by Susan Choi
In the trance that overtook her while reading, Karen was not sure how much time had passed. She remembered Mr. Kingsley once telling them that if they simply read Shakespeare at the same rate that actors performed it, they’d be able to read entire plays in a couple of hours. This was the sort of putatively encouraging but actually critical and discouraging advice Mr. Kingsley had constantly given them despite his never having, Karen would bet, read an entire Shakespeare play in two hours or even an entire Shakespeare play in his life, yet it was a piece of advice that had stuck in her head ever since. It had given her the obviously flawed idea that reading time and staging time must be similar when most times and certainly this time that wasn’t the case. It seemed to have taken her minutes to read through the play, and yet the play took up one hundred plus pages and was stuffed full of invisible silence, and not just the kind that takes up time onstage. There was copious onstage silence, that might take minutes or hours to enact, but there was also a silence of meaning, a refusal to spell out the facts. This refusal Karen felt as a challenge, although it took her some time, of having feelings and trying to name them, before she hit on the name for the feeling. Challenge. Very personal challenge. This isn’t to say that Karen felt the play was a personal challenge to her in the sense of a message from Martin, that letter he’d promised, belatedly sent. Karen isn’t crazy. She doesn’t hear the lampshade talking, or read messages in her eggs. This is to say that she felt, from herself, to herself, a strong challenge to enter the play’s silences and to utter their meaning.
* * *
MANY WORDS ARE both nouns and verbs. Present/present. Insult/insult. Object/object. Permit/permit. A list of such words, compiled for the business traveler not fluent in English, is pinned to my bulletin board. It’s meant to illustrate not just the words’ versatility but the fact that in each word the emphasis shifts the same way, from the first syllable to the second, with the sense shift from object to action. “I have a PREsent to preSENT to you.” “The stapler is an OBject to which I hope you won’t obJECT.” “This PERmit perMITS me to fire you.” These example sentences are of my composition. I like the list of words because it’s like a monotonous poem and also because the “rule” it represents applies only to those words and is otherwise useless. “Audition” is also a word that is both noun and verb, but it always sounds the same. It’s a word that means, literally, “the power of hearing,” or “a hearing,” as well as “to perform an audition,” a circular definition that is actually the first under “verb” in my dictionary. In the verb form most true to its source (audire: to hear), the action belongs to the listener: David is auditioning actors for roles in the play—he is “hearing them out.” But actors, poorly educated egomaniacs though they may be, understand about power. They’re the reason the circular verb definition—audition: to perform an audition—has become the most popular one: I’m auditioning this weekend, I auditioned for that, I auditioned for him, etc. “Audition” dramatizes the struggle between subject and object, between doing and being done to.
My hatred of actors and my resistance to including myself among them complicated the resolve I had made, after reading the play, that no one else but me would play the Girl. I wanted to act without being an actor, and definitely without having to act like an actor. But no less than I hated actors I also hated people who thought they were so good they just asked to be given a role. And so in the days leading up to auditions I never told David I was coming nor simply asked him to give me the part, never chose a piece, never rehearsed it, never reconciled myself to being auditioned—and never reconciled myself to not auditioning.
The morning of the auditions I printed out a monologue but I didn’t learn it. I didn’t even look at it. I drove to the club David used as a theatre, and sat outside in my car until I knew they were just about done—because I’d helped with the schedule, as usual making myself indispensable about these auditions that David had never suggested I come to, having almost certainly forgotten our long-ago conversation about my great talent because he’d been drunk at the time. Sitting in the car I was surprised to have no idea what I would do. I tried to audition myself. I listened hard and heard nothing. Then as if she’d been given a cue, around the time Karen sensed they were finished she got out of the car and walked quickly inside where a very young, petite, pretty actress was in conversation with David who’d clearly just auditioned her or perhaps relinquished subjectivity and allowed her to do the auditioning, from the looks of his slightly flushed face. Karen knew auditions made David anxious as if he were the one who had something to prove. Maybe that knowledge emboldened her. Grabbing a chair she sat down just across from him, shoehorning in on his conversation with the actress, who faltered and smiled and finally went for her bag while David’s assistant director picked up his clipboard and flipped pompously through sign-up sheets that Karen had printed herself. “David’s just about done if you’d give us a second,” said the assistant director but Karen disregarded him and only focused on David. “You don’t think I can do this,” she said.
“Do what?” David said.
“You don’t think I can do this,” she said again, just the same way. David clicked.
“I don’t think you can do this,” said David.
“You don’t think I can do this,” said Karen.
“I don’t think you can do this,” said David.
“You don’t think I can do this,” said Karen.
“I don’t think you can do this,” said David.
“You don’t think I can do this.”
“I don’t think you can do this?”
“You don’t think I can do this,” she confirmed, because you don’t fucking listen, you have no audition, you have no sense of hearing at all.
“I don’t think you can do this?” David said angrily.
“You don’t think I can do this!”
“I don’t think you can do this?”
“You don’t think I can do this!”
“What the fuck is going on?” cried David’s assistant director.
“Shut the fuck up, Justin! I don’t think you can do this!”
“You don’t think I can do this?”
“The purpose of repetition,” Mr. Kingsley once said, “is control of context. People cry, scream, grab each other’s crotches, rip their clothes off … repeating the same set of words…”
Karen and David didn’t grab each other’s crotches, or rip off their clothes. They did scream, with increasing gusto. Karen did cry, a bit, but only once she had gotten back home. REpeat/rePEAT weren’t on Karen’s noun-to-verb list, but they ought to have been, since they work the same way: an action, event, or other thing that’s done over again/to say something again one has already said. “You don’t think I can do this,” repeated, also means, “There are things I would like to do over.”
* * *
I’VE SAID THAT David interested me. Not Sarah. Sarah obsessed me. I don’t use the word lightly. Remember that the two words don’t represent differences of degree. The dictionary tells us that to be interested by someone is to feel “attentive, concerned, or curious.” Curiosity is a friendly emotion and even a moral position. Those whom we make the objects of our curiosity we don’t prejudge or condemn. We don’t fear and loathe them. My therapist, in our time together, often urged me to “stay curious” and it was a nice thing for him to try and make me do, unsuccessful as he was, because curious is a nice way to feel.
Being curious toward, interested in, David made me feel like I’d bought into him, made a choice. By contrast, being obsessed by Sarah was a form of enslavement. “Obsess” comes from the Latin obsessus, past participle of obsidere, from ob- (against or in front of) + sedere (to sit) = “sit opposite to” (literal) = “to occupy, frequent, besiege” (figurative). When we say we are obsessed, we say we’re possessed, controlled, haunted by something or somebody else. We are beset, under siege. We can’t choose. I was obsessed with Sarah, meaning obsessed by her, deprived by her very exis
tence of some quality I needed to feel complete and in charge of myself. If you’d asked Sarah, however, she would have said she’d done nothing to me. That’s how it is with the people by whom we’re obsessed. They’ve obsessed us, they’ve transitive-verbed us, but no one could be more surprised than they are.
So who makes it happen—obsession? Unlike the things that I did blame her for, I didn’t blame Sarah for this. I didn’t blame either of us. Obsession is an accidental haunting, by a person not aware she’s a ghost. I knew Sarah was my ghost, but she’d forgotten I even existed.
Karen and Sarah, her old friend the author, went from Skylight Books to an expensive and stylish Mexican restaurant made out of huge white sheets of linen like the caravan of some sultan, if sultans ate Mexican food. The fact that it never rains in Los Angeles is most impressed on visitors by those business establishments that don’t bother having a roof. Potted palms, white banquettes, service kiosks for the staff glittering with stemware and steak knives, all sat out under the orangish night sky with its one or two faint fuzzy stars. Aircraft cable crisscrossed overhead to form a grid from which hung fairy lights and bloated paper lanterns and the vast white linen sheets which were supposed to divide the night air into “private” dining regions so that the feeling, for a person who was sober, was of being surrounded by some giant’s drying laundry. Karen could see Sarah was nervous. Even Karen’s most attentive, private-practice-ready “listening face” couldn’t downshift Sarah into some lower gear. Sarah was almost at the bottom of her daiquiri and Karen, as Sarah talked, gestured to the waiter to bring another daiquiri and another of what Karen was drinking, a fancy nonalcoholic limeade full of what looked like lawnmower mulch. Because the perspective of a nondrinking person seems to be unique, especially among people who read, allow me to break in again and observe that in my experience people who drink never don’t when they find themselves with a nondrinker. In fact, they drink more. Nondrinkers make drinkers uncomfortable. The situation they’re afraid of—getting drunk in the presence of someone who’s sober—is exactly the one they create.
“But enough about me, what about you?” Sarah cried, at the end of a long recitation of unexpected things that had happened to her on her book tour, none of which could have been more unexpected than one of her characters turning up, in the flesh, to invalidate all Sarah’s memories of her. “What have you been up to the past dozen years?”
“Oh, this and that,” Karen said, smiling to show that she didn’t feel that this question came too late to be polite and that it might not even be sincere. “I’ve mostly worked as an office manager, personal assistant, personal organizer, stuff like that—you probably never knew it in high school but I’m highly organized.” Their shared laughter came right on cue. Just as she’d imagined, Karen told Sarah about her recent trip to Vietnam with her brother, in this way illustrating her carefree and well-funded life.
“Oh my God, your brother!” Sarah said, exulting in the fact that she remembered this person’s existence. “How is he? What is he doing?”
Karen answered Sarah’s questions in the same way she’d speak of her brother to any random stranger, citing all the most expected, least remarkable facts, that might belong to anyone. Single, lived here in LA, worked in corporate law. Karen’s brother, with whom she shared a face, and many other less visible things. Karen knew that Sarah couldn’t even pretend to find these unrevealing facts about Karen’s brother to be exactly what she’d expected, or the last things she’d expected. Karen’s brother had been so far beneath Sarah’s notice, back in the past, that Sarah struggled now to fit him in the picture, and even seemed to think Karen would marvel at the sound of his name. “Kevin, Kevin, Kevin, oh my God,” Sarah harped, as if Karen’s brother’s name were a piece of obscure trivia. “I remember … oh my God! He had this razor-blade necklace he thought was so cool, do you remember that thing?” Did Karen remember it? Did Karen remember every granule of the childhood landscape she shared with her brother, in which the razor-blade necklace, believe it or not, was not such a major landmark? Still, Karen nodded and smiled as if she and Sarah were keeping pace down Kevin Memory Lane, as if the razor-blade necklace turned and gleamed enormously above them like the sun.
How many rooms house the past? In their hometown, space came cheap. Even poor people’s houses were flabby with space; they were just cheaply made. The apartment Sarah shared with her mother, Karen and Kevin’s house that they shared with their mother, were crappy structures full of water bugs and mold, faucet handles and doorknobs that fell off, windows and doors that wouldn’t open or wouldn’t stay shut, but they were never cramped, there was always space, dank space, more than you could decently fill. Karen and Kevin, before and after their parents’ divorce, always had their own rooms: enormous rooms with low, stained ceilings, dirty matted shag carpet, accordion-style closet doors that had come off their tracks, sliding windows in aluminum frames that stuck and shrieked and developed a weird, whitish rust, like salt deposits, that came off on your hands. One room like that was bad enough, but two was killing. All through their childhood Karen and Kevin had continually migrated into one room or the other, they resisted each having a room of their own, they understood in their bodies, if not in their minds, that two bodies in one room defeats the room, but one body in one room is defeated. And so each kept sneaking into the other one’s room—sneaking, because throughout their childhood there was always someone holding the opinion that they shouldn’t share a room, whether stating it directly or not. Before the divorce, it was their father and grandmother who held this opinion. After the divorce, their mother for a while had a boyfriend who held this opinion. In high school, it was Sarah who held this opinion—not consciously, because Sarah did not even know that Karen frequently shared the same room with her brother. It was just that Sarah would have found it bizarre that Karen, in a house with four bedrooms and three inhabitants, might share a room with her brother. And so Karen and Kevin, for the sake of not seeming bizarre to Sarah, withdrew to their two separate rooms. Kevin, Karen understood, had shared Karen’s grim determination not to spook such a friend-prize as Sarah. It was possible that Kevin—twelve the year Karen met Sarah, still requiring “husky” jeans, soft and pale and pudgy and awkward and unappealingly bashful—felt that grim determination even more. Kevin gawped at Sarah from behind the doorframes. It was possible that Kevin had purchased the laughable razor blade on a chain, with saved allowance, from the head shop in the mall, in the hopes of winning Sarah’s approval.
So, yes, in Sarah’s version of Karen’s childhood, Kevin barely existed, while in Karen’s and Kevin’s versions of their childhood, Sarah loomed. Sarah had impressed herself by remembering Kevin, while Karen knew it was too much to hope Kevin might forget Sarah. When Karen booked her current trip to LA, she deliberately failed to tell her brother that she was coming this particular day to intersect Sarah on Sarah’s book tour. She didn’t trust him not to want to come along. She didn’t trust him not to challenge her vision of Sarah, which was the product of so much analytical labor, with his own vision which was sealed in the amber of a childhood crush. But at least Kevin had a vision of Sarah, unlike Sarah’s nonvision of him, in which her drunken recollection of his name was another of the unexpected things that had happened to her. “Kevin! Oh my God. So did you guys move to LA together? That’s so sweet. I remember you guys were so close.” Yes, they were, but no, she didn’t. She remembered no such thing. Karen, ordering Sarah a third daiquiri, smiled again.
“We were both living here for a while, and I really enjoyed it. But now I’m back home.”
It took Sarah a moment. “You mean our hometown?”
“Home sweet home.”
“You’re living there?” Sarah’s high-gear voice dropped an octave. She’d finally forgotten herself, and that sardonic quality of knowing—not necessarily caring, but knowing—that Karen remembered so clearly, returned. Sarah had always seemed to know. Not you, but something you wanted to know. Now she s
eemed to see their town, dumped over a neighboring table like so many dirty guacamole bowls. “I never imagined you’d live there. I’d sooner imagine I’d live there, and I never imagined I’d live there. How is it?”
“It’s great. It’s not the same place we lived when we were kids. I mean, that place is still there, but I don’t spend much time there.”
“I hated living there so much. I always felt so powerless.”
“We were kids. We weren’t supposed to have power.”
“You had power. You had that car.”
How Karen’s crappy high-school car loomed for Sarah! It was one of the things that fascinated Karen about Sarah’s book, this grievance about Karen’s car. It was one of the things that kept Karen curious about Sarah, and not just enraged. If Karen wandered off in Freudian directions, a guilty pleasure, she might conclude there was, in addition to the obvious penis envy (phallus-envy? Karen’s Freud is pretty rusty, please remember she majored in dance), also some obvious father envy going on, Karen’s car representing Karen’s father’s role in her life, which while minuscule was larger than Sarah’s father’s role in Sarah’s life, since Sarah never saw her father and didn’t even know where he lived. Here we might understand “father” as meaning any form of masculine care. See, for example, Sarah’s special friendship with the man we call Mr. Kingsley, and that friendship’s mysterious end. See, for another example, Sarah’s thing for David’s car. That phone he failed to answer, that mess in his passenger seat. That orgasm Sarah gives herself, masturbating, because David’s not there. Everything about the car represented David’s broken promise to take care of Sarah, as if David was more—or should have been more—than just another fucked-up teenage kid. Why was David responsible for her? What about the adults in their lives? As if on cue, Sarah said, “Do you see anyone?”