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.

In Which By The Time You Hear Me I Will Be On My Way Back Home

Vermicompost

by DAN CARVILLE

Around late January, when Christmas was just the echo of an echo of crumpled wrapping paper, I ran out of ways to convince you to come back. 

Apologies in advance for the second-person. I know it is the dirt worst, even worse than consecutive semi-colons, but you can lay the blame on my total lack of composure. I was pricing a belt at T.J. Maxx on Wednesday and tears ruined the buckle, rusted it out. 

A lot of bad things have happened, if I'm being honest. I know in a relationship, a real relationship that is what you have to be, or it catches up to you. A phone call out of the blue announces the lie has evaporated. 

I don't lie anymore, not even to myself. 

One of these unfortunate occurrences put me inside of a hospital. (It was nothing you did, and it was not really happening to me, anyway. He only goes after those we love, especially when we love ourselves too much to risk it.)

Hospitals all look the same, halls too wide for human occupation. Signs point us in the wrong direction, away from the place we need to be. I remember one time I was in a hospital; I was just a little boy, I had seen The Rocketeer; it was supposed to keep me awake, only the thing was it put me to sleep instead. 

I should have known that basic irony would be the defining jest of February. The reason I give a gift is to show who I am, the kind of person I might be under better, more favorable circumstances. I guess what I started thinking is, what if I am that person now, and the gift just proves how much further I had to go. 

Why you left is nuncupatory. The fact is you are not down in the Metro when I go there, and believe me I questioned city personnel. I keep thinking to myself how I never did anything bad to you except not take the trip you wanted me to. You never suggested I go, but you should not have had to ask. It eats at me a lot that I did not do that for you, but it is not even the biggest bite. 

Day one of therapy was like a bunch of swarming minnows, taking plankton-size chunks. My metaphors run away from me. Writing is inadequate to this particular task. There is something missing from it that can only be conveyed by the actual passage of time, not the gasp between paragraphs. 

I did go back. I also returned to where we first met, hoping I would glimpse you through an aquarium. That first day we met I was not really looking forward to seeing you. I canceled the night before, wrapping myself in a thin black blanket and reading until all my bad thoughts went away, of how maybe I was not the person you thought I would be, and would I hate myself for the lack of authenticity?

My therapist gave me this idea. He asked me what kind of person I thought I was. The only way I could answer is this: I never do things for the sake of them. He told me that some people might view that as a character flaw. I wanted to scream. 

But I did not. There is no anger there, even that has faded with the time we are given to get over ourselves. The training for this in the life of a man is minimal. I am, like plenty of others, not unfamiliar with being dismissed, but the way you did it.

That has nothing to do with it. It is what I tell my class (I am teaching now, you never let me tell you, it is great fun and you always told me I should do it and I did, I'd talk to you about it in these warmer nights if you let me, my lips brushing against a pillow like a perpetual greeting). What I tell my class is, the way you say something doesn't matter at all. If you're saying the right thing, you could tell it backwards and we would still shake at the end. 

March comes on like a refrain. Everyone is telling me to be social. "Don't retreat into yourself," a friend says. "It takes too long to realize nothing's there." I have my books and movies. I finished Carrie: the ending was just awful. I tried another Theodore Dreiser, and I noticed a theme. A woman is humbled, and she takes a man with her into the gutter. She makes a choice to save herself or save him, and whatever decision she lands on, she regrets. 

 

You must have some regrets. I never met anybody that didn't second guess themselves, but I suppose that is why you are not here right now. I would have liked to watch that movie with you, and I wish we had never disagreed. It is another character flaw, to enjoy bouncing hard against something soft, and then doing the reverse. I'm working on pushing the soft parts together, says my therapist. 

It is the opposite of what you are supposed to do in writing, and maybe that is what I find difficult about relationships at times. It feels like pressing the cathodes of a battery against each other, nuzzling their charged tips. 

I pray a lot now, which is funny considering I told you how silly I thought it was. Well, now I know why people do it: it is for when you want something real bad and divine intervention is the only way they can think to get it. I pray for you to come back in my life, and sometimes for wonderful things to happen to you. I figure if you are happy maybe it doesn't improve my chances, but it couldn't hurt them. Plus, you'd be happy.

That's not where these pleas to God end, however. I don't imagine just having you around. That's peanuts. I imagine marrying you in front of everyone I know. It gets worse. Even though we're already wed, I propose again. We could renew our vows. I was looking for a ring, but it wasn't good enough. The only thing that would say what was in my heart right now is seaweed and grass. I go back to the earth — I'm even composting now. I miss you. When you walk through the door, you won't recognize me. I ran to lose weight, and I kept doing it because I know you would have wanted me to. I'm volunteering for Hillary. I've seen so many places on these travels — the end of the park, choruses of concrete, metal detectors exchanging compliments, lightning bugs kneeling and circling my big stupid head. That's not all. You're here and praying too. My clothes are better, my spirit is larger. I am king of all the animals, and I sprinted a block to return a dollar that had dropped out of a girl's pocket. You won't recognize me at all. 

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

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