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Chapter One

Returning to the subject of L, as R and I inevitably did, we agreed she possessed a strange quality of ineptitude, one which caused all her practical actions—from the very simple, such as arriving at the airport on time, to the enviable, such as her impressive ability to command a steady supply of lovers—to seem as miracles: amazing accomplishments we would not have thought possible coming from a woman who appeared conscious of virtually nothing, save for self-effacement. For L existed almost exclusively on the conceptual level: her manner of living consisted of a series of gestures that she did not believe in any way adequate to the situation that was her real life. But the very thought of performing these gestures was immensely important to her, and the space they opened up in the world for her experiences to happen was also important, so much so that the experiences themselves seemed like afterthoughts, spillovers of a gesture that had failed to contain itself. Thus it was not uncommon for her to struggle verbally through a difficult sentence or confession, and to have her body involuntarily break through with an impossibly eloquent posture, like a martial arts maneuver conceived originally for self defense but materializing instead as a defiant dance.

    Similarly, R theorized L's presence as a fluctuating state of wave potential that only crystallized at irregular and unpredictable intervals. So that her beauty existed purely as a continuum, and never failed to astonish us with the moment of its actual appearance, which was different each time. Such was the nature of hervariety that she resembled nothing, and was completely different from herself at every moment. And perhaps in her customary time of bewilderment as an only child, she had felt strangely like her own twin, yet never quite identical. As a result, R was perpetually remeeting her and finding her familiarity uncanny, as though they had met somewhere before.

    And they had met before, six years ago in college, when she was one of the first women for whom R had developed that special non-heterosexual feeling. Because L never knew exactly what it was she wanted or who was doing the actual wanting, her desires slipped out unconsciously, and women were always falling in love with her. Women were always falling for her, and people like her who had a welter of feelings but just couldn't let themselves. People like J, R's boyfriend many years later, who, not knowing exactly what to do with his feelings, revealed them involuntarily and became charming in spite of himself, so that I could not help liking him, the way he could not help himself, fidgeting about in his living room full of guests in an attempt to keep from being trapped by his own hospitality. For J had perfected a politeness of manner that was all the more powerful because it was so sincere, while I was just coming to the realization that manners could ease the formality of a situation when it relied too heavily on itself, and make the people inside possible to each other. In this sense, L had an exceptionally uncanny manner, R had manners all her own, and I had no manners at all.

    Which is to say I did not have a personality that I could effectively project outward, and in my worst moments, I did not have a personality at all. I was a very poor impersonator of myself in public. At the time when I began to meet everyone else, I had just emerged from a long period of being almost completely mute, a condition which rendered simple tasks such as buying coffee or answering the phone unbearably painful, as though they were discolored paintings placed along the walls of a long, silent waiting room. Having decided that speaking was suspicious in its very nature, I soon found that I could no longer speak at all, and neither silence nor forced speech could save me from that feeling of being always about to disappear from my situation. Instead, I developed habits of austerity and artificial lighting, and adopted a certain tone in my writing, comforting in its extreme formality. I altered my living condition to admit the mythic state of recovery, and this recovery soon became the very condition on which my life depended. YJ, who later become my housemate, recovered herself in the opposite manner by developing skills of impersonation to such a degree that her outward personality stretched into a fabric flexible enough to cover the surface of any situation. When we first met on the way home from the editorial meeting, she interpreted my self-containment as evidence of fulfillment and capability, and I read her veneer of disdain as a sign of precocious confidence. Thus we continued to terrify each other until we had walked halfway across campus, when the bushes suddenly parted and C jumped out.

    Though he would never admit it later, claiming instead that he'd been walking just ahead and had overheard us discussing his poem with praise, which prompted him to slow his steps so that we would catch up to him. That was his version of the story, which YJ and I did not remember, just as I did not agree with C and YJ's memory that I'd been wearing a brown leather vest with tassel trim, an article of clothing I had never owned before or since, but which they believed on the strength of their narration could be found in the back of my closet. For that was where my characterization diverged from theirs, at the east gate of campus where I left them to walk north to my apartment, and they continued on together to develop a friendship that I did not really hear about until nearly two years later, when we found ourselves implicated in the same vehicle heading northeast toward a dinner party.

    The irony of that party rested in the fact that we all attended it with some expectation, conscious or otherwise, of torturing ourselves. Since it was impolite to inflict misery on others, particularly in a social setting, we preferred to inflict it upon ourselves, and we erected for the evening separate fallout shelters in which we huddled, covering our heads and peeking anxiously through the cracks until the wine was passed, forcing us to interrupt our suffering for pleasure. Thus it was perfectly fitting for LP to sob quietly in the back seat on the way home, and for YJ and G to sing softly along with Suzanne Vega in the far corner of a deserted living room, so that our arrival on the scene seemed to violate a private pact that had been established long ago. Months later, C and I experienced a similar quandary at another dinner party, only this time the pact between the couple in the next room had arisen just moments before, squeezing us into a situation so clumsy that we felt compelled to drive twenty miles across the bay to find an ocean vast enough to swallow all that awkwardness.

    So we walked through the dark sand together, though singly together, each circumscribing the other's world as unfamiliar domain that could be explicated, but never fully entered. C trudged through the deserted city of his world with all the moral burden of an explorer who had arrived just in time to witness the last fading wisps of a rampart destined to crumble before he could write its beauty down. Similarly, he was the first, last, and only survivor of his catastrophe, and doomed to repeat himself as he wandered from city to city, searching for rest in streets that were habitable only in a stranger's dream. He was like a war reporter who had been born just after the signing of peace, and could never quite catch up with the news, or comprehend the terms of the agreement. He was always sending himself, proud, anonymous, and armed with the statement of his suffering, out to the far limits of the front line, even after this line had long ceased to exist. And if the monuments in his poems took on the shapes of capitalized words like Love, Beauty, Courage & Truth, then these were names less of human forms than of ideas, and less of ideas than of their memory, which in his case, was the riskiest thing of all.

    For C wrote with all the awful clarity and slenderness of someone who had grown up Asian in Indiana, the memory of anger and that daily experience of coming home single to watch the double of his face peel away from itself in the mirror now sublimated into a stunning command of the English language that manifested itself as poetry, or a series of eloquent, articulate stabs at reality. YJ wrote also with clarity but none of the slenderness: her characters wore the fact of their bewilderment like layers of clothes which were continually going out of fashion and which they could never take off, because they did not know how they were supposed to be dressed in the first place. If C worked in the sanctity of silence, then YJ was always living and writing against a blind wall of cacophony that existed somewhere between plain sense and the din of cultural expectation and popular music. This struggle resulted in a fitful stream of dialogue which was always answering itself before it could even begin to be said, and was too ironic to sound like any language that could actually be understood, though it was, nevertheless, a language she heard every day.

(Continues...)