He had walked away from everything but the women all his life. He’d gone to college on a scholarship, then left in his third year to join the army; he’d entered business with a known embezzler, and within two years the business had gone under; he rose from technician to researcher in a biology lab, then got into a fight with his boss and quit; he worked on a large national magazine where he was quickly made reporter, then editor, and then fired because he disappeared for a week without explanation. On the block he was written off as a congenital fuckup. “He can’t find himself,” his mother moaned. “That’s a nice way of putting it,” his father sneered.
But his mother was right: Manny couldn’t find himself. Whatever the circumstance that Manny found himself in, he couldn’t find himself in it. He never repeated the same kind of work twice. Each job remained just that, a job. None of them ever became more than an apprenticeship. The events of his life refused to accumulate into experience, and he would not act as though they had. This inner refusal of his seemed to be his only gift. Certainly, it was the talent he pursued. By the time we began sleeping together, he was starting to tell himself that refusenik was his condition and his destiny. Even though he knew better, and being with me made him see even more clearly what he already knew.
When Manny and I hooked up, I was in a slump. That’s how I put it. “I’m in a slump.” Manny looked at me. “You’re in a slump?” he said. “What does that mean? That’s bullshit for you don’t wanna work, right? That’s what it means, doesn’t it? It means you’re a writer who doesn’t write. Even I can see that. We’re together now, what? Three months? I’ve been watching you. You don’t even sit down at the desk. You fuck away the day, day after day. Every day, you fuck it away. You did a little work, got a little recognition, and that’s it, right? You’re finished. You got no more fight in you. Right? I mean, what more do they want from you? Am I right? Have I got that right?”
He took one look at my life, and sex gave him all the focus he needed. He saw the leakage in the pipeline, understood the drain of spirit in me. He sympathized with what he saw — the sympathy provided the connection between us as well as the heat — but he wasn’t into euphemisms.
At forty-six, Manny was as skinny as he’d been at seventeen. I, as always, was fighting fifteen pounds of overweight. “Sweetheart,” he murmured against my breasts, burying himself in me in that way that men do, “you’re a Renoir.” I’ve never understood what it is about female flesh that sends them off like that, but whenever Manny said this I would smile into the dark with relief. I needed him to lose himself in me. I was still buying time. And I still didn’t understand for what I was buying it.
* * *
One year when I was teaching in Arizona, Leonard came out to visit me and we took a trip to the Grand Canyon, making a few stops here and there as we traveled across one of the most striking landscapes on earth. A day and a half into the trip, we came up over a rise, and there, as far as the eye could see, was the great western desert without a sign of human life on it. The sheer sweep of world without definition and without end took my breath away.
“How beautiful!” came out of my mouth before I even registered a thought.
Leonard was silent.
“No?” I inquired.
He smiled one of his small, tight smiles.
“What is it you feel?” he asked with genuine curiosity; he really wanted to know.
Now I felt obliged to think.
“Elated,” I replied. “Inspirited.”
Silence.
“Don’t you?” I asked.
“Never,” he replied, and shivered. “I feel awe looking at the elemental world,” he said. “Fear, actually. Conversely, looking at a civilized landscape I feel moved by the human effort to push back the alienness. With me and nature it’s either terror or gratitude. Inspirited, never.”
* * *
On upper Broadway a beggar approaches a middle-aged woman. “I don’t drink, I don’t do drugs, I just need—,” he starts. To his amazement, the woman yells directly into his face, “I just had my pocket picked!” The beggar turns his face northward and calls to a colleague up the block, “Hey, Bobby, leave her alone, she just got robbed.”
* * *
It was through the discovery and exploration of the unconscious that Freud made his major discoveries, chief among them that from birth to death we are, every last one of us, divided against ourselves. We both want to grow up and don’t want to grow up; we hunger for sexual pleasure, we dread sexual pleasure; we hate our own aggressions — anger, cruelty, the need to humiliate — yet they derive from the grievances we are least willing to part with. Our very suffering is a source of both pain and reassurance. What Freud found most difficult to cure in his patients was the resistance to being cured.
* * *
I had a friend once with whom I was certain I would grow old. My friendship with Emma was not one I would have described as Montaigne does his with Étienne de La Boétie — as one in which the soul grows refined — but now that I am thinking about it, I see that, in important ways, it was analogous. Ours was an attachment that, if it did not refine the soul, certainly nourished the spirit so well that, for a very long time indeed, we each seemed to experience our inquiring selves fully in the presence of the other. At school we’d both been prime examples of those very intelligent girls whose insecurities equip them with voices that easily generate scorn and judgment. It would be years before those formidable defenses altered sufficiently that each of us could see herself in the other. I remember once when we were in our twenties hearing Emma correct someone’s grammar—“The word is who, not whom”—and the contempt in her voice made me wince. Thank God I don’t sound like that, I thought. But I did. We were in our thirties when I first heard myself as I heard Emma whenever one or the other of us said some awful thing. And then the corrective of self-recognition — a thrilling occurrence at that point in our lives — worked a kind of magic between us. In no time at all it became necessary for us to meet or speak at least three times a week. The open road of friendship everlasting seemed spread out before us.
To the uninitiated eye, this vitality of connection between Emma and me might have appeared puzzling. She was a bourgeois through and through, I a radical feminist who owned nothing. She had married, become a mother, and pursued graduate work; I was twice divorced, had remained childless, and lived the marginal existence of a working freelance. Beneath these separating realities, however, lay a single compelling influence that drew us irresistibly toward each other.
Together, we seemed always to be puzzling out those parts of the general condition to which our own circumstances applied. Emma had embraced the family, I had rejected the family; she endorsed the middle class, I loathed the middle class; she dreaded loneliness, I endured it. Yet the longer we went on meeting and talking, the more clearly we saw that to know how we had come to be as we were was for both of us the central enterprise. When we spoke together of the exhaustion of love and the anguish of work, the smell of children and the taste of solitude, we were really speaking of the search for the self and the confusion that came with the mere construction of the phrase: What was the self? Where was it? How did one pursue it, abandon or betray it? These questions were the ones that concentrated our deepest concerns. Consciousness as a first value, we each discovered, was what we together were exploring.
The absorption grew in us day by month by year, fed by the excitement of abstract thought joined to the concreteness of daily life. In conversation with each other, we both felt the strength of context imposed on the quotidian. The more we explored the immediate in service to the theoretical — a chance encounter on the bus, a book just begun or just finished, a dinner party gone bad — the larger the world seemed to grow. The everyday became raw material for a developing perspective that was acquiring narrative drive: sitting in a living room, eating in a restaurant, walking in the street — it was as though we had grasped things whole without ever having had to leave home.