— George Xander Morris
November 30, 2007
My Smoke Alarm is Going Off.
I say, Thank you.
You say, No, I think I might have
carbon monoxide poisoning,
and the way the looped wire casts
shadows dissecting your face
into slivers I count, re-count,
you may be right.
You say, I want to make love
out of cardboard boxes,
corrugated for your pleasure.
Where water and road
bend together, bracelets of protein
denatured, cardboard boxes
won’t work, I say, and begin to trace
iron letters on your galvanized steel
mouth: acidulous quartz and orthoclase,
marble veined with other,
second layer phloem, redwood,
if possible. Did we start building
bell-curved breath upon bell-curved
breathlessness? Spring migrates
while you force me phonemes.
I try to write it with wet-erase
transparency. Of comfort I know
nothing, so when you say
splintering wood of slammed
doors and speed of darkness
on mausoleum floors, I stutter,
recalling the last kiss
akin to the first—
you’re aware of the teeth.
— Jessamyn Edra
November 30, 2007
About Beckett
by Bob Borek
Samuel Beckett sympathized with lobsters. A female liaison told one of his biographers, James Knowlson, that when they would dine together at the Iles Marquis in Paris, they would always sit as far as possible from the trout and lobster tanks because of how much they upset “Sam.”
The detail appears in an early short of Beckett’s, “Dante and the Lobster,” the first in his collection More Pricks than Kicks (1934). The protagonist is a university student named Belacqua. He is obsessed by Dante, and named, rather curiously, after a character that appears in the Purgatory section of The Divine Comedy – a young Florentine lute maker who is condemned to sit crouched under a rock for idleness. After taking an Italian lesson, Belacqua picks up a lobster for dinner with his aunt. He assumes that the lobster he carries back with him is dead. When he realizes that it’s not, he’s horrified, but his aunt assures him that “lobsters are always boiled alive.”
Belacqua imagines the lobster’s journey: “In the depths of the sea it had crept into the cruel pot. For hours, in the midst of its enemies, it had breathed secretly. It had survived the Frenchwoman’s cat and his witless clutch. Now it was going alive into scalding water. It had to. Take into the air my quiet breath.”
Nicely stated, but the sentiment is a bit odd. It appears more so in light of the fact that earlier in the story Belacqua read with disinterest an article about a man who was going to be executed, or that in the collection Belacqua constantly disparages the women around him and mocks their love for him. The crustacean catches him off guard: why? Perhaps it’s the immediacy, or the fact that it’s unexpected, but quite transparently, it becomes an occasion for Belacqua’s own musing on the pain of dying and the inevitability of death. After all, it’s Belacqua, not the lobster, who has an affinity for Keats’ “quiet breath.”
To console himself, Belacqua thinks: “it’s a quick death, God help us all.”
The narrator’s reply: “It is not.”
The humor entwined with pessimism points straight to Beckett, but the author of More Pricks than Kicks is not the same author that would later write the trilogy of Molloy (1951), Malone Dies (1951), and The Unnamable (1953) – novels which set Maurice Blanchot and Georges Bataille to scratching their heads, and sent Harold Pinter into paroxysms of praise. Nor is it the author that would captivate Western theater audiences with his two-act play, Waiting for Godot (1952), and it’s most especially not the same author that would win the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1969 for writing that, in the words of the Swedish Academy, “in the destitution of man acquires its elevation.”
No, the author of More Pricks than Kicks was an unknown and largely unemployed 28-year-old who had earlier cast aside a promising academic career at Trinity College in Dublin, and who had little reason to believe that anything he wrote would be either widely or narrowly read. It’s the work of a young man with a stubborn determination to create, but without a very clear idea why, how, or for whom.
It’s a shame that a story like “Dante and the Lobster” is almost always read in the shadow of Beckett’s later work because, taken separately, there’s something extremely refreshing about it. The simple short illuminates aspects of Beckett that can get lost in the fray as a reader struggles with the difficulty of his mature work. Namely, there is real yearning in Belacqua’s sentimentality. The strong narrative voice that comes in to strangle it leaves the reader rather unseated, even if he’s chuckling in his discomfort. The narrator seems to be making a bold and merciless push for the truth, refusing to accept any consolation. Still – why so uncompromising? The curt response hints that there’s something the narrator’s hiding: vulnerability. It’s a human weakness that he’s shunted entirely to the character, but Belacqua’s yearning is also the narrator’s. The fiction reveals something about the morose storyteller that he can’t quite admit to himself, and by doing so it eludes the narrator’s grasp. It’s a story that the older Beckett simply could not have written.
Most of those who are familiar with Beckett know him through his play Waiting for Godot, and further reading or theater-going probably took them to plays like Endgame (1957) and Krapp’s Last Tape (1959). He’s an author who stands very close to the heart of the 20th century Western canon, but most of his work, and especially his prose, tends to go unread. The work has its own inherent difficulty and obscurity, but it doesn’t help that it now exists amidst a glut of postmodern criticism – both good and bad, or that a reader often encounters the work mediated through the unrestrained praise of the cult. Consider Pinter’s “I’ll buy his goods, hook, line and sinker, because he leaves no stone unturned and no maggot lonely. He brings forth a body of beauty.” The accuracy of the statement is not what’s in question, but the fact that it’s delivered from a vantage point that it would take the uninitiated reader quite some time to reach. The average reader approaching Beckett can hardly be blamed if his or her expectations have been set artificially high or if in the first fifty or sixty pages of reading he or she sees little to no sign of this acquiring-of-elevation-in-the-destitution-of-man.
Beckett’s work is full of paradox, and a keen reader will quickly realize that his popularity is not without contradictions. It’s paradoxical that his work is so focused on insignificance, and yet is surrounded by those who are determined to proclaim its importance. Beckett was always puzzled by his success, and believed it was based on a misunderstanding. In many ways, his work resists canonization and it resists popularity. A writer who presents the human condition as grounded fundamentally in pain, suffering and uncertainty cannot be heralded with trumpets. Praise can quickly reach such a pitch that it seems the only point is to drown out and ignore the voice of the praised work. Where the gushing acclaim about Beckett begins, the man and his work end.
Of course, not everyone is lining up to prostrate themselves at the Beckett shrine. Beckett is an author capable of inducing genuine hostility in his readers, and those who develop an aversion to his work often read him just as closely and thoughtfully as those who profess enormous admiration. The most pronounced complaint brought against him is that he’s nothing but a dark and depressed man determined to hoist his misanthropic vision onto the world at large. The impression creeps in at the end of “Dante and the Lobster” through the voice of the narrator. It’s a voice that becomes much more developed, albeit refined, in his later work.
The fact that Beckett read Schopenhauer would seem to support the complaint. Schopenhauer was a philosopher writing in the 19th century who believed that the driving force in the world is the will. In his major work, The World as Will and Representation (1819), he suggests that we are all products of one vast will, and that our separateness is only an illusion. The rather enormous catch is that Schopenhauer’s will is wicked and is the source of endless suffering. Though our lives are destined to be full of pain and though death will win in the end, he suggests that most of us will still pursue our futile ends “as we blow out a soap-bubble as long and as large as possible, although we know perfectly well that it will burst.”
The only way out of the situation is to break down one’s will in any way possible, to practice poverty, chastity, fasting and self-torture. The view is not very different from that of ascetic monks, but whereas they are seeking some sort of communion with God, in Schopenhauer the end is wholly negative. He says, “We freely acknowledge that what remains after the entire abolition of will is for all those who are still full of will certainly nothing; but, conversely, to those in which the will has turned and denied itself, this our world, which is so real – with all its suns and milky ways – is nothing.” It’s worth noting that Schopenhauer himself never saw a need to put his world-view into practice, and lived a rather comfortable life. In his philosophy, a compelling reason not to commit suicide also falls by the wayside.
Schopenhauer’s ideas surface in Beckett in myriad ways. In his trilogy, the move from traditional narration to the troubled voice of The Unnamable calls into question just how individual the narrator is. The stripping down of form is analogous to Schopenhauer’s call to break down one’s will. In Beckett’s first novel, Murphy (1938), the title character attempts to induce a sort of nirvana-like state by tying himself into his rocking chair. Throughout Beckett’s texts, there is also frequent reference to birth as little more than a death-sentence. Thus Hamm yells “Accursed progenitor” at his father, Nagg, in Endgame and Molloy, in a fit of frustration, refers to his mother as a “uniparous whore.” What is most illuminating in a comparison of Beckett and Schopenhauer, however, is where their ideas diverge.
The most obvious distinction between Beckett and Schopenhauer is that the latter was a philosopher and the former was not. Though Beckett was a contemporary of Albert Camus and Jean-Paul Sartre, he never aligned himself with the existentialist camp or wrote philosophy of any kind. The closest he came was in his early essay on Proust, titled simply Proust (1931). Ostensibly, its subject is the author’s A Remembrance of Things Past (1927), but the influence of Schopenhauer runs pretty much all through the essay, noticeably when Beckett suggests that original sin is “the sin of having been born.” The essay was one of the first to pick out the strain of Schopenhauer running through Proust, but Beckett is also using Proust as a template to work out his own artistic concerns. Like “Dante and the Lobster,” it’s the work of a young man attempting to veil his weaknesses and his doubts, a young man who feels compelled to make a positive assertion.
What the younger Beckett tried to hide, the older Beckett embraced. It’s the admission of his own vulnerability that would later make a story like “Dante and the Lobster” impossible. The character who is a patsy for the narrator’s weakness would get absorbed to an ever greater extent by the narrator himself. The move is cathartic in some ways, but if the reader thinks that increased self-awareness will bring the narrator peace, he’s gravely mistaken. In Beckett’s prose, nothing will ever be quite so simple as “Dante and the Lobster” again.
Bertrand Russell, commenting on Schopenhauer, wisely notes that “belief in either pessimism or optimism is a matter of temperament, not of reason.” One suspects that Beckett’s temperament was close to that of Schopenhauer’s philosophy, but any world view to be extrapolated from his works is, if anything, a constant struggle against pessimism. What he staked himself on as a writer was complete uncertainty. He was known to enjoy quoting St. Augustine’s shapely lines, “Do not despair, one of the thieves was saved. Do not presume, one of the thieves was damned.” Perhaps the most difficult and shocking thing about reading Beckett is realizing just how much we tend to presume.
Beckett’s insistence upon uncertainty is apparent in the most popular question about his work: what does Godot symbolize? The usual hypothesis is that Godot is God, and that the play is about how God has abandoned man. In Anthony Cronin’s biography, The Last Modernist (1997), he catalogues a few other possibilities. One is that the name comes from a French racing cyclist in the fifties known as ‘Godeau.’ Another is that it comes from the French slang for boot, ‘godillot.’ Another is that it came from an encounter Beckett had with a prostitute on the corner of rue Godot le Mauroy in Paris. When he turned her down, she asked him sarcastically if was Waiting for Godot. Others have noted that it echoes Nietzsche’s German lines, “Gott ist tod” (God is dead). The fact that in French the emphasis is on the second syllable rather than the first has even played a factor in the argument. The reason that Godot doesn’t symbolize God is that it could just as easily symbolize the absence of God. It’s the state of not knowing, the “waiting,” that is the heart of the play.
Waiting for Godot is, in its way, a brilliant and simple demonstration of man’s state of uncertainty. In Beckett’s prose, “not knowing” was to take on a much different and more complicated character. Beckett’s reputation as a novelist rests chiefly on the basis of his trilogy: Molloy, Malone Dies, and The Unnamable. All three were composed in the space of only about four years, from 1946 to 1950 – far and away Beckett’s greatest burst of productivity. It was while working on The Unnamable that he wrote Waiting for Godot as a break from the monotonous task of writing and rewriting the novels. Each text was written first in French, the author’s second language. A few years later when Beckett saw what a difficult time the translator of Molloy was having re-creating the text in English, he took up the task of translating himself – something he would do for almost all his later work. He had to ensure that the text came into English very much alive rather than as a stale direct translation from the French.
The trilogy proceeds by disintegration. Molloy still has something of a plot to it. First, there is Molloy’s failed search for his mother, and then Jacques Moran’s failed search for Molloy. Malone Dies is the monologue of Malone as he sits alone in bed waiting for death. He decides to make up stories to pass the time, and though they quickly develop into beautiful and captivating narratives, he can’t help but interrupt himself with retorts like “what tedium” or “this is awful.” He states his dilemma quite clearly, saying:
If this continues it is myself I shall lose and the thousand ways that lead there. And I shall resemble the wretches famed in fable, crushed beneath the weight of their wish come true. And I even feel a strange desire come over me, the desire to know what I am doing, and why. So I near the goal I set myself in my young days and which prevented me from living. And on the threshold of being no more I succeed in being another. Very pretty.
Malone, like Beckett, is searching for answers to the most fundamental questions, the what and the why. His narrative of the young Saposcat suggests a younger version of himself in “a thousand ways,” but it is a disgust with the artificial that leads him to repeatedly abandon it. It would make no difference if he called the young boy “Malone” because he realizes that memory is far too imperfect to produce the narratives that are demanded of it, and so even the story of his past would be subject to craft. What he’s concerned with is his present situation, and there’s a push to find something that is pure and sacred, something that will satisfy his wish to “know.”
The result is a constant stripping down of all that strikes the narrator as false. In the close of Malone Dies, the narrator’s desire to dismantle his fictions is projected into one of his characters as a terrifying murderous impulse. The momentum at the end of the novel carries the reader into the world of The Unnamable. The text begins, “Where now? Who now? When now? Unquestioning. I, say I. Unbelieving. Questions, hypotheses, call them that. Keep going, going on, call that going, call that on.” It’s a – perhaps the – novel of doubt, one that starts with Descartes skeptical stripping down of everything, but doesn’t have such an easy time building up something from nothing. The book is determined to kick down every fictional prop, to rid itself of every logical means it has of sustaining itself, and yet to persist.
Referring to the narrator of the text is questionable because he doesn’t always go so far as to ascribe himself a body. He admits that he was the one who created the characters of Molloy and Malone, and though he does his best to keep himself from telling “fairy tales,” there are still a few fictions in the text. There’s the story of Mahood, who returns home one day on crutches of uneven length so that he’s left revolving about his house while his family moves from window to window to watch his approach. By the time he reaches the home, they’re all dead. Later, Mahood manifests himself as a torso kept outside a restaurant in a jar, set out as an advertisement. Most of the novel, however, is best conceived simply as a voice coming out of the dark.
To say the least, it’s a frightening and unsettling read. At times, the main thing pulling the reader through the text is simply the beauty of the prose; there’s not a line in the book that doesn’t seem to be invested with urgency and longing. Here’s a sample:
But it’s not I, it’s not I, where am I, what am I doing, all this time, as if that mattered, but there it is, that takes the heart out of you, your heart isn’t in it any more, your heart that was, among the brambles, cradled by the shadows, you try the sea, you try the town, you look for yourself in the mountains and the plains, it’s only natural, you want yourself, you want yourself in your own little corner, it’s not love, not curiosity, it’s because you’re tired, you want to stop, travel no more, seek no more, lie no more, speak no more, close your eyes…
The lines come from a paragraph that’s about a hundred pages long. Beauty not-withstanding, most readers will eventually have to ask themselves: what’s the point?
The voice of the text is paralyzed by his doubt and his vulnerability. In Waiting for Godot, Vladimir and Estragon seem somehow stoic, if not oblivious, with regard to their current situation. The tension is in the form of the play rather than in the characters themselves. In the novels, the voice is one of a narrator who is hyper-conscious of his situation and his suffering. Here, the tension is not only in the form, but behind the form. It comes from the narrator as the reader might imagine him.
The Unnamable’s search for something sacred, for the what and the why, seems in a sense to have become a search for self, a way to verify his own existence. Earlier I mentioned Descartes. One shouldn’t over-estimate his presence in the text, which struggles with quite a few of the major problems in Western philosophy. Still, Descartes is useful because everyone knows his proof of his own existence: “Cogito ergo sum” (I think, therefore I am). Needless to say, it would not be enough to satisfy The Unnamable. What the philosopher has observed is that there’s thinking going on. What, one might ask, is there to assure Descartes that he is the one doing the thinking? On this point, The Unnamable says, “I don’t say anything, I don’t know anything, these voices are not mine, nor these thoughts, but the voices and thoughts of the devils who beset me.” Is it any less possible that someone else could be injecting the thoughts into Descartes’ head, that it only seems as if the thoughts are his own?
For that matter, what makes Descartes so confident that the pronoun “I” justifies his identity? Recall some of the first words of the text: “I, say I. Unbelieving.” In a fascinating essay called “Subjectivity in Language” (1971), linguist Emile Benveniste points out that the pronoun “I” is a product of discourse, discourse being spoken and not written language. As he says, “It is in the instance of discourse in which I designates the speaker that the speaker proclaims himself as the ‘subject.’ And so it is literally true that the basis of subjectivity is in the exercise of language.” The pronoun “I” is what is called a deictic pronoun. It is derived from discourse and is used to bring attention to the existence of a particular thing in space in relation to the person speaking. It’s the same type of word as “here” or “there” except that it’s meant to refer to the body of the speaking individual. The original function of the pronoun, the link to the body, became obscured when it was taken up in the written text. After all, one can be reading the words of an author long since dead – in that case what does the pronoun refer to? With time, “I” came to stand in for one’s identity, for the core of the onion, for the way that each of us imagines the true self that controls his mind. What The Unnamable seems to find is that the referent of the pronoun, the “true self,” is ever elusive and indeterminable.
It would be a lie to say that the reader who finds such philosophical speculation not far removed from navel-gazing would be as excited by The Unnamable as one who finds it enthralling. Yet the text reveals an incredible falsity about philosophy. David Hume once said that “the errors in religion are dangerous; those in philosophy only ridiculous.” The implication seems to be that people are motivated by their religion in a way that they are not by philosophy, that they go to religion with a zealous desire to find a meaning to life whereas they go to philosophy with a cold and detached intellectual attitude. The Unnamable is not speculating. He attacks such philosophical problems with religious fervor. The form of the text is such that even if one were to read it in a foreign language that they did not speak, they would still be able to sense the spiritual craving running from line to line.
The Unnamable was published in 1953, shortly after the close of the Second World War. Beckett’s role in events was by no means unique. He was living in Paris at the start of the war, and retreated to a small village in the south of France called Roussillon. He played a minor role in the French Resistance for which he was awarded the Croix de Guerre, though he dismissed his actions as “boy scout stuff.” A number of his close friends ended up in the German concentration camps, and some of them died there. As the war drew to a close, Beckett was one of millions trying to fathom what had happened. They were faced with suffering that was simply too large to fit into the reasoned dialectic of History. Optimism suddenly came to seem like blasphemy and an affront to the war’s victims. There were no words for consolation.
It is difficult to imagine a time when pessimism and despair would be a greater temptation. Beckett’s misanthropic temperament had been violently cast onto the world without his having written a word. There were millions who could not reconcile their old religious and philosophical ideas with what had happened. In more fortunate times, uncertainty had seemed simply a negative alternative to optimism. It now became the guardian of hope. Beckett never wrote about the war (except for one very brief essay), and he never tried to explain the suffering that would become omnipresent in his work. Instead, he imagined worlds peopled by those who are given no reason to hope and yet hope, worlds peopled by those given no reason to persevere and yet persevere. It’s a theme which doesn’t always make for a cheerful night at the theater, but one that all of us have felt in our darkest, and perhaps our most truthful, moments. The Unnamable’s final lines: “I don’t know, I’ll never know, in the silence you don’t know, you must go on, I can’t go on, I’ll go on.”
If all of this seems dreadfully heavy, it helps that Beckett had a razor-sharp sense of humor. It seems only fitting that one dedicated to uncertainty couldn’t take himself seriously all the time. For all the exegesis surrounding Beckett’s work, it’s something which usually goes completely unmentioned. It seems either that scholars have a poor sense of humor or in their wisdom they’ve realized that nothing kills a joke like trying to explain why it’s funny. Still, an attempt could be worthwhile because Beckett’s comedy is one of the most fascinating aspects of his work.
At times, it is straight-forward physical comedy in the vein of Laurel and Hardy, Charlie Chaplin and Buster Keaton. In Waiting for Godot, there is Vladimir and Estragon excitedly swapping hats, and Estragon’s trousers falling to the ground without his realizing it. In Krapp’s Last Tape, there is Krapp with a banana lodged in his mouth staring blankly into space, or reveling in the sensation of pronouncing the word ‘Spool.’ Yet the humor that is most difficult to understand is that which seems to be based on suffering itself. As Nell says from her trash bin in Endgame, “Nothing is funnier than unhappiness… Yes, yes, it’s the most comical thing in the world.”
Beckett’s humor often seems to contain the very means to undermine it. It should have the trajectory of a bottle rocket, going up with the laugh and coming back down with the realization of the suffering on which it is based, but it just doesn’t. The humor seems to come from a gradual building up of tension that is calling for release. Lives pervaded by so much pain must eventually find a counter-balance in some sort of pleasure. With unhappiness, there’s a necessity behind the laughter that isn’t there in other types of humor. Yet the necessity would seem to suggest that these are desperate laughs, which most of Beckett’s are not. One can’t be too general about the humor because each laugh is unique, but they are all similar in that they are not a distraction from the current situation. They are a reminder of it.
As an example, I’ll take Nagg’s joke in Endgame. Nagg is Nell’s husband, confined to a trash bin beside her, just far enough away that they are not able to kiss. They seem to have been put there by their unappreciative son Hamm, the central character in the play. Nagg tells the story of an Englishman who has a tailor make him a pair of trousers for the New Year. After his first visit, he comes back four days later to find that the tailor made a “mess of the seat.” He then comes back a week later to find that he’s made “a hash of the crutch.” The man is happy for the tailor to fix them because he knows that “a snug crutch is always a teaser.” He returns ten days later to find that the tailor’s made a “balls of the fly.” Again, he concedes that “a smart fly is a stiff proposition.” The tailor proceeds to “ballockses the buttonholes,” and finally the man’s patience breaks. He says, “God damn you to hell, Sir, no, it’s indecent, there are limits! In six days, do you hear me, six days, God made the world. Yes Sir, no less Sir, the WORLD! And you are not bloody well capable of making a pair of trousers in three months!” The tailor calmly replies, “But my dear Sir, my dear Sir, look – at the world – and look – at my TROUSERS!”
In many ways, it’s a traditional joke. With each return of the Englishman, the audience’s expectation grows, especially once it has recognized the pattern. In the tailor’s punch line, there is a release of tension, by this time the audience is expecting something funny. Yet looking at the stage one sees that the joke is told by a miserable old man stuck in a garbage can, abused by his son, unable to kiss his wife. When one examines the punch line of the joke, the underlying message seems to be that the world is miserable. There is something incongruous about the laughter in a situation that, by all accounts, calls for despair. Why do we laugh? Aren’t we debasing the character by doing so? What if someone really were suffering like this?
These questions might seem to channel Beckett into the theater of the absurd, and the comparison would be fitting despite the fact that the absurdist label was one that Beckett particularly despised. Beckett saw ‘absurdism’ as just another value judgment about man’s existential condition, one based on groundless speculation. Labeling the humor as ‘absurdist’ can also lead to a dismissive analysis of the “but it’s funny” variety. It may be trite, but it’s still often forgotten just how many true things are said in jest.
Answers to the questions posed by Beckett’s humor can lead in two directions. One is how humor affects the audience’s ability to empathize with the character. The other is what laughter does for the suffering individual.
It’s worth considering that most people attending a Beckett play do not go to it in a mood of despair. When they sit in the audience and observe characters in distress, their mood must be brought down to that person’s level. If one doesn’t truly feel the way that the character does than there can be a hint of condescension in their pity. If the audience member does feel that the play has lowered their mood, then there can be a touch of resentment for the despairing characters that brought them down.
What Beckett’s humor does is give the audience a different point of entry to the character’s emotions – a point that is likely much closer to their own as they sit in the theater. When they laugh, they find themselves empathically involved in the character’s situation without their even having made an effort. With a little reflection, they would realize that the joy of the laugh is entwined with the character’s despair. They’ve become implicated in the character’s situation without their even having been aware of it. As for the characters themselves, if they were to reflect on their laughter, they are not inclined to trace its links to the despair with which they are already all too familiar. Instead, they observe the incongruity and they revel in it. They observe themselves not giving into despair when they have every logical reason to do so, and it is re-assuring. The laugh perpetuates itself. The bottle rocket does not come down.
It’s the raw elements of Beckett – the uncertainty, the suffering, and the humor – that can occasionally get lost as people grapple with understanding his work. Due to his reputation, many approaching Beckett feel pressure to like what is before them and to appreciate it. Such pressure is ill-founded. Like any ‘great’ work of art, Beckett only has so much to offer at a glance. Leonardo da Vinci’s “A work of art is never finished, only abandoned” is particularly fitting for the serious Beckett reader. If one initially feels repelled when they encounter Beckett, the feeling is completely natural. His work is not didactic, but the cult around it can make it seem that way. The work itself doesn’t insist upon its own importance, but if one really wants to become involved in it than it presents a profound challenge. As Salman Rushdie points out in an essay on Beckett, the terms are clear: “Surrender.”
When people are trying to make sense of Beckett’s art, they often turn to the text the “Three Dialogues” (1947). It’s a fictionalized dialectic on the subject of modern painting. Beckett put it together based on conversations with friend and fellow art enthusiast Georges Duthuit, casting himself as Plato and Duthuit as Glaucon. Like in Proust, painting is only the ostensible subject – Beckett is really trying to work out his own ideas about his writing. Beckett speaks of a “new art” that will break with that of the old, which is content to survey the world with “the eyes of building contractors” and “never stirred from the field of the possible.” When Duthuit asks him what it will be based on, he puts forward the often-quoted manifesto-like lines, “The expression that there is nothing to express, nothing with which to express, no power to express, no desire to express, together with the obligation to express.” The lines contain the same merciless push for truth as the final words of the narrator in “Dante and the Lobster,” all the confidence and gusto but none of the vulnerability.
Though never quoted, the dialogue continues. Duthuit retorts, “But that is a violently extreme and personal point of view.”
And Beckett’s reply: “—”
Download “About Beckett” as a PDF.
November 30, 2007
West Mexico Ceramics
Colima, Jalisco, Nayarit
We are unafraid here, and within
The neat cup of our arms is where
We hold everything in place
You think we do not speak because
Our faces have been baked into
Expressions of open-mouthed surprise
But we do not need to speak because
Our mouths are flutes, and the
Hollow sound of our voice needs no words
We have no eyes because
The twelve points of the sun act as our guide and
The nine turrets of the moon hang heavy around our neck
We have no feet because
There is no need to run
The earth is our strength
We do not need to stand because
Our bodies are baked from earth
We are complete in and of ourselves
We have no need for legs because
We have no need to flee
Though time grinds scars into our bodies and
Wears the pigment from our skin
We wear no clothing because
The fierce points of our nipples are too proud to hide
And the heavy thrust of our bellies
And the neat sheaves of our penises
Our backs are arched but not in defiance
They are arched because this is how
We hold the earth in place
— Mia Sakai
November 30, 2007
Obelisk at Manzanar, April 28, 2007
I watch you in the dust and you are
issei, Nisei, sansei
in white stone and kanji I cannot read
the thousand tsurus drape around your ropes
refracting the sunlight you squinted away from
and the Shinto Buddhist Christian prayers
give me homeland
and I know you are my people
buried underneath the signs labeled “baseball field”
and “Catholic Church” I see you
running, laughing, trying to live
while the guns point inward
and I know you are my people
captured in Chiura Obata paintings
and Dorothea Lange black and whites
you are my people, the checker-dressed girls
pledging allegiance in San Francisco
the old man whose soul looks skeletal his
grandson slung over his shoulder
I know that you are my people
as I clutch the rusted barbed wire
now tamed by National Park Service
exhibitionism—I hear you
in the subtle accents and patient cadence
of gray permed Nisei ladies speaking
of dead husbands and trips to Okinawa,
of 442 veterans covered in buttons,
sport coats, “Go For Broke” patches forgotten
by yonsei and I know you are my people
peppered in mochi and kirin to soak the past in
I hear you in the swish-swash of Shinto streamers
in the Pledge of Allegiance that tastes
salty with contradiction,
in the dust kicked by tires
following the legacies of trucks in camouflage colors
and I wonder where the shots were fired
where the rioters fell like DeWitt’s unholy syllables
and the gentleman soldiers fly through French tree trunks
with rifles and memories
scrambling, hugging death to their chests
as they fight for the forgiveness
for even existing
I hear you in the silence of forty years
the shame and the apple pies of denial
the saliva on the ground of No No Boys
splattering on the sidewalk like dreams deferred
and I know you are my people
almost gone, diluted in apathy,
and you stand tall and white and illegible to my
American eyesight
like the Sierra Nevadas in the background
In this arid air I hope we have not
deserted each other,
as I feel the shape of the scar
but do not know how to respond to it
My grandpa was MIS from Hawaii,
plantation boy, avoided internment
My grandma was Kibei, in Japan
making the bullets that pierced Yankees
and yet I see my reflection
in the tears over broken China,
homes resold,
Japs Go Home signs
and white women pointing with hatred
in their forefingers like they see
the devil in acute angles and eye folds
I imagine my Chinese American friend
wearing an “I am a Loyal Chinese” button
and I know you are my people
because I would’ve worn an ID tag instead
and part of me screams at you
see—
this is what it is like,
after Southern plantations and whips
and smallpox and reservations
and Emmit Tills and Geronimos
what else could you expect?
And the tragedy of our pain
is that
even we were imprisoned
even we, as if
maybe the others deserved it more
America did not betray us
we betrayed ourselves
America did not betray us
we betrayed ourselves
this is but one chapter in the
red white and blue bullet
that consecrated our borders
the sandstorms of Manzanar blew
gunpowder whose age we only now learn
and I know you are my people
lost in the shame of being
less than our dreams
lost in the shame of a betrayal
from the greatest of all betrayers
You are my people.
You are my people.
You are my people.
And for the first time in years,
I hear myself praying.
I choose to whisper it
into your illegible lines
and wonder if you can hear it.
— Takeo Rivera
November 30, 2007
Naming Him
by Jessamyn Edra
Evelyn grips the cold curves of the sink. She closes her eyes, lets the image of malformed Irish Spring soap and unscrubbed tub fade to black.
She remembers back when she was a kid, her mother promoted afternoon naps by turning them into a competition. Evelyn dutifully shut her eyes alongside her brother and her two favorite cousins, knowing that whoever woke up last got to walk to 7-Eleven and pick out a piece of candy after church. She always faked it—listening hard for the rustling of clothing, the shifts in breathing, and waiting just a little longer before lifting her own lids and yawning. She entered second grade with several cavities.
Evelyn opens her eyes and looks down at the rust-ringed drain. As she breathes slowly, in and out, she feels the full weight of her head.
“Hey, babe?” Edward says with a light knock on the door. For the past three months, until now, she has only heard his voice over the phone, syllables distorted by static. Now in the silence of the small studio apartment, his words are clear, even through the bathroom door. “You okay in there?” he asks. She hears the steady note of concern in his voice, but also his barely-muted anticipation.
She unclenches her hands. She puts the toilet seat cover down and sits with her knees tucked into her chest. “Yeah.” Then, with an effort at normalcy, she says huskily, “I’ll be right out, darling.” But somewhere along that last word, her voice hiccups into something from an old Western film, and her performance becomes parody. She coughs.
There is a pause. For a moment, she fears that he has noticed her incompetence, her lack of experience with this sort of thing. “Looking forward to it,” Edward says.
Evelyn listens to him walk quietly away from the bathroom, then stands up and lets the pink chemise, trimmed with black lace, resettle over her thighs. As the cool silk moves over her skin, she feels almost desirable. Hand outstretched, she takes three small steps to the door. But at the last moment she stops at the sink again, and this time, when she grips its edges, she looks up into the mirror. Her sleek hair has frizzed up in the humid, Hawaiian air and, despite her best efforts, her eye liner is unevenly applied, giving her left eye a slightly sinister look. She dabs at it with a piece of toilet paper and tries to smile. She lifts the corners of her mouth, but as she parts her freshly-glossed lips to show some teeth, the smile falls.
Earlier that day, her mother drove her to San Francisco International airport, telling her that Grandma bought herself a mink coat at the mall yesterday, that Auntie Luz waxed off too much of her eyebrows, that Bill did not like taking baths because it irritated his eczema.
Smiling, Evelyn half-listened to the latest gossip, her mind inevitably drifting back to Edward. She had opted out of her cotillion this year, the traditional Filipino debutante ball that announced eighteen with dresses fitted too tight and stiff waltzes with vaguely reptilian cousins. Instead, she convinced her parents to send her to Hawaii to visit Edward during Thanksgiving break. It was cheaper, she reasoned, and with the bills from her first quarter at college filling the file cabinet, they agreed.
Evelyn first noticed Edward more than a year ago when they were lining the dirt track for the meet against Washington High. The job normally needed one person, but she couldn’t chalk the straightaway without someone else’s eye. She tended to veer subtly to the right if left unsupervised. So he walked alongside her, his hands shoved in black basketball shorts that were too long for him. Sometimes he jogged ahead on the grass to check out the progress, but mostly he stayed with her. They finished lining the track and when she turned to look at him, she noticed the smudge of chalk on his jaw. It was smooth back then; the stubble she so adored would come later. She told him he had some chalk on his face. He pulled his hand from the deep pockets of his shorts and quickly brushed along his jaw-line. She hoped he would miss a spot, but he didn’t. She knew because she spent the rest of the afternoon sneaking glances.
“Are you bringing Edward anything from his dad?” her mother asked.
“No,” Evelyn said. She put her fingers to the car window and watched suburbia stream past. “Mr. Flores just sent him a care package, actually.” This was a lie. Or maybe it was the truth, but she doubted it. Evelyn’s mother had wanted her to see Mr. Flores, let him know that she was going to visit Edward, but she couldn’t bring herself to do it. She didn’t like him. Maybe it was the way he said, “Would you just call me James already?” every time she greeted him, or the cigarette smoke that announced his arrival. It could be the gleaming whiteness of his teeth that unnerved her, or the rigid part of his hair. But it was probably what he had said after Edward placed sixth in the two-mile against Kennedy. If Edward had run a good race, Mr. Flores would jog over to the track, holding a bottle of water—not cold, ’cause cold’s not good for you right after a race, but room temperature water—and a stopwatch to show Edward the new time to beat. Kennedy High was not a good meet for either Edward or Evelyn, and when Mr. Flores came jogging over as they changed out of their racing flats, Evelyn saw Edward grab a fistful of grass in preparation. “All those nights with Evelyn are draining you, son,” he pronounced and winked at both of them. Edward tore the grass from the earth and looked at her. He whispered apology as his father sauntered off.
Granted she and Edward did spend many nights kissing, and touching, and licking, and caressing. One night, they parked at Coyote Hills and fumbled about in the backseat of his Honda Accord. He pushed away fabric and bit down on her shoulder, and she prayed that he wouldn’t actually take off her shirt because she was wearing one of her rattier bras. The headlights of a passing car had been her saving grace, the sudden illumination of the car’s gray interior an apt reminder of where they were and what they were doing. Still—her smell was everywhere, and as soon as she got home, she washed her panties in the sink so her mother wouldn’t stumble upon them in the laundry.
Evelyn was almost ashamed by just how much she loved feeling his skin under her fingertips, loved the taut muscles of a long-distance runner just below the surface, loved even the smell of his sweat after a quick six miles. Even better than his skin under her fingertips was his skin under her lips. He tasted good, like eating graham crackers and then waking up from a long, afternoon nap, with the mild honey-sweetness still in her mouth. “Does that make sense?” she asked when she told him. “No,” he said, and kissed her. Still, they had not done anything that warranted Edward’s father winking in such a way. Mr. Flores never would have believed it, though. Edward said that since his mother died, his father only got worse.
“Oh, so you’re really not bringing Edward anything?” Her mother was displeased; her mouth puckered in thought about the correct social protocols. Evelyn’s mother was still beautiful, even with the thinning hair she washed with a special shampoo; something about the brown freckles at the corners of her eyes kept her girlish. Though she complained about how much weight she had gained here in America, she had aged softly, retaining her high cheekbones and the easy class that Evelyn never inherited.
“I am bringing myself,” Evelyn replied, twisting her long string of plastic pearls. “That should be more than enough.”
“No, not that.” Her mother laughed. “Anything but that. It’s still early.”
Evelyn laughed, too—and not the nervous, guilt-tinged laugh she may have uttered at any other time—but a real laugh; her mother had made a joke that acknowledged sex and, by extension, her adulthood. Evelyn knew her mother, who attended mass at St. Anne’s Catholic Church every Sunday, would never grant an official seal of approval on her decision to finally have sex with Edward. But understanding, on a woman-to-woman level, wasn’t impossible. The proof was in her name.
Her mother had named her Evelyn after a Filipino woman who sold kalamansi in front of the house her mother had grown up in. Every day, her namesake would carry in her basket not only hundreds of these small, round lime fruits, but also the letters of young lovers. In Tagalog, the only language which her mother could use to describe these things, she recounted the sharp, tangy smell of the letter that had been wrinkled by the weight of the kalamansi and the pleasure of smoothing out the thin paper on the floor of her room, watching the black letters appear under her hands. Her mother was not allowed to date until she was in college and when it was discovered that she had been sneaking letters to a fisherman’s son in the barrio, her father forced her to drop a semester of classes. “You only have time to do one thing: study or date,” he pronounced. The next semester, her mother studied hard, remembering how she had knelt with bare knees on uncooked rice. She held pails of water, too, as her parents chastised her. Because of this, her mother let Evelyn date as soon as she was in high school. Because of this, her mother named her Evelyn, after a woman who understood young love.
Edward had written Evelyn letters, too—his cramped handwriting filling page after page of lined notebook paper with lurid remembrances of short skirts and sticky afternoons. Her name all but disappeared under the flood of babes, darlings, and sweethearts. Other, sturdier names popped up like driftwood: Anne from work and Shelly from the cross-country team. Edward and Evelyn’s conversations were either do-you-remember’s exchanged or promises for the future—they didn’t have a present together.
Evelyn consulted friends. She read Advice for the Geographically Challenged along with articles in Cosmo. She researched and responded accordingly. She sent him perfumed pages of poetry: Amichai’s “Posthumous Fragments,” Neruda’s “Letter on the Road,” her own enjambed lines. She went to her first frat party, felt large hands grip her hips, and shed small tears. She sent Edward the racy photos and the care packages with his favorite candy, Mike and Ike’s. She glared at couples holding hands and ran for miles, trying to purge herself of this immense tension, this sleeplessness that made her mistake one head of hair for another, this affliction that made her grip armrests at movie theaters. She bought a scruffy loofah and inhaled chocolate. And one night, after she filled yet another awkward silence with trite advice when he was trying to decide whether or not to withdraw from organic chemistry, she promised him. A promise that their first night back together would be a night he would not soon forget. That got him talking, and the buttery flow of his low tones over the line loosened something heavy threaded through her.
When they got to the airport, her mother gave her a soft smile and said, “Be safe and have a good time.” Evelyn spent most of the five-hour flight looking out the window and twisting her pearls. She tried to fall asleep but couldn’t keep her eyes closed for more than a few minutes. Instead, she opened and closed the paperback she brought until the sky drained of daylight. It was after midnight when she saw the lights. When a plane landed in California, the world came to view in square grids of city or farmland, but the lights outside her window were an organic net of golden points, more web than grid. The red lights on the wing flashed as the plane began its descent into Honolulu, and Evelyn realized all the darkness rushing below her was water. An island, she remembered, like the Philippines. Evelyn walked to baggage claim, her steps shaky in her new high-heeled shoes. She almost didn’t recognize Edward when he came toward her, walking in his slow and deliberate way, sensuous but precise movements through the crowd. It always surprised people how quickly those tawny thighs moved on the track. He was holding a lei of yellow flowers. He was leaner than she remembered, more tanned, too. The good runners look hungry, their coach had said. He was wearing the striped polo she liked. He placed the lei around her neck and smiled crookedly, flashing his sharp canine teeth.
“I just lei’d you.” He winked.
She pushed him, but he grabbed her hands and pulled her in for a kiss and the kiss was familiar, his fingertips weaving into her hair like they always did.
“I’m just kidding,” he whispered in her ear. Edward planted a small kiss on her earlobe—thick earlobes were a sign of great intelligence, he once told her—and drew back to look at her face. She wondered if he noticed that she had pierced her ears. “I’m glad you’re here,” he said and picked up her bags.
The moist air enveloped her as soon as they stepped out of the airport. She felt hazy, her edges blurring like an object overexposed in a photo. “Your hair makes you look surprised,” she said.
He raised his eyebrows and chuckled. “Yeah, it’s due for a cut.” He ran his hand through his coarse hair and glanced at her. “So…how was your flight, kiddo?”
“It was okay. How was your drive?”
He shrugged and adjusted the backpack slung over his shoulder. “Eh, it was all right, a little long for me.” He smiled and she had a ridiculous urge to count his teeth.
Instead she nodded, and felt petal and pearl shift against her neck. Edward should hand her back one of her bags. Her arms dangled uselessly at her sides. “How are things with Rich?”
“Good, good,” he said. He re-adjusted the bags again and put his hand on the small of her back, guiding her in the direction of his car. His palm felt enormous and warm on the eyelet fabric of her dress. “He actually decided to go back to Michigan for the break.”
“Oh.” She looked downward, focusing on the heel-toe motion of walking in her heels. She thought suddenly of her mother who had worked as a bank teller in college; it paid well back then and was respectable for a young lady. She told Evelyn that she would walk close to a mile to work from campus in the black heels required for her uniform. On her way, she always passed by the crumbling Spanish-style mansion of a blind old man. The gentleman’s ancestors were well-established in Quezon City, but his children were in America, all gorgeous mestizos who sent home LBC boxes crammed full of good coffee and tins of corned beef. He always called out the window when he heard her pass: “Hoy, kumusta ka na, Lita?” He swore that he knew her by the sound of her heels on the pavement, but she never believed him until one day she passed him on the street. Their shoulders brushed—puffed sleeve of white cotton and starched corner of gray tweed—and he was silent. Ha, she thought, clacking away with a smile. Three strides later he called out, “Marry me, Lita!” She laughed and hopped onto the jeepney, her dress stuck to her back in the heat. It was only later that she learned he was in earnest. He had even gone to see her parents. She had stared down at his hands, sun-withered and crossed with veins, and when he reached to take her hand into his own, she refused as politely as she could, citing her studies.
“Yeah, so we have the place to ourselves,” Edward was saying. He looked at Evelyn and she returned her gaze to her shoes. “No coercion, I swear. His mom wanted to take him skiing, or snowboarding, or something.”
“Oh,” she said and nodded again, thankful to be at the car.
He opened her door and held her hand as he drove. The windows were rolled down and that thick air wafted in, carrying with it the possibility of warm rain. With Edward’s hand massaging hers, she felt her muscles slowly relax, one by one. She once sent him a rock she found on one of her rambling walks across campus. She thought he would appreciate its smooth lines, the way it retained heat, the way she held it under her pillow when she needed to grip something at night. The miles passed in silence and much to her embarrassment, she managed to fall asleep this time.
“Hey, babe?” She awoke to Edward whispering in her ear. “We’re here.” She opened her eyes to find him looking at her. “I was going to take you to get some food or something, but I thought sleep might be the better option.” He bit his already chapped lip.
Still half-asleep, the words were out of her mouth before she could stop them: “I thought we weren’t going to be sleeping tonight,” she said. Immediately, she regretted the joke.
“Well, then,” he said. She was glad he didn’t wink.
Edward had some difficulty with the keys when they finally got to his apartment on the seventh floor. In between apologizing for the out-of-order elevator and telling her how much he had missed her, she remembered that she liked him a great deal. She put her hand over his and he grinned, toothy and boyish. They unlocked the door together. “You’re going to love the view,” he said as he flung the door open. He tossed her bags to the side and took her hand. Quickly, they crossed the small space of the apartment; kitchenette, two twin beds, a television, a fan. He brushed aside the threadbare curtains that lined one whole wall and they walked out onto the lanai. Her eyes took in the dark ocean continuously shaping the curves of the island, the banyan trees that grew both up and down, roots descending from the branches to steady the tree during flood times, but also the skyscrapers and road construction and traffic. So Honolulu was a city after all.
“What’s the place with no lights?” she said.
“Diamond Head Crater,” he said, wrapping his arms around her from behind. “Those high-rises around it are the U of H dorms.” He pressed his lips to her neck as she stared out. A plumeria tree worthy of worship spread its branches next to a streetlight and a tattoo place. There was a Mustang parked outside “Tropical Tattoos” and when Evelyn leaned forward, she could make out the figure of a man smoking on the hood of the car.
An ambulance rushed past on the street below them and before the siren could reach its fever pitch, she took his hand. “Let’s go back inside.”
“Okay,” he said, and scooped her into his arms. One of her shoes almost fell off.
“Hey, hey, hey,” she said. She batted at his forearms. He had never lifted her before; she told him short people didn’t like it. And they didn’t, especially on the seventh floor. “Put me down.” She tried to laugh.
“Why should I?” he said. He buried his face in the crook of her neck. With only his foot, Edward slid the screen door shut.
“So,” she said, tugging at her dress which had ridden up a couple of inches in the process, “I can go get ready.”
He stopped in the middle of the room and considered this. “Okay.” He put her down.
She took a couple deep breaths. “Where’s the bathroom?”
“It’s, uh,” he walked over and opened a door, “right over here.” He smiled down at her and tugged at his earlobe, a tic she had always found endearing. “I’ll just be out here, getting ready, too, okay?”
“Okay,” she said and shut the door.
Evelyn can imagine him now, sitting on the edge of the bed, tugging at his earlobe, wondering exactly when she will be ready. She walks out of the bathroom. The clear clacking of her heels on linoleum is instantly absorbed by the dingy carpet. The silence is disconcerting.
“Wow,” Edward says, the single, breathless syllable breaking into her thoughts. He is wearing the boxers she got him for Christmas last year, bright blue and covered with penguins wearing orange bow-ties.
Emboldened by these penguins, she strikes a pose, placing her hands on her hips and jutting her chest forward. She turns her head dramatically to the right, letting her long bangs fly over her eyes, and pouts her lips, another parody of sexy confidence.
“What do you think?” she says, careful not to look at him.
He walks up to her and slides a fallen strap back onto her shoulder. His fingers are warm, his touch much-missed.
“You look—” He chuckles the way he did on their first date, nervous but happy. “Too good for any of the clichés I had planned to say,” he concludes.
“Spare me…” she begins, still half in character. But when she turns her head to look at him, she cannot finish her line. He brushes the hair from her face with those warm fingers. It’s been so long.
“Thank you,” she says. She looks down, embarrassed by the rush of warmth in her body. It is then that she notices Edward’s erection poking through his boxers. Her head snaps back up just as he leans in to kiss her forehead.
“Fuck!” His eyes are tightly shut and his thick eyebrows are knitted together as he grimaces. He exhales a single syllable through gritted teeth. “Ouch.”
“Oh my god!” She winces in sympathy. “I’m so sorry.” She means this, she really does. But underneath her hand now covering her mouth, she feels herself begin to smile. She suppresses the impulse quickly. What is wrong with her? “Are you okay?” she says, “You want me to get some ice?” She slips off her heels, ready to run for the fridge.
He slowly opens his eyes. She must still be conveying an accurate enough expression of concern because he sighs. “I’m okay.” He sits down on the bed. His erection has deflated considerably. “How’s your head?” he asks, staring at the wall in front of him. His roommate has a Sports Illustrated swimsuit calendar up and next to that is the Greenday poster she sent Edward in September.
“It’s fine,” she says. She needs to get a grip. She promised and it was not a promise made lightly. It was a promise she is sure even her mother would eventually forgive, as long as Edward and she get married immediately and never divorce. Breathe, she tells herself, this is Edward—you know him. She knows that his earliest and fondest childhood memory is of winding his mother’s hair in his small hands. She knows the way he kisses, never staying in one place long enough, and that his ex-girlfriend is a little prettier than she is, but she is much smarter. She knows that despite his mother’s fatal accident, he drives like a maniac, recklessly weaving in and out of traffic, making bets about the ethnicity of the drivers who piss him off—all in a car with no horn. She knows that when he cries, he is like a little boy, both hands covering his face. She knows that he likes smooth, not crunchy, peanut butter, and that he has exactly three pornographic magazines under his mattress back in California.
“I know you’re nervous,” he murmurs. “It’s my first time, too.”
Right—she knows that it’s his first time, too.
She sits down next to him and rubs his back with one hand. He glances at her with a half-smile, not wide enough for dimples. She moves behind him and starts massaging his back with both hands, planting open-mouthed kisses on his spine.
“That feels real good, babe,” he says with a low moan. His excitement should excite her. That’s the way it’s always been in the past, just the sound of his pleasure gave her pleasure—but even now as she kisses him, each kiss committing her further, all she can feel is anxiety. What if she doesn’t know enough? Or what if what she does know has changed? She stops kissing him. Breathe.
“You like that,” she says, pressing her body against his, “Edward?”
He turns to look at her, somewhat surprised. “I do,” he says, “Evelyn.” He turns away from her as he says her name. In the silence that deepens between them, she can hear the continuous whirring of the small rotating fan in the corner of the room. She closes her eyes and tries to concentrate on the sheer warmth of his body. She can do this. Maybe one more fact to recite, one more story to hold.
“Where did your name come from, Edward?” she asks him, her cheek pressed against the sinewy muscles of his back. She wraps her arms around his narrow chest and breathes him in; the plumeria-air making him smell as pure as soil.
“My name?” he says. He shrugs off her arms, not roughly but decisively, and turns so that they are facing each other on the bed. He looks at her, his gaze direct and a little cold. She grabs a pillow to hug to her chest. “Why are you asking about my name right now?”
“I don’t know,” she says. She buries her face in the pillow. “Just wondering, I guess.” She peers out from the top of the pillow, just enough to see his face through the hair that has fallen over her eyes.
He sighs and grips his thick hair with one hand. “Edward,” he says, releasing his hair, “is actually my middle name.”
She looks at him—at his rumpled hair; at his eyelashes even longer than her own; at the constellation of moles on his chest, Orion’s belt in sepia tones. “What?”
“Edward,” he says, “was what my mom wanted, after some character in a Jane Austen novel, Sense and Sensibility.” He stands up and just as quickly, sits back down. “But my dad didn’t go for it. My first name is Jamison.”
Jamison. James’ son. Somehow, she is not surprised. Edward’s hands are back in his hair. He is looking at the off-white curtains now. The muscles in his face are tensed. “After she died—” He stops and closes his eyes. Evelyn watches as he takes a deep breath. He looks almost too lean, the newly tanned skin pulled too tightly over his lank frame. She remembered what he told her; his mother went on a drive to cool off from another argument with his father, just a spat about the groceries, and collided with a pickup while merging onto the freeway. He opens his eyes, but keeps his gaze averted. He starts tugging at the curtain. “When she died, I was just starting high school, and when people asked me what I went by, I said Edward.”
She smiles softly and places a hand on his knee. He looks at her, his eyes taking a while to focus. “I see,” she says, rubbing small circles on his knee with her thumb. He is the same after all. “I like Edward better,” she says.
“Me, too,” he says. She reaches out and holds the angles of his face in her hands, relishing the prickly feel of his stubble, wanting to feel it brush against other skin. He closes his eyes and she leans forward to press her lips against his. She has missed this.
She feels as close to him now as she ever has, closer even; no sex necessary. And looking at him, she knows he feels the same. “So now that we know each other’s names,” she says, arching her eyebrows, “how about we, uh—” She can’t find the words so she pats the bed instead, still flexing her eyebrows. Her forehead hurts a little with all her exertion.
He tosses the other pillow lightly in her direction. “You’re ridiculous.”
She tosses her pillow at him. “You love it.”
“I do,” he says. And he is sincere. He takes both pillows and tosses them aside. They hit the floor decisively and she knows as soon as she hears the soft thuds that she has misread him. He feels close enough to have sex. She braces herself, as if against a summer monsoon; her limbs stiff planks waiting for July flooding. His face becomes less and less clear as he moves forward; his chapped lips filling her half-shut eyes. He kisses her, lightly, tenderly even. On their third date, they had been sitting next to each other in a booth at Nation’s where he ate with such vigor that a rib popped clean out of his mouth and on to her lap. He was mortified, but she had laughed, turned to him and they kissed for the first time. Soft and barbeque-flavored, she recalls, and smiles against his lips. He notices, pauses, and smiles back, his hair falling over his forehead. She breathes deeply and lifts her legs onto the bed. Maybe this will be okay. Edward begins kissing her again, his breath coppery-hot, and her scalp tingles when his tongue slips in and out of her mouth. He chews on her bottom lip.
“Ow,” she cries out, louder than she intended to.
“Oh, sweetie, I’m sorry.” His lips touch her forehead, eyebrows, cheeks, even her chin in feathery apology. She knows she loves him. He hums on her collarbone and she is breathless, her back arching in response. His smooth chest rubbing on top of her makes her squeeze her thighs together. All her muscles are rapidly contracting and releasing, except the ones in her fingers, which seem to be going numb. When he moves her legs so that they are no longer tucked underneath her and she is laying flat on the bed, she hardly notices. She begins to recite facts in her head again: He likes his tea stronger with each sip. He wants to be a forensic scientist. He tugs at her chemise and rubs his thumb furiously across her left nipple. She inhales sharply and exhales fractured words. His favorite color is red, but only because black is not a color. Black absorbs everything and reflects nothing. He moves to her right nipple. His breath fills the creases in between her breasts as he murmurs moist endearments: darling, babe, gorgeous. Everything but her name. He has terrible taste in music and cannot conjugate the simplest Spanish verbs, much less the irregular ones like ir, to go. Yo voy. Tú— He lets out a tangled groan that breaks into her recitation.
She can no longer hear herself think, and yet still can’t pull away. They are both laying down now, his hairy legs intermingling with her smooth ones. He presses into her with the full weight of his body. Sweat gathers in the small of her back, along her forehead, in between her toes. And even now, she feels as though she could summon up desire, if he would just—she grits her teeth and thinks that they have time. They have more time together. There’s no need, no need to rush. His stubble scratching her clavicle feels almost too prickly. She shudders as his hand sprints over her calves, searing. His fingers part her thighs and she gasps. “You like that,” he says. She bites her lip and closes her eyes. He moves his rough fingers forward, his thumb slipping beneath flimsy black lace. Breathe. She lifts her arms and begins to reach around his neck to remind him that she is still here, will be here for a while. There’s no need, no need to rush. Her fingers shake and she wills herself to solidify, to pull together. He grabs her wrists with his other hand and pins her hands above her head.
“Edward!”
His hand, the one that had been snaking in between her thighs, stops. His grip on her wrists loosens, but he does not let her go. He remains on top of her but eases back so that he can see her face. All the vulnerability in his once tense jaw has evaporated; his mouth is slightly open, his jaw slack. His brown eyes churn as they struggle to process the image in front of him: a woman restrained, breath curled on her dry tongue. Deep lines etch themselves into his brow. She tries to speak that one syllable, but her throat aches.
She shakes her head. No. He releases her wrists first. Then he moves his other hand from underneath her chemise. He gets off of her. The bed creaks and she hears the whirring of that fan, spinning blades reverberating in her throbbing skull. She feels wetness on her cheeks and realizes she is crying. She stares at the ceiling and hears the screen door that leads out onto the lanai slide open. He is outside now.
Her mother never saw him again, this fisherman’s son she had been writing letters to, this boy whose hand she held as they walked along the pier. In her second year of college, after her first proposal, her mother met a medical student with thick glasses and gentle hands. Not as cute, Evelyn’s mother admitted, but from the right type of family. Family is important, her mother said, you need to feel secure. By secure, Evelyn had always thought her mother meant financially secure. Young love is important, but her mother did not regret her choices—this is what Evelyn understood from the story. But maybe after all this time Evelyn had misunderstood this last sentence, maybe her memory of her native tongue had failed her and she had misinterpreted that last word: not secure, but something more basic—safe.
Evelyn hears the screen door slide closed and Edward’s soft footsteps return to the bed. She dutifully shuts her eyes.
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