A Plea for Eros (7 page)

But staring, even staring in this crude from, does not seem criminal to me. “Officer, he’s staring. Arrest him,” has a feeble ring to it. And I say this despite the fact that twice in my life I found myself the object of what would have to be described as aggressive staring. For several years, when I was in high school and then attending college in the same town, a young man I knew only slightly would appear out of nowhere and stare. He did not stare casually. He stared wholeheartedly and with such determination, he made me nervous and uncomfortable, as if he did it to satisfy some deep longing inside him. Without any warning, I would find him stationed outside the restaurant where I worked or outside the student union at my college, his eyes fixed on me. They were enormous pale eyes, ringed with black, that made him look as if he hadn’t slept in weeks. “I’ve been standing here since eight o’clock this morning,” he said to me once at three in the afternoon, “waiting for you.” One night after work he followed me through the streets. I panicked and began to run. He did not pursue me. The problem was that he acted in ways that struck me as unaccountable. He would make abrupt changes in his appearance—suddenly shaving his head, for example. He walked all the way to my parents’ house to deliver a gift, badly packed in a cardboard box. Filled with dread, I opened the box, only to find an ugly but innocent green vase. Not long before I received the vase, this young man’s twin brother had killed himself in a cafe in a nearby town. He had gone there for breakfast and then, after finishing his meal, took out a gun and blew his brains out. I am sure I associated the actions of the twin with the one who survived, am sure that the staring frightened me because I imagined potential violence lurking behind those eyes. The looks he gave me were beyond anything I had ever encountered, but I also honestly believe he meant me no harm. Perhaps in his own way he was in love. I don’t know. But the crux of the story is that I think I brought it on myself without meaning to. Once, when I was in high school, I hugged him.

I worked at a place called the Youth Emergency Service, and the staring boy used to hang out there. I don’t know where he lived or how he managed. He didn’t go to school. He was sad that day, as he probably was most days, and we talked. I have no recollection of that conversation, but I know that in a fit of compassion I hugged him. I am convinced that the whole staring problem hinged on this hug, and to this day when I think of it I am mortified. Acts cannot be retrieved and, sometimes, they last. This is not a simple story. I often wonder if any story is, if you really look at it, but I carry his face around with me and when I think of him and the former me I feel sorry for both of us.

The other staring man was a student of mine at Queens College. I taught freshman English there and an introductory literature class. My teaching was passionate, occasionally histrionic, but I was a young woman on a mission to educate, and sometimes I did. This student was clearly intelligent, although he had profound and jarring diction problems. His papers were written in a gnarled, convoluted style that was meant to be elevated but was often merely wrong. Eventually, I came to recognize that there were signs of schizophrenia in the writing, but that wasn’t until later. I had private sessions with all my students. These meetings were required, and when I met with him, I urged simplicity and hiding his thesaurus forever. The trouble began when he was no longer my student. He would barge into my office unannounced and throw unwanted gifts onto my desk—records, perfume, magazines. He, too, had a penchant for inexplicable transformations, for flannel shirts one day and silky feminine tops the next. On a balmy afternoon in late April, he visited me wearing a fur coat. Another time, I looked up to find him standing in my little graduate-assistant cubicle, his fingers busily unbuttoning his shirt. This story rings with comedy now, but I was aghast. In my best schoolteacher voice, I shouted, “Stop!” He looked terribly hurt and began stamping his foot like a three-year-old, whining my
first
name, as though he couldn’t believe I had thwarted him. After that, he would park himself outside the classroom where I taught and stare at me. If I looked a little to the right, I would see him in my peripheral vision. The staring unnerved me, and after several days of it, I was scared. When I crossed the campus, he would follow me—an omnipresent ghost I couldn’t shake. Talking to him did no good. Yelling at him did no good. I went to the college police. They were indifferent to my alarm. No, more than that, they were contemptuous. I had no recourse. In time, the student gave up, and my ghost disappeared, never to bother me again. The question is, What does this story exemplify? Would it be called “sexual harassment” now, because of the shirt episode? Was it stalking? What he actually
did
to me was innocuous. The fear came from the fact that what he did was unpredictable. He did not play by the rules, and once those rules had been broken, I imagined that anything was possible.

Neither of these staring experiences was erotic for me, but they may have been for the two young men who did the staring. Who I was for either of them remains a mystery to me, a blank filled with my own dread. They have lasted inside me as human signs of the mysteries of passion, of emotional disturbance and tumult, and despite the unpleasantness they caused me, I am not without compassion for both of them. I have stared myself. Looking hard is the first sign of eros, and once, when I was fourteen, I found myself staring very hard at a house. I had fallen in love with a boy who was fifteen. He cared nothing for me and was involved with a girl who had what I didn’t have: breasts. She fascinated me almost as much as he did, because, after all, she was his beloved, and I studied her carefully for clues to her success. One Saturday in the fall, I walked to his house, stood outside on the sidewalk, and stared at it for a long time. I’m not sure why I did this. Perhaps I hoped he would walk out the door, or maybe I thought I might gain the courage to ring the bell. I remember that the house looked deserted. Probably no one was home. It was a corner house on a beautiful street in Northfield, lined with elms. The elms are all dead now, but I remember the street with trees. That house, which once was his house, is still suffused with the memory of my terrible ache for him, a longing I found almost unbearable and which was never requited. Years later, when I was grown (much taller than he ever grew) and I saw him in a local bar, he remembered my “crush” and said he regretted not acting on it. As silly as it sounds, this confession of his gave me real satisfaction, but the fact is he didn’t want the fourteen-year-old I had been but the twenty-two-year-old I had become—-another person altogether.

Ogling should be legal. Looking is part of love, but what you see when you look is anybody’s guess. Why that skinny ninth-grade boy with glasses sent me into paroxysms of longing I couldn’t tell you, but he did. Feelings are crude. The ache of love feels remarkably like the ache of grief or guilt. Emotional pain isn’t distinguishable by feeling, only by language. We give a name to the misery, not because we recognize the feeling but because we know its context. Sometimes we feel bad and don’t know why or don’t remember why. Mercifully, love is sometimes equal and two people, undisturbed by the wrong underwear or the wrong nose, find each other inside this mystery of attraction and are happy. But why?

Contentment in love usually goes unquestioned. Still, I don’t think enduring love is rational any more than momentary flings. I have been married to the same man for fifteen years, and I can’t explain why he still attracts me as an erotic object. He does, but why? Shouldn’t it all be worn out by now? It is
no!
because we are so close or know each other so well. That solidifies our friendship, not our attraction. The attraction remains because there’s something about him that I can’t reach, something strange and estranging. I like seeing him from a distance. I know that. I like to see him in a room full of people when he looks like a stranger, and then to remember that I do know him and that 1 will be going home with him. But why he sometimes strikes me as a magical being, a person unlike others, I can’t tell you. He has many good features, but so do other men who leave me cold as a stone. Have I given him this quality because it is efficient for me, or is it actually in him, sonic piece of him that I will never conquer and never know? It must be both. It must be between us—an enchanted space that is wholly unreasonable and, at least in part, imaginary. There is still a fence for me to cross and, on the other side of it, a secret.

Love affairs and marriages stand or fall on this secret. Familiarity and the pedestrian realities of everyday life are the enemies of eros. Emma Bovary watches her husband eat and is disgusted. She studies maps of Paris and hopes for something grander, more passionate, unfamiliar. A friend of mine told me about evenings out with her husband, during which they seduce each other all over again and she can’t wait to get home and jump on his beautiful body; but if on the way into the house he pauses to straighten the lids on the garbage cans, the spell is broken. She told him, and he now resists this urge. These interruptions disturb the stories we tell ourselves, the ready-made narratives that we have made our own. A combination of biology, personal history, and a cultural miasma of ideas creates attraction. The fantasy lover is always hovering above or behind or in front of the real lover, and you need both of them. The problem is that the alliance of these two is unpredictable. Eros, after all, was a mischievous little imp with arrows, a fellow of surprises who delighted in striking those who expected it least. Like his fairy reincarnation, Puck in
A Midsummer Night’s Dream,
he turns the world upside down. Hermia prefers Lysander to Demetrius for no good reason. Shakespeare’s young men Demetrius and Lysander, as has often been pointed out, are as alike and interchangeable as two pears. When Theseus points out to Hermia that Demetrius is just as good as Lysander, he isn’t lying. It’s just that Demetrius is not the one she likes. After much confusion and silliness, the lovers are set right by magic. Demetrius is never disenchanted. The flower juice remains in his eyes and he marries Helena under its influence, the point being that when we fall in love we’ve all got fairy juice in our eyes, and not one of us gives a jot about the sane advice of parents or friends or governments. And that’s why legislating desire is unwieldy. A child rushes over and kisses another child in a New York City school, and he’s nabbed by the authorities for “sexual harassment.” Maybe it was an aggressive act, a sudden lack of control that needed the teacher’s attention. Maybe the kissed child was unhappy or scared. And maybe, contrary to the myth of childish innocence, it was
sexual,
a burst of strange, wild feeling. I don’t know. But people, children and adults, do bump up against each other. Everywhere, all the time, there are scuffles of desire. We have laws against molestation and rape. Using power and position to extract sexual favors from an unwilling employee is ugly and shouldn’t be legal. But on the other side of these crimes is a blurry terrain, a borderland of dreams and wishes. And it isn’t a landscape of sunshine only. It is a place streaked with the clouds of sadism and masochism, where peculiar objects and garments are strewn here and there, and where its inhabitants weep as often as they sigh with pleasure. And it is nothing less than amazing that we should have to be reminded of this. All around us, popular singers are crooning out their passion and bitterness on the radio. Billboards, advertisements, and television shows are playing to our erotic weaknesses twenty-four hours a day. But at the same time, there is a kind of spotty cultural amnesia in particular circles, a blockheaded impulse to crush complexity and truth in the name of right-thinking.

Once when I was attending a panel discussion on the fate or the state of “the novel” at the 92nd Street Y, because my husband had been roped into moderating this discussion, I listened to a novelist, an intelligent and good writer, berate Kafka for his depictions of women. They were bad, she said, wrongheaded. But in Kafka’s world of dreams and claustrophobia, a world of irreducible images so powerful that they shake me every time I remember them, what does it mean to second-guess its genius, to edit out the women who lift their skirts for the wandering K.? When I read Kafka, I am not that housemaid who presents herself to the tormented hero anyway. I am the hero, the one who takes the pleasure offered, as we all do when we sleep.

This is my call for eros, a plea that we not forget ambiguity and mystery, that in matters of the heart we acknowledge an abiding uncertainty. I honestly think that when we are possessed by erotic magic we don’t feel like censoring Kafka or much else, because we are living a story of exciting thresholds and irrational feeling. We are living in a secret place we make between us, a place where the real and unreal commingle. That’s where the young philosopher took the woman with the belligerent question. He brought her into a realm of the imagination and of memory, where lovers are alone speaking to each other, saying yes or no or “perhaps tomorrow,” where they play at who they are, inventing and reinventing themselves as subjects and objects; and when the woman with the question found herself there, she was silent. Maybe, just maybe, she was remembering a passionate story of her own.

1996

I FIRST READ
THE GREAT GATSBY
WHEN I WAS SIXTEEN YEARS
old, a high school student in Northfield, Minnesota. I read it again when I was twenty-three and living in New York City, and now again at the advanced age of forty-two. I have carried the book’s magic around with me ever since that first reading, and its memory is distinct in my mind, because unlike many books that return to me chiefly as a series of images,
The Great Gatsby
has also left its trace in ray ear—as enchanted music, whispering, laughter, and as the voice of storytelling itself.

The book begins with the narrator’s memory of something his father told him years before: “Whenever you feel like criticizing anyone, remember that all the people in this world haven’t had the advantages that you’ve had.” As an adage for life, the quotation is anticlimactic—restrained words I imagine being uttered by a restrained man, perhaps over the top of his newspaper, and yet without this watered-down American version of noblesse oblige, there could be no story of Gatsby. The father’s words are the story’s seed, its origin. The man who we come to know as Nick Carraway tells us that his father “meant a great deal more” than what the words denote, and I believe him. Hidden in the comment is a way of living and an entire moral world. Its resonance is double: first, we know that the narrator’s words are bound to his father’s words, that he comes from somewhere he can identify, and that he has not severed that connection; and second, we know that these paternal words have shaped him into who he is, a man “inclined to reserve all judgements”—in short, the ideal narrator, a man who doesn’t leap into the action but stays on the sidelines. Nick is not an actor but a voyeur, and in every art, including the art of fiction, there’s always somebody watching.

Taking little more than his father’s advice, the young man goes east. The American story has changed direction: the frontier is flip-flopped from west to east, but the urge to leave home and seek your fortune is as old as fairy tales. Fitzgerald’s Middle West was not the same as mine. I did not come from the stolid advantages of Summit Avenue in St. Paul. I remember those large, beautiful houses on that street as beacons of wealth and privilege to which I had no access. I grew up in the open spaces of southern Minnesota in one of the “lost Swede towns” Fitzgerald mentions late in the book, only we were mostly Norwegians, not Swedes. It was to my hometown that Fitzgerald sent Gatsby to college for two weeks. The unnamed town is Northfield. The named college is St. Olaf, where my father taught for thirty years and where I was a student for four. Gatsby’s ghost may have haunted me, because even in high school I knew that promise lay in the East, particularly in New York City, and ever so vaguely, I began to dream of what I had never seen and where I had never been.

Nick Carraway hops a train and finds himself in the bond trade and living next door to Gatsby’s huge mansion: a house built of wishes. All wishes, however wrongheaded, however great or noble or ephemeral, must have an object, and that object is usually more ideal than real. The nature of Gatsby’s wish is fully articulated in the book. Gatsby is
great,
because his dream is all-consuming and every bit of his strength and breath is in it. He is a creature of will, and the beauty of his will overreaches the tawdriness of his real object: Daisy. But the secret of the story is that there is no
great Gatsby
without Nick Carraway, only Gatsby, because Nick is the only one who is able to see the greatness of Gatsby’s wish.

Reading the book again, I was struck by the strangeness of a single sentence that seemed to glitter like a golden key to the story. It occurs when a dazed Gatsby finds his wish granted and he is showing Daisy around the West Egg mansion. Nick is, as always, the third wheel. “I tried to go then,” he says, “but they wouldn’t hear of it; perhaps my presence made them feel more satisfactorily alone.” The question is: In what way are two people more
satisfactorily
alone when somebody else is present? What on earth does this mean? I have always felt that there is a triangular quality to every love affair. There are two lovers and a third element—the idea of being in love itself. I wonder if it is possible to fall in love without this third presence, an imaginary witness to love as a thing of wonder, cast in the glow of our deepest stories about ourselves. It is as if Nick’s eyes satisfy this third element, as if he embodies for the lovers the essential self-consciousness of love—a third-person account. When I read Charles Scribner Ill’s introduction to my paperback edition, I was not at all surprised that an early draft of the novel was written by Fitzgerald in the third person. Lowering the narration into the voice of a character inside the story allows the writer to inhabit more fully the interstices of narrative itself.

The role of the onlooker is given quasi-supernatural status in the book in the form of the bespectacled eyes of T. J. Eckle-burg, and it is to this faded billboard of an oculist in Queens that the grieving Wilson addresses his prayer: “You can’t hide from God.” When his friend tells him, “That’s an advertisement,” Wilson doesn’t answer. The man needs an omniscient third person, and he finds it in Eckleburg, with his huge staring eyes. This speech occurs when Nick is not present, and yet the quality of the narration does not change. It is
as if he
were present. Nick’s stand-in is a neighbor of Wilson’s, Michaelis, who has presumably reported the scene to the narrator, but the reader isn’t told this directly. Together, Michaelis and Nick Carraway form a complementary narration that finds transcendence in the image of Eckleburg’s all-seeing, all-knowing eyes, a figure very like the third-person narrator of nineteenth-century novels who looks down on his creatures and their follies.

There is only one other noticeable pair of spectacles in the novel, those worn by “the owl-eyed man.” One of Gatsby’s hundreds of anonymous guests, he is first seen in the “Gothic library,” a drunken fellow muttering excitedly that the books “are absolutely real.” He had expected cardboard, he tells Nick and Jordan, and cannot get over his astonishment at the
reality
of these volumes. The owl-eyed man returns near the end of the book as Gatsby’s only mourner besides the dead man’s father and Nick. Like the image of Eckleburg, the owl-eyed man is both thoroughly mysterious and thoroughly banal. He tells Nick and Jordan that he’s been drunk for a week and that he thought the books might help “sober” him up. Nameless, the man is associated exclusively with the library and his large glasses. Nick does not ask the owl-eyed man to attend the funeral. He has kept the day and place a secret to avoid gawkers and the press, but, out of nowhere, the man makes his appearance in the rain, and during that time he removes his glasses twice. The second time, he wipes them, “outside and in.” I can see him doing it. For me the gesture is intimate, and although no handkerchief is mentioned, I see a white handkerchief, too, moving over the rain-spattered lenses. The cleaning of the glasses is ordinary and magical. The strange man is a second, specifically literary incarnation of Eckleburg, a witness to the problem of what’s real and what isn’t, a problem that is turned inside out through the idea of seeing through
special glasses
—the glasses of fiction.

The Great Gatsby
is an oddly immaterial novel. In it there are only two characters with bodies that mean anything, bodies of vigor and appetite: Tom Buchanan and his mistress, Myrtle Wilson, whose alliance causes the book’s tragedy. The rest of them, Gatsby, the hordes of guests, Jordan, and, above all, Daisy, seem to be curiously unanchored to the ground. They are pastel beings, beings of light and sound—creatures of the imagination. At Gatsby’s parties, “men and girls” come and go “like moths,” accompanied by an orchestra as if they were characters in a play or a movie. When Nick first sees Daisy and Jordan in East Egg, the girls are reclining on a huge sofa. “They were both in white, and their dresses were rippling and fluttering as if they had just been blown back in after a short flight around the room.” They are as weightless as dollar bills, or maybe hundred-dollar bills, blown up in a wind before they settle again to the ground, and whether or not Fitzgerald intended this lightness as another image of money in his novel, money is the source of the charm that envelops the ethereal creatures. Daisy’s music is her own “thrilling” voice, and it sounds, as Gatsby says, “like money.” But Nick is the one who elaborates on its timbre. In it he hears the jingle of coins and the rain of gold in fairy tales.

It may be that New York and its environs is the best place in the world to feel this particular bewitchment that all the pieties about honest poverty cannot disperse. Fitzgerald is right. Money in the Midwest may be respectable and it may even be considerable, but it is nothing like New York money. There was no money where I grew up, no “real” money, that is. The turkey farmers did well, and the dentists in town had a certain affluent shine to them, but, on the whole, status was measured in increments—a new
economy
car, unused skates, an automatic garage door opener—and there was a feeling that it was wrong to have much more money than anybody else, and downright sinful to flaunt it if you had it. When I arrived in New York, the money I saw flabbergasted me. It sashayed on Fifth Avenue and giggled in galleries and generally showed itself off with such unabashed glee that it was impossible not to admire it or envy it, at least a little. And what I saw during my travels through the city in the early 1980s was no different from what Nick saw. Money casts a glow over things, a glow all the more powerful to people who haven’t got it. No matter how clean or morally upright, poverty has cracks and corners of ugliness that nothing but money can close, and I remember the sense of relief and pleasure that would come over me when I sat in a good restaurant with white tablecloths and shining silver and flowers and I knew that my date was a person who could afford to pay. And it happened during my lonely, impoverished student days that a man would lean across the table and invite me to an island or to another country or to a seaside resort, to an East Egg or a West Egg, and the truth was that the smell of money would waft over me, its scent like a torpor-inducing drug, and had there been no Middle West, no Northfield, Minnesota, no home with its strident Lutheran sanctions, no invisible parental eyes always watching me—in short: had I been somebody else—I might have been blown off to an Egg in a gust of wind and floated across the beach and out into the Sound to the strains of some foolish but melodic accompaniment.

Gravity is personal history. That is why Nick tells the reader about his family right away. The Carraways have been “prominent well-to-do people for three generations,” three generations founded on the rock of a
hardware
business, a business that trades in real
things.
In the East, Nick trades not in things, as his father does, but in paper, bonds that will generate more paper. Money that makes money. And money has built Gatsby’s castle, a place as unreal as a theater set erected from bills or bonds or “cardboard,” as the owl-eyed man suggests. It is a blur of excess and anonymity as vague as Gatsby’s rumored past—a past we learn in bits and pieces but which is never whole, for he is a man interrupted, a man who has broken from his old life and his parents to become not somebody else so much as “Nobody,” a brilliant cipher. “Mr. Nobody from Nowhere” is Tom Buchanan’s contemptuous expression. Gatsby’s connections to others are tenuous or fabricated. He misrepresents himself to Daisy when he first meets her in Louisville, by implying that he comes from her world. Again the image of wind appears in Fitzgerald’s prose: “As a matter of fact, he had no comfortable family standing behind him, and he was liable at the whim of an impersonal government to be blown anywhere about the world.”

But in this ephemeral weightlessness of Gatsby’s there is beauty, real beauty, and on this the whole story turns. The man’s monstrous accumulation of
things
is nothing if not vulgar, a grotesque display as pitiful as it is absurd. But what Nick understands, as nobody else does, is that this mountain of things is the vehicle of a man’s passion, and as objects they are nearly drained of material reality. The afternoon when Gatsby takes Daisy through his house, we are told that he “stares at his possessions in a dazed way, as though in her actual and astounding presence, none of it was any longer real.” His nerves running high, the owner of the property begins pulling shirts from his closet, one gauzy, gorgeous article after another, “in coral and apple-green and lavender and faint orange, with monograms of Indian blue,” piling them high before Nick and his beloved. Then Daisy bends her lovely head and weeps into the shirts: “It makes me sad because I’ve never seen such—such beautiful shirts before.” I marveled again at the power of this passage, which is at once tender and ridiculous. But Fitzgerald lets neither feeling get the upper hand. Daisy pours out the grief of her young love for Gatsby into a heap of his splendid shirts without understanding her own feelings. But she recovers quickly. Sometime later the same afternoon, she stares out the window at pink clouds in a western sky and says to Gatsby, “I’d just like to get one of those pink clouds and put you in it and push you around.” The shirts, the clouds, the dream are colored like a fading rainbow. Gatsby stands at the edge of his lawn and watches the green light across the water from Daisy’s house. The last suit Nick sees him wearing is pink. If your feet are rooted to the ground, you can’t be blown willy-nilly, but you can’t fly up to those rosy clouds either. It’s as simple as that.