Two Mistakes
Something I started, and something I didn't finish.
I’m thinking about two mistakes I made that seem related. The first is getting married in 1966, when I was nineteen. The second is not finishing my dissertation.
I didn’t want to marry Jake or anyone else. I thought marriage would look bad on me. It would embarrass me, and it did. After the marriage ended, five years later, I didn’t marry again. The second mistake, not finishing my dissertation, dragged on past the time it would have been seemly to finish it, and decades later, at the suggestion of a professor who was still at Columbia, I went through motions to gain an extra muras degree, based on my literary publications. The motions fizzled out, on the part of the university.
If I had finished the dissertation, I would be happier about that section of my life, looking back, than I am now. Nothing else would have been different. Of course, I can’t really know that, but trust me, I was never going to have a life in the academy, where a Ph.D. would have mattered. I went to graduate school because Jake had to avoid being sent to Vietnam, and I didn’t know what else to do at the time. He was hired to teach second grade in Ocean Hill-Brownsville, which qualified as a draft deferment. Also, he had a vision of me teaching and having children and being able to look after them because working at a university would give me time for the life he imagined for me.
Like every other human being on the planet, the thing I was best at was having a secret life. The thing about my secret life is, I didn’t know who I was in it or what I did in it. I just knew that at some level, everything I did in the other life was a kind of lie. Not a betrayal of me. It couldn’t be. I wasn’t formed enough.
Have I ever not lied? Yes, here, on the page. Except, you know I’m a liar and like Epimenides the Cretan, who says that all Cretans are liars, am I telling you the truth when I say I’m a liar? If I’m telling the truth, what then is a lie? I’m not going to resolve this paradox for you. It underlies the philosophy of Bertrand Russell, Alfred North Whitehead, and Ludwig Wittgenstein. Address your questions to them.
I don’t know why seeking the extra muras degree seemed like a good idea when I embarked on it. It bothered me not to finish something big like that, but I don’t know why it bothered me. I don’t know whether it was about me and finishing things, or something built into our minds, like the pleasure of narrative ending somewhere imagined from the start.
I don’t even like stories like that. Stories like the Bible, for example, where the end is foreseen at the beginning. Maybe we sometimes want things we don’t like. What am I saying maybe? We want things we don’t like all the time. Like getting married.
I can’t really tell you or myself why I married Jake, and isn’t that lovely, the not knowing? We don’t know why we do anything, and the beauty in that is the same beauty as why matter exists. Energy gets tired. Things cool. That’s something to celebrate, if, like me, you want to live forever.
I’m a sophomore at Barnard College. Jake and I are living in the bedroom of an apartment I’m sharing with a lovely girl named Elsa, who put up with us, even though she and I were supposed to be roommates. She was a doll and a mensch. I don’t know what she did with her life after Jake and I moved out. Jake was in Law School at NYU, and he was waking up burned on the radiator beside the small bed we slept in. A few months before Jake and I went looking for an apartment, I proposed we see other people. Not break up but maybe open up our relationship a little. He said no. It was breakup or go on.
You could look back at the marriage as the answer to a question I bet a lot of other people ask themselves: Should I break up with you or marry you? When Jake said no about seeing other people, I think I thought something like, Well, this is going to go on for a while, probably, because I love you, so what’s the difference if we’re married or not married? Eventually, it’s going to unravel, and I will leave.
It did eventually unravel, and I did leave. Or he left. He left first, in the sense he became involved seriously with other people before I did, and he married one of these people in time. We unraveled, and it was nothing like what I’d imagined when I agreed to get married. It was years of stuff I will summarize as, Oh my god, am I ever going to stop thinking about this person? It was like after a stroke, when you have to learn to walk and talk. After we split up, as every normal person knows, I loved him more than I had thought myself capable of loving anyone. I know this because I kept one of those journals where the loser sets down sentence after sentence of horrifying awfulness, looking back with pleasure at loving Jake from a distance.
That day in 1966, after Jake and I found an apartment we liked, I asked my father to co-sign the lease. The building wouldn’t rent it to us, otherwise. My father said he would co-sign the lease if I agreed to marry Jake. I said okay, and my body floated up the way it does in a car accident.
There I am, walking along 34th Street, where my parents lived, in this ugly dress with ugly whitish colored tights. My mother is fighting with me. It has something to do with Jake’s parents wanting friends of theirs to come to the ceremony and my mother has said no. I don’t know who these people are, but I think my mother is crazy, and I can see she wants to make this moment memorable for the way it makes me feel like a beggar. It makes me feel like a beggar because I have my sister’s wedding to compare it to. My mother was happy at my sister’s wedding, and it took place at the Plaza Hotel.
For my wedding, we are walking around the block to the office of a rabbi my mother has found in the phone book. I must tell you, when I look back at this scene, it fills me with weird pleasure that it has the shape of a German Expressionist painting with jagged figures, walking and arguing. It fills me with weird pleasure, too, because I’m not there. I’m just a fat girl who is also a wad of drifting misery in that moment and who can’t see past the moment, the way we can never see past a moment to what comes next. We can’t see what comes next especially if it is not going along the lines of conventional narrative.
Why did Jake marry me, when he could see what I was? We see what we want to see, I suppose. Even though I’m a female human, I wasn’t trained to think about the needs of other people, and this is glaringly obvious to everyone who’s known me. I wasn’t trained to do anything. It was the glory of my growing up years. Parents let you out to run like a dog, and if you came back, they gave you food. No one cared about me because they had decided whatever I would need in life I would figure out how to get it, and they were right.
I don’t regret the time I spent with Jake. We had fun. We were young idiots. He was funny. But you can see now, and I can see now that Jake is involved with both mistakes—the marriage and the dissertation!
It’s not his fault. I don’t blame him for one moment. I don’t blame anyone. And there is so much freedom in not assigning blame to people, including myself. There is so much freedom, you can keep making mistakes for the rest of your life.
As I look back at the girl listening to Jake’s vision of our future, as I look back and know she doesn’t for one moment believe it will happen, I also see her pleasantly influenced by someone more experienced than her, someone maybe smarter—yes, she might have believed that. The great thing about this moment, the moment of making the decision to get married when I knew I didn’t want to get married, the great thing is I’m hazy. I’m a blob of I don’t know. All I know for sure is a kind of no. That’s the secret life. But how to be in the other life, on the surface of life? Maybe Jake has something to tell me about that. And I loved him.
Back to the lie at the core of my being. Every woman who existed in 1966 and who had ever existed was lying about wanting a life written for them by other people, and we were just on the cusp of the women’s movement and saying this out loud. At Barnard College, Kate Millett was my teacher, and five minutes after I met her, the lies in my life would be joined up with the lies all the other women on the planet had been telling.
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What would happen to your writing if its only intention was to give pleasure to the reader, complex pleasure but ultimately pleasure? Instead of an experience for the author or the narrator to relive and feel again? Instead of teaching something the narrator has learned or pretended to learn? Instead of saving humanity? You want to do a favor for humanity? Tell funnier jokes.
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Prompts to play with.
These are for your enjoyment and experiments. Please don’t post your writes in the comment section of the stack. You are invited to post them in “Notes,” where everyone in Stackland can enjoy them and comment on them.
At the heart of writing that seduces the reader and at the heart of comedy is contradiction that can't be resolved. Here are some prompts along those lines.
Everything unimaginable happens eventually.
We want to recognize something familiar, something familiar we have never seen before.
Everything that remains has learned to split down the middle.
Attraction arrives like weather.
When has anything you thought about the future turned out right?
When building up and tearing down are simultaneous activities.
Desire fulfilled is desire destroyed.
Every promise invites a change of heart.
This is flat out wonderful. Anytime I look back these days, what I see now is what I didn't see then. I thought things were one way. They weren't. That's why I like aging, You learn stuff.
In my journal I wrote that your way of writing is like drunken kung fu. It’s a compliment. I then said that I envied it.