Drifts Read online

  I felt spooked by the gaze of the feral cats when we first moved here, as I came upon them in alleys and driveways, in pairs and threes, like silhouettes or ghosts, staring at me, skirting back if I got too close while trying to take their photograph. An old man used to feed a large colony that gathered outside of his house on 19th Street, until he died and the house stood abandoned. Eventually the son came in and repainted the house and put it up for sale. Now it’s one of the new and renovated mansions, amidst so many others that remain run-down and empty. Its grand porch is vacant now, absent of the crowded postures of the unblinking cats. Where did they go?

  Since moving here I have been obsessed with a tiny striped cat, an orphan who disappears for months at a time. I call her the raccoon cat, because of her patterned tail and striped coat. The previous winter I was convinced I could hear her from outside my bedroom window, an eerie cry like a changeling’s, and the next morning I’d put on my boots and trudge around in the snow, attempting to find her. Later that spring I saw her perched, as if surprised, on top of a trash can in the alley, gnawing at the remnants of a slice of pizza. I began to lure the cat to my stoop with sardines and cat food, despite my dog’s protests. She would frequently dart away if I came too close. Sometimes, though, she would let me sit on the chair while she ate underneath the bench, and I would feel such joy, watching her little tongue go in and out. Other times I was content to watch her eat from the window. Soon other strays began to frequent the porch, and I would feed them as well, although I was less attached to them. I marked in my notebook whenever I saw the cat, keeping track of her comings and goings. In this way, as with keeping track of my interactions with the old woman, I felt that I was at work on my novel. But the cat will disappear for months, worrying me, until I see her dart beneath a parked car, raccoon tail waving. I still refuse to name her.

  When I first moved here, I taught a graduate writing seminar on the fragment at one of the liberal arts colleges. In each of the three fragmentary novels we read, a different narrator, experiencing a declining mental state, exacerbated by loneliness, worried over her lost cat. In each of the three, it’s unclear to the reader whether the cat actually exists. I said to my students then, over the uncanniness of this repetitive narrative thread across several books: Perhaps this is true loneliness. You worry over a lost cat you don’t even know exists. Everyone wrote in their notebooks when I said this, as if I had said something profound.

  Suzanne and I are always trying to reach each other, sending little missives, trying to set up chats. It used to be easy, when we had each other’s blogs to read, that showed what it felt like to be inside our days. Still it’s when we read each other’s work that we feel the closest. I write to her of my feelings of isolation, being off social media. I began to find it hard to be alone, when I used to love my solitude, I write to her. I scattered myself in fragments online. But still I google myself constantly. It’s a sickness. Suzanne is now reading May Sarton’s Journal of a Solitude, at my urging. She has just moved into her own apartment, separated from her poet husband, who is now dating a woman—worse, another writer—worse, a poet with a PhD and tenure-track appointment. Suzanne has been torturing herself online looking at pictures of them at literary functions together. How this taps into her isolation already, the community she has lost with the separation. Everyone says it’s so healthy to have friends, she writes to me, but I find it sometimes more isolating. The self-harm of social media—we both understand it and yet feel compelled by it, these pictures and narratives of success and happiness, however fictional.

  I last saw Suzanne that May, when she stayed with us for an event for her book. There were only a handful of people in attendance—a couple of people she knew, my editor, two of my students, an ardent bookstore employee. I was supposed to bring in the audience, I think. That summer, we communicate infrequently, but when we do, she talks about her ex, his new life. She must derive some pleasure from this rage, she writes me, otherwise why can’t she let it all go, her past life? For years she will cycle through this rage and despair, the grief of her divorce, fragments I let her repeat because I know she needs to. But Elena Ferrante is not a School of Emotional Coping! I try joking to her that summer. How exhausted I am after she stays here, having to be so emotionally available, although I also long to spend time with her. It’s uncomfortable sometimes to be in such close proximity with another woman. I see it in the ways we withdraw, have to repair inside. That’s what writing is for us. That interior space.

  One day, while taking the dog out for a walk, I come upon two Post-it notes on the sidewalk outside of the house. It takes a while for me to realize they are marked with my handwriting. I must have thrown them out, and my notes scattered into the street. I have saved them, crumpled, on my desk somewhere:

  Urgent need to communicate

  Urgent need to disappear (withdraw)

  The last notes Kafka ever wrote, when he was in the sanatorium, dying of consumption, slips of conversation to his nurses. Writing as X-ray. His last note was something like, To think I could simply venture a large swallow of water.

  That summer, I begin to bleed so heavily and for such an extended period of time that I feel sure I am entering perimenopause, even though I am only thirty-seven at the time. I can’t find any system to reliably contain it. One day, escaping to a restaurant to write in my notebook despite the heat, I stain the wooden patio chair with my blood. I try my best to clean it up, spilling water over it, mopping it up with paper napkins, my fingers smudged with blood. Finally I slink out of the restaurant, avoiding all eye contact from the smoothly sincere waiters, and creep home, weeping. I don’t go back there for months. On the toilet I bleed out large clumps of a fascinating and wobbly texture, examining the clumps with my fingers, while calling and texting everyone I know with a middle-aged uterus. My ob-gyn sends me to get vaginally probed to assess the size of a new cyst growing on my ovary. She puts me back on birth control, which makes me so psychotic that one day I make turkey sandwich after turkey sandwich, like an assembly line, eating each one until I make myself sick.

  I am supposed to travel for an event, but I cancel it. I cancel almost everything.

  Our housekeeper, who comes twice a month, a Peruvian grandmother named Beatriz, shows me her surgery scars, pulling her sweatpants down to one side. She had her ovaries removed at home near Lima, she tells me, it was cheaper there. In response I pull up my shirt and show her the scars on my abdomen. I often feel lazy, and rather wretched, having someone else clean the house while I’m at home, sometimes having abandoned work and watching something on my computer with headphones, finding it difficult to think or work with someone else in the house with me, making various sounds. She has cleaned the house for years, well before we moved in. But I also like having her here. I appreciate the company, someone to drink coffee with. I follow her around, helping her move furniture. She reminds me of my grandmother’s family, many of whom cleaned house as well, including for my grandmother, when she got too old.

  How strange not to be fertile anymore. A large part of me would feel relieved, that this was decided for me, in a way. I look at babies and know I’m supposed to want one. But John is mostly against it—overpopulation, climate change, money, our art, our lives, maybe we’d travel again—and I wasn’t for it enough to argue against him or even myself persuasively. Maybe when we’re older, we tell each other, and we’re making the work we want to. And yet we are already older. I have given up so much, at this point—abandoning trying to get into a PhD program to be in the running for a full-time job, giving up having a baby. All I had left was the precarious life of a writer.

  Although I am not sure I ever really believed I was fertile. It seemed odd to have never gotten pregnant, after two decades of being convinced in the dark, when I was tired, please, it just felt so much better without condoms. A poet and translator I once knew told me that when they looked at their breasts in the shower they thought, It’s impossible t
hat milk could come out of them, it’s physically impossible. I suppose in a way that’s what I always felt about myself. And that perversely my body would obey those feelings. And yet my body constantly betrayed how I wanted it to act or be.

  I never understood why David Markson has his Kate bleed constantly in Wittgenstein’s Mistress. Are we supposed to think she’s going through menopause, as if the aging female body is always speculative fiction? Maybe that’s what he thought a middle-aged woman’s body would be like when entirely alone—naked, without maxi pads, bleeding clumps into the sea.

  I was finally coming to terms, living here, with becoming a hag, which was becoming invisible. My striped hippie poncho and hairy legs and big straw hat in the summertime. Perhaps being a hag was like being a hermit—there was a grace and severity to this vocation.

  I realize, writing this, that I have not had my period in some time. I don’t have that to mark time anymore, the obliteration of the pain, the days elapsed in bed.

  For the rest of the summer I begin trying to live a regimented day, an almost ascetic life. To avoid stress, inflammation—in the body and the mind. How ritualistic, almost superstitious, I try to become—two hours in the morning of no email, no self-googling, exercise, prepare lunch, two more hours in the afternoon. Try to practice the Ayurvedic rituals I tape to my bathroom mirror. I like having my days structured for me. Blink my eyes seven times upon waking. Scrape my tongue seven times. Neti pot. I hold coconut oil in my mouth, which tastes like semen, then spit it out in the trash so as not to clog the pipes. Dry-brushing. Oil massage. Quick shower. Water with lemon before coffee. Yoga at noon. Or bike to the local college to swim. Grocery store. Then I make myself lunch—poached salmon, red quinoa, something green. My hands cold from washing kale for dinner. Return to work, if I am able. It’s exhausting, trying to think and work with all this housework. In the afternoon, I often let myself sink into the couch and the internet. Anyway, I become run-down if I’m too productive, if I push myself too much. I begin going to community acupuncture weekly, lying back on a lawn chair in the middle of the yoga studio, trying to shut out other whispered sensitivities, a line of needles on my abdomen, a heat lamp suspended above.

  Kafka’s naked calisthenics in front of the open window, even in the winter. In an August diary entry, Kafka writes that even though he has failed to write a word that summer, he has gone swimming almost every day at the Civilian Swimming School in Prague. He finally has conquered, he writes, some of the despair over his body, his frailty.

  Isn’t it hard though, Anna writes, to be so healthy and in your body while being in your mind and your private world? The world of the body and sharing that, and the world of the work, the retreat?

  Lately I have been thinking about Rilke for a story I’m hoping to write. His inability to work in the summers, this pattern that forms in the letters: escaping the urban summer, the country versus the city. In letters Rilke writes to Lou Andreas-Salomé from a red garden cottage in the Roman suburbs, where he’s followed Clara, who has her own separate studio there. Rilke complains about the humidity, the lifeless museum atmosphere, the ghastly hordes of German tourists. Their finances a constant worry. So much of his correspondence spent negotiating publishing contracts, payments, trying to secure future commissions. He must earn a living by writing. The next place he lives must be decided by the work he is doing, he writes. It is here that he begins to conceive of the novel that would take him six more years to finish—thinking through his hysterical Danish nobleman, going back to his initial, bewildering solitude in Paris. He asks for his letters to be returned. He plans monographs he’ll never write: one, on a poet, will necessitate a trip to Copenhagen, another, on a painter, requires a trip to Spain. He must learn Danish, continue Russian, and translate more from the French. He complains of his claustrophobia, nerves, toothaches. Later, in Berlin, where Clara has taken another studio, he suffers an impacted tooth, swollen gums and face. All the interruptions the day brings, the worries about money, the smells. Everything that infects his transcendence. He begins looking for a remote place with a good winter. A refuge in Capri. It is difficult tracing his peripatetic life, even then—is he fleeing the last room or going toward the next? In Rome, he longs to get a dog, for companionship, but he doesn’t let himself. What if he wants to travel? He is no longer working on the novel.

  Rilke had met Lou Andreas-Salomé when he was twenty-six and she was a decade older. She was married to a famous older scholar, but the marriage was unconsummated. The young René Maria had no back to his head, she wrote in her diary: all the wisdom just fell right out. She renamed him, giving him a proper German first name under which he would be published. She tutored him to change his handwriting to a smaller, more exacting script, and disciplined him to make his prose less florid. She had sent him alone to Florence, instructing the novitiate to keep a journal of the art he saw there. Some speculate this was her way to find space to think and write, away from her devouring, much younger lover, prone to violent moods and tantrums. One biographer speculates that, at the age of thirty-eight, she sent him away so that she could have an abortion.

  Up at night arguing with John. Our shared misery. His constant desire to move out of this city, so that we don’t spend everything on rent, so that he can have a studio. It also doesn’t seem like you are happy here, he says. I’m not sure sometimes whether happiness is possible. Stuck on the couch, on days I can’t manage to structure. It’s the summers that are so paralyzing. I complain to John all day over chat while he’s at the library. How empty it feels in this city. How far it feels to reach the other. We are looking for new spaces, but what we are really looking for is retreat, clarity, to escape our internal chaos. For the days not to feel glued together.

  In her journal May Sarton asks, Can art be happy, does it have to be depressed? Her meditation on the small pink roses at her desk. Like Rilke’s twigs of heather. It is only when she is alone, she writes, that she can see the flowers, that she can really pay attention to them.

  It seems impossible, Anna writes me, to work on a novel while living with another person. It seems contrary to what is necessary to write a novel, which is to be alone. And when her boyfriend is home her space becomes domestic, she becomes domestic. . . .

  There’s a line from the opening crisis of The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge: “My God, if any of it could be shared! But what would it be then, what would it be? No, it is only at the price of solitude.”

  Need to figure out—what does Rilke mean by “it.”

  “Today is a word only suicides ought to be allowed to use; it has no meaning for other people”—the opening page of Ingeborg Bachmann’s Malina, the truest line about writing a novel ever written. Every morning the unnamed narrator walks to her café to read the newspapers. Her lover nearby, her partner at home, in the Vienna neighborhood where she’s lived for years. As company, she has a secretary to whom she dictates her correspondence. Dreaming, nightmaring, remembering, swooning, despairing, putting on lipstick, looking at wrinkles in the mirror, making notes of book titles, buying a new dress, reading philosophy, talking on the phone, drinking coffee, smoking, going to conferences, replying to letters . . . but never any writing.

  The narrator in Malina wants to write a happy book for her boyfriend, Ivan, who also wants her to be happy, not in despair. This is probably why she’s blocked.

  The desire, in yoga, for my mind to be still—to be able to meditate on nothingness, to penetrate the day, to reset. Yet throughout class I make notes in my head for the book. “Monkey brain,” my favorite teacher calls it. I escape to the toilet to scribble down notes on my phone. Thoughts about what it’s like to be in the day and my body. That I should write about Kafka’s digestion. The disgust he felt at his body. The attempt to relieve his constipation—a rhythm in the diaries. The lists he makes of his meals, his high-fiber vegetarian diet. His father’s irritation at his son’s breakfast, his yogurt, chestnuts, dates, figs, gr
apes, almonds, raisins, berries, whole grain bread, oranges.

  There is a tremulous grace to how Genet squats, his back curving, as I stand over protectively, sometimes impatiently, for he can be very particular about where he chooses to go, and will take his time sniffing and nosing in the grass, sometimes pausing to sniff another dog’s poop, and then the quick shuffle he performs afterward, kicking up grass, though I admonish him not to. In the heat my dog’s shits are softer and more pungent, I must scrape the plastic bag through the grass.

  All that summer, handwritten signs are posted on nearby trees, signs that become progressively angrier, asking people to pick up their dogs’ shit, large scrawled black magic marker letters riddled with misspellings and colloquialisms. “Don’t be a McNasty!” When the rains come, the signs stay up, becoming blurry and illegible, the marker bleeding across the paper underneath the clear packing tape, until they are finally taken down.