Romance Three Ways
On "If You're a Girl," stories by Ann Rower
I began watching Cardinal (Hulu) because I’m in love with Billy Campbell. He speaks in a whisper. I love that whisper. He doesn't want to wake the dead. And his eyes. Why is he so sad? He's probably not sad. It's the way his eyebrows are shaped in a perpetual question about something uncertain and probably dangerous approaching in the distance.
I’m in love as well with Karine Vanasse, who plays Billy’s comrade detective on the show. I couldn’t wait for these two to get together. Actually, they are already together. Their passion resides in the space between their bodies and the silences between their words. It makes you think about what love is. Karine is hot. You won't believe how hot she is. Billy isn't really hot. He's too sad to be hot. And that's the genius of the show. One hot and one sad form a beautiful possibility.
This morning, Richard and I were talking about the show, and I realized there is poignancy in the role the detectives must assume in a series like Cardinal, where, each season, we watch a different set of horrific serial killings. The Canadian backwater where the show is set is a magnet for sadistic killers with a grand theory. What I’m saying is that, in a show like this, the detectives are always behind what the viewer knows. It takes the detectives a whole season to discover what we learn in the first episode or so—at least about who the killers are and what’s eating them. Schmendricks, we call out as the body counts rise, look, he’s right there, you just passed him on the street!
The poignancy of the one who can’t catch up is what I think has engaged me, and it’s connected to the narrator of a book I’m reading with massive enjoyment, a collection of linked stories by Ann Rower called If You’re a Girl. The Rower narrator is always the last person to know things and in her willingness to go with whatever flow sweeps her along, she faces life with love and curiosity. This person is the opposite of a know-it-all, and her lack of critical judgment opens her to adventures.
https://mitpress.mit.edu/9781635902020/if-youre-a-girl/
In one chapter, she's taking speed and passing out and is so weirded out by being married she agrees to spend a week in the hospital for neurological tests that every captured primate on the planet would chew through steel bars to escape. Not Ann. The tests and the marriage come swimming back while she's setting up an event in the Museum of Modern Art for the daughter of Larry Rivers. In the hospital, she accidentally finds notes a nurse has made that say she has a brain tumor. She mentions this to the doctor the next time he’s in her room, and he says:
Oh that. We do that all the time. The only way you can get a bed in this hospital is if you say it’s an emergency. We always do that.
But I could tell he was upset about me seeing it. Either that or he was upset about me finding out.
Of course you would tell me if I really had a brain tumor?
Yes, yes, he said pushing me back down. Relax, you don’t have a brain tumor. But maybe he was upset because he was lying to me. I didn’t quite believe him. Still don’t.
Later, I heard that he had been furious with the nurse, who had been so careless as to let the patient see the nurses’ chart and had her fired, and for a second I loved him. But then you always love them somewhat. All that lying around in bed waiting for them to come.
In another story, set in the 1970s, Ann is teaching English at City College, and she comes upon a line she doesn’t understand in a poem by W. H. Auden. That’s not the thing I want to tell you. I want you to notice the way Ann tells the story of almost forgetting to tell this story in her book. She’s in her eighties, now, looking back on her life. I’ll let her explain:
I woke up this morning with a knot of gloom in my stomach. It’s September! What with the academic calendar burned into my DNA practically from birth . . . September, not April, is the cruelest month, for sure . . . . And then, all of a sudden I remembered what it was—one of my favorite poems . . . ‘September 1, 1939’, which I haven’t thought about in a long time, but now it’s all coming back to me, leaving me utterly baffled as to how I could ever have forgotten one of the most memorable experiences of my young life. Not just the poem, not even really the poem itself . . . Oh, yes, the whole experience is flooding back into my brain as I write. A story I must tell, before I forget it all over again.
The line in the poem she can’t figure out is: “what occurred at Linz.” It’s before Google and Wikipedia, so she thinks to call Auden on the phone and ask him to explain it to her:
He was actually an East Village neighbor—he lived on Saint Mark‘s place with his lover Chester Kallman and I lived on Second Avenue and Tenth. . . . We discussed the poem, although he told me he was actually thinking of abandoning it completely. He had already omitted the line ‘what occurred at Linz’ and perversely, I thought, refused to tell me what it meant . . . . It’s hard to believe that I forgot about it until this morning. At some point over the years I found out Linz was [near] Hitler‘s birthplace . . . What else was in Linz? A huge concentration camp, Mauthausen, famous for being the camp where the Polish Intelligentsia (it could have been my father or me)—artists, teachers, university professors, and apparently Boy Scouts—ended up being taken.
I know what you’re thinking: You love Ann’s writing because it reminds you of your own—the way it jumps around in time and the way the narrator speaks to the reader as if she’s sitting across from you at a café. Yes, Ann and I are alike in these ways. But let me call your attention to the distinct glory of Ann’s form of flopsy-mopsy, Chaplinesque uncertainty. Like the detectives on Cardinal—and like the glory of all art that stays inside you—it isn’t exactly sure what’s going on. If an artist doesn’t stay in the unknowing space either through circumstance, temperament, or practice, they wind up in the camp with the know-it-alls who have grand theories. They wind up, more or less, with the serial killers.
In Ann’s world, people love drugs. It’s part of the hazy sheen that rises off her sentences, and reading her I was reminded I have almost never experienced pleasure from drugs. This feels like a sign of how my life was going to go. I was going to be awake and sort of out of it because I was never out of it enough. Never mind. In tribute to Ann and to the drug subculture I could only observe from a seat high in the bleachers, here are my two good memories of drugs.
The first is the drug they give you before a colonoscopy. It’s fantastic and lasts like a second. You know it happened, but it has no content. It’s a beautifully wrapped present with nothing in it.
The other time was when I had my knee reconstructed, and I was waiting for my friend Seymour to return to the hospital. I was still a little under the anesthesia, so when a nurse offered me morphine, I said, “No thanks,” thinking it might make me groggy and less than entertaining for Seymour. That’s how little I knew about drugs. I didn’t know that post surgical pain mounts in a progression that’s like cells dividing and reprinting themselves anywhere they can. Suddenly, I was in so much pain, I needed more than the usual amount of morphine to level out, and it took a little while to kick in, and Seymour held my hand, and I didn’t know what to do except not make a big deal about the pain, so I started laughing. I was very happy to see Seymour, who is no longer alive and who was, most of the time, kind and patient with me. The motto here is morphine is great.
Today on Warren Street, Richard and I sat on a bench in the sun. Before we left the house, he’d listened to a BBC recording of Ted Hughes reading some poems, with his broad Yorkshire vowels. In one poem, Hughes recalled the kind of steam trains Richard had ridden to school on from his village in Leicestershire, train cars with framed, pastoral scenes above the seats that were exactly like the views out the windows. Richard recalled his grandparents visiting Blackpool. Often in Richard’s backward glance, his grandparents are in their car, looking through the windscreen at a dark, moody sea.
We talked about the difference between nostalgia and an elegiac mood, although we couldn’t be sure there was a difference. We talked about the inconsolable grief felt by Sylvia Plath for betting on her husband Ted Hughes, rather than on herself. I recalled that Sylvia, early in her marriage, had sent out Ted’s poems for publication ahead of her own poems, and I wondered if she’d ever really been turned on, as she recorded in her version of a Stepford Wife diary, by thinking of Ted as a god.
Which brings me to the vagina candle developed by Gwyneth Paltrow a few years ago and to the third thing in this post I love. I haven’t smelled the candle yet. It costs a lot. I would be happy to smell it. It probably smells great.
I knew a woman in London, who was tall and beautiful. She was very cool, and I don't remember why she let me stay with her in the great flat she shared with her husband, who was also very cool. It was one of those things that happened when you were young in the early 1970s. Like calling Auden on the phone and having him invite you over to talk about his poems. Maybe these things are still possible. I think they are.
I'm recalling this gorgeous, generous woman because her husband teased her about the smell of her vagina. It was a thing to tease woman about the smell of their vaginas because it was a thing to tease women about every aspect of their bodies and think the joke was funny and based on something true.
When I stuck my finger in my vagina and licked it, it tasted kind of sweet. It tasted not at all like semen. I have always enjoyed sucking on a cock, once I got over the amazement people did things like that and the amazement that men wanted to eat my pussy. But the thing about the beautiful woman in London and her husband's mean nickname for her vagina—which was “tuna”—is not something you ever forget because it’s a perfect example of things you can't be sure are true and that hate you.
Have I ever had sex without making sure my pussy smelled good? I could probably get that done because I don’t drink much and, as I mentioned, I don’t do drugs. Cheers to Gwyneth’s candle. I would be happy to scent the entire world with the smell of this candle and say it smells like vaginas in general, and maybe it does.
Biz
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Zoom conversations.
The next Zoom conversation on writing craft and on the subject matter of the stack—the Village Voice, vagina candles, coffee with Auden!—is this SATURDAY APRIL 13 from 3 to 4pm EST. The Zooms are joyous gatherings FOR ALL PAID SUBSCRIBERS, where you can interact with other writers and readers, and where, ahead of time, you are invited to send questions about your own writing projects. Very tender and smart people come. I can't believe the numbers of smarty pants people who show up. To RSVP and receive a link, you must send me an email at: lauriestone@substack.com. Some emails go astray, so be sure I have confirmed you. If not, I haven’t received you RSVP, so send me a message here or on FB messenger.
Prompty People
Try writing a short piece entirely with dialogue. Here’s a sample:
I say to Richard, “Stand by the tree. I want to take a picture of you and the tree.” He says, “Why?” I say, “It’s our tree. Do you remember when it was a dying stick in a black plastic pail?” He says, “Someone left it by the hedge.” I say, “You knew I would bring it home.” He says, “I told you that. I wanted you to think I was thinking about you all the time.” I say, “It was a ploy?” He says, “Ploy is too strong a word.” I say, “I believed you. I believe everyone.” He says, “I was thinking about you all the time.” I say, “I was thinking about you all the time, too.” I say, “Do you remember when Palmy’s first frond unfurled?” He says, “I didn’t study it as carefully as you.” I say, “It spiraled open in the shape of the universe.” He says, “To be honest, I don’t care much about vegetation, or animals for that matter. I am confused if a fish is an animal, although I have advanced degrees in fields attached to the sciences. I seldom eat fish, although I fancy a kipper for breakfast from time to time. It reminds me of my mother. I do not think I spent five minutes in childhood wondering if she was happy.” I say, “The tree is the same age as our relationship. We found it right after we met.” He says, “You created the conditions of a rain forest.” I say, “We called it Palmy.” He says, “I think of the tree as Palmy, but I do not think if the tree dies it means we will die.” I say, “Fine, but I want you to stand by the tree in a happy period of life.”
The prompts are for your pleasure, to use for writes. Please don't post your experiments in the comments section below, but feel free to post them in "Notes" on Substack, where people can read them and leave comments. Enjoy!
Plath was a poet. Hughes was Mr. Plath
LUV this post, and I bought that damn goop candle. Let me explain: I teach a course about sexuality, gender & health and it was online Covid days. We were talking about celeb influencers and yada yada I said "I'm gonna buy it." I did, and it was very expensive but is, as it turns out, a very good candle. It burns slowly and evenly and smells most strongly of citrus. No clue if that's what GP's orgasm (not her vagina = :)) smells like, however.