My favorite thing about sleeping with the poet was finding out more about Ceres, the woman he lived with. I loved when she came into the bookstore. Why she chose Lawson’s over the other bookstore was unclear—or maybe she frequented it as well; I wouldn’t have known, my employment at Lawson’s banished me from that store and its conversations. Ceres favored the same thin-soled cloth Chinese-peasant shoes the poet did, so they walked alike, flat-footedly, but hers were worn with lace-trimmed ankle socks, from one ear hung a silk Victorian curtain tassel, from the other a silver kokopelli, and over her thrift shop floral dresses she wore old-man cardigans, just one or two buttons buttoned, never the correct button in the correct buttonhole, and worn thus the droopy beige or camel vapidity of the sweaters took on an air of witty dereliction, and below the buttoned button her belly jutted, five months along, and for me it was a surprise, the detailed impudence of her improvisation, since when the poet wrote about her she was ethereal, a soul in its last incarnation, and the thought crossed my mind, If he got that wrong what else did he get wrong?
Leo and I watched her forage in World Religions. Who is that? he asked. He could tell I knew her. I said her name. It is not, he said. It is. Ceres. What is she? he asked. I said A performance artist. She is not, Leo said. She is, she did an MFA, her thesis was living in a glass enclosure in the art building for a month, completely on display, eating, sleeping, zero privacy in everything.
And for that you get an MFA, Leo wondered, and I looked at him to see if he was exaggerating his old-fogyism, but he wasn’t. I said Ordinary life as art, you know?—because when he got riled up, Leo could be unpredictable, and I didn’t want Ceres returning to the poet with some tale of how that weird girl in the bookstore had egged her fellow clerk into accosting her, demanding to know whether she was going to buy one of those books she was pawing through. Leo did his silent scrutinizing damnedest to make her uncomfortable, but did she care? Nope. Genuinely, insouciantly: nope. Merely by coming and going without minding what Leo thought, she instilled in me the longing to be, not her exactly, but a woman capable of failing to notice male disapproval.
She carried Leo’s sketchbook to the counter. This was in Christianity, she said, but someone’s going to want it back, the drawings are beautiful.
Leo’s Thank you—they’re mine conveyed, under its gentleman-bookseller politeness, delinquent charm. His gunslinger mustache curved in a smile answering the white teeth of her admiration.
She had everyone.
Upright in lotus, the Roshi visiting from Japan hadn’t seemed dangerous, he hadn’t seemed predatory, though I had no trouble imagining the calm set of his mouth turning impatient, I can visualize the shift to scorn in virtually any face and did so compulsively about his while I sat cross-legged before him bothered by feeling that he was sexy, or being in his ambit was sexy, when the more complicated response, which I was also having, was that being in his presence was moving, as was his casually profound absorption in the ceremonious matter at hand, the process of settling on the koan that would be right for me, to do so called on Roshi to decipher, from the answers I was giving to his translator’s series of questions, what kind of trouble I was in, and the searchingness of his superb focus on me pierced me by being what I always longed for, which—it dawned on me as I exerted myself to maintain my weak-ass semi-lotus with a straighter spine—could only last another minute or so, because these interviews had formal parameters strictly observed, out of reckless mourning for the immanent loss of his attention I met the last question from Roshi’s translator with the plainest truth I was capable of, Needing to be perfect is killing me, words barely uttered before being translated into the language the translator was leaning close to speak into Roshi’s ear. My therapist was in love with the translator. Sometimes Santa Fe could seem like a very small town.
The road kept leading into the moon-shadows cast by shaggy old cottonwoods and out again and it was all I could do to make myself walk into another swath of darkness. Between the rich people’s place where the sesshin had been held and my house on the canyon’s opposite side, the road was laid out in a long inverted V, with, at the point of the V, a bridge across the river, the only safe way to cross when it was, as tonight, high with snowmelt. To stick to the road was going to mean five exhausted, flashlight-less miles, though I could look across at our small semi-neighborhood of companionable old adobes, flat roofs stair-stepping down every habitable bit of steepness. Little lights shone there.
One of them could be my husband’s—in our bed, under our patchwork quilt, reading.
The river ran between.
I waded in.
The opposite bank wasn’t far, maybe four or five yards, but the river was freezing, its bottom a mosaic of cobbles sunk in angora algae. The soles of my ballet slippers curved around stone after stone in a grippy, monkey-footed version of wading. A stone rocked and before I could regain my balance I was tipped into a pothole, drenched to the waist. The sodden drag of my jeans rendered even pleasanter the fluttering of my shirt in the breeze that was the close counterpart of the river’s rush, staying low, mirroring its roil, whisking off the foam tossed from its whorls and the geysers repeatedly slapped up between stones large enough to jut from the surface, behind stones lodged in twosomes or threesomes twiggy debris was trapped, rough half-sunk nests orbiting pell-mell, an occasional rock-anchored branch looming haughty as an antler. From the bank the river had looked as simple as a night lawn, as neighborly, as easily crossed. With the next slip I was knocked onto my ass, scared by the hurtling pressure against my chest and the close smell of snow and the impersonal possessiveness of the river’s wanting to roll me over, twirl and drag and bang its animal toy against rock. I shoved up, hoping my footing would hold, wishing I was stronger, wishing I hadn’t gotten into this, but I felt stubborn as well, and close to ecstatic. Drops came slinking from my ears and ran down my jaw to tremble at the point of my chin. I shook my head to fling them off. I wasn’t turning around. Above, where the woods thinned, a pair of headlights eked along the rutted dirt of Upper Canyon Road, and those lights had to be my husband out looking for me, and I shouted his name against the roar, and kept shouting, because with each shout the chances of his hearing me, whether he was driving that car or at home reading under our quilt, seemed to increase, each shout more urgent than the last, each instance of his name’s being flung out more desperate, likelier to be heard or sensed, because I believed in everything now, telepathy, the emergency intuitiveness of the soul, the lengths I knew he would go to to save me if he had the least inkling of my being in trouble were fantastic lengths, and equally fantastic was my own valuableness, my consciousness too great for the river to blot out. The headlights went slowpoking down the road and in their dust-infused radiance the silhouettes of chamisa and rabbit-ear sage seemed to billow outward, then contract with the lights’ passing, and I followed those lights until their disappearance drove home the loneliness of no one’s knowing where I was. Who was going to think to look in the river? Would he? Halfway across loomed a boulder big enough to climb onto and I floundered forward, freezing nerves of river running under my shirt. I slung my arms across the boulder, pasting my rib cage against coarse-grained granite, flecked and pitted, yet with a baby-powder-delicate film over it. Within a month my therapist was to leave the translator for the poet; in midsummer Ceres would give birth at home, in the bed the poet and I occasionally slept in when she was out of town, and because I had never seen a newborn and one had just appeared in a story I was writing, I would knock on their door when I was sure the poet was elsewhere, and she would let me in and give me the baby to hold—buttocks sleek as hard-boiled eggs, his umbilicus jutting like a withered jerky stick. A thousand nights’ bookstore typing wouldn’t have stuck that umbilicus to the belly of my fictional baby; how wrong had I gotten all the shit I went ahead and made up? Ceres squatted to soak her episiotomy stitches in a basin of warm water infused with yerba buena, glancing over her shoulder toward the bed wher
e the baby sprawled across my thighs to say Don’t you think you and—she named the poet—have come to the end of your karma, and when I agreed we had, she said—over her shoulder—Do you know where he is? I was beginning to understand how callous I had been, the openness of their relationship an assumption it had been convenient for me to leave unquestioned, at the guilt my expression must have conveyed Ceres said, over her shoulder, Please just stop moaning to him about not being able to live another day, and I said That was a mistake, then, All of this was a mistake, I’m sorry I came, and she said It’s good you came, this was necessary, and I said—insanely—Thank you and waited along with her in weird harmoniousness for the timer to ring, at which point the stitches would have been soaked long enough and I could hand over the baby, but before it rang, while her back was turned to us on the messy bed where I had done things I hated to think of, I touched my nose to the baby’s scalp and breathed in so I could get the smell right in my story, almost caught in the act when Ceres stood up from the basin and turned and said nakedly Try to love this incarnation, and only then, like a joke confirmation of wisdom, did the timer chime, and for whatever reason I was to hear her voice saying Try to love this incarnation at various moments of fucking up far into the future. I lay there with the boulder sending cold vibes of steadfastness through my chest, pelted by drops flung off by the river, and I thought of how I had sat down in front of Roshi, the dignity and repleteness of his person allied with the formality of the black robe whose spill lapped around him like the sand-waves encircling a Ryoanji boulder, what was affecting about meeting him was that he was immediately real, down to the fuzzed facets of his imperfectly shaven elderly skull he was real, down to his pared nails, to the blackness of his pupils, how hard and how long did you have to work in this life to come across as so immediately, vastly, eminently real to a random other, he was saying something, his Japanese translated by the translator my therapist was in love with, this person, the translator, the reason she’d asked me to accompany her to sesshin, to play wingman to her obsession with the translator, she’d needed a witness to her being in love and if it was a weird use for a therapist to make of a patient, okay, I was willing to sit there on the cushion beside her as an observer, a person acquainted with her impulsivity, who wasn’t therefore too surprised when at the conclusion of this evening’s session the translator ambled through the dispersing students toward us, only there was no us, there was only his smile at my therapist and her smile in return and his asking whether she’d like to go somewhere and her saying yes and not asking, not needing to ask, where, but she had been my ride to the sesshin, in her nice car she’d picked me up at the front door of the adobe where I lived with my husband—he’d called after me Get enlightened—and as I climbed into the front passenger seat and shut the door I felt honored to be enclosed in her real life, relieved of the distance maintained in her office, to be in her car was flattering, a vindication of the hard work I was doing to come across as sane, a person she could call her friend, and if I was her friend that must mean I had gotten free at last, as she had been rooting for me to do, of perfectionism. I would be her rock in the rushing vulnerability of being in love, I who had never been anyone’s rock. Once silent zazen was over, the interpreter asked who would like to meet one-on-one with Roshi. Anybody who wanted one would be given, in this private encounter, a koan. My hand went up. Alone with Roshi and the interpreter in an otherwise empty room, I waited for the riddle. The interpreter asked a series of questions meant to help the Roshi ascertain the right koan for me. As the interpreter asked and I answered and he translated into Japanese, Roshi presided in soundless, signless presence. He was in fact fathomlessly present. So it was true!—there was such a thing as enlightenment. His was a mercurial aliveness, like that of a fox or some other irremediably wild thing, which gives you pleasure just to be near, but also you start wanting wildness for yourself, you find yourself thinking Why am I this and not a fox. He spoke at last, gazing right at me. The translator translated: How does the river run? My therapist had said she sometimes found Roshi too austere, too commanding; when I’d asked Commanding about what? she’d said He’s used to getting whatever he wants, try finding a famous man who’s not, at my frown she said The people who’re capable of changing your life, they’re not necessarily angels, and though koans were supposed to be kept secret I wanted to confide mine to her, but she had gone and I was inchworming down the boulder, shoving off, ripped through by shudders of cold, thinking How does it run? How does it run? and as I was asking How does it run? there came a sort of floating self-notification, a light, bearable ominousness, warning that I was halfway across with no idea how to even begin to answer.
The romance of perfectionism worries me, the attractiveness of its claim to superior susceptibility. For a birthday card, my sister once sent me Arthur Rackham’s illustration of “The Princess and the Pea,” its tower of saffron, pale green, and rose patchwork mattresses crowned with a princess in pretty distress. Princesses in other fairy tales have wolves to contend with: she has a fucking pea. Try telling a new acquaintance I’m obsessed with details and they’re likely to wince in recognition, even to offer rival examples of detail addiction, especially if the new acquaintance is literary and discerns in obsessed with details the echo of Henry James’s admonition Try to be one of the people on whom nothing is lost! Perfectionism assigns you to Henry’s tribe, the Nothinglostonus, zero trying involved. Researchers can argue back and forth about whether or not an adaptive form of perfectionism exists, but colloquially, how bad off are you if your disorder can be preeningly confessed? A leper can’t say I’m such a leper. When other afflictions overwrite reality with fantasy—alcoholism, or addictions to gambling or sex—their self-destructiveness is bleakly acknowledged, but perfectionism’s rep as ambition on steroids remains glossy: it can present not as delusion, but as an advantageous form of sanity. The advantage lies in perfectionism’s command of the sufferer’s energies, its power to intensify, focus, motivate. Its exalted goals are likewise treated as plusses. A supposedly surefire means of pleasing a job interviewer is to answer What is your biggest flaw? with I’m a perfectionist.
Moreover, the trouble a perfectionist gets into can be hidden. The materials necessary for her to damage herself are readily available between her own ears; she will never need to trek barefoot through a snowstorm to the 7-Eleven for a bottle of vodka. Perfectionism offers self-sufficiency within affliction.
How dangerous can that be?
Often, when I was dithering over a problem, perfectionism would intervene, dangling before me flawless elizabeths who would transcend limitations lightly, with every hair in place. Of course mistakes originating in the overestimation of one’s abilities are appealing to perfectionists and nonperfectionists alike, with a dew of miscalculations precipitating all along the spectrum of wishful thinking. What sets perfectionism apart may not be the fact of wishfulness, but the degree of its tyranny.
For me, fantasies of exceeding competence again and again proved irresistible. No image of myself enchanted me more than that of sleek-haired, slender invulnerability, and while my first decision (if it can be called that, heedless as it was) one early-winter morning thirty-two years ago emerges now as an unthinking invitation to harm, at the time just the opposite felt true. In dreams begins responsibility, the compulsive mockingbird perched on a brain-branch had taken to reciting, the body of the Yeats poem didn’t interest the mockingbird but with that particle it was downright obsessed, it whaled away, a frittering repetitiveness the rest of my mind was going to have to submit to till the mockingbird tired out. It was anti-dreamy, responsibility, carnal as bone marrow; language for responsibility recognizes its origins in trapped or pressured bodies, responsibilities are inescapable, arduous, urgent, weighty, burdensome, crushing, there is bearing responsibility for and carrying the responsibility and having to shoulder and needing to live up to and being overwhelmed by, and I was drafted into solicitude, given something to carry—me
, who tended toward haphazardness even about things that mattered to me most. Impulsivity suited me down to my nerve endings. Patience, I experienced as a numbing imposition. My father’s favorite rebuke for perceived ingratitude from a child—nearly always me—had been I keep a roof over your head, said often enough and in a tone so complicatedly composed of righteousness and cajolery that even now writing this down brings his almost-lost voice back: the way it felt to be near him, to be pinned in place by blame, to love him in silence. He had kept the roof over my head, but it was his unpredictability that prospered in me, it was as if negligence was my first language, the one I felt most like myself in, most genuine and spontaneous, while in speaking other languages—responsibility, diligence—continuous parsing and management were required, the stiltedness of translation became oppressive and I would begin craving the sabotage that would return me to the known, it was as if my true work was to extend the charged atmosphere of my childhood into the entire rest of my life, as if when a fuckup was followed by incandescent blame, even if all this was done by me to myself, I was inalienably at home, I belonged and nothing had ever been lost.
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