I spend my spare time thinking about the pale yellow fur coat with white dotted trim that many of Vermeer’s women wear in his paintings. I page through plastic-coated books that John brings me from the library. The light of Vermeer’s paintings. Their silence and mystery. So often a woman writing at a desk or reading a letter. How ordinary they are. So often the painting seems to be of the same room, at the same picture window. John and I look at the images together, thinking of what time of day is depicted in different paintings—whether the sun floods in directly or diffusely. He takes the day off so we can go to the Met and to the Frick to look at their Vermeers. At the Frick, one of the yellow-coat paintings: the mistress and the maid look over a letter. On a nearby table there is a large vase of lilies, the smell overpowering the room. I feel dizzy. I sit in the tropics room, a sort of glassed-in courtyard, the water rushing, and stare at all the green.
Looking at the Vermeers, I am reminded of my conversations with Sofia from the fall—how to empty a text in order to fill it.
How unsettled I begin to feel in tight spaces. The claustrophobia of this dark apartment. The claustrophobia of my body. By the end of April, however, I begin to feel a little more human. I begin to find the riot of flowering trees and tulips less ominous and overwhelming. I sit out on the porch with the dog and drink my little cup of coffee and write in my little notebook. I begin to dream of landscapes, of escape—of land art out west, of European cities. All that spring I think of how Joseph Cornell didn’t travel, traveling only in his works.
It is now May. I have only the summer to write the novel, but in the mornings especially I can endure only the strange labor of my nausea. Still, I sit outside on the porch to get fresh air, notebook at my lap, the dog at my side. By late morning, the jackhammering will begin next door, and my thinking will end. The next-door neighbors are building out a back patio. It’s cold out, but at least there’s sun today. It’s been so gray. For weeks—so gray. I felt some quiet and green walking the dog this morning and want more. I dream now of the country.
Last week I saw the baby, on the monitor, swimming inside me. Afterward, I broke down weeping in the entryway of the hospital, overwhelmed by the new certainty of my life. There was some part of me that thought this wasn’t real, that this wouldn’t be permanent.
Outside on the porch, letting Genet sprawl in the sun while we watch the men carry concrete back and forth, pile rubble in trash bags into the green monster of a trash compactor. I caress my dog’s little rump. Outside it feels more possible, to return back to my notebook, to reading and thinking. Everything inside feels muggy, chaotic. John killed a large cockroach this morning. He has locked himself inside the bedroom, moaning, sick with the stomach flu. A few days later, I will be the sickest I will ever be in my life.
In my inbox, results from the blood tests, the news that we are having a girl. I sit here and think about this—a girl. What does that mean? Does it mean anything? Should it? Something sorrowful and profound about it. Thinking to the isolation of my childhood, of that child, and everything foreclosed from her, so soon. Like my daughter—my daughter—is now doubled inside of me.
These copies of days. The metronomic quality of summer. On the porch Genet goes in and out of light and shadows. Porch time, John writes me, your necessary nutrient. I want to buy a straw hat today. Maybe a dress. To feel buoyancy. I look up at the glowing canopy of green—the trees above, the birds. Finally I pick up my phone. Texts from Suzanne have accumulated while I was sitting here. She writes to me to avoid writing to him. Our little fragmented missives to each other, trying still to check in, even while living so far apart. I want to write about the prickliness and fragility and beauty of this friendship someday, but I don’t really know how. I never want to betray her.
I’ve managed only this one paragraph in the past two hours.
I begin to experience something like extreme pain over the flyers of lost dogs and cats, pasted on the street lamps and sign posts in my neighborhood, near busy roads, the descriptions heartbreaking in their specificity.
Was it in spring or summer that we drove by Prospect Park and saw a dog running from the sidewalk into heavy indifferent traffic toward the park? The pace of its run, as if delirious with freedom. I made John drive around and around. I felt sure it had been hit by a car—but maybe it ran into the park? Maybe it was captured? I didn’t write any of this down in my journal. It stays in my memory as a jolt—a sprint across those months, across these pages now.
There are two types of irises in the garden, a deep velvet maroon and a lavender with a yellow center. I don’t love them but appreciate their tallness, their certainty. I have become aware of time again, of the cycling through seasons. Genet rolls over and I scratch his belly with my dirty fingernails.
It seems the workers will be here all summer. Beefy and tattooed men appear, wearing baseball caps bearing American flags. They shake hands. They yell Yo! at each other. Is this a big job today? They carry garbage bags of debris, cigarettes in their lips. I think my presence unnerves them, this pregnant woman with her little dog, watching them.
I know I will be a completely changed person, I write to George, so I have to write Drifts now or never. His wife is in her third trimester. I’ve been writing and reading frantically, he writes to me. I have been doing nothing, I respond. Like a dog or a cat.
And yet today I feel I can summon the will to write the book. Outside feels so much more possible than inside. Even the internet—that’s inside.
Today I saw the old woman directing two men carrying a new stove wrapped in blue plastic from a truck into her house. She was dressed too warm for the weather, in wool slacks and a thick turtleneck. This was my second sighting of her this week. This spring we’d seen her wandering around on a parallel street, unable to find her house, which she asked us to point out to her, which we did, although we then went home and worried over what we should do, if anything. How much more I worry about her now. How much more I worry about everything.
Yesterday a sighting of the striped cat as I walked to the train, her little raccoon tail skirting under a car on our street. A quick puncture of joy and relief at this.
The two women in colorful veils taking their morning walk always smile at me now. Perhaps I too have become a recurring figure in their landscape, but it may also be that they find something about my appearance pitiful now.
Genet’s shits are so slow and particular in the afternoon. The feeling of it in my hands through the plastic bag. The beauty of his little asshole, how it expands, like a flower.
I hope you don’t think I’ve been ghosting you, I write to Sofia from bed, cramping from the amnio. How sorry I felt for myself after the long needle, the crummy paper cup of juice and package of cookies they gave me afterward, as I shuffled into the waiting room where they could watch me to make sure I didn’t faint or miscarry, then shuffled home on the subway, sitting through the jolts. I’ve just been a ghost in general. I was recently invited over to the Soho loft of Marie, a writer from the art and fashion world who once interviewed me. Not having made many friends here, and feeling so lonely and anxious, I wrote her that I was pregnant, as I knew she had a small child, and she invited me over for lemonade. I wore what I thought of as my most chic black tank dress. I was starting to show, even though it was early, and I felt so monolithic and sweaty next to her—her slenderness, her glamour, her caffeinated energy. It turns out, she whispered to me, she was very newly pregnant with her second. Immediately she invited this intimacy with me, which made me feel flattered and hopeful but also nervous. There was someone else there, an artist I had met before—I hadn’t realized it wouldn’t just be the two of us. I would come to learn that Marie often had someone else with her, usually a male artist or collector type wearing expensive sneakers. Sitting at her table, sipping lemonade, I started telling Marie about the burglary, and the artist intervened, and began lecturing me for calling the police. He told me that once, when he’d had
an intruder in his apartment, he merely chased him away. And, Sofia, I still don’t know whether he was right or not, but it was his tone, his insistence that he knew what was right and I had done something wrong—and that our situations were the same—that irritated me. I began, for some reason, to tell him about my project, that I was spending the summer thinking through this drifty essay on time and the body and looking at Dürer and Vermeer. And he kept on interrupting me, But how are you connecting this to the contemporary? To what was important, I think he meant. And, Sofia, I don’t know if I am. I don’t even know why I listened to him. After seeing him, I couldn’t write for days.
I have to turn in this project at the end of August, Sofia, and I’m paralyzed! I’m just fluttering on the internet constantly. Worried about the editors who are considering the mother book. Worried that feelings of rejection from that project will further stop me. All I can read now, when I can read at all, is Flaubert’s Sentimental Education, and I underline all the descriptions of food and clothes: the twelve types of mustard served at a dinner, the hero’s “pair of pearl-grey trousers, a white felt hat, and a gold-headed stick.”
Of course a haunting like you are writing to in Drifts is exactly not about the contemporary, it’s about the contemporary being interrupted, Sofia responds to me. I feel that there is a rightness to it, to what you’re haunted by, and that it is not in fact separate from the body. This body that is only asked to speak on “gender and feminism.” The bruise that we have spoken about so many times before. The Bartleby.
And yes, the twelve kinds of mustard—I completely understand! My problem is that I want to just revel in the objects, just be ravished by the surfaces of things. I think I told you before that I couldn’t write when pregnant, could not read anything but Agatha Christie, Sofia writes me. I had a huge stack. And I’d watch old black-and-white Egyptian movies and cry. There was one about an orphan girl who gets taken by these horrible people who cut all her hair off. I cried so hard! And I’d take the ketchup from the fridge and smell it. It smelled amazing.
Sitting on a lower step so Genet can lounge in a patch of sun. It is cool out today. My belly has really appeared this week—I cannot easily curl up into a ball, or masturbate on my stomach. I am hunched over in my striped poncho and straw hat, scribbling in my notebook. The dog has now found his corner on the porch, blocked in by the Adirondack chair. I bask in his blond-gray Sontag streak, his liquid amber eyes. I scratch the top of his head, scratch his little gray goatee.
Yesterday I posted a photo online in my new summer stretchy dress—that Yves Klein blue. This is the best you’ve ever looked, Anna writes me later. You look so avant-garde, how pregnancy suits you. I’m really struggling, I write to her. As if in reply she sends me a draft of her manuscript, but I can’t bring myself to read it.
In the night, sleeping on the couch, not being able to bear being with another person. Everything feels out of control, I write to Suzanne—I am feeling my isolation deeply. I am sure the hormones are partially at play. And also the stream of rejections of the mother book. And my rage and grief toward the hierarchy and casual cruelty of family that this pregnancy has catalyzed, that I thought I had clarity and distance from. I want my father and sister to be loving and present in a way they are not capable of. Also John is gone eleven hours a day, and the days feel glued together. I watch screens when I’m inside. I spend days not speaking to anyone but John. I feel like everybody has abandoned me. The privacy and alienation of this pregnancy, like an illness.
After one of these borderless weeping sessions, I am ghostly and numb the next day. I realize, I write to Bhanu, I am more worried about the milk, about afterward, than about the birth. How would it feel to be drained that way every day, by another person? How intensely emotional it will feel. I don’t yet feel prepared for it, for that form of love, for all of my love to leave me, to fill another so completely.
How long I can exist on the porch, surrounded by notes. I’m reading another Rilke biography. How slowly I read anything in this heat. The impossibility and desire of working on Rilke. The vertigo of another’s life, of reading. I can’t really work, but I stare at the bobbing chickadees. I want to take photographs of the roses growing on concrete, in tiny gardens of apartment buildings, straining against wire fences. Perhaps because of the roses, because I’m attempting this study of Rilke, the same line of his keeps circling in my brain: You must change your life. This is what I’m most scared of—but of course it must happen. I pull Genet’s warm ear. He starts at the bugs.
I am beginning to think that the woman in Melencolia I might be pregnant.
It is now June. I write to Bhanu today that I have been thinking of the extreme interiority that Lispector conjures in her work, but I cannot bring myself to read more stories. I sometimes feel closer to the books we carry around but cannot read, I write to her. She is reading the biography, slowly. Bhanu tells me that she spends most days writing strange things. Maybe for a chapbook. I ask after her teenage son, as she’s mentioned on her blog that he has been sick and she was on bucket duty. He’s better, she says—now they are arguing because he hasn’t brought in the neighbor’s trash can. I write to her that a few weeks ago I, too, was sick with a stomach bug—I couldn’t even keep water down. It was after I recovered that I began to come to terms with being pregnant.
I want to write increasingly small and minor texts, I write to her. I’ve been reading a biography of Rilke and am thinking of how he viewed art as sacred, how it was necessary to refuse the exigencies of the day, how he felt bored when he met his baby daughter at Christmas, he didn’t want anything to disturb his writing life. I feel so far away from this. Bring me the exigencies of the day, I say. The garbage can and the neighbors and the vomit and the slowly read Lispector. I am far more interested in that.
The last time Rilke was with Lou Andreas-Salomé, they buried her beloved poodle. In a postscript to a letter, he asks whether the dog’s replacement, a poodle named Schimmel, recognizes his smell on the envelope, and she replies that he gave it a good sniff. (Poor Schimmel would die two years later; Lou Andreas-Salomé had bad luck keeping dogs alive.) At this point, in the late summer of 1903, they have been estranged for two years, and he reaches out to her, as she’d told him he could do so, at his true hour of need. From a friend’s house at the artist’s colony in Germany—where he’s staying with Clara for the next two months, recovering from the exhaustion of his illnesses and from the city—he writes to ask if he can visit her. She suggests that they renew their correspondence first by letter, and in response he begins his urgent epistolary, narrating his past year in Paris and the details of his convalescence. He is unable to write about his suffering, he writes to her, except in these letters. Sometimes he writes her so frequently that she doesn’t have time to answer, and he wonders whether his letter has been lost in the post. He writes her from a damp, melancholy room at his friend’s house, blocked from light by the tall trees. It is not the room he usually is given when he is a guest there. Since their relationship has aspects both maternal and clinical, he writes to her of his remaining symptoms: poor circulation, hemorrhoids, toothaches, eye aches, a sore throat, fevers. He has tried steam baths and walking barefoot in the garden wearing his blue Russian tunic, despite the gloomy rain. When he lived with her, in Berlin and the suburbs, he kept her strict work hours, which made possible her prodigious output of novels and tracts. Days spent studying and working except for their barefoot walks in the woods. He adopted her way of life, her peasant dress, her vegetarian diet. After complaining, Rilke is given his usual little red room, which faces south and gets better light. In all these years, he writes, he’s never had a quiet room, this is what he’s been looking for, a room that no one else enters. The solitude is imperfect: the dramatics in the garden of the couple’s year-and-a-half-old daughter, the same age as his own daughter, who is two hours away on a farmstead with his wife’s parents. A new baby, the second child, is due any day, cuttin
g his stay short—infuriating Rilke, who must now go to his in-laws. How far away his painter friend, with his pregnant blond wife and cozy domesticity, is from art making. Everything about his world has gotten smaller and smaller, his house contracting around him, filling with the noises of the everyday. His art, too, has suffered from it, has become vague. He finds himself filled with unease amidst life’s casual unthinkingness. Nothing unexpected can happen with all of this dailiness. For everything must go into the art, he is sure of it. One must choose: either art or happiness. He remembers that first awkward déjeuner with the sculptor and his wife, how overcooked the meal was, how chaotic the table. (Rilke, a picky vegetarian, had written to Clara complaining that he didn’t want to eat anything.) The photograph of the three of them posed with the couple’s two shaggy dogs, standing at the pavilion in front of a collection of antique headless marbles. The sculptor and the poet in black heavy coats, Rilke petting one of the dogs, the squinting sculptor’s wife in her long black frock. It was during that awkward, unappetizing meal, he writes now, that he realized that Rodin’s house was just a roof over his head, a wretched necessity. Deep inside of him, he bore the shelter and comfort and darkness of a house.
There was a time when he’d thought a house, a wife, a child, would make his life more tangible. But now he wishes to withdraw more deeply into himself, into the monastery inside him, replete with great bells. He would like to forget everyone, forget his wife and his child. One must live within one’s work and stay there. Only once life has become work can it then become art. We are not made to have two lives, he writes passionately in his irritation, there can only be one. And yet he is unable to focus, to get anything done that resembles work. Is his will sick? Does he lack strength? Days go by and still nothing happens. He cannot become real. That is the fear, he confesses—he cannot become real. A silhouette in the midst of bodies, a fiction in the midst of reality. He wishes to cling to something when these fears come, and it must be work, and the things that work can produce. Once he had pined for the everyday world, for the visible reality, for people and a house that belonged to him, but now he sees he was wrong—it can only be things, he repeats. Only things speak to him. All this he writes to his correspondent, in a breathless confession. She replies with details of a quiet concreteness: Schimmel the poodle staring hypnotized at a squirrel scrambling up an old tall linden tree in the garden.
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