by Sid Holt
Of course, waiting women have also spoken for themselves. Gaspara Stampa, a sixteenth-century Italian poet often regarded as the iconic jilted lover, anticipates Barthes’s equation of waiting with love in her seminal poem “By Now I Am So Tired of Waiting”:
By now I am so tired of waiting,
so overcome by longing and by grief,
through the so little faith and much forgetting
of whom of whose return I, weary, am bereaved,
that she who makes the world pale, whitening
it with her sickle, and claims the final forfeit—
I call on her often for relief,
so strongly sorrow wells within my breast.
But she turns deaf ears unto my plea,
scorning my false and foolish thoughts,
as he to his return stays also deaf.
And so with weeping whence my eyes are filled,
I make piteous these waters and this sea;
while he lives happy there upon his hills.8
Stampa’s poem is, at its core, an indictment of indifference: She denounces the man to whom it is addressed because he fails to suffer from her absence, and thus fails to conceive of the passage of their time apart as an exercise in waiting. Stampa, in contrast, is excruciatingly aware of her lover’s absence, and she can be described as waiting precisely because she experiences separation as pain. This is what waiting is: the transformation of time into misery.
Dorothy Parker’s short story “A Telephone Call,” a two-thousand-word exercise in agonized anticipation, echoes Stampa’s initial figuration of apathy as the inverse of waiting. The work follows a woman waiting for a telephone call (not, we presume, forthcoming) from a man she loves:
I mustn’t. I mustn’t do this. Suppose he’s a little late calling me up—that’s nothing to get hysterical about. Maybe he isn’t going to call—maybe he’s coming straight up here without telephoning. He’ll be cross if he sees I have been crying. They don’t like you to cry. He doesn’t cry. I wish to God I could make him cry. I wish I could make him cry and tread the floor and feel his heart heavy and big and festering in him. I wish I could hurt him like hell.9
The story ends inconclusively, as it must. Resolution would be too relieving: It is inimical to the uncertainties and frustrations of waiting. With a gesture that mirrors Penelope’s in its contrived futility, the narrator begins to count by fives, hoping that her beloved will call her before she reaches five hundred. “Five, ten, fifteen, twenty, twenty-five, thirty, thirty-five.… ” “A Telephone Call” concludes without concluding.
Waiting is sustained by the possibility of fulfillment yet to be decisively precluded. The woman in Parker’s story is capable of waiting because she is capable of hope. If she believed with any certainty that the call in question would never come, then her orientation would change: She might grieve, but she would no longer wait. The man who neglects to telephone is certain that a woman is waiting on the other end of the line, and this is why he is not waiting, why he feels no urge to confirm that she is still there with her hands placed, as instructed, on the desk.
As in Secretary, waiting—a nonevent—constitutes the crucial narrative force in “A Telephone Call.” Parker eschews conventional plot arcs, in which ends represent marked departures from beginnings. The woman waiting by the phone follows Penelope in performing activities that represent a particularly poignant kind of stasis. For every image she weaves, there is a countervailing un-weaving: for every advance, a retreat. There is no progression, just endless circling around the same fixed point of obsession. Waiting itself is her occupation and preoccupation. “Absence becomes an active practice, a business (which keeps me from doing anything else),” writes Barthes.
If women historically have been the ones who wait, it is at least in part because most cultures have confined them to state of involuntary idleness. (Penelope is not permitted to leave home to participate in the war effort, and Lee is the secretary, not the boss.) The gendered distribution of waiting assumes a hierarchy of time and activity in which men set the terms and fix the schedules. To be waited for is to assert the importance of one’s time; to wait is to occupy a position of eternal readiness in which one can be called on at male convenience. Waiting amounts in this sense to “waiting on”: Waiting women exist provisionally and subserviently, in the service of an absent element.
In his book Interruptions, the critic Hans-Jost Frey writes, “To understand waiting as expectation is to think of it from the point of view of totality. One who waits is in a state of incompleteness and waits for completion.”10 (This formulation vindicates Jelinek’s cleverly transitive phrasing: If waiting is an active occupation, then absence is an active cruelty.) There emerges a metaphysical dependence: If togetherness is completion, then separation is fragmentation. The integrity of the lover is conditional upon the beloved, the eternally awaited. If waiting constitutes love, as Barthes suggests, it is because waiting is the ultimate act of vulnerability: It requires a willingness to endanger one’s wholeness, to halve oneself.
Jolted Out of the Self
Barthes makes two suggestions, both radical. First, he suggests that love is a question of waiting, and second, that waiting is essentially feminine. From this it follows that to fall in love is to become “feminized”—to wait, and thereby take up a traditionally and stereotypically feminine project. But Barthes goes further, proposing that the object of love is absent in a stronger sense: What it means to love, he writes, is for “an always present I” to be defined “only by confrontation with an always absent you.” A Lover’s Discourse is structured as a series of one-sided declarations, “the site of someone speaking within himself, amorously, confronting the other (the loved object), who does not speak.”11 The lover waits, speaks, entreats, but the beloved is constitutionally silent.
To love is to be jolted out of the self by the strangeness of another person, and the beloved entrances precisely because of his unutterable difference—the most basic and insuperable absence. He is absent even when he is present because he is other, situated outside of myself: “But isn’t desire always the same, whether the object is present or absent? Isn’t the object always absent?” As Barthes reminds us, there are two concepts in Greek for desire, one for the missing someone who’s left, and a second for the more curious sensation of missing someone beside me, someone who is with me but who remains less than fully accessible to me: “Pothos, desire for the absent being, and Himéros, the more burning desire for the present being.”12
Maybe love is the recovery of some former, half-remembered unity, and what we experience is just the aftermath of a prior separation. In the poem “Misery and Splendor,” Robert Hass writes of a couple mid-coitus that “they are trying to become one creature, and something will not have it.”13 But do they really want to become “one creature,” to collapse into each other? Wouldn’t this just expand the sphere of a single loneliness? Love and sex must honor difference: The beloved must continue to resist assimilation into the self, must remain apart, elusive, an adored, if tonally inconstant, mystery.
The Art of Elective Waiting
Waiting is consuming. At times it is terrible, a wound that cannot be mitigated but must instead be mutely survived. There are days when making it to dinner or tea, as per Sydney Smith’s sage advice, is a feat. And sometimes waiting is an insult, an indignity, as pointlessly pathetic as refusing to take off the wedding dress in which you were abandoned years ago by someone who no longer cares and probably doesn’t remember.
But waiting in some form is necessary. In his essay “Penelope Waiting,” literary critic Harold Schweizer argues that narrative itself is a specialized kind of waiting: “What constitutes a literary text or a work of art,” he writes, “is not its formal closure or sensuous completeness but rather its complicated extension in our own time of waiting.”14 Stories require displaced elements, problems that plague us enough to keep us reading and caring. Investment is diffuse, and present enjoyment is predi
cated on the projection of future fulfillment. Narrative obeys erotic laws: This is why the seeming nonstories of Secretary and “A Telephone Call” absorb us. Just as delay intensifies narrative and deferral intensifies orgasm, difference intensifies love.
The alternative to dejected waiting, then, is patience, the art of elective waiting: a capitulation that women author, a passivity over which we assert ownership and which we might come to more comfortably inhabit. When we identify with it, even the worst of it, waiting becomes an end in itself. Frey writes, “There is a waiting without expectation. It can set in when one has waited for something for so long, without seeing any signs of imminent fulfillment, that the object of expectation gradually begins to fade, and yet one does not stop waiting.”15 Waiting without expectation is like prayer, devotion undertaken without the expectation of immediate reward or acknowledgment.
There is no true not-waiting, anyway. What seems like fullness is just an intimation of filling, a preview of a more complete dissolution. What I want—to not wait, to converge—is impossible. I want everything, all at once, every part of myself touching every part of you at every moment. An intimacy as absolute as this could only be violent, a rupture. It would conceive of flesh as no more than barrier. It would hurt. I have wanted to admit you into my privacy: I have craved a feast of trespass and violation. And at times I have wanted you to wrench me apart and enter into me until the only life I remember is your life and the only word I remember is your name.
But this isn’t possible, and I don’t really want it, anyway. If I were a part of you, I would not be apart from you and there would be no me in opposition to you, no you to elude me. Instead, I choose my waiting and the joy I find in surrender, in flinging myself at everything I encounter with the brutality of adoration. Catherine of Siena understood this: The whole purpose of adoring God to the point of such delicious abjection is that he is by nature unattainable. He never arrives with a protein shake, prizing hunger apart from filling, or pleasure apart from pain. He never defiles the purity of agony with the weakness of relief. He hurts without mercy. He is a story that never ends.
Notes
1. W.S. Merwin, “Separation,” in The Second Four Books of Poems (Port Townsend, WA: Copper Canyon Press, 1993), 15. Retrieved from Poetry Foundation website: https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poetrymagazine/poems/detail/28891.
2. Steven Shainberg (director), Erin Cressida Wilson (screenwriter), Secretary (motion picture), distributed by Lions Gate Films (2002).
3. Roland Barthes, A Lover’s Discourse, trans. Richard Howard (London, England: Vintage Classics, 2002), 40.
4. Ibid., 14.
5. John Bayley, Iris: A Memoir of Iris Murdoch (London, England: Duckworth, 1998), 44.
6. Elfriede Jelinek, The Piano Teacher, trans. Joachim Neugroschel (London, England: Serpent’s Tail, 2009), 75.
7. Raymond Carver, “Waiting,” in All of Us: The Collected Poems (New York, NY: Vintage Books, 2000). Retrieved from Writer’s Almanac, http://writersalmanac.publicradio.org/index.php?date=2001/05/25.
8. Gaspara Stampa, “By Now I Am So Tired of Waiting,” in The Defiant Muse: Italian Feminist Poems from the Middle Ages to the Present, ed. Beverly Allen, Muriel Kittel, and Keala Jane Jewell (New York, NY: Feminist Press, 1986), 15.
9. Dorothy Parker, “A Telephone Call,” in The Portable Dorothy Parker, intro. Brendan Gill (New York, NY: Viking Press, 1973): 121.
10. Hans-Jost Frey, Interruptions, trans. Georgia Albert (Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 1996), 57.
11. Barthes, A Lover’s Discourse, 3.
12. Ibid., 15.
13. Robert Hass, “Misery and Splendor,” in Human Wishes (New York, NY: HarperCollins, 1989). Retrieved from Poetry Foundation website: https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems-and-poets/poems/detail/49593.
14. Harold Schweizer, “Penelope Waiting,” Soundings: An Interdisciplinary Journal 85, nos. 3–4 (2002), 280.
15. Frey, Interruptions, 57.
Texas Monthly
FINALIST—COLUMNS AND COMMENTARY
The publication of “The Reckoning” marked the fiftieth anniversary the University of Texas Tower shooting—the first mass murder of its kind. The victims included eighteen-year-old Claire Wilson and her unborn son. This is her story. Based on more than one hundred hours of interviews, “The Reckoning” is only the latest example of Pamela Colloff’s extraordinary skill as a reporter and writer. Colloff’s work for Texas Monthly was nominated for Ellies in Public Interest in 2001 and 2011; in both Reporting and Feature Writing in 2013; and again in Feature Writing in 2015. Her two-part series “The Innocent Man” won the award for Feature Writing in 2013. Earlier this year Colloff joined ProPublica as a senior reporter and the New York Times Magazine as a writer at large.
Pamela Colloff
The Reckoning
I.
In the spring of 1967, when Claire Wilson was a freshman at the University of Texas, she went to the library one afternoon to track down an old copy of Life magazine. Thumbing through a stack of back issues, she scanned the dates on their well-worn covers. Finally, she arrived at the one she was looking for, and she slid it off the shelf. On the cover was a stark black and white photograph of a fractured store window, pierced by two bullet holes; in the distance loomed the UT Tower. Above the university’s most iconic landmark were three words in bold, black letters: “The Texas Sniper.”
Claire sat down and studied the large, color-saturated pictures inside, turning the pages as if she were handling a prized artifact. She read how Charles Whitman, an architectural engineering major, had brought an arsenal of weapons to the top of the Tower on August 1, 1966, and trained his rifles on the students and faculty below, methodically picking them off one by one. She pored over the images of people crouching behind cars as the massacre unfolded, and the aerial photo of campus dotted with red X’s showing where Whitman had hit his intended targets.
On the list of those killed, she located the name of her boyfriend, Thomas Eckman. Her gaze fell on Tom’s picture, in which he sat in the formal pose of all midcentury yearbook photos, smiling broadly, his tie tucked into his V-neck sweater. Claire stared into his eyes, tracing the contours of his face. Holding the magazine in her hands, she felt some reassurance that what she had witnessed on campus that day had actually happened.
Not that she needed proof: above her left hip was a gnarled indentation, not yet healed, where one of Whitman’s bullets had found its mark. She had been hospitalized for more than three months after the killing spree, spending what was supposed to have been the fall semester of her freshman year learning how to walk again. But by the time she returned to UT, in January, the tragedy had become a taboo subject on campus. Absent were the protocols that would later come to define school shootings: the grief counselors, the candlelight vigils, the nationwide soul-searching. Whitman’s crime—decades before Columbine, Virginia Tech, and Newtown became shorthand for on-campus depravity—was unprecedented, and there was no language for it yet. The mass shooting was an obscenity whose memory stained the university, an aberration to be forgotten, and in the vastness of that silence, Claire found herself second-guessing what she remembered. The few times her friends tiptoed around the subject, they referred to it as “the accident.”
The person Claire longed to talk with most was gone. She had known Tom for only a few months, but they had been inseparable. They had met as summer-school students in May 1966, when she was five months pregnant and single—a scandalous state of affairs for a middle-class girl from Dallas, though Claire had never cared much for social conventions. Tom, who was also eighteen and new to Austin, had moved in with her on the spot. Claire had had no interest in getting married—the institution was an anachronism, as far as she was concerned—and Tom, whose parents had divorced when he was little, felt the same way.
Like her, Tom attended Students for a Democratic Society meetings and saw himself as a foot soldier in the civil rights movement, once driving with her
to the Rio Grande Valley to stand in solidarity with striking farmworkers. The two passed whole afternoons on the screened-in porch they used for a bedroom in their house off campus, quoting favorite passages to each other from the novels they were reading: he, Joyce Cary’s The Horse’s Mouth and she, Lawrence Durrell’s The Alexandria Quartet. Sometimes Tom pressed his hand to her belly to see if he could feel the baby move.
In the wake of the shooting, Claire tried to hold moments like these in her mind. But her thoughts often wandered back to that August morning, when she and Tom had set out across the South Mall—and then she would be there again, on that blisteringly hot day, walking on the wide-open stretch of concrete beside him.
• • •
The anthropology class they were taking had let out early, sometime after eleven o’clock. Claire and Tom walked to the Chuck Wagon, the cafeteria inside the Student Union where campus leftists and self-styled bohemians held court, and happened to run into an old friend of Tom’s from junior high. Eager to catch up, the ex-classmate suggested that they go to the student lounge to shoot some pool. Tom explained that he and Claire had to feed the parking meter first; downing his coffee, he promised they would be right back.
Tom and Claire stepped out into the thick, midday heat and headed east under a canopy of live oak trees. Tom was sporting a short-sleeved plaid shirt and his first mustache. Claire was wearing a brand-new maternity dress he had picked out, a beige shift with a flowery ribbon around the yoke. She was eight months along by then, and she could feel the weight of the baby as she walked. When they reached the upper terrace of the South Mall, the live oaks receded, and they were suddenly out in the open, exposed under the glare of the noon sun.
To their left stood the Tower, the tallest building in Austin after the Capitol; to their right stretched the mall’s green, sloping lawn. As was often the case, they were deep in conversation; they had just begun a discussion about Claire’s spartan eating habits and Tom’s concern that the baby was not getting proper nutrition. Claire was in the middle of saying that she had, in fact, had a glass of orange juice that morning when a thunderous noise rang out. An instant later, she was falling, her knees buckling beneath her. Bewildered, Tom turned toward her. “Baby,” he said, reaching for her. “What’s wrong?” Then he too was knocked off his feet.