Woman of Letters is a Substack run. She publishes short fiction, followed by brief essays on the topic the fiction investigated. Her stories are always thought-provoking, even if their message is sometimes unclear. I’ve included a few of her short stories here (in no particular order), with links in case you’d like to read the essays they come with.
By Naomi Kanakia
Once upon a time, a very old man ruled over a great nation (probably the greatest nation on the planet? Certainly close to the greatest, assuming China’s economy continues to under-perform).
The only game in town, for a state, is “How can I gain more and more of the world’s output for myself?” And this nation–our nation (for it’s the one in which I live) had created a global economy in which nations competed to sell their output to each other. And for reasons that nobody could quite understand, this country, the United States, kept winning this competition! For a century or more! Force was often involved, but not always. Other competitors: the European Union, Japan, China, always seemed as if they would at some point out-grow or out-compete our nation, but it never quite worked out–they always faltered at some point. This nation had something–let’s call it the X factor. They had it, and they had retained it, for three or four generations, which is pretty good!
Anyway, in this nation, a girl had come of age and wanted a husband.
Yeah, that was all preamble. Everything–all the economic, political stuff–just preamble to this girl who wanted a husband.
She was on the apps, answering messages, going on dates. Right now a guy was pretty interested. He kept messaging. He took her to expensive restaurants, told her how brilliant and beautiful she was. It was a lot of praise, and she didn’t entirely hate it. The passion wasn’t there, of course—she never thought about him when he wasn’t around. But they could talk. He listened. He wasn’t overly arrogant.
And, best of all, he was rich. He was a partner in a well-performing VC firm, and his yearly draw was probably on the order of $800,000 a year. Assuming his current fund did well—he’d probably get performance pay on the order of, like, three or four million dollars? And that was only the start—he could look forward to at least another decade or two of these payouts! She didn’t totally care about the money, but if she was honest she probably wouldn’t be seeing him if he didn’t have such good earning potential.
Meanwhile, a month ago she’d gone out with a teacher, and he was cute, funny, and he clearly thought she was just another Silicon Valley techie a ponytail and no personality! Which was so unfair, because, like, she was a software engineer, and it’s not even that common to be a woman engineer, first of all.
Second of all, most of them are really, really nerdy. They spend their time, like, going to anime conventions or whatever. She didn’t do that. She exercised, did regular person things, hung out with her friends, went to their bachelorette parties, got drunk on the weekends, took an edible and watched reality TV—which, okay, all of that seemed pretty basic. But her job was super technical. It was quite difficult and exacting. Like…most people with her job had majored in computer science as undergrads–a difficult major, kinda designed to weed out dilettantes. That means at eighteen or nineteen years old, they knew they wanted to code, and they must’ve already been kinda good at it? How did they get that desire? Not at school. They didn’t have a coding class at their little high school. I mean some of them did—Bill Gates had a coding club at his high school, and the school had even owned a computer (a fact made famous by the book Outliers). Anyway, these kids loved computers. They were drawn to the order and logic, they wanted to do computers their whole life, make something with them.
And she too kinda loved computers. She loved to code, loved to solve these problems that were too difficult to explain to other people. She hadn’t been into it as a teenager–she’d, like, gone to school and studied and hung out with friends and done sports. But in college she’d thought. why not take a coding class, and yeah all these boys were huge dicks about it, oh so you’ve never touched a computer before–which was untrue (she had, obviously, but she’d never really coded). And she’d done it. She’d treated it like what it was, which was school, and she’d stayed up late, studied hard, taught herself to code. And she’d gotten a fucking A. And she’d taken more CS classes and gotten A’s in those. And now she had this really well-paid job, that she ENJOYED DOING.
But, at the same time, it was still a job. It was work. She had meetings, deadlines, sometimes needed to work late. And at the end of the day, was it really meaningful? It was always just code, right? It was interesting–it was like playing a game all day–but ultimately, she was coding. It was creative work, but not ground-breaking–somebody needs to make the computers do the things they’re supposed to do, and she knew how to do it, and it paid a lot and that was great!
But she would love just waking up and not having to do it? Or not doing it for money? Some people just did it for fun–they built code things for fun. It’s a whole community, open-source people. They’d probably love if someone with her skills started contributing. She used a ton of open-source tools. If she logged onto Github and saw, oh here’s some bugs or whatever in Obsidian–she could just do it—just fix them. This was the same as what she did for work, but for free. Instead of being paid, like, $400,000 a year to do, she could do it for free. But on her own schedule, without meetings and stuff. Probably still lots of petty drama, maybe it wouldn’t be fun. But maybe it would be super life-affirming and wonderful, contributing to software she believed in! There’s probably a middle-ground somewhere, where she gets paid a little bit to do a job that’s more meaningful–but she had a friend who worked for the nonprofit that runs Wikipedia and he didn’t love it. He didn’t wake up each day inspired and energetic. He was like–it’s still work. You have bosses and meetings, but you just get paid less.
Anyway, if she married a teacher she’d need to keep doing her so-so job forever, whereas if she married a VC then she could quit. But that would also involve some kind of negotiations and compromises. Usually people with well-off spouses quit their jobs because there was a baby. She could raise a baby, she supposed, if it meant she got to quit her job. But then she’s just getting paid room and board to do another job. No, not that exciting. Lots of people seemed to have nannies and stuff AND they didn’t do a lot, didn’t really work. She’d need to ease into it. The key would be, once she got pregnant, to saym oh but I’ll scale down my job to take care of this baby–except we also need to get help? A full other person in addition to myself? Just to care for one baby? Kinda didn’t make sense.
So she went on dates and stuff, waiting to fall in love. She didn’t have a lot of free time–that was the thing. Because of this other thing, her job, which she was good at! So how was she gonna invest her time? Going on dates with some teacher or yoga instructor or whatever, who didn’t really respect her anyway, so she always felt as if she was auditioning for their fucking attention, even though she was a unique and special and beautiful person who deserved to be feted and honored? Or marry the VC who seemed to really like her and could give her a good life? Or find some side project that used her time and energies?
Or…just…keep working? No, not too exciting.
But she could it.
If she had to.
She was totally willing to say fuck it, nobody is gonna come along, I’ll just really invest in this job. I’ll sacrifice the evenings I could be dating the teacher, who might fall in love with me. I’ll put in the work to find projects, at this dumb company (which makes HR software that, if she’s being honest, isn’t particularly good or easy to use). Yes there are a lot of meetings, and the problems aren’t that interesting–Like, what at this enterprise software company is even worth the sacrifice of her weekends anyway?
What the fuck, she would do it. But it’d basically be just to make even more money and to find something to do. And then there’d be all this new-found drama related to her job–people jealous of her–office politics, etc. But people would be happy. It wouldn’t be a ton of drama–she shouldn’t overstate the case. A company is usually happy when a valuable employee decides to do more work.
But then after everything they could also lay her off! Like…she is paid four hundred thousand dollars a year, which is a lot of money, and someone could decide, oh let’s save money by firing this person, which is stupid, because she IS NECESSARY TO THEIR COMPANY’S BOTTOM LINE. SHE IS ADDING A LOT OF VALUE TO THIS COMPANY.
Using her life force, she decided to learn this valuable skill. It was valuable, that’s why she decided to learn it. If they suddenly decided she and it aren’t as valuable anymore–they’re kinda deprecating all this work she did learning this skill. What if that happens? What if they decide her skills don’t matter anymore at all? Oh, with AI we don’t need to invest so much in our cloud engineering team.
She’d deal with it, whatever, but then it’s a big investment she’s writing off. She’s already invested her whole youth, her education, her college experience, in learning this skill. Hasn’t she given enough? Is she really gonna invest more time in this company?
That’s what it’s all about, right? What is she gonna invest in? With her evenings? Once upon a time, she invested in computers.
Whatever.
That’s the thing about love–that ecstatic feeling—this is the person—this is the guy—he’s the one I’ve been working for all along—I have this job for him, to support him. It’s like religion. Like believing in a company. Like…well…it’s like taking a coding class and at the end of the semester saying I DID IT. I LEARNED TO CODE. People didn’t believe in me–even with all my intelligence–they didn’t believe in me. But I did it. I was good at it.
And the point is, when it comes to investing her remaining life force why should we ask this woman not to value MONEY? Accumulating it. Amassing it. Having it in her bank account. Getting money! Which she has! Maybe she’s the rich one! Maybe she’s the wealthy spouse who’ll enable someone else to pursue their dreams.
Which would also be pretty meaningful!
Anyway, she’s really not unhappy. She’s got some life force. She expends it. She’s got weekends and evenings. At some point, nobody is gonna want it and her anymore. She will come to an end. But in the meantime, all of this activity, all of her life, her energy, amounts to one thing: the fairly hefty sum in her bank account. Her whole life is just about increasing that percentage of the world’s product upon which she has some claim. And what if that too–all her wealth–comes to nought? What if America falters and fails and the dollar loses its value? What if there’s currency controls or inflation? A few years of hyperinflation could completely wipe her out–it’s not impossible. It’s happened before. There must’ve been girls (well, more likely men) working and saving in Weimar, only to lose it all.
But she doesn’t expect that to happen. In the meantime, through some weird alchemy that neither I nor any other scientist understands, America has managed to convince people like her to expend their life force on doing…something or other with computers. Something good? Something that produces value? We’re not really sure. It’ll probably never really become clear–any of it–and she will die and still nobody will understand why she was paid so much money, and whether her work did any good for the world whatsoever–but America issued a call, and she fucking answered it. If there was anything else they wanted her to do with her life, then they should’ve fucking told her. If someone had ever once told her–don’t do that, do this instead, we really need you to work on this–there’s a good chance she would’ve done it. But that never happened.
She’s still open to it, though, which is why she goes on dates.
To find the teacher.
Whom she could love.
Probably.
If she had to.
Once upon a time, a young man read on Substack that writers like him were, if not discriminated against by the world of letters, then at least severely underrepresented. To the young man, this discussion was a turning point: he had to finish writing his novel. In fact, the world needed his novel.
Within a few weeks of the online discussion (or “discourse”) dying down, he’d already forgotten the exact arguments. He couldn’t remember whether the problem was that publishing was dominated by white women who hated and feared the hard honesty of young men, or if there was some general crisis of confidence in young men themselves that made them not want to write about their own lives—either because of shame or simply because they’d lost faith in literary self-expression and cared only now for video games and podcasts. In other words, was this a demand problem (publishers / critics / readers didn’t want men’s books)? Or a supply problem (men weren’t writing the books)? Many online seemed to believe it was a supply problem, so their solution was hortatory—get out, read some Hemingway, and believe in words again, young man. This also had the convenient side-effect of exculpating the industry itself and making it a lot easier for everyone to get along.
The young man’s novel was a work of autofiction about (what else?) a young man in his late twenties, the graduate of an MFA program, living in New York City, and his struggle to connect with other people and live an authentic life. The book was a Hunger, a Crime and Punishment, a Bright Lights, an American Psycho. The book was composed of short episodes, each perhaps a thousand words long. Most episodes were amplified versions of things that’d happened to him. Conversations and encounters, in other words, but ones where everyone was more articulate, more understanding, and more emotionally invested than they’d been in real life. Each of the episodes had something or other to do with sex. Men really want it; women want it too, sometimes, but not as intensely, or at least in a way that’s not quite so destructive to others.
At the time, the young man was living in New York and working as a teacher at a private school—he taught high school creative writing (this was a very fancy school). The young man wasn’t a sterling example of masculinity: he liked that at this school you had to wear a blazer and tie ever day, but in his real life he still wore mostly rumpled jeans and t-shirts. He’d never played sports as a kid, he’d only ever had one girlfriend. He’d done the thing shy young men do when they’re worried about their masculinity, where they date that one girl in college who just absolutely idolizes them, the girl who practically knocks them over and pushes them into bed. But of course he hadn’t particularly connected with the girl on a personal level, and he’d only narrowly managed to avoid marrying her (she’d gotten a fellowship abroad, and during their year of long-distance the cord between them frayed and snapped).
Anyway, the young man’s issue was, in short, that he was very attracted to several of his students. The kids who took his classes were mostly girls. They wore plaid skirts and purple polos, and their bodies burst with youthful vitality. Two in particular hung out in his office during lunch, daring each other to show him their fantasy novel—he’d found it surprisingly good (better than himself at that age!), and had felt no compunctions in encouraging them. The rich dad of one of the girls hired him to tutor his daughter in writing and advise her how to get published. They lived not too far apart and once ran into each other at a street corner—she was with some friends from a different school and they all burst into laughter when he appeared, but she ran after him, took his sleeve, pulled him back, and told him to tell them, tell them about her book.
About seven years earlier, during a very formative period in the young man’s personal development, there’d been a outpouring of confessions by young women about all the ways that men had harassed, raped, and mistreated them. The young man was horrified, but he couldn’t help thinking, Oh, so it’s really common then? And, moreover, it’s very hard to get caught? In recent years, some of the worst offenders of that time had rehabilitated themselves, returning to prominence. One man, who’d drugged and raped fifty women, was released from prison after just two years. Reputations suffered, yes, but material consequences were few. Moreover, in many of the tales of ambiguous encounters, the young man had seen how susceptible women were to certain kinds of pressure, while in tales of the legal reaction, he saw how it was utterly impossible to prove the pressure had existed in the first place. The man had the persistent feeling that this online condemnation of sexual harassment and rape had, in fact, the opposite message: this behavior is common, expected, and easy.
The man of course was attracted to the girl he tutored. She had dark hair, sloe eyes, was lanky and gamine, and he could’ve deployed a dozen other adjectives invented precisely for the purpose of describing the appeal of teenage girls. He masturbated to her and only to her—he kept imagining her lying lazily in his bed, body bursting with joy and anticipation, her aliveness so intense that the emotion super-saturated the room, imparting even his plain curtains and the brick wall next door with a sense of shimmering expectation.
The man was shocked at how little he was distrusted. Nobody spoke to him about the amount of time he spent alone with this girl, both in his office and outside! He mentioned it to a female friend of his, and she said, “We don’t expect men to be Mike Pence—you can’t just never be alone with a girl—that’s unrealistic.’
“But it’s just crazy,” he said. “The rhetoric is that men are predators and women need to be wary at all times, but then you get handed the keys to the chicken coop. Some girl’s dad is literally like, ‘Do whatever this man says. He’s got your hopes and dreams in a vise grip, and your only chance of future happiness depends on pleasing him sexually.’”
“John!” said his friend. “That is so inappropriate.”
“What?” he said. “That’s kind of the subtext! He’s supposed to protect her from guys like me.”
“You’re being so patriarchal.”
“But she’s…I mean any guy in my position…”
Unlike the protagonist in the corresponding scene of his novel, he didn’t try to continue the conversation. He’d learned that his female friends fell into two categories, conservative and cynical or liberal and innocent. His one good conservative friend would’ve readily agreed with him that this was ridiculous, and that of course any man would lust after this girl. But his far-more-numerous liberal friends seemed positively affronted by the idea. Once, a (male) teacher friend had alluded, in a very oblique way, to the idea that a teacher could be attracted to their students, and a table of women had erupted in shouts of “Gross!”
Can you imagine, they’d said? That is so disgusting! The man had phrased it as a hypothetical, so he was not personally implicated, but this gave the women leave to say, “Wow, but that’s really how some people think! They think all men are pedophiles.”
And yes, whenever he probed his liberal woman friends on the topic, they did indeed seem to believe that a man who was attracted to a sixteen year old girl was a pedophile.
This belief troubled the young man, but not because of any sense of personal shame. He was one hundred percent certain that he was not a pedophile and was not abnormal. If these women truly believed the average man was so sexless, then they were simply incorrect. It would be fine to think it was wrong to be attracted to a teenager (in which case most heterosexual men were moral monsters), but to think it was abnormal was simply factually incorrect.
No, the problem this posed to the man was in terms of his fiction: the women who’d shouted “Gross!” and “Pedophile!” were the main audience for his work. How could he connect with readers whose view of reality was so different from his own? If he wrote down his current conundrum in a book, they would read his protagonist as a monster.
The man knew instinctively that he could either write the book or seduce the girl—he couldn’t get away with doing both. He was one hundred percent positive he could’ve slept with the girl and left her unharmed. Frankly, he was so attracted to her that he would’ve happily married her. From what he could tell, the harm in these relationships often came when a student felt used or exploited. Since he would’ve spent the rest of his life with the girl, he thought that risk was minimal. However, the lure of art was stronger than the lure of life, so he rewrote his novel to make it a thinly-fictionalized version of his relationship with his student.
He wrote down his issue, precisely as it is stated here, writing a version of himself that was not heightened or witty. He thought that he did a great job of describing the temptation to err, and how he’d ultimately laid down his sword, not through an overt rejection, but through an accumulation of slight acts of boundary-setting that slowly put their relationship back on a student-teacher footing.
The girl herself was talented, insightful, and courageous, and late in the drafting of his book she provided him with a climax. She came to his office shortly after her eighteenth birthday and silently handed him a short story about a student who’s lusting after her teacher—the girl’s story closes with the student locking the door of the office. And when he was done reading, the real life girl put out a hand, put her finger on the doorknob, and tried to push in the little knob—only to say, “Wait, this lock doesn’t work.”
“Yeah,” he said. “I disabled it, sorry. Mostly because situations like this. But don’t get me wrong—you are unbelievably, just—just really—”
Except by this time her face had collapsed. She stood up, her arms and shoulders bowed inward, and staggered out—they never had another meeting.
His novel was of course rejected by every literary agent to whom he sent it. Their comments were all in the same vein: a chilling portrait of a sociopath, but as a reader I want my sociopaths to be powerful. I don’t want to read about a wimp who expects to be patted on the back for not following through with his fantasies of hurting women.
The man wrote an essay where he tried to summarize this reaction, and then to give his response: my character was not a predator; he was an ordinary man in contemporary America; you, the agents rejecting this book, are only safe (your daughters are only safe!) because of the act of will undertaken by men like this. And yet that self-control reads to you as cowardice! (The essay was rejected by the three or four outlets to which it was pitched).
In meditating on this reaction, the man was struck by two things. First, the girl in question had shown immeasurably more courage than he’d ever shown in his own life; and, second, the dearth of men in fiction was neither a supply problem nor a demand problem, it was a problem with masculinity itself.
So far as he understood it, the problem you faced as a man was that, due to either sociology or biology, you had a relentless desire to aggress and dominate. In the young man’s case, he’d known, even as a young teacher, how to avoid leading on the girl in question—he could’ve praised her a little less effusively, and she would’ve gotten the picture. Instead he’d decided, slowly, carefully, persistently, to tempt fate and to court transgression. And even now, he couldn’t quite regret it: in capturing the girl’s affection, he’d proven some kind of dominance and added meaning to his life.
He didn’t know if women were driven to tempt fate, but he was positive that most young men felt an almost-irresistible desire to blow up their lives, to pursue sex, adventure, fame, fortune, etc, in ways that read as aggressive and dangerous.
Now, either you regarded this desire as good and productive (i.e. you celebrated masculinity in itself), or you regarded it as dangerous and potentially-harmful. Those with the former orientation had absolutely no problem achieving success in society—they turned into hucksters and self-help artists who appealed to desperate young men. But if you didn’t know whether masculinity was good (which is the same as suspecting it might not be good), then any artistic production meant, necessarily, writing about both the darkness and the allure of masculinity. If you portrayed this darkness as exceptional or abnormal, then you could have an audience, but this was a lie—no man could honestly believe that most male human beings didn’t have a little murderer and rapist in them. The agents’ objection was not that his character was a wimp, but that he, as an author, hadn’t allowed them to believe that his character was an aberration. They had objected to him puncturing, or attempting to puncture, the myth they needed in order to live peacefully with their fathers, husbands, and sons.
Nobody wanted an artist who merely aired masculinity’s dirty laundry. They wanted an artist who solved the seemingly-insoluble problem of masculinity. They would be happy with an artist who unambiguously condemned or celebrated masculinity, but it was impossible to honestly do either.
The man thought for a long time—he realized that once he solved the masculinity problem for himself, then it would cease to matter as an artistic problem. He’d write his book or not, and its publication would be of no concern.
The man was drawn back relentlessly to that moment in his office—to the girl’s face going cold, and to the horror he’d felt, to the fact that this person, who he knew and respected, who’d put his soul in her hands, had left his office feeling so shattered and unwanted.
Well…he still had her number, so he asked if she’d like to discuss that last meeting sometime. With most girls, the answer would’ve been embarrassed silence, but he knew her, and he wasn’t surprised when she said, “Sure, I’d like that.”
She came in a dark blue dress—wool or linen? He didn’t know fabrics, but it didn’t seem like cotton. Her hair was bobbed, had light-colored highlights, and she wore white sneakers. Her hug was one-armed, and their talk was superficial, awkward. He asked about her college classes. She was majoring in creative writing, she said. Then she added: “oh god, by the way, you don’t have that story I wrote still do you?”
“I mean, yeah,” he said. “I do. You printed it out, I remember.”
“Thank god, I had such a fear of it getting passed around at school somehow. Will you burn it?”
“Sure, if that’s what you want. I sometimes think about deleting my own book, to be honest.”
At this hint of self-doubt, the girl leapt forward, “Oh but what happened? You can’t do that! I tell everyone at school that the professors at Dartmouth aren’t nearly as good as my high school teacher was, and it’s so true—you know that, right?”
“I sent it out. Nobody was interested. I think…it’s just not what people want. Actually, I was wondering—I meant to ask—is there any chance you could read it? And really, truly give me your honest opinion?”
This was a line he’d handcrafted at home, and he’d practiced saying it to himself, looking down a bit at the table, just so he could deliver it exactly right. The trick was to hit the word ‘honest’ very hard on the first syllable, then trail off for the second.
“Of course! Oh my god, I’d love that!”
“Be brutal,” he said.
At 2 AM that night he got a gushing email where she compared him to Updike, to Philip Roth—nay, more honest than either, because he really made himself vulnerable and didn’t do any macho posturing, and if people didn’t like this book then fuck them, they were the problem.
He was surprised by how affecting it was to be reassured of your genius by a young, well-read, beautiful, sophisticated woman—so that is why they do it, he thought. For once in his life, the juice was worth the squeeze—the pleasure fully in line with expectation.
He invited her over the next night, and they were up until dawn, drinking and talking. He asked if he could kiss her, and she nodded. After they’d made out for a few minutes, he said, “We shouldn’t…we shouldn’t be doing this.” He knew that sex could only disappoint her, so he held off for a month, allowing her to persuade him that this was something she wanted.
They went through the usual travails—her dad got angry with her, left her terrible voicemails, even though he was polite whenever he met the young man. She got crushes on other men, more her own age, and tearfully confessed them to the young man—sometimes he almost hoped she would leave him, freeing him from the complications of this relationship. But he loved her, of course, and enjoyed spending time with her. She was everything a person could want in a partner. There was quite literally nothing more to ask for. For every disadvantage (he hated going to house parties), there was a corresponding advantage (it would be a literal decade, if ever, before she wanted children).
They dated. They wed. It wasn’t even a scandal, particularly. He kept his job and nobody at the school talked (at least to him) about it.
His friends got quite angry with him when he mentioned that there was little difference between him and, say, Elvis Presley stealing away Priscilla.
“What’re you talking about? Priscilla was just a kid. Selene is educated. She’s a writer. It’s completely different.”
“Is it?”
The thing is, he was very aware of the ways in which he had manipulated Selene when she was too young to have erected any defenses. It’d been almost comically easy to build her up, to flatter her, to hold back, play her hot and cold, and to refuse to douse her attraction. He’d felt very in control at all times, and the fact that he’d married her, and she appeared happy with the relationship, and even believed herself to have been the aggressor—this didn’t obviate the truth that his whole relationship had been a giving-in to his inner darkness, and that it all could’ve turned out quite differently, if she’d at some point changed her mind about his actions.
That was the oddest thing. His one flirtation with darkness—his one attempt to “be a man”—had been whitewashed by Selene’s receptiveness. And yet, he’d also created that receptiveness. He’d had this powerful impulse to sleep with one of his students, and with his intellect and cunning he’d looked around for a likely candidate and, well, he’d successfully “groomed” her.
Having succeeded in this one adventure, he was never again particularly tempted to stray. Selene was loving, supportive, and well-off. He was getting older and feeling less libido. His book finally sold to a small publisher: he’d wanted to title it Grooming, in a reference to Norman Rush’s Mating, but his editor said she would under no circumstances put it out under that title, so he’d acceded, and it’d come out as The Genius.
The book didn’t sell well, and it wasn’t received that well—readers echoed the sociopathic wimp comment that agents had once given him. In the same year, Selene sold her own novel for much more money, to a much better publisher. But she wasn’t the least bit embarrassed by her husband’s book—far from it, she told all her fancy literary friends about it, not even noticing how uncomfortable it made them.
Strangely enough, the young man developed a particular sort of female fan—college-aged, precocious, eager to be a muse and to believe in his genius. He learned quite quickly not to be alone with such women, not to meet for coffee, get their number, message them at night, etc. In short, he almost immediately set up boundaries to prevent him from manipulating them into bed again—it was no more than self-interest on his part, as his wife currently paid most of their bills (and also he loved her!)
But the elusive and much-sought-after male reader never materialized. All these pathetic, stifled men, who secretly believed themselves to have the souls of great heroes or great villains, were not interested in the young man’s rather underwhelming answer to the problems of masculinity, which is that most men are simultaneously quite evil, and yet not quite as evil as they imagine themselves to be.
The young man had discovered that, although he possessed the same kind of darkness as a Hitler or Ted Bundy, the quantity of that darkness was in his case so small that a relatively tiny (and, in the end, very socially-acceptable) level of evil was enough to suffice for a lifetime.
Once upon a time, a man was very sad. His sadness was physiological, he was told—unrelated to the conditions of his life. The man was half-aware of a phenomenon called ‘science’, which sought to make testable, repeatable prediction about future events. Scientists had in the last half-century expanded their predictive abilities to include mental phenomena, and they had observed that certain physical substances, when ingested, had the ability to reduce human beings’ self-reported feelings of sadness. They had extrapolated outwards from this finding—if a certain salt had the ability to reduce sadness, then obviously sadness must have some chemical component.
To the sad man, this was plausible. He believed himself to be sad because his effort in life to achieve high social status had failed—he had shown an initial precocity with music and had thought that by playing music well, people would pay attention to him and recognize him as a superior human being. For a time, this had worked, but once he’d entered his fourth decade of life, his peers regarded his profession as pathetic and juvenile. He sensed some distance between him and them, some derision, some lack of respect, and this made him sad. But he had also been reassured, by different scientists, that this feeling of being derided might be illusory: it might be ‘all in his head’. His peers had no special need to convey to him, through slight snubs and jokes and through status displays of their own, that they held him in little respect. It might in fact be some chemical process that was making him sad, and his sadness was perhaps making him perceive a lack of respect that didn’t truly exist. Thus, in confronting his sadness, the man was reassured that it was pointless to attempt to directly attack the symptoms of disrespect: he ought not, he was told, attempt to win fame or respect, and he certainly ought not cut himself off from people who (in his opinion) didn’t respect him. These would be the wrong things to do. Instead he ought to take certain chemicals and engage in certain other practices designed to bring his mental ecology into balance. Chief amongst the latter were three therapeutic activities: a) gratuitous physical movement; b) contact with nature; and c) a form of guided self-reflective activity known as meditation. He had never felt the desire for any of these three things, but he was assured that they (along with the chemical salts) were his ticket out of his sadness.
The man for years had attempted to channel his sadness into the writing of very sad songs, but lately he’d grown disillusioned with singing and song-writing. It was such a fucking pain to sit around, writing a song, to play it in concert, to try and get some producer to okay it, to have discussions about it and pick it apart. He’d for a time tried singing his new songs directly into his phone, which connected him to an audience of ten thousand or so people, but this too only made him feel bad—there was a phenomenon, for singers, known as “going viral”. When a song truly resonated, then it would be shared and reach a much broader audience. And every time his music did not go viral, he felt it to be deficient, and he felt that the initial impulse for the music was cheapened. His sadness was made sadder because it was a sterile sadness—his sadness didn’t connect with or inspire other people.
Nonetheless he tried for some years to follow the advice he was given by friends, family, and medical professionals. He took the chemical salts. He meditated, he exercised, he walked. But he undertook all of these actions so half-heartedly, starting and stopping, doing it a day here and a day there, that he always had for himself the excuse that he “hadn’t really given it a try.” If only he had really exercised the way you were supposed to, for thirty minutes a day, with elevated heart-rate. If he only he had really tried to step back from his thoughts while meditating. If only he had really done his ten thousand steps. If only he had really stayed on his treatment regimen. If only he had really eaten properly, instead of ordering so much takeout and drinking so much. If only he’d gone and enjoyed himself at the dinner thrown by his rich friends who’d just bought a house, or to the movie premiere of his friend who’d broken into doing soundtrack work. If only he’d done the things he couldn’t bring himself to do!
Meanwhile, the financial underpinnings of his life grew shakier. It was harder to book gigs, gas got more expensive, his car broke down, he needed to buy a new instrument. Debt piled up, and yet oddly he wasn’t saddened by the debt—he was so sad now that the debt didn’t figure as a real problem. He’d stopped thinking more than a year or two into the future.
The man lived in a rent-controlled apartment in San Francisco. He’d lived here for twenty years, which meant his rent was far below market rate. But he was suddenly handed an eviction notice. In his sadness, he went to find lawyers to fight it, but somehow things kept slipping through the cracks, notices kept piling up, the landlord kept coming around, knocking, offering him deals to leave. His brain was askew—he didn’t understand any of it. He felt under siege in his apartment, and yet it was also the only place he felt safe. He took to hiding in his bedroom, piling objects around the door—he drew the curtains, stopped going out. One time he thought that he’d turned on the oven, but then he went back an hour later and the oven was cold, so he thought oh my god, the house is full of gas—he opened all the windows and then he closed up all the vents and pipes leading to the oven / range, so he wouldn’t be tempted to use it again. Instead he ate all his meals from the microwave. And in his smelly, decrepit state he reached for his guitar, and he pulled the device into his lap—he began plucking on the strings and beating on the neck and body of the instrument, like he was four years old. He started singing to himself, just trying to enjoy the music. And, almost against his will, he began to shape the music, to harmonize, to alter, to turn it into something. He worked for months, as the landlord knocked on the door and the mail piled up. He perfected his songs, and sometimes, yes, he dreamed of releasing them—he thought what if I opened my phone and sang out to the world and the world responded, what if they came and saw the power shining out of my bearded, ugly, smelly body in this little cave of a home. But he was afraid: he knew that in 99 percent of cases, a man’s last stab at artistic fame tends to be pathetic and ridiculous. And these songs were long: almost ten minutes each. They were atonal and strange, with little spoken sections and falsetto interludes. They sounded, in fact, quite insane.
He knew that, objectively speaking, this music likely had no value for anyone other than himself. That if he was online, and he heard someone else release this stuff he’d be like, that’s self-indulgent crap—that’s a guy pretending to be a genius because only genius could justify making such an absolute mess of your life.
And yet the man continued to play—for long months he continued to play, shaping the music into a kind of prayer, a kind of chant for nobody but himself and the God that he’d begun to worship in the privacy of his own home. And so long as he played, the landlord didn’t knock, and food continued to arrive, and he remained safe.
Genres:
I was going to end the story there, but that’s a cop-out isn’t it? What happens next to the sad man? I think it depends on which world we live in. Is it the materialist one—a world where the scientists will someday explain all phenomenon (even though they haven’t yet?). If so then you’ve only three options: up, down, or sideways. Either his songs are successful and bring him fame, or he is evicted and goes to live in his car or he comes to his senses and gets a real job. Then within each of these three options you have an up, down, or sideways option with regards to his happiness. Perhaps success brings him happiness and perhaps it doesn’t, perhaps being evicted makes him strong and resilient and he realizes he can handle anything, or perhaps it makes him weak and ashamed. Perhaps in his new office job he learns to enjoy middling status or perhaps he just feels sapped of all joy and meaning. Or maybe he just muddles through in all scenarios, with periods of sadness or happiness, mediated by his biochemistry.
But I wanted to end the story where I did because I think the man sitting alone in his apartment, humming and singing to himself, pronouncing words, playing music, has, in that act, finally cured himself. And I don’t mean that in the abstract sense: I don’t think art, in the abstract, can save people. But a man who has spent his life thinking about his art can I think eventually come full circle, so that he possesses the spontaneity of the child but the wisdom of the adult, and he can create a work of solo genius—a work of art meant for an audience of one—he can create an artwork that is to him something greater than anything external—any work by Shakespeare or Beethoven or Bach—ever could be. With all his skill and his self-knowledge, he can alone in the silence of himself create the ultimate work of art, and he can experience the apotheosis towards which all art strives. And the result might not, to the onlooker, sound or look very good, but to the man itself, the song goes beyond consolation, and beyond expression, and it transfigures him in the way therapy always promises to do but never quite manages.
And in that moment of transformation, the man touches something deeper than the self. There is a reason the landlord does not knock. There is a reason the neighbor does not complain. There is a reason the noodles keep arriving via online delivery. And it is because he’s reached through the center of reality itself—and although he will never achieve the things he wanted (money, security, social status). he will see that those things were the form of something else. That money represented some immanent relationship between his consciousness and the world, and that by sticking his hand into the guts of the world and performing a neat bit of surgery, he’s managed to stitch things together in a way where money is no longer necessary.
So the man’s eviction woes simply disappear. The landlord never comes back. But the man emerges from his apartment, and he goes amongst the people, and he plays, and he’s given what he needs, and those who need his voice are able to hear it. And if you wanna call that being a prophet or a shaman or a magician, you can call it that, sure. But you can also say he’s just a really cool dude, to whom the usual rules do not apply.
Once upon a time, a man started to say mean things to his wife.
He didn’t want to be mean, but it was difficult for him to stop, because each incident was absolutely within the bounds of what was allowable. For instance, his wife had a demanding job, and she frequently took work calls during evenings, weekends, and vacations. One summer she cleared her calendar so she wouldn’t take any calls one Saturday while her dad was visiting, and he said, “Oh, so for someone you care about, you’re free.” She laughed it off, but he kept picking at it. “No seriously, you’d never clear a day like that for me.”
“Sure, I would,” she said.
“Then do it,” he said. “Give me a day.”
“Honey, cmon,” she said. “You know I have to be available!”
But he picked and picked, knowing she wouldn’t do it, getting worked up about the idea that she wouldn’t give him a whole day. And yet…deep down, he didn’t want to spend an entire uninterrupted day with her. He certainly didn’t want to use his precious marital capital to get that day! If she was going to clear a day, he’d rather she do it to be with their daughter, so he could go off and see some friends! Nonetheless, he kept insisting, “Just one day!”
“I can do something in September maybe?”
“Four months away?” he said. “Your dad told us a month ago he was coming—you just cleared time. You didn’t tell him, oh come back in four months!”
She didn’t respond to this devastating and, to him, unimpeachable point. The fact was, when a friend or relative was in town, she had time—she found it. But she wouldn’t do that for him.
He was in the right, but how many of these little fights could he pick before their marriage unraveled? Probably a lot of them! But the number was certainly not infinite.
When he spoke to his therapist about this issue, she took his side, saying it sounded like he had some major concerns, and that he was seeking proofs of his wife’s love. The man had noticed a tendency of therapists to be captured by his opinion—they rarely questioned or challenged him. His last therapist was always guiding him towards forgiving his inner child. She was convinced that he bore some grudge against himself, thought himself undeserving of love—she said what whenever he talked about himself, there was a heaviness, a sense of darkness. She wanted him to accept that he was a fundamentally good person, with needs that deserved to be met—he had fired her shortly after meeting his now-wife. But maybe he shouldn’t have. She obviously had a point—he’d created a situation where he constantly looked for proofs that his wife was insufficiently dedicated to him. And he’d done the same thing to others: to his friends, for instance. A longtime friendship had ended after he’d prodded, all but forced, a friend to say she thought he was a whiner—that he complained too much, and that she didn’t sympathize with his complaints about his life.
But the inner child thing didn’t resonate with him. He felt hemmed in by all this therapy stuff. He didn’t want to work on himself. He had too much reflection already. He felt there was no point asking any friends or family for their opinions, because it would always be the same: therapy for him; couples’ counseling for them. Talking, just endless talking.
When they want to solve a problem, human beings have three main options: the mythic, the heroic, or the Romantic. But this man was not educated in the humanities—he didn’t understand, on even a basic level, the action of psychology, literature, or religion. When he pondered how to change his life, he essentially had two arrows in his quiver: the psychological and the criminal. The psychological was a weakened form of mythic action—psychology used introspection to achieve some kind of catharsis, sapping some of his primal drives of their power to compel action. Since he’d rejected this course of action, he was left with the criminal: an affair, an addiction, or simply the slow drip of cruelty. He could try to annex his own darkness, giving himself over to it, and thus escape from the lash of conscience. In other words, he could accept (or even revel in) the fact that he was simply a dick.
But the man didn’t want to do that either, his only option was a harm reduction strategy. He knew instinctively that you don’t want to get into the apologize / abuse cycle, where you alternate increasingly abject apologies with increasingly big blow-out fights. He tried to keep his meanness to a steady drip of bitter comments—every time he held back on one, he congratulated himself, thinking he’d given his marriage another day.
Once he was watching a romantic comedy with his wife, and he said, “Wait a second, I don’t get it—the girl at the beginning of the movie has a great job and apartment, and she can do whatever she wants, whenever she wants—she sleeps in on Saturdays, goes for long walks by herself, stares soulfully into the water—”
“Tom!” said his wife. “That was a really depressing scene!”
“Seemed happy to me,” he said. “No kid, no responsibilities.”
His wife laughed, but Tom kept thinking—I mean it, I really mean it. I just want to be alone. And yet when his wife went on a week-long business trip, he went a little wild, drinking too much each night after putting his daughter to bed. Once he woke up bleary and hungover to his daughter saying, “Dad you FORGOT to wake me up, you forgot!” He had a call from his wife, who’d watched his daughter on the nanny-cam putzing around her room for an hour, calling for him. While making his daughter dinner he called his wife and got mad at her for spying on him.
As I mentioned earlier, this story is complicated by the fact that the man did have plenty of options—he simply wasn’t aware of them. The options were the mythic, heroic, and Romantic. To start with the latter, because it’s simplest—he could simply choose his sorrow. To choose the fact that he has this hole inside him, to choose the fact that he’s married a woman who’s unable to appreciate it. To sublimate that anger and pain into love for her—to love her three times or ten times as much. To gleefully allow her to take her work calls—to love her, in fact, for her love of her work. To love this especially in her (she ran a nationally-prominent do-gooder organization, if that matters, and ran it quite effectively). This was in fact how he’d felt when they first met—he’d loved her very independence, the very fact that he alone could give her the freedom she needed.
If the Romantic was impossible, he could try the mythic or heroic. The heroic option involves that most difficult of maneuvers—actually changing another human being. He would need to expand himself, to become less abject, to somehow display competence and strength on a level that would bring out a corresponding weakness in his wife and binds her to him in a wholly new way. In short, it would involve adding a new element to their marriage. The heroic option generally happens only by accident—as when one partner suffers a health calamity or job loss and the other steps up, covering the household uncomplainingly, providing support and aid, and causing their partner to see them in a new life. He could also try to develop sexual superpowers and woo her that way (the common idiom for this doomed maneuver is that they try to “reignite their spark”). In short, it involves re-envisioning and reinventing their entire relationship, often through the display of exemplary qualities that his partner had not previously known.
The final option is mythic action: the manipulation of value-laden symbols in a way that ushers some kind of alteration in a person’s essence. The most common form of mythic action in modern secular society is the sacrament of marriage itself: to go from being ‘a couple’ to being man and wife is still a value-laden experience that causes a mutation in how the couple is seen. Buying a house is another form of mythic action: When a person owns property, their relationship to their neighbors and neighborhood often changes profoundly, even if the property they own is no different, outwardly, from the one they used to rent.
Mythic action is most effective when condoned by society. You can’t simply start stealing food and killing poor people and expect it to mean the same thing it would if you were a Spartan youth. Conversely, because it is so societal, mythic action is effective even if you do not personally believe in the ritual. Even if you think marriage is bunkum and claptrap, you will change, as a person, if you get married—this occurs precisely because society now treats you differently—men speak differently to you—they assume you’ve been initiated into unspoken mysteries.
What Tom didn’t need a therapist, he needed a shaman. Any such figure possesses a handful of rituals that they understand well, and they would’ve been able to guide him through the appropriate ritual and then guide the community to see him anew. In the absence of such a practitioner, our hero was left at the mercy of the fates. Of course, the most powerful mythic action of all (at least in modern society) is the divorce. In this case, the magic lies not in the divorce itself, but in the reason you give. That reason becomes an incantation—a statement of value—this thing is important enough to me that I am willing to blow up my life on its behalf.
In this case, the man through his cruelty was slowly eroding the goodness of his marriage, making it easier for him to (someday) give up. And in the narrative about his wife’s overwork and lack of care, he was preparing for himself a mythic excuse. He did not want anyone in his life who didn’t have time for him. He wanted to be cared for on a small, daily, ordinary level. And yet, his current wife does care for him. She cares for him by putting up with his silly gibes and cruelties. She cares for him by taking care of their daughter so he can see his friends. She cares for him by rubbing his feet at night—by listening to his fears about ending up alone—by putting up with visits from his crazy brother who gets drunk and passes out in their basement—by never pressuring him to earn more money or get a different job—by giving him the time and space to be alone and brood (which he obviously does quite often). And his next wife, if there is a next wife, won’t necessarily treat him better. His salvation will come entirely from the act of sacrifice—the fact that he walked away from a perfectly-good love. His inner child will, for whatever reason, read this as an act of protection and finally stop feeling so fucking wounded.
So yes, the man’s divorce would have solved the problem that ailed him, and his second marriage would’ve been long and happy and prosperous. But you know what, the idea sort of depresses me. Surely, as an author, I can do a bit better than this relentless naturalism. Yes, in real life, divorce would be likely and would solve this man’s problem. But…in this story, something different happens.
In this story, the woman surprises him one day by clearing a week from her calendar. She says that her dad has offered to take care of their daughter, and she asks where he’d like to go. He says…I don’t know. She says you pick. He says I really don’t know. She says well I’m not choosing. He says…Rome? So they go and stand in the Colosseum, and he goes looking for the seven Egyptian Obelisks decorating Rome’s streets, and he tells her excitedly about the Palatine and Capitoline hills and about all the mad, bad emperors, and the old, lame good ones. And she doesn’t even bring along her computer and her phone. And she gives him a very decent blow-job on their second night, and on their final night he actually gets it up to penetrate her. And they stay happily married ever after. Because it turns out that he was neither the myth, the hero, the criminal, the neurotic, or the romantic lead—he was the damsel in distress, just looking to be saved. And, finally, he was.
Once upon a time, a woman thought What if I just wrote a regular short story? Wouldn’t that be so artificial and funny? But what would it be about? Like…hmm…what do people write about? I dunno…grief! That’s a classic one. Grief and submerged pain. But okay, it’s got to be a genuine attempt, which means it needs an immediately recognizable very ‘literary’ voice. Hmm, let’s look at Best American Short Stories and see what people are doing these days! Okay…just bought last year’s BASS…now I’m reading, reading, reading…seems like a lot of first-person stories told in a clipped, neutral tone, like Bret Ellis without the drugs.1 I can do that!
Primed and ready, the writer conjured up a potential first-person narrator named, err, Judith. A cisgendered woman, with kind eyes and a bobbed haircut. She wore leggings and a tunic, full-coverage foundation and light-brown lipstick—she worked as an account manager at a big tech company, which she seemed to like, but didn’t love. Just another millennial who’d never found her true metier. The writer and Judith met at the cafe in the Mission where the writer often worked. The writer asked if Judith wanted a coffee, and Judith said, “Not really. I actually have a call in a bit…”
“Okay,” the writer said. “So let’s just launch into it. Tell me about getting that phone call saying your dad is dead. Actually no wait, let’s start after the call. What happened? Who did you call next? Where were you standing in the living room?”
“Excuse me,” Judith said. “You want me to do what?”
“Just narrate in a cool, clipped tone the things you did right after hearing your father was dead.”
“Are you joking?”
“Yeah, you know, there are lots of details to take care of, right? You have to call other people and tell them about it and stuff.”
“But that’s awful!”
“It happened to you though, right? You dad died ten years ago. I think it affected you quite a bit.”
Judith and her dad were very close. The writer’s impression was that they were allies against Judith’s mom, a highly successful professional who’d earned many multiples of what her shabby-genteel father had brought in. Their situation was kind of like Mildred Pierce, the noir film about a hard-working restaurant owner who marries a sleazy aristocratic man who seduces her daughter. This film was, rather incredibly, Judith’s favorite movie.
“Yeah…but I just don’t think about it,” Judith said.
“Ever?”
“No.”
“And you don’t want to tell a cool, clipped, detached story about it?”
“Absolutely not! To what end?”
“I don’t know…I guess, to find some kind of transcendence? To summon up those feelings crisp and fresh and new and maybe get over them somehow?”
“I got over it by just never ever ever ever ever thinking about it.”
“Huh. But someone could get over it some other way, surely? Like…maybe there’s some value in just portraying this person who’s so numbed, or whatever, but you let their surroundings hold the weight of…I dunno.”
Judith was staring out the window, which was off-putting to the writer, so the writer lost her train of thought. “Stuff,” the writer said. “The surroundings hold the weight of, err, some stuff.”
“Yeah, stuff.”
“Would distance help? I can age you! Come back ten years older. Come back twenty years older! Then let’s have this talk again? You don’t need to transcend the feelings; we can just describe them very exactly, in all their depth.”
“Absolutely not, I just have no interest whatsoever in revisiting that experience in any form. It does not help to talk about it. What about you? Do you want to write about, say, coming out to your parents?”
“Not really.”
“Why not? It was an emotional time, right?”
“I mean…yeah…I guess.”
“What happened after you came out?”
“You know…the problem with my coming-out story is that I’ve fully processed the experience. I understand it. Whereas you really want the reader to feel like they perceive something that the narrator doesn’t or isn’t or can’t perceive.”
“Why would the narrator tell you something they don’t understand, but that the reader (who’s literally just met them) does understand? How many incredibly-obtuse narrators can there be?”
“I dunno. I once knew a guy whose girlfriend had tried to kill herself. And he tried to make this documentary about the experience, but he couldn’t finish it. So then he tried to make a movie about himself trying to make the documentary. Then he tried to make a movie about his attempt to make that movie. Ten years passed, and he kept adding new layers of meta storytelling. It was so comical! I was like Just make a movie about what happened that night. What’d happened was…his girlfriend called him to her dorm room and revealed she was in the process of killing herself, and she wanted his help to finish it. And eventually he called the cops and had her committed. But…it took him four hours (during which time blood was dripping down her wrists from her suicide attempt). So somehow during those four hours he was caught up in the spell, the folie a deux of this moment. There was something dark and thrilling in that moment that he couldn’t capture. And whenever he described this project, everyone knew exactly what’d happened, but he didn’t. He didn’t get it. Any one of his friends could’ve said Oh, you considered helping to kill her, and that’s why this is so compelling. But he didn’t get it.”
“Wow, you should write about that.”
“I did! I wrote a whole novel about a guy who’s obsessed with making a movie about the night he almost killed his girlfriend. Much better than any of his attempts. But I never tried to get it published. I looked at it and was like meh. It’s not that compelling.”
“Really?”
“Yeah…just didn’t seem like there was much there. I re-read the book and I was honestly kinda bored. The problem was…the story needs to be shaped. He obviously had this urge to kill her, but then…he didn’t do it! And he wants to explain that he had this urge, but so what? So he was almost bad? But is that really a story? Everyone is almost bad. Everyone almost hurts people, constantly. That’s not really a story. Years and years and years later I realized that since I was writing fiction I should’ve just gone back and written a story where she does in fact die that night. And then the cops investigate him for murder. It’s a thriller with the same premise (“What happened that night?”) but in this case there’s a shocking twist. He did it, he helped kill her. Boom, that’s a story.”
“Wow, that’s sort of like a noir. I’d read that.”
“Right! That’s the thing, people put so much effort into constructing the right images and style and tone for a story, but they don’t get that you can construct the story itself! In fact that’s literally the easiest and most powerful thing to change.”
“So why don’t you do it?”
“Oh I don’t know—he was another artist. Would’ve been shitty to take his material. And then I had other ideas—who knows. Maybe I’ll revisit the idea someday.”
“So then why do you need me? How would you tell my story?”
“Umm…I dunno…”
“I’d love it to be an old-school noir. Like something with that beautiful wavy hair, and that golden glow that comes out even in black and white. Did you ever see that movie Mildred Pierce?”
“Are you kidding right now?”
“It has Joan Crawford. It was so excellent. She’s gorgeous. I loved her.”
“What about the daughter?”
“Veda!” Judith said. “Ann Blythe. Ugh, what a sex kitten. Don’t you hate that type? They’re everywhere these days. We should watch that!”
“Definitely,” the writer said. “I mean I’ve kinda seen it already though. But I think there’s a new version with Kate Winslet?”
“Her,” Judith said. “Hate her. So severe-looking. Looks like a school-teacher. Even in Titanic. Oh well…they ruin everything, don’t they?”
“Yeah, I guess. Hey…uhh, did you have a meeting?”
Judith looked at her watch. “Oh it’s actually for 12:30. But I really should go.” Judith grabbed her bag, and they awkwardly hugged each other. As Judith’s brown hair brushed lightly against the writer’s cheek, the writer had a strange, intense jolt of longing.
Thinking about it later, the writer would remember, Oh yeah, I used to be in love with Judith. Like, before I’d experienced real love, I had this one-sided, unrequited attraction for her. I loved the whole vibe: the damaged, cynical daddy’s girl. I wanted so desperately to be with her. The oddest thing was that awhile after the writer had come out, she and Judith had hung out together, and there’d been drinking, and Judith had sort of made a pass at her, had drunkenly leaned on her chest, with her face held close to the writer’s, and had said, “I can’t believe I never knew you were gay…” The writer had been paralyzed—hadn’t said a thing, almost hadn’t moved. Probably for the best—there’s no way Judith would’ve wanted to actually be with a woman. She was just dropping bait, trying to manipulate the writer, the way straight girls feel compelled to do to gay women. But for a few years, remembering that moment, the writer had thought, Even if it was a game, I should’ve played it out. I should have tried for the kiss. What a strange thing that would’ve been. And the writer understood now why she’d summoned Judith back into existence: the writer was angry with her, wanted to hurt her somehow.
And reading over what she’d written, the writer saw there was a clear story here, where the writer drops all the posturing and metafiction and cool, detached tone and just tells a story. What happens is, Judith is depressed. She calls the writer over, and she’s in the process of killing herself, and she asks for help. And the writer considers helping her, because in reality she still has this terrible anger towards Judith for that one abortive pass made years ago.
It’s definitely a story that could be told. And the writer could tell it. But nobody would want to read it! She wouldn’t even want to read it herself! Her subconscious was pushing her towards creating this story, and yet she just as resolutely simply didn’t want it to exist. Not because of the inherent unpalatableness of the content, but for the truth it revealed about the writer—a part of her did indeed want Judith to die. But that wasn’t really a story. Not yet. It was simply a cold-hearted fact. But what was equally true was the fact that the writer wouldn’t really ever help her friend kill herself. So what to do with those two truths? The writer didn’t know. Maybe in ten or twenty years, the writer would discover something new that would allow her to turn the fact of that deadly ambivalence into a real story. But the writer simply wasn’t there yet—and no amount of cool, calm detached tone could hide the fact that although the writer had plenty of insight, she didn’t quite have the wisdom needed to shape that insight into a real story that would make sense of the full and accurate contours of her feelings about this person.
Of course she could write the story anyway and hope that something in the images or choice of words would convey some meaning she didn’t quite understand herself, but seeing what she’d already written, she just couldn’t see anything there. Sometimes a muddle is just a muddle! Maybe the writer should simply surrender Judith back into the unconscious and let her come back again someday in some entirely different form.
But all that would come later, in retrospect. Right now the writer was still on this imaginary sidewalk, still wrapped-up in this imaginary goodbye with a person who was, if not quite imaginary, then certainly not totally real.
“Hey,” the writer said.
“Hey you…?” Judith was already on her phone, presumably looking to see if her car was about to arrive.
“I’m sorry,” the writer said.
“What?”
“You were an important person in my life for a long time. You went through a lot. You were in my thoughts. I’m sorry he died. I know he was sick for a while. I’m sorry you were in so much pain. You didn’t totally need me, I know, so I don’t really feel that bad, because I did reach out, and it just seemed like you didn’t need or want me around anymore. BUT you’re a special person. Thank you so much for seeing something in me, when we were in college together. I had friends, but I was an alcoholic, and I was so shy when I wasn’t drinking. You took me under your wing. You spent time with me. You were the first person I ever felt comfortable texting and saying, ‘What’s up? Do you want to hang out?’ And I know you knew that I liked you, and aside from that one time, you always made it very clear, without words, that you didn’t feel the same, and I appreciate you doing so in that very gentle way (aside from that one time!) and I appreciate the faith you had in me that, despite my drinking, I would get the picture and not push things. Thank you so much for your friendship. I hope you are happy, wherever you are now.”
Judith turned around. Her eyes welled up. There was hugging and crying. The writer isn’t going to write out the whole fucking thing for you, but it was obviously very emotional.