the habit of being

When I arrived at the country escape of my lover, I was about six months along, and no one knew it. His wife and her friends sat outside at black metal tables on brick patios, drinking cocktails in the afternoon sun. I stayed mostly in my room, which had a window overlooking the back patio and the yards beyond it. The women knew I was up there, but they did not seem to know or care who I was, or why I was there. I knew all of their names, Sandrine and Belinda and so on, were because he told me, when he visited me upstairs. We would also talk about the baby’s name. It took a long time, but we decided on one.

When she was born, I could not think of the name we had chosen. I was too ashamed to admit that I did not know my daughter’s name, so I waited for my lover to use it. He did not. So I called her the baby, and waited.

Her name was not the only thing I didn’t know. In fact, I knew nothing at all. She had come very early, almost as soon as I arrived in the country, before I was ready. I thought I would break her. I was most afraid of her neck breaking from the weight of her head. My lover was much older than I was, and had had other children long ago. He showed me how to support her head when I held her. When I tried to copy him, I pressed too hard on the back of her neck and one of the bones of her skull, which had not yet fused, moved out of place. She had a protrusion on her forehead like a reptile, and I was horrified, thinking that I had ruined her. Her father was able to move the bone back into its correct position, to my great relief, and I did not make the mistake again.

After I could hold her confidently, all I wanted to do was to hold her, and to look at her. She was incredibly beautiful, even though she looked very much like me, and I never believed anyone who told me I was beautiful. I could also see how she resembled the photographs he had shown me of his other children. She was more obviously ours than I had expected, and I was happy with her. When she cried and woke me, I was excited to see her, no matter how little sleep I’d had. I was very happy. The only problem was that I could not remember her name, though I remembered very clearly that we had discussed it long and hard and had come to a decision. I knew that having forgotten meant something was the matter with me.

One first morning I took the baby downstairs, he came along and took her from me. There was an infant seat set out on the breakfast table, and he took her over to lay her down in it. I went to pour myself some tea, and presently all the women were up and about. Sandrine asked me whose cousin I was, and I said I didn’t know.

While I drank my tea, I forgot all about the baby. When I remembered her again, I couldn’t believe I could have ever stopped thinking about her for an instant, and I felt guilty for it. I walked back over to pick her up, but there was not an infant seat on the table at all. Why would there have been an infant seat there?

The only thing on the table was a brown cardboard box. The top of the box was open, and the baby was in the bottom. She was limp when I lifted her, and I stood there screaming and screaming. I ran around the house looking for him but he wasn’t there. I ran out on the porch and found his wife and demanded that she call him, that it was an emergency, that the baby was dead. I waited while she left him a voicemail.

All the women went inside and I waited out on the porch in one of the black chairs until he came back. Now everyone knew everything and no one came near me. At first I’d been sure it was me forgetting about her that had made it happen, but then I wasn’t so certain. He was the one who put her in the box. He was the one who didn’t want people to know. It was hours until I heard the car.

He walked up to me from behind and knelt down next my chair and said he was sorry. I asked if he was sure nothing bad had happened when he put her down, and he said he was sure, she was fine, and he gathered me up in his arms. I needed to hug someone, so I hugged him, but I did not believe it.

Today I read “Envy” by Kathryn Chetkovich. I was supposed to be doing other things, like studying, writing, laundry, but I haven’t gotten around to those things yet.

Last night I dreamt I went to hear Jonathan Franzen read and wound up sleeping with him. It turned out he had some sort of deformity, but in the end I was still begging him to autograph my copy of The Corrections. I’m sure this means something.

Before that, I was in a black livery cab on the way back to Manhattan from Westport, Connecticut, talking about Joan Didion with an older woman who is more successful that I can ever imagine being. Before that, I was at a birthday party, for another woman who is more successful than I can ever imagine being, considering whether I should make lobster an honorary vegetable for the night, considering that I don’t get invited to lobster bakes at yacht clubs all that often.

The previous night, I was at a dance performance about “girlishness” that was billed as “erotic and grotesque.” It was sortof an interesting concept, but it didn’t come together at all. The best part about it was a survey slipped into the program. One of the questions required me to check off which out of a long list of venues in the City I’d attended performances at over the last 12 months, and I checked off about ten different places, which made me feel great about my life, temporarily.

I feel like there is something seriously wrong with me. I’ve felt this way my entire life. I’ve come to realize it’s a common element of the so-called “artistic temperament,” but I’m left wondering if I would still act the way I sometimes do if I didn’t have this sinking suspicion that I’m innately crazy or immoral or otherwise fucked up. Or is it the fact that my behavior sometimes fails to fall in line with my better judgment that causes the feeling in the first place. Is it really not worth pondering since there’s nothing I can do about it, or is that way of thinking just another symptom?

I’m whitening my teeth at home. You squeeze this sticky bleachy stuff out of a little syringe into these trays that your dentist makes and wear them a couple hours a night. It seems to actually work, though I don’t have that celebrity smile just yet.

I am afraid of this being the year that disappeared. 2006 will be the first of many vanishing years, perhaps. Old people are always saying that time speeds by faster and faster. I am only 23, and already things that seem like yesterday are turning out to be last year, or even the year before that. It doesn’t help that I haven’t kept up my journal.

Why is that? I’m not entirely sure. In my early years of online-journalling (this was in the pre-blog days), this was something that sometimes happened: Suddenly, I was possessed to take down my site, leaving nothing but a splash page saying something about a “hiatus” and a link to email me (back then, people actually did). The typical length of such a hiatus was about six months, and I’d emerge on the other end of it with a new domain name (or at least a new design - Version 2.0 or somesuch) and what I thought to be a completely different persona.

Maybe I stopped writing here because I needed to grow a new ego. Or maybe it’s a combination of more mundane factors, like that I’ve been crazy-insane-busy. Back in February I was taking classes on frontal lobe functions and modern Indian history, editing the first story I’ve published in a national magazine (it came out in May, under a pseudonym), “finishing” my first scientific article (since then it’s been submitted, rejected, rewritten, resubmitted, lather, rinse, repeat), and sleeping with my best friend, among other things. The City was beginning to open up for me in big ways, and I was seeing a lot of dance and theatre for the first time. I also tend to get kindof SAD-ish in February, though this year it hit hardest in March.

I stopped sleeping with my friend and fell for a tall man with a Russian accent. I wrote manic emails like this:

I spent most of yesterday leading a gallery tour in Chelsea for the prospective graduate students, and then I went shopping in Soho and found this soft white dress that is so amazing and pretty that I spent $140 on it without even blinking, and this whole time it was freezing out and windy and I wasn’t dressed well enough. Buying the dress made me late for meeting the Russian boy at the bar in the IFC, so I called and was all apologizing and still wound up taking the wrong subway and having to walk a long way in the freezing cold and being even later, but I got there and he was all smiling at me and wanting to see the dress and hugging me and getting me some vodka to warm me up. And then we saw Manderlay which is incredibly intense and terrible and beautiful and we held hands the whole time and when it was over we were both just completely blown away and loved it and felt like the only people in the world who could see a completely disturbing film like that and come out of it excited and talking about how we’re going to make things like that someday. We went to the Belgian beer bar on West 4th and I impressed him with my knowing which beers were the best and we sat in a corner and had this whole conversation about world politics, and, still beaming about the movie, he kept touching my hair and we’d kiss and my hair would get in our mouths but it wasn’t even weird and he’s this amazing kisser. We wanted to go somewhere not so loud but we both live far away from there and it was so cold so I said, “We could go to my lab. It’s a few blocks away” and he said “Really? Okay. Let’s go.” So we stopped and got more beer to smuggle in and I took him to the Psychology building and up to the lab and he was asking all about my job and I swear to God I did not think we were going to have sex… Then we got dressed and were drinking beer and eating my Valentine’s Godiva my mom had sent which was still in the lab and a grad student I knew walked in but I just gave her some chocolate and it was fine. We talked and talked about my work and his work and I asked him why he’s not married and he told me about being engaged when he was about my age but it didn’t work out and they don’t talk anymore and if he’d married her he’d never be doing the things he is now…

And then he never called me again and I started reading The Rules and reciting them to all my friends on a regular basis. I made a proclamation — “No more telling them my whole traumatic life history. No more letting them read my writing. No more sex on the second date. Fuck being honest. I want to get married.” — and I then proceeded to stop dating altogether. I fought a war against bedbugs. My lab got a big grant from the NIH and I got a MacBook Pro. In March, I went to visit my parents, who had just moved to Louisville, Kentucky, and my mother and I had our first mint juleps and derby pie at The Brown. In April, I got my wisdom teeth pulled and discovered that The Double Life of Véronique is probably the best movie ever made. In May, I presented a poster at the Vision Sciences Society conference in Sarasota, saw my writing in Barnes and Noble, and had a birthday. At some point, I re-decided not to get a Ph.D. in neural science or psychology. In June, I landed a room in a West Village apartment owned by a 50-something Buddhist ex-dental hygeinist, but I didn’t move out of my old apartment in Astoria until July. I watched my ex-lover and his wife haul pieces of my antique bed down four flights of stairs and into a sudden rain-storm. I took a summer fiction workshop, and, reluctantly, wrote short stories. I decided I really want to get an MFA in writing. I dreamt that I took out my own heart and lungs and zipped them up in a transplant bag, but did not die. In August, my goldfish with no name died, almost exactly a year after I got it. I got a visa to Russia, where I will be giving a talk on my research in St. Petersburg next week. One Sunday, I wrote for 18 hours straight, and was incredibly happy. The next Saturday, I walked for miles and took hundreds of photographs. And then, I started to miss my website.

At night, the breeze from my open window rolls over me and I cannot stop thinking. It’s as though I have not thought in three years and my mind is playing catch-up. I fall asleep in the bed of my creative youth and wake each morning, early, though there is noplace yet to be. I am anxious and excited. This is the city of my undoing, which I fail to understand.

I’ve left a studio for a laboratory and I embrace it so. I am starved for science, for study, for focus. Here, I am studying perception.

Spark plugs long dead in my head are being replaced. First, I realize the numbness, the frost that has fallen, and it seems I am back here to shake myself out of it, as children shake snow-covered tree limbs.

I don’t know when it was that I stopped talking about the Catastrophe, when I stopped thinking about it, when I simplified it so far that it did not even seem real anymore. Still, five minutes spent reviewing the minute details of two years ago send me shaking and questioning who I am. I cannot pretend to be my pre-traumatic self, even here, even with all the change, the capacity for false starting over, the return of so many feaures that composed my life Before.

I never expected anyone else to understand what happened to me and my first love, as our fantasy crashed into a desert of obsession, manipulation, intense isolation. I lived out my very nightmares in attempt to resurrect our dream. Only my mother, who was most hurt by it, seems to show any comprehesion of the state I was in. It is because I do not fully comprehend it myself that I do not seem to be able to get over it, but instead push it under the rug so that I cannot dwell on it anymore.

I separated myself from that misery so that I could carry on, regain composure, but somehow in the process I cut myself away from all the heightened senses which created such a strong experience in the first place. “What happened to your sincerity?” I was asked, after all that time on the road.

“What happened to your art?” I ask myself now, both afraid to dig up the old gnarly roots, and afraid not to.

Meanwhile, my mother has dreamt that I had a child. A baby girl who was long and who talked at three months. The best dream ever, she says. I put my two middle fingers in the baby’s mouth and a wave of happiness shot through my mother which lasted far into the next morning. When she told me about this, I almost cried, but smiled instead.

I wake up some mornings frantic, unable to place the last time I used a tampon. Sometimes this sudden memory lapse happens in the middle of the afternoon. Always, two days later, I’m waiting in line at CVS with a pregnancy test in my hand, no matter how unlikely it is.

A girlfriend told me once, she was going through this same routine, trying to avoid looking the salesgirl in the face, and, out of the blue, the woman said “Good luck!” and gave her a big smile. She found then that she’d crossed a line. She’s now someone who looks like she could be a mother.

All I’ve ever gotten is an “Um. Do you want a bag for that?”

I’ve lost count of how many negative pregnancy tests I’ve had in the last two years. It’s a ritual for me, just a regular part of my sex life now, and invariably there’s disappointment mixed in with my relief.

They didn’t mention this in the “After Your Abortion” pamphlet.

. . .

I know that I am getting older, because I am able to go for longer and longer periods of time without expecting things from people, emotionally.

I’ll find myself crying with my arms around my knees, wanting someone to please do something about it, and it will seem like I’m acting out a scene from my youth. It’s a sort of nostalgia for neediness.

Somewhere along the line I started getting more interested in other people’s problems.

Still, “Why can’t anyone help me?” and “Why can’t I help anyone?” feel remarkably similar running through my head over and over.

. . .

I dream about war crimes now, but it still doesn’t seem like enough. I cannot keep away from this pornography. I even seek out the images they won’t show on TV. A man. A murder. A lonesome head. Unaccustomed to such acts, I think of the playing card Queen. Her court scorned and hooded. Maybe I am lucky that this scene is more surreal than I can process. A head without a body makes for only a fairy tale to me. But what more can such a media spectacle be? I think I’d rather have the prison sodomy pictures than this beheading. That I could at least begin to relate to. That would look more real.

. . .

I have too much hope for my words now. I cannot even birth a thoughtless paragraph. Before I knew meditation as a practice of watching thoughts come and letting them go by, I did this almost constantly with a pen in my hand. It was so easy, not knowing enough to try. I could put the nib to the line and the words would come up and go out so completely that I could barely remember them a few lines later. I wrote with such a fever and such aloofness that I did not recognize my own clauses the next day. Writing was an intoxicant this way, and yet it was calm. Thoughts got slurry, disjointed, metaphorical. One sentence did not necessarily have any obvious connection to the next. Images came to me which were not there during ordinary life. In those days, I thought of the written me as the “real” me, the unfiltered me, the authentic me.

Now I try to create such feelings with alcohol and love affairs, as I suppose I was always destined to do, but I find it was so much better have an addiction which produced something, even if only scribbles in a now-forgotten secret code.