by the end they want it even more than before, every time. If they say they don't, they lie. If they say they don't want love, what they want is to call love by another name: yours.

Slowing down now. It's all coming to me without any pressure, close enough to matter but not enough to hurt. Our own power, personified on a license plate or a bough. The birds of this area have a distinct call that pushes on the inner ear, asks for a recognition beyond the species. I yearn to find those little ones.

What have I been listening to? The new Head and the Heart is pretty good. I like positive songs, ones that make me feel the evil in the world is just tremors, a muted reflection of the good. Put it back, the tremors tell us, replace the milk in the refrigerator. You know it only gives you gas and makes you bloated. Forget how good it tastes.

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

In Which We Have Frozen All Of Our Desires

Smilla's Sense of Smell

by ALEX CARNEVALE

Engagements
play by Lucy Teitler
dir. Kimberly Senior

Sex Object: A Memoir
by Jessica Valenti
224 pp., Dey Street Books

"Why does anyone want to get married knowing what we know now ?" whines Lauren (Ana Nogueira) in Engagements, a play by Yale graduate and Mr. Robot writer Lucy Teitler. She spends the rest of the play's 80 minutes complaining about how degrading it is to live in Boston.

Whit Stillman has resorted to making period pieces since his own knowledge of what to satirize was last relevant in the late 1990s. It used to be that the upper, educated class of any society was the first to understand new things and create trends, but this is no longer the case. Technology democratized haute. As she pursues a PhD in Victorian literature, Lauren faces detractors who denigrate her chosen field because it is gauche to study the novels that first attracted you to literature. She possesses no special knowledge or distinguishing trait.

Lauren sleeps with her best friend's boyfriend Mark (Michael Stahl-David). She fucks him in a gazebo and it is admittedly great: really emotional and both of them come at the exact same time, like Prince having dinner/sex. Mark turns out to basically be a dirtbag, but what the hell, like most satire these days, Engagements is really about women and how they relate to the concept of men as objects.

I recently read Jessica Valenti's memoir about guys masturbating on top of her during her subway trips. The best chapter in Sex Object is about this Brooklynite with whom she shared a certain emotional connection named Ron. Ron was very clear about one thing: he was a feminist. He also had what appeared to be a titanic addiction to cocaine, and in lieu of a sexually transmitted disease, he passed that on to Jessica Valenti. Once, while he was in missionary, he asked the author to marry him.

lucy teitler

This was the most upsetting moment of Sex Object, and incidentally, of Engagements as well. Ryan (Omar Maskati) gets down on one knee to illustrate a point to the girlfriend (Brooke Weisman) he met at Yale, and she mistakenly believes that he is about to ask her to marry him. Any proposal should be answered at the time in which it is administered. If you want to be with someone for the rest of your life, what difference does it make how they ask you this question? And if you don't, you should end things then and there. This basic rule would have allowed Jessica Valenti to avoid a lot of trouble.

Instead of telling her friend about this gazebo-sex, Lauren decides to learn more about Mark at first. Since he is such a paper-thin character these scenes are not totally satisfying. He sends her anal beads in the mail and follows that up with a vibrator. This is not usually the sort of psychology employed by a man who is serious about a woman, and there is something bizarrely childish about Engagements that parallels the worldview of the show Teitler writes for, Mr. Robot. Neither show is filled with particularly good liars.

jessica valenti

Eventually Jessica Valenti meets someone she really cares about, a bro named Andrew. Almost immediately she is in couples therapy with this guy, and for some reason he is really resentful of the trauma that she has gone through. Men are so exhausting to pacify. She makes a really specific point of mentioning, in Sex Object, how keen her sense of smell is. A lot of times she will come home from her day of work, and she detects a bad smell in the apartment that he does not notice or care about.

Maybe that's something important in compatibility. It's a word I have been thinking about a lot. In memorable scene in Sex Object, even the most simple act is enough to convince Jessica of her husband's value. Valenti writes

Once when I was pregnant I refused to drink a glass of water Andrew had brought me because it smelled terrible. Water doesn't have a smell! he yelled, but he brought me another, because he is a kind person in that way. Boston smells the worst.

The Boston of Teitler's Engagements is a sad and lonely simalcrum. There was recently an article about how bad single women in New York have it. It's true that in New York these creatures outnumber their male counterparts by two to one, but things are far worse in Boston. There are like three guys in all of Boston with any personality, and even those men can barely plan an afternoon beyond, "I have Sox tickets" or "we should stay in." Being an unmarried woman in Boston is a recipe for a lengthy stay in psychoanalytic therapy.

There was an emotional moment on The Real Housewives of New York this week when Skinnygirl mogul Bethenny Frankel told her friend that she had a picture of her fiance cheating on her. "I don't want to know," LuAnn sobbed, and married the guy anyway. I don't know exactly why the rise of female empowerment also precipitated a dramatic lowering of standards among powerful, sexy intelligent women. Bethenny Frankel's boyfriend, for example, looks like Dr. Evil from Austin Powers.

Even Jessica Valenti ends up settling. Two years into her difficult marriage she becomes pregnant for a second time and decides to have an abortion. Her daughter Layla struggles with selective mutism, despite communicating well with her mother. Boston is so far from the city of her dreams. Sex Object is a woefully depressing book, both for the ways it tells us our culture treats women, and how the author has managed to make a meal out of these desiccated ingredients.

In Engagements, Lauren dates a series of unimpressive men, a list that includes a janitor, her college-aged neighbor and the boyfriend of her cousin. None understand her or even attempt to do so, and she cannot bring herself to like or respect them; it is only important whether or not they like and respect her. Her friend Allison (Jennifer Kim) eventually finds out that her boyfriend and husband-to-be has been sending the sexual gifts to a variety of women, and keeping a spreadsheet so that he doesn't mail the same vibrator twice. It emerges that this meager, sadistic amount of attention was basically enough to captivate an educated woman who studies the Victorians, and the excitement of betraying her annoying friend sufficient erotic charge. Who could ask for anything more?

Alex Carnevale is the editor of This Recording.