Smile (To Laura Riding)
I can never get your smile
Because I can never understand
How you can be as happy
As that smile
Since I now know
The Philosopher was right,
That pain is the only positive,
And pleasure just the novelty
of its absence
Still, it’s not you I see
But that smile, so perfect –
Not you, but you
Imperfectly, smiling
I burn your letter
At the kitchen stove
Starting with the corner
The flames erase your signature
Cauterizing even the word love
Stretching up, the fire
Finds substance in my fingers
It consumes my hand,
My wrist, my arm, my shoulder
My body burns in the kitchen
Still holding the empty phone
And this burning promise of a letter
The fire spreads across the telephone wires
Destroying every house in this exchange
Flames form pillars and whirlwinds
Igniting everything in their dance
The city burns, except, of course,
Your building Apartment 38 stands
Untouched, with a forceful solemnity
In the middle of endless constructions of flame
Within, icy and safe from all this,
You carefully compose your next letter
I know you’re all avid for the next installment of our riveting tale, but I was actually thinking of writing another anti-Bush screed focusing on the irony of the "terrorist organization" Hamas winning one of his beloved elections when I read this article in Slate that said it all and more:
http://www.slate.com/id/2134917?nav=wp
I know with my comparatively vast readership Slate really needs my referral but here it is anyway. But the audience grows restive so now here’s the eagerly awaited PART FIVE!
And so there she was at the top of the stairs by the railing. It was fall, not that long after school had started and still fairly temperate, so I didn’t feel too bad about keeping her waiting. We’d been a person short in the "pit" at the dining hall washing dishes that night, making things unusually crazy and me unusually gross. After a shower I’d sprinted over but still cut it pretty close. I ran up to her and then hesitated, out of breath. …Hey…, I panted.
Hi.
Sorry…late…
Well, when you said the 7:30 show I didn’t know if you meant 7:30 or before 7:30
—
No, my bad…
I finally got enough wind to take a glance up at her. She was unusually dressed up for our casual campus, with a sweater, blouse and skirt, and, just as unusually, made up with lipstick and mascara. Hey, look at you.
She gave that full, engaging grin.
No, really, you look nice.
Come on, we’d better hurry.
Yeah, sure. I led the way into the almost full theater and took my usual seat up in the balcony by the railing. Kathy followed, settling back as I leaned forward, scanning the crowd over the edge in the instant before the lights went out.
The funny thing was that the movie was Bergman after all, one of my favorites, Through a Glass Darkly. It captured me quickly, with the cheery Swedish family slowly and inevitably exposing their tormented side. In the midst of my enjoyment I felt an unfamiliar anxiety myself, wondering if Kathy liked it, if I wasn’t laying a relationship ending bummer on her with all the angst and sexual tension. My eyes darted between the subtitles and her, trying to unobtrusively keep a sidelong watch. She seemed rapt enough, her lips open a little then twisting into a smile as she caught me glancing over, mouthing What?
Nothing
, I whispered. Do you like it?
She just nodded, gesturing dismissively, and from then on I tried to monitor her more by sense, registering the sound and tremor of her every shift in posture, and, even more, to just become conscious of the sheer physicality of her, of her very vibration, of the kinesics of her body. And what spoke to me, besides the very real gravity of her, was her posture, not spineless and loose like the rest of us as we lounged and draped ourselves over our seats in a fruitless attempt at comfort, but correct somehow, appropriate, not rigid but upright and proper, her knees pressed together and her back straight.
And of course this acute awareness of her body, my downward glance following the curve of her shapely legs crossed at the ankle, exposed by the slight hike in her skirt as she sat, became erotic, causing me to shift my own posture in the presence of a growing excitement.
Yes, there was the novelty, the newness of her, the difference from the girls I’d known before fueling my desire, but there was also something deeper than that, a classicism and purity about her, a vitality contained and veiled, like the form of a classical statue rendered even more compelling by the drapery shading and suggesting it.
Fortunately there was Bergman in front of me and by concentrating on it for a minute I was able to distract myself from the flood of feeling, caught up again in the movie as we sat there in the darkened theater, our arms decorously on separate armrests.
Was Kathy at all aware of what was going through me? Virginia was surely more familiar with it, would have expected it even – she drove men to distraction every day, but had Kathy ever engendered such passion? And how would she respond to it?
But the climax of Through a Glass Darkly captured me up and carried me through, captivated, to the ending, and we both sat there for a moment.
Soon enough, however, the usual restlessness seized me.
Great, great, I said, getting up too, and we smiled dumbly at each other.
So?
She asked finally.
Oh, ah, yeah…
At this point you’d expect me to say something like I’ll call you, but in our college even the mighty telephone had undergone a change in status. There was only one phone per dorm hall or upperclassman bungalow and due to the close quarters (the entire college and all of its students were contained in one square mile), the peripatetic nature of students, and the unreliability of roommates as message takers, you didn’t call people much, you just inevitable ran into them. But since seeing Kathy had proved far from inevitable, it was clear we’d have to make unusually concrete arrangements. How about – I tell you what, why don’t you meet me on the steps in front of the movie for the 7:30 show on Friday?
Of course our college didn’t have anything as mundane as a commercial movie theater. Three films were shown on a rotating basis at early and late shows Friday, Saturday and Sunday nights. The offering were painstakingly programmed by a committee of dedicated cinema geeks with a catholic love for the medium – we saw European art films, classic Hollywood screwball and melodrama, campy sixties exploitation – everything, in other words, except the contemporary schlock the rest of the country was seeing.
What’s playing?
I’m not sure.
My friends and I went to the movies as if they were church, never looking at the program but just always showing up at the same day, place and time every week. Bergman, maybe. I said, a safe enough guess.
Hmmm She wrinkled her not inconsiderable nose. Subtitles.
Hey, come on, you know it’ll be good no matter what it is. But if you don’t want to…
No, it’s fine. I’d like to. Seven-thirty on the steps. I guess I’ll see you then. Don’t forget,
she said, as if five days was a long time in the future, and for the first time she seemed coy and uncertain. Well, bye, UBU.
See you. She turned and I watched as she walked away, setting her tray down on the conveyor belt and pushing the bar of the exit, a prickling apprehension rising through me, electric as the edge of a thunderstorm.
She was relaxed without seeming bored, responsive but not overeager, effortlessly revealing so much ready warmth and quick wit as we laughed and gossiped that I had one of those flashes of transcendental certainty, the kind usually sparked by a woman’s word or gesture, a deep appreciation of something I hadn’t even been able to see before, in this case the qualities of Kathy – her good nature, her optimism and sweetness, her sheer comfort in her in her own skin despite an appearance that many would find uncomfortable – that her many female friends (including, of course, Virginia) appreciated, and, ironically, it was my appreciation of those qualities that allowed me to appreciate the things guys usually appreciate, i.e. the erotic perfection possessed by her body below the neck, qualities which, because she wasn’t pretty and didn’t present as a slut, had hitherto been largely ignored.
And it was that realization, the charm and gravity of her as she took a last sip of coffee, the sharp morning sunlight outlining and illuminating her, that wouldn’t let me let her walk away for what I knew would be for all intents and purposes forever, that made me want to change what might have been into what WAS, to say Wait a minute, Kathy just as she was picking up her tray to leave.
This has, uh, been really nice, I said.
She stood there with a thin, tenuous smile. Yes, it has.
I mean, well, I was wondering if there wasn’t any way we could get together again or something…
Get together?
Yeah, you know, at night for a movie or a beer or whatever…
Are you asking me for a date, UBU? She asked with an ironic emphasis on the word date.
And in context the irony was entirely justified because at our college people didn’t really go out on dates. It was such a small school in the middle of such a large amount of nowhere that there was no place to go out TO. Everyone just sort of ended up at the same party or one of the two bars and paired off. It seemed like people were either sleeping together or unattached with no middle ground, rendering meaningless all the complex dating etiquette I’d only begun to master by the end of high school. But I’d never seen Kathy at the bar in all my misspent hours there, and we moved in such radically different social and academic spheres that that morning had been the first and, if I didn’t do something about it, the last time we had ended up together.
Whatever you want to call it, Kathy, I said, feeling the growing flush of anxiety of someone who’s been turned down more than once. I’m just saying I’d like to see you again. I mean it’s ridiculous that we’ve gone to the same schools for so long and we’ve never, you know, really gotten to know each other…Her silence drew me on to ever more embarrassing waters. I had this feeling right now that I really, I’d really like to get to know you…
O.K., O.K., All right.
She laughed, deciding, perhaps, that I was too agitated to be handing her a well worn line. It sounds like a good idea to me too.
But the key to Kathy, or rather the key to my future relationship with Kathy, was right there, in the form of the empty chair across from her as she sat alone at the long table in the dining hall, and all I had to do was to take the chance to sit in it.
I probably hadn’t gone to breakfast more than once or twice that semester, but that Sunday morning the alcohol, etc. of the night before had refused to settle into either stupor or nausea, and I’d woken up after only a few hours sleep, restless and energized, still a little elevated but not at all sloppy, the early morning world unfolding in front of me with a relaxed, inevitable clarity, my heroic and only dimly remembered overindulgences of the night before having had the serendipitous shock effect of lifting the bell jar for a moment, of oxygenating the atmosphere, of giving me PERSPECTIVE – allowing me, in other words, to be unselfconscious enough to turn the key, to set my food tray down, sit in that chair, and meet Kathy’s eyes.
There was nothing particularly enlightened about it – at that point it was still something more in the nature of a whim. The dining hall was so empty that it would in fact have been weirder and taken more effort for me to pass her by and then sit by myself watching her sit by herself. After all we’d known each other a long time – a total of six years, three in prep school (she’d come in as a sophomore when the benighted place finally went co-ed) and three in college (transferring from a part school in Florida that she, not being a party girl, should never have gone to in the first place). Despite that we hadn’t exchanged more than a dozen words in all that time, not antagonists, really, but certainly moving in different circles, with no mutual friends except for Virginia, who I’d tried to woo while ignoring or deriding everyone and everything she surrounded herself with (and we all know how well THAT went).
But I’ve learned that you can’t cut a girl’s friends out of the picture – they’ll always return, stronger even, taking over the foreground, blocking out the person they were cut out for, revenants who will haunt you the way Kathy came to haunt me.
YR PAL,
UBU
Just a quick note to UBU’s devoted public – I saw "Good Night and Good Luck" yesterday, and while it’s not a great movie it seemed (as I’m sure it was designed to) powerfully apt and pertinent to our present situation. When is someone of Murrow’s stature going to stand up to the Bush regime and say "It’s not un-American to question the president. It’s un-American to invade other countries with no authentic threat to the U.S., to knowingly mislead the public and congress, to torture, to imprison, to eavesdrop, to spy on American citizens without due judicial process?" Maybe it’s because there isn’t anyone of stature around anymore – we’re all Lilliputians and we have the Pygmy president we deserve (except UBU of course).
YR PAL,
UBU
P.S. If anyone should happen to come across this site and read these words I’d appreciate it if you’d leave some feedback as to which version of "Tyra" in the picture show you prefer…
They don’t trust ANYONE who questions them or even wants information about what’s really happening. It’s become so Orwellian — an endless war against an invisible enemy — that you’ve got to wonder how real this enemy is. Certainly the insurgents we’re fighting in Iraq have little to do with the guys who did 9/11, and despite the torture, internal spying and endless airport searches and harassment on anybody who isn’t a rich Republican there have been precious few dastardly plots spoiled. Again it’s "trust us American lives are saved by destroying American freedom" but if there were really concrete cases of that you can bet they would be leaked right away for maximum spin, and certainly NONE of the much trumpeted cases of anti-terrorism that got to the legal courts have amounted to ANYTHING. It’s almost amusing to see the shills of the corporate world contorting themselves to support Bush in every way, not because they really believe in the anti-terrorist crusade as anything but a way to sell him to the public, but because they want to get their taxes cut again and run roughshod over the various Governmental agencies that are supposed to protect the public against them. Occasionally some natural disaster or military losses will blow back the curtain to reveal the utter ineptitude and just plain wrongness of this administration. Soon enough, however the din of right wing radio, TV and bloggers, all underwritten by Bush’s corporate friends obscures everything in noise. But wrap yourself in your "patriotism" and belief in Big Daddy my friend, let Rove spin you into dizziness as they pick your pocket and kill your son and murder your freedom. Just trust them — they know what they’re doing, right?
