I feel shortchanged, don’t you?
Blame Joyce and his Dubliners, which I adore, but do pity Mr. Joyce, because the only thing some writers ever understand from his masterpiece is epiphany, epiphany, and one more blasted epiphany. There should be a new literary resolution: no more epiphanies. Enough. Have pity on readers who reach the end of a real-life conflict in confusion and don’t experience a false sense of temporary enlightenment.
Dear contemporary writers, you make me feel inadequate because my life isn’t as clear and concise as your stories.
I should send out letters to writers, writing programs, and publishers. You’re strangling the life out of literature, sentence by well-constructed sentence, book by bland book.
Wasn’t Herzog, that writer of cantankerous letters, around my age? That’s probably the best Bellow novel. I can’t remember whether Herzog ended with an epiphany, but somehow I doubt it. I must check.
One day I made a resolution not to complain. As you can see, I failed, but I did make that resolution once. I resolved never to complain again after witnessing a horrific incident years ago.
It was a day early in the civil war, August 1978. Beirut was racked with convulsions under the double weight of oppressive summer heat and three years of fighting; a bleak city, a wearied city. There had been a lull in the engagements, one of that multitude of brief cease-fires. I was walking home from the bookstore, rushing home in point of fact, toward the safety of my reading room with its brocade-patterned cream wallpaper that was faded in many a spot, my reading room with all the furniture in its appropriate place.
About fifteen minutes away from my building, I noticed a man on the other side of the street, a sinister-looking old man wearing multiple layers of coats in that groaning heat, obviously not well, probably insane. I remember that the topmost coat was a green loden. His dark eyes seemed to bore right into me across the distance. He leaned against a charred wall, immobile, next to an open doorway — a double door that had been closed every time I’d passed it — and through that doorway was nothing but darkness, an impenetrable darkness, or a darkness not yet penetrated. I realized even then that I was tired and stressed, that I might be daydreaming, hallucinating a scene, but I hastened my steps and refused to look back. The problem, dream or not, and as terrifying as the chimerical darkness seemed, was that I, or at least a part of me, wanted to walk through that doorway.
I realize now that it must have been a hallucination for it really was too obvious a foreshadowing, a touch of death foretold. Only a few minutes later, several steps on, I saw the corpse.
A man on the side of the road, thrown there, discarded, probably recently, blocked my path — not just a little in my way, but “thou shalt have to step over me” in my way. There was a smell to him, tart and a tad musky, like that of a carpet left in the attic too long. Underneath dried, flaky clots of blood the color of coffee grounds, his face had a bluish pallor. His head lay at an unnatural angle; his forehead wrinkles gathered around the promenade above his nose. Curly hair, a premature white that seemed almost dyed (no blue tint, no Bel Argent), thin and sparse at the edges, gave his head a spectral effect. I thought he was well and sensibly dressed, in a light-colored summer linen suit and a nice tie, also at a bizarre angle.
I was calm at first, placid and tranquil, transcendently serene. I considered the Pessoa quote “Whenever I see a dead body, death seems to me a departure. The corpse looks to me like a suit that was left behind. Someone went away and didn’t need to take the one and only outfit he’d worn.”
As bloodied and bruised as his face was, his clothes were spotless and dirt free, as if his murderer was someone of refined taste who dressed him up after killing him, waiting until the blood stopped running. I remember thinking, Yes, it’s quite possible that Ahmad, my Ahmad, would do such a thoughtful thing. It was at that point, I believe, after that notion crossed my mind, that I panicked and ran home as fast as my skinny legs could manage.
I won’t bore you with the how-to-calm-yourself-after-seeing-a-dead-body techniques at which all Lebanese become experts, although we are each adherents of different schools of practice. After reaching my apartment, I made a solemn vow that I would never complain about anything. I was alive — no matter what was happening, I was alive. The fact that I could breathe was a miracle. The fact that my eyes could see, the voluptuousness of seeing, that my heart beat, the joy of having a body. A miracle. I would not complain.
Let’s get back to the lunch, shall we?
My ex-husband’s family visited Hannah’s house for lunch — not the entire family, just Papa Lieutenant, Mama Lieutenant, our knight, and his two younger brothers, including the listless mosquito with malfunctioning proboscis, who was eleven then — a most bothersome, sullen eleven, I’m sure. He worshipped his eldest brother and despised Hannah, so his version of events, which he never tired of telling when we were married, was completely different from what she recorded in her diary. He always swore that the lunch was just that, that his brother had not proposed, had no idea that she thought he had, that no one in his family figured out that it was an asking-of-the-hand lunch, neither before nor after.
In her diary entry of that day, Hannah reported that the lunch went swimmingly. “He shook my hand the minute he walked in and never left my side. We had delightful conversations, sometimes pleasant and fluffy, sometimes deep and serious. Everyone thought we looked good together, definitely well matched. We loved the appetizers, particularly the lentils and the cheeses; we didn’t care for the fattoush, which was too lemony, and we couldn’t have enough of the grilled meats. We ate at least a kilogram.”
These passages were elaborately exuberant, the sentences overflowing, words leapfrogging one another, words jumping off the page into my lap. Each line ended with a loop that wanted to complete a full circle before flying off into the red-and-orange sunset at the other end of the room. “My soul was conquered by his right eye, praised and worshipped by his left.” The writing sounded nothing like her before or after — a personality anomaly, a desperate infatuation. “He is my throne and I am his crown.”
In comparison, Héloïse sounds reasonable and sane.
If, like me, you’d known Hannah before you came across this section of her journals, you’d have a hard time believing that this down-to-earth, sturdy, reliable woman could have written such absurdities. She always seemed to me like a woman who had studiously cut a clear path through the forest of life, but during this unfairly brief period she went off the path and into the thicket and its undergrowth.
Bless her. She was always braver than I, and more adventurous.
Yes, my ex-husband used to swear that his brother knew nothing, that had he proposed, he, my ex-husband, would have been the first to know, for he was the lieutenant’s confidant. The last bit I doubt. Just the idea that the self-involved imbecile could have been anyone’s confidant is too silly. The lieutenant didn’t propose to Hannah, of course. I don’t believe he could have. It wouldn’t have made any sense. But I also don’t believe that my ex-husband’s family could have left that lunch still clueless. The self-involved imbecile said that his family believed the lunch was to thank his brother for his kindness in walking Hannah home. Laying down such a spread as a thank-you for walking their daughter home? My ex-husband was an idiot, but I doubt his family was equally unperceptive. I believe Papa and Mama Lieutenant were stunned and confused, were impeccably mannered during the entire lunch, and waited till they were at home alone with their son before grilling him for explanations. I believe the supposed groom was as stunned and confused as they were. Poor man.