... having been breathed out

In December of 1944, writing hard for the comics and grumbling about it, working on the novel she'd been thinking about for two years, The Click of the Shutting, making notes for short stories at night, entertaining more love possibilities than she could possibly handle (a Virginia or two, the socialite Natica Waterbury, an Anne and an Ann, the model Chloe, et al.) and feeling abysmally poor, Pat still kept her eyes on the prize. She framed her desire for the "best" in life in metaphors saturated by the war and couched in the language of the enemy. (Her diary note is in bad German.)

How do they do it, the ones who make love
without love? Beautiful as dancers,
gliding over each other like ice-skaters
over the ice, fingers hooked
inside each other’s bodies, faces
red as steak, wine, wet as the
children at birth whose mothers are going to
give them away. How do they come to the
come to the come to the God come to the
still waters, and not love
the one who came there with them, light
rising slowly as steam off their joined
skin? These are the true religious,
the purists, the pros, the ones who will not
accept a false Messiah, love the
priest instead of the God. They do not
mistake the lover for their own pleasure,
they are like great runners: they know they are alone
with the road surface, the cold, the wind,
the fit of their shoes, their over-all cardio-
vascular health—just factors, like the partner
in the bed, and not the truth, which is the
single body alone in the universe
against its own best time.

It was Proust, after all, who wrote that neurosis gives plot to life, and Pat’s own plot, like that of most of her characters, was founded on repetition. She did the same things over and over again. For variation, she tried to do them all at once.

He wanted me to come to dinner, but I said no. No, I said, no. I believe in no. I believe in a hard, resistant, diamantine no. No and no again. No, I will not. No and never and not. I prefer not to. I have grown sick to death of yes. Oh yes, I will. Yes, certainly, of course, yes, darling, yes, sweetheart. Yes, yes, yes. And she said yes.

And as they walked away, hand in hand, I felt as if I could cry, but I did not. No, not. I will not cry.

Shame arrives before guilt.

But there is no going back, Harry. The mind is its own place, and it bears us backward and forward. It has its own architecture of the past that comes from real rooms and real streets, but they are made over and over again in time and now reside within, not without. Once those places were filled with the noise of garbage trucks and sirens and the sentence fragments of chattering pedestrians and the odors of the moving seasons, but the dense visions and clamor and smells have been simplified into interior mental codes grown stiff with words. The future is made up of that same stuff–elemental spaces we inhabit with wishes or fears. Why so many fears? There is no single story in that foggy region of childhood to explain you, Harry.

Conventions of the time
held them together.
It was a period
(very long) in which
the heart once given freely
was required, as a formal gesture,
to forfeit liberty: a consecration
at once moving and hopelessly doomed.

As to ourselves:
fortunately we diverged
from these requirements,
as I reminded myself
when my life shattered.
So that what we had for so long
was, more or less,
voluntary, alive.
And only long afterward
did I begin to think otherwise.

We are all human—
we protect ourselves
as well as we can
even to the point of denying
clarity, the point
of self-deception. As in
the consecration to which I alluded.

And yet, within this deception,
true happiness occurred.
So that I believe I would
repeat these errors exactly.
Nor does it seem to me
crucial to know
whether or not such happiness
is built on illusion:
it has its own reality.
And in either case, it will end.

Tributaries
feeding into a large river: I had
many lives. In the provisional world,
I stood where the fruit was,
flats of cherries, clementines,
under Hallie’s flowers.

I had many lives. Feeding
into a river, the river
feeding into a great ocean. If the self
becomes invisible has it disappeared?

I thrived. I lived
not completely alone, alone
but not completely, strangers
surging around me.
That’s what the sea is:
we exist in secret.

It should not be forgotten that Harry had been rewriting her own life in psychoanalysis for years, that what she called a slowly developing “revisionist text” of her life had begun to replace an earlier “mythical” one. People and events had taken on new significance for her. Her memories had changed. Harry had not recovered any dubious memories from her childhood, but on February 19, 2003, only a month before Beneath was shown, she told me that when she looked back on her life, vast stretches of it had vanished. With a little prompting, she could easily fill in those blanks with fictions. Weren’t most memories a form of fiction anyway? She remembered what I had forgotten, and I remembered what she had forgotten, and when we remembered the same story, didn’t we remember it differently? But neither of us was prevaricating. The scenes of the past were continually being shifted and reshuffled and seen again from the vantage point of the present, that’s all, and the changes take place without our awareness. Harry had reinterpreted any number of memories. Her whole life looked different.

And, Harry asked, where does it begin? The thoughts, words, joys, and fears of other people enter us and become ours. They live in us from the start.

I remember the afternoon I stroked your curls over and over when we were first in love. I remember lying with you in bed and feeling your fingers in my hair as you petted me for minutes on end and how lovely it felt, and I remember the daylight in the room, and I remember our love. What is the memory of love? Do we actually recall the feeling? No. We know it was there, but the manic desire isn’t there in the memory. What do we recollect exactly? The sensations are not reproduced. And yet, an emotional tone or color is evoked, something weightless or heavy, pleasant or unpleasant, and I can summon it. I remember lying in bed with Felix. But is it one time or is it many times merged together from the early days of our clutching love, when I ached for his touch? I know I held his head sometimes when we fucked. I know I put my lips to his ear afterward and whispered words long forgotten, probably stupid words. But do I really remember a single time, the once only? Yes, the Regina in Paris, with the uncomfortable beds we had to push together. Five stars and those beds. I think I remember the line of light between the heavy curtains as I sat on top of him, banging him. Long ago.

I remember coldness, too, his back to me. The distance between us, his eyes dead to me. I remember this: at a dinner. Where was it? The caustic joke about marriage, not ours, of course, but the institution in general. What were his words? I can’t remember. I recall I started, looked at him. In my mind I see a plate with a gold rim. He turned his head. Now it returns with the memory, pain, perhaps not as acute, but pain arrives with a recollection so vague it has almost disappeared—there was a joke, a plate, a look, and a cutting pain. Is pain more durable than joy, in memory?

Life is walking tiptoe over landmines. We never know what’s coming and, if you want my opinion, we don’t have a good grip on what’s behind us either. But we sure as hell can spin a story about it and break our brains trying to get it right.