I took a full-time job at a public-broadcasting network two months before graduation, vowing to maintain the running, to just peel back the days at the top and keep going. I began waking up before five, exploring the local parks, cemeteries, and reservoirs in the dark. To miss a day was to admit weakness, a system failure with ominously undefined ends. The appearance of supreme self-control belied the fact that I no longer had much say in the matter of what made me good or bad; there was only running or not running. As much joy as I still took in those long, lapidary, arch-ruining runs, my reliance on them was unsustainable: in fact I had lost control of my life, and I’d done it my way. The world was revealing a complexity that would not be mastered by discipline alone, and the thought of having to battle my way back into it every single morning of my life basically made me want to die.
* * *
The previous winter I had published my first piece of writing, nine hundred words on my relationship with running. I had thought it was about toughness and solitude; the editor titled it “An Addict Confesses.”
If you were searching for clues about how to tell a story in 1998, that noun/verb axis was the first and biggest to be found. The way to tell a story was to reveal the weird or painful thing that made you special. Your liberation would liberate the reader, and together you could bask in a kind of empathic synergy. Confession was a narrative form whose only sin was holding any part of yourself back; it developed its own house style and sense of what it meant to be good (relatable), to be moving (vulnerable), to tell the truth (to tell all). But like penance, with its standard opening—Bless me, Father, for I have sinned—and carefully whittled laundry lists, all such confessions are calculated, perhaps most when they hope to erase the signs of calculation. I felt uneasy about the publication of the essay, whose contents surprised Rafe; it was so unlike the girl who confided little and admitted nothing. But I had wanted to tell a story, and that seemed to be the only one I had. If I hadn’t quite admitted to myself that I was making a confession, in addition to danger and distaste the whole thing had something satisfyingly punitive to it. Something familiar. I liked it and I didn’t like it.
The part I didn’t like was how permeable the formula seemed to be. I adored The Crack-Up, Drinking: A Love Story, and anything Mary Karr had so much as cursed at, but more often you got raw self-exposure, conformed to a predetermined idea of what will inspire—or worse, trigger—the coveted empathetic response. All the better if the author is mixed up in the difficulty and discomfort of being a girl. Disconcerted by my own predictability, I retreated to my notebook and the fledgling art of e-mail, where I set the limits and decided how I might work within them.
Along with discomfort, that headline delivered an etymological redundancy: addiction, drawn back to its Latin root, addicere, suggests a form confession: ad, “to,” and dicere, “say, declare.” In its earliest, compound form, the declarative sense of the verb had weaselly connotations, meaning, variously, “to sacrifice, to sell out, to betray,” but also “to devote, consecrate; to adjudge, allot; to deliver, award; to yield, give assent; to make over, sell.” Our modern refurbishing of the word—begun in the early twentieth century, when the seemingly helpless state of opium and morphine stoners begged description—has given it a more passive meaning and therefore an ever-widening application. Addictions are still statements, of a sort—clinically they are often cited as symptoms of some larger issue—and in that sense generally involve a substance. But in becoming medical and then submitting to vernacular indignities, the concept of addiction has turned inward, and in that corollary realm its original meanings are more or less intact. Rather than engaging, betraying, devoting, awarding, assenting, or adjudging in relation to the world, we become the world—its innocent and all-knowing, the pure and the deceitful—and make those same statements unto ourselves.
I felt myself falling behind that spring, as though a train were leaving the station and a whole season was passed trying to run it down. I graduated on a bright, cool June afternoon, with a decent job and a boss promising to make me the youngest producer in the building. Rafe had made a confession of his own, bringing our meticulously unspoken feelings into the open for discussion, for decision. Soon after that we met: a drink, a show, a long talk in a cemetery. A blissful night. The next week I started up a fling with an intern who spoke only spotty English, then another colleague after that. Rafe was full of living plans and promises: he would tie my laces before dawn each morning and send me out the door in the stipulated pre-run silence; he had our children named and a dog picked out. I had no fantasies about our life together because beyond a nebulous dream involving New York, I couldn’t imagine my own future at all. Unable to commit but unwilling to let him go, I made it my essential purpose to catch up. And learned, over the next two years and best as I ever have, what it is to fail.
* * *
In his 1965 novel Stoner, which details the life of an unexceptional Midwestern English professor with the close emotional scrutiny and epic compassion of the Victorian masters, author John Williams describes a distance no amount of miles can cover. In his extreme youth, Williams writes, William Stoner “thought of love as an absolute state of being to which, if one were lucky, one might find access.” On reaching maturity he decided that in fact love was “the heaven of a false religion, toward which one ought to gaze with an amused disbelief, a gently familiar contempt, and an embarrassed nostalgia.” Then, in middle age, “he began to know that it was neither a state of grace nor an illusion; he saw it as a human act of becoming, a condition that was invented and modified moment by moment and day by day, by the will and the intelligence and the heart.”
I felt positively wizened at twenty-three and affected a tragic knowledge about Rafe’s attachment to me, the irony of that knowledge being that his feelings amounted to a terminal infatuation, perhaps even a drive toward my deficiencies, while mine had the fixings for a whole enchilada, if only I could get my human act together and become it. I couldn’t say what was more frightening: his love for me, which threatened total, heat-seeking consumption, or my love for him, which was wild and untrained and a danger to itself. Competing with an idealized entity based on you is a dilemma with two potential outcomes, neither of which I was prepared to face. Beating an untenably romantic nature out of yourself by force of will is a job with no real dividends, being a highly, untenably romantic thing to do. Keeping both predicaments in their balance until I could resolve them seemed the only option, but it required time. Of all my failures to offset the mortification of wanting, expecting, or caring too much, the most humiliating was having no real answer for the love of a good man. It humbled me.
I made a scrupulous accident of my entry into the working world, having accepted a job because it seemed the sensible thing to do. The network was in the midst of a push toward all things interactive, online, and virtual, and we impressed ourselves with big ideas that fizzled in execution or launched to an indifferent public. The bursting of the dot-com bubble coincided with a wave of layoffs that swept twenty-five-year veterans out to sea along with most of my colleagues, every day a new one gone. I jumped departments and stopped thinking in terms of job security.
Slowly, ever so, I weaned myself down to two hours of running a day. By the summer of 1999 it was ninety minutes on workdays, as long as I wished on the weekend. I even took days off now and then. My first real injury, a groin pull, forced a two-week hiatus, longer than I had been off my feet in years. And, lo, the world did not end. I just walked it with a slight hitch.
I moved into my own apartment. I made my first trip overseas, alone, taking a call from Rafe moments before I was to leave for the airport. As we spoke, I watched a sketch he had given me that I had framed and hung on the wall, a simple line drawing of a boy stretched out supine, his head in the lap of a hollow-eyed girl. The boy’s eyes are closed as she sews his sweet, untroubled smile shut.
We had been having a dreary old time, him protesting my well-maintained distance,
me pleading for more of his patience. Rafe said I was selfish—that I had a responsibility to give more of myself. I said exchanging accusations of selfishness is a sucker’s game. Though the eleventh-hour call—a multitiered goodbye—was awful, our most painful conversation, perhaps the most painful of my life, had already taken place. Again Rafe had pressed for an explanation of what it was I thought I was looking for, how I could justify what I was putting us through. The anguish in his voice was crushing, and I was startled to hear it refracted in mine. “I want to be good,” I had blurted. “I want to be better than I am.”
After a long, silent summer we tried again. At last and all of a sudden, it was the end of the century, and the world was counting down to Y2K. Media memos about a global infrastructure seizure befogged the air. Digital chaos threatened the perfect blight to an age of tech worship: sending us back in time. Ironically and otherwise, we began to prepare for the “apocalypse,” buying canned goods and water in bulk, daydreaming of barricaded homesteads run on personal generators.
Rafe and I spent more time together, not all of it tortured. More often we e-mailed and traded other loaded placeholders. Poems, mostly. Rafe was a “Fern Hill” kind of fellow, where I was deep into Donne. Over Thanksgiving, he snuck into London and hid a note in the phone booth outside the local Chinese dive where I had stretched cups of leafy tea across many teenaged afternoons. He had written a passage from my favorite holy sonnet (“Batter my heart, three person’d God…”) and another from “The Apparition”:
When by thy scorn, O murd’ress, I am dead,
And that thou think’st thee free
From all solicitation from me,
Then shall my ghost come to thy bed,
And thee, feign’d vestal, in worse arms shall see
I ran all the way there, on telephoned instruction. Then limped the folded slip of paper home like I was pulling a plow.
By early December we were both reading The End of the Affair, in preparation for the release of the film. Time was within earshot now—ever-present, undead, telltale earshot. Little, glowing, red, insect-limbed numbers are fine and functional keepers, but that mother’s just a vague idea until you hear it coming. I don’t remember much about that night—having just discovered my favorite book, the movie was a minor, almost inevitable disappointment—and less about the weeks that followed. I only know I never saw Rafe again, though his ghost arrived as promised, and without much delay.
The next thing that comes to mind with any clarity is New Year’s Eve, which I spent alone, back at the movies. Magnolia and Girl, Interrupted, a double-bill bummer royale. I remember too that I made my way home in a light-smeared daze, in time for the turning of the clock. I turned off my television as the minutes drained down to the hour, but the walls kept dancing: great blooms of colored fire overtook each other, painting the sky with bravas beyond my balcony. And for the first time in a decade I knelt down at the side of my bed, closed my hands against my forehead, and began to pray.
* * *
In his “Reflections on Gandhi,” George Orwell wrote, “The essence of being human is that one does not seek perfection, that one is sometimes willing to commit sins for the sake of loyalty, that one does not push asceticism to the point where it makes friendly intercourse impossible, and that one is prepared in the end to be defeated and broken up by life, which is the inevitable price of fastening one’s love upon other human individuals.”
At the time of writing, Gandhi was a year gone and already discussed in terms of sainthood. Orwell didn’t believe Gandhi was a saint because he didn’t fathom saints, or seekers of goodness for whom “there must be no close friendships and no exclusive loves whatever.” He saw in them a degree of nonattachment that “makes sense only on the assumption that God exists and the world is an illusion to be escaped from.” As far gone as Gandhi’s means may seem to most of us, his end is more commonly and perhaps more successfully sought in the age of secular connectivity than it has ever been.
Orwell’s argument is Stoner’s argument: a case for the world of human action over spiritual absolutes or killjoy cries of illusion. A case, after all, for love, though it is well applied to the concept of solitude: in extremity, aloneness is not grace but isolation, acknowledged by those who know about such things as the most inhuman form of punishment.
I still run. I ran this morning. I run like the average person does—if anything, the average has surpassed me, the habit has grown so commonplace—and am still and often questioned about the integral details. Though I no longer lament those old, heroic numbers, I don’t much care to talk about it, or compare, or compete. It still feels sacred. I don’t care to discuss it too because so often such interviews end strangely, with a wistful benediction: “You’re so good,” they say. “You’re so good.”
I still see movies too, often alone and, oddly, for pay. If anything, those early feelings of blissful concord formed a standard as well as a sensibility. I wouldn’t take those sprawling afternoons back: a sort of escape from escape and discipline free of discipline, they were the only thing connecting me to the world and its less arduous pleasures. It is perhaps of interest to note that what I don’t do is e-mail. Not in the same, boundless way, anyway, or with the same appetite for invention.
But I’m no saint, hell. A few years ago I ran almost straight through a case of pneumonia, making myself approximately 12.5 times sicker than I might have been. I still prefer to watch some of my favorite movies alone, greedily, piously. And were you to send me a charming e-mail tonight, I would confront and perhaps succumb to the impulse to engage you on overhopeful terms, generating a new distraction with only the rarest odds of proving more than that.
What I can say is that, having known isolation in all its trickster forms, I see it where and for what it is. I see that we are all running now. And I’ll see you out there.
Acknowledgments
Many and prostrate thanks to Sean McDonald and Emily Bell for giving me this opportunity and helping me see it through, and to everyone at FSG for their attention and care. Thanks also to Melissa Flashman for her invaluable support.
Stephen Elliott, Evan Hughes and Adelle Waldman, Meline Toumani, Carlin Flora and Giovanni Escalera, Gary Sernovitz, John MacFarlane, Pamela Kerpius, Kristin McGonigle, David Haglund and Maissa Boulos, Jeremy Keehn, Sarah Fan, Megan Hustad, Erin Craig, Kara Kaczmarek, Elise Tremblay, Pasha Malla, Dimme van der Hout, Jeremy Rodgers, Meredith Martin, Greg Marshall, Trevor Ross, Helen Coltrinari, and Ted Brunt are treasured and endlessly supportive friends.
Thank you to the exceptional editors I have been lucky to work (and occasionally play) with these last few years, especially Stu VanAirsdale, Stephanie Zacharek, Allison Benedikt, Elizabeth Ellen and Aaron Burch, Eli Horowitz, Lorne Manly, Ted Genoways, and Miriam Markowitz. A special thank-you to Gary Greenberg for his generously given time and advice.
I am indebted, with fond gratitude, to many of my teachers and professors, notably Charlie Keil, Bart Testa, Cameron Tolton, Jim Hoberman, and the late Pat Proulx.
Here I can only offer sincere but insufficient thanks to my family—to John Orange and Jackie Orange especially, and to Frank Clayton, Dana Orange and Matthew Tierney, Jeannette McGlone, and the late Rita Boyle.
If you are in my life you are in this book; the inverse also seems true. So thank you finally, and hello, to those readers I hardly knew.
Farrar, Straus and Giroux
18 West 18th Street, New York 10011
Copyright © 2013 by Michelle Orange
All rights reserved
First edition, 2013
Some of these essays were originally published, in substantially different form, in the following publications: TheRumpus.net (“The Uses of Nostalgia and Some Thoughts on Ethan Hawke’s Face” and “Do I Know You? And Other Impossible Questions”); Rumpus Women (“Have a Beautiful Corpse”); and The Virginia Quarterly Review (“Beirut Rising”).
Grateful acknowledgment is made for permission to reprint lyrics
from “Gee, Officer Krupke” by Leonard Bernstein and Stephen Sondheim, copyright © 1956, 1957, 1958, 1959 by Amberson Holdings LLC and Stephen Sondheim. Copyright renewed. Leonard Bernstein Music Publishing Company LLC, publisher. Boosey & Hawkes, agent for rental. International copyright secured. Reprinted by permission.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Orange, Michelle.
This is running for your life: essays / Michelle Orange — 1st ed.
p. cm.
ISBN 978-0-374-53332-8 (pbk.: alk. paper)
1. Title.
PS3615.R28 T47 2013
814'.6—dc23
2012026978
www.fsgbooks.com
www.twitter.com/fsgbooks • www.facebook.com/fsgbooks
The names and identifying characteristics of some individuals in this book have been changed, and some dialogue is reconstructed according to the author’s memories.
eISBN 9781466827707
This Is Running for Your Life Page 30
