In Which We Think About Both Of The Men

Elisa Sighicelli, Santiago: Curtain Tryptich, 2000

The Object of Their Affections

by ADA KAPLAN

I've spent a lot of time this week thinking about the fact that I love two men, and that two men love me. I’ve actually been thinking too much about this fact for the last two years.  There are good weeks and bad weeks, and this was an eventful one. For one thing, they’re both in L.A. now, and my intention for the new year was to free myself at last of this complicated and heartbreaking binary, but everything I do seems to make things worse. One of these men was my boyfriend for many years, and then neither of them were, and then the other man was, and now neither of them are again. This is because my latest solution is to “be on my own.” So I suppose I am single, though I wonder whether it’s possible to feel less so.

I have illusions, that I’m concentrating on my work, that I don’t need a man, that I am independent. I must uphold these illusions in order to believe in myself, as something other than the center of this enduring amorous sideshow. I call it a sideshow because it seems from the outside that’s how it must look, but to me, it’s my life. And I need my life to be about more than being the object of these affections, even if, truly, it isn’t.

I’m ashamed. Whatever women may think, it doesn’t feel good to listen to a man you love and respect beg or cry, or tell you to pick him because he brought a superior toy to your cats. What it does is make you despise yourself.  It’s the fault  of a weak and indecisive mind, possessed of delusions of intellect and ambition, but moored in that loathsome covenant of female want. How important, really, is it to feel beautiful? To be loved? Important enough to ravage the pride of two strong, kind men? They’ve chosen to remain in the situation, and I have never lied to either of them, but I implicate myself.

So far being alone has meant trying to explain why. It’s something about feeling responsible for the whole thing, and shouldering so much love, that I’ve forgotten how love should feel, when it isn’t jealous or concerned with others, or sad. There was a day around Christmastime, when I made my alone decision, that I felt my life regain a sense of levity. I actually jumped up and down in my childhood room. This only lasted a day.

Untitled (The Party Is Over)Being alone has meant buying an old lady roller cart so that I can wheel groceries into my apartment and a rubber gadget that allows me to open jars on my own. Being alone has meant failing at being alone, and convincing myself that I’m not at all interested in sex. This is mostly true, but there’s still a real part of me that cares. And if I cave and spend the night at the most recent boyfriend’s house, then I will pass the morning, which I intended to spend writing and working, because I am a serious independent woman whose priority is working and writing, as I did today, googling the 22-year-old girl who told him she wants to “bone down,” whom I've met briefly, only to be reminded by a fancy magazine that she is the daughter of a big producer, and prefers ballet flats to heels. 

He asks me what he should do about other women. I want to scream, but I say I can’t tell him what to do. Why? he says. They always ask me why. He only wants to be with me, he says, why can’t I just be with him. It’s a question I’ve heard from each side many times.  The answer is because I love them both. And because I don’t have the heart, because I lack the strength, to choose, I have to say no.

After I spent the morning browsing hipster photo blogs, I cried. I looked at the manuscript of my book and wanted to burn the thing for being so futile and uninteresting. I imagined my life, and their lives, unfolding. They were married to beautiful women in ballet flats. They were carrying toddlers on their shoulders. I was glad for them, glad they were free of me, but also reminded of the scene in Legends of the Fall when Susannah sees Tristan with his happy family at the state fair, and goes home, sits down at her lovely vanity, chops her hair off, and shoots herself in the head.

I imagine myself married to one of these men, and seeing the other at the state fair with his happy family. It’s bad. Then I switch them, and it’s just as bad, Even if they can’t have me, I know they want me to live.

Ada Kaplan is a contributor to This Recording. She is a writer living in Los Angeles.

In Which You Could Hardly Call Such A Thing Beauty

Tinseltown

by DAN CARVILLE

for D

You asked me, picking at your lower lip, did I see you as a person or a woman?

I guess what bothers me the most, besides you retching when I told you the score, is how you said you gave up on people. It was not for you to decide that bit of business. I had all this faith in you. I know now that it was not faith in your desires, but only faith in mine. The way I love you almost appalls me, too.

Since that day, I saw again an image I cannot forget, of a round window there in a place that I know. I always search for myself in it, as a fool looks for what he remembers of his own face in the mirror.

You said you were below a bridge, looking out on the canal. Your throat closed (you had pertussis last year). I credit you for this — everything in the world that deserved to be taken seriously, you gave it that allowance. But you did not laugh a lot.

I know I sometimes go on and on about reflections. But I really only love them when nothing is reflected, and I get to thinking, whatever might belong there. Is that now a sadistic way of looking at the world? That is what you said to me. You did not admit you wronged me, lied to me, destroyed the feeling there.

I have never forgotten anything either. I only pretend to so I can seem more like other people.

Slipping away from the city, all the trees shed their lights when the train swings near. Place aches, so I will not go to any of ours again, half-hoping to find you swiveling your neck to absorb the next scene. Within the frame, one man calls to another, hidden beyond a door. God, you said you loved all those things. I tried to forget that, and here it is.

We talked sparingly of my true theistic beliefs. You see, I do not care who views me praying for you, or against you. When a person does not care where they are going, only with whom they have been, it makes a sorry sight for any decent deity. I have to admit I am the one who did all this, tracing a new pattern over the old. It resembled the original too closely, I see now.

I grew to trust the writing advice of Derek Lam when he was first my instructor, and then my friend. I showed him some of these lines, especially the one where you did not realize what you had managed. He said that the second person, used it in this way, was so overdone. He'd had enough of the editorial, worldly You. Who gave these writers, he said, the right to make their primary subject all of ours as well? I told him this struck me as a kind of disturbing fastidiousness to one particular part of speech, and I also mentioned that he didn't know you.

That address comes before the invention of self, incarnate in us all. It reforms speech as the primary act. Calling to a person so radiates truth, because I would never lie to you, my darling. (See how this statement excuses both of us from culpability?) Calling to a woman is no different. In stockings and tights, denim or polyester fleece, the sullen take their bows. I looked for you there, among the carollers, thinking I had heard your gravelly voice. 

There is a Manichean residue on what you touch, as well as the oil from your hands.

A laminated card, or a picture shifting out of its frame. A half-eaten sandwich that resembles the skull's refractions in brightest light or unexpected darkness. A ramshackle, bouncing strategem. Rumors of insanity in final days, last strokes. A telescope tripping on its legs.

I showed someone else the things you said. "She was probably just confused," my correspondent wrote, "don't you ever feel that way?" I said I did about various things, including bocci and Old Maid. A moment later my phone rang. The voice on the other end of line said, "You can't understand why a person would be wary of someone who is never confused, or at least not very often?" I hung up the phone.

The thing about the second person is, 'you' constitutes the highest form of address. It will always be what we call a king, or a queen. You (you) can never take that away from me (again, you). In the border wars of Apollonia, men would bring their wives to see the fight, and the fight to see that they had wives. I have been party to this general type of thing before, but never as completely as when you exposed who you are to me.

I should not have listened so closely to you.

Take, for example, a capsule. Sealed inside, a daring pilot knows nothing of the world he enters. Each cadet is equipped with the same rations, the identical equipment. Of maybe 1000 pilots, one or two turns over the possibilities within the fragile walls of his enclosure. He emerges from it like the rest, but what he sees will be different from his fellows. The place he has come to is not unfamiliar.

I told all those pilots that they also didn't know you, not like I thought I did.

A couple of days before I told you to go away you sent me some pictures of yourself. I nearly did not recognize you because you looked so unhappy in them. The light I saw was only my own light, and the stars their reflection.

Imagine how the world would be completely changed if only everything limited itself to one chance. Or don't, but that is how I plan to live out my days. It is as you said. From high enough up, they all look like ants.

We always have a right to defend ourselves. I hope you are done, and that no one heard you.

Taking another form (not the tu form) comes beset with danger; this vibration of language is what gives time all its legerdemain. On occasion, I prevented myself from turning towards you, where you sat, arraying your things around you like the function of a light disorder. You showed me the inside of the capsule: exactly what was foretold when the man wrote, "Not to be pulled in." Pressing indistinctly on the high cheekbones of your face. You could hardly call such a thing beauty.

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. He last wrote in these pages about the falcon and the angel and the light in the trees.

In Which Diane Renders All Other Faces Useless In Comparison

Sob Story

by DAN CARVILLE

What I noticed about Diane first was actually something about myself. When I saw her I cycled through so many different reactions, unable to fixate on one in particular. First came a kind of mental thrust, a movement towards an indiscernible affection. Then lust, at how she was arranged. I only felt that bracing sadness afterwards, reminiscent of when I was a boy and saw a bird lose its sight.

I love animals, humans especially. Last week I witnessed an earthworm wriggling on the sidewalk. I put it in the ground. I thought to myself, "Is this what I think I am always doing?"

Her real name is not Diane. At times I wonder what this looks like from above.

I have told so many people I cannot be with them over the years. I suppose we all have, but when I think back on telling Diane, I realize on how little hinged my choice. The others held something messy and incomplete inside that I could not really ignore. Maybe that sounds harsh, but I am not really thinking of these women as they are, only what I saw in them. It's awful to think you want to make someone else more whole. It is no reflection on her, only on you.

On occasion I imagine my life if every time I had said the word need, I replaced it with want, and vice versa. Because that is what I meant to say, really. Whatever I wanted, I actually needed. Whenever I said need, I lied.

I suppose I could be the worm, wriggling. My metaphors are relatively less substantial, the further I get from the one I love.

She had marvelous taste. I know there is nothing in that except my own admiration. She spoke of everything outside of me with wild abandon, as though it were being described for the first time.

painting by patrick hughes

Diane was impressionable. Unfortunately she realized this, and took various measures to guard against it. I learned quickly, going over her lithe body, her arrested torso, that cruelty was useless. She was unconcerned by such things. She called them waste. (Like so many, she was the only one who could harm herself. If she was going to suffer, she — and only she — would know what she was punished for.)

To impress yourself on such a person, as is my habit and function, seems impossible at first. I used the internet. She came over at all hours; sometimes she would agree to come but not show up. When I asked her what had happened, promising myself I would be restrained, she waited for a long time before responding. Or maybe it just felt that way on gchat.

From time to time she would text me, but exclusively aphorisms and quotations. Largely they bore no relation to me, every once in awhile one would seem to comment on my lack of humility. It felt like we were never reading the same book.

Diane was a musician. I don't know why I say 'was', probably she still is. I am afraid to bing her and find out. I am happiest when I am writing, gleefully explaining this chronicle of her so I no longer have to force sense on it in my own mind. She has a marvelous voice, dusky and gravelly. I loved how she said my name, but I loathed myself for thinking there was anything substantial in it.

Our sex was high level. It transcended intimacy, since no other emotion could have been brought to these events without being overwhelmed by their intensity. Other writers make sex sound so similar to my own experience, or so foreign from it. I do not trust what they say about it, nor do I think I am ever supposed to.

We rarely went out together. Once I asked why that was, and she answered that no one asks why a blouse cannot nurse a child. I was quiet for a long time after that.

Yesterday I went back to a grotto she took me to once, a natural elision in the rock. Fog swarmed over beetles dancing between the parapets, oak and pine shivered and turned away. She was always saying how light went through objects; to be honest I thought it was kind of horseshit, but sometimes disbelief can turn around and become a kind of wonder.

Possibly I should have said this before anything else, but Diane had a serious addiction. Still, she was never high all the time, and she never used in front of me, for which I was grateful. Once I was so ashamed when she did not come to see me, as she promised. I typed to her what I suspected. She typed that it was inappropriate for two drugs to bicker amongst each other.

I thought it was a compliment when she said it, but I now believe the statement lacked any inflection at all. Diane excelled at unadorning the truth while still softening it.

Sex really had nothing to do with Diane. It was something she exuded, as I said, but then it would be replaced by what she was. Her lower body was a bit larger, and depending on what she wore, my attention could be drawn anyplace. How is it that a woman can be something and never say what she is?

Reading that back, it sounds sexist. I am not really talking about women, only Diane who is not Diane. I hope she reads this, because it will prove everything to her. She will hold this webpage in her arms like carrion. Most of what I said is true. Diane typed that it is wonderful to relinquish something that has already been destroyed. When I wake I see that mouth; I'd be lying if I said I was not entirely consumed with her in these moments, when the light hits any tender face other than her own. She seemed to absorb envy.

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. He last wrote in these pages about the falcon and the angel.