THIS IS IT

4:52 p.m., 2-13-79

"You can't write unless you can't do anything else." Robert V. Williams, 1963

It was, after all, not that big a problem, just make up a story about the affair, that fit of passion and pathos he thought might mean something to someone. He finally decided, after sifting his memory for locations, to set it in Southern California, because that's where he knew best, though his friends, naturally, or perhaps not, but he would if he were they, would read themselves and, what's worse, other people not themselves, into his story. Not only might Judy think it was she on that cliff with his breath on her neck but Tricia might get upset, think he'd been stepping out on her, and seek revenge in her usual way, getting laid. Not that he minded these little infidelities, in fact rather delighted in them as a sign his life wasn't boring, but Tricia thought he minded, and that galled him. When he'd explain all this to her, she'd just accuse him of rationalization, a curious sin. But that cliff--would his friends, present and past, Whatever he said, believe him when he said his characters were not, in any essential sense, them, or anyone else for that matter? If they stopped talking to him, then what would he do? Writing is hard enough, he thought, without that. Yet the cliff would be a cliff he knew in Del Mar, between the railroad tracks and the ocean at the end of the one-digit streets. Everything has to start somewhere. The woman who was not Judy, in fact he'll call her Ellen, who she wasn't either but he’s got to have a name, had just suffered some sort of tragedy in her life--on a Richter scale of tragedies, somewhat greater than the earthquake the other night as I wrote the first draft of this--it was Sunday night if you want to know--anyway Ellen had just suffered --something--a death of an old but not current boyfriend, living partner, what-have-you, in a bicycle accident, just before she came to Southern California for the conference, the La Jolla Summer School on Critical Theory or in Postmodern Writing, he hasn't decided yet just what to call it. Under the circumstances she was taking it pretty well, which proves it's not really Ellen--she was taking it fairly well, holding up under the party regimen (he means drinks not dogmas) of the evening then drawing to a Close. Anyway there they were on that cliff~ moon big in the sky just a shade past (or before, he can't remember how to tell) full, dark sky of course, with plenty of stars, the ocean lapping below, the stain of the moon's reflection, trace of the sun, stretching from beneath their feet clear to the horizon. They'd just come from a professor's house, Michaelson’s or Fredrickson's he hasn't decided which, not a party exactly, more of a reception for the participants in the conference, but you know how these things are, they drank a bit, too much (he ended up--or was it she?--draining a tequila bottle directly into the mouth, the other drove home through the fog--which ended at Torrey Pines beach if they were coming from Michaelson's, otherwise it was a Leucadia special, that fog), danced (more or less) to the Stones (of course and done other partylike things, and she took him up on his offer of a ride home. (Details slip--can he get it all together?) He too had a recent personal tragedy under his belt, not so spectacular perhaps, a bus trip to Toronto which ended a seven-year-long but progressively less time-consuming affair with a stupid fight in a country & western nightclub called the Brunswick House, or that other trip to Tennessee, but never mind it's not that story.

He met her (back to Ellen) as they arrived, she must have come by bus, he wasn't sure, they were both looking for the house to which they had inadequate directions, a familiar story, just go out and listen for it, but when they found the house finally it was behind another house, down a gravel path which scrunched when they walked on it, aural detail however non-specific, "This is it, isn't it?" he said for the third time and noticed that her blond hair hung in braids made her look like Mary Hartman, and he sensed (or so he afterwards believed) a note of distant hysteria in her voice when she said "Yes, finally," and, after they tripped over a Volkswagen engine disassembled or deconstructed on the porch by the professor's lover (should he make the mechanic a man or a woman? It's not you, Kathleen), "What is this? People should watch where they put things." "Yeah, like feet," he said, and from then on anybody could have seen they were going to be lovers, soon and shortly. (Or did I say it would last seven years, counting its deterioration? its fading away? and can I cover that gap by saying most of those years were the fading away? We did, after all, have but a year in a house very much like that professor's house, or even worse, just three weeks at a summer scholars' conference. "A writer of novels and tales in the act of creating universal works is at the same time telling us parables about himself [sic]," Leon Edel has written, I read in the LA Times, today or when I did the first draft of this. Good for Leon. Does that mean I can escape parable only by striving for particularity, only by reproducing as well as I can the actual elements of my life--escape self-commentary only by writing about myself? It is good to ponder such paradoxes, when the typewriter's broken, or while riding on the bus and reading this.) He added, after his smart remark, "Let me know if you'd like a ride home, I'm going down (or up, whichever) the coast too." Inside were a number of people talking dialectics and/or open form. It was somebody's birthday and he got confetti in his hair. It came out when he danced. She said, "Look at those people over there." They were older, the professor and her lover. There was an accordion player, somebody's mistake. The professor and her lover were dancing slowly, elegantly if you can imagine that. "It's a courtship ritual," she said. "It's foreplay." "Yes, of course," he said, and wished he hadn't. Then they got up to dance again. Her leg went between his. It was a rather forward form of dancing. He was sure he'd get laid. He really needed it too, or thought the sentence, "I really need it, too." He didn't know about her ex-lover, the bicycle accident, all that. Or is that too personal? Withdraw. When they danced they danced gently. They did not press against each other. Or if they did, it was not for each other, but for their separate griefs. Enough. Inside were a number of people talking dialectics and open form, and one hippy taking pictures. (I in fact have a photograph I could insert here, a man in a cowboy hat talking to a woman in a white dress and long black shawl. It is not, of course, a picture of my characters because they are, of course, inventions, and besides it wasn't taken in Southern California, but it's a good photograph, one, in fact, of some friends of mine. If I can find it, perhaps I'll paste it in.

//leave space for photograph//

That's enough though--I won't give you her voice. It was an interesting voice, switching accents with mood--you know, French comes on in bed, not the words usually, just the intonation, and when she's sitting around a seminar table discussing dialectics or open form her discourse becomes pure homogenized Californian, academic Californian, but still Californian, like she never came from anywhere.)

The point of this story he might as well say it right now I mean he knows you think he knows what it is so he might as well at least pretend he does know that the point is just that this is what happens to people, they matter to each other and then they go away, particularly these days, and you can say that's just the price you have to pay for this half-life, particularly these days which in some fundamental ways are getting better and better, it's the price you have to pay but it's okay, that is, we can get by, living is ~till better than dying.

So you see he got hit by a car while riding his bicycle in Golden Gate Park, it was one of those freak things, not the car hitting him, that happens often enough to bicyclists, particularly these days, but the way he landed, the coma he never came out of, and there was some other complication too, some suggestion of medical incompetence, but what did it matter. She hadn't been living with him, not for a couple of years, but she'd seen him recently, they'd fucked, and they'd talked of getting back together. It's not impossible, such things happen. But I ended up holding her, those nights at a conference he might have attended, she might not have gone to if not for his reappearance in her life, a way to escape his death by doing what they would have, could have done together if they'd been together and he alive. At least that's how I figure it, her appearance, so soon after his death. Later she told me, "Yeah, I know why we feel so close so fast, it's because we've both been around the block a few times"--what a cliché--"and we both know it, and it's made us cut the crap right down to the bone." She had an engaging way of speaking--and imagine all that in a fake French accent. Imagine.

It is too late of course these days--we can no longer fool our readers into thinking they're reading "true stories," they know about literary devices, plot formulae, all those inadequate ways of mocking "real life" on the fictional page--we can no longer fool our readers, so we might just as well lay everything out, as I've been doing here (everything?), take the reader into our confidence, tell him or her or it (in the case of those computer readable texts my friend Michael works on or with, I'm never quite sure what he does and suspect he is the same) how hard it is to write this story and these days, with all everyone knows about the theoretical not to mention the practical problems of representation. But of course you will object this extreme self-consciousness is itself a device, in fact a cliché, overly cute and all that. But, I will reply, theoretical innocence is a device too, naive narration, all played out. Besides, this stuff h2s been going on (not counting precursors and only according to my own estimate) for at least thirty years: there's nothing new here, no theoretical breakthrough, no dazzling displays of cleverness or (god knows) intuition. And when these newer, postmodernist, we have to say postmodernist as silly as it sounds, when these devices are used in a text, used to generate a text, though some say, have said, and rightly so in a certain sense,~at it is to the detriment of technique, which seems to mean the realist tradition, though some have said it, perhaps (and I am asserting this, no perhaps about it for me, oh no), just perhaps, technique then re-enters by the back door, on an-other level, wh2tever metaphor you like, but re-enters all the same. Time to get the laundry. Iran is revolving. "Gone With the Wind" is on TV. And I'm sitting writing this garbage. Gave the excess time on my dryer to a woman in the laundromat downstairs. I mean, I couldn't take it with me, my clothes were dry and I'd already put my money in, so all I did was point that out to her as she brought her wet laundry across the room, but she said, "Oh, really? That's super. Thanks." I couldn't understand it. All that fuss over ten minutes or so of dryer time. Can it be explained by her appearance? She had false-blonde hair done up in a beehive, I think that's what it's called. I don't remember her clothes or anything else, it didn't take that long, that exchange. Oh yes, a sweatshirt, and I noticed she was a woman from her profile at a distance. I remember that. But what is a beehive doing in ia Jolla in 1979? Is that a naive question? Or is it some ghost out of his (the writer's) past? High school graduation photos of ex-lovers.

To get on with the story, there's really not much to tell, not a connected narrative really, a few scenes exemplary of moments of kindness and/or passion--passion?--desire--good enough. Somehow they were in front of his house, that cliff by the sea in the single-digit streets of Del Mar, because he'd drunk too much tequila and she'd offered to drive him home, perhaps in his car to keep the details straight, they'd walked his dog along the cliff (a black lab is a dog that will walk for days with a tennis ball in its mouth) and then stood, side by side, looking out over the water, what they could see of it, the glint of the moon on the waves, side by side, he wasn't so drunk really, just wanted an excuse to get in the same car with her even if it was hers not his, then he'd invited her for the walk. "My dog needs to go out. Want to walk with us? You can watch me and keep me from falling off the cliff." That's what he'd said, or something like. Then he'd stood beside and just behind her, looking at the back of her neck where her hair parted, he'd touched her there, then he'd kissed her, steady in his mind and sure of what he wanted, bold enough through drink perhaps to try though he thought so much she might have the same thing in mind he'd have kicked himself (another cliché) if he hadn't tried, she did come on the walk with him after all but then of course she did have her own griefs to walk out and it might not have been his company that attracted her to the cliff, or so he thought at the last moment, hesitating on the edge of that cliff which is of course a metaphor (but then you knew that). She too, he recalls writing somewhere, hesitates, decides, yes, it's worth a try and he wants to add,

if he can make it fit, she said "You're not married or anything are you?" to which of course he will have himself reply "no" and the rest will be pornography. After he comes she will say, in what he will think of as an appreciative tone, "I want more of that," which he will assume means tomorrow. In any case he will fall asleep, and she will still be there in the morning.

He draws on at least three events of his "real life" to construct this scene, a kind of collage though, he must again insist, the characters he constructs from parts of his friends are not his friends at all but entirely new characters never seen before, like unicorns which as everybody knows-d~ ~~-B~ are imaginary combinations of horses and horns, dreams symbols of something or other. And so this character, this Ellen, is a dream figure, not (among others) the woman, Linda he pseudonomizes, who, years ago, the fourth in a sequence of intense two-week affairs approximately a year after his divorce, or dissolution as it is called, had followed him with her eyes, told friends who in turn told him that she thought he was cute and was after him, something like that (she wanted a "mate," she said, and he couldn't give her that, more's the pity, it would have been all over then and none of this shifting around, but then would it), and though he didn't quite believe it he acted, tenuously, as though he did, that is he talked and drank with her at a party (it was yours, Kathleen) getting so drunk it was clear even to her that he couldn't drive home so she took his car and him up the hill and across the freeway in Cardiff to the house he lived in among the flower fields, to his room with the waterbed she stripped and got into, quickly because the room was cold, and he remembers how surprised and, so she said, pleased she was that he could get an erection despite his drunkenness. Yes, he remembers, Linda, a source of story matter, a statistic, a name on a life list, how grotesque. But she did take care of him and, at times, he her and, however flaky their affair turned out, they were not nobody to each other. But enough of that. The other two events, seduction scenes all--he'd rather not dwell on them, hardly wants to mention them at all--one of them was answered (at the other end of the "real" seven-year affair) with a rejection still as mysterious to him as it is unpleasant to think about--not that he wanted to go back, much as he'd cared and still cared for her, the real-whom?--Sheila?--he was much happier, thank you, with someone else with whom he could usually (instead of rarely, it had been that kind of life, he sentimentalizes, but he should be allowed that, in this kind of production, don't you think?) feel, as she says, "on the same side of the fence," another cliché, but what are clich6s but truths too banal for art, and this was art, no matter how hard he tried to deny it. Life goes on, they say, everybody's lost a little love along the way, I heard somebody say or sing. The third, to return to his list, said, the first time he asked, the first time he'd said "You could stay here if you want," or even, "If you don't want to be alone [she was the one--the real--oh I've lost track of my name substitutions in this round robin--the real Robin, then, to hold the place, they're shifters after all--she was the one whose ex-boyfriend had just died, as she was on her way by bus to wherever it "really" was] you could stay here"--when he said that (the rhythm of his prose too grotesque already, how could it get any worse, no matter what he added, inserted, extracted, suspended, deleted) as he thought tentatively enough worded proposition, tentatively enough to offend no one--when he propositioned, however tentatively, she replied, wounding his ego a bit but he figured what the hell it was a friendly gesture and not just a come on--what she said was, "You'd like that, wouldn't you. I've got to get some sleep." How boring. "You can sleep here," he added, but she left, forgetting her long black shawl, perhaps, he thought, to give her an excuse to return.

What is this anyway? He feels himself falling into self-parody, a curious sin, endemic to the kind of writing he was trying to do today, though what he "really" wanted was just to tell his story. But Ellen, what is the story with her, why her name in the middle of this, what happened to her in this story, what did they see each other through, what trials tribulations etc., where's he going with his piece? To tell the truth, he doesn't really have a story for Ellen, just a scene, he doesn't know what to do with it, with her, he'd like to say it's because that's the way it is in Southern California, lives aren't connected enough to make sense, like walking down a road and stopping in a different house every night, looking for nothing but a little warmth, a mutual orgasm perhaps, some conversation, a cup or two of black coffee freshly ground from some foreign bean in the morning, and then a walk to the next house with no hard feelings. But of course it's not that way here and a good thing too, or there'd be no stories to tell.

And a fourth scene, a fourth even from his "real life," he needs a fourth scene to close it off--it goes with these others because it's a leading-up-to-seduction scene, never mind that it didn't get off the ground--somebody's sister, somebody else's lover--they were walking along the railroad tracks in the single digit streets of Del Mar, before he had a dog (which wasn't his anyway but borrowed from someone else's life), looking down at the beach, both hung over from the previous night's party, her name was, shall we say, Delia, for some reason. Delia. She was with this guy, partly out of inertia I guess, they fought a lot in public and didn't seem to have much in common but a taste for getting loaded. Anyway he'd gone off somewhere, her friend, not as hung over as they, and they were walking alone together along the railroad tracks. It was the first time either of them had been in Del Mar and they got lost, couldn't refind the house they'd slept in, somewhere around Nob he figured later, and they'd been all over and looked at the people on the beach and looked deep into each other's eyes, all that, thought of kissing, at least he did, but he didn't do it (he was younger then, a recent virgin), when she said, he can't remember how it came up, "Nell you know I'm trying to get some living done, the doctors say I've only got a few years." He didn't believe her of course, how can you believe someone, especially a doper, he thought, who says things like that, casually, by the railroad tracks on a sunny Sunday afternoon. I looked down at the ocean, at the wet-suited surfers working on the waves. But if it were true, how else would anyone bring it up? And you’d have to go on for a while. Living still better than dying.

9:02

ISN'T IT