The Grandstand and the Arena

Where do you live?

Richard Diebenkorn

In my twenties, I knew a woman who said to me, “You live in the grandstand rather than the arena of life.” We were in graduate school at Columbia. We were standing in the living room of the man who taught our seminar. She and the man were friends, and after finishing her degree this woman would leave the US to live in Oxford. She had a vision of a serious life, and she went on to write many well-regarded books and to lead what many people would call a serious life.

I can see the couch in the living room where we stood and in front of it the glass coffee table, and the stack of arts books piled on one side of it. On the top was a book about the painter Richard Diebenkorn, and I loved the colorful image on the cover, slipping between landscape and abstraction. Richard Toon is now reading a book by Haruki Murakami, an allegory called The City and Its Uncertain Walls, and he keeps talking about it on our walks, and the detail that sticks out for me as well as for him is that the characters who come to live in the strange city have to forfeit their shadows.

The shadows languish outside the city, as a shadow would, detached from its corporeal companion. Richard interprets the shadow that has been detached from the main character as the loss of the man’s first love, a childhood love, and Richard has been talking about this exact thing happening to him when he was fifteen. His beloved girlfriend Sophie, with whom he’d been snogging after running laps with her around the rugby pitch, Sophie of the piercing blue eyes and pageboy haircut, up and left him one summer while he’d been tramping happily through cow pastures imagining her return from holiday. She didn’t return to school, either, and he never saw her again.

The woman who told me I lived in the grandstand rather than in the arena of life might have started the conversation in a different way. She might have posed this as an either/or condition, like you either have a shadow hanging over your life, like the loss of your childhood love, or you don’t have a shadow hanging over your life. Either people lived in the grandstand of life or in the arena of life. However impersonal and general the proposition may have started out, eventually, a cloud crossed this woman’s eyes and out of it shot a beam of light that fastened on my face, as she suddenly declared, “You, Laurie, you live in the grandstand, rather than the arena of life.”

That insight or prediction has been the shadow hanging over my life ever since. Not really and yet maybe really. I just said it. It just came to me, the way everything I write just comes to me unplanned, as the keys click along, as if guided by spirits the way a ouija board is guided, or by some collective unconscious or dybbuk. Whenever someone tells you what you are, straight out, it’s a form of casting a spell on you. The declaration becomes an annunciation, with the weight of prophesy, and prophesy is convenient. Prophesy is a bread crumb trail to follow if, like me, you are possibly one of the ones spending their time in the grandstand rather than the arena of life.

This phrase has stuck to me like a shadow, a sticky shadow, one of those labels you need Goo Gone to remove. I have a giant container of Goo Gone in a closet under a set of stairs in our house. I have not removed the shadow of this prediction. I think about it often, and many years later when I ran into this woman again in England, she brushed off having known me to a friend she was with by saying we’d been girls together, or some phrase like that, in a consciousness raising group. She had been in this group. I had formed this group and invited her to join it.

Sometimes, when I think about where “the grandstand” is and where “the arena” is, I think “the grandstand” is where a person might sit who’d planned their life with so little concept of its structure—so free of the notion of arriving someplace they’d set out to arrive at—they can wind up working as a cater-waiter at age fifty-three. From this point of view, the freedom I’ve enjoyed I’ve also carried like a weight. It’s made me a luftmensch, a person of light substance who defies gravity by lacking gravitas. I can see that.

When I think about living in “the arena,” what flashes to mind is not a milestone accomplishment like publishing a book, or getting to work at a beloved institution, or taking part in a social movement that saves lives. What flashes to mind is flying off to Arizona to live with Richard in 2007. We hardly knew each other. Before that, I’d made several trips to see him in Scottsdale, and he’d come to New York a few times since we’d met seven months earlier at Yaddo, an artist colony in Saratoga Springs.

There was something about him, something about us that made me say okay, I’ll do this, I’ll try this, I don’t need to know how it will turn out, what do I have to lose. Honestly, I had nothing to lose. Richard had lots to lose, but that is for him to write about if he feels like it. The weight on me is that, indeed, he had lots to lose, and yet we agreed we would clasp hands and leap off to what we could make out of knowing each other. An experiment.

What I’m describing is something different from romance or erotic drive, although those components were part of the leap. I’m talking about something, it strike me now, right now, as I’m having these thoughts for the first time, it strikes me there was a kind of joyous seriousness in joining forces with this person, who seemed radiantly interested in what we would do next. I needed help. I always need help.

Richard helped me become a better a writer because even when we found each other obdurate and unfathomable—as we often still do—I also feel love for him. Feeling love has made me a happier person than I was without him. It’s helped me find things to love in the things I’m looking at.

There are moments in life you glance back at and you say, Ha, oh, that was a turning point. If I hadn’t gone west on Canal Street instead of East, as I was planning, the giant curtain that became my life in year X would not have opened. At any age, you can look back and see these forks in the garden of forking paths, and the sense you have seen one will be accurate enough in the moment you are seeing it. It’s not the truth of anything, and your life does not need a truth of anything to form a subway map and for you to see your route from point A to point B.

Accident, I’m talking about accident. The sudden arrival of a choice to get on a plane or miss the flight. The hazard of meeting a person whose offhand and unplanned remark about grandstands and arenas might color your life. The extraordinary joy of making friends with people who will love you for as long as they can before moving on. I’m not talking about origin stories or fated anything. Have I mentioned how much I dislike stories that start with the knowledge of where they are ending?

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