Siri Hustvedt - The Summer Without Men

The Eleatics did not believe in change, in motion. When does one thing cease to be itself and become another? Diogenes walks back and forth in silence.

Can we change and stay the same? I remember. I repeat.

* * *

Dear Boris,

I am thinking of you in the bath, smoking a cigar. I am thinking of that day your zipper broke in Berkeley and it was summer and you had not worn your boxer shorts and you had to give a lecture, so you pulled out your shirttails and hoped that no breeze would blow and reveal Sidney to the audience of three hundred or more, and I am thinking of time and rifts and pauses and that you sometimes called me Red, Curly, and Fire Head, and I called you Ollie after your belly got a bit big and Izcovich Without a Stitch in bed and that’s all except that Bonden isn’t too bad, albeit a bit slow and baked. I am waiting for Bea and then Daisy to visit and Mama is good, and I’ve been thinking of Stefan, too, but about the light days, the laughs, the three Musketeers in the old apartment on Tompkins Place and that really is it. Love, Mia * * *

Dr. S. talked to me about magical thinking. She was right. We cannot wish our worlds into being. Much depends on chance, on what we can’t control, on others. She did not say that writing to Boris was a bad idea, but then she never judged anything. That was her magic.

* * *

Lola brought me earrings, two miniature Chrysler Buildings. I had told her it was my favorite building in New York City, and she had rendered it twice in delicate gold wire. Holding them up, I couldn’t help thinking of the buildings in the city that had come as a pair, as twins, and a feeling of sorrow silenced me for a moment, but then I thanked her enthusiastically, tried them on, and she smiled. Looking at her smile, I realized how calm she was, how easy, how unflappable, and that these related qualities, which bordered on languor, were what drew me to her. I guessed that inside her head, the discourse that went on was also tranquil. My own head was a storehouse for multiloquy, the flux de mots of myriad contrarians who argued and debated and skewered one another with mordant parley and then started up all over again. Sometimes that internal babble wore me out. Lola wasn’t dull, however. I had met people who bored me stiff because they seemed drained of all internal conference and deliberation (the SMUGLY STUPID) and others who, whatever their inner capacity for complex cogitations, lived in an impenetrable box, immune to dialogue (the INTELLIGENT BUT DEAD). Lola belonged to neither camp, and even though her utterances were neither original nor witty, I felt an acumen in her body that was missing from her speech. Small alterations in her facial expression, a slow movement of her fingers, or a new tension in her shoulders when I spoke to her made me aware of how intently she was listening, and she seemed to be able to listen even while she was adjusting Flora’s shorts or putting a new bib on Simon. I suspect that she knew, without having to tell herself, that I admired her.

The offering of the Chrysler Buildings happened on a Saturday, if I am not confused, and I often am about days and dates, but as I remember it, Simon was asleep in a stroller, well strapped in, and Flora’s wig was not on her head. She clutched it tightly in her arms at first, sucked on a thick bunch of strands after that, meditating deeply on some subject known only to her, and once abandoned it entirely to run into the bedroom and examine the professors’ Buddha. All three looked exceptionally clean and shiny. They were off to visit Lola’s parents in White Bear Lake. When I admired the children’s outfits, Lola sighed and said, “If it will only last. I can’t tell you how many times we get there and Flora’s spilled grape juice and Simon’s spit up and I’m slimy. I have clean clothes for them in the car.”

That same day, Flora introduced me to Moki. As she told me about him, she swayed back and forth, pushed out her bottom lip, puckered both lips, rolled her head, and breathed heavily between phrases.

“He was bad today. Too loud. Too loud. And bouncy.”

“Bouncy?19;s sp1D;

Flora grinned at me, her eyes lit with excitement. “He bounced on the house. And then he flied.”

“Can he fly?”

She nodded eagerly. “But he can’t go fast. He flied slow like this.” She demonstrated by moving her legs and arms as if she were swimming in the air.

She came very close to me and said, “He jumped on the ceiling and in the window and on a car!”

“Wow,” I said.

She gabbled on about him, her mother smiling. They had to wait for Moki because he dawdled. Moki loved chocolate chip cookies, bananas, and lemonade, and he had beautiful long blond hair. He was strong, too, and could lift heavy objects, “even trucks!”

Moki lived. After they had left, I meditated for a moment on the imaginary and the real, on wish fulfillment, on fantasy, on stories we tell ourselves about ourselves. The fictive is an enormous territory, it turns out, its boundaries vague, and there is little certainty about where it begins and ends. We chart delusions through collective agreement. The man who believes he’s emitting toxic rays while nobody around him seems to be the least bit affected can be safely said to be suffering from one pathology or another and put away in a locked ward. But let us say that same man’s fantasy is so vivid, it affects his neighbor, who then begins to suffer from headaches and vomiting spells, and a contagious hysteria ensues, the whole town retching — isn’t there some AMBIGUITY here? The vomit is real. I thought of the crazed women flailing and wounding themselves in the churchyard of St. Medard, their gruesome deliriums and convulsions, their hideous pleasures, their glorious subversion of EVERYTHING. And what did I think in my madness? I thought that Boris, in concert with “them,” stood against me, and this was, in fact, delusion, and yet, wasn’t it also a howl against the way things are for me, a cri de coeur to be truly SEEN, not buried in the clichés and mirages of other people’s desires, buried up to my neck like poor Winnie. Beckett knew. Haven’t they distorted me with my collusion? Ibsen’s Nora dances the tarantella, but it has gotten out of hand. It is too fierce. Abigail hides her vacuum cleaner that sucks up the town. It is too fierce. I can see in my father’s eyebrows that it is not right, in my mother’s mouth that it is inappropriate, in Boris’s frown that I am too loud — too forceful. I am too fierce. I am Moki. I am bouncing on the house, but I cannot fly.

* * *

I do believe that on March 23, 1998, the only person who saw Sidney was you.

Boris

* * & fi*

When I read it, I smiled. Of course, he would know the date. His brain is a goddamned calendar. I was glad he remembered that I had pounced on the unzippered door to the little soldier himself, standing at attention the instant I gave the command. Oh Sidney, what have you gone and done now? Why AWOL now, old friend? You were never too bright, of course. Like all your brethren, you’ve served as little more than a moronic tool of your owner’s alligator brain. But still, I cannot help wondering, wherefore now, old pal of mine?

* * *

Soon, you are saying, we shall come to a pass or a fork in the road. There will be ACTION. There will be more than the personification of a very dear, aging penis, more than Mia’s extravagant tangents onto this or that, more than presences and Nobodies and Imaginary Friends, or dead people or Pauses or men offstage, for heaven’s sake, and one of these old ladies or girl poetesses or the mild young neighbor woman or the teetering-on-the-brink-of-four version of Harpo Marx or even wee Simon will DO something. And I promise you they will. There is a brewing, oh yes, there is some witches’ stew brewing. I know because I lived it. But before I get to that, I want to tell you, Gentle Person out there, that if you are here with me now, on the page, I mean, if you have come to this paragraph, if you have not given up and sent me, Mia, flying across the room or even if you have, but you got to wondering whether something might not happen soon and picked me up again and are reading still, then I want to reach out for you and take your face in both my hands and cover you with kisses, kisses on your cheeks and chin and all over your forehead and one on the bridge of your (variously shaped) nose, because I am yours, all yours.