by Anne Garréta
What to do?
You close this long parenthetical.)
So, you were writing that, when you sum it all up every year, in order to fill out your various tax returns, your expenses, it seems to you that for the past fifteen years you’ve worked to fatten up bookstores and airlines. And when you met D, your commuting oscillation from one side of the Atlantic to the other particularly benefited the airline companies. And between two such oscillations, you met her.
Let’s say that you remember rather distinctly that she sought to make your acquaintance.
That she had, since you always saw each other in public, the subtlety to indicate to you very discreetly, but very indubitably, her desire. And you’ll admit: that alone suffices to stir your desire. Picture a public situation, a soirée, a cocktail party, a meeting, a convention, a dinner, a salon, any congregation in everyday life. Imagine a desire that various proprieties compel you to hide from all those present other than the object of this desire, who feels none initially, a desire that finds no opportunity to declare itself. Calculate the forms and paths of your communication. Measure out the means of your concealment. Find secret strategies of seduction.
It seems to you that this is a dying art. And you still admire D’s initial sureness in it.
The necessity to deploy such art stemmed from the paradox of this desire’s parameters. A social setting, a straight woman, in a society that is also religiously, catholically, jealously straight, and a necessarily clandestine desire for a woman who is not. What codes to play by? What protocols to leverage?
On second thought, a crucial part of your attraction for D was tied to precisely that: the secret grasping of signs which, in the middle of a society both blind and supercilious, permitted the initiatory recognition of desire. You both stand amidst a crowd and, from afar, through a phosphorescence of the gaze, of the body, receive the sign addressed to you and perceptible to you alone. You are thereby excepted from the general blindness. Exaltation of a lucidity that seems denied to mere mortals, to mere heterosexuals whose official relaxing of morals (which has not been accompanied by any dismantling of the old privileges and reflexes) has—to hear them complain, as their religion is somewhat comical, oscillating as it does between triumphant dogma and doleful creed—radically disenchanted desire. You are the only ones to see the desire that is not allowed, in what is not said aloud.
You will add two things here. That D was not the only woman to offer you the vertigo of this esoteric communication of desire. And that, in what the common language persists in designating by the name of homosexuality, the part that always had the strongest pull over your imagination is none other than the semiotics and hermeneutics, so singular, that stem from situations of secrecy that homosexuality may involve. Finally, it’s this pleasure of signs that you hold dear above all else, their labyrinth where one hides and captures that which cannot be said (for it is outside the law of normative codes and public languages), that guaranteed you never had the least affinity for the ghetto. There language seems poor, as poor as that of the norm. The radical unknown of desire, the art of its emergence, the strategy of its unveiling have been reduced there to some elementary equations and codified protocols. Rationalization of desire, economic in appearance, you admit, and liberal in its effect. But for the anxious animal that you are (and which, above all, perhaps, enjoys its anxiety and values rationality very differently), without appeal and without vertigo. You like the possibility of blindness, the brusque burst of its eclipse. The assurance of its disappearance without remainder seems to you the ultimate illusion, a supreme twist of blindness.
And probably as a result, desire often came to you from women who, for the most part, professed the dominant religion. (Could it be that the obstacles have been the only things keeping you, and your inclination, constant?) And you can say in all seriousness, to all those who want to see in homosexuality the attraction for the same, the appeal of indistinctiveness, the refusal of difference—the new shibboleth of self-righteous morality, the mantra of Pharisees who, worshiping difference, are so full of it, they end up idolizing it—“I beg to differ.”
Escaping the general blindness, did you say. A great and noble ambition. Fateful hubris.
We merely trade one blindness for another. For lack of the common blindness, we will let a singular lucidity blind us.
D communicated her desire to you. Secretly. Then privately. And after a bit of reticence on your part, and the delay required to formulate and indulge a moral dilemma that your vanity was burning to cut short (for why hide it, and you didn’t even hide it from yourself at the time, D was a typically desirable woman, you saw her in and through the eyes of others), you blindly threw yourself into the adventure. Which is to say into the most banal of bourgeois affairs. Marivaux collapsed into boulevard theatre, the intrepid anxiety of the Enlightenment into trite positivism.
What memories have you kept of it? Memories of five to seven and lunch hours spent in your bed in exertions you do not dare call erotic. Extended nights and weekends at her place reiterating the same gymnastics routine. For she made it her mission to turn you into an athlete in the bedroom. You remember three nights spent at her place where she followed you from bed to bed, waking you for new marathons. It was imperative, at risk of disappointing her, that you fuck her standing up in the hallway; in danger of endangering her pride, that you ravish her on the kitchen table; at risk of being accused of despising her, that you screw her thrown over the ottoman cushions in the parlor; for fear of making her no longer feel desirable, that you sodomize her in the bed of the guest room; to prove your passion, that you make her come on the four-poster bed; and to make sure that no piece of furniture had been neglected, that you finger her against the piano… And especially (but there, you gave up, you failed the task) that you insert phrases, that you ejaculate your excitement at her shamelessness, that you excite her with obscenity and finally treat her like a whore. (And there your perplexity knew no limit: how is one supposed to treat whores? Badly, apparently. As an object, you speculated. Which, in practice, didn’t really get you anywhere. You tried, but flagrantly failed, for you had to start again over and over, ten times per night, just as many times during the day, and without forgetting any piece of furniture, in all the positions of the Kama Sutra.)
At the end of these three days, shattered, your wrist inexorably cramped, fingers stiff and unable to hold a pen any longer, loins sore, arms, shoulders, neck aching, back lacerated, brain dazzled from so little sleep, in the streets the unfamiliar light of day burned your eyes.
Description of a state that could just as well have been idyllic. But, just as narrative fiction is formally indistinguishable from referential narrative (for they mimic each other to such a point that in these twin mirrors only mirages can be glimpsed), the description of pornographic, solipsistic alienation is indistinguishable from that of the perfect shared erotic passion.
So, what’s the difference?
The difference is that there was none. D had taken a lover and had had the genius to choose a woman to fill the role. But while she might have feared—or met some difficulty with—obtaining a certain something from him, she risked nothing by turning a woman—whom she managed not to notice was one—into the instrument. The relationship thus remained strictly heterosexual.
Such irony would be enough to turn you off of lucidity.
[Night 6]
E*
The image your memory proffers resembles this: a confusedly Gothic conference hall, tables in the shape of a stretched ellipse, your head held in your hands probably to keep it from drifting, and, inside the space where an I resides, a dizzying void resonating with the words of someone from far away, all the way at the other end of that never-ending ellipse. The distress, the intense distress at being condemned to sit there, holding your head. For it will never finish. This feeling you haven’t felt since high school. Enduring the surge of endless words, so devoid of passion, so solemn, so full of faith and certi
tude in what is Good and True. A conclave of true believers babbling and pontificating about a counter-reformation of the articles of literary scripture, post-second coming of the subject.
So you were bored to death at this symposium where, under who knows what pretext, a palette of academics and sundry writers had been gathered. (You would only have to rummage through the shelves of folders that clutter your office and make up the archive of your life to find the symposium program and the text that you read there, but what’s the point? You said you would write from memory, and its fault lines are just as intriguing and suited to your project as its peaks.) As a rule, it’s not a good idea to line writers up in a room and entice them to talk. It’s enough to turn you off of literature (your last line of defense against the fierce disgust the human species tends to evoke in you).
Your boredom must have been obvious; boredom puts you in a bad mood. A French novelist took offense at your words. At lunch, she sternly reproached you with what she considered to be your outrageously pro-American, dangerously disillusioned, cynically nihilistic opinions. Altogether too many adverbs.
In every debate she tried to contradict you. She had a positive outlook, a great deal of faith, in addition to her adverbs. You are only ever skeptical. The idolatry of literature, its alleged eminent virtues, humanism, hyperbolic worship: they’re not for you. Contradiction fortified you; in the abysmal ennui besieging you, it was your only jubilation.
It seemed to you that, far from taking these pointless debates for the banal rhetorical jousts they really were, your novelist took them personally, came to believe you despised her and was hurt. You also had not indicated that you had read her works. You had not demonstrated any consideration. You wanted, on the last evening, to repair the perhaps brutal impression you had made and, asking her for a copy of her latest novel, undertook to read it amidst the brouhaha of aperitif chitchat.
It required you to exhibit a talent that you have acquired through so much reading, which allows you to scan a 200-page volume—provided it’s not a grotesque translation of a German treatise on metaphysics—in thirty minutes and retain enough to talk about it. Which you then proceeded to do with the author, competently enough that your remarks and questions surprised and seemed to delight her.
By way of explaining this little talent, this little secret weapon you unveiled, let’s say that a novel is like a car: any amateur mechanic knows upon initial inspection the type, its most common pathologies, and the structure of its engine. There are a few common models, a minuscule amount of rare ones that force you to revise your understanding, oblige you to dismantle them completely to understand their workings. We encounter more family sedans on the roads of literature than Ferraris or prototypes. Let’s also say that, to your eyes, literature takes after mechanics more so than religion. You see in it neither transcendence nor the ineffable. Rather valves, cylinders, ignitions… Which is to say nothing of the trips it can afford us, nor of the lands it can take us to.
You informed your novelist that her vehicle was well made, its mechanics solid. That, judging by ear, everything ran smoothly, the music of the motor was pleasant, the carburetor well tuned.
The two of you parted after dinner on an excellent note and you went back to your hotel room, planning to pack your bags, for tomorrow the symposium would come to a close, the French novelists would take off for Paris, and you for New York, where you lived at the time. For once, you would go to bed early. How long has it been since you went to bed early?
You stood in your boxer shorts, toothbrush in hand, when the telephone rang. Your novelist proposed that you meet her at the bar for a last drink.
That or insomnia… You slipped on your pants and took the elevator down.
You are sitting at a low, round table in one of those “club” armchairs. Wedged comfortably deep in the chair, legs stretched out before you. The bar is of the red velvet, wood paneling, and softened lights variety. The image in your memory is suffused with its dim red glow. The novelist is named E, she is sitting to your left in an identical armchair set at a right angle to yours. She is sitting on its edge, hunched over. All her mannerisms, even her way of sitting, are of a perfect femininity. Or: how to occupy the least possible amount of space in the world. You ordered a cognac, you’ll order several more before leaving the bar. You think you remember two identical glasses on the table before you. But you can’t be sure that she was also drinking cognac.
As for the conversation, you think she began by focusing on your bad manners, the rather un-feminine way you have of dressing (as proof: the leather jacket you always wear), of behaving, of speaking without seeming to give a fuck. That way of attacking and savaging opposing positions. Things which you recognize all too willingly, but which you don’t apologize for. Your attitude shocks her. She’ll tell you later that she envies your carefree attitude.
She tells you about her husband, her lover, her children, her writings. You listen to her, thinking of the reasons she might have for confiding in you what she really wants. Since she must know she won’t convert you to good manners, nor to her piety. You no longer know whether she irritates you or if she moves you in her honest efforts to define and, perhaps without realizing it, justify herself, her life. What kind of recognition is she seeking from you, and why from you?
You drink cognac and, sinking in the light numbness it brings on, you feel something like remorse at having treated this woman in such a cavalier manner. You lack, it seems, you have lacked, sensitivity. Her aggression toward you could be merely an (ineffective) form of defense. But against what?
She asks you questions, you don’t remember what about, and you respond with all possible cordiality. You start suspecting that, if nothing else, she is trying to seduce you. That desire would be the ultimate or in extremis form of recognition that she probably feels you have refused her.
The idea must have made you smile, because she remarks upon this smile and tells you that she prefers you like this, that she’s happy she had the idea of inviting you for a drink.
Otherwise, she would never have seen your other side. The one that smiles. This makes you smile even more. Here we go. We’re floating together in the warm bath of self revelations and secrets disclosed in the fiction of hidden faces. A good medium for the quickening of desire.
While finishing your cognac, while the liquid burns dimly in your mouth and throat, you wonder if you could want her. You probe your soul in search of desire. It suffices—you have often noticed—to look in order to find. And can we, in good conscience, refuse to recognize the consciousness of another? That or insomnia. Another cognac should be enough to render you positively charming. Attentive. A touching gentleness contrasting with your former fierceness.
When you two get up and leave the bar, the cordiality between you has reached an improbable peak. Your duplicity is perfect: if you plumb your soul, and you don’t stop doing so, you perceive two currents crossing your consciousness (as grotesque German metaphysics would have it). One, pleasant and gentle, has all the warmth instilled by alcohol and the comfort of the bar: a pretty trickle of sincere and ironic benevolence. The other, icy, considers the situation with a merciless eye: here you are in a new episode of the eternal struggle of consciousnesses for recognition, and the battlefield, once more, will be desire. The only question is that of the moment, of the movement, of the event that will begin the battle.
It’s three in the morning; you take the elevator. Her room is two floors beneath yours. The door slides on its rails. The corridor is deserted. All that’s left to do is say goodnight. You see her hesitate to proffer her hand, leaning, it seems, toward a less formal farewell. Seizing the invitation, you embrace her. It lasts a while. You take the scene in, coldly, though the coldness saddens you. She wrests herself finally, stammers something like, no, I can’t. And disappears. You step back into the elevator, press the button for your floor, thinking how it’s all so strange and familiar, and a bit tiring, to play this game; to play it again a
nd always according to the standard though implicit rules leaves so little to surprise. Who would dare to invent others? To thwart… Back in your room, you think while undressing that you certainly served literature honorably, these symposiums are decidedly exhausting and you conducted yourself with more tactfulness than you believed was possible, for after all, E no longer has any reason to blame you—didn’t you grant her full satisfaction?