Amity Gaige - Schroder

I care about pauses. Actually, I collect pauses. Back in the year 1990, fresh out of Mune, after studying many of the most significant moments in human history, I thought it might be cool to collect all those moments — literary, cultural, political — when something was not said or not done. Hesitations, standstills, lulls, ellipses. All kinds of inactivity. I called it “Pausology: An Experimental Encyclopedia.” The work stemmed from my longtime interest in the concept of “eventlessness” (which I would define as moments in history when nothing was happening, producing a significant insignificance).

At first I thought I was doing something groundbreaking. I was writing antihistory. History’s negative. Then I realized the obvious, that the material I was trying to collect was totally undocumented. One summer I hired a research assistant through my old prof at Mune, and we spent most of the summer just trying to figure out how to begin. After Meadow was born, I had to adjust my ambitions and reckon with the fact that there was no way that my encyclopedia would ever be “complete.” And after a while, looking over the bits and pieces of promising chapterlets and indexes, I thought, well it could make for an interesting coffee table book. I don’t know. People kept asking me, “How’s the book? Making progress on that book?” The truth is, I had told too many people about it to stop. 11

For all of his brilliant writing, playwright and unofficial pausologist Harold Pinter loved moments in which the characters did not speak, leaving us now with plays chock-full of excruciating or “pregnant” pauses. Although Pinter later came to repudiate his famous pauses, he happily wrote 140 of them into Betrayal and 224 into The Homecoming , which, if faithfully acted, led to some satirically long, theater-clearing performances that will fuel bad undergraduate repertoires for generations to come. I’d like to draw a connection here between dramatic pauses and marital pauses. Both dramatic and marital pauses vary in duration; the shortest, or most minor, are easily ignorable (“…”) but do signal some form of inner struggle; other beats are longer and more loaded with effortful suppression or confusion ( pause ), but the longest pauses ( silence ) are the ones no one should have to bear, and speaking personally I would have rather been flayed alive than to stand there with my wife having nothing to say , as in nothing left to say.

Therefore, anyone interested in Pinterian pauses could save the cost of the ticket and spend an evening witnessing someone’s disintegrating marriage. Here’s an excerpt from mine:

Ham Sandwich: A Marriage for Laura

WOMAN

Looking up from her schoolwork

Oh. I didn’t know you were here.

MAN

Yes. I’m… here.

WOMAN

Well… you might as well sit.

MAN

Where?

WOMAN

Anywhere.

MAN

Next to you?

Silence

WOMAN

Is she asleep?

MAN

Who?

WOMAN

Our little girl.

MAN

Oh, yes. She was very tired. But happy.

WOMAN

Happy… Happy…

Silence

MAN

And you?

WOMAN

Startled

Me?

MAN

Are you…?

WOMAN

I don’t know.

Pause

I don’t know.

MAN

Might we…

WOMAN

Oh. I don’t know anymore.

MAN

Do you…

WOMAN

No.

Pause

Not anymore. I…

Silence

Pause

MAN

Well. Would you like a ham sandwich? I’m going into the kitchen. I could…

WOMAN

Yes. All right. Thank you. A ham sandwich would be nice.

MAN

All right.

He stands

WOMAN

Wait.

MAN

What is it?

WOMAN

I don’t really want a ham sandwich. I’m not hungry.

MAN

Well. Would you like another kind of sandwich? Egg salad? Roast beef? What about an ice cream sandwich?

WOMAN

Like I said. I’m not hungry.

MAN

What about a pretzel? A fruitcake? Lamb with mint jelly? WHY IS EVERYTHING I OFFER YOU INSUFFICIENT?

Silence

END OF PLAY

But that’s not very funny. 12

Well, Harold Pinter wasn’t a very funny playwright either.

I’ve always been fascinated by — and uncomfortable with — pauses. My research forced me to see that short pockets of silence were everywhere and that even sound needs silence in order to be sound . There are tiny silences all over this page. Between paragraphs. Between these very words. Still, they can be lonesome. So for all my project’s shortcomings, I’d say the worst is that I haven’t shaken the lonesome feeling that pauses give me. Sometimes I still wish there weren’t any silences at all. And so it is with some reluctance that I give you this one.

When dressing in your underclothes, you used to loop both straps of your bra over your shoulders and then bend over, catching your breasts, as it were. Then you would reach around and hook the clasp, adjust the fit of the cups, and then you would stand, perfected. I often watched this ritual from the bed. I would wait for it. I liked the way it evoked a bow, the way that when you stood, you seemed to invite applause. I appreciate the tease of undressing, but there is nothing so transfixing as a woman dressing, article by article, fitting her toe through the ruffled hole of the panty, or drawing closed a zipper, pinky erect, saying, with her whole form, Maybe later . Of course I never really felt worthy of all that. It always seemed to me that as a man I was so much uglier in comparison. Take my male toilet . I would stand there in the bathroom with white bits of deodorant caught in my underarm hair, penetrating my own nostril with the whirring pole of an electric nose-hair trimmer. You left a scent of camellia in your wake. I left tiny whiskers in mine. My footfalls were heavy. Yours were soundless. You could handle glass. I looked like an idiot holding a champagne flute, a real gorilla. I’m grateful, really, and also sad, that you were so beautiful.

The beautiful weather could not last forever. While April and I slept, clouds slid into the sky above Lake Champlain, and with them, the mood had darkened. Back in Cabin Two, Meadow rattled the bottles in the half fridge, looking for something not there. She was tired of cheese sandwiches. Why hadn’t I bought any cereal? she wanted to know. Normal people eat cereal for breakfast. And fruit. Fresh fruit. Three to five servings a day. Everybody knows that. I watched her move about the cabin, still trying to get used to the color of her hair. Unfortunately, it wasn’t goldenish like Rapunzel’s. It was a parched color, like dried corn stalks. She must have done it wrong. I followed her around, holding the dry rope of it in my hands. Glancing in the bathroom, the smeared towels and sink basin made me feel sick.

After she’d walked in on me and April, I’d dressed quickly, and run after her. And now she would barely look at me, and I could understand why. I was in need of a shower. And a Laundromat. No. I was in need of a bonfire. I needed to burn my clothes and start over. I smelled of cigars and April and rain and vokka and my face was bloated as it is sometimes in the mornings after drinking. Meadow sat at the tiny cocktail table that functioned as the cabin’s dining area, resting her big white head against the heel of her palm as she bit off the corner of the last piece of Roman Meal, staring down at the plastic tablecloth. Jesus, I thought, what would her mother think? I was almost more afraid of that than of legal ramifications.