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next Wednesday morning. Hamish will announce the time and the way to participate via “Notes” and through his emails. Our conversation will be about ways to use “Notes” to post creative, flash pieces—to use a literary model of seduction on social media as opposed to the trend there for people to fight and argue.Hamish has taken notice of “Everything is Personal” partly owing to your responses. Please keep spreading the word and reacting to what you read here. There are three buttons at the bottom of each post: “like,” “share,” and “comment.” You know what to do with them. Huge thanks.
Six Scars
1975
There’s a scar on my left forefinger, a thin scar no one notices but me. It’s more than 40 years old, and I will die with it. I was cutting onions in the apartment on Christopher Street when the knife slipped. Robert and I were expecting friends, among them Peter and his girlfriend.
Robert held my hand under cold water and got a band-aid. He said I didn’t need stitches. He was tall and slender with a gorgeous mop of curls, slanted eyes, and high cheekbones.
I sautéed the onions with chicken livers, shallots and herbs. I added cognac and tossed it into a blender with a few hard-boiled eggs. I spread the mixture on endive leaves. We were looking for signs our lives were heading somewhere.
Peter was at our place every day. He liked us more than he liked his girlfriends, and it gave him an edge with them. That night, he brought Paula. Paula was a tap dancer. Before Peter, she’d been seeing a man who died in her bed. He’d had one those Nelson Rockefeller heart attacks. She had called the police and answered questions. These days she was doing past lives regressions. It’s impossible to have a brush with death without contemplating your own.
After Robert and I moved to East Hampton, Peter rented a house out there to be close to us. There was something about us that made people flop on our couch and eat soup at our table. After I became involved with Gardner, Peter wouldn’t speak to me. Eventually he and Robert split up over a business deal gone bad.
For years after Gardner’s death, I dreamt of being back with Robert. We would have sex, and then he would tell me it he wasn’t coming back. At the time of the scar, I was twenty-eight and a freelance writer. I knew what I would do with my life.
1992
There’s a scar down the center of my left knee. I was riding my bike along Ninth Avenue, on my way to a party, when a car cut me off. I was going downhill and couldn’t break fast enough. I was thrown off the bike, and the driver sped away. When I stood up, the pain was strange.
A third of the meniscus was torn from the kneecap and the interior cruciate ligament was snapped. I had arthroscopic surgery to snip off the torn meniscus and several weeks later major surgery to reconstruct the ligament.
I was 46 and alone, uncertain of how to be afraid. Fear, like language, needs connection to take shape. I recall blue-green surgical gowns, floating around me. I remember the thick fingers of the resident as she inserted a needle into the top of my hand. She didn’t prepare me for the peculiar heat of the spinal injection, although what can you say about pain that is indescribable?
Before the surgery, I called Robert. We were speaking again after ten years apart. He was living with a woman he loved, and he had helped raise her son. We would meet for coffee some afternoons. He lived near the Village Voice. It didn’t matter what we talked about. I was happy to see his beautiful face. On the phone, when I told him about the accident, he sounded concerned, but he didn’t call again for six months, and the reason he did was for something else. I mentioned I’d had surgery, and he grew silent, just the way he did in my dreams. He didn’t want me to need anything from him, and I didn’t make the mistake again.
When I woke up after the surgery, a nurse said my friend Jacob had been there and had left. He lived a few blocks away. I asked her to call him to return. While I waited, I was offered a shot of morphine. I thought it might make we drowsy or unfocused. I didn’t understand the way drugs work. I say this, knowing I am the only person in my generation who can say this. By the time Jacob was beside me, I needed several shots to level off the pain. He squeezed my hand. It hurt so much, all I could do was laugh.
A slice of tendon from the middle of my knee was grafted to bone to replace the broken ligament. It takes six months for tendon cells to behave like ligament cells, but more time is needed for the skin to fade from purple to rose to white, as well as for the nerves around the cuts to regenerate. When I squatted, the injured knee didn’t go down as far as the right one, and it was painful to put weight on it. Still, as in pornography—where people emerge pretty unmarked after god knows what mayhem—my leg was little damaged.
1997
By the time we got back to Sammy’s place, my ankle was raw. I didn’t know to wear boots on a motorcycle. I didn’t know the exhaust pipe becomes a griddle, and Sammy hadn’t warned me. Lenny Bruce had a routine. He’s in an ambulance, and his leg is hanging by a thread, and the nurse in the ambulance is sexy. He says, “I got hot. I got a hard-on. I couldn’t help it.”
On the couch, when Sammy pulled me toward him, his apartment looked better. When he pulled down my underpants, the elastic caught the burn, and I said, “Ouch.” He took my ankle in his hands and said, “This is the scar you’ll remember me by.”
He wasn’t beautiful. His nose jutted to the left and his chin stuck out too far. I already knew what I knew. We had sex, and I was happy in a drifty way. Afterward, he switched on the light, and we saw blood on the sheets. I said, “There’s laundry stuff that gets it out.” He said, “I don’t care about the sheets.” When he went to the bathroom for gauze and tape, I told myself to leave.
I went to the living room for my clothes. He said, “What are you doing?” I zipped up my pants and looked at him, and there it was, an expression so lit by gratitude someone else might have taken it for love. I said, “I can’t sleep here.” He said, “You don’t sleep. You don’t eat. Some boyfriend I am.”
He followed me to the kitchen and said, “How will you get home?” I said. “Walk.” He said, “It’s late.” I shrugged. He opened the fridge and got a Coke. He said, “I guess I’ll work, then.” I said, “Great.” He sipped the Coke. He was naked, leaning against the frame of the door.
I moved into the hall. He followed me a little way. I waved and took the stairs. On the landing, I heard the door click shut, and I exhaled.
I walked past the bagel place on the corner that smelled of poppy seeds and garlic. Jasmine was in bloom. I walked past the noodle joint where cabbies hung out. I walked so many miles that summer, it was as if I could walk out of my life.
The next time we met, he inspected the wound. He looked after it until it healed into an angry ridge. Before the redness faded, he started seeing another woman. In time the scar disappeared but not the smell of him.
1998
I had a facelift after Sammy called it quits. I thought about the pain I’d caused other people and really, from the start, I knew he couldn't love me.
At the time, I had a friend named Monica, who was 20 years younger than me. She was tall and sexy, and she did this thing with tossing her hair. The times we went out together, I watched men moth around her, and I felt myself disappear.
The facelift wasn’t painful, and the scars quickly faded. It was a face Sammy didn’t see, although I thought about running into him and hoped I would be laughing. On his last visit, he sat beside me on the couch. He was wearing shorts, and I felt the hairs on his legs. He was so happy to be free, he became aroused.
Among the gifts he gave me was a black lace bra. My friend Lily had had a cancerous lump removed from a breast a few years before we became friends, and although she had described the surgery, I hadn’t seen her naked. In my apartment, she unhooked the bra she was wearing and stood before me with her chin up. A divot of tissue was missing from her left breast, but it looked okay. It made me feel close to her, and I knew I would not forget the moment.
She said she felt disfigured. I said she was beautiful. I thought she was beautiful. The Sammy bra was strapless. I gave it to her, and as she slipped it on, a little of the sting of him went out of me.
Gardner on the first chair he designed.
2000
There’s a mark on the top of my left foot, where a picture fell. The picture was in a heavy frame, a charcoal drawing on fragile paper done by Gardner, a drawing of a circus horse, its tail rampant and smudged into flowing movement, its huge hindquarters supporting rearing front legs. The picture had been leaning against a bookcase in my apartment when it thunked onto my foot. The pain was sharp. I thought I might have broken a bone.
Jacob was there, and it was strange the picture falling like that, since it had passed between us in painful ways. After I had the facelift, he didn’t visit me. I thought it was strange. I called and asked why, and he said he was tired of our relationship. We had been friends for more than 20 years, and I was so stunned I said okay and hung up the phone. Maybe some part of me knew.
My friend Judy and Jacob were friends. When I told her about the call, she said Jacob considered us done. If we were done, then I wanted Gardner’s horse back. After Gardner died, Jacob had asked if he could frame it, and I had said he could frame it and live with it, but I didn’t want to give it to him. I gave him one of Gardner’s paintings to keep. When Gardner was dying, Jacob was the one who was always there.
After a few months, I wrote to him about the horse, and he sent it back, and I mailed him a check for the cost of the frame.
A year passed, during which I came to understand what I’d done wrong. The awareness had been under a rock, and one day it floated to the surface. Jacob was mainly a visual artist. He was also a writer and had published several books. He had given me the manuscript of a new book to read. It was about artists he loved, and I had found the writing wooden. Instead of offering him praise, I’d said, “I’m not the reader for this book.” How could I have done that? How could I have asked him to return the horse?
Every day, I ask myself this question, not specifically about Jacob or the horse. About everyone I’ve known. The obtuseness, the selfishness, the inability to see what people want from me and give it to them. These omissions are who I am as much as the warm smile I shoot when I see your beautiful face. Again and again, I do shitty things, as if I have no choice. Often Richard will say to me, “You get away with murder with that smile.”
I called Jacob and apologized. He forgave me on the spot. He was back to painting and making prints, and he was working every day. I went to see his new work. It was wonderful. I truly loved it. We went back to my place to drink champagne and celebrate our reunion. I said, “You are soaring.” We we standing by the horse. Jacob’s wispy brows were rising up with pleasure when the picture fell on my foot.
2002
There’s a mark inside my left forearm from a drill bit. My friend Lana could no longer afford her apartment in Manhattan, and she gave me the fancy shelves in her closet. That meant I had to clean out my closet.
I still had clothes from the Robert years. Into a shopping bag for Good Will went a three-piece white suit like the one worn by John Travolta in Saturday Night Fever. Robert and I had had matching suits. Who did we think we were? F. Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald? Good Humor men?
The next day my friend Judy helped rebuild my closet. She devoted more time and energy to the project than I could ever repay, but she didn’t want money. She wanted peace, and this I couldn’t give her. She said I was controlling. I am controlling. For my part, I didn’t like the way she used the imperative verb tense. “Close the door.” “Get me a screwdriver.” “I’m not scratching your floor!” she would say. My apartment became a cursed space for us, and since we knew we couldn’t fix anything between us, we just screamed and kept going.
Judy fitted the units from Lana’s closet into my closet, and she built miles of shelving. It was a brilliant design, and there was room to store Gardner’s art. Seeing it all around, I remembered how adorable and loving he’d been. I didn’t think you could forget something like that, but there I was, I was reminded. The finished closet, with its louver doors, made me sad about other things I’d left undone for too long. I was gathering Judy’s tools when I cut my arm on the bit of her electric drill. Little beads of blood bubbled up, and I could see the wound would leave a mark. The inattention was so unlike me.
Painting by Gardner Leaver and some of the furniture he designed, in my apartment on West End Avenue in New York City. The little vase is a gift from Jacob, who died several years ago.
I love this personal history of the body. Thank you
I enjoyed reading about your scars. The bike exhaust brought back fond memories of a chopper a friend loaned me for a week or so. It was super comfortable to ride and while I had boots, I noticed my ankles getting hot. Stopping on the side of the road, I saw the leather on my boots was smoldering. He hadn't warned me. No scars, and I was having way too much fun riding his bike without a lid, on long winding country roads. Had to just be slightly less comfortable when I was riding, to save what was left of my boots :D