Suitcase

You get on the plane that's leaving the airport.

FEEL LIKE A BIT OF TRAVEL? Grab a coffee. Look out the window. Tiny green things are poking up. How do they know how to do that each year?

How are you feeling? If you were here, I would listen to your thoughts, and we’d both feel less alone. I would ask you to say three things in the moment you love, and I would tell you three things in the moment I love. I will tell you now. I love the way writing stops time. I love those cheese and onion things I made last night from a video on Instagram. I love this photograph of Fran Lebowitz I am looking at right now.

It was taken by Peter Hujar in 1974 when Fran was twenty-three. She’s in her childhood bedroom, half sitting up, leaning on her elbows, and she is looking at the photographer, who is standing at the end of her bed and seems to have awakened her. On the wall paper around her are large polka dots. There are smaller polka dots on the sheets. The whole image comes off like a study designed by Krazy Kat. Her dark hair falls to her shoulders. Her face is sleepy and also alert, the face of a woman who has just had sex or who was dreaming of sex before the photo was taken.

The picture conjures all the sultry sexiness that shapes that time in our lives. Really, it’s the headline of our lives. Even if you think this isn’t true of your life, it is true of your life.

Look at Fran, and you will see yourself on one of those mornings. You will remember a bed and a sense, for a few seconds, of not knowing quite where you are or whether the floor is the ceiling or the walls are the sheets, and someone or no one (but a picture in your mind) is standing at the end of the bed, looking at you, for a reason that’s mysterious and that delights you, and you will feel you don’t need to do anything else that day. Everything that needs to happen outside you has already happened inside you, and you will be right. I love this picture. It is also the skill of a great photographer to stir these associations.

I wanted to share these feelings with you today because I wanted to feel happy and alive at the same time you were feeling happy and alive. You are the figure at the end of the bed, and I am in the bed, wondering what we are doing together. Or you are in the bed, and I am the figure with the camera, showing you a moment of your life that is also my life.

My fears about the world are your fears about the world. The overturn of Roe and other infringements on the rights of women define the worth of every female human on the planet. In 1968, I thought it would always be 1968 and we would remake the world, just like that. Sexism, racism, war mongering, you name the rusty nail of existence, we would make it go away. I was wrong and I was a little bit right.

My doubts about myself are the same doubts I’ve always had, and it’s funny to live long enough to know some things are stable. Let’s go back to the bed. Sleep seems a waste of time. I’m writing from a bed now, propped against a wall of pillows. I never used to write this way. I’m watching the light on leaves outside the window. I hear birdsong because I live on a farm road. I don’t miss the city I used to walk as if it was the map of my body. I miss everyone I’ve ever loved.

I had a friend for many years who told me when we first met I’d said to her, “Let’s tell each other everything.” I don’t remember saying such a thing, but I could have. This friend and I for a long time learned to tap dance under the guidance of a famous tap dancer, and we would drink afterward in a bar in Soho, and I would look at the color of her lipstick and the way she tied a scarf at her neck and I would think I was the luckiest person on the planet to be there with her in that moment.

In 1972, when I was teaching at Hunter College, a student came to see me after a three-week absence from the class. The student said, “I didn’t want you to think I’ve been away because I didn’t like the class or you. I have long depressions. Two weeks ago, I tried to kill myself with pills, fourteen Nembutals, but right after taking them I went straight to the hospital. My psychiatrist says I didn’t really want to kill myself, but I really did. I’ve done it before. Once, I stayed in bed for a year, gently touching my arm. You’re very nice. I don’t mean to burden you.” She said she liked the course very much, had no desire to do anything, and felt numb. She said, “Sometimes, I don’t feel anything when I pinch myself.” I started to say something in response and stopped. I understood she was speaking intimately about herself, only herself. She said, “My doctor says I think I’m sicker than I am.” Her hands looked tiny. She said, “I’m amazed you can stand up before a whole group of people and be so energetic and coherent.” I said, “Often, I don’t know what I’m doing.”

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Over the weekend, we had a houseguest, and at a point we were talking about times in our lives we had been a suitcase at the airport on one of those conveyor belts. Someone had placed us there, and we were tootling along to who knows where. It was the feeling of movement you hadn’t exactly agreed to.

When I was nineteen, I married Bruce. I knew I shouldn’t do it. I didn’t know how to get myself out of it. I didn’t want to end my relationship with Bruce. I wanted to live with Bruce in an apartment we had found downtown, and my father said he would co-sign the lease if Bruce and I got married.

This is not a story where anyone is to blame. It’s about looking back and seeing what it’s possible to see after 50 years. Many girls who had grown up like me would have figured out a way not to be the suitcase. I knew them at the time.

As soon as I agreed to get married, I felt bad about myself. I could see in the agreement some sort of trade I was working out, and I knew it was a trade no one should make because it was dishonest. I didn’t want to get married, and I was getting married, so why did I do it?

I felt bad because I think I was making a calculation about getting the apartment and leaping into something I imagined as a fancy and sexy adult life in New York City. I was ready for that, or I wanted to be. Maybe. I don’t know. A few months before Bruce and I got married, I told him I thought we should try seeing other people. That’s what people our age were doing. And then I got married. As if it were a plane that was leaving the airport? As if it was a hand in a poker game I was eventually going to get dealt?

I return to this decision often because I won’t ever be able to understand it. What I can promise is I felt bad because I was in a lie. Part of me likes the girl who wants things. Another part of me feels depressed by what she’s willing to do to get things she thinks she can’t get any other way.

At 19, I had already met Kate Millett, who was my teacher at Barnard, and I felt disgusted with myself when, in February 1966, I told her the news. She called me Mrs. Zimmer in class. Every time I heard these words, my stomach would knot, and I wanted to say, “You have mistaken me for someone else.” She had not.

Maybe what I’m looking back at is a time I didn’t know how to avoid becoming Mrs. Zimmer. I didn’t know how to skip past that phase. Until the women’s movement, the thing that wasn’t the thing I did with Bruce was being a woman who was used by men, gloriously and glamorously perhaps, but something like an artist’s wife, a model, a muse, a wild girl on the path to bitterness, not a person with a life of her own.

That’s what we learned to make for ourselves and for other women in the movement a minute later that would be starting and I would enter—a giant plane big enough for all of us that was leaving the airport.

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I like talking to you.

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Streaming now.

THE ENTIRE STORY LINE THIS SEASON for Amanda Peet’s character on Your Friends and Neighbors (Apple TV) is that she is going through menopause. That’s it. Week after week. The entire story line for Eunice Bae’s character is that she’s pregnant and not in her first youth. Hot flashes and vomiting. That’s it. Week after week.

Dear male writers of the show, Here are some excellent story lines you are squandering for the male characters: Testicular tissue mass decrease, decreased level of the male sex hormone, problems getting an erection, decrease in the elasticity of tubes that carry sperm, enlarged prostate glands, slowed down peeing and coming, lower sex drive, and MORE!! You’re welcome!

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Tom Burke

Every so often, a man will go into you. Maybe not you. Some of us, then. If not you, bugger off. Just go and bugger off. I'm here to praise Tom Burke. He is always sexy. It doesn't matter his part. Some people just are. Some men just are. He is great in Legends (Netflix). I loved it. Everyone was great. The story, based on true events, is about four customs inspectors learning to become spies and preventing the delivery of two tons of heroin from entering England. You have to pretend their success wasn't an asset to Maggie Thatcher. She's not that big a deal in the thing. Anyway, if you have nothing better to do than lie back and think of sex, here's some Tom.

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The difference between MEMORY and STORY.

If you are interested in knowing more about this idea, Richard and I are hosting a Zoom conversation on the topic on Saturday May 30 from 3 to 4 EST. This is a FREE BENEFIT FOR ALL PAID SUBSCRIBERS. To RSVP, please email: lauriestone@substack.com.

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