Aperçu Plus the Black Bobby Kennedy
Nov. 8th, 2008 03:01 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
mallorys_cameraAperçu is an actual plot point in Sue Miller's The Senator's Wife. Aperçu – something more than an aphorism, something less than an insight. It's that shimmer through of personal information into what is otherwise a lighthearted, impersonal conversation about the weather, about gas prices, about the corn crop in Ghana. It generally precedes an uncomfortable silence during which the other party to the dialog is thinking, did they really want me to know that about them? Should I acknowledge what they've just said? Always concluding, Nah-h-h-h.
Aperçu – one of my favorite words. I just don't get a chance to use it very often.
###
Last night I dropped Robin off in Santa Cruz to meet up with Max.
A similar plan had backfired last weekend.
It backfired while Max and I discussed Robin transfer logistics over the phone. "So what are you guys gonna be doing anyway?" I asked.
He told me.
After a beat, I said, "So let me get this straight. You want to take Robin to Aaron's Halloween party? You have got to be kidding. Why wasn't I told about this before?"
"Mom," said Max self-righteously. "It's not my place to rat Robin out to you. If you're having trust issues with Robin, deal with them yourself."
"I will. But why would you ever think it's okay to take two fourteen year olds" – Wells was part of the package – "to a party where I assume there will be alcohol and drugs in abundance and no inhibitions whatsoever about showing off imbibing? That is really irresponsible of you."
This put Max on the defensive. There followed an unpleasant exchange of words and emails, a coolness that lasted until Election Day Night when mutual adoration of The One made all lions everywhere eager to lie down with a lamb. Baaaaaaa!
Robin was surprisingly easy to deflect. Turned out he would much rather trick or treat for candy with his friends than drink or drop acid. He stayed over at Jo-Jo's house. They played x-box till five in the morning.
"What was your costume?" I asked him Sunday when he finally came home.
"I was a serial killer on a tri-state crime spree," he told me. "I wore a ski mask."
O-kay.
This was my costume. Not very imaginative either if it comes to that. But picturesque.
One of the things Max told me when we were fighting was that I should butt the fuck out of his relationship with Robin. I could see some logic to that. So I was surprised when Robin told me about the Friday assignation.
There is no direct public transportation route from Monterey to Santa Cruz. Robin would have had to take three separate buses to get there. Of course when I was Robin's age I loved public transportation and would often ride buses to the end of the line, just to see where they were going. But then, I was a weird teenager.
I was happy to drive him to Santa Cruz, I told Robin. But I wanted him to go to karate.
Two years ago, Dr. H told me that karate was a battle I could never win. I understood where Dr. H was coming from but I'm stubborn, unyielding and ill-advised. Thing is I worry so much about Robin. He's so brilliant – and so undisciplined. Karate is really the only thing he's done consistently in his life, and he's half-assed about it. But if he can get a a black belt by the time he's 16, at least he'll have that to fall back on if he flunks out of college. It worked for Steven Seagal, right? You too can be a Chungdrag Dorje in your spare time!
At 6pm I dropped Robin off at the dojo. At 6:45pm I drove back to the dojo to pick him up for the drive to Santa Cruz. I was early so I settled back in the car, flicked on the radio: Marketplace on NPR. Layaway is making a comeback. Most unaccountably though the unemployment figures that came out today are abysmal, stock market went up close to 3%. (So it's true then: rich people gain confidence when poor people suffer.) Also the Big 3 car manufacturers are going hat in hand to Washington to beg alms from Nancy Pelosi – now, bailing out the American auto industry makes a lot more sense to me than bailing out the strange and sinister American International Group, but only if some kind of incentive structure is embedded into the deal to make buying American more attractive to consumers than buying Japanese –
Restlessly I fantasized about the font face The New York Times would use when it printed my inspirational and insightful letter to the editor –
And then Robin emerged from a store on the wrong side of the street.
Huh?
I jumped out of the car to confront him as he crossed the street. "What's going on, Robin? Did you go to karate?"
"Of course," said Robin smoothly. "I bowed out early. Just the way you told me to."
"So if I go in there and ask Mr. Durney whether you were in class, he'll say, 'Yes'?"
"Sure," said Robin. Such an angelic face that boy has. And the longest eye lashes in the world.
"Great," I say. Seized the miscreant by the collar, pushed open the door to the dojo –
"All right! I didn't go." Robin spat the words out at me, scowling, as though I was the one who'd done something wrong. Peter Quint, you devil!
Mommy found herself straddling the horns of a big fat dilemma here. One way or another the seat of her pants was gonna get ripped to shreds. On the one hand, driving Robin to Santa Cruz to hang out with the big brother he adores hardly constitutes punishment. On the other, if I canceled the trip then I was screwing with Max's schedule too.
In the end, I decided to take away Robin's computer for a week and make him go to six (count 'em!) karate classes next week.
And drove him to Santa Cruz.
In the car I turned on the radio. NPR was conducting an Obama love fest on one of its call-in shows. "It's kind of like he's the Bobby Kennedy I never got a chance to know," sniveled Alan from Berkeley. "Except he's the black Bobby Kennedy –"
I clicked off the radio.
"I said I was sorry," hissed Robin.
"Maybe you can grow up to be the white Obama!" I said. "But not if you keep lying to your mother."
"I wasn't in the mood to go to karate!"
"And that is relevant how exactly?"
"What do you mean?"
I sighed. "Robin, you're fourteen. That means you're on the threshold of legal adulthood. Yes, being an adult is all about the big fun! You get to stand on line at the DMV! You get to apply for credit cars and buy all kinds of things you don't really need with money you don't really have! And let's not forget pubic hair –"
"Mo-om!"
"But see, here's the thing – a great deal of adulthood is about doing things you're not in the mood to do."
"What's the big deal with karate? I'll go next week."
"I'll tell you what the big deal is with karate – it's the only thing you've ever done consistently in your whole life. I worry about you, Robin. I worry about you a lot. You have no self-discipline."
"I have self-discipline!"
"I haven't seen it, Robin."
"I hate you," said Robin furiously. He started to reach for the radio button.
"You know when I was your age, I didn't believe that other people were real," I said. "I kind of thought they were – well. Not robots exactly. But I was the one telling the story, they were just sort of in the story. You ever feel that way?"
"Sort of," Robin said.
"And because I was the one telling the story, the good things that stories are always about would all happen to me without my having to lift a finger. I was special, you see, and the universe had to recognize that."
I looked at Robin out of the corner of my eye. He'd turned his head towards me, appeared to be listening.
"One day I woke up and I don't know why but it dawned on me that every single person in the world feels exactly the same way, that they're the ones telling the story. They all have inner lives and their inner lives are just as intense as mine."
"But they're not –" Robin began. And stopped.
"But they are," I said. "That's the mystery of consciousness. It was weird. Before that I was a pretty nasty person, but after that I found I couldn't be randomly mean any more. I mean, you know, I can be mean – but only if it's part of a strategy, only if there's a bigger purpose behind it. I can't be mean for fun anymore. I can't make fun of people. I just don't enjoy it.
"Robin, when I say you have no self-discipline, I'm not saying it to hurt your feelings. I honestly worry about you, Robin. We're so much alike. I want your life to be so much better than mine has been. Can you see that, Robin? Can you understand that?"
"Yes," he mumbled.
"What's your father's worst character trait?"
I didn't have to look at him to see the grimace on Robin's face. "He lies about stuff."
"Your father is a really, really brilliant man," I told Robin. "I think his lying is the reason why he's never accomplished anything in his life. It was always so much easier to lie about something than to do it."
"Would you… Would you have stayed with Dad if I hadn't asked you to?"
"No," I said.
After that, the conversation lightened up considerably. By the time we got to the rendezvous point – Gayle's Bakery in Capitola – we were laughing up a storm. "Remember the time you took me here and I wouldn't eat because I wanted pizza?" he said.
"Vaguely," I say.
"I was just trying to see if I could get you to do what I wanted by throwing a tantrum."
"And did you succeed?"
"No," he laughed. "You told me I was an ungrateful brat and made me sit in the car."
We had a croissant and an apricot hazelnut muffin (fabulous!) Max showed up 15 minutes later in his People For the Eating of Tasty Animals teeshirt. Odd. Max became a vegetarian two months ago for a poetry rap class he's taking, the only break in his science grind. Why Max wants to be a scientist is a great mystery to me since if ever anyone was born to be a lawyer, it's Max. I still remember on that Vision Quest cum Lord of the Flies adventure he did over his sixteenth birthday how he was the one urging governance to the other members of his group rather than haphazard touch and go: "We need to sit down together and figure our where to dig latrines, how we should rotate meal preparation –"
"Did they listen to you?" I asked.
He laughed. "Some of them did."
Also Max can out-argue anyone on the planet. At his middle school graduation party – hosted by the ultra-rich Newells, I almost didn't go – one of his teachers, Mr. Sigourney, came up to me: "He's intimidates me a little, that one. Has anyone else ever said that to you about Max? He's just so smart. I mean, that's good but hell, he's only 14 years old –"
"You've lost weight," I told Max. "Are you gonna stick with this vegetarian thing after the class is over?"
"I might," he said mildly.
To think that just two years before he was Deep Springs' butcher!
I surrendered Robin to the stewardship of his brother and took off. The ride home was ultra scary – I'm a timid driver at the best of times, my night vision has really deteriorated. What seemed like Tule fogging was rising from the Elkhorn marshes – I literally could not see ten feet in front of me. I crept along the two-lane road at 40 miles per hour, my hazard blinkers on, a long line of cars in back of me all desperate to pass me so they could go back to doing 75. Fuck 'em! I don't take it as an article of faith that there's a white line on the side of the road unless I can actually see a white line on the side of the road.
Finally after two sleepless nights, I slept last night without awakening every two hours. The price I had to pay was dreaming…
I dreamed of Montour Falls.
I dreamed of that house I loved in the early days of my second marriage when I also loved my husband, Robin's father. The house had been built in the mid part of the nineteenth century along neo-classical lines. It was right in front of a semi-famous waterfall; a rusty historical marker that informed the bypasser, She-Qua-Ga, "Tumbling Waters." A sketch now in the Louvre made about 1820 by Louis Philippe, later King of France.
The house had been for sale back then at a price that seemed to me, brainwashed by California's inflated prices, remarkably inexpensive: $50,000.
We were spending the summer in western upstate New York, Ben and I. That part of the state, close to the Pennsylvania border, is filled with ghosts of a prosperous past, the middle part of the nineteenth century when the Eerie Canal was the preeminent commercial waterway and everyone in these parts was rich and getting richer. All that remains of that prosperity today are these strange little boarded up towns filled with empty, rotting mansions, their Tiffany stained glass windows agleam in the long setting of the sun. This was one of them.
So much of our billing and cooing that summer was centered around the fantasy of buying that house. We'd fix it up – two studies, we were both writers, Ben was going to be commercially successful, I was going to write for The New Yorker.
"It's because I can do dialog," Ben told me. "That's my gift. You do these incredible sentence constructions. That's your gift."
We'd write all day, we'd make love all night. He didn't like it when I used the word "fuck" to describe what we did with our bodies. "We don't fuck," he'd whisper, drawing out of me slightly so he could balance on his elbows, look into my eyes. "That's something you did with other people. You fucked them. You make love to me."
I woke up and thought immediately: you will never see that house again. Not "I" will never see that house again. "You" will never see that house again. Who was narrating? Of course, Nancy's dead. There's no reason for me ever to go back to upstate New York. But the thought filled me with deep sadness. Another postcard for the catalog of all the things I've lost.
Except, of course, it wasn't lost. I typed "Montour Falls" on Flickr and there it was! I ran the photo through Lucis art so I could post it here without the phtographer's permission.
Someone bought the house. Someone painted the house white. Someone turned the house into – what else? – a bed and breakfast. They probably regret the purchase: I doubt the B&B ever has any living guests and ghosts don't pay in cash.
I would have regretted the purchase too. For a different reason.
Aperçu – one of my favorite words. I just don't get a chance to use it very often.
Last night I dropped Robin off in Santa Cruz to meet up with Max.
A similar plan had backfired last weekend.
It backfired while Max and I discussed Robin transfer logistics over the phone. "So what are you guys gonna be doing anyway?" I asked.
He told me.
After a beat, I said, "So let me get this straight. You want to take Robin to Aaron's Halloween party? You have got to be kidding. Why wasn't I told about this before?"
"Mom," said Max self-righteously. "It's not my place to rat Robin out to you. If you're having trust issues with Robin, deal with them yourself."
"I will. But why would you ever think it's okay to take two fourteen year olds" – Wells was part of the package – "to a party where I assume there will be alcohol and drugs in abundance and no inhibitions whatsoever about showing off imbibing? That is really irresponsible of you."
This put Max on the defensive. There followed an unpleasant exchange of words and emails, a coolness that lasted until Election Day Night when mutual adoration of The One made all lions everywhere eager to lie down with a lamb. Baaaaaaa!
Robin was surprisingly easy to deflect. Turned out he would much rather trick or treat for candy with his friends than drink or drop acid. He stayed over at Jo-Jo's house. They played x-box till five in the morning.
"What was your costume?" I asked him Sunday when he finally came home.
"I was a serial killer on a tri-state crime spree," he told me. "I wore a ski mask."
O-kay.
This was my costume. Not very imaginative either if it comes to that. But picturesque.
One of the things Max told me when we were fighting was that I should butt the fuck out of his relationship with Robin. I could see some logic to that. So I was surprised when Robin told me about the Friday assignation.
There is no direct public transportation route from Monterey to Santa Cruz. Robin would have had to take three separate buses to get there. Of course when I was Robin's age I loved public transportation and would often ride buses to the end of the line, just to see where they were going. But then, I was a weird teenager.
I was happy to drive him to Santa Cruz, I told Robin. But I wanted him to go to karate.
Two years ago, Dr. H told me that karate was a battle I could never win. I understood where Dr. H was coming from but I'm stubborn, unyielding and ill-advised. Thing is I worry so much about Robin. He's so brilliant – and so undisciplined. Karate is really the only thing he's done consistently in his life, and he's half-assed about it. But if he can get a a black belt by the time he's 16, at least he'll have that to fall back on if he flunks out of college. It worked for Steven Seagal, right? You too can be a Chungdrag Dorje in your spare time!
At 6pm I dropped Robin off at the dojo. At 6:45pm I drove back to the dojo to pick him up for the drive to Santa Cruz. I was early so I settled back in the car, flicked on the radio: Marketplace on NPR. Layaway is making a comeback. Most unaccountably though the unemployment figures that came out today are abysmal, stock market went up close to 3%. (So it's true then: rich people gain confidence when poor people suffer.) Also the Big 3 car manufacturers are going hat in hand to Washington to beg alms from Nancy Pelosi – now, bailing out the American auto industry makes a lot more sense to me than bailing out the strange and sinister American International Group, but only if some kind of incentive structure is embedded into the deal to make buying American more attractive to consumers than buying Japanese –
Restlessly I fantasized about the font face The New York Times would use when it printed my inspirational and insightful letter to the editor –
And then Robin emerged from a store on the wrong side of the street.
Huh?
I jumped out of the car to confront him as he crossed the street. "What's going on, Robin? Did you go to karate?"
"Of course," said Robin smoothly. "I bowed out early. Just the way you told me to."
"So if I go in there and ask Mr. Durney whether you were in class, he'll say, 'Yes'?"
"Sure," said Robin. Such an angelic face that boy has. And the longest eye lashes in the world.
"Great," I say. Seized the miscreant by the collar, pushed open the door to the dojo –
"All right! I didn't go." Robin spat the words out at me, scowling, as though I was the one who'd done something wrong. Peter Quint, you devil!
Mommy found herself straddling the horns of a big fat dilemma here. One way or another the seat of her pants was gonna get ripped to shreds. On the one hand, driving Robin to Santa Cruz to hang out with the big brother he adores hardly constitutes punishment. On the other, if I canceled the trip then I was screwing with Max's schedule too.
In the end, I decided to take away Robin's computer for a week and make him go to six (count 'em!) karate classes next week.
And drove him to Santa Cruz.
In the car I turned on the radio. NPR was conducting an Obama love fest on one of its call-in shows. "It's kind of like he's the Bobby Kennedy I never got a chance to know," sniveled Alan from Berkeley. "Except he's the black Bobby Kennedy –"
I clicked off the radio.
"I said I was sorry," hissed Robin.
"Maybe you can grow up to be the white Obama!" I said. "But not if you keep lying to your mother."
"I wasn't in the mood to go to karate!"
"And that is relevant how exactly?"
"What do you mean?"
I sighed. "Robin, you're fourteen. That means you're on the threshold of legal adulthood. Yes, being an adult is all about the big fun! You get to stand on line at the DMV! You get to apply for credit cars and buy all kinds of things you don't really need with money you don't really have! And let's not forget pubic hair –"
"Mo-om!"
"But see, here's the thing – a great deal of adulthood is about doing things you're not in the mood to do."
"What's the big deal with karate? I'll go next week."
"I'll tell you what the big deal is with karate – it's the only thing you've ever done consistently in your whole life. I worry about you, Robin. I worry about you a lot. You have no self-discipline."
"I have self-discipline!"
"I haven't seen it, Robin."
"I hate you," said Robin furiously. He started to reach for the radio button.
"You know when I was your age, I didn't believe that other people were real," I said. "I kind of thought they were – well. Not robots exactly. But I was the one telling the story, they were just sort of in the story. You ever feel that way?"
"Sort of," Robin said.
"And because I was the one telling the story, the good things that stories are always about would all happen to me without my having to lift a finger. I was special, you see, and the universe had to recognize that."
I looked at Robin out of the corner of my eye. He'd turned his head towards me, appeared to be listening.
"One day I woke up and I don't know why but it dawned on me that every single person in the world feels exactly the same way, that they're the ones telling the story. They all have inner lives and their inner lives are just as intense as mine."
"But they're not –" Robin began. And stopped.
"But they are," I said. "That's the mystery of consciousness. It was weird. Before that I was a pretty nasty person, but after that I found I couldn't be randomly mean any more. I mean, you know, I can be mean – but only if it's part of a strategy, only if there's a bigger purpose behind it. I can't be mean for fun anymore. I can't make fun of people. I just don't enjoy it.
"Robin, when I say you have no self-discipline, I'm not saying it to hurt your feelings. I honestly worry about you, Robin. We're so much alike. I want your life to be so much better than mine has been. Can you see that, Robin? Can you understand that?"
"Yes," he mumbled.
"What's your father's worst character trait?"
I didn't have to look at him to see the grimace on Robin's face. "He lies about stuff."
"Your father is a really, really brilliant man," I told Robin. "I think his lying is the reason why he's never accomplished anything in his life. It was always so much easier to lie about something than to do it."
"Would you… Would you have stayed with Dad if I hadn't asked you to?"
"No," I said.
After that, the conversation lightened up considerably. By the time we got to the rendezvous point – Gayle's Bakery in Capitola – we were laughing up a storm. "Remember the time you took me here and I wouldn't eat because I wanted pizza?" he said.
"Vaguely," I say.
"I was just trying to see if I could get you to do what I wanted by throwing a tantrum."
"And did you succeed?"
"No," he laughed. "You told me I was an ungrateful brat and made me sit in the car."
We had a croissant and an apricot hazelnut muffin (fabulous!) Max showed up 15 minutes later in his People For the Eating of Tasty Animals teeshirt. Odd. Max became a vegetarian two months ago for a poetry rap class he's taking, the only break in his science grind. Why Max wants to be a scientist is a great mystery to me since if ever anyone was born to be a lawyer, it's Max. I still remember on that Vision Quest cum Lord of the Flies adventure he did over his sixteenth birthday how he was the one urging governance to the other members of his group rather than haphazard touch and go: "We need to sit down together and figure our where to dig latrines, how we should rotate meal preparation –"
"Did they listen to you?" I asked.
He laughed. "Some of them did."
Also Max can out-argue anyone on the planet. At his middle school graduation party – hosted by the ultra-rich Newells, I almost didn't go – one of his teachers, Mr. Sigourney, came up to me: "He's intimidates me a little, that one. Has anyone else ever said that to you about Max? He's just so smart. I mean, that's good but hell, he's only 14 years old –"
"You've lost weight," I told Max. "Are you gonna stick with this vegetarian thing after the class is over?"
"I might," he said mildly.
To think that just two years before he was Deep Springs' butcher!
I surrendered Robin to the stewardship of his brother and took off. The ride home was ultra scary – I'm a timid driver at the best of times, my night vision has really deteriorated. What seemed like Tule fogging was rising from the Elkhorn marshes – I literally could not see ten feet in front of me. I crept along the two-lane road at 40 miles per hour, my hazard blinkers on, a long line of cars in back of me all desperate to pass me so they could go back to doing 75. Fuck 'em! I don't take it as an article of faith that there's a white line on the side of the road unless I can actually see a white line on the side of the road.
Finally after two sleepless nights, I slept last night without awakening every two hours. The price I had to pay was dreaming…
I dreamed of Montour Falls.
I dreamed of that house I loved in the early days of my second marriage when I also loved my husband, Robin's father. The house had been built in the mid part of the nineteenth century along neo-classical lines. It was right in front of a semi-famous waterfall; a rusty historical marker that informed the bypasser, She-Qua-Ga, "Tumbling Waters." A sketch now in the Louvre made about 1820 by Louis Philippe, later King of France.
The house had been for sale back then at a price that seemed to me, brainwashed by California's inflated prices, remarkably inexpensive: $50,000.
We were spending the summer in western upstate New York, Ben and I. That part of the state, close to the Pennsylvania border, is filled with ghosts of a prosperous past, the middle part of the nineteenth century when the Eerie Canal was the preeminent commercial waterway and everyone in these parts was rich and getting richer. All that remains of that prosperity today are these strange little boarded up towns filled with empty, rotting mansions, their Tiffany stained glass windows agleam in the long setting of the sun. This was one of them.
So much of our billing and cooing that summer was centered around the fantasy of buying that house. We'd fix it up – two studies, we were both writers, Ben was going to be commercially successful, I was going to write for The New Yorker.
"It's because I can do dialog," Ben told me. "That's my gift. You do these incredible sentence constructions. That's your gift."
We'd write all day, we'd make love all night. He didn't like it when I used the word "fuck" to describe what we did with our bodies. "We don't fuck," he'd whisper, drawing out of me slightly so he could balance on his elbows, look into my eyes. "That's something you did with other people. You fucked them. You make love to me."
I woke up and thought immediately: you will never see that house again. Not "I" will never see that house again. "You" will never see that house again. Who was narrating? Of course, Nancy's dead. There's no reason for me ever to go back to upstate New York. But the thought filled me with deep sadness. Another postcard for the catalog of all the things I've lost.
Except, of course, it wasn't lost. I typed "Montour Falls" on Flickr and there it was! I ran the photo through Lucis art so I could post it here without the phtographer's permission.
Someone bought the house. Someone painted the house white. Someone turned the house into – what else? – a bed and breakfast. They probably regret the purchase: I doubt the B&B ever has any living guests and ghosts don't pay in cash.
I would have regretted the purchase too. For a different reason.
