“Charlotte, come on,” the moderator called. “Laura, I’ll start and say you’re late. Come in when you’re ready. Ten, fifteen minutes.”
“No, don’t say I’m late. I can’t go out there. I’m sorry to do this to you—” I was so sleepy I could barely get out the words. The figures of the others, hovering, concerned, faded into a mist and I closed my eyes. Through the patchy film of sleep I heard intervals of applause as the panelists were introduced. So this is how it’s happening, I thought. With a drifting sigh, with a whimper.
After a while I got up and someone from backstage helped me outside and hailed a cab. A light rain was starting. This driver had no conversation but he maneuvered quickly through the slick, darkening streets, and when I next opened my eyes the car had stopped. Somehow I got to my door and made straight for the chair overlooking the river.
As darkness took hold and the rain got heavier, my body stiffened. The streets, the car, had been a shield. Now I was alone with it. I had failed. I was no good for anything. Useless. Finished. I couldn’t pretend to fight it, whatever the doctor called it. The virus could take on the shape of any emotion, and it became a virus of dread. As I was the illness, so I was the dread. The aches started in my shoulders, moving down the skeletal chain to invade every joint. Fear translated and made tangible. Like the Samurai warrior in the book, I had no friends. Could I make my mind my friend?
I sank deeper into the chair, imagining the future, the vibrations this very moment rolling my way. Evelyn. Mona’s mother lurked in my mind like a dream not yet dreamed. What could it be like, being Evelyn, gradually shedding everything but manners and habits of unknown origin? Soon even the songs would vanish. Maybe I should write down the facts of my life before I began to forget. So much sleep might obliterate memory, like a pillow pressed down on the brain. Jilly once told me about a conceptual artist who kept minute chronicles of every daily activity, from grocery shopping to chance encounters to making love, all painstakingly inscribed in color-coded charts and graphs. But her goal was to heighten awareness of daily life as a form of art, not to lasso memory.
I could envision myself years from now, not as lucky as Evelyn. No loyal daughter looking out for me. For all her affection, I doubted that Jilly would take it on. Too young. No, I’d be in a nursing home, a fairly decent one, let’s say. Let’s say I can talk almost rationally, I’m not a social disgrace. But I’m pastless. Forgotten the facts of my life, forgotten I was a writer, forgotten the books themselves, right now as unforgettable as my ears or skin. I do remember a few people who visit—Jilly, Joyce, Mona (not Tim, Tim is long gone)—though I’ve forgotten how their lives intersect with mine. I recognize them only from their visits. One day a visitor brings me my own books to cheer me, hoping perhaps to touch a nerve that might restore my life the way a second blow on the head restores to Ronald Colman in Random Harvest the life which the first blow on the head sent to oblivion.
The visitor arrives—most likely Joyce—toting a foot-high pile of books. For I’ve done what James Baldwin said is the writer’s task, steadily, methodically filled an empty shelf with books. The visitor brings books I haven’t even written yet: maybe a high-class thriller, and a comic novel set in the future, and the book which right now I find so intractable, the revised vision of Ev’s life that keeps him safely in his seaside town so he doesn’t end in a pool of blood on a Bronx street but grows old and hoary.
There are my books, handed to me one by one, and the pity is that I don’t recognize them as mine, not even with the name and the photos (of a youngish, fairly elegant, interesting if not quite beautiful woman). When I’m told they’re mine I don’t understand. Nonetheless in my better moments, alone in my austere little room, I read them. Not straight through—I haven’t the concentration for that—but passages here and there and .. . I like them. When the visitor—hopeful Joyce—returns, if I’m in one of my better moments, I say, Yes, I enjoyed the books but with certain reservations. I liked the part about the college years and the marriage, but why did she have to make the children die? That was cruel. Or, That was outrageous, about the adolescent seduced by the doctor. And presented so nonchalantly! And that seaside village: what was the author getting at, spinning quaint fantasies about the Moth Agent and the Shellfish Constable’s wife and the Surveyor of Lumber? Contrasting the peaceful town with the havoc of the city? What for? Everyone knows that already.
It’s clear that my mind, what’s left of it, has grown very ordinary. Or, rather, only the ordinary part remains; the radical imagination is gone. And I wonder why my visitor’s eyes fill with tears.
Maybe I even read this book, long ago completed and published though now it lies dauntingly before me, and I say, Well, I liked it all right but why did she dwell for so long on the scene with the pool, waiting for the pool to fill up (a scene not yet written, its exact place uncertain)? What was the point of that?
WHEN YOU’RE TRAPPED IN A ROOM WITH FEAR, when the fear is trapped in you, it seems a reasonable response to the world. Given the certainty of death, primordial mother of fear, and the mystery of how she will greet us, it’s a wonder we aren’t paralyzed all the time.
I felt a hunger to hear my parents’ voices, an infantile longing for them to rescue me, long distance. I reached for the phone, envisioning them in their sleekly landscaped Florida retirement community, which resembled a futuristic prison or orphanage outdoors, and indoors an unending airport lounge where they seemed content to wait out the remainder of their days, which might be many since they were barely seventy and in good health despite my father’s complaints.
“Hah,” he said on hearing my own complaints. “Everything they don’t understand they call a virus. Get a few good nights’ sleep, you’ll be all right.”
“Sleep is not my problem. I could sleep all day if I let myself.”
“Maybe you should get a job, then. Get out more. At least you’re not in pain. I’d take a virus any day over my arthritis. Listen to this. Our next-door neighbor here—he feels great, out on the golf course, plays cards every day, goes for a routine checkup and they find colon cancer. Bad, right? What everyone dreads. They take it out, a month later he’s back to normal and out on the course again. He hardly felt a thing. Meanwhile they keep telling me this damned arthritis won’t kill me, but I can’t do what I like to do, like go bowling or play golf.. . .”
“Golf? Since when have you played golf?”
“I never did, but now that I’m retired I might like to.”
“People seem to walk around golf courses very slowly. I bet you could manage it. Or ride in one of those carts.”
“I’d be afraid to swing the club. I could throw my back out and then where would I be? Besides, my vision is so poor, I don’t think I could see the ball. Listen, what you need is to get out of yourself a little. You’re still a young woman. You could marry again. You could even have a baby, it’s not too late. Nowadays lots of women do it at your age.”
“Is Mom around?”
“We just want you to be happy.”
“I know.”
“Laura?” My mother took over. “You’ve heard of Dr. Atkins on TV? Listen to him. He knows all about these kinds of things. Get a pencil, I’ll tell you when to watch. I watch him all the time.”
The rain had stopped as we spoke, but the night sky was overcast. I could barely distinguish the trees from the river or the sky. The only clear thing in the blackened windows was my own face, artificially lit, staring back as if from the other side of the glass. What was that look? Stony? Bewildered?
My father used to laugh affectionately when we drove through tunnels and I cried, Get me out of here! When I was very small I cried it in panic, then as time passed, with less panic, until it became a joke, a ritual performance. For he always did eventually get me out as promised. Now is different. I’m not in a scary, closed-in, seemingly endless place. That dark place is in me. Get here out of me! I want to cry to him.
It’s no performance, either.
It takes discipline, yes, but unlike the projects Grace describes, it’s not a discipline I’ve chosen. The man who slept outside for a year wasn’t really homeless; he chose to behave as if he were. Though maybe he didn’t feel he had a choice, any more than I feel I chose the books I wrote, or am writing. They chose me for their translator and I had to stick by them every waking moment, as the interpreter sticks to the Tai Chi teacher.
The eyes in the dark window glinted unnaturally; the comers of the mouth turned sourly down. Bitter, fearful and confused, not a face I’d like to present in public. It came to me that this was a juncture—since my father was not going to rescue me—when life begged to be lived as an. That way, it could be tolerated.
Very well. For a start, I put a better face on the face trapped in the glass. We’ve all heard of the hunger artist. I could be the first fatigue artist. Give it my best shot.
Too bad my performance would never resemble the lone violinist’s I heard on the radio, or the soprano singing Mozart’s Exsultate, Jubilate: they draw you in to surround you with feeling, a transforming embrace. My performance, born from constraint not freedom, would be a smaller, less generous thing. The audience would witness it, but only I would feel it. If I did it badly, no one would ask for a refund. If I did it well, only I would appreciate the craft required.
“Relax the thumbs. The thumb is the grabber. In Tai Chi there is no grabbing. Only relaxing. Yielding.”
The teacher is chipper this afternoon. The hotter it gets, the more energetic he gets. He probably has some theory about the vibrations of heat drifting over the river stimulating the flow of the chi. For him, maybe. Not for the rest of us.
“Head erect, suspended from heaven.” He moves through the group like a fish gliding through water—another of his favorite images—adjusting our postures. Most people are in shorts, except for the two stockbrokers, their shirtsleeves rolled up and ties loosened. “No, no. No weight on the front foot in this posture. Never equal weight on the feet. No stasis in the universe. With the weight on one foot you’re always poised to move, in a state of readiness.”
Grace breaks from the agonizing posture we’ve been holding for several minutes to rub her calves. “Shit,” she mutters, “my legs are killing me.” Assiduously, the interpreter translates, and the teacher approaches her.
“Learn to take pain,” he says somewhat harshly, for him. He’s generally forbearing. “Tasting bitter, we call it. Get used to the bitter taste.” Chagrined, she resumes the posture. Her face isn’t relaxed—she looks as though she has something bitter in her mouth.
“No, don’t sit down,” the teacher says to a student moving toward a bench, the young Dominican who works in the pizzeria on Broadway. I’ve seen him twirling the dough with a look of serene mastery, very like the Tai Chi teacher’s look. “Never sit while doing the form. Relax, but don’t sit.”
His rounds finished, he returns to the front and allows us to rest. “Good, very good. Everyone’s tasting bitter. You’ll feel the pain less if you remember the rushing spring. Yes?”
We nod obediently.
“The energy from the earth bubbles up into the foot, the place just behind the ball of the foot, where you’re rooted. That’s why it’s called the rushing spring. Concentrate on that energy and your legs won’t hurt as much. Now for some push hands.”
He pairs everyone carefully, large with small, athletic with delicate, old timers with newcomers. What matters is not size or muscle but pliability, as well as a feel for the oncoming energy in the partner’s body. If you can get out of its way, become an elusive shadow or ghost, as the teacher calls it, your partner will stumble through his own momentum. Large with small so that neither will be tempted to use force—needless for the one, futile for the other. He pairs me with a big paunchy man called Marvin, who’s been studying for a year or so, not nearly as long as I. We’re not meant to be adversaries—we’re in this together, like dancing partners—but my malaise and crankiness get the better of me, and very quickly Marvin has me tripping around on the concrete.
“What’s going on, Laura?” The teacher comes over, the interpreter at his heels as always. “Why do you resist him?” He demonstrates with Marvin and catches him before he falls. Marvin is gracious about it, I must say, and for a large man he successfully avoids using the strength at his disposal, not that it would do any good. In real life Marvin manages a local video rental place, and when I drop in, we exchange a complicit glance and a few words if he has time. How’re you doing, I ask, and he answers, No complaints whatsoever.
“Continue,” the teacher commands. Again Marvin becomes a shadow and I totter through the vacated space.
“Don’t fight him, Laura, but stay with him. Adhere, follow his every move. Know what he’s going to do before he does it. Never resist, but persist.”
“This is just not my day, I guess.”
“What’s the matter?”
I answer with a shrug.
“Continue. Listen to his energy. Listen.”
But I stumble again.
“How can you listen,” the teacher says, “if you’re so busy thinking and doing? Stop trying to do. You think nothing will happen unless you do it?”
I shake my head and move off to sit on a bench. He leaves me alone but appears worried. Even the interpreter looks concerned—I’m usually an apt student. What will he suggest this time? Chicory?
After a while he calls through the interpreter to those of us who’ve left the field. “Come back. I have a story to tell you. I see you all think this is very hard, the push hands. Hard to yield, hard not to use strength, hard to stay balanced. It’s not hard if you do what I tell you. Do nothing. Let the other do it all. You think there’s some secret power but it’s no secret at all. Listen. Long ago, Lao-tzu, the Taoist master, and one of his disciples, Du Be, were walking with a student and they came to a river. Laotzu and Du Be stepped into the river and began walking across it, apparently walking on the water. Like your Jesus Christ, ha ha. When the student tried to follow them he found himself in deeper and deeper water. Lao-tzu, already on the other side, said to Du Be, ‘Maybe we should tell our student where the stones are.’ And now, thank you.”
The class is over, and as usual we rest on the benches nearby. Grace sits rubbing her legs.
“I’ve been wondering about your work,” I say. “Can you really make a living doing performance pieces?”
“Oh, no,” she says with a laugh. “Most of us have to do what’s called real work. I work for a women’s co-op gallery downtown, running the business end. It’s an okay job, but I could really use the time to develop new projects. It’s amazing how much preparation they take. My Take Back the Night costume took weeks.”
“What was that?”
“About three years ago I constructed this very chic outfit out of metal, a long dress with boots. It looked like a medieval suit of armor, and I wore it every time I went out at night or rode on the subway. When strangers asked me why, which of course they did, that was the whole idea, I explained it was to illustrate the feeling women have of being threatened in the city, sort of like a walking Expressionist painting. Right now I’m planning a dental show. I need some root canal work, and it occurred to me how a visit to the dentist’s office is a formal ritual everyone goes through periodically. This new dentist tells me the equipment they use in dental school nowadays is very different from the old—they’ve got high-powered drills that make an excruciating noise, and you can’t even buy the old kinds of chairs anymore. In the new chairs the patient lies down and the dentist sits. He’s unhappy about this—he likes to stand—and we should be, too, because it makes the patient more powerless, and you know how at the dentist’s office you’re powerless enough as it is. So I thought I might have a show of the new equipment in a gallery, like a trade show, and actually have my dental work done on it in public. My dentist says he’d be willing to perform in front of an audience. I might even ask members of the audience to volunteer to have their teet
h fixed as part of the show. It’d certainly be cheaper. And people would become aware of the social and political aspects of the process.”
“What’s so funny, Laura?” It’s the Tai Chi teacher and the interpreter passing by.
“You should ask Grace. She’s a performance artist. She’s telling me about her work.”
“Go ahead and laugh. I don’t mind,” says Grace. “Lots of people laugh. Listen, I laugh myself sometimes. Our kind of art,” she tells the teacher, “what my friends and I do, is more of a process or a discipline than product-oriented.” She stops considerately for the interpreter but he nods to her to go on; he can translate large segments at once, though God knows what he makes of them. “We’re against the commercialization of art as a commodity to be shown in museums or sold in galleries. Our art is part of our lives, a way of life, political, social, personal. We don’t compartmentalize.”
This comes out rather shorter in Chinese than I would expect.
“In China in the old days, art was also not a career or even a profession but a way of life,” replies the teacher. “The artist expressed the harmony of the universe through the five excellences, painting, calligraphy, poetry, medicine, and of course, Tai Chi Chuan. He would never have dreamed of selling a painting or a sample of calligraphy. He gave it away as a token of regard.”
“Well,” says Grace, “then we’re part of a similar tradition. I’m not familiar with China. But the Western tradition goes way back. Diogenes, for example. Do you know about him?”
The Tai Chi teacher shakes his head.
“Diogenes was a Greek philosopher from the fifth century, B.C. The legend goes that he traveled around with a lantern in search of an honest man. But that’s not the half of it. He spent his whole life acting out his beliefs, making gestures we’d consider absurd. He pretended to be a beggar and begged from statues, he walked through the streets backwards, he glued shut the pages of a book. Once when he was invited to give a public lecture he got up on the platform and just stood there and laughed. In the same vein, I have a friend who walked around Soho barefoot when the women’s movement was in its heyday, with pots and pans hanging all over her body, to make a point. About women’s lives, you know?”
The Fatigue Artist Page 13