How Literature Saved My Life

2. LOVE IS A LONG, CLOSE SCRUTINY In which I characterize love as a religion w/ fallible gods.

Negotiating against ourselves

TWO OF THE ACTORS John Cameron Mitchell auditioned for his film Shortbus were boyfriends. Mitchell suggested that they improvise: meeting for the first time, one is a former child star doing research to play a prostitute in a TV movie, and the other is a real prostitute. One person’s goal is to find out how to play this role, and the other person’s goal is to have sex. The improv was going well (one actor was talking about his child stardom, and the other was portraying a drug-addicted street hustler), and Mitchell thought the scene might actually become sexual. They were friends of Mitchell’s, but he nevertheless found it nerve-racking—just the two of them and him in a room. The two friends did indeed start having sex, and Mitchell quickly grew bored, because the goal had been reached. Sex in and of itself wasn’t interesting to Mitchell, or, rather, “for porn, good sex might be interesting to watch because you can project stuff onto it, but what I was looking for in this film was bad sex, because it’s revealing and funny. So I whispered to one of them, ‘You need to come as soon as possible.’ And to the other I said, ‘If he touches your left nipple, think of your mother.’ And then I said, ‘Continue.’ ”

Love is a long, close scrutiny

IN OTTO PREMINGER’S Laura (my wife’s name is still Laurie), a body is discovered in the apartment of Manhattan socialite Laura Hunt (Gene Tierney). The corpse is at first assumed to be Hunt, since the body was dressed in her clothes and the deceased’s face has been obliterated by a shotgun blast. Homicide detective Mark McPherson (Dana Andrews) has three suspects: Waldo Lydecker (Clifton Webb), a closeted, high society gossip columnist who virtually “created” Laura; Shelby Carpenter (Vincent Price, ludicrously miscast as Laura’s hunky fiancé, a rube from Kentucky); and Ann Treadwell (Judith Anderson), Laura’s wealthy, soignée aunt who purchases Shelby to serve, essentially, as her gigolo.

Both as narrator and as actor within the drama, Lydecker overanalyzes the action as it unfolds, often deconstructing the drama before it happens. He’s Writer Man, Language Man, solipsism incarnate. When McPherson arrives and asks him if he’s Lydecker, Lydecker says, “You recognized me. How splendid.” Laura returns. He says to her, in a flashback, “In my case, self-absorption is completely justified. I’ve never discovered any other subject quite so worthy of my attention.” (In other words, he’s an essayist.) Though the film’s charm rides heavily on his wit—“I don’t use a pen; I write with a goose quill dipped in venom”—it must finally reject him, as do so many other narratives that feature introverted narrators contemplating more physically prepossessing specimens: The Great Gatsby, The Good Soldier, Cat and Mouse, A Separate Peace. I love/hate that I’m a writer rather than an action figure, so I compose works that celebrate and then desecrate my word-trapped half-life.

Lydecker is too clever, too too. When Laura introduces herself to him, interrupting his lunch in order to ask him to endorse a product her advertising firm represents, he says, “Either you have been raised in some incredibly rustic community where good manners are unknown, or else you suffer from the common feminine delusion that the mere fact of being a woman exempts you from the rules of civilized conduct, or possibly both.” Carpenter is not enough. Prone to waxing rhapsodic over “lunch, beautiful lunch, day after day,” he doesn’t “know a lot about anything, but I know a little about practically everything.” McPherson is just right, a regular Joe who is both smart and handsome, heterosexual yet clever, verbal but physical, the smallest man in the movie but the only one who lands a punch. It’s 1944: there’s a war on, and the hero can’t be an artist or a playboy. He needs to be someone who can get the job done.

There is, I swear, more smoking in Laura than in any other movie ever made. In Laura’s apartment, perusing her journals and diaries, McPherson builds a veritable pyre of butts. The most interesting thing that happens to the cigarettes in this hilariously Freudian movie (why do you suppose McPherson’s second in command is named McEveety—pronounced “McAvity”?) is that in the last twenty minutes the cigarettes disappear and become guns: the fireworks get bigger. And when Laura inspects with admiration the long shotgun McPherson is holding in his lap, she doesn’t need to ask if he’s happy to see her. Lydecker, of course, can’t control his gun: he kills the wrong girl earlier in the movie (Diane Redfern rather than Laura), and when he later tries to complete the act, even Laura can outmuscle him, causing him to misfire. He’s quickly mowed down by McPherson’s boys. There’s control (verbal), then there’s control (physical). There’s language, then there’s blood.

The people I’ve met who most closely resemble Carpenter are my jock friends from high school: dense galoots unaware that there’s anything to say about anything other than truistic bullshit. In my experience, the Mark McPhersons of the world don’t hide irrationalities beneath their controlled exteriors. Their interiors are equally logic-based (I’m thinking here of Laurie). Lydecker, on the other hand, c’est moi, trapped in his own wildly subjective invention of reality. In this movie, though, I get to banish him, exorcise him, tell myself I’m not him, tell myself a WWII-era fairy tale: she’s rich, he’s smart, she’s beautiful, he’s brave, Mark+Laura4Ever. Theirs is the one uncorrupt relationship in a film otherwise populated by “kept” couples—Lydecker and Laura, Carpenter and Ann. The only way the movie makes any real sense to me is if I understand Lydecker’s behavior to be just a more extreme version of the other characters’ behavior. “We are adrift, alone in the cosmos, wreaking monstrous violence on one another out of frustration and pain,” Woody Allen informs us. No punch line. “As history has proved, love is eternal,” Lydecker says just before raising his gun and attempting, woefully, to murder his beloved.

Love is a long, close scrutiny

FROM THE SOUND of things, the girl who lived next door to me my sophomore year of college was having problems with her boyfriend. One night Rebecca invited me into her room to share a joint and told me she kept a journal, which one day she hoped to turn into a novel. I said Kafka believed that writing in a journal prevented reality from being turned into fiction, but as she pointed out, Kafka did nothing if not write in a journal. I liked the way she threw her head back when she laughed.

The next day I knocked on her door to ask her to join me for lunch. Her door was unlocked; she assumed no one would break into her room, and in any case the door to the dormitory was always locked. Rebecca wasn’t in and neither was her roommate, who had all but moved into her boyfriend’s apartment off campus. Rebecca’s classes weren’t over until late afternoon, I remembered, and I walked in and looked at her clothes and books and notebooks. Sitting down at her desk, I opened the bottom right drawer and came across a photo album, which I paged through only briefly, because underneath the album was a stack of Rebecca’s journals. The one on top seemed pretty current and I started reading: the previous summer, she’d missed Gordon terribly and let herself be used on lonely nights by a Chapel Hill boy whom she had always fantasized about and who stroked her hair in the moonlight and wiped himself off with leaves. When Rebecca returned to Providence in the fall, she knew she wanted romance, and after weeks of fights that went all night and into the morning, she told Gordon she didn’t want to see him anymore.

Me, on the other hand, she wanted to see every waking moment of the day and night. As a stutterer, I was even more ferociously dedicated to literature (the glory of language that was beautiful and written) than other English majors at Brown were, and I could turn up the lit-crit rhetoric pretty damn high. She loved the way I talked (my stutter was endearing); her favorite thing in the world was to listen to me rhapsodize about John Donne. She often played scratchy records on her little turntable (this was 1975), and when I said, “The Jupiter Symphony might be the happiest moment in human history,” her heart skipped a beat. Toward my body she was ambivalent: she was simultaneously attracted and repelled by my strength. She was afraid I might crush her. These are near-verbatim quotes.

I finished reading the journal and put it away, then went back to my room and waited for Rebecca to return from her classes. That night we drove out to Newport, where we walked barefoot in the clammy sand and looked up at the lighted mansions that lined the shore in the distance. “The rich, too, must go to sleep at night,” I said, offering Solomonic wisdom. We stood atop a ragged rock that sat on the shoreline; the full tide splashed at our feet. The moon made halos of our heads. I put my hands through her hair and kissed her lightly on the lips. “Don’t kiss hard,” she said. “I’m afraid I’ll fall.”

Tuesday and Thursday afternoons—when she worked in the development office—I’d go into her room, shut the door, lock it, and sit back in the swivel chair at her desk. She always left a window open. The late fall wind would be blowing the curtains around, and the Jupiter Symphony would always be on the little red record player on the floor. She often left wet shirts hanging all over the room; they’d ripple eerily in the wind. On the wall were a few calligraphic renderings of her own poetry. Her desk was always a mess, but her journal—a thick black book—was never very difficult to find.

I was nineteen years old and a virgin, and at first I read Rebecca’s journal because I needed to know what to do next and what she liked to hear. Every little gesture, every minor movement I made she passionately described and wholeheartedly admired. When we were kissing or swimming or walking down the street, I could hardly wait to rush back to her room to find out what phrase or what twist of my body had been lauded in her journal. I loved her impatient handwriting, her purple ink, the melodrama of the whole thing. It was such a surprising and addictive respite, seeing every aspect of my being celebrated by someone else rather than excoriated by myself. She wrote, “I’ve never truly loved anyone the way I love D. and it’s never been so total and complete, yet so unpossessing and pure, and sometimes I want to drink him in like golden water.” You try to concentrate on your Milton midterm after reading that about yourself.

Sometimes, wearing her bathrobe, she’d knock on my door in order to return a book or get my reaction to a paragraph she’d written or read. She’d wish me good night, turn away, and begin walking back to her room. I’d call to her, and we’d embrace—first in the hallway outside our doors, then soon enough in my room, her room, on our beds. I hadn’t kissed anyone since I was twelve (horrific acne throughout high school), so I tried to make up for lost time by swallowing Rebecca alive: biting her lips until they bled, licking her face, chewing on her ears, holding her up in the air and squeezing her until she screamed.

In her journal, she wrote that she’d never been kissed like this in her life and that she inevitably had trouble going to sleep after seeing me. I’d yank the belt to her bathrobe and urge her under the covers, but she refused. She actually said she was afraid she’d go blind when I entered her. Where did she learn these lines, anyway?

Shortly before the weather turned permanently cold, we went hiking in the mountains. The first night, she put her backpack at the foot of her sleeping bag—we kissed softly for a few minutes, then she fell asleep—but on the second night she put her backpack under her head as a pillow. Staring into the blankly black sky, I dug my fingers into the dirt behind Rebecca’s head and, the first time and the second time and the third time and the fourth time and probably the fourteenth time, came nearly immediately.

From then on, I couldn’t bring myself to read what she’d written. I’d read the results of a survey in which 40 percent of Italian women acknowledged that they usually faked orgasms. Rebecca wasn’t Italian—she was that interesting anomaly, a southern Jew—but she thrashed around a lot and moaned and screamed, and if she was pretending I didn’t want to know about it. She often said it had never been like this before.

Every night she’d wrap her legs around me and scream something that I thought was German until I realized she was saying, “Oh, my son.” My son? She had her own issues, too, I suppose. We turned up the Jupiter Symphony all the way and attempted to pace ourselves so we’d correspond to the crashing crescendo. I was sitting on top of her and in her mouth, staring at her blue wall, and I thought My whole body is turning electric blue. She was on top of me, rotating her hips and crying, and she said, “Stop.” I said, “Stop?” and stopped. She grabbed the back of my hair and said, “Stop? Are you kidding? Don’t stop.”

At the end of the semester, packing to fly home to San Francisco to spend the Christmas vacation with my family, I suddenly started to feel guilty about having read Rebecca’s journal. Every time I kissed her, I closed my eyes and saw myself sitting at her desk, turning pages. I regretted having done it and yet I couldn’t tell her about it.

“What’s wrong?” she asked.

“I’ll miss you,” I said. “I don’t want to leave.”

On the plane I wrote her a long letter in which I told her everything I couldn’t bring myself to tell her in person: I’d read her journal, I was very sorry, I thought our love was still pure and we could still be together, but I’d understand if she went back to Gordon and never spoke to me again.

She wrote back that I should never have depended on her journal to give me strength, she’d throw it away and never write in it again, and she wanted to absolve me, but she wasn’t God, although she loved me better than God could. Anything I said she would believe because she knew I’d never lie to her again. Our love, in her view, transcended time and place.

Well, sad to say, it didn’t. The night I returned from San Francisco, she left a note on my door that said only “Come to me,” and we tried to imitate the wild abandon of the fall semester, but what a couple of weeks before had been utterly instinctive was now excruciatingly self-conscious, and the relationship quickly cooled. She even went back to Gordon for a while, though that second act didn’t last very long, either.

It was, I see now, exceedingly odd behavior on my part. After ruining things for myself by reading her journal, I made sure I ruined things for both of us by telling her that I had read her journal. Why couldn’t I just live with the knowledge and let the shame dissipate over time? What was—what is—the matter with me? Do I just have a bigger self-destruct button, and like to push it harder and more incessantly, than everyone else? Perhaps, but also the language of the events was at least as erotic to me as the events themselves, and when I was no longer reading her words, I was no longer very adamantly in love with Rebecca. This is what is known as a tragic flaw.

Love is illusion

“IF YOU’RE A NEWCOMER to this show, you’re probably wondering what in the world it’s all about. Well, it’s not about politics. It’s not about wars going on around the world. It’s not about trials and tribulations. It’s about you. It’s about your heart. It’s about what in the world is going on in your world. We are here to take your calls about family, friends, sweethearts, that special someone you met over the internet, falling in love, having your heart broken by love, babies, and graduations. And then we mix those stories together with your favorite love songs. Thank you for finding us. You’re listening to Delilah.”

Delilah (who, as any icon seeking goddess status must, goes by only one name) advises Kathy, who’s shy about approaching the former security guard she’s in love with, “What happens if you don’t follow through with this and he gets away again? Say ‘Thank you for alerting me to the fact that my headlight was broken. I owe you my life. Here’s a plate of cookies and my phone number at home. And my cell phone and my pager number and my fax number and my email address.’ Come on, Kathy—shoulders back. Be bold. Be brave.” Then she plays Mariah Carey’s “Dreamlover.”

Delilah, which is recorded live in Delilah’s home studio in the Seattle area and is broadcast six nights a week between seven and midnight in most markets, has 8 million listeners on more than 200 stations in every state except Rhode Island, covering 90 percent of the country, even though the show is in only five of the top ten markets. Delilah’s listeners are overwhelmingly female, modestly educated, and politically center-right. She also says that “it seems as if half my callers are single moms.” Unlike, say, Dr. Phil or Dr. Laura (my wife’s name remains Laurie), Delilah only occasionally accompanies the sugar pill with harsh-tasting medicine.

Delilah is a relentless valentine for and about the struggling class, a trump card for those holding an empty hand. Delilah offers the possibility of ordinary American female life redeemed by… by what? The sugar rush of over-the-moon sentiment. In five hours at her house one summer day, I ate pancakes and syrup for breakfast, cookies for lunch, and ice cream for an afternoon pick-me-up. The hungry heart will be cured by sweetness itself. Delilah wants every call to end on an “audio hug” of empathy and recognition, and it does, it does. Inevitably she lifts us up where we belong—where the eagles fly, etc.—even as her own life remains obdurately earthbound.

In 1982, when Delilah, who is white, brought her African American husband home to meet her parents, her father “freaked out, jumped up, and ran to the gun closet, chasing me off with a shotgun.” He disowned her, and when he was dying, he refused to allow her to visit. Most of her children—three biological, nine adopted—have African American, African, or Hispanic ancestry. She’s thrice divorced.

A disproportionately high percentage of callers are raising two or three children without the father, who has left or was never there. Asked what kind of man she’s attracted to, Delilah says, “You’ve got to be quick, bright, funny—and a mass murderer. Ever since I was a teenager, I’d pick out the guy who would break my heart. Because my father was so passionate and so brilliant and so emotionally not available, that, I guess, is what I’m attracted to.” Delilah and the show are father-fixated, redressing the distant or absent or dead father by positing an all-knowing, all-loving God.

(My minirebellion against my journalist parents was to become a fiction writer—and then, later, a writer of wayward nonfiction.)

Delilah embodies the ambivalence her audience feels toward competing definitions of being female. Her voice is half tease, half hug, which is what she looks like: ex-bombshell/Mother of the Year. She wears a low-cut blouse, which emphasizes her décolletage, but she frequently pulls up her blouse and crosses her arms over her chest. She espouses self-esteem to her listeners, but she confides to her executive producer, “My legs are the only part of myself I like.” In most photos, she appears to be an all-American blonde, but she frequently reminds her listeners that her hair color comes from Kmart.

In Love Someone Today, Delilah writes, “I had romantic notions playing in my head of a midnight dance under the spectacular sky. I found him”—her last husband, when they were still married—“sleeping soundly in our bed. I tried to wake him. After several unsuccessful attempts, I gave up and walked out. I felt angry and rejected, my feelings hurt that he wouldn’t jump up and enjoy my romantic fantasy with me. I zipped up my coat and headed out to the backyard again. I stood there, frozen in the beauty of the moment, yet still feeling a bit sorry for myself. I uttered a small prayer of praise, thanking the Almighty for this wonderful scene. And then, in a voice that was so clear it was almost audible, I heard God speak to my heart. ‘I didn’t create this moment for you and Doug,’ He seemed to say. ‘I created it for you and me.’ And together we danced in the moonlight.”

The world is a beautiful place, in other words, but men are oblivious, hopeless. As solace, Delilah presents romantic ballads about idealized lovers, narratives about children as cherubim, praise hymns about our Lord, our father.

Mary calls to reminisce: “Mama’s Nativity had a music box in it that played ‘Silent Night,’ but it was very old. I think she bought it before she and my father met. Some of the chimes were broken, so our ‘Silent Night’ was very strange, but we all liked it.”

Delilah laughs and says, “It was nearly silent.”

Mary says, “No, it wasn’t nearly silent. It just was—you missed a lot of the melody and you got a lot of the accompaniment, which made it very unusual. My dad did woodworking as a hobby. One summer he got a catalogue that had music boxes, so without telling anybody, he ordered a ‘Silent Night.’ He got out the Nativity scene, changed the music box, and threw away the old broken music box.”

Delilah: “And it was never the same.”

Mary: “And it’s still not the same. Every one of us can still sing the old ‘Silent Night’ that played on that music box for so many years. When we wound it up and heard that it was correct, we all just really attacked him. He didn’t know. He thought he was doing us a favor. And we were like, ‘Oh, Daddy! How could you do that to us?’ But we all still can sing that ‘Silent Night,’ that unusual version of it.”

Delilah: “Let me hear it.”

She hums the tune.

Once, a long time ago, something happened. It’s never been the same since. It was Dad’s fault. We’ll sort of forgive him and we’ll sort of not forgive him. What sustains me is the broken music box, which Dad inevitably tries to fix and isn’t fixable and is me.

Love is illusion

Love and Pain and the Whole Damn Thing, which my sister—one year older than I am—was obsessed with in high school and now has no recollection of whatsoever, centers on the romance between Walter (Timothy Bottoms), a depressed American college student, and Lila (Maggie Smith), who is old enough to be his mother and is dying. She possesses an odd beauty—bug-eyed, with a classical look resembling the androgynous-faced female personifications of Dusk and Dawn that Michelangelo sculpted for two tombs in Florence. You can tell how relaxed she’s feeling by whether her hair, bottle-red and somewhat thinning, has been pinned back like a naughty librarian’s or allowed to flow and tickle her shoulders. Rigid and prudish, or perhaps just very British, she wears mostly polyester dresses and tailored skirt suits, which, though modest, showcase her Barbie-doll legs.

One night she completely loses it, drinking hard liquor from a bottle shaped like a flamenco dancer, smoking a cigar in her hotel room, and writing “Adios” in lipstick on the mirror—her hair very much down, yellow and red suicide pills in her khaki lap, red-brown liquid stains on the chest of her blouse. Otherwise, Lila maintains a manicured appearance and modulates her tone of voice. When feeling ill, she recites a couple of (misremembered) lines from Pirates of Penzance to soothe herself: “The glass is rising very high/It will be a warm July.”

When Lila wakes up the morning after her suicide attempt, Walter tries to convince her that life is beautiful. During his long speech, he flings open the windows and says, “You see? There’s joy in the world.” The sun shines hard into the small hotel room, but only a moment later, workers unload a black coffin from a hearse parked in the street directly outside the hotel room. Walter slams the window shut, leaving her chambers as dark as they’d been a few seconds earlier. In another scene, Lila and Walter get in bed together for the first time, and it goes poorly. Lila gets up and tries to make a nonchalant, composed exit from Walter’s hotel room but instead trips and collapses. Maggie Smith plays the scene totally deadpan, getting up from the floor, arranging her hair, and walking out with a pair of proper white underpants caught around her ankles.

She tries to teach herself—and then Walter—Spanish from a little primer. “Amanece” and “oscurece,” she says, asking him to repeat these sounds back to her. He has an atrocious ear. The first, she explains, means “it lightens”; the second, “it darkens.” Dawn comes, then night. She seems unintentionally to be transmitting to him some deep, basic wisdom.

Throughout the film, their relationship proves herky-jerky. The sun comes out, but then the rain comes. “And what have you learned about me?” Lila asks. “That you can hurt me,” he replies, very much in love. Rain leaks into the road-tripping trailer in which they sleep one angry night together, which turns into many future happy nights. He steps on the gas (of life) and she puts on the brakes (of death). He’s never been happier. The question that haunts the entire movie: How does sex feel for someone on the verge of an early death—what squats in the parentheses, poised next to an orgasm? In the end, she dumps him via a handwritten letter: “My dear Walter, I know this is cruel…” Amanece. Oscurece.

Walter and Lila’s love is both impossible and possible for the same reason: she’s on the verge of dying. The impracticalities that long-term lovers suffer don’t concern this couple, as they do most of us. That is, when finally you’ve grown bored but are stuck with each other, the promise of death feels too far away. It becomes the new impossible dream.

What if Romeo and Juliet had lived? Soon enough, at the ripe old age of fourteen, they would have been arguing about whose turn it was to empty the dishwasher.

Movies love to imply that the man and woman held each other all night long, but you can’t do it. You have to roll away…

Love is illusion

I CAN SEE WHY you’re a Miss Nude USA regional finalist. You have beautiful long silky blue-black hair, a perfect pout, and a gorgeous body. Please send me the color photos you mentioned of yourself in fur, leather, lingerie, garter belt, and heels. Thank you. Payment enclosed.

Love is illusion

AGNÈS JAOUI’S The Taste of Others is the smartest, saddest movie about sex I’ve ever seen. Clara, asked by her student what the most difficult part of acting is, says, “To depend on another’s desire.” Valérie, surprised that she’s going out with Fred, says, “I would have never guessed it. We have nothing in common.” When Clara says about someone who likes her and the play in which she’s starring, “I don’t like his kind,” her friend Manie asks, “Is there anybody you like?” The film, which is also known as It Takes All Kinds, knows that what we love and hate about other people is how different they are from us: we’re disgusted by this difference, and we’re excited by it. Jaoui looks at otherness in a multitude of ways: bourgeois/bohemian, misbehavior/obedience, kindness/cruelty, blonde/brunette, actor/audience, teacher/student, brother/sister, sex/love, life/art. A bodyguard spends weeks protecting his client from Iranian kidnappers, but his client is mugged by local French thugs.

It’s myself I must be on guard against, because I always eroticize the person who isn’t in my life. As soon as she’s in my life, she’s as unastonishing to me as she is to herself. The Greek word eros denotes “want,” “lack,” “desire for that which is missing.” The lover wants what he doesn’t have. By definition, it’s impossible for him to have what he wants, since as soon as it’s had, it’s no longer wanting.

In the greatest book ever written, child Marcel’s hunger for Maman is indistinguishable from Swann’s jealousy over Odette, which is indistinguishable from adult Marcel’s desire for Albertine. The human animal never, ever gets what it wants; it can’t.

Before a single image of The Taste of Others appears, we hear a clatter of voices, as if a party is occurring in a room just out of sight: all the appeal of the not quite overheard. Throughout the film, the camera swivels away from its ostensible subjects to follow someone new, some new object of attention. In life, in love, otherness is sexy but unbridgeable. Art—literature, theater, visual art, opera, music—provides a framework to contemplate otherness and at least imagine a collapsing of distance.

Pornography is not, in my experience and opinion, a substitute for closeness; it’s a revel in distance.

We are all so afraid. We are all so alone. We all so need from the outside the assurance of our own worthiness to exist.

Love is a long, close scrutiny

HANDWRITTEN IN PENCIL on the back page of a library book I checked out:

“I understand your feelings about wanting to continue the relationship. However, my life is going in a different direction. I have other plans, and the motivation to continue the relationship is not there on my part. You, too, have new things ahead of you. There are nice things to remember from our relationship and I know we’ll remember them. It also scarred us both. I know you have problems to work out from it. I have my problems to work out from it. The bottom line is that it was not a happy relationship. My plan is to work on my problems and move on with my life, and I hope you’ll take on the same attitude. I wish you good luck.”

Love is illusion

THE MOST DRAMATIC sexual experience of my life was a yearlong relationship with someone whose entire philosophy, or at least bedroom behavior, was derived from the sex advice columns of racier women’s magazines. She wore extremely tight jeans tucked into catch-me/fuck-me boots, and she applied lipstick and eye shadow in such a way as to create the effect that she was in a perpetual state of arousal. Once, as I walked several paces ahead, she told the couple we were walking with that I had a great ass (I do!—or at least I did). In the missionary position, she would whisper, “Deeper,” and wrap her legs tightly around me. When she was on top, she would rub her breasts together, lick her lips, and run her hands through her hair, encouraging me to pull, hard, on her gold choker. When being penetrated from behind, she would suck on my thumb and look back at me with googly eyes, as if to prevent herself from losing consciousness.

Before performing fellatio, she’d moan, “Give me that big thing.” Although my equipment is only standard, she called it “porno penis.” (The first time we had sex, I’d just masturbated, imagining her, and I was at half-staff; she nevertheless said I was “the perfect size,” which is Cosmo 101.) She would kneel, gaze up at me as if with reverence, swallow, and at the end, wink. She’d slurp my semen as if it were maple syrup atop pancakes, which she made one Sunday morning in her underwear. Whenever I went down on her, she’d wrap her fingers—with brightly lacquered nails—around my hair, tug, and pretend to come almost immediately, thanking me profusely afterward. Once, when I licked her from behind, she exclaimed that she’d never been anywhere near this intimate with anyone before. Anal sex, with requisite screams. Her voice occupied a middle register exactly halfway between Baby Doll and Dominatrix. At dinner parties, she would mouth “I love you,” looking at me as if I were the president. I swear I’m not making this stuff up.

Her goal seemed to be to burn images of herself into my retina forever. Mission accomplished: I could never quite tell how much genuine feeling there was in her brilliant performance, and yet I still have quite specific sense memories of these events, which occurred more than twenty-five years ago. Humankind cannot bear very much reality.

Life/art

BENNA CARPENTER, the protagonist of Lorrie Moore’s best (and least appreciated) book, the antinovel Anagrams, says, “There is only one valid theme in literature: Life will disappoint you.” Love, in Anagrams, is never not seen against the background of death, never not seen in the context of physiology, evolution, devolution. Benna thinks about some birds, “From four blocks away I could see that the flock had a kind of group-life, a recognizable intelligence; no doubt in its random flutters there were patterns, but alone any one of those black birds would not have known what was up. Alone, as people live, they would crash their heads against walls.”

Why is she (why am I) so sad? On the upside, Benna obtains pleasure as well as terror from the mutable nature of language. “I’ve always been drawn to people who misspeak,” she says. “I consider it a sign of hidden depths, like pregnancy or alcoholism.” (When I first read Anagrams, I developed a crush on Moore, as do so many other male writers who read her work. Her punning and acidity make her seem like some fantasy sparring partner for the language- and irony-besotted. She gave a reading at her alma mater, where I was then teaching, and I hoped, a little naïvely, that she’d find my speech impediment irresistible.) Anagrams is suffused with varieties of misspeaking, and the central passage of the book, the last argument Benna has with her ex-husband, is organized around her mishearing “I never want to see you again” as “I want to see you again.”

Benna’s realization that “sloppiness was generally built into the language” tarnishes for her every act of communication, but it also causes her to conjure up pillow talk with Georgianne, her make-believe daughter: “ ‘Do you want to?’ she squeaks, in imitation of someone, something, I don’t know what, and she tweaks my nose, my skinny merink, my bony pumpkin.” Pure love, I’ve found, is pure language. Feeling becomes sound.

Love is a long, close scrutiny

A MY HEMPEL’S “WEEKEND” ends happily, but it has a very carefully orchestrated undertone of sadness, even despair. The story is divided neatly in half: the calm and the storm-for-now-averted. The first section is an evocation of the absolute epitome of middle-class familial contentment and pleasure: the weekend, kids, dogs, softball, drinks. There are the faintest hints of trouble: a broken leg and the dogs’ “mutiny,” but all is more or less joy.

Section break. Time passes.

Postprandial activities of no consequence: the adults smoke, throw horseshoes (a near ringer; this much heartbreak I can live with), pick ticks off sleeping dogs, repel mosquitoes. We’re on what feels like Long Island, and the men are readying to return to the city for work the next morning. When the men kiss the women good night—their whiskers scratching the women’s cheeks—the women want the men not to shave but to “stay,” which is the story’s perfect final word, conveying both sweetness but also the command of a dog’s owner to a dog and the strong implication that sooner than later, the bewhiskered men will wind up like the dogs, straying, “barking, mutinous.”

Here, right now, this is gorgeous. Please let’s keep it so. As soon as I think this/say this, I’ve ruined paradise.