Tell us why you do this

We sat in a ring on the stage.  The green velvet curtains, heavy with age, were pulled back and waiting to left and right in their neat long vertical pleats.  The house lights, cheap and fluorescent, mismatched in color, raised a skin of dust over the curtains that makes them in the light of memory silvery, glowing, enchanted, though rational recollection tells me they were in fact dirty and poor and striving for a little too much.  We were going into our fourth musical of the school year.  We were burnt out, but too young to know what burnout feels like.  We were listless, depressed, angry.  Bruce and Doc sat in their rolling wood chairs at the opposite apex of the circle from where I slumped on the black floor.

The musical was terrible.  No one had any more to give.  We had two weeks until dress and it was not coming together like it should.  This was to be the kind of moment I'd later hear called a "come to Jesus."  Since that day, age sixteen and burnt out, dried up of all the song and dance and Rodgers and Hammerstein I had to give, I've thought of it as a "come to Bruce."

"Tell us why you do this," Bruce said, demanding an answer.  The house lights cast long regular reflections on his bald head.  I thought wearily how much I loved him, how I'd do anything for him, the best teacher I'd ever had, how I only wanted to earn his approval and then I'd finally know what achievement was.

My schoolmates reached into a grab-bag of answers and offered each one up tenuously, hoping they'd found the right one.  Approval, approval.  Give it to us, please, god.  Let us guess the right answer and then we'll know we've done well and we can stop wondering what it takes to succeed.

"Tell us why you get up on stage and do this."

It's fun.  It's creative expression.  The chance to be somebody else for a while.  It's an education in the arts. All these little hopeful offerings in the dozens of young hands.

Doc frowned.  He always frowned, but his frown grew more intense.

No one had produced the right answer.  And so I decided to offer my own.  And honest one, though it was not the one my teachers wanted to hear, and I knew if I said it aloud the whole school would look askance at me.  I'd be the one who was doing it for the wrong reasons.

"I do it because I love the applause."

It was like ice inside me, to say it.  Such an awful chill, knowing I'd been honest and knowing that it was wrong.  No one is supposed to do art for the applause.

Bruce looked at me. He nodded.  And Doc.  He nodded, too.

"Libbie.  Is anybody going to applaud for the job you're doing now?"

"No."

"How are you going to earn that applause?  How are all of you going to earn it?"

Somebody else said, "We're going to do better.  We're going to put everything into this.  We still have two weeks; we can do better."

But Bruce kept looking at me, so I came out with more honesty.  It had worked the first time.  It had been the only right answer.

"I'm going to be so good they can't not applaud."

"Good," Bruce said.  "Do it."

The unfairness of perspective

When you roll onto your back and turn your face away I am caught by how beautiful you are, and staring, I cannot help but think what a joke reality plays, that we can't see ourselves from these tender angles, in this blue light, with the setting sun winking through the eyes of the blinds.  Asleep you are even less aware of the metered, measured poems that sing along your lines, the simplicity of your ankles crossed, the narrow longness of your feet.  Beyond the frank ridge of ribs the soft convexity of your stomach rises, edged by its thin line of fine fur, and the whole of your body gently jogs to the pulse just beneath your skin.  My hand rises to touch you, to smooth the spike of hair at your navel, to brush the angle of your hip.  Instead I put my fingers into my mouth and bite them, and let you sleep.

I wonder if you ever watch me sleeping.  And if you do, have I ever looked half so lovely?

9.5 miles in the mountains

Hoped to make it 11, but had to turn back due to ice.  By the time I got back down to the bottom of the ridge my feet were screaming in pain and my head was full of ideas.  There were some places where I stumbled on the trail, one scramble over a down tree that almost sent me off the side of the mountain.  My hands grabbed the trunk, snap like a mousetrap, bent back my thumbnail on the bark, fingers sticking to my trekking poles from the pitch.  My hands smelled fresh and green the whole rest of the day.  It's time for new hiking boots.  The soles are coming right off the old ones.  They'll stick in the mud somewhere and I'll walk on without them.

I feel a lot better.

I am going to kick a hole in the sky.

Confident (possibly without reason, but to hell with the play, see what I mean?)

Through the casement on the stairs I saw a small impetuous ghost slip through the shrubs; a silvery dot in the dark -- hub of bicycle wheel -- moved, shivered, and she was gone.

 It so happened that the car was spending the night in a repair shop downtown.  I had no other alternative than to pursue on foot the winged fugitive.  Even now, after more than three years have heaved and elapsed, I cannot visualize that spring-night street, that already so leafy street, without a gasp of panic.  Before their lighted porch Miss Lester was promenading Miss Fabian's dropsical dackel.  Mr. Hyde almost knocked it over.  Walk three steps and run three.  A tepid rain started to drum on the chestnut leaves.  At the next corner, pressing Lolita against an iron railing, a blurred youth held and kissed -- no, not her, mistake.  My talons still tingling, I flew on.

Half a mile or so east of number fourteen, Thayer Street tangles with a private lane and a cross street; the latter leads to the town proper; in front of the first drugstore, I saw -- with what melody of relief! -- Lolita's fair bicycle waiting for her.  I pushed instead of pulling, pulled, pushed, pulled, and entered.  Look out!  Some ten paces away Lolita, through the glass of a telephone booth (membranous god still with us), cupping the tube, confidently hunched over it, slit her eyes at me, turned away with her treasure, hurriedly hung up, and walked out with a flourish.

"Tried to reach you at home," she said brightly.  "A great decision has been made.  But first buy me a drink, dad."

...And in the meantime the rain had become a voluptuous shower.

"Look," she said as she rode the bike beside me, one foot scraping the darkly glistening sidewalk, "look, I've decided something.  I want to leave school.  I hate that school.  I hate the play, I really do!  Never go back.  Find another.  Leave at once.  Go for a long trip again.  But this time we'll go wherever I want, won't we?"

I nodded.  My Lolita.

"I choose?  C'est entendu?" she asked wobbling a little beside me.  Used French only when she was a very good little girl.

"Okay.  Entendu.  Now hop-hop-hop, Lenore, or you'll get soaked."  (A storm of sobs was filling my chest.)

She bared her teeth and after her adorable school-girl fashion, leaned forward, and away she sped, my bird.

-Lolita, pp. 206 - 207

Going on a long day hike tomorrow.  Going to do some thinking and some planning.

79

This is not a surprise anymore, but somehow this one feels the worst of all of them, because I went out on a limb this time, I tried something different, I allowed myself to hope, just a tiny bit.

I digested what I could of it, and when the full weight of it settled in me I cried, the first I've cried over any specific, nameable event throughout this entire awful, pointless process.  Yes, I've cried over the general frustration and futility of it many times over many months, but never before has one single strike merited more than a frown and a grunt and updating my spreadsheet with another R.  I guess if there is anything to be proud of here it's the fact that I made it to 79 before crying over a single one.

I said aloud, wailed, "I still believe in this book."  In disbelief at my own stupidity for still believing, in astonishment that after being told seventy-nine times that this book isn't any good, I still know it is.  In self-loathing, because as long as I fail to listen to those seventy-nine I will continue to do the same repetitive, slashing, stupid, fruitless thing to myself, and I will continue to hurt.

You came home shortly after, and stopped me in the middle of my distracted laundry because you could tell something was wrong.  I told you with my slow, stupid, tripping tongue -- how I hate my worthless mouth and my artless voice.  If I could have sat you down beside me and written it, I could have made you see how this is a knife inside me, twisting to get in or out, I can't tell which and the difference doesn't matter.  Instead I held onto you and frantically felt the shape of you, breathed the warm air around your neck, finding solace in the fact of you, who I haven't seen for a week and without you I know I will fracture along seventy-nine cracks and be nothing but sharp-edged pieces.

You made me lie down beside you until it was time for me to go to work.  I couldn't sleep, but feeling you sleeping calmed me.  When I left I told you a storm was coming.  I drove to work with one eye on the lowering mass of cloud in my rearview mirror, crossing the sky as a bar crosses a door, a deep and awful stab of ultramarine blue.

FML.

What do you do with a book nobody wants?  Is it even worth self-publishing it at this point? 

Early

For once, you are up with the alarm.  No flipping your ancient phone open and setting the snooze function by feel with still-sleeping fingers.  Our window with blinds down is a soft glowbox of morning blue.  The timid light turns your undershirt the color of ice, but when I, barely awake myself, lay my fingers against your back you are as warm as always.  Your face, a black profile against the morning, shows the sharp, frank curve of your beak of a nose, the tracery of your glasses.  My hand slides down your spine.  Pilled cotton, old shirt, familiar shape.  And, Sorry, babe, you say, and the bed beside me is empty.  This is all I will see of you for two weeks.  Unless that was really you in your uniform bending over me, smiling, to kiss me when I opened one eye just for a moment and fell back to sleep.  I am not sure I wasn't dreaming.