She felt better after scooping into her purse and poking her snowcapped fingertip into her nose a few times. The bitter nerve-killing slush, percolating to her throat, dislodged an idea: she’d go “homeless.” Why not? It’d be hilarious. The only thing she needed was herself; if Baptist wanted to toss her shit, fine. That was the worst thing about cities, the lack of storage. People complained about owning a car; how about owning a body?
Like the snail ascending Mount Fuji, she millimetered her way to Dolores Park. It was fifty degrees but her hands were numb asteroids and she had to wait for them to open before shirring the white drawstrings on her hoodie and zipping her leather jacket, piling her blond hair under her hat. At the park she settled down on some tufty unmowed grass under the palm trees, took her last three Xanax, and closed her eyes. Each time she woke it was still dark, and dew collected on her jacket like frigid sweat. At three A.M. she scavenged for something to cover herself with, and only when she was shivering under damp scraps of yesterday’s Chronicle did she truly appreciate how much thinner the dailies had become.
II. Incomplete
Regrouping was utmost. Save cash, rest her knee—she’d had to rip her jeans over the swelling. Her contact lenses had been in so long she’d have to boil them off. After waking in the park, she hobbled to a café on Guerrero to piss and think of some places where her persona was still grata. She decided to find Eve Chimie, a friend from Brooklyn who’d once bailed Linda out of the drunk tank after Linda had climbed into a squad car at a red light and demanded a ride home. Eve had moved to San Francisco a year ago with her modelographer boyfriend to study textile design at CCA, just before Linda’s exile from Brooklyn. She liked Eve because they looked very good in photos together.
Linda hopped the BART, using the ticket she’d jury-rigged by cutting the magnetic strip of a paid card into lengthwise quarters and gluing them onto duds. At the library she got Eve’s San Francisco address from an old email, then caught the N to Duboce Triangle. On her way there a man on the train shouted, “Girrrrrrrrl, I haven’t seen a bellybutton that fine in ten years.”
She staked out Eve’s apartment from a slope in the dog park across the street. Like every day before, the weather was keen blue, dusty sunlight throwing a sfumato over everything. The abundance of San Francisco’s million-dollar vistas was exhausting, like daylong nudity; the very topography nestled you in its pecs and tits, its buns and bulges, especially if you were rich. Otherwise it was the same archetype metropolis pumping out chances and threats, transients sleeping in the waste heat of office buildings full of tired people. In these respects one city was as good as another—it was what happened when people shared.
Down the sidewalk, Linda spotted someone approaching who was black like Eve and had Eve’s cropped hair and fendered cheekbones, and wore Eve’s Marc Jacobs bag and Topshop blazer and red sunglasses—but it couldn’t be Eve, because Eve didn’t, Eve wouldn’t, have a baby.
“Eve!”
Eve, as in ever, was not a name given to shouting—but the girl turned to Linda’s compass quadrant and waved. They squealed and made cumbersomely for one another, Linda dragging her bad leg, Eve searching for a break in the curb to push her stroller down. As they hugged, Linda looked over Eve’s shoulder at the baby, a saddle-colored grub who returned Linda’s stare with astonished gladness.
Eve kissed Linda on the cheek. “Oh my god, what’re you doing here?”
“What’s that doing here?”
“She’s mine! I made her!”
“No shit?”
“Wave hi-hi, Mercy! Linda girl, you look so cute.” (This was patronizing—childbirth had brought Eve no lower than an eight. Some people just were models.) “You busy? Come over to my place, it’s right there. I’ll tell you the whole deal. Shit is fucked.”
As they walked, Eve recounted how she’d gotten preggers literally the day she and Jared started classes at CCA, right when they’d secured their student loans and settled into their apartment. After two months of failed classes, homicidal arguments, and depressing web searches, they dropped out and did the damn parent thing. Nix substances, add omega-threes. Eight hours of easy labor in a natural birth pool, then sixteen hours of hard labor every day after that: Eve waited tables, Jared barbacked and waited tables. They didn’t have friends, art, or lives. They had a baby.
They entered Eve’s pink stucco apartment. On one leg, Linda helped carry the stroller up the stairs and entered a one-bedroom with ceilings you could reach on tiptoe. A TV lit the living room aquamarine with its channel selection menu. Accordion gates blocked the doorways.
Forgetting to lie, Linda told Eve everything about moving to SF, Baptist and all. Eve moaned in sympathy. “You can stay here. I need to clear it with Jared, but he loves you.” (This was true—Linda had hooked up with him right around when he and Eve started dating.) “And you know, this works. I’d love to have help with Mercy, if you’re down.”
“Sure. I used to babysit my niece,” Linda said, lying about both the babysitting and the niece, and the sibling for that matter. She dangled her hand by Mercy’s face until she remembered that that was what you did with dogs. “I’m good with kids.”
“Duh. You’re, like, good at everything.”
“Hey, can I use your shower?”
LINDA WAITED TABLES, under the table. She attended garages. She literally catered. She ghostwrote college essays. She art-modeled at SFAI and glorified soju cocktails in North Beach. Any job that didn’t require her to smile. She maxed her credit. She did coke for the energy to work to buy coke. All she didn’t do was sleep. But if exhaustion was the cost of radical freedom, if her thunderhead of irritability was only occasionally pierced with sky-blue instants of rapture, so be it. She gave manicures on Eve’s stoop. She coolhunted. She sewed clown pants for some lady’s toddler. She worked the door, the door worked her, work worked her. Work was not so much the proverbial toad squatting on her life, but many torpid tadpoles nibbling at it.
She needed a new phone, and though she was grateful for the free room, she didn’t want to stay long enough to become Aunt Linda. So onward she trudged through the entry level. She was a barista at a Valencia café, where she stank of roasted coffee and transactions of specie, and was fired for pouring twelve-ounce mediums for customers who ordered smalls because she deeply believed that a small was twelve ounces. She got shitcanned from her SoMa bartending gig when they caught her serving the runoff from the rubber spill mats to some shiny-shirted finance bros who referred to the Mission as “The Mish.” Then she was fired from a North Beach soup café after she’d left the warmers on overnight under a vat of potato-leek cream soup, and bent three steak knives chipping at the bed of anthracite it turned into; her manager fired her on the spot, and Linda did not cry, though she was bothered by how easy it was to take things seriously just because other people did.
The sense of oppression that work gave her daily recalled to her the undergrad FemStud litany of empowerment and objectification. Though this underrated the stealth agency of objects, the objective power of objects; the sex object in particular was no slouch. Plus, object work paid. Online she sold her panties, nail parings and locks of hair, used tissues and tampons, and all manner of unspeakable excreta. Domme work was viable, but she lacked the equipment for independent work, and San Francisco’s dungeons were overhired.
Her last gig had her smooshing her décolletage into a pleather dirndl while a guy named Escobar chauffeured her to dive bars, where she sold toys and candy from a tray strapped to her neck, soliciting tips from the tipsy. One night a short guy in a blue gingham shirt followed Linda into the street, snapping photos of her on an SLR camera he wore around his neck. Which wasn’t unusual in itself, she got stopped for street-fashion photos all the time. Then he said he had a knife. He was sweating, and when Linda covered her face from his flash he said, Don’t do that. She held still and the man neared, snapping her from the side, from behind. When he took a knee for the upskirt, Linda’s tray hit th
e sidewalk and she caught a fistful of his hair and scored several FemStud points on his throat, spat on his gingham and stove in his jaw as her candies tumbled downhill. The creep, snared in his camera strap, pled pure dada through his destroyed mouth until he struggled away to the brassy strains of Linda’s victory fanfare, and she picked up his dropped camera and snapped a photo of him as he ran.
Yes, let them objectify: then call down the objective force.
Minutes later she climbed into Escobar’s car with an empty tray, no money, and a bloody dirndl, and this job became the latest casualty of her sensibility. Being fired was fine as long as the job was awful, she decided. Living on tips meant soliciting the last thing she wanted: approval. Life had to come from somewhere; sometimes it came from below.
Wasn’t the obscene entitlement of a Stanford degree supposed to excuse her from all this? She’d grown up in a basement apartment in Waterbury with rancid orange carpeting and asbestos insulation, so when she’d arrived at Stanford, she’d been intimidated for about a week before she was thoroughly over it. All the preshie diminutives—MemChu, HooTow, TresEx, CoHo, FroSoCo—telegraphed its abdication of seriousness. Her first-year roommate wore alma mater sweatshorts while farting while doing crunches while studying for HumBio midterms. Rooming with Cory sophomore year put an even finer point on Linda’s class rage, making her resent the campus’s beauty: the $40,000 palm trees and sunsets washing sandstone and watered lawns in premium amber, the color of old money and tech money and patriarchy. Everything here was appallingly what it seemed. Her fellow undergrads were all careerist dickheads, thumb-sucking vegans, smug libertarians, batshit Republicans, pompous student-visa techies, precious study-abroad fuzzies, Division I Neanderthals, faculty lapdogs, marching band weenies recouping their squandered adolescences, and the unforgivably rich. Everyone seemed so well parented; everyone’s semantic web architecture or microlending nonprofit or carbon nanotube dildo was going to change the world. Meanwhile the artists failed to reach quorum. Linda did respect the political agitators who blocked streets and camped out on President Hennessy’s lawn, though less for their trite campus liberalism than for their structural willingness to fuck with people. Cory was okay. Everyone else was weak shit. Plus she’d been rejected from all the Ivies, so even if Stanford was good, it’d never be good enough.
Abjuring friendship, Linda had plowed through the English major requirements in two years. For her first grad seminar in American modernism, she scored a Ritalin prescription and went vagrant in Green Library for two weeks, building a thesis from her marginalia in As I Lay Dying (“SUFFOCATING IN PERSPECTIVE”). Contemporary writers were so shit-scared of moralizing that they delegated to their poor characters the responsibility for conveying their philosophies through indirect discourse, the indeterminate ironies of narrative distance, constraining writers from delivering the grand true-eyed pronouncements of Tolstoy or Proust. Writers had capitulated to the camera lens. Postmodern author-surrogates and clairvoyant first-persons were just Band-Aids on a fault line. We needed a return to omniscience.
On deadline day she printed off the manuscript, “Divine Intervention,” running triple the twenty-page limit. She turned it in at the English building, then checked her English department mailbox daily until her manuscript appeared; the lights dimmed all around her as she scanned the margins for checkmarks and dot-dot-U smilies. She expected one kind of feedback: praise, superlative. Cunningly prosecuted thesis—recalls Benjamin, Auerbach. Foundational text for new field of inquiry.
But the only comment came handwritten at the end:
Overall cogent effort. But you’ve overthought it: you question modernism as a valid category, “text” as a meaningful term, you’ve even psychologized my personal motives for asking the question. The point isn’t to outsmart the prompt or produce lots of uncommon words; it’s to answer the question. You appear eager to fast-track yourself to high-level criticism, but this is universalized unto grandiosity. Too much analysis, no synthesis. Stylewise: ease up on academic pleonasms, e.g., “employ” vs. “use,” “explicate” vs. “explain,” “monophonic discourse” vs. “voice.” And while I admire the economy of your ampersands—“a-n-d” will suffice. Writing shows promise. A+ for chutzpah. Yet I resist the marching tide of grade inflation, and so—
86
That number—a page citation? Not the grade? Not her grade?—HER grade?—for HER??? Did he fucking write it upside down or something? Oh, here it was, the hidebound athenaeum, drowning originality in its tin tub of status quo! Eighty-sixing new ideas with patronizing dismissal! They feared her jouissance! She showed “promise”? She’d shown promise years ago. This from some old white dickshaker who thought there was such a thing as overthinking. She showed up at the professor’s next office hours with her Add/Drop form in hand; once he’d signed it, she told him he was everything that was wrong with tenure.
Instead she tried a fiction writing workshop, where, in spite of its idiotic mission of focus-grouping literature, she could at least set her own agenda. But she quickly wearied of her classmates’ manuscripts, about characters with pounding hearts and wry grins who’d sigh and shrug and fail to meet her gaze, who held dying grandmothers’ hands, helmed starships, attended dorm parties, came out. They were so serious about it! And they got foot rubs of praise, the bland reading the bland—products of a contemporary literature rife with domestic angst, ethnic tourism, child prodigies, talking animals, period nostalgia, affected affectlessness, atrocity porn, genre crossovers clad in fig leaves of literary technique. No ideas, only intellectual property; no avant-garde, only controversy; no ars poetica, only personal essays; no major writers, only writing majors.
Opting out of the circlejerk, Linda silently played workshop lingo bingo in her notebook: Expand. Compress. Problematic. Tidy. Baggy. Heavy-handed. Conflict. Emotional core. Narrative arc. Chekhov’s gun. Kafka’s ax. Hemingway’s iceberg. Moment of grace. This should be a scene. I want to know more about the mother. What’s at stake. Not here on the page. The real beginning is. Sags in the middle. Ending feels rushed. What I’m interested in here. A missed opportunity to.
Linda had plenty of ideas for new work, but, disinclined to see them puzzled over in workshop, she decided instead to submit her polished and well-graded high school stories—“Cowboys and Indians”: near-future society, threatened by a saber-rattling nuclear Apache Nation, goes to war with the Indians; “Give Them Your Heart”: near-future society, fetishizing women’s internal organs, designs fashions around MRI and ultrasound; “The Green Death”: near-future society, devastated by a money-borne pathogen, collapses.
When her turn for critique came, Linda was not surprised to find that the workshop had reserved all its venom for her—the story’s “narrative voice” was “contemptuous,” “mannered,” “dictionary-happy”; its characters were “easy targets,” “flat little dominoes” that “the author” set up just to topple over. Worst of all, her writing lacked “empathy.”
Although prohibited from speaking during her critique, Linda cleared her throat and said to please spare her the bugbear of empathy—if they didn’t want to read about easy targets, people should stop being easy targets.
“I think what I’m hearing from these comments,” said the nameless twenty-seven-year-old instructor (bitch-bun, taupe snood), “is that the didactic allegorical aspects might be pulling readers out of the story. The satire’s a little on the nose.”
Well, Linda said, what if the author wanted to pull readers out? And break their noses?
“I guess the concern there would be that the story becomes, like, a prank? Saying nyah-nyah, see, I’m smarter than you. No one’s saying it’s bad, it’s just . . . a chilly, sort of valueless sensibility.”
Sure, Linda said, if you didn’t consider taste a value.
“Okay, Linda? Since you don’t seem to respond to even-handed critique, I’m gonna put this out there: the ironic, too-cool meta satire, the sneering and mocking? Is actually just a contempo
rary version of the bourgeois sentimentality it’s trying to mock. It is not new. Really it’s almost quaint. The backlash has already outlasted it. But the real problem is that it’s self-indulgent.”
“The last thing I want is to indulge you,” Linda said. She addressed the class. “Have you guys read her stories? Ooh, I had these Mennonite neighbors and they were so weird! My Romanian immigrant aunt had a stroke and said such inadvertently profound things! Fucking please.”
Linda left, forgetting her bag and notebook. Why was everyone such a sucker? Why the predictable taste for relatable characters conveyed in manageable little sentences, plot leading inevitably to redemption, books to curl up with? Where were the readers who wanted to be offended by difficulty, break forms and do violence to the tongue, books to curl up and die in? This wasn’t even mentioning the cringeworthy peer feedback letters she received in her mailbox (“I think the rape scene felt a little forced”). Well. At least she hadn’t given them her representative work. Just some high school shit.
She took an Incomplete and resolved never to become a professor; never to professionalize, become an adjunct or MFA or teaching fellow or resident or publishing intern or editorial assistant, or “contribute” book reviews or produce “content,” or give readings or interviews or freelance or blog. How pathetic to only resemble ambition, to grab at the sun from the stepladder of institution.
It’d be nice now to have banked away some of that indignation, that same grunt belief in her talent. Yet here she was, serving unpermitted mediums to people who asked for the small.
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