Lynne Tillman - Cast in Doubt

Next, there is a sequence of doodles, all geometric shapes: squares, rectangles and intersecting triangles; above these, EMOTIONAL SLAVES DON’T TALK. More magazine clippings of images from films, including one from Sergio Leone’s A Fistful of Dollars . Below it, Helen has printed in bold letters: “Make a movie NOW everything’s a movie.” The Leone image is pasted beside a news clipping about a man born with two heads, and beneath this collage is an item about the Watergate burglars as well as one entitled “Some Who Believe in a No-Work State.” On the next page a photograph of Helen and another young woman — her sister? Helen is holding a camera. Her sister is frowning.

There follow a few clippings about the plight of Patty Hearst that detail her kidnapping by, and her professed allegiance to, the Symbionese Liberation Army. Helen has inserted two pictures of Hearst — indeed the infamous bank — robbery image itself. Helen might identify with her, in some way.

On the opposing page, in carefully rendered block letters:

It was a queer, sultry summer, the summer they executed the Rosenbergs, and I didn’t know what I was doing in New York. Plath, The Bell Jar

I remember that terrible day. I remember it as if, were I to walk through the door, I would discover myself in a bar in Cambridge, with my friends, arguing about treason and the death penalty. How poignant and odd that Helen, who wasn’t born then, should have chosen this particular line. Just below it is a telephone number painted in what I take to be nail polish, a repugnant orange. Perhaps the number indicates the person who gave Helen the Plath novel, as a present, though from what I know of it, the book is depressing, not her best work. I have not read it. I believe the book is a roman à clef and has to do with the suicide attempt of a young college woman, which of course might have reference to Helen’s sister. But who turned Helen onto, as John would say, Plath?

Amelia Earhart. Dupe. First lady of the skies.

She had no guy holding her down.

No one could clip her wings.

She was no bird in the hand.

She is no living thing now.

Patti Smith

Helen has underlined “no living thing now.” John might be one of the many guys who would hold her down and clip her wings. But why is Earhart a dupe?

Script: He and I on the street. He does something I don’t like. I kick him. He holds me. I laugh. He picks me up. I wrap my legs around his waist.

The title for this fragment is “slap kiss I kiss tell.”

Next, two postcards of the harbor here, as well as some addresses of friends who are scattered around the States — California, New York, Arizona. There is a scrap of a page torn from a book: Jacqueline Susann’s Once Is Not Enough .

Linda looked thoughtful. ‘I agree. There must be some conversation before you leap into bed. And when a man invites you to his apartment, it’s for just one thing. Somehow it’s different if you invite him up for a nightcap to your apartment. You’re in control…’

On the opposite page, in her own hand:

Diploma: Emblem of knowledge. Proves nothing. Orgasm: Obscene term. Radicalism: All the more dangerous that it is latent. The republic is leading us towards radicalism. Dictionary of Received Ideas.

She has now definitely arrived and settled in Crete. The postcards are evidence of that; in addition the definitions from Flaubert indicate Smitty’s having read Bliss’ copy of Bouvard and Pécuchet . I do not believe the Susann novel is in Bliss’ library. If it were, would Helen have torn a page from it, destroying Bliss’ property? I have never read a book of that kind, to its conclusion. She has found it compelling enough to clip and preserve. Surely Helen realizes the thoughts in it, though in some oblique way relating to her experience, are idiotic, and the writing boorish. Yet she places Flaubert and Susann side by side, which is most peculiar.

She made her sister cry and didn’t help her because her sister made her cry and she even felt good and then felt guilty of course of course but later she saw she was just a bastard too just like her. I’m the bad one, I’m so bad, I’m being so mean to her and him.

I assumed she had guilt feelings in regard to her sister. But who is the “him” in this instance?

More pictures of friends. Another postcard, a charming view of our harbor. Another list of things to do. More visual embellishments, including pictures of rock-and-roll musicians who are called The Talking Heads and The Modern Lovers.

Twenty one today. NO one knows. Feel like the oldest person in the world. Went to the mountains. Later saw Kostas. We fucked. Letter from parents, happy bday happy bday, come home, finish school ETC. Telephoned W. She says everything is great. No TV. Would watch anything. Even the Waltons.

Was it her birthday the day I drove her to the mountains? And she said nothing, not a word. Which Kostas? Helen is a strange girl.

Detective Electric announced a short circuit we might blow it so they stopped at the doorway to destruction. Call the exterminator — not a weird electric woman if you don’t WANT AND NEED STRANGE CHARGES and she put her finger in his socket and up went the rocket, and they became an old flame.

On the page opposite, in bold letters again: DO THE OBVIOUS and STRAIGHT FROM THE UNCONSCIOUS. In her normal script: “I miss my dog.” I assume Helen is Detective Electric. She misses her dog. Her family must have had a pet, a dog. I wonder suddenly what became of the kitten she was taking care of here. I pour another Scotch and turn the page, to discover:

Most of our sentimentalists, friends of humanity, champions of animals, have been evolved from little sadists and animal tormentors. Freud

Of course it is not strange that one finds Freud cited in her diary, as Helen is the daughter of a psychiatrist; also Bliss has, I know, several volumes of Freud in his library. Following the quotation from Freud is a color photograph of a transvestite, in high drag. There is also a picture, captioned “Marvin Gaye”; he is dressed in a tuxedo and singing. I have never heard him sing but in this picture — his arms are outstretched and his palms up — he seems to be a crooner. Underneath his picture are what appear to be his lyrics: “Love just comes and it goes. That’s the way love is.” And, on the next page, “What’s going on?” Gaye’s name is cited again. Is he gay, I wonder.

During one short phase in my young life, I liked to play dress-up and wear my mother’s clothes. I believe it was when I was six years old. But Mother discouraged me. I was, in any case, quite content to dress as a boy. I am not sure that I completely understand transvestism and the desire of some men to masquerade as women. I did enjoy, from time to time, though, the secret drag clubs our crowd frequented years ago. We were influenced by Christopher Isherwood; no doubt some of us liked to imagine that we were night-crawling in Berlin in the twenties.

Can’t stop frightening thoughts. Some angel came to visit me and I was scared because I don’t believe in angels and she said that’s why I need your help. She was carved in stone but she could move and in the background there were millions of graves.

What are her most frightening thoughts? Is this a dream? A story? I want to race through the journal — not really a journal, a jumble — to find something definitive, something that is her own interpretation of an event, perhaps, something that is explanatory. I do not know what it might be. But there is more of the same, odd phrases and lists, names that I have never heard of. A calendar with the dates of her last periods, I determine, and a list of colors — blue, lavender, gray, green, just a list, which makes no immediate sense to me. Unless it has to do with her stab at watercoloring.