The Art of Intimacy (5 page)

But are we thereby overlooking the far more raw, more violent, more troubling truth hiding in plain sight? This is a tale that ends with the freshly reinscribed authority of one man and the disappearance of the other man. It seems less, at the end of the day, a story of identification than it is a story of psychological cannibalism. Mastery comes at a price: the price is Leggatt’s life and a state of permanent anonymity. The man who wanted to be seen will never be seen again.

Published in 1929, not long after
The Secret Sharer
but grounded in a very different setting, is Nella Larsen’s
Passing,
which also concerns a troubled and troubling identification within a romantic friendship. The reader inhabits the point of view of one of the friends, Irene Redfield, an African American woman living with her husband and two sons in perfect respectability in a Harlem town house, patron and participant in a vibrant African American cultural scene. The object of Irene’s anxiety, envy, disapproval, and admiration is her childhood friend Clare Kendry, who disorders Irene’s adult life and troubles her ideas about race, identity, and desire. When the two women unexpectedly cross paths in a Chicago hotel tearoom after many years apart, their childhood friendship is reignited. Clare, Irene quickly discovers, has been passing as white for much of her life and is married to an unabashedly racist white man who doesn’t know Clare’s secret. At the same time, Irene begrudgingly admits to herself that she is fascinated by Clare, and Clare confesses to feeling lonely for the company of other black people, marooned, passing (she calls it “this pale life of mine”) in an all-white milieu. When Clare turns up in New York and insinuates herself not only into Irene’s life, but also into Irene’s marriage, emotional chaos ensues for Irene.

In a highly ambiguous final scene at a party, Clare goes out a window to her death; did she fall, or did Irene push her? Neither the text nor Irene can say. “What happened next,” writes Larsen of the millisecond before Clare’s fall, “Irene Redfield never afterwards allowed herself to remember. Never clearly. One moment Clare had been there, a vital glowing thing, like a flame of red and gold. The next she was gone.” As with the unnamed captain and Leggatt, the main character, Irene, is fascinated, seduced, and profoundly disturbed by the intruder, and she can only reestablish her identity by the death, or perhaps the murder, of the one who causes her such ambivalence and doubt, the one who brings with her “the menace of impermanence.” Unlike
The Secret Sharer,
which closes on a moment that seems to be victorious,
Passing
ends with Irene passing out, overcome by a “great heaviness that submerged and drowned her. . . . Then everything was dark.” She has reconsolidated herself, and vanquished the menace of impermanence, at a high price both to herself and to Clare.

Passing
is a difficult novel to analyze, not least because its attitude toward its own ambiguities is so ambiguous. Is the novel as unconscious of Irene’s demirepressed feelings about Clare as Irene is? If so, why plant the rather large, damning hint that Irene pushed Clare out the window, or at the very least had an overwhelming desire to do so? If the novel is skeptical of Irene’s righteousness, and open to puzzling over the contingency of identity, how does the reader square that with a final gesture that is so punitive toward its passing character? Why must Clare die to restore the marital and social order, and what does the novel think about this apparent narrative necessity? Like a passing person, the book can be seen simultaneously in several different ways depending on who’s looking, what the reader’s assumptions are, and what larger interests might be at stake. And like
The Secret Sharer, Passing
keeps a few cards up its sleeve, cards that slip, all but unnoticed, between its two main characters, who find so much of themselves in one another’s eyes. The intimacy between Clare and Irene is as alluring as it is ultimately fatal, literally to Clare and figuratively to Irene. The homoeroticism at play here need not beguile us into ignoring the fight to the death for psychic survival at the core of the novel.

Larsen, like Conrad, deploys blur, but, unlike Conrad, who creates a visual and sonic atmosphere of dimness, whisper, and soft glow, Larsen blurs the two women at the root: point of view. Irene is the close third, controlling perspective of the novel; we only see Clare through her (often narrowed) eyes. We get Clare’s backstory, her childhood, and her current concerns strictly via Irene’s point of view. Clare is rarely given the opportunity to narrate her own life or to step outside of Irene’s voicing of her. Even the long letter that Irene receives from Clare at the start of the novel is summed up in a few short, incomplete quotes that don’t challenge Irene’s idea that Clare must be, should be, miserable. As the critic Mae Henderson writes in the critical foreword to the Modern Library edition of the novel, “Metaphorically, Clare’s interiority is a gap within the text; her inner life (including her hidden identity) remains sealed in the envelope, whose contents (like Clare herself) are later destroyed by Irene.” The very tightness of this perspectival structure is so overdetermined that one tends to tilt toward a belief in Larsen’s skepticism about her main character’s hyperrespectability and its cost.

At the same time, and complicating any conclusions about what Larsen may have been up to, is this interesting aspect concerning point of view: when Irene first reencounters Clare in the hotel tearoom in Chicago, she, too, is passing. In fact, Irene, not recognizing Clare at first and assuming that the other woman is white, finds herself the object of Clare’s gaze, her “strange languorous eyes,” eyes that, Irene fears, see what she’s hiding, because she was in search of a cool drink on a hot day and, moreover, hated “the idea of being ejected from any place.” As the two women stare one another down over their respective tea services, the perspective of the novel is momentarily undone by the power of Clare’s gaze. Clare, here, knows Irene, and knows that she’s black and passing for white, but Irene doesn’t, for several pages, recognize Clare, nor does she know that the other woman is black, and passing, as well. Who, in this moment, knows what about whom? Very oddly, by the time they’re paying the bill, Clare has taken on the mantle of the passing woman, while Irene’s casual slip over the color line goes unremarked by the two women, and, from here on out, by the novel as well, which seems to forget about it as rigorously as its characters do.

But can the reader? In this opening scene, the reader is drawn sweetly and firmly into Irene’s pleasure, first, at being in the tearoom (it was “like being wafted upward on a magic carpet to another world”), and, soon after, at the sight of Clare: “a sweetly scented woman in a fluttering dress of green chiffon whose mingled pattern of narcissuses, jonquils, and hyacinths was a reminder of pleasantly chill spring days.” Irene is immediately fascinated by this woman, not realizing that she already knows her, but she is unsettled, “put out” by the intensity of Clare’s gaze at her, which is “that of one who with utmost singleness of mind and purpose was determined to impress firmly and accurately each detail of Irene’s features upon her memory for all time.” A quiet duel of mutual gazing ensues for the next few pages, in which it is unclear whose looking will organize the scene, and, possibly, the narrative itself. Will Clare tell Irene’s story? Or will Irene tell Clare’s? Irene, who for the rest of the novel represents good race consciousness and pride, is determined, in these few moments, not to be revealed as being African American. Holding Clare’s gaze, she thinks, “Suppose the woman did know or suspect her race. She couldn’t prove it.” The reader is off balance in this tense scene, not knowing quite whom to trust or what, exactly, is at stake.

The tension breaks when Clare crosses the room to remind Irene that they were childhood friends. From this moment on, Irene becomes firmly ensconced as the guiding perspective, and she delivers Clare’s backstory—wrong side of the tracks, bad janitor dad, suspiciously fancy clothes, often seen in the company of white people—as a tale of a girl gone wrong, a pretty girl (“almost too good-looking”) who can’t be trusted. Girls like that, the reader knows, die a lot in novels. We are relieved, kind of, to leave the hall of mirrors where two passing women stare at one another in a segregated space, each daring the other to blow her cover, for the shelter of Irene’s point of view. Irene, we see, will tell the story: Irene is black; so is Clare; Clare is a liar; liars die. Only Irene’s husband, Brian, who, we later find out, is sleeping with Clare, seems capable of intuiting what Clare’s motives, her narrative drive, might be. In a discussion with Irene about Clare’s racist husband and what the attraction might be, Brian remarks, “They always come back.” (The “they” is somewhat ambiguous; he seems to mean white men going after black women, but in the context it could also mean black women returning to racist white men.) When Irene asks why, Brian replies, “If I knew that, I’d know what race is.” It’s a fascinating, telling remark that flickers past all too quickly, but leaves a strong trace. What Brian suggests is that race is as much a story lived out in the most intimate realms of one’s life as it is a physical reality, and that both are ultimately unknowable. Irene quickly snaps back, “Well, Clare can just count me out,” a statement that seems patently false, since the entire novel is occasioned by Clare.

Unlike
The Secret Sharer,
which seams the disappearance of Leggatt so tightly into a discourse of freedom and mastery that one almost can’t see the stitches,
Passing
seems at times to be inviting the reader to consider the story being told from the point of view of the character who occupies the center of the novel, but is also silenced by it. Leggatt and the captain may or may not be at all alike; Clare and Irene, we know with certainty, are two sides of the same light-skinned coin. One woman chooses to pass; the other eschews it (except when it’s convenient); both pay. In the space between them, a space as thin as a coin edge, is a vast, nearly unsayable realm of uncertainty and pain about the nature of identity itself in a racist culture. Irene reflects bitterly at one point that “Clare Kendry cared nothing for the race. She only belonged to it,” a sentiment that it is probably safe to say no white character has ever uttered in a novel. Clare’s freedom is as uncontainable by the book as it is by the strictures of Irene’s upright consciousness, and out the window she goes.

But even here, the book seems to undercut the surface morality with image and perspective: a window, after all, is a symbol of openness and escape, and Irene is both the only character who knows exactly what happened in that moment and the one who is entirely unable to remember it. “That beauty that had torn at Irene’s placid life,” writes Larsen, is permanently gone. While it may be erased from Irene’s life, the beauty of Clare is certainly not gone from the perspective of the reader, whom Larsen definitively separates from Irene’s point of view in this scene. As in the tearoom scene, we do not trust Irene, and we, perhaps, wonder what Clare might have seen in the other woman’s face as she hurtled toward the earth. There is at least one other novel in that gaze, a countertale, and the blur that creates
Passing
is also the blur that undoes any definitive reading of it. Is there a world, Larsen asks via Irene’s obviously repressive stance, in which Clare doesn’t have to die? The fact that Irene held the other woman for a time in her thoughts suggests that there is, but the fact that Irene then wished to erase her suggests that there isn’t; the reader remains uncertainly suspended between the two.

Nearly a century after Conrad and Larsen, many veils are off. It would be difficult in modern times to pull off the kind of subtle and sublimated homoeroticism, the deep sense of unknowable mystery, that suffuses
The Secret Sharer;
it would be equally difficult for a modern reader to overlook the rather massive intrusion of Irene’s subconscious and repressed desires in her relationship with Clare. We know too much, or we think we do, about what love is. We know it’s a battlefield. And yet, in Dennis Cooper’s piercing 1982 story “My Mark” (Cooper later revised and expanded this into the novella
Safe,
published in 1985), we see that a thanatopic intimacy can still have great power in fiction. The homoeroticism is frank—“My Mark” is the account by a man of his obsession with his ex-lover Mark—but the “death” of the other, of Mark, is not a literal death; it might be something closer to a slow dissection, and the instrument of this dissection is not a knife, but language. “My Mark” accomplishes the extraordinary feat of skinning someone alive, a former lover, through description. There is no physical violence in the story, only a gaze—and a gaze from within the imagination at that—so searching, so thorough, and so invasive that one feels slightly guilty reading it, like the worst sort of voyeur. One feels, inarticulately and inchoately, complicit with a tremendous darkness, but it is impossible to locate or account for that complicity since one is, after all, simply reading a short story. Anger at a rejecting ex-lover is nothing new. Moreover, as in Maxwell’s
So Long, See You Tomorrow,
Cooper makes it clear that nearly everything we’re reading in his account of Mark has been invented by the narrator. Where could the harm actually lie?

And yet.

“My Mark” begins with the bland sentence “Mark stands in the windy darkness outside a nightclub.” He’s been drinking, snorting coke; he throws up, falls to his knees; a man passing by helps him up, then takes him home. Drunken, stinking, sweaty, Mark nevertheless agrees to sex. “His ass,” the narrator recounts, “may as well be a new best seller, the way the man thumbs to its dirty part.” The description of the sex that follows is more memento mori than lusty brief encounter, stringing Mark up on his own body.