Man Walks Into A Room

Let the late night writing commence. It feels like college again. I’ve given up Starbucks in favor of my white bed with my black dog and a mismatched pair of pajamas. Turns out I’m broke. And I did the math, calculating the five or so dollars I spend each night at Starbucks on a chai and then on a decaf tea to warm me up when the chai has cooled. Five times thirty is one hundred and fifty dollars. I could pay off… well, a third of my Banana Republic credit card with that! I’m living on fumes, charging every necessary item to a credit card I’ve had since high school. Starbucks, as you can imagine, is not necessary.

Let’s just call a spade a spade, ok? I’m not in the mood for this right now. I haven’t been in the mood since, oh, maybe Tuesday? I’ve had a few bitter realizations, a few rough days, a few too many friends whose lives are being torn apart by men and relationships and all the disappointment inevitably involved with those things. I wrote a bitter rant that somehow turned into a diatribe about loneliness and how you could depend on no one because eventually we all DIE. Yeah, I’m in THAT kind of mood. I’ve taken to not reading. I’ve taken to not responding to my emails. Luckily I planned this week’s date before the shit hit the Cynical Sally fan, and we met at a little coffee house right around the corner from his house.

But it has to be acknowledged that I DID NOT want to go on this date. I sat at my desk minutes before I had to walk out the door, makeupless, picking at a scabbed over pimple on my chin, IM-ing my best friend about how much I DID NOT want to go on this date. Do you think I should just cancel, I asked her? Nope, she didn’t. Give him a chance, she said, and then was shocked by my sudden declaration that he was unattractive and untalkative and FAT.

“104!” she yelled. “That’s terrible!”

Fuck terrible. Fuck being nice and being open and not thinking about it so much and keeping at it and dressing to impress. Fuck all of it. And then I said it,

“I think this is going to be the last date that I go on.” Now, my best friend is as avid a reader of this blog as any of you. In fact, I think she might win the title of biggest fan, so she has a stake in all of this. She needs her Monday evening entertainment just like the rest of you. But even still (and this is why I love her), she listened.

It’s been eight weeks. Nothing compared with the fifty-two I’ve set out to tackle. Eight is not even a quarter of the way there. Not even a fifth. And each week has seemed so long, so long ago, so overwhelmingly disappointing. And the disappointment is killing me. I guess I never anticipated hoping for anything more than a few good stories. I guess I underestimated the very loud, very bloody heart on my sleeve.

But this is not the date review. This is the book review, and it has to be said that this is not going to be a typical book review. I know I gypped you last week with a portion of the book instead of my own thoughts, but this week I feel the need to do something similar, because the portion of the book seems to BE my own thoughts. It’s magic when that happens, no? And, since the original intention was for the books to influence the boys and the boys to influence the books, I’ll let Nicole Krauss say it better than I ever could.

… “Thinking about what?”

“The old thoughts. The whole subject of loneliness.”

“What, you think I’m lonely?”

“Are you?”

Samson shrugged. Some jazz was playing low from Ray’s stereo, and it reminded him of Anna as he had come across her once, humming and swaying barefoot to a plaintive saxophone coming from the radio. He studied a paperweight on Ray’s desk, a starfish suspended in glass. “I suppose you don’t get very lonely,” he said, “what with so many people around you all the time, with the whole team working together.”

“Me?” I’ve been lonely my whole life. For as long as I can remember, since I was a child. Sometimes being around other people makes it worse.”

“Really? Because it always seems…” Ray looked at him, waiting. “Anyway, what about your wife? Didn’t you say you were married?”

“When you’re young, you think it’s going to be solved by love. But it never is. Being close—as close as you can get—to another person only makes clear the impassable distance between you.”

Samson hefted the paperweight and paused to think of how his great-uncle Max used to take him to the pool at the local Y, how he would tread water and float on his back while Max did leg lifts in the water, talking to him about love. He spoke to Samson as if he were an old crony, one of the liver-spotted survivors in to do a few asthmatic laps, to exert a last burst of prowess, a man withered by exposure to the elements. He had been barely twelve. Love, Max would say, his gnarled toes breaking the surface, love is the goal of the species. Not shtuping. Shtuping you can do anytime. It’s love that’s not so easy to find, lowering the left foot as the right floated up in a regiment of European bathhouse calisthenics.

He put the paperweight down and looked at Ray. “I don’t know. If being in love only made people more lonely, why would everyone want it so much?”

“Because of the illusion. You fall in love, it’s intoxicating, and for a little while you feel like you’ve actually become one with the other person. Merged souls, and so on. You think you’ll never be lonely again. Only it doesn’t last and soon you realize you can only get so close, and you end up brutally disappointed, more alone than ever, because the illusion—the hope you’d held on to all those years—has been shattered.”

Ray stood up and walked to the window, and Samson marveled again at the starched clothes, the linen sleeves neatly cuffed at the elbows, the pants with razor creases, a man untouched by weather.

“But see, the incredible thing about people is that we forget,” Ray continued. “Time passes and somehow the hope creeps back and sooner or later someone else comes along and we think this is the one. And the whole thing starts all over again. We go through our lives like that, and either we just accept the lesser relationship—it may not be total understanding, but it’s pretty good—or we keep trying for that perfect union, trying and failing, leaving behind us a trail of broken hearts, our own included. In the end, we die as alone as we were born, having struggled to understand others, to make ourselves understood, but having failed in what we once imagined was possible.”

“People really want that, what did you say, merging souls? Total union?”

“Yes. Or at least they think they do. Mostly what they want, I think, is to feel known.”

You can see why I wasn’t in any mood to meet Eight…

By the way, this book kicked ass. Do yourselves a favor and go buy a copy.