ON THE Massachusetts Turnpike, I stopped at a Roy Rogers and ate a rubbery sandwich, bought some coffee, then called home. Hannah thought I was crazy for driving home this late. She knew that I’d fallen asleep on the road once, before we were married. I’d been driving alone then too, and woke with the tires on the passenger side madly recoiling off hummocks of grass. I’d felt free to tell her about it because of my theory that it only happens once. If you survive, you never do it again. You find ways to stay awake—playing loud music, slapping yourself, twitching and jerking, pulling off to take a nap.
“Just find a rest stop and curl up and sleep,” she said.
“I can’t.”
“Why?”
“I have to get home.”
“Why?”
I shrugged, though of course she couldn’t see it. I told her I loved her. I wanted to be home. To see our children. To sleep in the same bed we’d slept in for two decades, not in my brother’s van.
I hung up and used the bathroom. Back on the turnpike, I began to develop a massive headache. Headaches used to be thought of as demons demanding release—hence trephination, cutting holes in the skull, the oldest surgical procedure we know of in human history. Many prehistoric skulls have been found trephined. I suppose it cooled the brain.
My headache, though, would keep me awake. I should have been thankful.
I’d exhausted Duke Ellington. In the drawer beneath the seat I rummaged blindly and found a Frank Sinatra CD, Only the Lonely, and popped it in the player. Plunging through darkness, thumb and head throbbing, it gradually struck me as nothing short of miraculous that I was hearing a voice without a body present. The illusion of presence is sometimes more powerful than the real thing. For example, I could turn up the volume louder than Sinatra could physically sing. But that would puncture the illusion. It would be like magnifying a picture until all you see is pixels.
Still, what a voice! During the high notes of “One for My Baby” it wobbled like someone balanced on an unsupported ladder. Not that he couldn’t manage that register—just that the effort itself was the point. It means something to climb up there by yourself, he was saying, with your clown makeup on. The cover of the CD showed Sinatra’s face superimposed on that of a clown. The saddest cliché: a smiling clown with a broken heart.
Who first thought of the heart as the seat of emotions? The first human being backed up against a cliff by a saber-toothed tiger, no doubt, whose adrenaline caused the threatened organ in his chest to kick into overdrive. Since this happens to animals too, the cornered heart may be still another link with our true ancestors—with dogs, like my brother’s Rip trying to guard her little pups from young professors of English.
Heart in hand. Bleeding heart. Heavy heart. Heart in mouth.
Heartstrings. Heartbreaker. Heart of gold. At the heart of.
Our emotions, it appears, are virtual machines jury-rigged by evolution as strained through human language and culture. Loneliness, for example, is most likely a vestige of the threat to survival in being cut off from one’s group. Solitude and privacy, constructions of our culture, are never uncolored by loss or care, then. And the rewards of privacy—independence, self-sufficiency—are never unaccompanied by the risks of loneliness: depression and the sense of not belonging.
Was Paul’s heart defective? Were his emotions out of whack? He had to be the loneliest man I’ve ever known. His whole body expressed it, especially in his later years, once he’d retired and cut himself off from the social world of work. Slouched and retractive, he moved through our house on his periodic visits as through a tunnel. I realize now he must have visited us because of Hannah, not me. Once Hannah grew used to him, she at least took an interest, in his travels, his ideas. I’d modeled myself against him all those years—not consciously, perhaps, but instinctively, for survival. My habits, my tastes, my posture, my clothes, became everything he wasn’t. I don’t mean to imply that my brother obsessed me. When he was alive I hardly thought about him, and never consulted a snapshot of Paul when I shopped for clothes. Yet I felt a sort of contamination if I wore baggy trousers.
Hannah, on the other hand, stopped regarding him as odd, at least when he was around. He warmed up in her company and even talked freely. In recent years she’d given him financial advice—start an IRA, don’t use savings accounts, buy this or that mutual fund. When he took a buyout from his company and retired two years early, before Medicare kicked in, she told him about COBRA, how his health insurance would continue for so long, then he’d have to pay for it, until age sixty-five. She talked to him as though he were a normal human being, and spiced the talk with friendly advice. In return, he melted in her presence. They sat in two chairs at the kitchen table, facing each other. He laughed and expressed his opinions on voting, on politicians, on taxes. With Groucho Marx logic he asked, Why vote for someone who wanted his vote? As for taxes, he couldn’t see paying for schools or libraries when he had no children and got nothing out of reading.
He sat with legs crossed, a hand between his knees, body folded forward toward Hannah. I remember thinking, How does one become a stranger to everyone yet so willingly respond to ordinary human warmth?
I could count those conversations on one hand. He visited us maybe once a year or so. When they talked, I tried to find something else to do, like washing dishes—something on the periphery.
Our bodies are webs in which we’re hopelessly caught, and for all the primping and preening we do—the exercise, dieting, cosmetic surgery, conscious carriage—most of what we show to other people lies beyond our control. Often, like Paul, I recoil from the world and sink into myself. It’s like breathing underwater. Our bodies are also palimpsests, and in acts of regression we recover older texts. We are Nutcracker Men or, even older, deep-sea creatures crushed inside a larger world. We in fact have two hearts, a right one and a left one, with no passageway between them, as William Harvey proved. And why two hearts? Because when our fishy ancestors emerged from the ocean and developed lungs, something had to pump blood to the body—the left side of the heart—while the smaller right side, inherited from fish, pumped it to the lungs, so it could be oxygenated. And our lungs, by the way, did not evolve from gills, as Steven Vogel points out, but from “out pocketings” in the esophagus, the same outpocketings that once served as swim bladders when we lived underwater.
It was pitch dark outside. The traffic had thinned to big trucks and small cars, each its own universe. I felt strangely detached. Few everyday activities in modern life are more eerie than driving alone at night. The glow-in-the-dark instrument panels, like ancient phosphorescence—the anthropoidal arthropod machine—the movement through stillness, while still inside the movement . . . Night fills the car. It feels like space travel. You hallucinate timelessness. Beyond the road, there’s nothing to see: no hills, trees, buildings, or people, no flat or rolling distances, just the occasional light blinking past. You’re at the edge of the world, or even past it.
What an illusion. I wonder what alien race devised it. Maybe it’s a plot hatched by our genes to prepare human beings for real space travel, so that they, the genes, can colonize the universe. What else are we for but to carry our genes? The purpose of the heart is to circulate blood; the purpose of the circulation of blood is to transport oxygen from the lungs to the cells; the purpose of transporting oxygen to the cells is to enable them to burn the sugars or starch that make energy for the body, which, to close the loop, fuels the beating heart. My body is a self-consuming artifact. It’s dispensable. And, thick with wonder, alone in a darkness without shapes or edges—omniscient, squirming, swiveling my head, reaching for things, listening and watching—I drive and suspect that whatever selfhood I possess, with its fears, joys, hopes, and black depressions, is also dispensable. Like my body, it’s a gadget concocted by the genes to reproduce themselves.
Men and women once were one, says Plato. Then the sexes split apart, and we were haunted by loss. So the genealogy of loneliness is loss, and the mark of loss is sexual difference. And when we struggle to mend that loss, it’s as if, as Kafka said, we want a secret from each other—as if the other were a part of oneself, and to recover that part we have to claw through the obstruction.
Sexual difference means we’re hung with body parts of comic inconvenience. The jerry-built body that makes us men and women has done so by deforming us. We’re all monsters, then. Have a form and you’re deformed. Females are failed males, and men failed women. Each wears the other’s sexual organs turned inside out. In the medieval fabliau “The Four Wishes of Saint Martin,” a peasant takes home four wishes from the saint, as a reward for his devotion.
Give me one of the wishes, says his wife.
No, he says, you’d waste it. Women are stupid. You’d do something crazy. You’d wish that I be turned into a goat, or bear, or ass.
I promise you, she says, I’ll never wish your shape be changed to anything else.
Okay. Have a wish.
I wish, she says, that you be covered with pricks, from your head to your toe, and all stiff as iron—then you’ll know what a prick you are!
In the translation (from Old French) by Robert Harrison of this twelfth-century text, the transformation is described as follows:
A prick leaped up on both his knees—
keep listening and by God you’ll hear
of miracles—from out each ear,
and right in front on high there now
appeared a great prick on his brow,
while downward to his feet the hick’s
whole body was a mass of pricks.
From head to foot the pricks had sprung:
he now was, one might say, well hung.
So maybe, we conclude, it’s men who are stupid. But the story isn’t over. The peasant is enraged, of course, and wishes in revenge that his wife be covered with cunts.
She found, within a moment’s space,
two cunts were now upon her face,
and on her brow, four, side by side.
In front, in back, cunts multiplied,
And there were cunts of every kind,
and cunts before and cunts behind;
cunts sinuous and straight, cunts brushy,
hairless cunts, cunts piled and plushy,
cunts both virginal and splayed,
and cunts well used and cunts well made.
That’s two wishes down. The man and his wife now come to their senses and realize that in order to have one wish left, their fourth—a wish that will make them wealthy and happy—they’ll have to use the third wish to rid themselves of these ornaments. So they wish them all away.
They glance down and see that their original genitals have also disappeared, gone with the third wish. No more sexual markers; the man and wife are neither male nor female. They must use their fourth wish to get back to square one.
I think of this story as the wise and clever triumph of our common straitjacket, dual gender. The nightmare of what happens, for the peasant and his wife, lies not in being covered head to toe by the genitals “appropriate” to each. On the contrary, it’s the moment they have no sexual markers at all—the moment they’re overwhelmed by sameness.
No wonder we rush toward each other through darkness, as I was doing now, just to come full circle.
But what about those for whom the body is a straitjacket wrapped around itself? Those reclusive human beings like Paul whose loneliness spawns repeated acts of solitude? Hung with sexual markers, they might just as well be as blank as mannequins. Neither same- nor opposite-gendered bodies exist for their embrace, since embraces would consume them.
Yet Paul’s solitary pleasures in some respects aped the medieval story about the peasant and his wife, if the evidence I’d found was any indication. There were plenty of magazines and videos in his house—some buried in trash, some scattered about—mostly pornographic and of every variety. But certain themes emerged as dominant. My brother’s taste seemed to run toward genital confusion. It was as though Paul combined in himself both the man and the woman in “The Four Wishes of Saint Martin,” and therefore for his pleasure sought out embodiments of his own self-loathing. “He-women” said the video boxes, with their photos of long red shafts suspiciously prosthetic yet glistening like intestines and sprouting in crowded groins beside what looked like rotted fruit. Pornography had apparently grown surreal in recent years. Other images displayed several bodies stuffed into one another in multiple ways by means of these excrescences. The colors of the photos were like those in cheap cookbooks—red and yellow prevailed. I found them grotesquely comic and infinitely sad. If you were desperate, I suppose, they promised at least a kind of release. But release for someone so ferociously solitary can only crush that solitude, like mercury, into solitudes—into duplications of the same.
I realize now why I drove home that night instead of waiting for morning: to end my fussy loneliness. It made me feel creepy. I was cultivating solitude, that two-edged sword. Minutes ago I’d been omniscient, in control. Now I’d begun to feel sorry for myself, trapped in a sameness that never stopped unspooling. Space withdrew before my headlights and piled against the distance, yet nothing seemed to change. The van, I thought, could be on a rolling tube simply driving in place. Something seemed to buzz—my fluorescent headache? Most likely my tires, whose soft running rip ran beneath everything, including Frank Sinatra’s voice. It sounded like masking tape being pulled off a stage. It gave solitude a skin.
I still have the same Time-Life book I had as a teen: The Body. It’s a popular instructional manual in a series called the Life Science Library, with photographs, paintings, old woodcuts, and minimal text, in the style of the early sixties. In obvious homage to (or theft from) Renaissance anatomical woodcuts, especially those of Vesalius, our circulatory and muscular systems are portrayed throwing javelins in deserts or pole-vaulting on beaches, with ancient ruins and Tuscan villas dotting the background. One picture is captioned “The Skeleton: Tower of Strength.”
All of this is noble and Adamic, and expresses a kind of Olympian pride in nation and race. In the section titled “Triumphs of Structure and Design,” we learn that bone is the steel and concrete of the body. Photos of ball-and-socket joints are juxtaposed with those of TV rabbit ears, the spine is pictured beside a broadcast tower with its web of steel guys, the cranium beside a domed stadium, and so on. None of this is meant to suggest that the natural is unnatural—exactly the opposite. We are the triumphs of structure and design, and our bodies provide the foundational models for culture’s designs.
There’s another way of looking at it, though. All the prosthetic bodies we employ in our lives, from autos to backhoes to forklifts to cherry pickers, not only demonstrate the body’s limitations but also illustrate how the body in time devised ad hoc means to adapt to new demands. During the slow gale of evolution, our bodies adjusted to bodies that had adjusted to entirely different climates and geographies. So the construction of the body, accomplished with whatever glue or spit was handy, was continually revised, subtracted from, added to, and propped up, with much straining of already existing girders and with improvised supports and odd hinges and joints, not all of which dovetailed. One thing we couldn’t do was to strip it down and start all over and get it right once and for all. Our bodies are palimpsests because evolution could only modify an anatomy that already existed, and couldn’t anticipate environmental upheavals, such as flooding and ice ages—it had to take them as they came.
For example, the spine. About six and a half million years ago, hominids began walking erect. Once we became upright the spine had to change, being previously suited to a horizontal position supported by four legs. How did it change? Among other things, the lower vertebrae grew bigger, to bear the new weight of the upper body. The pelvis rotated, and the iliac blades spread to make plates to hold the awkward bulk of the intestines. Still, we have lower-back pains and hernias, because of pressure on the disks between the vertebrae and because the heavy pudding of the intestines manages to find cracks to squeeze through anyway. And we have other problems, from aspirating food to fainting easily to varicose veins, all stemming from upright posture.
If the version of a monster in industrial society is of a creature constructed from spare parts of corpses, then, again, all of us are monsters, because as we evolved, old structures and parts became used for new functions. So the pores we use for sweating were originally holes through which our formerly more plentiful hair grew. And our sweat-producing glands were evolved from our ancestors’ eccrine glands, used to prevent a creature’s feet from slipping. Monkeys still have such glands on their palms, and when they sense threat or danger their paws become sticky to ensure a good grip in leaping for a branch. That’s why our palms sweat when we’re apprehensive.
And goosebumps exist because our ancestors puffed out their bodies and raised their hairs when cold or in danger. When we find ourselves doing the same, the vestigial hairs to which our erectile muscles are still attached don’t emerge above the skin, the result being goosebumps.
And armpit sweat contains a vestige of the odor with which our primate forefathers attracted their mates.
And milk glands of women probably began as apocrine glands, which oozed the scented wax our foremothers employed to send sexual signals.
And the hymen is the vestige of a membrane in mammals whose function was to limit sexual activity to the period during which conception was likely.
And so forth. Our bodies may well be cultural constructions, as the feminist philosopher Judith Butler says, but their homemade parts and sedimented scraps can disrupt the most compulsory cultural activities, from cooking to dancing to eating to speaking. The matter of the body erodes or bursts through its cultural performances. The “heavy bear” we lug around (Delmore Schwartz’s phrase) is not respectful of occasions. For example, our descended larynx—the product of an upright posture—means we’re the only mammal whose windpipe is next to its esophagus. The result can be explosive fits of coughing guaranteed to snuff candles at the most romantic dinners. The locations of body parts are often full of inconveniences. “Love has pitched his mansion in / the place of excrement,” says W. B. Yeats. Bad breath undermines eloquence, feet step on feet, noses subvert kisses, and farts punctuate bromides. Recessive genes and genetic mutations don’t help. In one rare condition, the heart is reversed and appears on the right-hand side of the body. Just as faulty materials or unstable foundations throw buildings out of plumb, as in the famous Leaning Tower, so our bodies list or drag or keel over, or internally collapse, or wear due to friction.
Early Christian churches were often made from the ruins of pagan temples, and the churches in turn were sometimes retrofitted to become Islamic mosques. Just so, our bodies are made from parts we used to have when we were animals—a whole parade of animals—which is no doubt why, at certain moments, we still are.
Sinatra was singing “Angel Eyes” now—a different sort of vestigial organ, I suppose—as I drove down I-88 past Cooperstown. Mothers tell their children that the shoehorn between the nose and the lip was made by an angel’s finger. Shoehorn? It must have a proper name. Quick, my Britannica. “The upper or maxillary process grows inward more slowly, but at last joins with the fronto-nasal process, and in the adult the lines of union are seen on each side as ridges of skin which run down from the nostril to the margin of the lip, and enclose that slightly depressed vertical gutter to which the term philtrum is given.” Volume XVIII, “Mouth,” the only water-stained pages in all of my twenty-eight volumes. The brownish crackling paper feels as if it were drooled on sometime between the two world wars.
I’d be home soon. Good. “ ’Scuse me while I disappear,” says Sinatra’s lyric. It was one A.M., and the traffic was so scant I could use the high beams for long stretches.
Angel eyes. Cherry lips. Tin ears, glass jaws, noodles, pussies, puds. There are times you’d think our human bodies might just collapse into a pile. They adjust to the ripples of time, both macro-time, the span of evolution, and micro-time, the segment we’re each allotted. And they are the checkpoint crossings between inner dispositions and external circumstance, with the result that the emotional and social obstacles they have to hurdle during their threescore and ten can take quite a toll. Some do collapse back to their infant state of fragmented pieces lost without a home. Some erode, some distend, some tighten, some loosen, some sag, some sadden, some shrink and retire, some grow monstrous, scabby, scaly, or hairy. No wonder we’re lonely. No wonder our loneliness is the one thing we share.
Five miles from home. The final cut from Only the Lonely had finished, and for the past half hour I’d been driving in silence. Wide awake, though. Thirsty, head throbbing. Thumb a dull reflex of low-amp pain. My lips felt inflamed but shriveled and hard, like cracked window putty. I’d seen some Chap Stick somewhere, and checked the little compartments in the dash. The small black and white tube lay behind a roll of quarters my brother had left there, I assume for paying tolls.
It slivered and caked on my lips unpleasantly. All at once it occurred to me that the last person who’d used this Chap Stick was dead. Molecules from his skin now smeared mine. It was almost like kissing him. I saw Paul in my mind, surrounded by flowers—face puddled in satin, soft eyes closed, lips slightly parted.