The Friend

by Sigrid Nunez

  And what does this mean he thinks that those who are without such belief, those who not for one minute trust that God takes care of the Lilyas of the world, should do?

  My friend said, For people who have themselves been victims of inequality and exploitation, like the people trapped in Lilya’s slum, there might be some understanding for the way they mistreat one another. There might even be forgiveness, she said. But the depraved behavior of all those privileged members of the prosperous Nordic welfare state—this is harder to accept.

  • • •

  I once saw a photograph in a magazine: a long line of men snaking outside a shack being used by some teen prostitutes. I don’t remember what part of the world it was. I do remember that there was nothing about the men to suggest anything out of the ordinary. Several of them are smoking cigarettes. This one is looking at his watch, that one is studying the sky, another is reading a newspaper. Overall, an air of patient boredom. They might have been waiting for a bus, or for their turn at the DMV.

  • • •

  My friend told me about another case. Again, doctors could find no injury or disease that would have prevented the patient from speaking like any normal person. But she would not speak. When it was suggested that she start journaling, she was enthusiastic. In a week she had filled a whole stack of notebooks. She wrote in an astonishingly cramped script, the tiniest letters imaginable, my friend said. Just watching her scribbling away was frightening. Her hand ballooned, her fingers blistered and bled, but she wouldn’t—couldn’t—stop.

  We never knew what she was writing because she didn’t share it with us, my friend said. But I wouldn’t be surprised if it was mostly repetition and nonsense. Fortunately, we were able to give her medication that helped her stop the maniacal writing and start speaking again.

  • • •

  According to Larette, she, too, had gone through a period of mutism. Whenever she tried to speak her throat would close painfully, as if invisible hands were choking her.

  I would try very hard, in spite of the pain, but the most I could manage was a dry squeak, like an asthmatic mouse, which made people laugh. I was so ashamed that I stopped trying. When I wanted to communicate I’d use writing or some kind of sign language or silently mouth the words. Still, my throat hurt all the time.

  In therapy, she remembers an incident that she hadn’t thought about in many years. This involved her grandmother, about whom she tried to think as little as possible. When Larette was ten, her mother was stabbed to death by a boyfriend. There being no father in the picture, she was placed in the care of her grandmother. Larette referred to this woman, an increasingly desperate meth addict, as “my first slaveholder.”

  She was the first one to sell me to men. I remember we were sitting at the kitchen table, and she got up and went to the fridge. She opened the freezer and took out a Popsicle, which she unwrapped and broke in two. I remember it was cherry, my favorite flavor. She popped one stick in my mouth. Lemme show you, hon. She put the other one in her own mouth and went to work on it.

  This was one of several memories Larette had doubts about including in her book. She was afraid it would sound too made-up. She kept deleting it, then putting it back in, then deleting it again.

  • • •

  I know another woman, a writer, who has at times made her living as a sex worker. She is against the latest thinking that says every prostitute must be seen as a VOT. She wants a firm line drawn between a slave and a free and willing worker like herself. Brothel raids, john stings, and public john shaming fire her outrage.

  God save us from the white knights, she says. Why is it so hard to believe that we don’t all need, or want, rescuing? But then, hasn’t it always been impossible for society to accept that what a woman does with her body is strictly her own business.

  A story this woman likes to tell concerns the French actress Arletty, who in 1945 was convicted of treason because, during the Occupation, she’d had an affair with a German officer. In her defense she said, My heart is French but my ass is international. (Actually, my friend prefers a different, more succinct version of Arletty’s famous quip: My ass is not France.)

  My friend the sex worker says she is amazed how naïve most women are. They have no idea that most men have had sex with a prostitute, their own fathers and brothers, boyfriends and husbands among them. I have heard Larette say the same thing—as I have heard men say they are doubtful of men who claim never to have paid for sex.

  In a recent television documentary, a former prostitute who worked out of a suburban motel explains that Monday mornings were her busiest times: apparently nothing was so good for business as a weekend spent with the wife and kids.

  I once asked my friend if she enjoyed being a sex worker. I was pretty sure she’d say yes. But she looked at me as if she hadn’t heard me right. I do it for the money, she said. There’s nothing to enjoy. If I could make a living off writing, I wouldn’t do it at all. It’s easier than teaching, she said.

  • • •

  I had to promise not to use anything the women in the workshop wrote. But my friend the psychologist agreed to let me write about her and the work she did. You, in your generous way, pitched the idea to an editor you happened to have lunch with. Soon I had a contract and a deadline.

  • • •

  Not long after we had graduated from college, my friend published some stories. The magazines they appeared in were small but prestigious, the kind of literary quarterlies that got serious attention. One of the stories won a prize, and later that year she was nominated for, and subsequently granted, a much bigger prize given annually to promising young writers.

  I want to know why she stopped writing.

  It wasn’t exactly a decision, she said. It was just something that happened. I’d started writing a novel and was having trouble concentrating, and someone I knew suggested that I try meditation. That’s how I got into Buddhism. I spent a month at a retreat upstate learning how to meditate, and I’ve been doing it ever since. I know there’ve been plenty of writers who were into Buddhism—and who doesn’t practice some kind of meditation or yoga these days? And I know there are people who say that meditation helped their careers. But from the time I started studying Buddhism I found it at odds with wanting to be a writer.

  To clarify, though, I didn’t ever stop writing. There was no need for me to do that. I journal, for one thing—in fact, I consider journaling a kind of meditation—and I write poetry. The things I see in my job every day are very disturbing, and I’ve found that poetry helps. Not that I ever write about my job. My poems tend to be about the beauty of the world—about nature, mostly. It isn’t very good poetry, I know that, and I have no desire to share it. For me, writing poetry is like prayer, and prayer isn’t something you have to share with other people.

  It wasn’t that I wanted to withdraw completely from the world. I wasn’t about to become a Buddhist nun or anything like that. But as I say I started having doubts about becoming a writer. I didn’t see how I could reconcile a literary career with the goal of freedom from attachment. Soon after I finished the Buddhist retreat I did a residency at an artists’ colony—I was hoping to get back on track with the novel. I remember looking at the other people there, some of whom were just starting out like me and some of whom were already established, and thinking about what it took—besides talent, of course—to succeed. You had to have ambition, serious ambition, and if you wanted to do really good work you had to be driven. You had to want to surpass what others had done. You had to believe that what you were doing was incredibly serious and important. And all this seemed to me in conflict with learning to sit still. To let go.

  And even though writing isn’t supposed to be a competition, I could see that most of the time writers believed that it was. While I was at the artists’ colony, one of the writers there got an advance so huge it was reported in the Times. That
night at dinner he said, There go my last two friends. He was joking, of course, but I have noticed that whenever a writer hits it big a lot of effort seems to go into trying to bring that person down.

  Also, it seemed like money was in the front of everyone’s mind. I didn’t get that. Who on earth becomes a writer for the money? I remember my first writing class, the teacher said: If you’re going to be a writer, the first thing you have to do is take a vow of poverty. And no one in the room batted an eye.

  It seemed to me that everyone I knew who was a writer—which back then meant pretty much everyone I knew—was in a state of chronic frustration. People were constantly getting worked up over who got what and who got left out and how horribly unfair the whole business was. It was very confusing. Why did it have to be like that? Why were the men all so arrogant, and why were so many of them sexual predators? Why were the women all so angry and depressed? Really, it was hard not to feel sorry for everyone.

  Whenever I’d go to a reading I couldn’t help feeling embarrassed for the author. I’d ask myself did I wish that was me up there, and the honest answer was hell no. And it wasn’t just me. You could feel it in the rest of the audience, that same discomfort. And I remember thinking, This is what Baudelaire was talking about when he said that art was prostitution.

  Meanwhile I was still struggling with the novel. And then one day I said to myself, Say you don’t write this book. Weren’t there a zillion other people willing to bring novels into the world? Weren’t there, in fact, already too many novels? Did I honestly think mine would be missed? And could I justify doing something with my life, my one wild and precious life, that I knew, undone, would not be missed?

  Around this time I happened to hear some writer talking on the radio. I can’t remember who it was, but for me it might as well have been God. I remember him saying that if in all the next year not a single work of fiction was published, instead of the staggering number of stories and novels we knew would be published, the effect on the world would be essentially the same. Not true, of course, because I suppose there’d be a significant effect on the economy. But I knew what he was saying, and I felt as if he were saying it to me. Which is when I said to myself, You must change your life.

  Not that I didn’t have regrets. There were plenty of times when I had the very lousy feeling that I was just a quitter, too lazy or too cowardly to live up to my own dream. But if I needed proof that I’d made the right decision, I just had to look at my own reading. I used to be the most passionate bookworm, but over the years I’ve become less and less interested in reading, especially fiction. Maybe it has to do with the realities I see every day, but I started to feel bored with stories about made-up people living made-up lives full of made-up problems.

  For a while I kept up. I’d buy a book that everyone was calling a masterpiece, or the Great American Novel or whatever, and half the time I wouldn’t finish it. Or if I did finish it, I wouldn’t remember it. Most of the time I’d forget a book almost as soon as I closed it. Then it got to the point where I pretty much stopped reading any fiction at all, and I realized I didn’t miss it.

  What if she hadn’t stopped writing fiction herself, I asked. Did she think she would still have lost interest in reading it?

  I don’t know, she said. I just know I’m much happier doing what I’m doing now than I would ever be doing what you’re doing.

  • • •

  Maybe it was a compliment that she felt she could say all this to me without worrying about hurting my feelings.

  • • •

  The student who graduates from a writing program and goes on to . . . renounce writing. You and I were familiar with the type. There seemed to be one in every class, and we always wondered: Why was it so often the one with the most promise? (Exactly the case of Wife One.)

  • • •

  Write about an object. Write about something that is, or was, important to you. The object can be anything. Describe the object, then write about why it’s important to you.

  One woman wrote about cigarettes. Her best friend, she called them. She’d started smoking when she was eight. I would never have survived my life without them, she said. I would rather smoke than do just about anything. Another woman wrote about a knife she had used to defend herself. She was not the only one to write about some kind of weapon. But about half the women wrote about a doll. All but one of the dolls came to a bad end. They were lost or broken or in one way or another destroyed. The one doll to escape such a fate was now hidden away in a secret place from where the writer hoped someday to retrieve her. That was all the woman would say. She shook her head when I reminded her that she was supposed to describe the object. If she did that she might draw down evil, she said. The doll would come to harm, she would never see it again.

  • • •

  Week after week, reading the women’s stories on the bus ride home, they began to seem like one big story, like the same story told over and over. Someone is always being beaten, someone is always in pain. Someone is always being treated like a slave. A thing.

  Some of the suffering are:

  The same nouns: knife, belt, rope, bottle, fist, scar, bruise, blood. The same verbs: force, beat, whip, burn, choke, starve, scream.

  Write a fairy tale. For some, a chance to fantasize revenge. Again, always a tale of violence and humiliation. Always the same vocabulary.

  No writing is ever wasted, you used to say. Even if something doesn’t work out and you end up throwing it away, as a writer you always learn something.

  Here is what I learned: Simone Weil was right. Imaginary evil is romantic and varied; real evil is gloomy, monotonous, barren, boring.

  • • •

  This was the last thing you and I talked about while you were still alive. After, only your email with a list of books you thought might be helpful to me in my research. And, because it was the season, best wishes for the new year.

  PART FOUR

  It sounded so unlikely: a memoir about a love affair between a man and a dog.

  The man: J. R. Ackerley (1896–1967), British author and literary editor of the BBC magazine The Listener.

  The dog: Queenie, a German shepherd. Acquired at the age of eighteen months by Ackerley, at the time a middle-aged bachelor with a formidable history of sexual promiscuity who’d given up hope of ever finding a partner.

  The book: My Dog Tulip. The change of name suggested by an editor who saw a problem with “Queenie” because Ackerley was known to be gay.

  Naturally, it was from you that I first heard about Ackerley. A volume of his letters had just been published. Well worth reading, you said, like everything he wrote. But it was his memoirs that you called indispensable.

  Find the right tone and you can write about anything: I was reminded often of this dictum while reading the book. “More than you want to know about what goes in or comes out of a dog’s vagina, bladder and anus,” warns one customer review. In fact, most of My Dog Tulip is about what Ackerley calls her heats. Though at times the reader can’t help feeling it’s inevitable and so might as well brace for it, no act of bestiality occurs. But to say the relationship was not intimate would be a lie. Ackerley himself admitted that he sometimes touched a sympathetic hand to the burning vulva the frustrated dog kept thrusting at him.

  Consider rereading, how risky it is, especially when the book is one that you loved. Always the chance that it won’t hold up, that you might, for whatever reason, not love it as much. When this happens, and to me it happens all the time (and more and more as I get older), the effect is so disheartening that I now open old favorites warily.

  The prose style is just as fine, the wit as sharp, the story, if anything, even more compelling than I remembered. But something has changed. The second time, I don’t find the author as likable. I find him even somewhat dislikable. His hostility toward women—had I missed that, or just forgotten it
?

  Women are dangerous, especially women of the working class. . . . They stop at nothing and they never let go.

  True, Ackerley has little affection for humans in general. But the misogyny is clear. Women are bad because they are women.

  An exception is made for Miss Canvey, the competent and compassionate vet who immediately diagnoses the cause of Tulip’s behavioral problems as a matter of the heart: She’s in love with you, that’s obvious.

  As is the fact that he’s in love with her. But, obvious as this might be, I am bewildered by his treatment of her. Tulip’s behavioral problems are severe. A holy terror of a dog, badly trained, nervous and excitable to the point of hysteria, unsociable. She barks relentlessly, and she bites. Her behavior is so bad that it damages Ackerley’s relationships with people. Friends are dismayed that he won’t do more to discipline her. He blames “the disturbances of her psyche” on her first home, where she was left too much alone and sometimes beaten. But he himself often succumbs to berating and striking her, even though he knows such punishment can only confuse her.

  Frustration, rage, violence (his words). The pattern seems inescapable. When Tulip has a litter, intensifying the chaos already reigning in the Ackerley household, he sometimes cuffs the pups.

  Hard not to conclude that, with better training, Tulip would have been a happier dog, and Ackerley’s own life (to say nothing of his neighbors’) would have been much improved. But he is another one who balks at domination. Fixed in his head is the idea that Tulip must enjoy a full canine life. Meaning she must be allowed to hunt and eat rabbits, she must experience sex and motherhood. But, even after one litter, he can’t bring himself to have her spayed: How can I tamper with such a beautiful beast? Despite twinges of conscience, he is able to care less about the fates of the mongrel pups for which he knows he won’t find good homes. The beloved’s needs are all. Her heats not only turn both their lives upside down, they create havoc for his entire London district, given the large number of dogs that, like Tulip herself even in heat, go outdoors unleashed.