by Paul Lisicky
I thought I could live with that back then.
Part III
Oiled, Sooted, Smeared
2010 | After a month or so away from writing—school, grading, the usual end-of-the-term deadlines—the world is new and precarious. Tsunamis and earthquakes are practically quaint, the stuff of predictability. The volcano in Iceland disrupts air service between the United States and Europe for at least two weeks. Tourists rack up hotel bills, they walk the New York streets until their feet hurt, their heads numb with looking. Can’t science take care of it? Can’t the governments? These questions are at the heart of the frustration, but at least we’re not scorched by the lava flow. In one photograph, the fire soars and flares over the icy mountain, while a farmer steers a tractor in the foreground. The image is so extreme and beautiful that it looks Photoshopped, or like a shot from Close Encounters. I don’t know what’s stirring about it. It certainly makes us feel alive to look at such a thing. On one hand, I think, complacency and calm in the midst of apocalypse—that’s it. Of course. The metaphor for how we know ourselves now. We go on in our dailiness even as the world is blowing up in front of our eyes. But even that feels too easy, theoretical. To see a fire like that in our own backyards! How it would affect the way we move through our rooms, our kitchens, the shed out back, and even how we hang up the tools on the walls.
Somehow the Gulf of Mexico oil spill feels more personal. Perhaps by the time you read this, that disaster will have a name, as other disasters are made benign and containable by a name. The chaos of the Twin Towers becomes 9/11. The first Iraq war is Operation Desert Storm. Maybe the Gulf disaster will come to be known as Deepwater Horizon, but the corruption of it doesn’t deserve such a poetic name. In the past few days, scientists speculate that the oil will enter the Loop Current, head out around the Florida Keys and up the East Coast. Some reports say North Carolina. Others say the south beaches of Nantucket. A few even say Europe, and the fact that no one has a clue sometimes feels as bad as the disaster itself. Food-related words are bandied about: mousse, chocolate, peanut butter, pancake batter, pudding, patties, melted chocolate, mole. No one of course says out loud what it really looks like: shit. Shit all over the white beaches of Alabama and the Florida Panhandle. Already a duck is becoming the poster child of the disaster. The coating on the duck is so thick that he can barely see through it. We already know that the duck is not going to survive. Maybe that oiled duck is just what we need to shake ourselves awake, just the way the shot of the napalmed Vietnamese girl shook a whole generation awake. But we are already bombarded with so much. Maybe a single image can’t even have consequence anymore.
By the time you read this you’ll have a better sense of things. Restoration will be under way, raw green marsh grass planted, shrimp and crab nurseries sparkling in the sunlight, and the dolphins will thrive without any memory of what had befallen their ancestors. Or what about a miraculous intervention: God reaching down into the water, soaking it up with his mighty woolen arm.
Then again, the worst might come true. One species after another falling out of the world, like pages falling out of a book that’s no longer read. Everything we love oiled, sooted, smeared. Not just the things we see, but the things we can’t. We’ll go on as a species for a while, but after the whales and dolphins and birds are gone, we won’t be able to live with ourselves.
2005 | It’s been six months since Denise and I have had contact. We appear to be conducting a test: yes, it’s possible to shower, to make breakfast, write emails, and read student work without thinking of you. There’s a sick little thrill to the test. Maybe through abstinence we’re getting ourselves back. A lightness in our step, a quickness to our thoughts.
It helps that it’s a busy moment. After that semester in Wilmington, I’m teaching a graduate-level workshop at the college where I’ve been teaching fiction writing for years. The students are eager to talk; they speak about Flannery O’Connor, Joy Williams, and Denis Johnson with happy detachment. They love literature, love one another’s work, and want to be with one another in the same room. They’re kind. There’s no entitlement in their voices. More important than that, their work is good, very good. Somehow this frees me up to concentrate on my own writing, and I write pages and pages of a new novel that I’m convinced is going to change everything for me.
It is time to make bigger claims for myself.
Later in October I send out a group email to announce my new email address. This triggers any number of hellos from people I wouldn’t have heard from otherwise, one of whom happens to be Denise.
Question 1: Would she have written to me had I not written to her first?
Question 2: Was it annoying to get a group email from me in lieu of a personal message? After how many months of silence? Sixteen?
I write back in a matter of an hour. I don’t express my annoyance with the fact that she signs her name Denise rather than with any of the nicknames we’ve used for each other over the years. I don’t say a thing about the professional request at the heart of her letter—months and months of silence and she’s asking for a favor, a letter of recommendation from M, no less. Maybe she is just holding a wet finger to the wind. She is trying to see whether I’m angry with her—does she think I have a right to be furious?—but there’s a distance and hardness in her lack of particulars. When I look over my response six years later, my all-too-sprightly “must go for now, dear,” it’s clear I want to say everything is all right. I don’t want to play the part of judging her, abandoning her. But I’m not sure I believe any of it. I wonder if my cheerfulness is its own kind of aggression: you are a petulant child and nothing you can do will shake me. The language in my letter runs on its own currents. It is all reconciliation, forgiveness, but I’m not sure it’s real forgiveness. My language is not at all besieged by the stops, starts, and fumbling of real thought and feeling. Not a single sentence has been worried over. Not a single sentence suggests, I love you and we need to build a bridge.
But I keep coming back to her last lines: Hope things are going well for you. Miss you. Love you deeply.
That “miss you.” That “deeply.” You’d have to be lead to resist such things.
Papito,
So good to hear from you. You sound wonderful. That’s great news about the film option and I think M might be on to something re: the new book. You should truly consider such a thing.
I long to be back at work on a novel and deeply immersed in the essay collection, but time has not allowed much of either although I have managed to start sending the new essay around. [X] just rejected it last week. Any venues you think might be possible, I’m all ears.
I know what you mean about health insurance. I have to go for my one year post-cancer check-up. I’ll always need the health insurance now. The Houston job could work out well, yes? Your take on R— — is right on the money. Although that huge endowment they received allowed them to change their name, become a “university,” the reality is most of the change revolves around the engineering school…. I do love Ron Block, though. One of my favorite days so far were the hours spent devising the graduate reading list. For once, we were two writers talking about writing I’ve always loved going into work. You know how much I’m energized by teaching….
I forget whether or not I told you the book has definitely been optioned for film. Katie threw in another bonus payment, so as soon as the contract arrives that’s a go. She’ll be writing the screenplay herself.
Okay. More later. I love you to pieces. Be well.
Love,
Chiquita xoxoxo
P.S. I am dying to get up to NYC to visit …
There she is, there is her voice: alert and surging forward. Perhaps she’s relieved that we’ve learned to be fluent again, to renew what we’d been. It’s been too much work not to speak. Too much to keep ourselves closed off while pretending to be open and alive to the things around us.
To pieces. Dying to get up.
I write back to h
er. Then that’s the last I’ll hear from her for a very long time.
2010 | On June 12, the New York Times reports that BP is corralling approximately ten thousand barrels of crude a day. “The cap is capturing so much oil,” the report says, “that the company [does] not have adequate equipment to process any more.”
Four presumptions lay behind this report:
We’ve had enough bad news for the past seven weeks.
Science and technology work wonders for us. Oh, pity you doubters, you travelers stranded by the volcano. All our great myths are once again affirmed.
Narratives do have rising action and falling action, and a story, if it is to be a satisfying story, must end well and be resolved.
Apocalypse has been too much for us to handle, and now we can get back to fishing and casinos and high-rise hotels.
No mention has been made of any undersea plume. No mention of the other fact, which shows up repeatedly in other forums: to cap the well, BP has had to increase the flow of oil to twenty thousand barrels a day. I can’t imagine what negotiations and transactions might have gone on to prompt the newspapers to omit that bit of news.
Maybe we should stop calling it a spill. Exact language is in order. Let’s call it a hemorrhage, a hole punched in the skin of the earth. That must be why the story unsettles us. It reminds us that spilling is our most inevitable condition. How much work goes into reining ourselves in at every moment when all we want to do is spill, spill?
Spillage: foul words, foul thoughts. Sickness, the body without agency. Spillage: the world that is hungry for endings.
“It could take well into autumn—and maybe much longer—to deal with the slick spreading relentlessly across the Gulf,” says the opening line of BP’s latest PR release.
Maybe much longer.
No mention made of the spill off the Mexican coast in the 1970s. Forty years after the fact, tar still leaches in the estuaries. Into the mangrove, onto your skin if you put your hand in sand, water. Take your hand out and it smells like fetid soup.
2005 | One sentence comes back to me over and over and over again: “I have to go for my one year post-cancer check-up.”
I wonder how I passed that by when I first read Denise’s email. It almost seems that she’d wanted me to do that. Did she assume I’d rather not know? Could she hear it in my voice when she first said there was cancer in her colon? They caught it early, she’d said. Luckily, I am going to live a long time.
Then I think, no, it’s not so much that, no. She wanted me to know. Yes, I am worried about my body, but I don’t want this to be my one story right now. I think about my coming out to her in that dining room so many years back. The years I held back that news simply because I didn’t want my gay identity to be the single subject of me. Rather, a subject of me. These are two separate matters, of course, but I can understand the resistance to being interpreted through a single lens.
No, I think. It is an inverted arrogance to think she was protecting me. She probably didn’t want to make it so real to herself. Couldn’t you bring back cancer simply by uttering its name too much? Hard enough to get through the day, to write the check, sign the check, seal the envelope, put the stamp on the envelope, and walk to the post office. And then the next day you do it all over again.
I’m sure she knew what she was doing. Cancer as disruptive as a common cold that hung around too long. I understand that. No other way to stop the dreadful faces of concern—are you okay? Faces that are never really about you, but about the one who asks the question. Tell me you are okay so I don’t have to lose any more sleep. Enough to protect dailiness, simple dailiness, which must feel like adventure after you’ve been through radiation. To go out for a cup of coffee: precious. To walk to a dog park. To buy the kind of dress that makes others eye you and pull you in. To start exercising again. To walk the treadmill for twenty minutes, breathing, arms swinging.
A few things I know about the months before the illness. She’d lost lots of weight, rapidly. She was working very hard to finish a nonfiction book with a looming deadline. Teaching a full-time load and trying to finish a book. Living in a new place hundreds of miles from home. Cup after cup of coffee, tapping away on her keyboard as night moved into morning. The fight inside her shaping her sentences, which are more heightened in pitch and description than anything she’d written before. Although it is a book about fire, it is also the book about a catastrophe in her, though she doesn’t announce it as such. I don’t know if she knew, but the book certainly did.
The incident at the beach house. Maybe she was angry at cancer, at death, and we just happened to be standing in the face of it. Here she was, returning to the place where she was sick and didn’t yet know it. Impossible not to associate those streets with that strange feeling in her, a tiredness. A worry over the book, a worry over the job she was applying for. The memory of her body out of control, waking up in the middle of the night to look at her face before the bathroom mirror. The flatness of the skin and hair. The strange thing it did to the hairline. The dryness: lips, fingertips, upper arms. Her thinness.
Another thought stops me: Denise’s first bout with cancer comes around the same time as my mother’s breast cancer in 2002. My retreat, Denise’s withdrawal, the haziness of my memory around that time.
The realization of that is enough to stop my breath.
Does a realization stop breath? Of course it can. Not complete breathing, but the pattern. Perhaps there’s relief in breaking the pattern, for how else would you know you have a body, a body to lose?
Maybe Denise knew I’d already had all I could take on my mind.
High Maintenance
2010 | Reporters seem to know exactly how to piss off Joni Mitchell. Ask a provocative question, call her a female singer-songwriter, a folk singer, imply that her foray into jazz was a failed experiment. Talk about her career as if her best songs were “Free Man in Paris” and “Help Me,” songs written and performed in the 1970s. Ask her opinion of the younger songwriters who claim her as an influence, singers who have as much in common with her as plastic does with mahogany. It is so easy to get her going: watch her face get stony, listen to her voice get hard. It must be part of the assignment: Ask her anything you want, but you must ask this offensive thing. Ask this, and the article will be posted and retweeted all over the world.
Which is true of the article I’m looking at today, in which she calls Bob Dylan a plagiarist. She loves Bob Dylan; she’s indebted to him for the long lines in Hejira and Don Juan’s Reckless Daughter, but the interviewer likely hasn’t done his homework. If he has, he chooses not to mention the influence. The pronouncement is just too choice, too ludicrous.
I wonder if Joni means what she says. Maybe so, maybe not. Both are true at once. She’s upset that, because of her gender, she’s never going to be called the greatest American songwriter of her generation, regardless of her innovations. The reporter, most likely a man, probably has ideas of his own: She isn’t nurturing, isn’t compliant. She’s thorny. And what could be better than to watch a woman, an accomplished woman, take herself down in front of people?
Maybe at a certain point, after she’s had a night to think it over, she feels confused about that outbreak. She can tell that the rage reads as if it’s aimed at her audience. She must think, is that what I’ll be remembered for? Not my guitar tunings, not my collaborations with Charlie Mingus or Jaco Pastorius, but for my temper. But then again there is so much to be angry about, so much wrong in the world, the barbarism of the music industry, which she calls a cesspool.
I put on Shine, the most recent album, an album I listen to more out of loyalty than love. Plenty of people who call themselves fans won’t even touch music like this, with its songs about oil, mining, capitalism going awry. It is the child with the glowing eyes, the child that isn’t quite right, whose head got whacked by the seesaw. At the same time, this is music for a world on the brink, brought about by its own wanting, its greed. Strange birds of appeti
te. Today the oil, if we’re to believe what we read, is washing up on the shores of Dauphin Island, Alabama. The waves are actually the color of New England cider, thick, with clots of darkness in them.
High maintenance. I think about how that phrase was once bandied about a few years back, as if a loved one—a child, a girlfriend, a friend—should be a co-op with low monthly charges. A room we could live in, without giving too much back. Turn up the lights, turn high the heat.
High maintenance: someone who gets hurt easily, someone who needs special care, who can’t go for two hours without blowing up, or sulking in wounded silence. And God help you if you should get in her way. She’s the kind of person who can ruin your weekend just when you’ve packed the car to go to Maine. She’ll send you to a therapist, make you lose your appetite, make you sit in a basement hall with a twelve-step group, among the glittering and wounded, who use phrases and metaphors you once felt superior to.
Go to him, sings Joni. Be with him if you can. But be prepared to bleed.
The friends I met in my thirties were different from Denise. They were people who didn’t need to fill up the room, or express what I couldn’t express for myself. We were equal partners. One didn’t need to talk more, feel more than the other. It was a time when we all thought a sane life was possible. This, of course, was before 9/11, before the Bush regime, anthrax, terrorism, torture, mass incarceration, two wars, an expanded police presence, Katrina. And did we mention the Great Recession?
Maybe, at a certain point, I allowed myself to think Denise was of a different time and place. It seemed to be that she was confusing volatility with authenticity. No other reason I would have stopped finding the need to write to her about the crucial things. I was practicing, practicing for a life I believed I could live apart from her. If I could do it, she could, too. There were always people for her, not just new friends coming into her life, but family. Always family.