The Art of Intimacy (7 page)

Recently, I went to the studio of a photographer friend who was working on a series of photos about specialized forms of bondage. There, I watched a naked woman encase herself in a balloon. It’s one of the lesser-known fetishes, but apparently one that inspires unusual devotion. With the help of two others, the woman inserted herself into the inflated balloon, which was perhaps six feet high and three feet wide, and the others taped off the opening, leaving the woman to stand inside for a time. The inflated balloon was translucent, which meant that the woman, visually, had a muzzy, dreamlike quality. Somehow, perhaps because of the balloon’s curves, she looked smaller than in real life, like the hologram of Princess Leia in
Star Wars
or Auntie Em inside the crystal ball in
The Wizard of Oz.
She kept up a light, soft, steady tread with her bare feet, which steadied the balloon in place without tearing it. Watching her, I was both fascinated and uncomfortable in a way I couldn’t articulate. When I told the story afterward of watching the woman in the balloon, the first reaction of many was that the balloon must be a womblike environment and this must be part of the impulse, to return to the safety of the womb. This is certainly one aspect, at least of what the scene looked like from the outside.

However, the idea that this scene was primarily fetal didn’t touch on what else I saw, which was the extraordinary beauty of the woman once she was encased; the irreal quality; the claustrophobic glamour; the fragility of both balloon and woman; and the sense that we were looking at a gorgeous creature whom we could not touch and who could not touch any of the four of us who were in the studio that afternoon. Nor, of course, does the primal understanding of this scenario entirely account for what lurked in all of our minds: there is a limited amount of oxygen inside a balloon, and while it isn’t necessarily fatally threatening to be there, suffocation is one of the notes that the image strikes, a possibility with which it toys. When I told the story to others, I told all of these parts, but I didn’t tell the other part, the part that it took me weeks to understand. When I looked at the woman in the balloon, I felt a tremendous sadness and a certain amount of fear: Why, I wondered, did she feel compelled to do this difficult thing, create this extraordinary technology to get closer to something, some state, that she couldn’t reach otherwise? It seemed so hard, to expose her to so much mockery and exploitation—look at the freak inside the balloon!—and to bespeak such intense loneliness. It was as if she was a Houdini of her own inner life, binding herself to get to herself in a way she couldn’t do effortlessly, in daily life.

I didn’t tell this part of the story, because it was so clearly my projection of her emotions—the emotions of a complete stranger—and potentially far too revealing about me. I don’t think of myself this way, as a Houdini of my inner life, but why was that such a strong reaction of mine, and why did that idea frighten me so? Is it an image, perhaps, of writing, that terribly difficult technology we use to produce the sense of an inner life on the page? Some more personal nightmare? I still don’t know. I was also reluctant to risk being seen as critical or uncool, shocked by such an innocent, pneumatic fetish. So I told the story as an adventure in modern lifestyles, more or less, and I included many fascinating physical details.

If I were writing this scene into a story, there are several potentially sentimental paths to take with it. The first is comic—clowns, the sound when the balloon popped (which it did, eventually), latex, Sally Rand, etc. The second is sexual—her being turned on inside the balloon, breasts and balloons, condoms and balloons, people masturbating outside the balloon, etc. The third is female psychosexual tragic—the lack of oxygen equals cultural gender oppression, she’s a prisoner inside the balloon or inside her own desire to be imprisoned within the balloon, her mother is tying off the balloon opening, her father is tying off the balloon opening, etc.

All of these are plausible, of course, but none of them goes anywhere near the uneasy space between me and her that I still can’t entirely express, and none of them allows her beauty to matter on any level other than the sheerly physical (slapstick, porn, enslavement). All three of these narratives are what we might expect to see and none of them allows for what I didn’t expect to feel: fear and sorrow and enchantment, intermixed. All three, it might be noted, also expose the woman inside the balloon as a character who is reduced to type—clown, sex object, or victim—and none of them exposes me as the one who is choosing to tell her story. In this way, sentiment also functions protectively, as fig leaf and veil for the author. Her vulnerability touched on a vulnerability within me that I didn’t understand, but any of these sentimental paths would blot that out and save me both the trouble of trying to articulate it and the potential arduousness of even attempting to do so. What was she doing in there? Why did I imagine what she was doing in there in the way that I did? Why am I still thinking about it? What did we, peering at her inside the balloon, look like to her?

I haven’t written this scene into a story, except insofar as this book might be considered a story, a story of stories. But if I were to write it into a story, I might begin with the possibility that the scene of the woman in the balloon may not be entirely knowable or fixed, that it might always bob away from the boundaries of whatever narrative it produces. A simpler way to say this would be that, naked though she was, the woman in the balloon retained an essential privacy. There may well be a vast space between the experience for her and the experience of each viewer. If I could, I would try to include that space.

The answer to the question Why meet?, I might suggest, is that we do not know in advance whom we will meet in art, what characters’ meetings with one another will produce in them or in the world, nor do we know in advance what effect these crossings will have on us. We sometimes know what we wish, what we dread, what we expect. But we do not know what will happen if only we have the courage to look closely. Intimacy is not a good place to go for ideals, humans being what they are. But it is a tremendously fertile zone for all the emotions and mental states for which we have a name, and many for which we have no name at all.

One of the most complex and mobile intimacies produced on the page is that between reader and writer. As writers, we engage this space between with every letter we put down, every comma, every sentence, paragraph, and scene. It’s a curious business, writing toward a reader whom we can’t see, don’t know, and who must be multiple, or at least we hope so. We write toward a point that cannot be fixed in number, space, or time. This point is, on the one hand, an ever-changing crowd, and, on the other hand, an abyss. Questions such as Who is your ideal reader? and Who is your audience? obscure the larger, more unsettling truth, which is that the writer is continually engaging an unknowable Other, a protean ghost. In a conventional, realistic piece of fiction, this protean Other, this reader, is treated as if he or she isn’t there and isn’t needed. The world of the book is a bustling, self-contained whole; the fourth wall is unbroken. The reader is asked to peer in, to witness, to identify, to like and dislike, to be moved, and so on, but the essential privacy of the separate spheres of book and reader, like the essential privacy of the woman in the balloon, is respected. It’s an illusion, of course, but it allows the reader to relax into the dreamspace of the fiction unself-consciously.

In other works of fiction, the space between reader and writer is more kinetic, more acknowledged, less reliable, and the interdependence between the two is more exposed. The reader is not allowed to relax into the dreamspace of the book or story but is, instead, continually jolted awake, as it were. A modern classic of this genre is Italo Calvino’s
If on a winter’s night a traveler,
which begins, “You are about to begin reading Italo Calvino’s new novel,
If on a winter’s night a traveler.
Relax. Concentrate. Dispel every other thought. Let the world around you fade.” This is very funny, because, obviously: fat chance of relaxing now that he’s made you so hyperaware that you’re reading. Calvino seems to be an eye looking out from the page at your eye, or your I, pun intended, and just to be even more contrary, he insists on being as hard to pin down as “you,” his invisible cocreator. He writes, “You prepare to recognize the unmistakable tone of the author. . . . But now that you think about it, who ever said this author had an unmistakable tone? On the contrary, he is known as an author who changes greatly from one book to the next. And in these very changes you recognize him as himself.”

In subsequent “chapters,” a different novel begins every time, and in each of these novels the reader is invoked as the one reading the novel, the one without whom the novel cannot exist (“You have now read about thirty pages.” “You have entered the novel.” “The plane is landing; you have not managed to finish the novel”). Frequently, the metaphysics of reading itself is discussed. The materiality of the page, and the elusiveness and permeability of the text, are continually subjects as well. “The book,” Calvino writes, “should be the written counterpart of the unwritten world; its subject should be what does not exist and cannot exist except when written, but whose absence is obscurely felt by that which exists, in its own incompleteness.” “That which exists, in its own incompleteness,” being you, reader. The topos, the meeting ground, for fiction that makes powerful use of the relationship between reader and writer is white space, which we can simultaneously consider to be white space on the page and the blankness, the open air, between reader and writer.

In
If on a winter’s night a traveler
there is a playfulness and lightness in Calvino’s dance with the reader that charms, even riddles, but doesn’t truly intrude or challenge. The “incompleteness” to which he alludes is not a hole in the self as much as it as a place where the threads fray, where the raggedy seams of being are visible. Within one book, one self, many may reside with equal probability. The white space between chapters in
If on a winter’s night a traveler
is akin to the subjunctive space in the Maxwell and Bowen novels I discussed earlier: the
if
is a fold, another tale, a space of nearly limitless possibility, a perpetual opportunity for seduction. “I put my eye to the spyglass and train it on the reader,” Calvino writes. “Between her eyes and the page a white butterfly flutters. . . . The unwritten world has its climax in that butterfly. The result at which I must aim is something specific, intimate, light.”

In other works of fiction, that white space between reader and writer is not a white butterfly. It is more treacherous ground, the whiteness of ice that might crack or has cracked, and readers may find that their participation involves risks that are not as metaphysical or lepidopteristic. In two contemporary works of fiction, Joan Didion’s
Play It As It Lays
and Percival Everett’s
The Water Cure,
the space between reader and writer is roiled, uncertain, and the questions it asks the reader are more often ethical or moral than they are cerebral. Both are confessions, in a way, but of what crimes, and to what ends are not immediately apparent. It’s clear, however, that the reader will not be allowed a cozy seat in the anonymity of the confession booth as confessor. Instead, the reader is continually dropped into various uneasy roles as voyeur, enabler, terrorist, and confidant to secrets that are very uncomfortable to know.

Maria Wyeth, the complicated heroine of
Play It As It Lays,
is made primarily out of white space, out of ellipses, rumor, innuendo, gossip, banal phone conversations, images from B movies, absence, every cliché about Hollywood ever invented, intersecting highways, invisibility, and a kind of fretful, compulsive need to stay in motion without actually getting anywhere.
Play It As It Lays,
published in 1970, is a confession, essentially. Maria, thirty-one, is telling her story from a cushy mental institution, where she’s gone, or been sent, after committing a terrible crime, or what we’re told is a terrible crime. Up until this point, Maria has been a B-movie actress in Hollywood, married to a director named Carter. The high point of her career thus far was playing a girl raped by a motorcycle gang in a movie called
Angel Beach;
otherwise, she mostly ornaments Los Angeles, looking good in a silver vinyl dress, driving too fast, taking drugs, and going to parties. She has a small daughter with an unspecified, debilitating medical condition who is institutionalized, and this is the one part of her life about which Maria is unabashedly tender; otherwise, she seems to be glamorously alienated and empty. Her marriage to Carter is coming apart, and her career is going nowhere.

The literal action of the book is Maria’s breakdown—the slow breakup with Carter, some cruddy sex, an illegal abortion, and then the climactic scene in a motel near a movie set in the desert, her “crime,” what the other characters refer to as her “murder” of another character, named BZ. What actually happens in this scene is that BZ, an insanely jaded gay Hollywood insider straight out of the pages of Jacqueline Susann, kills himself by taking a handful of pills, and Maria, who is lying next to him at the time, does nothing to stop him. This is her crime, her sin, and the book, like all confessions, is itself the mark of Maria’s hope even in the midst of an overwhelming sense of pointlessness, existential dread, and anomie.

The opening lines of the book are, “What makes Iago evil? some people ask. I never have to ask.” What follows, however, is actually an argument for how it is that we choose to live anyway, even in the face of our knowledge that evil is inevitable, pervasive, and natural. BZ, who is in many ways Maria’s doppelg änger, her secret sharer, the one who recognizes her and whom she recognizes, kills himself while Maria, who has just as much reason to do so, doesn’t. It’s that choice, that flip of the coin, that the book attempts to understand. The novel closes with these lines:

The book, and Maria, are constructed of tiny “chapters” that are like the few words you might barely be able to scratch out on the rim of the abyss. Here is chapter 52 in its entirety:

Didion makes Maria out of these fragmentary scenes, and she also switches between a first-person narration from Maria’s point of view and a third-person narration. These do not alternate in a predictable pattern. Roughly—very roughly—the first-person narration opens and closes the book and the third-person narration occupies most of the middle of the book, as if Maria were making a movie of her own life and running it in her head at the institution. But sometimes the first-person narration just drops in unpredictably and then just as unpredictably departs. The organizing principle, in other words, is intuitive and uneven, and its unevenness constitutes a fault line, a crack, that runs through the character, the novel, and, by implication, the human condition. Maria is composed of a collage of gazes, in a way—in addition to the first-person and the close third-person, there are sections in which she is described by other characters, mostly unflatteringly; and there are also several celluloid Marias—the Maria who’s the chick in
Angel Beach,
and a cinema verité Maria shot by Carter early in their marriage.

This uneven, contradictory, sometimes self-canceling, oddlot jumble, these concentrated shots floating in white space, do not give us Maria “whole” or in some final form. They give us Maria shattered, scattered, and spiraling—she moves around herself, probing, both in control and not in control of her own narrative. She is composed of her own self-consciousness, but she is also—like any actress, and, indeed, any person—explicitly composed of the highly partial and manipulative gazes of others.

We are explicitly included among these others. By compiling this scrapbook of gazes and opinions, Didion invites us to contemplate our own judgments, decisions, perspective, and possibly uncertain answers to the questions that not only face Maria, but also compose Maria. As befits a novel about a movie actress, we are an audience, but unlike the audience in a movie theater, we are not permitted the anonymity and boundarylessness of the dark. We are not, as in
Scopophilia,
invited into the limerence of voyeuristic identification. Instead, we are caught looking in the glare of the white space, caught peering and probing, dissecting, or, possibly worse, caught in the act of trying to glue together that which is hopelessly broken.

In chapter 52, for instance, the list of things that Maria would “never do” is a list of her rapidly diminishing options as her marriage and her career disintegrate. The reader must know that the list is a lie, that, in fact, Maria is making a list of what she is most likely about to do, or has done already. The reader must also know, must notice, how limited a list it is. Nowhere on it, for instance, is
go back to school
or
get out of Hollywood.
Without this knowledge of what kind of woman Maria is and what she’s becoming, the chapter makes no sense; Didion does not allow the reader to play innocent. The next stop for Maria in this world is some form of prostitution to a greater or lesser degree of tawdriness. The Yorkie, here, would be the high end of that spectrum. In the white space around chapter 52, the place where the reader meets the text, is worldliness, the assumption of a shared sensibility that would never bother to ask what makes Iago evil. Bail on that complicity, and you bail on the novel itself. You literally cannot read it. The emptiness around the text is the emptiness of a dead-end street at night, the few words like the click of heels on the pavement. If you don’t shudder, you are either terribly naive or stone-cold insensitive.

Even more problematic for the reader is the complicity with Maria’s radical passivity, a passivity that results in the death of BZ. In the penultimate scene of the book, BZ turns up at the motel where Maria is staying. He has a bottle of Seconal and the clear intention to commit suicide with the pills. Maria doesn’t stop him. Instead, she holds his hand and falls asleep as he kills himself. Again, a certain kind of knowingness is invoked. BZ says to Maria, “You and I, we
know
something. . . . We’ve been out there where nothing is.” And, a few lines later, when she tells him not to take the pills, he says, “Don’t start faking me now.” She doesn’t. At this point, it’s a bit late in the game for readers to start faking, either, to pretend that they don’t know about all that nothing around and within Maria, and by implication around BZ. It’s too late to retreat into a generic optimism about the value of human life. The existential trap has been sprung. Each of the fragments up to this point has depended on the reader’s knowledge and understanding of what isn’t being said, being shown, the reader’s silent nod. We know why the list in chapter 52 is so short. If one allows that there can be a pain in being alive that nothing can assuage, and if one believes, further, that all human beings have a right to their own destiny, then it must follow that BZ has a right to his own death and Maria’s sleep is just.

This, however, is not a comfortable conclusion to reach. It seems inhuman. If the expanse in Calvino’s novel of novels was infinite and endlessly revisable, here, that same expanse equalizes suicide as a plausible choice. Freedom also means the freedom to choose one’s death. It must, or the concept has no weight at all. The openness and exposed interdependence with the reader that was a dance in Calvino’s book is, here, the raised eyebrow, the piercing look that says
Don’t pretend you don’t know.
Didion dares the reader to look away, to blink. She will not make it easy. She does not ask the reader to be sympathetic to Maria, to see that she’s had it tough, that she’s more or less alone in the world, that she’s doing her best. She’s not doing her best. In fact, she’s not doing much at all. Instead, she’s floating, she’s drifting, she’s falling. What Didion asks of us is not sympathy but a degree of participation in Maria’s self-construction, and self-destruction, that binds us into a profound intimacy with her. We helped invent her, and we know that. We can’t say that all we did was buy a ticket to the show. Our fingerprints are all over the novel. The white space, the space between in
Play It As It Lays,
is like the blank piece of paper that the cops give the perp in myriad television shows and movies, saying,
Start writing. Tell us in your own words what happened.
The piece of paper is being given to us.