Trance

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Trance Page 50

by Christopher Sorrentino


  Dodd laughs into his handkerchief at his own joke. He has a rasping, dry laugh; it makes his shoulders shake and his chest rattle. Waiters break their stride, carefully arranging expressions of concern on their faces, until they realize that what Dodd is doing is laughing.

  “Of seven estates, which together formed an elongated ellipsis of faded gingerbread, rickety widow’s walks for the vigilant Dutch wives of popular antiquity, and pale erosive land, ours is the last remaining. Now, beyond the dunes and the wayward pickets demarcating their perilous swollen rises, there are evenly laid-out cottages, newly made, of aluminum and plastic. Built, I imagine, to capitalize on the attractions the place holds for the newly affluent, which I would characterize as a perception of stolid ‘authenticity’ and ‘char–acter’ on the part of its year-round people—qualities which I can assure you are entirely mythical—and a desire to passively partake of the xenophobia historically to be found in such a place.”

  The waiter arrives with two fresh martinis and a steaming appetizer. Dodd laughs as he sets them down.

  “Now, on my part of the Island the sights are magnificently decrepit, void of utility, void of any trace of this century, white hot and peeling in the sun: the church, the jetty, the seawall, the lighthouse. These places exist solely as monuments to averted catastrophe, of— ferings to the angry gods of the elements, and they now creep with the most primitive of organisms. Jellyfish, the wives of Jewish businessmen, and so on.”

  Dodd seems nearly about to shake himself apart with the cannonade of laughter this provokes, and the restaurant’s din hushes for a moment as he comes to himself. Guy is still and very quiet.

  “You said something about the muse?”

  “Oh, yes. I work when I can, indeed I do. Oh yes yes yes. Not as often as I’d like; the editorial work is so demanding. Nothing terribly elaborate, mind you. Good old-fashioned stuff. A beginning, an end. A man, a woman. A conflict, a resolution. It seems to me that so much contemporary writing resembles the sort of undertaking that dark intent little persons should be working on in laboratories in Massachusetts and California even as we speak. Thoughtful little intent dark persons doing thoughtful things, with the aid of blackboards and slide rules. And yet I see myself as a writer who happens to pass the time as an editor. The thing is, I enjoy helping people. I enjoy it a great deal. I love to wrest rough, promising work from the hands of an arrogant young writer and mold it into a sleek piece of salable work. It just isn’t any fun otherwise.”

  An unnerving clatter issues from Dodd, and the table shakes lightly. He focuses on Guy.

  “Now. Your proposal. The most exciting thing to cross my desk in three or four months. A very exciting-sounding project. Oh yes yes yes. But I’m assuming you’re looking for top price. And Dearstyne, Harbottle has never let anything like money stand in the way of its reputation as the most prestigious literary publisher on the block. That is, we don’t pay out much of it.”

  Dodd laughs into his handkerchief.

  “And even if we were to do so in this case—saying so, mind you, merely for the sake of argument. Well. As captivated as I am by the story you propose to tell, I am beholden to superiors, sales staff, and shareholders; to Mr. Dearstyne, who, though he lies abed in a state of enfeebled senility, still ratifies each acquisition so that this clubby little world we all live in knows that the list under the imprimatur of his name is still decisively reflective of his singular vision; and to CBS, which is looking to acquire us for tax purposes, though it’s safe to assume that they are interested in losing only so much money if you get my drift.”

  “Do you think you’re going to lose money on this book?”

  Here they pause for a moment as Dodd laughs.

  “But of course! It would be—oh, too tedious to explain the arithmetic, the accounting involved, but I think I can state categorically that we lose money on every book Dearstyne, Harbottle and Company publishes.”

  “How do you stay in business?”

  “Well, it’s a matter of prestige. We have it; the other fellows don’t. Nordic used to, but their list’s far too big now. Oh, yes yes yes. Rommel, Mays and Croix likes to pretend. But in reality, there’s only us. And so they settle for vulgar profitability. Though, truth to tell, the others all are losing money as well. Schlock or not, it is a tough market out there. Tough, tough market. Yes yes yes. I know, I know: it seems healthy, robust. Every time you turn around someone has sold a million copies of this book or that. But it’s tough, believe me. Just keeping abreast of the trends must be difficult. If you’re the sort of publisher who feels he has to do that. Last year it was dolphins. This year it’s sharks.”

  Dodd hacks his mirth into his handkerchief.

  “So, really, I don’t think I can make an offer. Or, rather, any offer I’d make would be insultingly small.”

  “Try me,” says Guy.

  “Oh, no. No no no. I couldn’t. I wouldn’t. You deserve a publisher who can get behind this project both emotionally and finan–cially.”

  Guy leaves him laughing into his handkerchief, unfolded and spread to cover the lower part of his face, as if he were afraid of infecting the world with his rueful self–deprecation.

  PART FIVE

  Nice, Normal Revolutionaries

  “it seems very pretty,” she said when she had finished it; “but it’s rather hard to understand!” (You see she didn’t like to confess, even to herself, that she couldn’t make it out at all.) “Somehow it seems to fill my head with ideas—only I don’t exactly know what they are! However, somebody killed something; that’s clear, at any rate—”

  —THROUGH THE LOOKING CLASS

  THE PRESS WAITED EXPECTANTLY under its canopy. The strange lingering season of waiting was about to expire, and there was nothing to do except continue to wait until the end. Tomorrow each’d turn up at work and be assigned to the Hall of Justice or to a supervisors’ meeting or to hang around plaguing tourists at the turnaround on Powell and Market.

  Two long moving vans (“One just for the paintings and sculpture,” went the rumor) came up the driveway. It was hard for the press to believe that this was that very last thing they’d been waiting for: two trucks slowly filling with cartons and furniture. It messed with their sense of narrative. It was supposed to be hugs, kisses, John Wayne framed in the narrowing space of a closing door, isolated and cast off as Natalie Wood returns home from her prolonged sojourn among the savages.

  Instead, Hank and Lydia had put their spread up for sale and were moving to a deluxe apartment on Nob Hill. Their public statements concerning the move were elliptical—irritatingly so. Clearly the couple was attempting to say goodbye, to break things off.

  But the press had its questions. The public had its needs. How big was the new place? Did it have superb views? Did they look forward to having all the amenities of the world’s greatest city right outside their front door? Would the family keep the same staff? Would some of those faithful retainers have to go? Would the couple miss the home in which they’d raised a family? How did the children feel about the move? Were they supportive, or had they raised objections? (And) did this move suggest that they had given up on Alice? That was the big question, the one they wanted to shoehorn in. There was no one to ask it of, however. No sign of Lydia or Hank (They were staying “in a six-room luxury suite at the Fairmont,” went the rumor).

  Turned out one of the trucks was taking extra furnishings directly to a storage facility in San Mateo. The new apartment on Nob Hill couldn’t hold what the house had.

  The canopy was faded and weather-beaten, torn and repaired in places. The grass beneath it had died. Some had been there under it almost every day. Theirs was the subtle side of the story. A family in shock. A family coming to terms. A family moving on. They stood, they ate sandwiches. After Lydia had complained about the driveway’s being full each day, they’d parked their cars and vans at the side of the road below, at the slight risk of bodily injury, not to mention parking tickets. Their ranks
thinned over time, but some stayed. When the daily buffet stopped appearing, they formed groups and began breaking for lunch. After Inge and Maria stopped setting out the urn, they took turns riding down the hill to Burlingame for cof–fee each afternoon. Under the canopy an etiquette evolved. A pecking order. They dropped their cigarette butts into a standing ashtray Hernando provided that looked as if it had been looted from an of–fice building in Mesopotamia (“Probably priceless,” went the rumor). Someone began remembering to save the brown paper bags the delicatessen packed their sandwiches and coleslaw in, and they used them to collect trash. They were scrupulous about such practices. They wanted to be good guests. They wanted so much to be the one gleaming, exemplary facet of the whole sad story.

  By late afternoon it was clear that the trucks would not be loaded by the end of the workday, that despite having spent more than a year under the canopy, the press was to be deprived of the privilege of closing the door on the story. The last truck would leave, and there’d be no witness to write, “The last truckload of furniture and the accumulation of decades of privilege rolled slowly down the driveway leading from Galton Mansion today, leaving behind an empty house with more than its share of ghosts.” The day took on a elegiac cast. People said their goodbyes. Tomorrow the assignment would be over, and the greater world would once again take its measure of them.

  TANIA AWAKENS ON THE sofa in the middle of the night. Light enters the apartment through the big windows overlooking the street. She gets up, feels around on the table with her fingers, finds cigarettes, though her throat is raw and the first drag tastes like yarn.

  The place is on Geneva Avenue, charitably described as the ass end of town, an apartment over a dry cleaner’s with dropped ceilings, guttering fluorescent lights, and Armstrong tile covering the floors. When they moved in, they sat around groping for comparisons. Like a Lion’s Club in an ebbing industrial city? Like an abortionist’s office? It was a perfect spot for them, transient, impersonal, a place to sit in a folding chair and eat out of a Styrofoam tray, your mind somewhere else.

  This is the home of the women’s collective, that perplexing splinter. Men Welcome, kind of. On the table are piled yellow pads, covered with writing, a dog-eared and marginally notated copy of The Dialectic of Sex, and pamphlets with titles like Mother Right: A New Feminist Theory, The Bitch Manifesto, and What Is the Rev–olutionary Potential of Women’s Liberation? All this literature, all these pamphlets coming from places like New York, Cambridge, Chicago, Pittsburgh (Pittsburgh?). Typed, Xeroxed, stapled, illustrated with rough line drawings, each booklet is sufficiently crude to lend it power and a labored gravity. Yea, sister! A space has been cleared away for the Royal portable with its jumpy ribbon and sticky keys.

  An uncharacteristic late-spring rain drums on the windows. Tania goes to study the street below. She sees a woman walking briskly, bare-headed, staring straight ahead. She’s trailed by a man in a slicker who stops and shouts after her, then trots to get up ahead, where he turns to face her, walking backward, gesturing placatively with his hands and looking over his shoulder to avoid running into anyone. The woman keeps walking, eyes front, stepping nimbly out of the man’s way. They follow this pattern, continuing on toward the corner, where two men stand under a pool hall awning, sipping from drinks in brown paper bags. They are loudly amused, and the man in the slicker responds angrily. The woman keeps going, crosses Mission and heads up the hill on Geneva. The man in the slicker knocks the brown-bagged drink out of the hand of one of the men standing under the awning. Fists come up, the circling, the shouts, foamy liquid from the spilled container pooling on the shiny sidewalk. The other man under the awning serenely sips from his drink. The woman keeps right on going up the hill. Rainy midnight at the edge of San Francisco.

  Yolanda wanted to segregate them here, get them working on something that would define them categorically and undeniably, edge them away from random destruction. But as an analysis gradually emerges, Tania finds herself unconvinced by the latest Truth. She lifts the limp sheet of paper rolled into the machine and reads the passage typed on it:

  Middle class women are most positively situated, due to their education and sophistication, to see the inherent contradiction between the promises of society and what is actually offered to women, to see the extent and placement of the fault lines in our “democratic” Amerikkka beyond simple questions of racism and imperialism. Moreover, as Marcuse explains, the “prosperity” of a given society DOES NOT DIMINISH THE NECESSITY OF LIBERATING ONE’S SELF FROM IT.

  In this sense FEMINISM IS THE MOST COMPLEX AND VALID ISSUE OF THE DAY for you have ONE HALF OF THE POPULATION HELD IN SUBJUGATION BY THE OTHER HALF. Though we are conscious of women’s oppression per se, we must not lack in our consciousness of most women’s class oppression!!! We CAN discuss the oppression of the black man, but NOT without addressing the shocking sexual exploitation of black women. To us, the primary issue remains male supremacy. Once this has been overcome, we can truly and comprehensively address the problems of an unjust society.

  Her time in the closet, this hot air is its ultimate lesson? Everything she’s experienced over the past year stems from such social and historical “circumstances”? All the reading, the talking, the takeout; the stolen cars, the graffiti, the threats; the calisthenics, target practice, and drills; the shit-stained toilets and scummy shower stalls, the inflammatory rhetoric, the guns and bombs, the robberies, the cold-blooded homicide? This is their penance for Myrna Opsahl’s murder? Does it make her feel better about Myrna Opsahl and her motherless children to conclude that what happened was necessary in order to free them all? The passage is from an essay provisionally entitled “Women in the Vanguard: Toward a Revolutionary Theory,” but it might as well be “Why We Need to Move into Our Own Place.” In their eagerness to get out from under Teko, they have talked themselves into a new reality.

  She’s been having these dreams that make her eyes snap open hours before sunup. Tonight she’s dreamed that she was standing in a kitchen talking to a Chinese man. The kitchen appeared to be that of a restaurant, with lots of pots and pans hanging overhead, chrome racks, tall worktables, etc. She and the man spoke while he cleaned and gutted fish, reaching for them and then slicing them up the length of their bellies and removing the entrails. Finally, he reached, and instead of a fish he picked up a cat. Tania protested—That’s not a fish, you can’t do that, and so forth—but the man simply held the limp and passive cat in position, looking amused. Tania averted her eyes. But when she looked again, she found that the man had been waiting for her. He slit the cat open.

  Sometimes when they’re sitting here, halfheartedly hacking out an “analysis,” Tania asks the others what they think of such dreams. They readily set aside their work.

  Yolanda opens a beer. “Once I dreamed that a robot was walking down the street. So I jump onto his back and try to tear his nose off. I’m screaming how I want it for myself. Then suddenly I’m like not on his back, so I break into this building to get away. The robot tries to come in after me, and I look and now there’s this old lady hanging on, a grandma really, and I run up the stairs and there’s this girl, she’s really high, and she’s carrying a silver tray of grapes.”

  “I dreamed I was walking in the rain,” says Susan. “I meet a nun, and I ask her why I can’t forget my ex-boyfriend. She says I have to be more romantic. Then she’s like gone. So I keep going and I hear this whimpering sound. And there’s this duckling crying, trying to get out of the mud. It’s black with soot and soaking wet. I pick it up, and I’m carrying it home, and when I get there it’s turned into a golden retriever puppy.”

  Joan says, “I’m taking a bath with a strange lady. I see a oven. There’s a strange feeling. The lady goes, ‘Dissatisfaction is the partner of loss.’”

  “That’s just goofy,” says Tania.

  “I’m in a church with a doctor. He says, ‘Serenity is the partner of confusion.’ I see a washing machine. I feel ashamed.”
r />   “Don’t make fun.”

  “Who’s making fun?” Joan is making notes on a sheet of paper headed “OUR BODIES: WE’VE NEVER REALLY OWNED THEM.” She wears a slight smirk.

  Joan’s been edgy lately, moody. Tania often senses that she’s bullshitting them, playing up the Far Eastern angle, toying with whatever stereotypifying residue may linger here. It has to be boring. At each stage in the discussion, as they struggle toward their feminist critique, they literally turn to her, as if she were the natural arbiter of how oppressed they are.

  But it isn’t just that. Everything changed after Myrna. Joan’s ragged patience finally wore out, and she announced that she was ready to take her chances, to return to the East Coast, free of them all. Tania begged her to come to San Francisco.

  “Aren’t you cured yet?” Joan had asked, with annoyance. But in the end she came.

  Actually, Tania feels as restless as Joan: bored with the SLA, eager to leave, troubled by Myrna Opsahl’s murder, anxious about getting caught. The standard gamut. But she doesn’t have a lot of options. The SLA’s talent for getting attention is coming back to haunt them. Each month brings a new opportunity for the press to resuscitate the story of her celebrated absence, brings renewed calls for the FBI to solve the case, and she has to lay low.

  Everything changed. She wants to say, if only she’d known—but the guns had always been there; they’d fetishized them, carried them, fired them, spoken of their mystical, liberating power. You aim one at somebody, you better intend to fire it at him. What other possible use could a gun have? Teko and Yolanda didn’t see it that way. Actually, they didn’t see it any way at all. At first, Teko had exulted in the murder, but he soon realized that his wife was not in an exultant mood. It became a closed subject, occulted, taboo. They moved to San Francisco to form the women’s collective. That’s the offi–cial reason. The money that funded this undertaking might as well have materialized out of thin air.

 

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