The Art of Intimacy (2 page)

In the idiosyncratic and inventive 1999 movie
Being John Malkovich,
directed by Spike Jonze, the characters played by Catherine Keener and Cameron Diaz, via a means that was never precisely explained, would jointly sort of inhabit the body and mind of John Malkovich—Malkovich played himself in the movie—in which interesting vehicle they were conducting an affair. One of the most hilarious, and perhaps disturbing, recurrent lines in the movie was “Meet you in Malkovich,” which was what the lovers said to one another when they wanted to meet. It’s impossible to know exactly what screenwriter Charlie Kaufman may have had in mind when he constructed this scenario, but, among other things, it certainly foregrounded a quality peculiar to the actor John Malkovich, which is the quality of never seeming to be entirely real or to fully inhabit his own skin. It seems, on an intuitive if not a realistic level, that one could, actually, meet in Malkovich, because it’s never clear if he is, in fact, entirely John Malkovich or if he’s a supposition, an ironic stance, a self-aware pose, John Malkovich playing John Malkovich. There seems to be room in Malkovich for other people, because his own attachment to himself seems so tenuous.

He seems to always be a bit “as if,” a bit hypothetical, contingent, which is to say: a subjunctive. What Keener and Diaz were saying to one another was:
Meet me in the subjunctive,
in a possibility.
Meet me in the
if. In the end, their relationship does actually work out, the subjunctive being, perhaps, as good a place to foster intimacy as any other. While it is lovely in real life to meet in real life, on a textual level, as much, if not more, can often be accomplished in the subjunctive, language being uniquely suited to holding open the simultaneous possibility that an event is occurring and not occurring, that this or that might happen if it were to occur.
If I saw you. If we met. If I had gone through that door. If I had found you. If you were here.
The
if
is a wonderful device, because it simultaneously alerts the reader that what is to follow did not happen and allows the reader to engage in the narrative as if it were happening. As a grammar, it’s an optical illusion that is also potentially quite a powerful tool for summoning up desire and loss simultaneously and causing the reader to experience both states with equal force.

The writers Elizabeth Bowen and William Maxwell made extraordinary use of the subjunctive in the novels
The House in Paris,
by Bowen, and
So Long, See You Tomorrow,
by Maxwell. Though the exterior narrative frame of these novels has to do with the impact of the relationships between adult lovers, and illicit lovers at that, the deeper, much more distressing, and much more perplexing and tender narratives at the core have to do with a much less nameable and far more delicate intimacy: both novels concern children who meet, quite briefly and by chance, in the “real life” of the novel, but who continue to meet for a much longer time than that in that subjunctive, that “as if,” which, as it turns out, is the book, the novel that results from their meeting. The time of these children being physically present with one another is very short, but in both novels it leads to a psychic intimacy that is profound and long-lasting.

In
So Long, See You Tomorrow,
the literal action concerns a murder on a farm in Illinois in the 1920s. One man, Lloyd Wilson, has been sleeping with Fern Smith, wife of Clarence Smith. Lloyd is also married, to Marie. The affair is discovered; Fern takes the kids, leaves Clarence, and ultimately divorces him; Marie will not give Lloyd a divorce. Clarence becomes increasingly despondent and ruined and one day he kills Lloyd, shooting him as he milks a cow. A short time later, Clarence kills himself as well. The lives of all those who are left are shattered. One of Clarence and Fern’s children is Cletus Smith, who is thirteen at the time of the murder. The unnamed narrator of the book is a boy of about Cletus’s age who lives in the same town with his father and stepmother; his biological mother died of double pneumonia a few years before and he is still grieving her. Or, actually, the narrator is the elderly man that the boy became and the book, he says, is “a roundabout, futile way of making amends.”

For what, one immediately wonders, is he “making amends”? Cletus and the narrator apparently met once in a half-finished house that was being built by the narrator’s father and then played together a few times. Several years later, after the murder and suicide, they coincidentally ended up attending the same high school in Chicago. But when the narrator passed Cletus in the hall one day in that high school, he didn’t say hello, basically because he felt awkward and embarrassed by the other boy’s catastrophe. Maxwell writes, “I think if I had turned and walked along beside him and not said anything, it might have been the right thing to do,” but “it has taken me all these years even to imagine doing that.” That’s it. That’s what occasions the entire book—one boy didn’t say hello to another in a high school hallway. But this minor failure, this gap, opens up a chasm of regret, and, indeed, a strange kind of mourning. From this failure, an intense act of imagining takes place as the narrator reconstructs the entire story of the affair and the deaths, winding the novel through the points of view of nearly everyone in the scene, including the Smiths’ dog, and not least through his own point of view—his hunting through newspaper archives for the details of the case, his later years in analysis as an adult, his dreams, his throttled feelings about his own mother’s death, his visits to his hometown when he is an adult, his musings about the tragedy.

Maxwell constantly reminds us that nearly everything about his narration is tentative, subjunctive, speculative. In fact, the first sentence of the book begins, “I very much doubt that I would have remembered for more than fifty years the murder of a tenant farmer I never laid eyes on if . . .” This is about as unimmediate as you can get—
I doubt that I would have if
—so on top of these being verbs of awareness, bane of the writing workshop, they’re in the subjunctive—I would have remembered, thought, seen, understood.
I doubt that I would have if . . .

And when the boys meet, they also meet, in a way, in the
if.
Maxwell makes his way toward this meeting by talking first about a very different sort of house, a Giacometti sculpture called
Palace at 4 a.m.
That house, the narrator says, always “reminds” him, as an adult, of the new house his father was building where he met Cletus, because the Giacometti, the art, is made of wood but has no walls, and at a room at the top there is “a queer-looking creature with the head of a monkey wrench” that looks like a cross between “a male ballet dancer and a pterodactyl.” The palace, the house, is thirty inches high and “it is all terribly spare and strange.” Then he explains how this object first formed in Giacometti’s mind, and then he moves to discussing the half-built house where he met Cletus, but even this is surrounded by phrases like “I seem to remember,” and “it could also be that,” and then, too, he says, maybe he’s just remembering a picture of the new house being built, and maybe this is a real memory or maybe it’s “a form of storytelling.” Only then—after the art, the artist’s dream, the narrator’s highly conditional memory and undermining of his own memory, do we get Cletus. Here is the scene:

It’s sort of a miracle that Cletus is there at all after all this conditionalness, but there he is, at last, quite a real boy, framed, like a picture, by a hole in the center of the house through which the narrator sees him. The boys meet. They hang out together a bit and then the narrator tells us something else: that even though this meeting took place after the affair and the wreckage, but before the murder and suicide, and, of course, after the death of the narrator’s mother, “I didn’t tell Cletus about my shipwreck . . . and he didn’t tell me about his.” So the two boys were, in their way, two shipwrecks passing in the night, walking through this uncanny, unfinished house. Their intimacy is provisional, transitory, and not understood by either of them at the time. This scene is the entire interaction between them, plus the moment of the narrator not saying anything to Cletus in the hallway. And yet it is this fleeting encounter that occasions the entire book, a profound deployment of the narrator’s imagination, a world-making intimacy.

It’s sort of a miracle that Cletus is there at all after all this conditionalness, but there he is, at last, quite a real boy, framed, like a picture, by a hole in the center of the house through which the narrator sees him. The boys meet. They hang out together a bit and then the narrator tells us something else: that even though this meeting took place after the affair and the wreckage, but before the murder and suicide, and, of course, after the death of the narrator’s mother, “I didn’t tell Cletus about my shipwreck . . . and he didn’t tell me about his.” So the two boys were, in their way, two shipwrecks passing in the night, walking through this uncanny, unfinished house. Their intimacy is provisional, transitory, and not understood by either of them at the time. This scene is the entire interaction between them, plus the moment of the narrator not saying anything to Cletus in the hallway. And yet it is this fleeting encounter that occasions the entire book, a profound deployment of the narrator’s imagination, a world-making intimacy.

The novel, remember, tells us an important story of its own making—the shipwreck that is one boy meeting the shipwreck that is another in the unfinished house, the cloud of truly horrible tragedy over the boy who can’t tell his story, and then the impetus for the other boy telling that boy’s story for him: because he failed him in life, failed to say hello to him in the hallway, failed to connect. If he had been able to so much as reach out to Cletus in that hallway, there would be no need for the book, the art, the Giacometti. But because of that “failure,” that
if
that we now see is so double-edged, the narrator must build the palace that is this book, and, moreover, he is showing us that he’s building it, showing us that this is all subjunctive, conditional, fragmentary, partial, invented, guilty. We sometimes talk about ironic distance in fiction, and I think that here Maxwell is achieving his ironic distance through grammar, essentially—through the subjunctive, and the subjunctive is explicitly standing on an acute sense of moral failure: If I had been able. If I had loved. If I had grieved.

In terms of structure, Maxwell is building a palace in the air midway through the book, a palace made of testimony that never happened about a murder that certainly did, the existence of which he has proved through documents—newspaper accounts, police reports. The narrator is explicitly telling us that this is probably all wrong, invented, perhaps dreamed, but he is also telling us that this is what is owed to Cletus, and that this book is a kind of reparation for a failure of empathy. What one boy has to do with one another, what is so important about this moment where they intersected, is, I think, that it is the moment when one boy became the narrator of the other via imagination. He becomes a writer, in effect. Not because he’s such a good storyteller, but because he failed, because there is a gap, because we can achieve a union and a reunion, an intimacy in art that may not be possible in real life. Indeed, can one conceive of a more intimate act than to imagine the most private core of someone else’s entire life as well as the interior life of his entire family, right down to the thoughts of the dog, albeit a dog that didn’t actually exist?

With this book, the narrator finally imagines the other—not because Cletus was his brother or his father or his beloved or his enemy, but actually exactly the opposite—because Cletus was a stranger to him, someone whom he met in the unfinished house of mourning where we all live. The almost unbearably brief flash of recognition between them is caused not by the intimacy of love, but by the intimacy of death—they’re both mourners. And the
if
that pervades the book is so ironic, in a way, because there actually isn’t any
if
when it comes to death and grieving; the human mortality rate is 100 percent. So that
if
includes all of us as well, a community of mourners who can recognize ourselves in those two Midwestern boys of nearly a century ago.
Meet me in the
if. The postmodern cleverness of that invitation in the Spike Jonze film—a film, it must be said, with a profound tenderness pulsing at its core—in Maxwell is a heart-broken entreaty to the past, a letter that can be neither sent nor answered, and yet must be written; its composition seems to be a matter of profound emotional urgency.

The House in Paris,
like
So Long, See You Tomorrow,
also concerns a brief crossing of young psyches that opens, and then closes, a door to the past. Two children of about ten, Henrietta and Leopold, meet for one day in a house in Paris. They are both traveling, in the company of a chaperoning spinster named Miss Fisher—Leopold has come from Italy to see his biological mother, whom he has never met; Henrietta is going from England to Mentone, in France, where she will stay with her grandmother. Henrietta’s mother is dead, and her father doesn’t really seem to know what to do with her; Leopold lives with adoptive parents in Italy. Both children are nervous, precocious, curious. They don’t play together so much as interview one another and knock around the house, bored. And that house, like the half-built house in the Maxwell book, is odd: it’s described as looking “miniature, like a doll’s house,” peculiarly narrow, on a street that is preternaturally silent, and inside there is “doll’s house furniture.” It’s a sort of dream house, uncanny, a way station. Upstairs, an elderly woman, Madame Fisher, Miss Fisher’s mother, is dying. The first section ends with devastating news for Leopold: his mother is not coming.