How Literature Saved My Life

by David Shields

  I finished reading the journal and put it away, then went back to my room and waited for Rebecca to return from her classes. That night we drove out to Newport, where we walked barefoot in the clammy sand and looked up at the lighted mansions that lined the shore in the distance. “The rich, too, must go to sleep at night,” I said, offering Solomonic wisdom. We stood atop a ragged rock that sat on the shoreline; the full tide splashed at our feet. The moon made halos of our heads. I put my hands through her hair and kissed her lightly on the lips. “Don’t kiss hard,” she said. “I’m afraid I’ll fall.”

  Tuesday and Thursday afternoons—when she worked in the development office—I’d go into her room, shut the door, lock it, and sit back in the swivel chair at her desk. She always left a window open. The late fall wind would be blowing the curtains around, and the Jupiter Symphony would always be on the little red record player on the floor. She often left wet shirts hanging all over the room; they’d ripple eerily in the wind. On the wall were a few calligraphic renderings of her own poetry. Her desk was always a mess, but her journal—a thick black book—was never very difficult to find.

  I was nineteen years old and a virgin, and at first I read Rebecca’s journal because I needed to know what to do next and what she liked to hear. Every little gesture, every minor movement I made she passionately described and wholeheartedly admired. When we were kissing or swimming or walking down the street, I could hardly wait to rush back to her room to find out what phrase or what twist of my body had been lauded in her journal. I loved her impatient handwriting, her purple ink, the melodrama of the whole thing. It was such a surprising and addictive respite, seeing every aspect of my being celebrated by someone else rather than excoriated by myself. She wrote, “I’ve never truly loved anyone the way I love D. and it’s never been so total and complete, yet so unpossessing and pure, and sometimes I want to drink him in like golden water.” You try to concentrate on your Milton midterm after reading that about yourself.

  Sometimes, wearing her bathrobe, she’d knock on my door in order to return a book or get my reaction to a paragraph she’d written or read. She’d wish me good night, turn away, and begin walking back to her room. I’d call to her, and we’d embrace—first in the hallway outside our doors, then soon enough in my room, her room, on our beds. I hadn’t kissed anyone since I was twelve (horrific acne throughout high school), so I tried to make up for lost time by swallowing Rebecca alive: biting her lips until they bled, licking her face, chewing on her ears, holding her up in the air and squeezing her until she screamed.

  In her journal, she wrote that she’d never been kissed like this in her life and that she inevitably had trouble going to sleep after seeing me. I’d yank the belt to her bathrobe and urge her under the covers, but she refused. She actually said she was afraid she’d go blind when I entered her. Where did she learn these lines, anyway?

  Shortly before the weather turned permanently cold, we went hiking in the mountains. The first night, she put her backpack at the foot of her sleeping bag—we kissed softly for a few minutes, then she fell asleep—but on the second night she put her backpack under her head as a pillow. Staring into the blankly black sky, I dug my fingers into the dirt behind Rebecca’s head and, the first time and the second time and the third time and the fourth time and probably the fourteenth time, came nearly immediately.

  From then on, I couldn’t bring myself to read what she’d written. I’d read the results of a survey in which 40 percent of Italian women acknowledged that they usually faked orgasms. Rebecca wasn’t Italian—she was that interesting anomaly, a southern Jew—but she thrashed around a lot and moaned and screamed, and if she was pretending I didn’t want to know about it. She often said it had never been like this before.

  Every night she’d wrap her legs around me and scream something that I thought was German until I realized she was saying, “Oh, my son.” My son? She had her own issues, too, I suppose. We turned up the Jupiter Symphony all the way and attempted to pace ourselves so we’d correspond to the crashing crescendo. I was sitting on top of her and in her mouth, staring at her blue wall, and I thought My whole body is turning electric blue. She was on top of me, rotating her hips and crying, and she said, “Stop.” I said, “Stop?” and stopped. She grabbed the back of my hair and said, “Stop? Are you kidding? Don’t stop.”

  At the end of the semester, packing to fly home to San Francisco to spend the Christmas vacation with my family, I suddenly started to feel guilty about having read Rebecca’s journal. Every time I kissed her, I closed my eyes and saw myself sitting at her desk, turning pages. I regretted having done it and yet I couldn’t tell her about it.

  “What’s wrong?” she asked.

  “I’ll miss you,” I said. “I don’t want to leave.”

  On the plane I wrote her a long letter in which I told her everything I couldn’t bring myself to tell her in person: I’d read her journal, I was very sorry, I thought our love was still pure and we could still be together, but I’d understand if she went back to Gordon and never spoke to me again.

  She wrote back that I should never have depended on her journal to give me strength, she’d throw it away and never write in it again, and she wanted to absolve me, but she wasn’t God, although she loved me better than God could. Anything I said she would believe because she knew I’d never lie to her again. Our love, in her view, transcended time and place.

  Well, sad to say, it didn’t. The night I returned from San Francisco, she left a note on my door that said only “Come to me,” and we tried to imitate the wild abandon of the fall semester, but what a couple of weeks before had been utterly instinctive was now excruciatingly self-conscious, and the relationship quickly cooled. She even went back to Gordon for a while, though that second act didn’t last very long, either.

  It was, I see now, exceedingly odd behavior on my part. After ruining things for myself by reading her journal, I made sure I ruined things for both of us by telling her that I had read her journal. Why couldn’t I just live with the knowledge and let the shame dissipate over time? What was—what is—the matter with me? Do I just have a bigger self-destruct button, and like to push it harder and more incessantly, than everyone else? Perhaps, but also the language of the events was at least as erotic to me as the events themselves, and when I was no longer reading her words, I was no longer very adamantly in love with Rebecca. This is what is known as a tragic flaw.

  Love is illusion

  “IF YOU’RE A NEWCOMER to this show, you’re probably wondering what in the world it’s all about. Well, it’s not about politics. It’s not about wars going on around the world. It’s not about trials and tribulations. It’s about you. It’s about your heart. It’s about what in the world is going on in your world. We are here to take your calls about family, friends, sweethearts, that special someone you met over the internet, falling in love, having your heart broken by love, babies, and graduations. And then we mix those stories together with your favorite love songs. Thank you for finding us. You’re listening to Delilah.”

  Delilah (who, as any icon seeking goddess status must, goes by only one name) advises Kathy, who’s shy about approaching the former security guard she’s in love with, “What happens if you don’t follow through with this and he gets away again? Say ‘Thank you for alerting me to the fact that my headlight was broken. I owe you my life. Here’s a plate of cookies and my phone number at home. And my cell phone and my pager number and my fax number and my email address.’ Come on, Kathy—shoulders back. Be bold. Be brave.” Then she plays Mariah Carey’s “Dreamlover.”

  Delilah, which is recorded live in Delilah’s home studio in the Seattle area and is broadcast six nights a week between seven and midnight in most markets, has 8 million listeners on more than 200 stations in every state except Rhode Island, covering 90 percent of the country, even though the show is in only five of the top ten markets. Delilah’s listeners are overwhelmingly female, modestly educated, and politically ce
nter-right. She also says that “it seems as if half my callers are single moms.” Unlike, say, Dr. Phil or Dr. Laura (my wife’s name remains Laurie), Delilah only occasionally accompanies the sugar pill with harsh-tasting medicine.

  Delilah is a relentless valentine for and about the struggling class, a trump card for those holding an empty hand. Delilah offers the possibility of ordinary American female life redeemed by … by what? The sugar rush of over-the-moon sentiment. In five hours at her house one summer day, I ate pancakes and syrup for breakfast, cookies for lunch, and ice cream for an afternoon pick-me-up. The hungry heart will be cured by sweetness itself. Delilah wants every call to end on an “audio hug” of empathy and recognition, and it does, it does. Inevitably she lifts us up where we belong—where the eagles fly, etc.—even as her own life remains obdurately earthbound.

  In 1982, when Delilah, who is white, brought her African American husband home to meet her parents, her father “freaked out, jumped up, and ran to the gun closet, chasing me off with a shotgun.” He disowned her, and when he was dying, he refused to allow her to visit. Most of her children—three biological, nine adopted—have African American, African, or Hispanic ancestry. She’s thrice divorced.

  A disproportionately high percentage of callers are raising two or three children without the father, who has left or was never there. Asked what kind of man she’s attracted to, Delilah says, “You’ve got to be quick, bright, funny—and a mass murderer. Ever since I was a teenager, I’d pick out the guy who would break my heart. Because my father was so passionate and so brilliant and so emotionally not available, that, I guess, is what I’m attracted to.” Delilah and the show are father-fixated, redressing the distant or absent or dead father by positing an all-knowing, all-loving God.

  (My minirebellion against my journalist parents was to become a fiction writer—and then, later, a writer of wayward nonfiction.)

  Delilah embodies the ambivalence her audience feels toward competing definitions of being female. Her voice is half tease, half hug, which is what she looks like: ex-bombshell/Mother of the Year. She wears a low-cut blouse, which emphasizes her décolletage, but she frequently pulls up her blouse and crosses her arms over her chest. She espouses self-esteem to her listeners, but she confides to her executive producer, “My legs are the only part of myself I like.” In most photos, she appears to be an all-American blonde, but she frequently reminds her listeners that her hair color comes from Kmart.

  In Love Someone Today, Delilah writes, “I had romantic notions playing in my head of a midnight dance under the spectacular sky. I found him”—her last husband, when they were still married—“sleeping soundly in our bed. I tried to wake him. After several unsuccessful attempts, I gave up and walked out. I felt angry and rejected, my feelings hurt that he wouldn’t jump up and enjoy my romantic fantasy with me. I zipped up my coat and headed out to the backyard again. I stood there, frozen in the beauty of the moment, yet still feeling a bit sorry for myself. I uttered a small prayer of praise, thanking the Almighty for this wonderful scene. And then, in a voice that was so clear it was almost audible, I heard God speak to my heart. ‘I didn’t create this moment for you and Doug,’ He seemed to say. ‘I created it for you and me.’ And together we danced in the moonlight.”

  The world is a beautiful place, in other words, but men are oblivious, hopeless. As solace, Delilah presents romantic ballads about idealized lovers, narratives about children as cherubim, praise hymns about our Lord, our father.

  Mary calls to reminisce: “Mama’s Nativity had a music box in it that played ‘Silent Night,’ but it was very old. I think she bought it before she and my father met. Some of the chimes were broken, so our ‘Silent Night’ was very strange, but we all liked it.”

  Delilah laughs and says, “It was nearly silent.”

  Mary says, “No, it wasn’t nearly silent. It just was—you missed a lot of the melody and you got a lot of the accompaniment, which made it very unusual. My dad did woodworking as a hobby. One summer he got a catalogue that had music boxes, so without telling anybody, he ordered a ‘Silent Night.’ He got out the Nativity scene, changed the music box, and threw away the old broken music box.”

  Delilah: “And it was never the same.”

  Mary: “And it’s still not the same. Every one of us can still sing the old ‘Silent Night’ that played on that music box for so many years. When we wound it up and heard that it was correct, we all just really attacked him. He didn’t know. He thought he was doing us a favor. And we were like, ‘Oh, Daddy! How could you do that to us?’ But we all still can sing that ‘Silent Night,’ that unusual version of it.”

  Delilah: “Let me hear it.”

  She hums the tune.

  Once, a long time ago, something happened. It’s never been the same since. It was Dad’s fault. We’ll sort of forgive him and we’ll sort of not forgive him. What sustains me is the broken music box, which Dad inevitably tries to fix and isn’t fixable and is me.

  Love is illusion

  Love and Pain and the Whole Damn Thing, which my sister—one year older than I am—was obsessed with in high school and now has no recollection of whatsoever, centers on the romance between Walter (Timothy Bottoms), a depressed American college student, and Lila (Maggie Smith), who is old enough to be his mother and is dying. She possesses an odd beauty—bug-eyed, with a classical look resembling the androgynous-faced female personifications of Dusk and Dawn that Michelangelo sculpted for two tombs in Florence. You can tell how relaxed she’s feeling by whether her hair, bottle-red and somewhat thinning, has been pinned back like a naughty librarian’s or allowed to flow and tickle her shoulders. Rigid and prudish, or perhaps just very British, she wears mostly polyester dresses and tailored skirt suits, which, though modest, showcase her Barbie-doll legs.

  One night she completely loses it, drinking hard liquor from a bottle shaped like a flamenco dancer, smoking a cigar in her hotel room, and writing “Adios” in lipstick on the mirror—her hair very much down, yellow and red suicide pills in her khaki lap, red-brown liquid stains on the chest of her blouse. Otherwise, Lila maintains a manicured appearance and modulates her tone of voice. When feeling ill, she recites a couple of (misremembered) lines from Pirates of Penzance to soothe herself: “The glass is rising very high/It will be a warm July.”

  When Lila wakes up the morning after her suicide attempt, Walter tries to convince her that life is beautiful. During his long speech, he flings open the windows and says, “You see? There’s joy in the world.” The sun shines hard into the small hotel room, but only a moment later, workers unload a black coffin from a hearse parked in the street directly outside the hotel room. Walter slams the window shut, leaving her chambers as dark as they’d been a few seconds earlier. In another scene, Lila and Walter get in bed together for the first time, and it goes poorly. Lila gets up and tries to make a nonchalant, composed exit from Walter’s hotel room but instead trips and collapses. Maggie Smith plays the scene totally deadpan, getting up from the floor, arranging her hair, and walking out with a pair of proper white underpants caught around her ankles.

  She tries to teach herself—and then Walter—Spanish from a little primer. “Amanece” and “oscurece,” she says, asking him to repeat these sounds back to her. He has an atrocious ear. The first, she explains, means “it lightens”; the second, “it darkens.” Dawn comes, then night. She seems unintentionally to be transmitting to him some deep, basic wisdom.

  Throughout the film, their relationship proves herky-jerky. The sun comes out, but then the rain comes. “And what have you learned about me?” Lila asks. “That you can hurt me,” he replies, very much in love. Rain leaks into the road-tripping trailer in which they sleep one angry night together, which turns into many future happy nights. He steps on the gas (of life) and she puts on the brakes (of death). He’s never been happier. The question that haunts the entire movie: How does sex feel for someone on the verge of an early death—what squats in the parentheses, po
ised next to an orgasm? In the end, she dumps him via a handwritten letter: “My dear Walter, I know this is cruel …” Amanece. Oscurece.

  Walter and Lila’s love is both impossible and possible for the same reason: she’s on the verge of dying. The impracticalities that long-term lovers suffer don’t concern this couple, as they do most of us. That is, when finally you’ve grown bored but are stuck with each other, the promise of death feels too far away. It becomes the new impossible dream.

  What if Romeo and Juliet had lived? Soon enough, at the ripe old age of fourteen, they would have been arguing about whose turn it was to empty the dishwasher.

  Movies love to imply that the man and woman held each other all night long, but you can’t do it. You have to roll away …

  Love is illusion

  I CAN SEE WHY you’re a Miss Nude USA regional finalist. You have beautiful long silky blue-black hair, a perfect pout, and a gorgeous body. Please send me the color photos you mentioned of yourself in fur, leather, lingerie, garter belt, and heels. Thank you. Payment enclosed.

  Love is illusion

  AGNÈS JAOUI’S The Taste of Others is the smartest, saddest movie about sex I’ve ever seen. Clara, asked by her student what the most difficult part of acting is, says, “To depend on another’s desire.” Valérie, surprised that she’s going out with Fred, says, “I would have never guessed it. We have nothing in common.” When Clara says about someone who likes her and the play in which she’s starring, “I don’t like his kind,” her friend Manie asks, “Is there anybody you like?” The film, which is also known as It Takes All Kinds, knows that what we love and hate about other people is how different they are from us: we’re disgusted by this difference, and we’re excited by it. Jaoui looks at otherness in a multitude of ways: bourgeois/bohemian, misbehavior/obedience, kindness/cruelty, blonde/brunette, actor/audience, teacher/student, brother/sister, sex/love, life/art. A bodyguard spends weeks protecting his client from Iranian kidnappers, but his client is mugged by local French thugs.