That’s not all there is to it, though. It’s not that simple. To know the rest of it, you’d have to know why it didn’t work, why you couldn’t share your Its the way you shared the privy. Why didn’t you really enjoy sharing the privy with her? Because it was “embarrassing” you said. But which embarrassed you most, her calls of nature in your presence, or your calls in her presence? Your own, if I’m not mistaken. So you barred them. The origin of the word “embarrassment” means “to bar,” to put behind bars. I want you to see that the reason you couldn’t have true privity with her, and thereby true love with her, is that you barred yourself from her.
The reason she wouldn’t let you love her is precisely that, your barring yourself from her, requiring her to bar from you the only thing she could bar, because she couldn’t bar her It from you. Why did she let Marshall Allen have her? Maybe because he wasn’t barring anything from her. Being a half-wit, maybe he didn’t have anything to bar. Maybe we should all be idiots, so we wouldn’t have anything to bar. Did you know, by the way, that the Greek origin of “idiot” is related to privity, that idios means “private,” means “one’s own”? But you are disgusted with my endless origins. I will give you no more.
You’ve had more than enough of me. Now you’re going. You’re leaving Five Corners. But you came to me this time because you wanted to learn what love is, so you can be burdened with the knowledge of it wherever you go from here. You’ve learned some other answers, but never the right answer.
Why are they all two-holers, Dan? I keep asking you questions, and never giving you a chance to answer them, and this is my biggest question: why are they all two-holers, every privy you’ve ever seen? Have you ever seen a one-holer? Or better, have you ever seen, or known of, or heard about, any two people other than yourself and Rachel, who ever used a two-holer together? No. Then why do they make them that way? Since you’ve been a carpenter, I suppose you’ve built a number of two-holers yourself, haven’t you? Did any of your customers ever tell you to make two holes? Did you ever stop to ask yourself why you were cutting out two holes? Why not three? Or one?
Yes, it’s just “traditional.” But why? Most things traditional are the invention of necessity, but if people don’t use two-holers together, it’s not necessary, is it?
No, I still haven’t told you what love is. All I can talk about is privies. Maybe privies are easier to talk about than love. But here’s what I’m driving at: People aspire to love. Their Its aspire to love. Few people ever achieve it. To put it crudely, the two-hole privy is man’s aspiration to love. As few people ever truly use two holes together as ever really achieve love together.
You never achieved it with Rachel because of the impediment of your embarrassment. Not just over your calls of nature. But over yourself, your It, as it really is. You couldn’t let Rachel share that. You couldn’t let her see you as you really are. So she couldn’t let you have her as she really is. Here it is, Dan: here’s your long-sought definition: Love is the condition of two people—two identities, two Its—being able to see themselves as they really are.
But that’s not quite complete. I’d have to elaborate a bit, if you’d let me. Love is the condition of two Its being able to see and to accept themselves and each other as they really are. Love is the condition of being able to tell someone what you really mean and feel. Love is the condition of having no secrets. Love is the condition of sharing Its, of sharing the privity of the soul.
It sounds pretty near impossible, I know. And it pretty near is. If you ever achieve it, in some other place, send me a postcard.
Goodbye, Dan.
The next day Daniel Lyam Montross found and killed Marshall Allen, and then he left Five Corners for good, and headed south. Daniel thought back over the previous years, and remembered what Rachel had said when he had asked her what love is. “Love is when you want for something to happen to you and know that it won’t, but want it because it won’t.” And he thought: What she wanted was for me to share my It with her, as she tried to share hers with me. And he realized: But she knew I wouldn’t. And he knew: But she wanted me to because she knew I wouldn’t.
This morning Diana showed me another one of “Daniel’s” poems. Apparently he has been writing poetry like mad lately. But she claims that this one is the last poem he will write about Five Corners. The rest of his poems, she says, will be about Lost Cove, North Carolina. This last poem, called “Of A Lost Town,” is probably his best; in fact, it is so good that it almost persuades me Diana couldn’t possibly have written it herself. She’s talented, all right, but not that much. Reading that poem made me feel that Daniel Lyam Montross really does exist. But not in me. I refuse to include that poem here. I refuse! I refuse!
This morning also Diana reminded me of the time when I had tried to get her to “act out” the scene between Marshall Allen and Rachel, when Marshall sneaked up and fused her in an animal way while she was bent over eating (or pretending to eat) flowers. Diana said she was ready, if I still wanted to “act out” that experience. She said it might help me understand how Marshall really cared for Rachel in an animalistic way and therefore would not have pushed her into the millpond. This started another argument on the subject of whether Rachel had jumped or been pushed into the millpond, and I told her that nothing would convince me that Rachel wasn’t pushed into the millpond by Marshall Allen. I pointed out how necessary it was for Daniel to have that justification for killing Marshall Allen; otherwise Daniel would become a villain himself. But I was still kind of excited by the idea of acting out that particular situation, and I said, All right, sure, although I wondered if she wasn’t still worried about getting pregnant. She said she was certain that she was already pregnant, so it didn’t make any difference. So we acted out that scene, Diana pretending she was Rachel, I pretending I was Marshall, both of us pretending we were animals without any human intellect or feelings. I have to admit I enjoyed it. I also have to disclose the fact that I lasted longer than I ever had, that because I didn’t have any human mind to worry or get anxious about what I was doing, I held out, I endured, I even lasted longer than she, for the very first time. And I hoped that in my next incarnation I could be a buck deer or some other kind of animal.
But that wasn’t the last instance of “acting out.” She had one more idea in mind. There was one more, one last thing which she wanted to do. And that was act out the scene of Daniel’s and Rachel’s last moments together. Diana made me listen to Tape #197b. Rachel had come into the privy again while Daniel was there. The last sharing of the privy. The last privity. She had reverted again to her crazy way of talking. Her words and her presence aroused him. In desperation, he suddenly rose and lifted her bodily up from her hole and tried to empale her upon his picket, and when she violently resisted he tried to have her in the old way that was familiar to her, which she resisted even more violently, even biting him painfully, at which he, having gone without any sort of fusing or felicity for such a long time, asked her if she at least wouldn’t mind relieving his passion with her hand, but she refused him this too, she refused him all of her, waiting, perhaps, for him to become an animal like her before he could have her. All he had left to him, it seems, was his own hand, and he was so tense and desperate that just a few strokes might bring relief, and that maybe he wouldn’t even mind that she was there with him, because if he didn’t mind that she shared the privy with him, why should he mind this? So he did. He had to. And just as he approached the point of relief, she began cooing, “Daniel’s bad, he is, Daniel’s bad, bad, he is, he is, oh, is he? he is, yup,” which made him stop, but too late. I think she must have been trying to tell him that now he was really sharing himself with her, but then it was too late.
I wish, I wish to hell he had never done that. Or I wish, at least, that Diana hadn’t made me listen to the tape. Or I wish, if nothing else, that she hadn’t been so determined to have the two of us “act out” that particular scene. Which, of course, I wouldn’t even think of do
ing. I couldn’t possibly jerk myself off while she was watching. I told her I would kill myself before I could do something like that. She kept on, though, about what a simple and innocent thing it was, and I got angry and demanded to know what kind of perverse pleasure it could possibly give her, was she some kind of goddamn voyeur or something? and she reminded me of the time back in Connecticut when I had been the voyeur myself, watching her swim naked, and then she said that this particular experience had to be acted out in order to help her understand Rachel’s mind at that particular moment and help her understand why Rachel killed herself. I became very angry that she was stubbornly refusing to accept the obvious fact that Rachel had not killed herself but had been pushed by Marshall Allen. Maybe, Diana said with a kind of smirk, maybe if you could bring yourself to do this very simple and relatively innocent thing, it might help you understand the situation better. I’ll pretend I’m Rachel, she said, and I’ll tell you everything that’s going on in my mind while I watch you. I told her she might as well put the whole business out of her mind because she could talk until she was blue in the face and I would still kill myself before I could do something like that. Then she said I didn’t really love her because according to Henry Fox’s idea of love, it meant sharing our Its, and I ought to share my masturbation with her. I don’t masturbate, I said. She got a kind of smug look on her face and said, I’ve seen you do it. WHEN!!?? I yelled at her. WHEN THE FUCKING HELL WAS THIS??!! So she told me about the time back in Dudleytown, back before we had become lovers and I was going crazy trying to live with her without any sex, and she told me about how the sight of me doing it had made her do it too. I was so flushed and embarrassed I could hardly breathe. And that’s not all, she said, I’ve seen you do it lately too. And she laughed, and whipped her hand mirror out of her purse and shoved it up in front of my face and said, Goodness, look how red you are! Red as Rachel’s hair! and I knocked the mirror out of her hand and turned my back to her and fumed for a while, wanting to just evaporate or fall through the earth or die. GODDAMMIT, I said, IF YOU’VE ALREADY SEEN ME DO IT SO GODDAMN MANY TIMES WHY DO YOU HAVE TO DO IT AGAIN??!! and she said that it made a big difference if I knew that she was watching, just as Daniel had known that Rachel was. If I wanted to she would do it for me too, she said. If we’re going to share our Its, she said, we have to share our masturbation. I said that was something that you simply don’t share. My solipsitis was beginning to act up something awful, and I began to wonder if I had been out here all alone in the woods by myself all this time, jerking off all the time, and now my conscience was catching up with me. Masturbation, after all, is the ultimate absolute solipsism. Please, Day, she said. No! I shouted. Can’t you stop thinking about it?? Can’t you at least stop talking about it??
Then she began searching through the pockets of some of her clothes until she found an old, half-empty pack of cigarettes. She sat down in one of the Adirondack chairs and put a cigarette in her mouth, the first time she had done this in a long while. “I guess,” she said, and lighted her cigarette, “that not only do I not love you,” she inhaled deeply and held the smoke in her mouth, then let it filter out with these words: “but maybe I don’t even like you very much. In fact, I don’t think I can stand you. In fact,” and then she delivered herself of the most horrible piece of “psychologizing” that I had ever heard: that she supposed the real reason she wanted to watch me masturbate was that it would justify the contempt she felt for me.
That did it. I kicked her tape recorder as hard as I could, knocking it clear up under the lean-to. Then I grabbed up my coil of rope and ran out of our camp, to the nearest big maple tree. I gave that tree a big hug and then I began to climb her. “Stop, Day! Please stop!” Diana yelled after me. I climbed as high as I could go; the water started pouring out of my eyes so I could hardly see to tie the rope. Good thing I studied knot tying in the Boy Scouts. Diana was yelling her head off and even trying to climb the tree, which I knew she couldn’t do. I tied a pretty good hangman’s knot in one end of the rope and then tied a clove hitch around the limb I was on, and then I stood up on the limb and slipped the noose over my head and pulled it snug around my neck. I began thinking that suicide was sort of like masturbation, that suicide is to murder what masturbation is to coitus. Did I say that masturbation is the ultimate absolute solipsism? Then I amend that. Suicide is. If it would give Diana a big thrill to watch me jerk off, it ought to give her a bigger thrill to watch me jerk my whole body from this tree. Maybe she would cream her jeans. I knew I would cream mine, because that’s what hanging does to you, I’ve read about it. It made me laugh, as well as cry. And suddenly I realized that when I was dead, Daniel Lyam Montross would be “dead” too, at least as far as his present wretched incarnation was concerned, and that probably Diana would mourn his loss more than she would mourn the loss of me, but then I realized that Diana too would be dead. I had allowed her to live, just as I had allowed Daniel Lyam Montross to live, and now I could kill them both in one stroke. Diana was still trying to climb the tree and still yelling her head off, trying to take back the things she had said, trying to claim she hadn’t really meant them but was just acting them out as part of the “script.” I didn’t want to listen to her. I couldn’t wait. So I yelled at her, “I HOPE YOU SUFFER FOR THE REST OF YOUR LIFE, YOU BITCH! SEE HOW YOU LIKE HAVING LOST COVE ALL TO YOURSELF!” and then I yelled one more thing: “I HOPE YOU NEVER FIND OUT WHY YOU ARE YOU!” and then I began walking out the limb toward its end. She raised her hands in a kind of praying gesture and screamed I LOVE YOU, DAY! I REALLY DO! PLEASE BELIEVE ME! to which I responded by clenching my fist and stiffening the middle finger upwards and jabbing it in her direction as viciously as I could, three or four times, and then I looked for an instant to judge how hard I would have to jump in order to clear a couple of limbs that were below the limb I was standing on.
Oh, this has been the terrible tragic story of a boy who loved a girl very much but was not loved by her at all, oh, this has been a story of a search for the right place where love could be, oh, a story of searching and not finding, oh, this has been a miserable story of sharing privies and jerking off, of loving oneself for not being loved, and of killing oneself for loving oneself and not being loved, oh, this
I closed my eyes and jumped.
It was not until April of the following year, four months later, that I managed to determine which of Vermont’s several ghost villages the couple had chosen for their autumn episode. After the trouble I had gone to in locating Five Corners, I was more disappointed in not finding them there than I had been in not finding them in Dudleytown. Day Whittacker’s lean-to had fallen, perhaps crushed by the weight of heavy snows in January and February. I found nothing in it, although beneath it I found Diana Stoving’s tape recorder, with one cassette in it. Searching elsewhere around their former camp, I found the grave. The grave had no headstone nor even a modest marker, save for a single scrap of paper weighted down by a rock. The paper was almost disintegrated but the handwriting in pencil was still legible, and is the poem I have appended.
I must confess that I had no heart for digging into that grave to find out which of them was buried there. It was Diana Stoving, of course, whom I was searching for, not Day Whittacker, and I knew that I couldn’t bear it if I were to find her in that grave. But by careful investigation elsewhere around the vicinity of their camp, I was able to spot a rope dangling from a maple tree, and to allow myself to believe that only a good Boy Scout could have tied the perfect hangman’s noose in the end of the rope. That was small comfort, but enough to make me hope that I might still find Diana Stoving in some other place.
In April, with the trees bare and patches of deep but dirty snow still in all the shady places (and there are many, many shady places), Five Corners is not a pretty place. But I could imagine how beautiful it must have been during their autumn, and I could imagine how beautifully decayed it must have become during their November. Imagination is both a wondrous and a terrible th
ing. As Chaucer said in his “The Miller’s Tale,” people can die of mere imagination. Reading the poem which follows, I began to imagine that this place, Five Corners, had never been inhabited by anything but sylphs and, briefly now, myself. Such a feeling can be conducive to a bad case of, to coin an imaginary disease, solipsitis, and I did not stay long there. But somebody, I knew, some identity corporeal enough to hold a pencil and paper, had written that poem. And to me, a good analyst of handwriting, that identity was a female.
Of a lost town, there’s little one can say.
I lived my seasons by their seasoning spell;
I knew my neighbors by their popular names,
A friend of all, and friendlier than they.
I moved among the wicked and the good,
Tried to distinguish them but seldom could.
Are towns created naturally of folks
At variance with themselves? Sure enough.
I never really lacked sufficient proof.
Myself against the self of me provokes
Itself into a Town of One. Or Few.
Or Several, but none of whom is you.
A town is but a tournament of two!
A tilt without lances, a horseless joust,
And arms at passage, arsenals unloosed!
A town is but a passage, passing through.
Death of a town is the end of the fight.
Our arms do not touch passing in continual night.
Lost, lost this place, as gone as I myself.
My town, those several of me who fought,
Is emptied now of all but afterthought:
An Itless town is less a man than sylph.
Yet sylphs are less ephemeral than man.
I’ll be a sylvan sylphid if I can.
The Nearly Complete Works, Volume 1 Page 61