I am exactly the same
And I care less.
In my fifties, I stopped wondering why people do what they do. People don’t know why they do what they do, and the people who admit this and skip over the subject of human motive appeal to me. You find your thoughts moving to light floating on a wall, reflecting the fronds of a palm swaying in barely perceptible currents of air.
In my twenties, I was seeing a shrink, and one Christmas I knitted him a pair of mittens. The following Christmas I knitted him another pair of mittens with the exact same wool. He asked me what the significance was of repeating the gift. I had no choice but to see that my interest in what we were doing was thin. It’s irresistible to think about something in the past that can produce the same intake of breath and embarrassed laughter any time you summon it for the rest of your life.
Richard could eat a cheese sandwich every night for his tea and not care. He digs out the snow, so our solar unit can sweep around with the sun. There is no sun. Where are the birds? You don’t hear Scriabin enough on the radio. The red of a poppy makes everything else look like paper.
I am loving the puffy coat I was given for free when we bought a side table from a stranger in Rhinebeck. The wool on the nearby sheep is so thick it covers their eyes and they bump into each other. (Not true.) I thought about a man who walked down the stairs of the south tower after the first plane hit and faked his death instead of breaking up with his girlfriend. (Not a real person.) I bought a small Turkish kilim from a woman who looked like a young horse stepping high in mounded snow. Richard is reading Nietzsche’s The Genealogy of Morals, and I’m glad we’re not interested in the same things. Dear universe, I’m sorry for the dream I had last night. I’m at a hotel and someone comes into my room and vomits over everything. I think about the sudden turns life takes and sorrow for the vulnerability of hotels.
In The Wizard of Oz, no one can believe Dorothy wants to return to a black-and-white world. No one can believe she misses Aunt Em, who out of cowardice and fake piety hands over Dorothy’s dog to a woman with money and social power. No one can believe the male farmhands are content to work for Aunt Em, who scolds them for not attending to their chores all the time. The pleasure of the film are the performances by the great hams of Vaudeville given set pieces in the movie, chiefly Bert Lahr as the cowardly lion with a Brooklyn accent. The accent is the truth of the movie, the smell of Times Square and urban life, where every kind of misfit missing a heart and a brain and courage sit together in a bar, wanting the night never to end.
I think the way it happened is I asked Bruce are you going to stop seeing the woman he was having an affair with, and he said no, and the next day I found an apartment and by the end of the week I had moved out. I remember Bruce saying many decades later he was surprised I left without a conversation. I understood he didn’t want to stop his affair. It hurt my feelings, and it was also a relief his doing this to me. I liked loving him in his absence. Rent for the apartment was $200—half the money I earned teaching two courses at Hunter College. I lived on Charles Street, and there were water bugs and mice. I made it beautiful. The fear I felt was hypothetical and in retrospect exciting, as if now real life was going to begin because I was on my own. Real life did not begin in the way, perhaps, I imagined real life beginning. Real life has turned out to be a series of these kinds of moves.
I read a piece in Paris Review by David Adjmi, an appreciation of the Hitchcock film Shadow of a Doubt (1943), starring Teresa Wright and Joseph Cotton. He plays her uncle, a serial murderer her tender and searching character comes to learn. Suddenly, I remembered I’d known Teresa Wright in her later years and that we’d met a few times at Popover Café on Amsterdam Avenue. I remember sitting across from her and seeing the young face in the old face, both beautiful in their ways.
We first met in 1990 after a performance she gave at Berkshire Theater Festival in Athol Fugard’s play The Road to Mecca. The play is about an aging artist, nearly destroyed by isolation yet sustained by her work, and Gardner and I had cried as we sat there. It was August, and he had been diagnosed with bone marrow cancer, and by December 14 he would be dead. Teresa came out to talk to us after the others had left, maybe because I was a reviewer for the Village Voice. Maybe that’s why we met afterward in New York or because Gardner had died.
I’m straining to recall our conversations. Did she talk about her daughter? Her career in Hollywood? I was interested that she still wanted to perform. She was 72, six years younger than I am now. During the play she was on stage for two hours and at one point delivered a monologue that runs for four pages. This strikes me now as a massive accomplishment and also something actors learn to do. With or without the actor’s nightmare of forgetting your lines and not remembering where the theater is and when the play starts, actors have practiced looking out and continuing to speak no matter what. That’s what actors do.
At the time I knew her I was 43, and when you are 43 and talking to a person in their 70s, they seem to occupy a different plane of existence. This is something I cannot keep in mind now when I interact with people several decades younger than me, that to them I may appear to be a lizard or another life form from a period of history they don’t know, nor the ideas that sparked the air of that time.
In 1941 when Teresa was 23 and first signed a contract with Samuel Goldwyn, she inserted a number of clauses that sound like the wit and self-possession that mark her acting: “The aforementioned Teresa Wright shall not be required to pose for photographs in a bathing suit unless she is in the water. Neither may she be photographed running on the beach with her hair flying in the wind. Nor may she pose in any of the following situations: In shorts, playing with a cocker spaniel; digging in a garden; whipping up a meal; attired in firecrackers and holding skyrockets for the Fourth of July; looking insinuatingly at a turkey for Thanksgiving; wearing a bunny cap with long ears for Easter; twinkling on prop snow in a skiing outfit while a fan blows her scarf; assuming an athletic stance while pretending to hit something with a bow and arrow.”
I don’t know why our meetings stopped. I’m sure it was for no important reason. I don’t like to think about the ending of anything. I remember almost nothing, really, of our conversations, except that they happened.
Biz
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"...when you are 43 and talking to a person in their 70s, they seem to occupy a different plane of existence." I think this is sometimes true and sometimes not true. Because my genes include oily skin that doesn't wrinkle, younger people are often astonished that I am 71. But like Jeannie Ewing, below, I think it is a matter of how deep the personal connection is.
I love the way that you can write ten seemingly random things in a row, but it is so skillfully done that it makes a coherent whole. You are a magnificent writer and I look forward to your posts. Some days I get up in the morning and delete nearly everything I subscribe to without reading it. I never delete Laurie Stone! Rule to live by: Never delete Laurie Stone.
Hi Laurie,
I'd like to comment on this excerpt from your piece today:
"At the time I knew her I was 43, and when you are 43 and talking to a person in their 70s, they seem to occupy a different plane of existence. This is something I cannot keep in mind now when I interact with people several decades younger than me, that to them I may appear to be a lizard or another life form from a period of history they don’t know, nor the ideas that sparked the air of that time."
I am 43 years old, approaching 44. My parents are in their 70s, and, while sometimes, yes, they do seem to "occupy a different plane of existence," mostly they don't. I don't feel that those who are decades my senior are "lizards or another life form." Instead, I try--with every human interaction, whether someone is younger or older than I am--to enter into their world, to try to understand what their lived experience is like, as they relay it to me.
Imagining what life might be like for someone else is the only way I've learned to grow, to mature. I just want you to know that I don't see you the way you may think someone my age sees you. I appreciate you. Thank you for your contributions to the literary community, Laurie.