Mortals

cranny of the Other in order to suck out the genius in all the loci they can get to. So I should be happy. But am I? No.

Do you know the Emily Dickinson poem that begins “A Day! Help! Help! Another Day!”? That’s almost me. I need you to help me with Joel, or rather I need you to help me with certain impulses I am developing toward him, impulses I disown but need help in curbing. I suspect that what is happening is my own fault, in a way. Lately Joel is finding himself irresistible. Somehow all my loving efforts to build up his selfconfidence have born monstrous fruit. He has begun to really love himself. He feels he is too good for anything. Here is an outburst he had. He started to put on a shirt with his monogram on it, a gift from his mother, but then stopped and tore it off and threw it on the floor, saying I HATE MY INITIALS. Suddenly he is too fine for them, or something. Later we were getting on the bus for a day trip to Monte Alban and he was in a fine mood, looking forward to it, we had a nice little lunch packed, and he turned to me and said, “This is going to be neat. Now don’t let anything I do ruin our day.”

Now he is preening himself and is on the verge of flirting with other people. In fact he was flirting the other night, in a sidelong way and over his shoulder, with a clot of tenured fauves from the UC Berkeley Art & Musicology Departments.

As you know, and as Ray will have emphasized, I am not prepossessing, physically. I could be described as pudgy. Also I am being driven bald at an accelerated rate lately, through anxiety, I believe, or possibly by something in the water in Mexico. I am not saying I am repulsive. Let others say that. But on my best day I rise to the average. Joel seemed always not to notice. So we got on famously until I succeeded in convincing him that not only is he attractive but he is worth knowing and worth treating nicely. The problem that is emerging between us is teasing. I have a tendency to want to tease, which I am basically in control of. But I began teasing more as his rehab progressed, I think. I don’t know why. Possibly I am seeing him as a duckling getting ready to fly, and if he is going to fly away it might be better for me if he does it now, before I get further attached to him. So that would be one Surmise. Or the impulse could be to tease him as a way of showing I still have some kinds of power he doesn’t. His attempts to tease back are pathetic. Or the fact that I am footing the bill for everything could be involved. One thing I do to make a little money now and then is to sell one of the business names I’ve copyrighted. I have a list of these names, in different categories, and I sold one, Bodysmith, to a gym chain, and here we are, spending my fee together. We never discuss money. We used to. He used to actually express gratitude now and then. Or possibly I tease because teasing was the worst thing ever done to me (ask your husband what I am talking about) and I have some perverse drive to make Joel experience at least a dilute version of what I went through. I don’t even know what I mean by this. I am trying to think of everything. I am drifting toward wanting to humiliate Joel and I reject myself for it.

I see that my breakfast is here. On a plate with a dollop of refried beans and a piece of toast like a section of planking is a sunnyside up fried egg with a major bloodspot in it. The coffee is like ink. This may be a diet day for me. I have had many diet days in Mexico.

Joel makes me wonder who I am.

By the way, we must be Proud of our identities these days, we must be fierce, insulting, even, as we proclaim ourselves, flaunt our teeny individualities. A woman who teaches English at one of the junior colleges in Marin told me that a student requested she not be required to do a paper on a certain writer because he smoked. She explained that she felt strongly on the subject and would be much more comfortable expositing a nonsmoker. Believe me that this happened. This is not the sort of thing a normal mind could make up.

One thing that tempts me in re teasing is that Joel is truly a virginal mind. Teasing can be a form of instruction. And Joel is a dummy, in fact, but so beautiful that if it weren’t for his accompanying stupidity he would be totally beyond my reach or grasp. I no longer say “A penny for your thoughts” to Joel. I hate being overcharged.

I want you to know that I don’t blame Joel for his defects, by the way. He is the product of several tragedies larger than he is, so to say. He has no relationship whatever to the written word, for example, which is now common. All his referentia are audiovisual.

This is what I think is happening with American children in a very general way, and what I think happened to Joel. I think people are finding their own children boring. And this is due to two factors. Factor one is that by the time a child normally would be a developed persona, a real individual, he or she has become a kind of playback machine for various media tropes and loops: he or she has become what he or she beheld, that is, your child is old television, a rerun. Your child is things you have seen yourself and have outgrown. Then factor two comes into play, to wit, that when the parent looks at his boring child he knows that on television or video, even as he looks into the face of his child, there is bound to be something on that’s more interesting than the child before him.

This is my Joel. His parents were bored by him. Add to this that they made their livings in media themselves and were, I would say, themselves boring. Even his beauty failed to interest them, I feel safe in saying. Both parents were goodlooking, so he was expected to be beautiful.

This is my television-as-the-root-of-all-evil general theory of American civilizational decline. You will observe that it explains a lot, including why children are out of control to the point of bringing guns to school and scribbling their initials all over the material landscape. By the way, I never wanted television in our house. Ask Ray. It was purely visceral with me. I didn’t know why, but I hated the thought of it. Ray wanted it. So we got it.

I can pretty well re-create what happened finally between Joel and his parents. They didn’t mind that he was gay, apparently, but they hated it that he was so childish. He tried to be a model, but something childish showed through in photographs and it didn’t work out for him. I feel responsible for him. I’m not sure there are hordes of people who would want Joel once they got past his fleshly envelope, if you know what I mean. He has a little trouble with his fricatives, for example, not a real speech defect but kind of embarrassing and, I think, one of the reasons he got into the habit of not talking much. He has had the experience of being tossed away after something in him seemed not to live up to his exterior. Also, Joel is afraid of life, but in an adorable way. For example, every morning he makes me read the obituaries to see if anyone younger than he is has died. He doesn’t want the names, just the ages, if there are any. And these days there often are. At this point I should mention a shining virtue of his. He is faithful. Fidelity is natural to him. Even if he flirts now and then, this is true of Joel. So, to continue. Joel gets an oversupply of attention for his exterior and I get a paucity of attention for mine. I have a rich interior and a poor (face it) sort of exterior. He has a rich exterior and internally he is a mixed bag, say. Nobody knows what I am because of what my exterior oh so wrongly suggests. So in a way we make a perfect object together.

I badly want you not to misperceive me over Joel. I sensed in your questions that you might be, thus I want to emphasize what I love about him. He is the kind of man who can be loved. He is loyal. He is still maturing. He is less precipitate in conversation than he was. And he is beautiful. With him I have an experience of sublime beauty beyond anything I ever thought I would have. His innocence, when it isn’t driving me insane, is probably good for me. And I think I see more, now, of what he sees in me. It’s my mind and my wit that attract him, those things and my talent for striking back. I get revenge. He has seen me in action, my fangs and talons out. He sees me as an armed thing. He is, by nature, a disarmed personality, which has been a disaster because his beauty has attracted the unjust in greater numbers than the just.

Ray stopped reading, feeling coldness blossom inside himself. He thought, This is for me, warnings for me, these letters are acts of war… He is striking at me through her. Ray continued reading.

Also, there is a fact of gay life that comes into this that you may not appreciate. I can have my beautiful man and enjoy him intensely as long as I can and not worry about the things I would be worrying about if we were planning to reproduce. There are gay men who want to adopt and so on, a minority, and go for it, I say, if you want that. But there is a certain freedom to enjoy beauty per se that straights must lack, with their great mission of reproducing our species, and so having to consider other qualities, such as brains, for example.

Ray had to stop. He thought, I’m surrounded, this is demonic… The idea is to suggest that Iris is my Joel, my ornament, my toy… We have no children, et cetera, that’s the subtext, that’s it! The bastard!

Now he had to finish the letter. He had to see what else there was that was like this. His hands were shaking. He hadn’t eaten. That had been a mistake.