Notes for an Important American Story

This is a story about a man whose heart is large but full of rage. Or just angst. Or just malaise. Something like that. It is set on a sweeping piece of land in West Virginia or New Mexico, or at a small Midwestern university with financial problems, or during the apocalypse, or post the apocalypse, or maybe Brooklyn. The state of the world has rendered him powerless and apathetic. Maybe he has everything he thought he wanted but feels nothing. That could be good. Something to do with his father. Or his mother. Or both. Often he drinks too much. Often his angst presents as compulsive, near-violent masturbation. Someone may have committed suicide, probably his mother. This man might ride horses or he might be a washed-up academic. He might have an alienated teenage son, or an alienated adult son whose life he has ruined. Possibly the son comes back to town seeking reconciliation but instead they have a fistfight. The scope of the man’s ability to ruin lives is wide, and he can do it with a fist or with a casual remark. This man hates himself, but has a cunning knack for directing his self-hate toward those around him in just such a way that it takes them a while to realize it.

He will need to have at least one brother. This is not a man with sisters. The man and his brother(s) will need to compete. It may be about a woman or about how one is favored or adopted or they may not even know what about. Any brother should be damaged in some way.

He might have a secret, but not necessarily. He could wear everything on his sleeve.

He does not have a feminine side. Or he totally does and this is his problem. He’s failed his father in this way. By not going into the military. Or the family business.

He smokes, and has no interest in quitting, or tries repeatedly and always fails.

Perhaps he makes subtly racist or sexist or homophobic remarks on occasion, but sees himself otherwise, mostly on account of having fucked that Asian gal or that one guy that one time. Somehow this all relates to politics. Or war. Terrible things he’s seen or done. Or philosophy. Terrible things he’s thought about.

He is handsome, maybe in a rugged way, maybe in a soft way. If he’s handsome in a soft way, wide eyes and a sort of cheeky thing, he will spend no small amount of time obsessing about this failure of birth, and attempts to compensate in a variety of ways, sexually, academically, etc. It’s possible that his entire persona is a result of this compensation. Above all he has charm. Killer charm. In the big-budget-film version of his story (from which he will publicly distance himself), he’d be played by George Clooney.

There’s a beautiful woman in his life; she exists only on a marble pedestal he has constructed for her with the express purpose of knocking her off it. This is a woman whose beauty defies the very meaning of beauty. Her beauty is heretofore unseen, as if beauty didn’t really even exist before. It’s a beauty that transcends description, but if he were to try, she would for sure have hair the color of a newborn colt shining under the light of a thousand suns, she would have skin like alabaster silk, lips the color of spilled blood. She would have eyes a brand-new color, like kaleidoscopes, where if you looked into them, you would see a perfect world.

Theoretically, she is there to reflect him back to himself for some learning. But not too much. Maybe just enough so that he understands something about himself on an even deeper level, but not so much to change his ways. His ways should remain unchanged. Maybe he’s more of a metaphor than a man, whatever that means.

Truthfully, the woman is pretty, but not that pretty. Who is? She’s pretty enough to have modeled in one JCPenney ad when she was nine, smart enough at nine to have immediately rejected a career based on image. Her greatest asset is her brain, but he’ll never truly know this. He thinks he will, but for him it’s still 99.9 percent biology, which is also the source of some angst, because he’s smart enough to feel he should be able to overcome that, but also aware that he’s not willing to really try, and also aware that he sort of doesn’t have to try, because he’s attractive and successful enough to where his brains and charm push him over into “extremely attractive to a lot of women.” Anyway, whatever it is that she’s got, he wants. They meet at a saloon where she tends bar, or in a classroom (she is his student; she is always his student) or on the set of a movie, one that isn’t very good; he may have been nominated for an Oscar as a young man in the ’70s, now he’s playing the family patriarch. She’s working craft services while finishing her undergrad at Columbia (she dropped out in the ’90s). He notices she’s reading a book of poetry, one he’s read before; they talk. He’s actually married, though they’ve been living apart for some time, and she knows he’s married, and this is so not her thing, married men (famous married men!), whether or not they’re apart, though cheating is sometimes his thing, and he will continue to feel her out. Part of the thing is he’s not really picking up on what she’s putting out, which is, initially, basically nothing. She’s friendly to everyone, and maybe even more friendly to someone who chats her up about poetry. But that’s it. Would she be attracted to him if he weren’t married? Maybe? Sure? Yes, but believes she can shut that down when someone’s married? But actually who is she kidding? So maybe there’s a tiny vibe of that that he could be picking up, or thinks he’s picking up, but really isn’t enough to hang anything much on, even though that’s exactly what he’ll do.

This is when the wooing begins, small at first, he has calculated that she is ordinarily not one to date a married man, so maybe he’ll bring a used book he thinks she might like, “just a loaner,” something that wouldn’t have to be construed as wooing, a text message, not even flirty, doesn’t matter, he knows what he’s doing, slowly building up to grander gestures, throwing a brand-new carton of cigarettes out the window because she mentions she hates it, maybe her mother died of lung cancer, maybe he steals her away to Battery Park to look at the sunset even though he’s supposed to be on set and holds up the production for an hour, until finally he wears her down, just a tiny bit, whispers compliments in her ear about how her mind drives him crazy, how there’s a potent connection between them, and how can she just ignore that, and so in spite of her better judgment, she lets him take her away for a weekend at his house in Bucks County and that’s it. He’s a movie star and he’s sexy as hell and he reads poetry and she has come to believe that he sees something in her that maybe she hasn’t seen in herself, which may or may not be true, because one of his skills is making you think things he wants you to think. You here being “women he’s interested in.”

So she goes, and they spend most of the weekend in bed, and the sex will either be on the rough side or on the tender side, or maybe even on the underwhelming side, it almost doesn’t matter, because she allows herself to like him for a minute, and this minute, of course, is an important minute, a minute in which something is lost, something here being his interest. They return from their weekend in Bucks County, he kisses her good-bye like, That was amazing, looks into her eyes like, I am going to come to your place tonight or maybe you could even stop by my trailer so I can fuck you again good, but that’s it, the last look like that, and don’t forget he’s an actor, he can toss a look like that in his sleep, but about a hot minute after this look happens, he’s not hanging around the craft table anymore, if he bothers returning her texts they’re short and usually irrelevant to her text; Coffee later? will be answered with a series of punctuation marks, something like an emoticon she’s never seen before. She recognizes what’s happening immediately, of course, because she’s a bright gal, and quickly regains her better judgment, and backs off, tells him, Okay, that was fun, let’s call it a day. Before she gets in too deep. This will of course respark his interest a bit, and he will endeavor to keep her just interested enough for a while, and will put in the most marginal effort, bringing flowers from the Korean market, talking just a little bit about the future, not a fully committed future where they own a house together but maybe a future vacation, a play he thinks she should see, or he’ll say, My mom would really like you, you should meet her, something just enough to plant a seed, good enough for a brief delay, and he’ll of course sleep with her a few more times, until she endeavors to bring up a conversation about how this doesn’t really work for her, and he tells her that he let her know from the beginning that he was never really available, and she tells him that in fact that was not at all what happened, that he pursued her as though he was totally available, and then he has to resist the urge to point out that everyone knows he’s married, because he knows he’ll look like a dick if he assumes that everyone knows about his personal life because he’s famous, even if it’s true, but still he convinces her to go for a drive in the country, talk things through, she’s pretty weary by now but agrees to go, and they stop and fuck at the first motel they pass, and the car ride back is rather silent, because she’s done. This will set off a period in which the movie star more or less stalks her, which seems kind of crazy, right, last week he was finished with her, plus he’s a movie star and could have anyone he wants, seemingly, but of course it’s not very often that someone seems not to want him, and after the movie ends he will start writing her long, often incoherent letters, probably written drunk, and he will leave so many messages, alternating between desperate, a little bit sweet, and verbally abusive, to where she will change her phone number. He will never divorce or get back together with his estranged wife, but at her funeral, he will again wonder if they should have tried to work it out.

The beautiful woman will repeat this process with another man, another man not at all unlike our hero the movie star, this time a brilliant professor (hers, as noted) who is technically available in that he isn’t married, but one who’s never quite recovered from a sex scandal that in fact hadn’t happened, or hadn’t happened the way it was portrayed and/or gossiped about, or in his mind wasn’t any kind of a scandal, it was a private affair between two consenting adults, never mind that one of them had only just voted for the first time and the other had just turned forty. Though he was cleared of all charges of sex with a minor, the damage to his reputation was done. None of this comes to her attention, she sees only that he smokes an awful lot of pot and is perhaps overly interested in talking about pot, is extremely knowledgeable about pot, and different kinds of pot, and is thinking about getting involved in the legalization of pot, except for he’s usually too busy smoking it kind of all day, seems kind of depressed and doesn’t want to socialize much, but still they have long conversations on his porch or her front stoop into the night, and he too has this thing where he knows how to perfectly balance his profusely expressed awe of her with enough subtle but diminishing comments whereby she might as well literally be performing a gymnastic act of walking this balance for the duration. He’ll tell her that her particular type of beauty is underappreciated, but that he’s the man for the job.

But then later there’s a guy who appears to be totally different. So different that at first she’s not interested. Maybe she’s not really attracted to him, maybe he’s in advertising but not in creative, in like accounts payable or something. Maybe the fact that she’s not really attracted to him is part of the reason she gives him a chance, maybe she’s just trying to be open. Maybe she thinks a less attractive, ordinary-seeming guy with an ordinary job will have ordinary issues, or maybe no issues, and she could grow to love him. And but what she doesn’t bank on is that she will grow to love him (love here being, well, maybe not the perfect word, desire could be more appropriate, it’s hard to say whether love is just this pure thing that isn’t ever complicated, or is definable more than one way, or definable by each individual or each couple, sometimes you think you know what it is by what it isn’t, or what it shouldn’t be, like any of the scenarios depicted here in these notes so far may not seem like love to you, but who’s to say if it works for you, what it is, really? If you fight and fight and fight and you fuck and fuck and fuck and laugh and laugh and laugh and you stay together forever, is it love? Or what if you just do all that for a period of years and then it’s over? Was it not love because it ended? Does anybody know?). So anyway, they spend time together and it turns out he’s kind of an interesting thinker, he’d taken some philosophy classes in college, and they have long conversations over many bottles of wine that make her reconsider a lot of ideas she had about the world that were sort of fixed, but then at some point the overall vibe of these conversations seems to take a turn into the-world-is-a-terrible-place kind of thing, which ties back into why he’s really at this job, because he’s just passing time until he dies, because there’s not much point to anything, and it doesn’t really matter what anyone does because the world is self-destructing. She asks—facetiously—why he doesn’t just kill himself, and he says because he’s a coward, and she spends some time trying to pep-talk him (resisting her urge to explain just now that suicide isn’t generally thought of as an act of bravery), spends a lot of time trying to convince him of the world’s good, gives him a ton of examples of the small beauties and goodnesses in the world, like his eight-year-old niece who excitedly collects pennies for UNICEF (A pointless exercise, he says), or the barista who always smiles and lets the line back up every day to make him his latte exactly how he likes it (She just wants a tip), or how much his dog lives for his existence (Well, sure, I feed him), tells him that he can contribute, make it better, but this is futile, and eventually they break up too. As with the academic, and the movie star, this goes back and forth for just a little while until he is sure he can be the one to break it off last. The last time he won her back involved actual threats of suicide, which was a pretty brilliant (if profoundly fucked-up) plan on his part, especially because she’d actually mentioned it, because it played into her hidden desire for this kind of power, that her love was so powerful that she could actually save the life of a man, in spite of a sort of logical voice in the back of her head that told her (a) how totally fucked that was and (b) that he was, as he’d said, never really suicidal at all.

After several go-arounds, the beautiful woman decides it’s easier to let him be the one to break it off than to put the effort in. Also there’s a whole thing about being the break-upper or the break-uppee, and how a person is one or the other, and she has accepted herself as the break-uppee partly because it’s easier to think of yourself as not the bad guy this way, although then you admittedly sometimes end up thinking of yourself as the victim, which is really not any much better. It may even be worse.

Finally the beautiful woman meets a guy who seems to be everything she’s looking for. He’s an artist, he’s engaged with the world, he’s not depressed, and he’s madly in love with her. There’s no conflict above and beyond whatever any good couple might have whereby no two people live their lives exactly the same way and so you just sort of pick your battles kind of thing, and let stuff like socks on the floor go, where with someone else who makes you want to pull your hair out, socks on the floor might be a deal breaker. Everything is amazing for a while until he’s offered a full-time job in Marfa that comes with a 12,000 SF studio. This guy is so great that he genuinely puts this forward as a discussion, that if living in Marfa is something she thinks she just can’t do, he’ll let the opportunity go. They even go to Marfa and look at houses, it’s actually quite charming, there’s much to like and they could live extremely well there, though it’s more than a bit isolated. But she can’t do it. She feels awful about it but she just feels like, love of her life or not, she can’t see herself living in Texas, even in an arty town, for the rest of her life. She had lived in Texas for two miserable years in high school when her parents were separated, couldn’t reconcile the absence of real seasons, couldn’t get comfortable with the sounds of nature year-round, like she liked nature fine, at designated times, like in the summer, or at her grandparents’ house where the sound of mourning doves or cicadas seem to fit, but year-round the sound of mourning doves is disconcerting, and in the city she might complain about the sounds of traffic or the sounds from the sports bar next door or a jackhammer or a fight on the street too, but at least those sounds make sense to her. She’s a New York City girl, a freelancer, and except for those two years in Texas she never lived anywhere else. She could work anywhere really, and his job will more than cover their living expenses, and in Marfa, with no obligations, she could even work on that book she’s been wanting to start. But she tells him she doesn’t think she can do it, and he says, Okay, then, we’ll stay. Which is when she tells him to go without her. Which is when she realizes how much worse it really is to be the bad guy. Which is when she realizes she’s got as many problems as all the guys she’s dated prior to this nice guy and she finally goes off and gets some therapy because enough of this shit already. It takes a few years but she gets her shit together, goes to graduate school, gets a teaching job herself, and that’s it. Maybe does or maybe doesn’t meet another genuinely stable nice guy. Either way, not very interesting, this ending. Better you should go watch An Unmarried Woman at this point.

There might be some redemption in the end. Perhaps religion has been the origin of our movie star’s ruin, but may also provide his salvation. Salvation could even have come via his good woman if he’d given her a chance, not by most-likely-fake suicide prevention but just in that way that a really good relationship brings out the best in you without seeming to even be an effort on anyone’s part but just because you’re right for each other. That’s not this story. They weren’t right for each other and there probably isn’t any right person for him, or there is, or there’s more than one but he’s just not willing to let it happen, and so he will keep looking but he will think about the beautiful woman long after she has found a right person. He might even convince himself she was the right person, the only right person, and that he blew it big time when he let her go, because that would be a good reason not to ever commit to an actual right person. Later he develops some health problems, his heart most likely, will end up in a nursing home with a bunch of old people, still miserable though there is a cute night nurse he flirts with when he can’t sleep, which is most of the time. She’s about thirty years younger than him, happily married, had no idea he was a famous movie star/academic/whatever until he told her, still doesn’t know who he is, just wants to make his end a little more pleasant, maybe even succeeds. Maybe she’s the last person to squeeze his hand and when he goes, he takes that hand squeeze with him to heaven or hell or wherever he’s going, and that hand squeeze is now the only thing that’s ever really mattered, or it’s all the things that ever mattered, to him or to anyone. To everyone.

Maybe this story isn’t American enough. Or maybe it’s already been told. Or maybe it’s a novel.

If it is, it has an amazing last line.