House

Have you ever woken up in a new life?

Screen shot from One Sings, the Other Doesn’t” by Agnes Varda

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House

If you are a late starter, you might also be a late finisher. Richard and I have arrived at the age where, if you die, no one clucks poignantly and says, “Oh, too soon.” I was seventy-three when I bought my first house. Half a house, actually. The other half belongs to Richard. Five years ago, he left academe and Arizona, where he’d been living, and entered the drift of life. It felt relaxing to him not to belong anywhere.

We pooled dead-parent money to buy the house, and I was excited as a newborn homeowner. Never mind it was a property too defeated by the neglect of its former owners to ask for bandages and meds. A few months later, COVID arrived, and we didn’t have anything better to do than make the house happy. Right now, you can probably hear the drilling and hammering outside the windows. The exterior is getting the best facelift you have ever seen. I’m jealous.     

We’d already swapped out the asphalt driveway with its grease stains for light-reflecting gravel. We’d already swapped out the old roof, a color so mournfully brown even moths looking for camouflage used to say, I can’t hide here. It’s too disturbing. The Trex deck with plastic railings and the vinyl siding are gone. Our brilliant contractors and their crew have been living with us for a month and will be around another month at least. Ahead of painting, the windows are wrapped. It’s like living in a Cristo. When the jobs are finished, who will live in this elegance? Baby old people.

As soon as you start a first time, you remember your life of first times. This morning I was thinking about a woman I met several years ago and the way I fall in love with strangers. I was a dinner party, and another woman was there who was beautiful and lean. She sat up straight behind her plate, piled with quinoa, salmon, and a sauté of vegetables, and she brought the fork to her lips many times. I wanted the friends who had invited us to disappear. Her curls were thick and tumbled over her face. She had a habit of placing her fingers in her mouth as if extracting words on a string. She spoke about a mess she was in. I wanted to postpone the time of knowing her better. I wanted a tattoo with the word "lucky" on my inner arm. I watched her eat until nothing was left on her plate, and I waited until we could stand together at the sink. She smelled of oranges and smoke. I sponged down counters and watched her muscles firm as she pulled plastic wrap over leftovers. She wasn’t sure where she should live or if she would have enough money to get by, and I could see this excited her, as if she was still young. She asked what I would do in her position, and I said nothing in order to see what she'd say next.

Two years ago, I started the publication you are reading now. Everything is Personal is named after a book I wrote in 2020, and the title is a joke, in that I take personally things that are social and political. I had recently published another book called Streaming Now, Postcards from the Thing that is Happening, and I was looking for a way to spread the word. A friend suggested I start a Substack, and soon after jumping in, I saw I’d come to a planet that was discovering itself. I mean writing here changed my life even more than the house. I get up each morning with birds singing outside and birds singing inside me. What are they singing about? I’m alive and look at my feathers. Wait, there’s a worm. OMG, that squirrel is twirling around on our feeder! Should we be generous? Hell no, we’re birds!

Everyone has always been more successful than me, I like to think. Don’t look into it. It has the same weight as the name of the hair color I use, “cola.” My mother used to squeeze my hand with little pulse beats as we walked along the streets of Washington Heights. I had her all to myself in the years before I went to school. Around three o’clock, we’d walk to the schoolyard to pick up my sister, and as soon as my mother saw Ellen, she dropped my hand and rushed forward. Everyone has always been more successful than me, and it isn’t true and no one cares.

Have you ever woken up in a happier life? I do it every morning, compared to sleep. Occasionally, I have a dream in which a wish is fulfilled. I wake up to the realization it has not been fulfilled, and I feel oh damn, it will never be true, love is lost forever, and I am lost forever in lost love. The rest of the time, my bag is stolen, or I'm being chased, or I'm walking around without pants. There are no health benefits in sleep if you can’t get to the ski slope. No matter what you do, there are road blocks and sudden responsibilities to a dog or a relative you’ve never seen before, and you forgot you were going to the ski slope in the first place. Why is there a test you didn't study for, and where is the room you are supposed to take it in, and why don't you know any answers, and how can you go on living with this failure. Then you're in the play, I mean there are people in the audience watching you, and you have no idea what your part is and no memory of having read the script.

When you fall into sudden good fortune, it’s the same thing for the first time, the way you fall in love with strangers. The way each new death is all the deaths you have ever known.

You don’t learn anything as you move forward in life because it’s beside the point. It’s not that you forget your life. It’s that sensation in the moment remains so keen it obscures the moments you have already lived and the imagined moments you have yet to live. Both of these time frames are ghosts. It’s the reason you aren’t old or young inside yourself, only who you are.

Last night we watched The Naked Civil Servant, the film adaptation of Quentin Crisp’s memoir, produced for British television in 1975. That is fifty years ago. That is half a century. Richard and I in separate countries on separate continents, I in the US, he in the UK. At the time the film came out, Crisp was living in the Village in New York, where everyone more or less had come to look like him. We wore the clothing of freedom. The hair and makeup of freedom. Crisp had lived long enough to see people—gay and straight and male and female—dress like what we called glam rock fashion and Quentin, in the 1930s and 1940s, walking the streets of conservative London in lipstick and red bouffant hair, called being “a flamboyant, effeminate homosexual.”

John Hurt plays Crisp with the same touching confidence that Crisp applies to his life. He’s not going to apologize, translate himself, or ask for love for being who he is. He’s going to live according to the rules of improv comedy, where you say, “Yes, and . . . “ to whatever is proposed to you. You are a poncy queen, says the world, and you smile and say, well of course, I didn’t intend for you to assume otherwise. Crisp gains the power of resistance that is always bold and always unwilling to argue.

The film seems a bit musty in the way it positions the viewer outside Quentin’s society of renegade queers, who gather in a coffee house to trade intel on police sweeps and makeup. The first time Quentin is offered a tiny tube of lipstick, it glows and levitates with holy power.

The dated aspect didn’t matter to me. I kept thinking about how I could be more like Quentin—aware of what life is and not needing to fight all the time. What quiet would that offer me and the world around me—even the entire world to which I would be adding my pea-sized pellet of softness? I couldn’t imagine it, and of course with shyness and stubbornness you see you may not really want it. The pleasure for Quentin is, he doesn’t want to be mistaken for a man. The risk for me is, I might be taken for a girl. 

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My Brilliant Friend, season 4 episode 2.

Alba Rohrwacher as Lenu in season 4 of My Brilliant Friend (HBO).

Lenu has learned that Nino is still living with his wife and their children in Naples. She’s out of her mind with rage and disgust and I still want him. That’s the whole episode.

She’s back with her two young daughters, and she schleps them around, from this apartment to that apartment, in a feeling state of falling. Falling from a height in a dream. Falling out of love, without falling out of the need to keep seeing Nino and smelling Nino and hearing Nino’s voice. She knows what he is. It doesn’t matter. And the doesn’t matter of it all, the Stella with Stanley of it all, is something she doesn’t know how to understand.

She thinks it makes her a bad feminist still to trot after a man. She doesn’t yet know she is still at the center of her life, not Nino. He is her id puppet, and it’s still her id.

What to do with men if you are a woman. Sex might be the one place where a woman isn’t reminded of the way society works. Sex without commentary. Not a Godard movie, I mean. The thing that Lenu can’t resist is the thing that makes women and men the same in tiny bursts on beds. I’m saying it’s easy to mistake sex with men as the problem if you are a feminist—when actually everything else is the problem.

A dahlia sa big as the Ritz.

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