Great Expectations

by Kathy Acker

  2. The Beginnings Of Romance

  * * *

  Day

  The First Days

  Timelessness versus time.

  I remember it was dusk. The lamps began to appear against a sky not yet dark enough to need them. I was shy of my mother because when she was on ups she was too gay and selfish and on downs she was bitchy. When she changed from ups to downs was the best time to approach her.

  I adored my actress mother and would do anything for her. “Sarah, be a good girl and get me a glass of champagne.” “Sarah, I’m out of money again. Your father’s horrible. You don’t need an allowance: give me ten dollars and I’ll pay you back tomorrow.” She never paid me back and I adored her.

  “I never wanted you,” my mother told me often. “It was the war.” She hadn’t known poverty or hardship: her family had been very wealthy. “I had terrible stomach pains and the only doctor I could get to was a quack. He told me I had to get pregnant.” “I never heard of that. You got pregnant?” “The day before you were born I had appendicitis. You spent the first three weeks of your life in an incubator.”

  The rest I know is little. My father, a wealthier man than my mother, walked out on her when he found out she was pregnant with me. Since neither she nor grandmama Siddons ever said anything specific about him, I didn’t know who he was. I always turned to my mother and I loved her very much.

  Mother didn’t want me to leave her. I think she could have loved me or shown that she loved me if she had had more time or fewer obsessions. “I don’t care if my daughter respects me. I want her to love me.” She craved my love as she craved her friends’ and the public’s love only so she could do what she wanted and evade the responsibility. All her friends did love her and I, I lived so totally in the world bounded by her being her seemings, I had no idea we were a socially important family. I didn’t know there was a world outside her.

  There is just moving and there are different ways of moving. Or: there is moving all over at the same time and there is moving linearly. If everything is moving-all-over-the-place-no-time, anything is everything. If this is so, how can I differentiate? How can there be stories? Consciousness just is: no time. But any emotion presupposes differentiation. Differentiation presumes time, at least BEFORE and NOW. A narrative is an emotional moving.

  It’s a common belief that something exists when it’s part of a narrative.

  Self-reflective consciousness is narrational.

  Mother wanted me to be unlike I was. I got ‘A’s in school—it wasn’t that I was a good girl, in fact even back then I was odd girl out: school was just the one place where I could do things right—but mother said getting ‘A’s made me stand out too much. Otherwise I was just a failure. I felt too strongly. My emotional limbs stuck out as if they were broken and unfixable. I kissed mother’s friends too nicely when they were playing canasta. I was too interested in sex. I wasn’t pretty in a conventional enough way. I didn’t act like Penelope Wooding. When I washed a dish, I wasn’t washing the dish. Since I didn’t know if mother was god, I didn’t know if I loved her. My friends told me I perceived in too black-and-white terms. “The world is more complex,” they said. I said, “I get ‘A’s in school.” Unlike.

  “What was my father like, mommy?”

  My mother looks up from a review of her newest hit. In those days she always got fabulous reviews.

  “I mean my real father.” When I had turned ten years old, my mother had carefully explained to me that the man I called my father had adopted me.

  “He was very handsome.”

  “What exactly did he look like?” I had no right to ask, but I was desperate.

  “His parents were wonderful. They were one of the richest families in Brooklyn.”

  Talking with my mother resembled trying to plot out a major war strategy. “What did his family do?”

  “I was very wild when I was young. You remember Aunt Suzy. I’d sneak down the fire escape and Aunt Suzy and I’d go out with boys. I’d let them pet.” My mother was high on Dex. “Your father was very handsome, dark, I fell in love with him. It was during the war so everyone was getting married.” My mother refused to say anymore.

  When I asked grandmama Siddons about my real father, she said he was dead. I replied I knew he wasn’t dead. She said he was a murderer.

  Why is anybody interested in anything? I’m interested when I’m discovering. To me, real moving is discovering. Real moving, then, is that which endures. How can that be?

  Otherwise I lived in my imaginings. If anyone had thought about me rather than about their own obsessions, they would have thought it was a lonely childhood, but it wasn’t. I had all of New York City to myself. Since mother was an actress we had to live in New York or London, and I hugged New York to me like a present. Sometimes I’d leave the apartment and walk down First Avenue to the magic bookstore of brightly-colored leatherbound books. Book- and dress-stores were magic places I could either dream or walk to. Then I walked up Madison Avenue and fantasized buying things. I walked down to Greenwich Village where the most interesting bookstore held all the beatnik poets but I never saw them. I had to happen upon what I wanted. I was forbidden to act on my desire, even to admit my desire to myself. Poetry was the most frightening, therefore the most interesting appearance. Once or twice a monthly afternoon I’d avidly watch a play I had no way of comprehending.

  When it was all happening around me and I had very few memories of what was happening, I didn’t need to understand and, if I had understood, I probably would have been too scared to keep moving.

  Mother was a real actress. I never knew who she was. I had no idea until after the end that she was spending all of her money and, then, that she was broke. She had always been very tight with me: taking away my allowances, never buying me anything. She madly frittered away money. Suddenly, surprisingly, she asked me if I wanted gifts and she bought me three copies of a gold watch she liked. At the same time she owed three months’ rent, two of her bank accounts were closed, all of her charge cards had been revoked. The 800 shares of AT&T grandmama had given her were missing. She was becoming gayer and less prudish. I would have done anything for her. She didn’t talk to me or to anyone directly. She lifted up her favorite poodle, walked out of the apartment house, and didn’t return.

  Do I care? Do I care more than I reflect? Do I love madly? Get as deep as possible. The more focus, the more the narrative breaks, the more memories fade: the least meaning.

  In spite of these circumstances which brought me to Ashington House, I’m thrilled when I see it. Trees always make my heart beat quickly. Bronze chrysanthemums. Dahlias around a pond in which two ducks quack, black and gray. And the whistle low. Two long streets, along leaves, lead away.

  My aunts Martha and Mabel greet me. I’ve never met then before.

  They’re very wealthy and they’re so polite, they’re eccentric. They tell me I’m going to meet my real father. I don’t want to see him, I do I do. I know he’s handsome.

  Aunt Martha tells me he’s away at the moment.

  We stop, walking in front of a picture of my father. At least it’s a picture of him. “Your father,” Aunt Mabel comments, “was too adventurous. Wild … headstrong … Your mother was his first wife and you were his first child.”

  “Who’s his new wife?”

  “He’s had three. Last year he killed someone, shot him, who was trespassing on his yacht. The family got him off on psychological reasons. After his six-month stay in a rest home, he just disappeared.”

  “Aunt Mabel’s scared, dear,” Judy’s commenting on Punch, “that you have some of your father’s wildness.”

  Despite my politeness, they know who I am.

  “I really don’t know very much, Sarah. But I don’t think you should have anything to do with him.”

  “Your father,” Aunt Mabel interrupts her sister, “acts unpredictably. He can be extremely violent. We have no way of telling how he’ll act when he sees you. The fami
ly has decided to help you as much as we can, but we can’t help you with this.”

  I don’t know what I’m going to believe.

  He—for there can be no doubt of his sex, though the fashion of the time did something to disguise it—was in the act of slicing at the head of a Moor which swung from the rafters. It was the color of an old football.

  I called Jackson up and he came over immediately. He was a drunken messy slob, maudlin as they come which all drunks are, but that’s what let him be the kind of artist he was. He NEEDED to suffer to thrust himself out as far as he could go farther beyond the bounds of his physical body what his body could take he NEEDED to maul shove into knead his mental and physical being like he did those tubes of paint. I not only understood, I understood and adored. I would be the pillow he would kick the warm breast he could cry into open up to let all that infinite unstoppable mainly unbearable pain be alive I would not snap back I would be his allower of exhibited pain so he could keep going. That’s why he loved me. He didn’t need brains. He didn’t need intelligence he was too driven.

  “You’re so beautiful, so warm: I don’t know why you want me.”

  “I don’t want you cause you’re famous, Jackson. That’s why all those other people’re eating you up, making you think you’re only an image HISTORY (in New York City a person’s allowed to be alive or human if he/she is famous or close enough to a famous person to absorb some of the fame) so now you can no longer paint unless you close up all your senses and become a real moron. I want your cock because you’re a great artist.”

  He seemed to be crying for his entire life. “I always thought about you, darling, even before I knew you. Exactly who you are was my picture of you: you are the woman I wanted the woman I thought I could never have. Now I know you. Why do you want me? I’m a mess. I said to myself: I’ll do anything I can, with myself with EVERYTHING, to make my work, I did it, I did do it, I really fucked up my health and my mind. I don’t regret this, but now I’m a mess. Please, don’t be naive.”

  I knew this man, whatever would happen and death was the least, would stick by me.

  And ‘she was given the real names of things’ means she really perceived, she saw the real. That’s it. If everything is living, it’s not a name but moving. And without this living there is nothing; this living is the only matter matters. The thing itself. This isn’t an expression of a real thing: this is the thing itself. Of course the thing itself the thing itself it is never the same. This is how aestheticism can be so much fun. The living thing the real thing is not what people tell you it is: it’s what it is. This is the thing itself because I’m finding out about it it is me. It is a matter of letting (perceiving) happen what will.

  My mother was dead. We knew that. She might have been murdered or she might have killed herself, perhaps accidentally. The police had abandoned the case and I didn’t know how to find out on my own.

  None of my father’s family made any show of mourning for my mother. The funeral was a ghastly comedy. I was the only one sobbing my heart out while around me, hordes of women discussed Joan Crawford and her daughter and canasta games. Every now and then, I remember, Aunt Mabel told me to hand the chocolates around to her friends. I was wearing a fuzzy lavender sweater. One middle-aged woman shook the sweater back and forth and screamed that she wanted my mother’s apartment.

  After that, for a few months, I had nightmares, not nightmares but those deeper where I’d screaming wake up because there are so many thoughts, the thoughts are unknown.

  I realize that all my life is is endings. Not endings, those are just events; but holes. For instance when my mother died, the ‘I’ I had always known dropped out. All my history went away. Pretty clothes and gayness amaze me.

  The next thing I knew I received a letter from my father saying he was journeying to Seattle to see me, and then, it seems just a few days later, but that’s my memory, I was standing in an old wood bar, then I was sitting down, a roly-poly man not at all the handsome soul-eyed man in that little painting I had wondered on was telling me he distinctly remembered my mother. But he didn’t sound upset about her and she had been obsessed by him. “Are you my father?” I finally asked. “No. I’m your father’s first cousin.” He began to proposition me. “Oh, where’s my father?”

  “He’s not here yet.” Then this roly-poly man told me he came from an immensely wealthy family. His daughter picked bums off the street and slept with them. These stories made me realize that my mother’s bohemian and my weirdnesses, which I had thought the same as the rich’s amorality, were only stinky bourgeois playfulness.

  Lutetia is the foulest because poorest section of Paris. After Charles the Simple visits Lutetia, he’s so disgusted he tears a plan of Lutetia in two and orders the split to be made into a wide avenue.

  Yvikel the widower has a daughter Blanchine whose health is slowly declining. They live in the center of Lutetia. Yvikel does everything he can for his daughter and resolves when she dies he’ll kill himself.

  After the avenue is built and sunlight, hitherto unknown, floods their rat-trap, Blanchine begins to recover. She recovers. To celebrate his gratitude, Yvikel recreates the plan of Lutetia in silk. Charles the Simple’s hand reaches out and saves the section.

  Dr. Sirhugues discovers a therapeutic blue plant light. An enormous lens concentrates this light on the diseased person held still by a cylindrical cage or ‘focal jail.’ But the rays are too powerful for the person to bear. Finally Dr. Sirhugues finds that only Yvikel’s ancient silk is able to absorb and render harmless the dangerous portion of these rays.

  I don’t think I’m crazy. There’s just no reality in my head and my emotions fly all over the place: sometimes I’m so down, all I think is I should kill myself. Almost at the same time I adore everything: I adore the sky. I adore the trees I see. I adore rhythms. I … I … I … I … I’m I’m mine mine my. I can’t I can’t. I hate being responsible oh.

  I don’t care what people think; when they think they’re thinking about me, they’re actually thinking about the ways they act. I certainly don’t want them to give me their pictures of me I like the ways animals are socially. I would rather be petted than be part of this human social reality which is all pretense and lies.

  I expected my father to be a strong totally sexually magnetic daredevil, macho as they come, but he was kind and gentle. He must have been very ill when I first met him because he had had five heart attacks. But his great physical pleasures were still drinking on the sly from Aunts Martha and Mabel and eating half-a-pint of coffee ice cream before going to bed. He relied for his life on the roly-poly cousin Clifford Still.

  He must have wanted Clifford and me to marry. He believed in a reality that was stable which justice formed. A man who worked hard earned pleasure. A woman who took care of her husband kept his love. Approaching, death, for I quickly realized my father was extremely sick, frighteningly had to destroy those bourgeois illusions.

  As his sickness grew, he began to depend on me. He didn’t want me to walk away from his bed. I had known so much sickness.

  “Your mother led me a hard life, Sarah.”

  “You weren’t together very long, daddy.”

  “It was a passionate difficult existence. She wanted me to wear out. I don’t think that’s fair. I never understood her and I had very little tolerance for who she really was: I adored a figure-head. It was my death or getting rid of her, and she wanted the career.”

  “You thought you loved her.”

  “She depended on me more than she knew.”

  “People who don’t have any sense of reality, daddy, live crazy. Other people don’t understand why they act the ways they do. They survive because everyone survives.”

  As death approached my father said his life was useless. Because he now mistrusted.

  I watched everything and I swore I’d never marry a man I didn’t love and I’d never live for security.

  Everyone hates me. My mother may have been mur
dered. Men want to rape me. My body’s always sick. The world is paradise. Pain doesn’t exist. Pain comes from askew human perceptions. A person’s happy who doesn’t give attention to her own desires but always thinks of others. Repressing causes pain. I have no one in this world. Every event is totally separate from every other event. If there are an infinite number of non-relating events, where’s the relation that enables pain?

  All of my family is dead. I have no way of knowing who means me harm and who doesn’t.

  The First Days of Romance

  My father had left me all his possessions and I was, by the world’s accounting, a well-to-do young woman. I owned a large house in Seattle. The rest of the money, since it was tied up in stocks and bonds and lawyers’ incomprehensible papers, only meant that I was no longer untouchable. I knew most people wanted money or fame desperately just in order to survive. I knew I was no longer a person to a man, but an object, a full purse. I needed someone to love me so I could figure out reality.

  The rest of my life was programmed for me: since I had inherited a house in Seattle, I would go to Seattle. Clifford, my father’s best friend, was going to accompany me. I would never do what I wanted to do. My aunts Martha and Mabel would make sure that my money wouldn’t allow me to act unreasonably and pleasurably. I was to grow accustomed to that reality.

  My father died in the middle of January. It is now almost two years later. I can’t describe Sutton Place—where Ashington House lay—for I miss it so deeply.