Screen Tests

by Kate Zambreno

  Double

  The poet and I share the same birthday, although we are a decade apart, which is to say I am a decade older than him. When I found out that we had the same birthday, I thought that this must somehow explain the instant kinship I felt with him, also because we both came from lower-middle-class Catholic backgrounds, backgrounds we had somehow transcended, or wanted to transcend, by being writers. On my first birthday while living in this city, we decided to meet up. We ate salads at a vegetarian restaurant and then went to a bookstore where he bought me the hardback of Wittgenstein’s Philosophical Investigations. I still read the poet’s inscription every time I look at it. I often think about how Wittgenstein thought his book was a failure, but he thought he should publish it because he was worried about his students plagiarizing his ideas from his lectures before he published them. It was generous for the poet to buy me the book, which was expensive. He was effusive like that. Often he paid for our meals with a credit card that he then expensed as a business meeting for tax purposes. I have often found poets, especially the poets who live in this city, to be the most money-minded and hierarchical of writers, perhaps because they have to be. The poet was interested in knowing every famous writer possible to know, and he would often mention these friends to me. I don’t know if that’s why we became estranged, his nature I might describe as arriviste. I think it could have been something I said or did, or didn’t say or do. My friendships with writers I’ve met in this city have often fallen apart, having begun too fast and having often felt transactional. Even though we are no longer friends, we still write to each other on or around our birthday. He often communicates with a flurry of emojis that can vibrate or send out confetti. One of the last times I saw the poet was at a dinner party at his apartment, where he sat me next to a magazine editor he was hoping would write a profile of him someday, which happened, I noticed with some bemusement, last year. At the party, he told the story of how he got into the private university that he attended, despite not excelling in school. His acceptance letter was written to his name and address, but referenced different information than what was provided in his application. He realized that another student, with his same name, which was not an uncommon name, was the one accepted. He went to the school anyhow, met well-connected people, became the assistant to a famous writer, and even became a fairly famous poet himself, as far as the limits of that go.

  W. at the Movies

  After one of his Cambridge lectures, the philosopher would need to go see a movie. He would sit in the front row and let it wash over him, “like a shower bath,” to try to expunge the disgust he felt for himself. His favorite actresses were Carmen Miranda and Betty Hutton. In 1949, he traveled on the Queen Mary third class, to visit his friend and former student, Norman Malcolm, in Ithaca, New York. He wouldn’t let his friend pick him up upon arrival in New York City. Perhaps, the philosopher wrote to him, I’ll meet a beautiful girl on the boat who will help me, just like in the movies. He also joked that he hoped to be introduced to Betty Hutton. At that point he felt too anemic to practice philosophy anymore. He was diagnosed with prostate cancer after returning to England and died soon after. He didn’t live to see the breakdown of his favorite star Betty Hutton, whose film career ended due to a contract dispute at Paramount in the early 1950s. Afterwards she worked in radio, in Las Vegas nightclubs, in television, and did a stint on Broadway. In the late ’60s, when the actress was in her forties, her depression and addiction to various pills worsened, coinciding with the collapse of her fourth marriage, bankruptcy, and the death of her mother in a house fire. She had a nervous breakdown and attempted suicide when she lost her singing voice a couple years later. Eventually she converted to Catholicism and worked as a cook and housekeeper at a rectory in Rhode Island. The philosopher didn’t live to see her path converge with his. In the summer of 1920, he also had a breakdown and went to work at a monastery, as a gardener.

  Author Photo, Part One

  Roland Barthes is smoking a cigarette.

  James Baldwin is smoking a cigarette.

  Karl Ove Knausgaard is smoking a cigarette.

  Clarice Lispector is smoking a cigarette.

  Marguerite Duras is smoking a cigarette.

  Susan Sontag is smoking a cigarette.

  Alejandra Pizarnik is smoking a cigarette.

  Paul Bowles is smoking a cigarette.

  Jean Genet is smoking a cigarette.

  Yukio Mishima is smoking a cigarette.

  David Wojnarowicz is smoking a cigarette.

  Ingeborg Bachmann is smoking a cigarette.

  Roberto Bolaño is smoking a cigarette.

  Samuel Beckett is smoking a cigarette.

  Carson McCullers is smoking a cigarette.

  Thomas Bernhard is eating an ice cream cone.

  Withdrawn

  I find myself often thinking of a writer I used to correspond with, who every decade publishes, or published, a slim, witty novel of language and ideas. When I first began writing in public, around when my own first slim novel came out, we would leave comments on each other’s blog posts and then would continue the conversation in long email chains. But I haven’t heard from her since I began publishing books on larger presses and moved to this city. This also coincided with the publication of her last novel, which she had worked on diligently for an entire decade, which, once published, was met mostly with silence. Although my move to the city had nothing to do with publishing, I was aware of an impression that I had suddenly become a writer of this city. By the time this writer and I had begun communicating she had withdrawn largely from her literary community, or communities, in despair over the hostility of what she would call the poetics coteries, and when we stopped communicating I got the impression she had decided to withdraw from her friendships with writers completely, or at least from me. Or, I wonder now if it was in fact I who withdrew from her? Our references to each other were not only of quotes from Foucault, Duras, or Blanchot, but also of film, like our longing for writing that was like the cinema of Wong Kar-wai. After a lengthy conversation about a theory of emotions in literature, both reading emotionally and emotional works, it turned out we both considered Broadcast News to be one of our favorite movies. It was one of the first movies that made me realize something mainstream could be art, she wrote me. Like Billy Wilder but in the ’80s. I had written to her that I often wish I could be like Holly Hunter, allowing myself to voluptuously weep once a day, as if to clear the pressures from my life. She wrote me that sometimes when she feels like she is totally losing it she wishes she could channel that scene where Albert Brooks puts on a French or Spanish pop song and begins mouthing along expertly to the words. I knew exactly what scene she meant, as I thought about it often and have watched the clip online countless times since then. Albert Brooks on the couch mixing the margarita in the glass with his two fingers, singing along to Francis Cabrel, guzzling the drink with both hands, falling back into the couch with that loud gulping sigh at the end. He has just been rejected professionally and, he senses, romantically. There is something rapturous to the mania of that moment, of being alone at home drinking while everyone else is working on the breaking story he has been shut off from, abandoned in favor of the blond, dashing William Hurt character, the sinking further and further in, like an ecstatic acquiescence to failure.

  Ghost

  We wrote to each other worried that S. hadn’t written any blog posts for a while or left comments on our blogs. We hoped she was okay. Her husband, a Latin American poet who since becoming her ex-husband has won a major award, had recently left a comment on my friend’s also pseudonymous blog. This felt like some sort of rupture in the fabric of community and semiprivacy that we had created. Did S. tell her husband the public identity of our friend, whose one novel in the ’90s is now considered an important work of New Narrative, in its meditation on identity, language, and friendship? Had our covers been blown? S.’s husband had never commented on his wife’s own blog—we didn’t even
know if he read it. My friend wrote me that she felt that S. was leaving her messages in the night somehow, but I didn’t know whether she meant actual messages, like emails, or somehow psychic messages. My friend responded politely, even cheerfully, to the husband, the Latin American poet, in the comments of her blog, although I knew this breach of security meant my friend would most likely disappear forever from the Internet, worried over others finding out her identity. It wasn’t supposed to be about names and who knew whom, but conversations about literature. My friend wrote me that the husband leaving messages as opposed to our friend S. felt like a story in Bolaño’s The Return. Later, after we had been out of contact for a while, I read the collection. For a while I thought she was referring to the title story of The Return, when the narrator dies on the floor of a Paris disco and finds out to his horror that the move into the afterlife is exactly like that scene with Patrick Swayze in Ghost, where he sees a diaphanous ghost version of himself floating above his dead body. The story later advances into a plot about necrophilia. I realized that this couldn’t be the story my friend meant, but rather another story in Bolaño’s The Return, but even reading through it now, I have no idea which one. What is wonderful about Bolaño, my friend wrote to me at the time of our correspondence, is that his main characters are poets and revolutionaries.

  Second Dog

  For a long time we wanted to get a second dog. Then we had a baby, and I had to give up this desire for a while. Now I might want a second child. I also still want a second dog. When I think about getting a second dog, I think about what we might name the dog. It’s exciting that we won’t have to disguise naming the dog after a writer or artist. Our dog is named Genet, and I fantasize about a little terrier named Violette Leduc, so if our Genet ignores her or humps her, I can pretend I’m enacting some literary gossip, as Violette Leduc always abjected herself to Genet in her desire for his friendship. With babies, there is more pressure to at least disguise one’s pretensions. Our daughter is named after Leonora Carrington, but we call her Leo. On the playground she plays with a girl named Cy (after Cy Twombly), a Willa (after Willa Cather), and a Nico. There was a Joaquin today. There is an Emile (or Emil)—we don’t know whether if that’s after Zola, or, what I originally thought, Cioran, although the name might have nothing to do with writing at all. I have no idea what we would name the second child. I scan my bookshelves and nothing feels right. Perhaps this is a sign we are not going to have a second child. I think it’s more likely we will get a second dog.

  John Wayne

  On a recent Saturday I attended my four-year-old niece’s birthday party up in Westchester, New York. The party was held at a gymnastics center in one of those half-occupied corporate campuses. The adults stood around watching small bodies bouncing up and down in anticipation while waiting in line to jump up and down on a trampoline. There was something exhausted to the way we all stood around in clumps, saying hello or making small talk, watching for the tiny bouncing body that was ours. The previous birthday parties I had attended of my sister’s two daughters had been held in the backyard of my sister’s house, as they were born at the beginning and then the end of the summer. The parties usually featured some entertainment—a clown, a balloon man, a puppeteer, a bouncy house, or some combination of these things—and beer, which was helpful so the adults could have something to hold in their hands. There was no beer at the gymnastics center, although when the immediate family went back to the house afterwards, my sister did offer me a beer, which I accepted, although I wasn’t able to drink it, having forgot where I placed it, as can happen when one is around small children. My father and my aunt, his sister, were there, having driven in from the Chicago suburbs, as my father doesn’t like to fly. My father tries never to miss one of his grandchildren’s birthday parties. My aunt and father stood around at first, while on the bouncy mats at the gymnasium, making some small talk with the adults, and later ate their pizza speechlessly in what was known as the party room, where all of the four-year-olds played their toy kazoos at once. My father and aunt were likely exhausted from the travel, but also exhausted because they are old and in poor health. They were exhausted before all the standing. I observe on this trip that my father has gotten heavier and seems less mobile than before. When my father measures the distance between the last time he saw my one-and-a-half-year-old daughter, he observes that she’s become more mobile even though it’s only been a few months, and I observe he’s become less mobile. My aunt, who I haven’t seen since last summer, seems to have lost weight, although she is still not very mobile. They both seem gray and unhappy. A startle to realize that my aunt is only in her late sixties—not so old, I tell myself, but only because I myself have gotten older. My aunt is now a senior citizen, but she is still the baby of the family, and my father, being her last surviving sibling, takes it upon himself to try to look after her, as she in turn looks after him. In this way when together they resemble an old married couple, which I realize the adults in the room probably think, if they don’t know my sister well, which most of them do not. Still, I am a kid to them, even though I am suddenly a middle-aged adult. On this visit, my father and I take my daughter to a playground near where I live. Over this trip—where I see them only twice as they are staying near my sister’s, which we all prefer—both my aunt and my father tell me that they each bought a new television set. My father has now told me several times he bought a new television set, and each time I let him tell me again, as if for the first time. My father’s new television set is much larger—seventy inches, he says, to which each time, whether over the phone or now in person, I attempt some sort of noise that seems appropriate to the amount of space his new television set takes up. However, I have no idea how many inches the television set that’s been in his living room for the last decade was, and how it compares to the new one. His son, my brother, the computer science professor who lives in the Midwest and is far more dutiful than I, helped him install it, he tells me. He still has the same, much smaller second television set in the basement, or perhaps he moved the larger set upstairs downstairs, replacing the much smaller set, but he doesn’t watch television down there anymore, he tells me. I have a new television set, he tells me, which I interpret as another way of saying: I am not going down the stairs anymore. Also, as we sit on the bench at the playground and watch my daughter go down a slide, he tells me, after much nudging as to the state of his health, that he’s worried about not passing his night-vision driving test, so he’s also saying: I got a new, larger screen so I can see better. On the television set he watches a different John Wayne Western every night. He has a collection of 250 Westerns, he tells me, which seems like an exaggeration, although likely not all are John Wayne movies. The Internet just told me that John Wayne made “at least 73 films.” My father has mostly stopped reading—he is, or was, an avid reader of histories and biographies—but he still watches one Western a night. My father also tells me, again, that recently he also purchased a new, much larger fish tank. Although he doesn’t wish to go on trips to Italy, or buy new clothes, even though all of his clothes are worn, he chooses to buy a new, much larger television set, and a new, much larger fish tank, all in the living room, where he spends the majority of his time. So he has two new, larger screens—on one he watches John Wayne, and the other, fish swimming by. Although my father has to stand to watch the fish, as he cannot reorganize the living room space, which has been the same configuration since my mother died fifteen years ago. She died in that living room, in a hospital bed facing the television set, which was not on, as my mother didn’t like to watch TV, and by that time, she wouldn’t have been able to see it or hear anything anyway. It would be nice, I tell my father, while sitting on the park bench, feeding my daughter some of her granola bar, if you could find a way to be able to sit on the couch and watch the fish swimming by, as opposed to standing over them, which doesn’t seem relaxing at all. But while saying this, I also realize the problems he has getting up from a couch now
, which I observed at my sister’s house, so perhaps he’d rather stand while watching them. While at the birthday party I speak to my aunt much less, as she irritates me, mostly because of the tone in which she talks to me, and the way she calls me Katie instead of Kate, but she also tells me she got a new television set in her living room, the house my father and she were born in, where she lives now all by herself. She feels guilty, she tells me, throwing out a perfectly good television set, which also annoys me, my family’s extreme thriftiness. I can picture them both in their own living rooms at night, sitting in each of their armchairs that have grown dingy and thin, with the impression of their bodies and past bodies. I do not know what my aunt is watching on the television set, but I know my father is watching a John Wayne film, one he has already seen many times before. I think there is something relaxing to my father about that repetition. He knows the story line, and the history has already happened. The last time I was home, or at my father’s house, was two years ago, when I flew in to take my father to specialist appointments, as he had a health scare. I promised my father that that night we would watch one of his row of DVDs. I picked The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance, as it was directed by John Ford and stars Jimmy Stewart alongside John Wayne. I hoped it would be a Western that artfully commented on Westerns. Jimmy Stewart is my father’s second favorite actor, after John Wayne, and I’ve always suspected this is because both of these actors were Reagan Republicans, like my father. Also the film stars Vera Miles, who my father and I both like, me for Psycho, and him for The Searchers. It was such a strange film, The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance. I’m still thinking about it. What was strangest to me is that Jimmy Stewart and John Wayne also played younger men, as the film flashed back twenty-five years, to their youthful idealism in a small frontier town. They were supposed to be very young in the flashback scenes, and probably in their forties in the present-day scenes, but both actors were quite obviously in their fifties. The film opens in the present day with a funeral for the John Wayne character, a rancher who is one of the last cowboys, who the Jimmy Stewart character, now a politician, insists can still wear his boots in the coffin. I think this was supposed to symbolize that the West, as they knew it, was also now dead. There was something so grating about John Wayne’s voice, the way he kept calling the Jimmy Stewart character “Pilgrim,” but I assume that what I found grating in tone my father felt soothing. I wonder if when we watched it together, in the basement of my father’s house, I thought about my father, and his eventual funeral, especially since he was at the time very sick, but would then get better. While writing this I also remember a strange event that occurred while on the playground during my father’s visit. While I helped my daughter around the jungle gym, teaching her how to go down a slide, a talkative five-year-old asked me if I was my daughter’s grandmother or grandfather, which I had no idea how to react to, although my father laughed it off. How strange that she would think I was so much older than I obviously was. Then I realized, mathematically, I could have been her grandmother. It wasn’t that she didn’t understand my gender that bothered me, but that she assumed that I was old. But of course to her I was old, even if I could be made still to feel so young.