How precarious my life feels now. Will we move, will we stay here, will we have to welcome it, to see possibilities in it, not foreclose ourselves? Maybe we belong here, in this city. Or where else? How will I continue to exist, to write? I feel almost mesmerized by this sadness lately. Maybe I should have gotten an MFA or PhD, or written the kinds of books that would have won prizes and awards, like the ones that fill the bios of the faculty I’m reading with next week. Another faculty reading. How can I still have nothing from the book to read? It’s so fragile, private, unfinished. I don’t even know where it’s housed. But also it’s within me, unbearably intimate. Like my other uneasy tenant, swimming around inside of me.
After a morning of commuting uptown through Times Square (the raw heat, the stairs), of obliterating encounters and meetings at the university, I peeled my black dress off my sore body and climbed into bed with Genet, curling around him naked. I wept, as he licked the tears off my face, until he left to throttle his stuffed penguin in the next room. Later I think of a work by Moyra Davey, a photograph of the artist pregnant and naked in bed with her terrier, collaged with the line from Anne Sexton: Why else keep a journal, if not to examine your own filth?
The office I’m sharing this semester at the college upstate belongs to a poet who has won a multitude of awards and also appears to be somewhat of a hoarder. Boxes of papers everywhere, various phones not in use, thermoses, empty containers of laundry detergent lined up behind the desk. A whole row of Rilke on her bookshelf. I take home an out-of-print biography. (I’m realizing just now that I’ve never returned it.) The poet comes in with a student assistant, as I’m speaking to two potential students. I am awkwardly positioned on her couch. I’m sorry, who are you? She’s never heard of me, even though I’ve been teaching there five years. What do you write? she asks me. She catches me off guard. Prose, little things, I stammer out.
It reminds me of when Lou Andreas-Salomé took Rilke to meet Tolstoy at the turn of the century. On the brief walk the master agreed to, he ignored the young poet, speaking in Russian to her instead, until at some point he finally asked the younger man, what was his occupation. I have written some things, the poet managed to say. Which was true. At that point he had written the few books of verse and the lone dramatic output of his alter ego, eternally twenty-eight, alone in his dingy Parisian walkup.
Today in the accessibility seating on the train, during the crowded rush, an older woman, dressed sedately in black, takes out a bottle of nail polish and begins to touch up her nails. A shimmery brownish-pink like my mother wore. The smell is overpowering. During the entire ride back to Brooklyn, I try to figure her out. So professional and closed in on herself, but unaware of the fumes she gives off, or indifferent to them, which bespeaks something like exhaustion. Her tidy yet worn wardrobe, black orthopedic loafers, black cardigan, and black trousers. Pearl earrings and a gold watch with little diamonds around the face. A black Michael Kors bag. I decide she works at the Macy’s at Herald Square. In watches, or leather goods—why her nails must be impeccable, why they chip, tapping on the glass case.
Yesterday on the train I observed an elderly couple across from me, eating a bunch of lychee-like fruit with hard brown shells, shapes I’ve noticed piled sculpturally on stands in Chinatown. I watch the woman peel back the skin, putting the pieces back in the plastic bag, while spitting the black seeds on the floor, like glossy stones that skitter near my feet. The fluidity of that gesture. All without saying a thing. I watch again, as if everything is in slow motion.
Up late with night sweats. My body radiating heat. Up again (slowly, sorely) at 4 a.m. John strokes my flank, trying to soothe me. Time feels now so fast, yet I cannot believe I have to carry her, in this city, on these commutes, for two more months. When can I feel weightless? Last night, instead of a heavy dinner, I had a small bowl of the new strawberries. I ate them cold and freshly washed, my feet up, rubbing them together.
On my day off, I stay in bed. Overhot all day. I share my raspberry sorbet bar with Genet, even though it tastes fishy afterward. I try to avoid the Italian when I go outside. A woman coming out of the apartment building smiles as I lumber after Genet. He shits little ribbons because of the heat.
As soon as I get home from teaching I strip off everything—everything feels too restricting. I eat a sticky bun while sitting on the couch without underwear. I remember the grocery store coffeecakes on the plastic tablecloth in my grandmother’s dining room—how hot it’d be in the summer, my grandmother refused to install an air-conditioning unit. This weekend we saw Vera from the dry cleaner’s being pushed in a wheelchair, a cast on one leg. I stopped and asked her in dismay what happened. She grasped my hands, her fingernails long and unpainted, and something in that reminded me again of my grandmother, the way she cackle-laughs, her asking when I’m due, exclaiming, It’s a girl! It’s a girl!
The cat is back. I almost cried to see it. Such a little thing—she wagged her tail slowly back and forth and walked a few blocks with me. Are you walking with your cat? a man asked me. She is my cat! I wanted her to come to the porch. I put out cat food and water while Genet barked at the window hysterically. I am so happy to see you! I said to her.
Sofia writes me that she dreamed of her abdomen sticking out. Everyone lately is writing to tell me they’ve dreamed about me, or about pregnancy. The emotional weight of being asked to carry other people’s dreams. As if I’m some harbinger of anxiety. Every day I’m a little larger, my clothes a little tighter. She swims around and around inside me.
I write to Sofia that I don’t know how I came to be so pregnant, but I’m sure it’s linked somehow to the robbery.
In early September, instead of reading birthing books, having also canceled the birthing classes, in order to try to work on Drifts, I watch the early films of Chantal Akerman. I was asked to write about her for the anthology exactly a year ago, an essay I have now failed to deliver. I finally feel able to enter her films again. The slowness of her work. The camera skirting around the room in La chambre. The repetition of claustrophobic interiors. I take notes on my own domestic space. Going to the fridge to get food. The fruit flies. Genet following me. Clothes hanging on the drying rack. The clutter of books and notebooks. Heating pad and pillows on the couch.
I take photos of the screen while watching Akerman eating sugar in Je tu il elle and think of restaging it. Where can I get a mattress in a room? I text Marie. Perhaps she will art-direct it for me. Anything you need, darling, she writes back. Although she is pregnant and miserable as well. I will write letters and shovel a bowl of sugar into my mouth. That’s what I feel I’m doing anyway. Of course I soon forget this—it was only a momentary desire.
Together John and I watch Akerman’s News from Home, eating cashew cheese nachos on the couch, Genet curled up on my left hip, wanting the warmth of the heating pad. I have to get up constantly now and change positions like the dog. The camera tracing the young filmmaker’s walks when she lived in the city, working odd jobs in the early seventies. The opening shots of large American cars, transit depots, the neon signs of diners. The forlornness of the mother’s letters, which the filmmaker reads in voice-over. “I hope it’s not too hot—I know sunny weather depresses you.” Her mother’s complaints about bad health. “I thought it was menopause but it seems it’s exhaustion.” The ghostliness of these letters, the absences we feel in between, how so few are returned. The maternal longing, guilt, worry, chastising. The gossip and news. Engagement and birthday parties. Money worries. Vacations to the seaside. Babies born. The soothing repetition of her address. Darling daughter. We project onto the daughter’s silence—she is experiencing the alienation of New York City, this new, temporary home. The exterior shots are the postcards she does not send. The spaciness of such a work. Night. Windows. The geometry of the train platform, extended long shot in the train, its snaking interior. People look into the camera.
While watching the film, I feel this is everything I wan
t art to be. Perhaps the film resonates because all summer I have felt pain at my family’s absence, their seeming lack of interest, my longing for my mother to still be alive. The elegiac feel of it. That Akerman and her mother are both dead. That this industrial New York is no more. The historical poignancy of the final shot of the receding skyline, while pulling out on the Staten Island Ferry, the twin towers in the distance.
Last night it took hours to get home from teaching uptown—all the stairs everywhere. Lately, I dream of stairs. How slow I must be. How I must consider movement. Yesterday I had the momentary fantasy that I could take off my stomach for the day and walk around. How I long for that lightness. My whole body is constantly sore and tender. All night I shift from side to side groaning—my hips, my pelvis.
Weeping again from the responses in my inbox from my department chairs. I get contractions when I weep. Yes, I can cancel class, but I must make it up, or get a substitute, for which they either have no budget or can pay very little, which makes it almost impossible to try to get a substitute. I’m being difficult, that’s the undercurrent of the responses. My department head at the university writes to me that with luck everything will go without complications—she went to a party the week she gave birth, she writes. Sat the baby on the couch. Maybe it’ll be the same for me. It’s unbelievable. I forward all these emails to Suzanne, who shares my rage, which is my grief, our adjuncting lives, how little power we have. How am I supposed to make class up when I give birth weeks before the semester ends? I will be raw and bleeding. And, more than that, my midwives warn me that it will hurt my ability to heal, to nurse, if I go back to teaching a week after I give birth. Something won’t feel right, one of them says to me. Suzanne suggests that I take time off, the next semester, for nursing and bonding. But I have to work! I cannot afford not to teach. And there’s nowhere for us to move to, now. I need to finish Drifts to receive the rest of the advance, to pay for John’s two months of unpaid paternity leave, to pay for the hospital bill, the midwives, to pay for everything. I want to just quit—everything—then what? I already cannot afford childcare, which I desire, to continue writing. This pregnancy exacerbates everything.
You need a bitchy pregnant friend, Sofia writes to me, in sympathy. Marie and I text each other our complaints. Our exhaustion and melancholy. How weird and volatile we are feeling. The underside of the now incessant congratulations. Sometimes we will text each other for an hour, sentences punctuated by a series of emojis: the strong arm, the heart, the weeping face. But what can Marie, who has a nanny and a night nurse on call, really understand about my adjunct woes?
Have been trying lately to practice extreme forbearance. Now the subtle torture of an almost imperceptible rash of tiny raised bumps on my hands and feet. John smooths cortisone cream on my hands and feet—he rubs oil on my pubic mound as it’s getting too difficult to reach. I wash with pine-tar soap. At night lukewarm oatmeal baths. I sat on ice this morning—itchiness in vagina, sore pelvic area. She’s now head-down, says our midwife. Woke up from non-nap, itchy, restless. Nervous exhaustion. Inflamed, generally. Impossible to think or write.
I’ve been snapping the same selfies in front of our closet mirror, next to the laundry hamper. The same print of the royal blue rhomboid behind me. I put them up online. Yesterday was the first time I felt like myself in a while—all black, black socks (because of the rash) and Birkenstock clogs, the only shoes I can stuff my swollen feet into, my lightweight frock coat, the long jersey dress that has stretched to fit me. Harried, sunglasses on head, black rubbery Swatch watch on my wrist.
On a rush-hour train people go out of their way now not to see me. The dude who refused to look up from his paperback Bonfire of the Vanities to see the heavily pregnant woman swaying irritated above him. I have to announce myself to prevent people (men) from shoving me or pushing into me on the train. Everyone feels they’re more rushed, more exhausted, than everyone else. I feel the baby responding to a busker on the trumpet behind me, playing along to recorded elevator music. Now he’s playing “New York, New York” as we ascend on the bridge. I am glad my bad attitude has returned. I feel more myself.
I fear the baby will be born on the day of the election.
I’ve had to be incredibly resilient, this mutely moving body, to get through rush hours and train transfers and hours of student meetings. I don’t recognize myself in this uncomfortable and unbearable body. How she spins inside of me. What will become of me? I don’t know. This cleaving, this rupture.
I fell asleep in the bathtub, then again on the toilet last night.
I wake up and read all the news about the election. How I have hated men in public throughout this pregnancy, how I play chicken with beer-necked men at Grand Central, who barrel through, insisting that everyone get out of their way—my witchy refusal to allow these men to push in front of me, I write to Sofia.
The strange almost-erotics of alienation that you mention, she writes to me. Perhaps, she writes, one loves one’s alienation, painful as it is, as a kind of survival strategy, a way of loving the self. Or maybe it’s not a strategy, one just gets used to it, the alienation, until it becomes like the scent of one’s own skin.
There’s so much dread about being an artist and a writer once you’ve become a mother, I write to Sofia. I wonder how much I’ve internalized it. My thinking and writing felt more sensitive and intense than ever, before the pregnancy, and pregnancy has only magnified this. Despite the slowness and heaviness, I feel a real potency and lucidity. I think I’m glad this has happened. This decreation. This complete overwriting of the self.
In 1908, René Maria moves into the Hôtel Biron, a former convent of Sacré-Cœur, a gray mansion with a field of weeds converted into artists’ studios. He will occupy this space, with its soaring ceilings and three bay windows, on and off over the next couple of years, in another attempt to work on the novel. Because he cannot afford any furniture, the sculptor, with whom he has reconnected, gifts him a large oak table. He looks out over an abandoned garden. Rabbits leap across the trellis as across an ancient tapestry, he writes Rodin, who likes it so much when he visits it that he rents out an entire floor for his city studio; later, the entire building becomes the museum to the sculptor’s work. There is a portrait photograph of Rilke sitting at this table in 1908, looking pensively into the distance. He is most likely not at work on the novel, which exists entirely in loose forms, mostly letters and notebooks. But at the New Year he promises to commit himself to the novel—no more poetry collections, no more receiving visitors or taking vacations until it is finished that summer. His publisher has agreed to give him a monthly salary if he writes the novel by that deadline. However, three women visit him in Paris that year: his wife, his mentor, and a new love interest. In two haunted nights he writes a requiem to Paula, who died weeks after giving birth—an embolism, so sudden that her last word was Schade! (A pity!) He travels for half the year. But by winter of 1909 he must truly confront the novel. Except for two vacations, he spends the rest of the year in Paris at the hotel, writing and rewriting. He has promised to remain cloistered inside the hotel, locking himself in his drafty room, taking meals through a little sliding window. To write the novel, he must cease to exist. It was in these rooms that he rewrote these scenes of childhood. He writes, in a letter, that he is beginning to feel the space around him become vast. It is here, in a beloved city, that he writes about memories of the same city, which he then despised. It is here, after he was famous, that he hid out and pretended to be a nobody, the twenty-eight-year-old barely published poet, writing alone in his room. For a city is not linear. How fiction works in repetition until it takes a final form. How many iterations and foldings of time a novel can take. And what is a novel but an immense solitude? He tells his publisher in May that he cannot finish by August as planned. By the fall of 1909, sick, fluish, exhausted, he spends three weeks recovering at the Black Forest spa. Still sick, he returns to Paris in October to wrestle again
with this work. Most of the text exists only in a mass of small notebooks, scattered parts of old manuscripts, scraps of paper, letters and ripped-out diary pages, disconnected scenes and episodes. Nothing like a first draft. He fails to assemble a coherent manuscript. He can’t get a sense of the whole. Finally, his publisher invites him to stay at his mansion outside of Leipzig. He will give him rooms, away from their two little girls. He arrives with a trunk filled with these tiny notebooks and notes. For two weeks, in a small quiet room in a tower, he dictates the novel to a typist. By the beginning of 1910, he has finished the book. Once it is published, Rilke surrenders to a total crisis of the self, exhausted from the experience, feeling perhaps that he has spent himself, that he will never write again. More than a decade of restless wanderings follow, an entirely itinerant existence. In 1914 alone he travels to Paris, Berlin, Munich, Zurich, Paris, Duino, Venice, Milan, Paris, Leipzig, Munich, Eschershausen, Munich, Frankfurt, Würzburg, and Berlin again.
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