Siri Hustvedt - The Summer Without Men

There are times when the fragility of all living things is so apparent that one begins to wait for a shock, a fall, or a break at any moment. I had been in this state since Boris left me and my nerves exploded — no, earlier than that, since Stefan’s suicide. There is no future without a past because what is to be cannot be imagined except as a form of repetition. I had begun to expect calamities.

My mother and I walked Abigail to her apartment and then helped her get comfortable on her sofa. She ordered us several times to “stop fussing,” but in her face I read relief that she was not alone, not alone yet. She promised to see her doctor and kissed us both before we left.

Later that evening, I saw the multicolored bruise my mother had sustained on her side when she rescued her friend from the floor. The walker had somehow been involved and my mother must have banged into it hard. “You mustn’t mention it to Abigail,” my mother said. She said it several times. I promised several times. We sat together in the living room and I felt the hush of the building, nearly silent except for the sound of a distant television.

“Mia,” she said, not long before I left her. “I want you to know that I would do it all over again.”

My mother sometimes behaved as if I had access to her thoughts. “What, Mama?”

She looked surprised. “Marry your father.”

“Despite your differences, you mean?”

“Yes, it would have been nice if he had been a little different, but he wasn’t, and there were so many good days along with the bad days and sometimes the very thing I wanted to change about him one day was the thing that made another thing possible another day that was good, not bad, if you see what I mean.”

“Such as?”

“His sense of duty, honor, rectitude. What made me want to scream one day could make me proud the next.”

“Yes,” I said. “I understand.”

“I want you to know how good it’s been to have you close, how happy I’ve been. I’ve had fun. It can be rather lonely here and you have been my happiness, my comfort, my friend.”

This rather formal little speech made me glad, but I recognized in the hint of ceremony the ever-present pinch of time. My mother was old. Tomorrow she might fall or be stricken suddenly. Tomorrow she might be dead. When we parted at the door, my small mother was wearing flowered cotton pajamas. The pants ballooned around her tiny thighs and stopped just above the knobs of her scrawny anklebones. She was holding a liver-colored hot water bottle in her arms.

* * *

Daisy wrote:

Dear Mom,

I saw Dad for lunch and he didn’t look so good. He had stains all over his shirt, smelled like an ashtray, and he hadn’t shaved. I mean, I know he often waits a couple days, but he looked like he hadn’t shaved in a week, and even worse, I thought he might have been crying before he saw me. I told him he looked bad, like a clochard, but he just kept saying he was fine. I’m fine. I’m fine. Mr. Denial. Any thoughts? Should I keep trying to get him to talk to me? Send out a detective? It won’t be long now, Mamasita, before I see you!

Big kisses from your own Dazed-and-still-disappointed-in-

Daddy Daisy.

* * *

I replied:

Your father couldn’t have been crying. He only cries at the movies. But do check on him.

Love, Mom

* * *

I had known Boris for perhaps a week when he took me to Elia Kazan’s A Tree Grows in Brooklyn at the Thalia on Ninety-fifth and Broadway. There is a moment in the film when the young heroine, played by Peggy Ann Garner, walks into a barbershop to retrieve her dead father’s shaving mug. It is an affecting scene. The girl adored her drunken, sentimental father, with his false hopes and impractical dreams, and losing him is a massive blow. I don’t believe Boris sniffed, although he may have, but for some reason, I turned to look at him. The man beside me oozed tears in two heavy streams as the liquid dripped steadily off his chin and onto his shirt. I was so astonished by this display of feeling, I politely ignored it. Later, I came to understand that Boris responded far more directly to the indirect; that is to say, his real emotions surfaced only when mediated by the unreal. Time and again, I had sat dry-eyed beside him while he snuffled and wept over actors on a big, flat screen. I had never, ever seen him cry in the so-called real world, not for Stefan, not for his mother, not for me or for Daisy or for dead friends or for any human being who wasn’t made of celluloid. That said, I was shaken by the oddly frightening thought that Boris had changed, that if he hadn’t met Daisy immediately after a movie (which seemed unlikely since he worked all the time and had mostly watched films on DVD in recent years) the Pause might have altered the deep structure of Boris’s character. Was he crying over her, the Frenchwoman searching for new neuropeptides? Had the wall come down for her?

* * *

Nobody was on the rampage. Nobody understood Nobody — that was the gist of the problem. The two of us had stumbled onto “the hard problem”: consciousness. What is it? Why do we have it? My highly conscious correspondent inveighed against the monumental stupidities of scientism and the atomization of processes that were clearly inseparable, “a flow, flood, wave, stream, not a series of rigid discrete pebbles lined up in a row! Any idiot should be able to divine this truth. Read your William James, that stupendous Melancholic!” A Thomas Bernhard of philosophy, Nobody indulged in splenetic rages that had a weirdly calming effect on me. I loved the Stupendous Melancholic, too, but I steered him to Plutarch’s flux and flow, the Greek wit who railed against the Stoics in his On Common Conceptions:

1. All individual substances are in flux and motion, letting go parts of themselves and receiving others coming from elsewhere.

2. The numbers and quantities to which they come or from which they go do not remain the same but become different, as the substance accepts a transformation with the said comings and goings.

3. It is wrong that it has become prevalent through custom that these changes are called growth and diminution. It would be appropriate that they should instead be called creation and destruction ( phthorai ), because they oust a thing from its established character into a different one, whereas growth and diminution happen to a body that underlies the change and remains throughout it.

The story is old. When does one thing become another? How can we tell? He attacked Boris, too, as a naïf, a man whose notions of a sub or primal self were absurd, misplaced. “You can’t locate the self in neural networks!” I defended my alienated family member with some vigor, arguing that self was an elastic term certainly, but Boris was quite specific about what he meant — that he was talking about an underlying biological system necessary for a self. According to my invisible comrade, not only Boris but everybody was asking the wrong questions, with the exception of Nobody himself, isolated spokesman for a synthetic vision that would unite all fields, end expert culture, and return thought to “dance and play.” A utopian nihilist is what he was, a utopian nihilist in a manic phase. I kept thinking what he really needed was a good, long head rub. And yet, I did say to myself, When I was mad, was I myself or not myself? When does one person become another?

Do you remember, I wrote to Boris, that evening two years ago when we realized we had just had exactly the same thought, not an obvious one at all, a rather eccentric notion that was brought about by some mutual catalyst, and you said to me, “You know, if we lived together another hundred years we would become the same person?” Ton amie, Mia