The Art of Intimacy (6 page)

It isn’t until midway through the story that the first-person narrator reveals himself and reveals that he’s been narrating all along. He slips into a scene that at first doesn’t seem to include him, a moment of Mark leaning against a wall, “his black curly hair closely shorn.” The narrator remarks, “Last year it was long. He still seemed angelic. . . . I felt like I was on something, but had a hard-on; the best of both worlds.” Blurring perspective, time, and even his own consciousness, the narrator unmasks himself in the equivalent of a mumbled aside, making himself a shadow to his ex-lover; or, as he puts it, “a ghoul . . . dreaming of someone I barely know.” If Conrad used blur and penumbra to charm and disorient the reader while dispatching the disturbing other into the sea, and Larsen blurred perspective at the root so that one woman could take ownership of the story of the disturbing other, Cooper uses shadow, blur, and a nearly entirely effaced narrator to slip up behind this Mark, this mark on the page, and describe him to death.

As we come to understand that we are reading a spurned lover’s version of another man’s life, specifically the other man’s sex life, the reason for the malice, the invocation of Mark as skeleton, in these descriptions seems to become clear. “A man,” observes the narrator, “has his face in Mark’s ass. It smells like a typical one, but belongs to a boy who’s a knock-out, so it’s symbolic. . . . It’s the end of their day, the beginning of mine. He’d just be spreading his ass with his hands and fitting it over my face about now, if he were smart and didn’t need money, settled for gold in the eyes of a guy who is gaga for him.”

In other words, in the ex-lover’s gaze, Mark is a stupid whore, an It, a skeleton, an “apparatus” mainly identifiable by the ordinary smell of his ordinary ass. “I exaggerated his power, as it was a time in my life when I needed to feel very strongly,” opines the narrator. “Mark filled the bill.” This spiteful take on Mark would not be interesting, though, if Cooper didn’t also allow us to see the deeper motive for this rage, that it is revenge for an injury he feels that Mark inflicted on him, but not the injury of leaving. Yes, Mark did pass as quickly through the narrator’s life as he had through the lives of other men, but the injury he inflicted on the narrator was inflicted when they were together.

The narrator writes, “When I was with him his looks left me speechless, and that kind of beauty is insular, fills all my words anyway, so that what I construct must divide him from them in slight ways, such as the warmth of his skin against clinical language, like that of a man who lies down on a sharp bed of nails and is saved from real pain by the evenness of the impression.” And a bit later on, “A head that has power over me. . . . I fill a head with what I need to believe about it. It’s a mirage created by beauty built flush to a quasi-emotion that I’m reading in at the moment of impact.”

What Cooper seems to be describing is that moment of impact, of being thrown into crisis by Mark’s beauty, left “speechless,” finding that his words are filled by it, that he was in some sense sealed in, because “that kind of beauty is insular.” It is specifically against that speechlessness, he tells us, that he must divide “him from them”—i.e., divide Mark from his words—in order, following the logic, not to be subsumed and rendered silent by a beauty for which he was unprepared, a beauty that threw him into crisis as a man and, perhaps even more threateningly, as a writer. In self-defense, against that beautiful head with its overwhelming power, the narrator will “fill a head with what I need to believe about it.” He will, in other words, reinvent Mark in his own words, render that head a skull, shroud and seal the other man in language. He will write this story that imagines Mark from the inside out, literally down to his very bones.

One feels that the piece is as much an exorcism as a work of fiction. An eye for an eye, speech for speechlessness: this is the writer’s revenge, not against abandonment, but against a beauty that went to his core. “I’d loved Mark, found that emotion was possible,” he writes at the end, having utterly vivisected Mark, and, perhaps, himself. The shudder that the reader may feel comes not from experiencing the ex-lover’s rage at being abandoned—a very ordinary and comprehensible emotion—but from the writer’s will to overwrite the other, to kill that organic, unwilled, languageless beauty with composition. Against the warmth of skin, “clinical language.”

The modern writer is hard-pressed to toss characters overboard or out of windows. Instead, he delivers the blow to an ego-threatening intimacy with language. If the ego stakes in
The Secret Sharer
are mastery, and the ego stakes in
Passing
are identity, in “My Mark” the ego stakes are language itself and the ability to speak. It is fitting, in Cooper’s story, that the murder is a murder in language only, that the writer makes the threatening other disappear into words. Visual beauty will not triumph over linguistic ruthlessness. For the reader, however, the shudder we feel at the end of “My Mark” is as visceral as it is in the two other texts. We know that something has gone missing, something both dearly loved and deeply feared by the narrator, who will now never be able to get it back.

This is not a frivolous question. In her 1997 collection of essays
The End of the Novel of Love,
the critic Vivian Gornick makes the provocative argument that the pursuit of love is, essentially, empty as the foundation for a serious work of art. She writes that “for a hundred and fifty years in the West the idea of romantic love had been emblematic of the search for self-understanding: an influence that touched every aspect of the world enterprise.” But now, she continues, apparently after the sixties, we’re over it: “We loved once, and we loved badly. We loved again, and again we loved badly. We did it a third time, and we were no longer living in a world free of experience. We saw that love did not make us tender, wise, or compassionate. . . . Within ourselves we remained unchanged.” She reports that “romantic love now seems a yearning to dive down into feeling and come up magically changed; when what is required for the making of a self is the deliberate pursuit of consciousness. Knowing
this
to be the larger truth, as many of us do, the idea of love as a means of illumination—in literature as in life—now comes as something of an anticlimax.” She concludes, “Today, I think, love as a metaphor is an act of nostalgia, not of discovery.”

To this argument, one might be tempted to reply, echoing Gornick’s high-handed tone, “Speak for yourself, lady.” Whose expectation is it that love only makes one “tender, wise, or compassionate”? That it is a “yearning” to be “magically changed”? Whose idea is it, moreover, that the pursuit of romantic love—as just one form of intimacy—is primarily a means of changing the self, of “self-understanding,” as opposed to, say, loving another human being, or several? Gornick also repeatedly elides love, heterosexuality, and marriage as a seamless, proscriptive whole. By “love,” she means: men and women getting married or getting unmarried, a definition as naive as it is offensive. That the rise of divorce in Western culture in the latter half of the twentieth century didn’t deliver transformation and transcendence to the population at large seems to have led Gornick to dismiss the whole topic for art, for everyone, forever. Her idea that “many of us” have realized “the larger truth” that love is nostalgia is so sour and narcissistic as to be absurd. Gornick’s stance saddens me, because it sacks love as a Great Theme on account of its inability, apparently, to deliver freedom and a bigger self; to, in other words, produce the ideals of the Enlightenment in individuals. Gornick has never, apparently, considered the possibility that this Western construct of the past few centuries might be as contingent and partial as any other construct. Instead, she blames love for being unable to measure up.

Gornick’s argument does, however, inadvertently point to a different dilemma, which is the ubiquitousness, the cheapness even, of intimacy as a modern ideal. If intimacy were a person, he or she might be tired, dragged in as s/he is to glue together every sagging plot, every movie at the movieplex, every self-help book ever written, every conversation (overheard on the subway: “I know he wants to call, so I’m giving him that space”), every commercial, and many works of literary fiction. A particularly modern, faux-sincere, kitsch intimacy sells everything from afternoon talk shows to pictures on Instagram to Facebook’s endlessly mined personal information, so glittering to retailers. We are continually willing to buy access to some inner zone or other, to the truth, the inside story, the “unretouched photo.” But as Charles Baxter has put it, “Intimacy suggests a possibly sexualized, private, almost sacred location or space, a closeness
that not everyone can share.
” To which the average marketer might reply, “So you mean a limited edition kind of thing?” In this climate, intimacy could not be faulted for wanting to take a damn rest. And it’s a bit suspicious, this reliance on intimacy as the sine qua non of human existence, it’s a bit, well, thin. That’s what we’re down to, here in the third millennium? Spiritual enlightenment, transcendence, courage, ethics, what language is, the collective good, and, for that matter, the existence of evil: when did they become chopped liver?

I suppose we could blame modernism for making those categories so problematic that all we have left to talk about with any seriousness is human connection and its vicissitudes. And yet what we talk about when we talk about intimacy in literature is, very often, how it isn’t working out, a condition we tend to agree is sad. This is the problematic truism of writing fiction today, if nothing else: the reader does not have to be convinced that intimacy matters, that intimacy always suffices for what we call the “stakes” of a story. It’s not that we all necessarily believe without exception in love as salvation or enlightenment, but we do believe without too much doubt that
characters
believe in it; as motivation, it works. (The only thing it might be compared to in this regard is money, but that’s an essay for another day.) We do not question the assumption that people want to get closer to one another, that they will move heaven and earth in an attempt to achieve closeness, and that they will grieve mightily for the loss of that closeness. One cannot, as a writer, place patriotism at the center of a novel without shoring it up and explaining it quite a bit; ditto spiritual belief. But intimacy—whether it’s romantic love, bonds with one’s children or one’s parents, intimacy among friends, even intimacy with objects; intimacy found or lost—is a sure thing, a state of affairs that can quickly undo a writer wishing to create art and not schlock.

I would counter Gornick’s argument with the supposition that the dilemma the writer faces isn’t that no one believes in love since 1968, but the opposite: the idea that intimacy is a self-evident good is so omnipresent that we don’t even notice it. (I am indebted, here, to Elizabeth Povinelli’s argument to this effect in her book
The Empire of Love,
which looks critically at what she terms “the intimacy diaspora” after the Enlightenment.) It’s all too easy to throw a little intimacy, especially damaged intimacy, at a narrative to get it to seem serious and literary. Like corn syrup, it fills stuff out and makes it tasty. We’re accustomed to its value. To which the struggling (always struggling) writer might well respond, So what? Intimacy
does
matter. What’s the harm in relying on that? Don’t we come to literature to try to understand what it is to be alive? Aren’t we all trying to connect?

The harm, it seems to me as a struggling writer among other struggling writers, is that piety of any kind is never especially good for art. Characters can, and should, believe in all kinds of things, passionately and with brilliant wrongheadedness, but the book is, generally speaking, up to something else, something broader, something less sure of itself. Questions the writer might ask herself as she struggles to bring a sense of intimacy onto the page are, What assumptions am I making about what intimacy is? What received ideas about intimacy am I perhaps unwittingly reproducing? Many might immediately think of demographic categories—cultural assumptions that this sort of person can’t be with that sort of person; this one is the wrong gender, race, age, body size for that one; intimacies such as domestic heterosexual love, preferably with children, are the Big Stories and everything else is a footnote or a curiosity. One might question these assumptions.

One might also question easy gender stereotypes about intimacy: women only want love and men only want sex; women are better at intimacy than men; female friendship is always fraught with poisonous competitiveness, especially for male attention; mothers resent daughters; fathers abandon sons; women are needy and manipulative; men are disappointing and selfish; and so on. While one is at it, one could also question received ideas about sex and sexual identity: men are dogs and women are victims; sex within marriage is always boring and adultery is always thrilling but emotionally false; women are dying to get married; gay men are promiscuous and amusing; lesbians are hyperdomestic and faithful; bisexuals are untrustworthy tricksters who probably don’t even really exist; female orgasm is a difficult and often comic pursuit; children being sexually abused feel numb; orgasm is always pleasurable; real sex is between people who are in love and any other kind of sex is shallow and empty; one-night stands make you feel sad and sticky the next day; men with younger partners are lucky and women with younger partners are pathetic and probably have had bad plastic surgery; mothers don’t have sex; fathers never get as much sex as they want and will inevitably turn to the (female, nubile, witless or sometimes conniving) babysitter; “foreplay” is a category; “slut” is a category; everyone’s primary drive is sexual; sexual identity is fixed at the age of three. And so on. As one who teaches writing, I’ve read a supernatural amount of fiction that traffics in ideas and judgments about all kinds of intimacy that, at the very least, might be brought to the level of consciousness before being committed to the page.

But beyond these received ideas, cultural anxieties, and judgments, the writer might also ask herself if she is really so sure about what she’s describing, if she has looked closely enough at the bond she is exploring in her work. Let us take, for instance, a well-worn cultural stereotype: the older, successful man with the younger, pretty woman on his arm. Often, one of two assumptions immediately spring onto the page. The first is that he is making use of her as sex toy and badge of his prowess (see:
The Dying Animal, Rabbit Redux,
etc.). The second is that she is making use of him as financial mark or psychological cat’s paw (see: the film
The Blue Angel, Of Human Bondage,
etc.). In the first scenario, he will inevitably trade her in for an even younger, newer model, particularly as his prowess declines. In the second scenario, she will ruin his life and perhaps, one way or another, he will end up dead, either literally or figuratively. If one proceeds from either of these two assumptions, the story writes itself. In the first scenario, he must be powerful, vain, and cold and she must be nothing but her physical beauty. In the second scenario, she must be a dark temptress and he must be repressed, tragic, possibly foolish, definitely balding. Humiliation must be part of the emotional tapestry; secondary characters must offer warnings that go unheeded; the power of illusion and self-delusion must be part of the theme. Comic set pieces can be expected.

Why bother even writing the rest or, indeed, reading it? We’ve already decided that we know what the intimacy between these two must be, we’re sure of what they say to one another in the dark, we’ve assigned it a low value on the intimacy scale that forecloses on surprise, certainly on any real pleasure or dramatic tension in their union. All that’s left to the writer is coloring in the outlines with more or less wit and with greater or lesser degrees of empathy. But what if the writer allows that she doesn’t necessarily know what goes on between these two? What if she pauses to look closer? What if, for instance, the older man is an eminent artist in a wheelchair and the younger woman found herself, to her own surprise, falling passionately in love with him? What if the older man is white and the younger woman is African American? What if she is still deeply connected to the female lover she lived with for twelve years? What if the older man delights in the younger woman, but also envies her the freedom, on all levels, that is slipping from him every day? What if she’s an aspiring artist, but not a very good one? What if he knows this but doesn’t tell her, out of love? What if she knows that he knows this, too, but doesn’t tell him, also out of love? What are her feelings as she wheels him up over a curb, the heavy wheelchair barking her shin? What are his? What do these two say to one another in the dark?

And so on. One doesn’t have to ask if this older man and younger woman have produced the ideals of the Enlightenment in each other to be interested in what goes on between them or, possibly, to find meaning, resonance, and unexpected revelations in their story. Nor does one have to champion this pair and hand out narrative rewards in compensation for their cultural suffering—prejudice against the disabled, racism, homophobia. Maybe they live happily ever after, maybe they don’t; maybe the intimacy between them has revelations to offer about love, or maybe it doesn’t bear on love (or hate) at all. The Great Theme here at the end of the day could be art, it could be mortality and the power of time, it could be an inchoate dissonance between human beings that suggests the limits of intimacy, however strongly felt. It could also, as the conventions with which I began suggested, be a story of use. There’s no reason to take that off the table as a possibility. However, it isn’t the
only
possible story. In life, that isn’t the case; why should it be the case in art?

It was Oscar Wilde who quipped, “Life imitates Art far more than Art imitates Life.” Or, as Joan Didion put it in a kinder mode, “We tell ourselves stories in order to live.” When we come to the page hoping to reveal something about intimacy, it is all too easy to force the rough, wayward, polyphonous, uncertain nature of this phenomenon into shapes that we already know and then come to foregone conclusions. We are anxious about intimacy, we crave it and fear it, and as a culture we can have a low tolerance for its essentially mercurial nature. One of the quiet implications of Nan Goldin’s work, for instance, is the durational aspect of a photograph: it is the medium of the glimpse, the moment, the blink of an eye. Photographer and subject are linked in the image for a few seconds at best. Part of the pleasure of looking at her work is the viewer’s subliminal knowledge of this; it is the shadow and subtext of the human connections Goldin has spent her career composing.

One word for low-level writing about intimacy might be
sentimental,
a term that can apply equally to romance novels, to stories of the deaths of children from cancer, and to narratives about middle-aged male professors having affairs with female students. In any or many of these, and in other examples of sentimentality, the writer’s wishes and values override anything in the experience of the characters that doesn’t fit the writer’s fondest hopes: true love will prevail over every circumstance and result in marriage; the dying child will offer life wisdom to everyone around him; sex with the female student will be a mind-blowing, life-altering experience (for him). The emotions one might wish to have—enduring love, transcendence, lust—which are coincidentally the most socially acceptable emotions in each of their respective situations, are slathered thickly over the story, muffling the emotions that might be more complex, more resistant, more ambiguous. (J. M. Coetzee’s
Disgrace
is one of the few novels that comes to mind in which sex between a male professor and a female student is presented in complex double focus as an act of desperation and passion for him, and as a chillier, more coercive experience for her, yet one she chooses.) On the level of craft, this is a counterintuitive state of affairs—doesn’t every writer wish to be original?—but every writer is also a reader, and readers want to be gratified, particularly when it comes to matters of the heart. Intimacy is such an, as it were, intimate area that even as we long to look at it, we are afraid to look too long or too closely. It can be too vulnerable to bear the idea that negative capability is as constitutive of intimacy as it is of, say, artistic inspiration. And in the former, one is much more often naked, literally or figuratively or both.