The Reenactments: A Memoir Page 4

  Vinnie does finally return, and we ride the Van until dawn. At one point Paul and I are sitting on the floor of an ATM, talking to a homeless guy—Tommy—who had pulled his laden shopping cart in beside him. This is in South Boston, Southie, an especially brutal part of the city. When I was working at the shelter I’d been put in the hospital after being jumped by some punks in Southie one night after work. Southie hasn’t changed much—we’d just spent an hour talking to a guy who lived near the railroad tracks, who’d seen a friend beaten to death by some kids with baseball bats the week before. As we sit on the floor talking to Tommy, wearing our donated coats, some punks come up to the doors and shake them, banging on the windows, yelling, KILL THE HOMELESS FAGGOTS. Paul and I, when we first met, had spoken about the stereotype of the dangerous homeless person, and how in reality most of the homeless are utterly vulnerable to the weather, to cops, to violence. Now here we are, squatting on the floor of an ATM, wearing our homeless coats, as a pack of Southie teenagers paw at the windows, threatening to kill us. I genuinely fear for our lives. I couldn’t have planned it better.

  THE first script Paul writes is beautiful—poetic, smart, dark, weird, moving, like the greatest Rumanian art-house movie you never saw. I read it and weep, my agent (Bill) reads it and weeps, my wife (Lili) reads it and weeps. Paul really did it, Lili says, it’s amazing. Then she adds offhandedly, Hollywood will never make this movie. Lili’s an actress, she knows the business, and, as it turns out, she’s right. Three years and two big studios later, after every junior executive has stuck a finger into it, Paul’s beautiful script is nearly unrecognizable—I cannot read a page without wincing. Fortunately, within a year the economy will collapse, and the budget will be cut, and Paul will move to a smaller studio (Focus), and be allowed to go back to his original script.

  ONE small moment in Paul’s first script does feel a little off, and we talk about it the next time we meet, at the same restaurant in L.A., a few months after our night on the Van. It is the scene where the “Nick” character (I guess this is how I will have to start referring to myself) stops off at what the voiceover refers to as “my drycleaner’s.” It is a scene where I am picking up some trashbags full of clothes from my landlord (not my drycleaner, though my landlord did happen to be a drycleaner when he was younger, which is why he has these clothes to donate). I tell Paul that when I was working with the homeless I didn’t have anyone I would refer to as “my drycleaner”—in fact, I don’t think I ever had anything drycleaned at all. Even now, twenty years later, I’ve maybe dropped off a couple suits over the years, but it’s hardly a regular thing. I don’t think I bought any clothes from anywhere but a secondhand store until I was thirty. Most of my friends worked with the homeless, and no one I knew had a drycleaner. Paul grew up in a very different world than I did—his grandfather was John Huston’s agent—and he looked at me oddly for a long minute when I told him this.

  How’d you get your clothes clean? he finally asked.

  SIX

  FLAMEWORK is a glassblower’s term for how one can transform sand and pigment into, say, a vase or a glass. Or a flower. Leopold Blaschka, describing his own flamework, wrote:

  Many people think that we have some secret apparatus by which we can squeeze glass suddenly into these forms, but it is not so. We have tact. My son Rudolf has more than I have, because he is my son, and tact increases in every generation.

  (1970) We drive up to the Agassiz for the day, my mother, brother, and I. It must be a Saturday, when my mother isn’t working—she must have the day off from the bank, and she won’t have to show up for her bartending job until that night. The drive takes an hour, I know this because the drive from Scituate to Boston always takes an hour, more or less. You take the backroads to the highway, then, just before you enter the city, you drive past the Florentine tower of Pine Street, the tower of the original firehouse, the tower the firemen would practice jumping from, before it became a shelter.

  RAMACHANDRAN found that when a patient with a phantom arm watched another person’s intact hand being rubbed, he actually felt his phantom being rubbed—massaging the other person’s hand appeared to relieve the pain in the phantom. This is what we know: certain sensory neurons in your brain are activated, they fire, when your hand is touched, and a certain proportion of these same neurons (mirror neurons) also fire when you watch another person’s hand being touched, as if the neuron were “reading” the other person’s mind, or “empathizing.” Some claim that these mirror neurons are what separate us from the apes, but this can only be true if you believe that empathy is limited to humans.

  ON Ash Wednesday we give something up so we can empathize with Jesus, just as we reenact the crucifixion each spring (these constant resurrections, these passion plays), so we can witness, again, his suffering. We see it so we can then remember it, seems to be the idea, even though none of us was there the first time around. Think of the Pietà, the mother gazing upon the unimaginable, knowing she only gets these few moments—one take—to feel whatever it is she is going to feel, for eternity. Ideally, through this yearly reenactment, we will find empathy within ourselves for all who suffer and sacrifice. In practice, though, for some, we end up just picking at old wounds, reenacting scenes from the past, trapped on the wheel of suffering (samsara). My problem with empathy is, perhaps, one of perspective—each year, on the anniversary of my mother’s death, I never put myself in her place, I don’t know if I should—painkillers, ocean, gun—I simply return to the place I found myself in, the moment I heard she was dead.

  LEOPOLD Blaschka and his son Rudolf, of Hosterwitz, Germany (near Dresden), were the creators of the Glass Flowers. Leopold, as a young man, had gone into the family business of producing glass ornaments and glass eyes. Occasionally he would take on a commission for glass replicas of aquatic creatures—anemones, sea slugs, jellyfish—for museums. At one point he even constructed an aquarium in his house, in order to have live specimens from which to work. In 1886 the Blaschkas were commissioned by George Lincoln Goodale, founder of Harvard’s Botanical Museum, to create a series of glass specimens of flowers, to be used for research. Three years later they signed on to a ten-year project. It was to be financed by a former student of Goodale’s, Mary Lee Ware, and her mother, Elizabeth. When Leopold died, in 1895, Rudolf took over, and would continue creating the glass flowers until his death, in 1939. In those fifty-plus years over 4,300 models of 830 different plant species were made. Most (two-thirds) seem to have been created in the first eight years, when Leopold was still living, yet this might have more to do with ever-increasing levels of difficulty as Rudolph worked his way through the remaining species—a daisy might be less complex to reconstruct than, say, a stalk of wheat. Yet the Blaschkas took on no apprentices and left no heirs—no one has since been able to replicate their artistry and skill. This knowledge died with Rudolf.

  THE Glass Flowers exhibit has been called “the Sistine Chapel of glasswork”—does this simply mean they are irreplaceable (though this begs the question as to what is replaceable)? Does it mean they are at the very height of artistic achievement, that they inspire awe in the viewers? Perhaps we find something cathartic in the apple blossom that looks like nothing but an apple blossom, but what? Perhaps it is simply, How did a human being (or even two) accomplish this? Perhaps, depending upon your temperament, the question is, How did God accomplish this, how did he (or she) connect this leaf to this stem? Or perhaps you simply believe that the plant found a way, just as the father found a way, and taught the son. Or perhaps we wonder why anyone would spend their lives recreating the world around them. Perhaps this forces us to ask ourselves, in this dimly lit room, how we spend our days. Go, listen to the murmured comments of those in the dark beside you: None of these are real? Is it possible? Completely glass?

  THE Ware mother and daughter employed the Blaschka father and son to gather together all the flowers of the world, impossibly, into one room (Couldn’t one simply visit a greenhouse? one migh
t ask, though only a greenhouse in a Borgesian fable could contain all the plants in the world). What did these women hope to achieve, what did they want? What kept them going, for fifty years, through one world war, right to the edge of another? Why flowers (not actual flowers, but replicas)? Was it simply a Victorian impulse, the belief that the world could be catalogued, preserved? Did they want to understand this one aspect of the world, to praise it? Were they thrilled by the uncanny illusion each flower offered, how impossible it was to tell which was real, which created? What about the desire to freeze time itself? Decay, rot, death, delayed forever? Was it vanity, to possess the world, or humility, the chance that they could be part of something larger than themselves? What was the original impulse to say yes? Which flower did they first hold in their hands (lilac? hydrangea?) that inspired them to say, Yes, we will do this? Did they see (like I can’t help but see) the deeply sexual nature of each flower, opening, offering herself?

  DIDION offers this: Time passes. Memory fades, memory adjusts, memory conforms to what we think we remember. It is possible we went to the Agassiz only once, I know this, this is the way memory works, at least my memory, even if it doesn’t feel that way, even if now, when I return, it all seems so familiar, as if I’d spent many hours, many days, there. The walls of birds, the bones of a whale hanging from the ceiling, reassembled into a whale, the cabinet of apes, each seemingly staring straight at me—familiar, yet strange. Ernst Jentsch defined the uncanny as being a product of “intellectual uncertainty, so that the uncanny would always, as it were, be something that one does not know one’s way about in.” Uncomfortably strange or uncomfortably familiar. Tacked to my bedroom wall in the house I grew up in was a postcard from the cabinet of apes, bought in the Agassiz gift shop. It somehow survived all the purges (white paneling, Fleetwood Mac), right through the time I left that house. Maybe memory is constructed of merely this—a postcard tacked to a wall—maybe this postcard is why the Agassiz is, to me, so familiar, so strange.

  SEVEN

  FOR the last four summers my wife and child and I have lived in a 150-year-old barn in upstate New York. I renovated it four years ago, putting in just enough work so we could spend the warm months sleeping in it. One night, when Maeve was one and a half, our second summer in the barn, an hour or so after she’d finally drifted off into sleep, the light in her room suddenly switched on (her door is made up of glass panes covered with a thin fabric)—then it switched off. Then on. Then off. On. Off. For the next half hour this continued. I crept to the window—Maeve was standing in her crib, reaching out to the switch, then looking around the room as it snapped into light, aware that she was the one controlling it. She’d only learned to walk a few months earlier.

  Her room, from a distance, pulsed like a huge firefly.

  ANOTHER true story: I went to a museum in Houston a few months ago, with a friend, a writer who hopes to write a memoir. We were standing before a Maurizio Cattelan sculpture (All, 2007)—thirteen bodies covered with thirteen spotlessly white sheets, lined up on the floor at our feet. As we moved in silence slowly around the bodies, we saw that one of them appeared to have had his head cut off, yet it was placed back in the spot where the head should be. Another was missing a hand. Then we realized that each was carved out of its own single block of marble. My friend asked me if it had been cathartic, to write my memoir. I looked down at the sculptures—it was cathartic for me to look at them, but I could imagine it might have been hell to make them (I was cheered / when I came first to know / that there were flowers also / in hell). No, I answered—how was it for you to read it?

  Aristotle, in his Poetics, never promised catharsis for the makers of art, only for the audience. To return to the scene of the crime, or the scene of the death, can take a toll (and god forgive me, / I pulled to the side of the road and wrote this poem), but then so does the energy it takes to avoid it, to deny that you are, once again, standing over the corpse, or listening to her laugh in the next room. When I first started out I wrote a series poems about my mother’s suicide—at the time it seemed I would never write about anything else (the good news is the same as the bad news). Some were purely elegiac, yet they were stuck in a sort of two-step in the seven stages of grief—stuck somewhere between disbelief and rage. When I return to that scene now (reluctantly, ambushed), my experience is not one of catharsis, but of a nearly unbearable resurgence of chaos and pain. And ultimate failure—that container, those poems, can never contain this grief, nor her death, nor does it make anything right, nor does it put it behind me, not forever. Grief, as Kevin Young says, is evergreen. The urn that holds the ashes might be hand-carved, but the ash will always turn to paste in your throat.

  MAEVE wakes up some mornings now, when it’s still dark out, sobbing. Hot Pepper, she cries, come back, please. Hot Pepper, come back. Hot Pepper is her little brother, who lives in Paris, who drives a car with his hands and feet out the window, who has ears big enough to hear everything we say, even if we whisper. Maeve is almost four, she has been talking about—and to—Hot Pepper for almost two years now. Sometimes Hot Pepper has fifteen brothers, including Crunch-Crunch and Bailey, sometimes he lives on the head of an elephant, sometimes Paris is the lit windows behind our Brooklyn apartment. Hot Pepper lives there, she tells me, pointing. That’s Paris. If she hears a story about anyone who is bad, or mean, she assures us that Hot Pepper will take care of him—Hot Pepper will fly in and knock him down, she promises. I love Hot Pepper, she says. I pick her up when she misses him, hold her as she cries. I know, love, I know, I murmur—it’s hard to miss someone.

  PAUL Levy offers this:

  Instead of an either/or universe, where our projections are either real or unreal, there is an area in-between in which they are both/and: both real and unreal at the same time. Instead of the assumption that our projections are merely unreal figments of imagination, Jung points out their very real effects by saying, “Whatever their reality may be, functionally at all events they behave like realities.” Having very real effects, the products of imagination are not imaginary illusions. Jung elaborates, “What we are pleased to call illusion may be for the psyche an extremely important life-factor, something as indispensable as oxygen for the body—a psychic actuality of overwhelming significance. Presumably the psyche does not trouble itself about our categories of reality; for it, everything that works is real.”

  (2010) A few months before we may or may not begin filming (rumors, whispers)—at this point I’m not allowing myself to believe it’s real. The anniversary of my mother’s death is coming around again, and for some reason it’s hitting me hard—harder than last year. I’m having a rough go of it, wrapped in my cotton wool. Catharsis? I know nothing of catharsis. If Lili is out for the night, Maeve will sometimes cry out, Mommy, come back, Mommy, come back, over and over. I sit on the couch, stare at the wall, listen to her cry. Mommy come back. Countless hours of therapy have led me to this—her body refuses to stay ash. How to let go? I’m still afraid of being left, and so I dream up escape routes, I believe everyone does, it’s barely worth mentioning. Some days I swear that if a woman held out her hand to me I would take it, I would leave my wife and child, I would burn down the house, just so that I would be the one to leave this time. I go to my therapist, I tell him about my struggles, we do some work. I am once again adrift in a sea of incomprehensibility—I will never understand my mother’s suicide. For some reason the weight of it, this time around, is crushing. Its intensity seems not to have diminished one watt since the gunshot, so many years ago. My therapist has me lie flat on my back, reach up into the nothingness above me, say the exact words Maeve says. Come back. Don’t go.

  Afterwards, as I bicycle away, Central Park on my left, I come to Columbus Circle, which is, as always, crowded, frenetic. I’m a little spacey. A woman jumps in front of my bike, holding a small red sign up to me, which I cannot make out. Get out of the movie, she yells. I slow down, look around. Movie? It looks like I am simply in New York on a S
aturday morning. It seems impossible—is everyone else in the whole city in this movie except me? I look around for the cameras, the lights, anything. Get out of the movie, she yells again.