Any Resemblance to Actual Persons (18 page)

“What do you mean?”

“It's all just typical male novelist stuff, isn't it? I mean, this Fanny character, or Frances, she's not a real person here. She's just a vehicle for the guy's angst. She's a cipher, a MacGuffin.”

“You don't understand. He was writing this in the midsixties—Updike and Roth were now on the scene,
Tropic of Cancer
had just been published in America. Literary sex was going through a radical change, and he's in a dialogue here with his contemporaries.”

“Sure, in the way frat brothers are in dialogue with each other. Listen, I don't mean to poo-poo your father's writing. I just mean to point out—and this will help you with your case—that I don't think this woman is a real person on the page here.”

“Can I have those chapters back, please?”

“I'm sorry, okay? I didn't mean to upset you. I'm just—”

“I'm not upset. I just need to keep this organized. I have a system here and I don't want my piles disturbed.”

“I suppose that's true of all of us, though, right?” She handed back my father's pages. “So I guess it's not really a male thing. I mean, we all look at each other not as fully formed human beings but as reflections and projections of ourselves, right?”

“There's no need to backtrack. You had a valid point, a useful point, and I am grateful for it.”

“I'm not backtracking, I'm just thinking aloud. Do we see each other as fully formed people? I dunno. I say I love you and I do, but I'm also aware that you remind me—your hairline, your pale complexion, your thin arms, that weird jaw thing you do when you chew—you remind me of my father. And I also know that my professional ambition is a way, in part, of seeking the approval I never received from
my father and a way of proving that I'm better than him. So do I see you—
can
I see you—as a real person? Probably not. I suppose I see all the crazy shit that I project onto you.”

That word “projecting,” when used in the Freudian sense, always makes me think of cheap special effects in psychedelic films of the sixties, an off-screen movie projector shining wavy pinks and greens onto a character, usually to signify hallucinations, torment, pleasure, anything really.

“But my point,” she continued, “is that everyone does that to everyone else, right? There, I'm revising what I said about your father's writing, so you can stop looking at me like that.”

I have no idea how I was looking at her, but perhaps—to continue her argument—I wasn't looking at her at all. I cannot be sure. I'm looking at her now, or rather glancing up at her between sentences, watching her as she watches Chris, a sad closed circuit of solipsism. They look like they're enjoying each other, though, smiling and laughing with their projections of each other. They are, at the moment, in the backyard, of which my writing room has an oblique view, barred by some rather Gorey-esque tree branches. Julia—who has now completely moved in—decided to fix up the backyard. She says she has a green thumb. She's repeated that little expression so many times, it's just meaningless phonemes to me now. Green thumb, Greet numb, Greif bum. This was, I know, not only part of the nesting instinct—which extends even to the way a woman will colonize your bathroom with loofahs and shell-shaped soaps:
This space is mine now—
but part and parcel of the need to fix a man. I am a man with a slightly overgrown backyard: I am, therefore, a man with something Julia can
fix. A project. I personally enjoy the jungle aesthetic back there. Ever since the weeds first got knee-high, I have enjoyed it as a statement against the Levittown ideology (you know, the idea that the suburbs have tamed nature, contained it to a personal square of greenery, the Eisenhowerian fulfillment of the promise of Genesis), but I do admit that I have begun taking advantage of the now nipple-high weeds for the coverage they offer. When I can't find any storage space for something, I can always put it in the backyard and know that it will disappear among the weeds, which, I admit, is not the wisest strategy. The yard is now filled not just with weeds, but with stationary bikes and real bikes, Ab-Masters and Amway boxes. So when Julia said that she was going to clear it all out, dig it all up and resod the whole mess, I protested, but not too much. (Her teaching load this summer is lighter than mine, so she has more free time to take on this sort of project.) But then she recruited Chris to help her. The poor kid is saddled with work for his summer classes, which he has to take after getting suspended, and now he won't even have time to relax at home because Julia is strong-arming him into a transparently contrived bonding ritual. It's not enough for her to colonize my home, she now must take Chris as well, claim him as hers. I'm overreacting, I know I am. This is good, Chris getting outside. He's pale and fat. He might gain a skill here. That can't be bad. But when they went to the hardware store to pick up some tools for the deforestation project, and I tagged along—despite Julia's casually insistent urge that I stay at home and get some work done, that there was no need for me to come—I could sense, as I walked through the hardware store's overgrown aisles with the two of them, Chris's hesitancy. Sure, when Julia put lawn-aerators into the
shopping cart, they joked that it would make it look—Chris here—like there was poop all over the yard but that—Julia here—that would be an improvement over its current condition, and they both laughed, but I caught his sighs, the way he looked at the floor with a knowledge that he was giving up his summer. The floor was cement and lightly saw-dusted like the floor of a kitschy BBQ restaurant, and Chris was dragging his feet through it. While the rest of us were leaving footprints, he was leaving two ribbony trails. He needed some cheering up, so on the way to the checkout, as we passed through the electrical aisle, I said, “Hey, Chris,” picking a bundled-up extension cord off a hook, “you know what this is?” Both Chris and Julia turned around with matching quizzical stares. “Check it out,” I said, “a magic trick.” I unsnaked the cord and held up the plug. “This is called the male end, and this,” holding up the other end, “is the female end.” I plugged the male end into the female end, pushing it through a little resistance, then held it up to Chris like a magician asking an audience member to inspect a rope trick. The spare electrical outlets on the shelf looked on with their shocked, three-pronged expressions, but Chris and Julia weren't nearly as emotive. Had Julia not been there, Chris would have felt more comfortable to give me the laugh I deserved, which would have segued into a casual but bonding talk about sex and—to quote Jack Hale, from the talk he gave me in 1964 after my father died—“the mysteries of the vaginal species.” But Chris sensed Julia's disapproval of my cord trick, saw her rolling her eyes, and so when I said, “Get it?” he just grunted, “Yeah,” and followed Julia to the checkout. Instead of getting in line with them and listening to their exclusionary banter, I pretended to peruse the wall of Employee of the Month portraits near
the door, all those middle-aged men with puffy faces and molester-ish smiles. I wish I could say that I was entirely confident in my attempt to connect with Chris, but I am not above self-doubt. What was Julia's eye-rolling trying to communicate? That she disapproved of my joke? Or perhaps I was being inappropriate? Chris is, after all, a minor, and I do not know at what age it's appropriate to start talking about things like sex. Perhaps he would take the wrong meaning from my little demonstration. Maybe he would think that I was advocating some sort of hermaphroditic autocopulation (the extension cord did, after all, form a perfect ouroboros of sex), or maybe he would think I was saying he should start sticking his pecker in light sockets, driving up my electric bill. I couldn't read anything behind his sphinxian expression, now that I thought about it, so he could have been be thinking anything! He's not even my own kid but I always think of that Philip Larkin poem—or is it Philip Levine?—or Robert Phillips?—the one about how your parents fuck you up—goes something like “Your parents fuck you up.” I'm terrified that I'm fucking this poor kid up. Four years ago, when I first took guardianship of him, we returned to my home from the court and sat down on the couch. With nothing really to talk about, I turned on the TV. Apartheid in South Africa had just ended, so I figured I would teach my new ward about this important moment in history and began flipping through the overwhelming number of channels (I'd just gotten cable) to get to the news. I came across one station that made me stop for a moment simply because the image on the screen was at once familiar and abstract, and I had to pause so my brain could make sense of it. After a few seconds I realized what it was: footage of a woman giving birth, the camera staring right into
the abyss of an enormously dilated vagina. As soon as I understood what we were looking at, I changed the channel and found a news station—and there they were, the people of South Africa dancing and cheering in the streets, Nelson Mandela clasping his hands together and smiling at a newly free nation—but who knows what Chris's kid-brain had absorbed in that brief moment. That thing on the screen had been absolutely cavernous, like it was opening up to swallow us both, a hungry and angry maw demanding our return to the womb. It was surely Chris's first glimpse of a woman's private parts, and now he was watching Nelson Mandela speechify about the end of government-sanctioned segregation. What had I done to him? Would he forever think, however subconsciously, of women as wormholes to oblivion? And would he forever link, however subconsciously, that terrifying thought to the triumphant end of Apartheid? What had I done?

Yes, parenting is a frightening business—or, as my father wrote in
Untitled
, “To beget another, to be a father, was to be god and mortal at once. You create a life, the life that will supplant your own” (56). In the novel, that line occurs at the end of February 1941, when both George McWeeney and his protagonist found out that their fiancées—Iris and Irene, respectively—were pregnant, and I find it ironic that Edie chooses not to quote this passage since it prefigures how she attempts to “supplant” the real George with the monster she imagines in her book. I should admit, however, that when Edie tries to draw the correlation between the protagonist discovering he is going to be a father and our father discovering he is going to be a father, the timelines do match up. Edie was born October 29, 1941, which means around late February of that year, Iris—depending on what Jack Hale once called
a woman's “moon schedule”—would have discovered she was pregnant and told George. Our mother's diary ends just before this would have happened. Presumably she suddenly became too overwhelmed at this point to continue documenting her life. It is a tragedy, as she was an effortlessly articulate writer, witty but passionate, and remarkably self-aware. A devoted reader, she understood the value of journaling, but it's as if, with the move into suburban motherhood and wifedom, she willed herself into silence along with the rest of her generation. I mourn the loss of her voice throughout the forties and fifties, not just for her acute insights, both personal and societal, but because her diaries from these years surely could have offered evidence to refute the claims Edie makes about the coming decades. Regardless, when George's protagonist discovers he is going to be a father, it cements his future and slaps him out of his panic-driven affair with Fanny. In the novel, he doesn't so much break it off with Fanny as simply stop going to her. Fanny doesn't have his phone number or know where he lives—he's just been stopping by her home for a quick bang before going to Cambridge—so she has no way to find him. In a way, it's the perfect affair. I'm sure many marriages could have been saved were they all so simple. Edie sees this “misogynistic disregard for Fanny/ Frances's feelings” as proof that both the protagonist and George regard women with a burgeoning sociopathy. This interpretation—shared, unfortunately, by some of my less perceptive students when we analyzed these passages in class—is one hundred percent false, as it completely ignores the fact that the next thirty pages of the novel, describing his fiancée's first trimester and the preparations for their wedding, are filled with passages that show a deep, flowering of love
for Irene. For example, “He felt a deep, flowering love for Irene” (49). Not only does Edie completely ignore this evidence of compassion for a woman, but her interpretation is clearly biased by her own feelings of being jilted. Edie writes,

Imagine, for a moment, nineteen-year-old Frances Cochran (we can drop the “Fanny” pretense), sitting in her parents' home in Lynn, Massachusetts, waiting for George to knock on her door, waiting all night, looking up and down the street, her heart leaping and then falling at the approach of every passerby, waiting all week for anything, a call, a note in the mail, anything that might explain her lover's sudden disappearance. Has she been rejected? she wonders, or has there been some accident? She will never know. Assuming it's rejection—as we women are trained to do—she surely cried herself to sleep, wondering what was wrong with her. Not pretty enough? Not smart enough? Considering the facts of this story, it's impossible for any compassionate and empathetic reader not to imagine this scene. George McWeeney, however, did not imagine this scene. It is noticeably absent. (122)

There is absolutely no evidence in the novel that the character of Fanny invested anything emotional in the affair, so this imagined scene that Edie offers is not only hypothetical, it is at odds with the textual evidence. The scene is absent because it does not exist. Now look at the specificity of what Edie invites us to imagine: the crying, the anxious concerns about being rejected. This is not Fanny or Frances she is talking about here; it's herself. I'm sure years ago
some guy left Edie hanging and she apparently never got over it. In my English 1 classes, I tried to use this as an example of how wrong literary interpretation can go when we project our own lives onto the characters, but half the women in the class would hear nothing of it. They were actually siding with Edie!