Courtship
The below date from the end of our courtship.
Beware mood in men. N. palpably depressed by a split in some Spanish labor union. He is stalking around cursing a group called the renovados under his breath. His information is from a hectographed newsletter a year old which has just gotten here. It took a certain amount of temerity to extract even this much. All I wanted was to be able to help him reframethis bad news if I could, be less sad over it, be a shoulder to lean on once I had the basics of what was wrong. But I was told I would have to know the whole history of anarchosyndicalism in Spain from the Cro Magnon era, which he would have to take the time to tell me, before I could begin to understand about this. He’s not disposed to do this for me, however succinctly, and the answer to the question of whether there is something around he can give me to read on the subject is no. Apparently he prefers to be down in the dumps about this, without any interventions by dear friends. I think I was brave to ask if there were also other areas in his life where tentacles of depression could suddenly shoot out and envelop him, turning him into a morose dinner partner without warning, to which he says no. My aversion to mood in significant others is overdetermined and reality based. One centerpiece in my history is the three-month-long mood I plunged my mother into by accident one summer. I was going to do something pleasant for her. I had just gotten my driver’s license via a long sequence of beggings and cajolings, borrowing cars, getting guys to teach me. It was a triumph for someone who was practically underclass. The first thing I was going to do with my license and the car I had borrowed was take my mother to a cabin on a lake for the weekend. It was going to be wonderful, one of the best things my poor barge of a mother had ever gotten to do. In any case what happened was that as we backed out of our driveway for our excursion there was a big thump. So I got out to see what was going on, and what it was was that I had backed up over my mother’s suitcase, crushing and ruining it, the very suitcase, I was just about to learn, that meant more to her than any other possession she possessed, as she put it, because it had been a gift to her from her therapist and represented the only decent thing anyone had ever given her, allegedly, never mind my own pathetic outpouring of love objects from drawings to ashtrays to napkin rings to decoupage still lifes. The point seemed to be that the suitcase was brand-new. I assumed she’d put the suitcase in the trunk, and she assumed I would know she’d put it down where I could put it in the trunk, since bending to the degree necessary to stow the suitcase away would have been difficult for her. So then everything was off except misery. She was crushed. She was in mourning for the suitcase for three months at least. She was impenetrable to my apologies or the even more offensive offer that I somehow buy her an even better suitcase as a replacement. How could I conclude other than that emancipation meant liberation from people with moods. About the same time, my best friend Toni’s mother went into a two-week funk because after the kitchen was renovated someone set a hot pot down on the new Formica counter and caused a faint brown semicircle, ruining everything, notwithstanding that Toni’s father had the section of Formica replaced instantly. When later Denoon and I had a vehement contretemps over his assertion, during an up to then placid discussion of differences between men and women, that in contradistinction to men, women experience injury and injustice more strongly than they do good luck or surcease of sorrow, I had all this uneasily in mind but I still won.
He keeps asking me about morale here, which I tell him truthfully seems good overall as far as the women go, but that how happy the men are is? We were out postprandially repairing antigoat fencing around the poplar plot next to the gum tree plantation. Young poplars are to goats as catnip is to cats. When I said morale among the men was a question, he was dismissive. All he would say was Men are only happy in prison or in the army. I am at a point where I suspect him of producing a few too many of these morsels and tidbits re the perfidies of the male race because he’s under the impression I’ll get off on them. So I’m being rather cum grano salis on these throwaway lines, for a change. How would you know men are happy in prison? I asked, and got I know men are happy in prison and the army because of what they fail to do when they get out. Most of them fail to avoid going back to prison. Second, they fail to say anything negative enough about what they’ve experienced to keep their affines and the young from risking going there. And you know men are happy in the army because when they get out they do nothing to keep younger men from joining up, and in fact they themselves join the American Legion to keep their memories of war and killing as fresh as possible and have circle jerks where they call anybody who’s for peace commies, and a deep calm drenches the male soul when it feels the persona it inhabits being firmly screwed into a socket in some iron hierarchy or other, best of all a hierarchy legitimately about killing. His misandry turned out to be a genuine if sporadic thing and continued, although accompanied by hagiographical asides re certain obviously countertypical men. In our exchange at the goat fence he picked up my skepticism about the sincerity of his attitude and abruptly and sternly went into an anecdote about a street performer who had been a fixture in his arrondissement when he was staying in Paris. This was an African guy, a magnificently muscled Senegalese who Nelson assumed at first was doing an escape act since he was bound up in chains and straining mightily against them. He was kneeling. But this wasn’t an escape act, it was art. The guy straining interminably against his bonds was the show itself. What was interesting was the audience, which was made up overwhelmingly of fascinated men. Women would come by, take a look, shudder, be puzzled when there was no escape, and move on. But men were transfixed, and stayed, and kept putting money in the performer’s skullcap. Explain this to me, Denoon said. Another time Nelson was claiming that there are almost no successful complete poems, that perfection should be looked for in fragments of failed larger structures, and I was suggesting he was conflating a human limitation — the tendency to retain only the more vivid fragments of poems — into a perverse cosmic judgment about poetry itself. In passing he quoted some lines he liked from an allegedly otherwise nongreat piece of poetry. An odd thing is that just hearing them that first time was enough to fix them in my memory. I think this is verbatim: The bald accountant back at his desk from vacation / Takes comfort in the president’s angry order / The exile returning from honors in another nation / Feels a thrill seeing the first brutal face at the border. When I suspected disingenuousness on his part the most was when he told tall tales out of school about his gender and himself in particular. As: he was a freshman in college and he read a story by James Agee told from the standpoint of a cow en route to the slaughterhouse, a tour de force that affected him so deeply that his girlfriend gave up meat over the summer vacation — he kept on eating meat himself. So how to read this? As a confession of fundamental tendencies I should be forewarned about? As a demo of how clearly he grasped and disliked the traditional emotional division of labor between women and men? Or as something tendentious and mixed, ostensibly offered as a warning about even him while secretly intended to get me to appreciate him above all for his sterling evolution to the way he was now? I have fear and loathing of liars. I almost wish this were the nineteenth century so I could say something like You lie to me at your peril, to anyone who tried it. I had a glyph to indicate lying that I used in my journals, a circle with a line across it at different levels for probable different degrees of deception, id est an eye winking to different degrees. I see I even put a nota bene in my journal to watch for any reference by Nelson to himself as being a poor liar, which would be evidence that I was dealing with a real liar, in fact. This all makes me seem phobic on the subject. I was simultaneously trying to keep in touch with the fact that the approach of love can make you paranoid. I may lie when my back is against the wall. Obviously. Lies led to my existence in the world. I wasn’t conceived through the association of ideas: somebody said to my mother that he liked her, was attracted, could be trusted. I think my personal utopia would be nobody lying.