At the Bar
Notes from a darkling plain.
I’m sad. I’m scared. You know what I know. This is a love letter.
We're at the bar. The lighting is soft. It's not time to leave. You know what’s going on outside. I don’t need to list it for you. I have something funny to tell you. I’m wearing a jacket the color of a pumpkin. That’s not the funny thing. I voted early on State Street, and I'm looking at your eyelashes. The pain is everywhere that people are. Tell me about the morning light in your bedroom. Tell me about the look on the face of the last person you said “I love you” to. What were they wearing?
Over the weekend, Richard and I hosted six writers at our house, where we wrote together and talked together and read together and ate together and invented together and were made to feel alive in the world and befriended. There was a rush up to the gathering with shopping and prepping and cooking and the catering mind of working backwards from the arrival of guests to the times of service.
I forgot about my life in the sense of what if and where do we go. I forgot the contractors returning today and the gutter people coming, too. It's cool this morning. Our friend Linda has stayed over. I've saved smoked salmon for her breakfast, and in a few minutes we'll sit in the kitchen while Richard makes coffee. It's five years since we closed on the house. The guests felt looked after. It was a play by Pirandello, where the actors are at ease without a script.
During one exercise, in a room with another writer, I was answering her question about a friendship that was changing. I wasn’t sure it still had a smell or if it had ever really existed. I was looking back at a person who was me I didn’t know. I had met her on a train. We’d talked and then not seen each other again. I was trying to look squarely at romance. The phrase “look squarely at romance” is a straw hat with holes. The thing I said about the friend is I wanted to fail and care less. As soon as I said the words, “fail and care less,” I knew they had no puch. Puch is the thing a fur has when air makes the hairs float.
When this friend wrote to me on my birthday, I knew no romance is ever dead. I have tried looking back at the romances in my life, and the romances are still out hiking on trails and rowing boats they don’t know how they got into. I was going to talk about a man who says he loves me because there is no possibility we will ever touch again. I was going to talk about the way wanting someone makes you want the other things they have to offer. I talked about the woman because the last loss is all the loses that have come before, and in that way it’s more seductive than anything that rests easily.
Everywhere I look I see people trying to improve themselves as moral individuals, and it bores me. One of the things I loved about my friend is we could yell at each other, Jew to Jew, then cool off without leaving the room. In the women’s movement, when we found ourselves attached to friends we thought of as family, what did we mean by trust? Trust to do what? Anyone who learns to conceal a secret self knows how to break a bond of trust when it’s in the way of something else they want. Doesn’t everyone learn to conceal a secret self inside family life? Inside any relationship?
I’m streaming the TV series Disclaimer (Apple), where a woman sits on the beach and allows a young man to drown. She has been having sex with him for several days while her husband is away and she’s been left with her young son. She hates her life except for the sex she’s having with the young man, and then she lets him die after he saves her son from drowning.
Really?
Yes, a woman could hate her life. Yes, a woman could be bored taking care of her young child. Yes, a woman could decide to have sex with a stranger she meets on the beach. Yes, she could become alarmed when the man says he will follow her back to England, where they live, after they leave Italy, where they are vacationing.
Could a woman fall asleep on the beach so long her son would be carried into the water on a rubber raft without her knowing? Really? After her lover rescues the boy and is himself caught in a rip tide, could she sit on the sand, glancing at the surf, without alerting others he is drowning? Because everyone knows bad mother and hot sex are the gateway sins leading to manslaughter by proxy?
Twenty years later, after the woman’s secrets are revealed to her husband and her co-workers, the world operates as if this woman could exist. The world believes in the existence of this kind of woman because this woman is entirely a creation of the world’s imagination of what a woman is. To play this remarkably unappealing character, Cate Blanchett is an awkward horse with lowered head, trudging back and forth to the barn. This is a love letter to actual women.
Saturday night, I was a reader at Spotty Dog Books and Ale on Warren Street. The event was organzized by Andrea Kleine, and the theme was “hellscape.” Emma Copely Eisenberg and Laura Marris were the other readers, and the house was packed with young women, women closer to my age, and a sizable number of men. There we all were in the bar.
When I heard the theme was “hellscape,” I thought not of the darkling plain outside the bar but of myself, and I told the story of a friend’s dead dog. My friend had adopted the dog from a dying woman, and the dog had lived another eight years. It was a little Yorkie I felt an instant aversion to. It sometimes smelled bad, and it developed a choking cough, and as it got older the pearly cataract eyes of a zombie. That my friend could love the animal no matter what was part of her humanity and something that annoyed me because it seemed to devalue her love for me. The dog and I were rivals, and in life the dog won.
The narrator of my story relates the dog’s death, which was pretty much based on what really happened. What really happened is the dog was becoming frail and unresponsive during a time I was staying with my friend. She placed the dog in the basket of her bike and rode it a mile or so uptown to her vet and returned with the dog, wrapped in a yellow blanket. Only the dog was no longer alive at this point, and my friend wasn’t sure and asked me to check.
In real life I checked, and sure enough the dog was dead, its tongue hanging from its jagged mouth, and I had to tell my friend, who was in another room, leaning against a wall. I held her and felt sad for her and the dog. She was so distraught, you would have needed a heart of stone not to feel for her grief and feel grief too for the starkness of death beside us.
When I wrote the story as it happened, it sounded sentimental, so I flipped it. I wrote something I had not felt—at least not entirely. In the story, the narrator, finally rid of the bloody animal, confides to the reader: “It was all I could do to keep from laughing.”
Harsh, you’re thinking! If anyone is the zombie with a heart of ice, it’s you! In my defense, I can say, it wasn’t true, reader! I hadn’t really been happy when the dog died, although in absolute candor, it was a relief no longer to hear its hacking cough and see its ratty face. Why did I do this to my friend? Like the scorpion who promises not to sting the frog that carries her to safety and then stings the frog, it’s the writer’s job to keep you in the bar as long as possible.
Readers, you fluff my heart.
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Dear writer of beautiful chaos,
You had me at the pumpkin jacket. The way you dance between moments like a bird hopping branches - from State Street voting to eyelashes to dead dogs to TV dramas - it's the most honest way anyone could tell a story. Because isn't that how our minds work? Not in neat little boxes but in sprawling connections, where a friend's grief reminds us of Cate Blanchett playing an unlikeable woman, reminds us of trust and secret selves and Jewish arguments that end without ending.
I love how you write about romance like it's a living thing that doesn't know it's dead - still out there hiking trails and rowing boats. That's exactly right. Every lost love is still wandering somewhere in our personal geography, taking up space, breathing our air. And that line about the "straw hat with holes" - how perfectly it captures the futility of trying to pin down something as wild and unwieldy as romance with mere language.
You make me think about all the times I've turned truth inside out for the sake of a better story. How we betray small confidences in service of larger truths. The way you transformed your genuine grief for your friend's dog into that deliciously wicked laugh - it's the writer's sleight of hand, isn't it? We're all that scorpion, stinging not because we want to, but because that's the price of keeping readers in the bar, under that soft light, listening for just a little longer.
Your writing is like that moment when you're asked to check if the dog is really dead - raw and tender and horrible and human all at once. You weave through time like it's a room you're redecorating, moving furniture around until the truth sits right. From contractors and gutters to drowning lovers to hellscapes that turn out to be internal after all.
Thank you for this maze of moments. For showing how a love letter can be both tender and sharp-edged. For reminding us that sometimes the truest way to tell a story is to let it wander, to let it follow its own strange logic, like a Yorkie in a bicycle basket, carried toward its ending.
With gratitude for your beautiful chaos,
A reader who stayed in the bar until closing
==Tell me about the look on the face of the last person you said “I love you” to. What were they wearing?==
Charmed, pleased, delighted. A pink sweatshirt from Puerto Rico that had a toucan over most of it.
==“It was all I could do to keep from laughing.”==
This may be unfair to the writer, but I read this shortly after hearing (via YouTube) Steve Goodman and David Allan Coe sing (in separate videos) the song Goodman wrote with John Prine, "You Never Even Called Me By My Name." The first line of the song: "It was all that I could do to keep from cryin''"