All that wasted time I've been bitching about--only part of it was *bad* waste.
My general mental paralysis, which was not under my control, was a bad thing, but it created an umbrella in which some very good things happened. Not many people, I think, know what it's like to read Genet in an empty laundry room while their underwear chugs around and around on the hamster wheel of the dryer. I used to do that every week.
Not many people know what it's like to do what they love *just* for love, *just* for joy. I used to do that every day. I wrote just to see where it would take me. I wrote what my visitors showed me. They revealed certain moments and aspects of their lives to me, and because I did not ask them for more (as in "Yes, but why are you in a dodgy motel, my darling, waiting for a stranger?"), they trusted me.
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It must be frustrating for characters, you know--never to be taken as they are. Well, they used to be; any older book you pick up which bores the shit out of you is probably one of them. If you find yourself asking, are we going anywhere with this?--that is probably a book where the characters got to have their day.
They are people, you know, and like people, they prefer to feel that they matter for themselves, not for what's going to happen now that their dead father's Vietnam buddy, on whom they nurse a displaced oedipal crush, has come back to town. Which is a problem because their husband is his PTSD therapist. And an affair between a patient and the wife of his therapist would spectacularly wreck everybody's lives anyhow, but especially because one of them is a sniper.
You'd be amazed how touchy characters are about that kind of thing. They certainly don't want you to know about it, because after all, who the hell are you?
It makes perfect sense. If I was the one schtupping my dad's (fictional!) old combat buddy who happened to be my husband's patient, that is not the first thing I would reveal about myself to a new acquaintance. I am fairly sure the same thing is true of you. Why wouldn't it be true of our visitors?
Furthermore, a lot of characters are actually pretty competent at managing that kind of situation. You think a hardened, damaged vet can't do his therapist's wife and then stare the therapist down like nothing happened? Well, if not, then he can just stop going to therapy, and the therapist, being a busy man, will probably just take the next guy on his list. The wife, of course, will not be inclined to press the matter.
What writers have to do these days, and it's actually kind of embarrassing and stupid, is figure out ways to disable their people's competence so that things can happen. The vet has to keep showing up for therapy despite his shaking hands. Or the husband for some reason doesn't want to let the vet just disappear and pursues him like a demented angel of mercy. There are people who do that kind of thing--overly helpful, meddlesome types. Is that who the woman married, though? Well...it is now.
Notice that as the situation gets more interesting, more story-like (the vet standing outside the office door, still able to smell Mrs. Therapist on those trembling fingers--oh, and his memories of when she didn't smell that way at all, but of baby powder and juice--god what a perv he is, screwing a woman he knew when she was two)...as this happens, the people are getting both less competent *and* less real.
This is what could be called the Sopranos Dilemma. To wit: A wiseguy in therapy? Uh...sure. Yeah. A guy in the mafia is going to pay money to sit and tell a woman his doubts. Can you even COUNT the red flags in that sentence?
Don't get me wrong. It's fantastic, as both entertainment and metaphor. But "the lambs are screaming, Clarice." The night visitors are crying. Men who sleep with their therapist's wives that they knew as a two-year-old don't stand outside the door with shaking hands, smelling her on their skin and feeling two kinds of damned. They just don't. If they do anything at all, they think, "Heh-heh. And you don't even know it, you chump." Or, "It's not my fault. She made me."
The kind of man who would have an interesting, worthwhile reaction to that sort of situation is the kind of man who wouldn't be in it. Or not in that way. That's how life is.
Life takes us away from story. Life is the first thing a writer has to get rid of. But you need it, too; you need to learn to steal from it, so you can cover your necessary distortions with the proper scent.
But this hurts. This hurts your visitors. It does.
Think about it. If you or I were doing the combat buddy who was also our husband's patient...is that how we'd handle it? So badly that our lover would be laughing at our husband like that?
More importantly, is that who we'd think we were? Is that what we would think was the most essential and interesting part of ourselves? Is that the story we would tell ourselves about ourselves?
Almost certainly not. We'd see ourselves as the mother of a cowlicky soccer player with a heartbreaking smile; we'd locate our truth in the semester we spent in Senegal that reoriented our center of gravity. Made us less American, in a good way. Or that summer we spent at Jenny's bedside while she slipped away.
But guess what. Those things don't matter. Because you know why? Those things have no potential to put you (possibly a hostage, possibly vainly pleading for sanity, possibly both) and the unhinged sniper on top of the town hall at midnight and then your husband walks right the hell into the line of fire and yells "ENOUGH!" (You know, or the reverse--your husband is up there trying to reason with the man, and you all of a sudden feel your old berserker of a father in you and you walk right out in front of Snake's gun.)
Yeah, that's all a storyteller would care about.
And you know what a really evil one would do? She'd take your sister Jenny's death (oh did you know Jenny was your sister?) She'd take your sister Jenny's death and move it up so it was happening at the same time as this affair. And she'd use your cowlicky soccer-playing kid with the bright eyes, and she'd use your memories of that hot flyswatting place, the one that made your heart bigger and sadder, she would use those things--she would use you--to make us care about the fact that you just walked in front of your lover's gun. Isn't that great?
Everything about you, in other words, everything you just offered me in order to prove that you were more than this affair, that this affair was not you...would become sublimated to the affair. Everything would be all about the moment you walked in front of the gun.
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Now if you really did walk in front of your lover's gun at midnight, if it went that far, you'd need to talk about it, wouldn't you. Yes, at some point, in some way. You might let someone in to that moment. But: it would be a person of your choosing. In your own time. In your own way. And on your own terms.
That's what our visitors want. Our true ones, the ones who come to us from the real and scary inner darkness like wild deer. They want to show their wounds in their own time. In their own way.
And for themselves, not for us.
