What Are You Going Through

by Sigrid Nunez

  I’m so glad you came, my friend said when I kissed her goodbye.

  I told her I’d come again, the next day.

  What are you doing tonight? Anything?

  I told her I was going to hear my ex give a talk.

  Oh, him, she said. And she rolled her eyes.

  I asked if she’d read the article on which the talk was based and she said that she had.

  Nice to see he’s still his old ball-of-fun self, she said.

  * * *

  —

  Recently a story appeared in an anthology, based on a true story familiar to my friend and me because it involved someone we used to know, another old coworker. A man teaching at a university was overcome by the presence in one of his classes of a young man who happened to remind him of the beautiful ephebe who’d been the love and obsession of his youth. Giving in to temptation, he seduced the student and was thrilled when his feelings were returned. A passionate romance ensued, with both men hoping that, despite the generational difference in their ages, their relationship would endure. But after a short time it was revealed that the young man was in fact the professor’s former lover’s son. This discovery set off a series of deep disturbances in the professor’s psyche. He immediately broke off the relationship but was never able to get back to a normal life, becoming so distraught that in the end he killed himself.

  I remember that, at the time, what none of us could quite believe was that, until the truth was revealed, this man had managed to ignore not only the clue of the family resemblance, which was in fact striking, but the much bigger clue that his two lovers shared the same surname. Also incredible, that he never once mentioned anything about either of these remarkable “coincidences” to the student, and apparently never sought to learn whether there might be something more behind them.

  The power of denial. It’s happened more than once: a girl finds herself giving birth, in a high school bathroom, say, and later reveals that she’d had no idea she was pregnant, the many changes taking place in her body having been attributed by her to—whatever.

  The boundless capacity of the human mind for self-delusion: my ex was certainly not wrong about that.

  In the published story, which was written by the young (well, no longer young) lover, characters’ genders and other details have been changed so that the student with whom the professor ends up having an affair turns out to be a daughter about whose existence he’d never been told. According to the writer, this was to create a more dramatic conflict and to make the suicide more convincing. Of course, the truth was far more interesting, and my friend was not the only one who felt that the writer had in fact “ruined” the story—forgetting that what had actually happened was not a work of fiction. Some people who were close to the professor were upset to see him turned into a fictional character and thought the story should never have been written or published at all.

  But there it is, and now we have it. Another saddest story.

  * * *

  —

  Jesus, du weisst is the title of an Austrian documentary I saw about fifteen years ago and have never got out of my head. Jesus, You Know. Six Catholics are shown, each alone in a different empty church, having agreed to pray aloud while kneeling and facing the camera that has been set up on a tripod in the chancel. These ordinary believers, three men and three women, have a lot on their chests, they have a lot on their minds, there is oh so much that they want to tell Jesus about. The phrase “you know” is repeated several times. (In fact, You Know, Jesus would have been the more accurate title, since it’s the informal conversation filler and not the Lord’s omniscience that is the meaning here.) These intimate one-sided talks, mostly about family problems, are more like something you’d expect to hear a person telling a shrink or a confessor than what comes to mind at the word prayer. Not quite the love letter to God, not the raising of the heart and mind to God or the requesting of good things from him as defined by the Catholic Church.

  One woman is depressed because her husband has suffered a stroke and now spends all his time watching bad TV shows. Another complains of a husband who’s cheating on her. Maybe, with Jesus’ help, she can find the right words to make an anonymous call to inform the other woman’s husband. And might Jesus also give her the strength not to murder her husband with the poison that she confesses already to have obtained.

  An elderly man emotionlessly questions Jesus about the abuse inflicted on him when he was a child: Why did my father beat me. Why did my mother spit in my face.

  A young man goes from bemoaning his parents’ failure to understand his religious devotion to describing his bewildering and sometimes religious erotic fantasies.

  A young couple takes turns discussing the unhappiness that has arisen in their relationship because she wants one thing in life and he wants quite another thing.

  They drone on and on, the six. There is no other way to put it. As there is no way to ignore the fact that a considerable amount of what we hear from them would have to be called whining. A defensive tone creeps in: each person seems to have felt a pressing need to explain his or her feelings, to present his or her situation as though laying out a case before a judge.

  Of the handful of people who were in the audience with me, not everyone stayed till the end.

  What the prayers recorded in the film lay bare are depths of loneliness, self-doubt, and sadness. Each supplicant seems to be crying out for love—a love they’ve never found or a love they fear they’re on the verge of losing. Although the people in the film are of different ages and come from different backgrounds, they share two most important things: religion and nationality. What would happen if the director’s experiment were to be repeated with other groups of believers, non-Austrians, non-Catholics—would the results be the same? I think so. Watching the film, hearing the prayers, I felt like a witness to the human condition.

  What is prayer and is God even listening are two questions the filmmaker wants the viewer/voyeur to chew on. Me, I left the theater thinking of the popular inspirational command: Be kind, because everyone you meet is going through a struggle.

  Often attributed to Plato.

  Not long after I saw the documentary, I happened to catch an interview on the radio with the filmmaker John Waters. Asked to make some movie recommendations, he immediately named Jesus, You Know. My favorite holiday movie, he called it (we were in the Christmas season). The people are maddening, John Waters said. And what the movie makes clear is that, if there really was a Supreme Being who had to listen to people’s prayers all the time, he would go out of his mind.

  III

  I went to the gym. I have been going to the same neighborhood gym for many years. Others have been going there for at least as long as I have so I see some of the same people whenever I’m there. One person in particular I wonder about: all these years, no matter what day or what hour I go, this woman is there. Though we’ve never become friends—if we ever even exchanged names, I’ve forgotten hers—we tend to chat if we happen to be in the locker room at the same time. I remember our first conversation was about the book Infinite Jest, a copy of which she happened to have with her. When I asked her how she liked it she said that the best thing about it was its length. She would be reading the book for a long time, she said. Weeks. And she felt that, even if she didn’t love it, at least she’d be getting her money’s worth. (I could not help thinking of an all-day lollipop.) She was so tired, this woman said, of paying twenty bucks for short books—stuff that lasted only a short time, sometimes not even a weekend.

  And sometimes it’s just a book of poems, she said. How can they charge that much for a book of poems? Who buys them?

  Not many people, I assured her.

  At the time, the woman at the gym was young, still in school, as I recall, or maybe just out of school. Art school. I remember very clearly what she looked like because she was so pretty, with features
that were vivid and dramatic even without a touch of makeup, and how I was reminded of a story about a movie director saying about a child actress that she shouldn’t be filmed wearing all that makeup, only to be told that little Elizabeth Taylor wasn’t wearing any makeup.

  The woman at the gym was also blessed with what would have been a great body even without all the effort she spent working out. Over time, though, her looks have changed, I wouldn’t say drastically but more than most people’s do. In middle age she is toned but overweight, her precise features have blurred, the dazzle is gone. No one is more aware of this than she is. In the locker room she sits hunched and swathed in towels with a look of grievance on her face. Why do they have to have all these mirrors in here, why do the lights have to be this fucking bright?

  I agree about the lights. They are fucking bright. But her remark about the mirrors confuses me. I have no trouble ignoring them.

  How was it possible, the woman in the locker room wanted to know, for a person to work out every day and watch every bite she ate and still not lose weight. She now ate half of what she used to eat, she said, but every year she had to eat less just to keep from becoming a blimp. At this rate, she’d soon be down to a carrot and a hard-boiled egg a day. And it wouldn’t be so bad if it didn’t hurt, she said, but when her stomach was empty it was like a rat trying to gnaw its way out of there, at night sometimes it was so bad that she couldn’t sleep. She knew it sounded crazy, the woman in the locker room said, but when her sister got cancer and lost thirty pounds she couldn’t help wishing it would happen to her. And was it so crazy? After all, always hating the way she looked, always fighting against her own body and always, always losing the battle meant that she was depressed all the time, more depressed than her sister had been about getting cancer. And anyway her sister was fine now.

  Shopping for clothes, the woman in the locker room went on. That used to be fun. That used to bring joy. But now it was more like a punishment. Whenever she needed new pants or a new dress, she had to try on a hundred things before she found something that fit, and the whole time she had to look in the mirror. She would stand there looking at herself in the mirror and gritting her teeth, she said, gritting her teeth now as she told me the story, thinking how it used to be—not just how much fun but the high she always got from admiring her own body.

  From the back is the worst, she said. I really can’t stand how I look from the back. I never wear anything anymore that doesn’t cover my butt.

  Going to the beach, going swimming, getting a tan—all these things used to be fun too, the woman in the locker room said. But now there was no way she’d ever appear in public in a swimsuit, she wouldn’t even go out wearing shorts. No matter how hot it was, she said, she always covered herself up. Even if she lost weight, even if she was thin again, she wouldn’t show her body in public, she said. Even though she knew she didn’t look worse than most women her age—she knew that in fact she looked better than most of them—she didn’t understand how some women could show themselves basically naked the way so many did, without self-consciousness, without shame. When she saw a woman walking on the beach with cottage-cheese thighs and a belly slung like a hammock, she had to turn away, the woman in the locker room said, she couldn’t even look. And she would rather die than give anyone a reason to feel that way about her.

  There was genuine horror in the woman’s voice. There was horror and bitterness and pain. What a nasty trick life had played on her.

  Have you heard the one about X, Y, or Z, who had so many facelifts that the dimple in her chin is really her navel? As I recall, the first time I heard this joke it was about Elizabeth Taylor.

  Long before the arrival of FaceApp, I remember once hearing someone say that everybody, sometime in their youth— say around when they finished high school—should be given digitally altered images showing how they’ll probably look in ten, twenty, fifty years. That way, this person said, at least they could be prepared. Because most people are in denial about aging, just as they are about dying. Though they see it happening all around them, though the example of parents and grandparents might be right under their nose, they don’t take it in, they don’t really believe it will happen to them. It happens to others, it happens to everyone else, but it won’t happen to them.

  But I myself have always thought of this as a blessing. Youth burdened with full knowledge of just how sad and painful aging is I would not call youth at all.

  The other day, this happened: I was sitting with some friends at a sidewalk café. A middle-aged woman standing near the curb was speaking into her phone, her voice raised above the street noise. I’m the youngest, we heard her say. From the window of a passing car, a man roared: How can you be the youngest? You look a hundred years old!

  An elderly and once very beautiful woman I know had this to say on the subject: In our culture, what you look like is such an important part of who you are and how people treat you. Especially if you’re female. So if you’re good-looking, if you’re a good-looking girl or woman, you get used to a certain level of attention. You get used to admiration—not just from people you know but from strangers, from almost everyone. You get used to compliments, you get used to people wanting you around, wanting to give you things and to do things for you. You get used to inspiring love. If you’re really good-looking and you aren’t mentally ill or obnoxiously conceited or a total dimwit, you get so used to being popular, you get so used to love and admiration that you take it for granted, you don’t even know how privileged you are. Then one day it all disappears. Actually, it happens gradually. You begin to notice certain things. Heads no longer turn when you pass by, people you meet don’t always later remember your face. And this becomes your new life, your strange new life: an ordinary, undesirable person with a common, forgettable face.

  I think of this sometimes, the once beautiful woman said, when I hear young women complain about how, wherever they go, guys leer at them or make catcalls—all that coarse, unwanted attention. And I get it, she said, because I used to feel that way too. But show me the girl who’ll be saying years from now, Sing hallelujah, I’m so glad that never happens to me anymore! It’s like menopause, she said. No matter how much of a relief it might be not to have to deal with menstruation anymore, show me the woman who greets her first missed period with joy.

  I remember, the elderly and once beautiful woman said, after I reached a certain age it was like a bad dream—one of those nightmares where for some reason no one you know recognizes you anymore. People didn’t seek me out or try to make friends with me the way they’d always done before. I’d never been in the position of having to work at making people like and admire me. Suddenly I was all shy and socially awkward. Worse, I started to feel paranoid. Had I turned into one of those pathetic people always trying to get others to like them when everyone knows that that’s just the sort of person other people never do like?

  One day my son brought home a friend, the once beautiful woman went on, and I happened to overhear her say, Your mom’s kind of weird, isn’t she. To this day I’m not sure what the girl meant, I never did get to the bottom of it, but it threw me into a crisis. Around that time I started to withdraw. I mean, I still went to work and took care of my family but I did less and less socializing. Also, though I never got fat, I stopped wearing makeup and I stopped coloring my gray hair.

  I remember, the once beautiful woman said, one of the worst parts of it all was the guilt. I honestly felt that, by growing older and losing my looks, I was a disappointment to people, I was letting them down. There was no denying that I was a disappointment to my husband, not that he ever said so, but he didn’t hide it, either. And when he started cheating, I knew that he used the fact that I didn’t try to make myself look better—meaning, of course, younger—as a justification. My own mother, who once worked as a model and was what you’d call a woman of the world, had warned me that I was putting my marriage at risk. After all, my l
ooks had had everything to do with why my husband married me, it was a big part of what he fell in love with, he and I both knew that, it would have been absurd to deny it. But the girl he fell in love with and married was now gone—and how was he to have known he’d be incapable of desiring the woman in her place? And so he did what so many other men in his predicament do, the once beautiful woman said, he left me for someone else. Someone who, as friends kept pointing out—I suppose because they thought it would make me feel better—bore a strong resemblance to what I had looked like twenty years earlier, when I was her age. Friends also kept telling me, Now you’ll meet someone else, now you’ll find a man who loves you for yourself and not just for how you look! Funny thing, though, I never did meet such a man.

  Maybe I really am weird, like the girl said, or maybe I’m just a terrible, shallow person, but it often feels to me as though I had died, the once beautiful woman said. All those years ago I died, and I’ve been a ghost ever since. I’ve been mourning my lost self ever since, and nothing, not even my love for my children and grandchildren, can make up for it.

  The woman at the gym had always wanted to be a painter, she said on another day when we met in the locker room. I thought I could make it but I wasn’t sure, she said, because that’s how it is when you’re starting out and you haven’t had a chance to prove yourself. Most of my teachers were men, she said, and I remember how two in particular really encouraged me. They were always telling me how good I was. Of course, they were also always coming on to me, but that wasn’t any surprise, other men came on to me too, and a lot of male teachers came on to their female students back then, that’s just how it was. But I couldn’t help having doubts. I couldn’t be sure if they really liked my work or they just liked me. I couldn’t ignore the fact that my one female teacher wasn’t as impressed with my work as the men were. But then I thought maybe she was just being competitive or jealous, like a lot of women are, and in fact one of the men assured me that this was definitely the case. The longer this went on, the more confused I got, she said. I didn’t know who to trust, I couldn’t tell what was sincere, what was flattery. I lost all confidence in my own judgment. I’m not trying to make excuses. If being an artist really had been my destiny, I know nothing should have stopped me. But when I look back I think, My God, those men! They really had me turned around. I couldn’t tell what was real anymore.