by Rachel Hulin
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Harry,
Fuck, I totally don’t remember that part. I must have blocked it out.
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Matilda,
I rather think you blacked it out.
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Harry,
So you all discussed what a terrible lying liar I am, and then Nate left? I told you my most overused emotion is shame. Here it is again, in spades.
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Matilda,
My purpose is not to shame you. You were clearly distressed, and you were pushing us all away, so I made Nate some coffee and drove him to the train station. It was fine. I picked up Vera on the way back, as we were supposed to hang out anyway, but I wanted to be close to home to keep an eye on you.
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Harry,
Oh. Well, I already told you I knew about her. You didn’t have to hide it.
As far as I can tell Vera’s got nothing about her that necessitates any kind of risk. She’s long like spaghetti. I couldn’t see a spark.
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Matilda,
You saw her from thirty yards away through a window, what are you even talking about?
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Harry,
And if you’re practicing making omelettes WITH cilantro, like you said, you are most certainly banging her.
PS I have another lyric for you, Harry. You know, a girl like that, with a boarding-school past and high expectations and a size 25 waist and a fancy hyphenated last name? She doesn’t want you long term. So you might want to start thinking about what she does want. Perhaps she’s interested in you for a moment, to see if you really will publish somewhere worthwhile. Perhaps she wants to advance her own career.
So if you are in sight and the day is right
She’s the hunter you’re the fox
And you don’t even like cilantro! You say it tastes like soap. I however love cilantro.
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Hey Matilda,
I’ll tell you why I like Vera, if you’re so invested.
She’s actually quite free of pretense. She’s smart without it comprising her whole identity.
She keeps track of the moon cycles. She writes lyrics and sings them and puts them on CDs for people, just to be kind.
She makes me go on nature walks and we identify trees together.
You know what we did last weekend? We made handmade dream catchers, and then took a nap to see what would happen.
She’s magical, Matilda, like few people really are. You know exactly what I mean.
And you don’t need to attack the good things in my life just to make yourself feel better. What did you see in Nate? Is he ever going to give you what you want? It’s just more self-sabotage.
Or is it Jewish literary social climbing?
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Hey Harry,
I’ll tell you why I like him. He believes in himself. He comes from something. His literati grandmother encourages me and says I could host fantastic, crème de la crème art parties in New York one day. She said I could be a “contender,” a “doyenne.”
His mother laughs at my stories and adds extra olives to my dirty martinis—not like ours, who thinks white Zinfandel is the only kind of wine and that you can keep the same bottle in the fridge for a month and have a prudish swig each night and that is living.
Mom, who should be the chairwoman of D.A.R.E.! Mom who is completely neglectful of all my needs until there’s a whiff of substance in the air and then she turns into a goddamned bloodhound, clutching my arm, proclaiming, “But I love you!!”
Nate wants to talk about books and watch films and pay me compliments. And I really, really like it most of the time.
It’s not his fault that he has dispensed with the stereotype of men as breadwinners, without picking up any additional household tasks to compensate. That’s his generation.
He shines, Harry. Which is the absolute most important thing about anyone.
(Also he’s a half Jew, which as we know are always the best. Just enough neuroses for an edge, but not too much. I attract half Jews like a freaking flame.)
A lot of people are half Jews who you wouldn’t expect.
I should buy halfjew.com.
Anyway, don’t worry about him using me. Maybe I’m using HIM.
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Hey Matilda,
I think you most certainly are using him. It also sounds like you’re hunting for a new, more fabulous family.
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Hey Harry,
Right back at you.
And there’s no trace of Nate anywhere, so don’t worry about it. I got back and he’d taken the good cheese. The Taleggio and the Gouda with flavor crystals. He knew I loved that one best.
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Hey Matilda,
How are you going to pay rent this month, if you have no new brides?
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Hey Harry,
I have procured some parental funds. I can’t bring myself to leave the apartment to earn any money myself.
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Matilda,
From Dad?
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Harry,
Yes, from Dad. Thanks for sharing my issues with him, Harry. Super rad of you.
He’s been counseling me, Harry:
Dad: “Harry tells me you’re having a rough patch right now. Anything you want to talk about? You should call your mother.”
Me: “Oh, COME ON!!! Can’t you all just leave me alone?”
Dad: “Now don’t overreact! Why don’t you just call her, tell her about your busy life, and chat her up a bit? Let’s be frank: You and I have argued about our different understandings about what courtesy and respect require concerning response to letters or calls. Maybe it’s a generational thing, I don’t know.”
Me: “My life is in the shitter, Dad.”
Dad: “That can’t be true. What are your passions, what do you think about as you go about your day?”
Me: “Oh, you know—creativity, aging, birth, death, sex, booze.”
Dad: “Well, that’s everything worth living for, baby! Keep at it!”
I find it HIGHLY ironic that Dad is worried about Mom, when he is the cause of her initial ruin.
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Matilda,
According to her.
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Harry,
You know, sleeping is like practice dying. If everyone likes to sleep so much—craves more of it—why is everyone so afraid of death?
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Hey Matilda,
I wonder about that, too. Thanks for telling me about the sound the universe makes. Apparently when you take the Amazonian drug ayahuasca you hallucinate a similar noise, and it feels like your very being is folding into nature.
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Hey Harry,
I’ve been thinking about what you said about self-sabotage. It reminded me of Leo, my first boyfriend in the city. Did you ever meet him?
Here, I wrote it like a story.
He came with me to New York after college. I picked him up in a senior Anthropology of Death seminar, when he slid me a note that said:
Go on a date with me?
And there were two boxes, SURE and MAYBE. First I picked MAYBE, because he was gay, but then I decided not to be rude, because that was bold of him and he had the shining.
Leo was a very talented musician who lived downtown in an apartment above a club, so there was always a bass thump going, like a heartbeat. I’d come over after work and he’d pour me a glass of schnapps and sing me show tunes on the baby grand. He was shopping a musical to some Broadway people.
Once in a while I’d put on something slinky and sort of position myself in a sprawl on top of the piano, the way I imagined a young Bernadette Peters might do.
I’d sing along as he was warming up.
If I were a rich man, yubby dibby dibby dibby dibby dibby dibby dum.
Etc.
“Yo, it’s cool if you just hum that quietly, Matilda,” Leo would say.
Leo had a chain wallet.
After a
lot of schnapps one time Leo said to me, “Does it make you gay if you’re attracted to men? Not all men, but some in particular?”
“I don’t think so,” I said to Leo. It was particularly hard for him to play someone in life who isn’t gay, because he was a young male Canadian music savant with a chain wallet in the musical theater industry who liked fine liqueur.
Finally I went to see him one night and the apartment was pin-drop quiet, not an aria in earshot. I went to hang my coat in the closet, and Leo was already in there, holding on tightly to his leading man.
Leo and I eventually broke up when he discovered his sleep apnea and got one of those scuba masks. He said there wasn’t room for me anymore on the couch.
Some people are just meant to be by themselves, and maybe I’m one of them. It doesn’t mean I’m not a great person. I mean, the pope must get lonely, too.
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Matilda,
Nope, never met that one. I never understood chain wallets. Does the chain have a function?
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Harry,
I don’t have the best history with love. I’m trying. I just fear waking up and it all being tragically too late. Thirty-five is a deadline, because the distance between thirty-five and fifty is essentially two years.
(And by the time you’re forty, your career needs to be established. I remember fifty-five-year-olds who would wander into the photography center when I worked there. Starting their life as artists at that age—not good. They smelled of lavender and the suburbs.)
I should have just told them it was too late, but instead I took their money and pointed them to the color lab. Which is now of course obsolete, itself.
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Matilda,
That is much like tenure, I’m afraid. I do understand. And thirty-two is a great age. We’re in our prime.
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Harry,
We’re peaking, Harry. It’s only downhill after the peak.
And love is not like tenure. Why do you even give a shit whether the dinosaurs in your department validate you? It’s such a small, unimportant segment of society! You are GREAT. I SAY SO!
Seriously—ideally they are threatened by your brilliance and will ratify that by kicking you the hell out of there.
You need to think about this all a bit differently. What’s the worst thing that could happen?
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Matilda,
The worst thing that could happen is that I have to start over, in a completely foreign place, just because of a job. Like, Omaha. Or Cincinnati.
I don’t think you understand the importance of this for me. Tenure means I can relax and work and grow into the writer I know I can be. I KNOW I can produce wonderful prose, I used to write without a moment’s thought when there was nothing to lose in high school and college. But now I’ve lost my edge.
I just need the solid foundation of tenure to get myself going. That little push will mean everything.
But I fear my publishing record is too dismal for them to approve me. And so I’m stuck in a catch-22.
It’s the uncertainty that is so difficult.
It’s coloring every day for me.
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Harry,
But I hear you. I classify all my days by color: green, yellow, red, and mean reds.
I’ve had thirteen mean reds this month, which is a record. I really only leave the apartment to get supplies. The worst bit is that soon enough it will be spring, and the magnolia blossoms will come out, and it will be too much beauty to bear. Isn’t life heartbreaking enough without magnolia blooms once a year making our hearts explode??
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Matilda,
I’m so sorry you’re having a hard time, but I do want you to know I’m proud of you for trying to lead a big life. I just don’t want you to get stuck inside fearing the proverbial blossoms in the service of making that happen. Do you know what I mean?
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Hey Harry,
“Prose” is a gross word. Like “saliva.”
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Hey Matilda,
What’s the latest with Nate? Can you at least get some closure there?
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Harry,
Holy shit, how did you know? He literally just left my apartment. Your clairvoyant gene is finally activating, just twenty years after mine.
Nate actually scared the crap out of me—he came in with his key, ostensibly to fetch his things.
I was quite unwashed and surprised, but I recovered after jumping like three feet in the air and he reached toward me and said, “I’m ready to talk about it, baby.”
WHAT!
It was like turning on the car again in the middle of a CD you were super-duper into. Something awesome, like Coltrane. You were singing out loud, not a care in the world.
Only this time when you turn it on, it just sounds like noise. He was just some guy. I barely felt any connection to him at all, he seemed like a stranger.
It took me twenty minutes to get him out of here.
I said that horrible line twentysomethings say at breakups, Harry. I shouldn’t have, I’m far too old for it. I cringed while I did it, but it did give me secret pleasure.
“I love you, but I’m not IN love with you.”
He went away.
I feel good. I feel cleansed. I feel confused. Something has changed.
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Hey Matilda,
Wow. I think this is good news?
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Hey Harry,
How can someone have so much power over my emotions and then have so little? It doesn’t make any sense.
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Hey Matilda,
Maybe this was more about you than about him.
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Hey Harry,
But I adored him, Harry. And now I can’t even trust my own mind.
Why can’t things be simpler? They seem to be, for other people—Isabel Shaw from college just bought a classic five on Central Park South. Family money.
She’s a child psychologist at a Bronx public school and her husband is a lawyer for the ACLU, so you can’t even hate them. I fucking resent that like hell. I can never look at her again, let alone return her texts. She texts me all the time! Pathetic.
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Matilda,
I am so glad you are moving forward.
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Hey Harry,
Me too! Can you send me $500?
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Hey Matilda,
Yes. But only if that’s the last loan. If you need to ask again, you have to come live with Mom.
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Harry,
Fine. Very manipulative of you, smooth. And Mom doesn’t want me back after Freddy. She’d send me to her psychotherapist, who was actually IMPRESSED during my college summer of bulimia. He told me he once did a whole purging program with his hippie wife where they drank a gallon of water each morning and then vomited it up to cleanse themselves.
I was like “Um, that is VERY BAD FOR YOU, ARE YOU AN IDIOT?”
He seemed to think my eating disorder was a craze of some sort.
I said, “No, this is disorderly behavior based in my need for perfectionism, keeping up appearances, and my deep discomfort with who I am at my core.”
He had no clear understanding of this at all.
He then launched into a soliloquy about how FASCINATING our family was, about what a genius, charming narcissist Dad was, and about how he could really see him as a HOLLYWOOD ACTOR.
Why couldn’t Mom just send me to food rehab like all the other parents? No, I don’t want to go to that therapist again.
Anyway.
How’s your illicit love affair? Did she leave you for the provost yet? Or an assistant dean?
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Matilda,
It’s going fine.
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Harry,
I have two pieces of unsolicited advice, courtesy Dad 1988:
1. Don’t think, just do.
2. Drink your spit (when we were thirsty in t
he car on long trips).
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Matilda,
I’m afraid I may have taken your first piece of advice. I’m rather worried about it.
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Harry,
You’ve done something without thinking? Congrats!
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Matilda,
I found a quote today you’ll like:
“I am awfully greedy; I want everything from life. I want to be a woman and to be a man, to have many friends and to have loneliness, to work much and write good books, to travel and enjoy myself, to be selfish and to be unselfish…You see, it is difficult to get all which I want. And then when I do not succeed I get mad with anger.”
—Simone de Beauvoir
Did you know that de Beauvoir and Sartre were a couple with questionable morals? Apparently she would seduce her female students and then bring them back to him, in a move they called the “trio.”
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