GRETCHEN WOULDN’T let me wallow in my woes and by the end of the week she’d planned, organized, and publicized:
A Fiction Reading!
3 Up-and-Coming, Soon-to-be-Famous Student Writers!
Crystal Room, Sproul Hall, 4 PM, March 23!
This poster was tacked to every bulletin board in the department, taped to every elevator wall and glass door. It was in the window of every Westwood Village bookstore, every restaurant, every cute little clothes shop. It was in at least two places on every floor of every library. It was so prominent in the cafeteria it disrupted the color coordination of Ackerman Union.
I went to the Westwords office to congratulate Gretchen on the excellence of the idea as well as ubiquity of the blitz. She was seated at her desk, typing happily, when I walked in and asked: “Who are the three up-and-coming, soon-to-be-famous student writers?” I knew and I didn’t know.
She back-spaced, pulled out her little packet of Ko-Rec-Type, and said, “Jesse Ragent, Mimi Hammer, and….” She was concentrating upon positioning the white tab of opaquing film. The sun flashed off the floor; her typewriter twinkled. An advertisement for the upcoming issue was tacked to the front door, covers of back issues were spread across the walls, a submissions poster was taped to the ceiling, dozens of different editions filled bookshelves, all over were manuscripts, order forms, form rejections. She stood, hugged me, and whispered, “You.”
The office was on the third floor of the oldest building on campus. I stood near a window, looking out at the lucky, mechanical swimmers in the pool. The window was large and round and could be swung open from the inside. I had a deep, jittery urge to jump. I was certain I could get someone, anyone, to substitute for me, but Gretchen said she’d already mailed announcements to the Bruin, KCRW, the Evening Outlook.
“You can’t violate an expectation that’s already been aroused,” she said. “As a writer, even a beginning one, you can appreciate that.”
The clear, round window looked inviting again. I tipped over a rickety table as I chased Gretchen around the room and asked her why she had done this to me. Arrested for streetwalking, she could have explained the high heels, the black hose, the hand-held purse in such a way that she would be given a citation for exemplary citizenship. I knew any attempt at inquiry was useless, but, still, I was curious what was going through that amazing mind of hers when she conjured up this fiasco. She said she’d never heard me babble that bad before and was so determined to erase my feelings of failure that she decided to orchestrate a triumphant night of eloquence. Gretchen was certain that once I was wearing a three-piece suit, speaking into a microphone, and looking out only at friends and admirers, my trembling difficulties would die a quick death. I had, of course, heard previous versions of this remedy: Mrs. Sherfey’s suggestion that I play Iago, Mother’s hope that I’d become fluent through the forensic society. This time, though, for reasons that remain a little fuzzy—deluded about the transformative properties of art? weary of my own despair? who knows?—I was weirdly sanguine about the solution. I avoided Gretchen’s kiss and trotted off to my afternoon class, which was, if I remember right, Moral Problems in Philosophy: Kant, who languished in limbo between noumenon and phenomenon, to Camus, who got all chilly inside when Maman dropped dead.
This was a moral problem, and I approached it very philosophically. With Camus in my pocket and Kant in my mind I realized I’d probably be able to read if I read under the influence, and I could get back at Gretchen if I wrote and read a story about her. I told Gretchen I was writing a story based on my grandfather—the pawn shop, the bowl of pennies, the ancient clock, the white whiskers, the glass of bourbon, the Sunday paper open to the obituaries—and needed the entire weekend to myself.
My ambition was to write about someone I hadn’t grown up with, to make someone else matter. It didn’t help a lot to receive a flurry of calls and letters all weekend from my family. Mother photocopied a publisher’s dismissal of her book about “civil liberties for young people.” The editor said that “if, instead of answering your own questions yourself, you developed a series of inquiries through which you led the student to arrive at the proper conclusions, you’d have a more marketable product. Unless you involve the students in each of the episodes, you run the risk of losing their interest; let them uncover for themselves the facts and principles that underlie each unit.” I felt like maybe he was onto something. Beth passed along a joke that passed right over my head:
—Was Ben Franklin a Puritan?
—No. He never went to church.
Father sent me a two-sentence, homemade postcard that said: “If a shirt comes to you from Macy’s it’s from me, Dad. The shirt is from Dad.” On the front was a photograph he’d taken of the Transamerica Building, never a good omen with Father. Then Beth called and got caught on her favorite complaint: “Sometimes I wish people didn’t have to look at me at all. I don’t know who I feel more sorry for—them or me.” I wrote twelve hours a day; slept six; ate two; read three; masturbated, in anger at Gretchen, one. She, and everybody else, and even I at first, thought the story was about her, but it wasn’t. Not really. All I’ve ever fixed on is my nonfictional family in its perfect righteousness.
Gretchen thought I’d written about my grandfather’s drinking habits and untimely (at ninety-six, he was guiding one of his best customers through the back room of his junk shop when his heart suddenly hurt) death. She invited Charles to come to the reading, and Sandra, and a number of classmates whose language I’d declined when I was helping Gretchen with Westwords. All these people were sitting in the most comfortable chairs of the Crystal Room in Sproul Hall when I entered, drunk as a skunk. I’d been drinking pure gin in a plastic cup since mid-morning and it was now four. I grabbed the arms of couches; I didn’t recognize Gretchen or Sandra (Beth couldn’t come, though Charles was a surprise witness); I took a thin blue pattern in the rug for a river and leapt away from it; I thought the top of my head was going to twirl off; I had the pleasant sensation of a gauzy veil separating me from everyone else as I made my way to a seat up front. The Crystal Room had that gorgeous, riverlike rug wall-to-wall, velvet-covered chairs, foot rests for important people, unfathomably deep cushions, color portraits of past presidents, and one immense crystal chandelier that refracted everything.
While Gretchen stood at the podium, giving some sort of benediction, I kept seeing the crystals convert into snow, ice, falling glass. The room had a maximum capacity of seventy-five, but there must have been a hundred and fifty people there, standing, sitting on the floor, leaning against lamps, listening to Gretchen, who was urging everyone to subscribe to or join Westwords and emphasizing beyond common decency the coincidence that all three up-and-coming, soon-to-be-famous student writers had published first in her magazine. She got a big hand at the end of her subscription drive, then sat down. I haven’t the faintest idea whether the first act of Jesse Ragent’s screenplay was any good because I wasn’t listening, and I can remember only the two totally explicit tableaux in what Mimi Hammer called a “cruel pastiche of shy pornography.”
When Mimi was finished most of her friends left, but everyone else stayed and watched me take my manuscript out of my coat pocket, watched me clip the recording microphone to my tie, watched me grip the podium with both hands. The room twirled. The chandelier kept shattering. People’s faces lost integrity.
“Good afternoon,” I said and the microphone screeched a little. “I think we should all be grateful to Gretchen Noyes for organizing this very successful event.” I motioned for Gretchen to rise, and she rose, and the audience applauded. “To those of you who know either me or the organizer of this very successful event, the story I’ll be reading might appear to be somewhat autobiographical in origin.” Gretchen gasped. “Whereas, actually, I’ve never gone hiking with the organizer of this very successful event. I’m not a sadist or a photographer. I’m no nature buff. None of this happened. It’s completely made up.” A few scattered skeptics.
I said the title—which occurred to me at that very moment—was “Deep Breathing” and began to read:
We hiked and hiked and hiked. The moon hung above us like a floater in the eye. Thin, lighted disc; electric lamp; perfectly circular moon—I hated it. I didn’t want to see her face. I didn’t want her to see mine. The moon seemed accessible to me, bothersome and ceaseless, and I hated it. I wanted darkness and earth. Clouds, if possible. Not the moon. I craved eclipse.
I imagined I was a harlequin, danced about, told jokes. Sarah said she’d heard the stories before: they weren’t funny. I disagreed. We looked into each other’s glasses, saw ourselves, and waved. We exchanged glasses and stumbled. Sarah was nearly blind. I wore glasses to feel detached and look intelligent. She thought I was brilliant. She told me so. I wasn’t brilliant. The moon was brilliant.
The path narrowed. Tree limbs shook at us like parents’ fingers. Bushes jumped out at us like animals. We were lost. Lost, Sarah said. I was wearing jeans, a torn green lumberjack shirt, boots. I was carrying a sleeping bag, a backpack. Let’s go back, she said. I had no idea how to get back. I had no intention of going back. I didn’t want to go back. I wanted to hike. Sarah wanted to sleep. She was tired. I offered to carry her backpack for her. Her sleeping bag. Her head. The moon. She walked ahead of me, moving her arms like pistons.
My eyes focused on her ass. I thought that was vulgar and tried to avert my attention. I stared at her backpack, her head bobbing up and down. I looked up at the moon, down at the dirt. Moon like an attenuated traffic light, dirt like waves. I squinted toward the treetops, peered into labyrinths of entangled tree limbs. They were all of only passing interest. My eyes were riveted on her ass.
Sarah asked me to promise we’d stop at the first clearing to which we came. I promised. I’m tired, she said, you have to respect that. I told her I did. I was tired, too—sleep was inevitable and natural, like the moon. I wanted to remove the moon, rebel against sleep. I wanted to hike until the moon faded, until the sun rose, until my backpack slipped off my shoulders.
We walked into a black meadow that was dominated by plants taller than we were. We walked in wet soil and whipped whorls of long, pointed leaves out of our way. Culver’s Root, she said. I disagreed. I hate displays of knowledge. Sarah slipped and pulled clusters of leaves with her. The moon surveyed the field, withheld comment. We turned our hands into scythes, trampled Culver’s Root, tore off leaves.
The meadow curved upward. We used plants like walking sticks. The meadow straightened its back, stood straight up. The meadow became a hill, became a 70-degree angle. Our backpacks hung on our shoulders like vaults. Sarah’s sleeping bag slipped out of her hand, unrolled into mud, opened flat like a mattress. I suggested we stop hiking, take advantage of the mattress. She rolled up the sleeping bag like a tongue. She stood and walked ahead of me. I quoted a passage of Camus’s so banal it is the text of a fairly popular poster: do not walk ahead of me, do not walk behind me, walk next to me and be my friend, et cetera. She hurried away from me. I ran after her. Climbing the hill, carrying my backpack and sleeping bag, I ran after her and overtook her.
The top of the hill curved toward us like a lip. The moon flashed off the plants like lightning. We made crunching sounds, snapped twigs, stepped on snails. We kissed the hill’s lips. We …
The podium rocked, the rug curled up, the chandelier crashed to the floor, everyone turned upside down, and I fell backward with a cold thud. My skull was bleeding, the microphone was wrapped around my neck like the umbilical cord at my birth. The next thing I knew I was in a high bed surrounded by metal railing in a white room decorated with plastic flowers, staring at Sandra.
I sat up and said the expected.
Sandra, who was sitting in a chair on the other side of the metal railing, put her finger to her lips and said, “Shhh. Lie back down. You need to rest. You’re in Student Health.”
Curtains, sheets, floor, table: everything in the room was white. I could feel a bandage on the back of my head and that, I assumed, was also white.
“What happened to me?”
“Well, you were obviously somewhat inebriated at the reading,” she said. “Just as you were really getting into your story, which sounded like it was going to be quite exciting, you fell over and hit your noggin on, it looked like, the front leg of a chair. Gretchen and I and Jesse somebody carried you out, and I drove you over here last night.”
“Last night?”
“It’s Thursday morning, Jeremy. They gave you some sedatives and you slept sixteen hours. Gretchen told me to tell you she figured you passed out from ‘sheer embarrassment over the repetitious staccato syntax.’”
“Tell her I told you that’s not funny.”
“She also said even those couple of pages were a revelation to her. She had no idea how angry you were; she feels kind of shy and confused right now.” I looked glum. “Don’t look so glum. You’re being released the day after tomorrow.”
When Sandra thought I was physically and emotionally prepared to hear her harangue she said, “I hope you realize you nearly killed yourself yesterday afternoon. It probably seems very romantic to you to be self-absorbed and self-destructive, but what you’re engaged in is so obviously slow suicide. You have to face the problem frontally—rationally. Won’t you take the big step and try, at least for a while, voluntary stuttering?”
I couldn’t take any big steps, at least for a while, since I was confined by the metal railing and still felt woozy from all the pills and spills, but I consented to Sandra’s proposal; I hardly had the strength to do otherwise. Thursday, Friday, Saturday afternoon she came in with her tape recorder and told me to establish tension in my upper articulators on unfeared sounds at progressively higher levels of tension.
“What are my upper articulators again?” I asked, turning on my side so I could see her on the other side of the bars.
“Teeth, tongue, mouth, and lips.”
“What are my unfeared sounds?”
“Jesus, Jeremy, that fall must have really thrown you for a loop. You’ve forgotten everything.” The tape recorder was on. The light failed. “I’ve never heard you have any real problems on B, D, G, J, K, L, M, N, P, R, T, V, or Y.”
I rattled the metal bars and attempted to suppress a strong, sudden insight that if I kept going I’d assume permanent occupation of the basement in the tower of Babel. Why create dissonance I didn’t need? I felt absurd bouncing my lips like a bumblebee on B when I no longer stumbled on B. Where was S now that I wanted it?
“I just wish all these tools and techniques and concepts had some real impact on my speech other than making me abnormally self-conscious about it. When I was a little kid I didn’t think that much about stuttering. It wasn’t that bad. It didn’t mean that much to me.”
“Is that true?”
No, Sandra, you know that isn’t true. You know everything. You can read my mind. You know I wouldn’t be writing this if that were true.
She suggested I list a hundred unfeared words, then “we” would voluntary stutter our way through them. Unlike all of Sandra’s other voodoo, voluntary stuttering wasn’t a technique to talk. It was a style of stuttering. She had at her disposal a lot of paradoxical aperçus to the effect that stuttering is the attempt not to stutter, you stutter because you’re afraid you might stutter, you remain a stutterer as long as you pretend not to be one…. The basic idea was consciously to practice your bad habits, thus eliminating them. It scared me because I knew it would work if I wanted it to.
All through April and May she’d instructed me to use, for instance, “goose” as the last word in a sentence, prolonging the g smoothly. In the empty clinic room, looking straight into Sandra’s sympathetic eyes, I said, “Last night I went into the woods and shot a gghhoose.” This wasn’t strictly true. Last night I’d neither gone into the woods nor shot a goose. Which wasn’t the point. The point was that I had, at least for a moment and in special circumstances, controlled the act of communication.
I flew from goose to dogwood to jonquil to Mesopotamia with such surprising confidence and success that Sandra thought I should now attempt to stutter voluntarily on feared words in real life, for instance, with Gretchen. My relationship with my editor was now barely cordial—from what little she’d heard (and neither she nor anyone else ever actually read the rest), “Deep Breathing” wasn’t true to how anything happened, she simply didn’t talk like that, the whole solipsistic environment suggested the story was a wet dream—and this would be only one more pressure upon our crumbling alliance, but Sandra explained that I’d never rise out of the linguistic ghetto if I didn’t test my private triumphs out on the road. It was near-impossible to deny her anything since she always asked so nicely and you hated to hurt her feelings. I promised to float, when arguing with Gretchen, through five feared words a day.
WHILE SHE WAS turning up the volume on the Jupiter Symphony, I said, “Ah, the Jupiter Sssymphony!” and she turned the volume down. While she was cutting cucumbers, I said, “Don’t you ever get tired of sssalad?” and she threw a tiny tomato at me. After dinner, after dessert, Gretchen washed dishes and I dried them. The kitchen was too small, cold, and dark: an ideal boxing ring. I dried a dish and tried to voluntary stutter on my third feared word of the day. My listener’s back was to me; my luck left.
“Do you want to go to the beach on S-S-S …?”
Maybe she didn’t want to go to the beach on Saturday. Maybe that was what she was trying to tell me. She wiped clean the face of the toaster and ran the rag over the knobs of the gas stove. Then she threw the rag into the sink, spun around, and said, “I think Sandra has got you so hyper-aware of your mouth you hardly know where to put your lips anymore when you kiss. What’s happening to you, sweetheart? You’ve become so childishly shy, so involuted. So self-self-self. Blah-blah-blah. I think I need someone who’s a little stronger and more certain of himself.”
July Fourth weekend we rented a boat on a bay near Newport Beach. In the distance sand dunes rose up out of the backshore and farther away the sun burned the water white out at the horizon. It was low tide. The ocean rocked softly, coughing up moss and seaweed. Sea gulls, gliding over the water and looking for food and trouble in large fluttering packs, did tricks in the air. We couldn’t have been more than fifty yards afloat when Gretchen started telling me how to row. “Stop feathering,” she said, for she wanted to remind me she’d once been the star student at the most exclusive boarding school in Santa Barbara. “We’re drifting left.”
Quite frankly, I let us drift left. Direction didn’t matter to me. It mattered to Gretchen. Her doctoral dissertation was a kind of complicated map reading of The Dream Life of Balso Snell. At the other end of the bay were some sailboats we were in no danger of disturbing. Sea gulls spread their pearl gray wings and soared up into the air toward those hulking sand dunes. Gretchen said we should definitely stop drifting and pull right. She used numerous nautical terms I didn’t quite catch. I squirmed on the seat with my arms folded, refusing to row, while Gretchen in angry silence brought us back to the beach, where we hit each other across the arms with the oars.
One night, in her apartment, she said I no longer satisfied her.
As we’ve said before, there is no safe, effective means of enlarging the organ. And, in the vast majority of cases, there’s simply no need to do so. Clitoral stimulation, not penis size, is the key to women’s sexual satisfaction. We’re enclosing previously published information on the subject of penis size averages.
Another night, in the Westwords office, she said, “Please. Don’t. Roll over, Fido, play dead.” When I did what she requested, she was enraged that I neither knew her well enough to know she was joshing nor had the hubris to will, regardless of her request, what I wanted.
She now discussed everything all during desire—this felt fine, that didn’t—whereas I’d always thought running commentary was pretty much of a no-no.
She once attempted to underline an explication de texte while masturbating me. I once tried for the better part of an evening to enter her in every conceivable way and, when all failed, I cried like Rousseau into her bosom. I was once at the foot of the bed, attempting to titillate her with my tongue, but even after Pachelbel’s “Kanon” had repeated itself she was still dust-dry; I fell off the bed onto the hard wooden floor and stayed there until sunrise.
At her birthday party we argued whether I was going to accompany her and her parents to Mazatlán for Labor Day and, driving home along Venice Boulevard in the middle of the morning, I kept wanting to collide with each new automobile coming the other way, killing the person on my passenger side, as if the only emotion I’ve ever wanted to feel forever is grief.
SANDRA FINALLY REALIZED she’d be wiser to exploit, rather than explode, my literary pretensions. She told me to monitor ten minutes of my conversation every day, recording where the conversation occurred; to whom I was speaking; the topic; the stress level; where the tension occurred; whether my airflow stopped; whether tension increased when I anticipated a feared word; how many times I substituted a synonym for a word beginning with S or F; whether I did any voluntary stuttering and, if so, on feared or unfeared words; whether I used circumlocuted sentences to convey simple ideas. Notes on stuttering.
In my daily speech log I was supposed to eschew all psychological speculation, all memories of emotion, all attitudes, and pay exclusive attention to empirical behavior. Doesn’t someone say somewhere that poetry isn’t the expression of, but an escape from, personality? In this one aspect, speech therapy wasn’t completely dissimilar to “The Idea of Order at Key West.” It offered the possibility of a real refuge from feeling.
The conversation occurred over the telephone. I was talking to Beth. We were talking about Meher Baba. It was a low-stress situation. Tension within normal limits occurred in my stomach. Airflow stopped once, when I couldn’t say “transcendental.” Tension increased before some feared words. I avoided most Fs and Ss. I forgot to voluntary stutter. I used simple sentences to respond to astonishingly simple ideas.
The conversation occurred in Rico’s Restaurant on Gayley. I was talking to Gretchen. We were talking about breaking up. It was a high-stress situation. Tension occurred in my head. The tension was within abnormal limits. Speech kept reversing on itself. Airflow often failed, especially when the ostentatiously gayley waiter attempted to eavesdrop on the conversation. Tension increased on most feared words. I avoided all Fs and Ss. I did six semi-voluntary, semi-involuntary stutters. I used circumlocuted sentences to express anguish.
Toward the end of November, while I was rereading the entry about my surprisingly poor performance speaking to a pack of trick-or-treaters, Western Union rapped on my apartment door and the cosmos collapsed. If my family is ever known for anything, it will be for its love of endless language, its feeling for words as the only food. Not even the telegram was flat. Even that was written. It was from Father, and it said: MOTHER IN HOSPITAL FOR BONE SCAN. CANCER HAS SPREAD TO SPINE, LUNGS, SKULL. ADRENAL GLANDS BEING REMOVED. COME HOME IMMEDIATELY. IS THERE NO END TO ALL THIS DARKNESS?