Affinity

by Affinity- The Friendship Issue (retail) (epub)

  And yet I couldn’t stop stealing looks at this Gess. People were walking in, taking their chairs, tossing down their backpacks, but the room was a lot more alive in her corner. It was as if a dog whistle were being blown and only I could hear it. She sat in her chair as a dancer would, right leg folded and tucked under the left, dressed in black, black scoop-neck top, black linen slacks, flat black shoes, an immense flat cordovan purse on the tabletop in front of her. Everyone else sat relatively still, obedience shaping their postures, while she slid around in her chair, fingertips extended in dual directions, her body both talking and listening at once. Most of the other students, all women, cultivated an air of practicality about them. They were softer; they required scarves around their necks, the plushness of their skin. Denise, on the other hand, was near to the bone, as if it didn’t matter to her that her heart, liver, lungs, breasts, and sexual parts were closer to brute danger.

  The professor had an air of benevolence about him. He smiled in the manner of a parish priest, as if he were about to lift his arms, raise them high above his head to say, “Let us pray,” after which we were to bow our heads. He opened his book, asked us to open our own books, and started to speak at length about Blake. His sentences were so sculpted that it was hard not to wonder whether he’d spoken those same words, in the same order, for the last dozen years. Once he got going, the kindness seemed to come less from inside him than outside the room. He rarely looked any of us in the eye, even though he certainly wanted us to feel seen. Maybe it was nerves. Or perhaps too painful to take in the fact that he was teaching Rutgers faces rather than Princeton faces. The Princeton faces would have focused on him; they would have looked right through him to their sunlit futures. The Rutgers faces were likely more complicated. We all wanted multiple things, things we couldn’t put a name to. How do you look at people who want to leave their husbands, or find their husbands, or shoot heroin up into their fingers, or fuck on the garage floor rather than in a bed, or move away from the state of New Jersey, without yet having an inkling of any of that?

  The afternoon sun saturated the fabric of the rolled-down blind. What was I doing here? I had never been a fan of school: most of my creative work was animated by a desire to bypass it, as well as all the dreads I’d associated with it, the pressure of conformity, competition—years and years of sour stomachs, anxiety enough to compromise the immune system. And now here I was pinned to those hard chairs again, the most banal kind of resignation, although the idea of graduate school certainly sounded credible to my parents and their friends. I should have been designing houses. I should have been playing my guitar in a too-tight coffeehouse, risking the crowd’s indifference. As for writing? I knew I could write a story, a funny story. But a lot of people could write funny stories.

  There was no doubt Denise always knew she was a writer. I’d never known anyone with so little doubt about her capacity to handle the task set out before her. It was not a task she believed she needed to earn, all the more intriguing given that she didn’t come from a literary family; her father was a mailman, her mother sold cards in a Hallmark shop. If Denise did have doubts about her vocation, she kept them hidden, as one would the airplane-size vodka bottles behind the stacks of dishes in the china closet. In the weeks ahead she developed a theory about Blake’s line breaks. The professor agreed with her up to a point; there was a shove in his reply, which invited Denise to push back. She was never afraid of pushing back. Her face went gold. It smoldered every time she called the professor by his first name, Bob, as if she and Bob were equals, had always been so. Or not equals. Maybe she knew that when her book came out and her face was on the cover of The New York Times Sunday Book Review, Bob would be standing in line at a bookstore, waiting for her to sign it. Then later he’d try to teach the book and get it all wrong, and she would have to walk into the room, ready to interrogate his simple assessment.

  To see them banter was a little like watching sex, or some version of it.

  I looked around at the women around the table. They couldn’t take their eyes off Denise: the hands always in motion, the bracelets ringing on her thin olive arms. The expressive eyes that believed literature could take care of you, could make you feel known to yourself, less alone. She was onto something, whether they wanted to take it in or not. They’d gleaned that a devotion to literature insisted on a pact with the body. You covered it. You made sure it wasn’t noticed. Denise, on the other hand, was body. She didn’t hold that body against you. She didn’t use it as a threat. She invited you along, as if you could be as vital as she was if you were willing to come along. But what was I to do with her instruction in an English Department in which the professor who taught James never once mentioned same-sex desire in relationship to that work? If only he’d been bold enough to speculate about Marcher’s withdrawal from May Bartram, or just questioned the root of the relationship between Mallet and Roderick Hudson: “You came and put me into such ridiculous good humor,” says Roderick to his mentor. So many contradictions around those tables, it was no wonder I spent half those years blinking, looking for the correct stanza, in a fugue state. Occasionally when I couldn’t process the contradictions, I drifted up toward the ceiling and pictured Denise’s face up on a screen, the big screen, playing a vulnerable but tough woman who fell in love with all the wrong men, surviving everyone who tried to fuck her, destroy her.

  To push out the walls of the seminar room. Not at all to be at the center of that room, but what? There was a village inside me, but I didn’t have a clue as to how to get that village out. The enclosure I’d built around that village was exhausting me. Words: more treacherous, and potentially full of trouble than any of the tools of music, where you could hide between the notes, enfold yourself between pauses and breaks like a bat inside a crack in a wall. You could be a great dancer and hide, a great sculptor and hide, an architect, a city planner, an oboist, an actor, and I’d chosen a field that required you to stand naked in front of your reader. Words did not give you safety. Words were magnificently scary in what they exacted of you. I both wanted to run away and slide into the great furry arms of them, be mauled and screwed senseless if that was what they required.

  My writing place was in the far end of the basement, a few feet from the huge metal box of the heater. I felt drawn to the purr of the motor, the way it kicked on and off every five minutes, as if it were sucking fresh air into the house, then blowing it out into the yard, atop the barberry. I’d made a cage for myself down there, at my father’s drafting table. I figured my writing would possibly be better if it were conducted in the most unappealing conditions possible. I made sure I didn’t shift too much on the high metal stool. I only went upstairs to pee at least fifteen minutes after I felt the urge. Perhaps in part I was trying to appease my father, who believed that hard work justified a human life. It didn’t so much matter what the product was, but how you pushed, bullied yourself. It could not look like I was playing—or having fun. I made myself a little med school there, but with pens and paper instead of scalpels and forceps. I felt far away from the outdoors, from everything that mattered to me: plants and animals and music and sex and God.

  The door opened. “Paul?” my mother called from the top of the steps.

  I stared at the words on the page. Where was syntax? No cause and effect. It unsettled me to see how easy it was to deface a piece of paper.

  My mother called my name again.

  I could have cried, I’m writing, but that would have translated to: selfish. I knew she was deliberately distracting me from my concentration even as I knew she wanted me to succeed at my writing. Achievement was as important to her as it was to my father. If I were to be published in a magazine, my mother would have shown up at the newsstand at 7:00 a.m., carried all dozen copies to the cash register, then, on the way home, slid them individually into the mailboxes of all the women from the church choir she had a wish to feel superior to.

  Out in the garage, I lifted the grocery bags from th
e car, burning in the face. It wasn’t like I was actually writing anyway. Possibly I was even grateful to be summoned out of the cage.

  I slugged cans into the pantry shelf. Her back, shy; her shoulders tight as she ran a hard stream of water at the sink. I couldn’t stay upset with her for long, for she was my other half, right? There was no way I’d ever be otherwise, as she’d named me after her twin brother, Paul, who had died when they were seventeen. She talked about Paul all the time and never let me forget how funny he was, how smart, how sweet, how beloved, how curious—I’d never measure up to the myth of him. But connections are always deeper than names, and I suspected I’d learned how to watch over her long before I’d been able to form sentences. Her rolled eyes, her glances, the movements of her fingers, which were always sore these days, none more bent than her wedding-ring finger—I was always attuned to her like a guide dog, as if it had always been my duty to check in on her emotional temperature, especially when she and my father had been fighting noisily into the night. And whenever my watching was too acute—when she caught me doing it, though she wanted me to—she pushed me away, for there was something not right about a child being too close to his mother, particularly if that child was a boy: everybody knew what that meant. At such moments, it was hard not to believe she was the saddest human alive, even though she’d always appeared to be happy. You’re always smiling, said a woman in the supermarket when I was five. And I remember looking up at my mother’s mouth, the swipe of coral lipstick at the tips of her white teeth, and thinking, she’s right. How lucky I was to have a happy mother. Happy was the mark of love, happy the sign of being chosen—we all wanted to be known as happy, right? And I held on to all the possible meanings of my mother’s happiness as the two of us stepped over the grate by the automatic doors. So many objects fallen through the grate, into the soot and lint, never to be scooped up again—dimes, a makeup compact, blue plastic gum-machine rings, coupons, receipts, two S&H Green Stamps, ballpoint-pen caps. Unhappiness beneath the soles of our shoes while the two of us walked forward, across the parking lot, the sun heating our heads.

  If you were to tell me that someone was to come along to replace my twin, I’d have said: impossible. And if that same person was to say her name would be Denise Gess, I’d have said it once more. A skyrocket, a shelter, a skylark: what would Denise have wanted with me? No, absolutely not. I did not have time for a real best friend. Besides, I already had a head full. Not to mention a house balanced across my shoulders, even if I was lurching now, right leg so far ahead I was practically on the ground.

  Two Poems

  John Ashbery

  PLAYING IN DARKNESS

  The men on top of the hill

  launched a new dirt lobby

  meant to outstrip the precious,

  that is, previous, tentative

  by a better than three-to-one margin.

  And slightly without you

  horrified spectators esteem the rain input.

  You would have too crude shelter

  of boards circling a central meaning place.

  Arrhythmia! You pant. Not by a long

  chalk, crotch shot

  on a bowling team, English-worthy kebabs.

  Let Fido confide, or cough up. I can’t

  vouch for the clientele, in lockdown mode.

  They don’t want you there, aporia.

  Mrs. Mulligan down the hall broached the topic

  long after everyone had gone home

  into the night.

  DESERT MOMENTS

  We watched his regular camera

  until it became nervous.

  There were other horns inside for us,

  things the pasta brought, never to be paced over.

  My gosh! The President of the United States!

  Years and years went by like that.

  It was impossible to keep track of them.

  I’m all about truth, and meaning. In the end

  they said they were delighted with what they found.

  Circuits are busy. Of course, we’re not going to sit here

  and wait. I have met you in the small shops,

  a large cookie presence. It was “robust.”

  Save me the czardas

  at Puke University.

  I’m glad he goes in there.

  That was the president, you clucks.

  Why is it taking so long?

  We might come closer (the eldritch mother’s refrain

  over twenty-three years ago).

  Oh, that’s what that is.

  Then suddenly it’s forty years later,

  and I was like, “Holy shit!

  I’m just happy to be alive!”

  It’s almost like you’ve done something

  totally preppy. Your hands are a little dirty,

  though.

  Yrs and oblige,

  Holofernes J. Crinkleaf.

  “Dear Smitten …”

  The Soft Disconnect

  J. W. McCormack

  Like a bug in a book that gamely improvises a bridge from each plummeting page, the evildoer called and we two friends, being two poor examples of the sinner class, answered.

  My partner and other-through-all-ages is Lunch, so-called for a congenital hoggishness that extends itself gut-wise into general behavior, and I am called Breakfast for reasons that are similarly apposite with wit to physical virtue. The hammy hand and the rakish black pudding are we—but I cannot help but think we might have fared better had we another meal between us.

  When I close my eyes and set my stainless-steel memory to emulsify, I see the curd-stains on the bedspread that had become tendriled about my dear partner’s egg-white whey-flesh, this being the only attire that Lunch had managed to obtain on his way to silence the ringing culprit of his spoilt day-slumber. The next image is of my partner quieting the phone’s receiver with one bulgy knuckle and, emitting the breath-flavor known as mustard sausage, avouching my participation in a caper.

  I will speak for us both, though we are the same: we are mountebanks, we fancy ourselves recalcitrants and revolutionaries. But the world calls us criminals. Jug jobs for dosh and finn—what the class of men known as lay call bank robberies—were Lunch’s buttered bread, the eggs in my oatmeal, but what the berk on the other line was hatching made our usual bust and screw look like dinner (a meal we both abhor). A soft disconnect. Oh yes, boys.

  Back in the nog-days, when Lunch and I were pursuing our degrees in the Malefactory Arts, the university halls were eternally abuzz with rumors (begun by the tenured rogues, stool pigeons, and other base canards who were our professors, then passed on to the knavish student body) of a means by which to black-out the city—say, perhaps, by scrupulous application of sharpened shears where the wires meet—and by this botching of the cables achieve what every true scalawag dreams of: an entire society rendered criminal. The butcher boy robbing the printer’s devil under the blinded eye of the magistrate, only to trundle homeward and discover that the glazier has had his way with the sum total of his vulgar possession. A perfect wheel, where mutual treachery would make for a fluid distribution of wealth, a never-ending variety of lifestyle.

  Oh, what dreamers we were in those days! You should have seen Lunch; he used to strut like a dauphin down aisles of garbure, hefting his girth with the same grace with which he’d polish off his first pork casserole of the day or inveigle the shills on the sidewalk to keep their eye on the pea as he transferred it between inverted cans marked Potted Meat. A member of the Gargantua class with the bacon-strangled heart of a champion; I knew my opposite number at first sight. But look at my poor Lunch now: inhaling hoagies in the getaway car, our array of drills and lock picks pastrami-moist, sausage-sized fingers chafing against the trigger. You’d need a map to find his inner thigh, boys—a map as exquisitely detailed, if you’ll forgive the belchy transition, as the one to the electric heart of the city that our employers slid under the front slot of our grubby basement flat once we agreed to enr
oll in the scheme.

  I should’ve smelled sour milk right off. Their reference was our school-days chaplain, Father Thierry Delmonico, a onetime asphyxiator of clerics who’d proved the figure of speech, of the type known as paradox, beginning “he who fucks nuns will later join the church” by joining the priesthood in his old age, a straightened Saul whom I gathered meant to christen us two apostles to do the work properly known as dirty in his stead. On our way to the rendezvous, I identified our accomplices as members of the bungler class. But the real liability was dear old Lunch, devouring a bouquet of corn dogs as I sucked my oatmeal through a straw, sweating mayonnaise as we made our descent into the sewers—I should’ve seen the jar of olive oil cached in his shirttail, should’ve calibrated the outcome of his sweet ass, his sucrose posterior, in proximity to all that electricity—but instead I silenced the little voice in me, like the ghost of so many embryonic chickens, chanting, You’ve gotten so sloppy, you’re gonna get us both caught!

  The proposed boondoggle was a nicked page from the Vademecum of Carlos Calisaya, a profligate philosopher of the genius class whose aphorism The dialectical origin of social oppression is the padlocked door anticipates a conclusion of the variety known as foregone, namely that equality proceeds from breaking and entering. I’d thumbed my way through my undergraduate copy till its page numbers were anointed with cream cheese, the annotations pockmarked with poppy seeds, and vellum so packed with gluten that I needed a knife to peel apart the leaves before countering good old Lunch’s notoriously bunco proofs and reductios (back when a love of sophistry overcrowded Ragù Bolognese in my friend and partner’s ponderous innards). The soft disconnect itself was mere extrapolation—on the part of a consortium of Graduate footpads, crimps-in-training, and Bachelors of Hooliganism—from Calisaya’s famous dictum Daylight is the plectrum of the Primogeniture.