The Tao of Humiliation

by Lee Upton

  It was a good fifteen minutes until—seen initially as a reflection in a window—Sofie appeared. Slowly her character brought a book to Permulutter. A shot of both women’s hands. Then the two women sat by a window, reading, huddled close. Somehow the effect was vaguely unsettling, as if violence threatened just outside the frame.

  Bizarrely, the film was like the novel. Except maybe there were nude scenes? Why else would the boys be in the theater unless someone promised them nude scenes? Ingrid Permulutter was known for nude scenes. But the lighting was vaguely gray and blue. Her nude body would look like raw hamburger in that lighting.

  Ingrid Permulutter began talking about a tractor. I’m serious.

  Nevertheless, something unblocked in me. Maybe it happened because I was relaxing into the horribleness of the movie. Maybe I was feeling vaguely superior. But then—without meaning to—I was within the consciousness on the screen, behind Ingrid Permulutter’s eyes. It was like melting into another dimension, and I wasn’t aware of myself or of what I’d lost. It was a precious, wonderful thing. It was the closest I’d felt to acting since I left the theater.

  By the time I could bring myself back to what was actually occurring on the screen, another friend of Permulutter’s character arrived, a big-chested bushily-bearded man with a pony tail like a brillo pad who looked ready to scold Permulutter and Sofie’s characters for something or other. I was losing the plot, losing everything, and then I began watching my friend in the corner of the screen, watching the way Sofie turned her head, brushed her hair from her face, laughed.

  My skin knew first. That’s where the crawling sensation started. I began telling myself I was making a mistake. Until I was certain. What I was watching in Sofie’s character was laughable, needy, raw. She was playing a woman without skin, without the most basic mask. Sofie had used me—had built her character out of my gestures, the way I pushed my hair back from my forehead, the way I crossed my legs, the way I sighed and looked at the ceiling when I was trying to hide my feelings, the way I pronounced consonants that have always given me trouble, the nervous tics that even I recognize as my own.

  It was as if I was watching myself being slowly skinned alive. Sofie was putting on my skin. And there was nothing I could do. I told myself not to sensationalize what I was seeing, but it was like watching a murder when I was the woman being murdered on the screen.

  One of the teenage boys laughed stupidly. It was an imitation of my most nervous laugh. He’d heard the laugh from Sofie’s mouth.

  The next morning waves blasted the sand, leaving behind a watery sheen fine as the cataract of an eye. The water was still too cold for swimming.

  When I was a young girl we always arrived at the hotel in full summer. I had loved standing in the surf, the waves washing around me like scald on milk. I would run to the hotel, dripping wet, sand in my hair. By the time I got to the hotel’s steps the sun would have warmed my back and dried me off.

  Back then my mother once told Robin and me that God creates no duplicates. For proof she said that every fingerprint is individual. To which Robin, mature even as a seven-year-old, had asked, “How do you know they’re all different? Do they have everybody’s fingerprints?”

  I had been comforted by my mother’s reasoning, which seemed to suggest something about the soul.

  Did Sofie impersonate me just because she was so good at it? Was that her art: impersonation? There it was: a woman I trusted had betrayed me at a level I didn’t have words for.

  Had Eamon seen the movie yet? Eamon would be objective. He would think—as I did, reluctantly, that it was the best work Sophie had ever done.

  Two days before Jocelyn was due to return I found myself pulling my car off behind the abandoned theater Eamon had driven me to see. The building loomed large and faceless in the twilight. I hesitated a long time before I got out of my car. Once I did, I could hear a stream churning from somewhere behind the building. I walked toward the sound.

  The twilight was deepening. Leaves hung thickly in the trees, heaving as if sopping with rain. With each step I needed to draw sticky cobwebs away from my face and hair. With a low swishing like the sound of a dress against a woman’s legs, reeds scissored on the creek bank. And then wonderfully enough: light bounced between the shrubs and trees—gold flickers. The first fireflies. I had never seen so many.

  I imagined A Midsummer Night’s Dream staged right there, in the open, behind the abandoned theater. I could almost hear broken rhythms—like birdsong or traffic in the distance—not the individual lines I’d memorized from dozens of plays, but a sort of mingled music from all of them, as if the sounds were traveling from my earlier life. After a curtain call the echoes of voices from onstage didn’t stop but only faded until I slowly returned to my regular life, folding back into being the person I knew myself as: So this is who I am—this is my life. This odd, funny, precious, arbitrary life. It used to take me forever to get to sleep after a show. I was overwhelmed by the spreading warmth of a certain sort of faith, the belief that I had doubled my time on earth by inhabiting another sensibility.

  Did I go too far in imagining that what Eamon and Sofie and I did enhanced life and lessened the quantity of grief in every audience? Did we allow people to forget, to move beyond what they had been, to lose themselves the same way that we lost ourselves onstage? What an ambitious woman I had been—back when I had known that there are unfathomable possibilities, and that any life has to be reclaimed again and again.

  What Sofie had done: she had made me into a caricature to myself and to anyone who knew me. I suppose that if a mere acquaintance had done the same it wouldn’t have made such a difference. But a stranger wouldn’t have known how to dig under the skin so deeply.

  Standing there, my feet sinking a bit in the soft soil, I ached more than ever to return to my old life. And I told myself that what stopped me from acting was clear, and that all my attempts to make reality more complex paled before the obvious: my discovery of my mother’s abandonment of me had to be what did me in. I shouldn’t try to make the truth more mysterious than that. For a while my mother had been able to live without me. The important thing: my mother never changed her mind about me again after she came back for me. Her abandonment was temporary—that’s what I must keep remembering. And that I had loved her beyond love. And that there was never anyone like her, and that she was wholly irreplaceable, as I was, finally, to her. What does it mean to give up what we love most? What does it mean to reclaim what we love most? Perhaps I have had to make myself know what such an experience is like? Or am I mystifying my life again? I suppose the obvious is mysterious enough.

  The dark was settling. In fullest darkness the fireflies were meant to disappear. Until then, they sent across the air their flickering signals.

  There was only one truly inexplicable mystery left, and I knew myself well enough to claim it: I would forgive Sofie.

  Acknowledgments

  I’m grateful to the editors of the journals in which some of these stories have appeared previously, sometimes in different versions and under different titles: Antioch Review, Ascent, Cezanne’s Carrot, Confrontation, Freightstories, Gargoyle, Hotel Amerika, Idaho Review, Roanoke Review, and Short FICTION (England).

  “You Know You’ve Made It When They Hate You” first appeared in Antioch Review and was reprinted in Peculiar Pilgrims: Stories from the Left Hand of God.

  I wish to thank Peter Conners for his insightful advice and his faith in this collection. I’m also grateful for the assistance of Jenna Fisher and the other dedicated people at BOA who have helped usher these stories into the wider world.

  I thank my students and departmental colleagues at Lafayette College. My gratitude extends as well to Anthony Caleshu, Anna Duhl, Marilyn Kann, Neil McElroy, MaryAnn Miller, W. P. Osborn, Emily Schneider, Randy Schneider, Beth Seetch, Diane Shaw, Jim Toia, and Sylvia Watanabe.

  I thank Yetta and Ted Ziolkowski, my inspiring and invigorating in-laws.

  I writ
e with the sustaining memory of the lives of my mother Rose, my father Charles, my brother Joe, my sister Lana, and my niece Carla.

  This book is dedicated to my sister Alice Faye. No one could be more loyal or more thoughtful, more reliable, good-natured or, frankly, more organized. She should run continents. We would all be her delighted citizens.

  My daughters Theodora and CeCe have given me the most gasping, head-on-the-knees laughter that a person could experience without losing consciousness. I cannot thank them enough for letting me listen to them and for being their uniquely and undeniably beautiful selves.

  I thank my husband Eric—with love beyond words.

  About the Author

  Lee Upton is the author of twelve previous books, including five books of poetry, four of literary criticism, a novella, and a recent collection of essays, Swallowing the Sea: On Writing & Ambition, Boredom, Purity & Secrecy. Among her awards and prizes are the Pushcart Prize, the National Poetry Series Award, and the Miami University Novella Award.

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  The Tao of Humiliation

  By Lee Upton

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