by John Crowley
John C. enrolled at Central High School for the fall semester of 1959, having convinced his father and the principal and the director of studies that he had enough credits to transfer, and that with enough effort he could graduate in June of 1960. He was helped to select courses that would be applicable, and was allowed to take typing as an elective. When the semester began he found, without surprise, that he was the only male in the typing class. He loved it, loved the girls in their skirts and dresses, their beehive hairdos and flips, their Capezios and their tennis shoes. St. Joseph’s had been divided into wings, one for the males taught by brothers, the other for females taught by nuns; the two connected nowhere. Now he sat amid the upright backs and lifted hands, the unearthly clatter of all the Remingtons going at once like an enfilade, and could hardly keep from laughing aloud in delight.
That month his agent sold a new story of his to a science fiction magazine for twenty-seven dollars and fifty cents. On a Saturday he went to Robertson’s department store and bought new clothes: soft pleated grey flannel slacks, narrow at the ankle; white shirts, to be worn with the sleeves rolled up two turns; patterned sweaters in cashmere and merino. The cuffed slacks broke prettily over penny loafers (also new) and showed a bit of bright white sock. John C. had before been a poor dresser, mostly content with what his mother brought home from sales. In October he was ready to start dating, which the school he’d previously attended, and his lack of wheels, and his timidity, had made difficult. His parents, who had never before seen any reason to give him a curfew, told him he must be in by ten on school nights, and by midnight on weekends. He never violated the rule.
With a car and a daily drive to Central, and soon the trips to Barbara’s house in Sunnymede, a middle-class development off Wayne Street, or later on to Phyllis’s in the similarly named but very different Sunnyside Apartments on Jefferson Boulevard, he learned more about South Bend in this year than he had in all his isolated years on Ponader Drive. He had always had an odd disability, a nearly absent sense of spatial orientation that for a long time he hadn’t actually perceived, just as people who have no color vision sometimes don’t perceive their lack until it’s proven to them. Now he knew about it, and knew he had to take it into account. He acquired a city map at a drugstore and marked it in colored pencils, the way to this place, the way to that, the houses of girls, the diners and carhop places, the drive-in movie theaters. At the drive-ins, the Western Theater on Peppermint Drive, the Moonlite on Chippewa, he sat with Phyllis resting in his arm and watched fox-eyed Natalie Wood and James Garner in Cash McCall, admiring Garner’s beautiful suits of blue and black. You’d look so sharp in that, Phyllis murmured, and John thought, yes, he would. When the second feature, The Electronic Monster, started he talked to Phyllis about Phyllis, looking with genuine delight and sympathy into her eyes, which strangely resembled Natalie Woods’s. Then no talking for a long time while the great beams of light from the projector played over the screen, producing the illusion of motion. The cones of her white stitched bra were stiff; the sleek sateen of her underpants, which he found beneath the gingham skirt, grew damp beneath his hand: but he’d go no farther.
Amazing how it was that he could now know, as though granted a new sense or instinct, what he hadn’t known, what other boys growing up elsewhere might have known but he never had: that the girls he was drawn to were just as drawn to him, some of them at least, and more than that: that their desires were as intense as his own, however muffled or tied down; and if you did know that, how easily released they were, right up to the last barriers. What trust they placed in him, what hope: that he’d be good, that he’d know them, know their hearts. And he was, and he did. And he’d bring them home and they’d straighten themselves in the odorous front seat and do their lipstick in the rear-view mirror, eyes soft in the street-light. In no way would he get in trouble, as the phrase was, the trouble that haunted parents, and no way he would get girls in trouble, wake up little Suzy. He broke no hearts; he made clear to them he would not, but neither would he would pledge his own. And he’d drift in at his front door at the appointed hour and his mother would look up from her mystery novel and look at him with interest and some kind of knowledge of her own that he had not suspected, not before; and in his narrow bed, night after night, he’d lie in the grip of a lust more potent and unceasing than he had ever felt—or rather than he had felt since he had last left this point in time behind and gone on into the life he was to lead. He’d relieve the pressure twice in a night and then sometimes wake from thrilling dreams anointed again, and turn his face to the wall in wonder, and he’d laugh: remembering, and at the same time being, what he once had been.
La Brea Medical Transcription Service • 1419 La Brea Avenue • Los Angeles CA 90019
For: Dr. Carla Young PhD
9/23/92 Initial Session
CY Notes: John C. White male in good physical health, employed as a screenwriter, age 49. Presenting with undefined anxiety and midlife crisis.
Transcript begins at 05:00:02
_______________________________________
CY:—and record our conversations, purely for my own uses. If you object—
JC: No, no. It’s all right. I’m sure it will be useful. A record.
CY: So how are you today? How can I help?
JC: I’m fine, thank you, Doctor. I’m in trouble. I am at . . . an impasse, I guess would be the word.
CY: Well, all right. Good enough to start with, I suppose. Do you have any questions for me before we—
JC: Several questions. Just deciding to make this appointment made me question myself.
CY: Can you say what sort of questions?
JC: Questions of how much I want to tell you, and whether what I tell you will be believed, and what good it would do me if you did believe me. Or didn’t.
CY: Those are extremely important self-queries, but I think we’d need a lot more groundwork before it would be useful to address them. For us to address them together, or for you yourself to do so.
JC: All right then.
CY: Can we perhaps begin with the problem you named on the form?
JC: The one I came in with, or maybe you’d say “presented” with?
CY: Your creative block, or what you experience as one. We can begin with that, if that’s where you now feel comfortable.
JC: I no longer feel comfortable anytime. But thank you, okay. The film. It’s an idea I’ve been working on for a long time. Years, actually. Now the situation seems right. Rocco Sisto has committed to the concept—you remember he got Best Actor last year for Midsummer, the Shakespeare adaptation. Terence Malick has expressed interest.
CY: And?
JC: And I—well—I can’t, I can’t conclude it.
CY: You can’t imagine an ending for it.
JC: No. I know how it has to end. It’s just that the story, as a film story, can’t end.
CY: I’m lost. You’d better try to explain.
JC: All right. This won’t be easy for me.
CY: I’m patient.
JC: Okay. The film story—or maybe better to call it the situation, because the story or what might be called the plot is the problem—is this. A man, a man about my age, learns that he can begin his life again, starting from a point in his past that he chooses, and can make it different: he can choose a different way of life, fulfill different ambitions, meet different people. And just as important avoid the choices he did make, the life he did lead, the people he did meet and get involved with.
CY: Hm. And what earns him this chance?
JC: Well, nothing. It just suddenly appears to him to be possible. That the world holds that possibility.
CY: No magic ring, no djinni, no three wishes?
JC: No. Anyway none will be revealed. But there’s one limit, or not a limit but a condition, or an out you might say, depending on how things work out for him. He is given
a way to return to a point in his youth or childhood and then to mature and grow older again in a new life that he makes through new choices. But when that day comes around again, the date on which he first found he could go back and do everything differently, he can—no, he must—decide whether to continue the new-made life, or return to the first life, and take it up again at exactly the place and moment he made the choice to leave it. And begin there at that moment again.
CY: A sweet deal. He gets to make a whole new lifetime of mistakes and surprises and, I guess, gratifications, and then annul it. Is that what he does?
JC: Well. That’s the problem. He’s approaching that day, and can’t decide. Or I can’t. The audience will have seen both lives, quite different in lots of ways but neither one clearly better or worse—crises or big moments from each life are shown in the year the character reaches them. Until, in fact, he reaches the age I am, or he is, when this chance was given him. And he has to choose.
CY: I see. I think I see.
JC: It’s an aesthetic problem. If a character in a story is presented with two distinct things or paths or outcomes, and the story makes it possible that he might choose either—that is, in the story as it unfolds, neither possibility vanishes or becomes obviously wrong—then there is no right way to end the story.
CY: Why is that?
JC: Because audiences will perceive that either choice is arbitrary, is imposed by the creators, isn’t compelled. It could just as well have been the other. Neither choice can be a satisfactory ending.
CY: Okay.
JC: Like love stories, where a character has to make a choice between two people, neither of which is clearly Mr. Right. Or Ms. Right.
CY: Okay.
JC: Well. The commonest solution—and this is such a general problem in storytelling that it does have a common solution—is the Third Thing. The Third Thing is something, or someone, that has been in the story all along, little noticed or maybe misunderstood, but whose real nature is suddenly brought out at the end and negates the other two false choices.
CY: As for instance . . .
JC: For instance a woman’s first pulled to A, who’s nice, then to B, who’s different but flawed, then back to A, who turns out to have a nasty secret. And all along she’s talking to her gay male friend about it all. And in the last minutes it’s revealed that the friend isn’t gay at all, that what she thought she knew about him was wrong, and he’s the right choice. The third thing. You get it, right?
CY: Right. I pretty much got it when you began. So this third-thing solution—is finding that third thing what you are stuck on?
JC: I’m stuck because there is no third thing. There can be no third thing in this story. And whichever choice the character makes is at once neither the right nor the wrong one, and likewise the choice that he doesn’t make. And not to make a choice, to remain in the state he’s in, well, that’s to make a choice as well, and is unsatisfactory in the same way.
CY: It’s Buridan’s ass.
JC: It’s what?
CY: Buridan’s ass. An ancient philosophical problem posed in, I don’t know, the 12th century maybe? A problem of choice. An ass—you know, a donkey—is standing equidistant from two piles of hay. Each pile is the same size, the same tastiness or whatever it is that makes some hay more appealing than other hay, all of that exactly equal. And so the donkey can’t make a choice. Has no rational basis on which to make a choice. And so . . .
JC: He starves to death.
CY: Right. Actually there’s a different and in a way more interesting version, where the donkey is equidistant between two different things, a pile of hay and a bucket of water, and he’s exactly as hungry as he is thirsty, and so . . .
JC: So he . . . he . . . Yes.
CY: Is that what your story is? A philosophical problem play? A problem you want to work out by creating a character who faces it?
JC: No, no.
CY: It would seem to be at least metaphorical, wouldn’t you say? Is that the difficulty? To get the story to reflect what you want to say about your own life. You seek to grasp what it is in your life that seems insufficient or disappointing . . .
JC: It’s not metaphorical. It’s . . . autobiographical in nature.
CY: Autobiographical.
JC: Yes.
CY: You mean that the events that happen to the character in the first life you describe resemble the facts of your own life? Or do you mean that the events and people in the other, the imagined life, are autobiographical—
JC: No. Not either of those.
CY: Maybe “metaphorical” wasn’t the right word. But it’s sort of well known that people who come to therapists with some very particular reason or problem they want to work on—their suffering actually comes from some other source. Even if the initial reason is real enough to them. But in order for me to help—
JC: Doctor. What I need from you is not any of that . . . argumentation.
CY: Then what?
JC: What I’ve come for is to ask for help in making this decision. You have to listen. You have to listen first to all that happened, and then you have to help me to decide.
Transcript ends 58:32:02
In his first semester at Central, John C. began to visit the Student Counseling office for help with his post-high school plans. It’s possible that there had been some sort of student counseling at St. Joseph’s, but he had never asked about it, nor even considered the possibility.
He already had an offer from Notre Dame, via his father and his father’s associates there, to attend the college tuition-free; and since he could easily live at home and commute, he’d save himself and his family a lot of money that way. Though he hadn’t yet explicitly rejected it, in no world past or future was this an invitation he would accept, and he believed he would never have to. He could certainly go instead to Indiana University, which by law had to admit any person who graduated from high school in the state, but that also was not in his plans. He would instead do what no teacher in his former high school had suggested and no one at home knew how to do: he would apply to universities elsewhere, and in his applications give his reasons for selecting each of them, listing his interests, his achievements, his honors, and his publications. At the Office of Student Counseling he got the addresses of the universities he’d selected, so that he could send away for their particular forms and requirements, which upon receipt (“What’s all this?” his father asked, starting a brief but touchy conversation) he filled out, with advice from Counseling; and with the application fee of two or four dollars of his own money in the form of a postal money order, he put them in envelopes, addressed them in his new grownup hand, and lastly added multiple 4¢ First Class stamps (some commemorating the Boy Scouts, some the VIII Winter Olympics) plus one plain blue 1¢ Abe Lincoln after another until the postmistress nodded assent. When he received letters of acceptance from those schools, including their offers of decreased tuition or other inducements, he would choose among them.
The University of Southern California. The University of California at Los Angeles. The University of California, Berkeley. Not Harvard, nor Yale, universities where (like Notre Dame) only boys were admitted; he hadn’t applied to those. John C. had a general aversion to boys. He liked girls. It was something that had long been noted by his father, who had of course surrounded him with sisters.
When the acceptances began to come in, and the colorful brochures showing happy students and wide lawns and earnest professors, he decided after brief study (his sisters leaning over his shoulder and marveling and choosing for him) on the University of Southern California.
And the worlds he would occupy and the world he had occupied began to divide irremediably.
In that world he had never played sports of any kind. Though he certainly could have taken one up, track or tennis, but not football or basketball (the ones that mattered), he
did nothing about it, and only at his father’s insistence would he go with him to the golf course to caddy, or at least pull the golf-bag trolley behind him from hole to hole.
In this world he asked his father to take him golfing, teach him the basics, and he took up the game his father was devoted to, and proved to be at least basically competent; he was a good putter but his long game was weak. He asked his father for pointers.
In that world he had found himself often unable to sit alone comfortably in the same room as his father, though he could never understand why he felt that way. If the rest of the family or his siblings or his mother were there, he could share the space, but not alone with his father (feet up, reading the paper; watching television; leafing through a medical journal). He’d work to overcome it but mostly he’d just leave.
In this world he sat contentedly with his father, asked him questions, tried to elicit his opinions or his history, just by the way; they talked about McCarthy and the Communists, about Ike and Nixon, about his father’s father and his grandfather. John C. talked about himself too: what he hoped to do—make movies, direct plays, write poetry—and his father had to assent to listen. Sometimes he’d bring his sewing—capes and vestments and robes for his tall rod puppets.
