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Contents

• Preface • 4
• Introduction • 6
• “In the Very Air We Breathed” • 13
• Epilogue • 81
• References • 97

Preface

In 2001, at the age of 73, Maritza graduated summa cum laude from New York University with a double major in Art History and the Humanities. Even though her formal schooling had ended at fifteen when Nazi Germany occupied Budapest, she had been admitted to the University on the strength of an entrance essay she had submitted, “partly as a lark,” she has told me, when she chanced to hear on the radio that NYU was accepting “alternate experiences.”

Her thesis, entitled “Art and Artists of the Holocaust: Survival and Resistance,” opens with this description:

It was a cool November morning in 1944; we were a contingent of women of all ages, being marched to a slave labor camp. The early sun penetrated the mist and cast strange shadows, the fields were barren except for an occasional sunflower patch. The petals of the flowers matched the color of my yellow star. I promised myself to come back some day with my camera and catch the magic of this light. I now know that this ability to observe and reach within myself, the insistence of holding on to my identity and autonomy helped me to survive and was essential to my eventual escape.

In this passage we get a glimpse of the woman who was a keen observer, possessing a creative and courageous mind, determined to imagine a life beyond the horrific circumstance she found herself in.

In “Jewish Response to the Holocaust” another paper she wrote as a student, Maritza explores the concept of resistance and documents the multiple forms of resistance that Jews exhibited before and throughout the war. She extends Bauer’s1 definition of Jewish resistance as “any group [italics mine] action taken” (27) to “any act taken by an individual Jew to save his life or thwart a Nazi plan.” Maritza and other family and friends survived because of small and large acts of resistance, including, in her case, escaping from the death march that would have ended her life.

How did I come to know this remarkable woman, whose courage, ingenuity and foresight, as well as her determination to maintain her humanity in the most inhumane conditions continues to be an inspiration? Here is how our friendship began. 5

Bauer, Yehuda. The Jewish Emergence from Powerlessness. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, ©1979

Introduction

One [wo]man’s experience may serve as a point of entry into one of the most appalling human tragedies of this century.

         — David Cesarani, Genocide and Rescue: The Holocaust in Hungary, 1944

 

Life may not be the easiest, but now, as always, I can find pleasure and beauty in it.

                                                                     — Maritza Shelley, email March 25, 2016

As a young woman in her late teens, I would often ride my bike into the small village where I lived on Eastern Long Island, New York, and down the main street toward the ocean. I would sometimes stop at a beautiful stucco Episcopal church that had two tennis courts behind the pastor’s rectory. I would stand outside the fence, watching the same group of people who played for hours every morning. I was an outsider, not only to the game, but to the cultural connections that in many ways bound them together. 

All of the players were owners of second homes, many highly educated, and several had grown up with considerable wealth and privilege. In most ways, their lives in no way mirrored my own. I was growing up one of six siblings, with parents whose formal education had ended when they graduated high school. A grandmother also lived full time with us, my two sisters and I shared one bedroom and my three brothers lived in our basement. In all ways our lives were modest.

These tennis players, however, were a very friendly lot, and would engage me in conversation, and one day, invited me to play with them. Even though I hadn’t played much tennis, they were so encouraging that I accepted their offer and showed up the next day in ragged cut off jean shorts over a yellow leotard with an old wooden racquet I’d found in our basement. I’m certain they were appalled but would never have even subtly suggested that I might don tennis attire. (Eventually, I made myself a white piquet tennis dress—and the fuss made over me the day I showed up in it made me realize how I looked beforehand!)

So began my decades long friendship with a group of people who profoundly affected my values and views of the world, those quite different from my Republican, largely agnostic family and conservative community. They were all liberal, non-religious Jews with leftist leanings, active politically and socially, and they nurtured those instincts in me. All had lived through the Second World War in various capacities and in various countries, including Poland, England, Holland and Hungary. Now they lived in Manhattan, Brooklyn, and Queens and had summer homes in eastern Long Island.

Among these couples and a few single women, I met Maritza, a beautiful and graceful woman in her 40’s, a Hungarian born Jew, who grew up in Budapest and lived there until just after WWII. For most of the nearly 45 years I have known her, she rarely spoke of her experiences during the War and I came to understand that she, like many others who suffered at the hands of the Nazis and anti-Semitism, preferred not to relive such brutal memories.

Although I was always curious to know more about her history, I wanted to respect her privacy, so rarely “pried” into her life under Nazi occupation. When I was in my late 40’s, I realized one of my dreams. I flew to Budapest to meet Maritza while she was there visiting her family. By this time, we had been close friends for over 20 years. From our shared love of tennis, Maritza and our other friends nourished my growth with access to theatre, music, film and art, so central to all of their lives. Maritza seemed so accomplished to me! She was an artist, creating beautiful stained glass and watercolors, (which we have practiced together throughout the years) and worked as an airbrush artist in a studio in New York City. But she also volunteered one day a week at the Legal Aid Society instead of taking long weekends at the beach, gave talks for UNICEF and was always learning, taking classes at the New School on everything from movies to Chinese ink brush to repairing a motorcycle. Naturally, traveling to her childhood home was an honor to me!

At the time of my visit, her 95-year-old mother was still alive, but had just moved into a senior care facility from the tiny apartment she had lived in overlooking the Danube. Maritza’s older sister Dolly still taught ballet to young children, and her husband Pista was a director in the theatre. They had a two-bedroom ­apartment in Budapest, where Maritza preferred to stay. I was generously offered her mom’s vacant apartment, at the Danube near the bridge to Margit Island. Each day I would meet Maritza for part of the day, and she would help me explore Budapest with its famous bridges, and the beautiful countryside sur­rounding the city. We swam in beautiful public “wave pools” that replicated the movement of the ocean. We traveled by train through red fields of poppies to visit the studio of Margit Kovacs, one of Maritza’s favorite sculptors. I had recently read Kati Marton’s book Wallenberg and I was excited to see many of Imre Varga’s sculptures including the statue of Raul Wallenberg, the Swedish diplomat who established “safe houses” and saved so many lives in Budapest during the Holocaust.

I met some of her childhood friends, and we drove with one named Stephen in an old VW Bus to the hills where their summer villas had stood close to one another. Although we did not glimpse any of their actual homes, I could imagine them as children running playfully around the orchards on long summer evening. Sometimes, walking the city together, she would recount some of the history of the city and her life growing up there. Still, I did not probe too deeply, letting Maritza take the lead on what she wanted to share.

Fast forward nearly twenty years to a late spring evening in 2015 and Maritza and I are having dinner together in an outdoor café in Sag Harbor, where she has a second home. That morning I had heard a piece on NPR about the dwindling generation who are still available to give first-hand accounts of the Holocaust. Although Maritza is healthy with an amazing intact mind and memory, she is now in her late 80’s. I say, “Maritza, I don’t know why it has always been so difficult for me to ask you this, but I’m really interested in hearing your life story.” She merely laughs and the conversation turns elsewhere. But a week later I call her. “I was serious about wanting to hear and write about your life,” I say cautiously. She demurs, saying her life is not all that interesting. I assure her that at least to me, it is. And this time she says,  “OK.”

Thus began a journey for both of us. We met weekly during the summer months, usually sitting under tall oak trees in her quiet backyard, and as summer waned, these interviews stretched into the winter months in various sites in New York City.

Four years have passed, as interviewing turned into re­searching, writing, and mutual reading of drafts. Maritza once asked, “What interests you about my life besides my experiences during the war?” “Everything!” I replied. For this is not just the story of one woman’s experiences during WWII, from when Germany invaded Hungary on March 19, 1944, and surrendered to the Allies on May 7, 1945. It is the story of a remarkable life, lived fully whether in times of great luxury or terrible deprivations, of continued accomplishments and tragic happenings. Her story has taken me deep into the history of Hungary, learning about the rich heritage that Hungarian Jews share not only in their own country, but in remarkable accomplishments that have enriched our world. I am deeply grateful for this opportunity and greatly humbled to be entrusted with her memories. 

In the Very Air We Breathed

A note about the text: While much of this story draws directly from transcripts of our interviews and conversations following those, I often used research to supply context and fill in historical information that a reader might not have. All the drafts were read by and approved of by Maritza, as agreed upon when we first began this project.

In March of 1938, when I was nine years old, the Anschluss happened=Germany annexed Austria, our closest ­neighbor to the West. Yet we still lived as we’d lived before. Yes, my father had to have some different kind of business—but he still made money. We continued with our schooling. Life remained largely the same for us in Budapest, even as the Germans were rounding up Jews and other “undesirables” across Europe and building their concentration camps, beginning with Dachau in 1933, the year Adolf Hitler became Chancellor of Germany. 

Chapter One • Life Interrupted 

Although I knew some Bible stories from my mandatory religion classes in school, I never believed in God. In fact, I don’t think I ever heard the word God spoken in my home by any members of my family. However, had I been a believer, I’m sure my faith would have been sorely tested on a tranquil, sunny Sunday, March 19, 1944.

My older sister and myself, both teenagers, were attending a Bach concert at the beautiful Saint Teresa’s Church in Budapest. We emerged from its soaring ceilings and graceful arches, filled with Bach’s stirring melodies, and our world had changed. Massive gray steel tanks, their menacing long snouts leading the way, flooded the avenues along the Danube. Soldiers of the Wehrmacht with Third Reich armbands, boasting the Nazi swastika, strutted two by two in black boots, long belted overcoats and the distinctive German steel helmet, the Stahlhelm. Trucks overflowing with German soldiers rolled beside the tanks as well as smaller open motorcars, carrying two or three German military personnel. The expansive boulevard we so loved had become cramped and tense, filled to the margins with guns and soldiers. Adolf Eichmann and other SS officers were among them, sent by Hitler to accelerate the “final solution” for Hungary’s 750,000 Jews. Nazi Germany had invaded Hungary.

Having heard the news, my parents, who were hiking in the Buda mountains just outside of the city, hurried home, and when my sister Dolly and I arrived back at our apartment, my father was already on the phone working to procure false papers for us. He tried to secure as many lifelines as possible, knowing that might be our only chance of survival. We eventually had papers from the Vatican and Sweden as well, but our first papers changed our identities to Christians. Our false papers mirrored us—father, mother, and two teenage daughters. We lost the telltale “I” for Israelite, or Jew, which appeared on all our documents, and my father’s occupation went from owning and operating a textile factory to physical education teacher, about as far from anything we could imagine for him with his slight limp.

Could we have known that our fellow Hungarians, our neighbors and our countrymen, our police and our government would cooperate with the Nazis and betray us with such enthusiasm? We thought, naively, we might be spared the fate of so many other European Jews. After all, Hungarian Jews had always been proud patriots, enjoying a symbiotic relationship with our fellow Hungarians, and making major contributions to the prosperity of our country. We trusted that Regent Horthy, an aristocrat and not—we thought­—a Nazi, would protect us. There will always be debates about what Jews everywhere could have known or might have done had they known Hitler’s plans. But even as present day Hungarians attempt to whitewash their complicity—erecting in 2014 (under cover of night and with police guards) a controversial monument portraying themselves as “victims” of Nazi Germany, the truth is that most Hungarians turned their backs on us and cooperated fully with the German genocide.

Spoiler Alert! –  This review discusses the ending of the book, albeit obliquely, so you may prefer to avoid reading the review until after reading the book. 

What is it like to be a bear? On Nastassja Martin’s In the Eye of the Wild:

The romance of the anthropologist has, I suspect, largely fallen out of favor, being as it is a way of telling stories of exotic people in far off places; an account of “discovering” and reveling in “Otherness.” Yet, there is something mesmerizing about the idea of being plunged into a world that is utterly different and slowly figuring out its mores, and a thrill, too, (a dangerous one perhaps?) in observing yourself gradually become changed. If it is no longer acceptable, however, to tell such stories about other cultures (unless in science fiction), it seems that another possibility remains open — to narrate an encounter with an animal. Nastassja Martin’s In the Eye of the Wild, translated from the French by Sophie Lewis, is a curious hybrid of the two forms, a compromise of sorts. Narrating the story of her rencontre with a bear and its aftermath, Martin, an anthropologist, also describes the nightmare world of hospitals and extensive surgeries, and her experiences among the Evens people in Kamchatka. As she moves through these various spaces and kinds of interaction, she grapples with the question of what is alien and what is familiar, seeking a place where she can belong without remainder.

Animals have long, maybe always, been, in addition to companions or food or tools of labor or food, a source of mystery and fascination. The increasing popularity of vegetarianism and the rise of Animal Studies, the popularity of J. M. Coetzee’s Elizabeth Costello and Werner Herzog’s Grizzly Man, all attest in different ways to a larger cultural meditation on the nature of the human-animal dichotomy. What do we really know about what it is like to be an animal? How do we ethically co-exist with them, what agency do they have, what are our duties towards them?   

As it happened, I read Martin’s book (in one cozy sitting — it is well suited for curling up in front of a fire with) a few days before I was teaching an essay by Val Plumwood entitled “Being Prey,” which describes the experience of a crocodile attack. The pairing was apt: both writers narrate a (harrowing) encounter with a predatory creature, but seek to do so in a different kind of way, to call into question the standard assumptions and beliefs that underpin such tales. Plumwood writes of her struggle to resist the cultural pressure to describe what happened to her through the trope of the mythic struggle, or “masculinist monster myth.” Rather, she seeks to understand herself as prey, as part of the food chain. Her story, she says, “is a humbling and cautionary tale about our relationship with the earth, about the need to acknowledge our own animality and ecological vulnerability.”

Martin, too, gains a new sense of animality from her experiences, but one that is hers alone, rather than a shared property of all humans. She is now medka, an Even word for people who have been marked by the bear, who are half human, half bear. Already before, her Even title, matukha, she-bear, marked an affinity with the creature, but now she is changed. Maybe: she has met what was always awaiting her. Where Plumwood’s essay arrives at a new understanding of her place in a larger cycle of life, a feeling of belonging in the world, Martin’s, instead, is characterized by a profound sense of isolation from other people.

For indeed, the meeting, the animal’s grip on her face, her jaw in the bear’s own, is one of an intense intimacy, whereas her encounters with various medical professionals, first in Russia and then in France, are horrifically alien. She is tormented by doctors and nurses, subjected to various treatments that cause atrocious pain and seem never-ending, as complications arise and she is told that another surgery will be needed. She can trust, it seems, no one, particularly after her return to France, when she is all too aware of how she has become a mere pawn in complex rivalries between France and Russia, or different French hospitals. She is visited by a therapist whose counsel is based in cultural notions of identity that Martin has spent years critiquing, who seeks to help produce a particular kind of story of healing that is utterly unsuited to Martin’s narrative needs. Strangers, and even friends and family, look upon her altered face with pity. She feels, keenly, that she does not belong, and plots her return to Kamchatka.

But there, with the Even people whose understanding of her connection to animality seems so central to her efforts to make sense of events, too, she does not belong. An intriguing feature of both Plumwood’s essay and Martin’s book is that although the encounter with the animal takes center stage, at the margins there is also the insistent presence of another form of difference, another culture with an other concept of human-animal relationships. Plumwood’s awareness of the need for humility in relation to the natural world is partly inspired by Aboriginal thinking, but while the essay thoughtfully explores human-animal power dynamics, it remains relatively reticent on the topic of Indigenous-settler relations. Yet the traces of Indigenous people are all over the text: Plumwood sets out to see Aboriginal rock art; notes that she has not consulted with the Indigenous Gagadu owners of the land about her trip. The understanding she comes to by the end is heavily indebted to Indigenous beliefs, but is presented as her own. Similarly, Martin’s relationship to the Even people is central to her story, and her recounting of her experiences. The question of potential consequences that the publication of this text will have for them is not discussed. Ultimately, Martin’s allegiance is to her writing, to anthropology; this is where she belongs, what she does.

I say this, not to accuse either writer of cultural appropriation or exploitation (though I’m admittedly not not doing that either), but to ponder the question I began with — the romance of the anthropologist, the story of an encounter with otherness, and the residue of other kinds of encounter, other questions of power. “I go close, I am gripped, I move away again or I escape. I come back, I grasp, I translate. What comes from others, goes through my body, and then goes who knows where,” writes Martin. This is the experience of transformation, the work of writing. The endlessly tantalizing possibility of something truly different, truly other, that we could learn to know.

“She’s gone to the U.P,” they would say, or, “She gone up North.”

Despite the fact that, technically, up North and the U.P. were two distinct regions. When it came to where Marilyn had disappeared to everyone knew it was the U.P. even if some referred to it, not really correctly, as up North.

It’s late at Carl’s and James makes his joke about the things waiting outside in the trees, above the gravel parking lot. It’s not a joke, really, because there’s no punchline, but people think of it as James’s joke anyway even though it’s more like a refrain or a half-finished fairy tale. It’s been a tough year, and there’s an unspoken hope that things are about to turn around for the better.

And yet the subject of this evening’s small talk at Carl’s is, as usual, Marilyn, who has incrementally transformed her personal tragedy—the loss of her two boys in a snowmobile accident—into a legend, and herself into something beyond a martyr–something mythical. When she becomes too familiar, and her presence demythologizes her aura, she disappears into the U.P. There is only one practical way to get there and that is the five-mile-long bridge across the Mackinac Straits, the bridge from which just last year a woman—in her car— was blown by a 50-mile wind gust off the bridge to plunge into the November Lake Superior water 150-feet below.

“The creatures have enlarged themselves,” James begins. The Pepsi clock above the bar reads 11:28. The way it will go is that, depending on various stages of drunkenness people will let James talk. They will even be gracious and welcoming. They will encourage details. It will be, for a brief time, like a workshop: tell us more, hold on; give us more details; what do you mean “hanging” in trees;” how did they get there; where’d you get this idea.

“It’s not an idea,” James says. One of his large ears is either purple or tattooed.

“You can’t bullshit a bullshitter,” Frank, James’s half-brother, responds.

“Maybe Marilyn left because of the ‘creatures’,” someone says. Carl, the owner and bartender, has heard this all before and is bored but knows that, very soon, things will veer deeper yet into boredom and James and his posse will disperse into the cold night.

Lisa has been listening and finally has this to say.

“I don’t think she’s up North at all. I don’t think she ever left.”

Lisa is the youngest of the group and has been waiting for a very long time—almost a year—to interject and change the trajectory of the story. Her own mother was a borderline narcissist and she has no interest in the attraction to Marilyn’s supposed vanishings to some place in the U.P. Lisa wears silver and turquoise bracelets and rings that give some people the impression she is from Arizona or New Mexico. Her skin is dark, dark for this part of Michigan.

“Cold enough for you yet?” Frank asked her last winter, the coldest one on record. Lisa lives on Mercy Street above the hardware store and all year it smells like spring in her apartment because of the fertilizer.

“Lisa doesn’t think she’s up North,” James repeats to the group, signaling one last round with a thing he does with his fingers above his head. Then he says, apropos of nothing: “Lisa never smiles.”

“I bet she doesn’t believe in the tree-things either,” someone else shouts from down the bar. Then laughs. No one wants to describe them, the things in the trees, because to do so would sound downright foolish. What: long snouts? What: hunched backs? Yellow eyes? Sharp teeth? Who could say these things—even if they were true—and not come across as a halfwit?

Lisa has soft features and smooth black hair and drives a red Cherokee. Before she came to Michigan she worked in Dayton, Ohio at an accounting firm where a software error resulted in an unaccounted for one hundred and seventy-eight thousand dollars that she used to move here and begin, as they say, a new life. The possibility of erasing who she was and what she had done. Her soft campaign against Marilyn is strategic, although Lisa has no endgame in sight. Marilyn is known for two things: the tragedy re: her children and the fact that she is what they call an artist-type. She wears flowing robes or shawls and even sandals in winter. Her decorated cigar box phase gave way to her shadow box phase without anyone even noticing.

“Oh I believe in them all right,” Lisa says. “They’ve gotten bigger.” In Ohio she drank her beers in poured pints but here she knows better and now doesn’t even need to say anything to Carl for him to bring her a longneck of whatever is one dollar.

“Not bigger, enlarged,” James says.

If she had to guess Lisa would say James is in his fifties but the only time she sees him is in this bar and under its distorting conditions and dim lights. In the way certain men do, James possesses the space around him while others flounder.

“Has this ever happened before?” she asks him.

“What?”

“The enlargement.”

“It’s been happening,” he says, “over time. They gorge, they get bigger.”

“You tell her!” Frank says as if they’re having a debate.

Lisa always does this then: gets out a cigarette and a lighter as if to. But she won’t. She can’t. She’ll wait until she’s outside.

“Okay so if she’s not in the U.P. where is she?” James asks.

On the TV above the bar the extra inning Tigers game is just over and there’s the lonely clapping of one person. Can’t hit for hitting someone says. There is now fog drifting in the blue light of the sulfur lamp outside. And there is the soft rumble of a car or two starting up in the parking lot.

There’s a phone ringing behind the bar and Carl lifts the receiver and puts it down again. It’s near closing time and there’s no reason to talk on the phone. If it’s an emergency they can reach him on the second phone, the private line, beneath the counter at the other end of the bar.

“Who’s up there with who?” asks James.

“Marilyn. With them,” says Lisa.

If she wants to insert herself into the familiar narrative about Marilyn then she needs to make a space in it, a gap, and then use that gap to expand her own detoured version. Lisa suddenly misses Dayton and the fine, marbled museum she’d spend Sunday afternoons in during hot summer days. It was there she learned about perspective and vanishing points and, in a way, how to vanish herself. She could be very still on a bench for a very long time.

Lisa gets up, walks over to the window, leans in, cups her hands and looks up into the trees. She comes back to her stool. She’s only met Marilyn once, at a charity softball game for the burned down Elks Club; a fire started, it turns out, by a stove purchased with the funds from a previous charity softball game for the remodeling of the kitchen. It was clear to Lisa right away that Marilyn exerted a kind of gravity that gently pulled those around her into her orbit and that these satellite people, after a time, repeated her bullshit stories as if they were fact. Who would lie about losing two children in an accident? Why would anybody do that? Since there could be no good answer to questions like that; they weren’t questions that were asked. The wrecked snowmobile in Marilyn’s garage that she uncovered and showed to people when they came around was, Lisa knew, nothing more than a prop. And the place Marilyn disappeared to periodically in the U.P. was, Lisa also knew, not really a place at all. It didn’t exist.

How much of Marilyn’s life was a prop, a fake, an impersonation? Lisa didn’t have to think long about these questions to know the answer. She saw behind the façade right away, a façade betrayed by little gestures. Did Marilyn know she’d met her match in Lisa? Lisa wasn’t sure. How smart was this Marilyn woman? And what sort of smarts were we talking about?

It’s last call.

“Why would she be up there with them?” Frank asks, circling back to what someone said earlier.

Carl has already turned down the heat and cleaned the bathroom.

“Ask the expert,” James says, nodding to Lisa.

But Lisa has never actually seen things in the trees.

Lisa slips on her black leather jacket with the torn and stitched sleeve and looks ready to leave. This lends an air of expectancy to what she’s going to say and already she can feel the gravity shifting from Marilyn to her. If she can just hold off a little longer before saying anything, if she can just let the slight anticipation build, if she can just find the right words and the right cadence to address the question of why Marilyn might be up in the trees with the enlarged ones.

Above the bar is a framed picture of Osama bin Laden with an X of black electrical tape over his face. Last month, for the first time, someone asked who it was, and it was then that Lisa understood how easily history slips away. Like her own. She wants so hard to be new again. She is suddenly afraid to leave the bar and go outside and to her Jeep parked beneath those branches. The wind pushes against the windows. It seems to know something. Does Carl understand this? Does he appreciate the situation? Is that why, after last call, he cracks a bottle open for Lisa and sets it before her on the wiped-down-for-the-night bar? She wants to ask him to become her ally in displacing Marilyn, but she can’t be sure whose side he’s on and in this moment she is trapped between the bar and the empty parking lot.

Carl isn’t laughing but something about him suggests laughter. He has tucked in his green flannel shirt and Lisa notices all the rough, awkward, nail-sized holes punched in his leather belt. She is shocked. She looks away. Outside the window there is shadowy movement above the Jeep. In her mind, the trailer is burning. The trailer Marilyn is hiding in. Not someplace in the U.P. Not someplace up there with the enlarged ones in the trees, either. But rather in the abandoned trailer just a mile or so from here, in a cold swampy outwash plain, a concoction of put-together words Lisa’d never heard in Dayton.

She shudders and Carl puts his hand on hers, gently. She could go home with him tonight but those holes in his belt! She hears a scratching at the door and in a fleeting thought wonders if she could spend the night here, in the bar, in a back room or something, until the light comes up.
“Don’t worry, it’s locked,” Carl says but that just makes her worry more.

All the talk of the creatures in the trees has gotten to her. Plus the overheated bar, the beers, the black night. Plus Carl’s dangerous belt. And the Towers-eyes looming from above the bar. And the burning trailer, the enlarged ones waiting outside.

And that museum in Dayton, the way it held her in place, grounded. Lisa feels herself floating now, really, just above her barstool in a way that Carl senses but can’t understand.

“I’m right about Marilyn, right?” she says more than asks.

“In that?”

“In that everything. She never went up North. She never lost kids in a car wreck, she . . .”

“Snowmobile accident.”

“Okay: She never lost kids in a crash.”

“Snowmobile crash. Against a tree and into a ditch. Broken necks.”

Lisa turns the half-finished bottle of beer onto its side, watches it foam across the bar.

“Get out,” says Carl. He looks tired. He looks like he just wants to go home. “Get out.”

Lisa feels nothing beneath her.

“Fuckin’ annoyance,” she says.

“Get out. Get out!”

Lisa leaps, grabs the bottle, wants to scream, I’m already out, I’m already out! I’m out I’m out I’ve been out I’ve always been out help me bring me in God help me please I’m out I’m out I’m out!

*

She thinks about sleeping in the Jeep, recklessly. Bundled in the lumpy sleeping bag in the back. Instead, for now she sits still in the driver’s seat, her mittened hands on the steering wheel, the car keys on the seat between her legs, her breath slowly fogging the windshield, thinking back to her Dayton friend killed sophomore year in the drive-by shooting whose mother she, Lisa, looked upon with unaccountable disdain at the funeral, as if the stupid, wilting, palliative flowers at the casket were somehow her fault rather than the florist’s, as if she deserved the knock on the door at 1 am, and the young, pale-faced officer’s face as stunned-looking as if he were reporting his own daughter’s death to himself.

And then she does this. She crawls back over seat tops, deeper into the weirdly geometry-ed Jeep parked there outside Carl’s like some stupid hulking metal thing. She shudders, tunneling deeper yet into the jeep and then deeper still into the sleeping bag. What is she doing here, beneath the trees with those apocryphal creatures looming? Leaving Dayton was just another false move, she thinks, a misdirection. How many Marilyns must she slay?

In the morning, she is new. Somehow. Sore and cramped, but new. Outside the Jeep in the empty parking lot Lisa stretches. The sun is out, fierce and brilliant. There is a wind and she can hear Lake Michigan in the distance. She looks up into the trees and they are, of course, empty.

She smiles.

 What is it men in women do require?
The lineaments of gratified desire
What is it women in men do require?
The lineaments of gratified desire

– William Blake

Declan sits facing the speaker on what we call judgment row, his back to the wall. The speaker is earnest and funny. We fellow survivors laugh with her as she tells her story of descent into penury and madness. The little room, a former storefront on a side street in the West Village, is full on this cold Friday night, everyone eager to share. Declan has his hand up. He starts talking about a course he’s taking at Brooklyn College with Allen Ginsberg. They’re reading Frank O’Hara. The class is opening him up, he says. He feels vulnerable every day. Declan is fairly new to this particular meeting, having driven over the bridge to see a cousin. He’s wearing jeans and a strange kind of red acrylic sweater with a lightning bolt or something down the middle. He has a Brooklyn accent. I don’t even (consciously that is) take note of whether he’s actually good looking. I’m just intrigued.

After the meeting, Declan is standing outside against the wall, smoking a Marlboro. I walk over and start talking to him. I can see the whites of his eyes, or at least that’s how I describe it later. It’s a biting, drizzly late March night, and I’m wearing a heavy slicker—nothing come-on about the outfit, but for some reason he seems afraid of me. He’s almost vibrating. ‘He’s a little bit shy,’ I think to myself.

Shades of those rare days to come when, for instance, Declan tentatively holds my hand while we’re walking in Central Park, testing romance. Suddenly his hand alights on mine, as erratic as a butterfly on a leaf, and then, before I can settle in, it’s gone, as if intimacy were, after all, too big a risk.

We stand out there talking in the cold drizzle for a while before he invites me for coffee. I’ve had several boyfriends and one husband from (old-time) Brooklyn, and each of them mysteriously shed his accent along the way. Declan clearly has not. He is soft-spoken, but it comes through all the same.

He takes me to a little café, gone now, in the West Village. A woman we both know from the Program—pretty blonde—is working there. Something about the way she serves him his herbal tea. She’s attracted to him. Then I realize why: he’s good-looking. The sweater, the Brooklyn accent, and the old pockmarks got in the way for a minute. Blue, blue eyes. That, and he’s disarmed me with his sweet reticence and charm. I don’t even realize I’m falling in love. Not then. The next day, after we’ve been up all night talking, sitting across a small table in my tiny garrett, is when it hits me. It hits me. No ambivalence.

Does anyone still write about passionate, romantic love? It’s difficult for me. I’m confounded now that I once adored this emotionally abusive dinosaur. But I want to understand myself, or at least who I was then. What keeps coming up is passion—the importance of it.

Declan tells me I’m feral. We’re sitting outside my apartment in his old, beat-up Brooklyn car that smells intoxicatingly like him. He grabs my face, looks in my eyes and says, “feral.” That is recognition. Most people I know think I’m very nice. It’s convenient for everybody, including me. No need to look past that. Declan takes me on, all of me.  He grants me my humanity, satisfies me as I have never been satisfied before, tries like hell to subjugate me just in case it can be done, attacks me as he does almost everyone who closes in on him, and ultimately leaves me, or I am forced to leave him, because he’s brought me down. Repairs take years.

Declan may not fit the usual definition of a hero, but he did have a genuine appreciation for my sexuality. In light of the times, when all kinds of men are getting their comeuppance, I have to ask, who are these guys who seem to lack basic male pride? Bonobos know better. Do they honestly think women are incapable of desire and therefore have to be coerced? Is that it?  I hear talk of the abuse of power, but when it comes to sex, there is no genuine power where there is no seduction. A woman in lust is beyond willing. This other thing—coercion is how it’s most often described—must feel empty. In cultures where women are genitally cut, the commonly held belief is that male pleasure is fleeting, superficial and easily dismissed. But when, in the act of sex, only one person experiences pleasure, that has got to be lonely to the point of alienation, and frustrating—for both.

Declan wouldn’t dream of imposing himself. On the other hand, it never would have occurred to him to ask beforehand if he could kiss me. Ask? By the time we got around to it, I was dying for it to happen. The sexual tension had to build and build first. When we finally kissed, I could hear the blood rushing in my ears. I was standing on an ottoman to reach his height. We held each other and kissed fiercely. In spite of that, we didn’t have sex right away. On his way out the door, Declan, while kissing me again, gently reached behind and grabbed a cheek of my ass and kneaded it a little (with long, elegant fingers). The gesture was slightly lewd and proprietary. It left me breathless.

I’m still in the West Village, in the same nice-sized, rent-stabilized apartment we originally took together; he’s retreated back to Brooklyn like some monster of the deep, where he’s hiding out with his ex-wife—who seemed to linger at the edge for all the years Declan and I were a couple, even when we tried living together. She bided her time. Made me feel like Circes, or worse, Calypso. I resent good, repressed women, which is what I imagined her to be (I have no idea really). I always think of Penelope, waiting chastely, barely leaving the house, weaving, for twenty goddamn years while Odysseus is out having adventures and getting side-tracked by passion. I want to know more about the Minoan Age, the civilization that came before Homer. Almost ten years have passed, and I still think about the beautifully preserved murals I saw on the ancient walls of the Palace of Knossos, where strong and agile adolescent girls are grabbing bulls by the horns and jumping over them. What happened to that sport?

My mother believed sex is natural and wholesome. She liked that the Greeks built temples for Apollo and Dionysus side by side. Somewhere outside time, the two gods of mind and body are best friends. She brought me up in that spirit. And there was no father around, so patriarchy was one removed. Then, as I reached puberty, the sexual revolution began. That helped, too. Although I didn’t escape entirely right away. I had a fair amount of the usual bourgeois, white-girl inhibition to throw off, but I started early and kept at it. By the time Declan came along, I was ready for the real thing—if you call the real thing being reliably satisfied. And I do. At least, I don’t think it’s a minor part of it.

Honey baby, won’t you cuddle near,
Just sweet mama whisper in your ear
I’m wild about that thing, it makes me laugh and sing,
Give it to me papa, I’m wild about that thing

– Bessie Smith, “Wild About That Thing”

Declan wanted me to come and held back not simply out of generosity, but because, I’m guessing, it made him feel powerful. Maybe that’s why it was sometimes difficult for me to give myself up. His prowess belongs to a tradition we aren’t featuring much lately, that of the man holding on, waiting for the woman to give it up. Nothing to do with equality. In fact, he reigns supreme. But the act itself was for me. He was plugged into me, lighting me up. His orgasms, while assured, were not the focus—and, as he later explained, were invariably heightened by mine.

Declan also got inside my head. He intuitively understood the way to free me was to spur the fantasy that I was his tool, that we were doing this dirty thing for him. “You’re my vessel,” he’d whisper.  In fact, it was the other way round, but as long as we weren’t allegedly doing it for me, as long as I could mindlessly abdicate all responsibility, I could let go.

Yes, it’s long over now, but I don’t want his particular valor to go forever unsung. He wasn’t often thoughtful or even kind—except there in bed. Outside of it, Declan was a prisoner of that terrible male ego. “John Wayne ruined my life,” he used to say. I colluded though—I fed the myth. I wanted to walk next to the baddest guy in the jungle. Not that Declan was anything approaching that—he was too stuck inside his head—but he looked the part. My ex-husband truly was fearless and violent and, unexpectedly, kind and warm-hearted too. Declan, on the other hand, was a master of illusion. We both fostered that illusion—wanted it to be true. We liked to romanticize the class thing, the princess leaving the castle on the hill to join the peasant in the field. Except I will never know what it’s like to be born poor. You can commit suicide, but class suicide is nearly impossible.

As it happened, my family no longer had any money to pass along, so I did have to work. And working on the white-collar version of the factory floor stinks—it’s desensitizing and mostly unrelieved, punctuated by tiny intervals of abbreviated pleasure, those infrequent, stolen minutes outside on the street. This didn’t stop Declan from zeroing in on whatever idea of privilege I had left. For instance, he tended to be almost deferential to waiters. If I simply asked for a table by the window, it would be enough to elicit, “What a sense of entitlement!” C’mon, really? He had his own version of entitlement, belonging as he did to the last generation (let’s hope) of men who expect women to do the housework.

I was not about to come home to Declan, after a long and miserable day writing pharmaceutical advertising copy, and pick up after him. I stupidly did do all the shopping and the cooking, because I wanted to please him, but I stopped short of cleaning up his messes. He deliberately tested me, one time spilling both his ashtray full of cigarette butts and a mug of coffee on the floor and leaving that soupy concoction for me to find. There wasn’t much hope for us after that.

I grew up in a strange kind of a home, an apartment on Park Avenue, with my mother and our live-in maid. No man lived in the house, not even for the occasional night. In those days, my free spirit of a mother was nevertheless very proper about certain things. She would get up and come home in the wee hours—that’s how demanding the mores of the fifties and early sixties were. There was no benevolent or otherwise higher-up for my mother and me to serve, and the live-in maid served us, saving her pay to get back to her own son in Rutherford, New Jersey. I never even learned how to wash dishes until I found myself, (long before Declan) at the age of nineteen, living with a man for the first time. He was the one who taught me how to wash dishes and hang up my clothes, but he certainly didn’t expect me to do all the housework. In fact, neither one of us felt equipped to do any housework at the time; it interfered with our drinking. While I’ve lived with more than my fair share of men since, the only ones who assumed I would clean up after them were solidly working-class. There was not going to be any other maid. Too bad I am so often drawn to these men, because our fundamental disagreement over what the woman’s role should be is a lot to overcome.

I can’t defend my belief that working-class men are sexier. Of course it’s not, objectively speaking, true. Even my own experience gives the lie to this prejudice. Nevertheless, it persists. One reason could be an early, formative experience: To celebrate my thirteenth birthday, my mother took all the girls in my class and me on a boat up the Hudson to Bear Mountain. We shared the front deck with a bunch of high school kids from Brooklyn. The boys had ducktails. The girls had teased hair and wore tight, black capris and ankle bracelets. Bobby Darin’s “Dream Lover,” his latest hit, was blasting from a speaker. I watched the boys making out with the girls, grinding. I didn’t know how to feel about it, I only knew the older high school boys at Rudolf Steiner (where I went), didn’t behave that way in public. The older girls I knew didn’t even come close to behaving that way.

Sexism exists in every class. Only the style differs. Bourgeois men are complacent; working class men, what’s left of them, are traditionally more direct and often unapologetic. In lieu of self-awareness, which barely exists, I prefer the latter. In other words, when it comes to sexist acting out, I would much rather be confronted than unwittingly patronized. Catcalls don’t bother me at all.

You have to be conditioned from early childhood to wait on a man, day in and day out, for no pay. Taking care of little children is another matter. The idea, though, of doing it for a fellow adult! The beginning of hegemony, Engels said. And then I’m supposed to love him on top of it? Honestly, no. But the power Declan had over me can’t be overstated. While I wouldn’t clean up after him, I was willing to do a lot even my libertine my mother never taught me. I did my best to come down off the hill and toil in the field by his side—and be satisfied. That is the kind of rule I understand—give it to me, papa.

A candid, young gay friend told me recently the reason it can be hard to find a top is because the orgasms are so much stronger for the bottoms. I hadn’t fully understood this about gay men until he explained it to me. “The only men who want to be exclusive tops are the ones with macho hang-ups,” he said.

So it’s not strictly female desire—maybe it’s explicitly the desire of the bottom. What I (and my friend) experience isn’t a brief spasm; it’s a total corporal response, a tidal wave. Satisfaction runs correspondingly deep.

Germaine Greer wrote fifty years ago in her masterwork, The Female Eunuch: “If we localize female response in [the head of] the clitoris, we impose upon women the same limitation of sex which has stunted the male’s response…when the release is expressed in mechanical terms, it is sought mechanically. Sex becomes masturbation in the vagina…if women are to avoid this last reduction of their humanity, they must hold out not just for orgasm but for ecstasy.”

This kind of ecstasy is still taboo, possibly more than ever. I don’t see passionate sex scenes in movies anymore, and they seem to be missing from a lot of contemporary literature. Only the music gets to it. Justin Timberlake’s mildly subversive lyrics in one hit could be a manual for not stopping too soon—which he equates with generosity. Exactly. I’m glad somebody’s talking about it. The old blues singers—Bessie Smith, Muddy Waters, John Lee Hooker—were preachers. Just listen to the lyrics. They were instructors. And we do need to be taught.  Those lyrics are not meant only to titillate, although I’m sure any discussion of sex has that in it. They’re more about the fundamental, largely unacknowledged importance of desire, of passion, generally forbidden because it defies the social order, because it’s transformative and a legitimate claim to freedom.

Sexual love is the movement that breaks the rules; an uprising of the senses that abolishes propriety…It is unpredictable, disorderly, and bad for industrial relations. — David Widgery

For the sake of this freedom, I want to formally acknowledge a crisis of female desire and the satisfaction that is its due.

Various younger female friends (not the broadest consensus, admittedly, but still informative) tell me the bedroom protocol these days is that a gentleman takes care to go down on his partner first, bringing her to orgasm before he enters. The understanding is his penis (not to mention his entire body, all of that skin that could be electrifying hers), won’t be the instrument of her satisfaction. It’s almost as if her orgasm is a minor, inconvenient obstacle that has to be dispensed with first. A society of wankers is what we have become. “Well, at least now everybody’s getting off,” could be the reply.

The general assumption is that intercourse never worked; however, not until the nineteenth century, in British and North American culture, was the vagina (which, incidentally, is surrounded by clitoral tissue) ruled out as a source of satisfaction for the woman. Our subsequent accommodations based on this relatively recent notion aren’t as liberated as we like to think.

By the time middle class boys and girls start experimenting on each other, the majority of them already believe only the male comes during intercourse. Both sexes have given up on the possibility of the female coming that way even before they’ve started doing it. Mainstream pornography reinforces this prime example of cultural hegemony, focused as it is entirely on male pleasure, culminating in the male orgasm. Since the women on screen are clearly faking it, there is nothing for women watching to identify with and therefore get aroused by.

A heterosexual friend of many years and I have developed the habit of being frank with each other, and we can sometimes breach the great divide. He is handsome and therefore got laid a lot in his twenties, when, for a while, he preferred one-night stands. It was never about pleasing the woman, he confided in me years later. In fact, he wasn’t sure why they were so willing. He figured all they wanted was a boyfriend.

“Why else the three-date rule that seems to be in vogue these days?” He asked me. Proof for him that we don’t have the same kind of urgent need.

“A woman is always risking the ‘wham bam thank you ma’am’ kind of night you describe, which is one good reason a lot of us have learned not to jump in the sack right away. No matter how urgent the need, hooking up with a complete stranger probably isn’t going to satisfy it. Furthermore, try to imagine having little-to-no expectation of achieving orgasm during intercourse itself, and you begin to get an idea of the source of confusion on this end. Not so straightforward then, is it?”  

I continue to educate my patient friend, lecturing him on contrasting attitudes toward female sexuality in different epochs and other cultures. In ancient Greece and throughout the middle ages in Europe and the Middle East, for instance, females were generally thought to enjoy sex a lot more than men. “Almighty God created sexual desire in ten parts; then he gave nine parts to women and one part to men,” the founder of the Shiite sect and husband of Muhammad’s daughter, Fatima, wrote around 500 A.D.

My friend is hardly alone in having thought that the female of our species, unlike the average male, can effortlessly rise above the demands of her easily tamed libido. But hard science has begun to challenge this broadly received opinion. Daniel Bergner discovered this in the course of his research for his 2013 book, What Do Women Want? Adventures in the Science of Female Desire. He quickly learned, “Women’s desire—its inherent range and innate power—is an underestimated and constrained force, even in our times, when all can seem so sexually inundated, so far beyond restriction.”

For instance, recent data debunk the long-cherished idea that heterosexual women are naturally monogamous because they require security and affection more than sex. Several clinical studies have established that, to the contrary, women in monogamous relationships commonly experience a waning of desire, primarily because they are bored. Men, on the other hand, adapt much better to the everyday sameness of sex with one partner. Monogamous women’s lack of desire is attributed, therefore, not to negligible libidos, but to predictability.

To this I would add that inhibition brought on by low expectations might also contribute to waning desire among monogamous women. The sublimation of our physical responses while being penetrated, not wanting to get too aroused, knowing that our partner won’t hold off  long enough (and having been taught it is castrating to make demands), accompanied by the embarrassment and even shame surrounding our inability to achieve a timely enough orgasm, may eventually lead to an unconscious association of frustration with the partner, which could be a major cause of repression generally, but especially where lack of fulfillment has become institutionalized.  

Once, a long time ago, while visiting a commune, I watched a tiny baby crying in its mother’s arms in a room full of stoned hippies, while Hendrix blasted from giant speakers. After a while, the baby realized that neither its mother nor anyone else nearby could hear it and, suddenly, instead of trying to cry louder, it just stopped all together. When an emotional or physical need goes unmet long enough, sometimes, mercifully, it dies.

Because when I looked at Declan, I associated him—his body, his penis—with intense satisfaction, I couldn’t help but yearn for him in the uncomplicated way a man typically does for the object of his desire.  Predictability was part of the allure in my case. Declan was a kept promise, a long, tall frosty glass of beer on a summer afternoon. He liked to needle me, accuse me of being with him only for the sex. Not true, I would protest.  He was, after all, brilliant, funny, handsome. The sound of his low, inflected voice sent me. He made me laugh! ‘I’m in love with you,’ I insisted. But how does anyone distinguish between love and that palpable need?

The gentle devotion of orchardists tending trees and watching them grow slowly over seasons—I concede the long-time companionship of a happy couple wins, and passion, especially one as corrupted as mine, ultimately loses. But I will always have that experience. I have had that remarkable, crimson adventure. I know what it is to be in the thrall of someone.

The first night that Declan and I spend together, he takes me back to his small one bedroom in Brooklyn Heights. The neighborhood is a hermetically sealed enclave of gentility, and Declan has landed one of the last of its old-time, blockbuster apartments for a song. Not unlike my situation across the river, where I occupy a tiny garret in the soon-to-be one-percent West Village. We both have that specialized New York skill of being able to find a cheap place to live among the swells. His has character, even a degree of charm, right there on the main floor off Montague Street. There’s an actual foyer, a bar with a few stools marking off the small kitchen and a window seat in the living room. There’s a comfortable old couch and a rocking chair, a TV and a bookshelf full of Thomas Merton, Kierkegaard, Spinoza, Joyce, Yeats, Synge, Beckett, Joseph Campbell and Carl Jung. A bare wood floor.

The bedroom is tiny—just big enough for the queen-sized bed. We pile into it. The air-conditioner is old and loud. He establishes a custom by reading to me. This first night it’s a letter from Kierkegaard to his fiancé renouncing their engagement. A sacrifice, Kierkegaard laments, he must make for the demands of philosophy. I find it wildly funny that Declan reads this on our first night together.

I don’t come that night, not until the next day. We’re going at it in his tiny bedroom, missionary style, skin-to-skin and slowly, which suits us both. No foreplay to speak of, which suits us both too. I prefer the fucking itself to be the foreplay. I know I’m in the minority, but it’s all about what happens there. And I’m so hot for him, it’s not like I have to be primed. Even so, I’m amazed when I begin to realize this is happening—that he is staying with me, and, together, we are going all the way. Orgasm during intercourse—I’ve experienced it before, sporadically. I’m not a complete stranger to it, but I sense this is different. This is the way it is going to be.

Afterward, I am beaming, crazy in love. Declan is so ebullient, he can’t resist crowing about it to a few of his Brooklyn friends whom we meet for coffee nearby. We’re all sitting outside at a big, round table on that brilliant early June afternoon (it takes a while for the affair to begin—a few months in fact.) One doleful woman plainly has a crush. I can see heartbreak in her eyes, like glass shattering. Declan is oblivious. He is just overcome with pride.

Declan understood from the outset that I was capable of the same kind of lust he was, and that it is a human, not exclusively male, trait. I am continually surprised by the number of worldly, educated men who think otherwise. Take the powerful, fallen men in the news, who seem unaware of the potential of female desire. These guys are no Don Juans, that’s for sure. I truly don’t get what motivates them other than a failure of imagination. I am, and have always been, insulted if there is even a suggestion I could be manipulated into having sex. Of course seduction is a form of manipulation, but I mean when a man tries to talk me into it, as if I don’t know my own body and mind. Or when it is assumed to be always, on some level, a cold, antiseptic transaction, and it is only that he knows how to drive a good bargain. His pleasure in exchange for some kind of false security or even, simply, trading on my possibly fear-induced inability to say no. Dehumanizing. I would far rather get out-and-out paid than bullied.

On the other hand, lately, it seems, we’ve been attaching all kinds of significance to even the most casual and forgettable acts. My mother used to say, and she sounded genuinely bewildered, that she didn’t understand what all the hoopla was about, it’s just a natural, bodily function. I cannot reconcile my experience, what I know to be true, with what sometimes sounds like prudery. Women deserve to be treated with respect, but not at the expense of our full humanity. We shouldn’t have to be traditional nice girls in order to qualify for it.

For instance, I read somewhere that a grown, presumably heterosexual woman was traumatized by a man exposing himself. Seriously? After one memorable occasion between the sheets, Declan said, “Well, that explains phallic cult worship.” Not always a welcome sight maybe, but traumatizing? (And, by the way, when did we forfeit our birthright, the ability to say, with panache, “Put that thing back in your pants, boy”?) Was the woman not aroused at all or aroused against her will? Either way, if the sight of a physically excited man is, by default, triggering, this smacks of Victorian hysteria—it’s unwholesome. When any inadvertent exposure to eroticism is, ipso facto, a terrible affront, then something is fundamentally wrong.

Rape is different—different even from coerced sex—it is a purely violent act.  I wish there were some way to talk about the various forms of unwanted aggression without lumping them together. Meanwhile, please understand that I second every woman who speaks out against violent abusers and those lesser shades, boorish incompetents. Men who know only their own pleasure are useless wankers.

While we’re outing and renouncing them; however, I hope we also remember to teach them that they, too, could be desirable. Men’s understanding that women are capable of independent, possibly at least as compelling, desire leads to the recognition that we are autonomous beings. Such understanding may even influence the way men behave. In Egypt, where ninety-seven percent of the married women surveyed have been genitally cut, the percentage of of women who have been sexually harassed is as high as ninety-nine percent, according to a 2013 report by UN women. Consider that there could be a buried element of frustration in all of this puerile acting out. I’m not excusing it; ignorance is never an excuse. Let’s try to banish ignorance nevertheless. Give the men in our world, at least, some idea of what they’re missing.

After all, isn’t that what we all want?

On “Funhouse”

Everyone knows Shanna McNair is one of the great citizens of NYC writing circles, an indefatigable leader of workshops and a thinker about how to publish, where to publish, who’s good in publishing (and who’s not), a thinker about how to conceive of the writing workshop, about how to make it do something useful, a leader of the community, a generous and selfless person. I think there is nothing more important, really, than being a leader in our community, and so when I think about people I admire in writing circles, Shanna McNair is at the top of the list. But like many people who are really good at the community piece of being in the literary world, the danger with a Shanna McNair is that we forget she’s a really great writer too.

And “Funhouse,” as the title would suggest, is the proof of that, that she’s a really great writer, too, as evidenced in this truly moving and refractory account of love and self-destruction, a story that bends back on itself about a half dozen times before the pages are through, forcing us to revisit our presumptions about the main character, Mary, over and over again, as she appears to get herself, or to have gotten herself, into worse and worse scrapes. I have to admit, I loath the Gary Wright song that “Funhouse” uses as its epigraph, but it’s a sign of the great wisdom that McNair brings to bear on this vulnerable, broken, longing protagonist who is her first-person narrator, that you don’t know at the end whether the character knows how murky and woebegone is her conception of love, and, further, whether we should think of this story as confessional, or the furthest thing from confessional that we might find in a contemporary realistic short fiction, a post-modern story of love, an anatomizing of poor choices, refraction of a story of love, a story that may have some actual appropriated non-story material in it, or, maybe not, maybe all those tape recorded voices are invented, a story of recursions and regrets and repetitions! A story with a really bad song as its epigraph on purpose!

The model for this elevated, poignant, lacerating, romanticist vision of human longing is the Denis Johnson of the early period, the guy who wrote Angels, and perhaps, via Denis Johnson, the Isaac Babel of Red Cavalry, where the very worst human tendencies are somehow the long slow way, the very costly way to God. You feel that in “Funhouse,” that all of the good times that were not good at all are such that a protagonist can manage one split second of saying “I’m sorry,” and really meaning it, and thus making good, at last, however briefly, redeemed at the last moment when redemption counts. I always sympathize with a character like this, with my whole heart, and evidently McNair does, too, because she couldn’t tell this much truth without sympathizing, which is probably why she’s such a good citizen, too. She has the really, really big heart.

Now’s your chance, therefore, to read the work of the really great writer, Shanna McNair, and if you want I can tell you about some other stuff she does that’s really valuable too.

—Rick Moody

Funhouse

My heart is on fire/ My soul’s like a wheel that’s turnin’/My love is alive, my love is alive, yeah, yeah, yeah. —Gary Wright, “Love Is Alive”

There is no limit to the kindness two people can show one another when love is alive. My love was burning and burning but my lover had left me. There I was, shooting fire out of my fingertips. My hot hot soul was a madness of overlaps. My deep tunneling eyes, agape with loss. Me, a smoldering afterthought, awash with ash. No. I would rise, goddamn it. I would not become one of those perfect fossils that lava burns and leaves for dead. Rise up and keep burning. Lovers have only one heart, one heart with no spares; must save it for loving somebody who cares.

And I had to move back home. I had to drive all those miles home, from Seattle to Maine. Alone. Hello, heart. Hello, travel. Hello, addiction. I created a little project to do, on the road. I called it “The Lovers Project.” The Lovers Project would be a thing I would publish, I told myself. Was I a writer? I imagined I was. I’d been a reporter before for a paper back home. Reporters could be objective. Reporters were like anthropologists, studying culture from the outside. I’d report on the whats and whys of love. Me, just a nodding interviewer, not a lover at all. I could yes and no and commiserate. Forget all my lava and fire and burning. Love was what people wanted to talk about and I would simply listen. I bought an Olympus mp3 voice recorder. My plan: talk to twenty strangers as I drove from the West Coast to the East Coast. It was a June afternoon in 2002 when I twisted the key in the ignition and fired it up. I was 31. I had eighteen hundred dollars. I’d ask each of my interview subjects to tell me about their greatest love story. “The One,” I’d say. Was I collecting fossils? No. I was collecting fire.

When I closed my eyes and asked my heart to tell the truth about my own greatest love story, Leo was The One. After decades of friendship, we became lovers. We moved from Belfast, Maine to Seattle. He had a one-year contract there as a project architect. It would be like a kind of romantic vacation for us. Who knows, we might even stay in Seattle. Our apartment overlooked Puget Sound. I was a barista down the street at Pike Place café. What gorgeous first days there. Leo was the best friend I’d ever had. He loved to play and was up for jokes and food and drinks and adventures. He was voluble and sensitive and held my hand when we went on walks and cooked me things like garlic scape pesto with cavatelli. His marvelous laugh expanded with such exultation that it felt like imagination with a capital “I” had come to roost. I felt a great trembling need boiling in my soul and it was Leo and just the sight of him set me buzzing and glowing. His smart dark eyes flashed and seared and left brilliant light-marks behind my own eyelids, as if I’d been staring at the sun; and I traced those bright maps of possibility. I longed for him so absolutely that the dam of my sanity broke and gushed and kept gushing. But nothing could put out the fire inside. It burned deep, deep, deep. And then the fighting started. The contests of wills. And finally, Leo told me he couldn’t stand it anymore.

Said we were over. He didn’t love me. He didn’t want to feel such complicated emotions. He said my real love was drugs, anyway. And I was too much. Too stormy. He said that. Stormy. Seattle, where the rainy weather read like some pathetic fallacy—I was crying and the sky was crying. Can’t you see the tears run down the road. I begged him not to leave me. Leo was resolute. His job contract was complete. He got a U-Haul and went back to Belfast.

It was time for me to return home, too. Escape the rain. I held a sidewalk sale out of our apartment and got rid of the big stuff. I packed the rest into the car, in a fit of triumph, executing a miracle of spatial relationships, with the sightlines clear of boxes and bags. And then I went downtown and scored. Pain pills this time. I’d gotten off the heroin some years back. Being a junky is a losing game.

There I was, driving my car back home to Maine, popping them all the way. My manifesto: anything goes. Dull the agony of defeat. You could say I was following him. I was definitely following him. There were friends to visit on the way back home, too. Friends in SF, LA, Omaha, Columbus and New Holland. AAA mailed me a hard-copy map, built around those stops. A folded booklet with highlighted routes. I went south through Washington and on through Oregon toward California, tall trees lofting high. I took my interviews along the way.

I paid cursory attention to the profundity of the landscape rolling by. I was off-grid. I had a flip phone with limited minutes. I was the picture of wild, at least to myself. I wore thrift store dresses or jeans with my cowboy boots. It was me and the map and my pain and cigarettes and CDs and the radio’s endless love songs and the people I met and their love stories. And love. Love. Love without swipe-rights or internet porn. In 2002, selfie millennials weren’t dolling up like Disney princes and princesses. Love was love was love and risk was risk was risk and my car was my universe.

The car: a second-hand gray Toyota sedan, a ghost of a car, an Everyman car. The only tell about who I might be, inside the vehicle—was the “HOWL” bumper sticker on the rear. I’d attempted to remove it and now it read “HOW”. HOW played in me like a poem. A loss, a longing; a question with no answer as I drove.

It was an impossible wish, this love I’d yearned for, and when my love for Leo finally rose into being, it presented as a hunger, awesome and infinite. The shift in me and the power of my need for him was terrifying. My love was alive. If he was gone forever, I was gone forever. I’d been living for years in the white light of that final crossing-over, anyway. Drugs imbue a person with death. To hell with me. I had fucked so much up, why not let it all go for good. I had a price to pay for all the bad I’d brought into the lives of friends and family. I couldn’t stand it. I kept on with the drugs. The drugs roared and I let myself be wild. World, here is my take on loathing and barbarism. Drive that car until the wheels fly off. It’s a limbo-la of live fast, die young and have a good-looking corpse. So-what, to the tits. Or whatever horsemonkey I was telling myself back then.

My desperation was toxic. Static energy crackled in my ears—loud, arena-static loud, as though my soul were translating the torture of the ages, as though my soul itself was a Colosseum entertainment. Leo. Lakes of lava reverberating with cannonading salvos. Leo. And now so much burning, burning. I placed a tall, lighted jar candle in the cupholder of the car console, a “Mano Ponderosa” prayer candle. The flame was for Leo. For our love. For my hope.

Oh, Leo. Why did he give me the gift back. The gift was an oversized green vintage Collier’s World Atlas and Gazetteer, with a graphic of a golden spinning globe imprinted on its cover. But it was more than that. The gift occupied the passenger’s seat. I started talking to the gift somewhere in California, before I hit San Francisco. The gift held my soul. My soul and my regrets. The gift was alive.

The gift was a flip-book I made using photo booth pictures. I found a curio shop that had a booth in the back. The cashier let me take hundreds pictures of myself with props—a boa, sunglasses, different outfits, pinwheels, wigs, bubbles. Stop-motion is perfect for a flip-book. I’d put in the money and four photos would come out. I held up four signs in one cycle of four, “You/ and/ me,/ Leo!” In another, I spelled out L-O-V-E in letters I pasted over my eyes as though I was winking the letters. I glued the photos along the outside pages of the atlas. The pictures really did “flip”. My best love letter ever. Two-by-two-inch pics started at the upper corner of the front page and ran all the way down the side to the bottom of the last page. Because, see, Leo? An atlas! We would travel the world together.

My love had swollen great as a hot air balloon. Friends thought I’d lost it. I had. I had become a pathetique, a joke of myself. I’d become something of an absurdist’s performance piece. As though someone had written me into a one-act play. At the end, maybe I’d cue at the deli of death, take my number and eat that final slice of ham. Such zizzing mania. I was a spooky live wire, snaking and sparking. I was a fissure of light wiggling just over there, barely noticeable. Giddy little seam. Widening steadily. Blinding vision.

I knew what Leo told me when he left me was true. He didn’t love me. But my heart was burning so bright. A bonfire in the darkness. The loop of pain I would have to travel to recover myself—seemed eternal. A Venus ring of sorrow. I couldn’t possibly cover all of the miles in a single lifetime. The man I loved didn’t love me. My chest ached from the swallowed tears. Daily machinations became nonsense. A wasteland of thoughts playing double-dutch. All those fleet thoughts, too fast to keep, shooting like stars. I was heavy on heavy ground, arguing with the staggers and the jags.

I drove and I burned. I burned and I drove. I talked to myself and talked to the gift. I followed the AAA map and I smoked and listened to music and talked to myself. Whole conversations, all the voices. Told off all of the offending people of my memories. Said what needed to be said. Impassioned speeches for Leo and why our love was real issued from my lips as though my words could reach his ears. Radio love songs came and went and I cried and doubted and drove and burned. And when I had enough gregarious energy to suppress my viscerous black static, I parked the car and found a bar. And in that bar, I found a new lover to interview. They didn’t know my secrets, my madness, my burning and burning. When all was aligned, I’d ask the person to tell me their greatest love story.

I sought out men and women who had a particular atmosphere of fear in their eyes. People who were soft in a way I recognized. People who were fallible enough to trust me. Then again, I did convey an air of seriousness. And I bought them drinks, which helped. Your story is important, I would insist. I believed this and my conviction shone true, unmistakable. I could spot a lover from a mile away. Takes one to know one, as the saying goes. Lovers and junkies, we breathe a rarified air. My lovers were full to the rim with their stories. I sensed their readiness. They were dreamers, idiots, fools, lovers. Drug addicts. Fuckheads. Bad people and good people.

I relished the danger of the situations I put myself in. There was the obvious physical danger of approaching a stranger alone in a bar and getting into a volatile conversation like this one. I drank with them all, did drugs with a few. I always left it at the bar. If I needed to, I got a hotel room, or—stupid as it was—I slept in my car. I listened and they all talked to me and gave me their secrets, open as God, each telling their guarded passages with what seemed to me to be sweet, terrible relief.

*

Lover: I was just a kid. I was six years old. But I loved her. I never had that feeling again. She kissed me behind a tree. My mother caught us and yelled at us. That’s all. Her name was Susan.

*

Lover: I met her at my cousin’s wedding. We danced to “You Make Me Feel So Young” by Sinatra and we were flying. Such a big wedding at the Fairmont Hotel. There were photographers and everything. She had a blue taffeta dress on. She was the most exquisite girl there. I gave her my number and she folded it and folded it until the paper was tiny and put it in her shoe. She was on a date with a family member. I never saw her again. She never called.

*

Lover: I was traveling in Spain with my mother and father. Granada. I was in tenth grade at the University of Granada. All of us American kids hung out around Plaza Nueva at night. City center. There were lots of travelers living in Granada. I fell in love with a man from Gambia. So tall, so dark. His laugh sounded like a kind of extravagant hiccup. He and the other Africans living in the area would take turns hosting dinner. He was such a good cook and sweet, sweet host. We ate with our hands and told jokes. I would give anything to go back there and be with him again. He told me he had three gifts for me. If you are hungry, there is my food for you. If you are tired, there is my shelter for you. If you are lonely, there is my love for you. He asked me to marry him. Make a compromise, he said. Come to Gambia. Work on his farm.

Me: What happened?

Lover: I was too scared.

*

Lover: He was a monster when he was angry. Just a really bad guy. I don’t want to get into it. He was in prison off and on. You love someone in prison. Because they keep fucking up. At some point, though, you have to let it go. He didn’t care, is what I found out. Damn, it was so fucking hard to leave. Because when he was good, he was a different person. He was nice. I miss that.

Me: Where is he now?

Lover: I don’t care. I can’t care. I guess I don’t let myself. There were good times we had. Like when he brought me a candy necklace for a treat. He looked like a boy when he gave it to me. I got that feeling like we were two kids playing in a sandbox. He ate the little candies off my neck. We had PBRs. The sun was shining on the porch. I don’t know. There was a sweetness to him. His love was so big when he was good.

*

Lover: I think of her every single day. I wake up thinking about her. Sometimes I cry myself to sleep thinking about her.

Me: How long has since you saw her?

Lover: Eighteen years, three weeks and twelve days. Nine hours and some minutes.

Me: Have you looked for her?

Lover: She lives in Greece, as far as I know. She’s living with a man named Greg. She went straight on me. I don’t think she exists as I knew her anymore. She’s gone. She was more beautiful than you can imagine. The whole sky. All the stars. She’s still mine in here. In my heart.

*

I listened and witnessed. Love is not for resolving, I would say to my interviewees by way of encouragement. Love is not a problem to be solved. This helped them take heart. I assured them that I would faithfully transcribe their story. Each knew their puzzles would remain incomplete. It comes with the territory. There were emotional paradoxes and tricks of biology and always, always, there was great and palpable longing. Some lovers were passionate about what they knew to be true; all a’thunderclap they were, ablaze with sureness. Most everyone was pining for someone, someone who was gone or lost. Some were agapes and bore the pain of unrequited love in bitter, gorgeous duende. Some were angry about sex, or loss of youth, or about being rejected, cheated on. Undervalued. Some told me, at first, that their real love was the love relationship they were involved with in the present. Usually over a few drinks, their story would change. Most big love stories lived in the wayback of memory.

*

Lover: I met a man in my 20’s. He was a comic. A brat. I really hated him at first. He was, I don’t know. Caustic or something. Hateful or something. But, as time went on, I saw him differently. He grew on me. He turned out to be my clarion call. My everything.

Me: Why did it end?

Lover: We got married. I hate him again. He does his thing, you know. He’s a cheater. He’s The One. I wish he wasn’t. This interview is stupid, by the way.

Me: But I’m listening.

*

Lover: She tried to destroy me. She took every last thing I had. My bank account, my car. She told my boss I did bad things I didn’t do. She set my friends and family against me.

Me: When did this happen?

Lover: Last week. I don’t have anything left.

Me: Why do you still love her?

Lover: I don’t know.

Me: You said she tried to destroy you.

Lover: She did and she didn’t. I have hope. We’ll get back together. We’re supposed to be together. This will all pass.

*

There was another part to The Lover’s Project. This didn’t get very far. I imagined a perfect love, not Leo, not anyone I’d ever met or known before. I had a friend set up a mailbox for me in Maine, so that I could mail letters this imagined, perfect love. I called him “Vaughan”. I kept trying to write a letter to Vaughan. It wasn’t working. Dear Vaughan, I would write. Today is a terrible day. You’d understand why, since you know me so well. I never finished a letter to Vaughan. I never wrote to Leo, either.

In San Francisco, I drove all of Haight Street, eying myself in the rearview. I’d lived there in the late 80’s and early 90’s. Ten years. I left to go to rehab in Maine, where my parents lived. I went to college in Maine. I had two bachelor’s degrees; one in writing, one in art. And look at me, driving old haunts. Skinny, freckled, wrinkled. Needing a haircut. What a fucking idiot. I blew out Mano ponderosa as way-distant clouds slipped and boiled. I used to say, cheerfully, that there was a new perspective on every San Francisco street corner. Huh. At a light, I thought my foot was on the gas when it was really on the brake. What a grotesque living metaphor. I hated myself intensely. The car was full of snuffed candle smoke. I decided I’d skip seeing the SF friends. I couldn’t manage it. Heroin triggers were everywhere. I didn’t visit the Mission district, didn’t have a drink at The Casanova, the old poetry slam hangout. I sailed through town and escaped.

Adrift in the relative silence, me, a woman in her thirties with no savings, no career, no kids, no house. If there were prospects, I wasn’t able to grock them. Nothing was adding, not quite. Life-questions ignited and re-ignited in my mind. What do I want? What can I actually give back to society? I painted and made art projects and I wrote. How can visual art or writing ever make any money? Does money matter? Do I want kids? Do I know what love is? Will anyone ever love me again? Will they at least pretend to love me? Who cares? What if this journey across America is a Shamanistic journey, what if I am looking for those lost soul-pieces to pull back into my soul? Are the pieces the love stories?

I occasionally ran my questions through my guardian angels, my Shaolin Kung Fu movie monks I imagined were guiding me. The mega-stealth kind that can fly and are enlightened. Fine, they were not real guides, more like magic eight-ball guides. I’d ask: Shaolin monks—good or bad? Shaolin monks gave me a good or a bad. They didn’t like me driving across country. That was bad. They didn’t like Mano ponderosa, either.

The monks had nothing on my pervasive regrets. This is what grief shakes loose. Regrets. My regrets were legion. A seemingly endless supply. I felt great tape of my consciousness winding down. I heard medleys of songs and they stuck in my head. Like the emblematic line of “Welcome to the Jungle” paired with “Superstition”: Welcome to the jungle, wash you face and hands! Or, “Smoke, Smoke, Smoke That Cigarette” paired with “One Way Ticket to the Sky”: Tell Saint Peter at the golden gate that you hates to make him wait, ‘cuz I gotta one way ticket to the sky! And here and there, I heard a laughing tribunal in my mind—a chorus of laughter. Once a cycle of regret finished, the laughing might start. I kept driving, even though the movie monks told me not to, and I heard this one:

You should have stayed in San Francisco when you were 27, instead of going back home to Maine with your tail between your legs. You could have kicked heroin in SF. Who wanted her parents instead of staying strong? Now look at you. No way you could ever really be here again, huh? No way you could ever rejoin the slam poets, right? No more art shows at SFMOMA. No more working at City Lights Books. The city spit you out, didn’t it. You’re worthless.

—Chorus of laughter.

Steady, now. This is a funhouse. Many faces. Many rides. Zoltar and the monks, telling fortunes. Me, riding the rides. Whose circus is this? My circus. My monkeys:

Maybe it’s true that junkies become junkies because of raw beginnings. That’s what the statistics say. Maybe Mom and Dad harmed you when you were growing up. Maybe that puts you at a disadvantage. It’s okay, Mary, so what. Maybe you dodged another bullet. Maybe you have an advantage, after all. You do have advantages. US citizen. White female. Skills for labor. Decent health if you could take care of yourself. Tall. Always poor me, huh. So you just didn’t get the easiest childhood. You’re an adult now. It’s over. They are just people, Mary. You big stupid baby.

*

Morris X. The haunting brown eyes of Morris. He called you when he was performing his final act of auto-erotic asphyxiation. His voice was wheezing into the receiver. Remember the sound? And how he begged you to visit him the next day. You said what he was doing was disgusting. He said he loved you. He said he was sorry you couldn’t be together. He said it was his fault and he was sorry. When you hung up the phone, he hung himself.

*

You couldn’t even go home from SF to bury your grandmother. Junky. And what about what your grandfather, her husband, said on his own deathbed when you were a child? Said: Mary, please keep playing the saxophone. Remember? Tubes coming out of his face. Promise me, he said. Promise me you will. What happened to the saxophone, Mary? Gone, right? Junky. Nobody on planet earth will ever care for you like he did ever again. Where’s you’re grandfather’s sax? Where’s his honor? Where is yours?

*

You begged Rail X for the number for the dealer. He fought you. His roommate fought you. Punched you. They were trying to protect you. You didn’t give up. You kept going back, days and days of this. You insisted—because Rail X was the one who first shot you up and got you in this mess. You knew you could work on his guilt. Manipulative. Finally, he gave you the number. The dealer would say, “15-20 minutes” when you called. You junky. Three years. You got off it, but you dragged your family into it, your friends, everyone you ever knew and loved. You hurt them all. And now, it’s pills. What a waste of life. How dare you squander the magnificent gift of life you were given.

— Chorus of laughter.

*

I stopped and visited my friend, long tall Tim X in LA, many years my senior. His cherishing, familiar face was open and empathetic. He saw my pain, slowed me down. He took care of me, if only for a few days. I had forgotten what real friends can do and the warmth between. His love story was about people he called The Underdogs. He said they were the least and the best of us all. He played me songs from his new album and we ate tacos and laughed and he showed me Watts Tower and took me to the horse stables in Athens. I sang my song I’d made up in the car about Jesus, Walmart and Disney. And then it happened. He told me I was one of The Underdogs. He told me my tits were like two happy cheerleaders. We laughed about that. The cheerleaders.

I told Tim my heart was reeling. He told me he could help. Maybe he could fix it. That wasn’t true. He didn’t know about my burning and burning. He didn’t know about the drugs, or if he did, he didn’t say anything. He probably didn’t, in fact, know me at all. I wasn’t one of The Underdogs. On our last night, he put earphones on my head and played “The Greatest” by Cat Power and rocked me like a child. He said there were things he knew that I might not know. Maybe, maybe. HOW. I wished good over him and he wished good over me.

*

I had nobody to see in Las Vegas, but I went anyway, consulting the AAA map outside of the marked pages. I splurged and stayed at Paris, Las Vegas and ate dinner in the Eiffel Tower Restaurant and swam in their ridiculously ornate pool room. And in the neon glow of night, along the shouting streets, in bars crammed with people who had daydreams in their smiles, I found my lovers.

Lover: I don’t have a “The One”. I’m still looking. Might be what I’m here in Las Vegas for.

Me: I have a “The One”. His name is Leo.

Lover: Okay. Okay. There was this one girl, she visited me and my dad on the lake one summer. So my dad was after this woman, he was single. The woman brought her daughter along and I fell for her in a second. We were teenagers. We went out in a rowboat together one afternoon. Her skin was brown and soft and sweet. I’m still there. The water was lapping at the boat and we were kissing and kissing. She was the best kisser. Like a dream. Nobody has ever kissed me like that since. I’m in love with that kiss.

*

 Lover: I’m married. He’s married. I can’t even tell what’s a lie anymore. All I know is I love him and my heart beats for him. We’ve been having an affair for six years now. I believe we’ll be together again, just us. Some way, somehow, we’ll be together. I don’t even care what happens. There’s just no comparison. The sex. He’s so playful, you know? And his smell. Like warm grass. Grass in the sunshine. My husband knows. We do fight about it. But I don’t care. The heart wants what the heart wants. There’s nothing I can do.

*

Lover: Well, I’m into BDSM. I’m a freak. Once you go BDSM, you don’t go back.

Me: Yeah, I heard that saying.

Lover: It’s true. Can you guess what I am? I’m not a dom. I’m a submissive. But I like some things my way. I like all the dress-up and the toys and                stuff. But I like having a husband to come home to. My husband doesn’t play. My needs are incredibly specific. Very, very particular. All I can say                is, husband is really patient. Really patient.

Me: Who is The One? Is there one?

Lover: Well, if I’m being honest. I hate to say it. Probably me.

*

Lover: I’m fifty now. I work out, the boys love it. All the 20-year-olds call me Big Daddy. It’s the best. Ha-ha! I have a lot of fun with that. We do crazy things. It’s like they can’t touch me. My heart was taken a long, long time ago. My lover died. He had lung cancer. We had such a life together. The white picket fence—we had it. We were in love. We met in high school. He died August fifteenth of last year, in hospice. I still have our house. But I don’t have anyone to come home to. There aren’t those long talks by some hearth or anything. What I have now, is I have sex now.

I drove hard toward Omaha, to spend time with Alice X. I’d lived in Omaha for a few months when I was twenty and worked at her bookstore. Omaha, a six-month stay for me with a friend attending the university there. Some kind of adventure. At age eighteen I had moved away from my parents in Maine—took whatever path I could to leave. My two brothers, Hark and Roy, were all for the move. Hark lived in LA, so my first stop was LA. Then, Omaha. After that, SF. In SF I became heroin addict, and then there was the inevitable rehab. I tried to go to rehab in SF. The lines were three months long. I waited and waited. I tried an outpatient clinic. That was a failure. Finally I called my oldest brother Roy and told him what was going on. Roy still lived in Maine, and had an okay relationship with the parents. He was kind about my predicament, which shocked me. I had expected anger, a backlash. But Roy was warm. He told the parents and the parents called me. They said to get on a plane and home home to Maine. They said they didn’t want me to die. I didn’t want to die, either. I went home.

*

I traveled over twenty four hours from Las Vegas on through the exquisite and fearsome orange and red and purple mountains and ranges of Nevada and Utah and on through the cool national forests of northern Colorado, stereo blasting, Mano ponderosa burning. I could barely imagine Omaha and Alice. The regrets churned and churned:

You think you’re smart. You think you’re an artist. A writer. Who knows you? Nobody does. You’re a hobbyist. Artist is a praise-word. Writer is a praise-word. If you made real money, you could donate to the SPCA. Or you could volunteer, you know. Find a way to help gestating pigs get pens they can turn around in. Help baby chicks on chicken farms keep their beaks. Baby seals, Mary. Bear-baiting in Maine. Mary! Those animals need you. You’re unbelievably selfish. Remember Carrie X’s sick kitten, Asa? Your friend was feeding him with a bottle every hour and a half. He was very sick and so tiny. You said Carrie could come out with you and get lunch. That Asa would be okay. He died a few days later. He died. His death is your fault. Carrie said it wasn’t your fault. Guess again. Your fault.

*

You sent Ricky X a note and told him to meet you at the front of the school. You said in the note you were going to kick his ass. He showed up and you grabbed him by his hair and swung him in circles until you couldn’t hold him anymore. And then you dropped him, right there in front of everyone, on the grass. Why, because he tried to be class clown? Because he smelled and everyone hated him? No, because you are bad and you are rageful. Don’t say you did it because you got hit at home. You did it because you are full of hate. That word Aunt Laura has for the devil, the one she can’t say out loud? That’s you.

*

Just over the Nebraska line, I stopped at the Flying J in North Platte and filled up. They had a game room. I went into the game room for an interview but lost my nerve when I spotted a haunted-eyed man with thick hands and a quivering mustache, watching me as he hovered over a pinball machine. I retreated, got a cold sandwich, chips and a coffee from the retail store and went back to the Toyota.

*

Alice was in her late sixties. A rangy little lion of a person with short red henna hair and oversized glasses. Her apartment walls and ceilings were busy with color, with her collage-work. If she liked a picture, she’d cut it out and stick it to the wall. Forty years years of collages. Political scenes and romantic scenes and jokes she liked, inches thick. She’d been doing that since her engagement was broken off, way back when, in her 20’s. She’d never had another lover. We drank Veuve Clicquot and she told me about John.

Lover: John X. I don’t like telling this story. But I’ll do it for you. The stupid pigfucker left me for my best friend. I had been trying to find him all night. I finally went to work and saw him driving his motorcycle—it was a twist of fate sort of thing. I flagged him down and he crashed into an oncoming truck. I thought he died. But he was okay and the ambulance took him away. He wouldn’t let me visit. He returned my letters. And then he married my supposed best friend. And I was beautiful. Prettier than you. Prettier than all of you young bitches. I am tout seul. Like Garance in “The Children of Paradise”. Tout seul.

Me: I love you, Alice.

Lover: Fuck love.

*

I was tired when Alice and I parted ways. Very tired. My yearning for Leo was becoming heavier and heavier. My regrets were wheeling nonstop. There was a traffic jam on I-80 East around Des Moines that had us all idling for an hour and a half. In this slow crawl, I saw a long-haul trucker with a vacant stare—a carful of arguing children—a sad woman in the passenger’s seat hugging a dog in her lap—a man smoking and rocking out to music—and on and on. All horribly impatient. The whole primitive populous, endlessly individual, all needing and doing and going. Stopping and starting for hours made us all angry. Drivers were laying on the horn and flipping each other off. The seemingly endless confrontation of the American crowd. And people looking inquisitively at me inside my car kicked up yet more dust inside me. My regrets crossed over and become a chorus of my secrets, surfacing in my mind, speaking clear, plain English:

You missed Grandma Dixon’s funeral because your habit was raging bad back then. You couldn’t even get on an airplane without being arrested. Mom hates you for that. You deserve it. Couldn’t go to Maryann X’s wedding either for the same reason. You’re a terrible aunt. Bad sister. Bad daughter. Do you ever give anything back to anyone? Ridiculous.

*

You were raped at age 14. You never told. Why didn’t you tell? You could have had a different life. Someone would have helped you. No, you kept the poison to yourself. And maybe if you weren’t anorexic, you could have kept the baby. Maybe if you didn’t ask for it, maybe if you didn’t like that older man and go on that date. You wouldn’t have been raped then. You would have kept your innocence. It’s your fault. All yours.

*

Nobody will ever really love you because you are a junky. Not ever. You’re human garbage. Lucky break getting out. Lucky you don’t do heroin anymore. What don’t you do. Just anything else, right-right? Why can’t you stop? Human garbage. Just try to reason with yourself on this one. People like winners. Firsters. Inspiring people, in first place. They don’t like second place, especially. If you’re close to first place and don’t make it, they’ll deride you. Heroin puts you in last place. You’ll just be forgotten. No first place for you. No second place. No third. Last. Not even last. Garbage. Not even garbage.

*

Don’t you know that global warming is happening? Look around. Why aren’t you helping? What about generations to come? And human beings are hungry, all over the world. You get to eat. You even get “free time.” Recreation, soul-searching, time for art, time for an existential crisis. You have endless nonsense time, you lucky asshole. You don’t act lucky. You don’t even recycle, not enough. What about the fish in the ocean? The worldwide garbage dumps full of plastic waste? You’re a terrible person. You get to go to college if you want. Live in a house by yourself, if you want. All you need is a job. You can have these things. Yet, you choose to remain ungrateful. You don’t even know how to pray.

*

I drove four hours. That was plenty of navigation for the day. I got a room at The Graduate in Iowa City and slept. When I awoke I was crying and had been crying in my dreams. The pathetic fallacy of rain and tears had followed me. Outside, thunder and lightning were raging, and rain fell loud as trauma. I holed up for the day and then stayed another day. Ordered room service. I slept and dreamt.

I dreamt I was following Leo in the woods of Maine. He was always many, many agonizing steps ahead. I couldn’t find him but I saw him with my heart, walking away, going somewhere else. He was happy without me. He was walking steadily over the soft leafy floor of the woods, a song of himself playing in his face. He was on his way to meet someone else. His steps were natural, careless. He was enjoying the woods, unaware of my running and how I ran, desperate, determined. We were paced apart. And then the woods became hot. And in the heat, the trees fell away and become desert. And the desert opened and expanded and became a dusty city, hot in the sun. And I was riding in a Jimmy army truck, packed with people. And there were Jimmy army trucks as far as I could see. There was a war and everyone would soon be killed. The dust was cloying as the Jimmy trucks drove the streets. A feeling of terror abounded, thousands of us trapped in this place and no way out. I screamed for Leo, screamed for Leo, until I woke up, sweating and shaking.

I looted the mini-fridge and called Leo from the hotel phone. He didn’t answer. Called again from my flip phone. He didn’t answer. I waited a while, turned on the TV. Drank to replace my well of tears with alcohol. Popped more pills. And when the dimension of my emotion went flat enough, when I was good and slick with alcohol and pills, I went out to find my lovers.

            Lover: I’ll talk to you about this, but my husband is right over there. Really my soulmate is not my husband. I think he knows. People know, right? I think he does. My real soulmate is my mother. She’s gone now, rest her soul. I mean this in the platonic way, the normal family way, of course, of course. Nobody loved me like my mother. And I will never love anyone else like I loved her. I still love her. Always will.

*

Lover: I think if you really love someone, you hate them, too.

Me: I don’t agree.

Lover: Doesn’t matter if you don’t agree. It’s just the truth. Even if you’re not trying to do anything. You get that close to someone; all of your emotions are involved. They just are.

Me: Are you saying—you sabotage things?

Lover: I manipulate things. Manipulation doesn’t have to be a negative thing. I do some mean things on purpose. Trivial things, really. To keep her with me. I’m not proud of it.

 Me: I would never do mean things on purpose to anyone.

 Lover: You don’t know what you’d do. Different loves bring out different things. I’m bisexual. I’m totally different when I’m with a man than when I’m with a woman.

Me: Are you more satisfied with one or the other?

Lover: I like sex with men more, that’s for sure. But my heart wants a woman. Women are more complex than men are. It’s just my opinion. I like their energy.

*

I was on I-80 East in Illinois, near Naperville, when I determined I would not stop in Columbus to see the friend there. Fuck the whole state of Ohio. Fuck all of this. Fuck The Lovers Project. I pulled over on the highway. The sun was bright and loud. Clanging loud. Hard light. It seemed like a good idea to turn my phone on. Leo might call. I reached for the Olympus, which I’d set in the cupholder. I pressed the record button and my finger slipped. I pressed the record button again. “I’m going home,” I said into the recorder. This statement was definite. Real. I set about rejiggering my map route to drive along Lake Erie. I folded and re-folded the AAA booklet until the route was all set. I needed to get home. I burned and burned for Leo. And I was very tired, indeed. I felt as though my human electricity was slowly going out. A dangerous turning for a junky.

That’s when I saw the blues flashing behind me. A cop. I extinguished Mano and hid it and rolled down my window. He was a state cop, all dressed in brown. He tipped his hat when he asked for my license and registration. A sweet face for a cop, though I knew that didn’t mean anything. He could be as friendly as an asp, for all I knew. I was confident because there were no illegal drugs in the vehicle. Just pills, which appeared to be mine. I wouldn’t be offering those up. He looked and verified and asked where I was headed with all the stuff in the car. I smiled and we chatted. I told him home was Maine. Maine, the cop repeated, nicely enough. The cop warned me not to stop on the highway unless I was having an emergency. He smiled and let me go.

I navigated off the shoulder and joined the flow of traffic. I was strangely calm. The cop followed me for a few miles; then peeled off. Lucky break. I reached for the Olympus again. It was time hear the stories. I hadn’t listened to them in full, not yet. I hit “play” and waited. My voice came on. “I’m going home,” I said. I hit play again. “I’m going home,” the recorder responded. “I’m going home.” I checked the file folder button. Empty. Impossible. All of the interviews were gone. Lost to all eternity. My tears must have been all spent. I couldn’t cry. I knew I would fuck the whole thing up. The sensation was one of an odd vacancy of being. A quiet in my center.

*

I was eating fried chicken at Waffle House in Austinburg, Ohio when I saw a message blink on my phone. My friends from New Holland, Pennsylvania. I listened. They had a daughter. A toddler. The best thing I ever did, my friend Christa X said in the recording. I can’t wait for you to see how beautiful Mia is. When are you coming? We’re all excited to see you, Mary. A tiny reserve in me mustered a response. I’d go.

I visited a Kroger grocery store in I-don’t-know-where Ohio, along the way east to New Holland, somewhere off the turnpike. I got lost along the way. I had to pick up some things. Toothpaste, snacks, stuff. And if there was a little girl for me to meet, I better not smell too much of cigarettes and bad news. I bought my things and went to the single-occupancy handicap bathroom right there in front of the checkout lanes. I set to work giving myself a wipe-down; I took off my clothes and got to work using the bathroom soap and paper towels. I sighed. I put one of my feet under the tap in the sink and scrubbed with my hands. The warm water felt pretty good. Then the door opened. I had forgotten to lock it. It was a girl of maybe ten in a striped t-shirt. When she saw me naked and hunched like that, she swung the door wider, onto the checkout lanes. “Mom?” she called out to her mother. “Mom?” I leapt to close and lock the door, and as it shut I caught sight of the horrified checkout shoppers in line.

When I slunk back to the car and shut myself in, I had accepted something. I would never be a mother. I probably wasn’t even equipped to be a friend. I was very sick. I also understood, very keenly, that other people needed me. For now, I could pretend. I would just pretend.

*

It was the late afternoon of a clear and sunny day when I reached Christa and Martel X’s house in New Holland. I was wearing jeans, a t-shirt and sandals. I made sure the outfit was as normal as possible. I got out of the car and closed the door. Stretched. The burning and burning, would they be able to tell? I had done my best to wash it away. Mia was too young for all of this. I checked myself in the side mirror. I dug in my jeans for Chapstick and applied it, watching myself.

Christa, long hair flying, came running out onto the lawn with a rapturous face. Such glee, what a wonder. Another pathetic fallacy, but not a cheap one. One for children’s storybooks. Ah, children. Her daughter. Christa had been waiting for me by the window. Sweet and sure as friendship. Christa was not an abstract. There she was. I felt a rushing chill sweep over my arms. Goosebumps. Christa. Hope lit her skin. For some reason, I looked over my shoulder, just quickly.

“Christa,” I said.

We hugged.

“How was your drive? Well, forget that for now. I’m so happy to see you! You’re looking quite slim.”

“Me?” I asked.

“Are you ready to see the best thing I ever did?” There it was again. What she’d said before. “Are you ready to meet Mia?” Christa held out her hand and I took it. We went inside.

Amidst the pedestrian layout of Prague, perpendicular to the winding cobblestone footpaths, busts are inlayed into the streetscapes of the city. Out of the building walls, metallic heads of figures from prominent poets and illustrators to scientists and activists protrude onto the sidewalks, introducing frozen avatars of contributors who stand memorialized amongst the fluid mosaic of passersby. Below the slopes of Petřín Park, one subtle facial lieu de memoire of the Malá Strana district alludes to what functioned as an artist’s space encased in a courtyard between several apartment buildings. Affixed to a smooth, rectangular plaque juts a craggy, low-eared, periorally furrowed bust of a late Josef Sudek. The monument to the Czech photographer indicates not only his mortal timespan, but also a place whereby an extant individual could pace a few steps northward and ring a buzzer. A reciprocal buzz welcomes the pushing of a door, the passing over a threshold, and the strolling down a pair of dim corridors before stepping upon the stone-tiled ground of an outdoor enclosure lit relative to whatever level of natural light the firmament permits at that very moment.

Inside the edificial well and behind bounds of shrubs sits a diminutive wooden structure that evokes a single-story cottage: Atelier Josef Sudek, the former darkroom and domicile of the local artist largely known for his depiction of light. Sudek portrayed a Prague in greyscale, arresting the brilliance of rays beaming through naves, the incandescence of street lanterns cutting through fog.

Within the small, twentieth-century pavilion in which he rendered the chiaroscuro effect, the biotic buzzer who commands the interior button circuit is never staffed by the same person, yet she or he programmatically adds the same value upon greeting: “Deset korun.” Ten Czech crowns: the price to pay to view photographic specimens in printed form.

Two Spartan gallery rooms showcase rotating exhibitions: Central Asian rodeo games in action, contemporary pictorial commentary on data collection, overexposed white light obfuscating facial profiles. Sometimes Sudek’s prints furnish his old darkroom’s space from whose steamy windowsill he captured a glass-cum-vase holding a rose triad leaning leftward.

Other Prague places besides the Atelier Josef Sudek pay homage to him and his oeuvre. Across the river Vltava, the Prague House of Photography periodically exhibits his work (not to mention pictures of him at work). One such instance encompassed Sudek’s recordings of WWII destruction circa 1945 in parallel to Timm Rautert’s portraits of Sudek active during the pre-Prague Spring atmosphere of 1967. Rauert, then-student, showed Sudek, one-armed veteran photographer, lugging his large-format camera across the footpaths of Petřín Park’s hills, as well as sitting in his still-functional studio, crammed with lit lamps shedding light on boxes of photo paper lodged in disarray, curios around jarred chemicals and flash bulbs weighing down the shelving’s capacity to maintain its horizontal integrity.   

A peculiar mystique had magnetized me to study and stay in Prague for over two years. The hands-on experience familiarized me with the vital personalities of the endemic culture together with how their creative manifestations reflected the charming location and its mysterious layers. Josef Sudek was a permanent fixture in the artistic canon, referenced in university seminars and included in museum bookshops for his spectral, black-and-white images of lonely streets, bare branches, and still lifes. 

Monuments and mementos pervade Prague. Although aging and temporality inform the evolution of reality, a certain agelessness of the cityscape’s spirit may be articulated via the language of light.

 

Errata