David Wallace - Girl With Curious Hair

'He didn't like to kiss me. I could feel it.'

'No contest to the charge that kissing an actual living girl is not my favorite boy-girl thing to do. It's not a squeamishness issue, has nothing to do with the fact, noted somewhere, that kissing someone is actually sucking on a long tube the other end of which is full of excrement. For me it's rather a sort of silliness issue. I feel silly. The girl and I are so close; the kiss contorts our mouths; noses get involved, bent; it's as if we're making faces at each other. At the time, with her, yes, I'd feel vaguely elsewhere, as a defense against myself. Admittedly this has to do with me, not her. But know that when I wasn't with her I dreamed of the time I could kiss her again. I thought about her constantly. She filled my thoughts.'

'What about my thoughts?'

'And then let's be equally candid about the utter lack of self-consciousness with which I'd kiss her elsewhere, slowly and in a way I'd found too soon she loved, and she'd admit she loved it, she does not lie, she'd admit to the pillow over her face to keep her quiet for the people in the other apartments. I knew her. I knew every curve, hollow, inlet and response of a body that was cool, hard, tight, waistless, vaguely masculine but still thoroughly exciting, quick to smile, quick to arch, quick to curl and cuddle and cling. I could unlock her like a differential, work her like an engine. Only when I was forced to be away at school did things mysteriously "change." '

'I felt like there was something missing.'

'I kiss her bitter photo. It's cloudy from kisses. I know the outline of my mouth from her image. She continues to teach me without knowing.'

'My feelings changed. It took time, but I felt like there was something missing. He just works all the time on well-formed formulas and poems and their rules. They're the things that are important to him. He'd tell me he missed me and then stay away. I'm not angry but I'm selfish, I need a lot of attention. All the time apart gave me a chance to do some thinking.'

'All the time apart I thought of her constantly — but she says "My feelings have changed, what can I do, I can't with Bruce anymore." As if her feelings controlled her rather than vice versa. As if her feelings were something outside her, not in her control, like a bus she has to wait for.'

'I met someone I like to spend time with. Someone here at home, at school. I met him in Stats. We got to be really good friends. It took time, but my feelings changed. Now I can't with Bruce anymore. It doesn't all have to do with him. It's me, too. Things change.'

'The photo is a Sears Mini-Portrait, too large for any wallet, so I've bought a special receptacle, a supporting framing folder of thick licorice cardboard. The receptacle is now wedged over the sun visor, along with a toll ticket, on the passenger side of my mother's car. I keep the windows rolled up to negate any possibility of the photo's blowing around, coming to harm. In June, in a car without air-conditioning, I keep the windows rolled up for the sake of her photo. What more should anyone be required to say?'

"Bruce here I feel compelled to remind you that fiction therapy in order to be at all effective must locate itself and operate within a strenuously yes some might even say harshly limited defined structured space. It must be confronted as text which is to say fiction which is to say project. Sense one's unease as you establish a line of distraction that now seems without either origin or end."

'This kind of fiction doesn't interest me.'

"Yes but remember we decided to construct an instance in which for once your interests are to be subordinated to those of another."

'So she's to be reader, as well as object?'

"See above for evidence that here she is so constructed as to be for once subject as well."

'A relief of contrivance, then? The therapeutic lie is to pretend the truth is a lie?'

"Affording you a specular latitude perspective disinterest the opportunity to be emotionally generous."

'I think he should get to do whatever makes him feel better. I still care about him a lot. Just not in that way anymore.'

'By late May 1983 her emotional bus has pulled out. I find in myself a need to get very away. To do a geographic. I am driving my mother's enclosed car on hot Interstate 95 in southern Maine, moving north toward Prosopopeia, the home of my mother's brother and his wife, almost at the Canadian border. Taking I-95 all the way from Worcester, Mass., lets me curve comfortably around the west of Boston, far from Cambridge, which I don't wish ever to see again. I am Bruce, a hulking, pigeon-toed, blond, pale, red-lipped Midwestern boy, twenty-two, freshly graduated in electrical engineering from MIT, freshly patted on the head by assorted honors committees, freshly returned in putative triumph with my family to Bloomington, Indiana, there to be kicked roundly in the psychic groin by a certain cool, tight, waistless, etcetera, Indiana University graduate student, the object of my theoretical passion, distant affection and near-total loyalty for three years, my prospective fiancee as of Thanksgiving last.'

'All I said to him then was do you think we could do it. He had asked me if he could ask me someday.'

'I was home again for Christmas: as of the evening of 27/12 we were drinking champagne, lying on her leopard-skin rug.'

'I told him a hundred times it wasn't a leopard-skin rug: the last tenant just had a dog.'

'We were discussing potential names for potential children. She said for a girl she might like "Kate." '

'And then all of a sudden it's like he suddenly wasn't there.'

'At this point she'd bring up how I seemed suddenly distant. I would explain in response that I had gotten, suddenly, over champagne, an idea for a truly central piece on the application of state variable techniques to the analysis of small-signal linear control systems. A piece that could have formed the crux of my whole senior year's thesis, the project that had occupied and defined me for months.'

'He went to his Dad's office at the University and I didn't see him for two days.'

'She claims that's when she began to feel differently about things. No doubt this new Statistics person comforted her while I spent two sleepless, Coke-and-pizza-fueled days on a piece that ended up empty and unfeasible. I went to her for comfort and found her almost hostile. Her eyes were dark and she was silent and trying with every fiber to look Unhappy. She practically had her forearm to her forehead. It was distressed-maiden/wronged-woman scenario.'

'He only came to my apartment to sleep. He spent almost all Christmas break either working or sleeping, and he went back to Cambridge a week before he had to, to work on his thesis. His honors thesis is an epic poem about variable systems of information-and energy-transfer.'

'She regarded the things that were important to me as her enemy, not realizing that they were, in fact, the "me" she seemed so jealously to covet.'

'He wants to be the first really great poet of technology.'

'I see it like I see weather coming.'

'He thinks art as literature will get progressively more mathematical and technical as time goes by. He says words as "correlative signifiers" are withering up.'

'Words as fulñllers of the function of signification in artistic communication will wither like the rules of form before them. Meaning will be clean. No, she says? Assuming she cares enough even to try to understand? Then say that art necessarily exists in a state of tension with its own standards. That the clumsy and superfluous logos of all yesterdays gives way to the crisp and proper and satisfactory of any age. That poetry, like everything organized and understood under the rubric of Life, is dynamic. The superfluous always exists simply to have its ass kicked. The Norbert Wiener of today will be triumphant in the Darwinian arena of tomorrow.'