David Wallace - Brief Interviews with Hideous Men

Q….

‘My own experience indicates that the cliché does not mean [sustained f.f.] I can’t believe that this possibility now exists in my consciousness but rather something more along the lines of [sustained and increasingly annoying f.f.] I cannot believe that this possibility is now originating from a point external to my consciousness . It is the same sort of shock, the several-second delay in internalizing or processing, which accompanies sudden bad news or a sudden, inexplicable betrayal by a hitherto trusted authority figure and so on and so forth. This interval of shocked silence is one during which entire psychological maps are being redrawn, and during this interval any gesture or affect on the subject’s part will reveal a great deal more about her than any amount of banal conversation or even clinical experimentation ever would. Reveal.’

Q.

‘I meant woman or young woman, not [f.f.] subject per se.’

Q.

‘The true cocks, the rare ones I have misjudged, will yield the briefest of these shocked pauses. They will smile politely, or even laugh, and then will decline the proposal in very direct and forthright terms. No harm, no foul. [Laughter.] No pun intended — [f.f.] cock, foul . These subjects’ internal psychological maps have ample room for the possibility of being tied up, and they freely consider it, and freely reject it. They are simply not interested. I have no problem with this, with discovering I’ve mistaken a cock for a hen. Again, I am not interested in forcing or cajoling or persuading anyone against her will. I am certainly not going to beg her. That is not what this is about. I know what this is about. The — and force is not what this is about. The others — the long, weighted, high-voltage pause, the postural and affective shock — whether they acquiesce or become offended, outraged, these are the true hens, players, these are the ones whom I have not at all misjudged. As their heads are thrown back — but their eyes are on me, fixed, looking at me, [f.f.] gazing and so on, with all the intensity one associates with someone trying to decide whether or not they can [f.f.] trust you. With [f.f.] trust now connoting a great many different possible things — whether you are having them on, whether you are serious but are pretending to have them on in order to forestall embarrassment should they be outraged or disgusted, or whether you are in earnest but mean the proposal abstractly, as a hypothetical question such as [f.f.] What would you do with a million dollars? meant to elicit information about their personality in possible deliberation as to a fourth date. And so on and so forth. Or rather whether it is in fact a serious proposal. Even as — they are looking at you because they are trying to read you. To size you up, as you have apparently sized them up, as the proposal appears to imply. This is why I always propose it in a blunt, undisguised way, abjuring wit or segue or preparation or coloratura in the pronunciation of the contractual possibility. I want to communicate to them as best I can that the proposal is serious and concrete. That I am opening my own consciousness up to them and to the possibility of rejection or even disgust. This is why I answer their intense gaze with a bland gaze of my own and say nothing to embellish or complicate or color or interrupt the processing of their own internal psychic reaction. I force them to acknowledge to themselves that both I and the proposal are in deadly earnest.’

Q….

‘But again please note I am in no way aggressive or threatening about it. This is what I meant by [f.f.] bland gaze . I do not propose it in a creepy or lascivious way, and I do not appear in any way eager or hesitant or conflicted. Nor aggressive or threatening. This is crucial. You’re doubtless aware, from your own experience, that one’s natural unconscious reaction, when someone’s body language suggests a withdrawal or leaning-away from him, is automatically to lean forward, or in, as a way to compensate and preserve the original spatial relation. I consciously avoid this reflex. This is extremely important. One does not nervously shift or lean or lick one’s lips or straighten one’s tie while a proposal like this is sinking in. I once, on a third date, found myself with one of those annoying isolated jumping muscles or twitches in my scalp which seized on and off throughout the evening and, on the ottoman, made it appear that I was raising and lowering one eyebrow in a rapid and lascivious way, which in the psychically charged aftermath of the sudden proposal simply torpedoed the whole thing. And this subject was by no stretch of the imagination a cock — this was a hen or I’ve never inspected a hen — yet one involuntary twitch in one eyebrow decapitated the whole possibility, such that the subject not only left in such a frenzy of conflicted disgust that she forgot her purse and not only never returned for the purse but refused even to return telephone messages in which I phoned several times and offered simply to return the purse to her at some neutral public location. The disappointment nevertheless drove home a valuable lesson as to just how delicate a period of internal processing and cartography this post-proposal moment can be. My mother’s problem was that toward me — her eldest child, the elder of the twins, significantly — her nurturing instincts ran to rather erratic extremes of as it were [f.f.] hot and cold . She could at one moment be very, very, very warm and maternal, and then in the flash of an instant would become angry with me over some real or imagined trifle and would completely withdraw her affection. She became cold and rejecting, rebuffing any attempts as a small child on my part to receive reassurance and affection, sometimes sending me alone to my bedroom and refusing to let me out for some rigidly specified period while my twin sister continued to enjoy unconfined freedom of movement about the house and also continued to receive warmth and maternal affection. Then, after the rigid period of confinement was over — I mean to say the precise instant my [f.f.] time-out was completed — Mummy would open the door and embrace me warmly and blot my tears away with her sleeve and would claim that all was forgiven, all was well again. This flood of reassurance and nurture would once again seduce me into [f.f.] trusting her and revering her and ceding emotional power to her, rendering me vulnerable to devastation all over again whenever she might choose again to turn cold and look at me as if I were some sort of laboratory specimen she’d never inspected before. This cycle played itself out repeatedly throughout our childhood relation, I am afraid.’

Q.

‘Yes, accentuated by the fact that she was by vocation a professional clinician, a psychiatric case-worker who administered tests and diagnostic exercises at a sanitarium in the neighboring town. A career she recommenced the moment my sister and I entered the school system as barely toddlers. My mother’s imago all but rules my adult psychological life, I am aware, forcing me again and again to propose and negotiate contracted rituals where power is freely given and taken and submission ritualized and control ceded and then returned of my own free will. [Laughter.] Of the subject’s, rather. Will. It is also my mother’s legacy that I know precisely what my interest in carefully gauging a subject and on the third evening suddenly proposing that she allow me to immobilize her with satin restraints is, derives, comes from. Much of the annoying, pedantic jargon I use to describe the rituals also derives from my mother, who, far more than did our kindly but repressed and somewhat castrated father, modeled speech and behavior for us as children. My sister and I. My mother possessed a Master’s Degree in Clinical Social Work [sustained f.f.], one of the first conferred upon a female diagnostician in the upper Midwest. My sister is a housewife and mother and aspires to be nothing more, at least not consciously. For example, [f.f.] ottoman was Mummy’s term for both the sofa and the twin love seats in our living room. My own apartment’s sofa has a back and arms and is, of course, technically a sofa or couch, but I seem unconsciously to insist on referring to it as an ottoman. This is an unconscious habit I seem unable to modify. In fact I have ceased trying. Some complexes are better accepted and simply yielded to rather than struggling against the imago by sheer force of will. Mummy — who was, of course, after all, you are aware, someone whose profession involved keeping persons confined and probing and testing them and breaking them and bending them to the will of what the state authorities deemed mental health — quite hopelessly broke my own will early on. I have accepted this and reached an accord with it and have erected complex structures in which to come symbolically to terms with it and redeem it. That is what this is about. Neither my sister’s husband nor my father were ever involved in poultry in any way. My father, until his stroke, was a low-level executive in the insurance industry. Though of course the term [f.f.] chicken was often used in our subdivision — by the children with whom I played and acted out various primitive rituals of socialization — to describe a weak, cowardly individual, an individual whose will could easily be bent to the purposes of others. Unconsciously, I may perhaps employ poultry metaphors in describing the contractual rituals as a symbolic way of asserting my own power over those who, paradoxically, autonomously agree to submit. With little other fanfare we will proceed into the other room, to the bed. I am very excited. My manner has now changed, somewhat, to a more commanding, authoritative demeanor. But not creepy and not threatening. Some subjects have professed to see it as [f.f.] menacing, but I can assure you no menace is intended. What is being communicated now is a certain authoritative command based solely on contractual experience as I inform the subject that I am going to [no f.f.] instruct her. I radiate an expertise that may, I admit, to someone of a particular psychological makeup, appear menacing. All but the most hardened fowl begin asking me what it is I want them to do. I, on the other hand, very deliberately exclude the word [f.f.] want and its analogues from my instructions. I am not about expressing wishes or asking or pleading or persuading here, I inform them. That is not what this is about. We are now in my bedroom, which is small and dominated by a king-sized Edwardian-style four-poster bed. The bed itself, which appears enormous and deceptively sturdy, might communicate a certain menace, conceivably, in view of the contract we have entered into. I always phrase it as [no f.f.] This is what you are to do, You are to do such-and-such, and so on and so forth. I tell them how to stand and when to turn and how to look at me. Articles of clothing are to be removed in a certain very particular order.’