In Which We Fly Perilously Close To The Ordinary Sun

Did You Ask Me?

by DAN CARVILLE

I saw her at a stoplight, through the window of my car, long afterwards. Early morning. The first inches of dawn touched her shoulders. I had a passenger in my car, a friend of mine who I have not seen since he moved to Salinas. He sang along with what was on the radio. As we passed her, trailing a suitcase with a long handle, my friend stopped his singing. He said, "Can there be a single hour left in this night?"

I drove cars many times after that. But I did not enjoy it anymore. How could I, when the possibility remained of passing by another person I know better than myself, moving so fast momentum alone might take me miles beyond her?

I dislike rhetorical questions intensely, but I have to admit the world is filled with them.

I never understood the intimacy of others, or could see myself taking part in it, until I met her. Since she left, I lost whatever understanding she gave me. A key frame, redrawn on paper. One conversation I had with her keeps recurring in my mind.

Flashing her blue eyes, she said, "Dan, you have to stop." I asked what she meant.

"You know, of course, the story of the acolyte?"

I said I did not. She told the fable. It was about a student who invested nearly everything in his instructor, until he heard himself referred to by his teacher as a slave. The student was despondent and suicidal until the master explained that he had done it on purpose in order to shatter the student's imperfect view of him. 

I did not ask the relevance of this tale, both because I dreaded the answer, and because there is no real way to make a woman tell you anything she does not want to. I explained this to her. Her face wrinkled, like she was about to spit something disgusting out of her mouth. She was silent for a few moments.

Then she shouted, "But did you ask me? But did you ask me? But did you ask me?" She forgave me in minutes.

She would not let me touch her for the first month. The anticipation was a monkish ritual to be enjoyed and loathed in equal part. I wondered aloud why she chose this. Did she not want to be with me the way I wanted to be with her?

She laughed and said, "What are you thinking now?" She repeated herself a lot, usually to be silly. I could not help loving that aspect of her, and when she was gone it was the first thing I mocked, quietly to myself. I was at the airport, flying back to New York. I watched a woman repair a wheelchair with one hand. Families and couples criss-crossed each other, alternately wiping off and enclosing their hands in soft, white, slightly damp paper. I said to myself, "What are you thinking now, Dan?" and I said it more than once, more than enough.

I first met her when she was dating a TA I knew from college named Mark. Even though I rarely kept up with my college friends, I would catch up with Mark from time to time. In those days he had a marvelous mind: vindictive, forceful and empathetic all at once. I remember us both walking out of some seminar on the Palestinian situation once we saw the syllabus.

Mark saw the world as an ancient husk. I will not say he hated it. He felt that the idea of improving it was completely in vain, and self-important besides. It was difficult but not impossible to reconcile this idea with the little goatee I never saw him without.

Mark had told me his girlfriend was a musician long before I met them for drinks, and even sent me a few of her songs. I never planned to listen to those mp3s, but I did find it very sweet and maybe a little childish that he wanted my approval. I am not sure what he saw in me, really. It only occurs to me now that he may simply not have had many friends in the husk.

I remember coming home from a Greenwich Village bar at the end of that night. I see myself then as a flame shaped like a man, so excited was I at being able to hear her music; somewhat upset that I had possessed this kind of treasure days prior without knowing it. (But it was not just that. It was also the idea that I might also have, within the walls of the apartment I shared with a computer science PhD named Amil, so many other secret delights waiting to be found.)

She took a job at Columbia and now lived uptown. Mark visited and wrote her from Ann Arbor. I knew I had to break them up somehow, but my options were limited. If she would willingly deceive Mark to be with me, I could not respect her; if something trivial could cleanse her feelings, then I could not really trust her.

After a few days, I just called her. I did not really care at that point, so many times had I given myself over to her voice, her fey discretion, the blush in her face. (I would have also been similarly thrilled by the girl in Willy Wonka who turned into a massive blueberry, had she only become a round, shy cherry instead.)

Dumbly I asked if she remembered me.

"Yes, Dan. I am glad you called," she said.

Despite myself, even though every part of me knew I should not say the word, because I am always frowning at good fortune and expecting bad, I asked why.

She said, "Do you know the story of the falcon, the angel and the death adder?" I said I did not. She e-mailed to me.

I read it quickly and asked, "Which one am I?" I already knew which she represented.

On the other end of the line, I heard her laugh again, chalky and solid like her lower half. "That is the right answer, Dan. I only want to know those who cannot immediately tell which they are." That in her delicious accent.

I met her in the park regularly after that. She would talk to me for hours, never flinching when what I wanted to discuss seemed flimsy even for me. (Once I asked her what she thought about the death penalty and she just rolled her eyes.) We would write when we did not meet, posing each other so many questions. Finally, in Sheep Meadow, I broached the subject that had been on my mind, although I would be lying if I said it was torturing me.

"Have you told Mark about us?" I said. Her first answer would be definitive, final - anything else would be merely apology or confession.

She said, "Dan, what did he tell you? That I am his girlfriend?" I nodded.

She said, "That night we met, do you know what he said to me before we went to you? I can see that you do not, and I am sorry. I thought you knew." Her hair shivered and she touched my body with some blunt instrument. It may have been her hand.

"It was just before we left. He said, 'If you don't like Dan, I will futilely try not to hold it against you.'"

I said that seemed like a nice compliment, but that that I did not fully understand. She watched a group of babies fight over a toy shaped like a fat orange cat and brushed strands of dark hair back from her face. She said, "It may seem like we stop..."

She said, "It may seem like I stopped loving him, but that's not true. I only stopped acknowledging his love."

I think about that almost every morning, since she is no longer here, since she will not say something more destructive to replace that original thought. At first I concluded that those who always gave so much of themselves were by their nature also the cruellest. I hope I am not like that, but I think what she was saying is that we all are.

But then, it seemed like she would never stop wanting me. Unlike anyone else, she never made demands on sex, attaching it to no other part of our lives. Amil moved in with his boyfriend in Prospect Heights and she took his room. Because I snore, we often slept in separate beds. The other reason was that she used her sleeping place also as a sort of office, although she would allow me in it if I asked.

(Do you know how hard it is for me to say or hear her name? I know I cannot put it down here, either. For her to recognize me in real life, putting her suitcase aside for one moment, dropping it fully to the ground, would be nothing. She cannot see me in my writing, she must only see herself.)

After I saw her at the stoplight that day, I again started every morning with thoughts of her. I replayed the most eventful of our past conversations constantly. Paranoia enveloped my brain; I tried and failed to distrust her in retrospect. I thought of e-mailing Mark and asking questions I had held close for so long, but if he felt the same way I did, then I would no longer be suffering alone. (Had he given her to me?) I dreaded the idea of not being original.

Here is the story of the falcon, the angel and the death adder:

The falcon always soared as high as she could, and descended as low. One day an angel appeared to her at the top of her flight. The angel told the falcon that she could soar even higher than the sun, but that she might not be able to return to Earth. The falcon asked how she would feed herself. The angel answered that he, the angel, would provide an appropriate source of sustenance. The falcon asked for a day to consider and the angel agreed.

The falcon flew as low as she could, until the sun dropped out of view. There, in the bowels of Earth, she met the death adder. The death adder told her that she could fly even lower, into the world beneath the world, where she could eat and laugh and love forever with others like her. The falcon asked what she would have to do in return. The death adder said nothing, except that she could never again go to the top of the world, but would have to be content with the space between, where other birds flew nearby.

The falcon asked for a day to consider things. The death adder stuck out his long tongue, but agreed.

The falcon dropped to an old man's porch while she considered these two fine offers. The old man came out to give her a few scraps and leftovers such as he had. He asked the falcon where she planned to fly next.

"I don't know," the falcon said, shaking her dark little head. She could not meet the old man's eyes, knowing that if she did, the man might sense an inclination in her twisted face. "I don't know, I don't know, I don't know..."

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. 

"When She Comes" - EMA (mp3)

"Satellites" - EMA (mp3)

In Which Nothing Exists That Does Not Empty

The Pissarro Affair

by DAN CARVILLE

Am I the bumblebee in the sun's cause? - Joseph Ceravolo

It helps to have something light to focus on. I enjoy any story, as long as it does not go on for too long. I start to wonder to myself, where will it go?

The most surprising things seemed to bring Sarah joy. When my friends met her, they seemed to distrust this aspect of her, so I began to do the same. Just as I believe she is reading this, she read, over my shoulder, some terrible line in a poem of mine. The line itself had been fashioned out of the refuse of Raymond Carver and Sharon Olds; it was juvenile in their fashion and a bit in my own. I cannot recall it exactly now, but it had to do with the way water ran over a corrugated surface in utter darkness.

I do remember her saying she would not forget what I had written. Stupidly I judged her for this bit of naivete. Partly I was correct, undoubtedly she has lost the thread by now.

I have been embarrassed to write of all the rest, but not of Sarah. I was always proud, pathetically proud, that anyone like that could not only find something tolerable in my presence, but be so continuously excited by it. 

I showed her Pissarro, who I have loved since someone I can never forget showed him to me. Pissarro's view of the road to Versailles occupied her for many vital reasons, and we would go to the Met to see his work there whenever we could. I will try to list the reasons I think she liked his paintings without drifting into my own:

1) It proved that reality is basically only constructed of temporary things, like wind and rain, which can dissipate. They are merely a covering that can be peeled back with time.

2) He knew the way the wind touched the earth, and the way the earth touched the wind.

3) It showed that any place a man and woman are together, there is a road to something better.

I will not give her real name, unless Sarah is her real name. She was adopted by a loving family in upstate New York, she told me, and once asked me to meet them. I had something else to do that day, or I found something else to do. Why did I not meet her parents as she requested and maybe even required?

I will list the reasons I did not alongside the fourth aspect she loved in the road to Versailles:

1) I thought they might laugh when they saw me with their daughter.

2) I supposed it was equally possible they might cry.

3) They knew her last boyfriend, and I happened to think he made a lot better presentation than me. (He was not a better writer, though, thank God.)

4) Lately I have a hard time trusting atheists or agnostics. It is not that I think they must necessarily serve someone but it makes me uncomfortable, the idea of them not serving anything. Pissarro's given name was Jacob Abraham, but his French alias served him far better than his real name.

At the time I would not have been able to articulate this as a reason not to meet my girlfriend's parents, but it strikes me as an entirely plausible one now.

So you will not have to skim to the end to find out how this comes out, I will describe the last time I saw Sarah. We went to the movies; I can't remember what exactly we saw, but I am pretty sure George Clooney was in it. The wrinkles on his forehead were not the only reason it was hard to focus on the screen. Sarah had her legs sort of twisted around me, the way a parasite wraps around its host. (I don't think that now, but it was how it seemed then.) I knew by this how forgiving she was, since I had tried to break up with her a few days before.

I've noticed how I make you feel sometimes. Did you think I had not?

Always turn an accusation into a question. It's the perfect distraction from your own culpability in any matter.

Everything I said in those years, and much of what I have written since, was completely cynical, except as concerns the road to Versailles. Then it retains a simple beauty mostly lost to civilization after the flush of the renaissance.

A few days ago, my grandmother died in her sleep. My grandfather passed the previous year, and prior to his death he had promised to reveal several things about his wife's mother that we did not know. Since he died first, it was not possible for me to go to any other source. At a birthday party for my cousin's children, I asked my grandmother about her childhood.

Her father was a carpenter with two small daughters. He prized one over the other. On his off day he took the kids into the mountains for a picnic. (Newark has generally provided very good reasons to flee from it whenever possible.) Her mother, it was implied, had been institutionalized, either for some harm she had done to herself, or the threat of harm to her daughters. My grandmother spoke sparingly of these times, lending a subtlety to the descriptions I admired. Like many people, she had a tendency to flatten out certain parts of the tale, and omit key elements.

I am obliquely referencing the frame of this story.

I love describing the physical thrill of being with other people. I have never once not found it completely overwhelming. Isn't presence wonderfully absorbing? On the road to Versailles we can see families there, linked by arms. Even not touching is a kind of touching, rendered by Pissarro; the touching of the road to the sky, the trees to their branches, and our arms to anything that moves.

Sarah loved to look at my old photos. I have never really felt a fascination with the pasts of those I loved. I asked about all her old boyfriends of course, but only to learn how they treated Sarah so I would not make any of the same choices, no matter how effective they were. I didn't do it because I wanted to know.

(Some people are so honorable that they will not share certain parts of themselves with you unless you ask. Others — incorrectly — think that not telling someone you hope to love everything is dishonor.)

I never told anyone this before and I have no plans to do so again.

Sarah tossed her shoulder-length brown hair back and went about her day. She seemed always to be wearing lipstick, even when I knew she had none on. She had a fantastic grasp of how things looked on her body, which only briefly widened at the waist, foreshadowing the person she was to become. Everywhere else she was too slender.

It only came to me later, or maybe it never actually came to me, how much work had to go into all of that.

I was slow to discover Pissarro, since I was unnaturally biased against landscape painting until the age of 24. He and I are also nothing alike: he had a successful career in business that paralleled his passion without informing his life as an artist. In view of the Dreyfus affair, Pissarro told his son, "Despite all these anxieties, I must work at my window as if nothing had happened."

The only thing I have patience for is punishment through silence. Pissarro was thankfully not like that, as most great painters are not. Again and again he painted the road to Versailles from that window. I try to show how much I have changed by the fact that I am able to sit and absorb his work so much longer now. The Met is a terrible museum, but every large house has a few pleasant rooms.

I received an e-mail from a friend during the rendition of this broadside. One line in it said, "I think a lot of what you witness is how others react to you and your behaviors. Or proxies thereof."

I can never forget the person who introduced me to Pissarro. I don't think she loved virtually any of the same things about him, or the world, that I did, or even knew that I loved her, since I did not bother telling her. (She did not respect me enough to make me say it, either.) The reason I did not trouble myself by confessing was because of a particular piece of pablum I had read in a vacuous novel, that love was either simple or impossible. If you had to ask for it, that just meant it was impossible.

I now know that idea is a lie. Still, I have never had anyone change their mind about me. I have altered my own romantic view of others, and not simply over time, or because my friends disliked Sarah so openly and continuously. I admit I judged Sarah for the imperfections they showed in her, but I also judged my friends for what they said as well. Pretty much everyone was made worse by this relationship.

Changing one's mind should ideally be a sign of strength. At first I despaired that I could so easily go back on my word, or desire something I had sworn I never wanted or needed in my life. Now it is a part of myself I have grown to respect; as Jung put it, "He did not think, he perceived his mind functioning." I am so glad that I am changeable, that I can keep discovering things about the people that I love, or find new ways to care for them. It gives me faith that I still might change the way you see me.

You can ask someone to come closer. Even if Sarah did not do it the first time I asked, she was willing to say she might. I loved her for that concession, and to honor it, I have made a lot of compromises since for the sake of others, which of course are only for myself.

with Cezanne

When I first met Sarah she was with her boyfriend. I hated the way she touched him; it resembled how Goldilocks stroked the empty beds of the bears whose house she broke into.

There is a particular piece of my writing that my grandmother brought up to me every time I saw her. Sarah thought it was both difficult to understand and riddled with cliches as well, and I have to admit she was probably right. Since I wrote it when I was thirteen, she should have been a whole lot more forgiving, but I respect that she was not. Forgiveness is never a very attractive quality.

My grandmother said the essay, which concerned the seizure I had at the age of eleven, reminded her of her own childhood and showed to her that some of things she had seen and felt then were not shameful or strange at all, or perhaps that they were, but not unique.

I am attempting to replicate something of that feat here. I will know whether or not I have failed by the e-mails I receive in the days to come. If I see Sarah's name in the From: field, I will not read anything she says, I will just print out the message, stuff it in my pocket, and leave it on the doorstep of a fire station.

Sarah is married now, and I saw some photos of her and her husband on flickr, before I realized how sick it was making me. I can tell how much he loves her. I can tell how much she loves him by how he seems to resemble the man I was.

Dan Carville is the senior contributor to This Recording. He is a writer living in Brooklyn. He last wrote in these pages about an hour of sleep in the snow. You can find an archive of his writing on This Recording here.

Photographs by the author.

"Love Is Won" - Lia Ices (mp3)

"After Is Always Before" - Lia Ices (mp3)

photo by Kate Edwards

In Which We Traded All Our Thoughts In For An Hour Of Sleep In The Snow

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 the chaos. 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.

Paintings by Albert York, photographs by the author.

"I Couldn't Say It To Your Face" - Ben Sollee (mp3)

"Monster Love" - Goldfrapp (mp3)