Mallory's Camera

Got a powerful hankering to reread Moving On last night. I've already reread all 728 pages at least three times but not for the past 20 years or so.

Alas! The epub was only available through Amazon, which, of course, I hate and have vowed a mighty oath never, ever to use.

But what are you going to do when you have an itch that only Amazon can scratch?

Reader, I bought it.

The $8.88 I spent will pay for approximately one-half of a bolt on Bezos's yacht.

Maybe it's the bolt that will break and sink the whole fucking thing.

A girl can dream.

###

Moving On is a deeply flawed novel, which I kinda knew even the first time I read it in the McGill University library stacks so very, very long ago while the golden light poured through dusty windows. (What I didn't know was how profligate I was being in wasting my youth.)

But if you're ever trying to figure out why people who live in Texas—or who once lived in Texas—love Texas, it is the novel to read. Moving On drips Texas.

It doesn't have much of a plot.

It's a more or less aimless chronicle of three years in the life of a highly annoying character named Patsy Carpenter who is Jacy Farrow with an education: Pretty—though McMurtry has a hard time describing her prettiness, which is weird because McMurtry is very good at describing un-pretty characters. Entitled. Rich. Reads a lot—this is how McMurtry tries to make the character endearing; it doesn't work.

Patsy Carpenter has the worst dialogue of any character in any McMurtry novel.

I kept trying to hear the dialogue as I skimmed the quotation marks on the page, but honestly, that's not possible. Nobody talks like that no matter how pretty, entitled, rich, well-read, and pert they are.

Patsy's dialogue, too, is kind of a mystery because McMurtry is known for his realistic dialogue, and indeed, the other Moving On characters—with the exception of the Los Angeles contingent, Joe Percy, who is thrown in to provide deus ex machina—speak very realistically.

What Moving On has going for it, though, is that somehow its characters and the things that happen to them lodge in the same part of your brain as actual people you know and the things that happen to them. It's a very strange and unique literary alchemy that has something to do with the bemused, third-person narrative voice. (If I were writing a Ph.D. thesis on the works of Larry McMurtry, I'd go to greater lengths in my analysis.) Reading Moving On, I kept wondering: What if I were a Larry McMurtry character? What kind of novel would Larry McMurtry write about me?

###

Anyway, I got about a third of the way through the book and so stayed up much later than I ordinarily do. When I finally slept, I dreamed about Marybeth: We had a horrible fight because I had taken her diary—a leather-bound volume with pages and pages of neat, blue-ballpoint script—and done something so bad to it that we stopped speaking. (In real life, Marybeth and I also stopped speaking, but we never had a horrible fight because I never could articulate exactly what she'd done to me—though I felt it, I felt it.)

Today I must Remunerate as soon as I get back from the transfer station, which I must go to because Icky is too cheap to pay for garbage service.

Also, fresh-faced little Brian finally passed along the right password to the Adrienne-4-Ulster-County SquareSpace account, so I'm gonna try and finish that website by the end of the weekend.

Dreamed the old volleyball gang—which over the years kinda morphed into the Big Bash collective—was publishing a magazine with state-of-the-art printing technology invented by Steve R_______.

We were all still young.

Marybeth informed me with the deliberate carelessness that was always oh! such a studied effect with her that Nef had been chosen to edit the thing.

Nef! I thought. That shallow, empty-headed poseur?

Of course, I would have been a better choice to edit it, to write every single piece in it if it came to that, but it wasn’t likely I would be picked seeing as how I was no longer on speaking terms with most of those people. (Which is true in Real Life, too.)

Maybe, I could write a piece or two, Marybeth continued.

And I was torn between the desire to be represented in this exciting and bound-to-be-successful-‘cause-the-R_______-were-doing-it endeavor and the desire to shout, Fuck all of you! at the top of my lungs.

Then I was talking to one of the magazine people, I think Ruth, except in Real Life, Ruth is an exceptionally nice human being whereas this person in the dream was shallow and undeserving. The dream-Ruth lived in a dream-San Francisco, which was not the real San Francisco, in a mega-million-dollar house at the bottom of a tall hill. And she was telling me how she grew all her own vegetables.

And I woke up.

###

I more-or-less did nothing yesterday except read and Remunerate.

Guilt began to creep in in the early afternoon.

But the sky was pewter grey, and the landscape was shadowless, and honestly—who wants to go tromping in that?

In the evening, Ichabod texted me to tell me that someone had found his Stanford diploma and a bunch of my old diaries.

(Those diaries had comprised several black bags worth of garbage in the purloined UHaul.)

Damn! I thought. Now I’m gonna have to keep those diaries.

Because the diaries have obviously gone to a lot of trouble not to be destroyed.

###

It’s supposed to rain buckets today. A Nor’easter except without snow. The governors of New York and New Jersey have declared proactive States of Emergency.

Thursday Night Film Series continue dernier soir avec Entre les Murs, une film intéressante si elle n'est pas particulièrement amusant. I actually thought it was a documentary. Although I’d never heard of it before, apparently it won the Palme d'Or at Cannes in 2008 and was the French Oscar nominee for Best Foreign Film, which just goes to show you how up I am on all things cultural. (Not, in other words.)

Film chronicled a year in a middle school in the 20th arrondisement. French education has changed a lot since Zero Pour Conduit or even Les Quatre Cents Coups (one of my all-time favorite movies) – now it resembles education in Oakland or inner city Los Angeles or even (gasp!) Monterey with Africans subbing for Mexicans. That was the most fascinating part of the film for me, watching how the ever flickering internecine classroom feuds among the different nationalities – Berber Moslems from Morroco, black Moslems from the Republic of Mali, black Christians from Martinique – could be pushed aside when dealing with a common enemy i.e. the teacher. Student actors were very good – I had a hard time believing they were working from any kind of script.

Film was frustrating to watch because the teacher was such an awful teacher. Serious boundary issues there.

Afterwards Marybeth and I got pleasantly drunk at the nearly empty nearby Jack’s, and she described her student teaching assignment in the heart of Oakland – “So there I was crying hysterically in the bathroom, and my Master Teacher just shook her head. ‘The problem is you’re trying to be their friend. Tomorrow go in there and be Adolph Fucking Hitler.’ And that’s exactly what I did and it worked. And that’s exactly what I’ve done ever since.”

Marybeth and Kim are going to Paris in April and I am going to house sit which is beyond perfect – they have one of my favorite houses in the world.

I also got the Marybeth seal of approval for my future plans. “Traveling with the circus sounds wonderful to me! In fact, I’m jealous. No, Patty, no – you have worked and worked and worked and worked your ass off these past six years. You need a break. Just do one thing for me – get a video camera and make a movie about the circus! Even without any film making experience, you should be able to make a movie at least as good as The Class.”

Not a bad idea. Robin's adventures could make an interesting documentary.

I’d spent the day divesting yet more junk via Freecycle and sorting through old photographs. Only one of them made me cry – snapshot of Kevin who was killed by a drunk driver eight years after this picture was taken. The Hares have a familial curse – the firstborn of every generation dies in a car crash. This has been going on since there’ve been automobiles and Hares.

I lost touch with Desi, Pat and their kids after my divorce from Bill (understandably.) But I’d liked Kevin very much as a kid, was very sad when I learned he’d died. He didn’t deserve to be the generational sacrifice.

Not counting Kevin pathos, I cried for two and a half hours yesterday. Slight improvement over the day before.

Susan hasn't slept in six months.

Well. Xanax knocks her out for a couple of hours every night. Is that the same thing as sleep?

I worry about her.

The onset of the sleeplessness was quite sudden, coinciding with the week before she came down to Monterey last August. It was the subject of animated debate among the three of us – Marybeth, Susan and I – as we dined and hiked and hung out. On Asilomar Beach we found three mummified seals and a yamaka that had either slipped off someone's head or been hurled into the sand in an act of agnostic desperation.

"It's some weird menopause side effect," said Susan. Marybeth agreed.

"I don't know, Susan," I said. "I'd be inclined to think something's going on with your thyroid. Are you still taking Thyroxin?"

"I had my doctor check that," said Susan. "My levels are still the same as they always were."

"Well, then," I said. "I'd be inclined to think it's psychological, connected somehow to your mother's death, some need to be vigilant."

Big long pause. I could hear Susan snorting.

"You're out to lunch, darlin'," said Marybeth. "Not that I don't worship the bologna in your sandwich."

Fast forward six months. I was up in the Bay Area for the San Francisco Gift Show, stayed with Susan & Jeff.

Susan's still not sleeping. Her face looks like a map of the throughways, turnpikes and shortcuts through some particularly populous part of New Jersey. She's aged ten years in six months.

We went out to the backyard so that she could watch me court lung cancer. As a secondary benefit, the night was warm and lushly overlain with stars.

"You never think about quitting, do you?" Susan asked.

I shrugged. "I like it. And I don't much want to spend my declining years in a geezer lockdown with a view of the golf course. Although, of course, part of me would like to live forever. Not to interact, you understand. But to watch and observe. It's so-oo interesting. Armageddon in the Middle East, bioengineering in the Orient, the fall of Western Civilization. I'd like to see how it plays out. Not as some egoless part of the Great Mother's nipple hairs when my soul migrates back to her all-encompassing bosom, but as me with my own sensibilities lodged firmly in my head."

"That's what I'd like to," said Susan. "I just want to see what happens. Did you know that ninety-eight percent of all the species that ever existed on this planet are now extinct? It's hubris to think it's not gonna happen to humans."

"I wan-na be around to pick up the pieces…" I croon.

We laugh.

"Robin said something funny to me yesterday," I said. "I'm not sure how the subject came up but we were talking, and I said, 'You know, I was alive for a long time before you were born.'

"And he just looked at me and said, 'No, you weren't."

We laugh again.

"I have all these cardboard boxes," said Susan. "They're in my basement. And they're all filled with dead people's stuff. My mother's, my godmother's. Jeff's mother's, Jeff's father's. And now I can barely walk into a store without looking around at all the things on the shelves and thinking, 'Some day this is going to be dead people's stuff.'"

"Good Will's the middle ground between the Antique Roadshow and the dump," I said, stubbing my cigarette out.

We went back into the house.

But this conversation took a lot of my pleasure out of the next day's San Francisco Gift Fair – substandard this year anyway since all the big kitsch manufacturers stayed home, leaving the field to gift reps. I could hardly bear to look at the Zodiac faeries, or the scale replica of the Temple of Ramses, or the candles shaped like toilets, or the lifesized porcelain Doberman replicas. I kept seeing junk destined for a crumpling cardboard box in someone's basement. The intermediate stage where someone actually covets it seemed transient, and somehow inessential.

I went to the cathedral to light a candle for my mother (four years dead yesterday.) It was filled with old Italian ladies praying for the Pope.

My mother – a secular humanist by conviction, a Jew by birth – no doubt would have been appalled. But for me, all religious observances are interchangeable.

I like the Pope though I don't agree with most of his beliefs and dictates. He seems to have been a genuinely good human being – a real reformer in the first ten years of his papacy though that changed after he was shot. Understandably. Even in the last conservative eighteen years of his reign, he invariably came down on the side of freedom and peace, if not always truth. Hey! Two out of three ain't bad.

"Ask me anything at all about Kurt Russell or John Stamos," I said to Ben this morning. "Go ahead! Ask me."

"Why is Kurt Russell such a right wing prick?" asked Ben.

"I'm glad you asked me that, Johnny. As a young lad under an exploitative contract with Disney, Kurt's only taste of freedom were the summers he spent learning to fish and hunt and gut things in a rural outpost in Maine under the tutelage of his grizzled and outspoken but kindly grandfather."

"I see," said Ben. "Well, if you're gonna learn to dress a deer, the place to do it is Maine."

"Oh, I don't know about that," I said. "I'd like to see how Austin Scarlett would cope with the assignment. Maybe a flowing gown in a tasteful, Loretta Young green."

"Why did John Stamos ditch the supermodel?"

"Ask rather why the supermodel ditched John Stamos! He's a no-talent loser with a pretty face. He was probably starting to get wrinkles."

Ben sighed. "I like it better when you watch Dog the Bounty Hunter when you have insomnia."

"We don't get to choose what the cosmic veejay plays," I said primly.

Depression descended upon me like the proverbial sack of bricks around 1 pm yesterday. I can actually track the exact moment although it's a bit embarrassing. It was the email from Marybeth. Blah, blah, blah, she'd just returned from a fabulous trip down the coast, the wildflowers were amazing; she was about to go up the coast for two days to see Susan's play – was I going too? – but wanted to fit me in this Sunday –

I didn't initiate this email exchange, I thought, furiously squinting at my computer screen. Marybeth and I haven't seen each other since early last summer. For a while her name remained on the official roster of Close Friends, but every time I called her, she had something else to do. I got the hint. My feelings were terribly hurt but after a while, I stopped thinking about it. I have no idea why she emailed me now – Susan must have asked how I was.

"She inherited a million dollars," Ben pointed out, reasonably enough, whenever I broached the issue with him. "Of course, her life is all about travel and fun. Wouldn't yours be under those circumstances? You're still her friend."

But I don't feel like her friend. I feel like the Velveteen Rabbit.

Envy. I do not covet my neighbor's ass. I covet her stock portfolio.

Envy is a really difficult emotion to work through. It blanches out all joy in the moment; the mantra becomes, "Loser!" The store actually did well last month – much, much better than I forecast it would do at the beginning of the month – and I love the little store, it brings genuine pleasure to the people who come through its doors, it's as much a creative accomplishment as a novel or a painting. But I am tired of living on the margin. Tired? Try exhausted. You're invisible when you live on the margin, and more than anything right now I want to be seen and valued –

How does Osama bin Laden’s latest straight-to-video translate into more votes for Bush? I just don’t get it. I mean, doesn’t the fact that Osama is still around to thumb his nose at the U.S. mean that Bush has failed? Spin, where is thy logic? The whole political nightmare grows more and more like 1984. Osama is our own personal Emmanuel Goldstein. Orwell got the headdress wrong – it’s a wacky turban, not a zany yamaka – but in all other ways, it’s perfect. Some aspiring science fiction writer needs to write a series in which frail, tubercular Eric Blair uses the I-Ching to predict the future. Unless, of course (as the most paranoid part of me suspects) Osama is really making his home movies from a well-appointed studio apartment in the Pentagon basement.

Momentous events are underway all around me. But I persist in tunneling down into my own private anthill. Let’s see – the quest for Bop-It, which took me to the darkest reaches of the Salinas Wal-Mart, has been resolved: Nathan has one that we can borrow. The Salinas Wal-Mart really threw me off course. As faithful readers of this chronicle know, I’ve been struggling with the meaninglessness of life for quite some time now. If this were a movie, it would be time for the Virgin Mary to wander into Slow Burn and buy some Mad Dog 357. That would restore my belief in God and celestial city planning. Instead, I keep ending up in these huge, ugly retail stores where I turn into an anthropologist from the planet Mars, lose myself amidst aisles and aisles of the ugliest planned obsolescence imaginable, forget what I came in for and stagger out half an hour later with a migraine from the bad fluorescent lighting. The Salinas version of Wal-Mart is particularly horrible because all the flourishes are missing – the clientele is Mexican, after all, why waste cute little yellow happy faces on Spics? So it’s just one huge rat cage with bar-coded pellets.

That night I swung far in the opposite direction – Marybeth’s art opening. Marybeth does collage. I was instrumental in pushing her in that direction – there was a period in my life when I offered vocational guidance freely: Susan, go to law school; Steve, go to medical school; Marybeth, do collage. And lo! these suggestions turned out to be just the ticket and today these same people are all enjoying successful careers.

Marybeth is very good at collage: her art is beautiful. And her staging is magnificent, frames, mounting, all the production work behind the presentation. The opening took place at the Pacific Grove Art Center, which has become very upscale over the years although not upscale enough to pony up good wine and hors d’oeuvres for its artists’ openings – I had to sneak off to Marybeth’s studio for tequila and peanuts. There I found the afore-mentioned Mizz Susan plus the Zamarias, still in traffic shock.

“It took me four hours to drive down from Oakland,” said Susan.

“Four hours!” I said, shuddering.

We held the smile a couple of beats too long.

This is the problem with having best friends whose lives no longer run in parallel with one’s own – the habit of not communicating regularly is a great conversational deterrent.

Oddly, the same thing is not true of people one knows less well. Tom Zamaria and I chattered like monkeys. Photoshop, his Viet Nam experience –

“I’ve been having a lot of PTS symptoms lately,” he told me.

“It’s the election,” I said.

Also ran into the DeTomasso’s. Ironic because when I’d met with Tony earlier that afternoon about the Weissman lab website, I’d complained about Jeannie –

“She never writes, she never calls. And when I call, she ignores me. Doesn’t she luv me anymore?”

“Jeannie’s psychotic,” said Tony. “Or maybe it’s menopause. Don’t take it personally. This has been a bad year for her. And we’re coming up on the first anniversary of the big bad –“

Elizabeth’s death.

Jeannie looked very haggard at the opening, fine tracery of lines turning into an actual network across her beautiful face. Suddenly, she looks her age. In fact, she looks older than me. We chattered but there was no entrée into anything deeper and that made me very sad. I’m shedding friendships. In the end, who will be left?

Okay weekend devolved quickly into the usual touch-and go – Saturday, I cashed in the spa certificate (delayed b-day gift from the maiden aunties.) Facial, massage, manicure, pedicure – for five hours my skin was the most important thing in the western world, the center of a vast network of willowy handmaidens. I begin to understand the true significance of mikvahs – it’s not about menstruation fetishes at all, it’s about being girlied.

For several days afterwards my skin was as soft as the proverbial baby’s behind and my nails still glitter a kind of lustrous shell-pink.

Then Sunday was Mother’s Day. Mother’s Day is not a real holiday. But then, I suppose, Christmas wasn’t a real holiday either until Charles Dickens wrote The Christmas Carol and anyway, I’m all about extortion. The boys fixed me breakfast with more protein (fried protein) than your average Sudanese might see in a year. I ended up slipping most of it to the dogs and feeling horribly guilty that there wasn’t some way I couldn’t airlift it into Africa. The boys, the dogs and I went for a long beach ramble and then I came home and went for a twenty mile bike ride along the coast. The headwinds were fierce – 40 miles an hour according to the weather reports on the news later that night. Gale force winds but no storm. Sand streaming in from the dunes almost blinded me. I passed a dead raccoon on the trail – the exposed side had been blasted down to bone while the side against the dirt still had its pelt. I really wanted to snag it, take it home to make a little voodoo doll or something but I had no way to carry it.

The winds were still blowing strong on Monday, and this was a problem. The store is right up against the sea wall and nobody was coming into it. Sales had been so strong this month up to now too but of course the whole operation is immensely under-capitalized, held together by spit and grit, so the day-to-day cash register receipts are critical. My biggest flaw as a human being is that I personalize everything – I think politically and strategically, but I am utterly incapable of transforming those thoughts into boundaries. So when nobody comes into the store to buy stuff, it’s a double whammy – (A) because we’re all going to have to pile into that refrigerator box under the bridge sooner rather than later, and I worry that there won’t be room for all the humans plus the dogs and (B) because the real reason people are not coming into the store is because I’m repulsive. Still, I managed to maintain an upbeat perspective until three o’clock in the afternoon when Marybeth came into the store.

Now Marybeth, of course, is one of my closest friends.

But there’s a reason why I haven’t seen her in three months and have studiously figured out ways to wiggle out of every proffered invitation.

The first words out of her mouth were, "Oh my God. Do you ever get any time off?"

"Well, I like it, Marybeth," I said, wrapping my hands around my elbows. Not the full scale self-hug offensive. But close. "It’s like having my very own interactive dollhouse."

"Oh, it’s wonderful, it’s wonderful," she said. "Look at all this new stuff! I’ll have to bring Kim down here." Impulsively she held out her arms. "I miss you, Mrs. E! When can we convene for some quality one-on-one time?"

We made a dinner date for Thursday and then we did a short catch-up. She’s just back from London. She and Kim and Alex are all leaving for a three-week tour of China and Tibet in July. The kitchen remodel is almost done. She and Kim are spending every weekend at their cabin in the Sierras – and oh, yeah, Kim just won a thousand bucks gambling at an Indian casino – except this weekend she and Sue were going down to Santa Barbara to drink Old Fashioneds at El Cantina Encanta –

Thus might the ant describe retirement to the grasshopper.

"And what are you up to, my dear?" Marybeth finished in a breathless rush.

"Oh, you know. The store."

"The store!"

"Well, it’s a lot of work, you know. Plus I’ve started writing again –"

"When do you find the time?"

"Well, you know. I get up early – "

"How early?"

"Uh. 4 AM."

"4 AM." Marybeth’s eyes glassed over.

Shortly thereafter we embraced once more and she sailed out the door.

And I’m eaten up by that most unpleasant and ignoble of emotions: envy.

Well, of course, Marybeth inherited a shitload of money from her alcoholic but exceedingly rich parents plus she and Kim managed to get in when the getting was cheap on overpriced Central Coast real estate. Me, I frittered my youth away on sex and drugs, never dreaming there would be a time when I’d prefer a mutual bond portfolio to LSD. Thus in my fifties I have almost no worldly goods and every day is an adventure in balancing my checkbook.

Of course, we’re both going to be dead in another 30 years.

But really, if that’s the most sanguine spin I can put on our long years of friendship, I’m even more twisted than I thought. No wonder people don’t want to buy hot sauce from me! I’m like a human magnet beaming evil, anti-positron rays.

I sank into a deep depression. At around 5, I called Ben. "We’ve made $33.17 and I think it’s time to call it a day."

"Well, yeah," said Ben. "With the wind blowing the way it has been, nobody’s gonna risk the tsunami watch by the seawall."

Came home. Refused to eat family dinner. Sequestered myself in the bedroom – Law & Order reruns preempted on two (count them!) channels by fucking NBA play-offs and a fucking Steven Segall movie. Steven Segall is supposed to be some kind of living Buddha. I wondered if Marybeth, Kim and Alex would stumble across any shrines to him in Tibet.

Woke up multiple times during the night.

Was broken out of the depression by a curious encounter the following day. Around noon an unlikely apparition sails into the store – a young guy, 6’6", wearing one of those long black Matrix-style coats. Peculiar pubic hair beard. That my-daily-grooming-routine-consists-of-dumpster-diving smell. In his hand, he carried a deck of grimy playing cards. About a quarter of them were missing.

"I will name three hot sauces and if you carry them in your store I will worship you as a goddess!" he said.

"Get out the portable altar," I replied.

"Smack My Ass and Call Me Sally! Endorphin Rush! Dave’s Limited Reserve!"

"Assume the position," I said.

Of course the real reason he was in the store was to hustle me out of small sums of cash and you had to admire his chutzpah. "I’ll bet you thirty dollars against a bottle of hot sauce that I can guess the card you draw from this deck."

I shook my head. "Sorry. I don’t play that game."

"Ah! Wise woman. Never bet against a magician. I’ll do the tricks for you anyway."

Except that he couldn’t. I mean, this guy was the worst mountebank I had ever seen. He could barely shuffle the cards. I would have been embarrassed for him except he was so cheerfully unembarrassed for himself and anyway, in between card tricks he was licking his fingers and then sticking them in the sample cups along my hot sauce bar like a slob.

He stayed in the store for half an hair, glomming hot sauce and doing his inept stand-up routine. After a while it went beyond annoying, lapsed into the realm of the purely ludicrous. This was the epiphany I was looking for: because when he finally left the store I felt upbeat and invigorated. There wasn’t any difference between him and me, we were both purveyors of the Big Goof and really, forget the Prozak and the Zyban: the Big Goof is the only known antidote to envy and depression.

Cup of strong coffee and an empty house. Gray sky with a sultry feel: purple bougainvillea in my front yard seem to have concentrated all the available color wavelengths in a monochrome universe.

The Santa Cruz Mystery Spot bumper sticker got them as far as Sacramento before one of the front tires developed an aneurysm -- so much for JiffyLube's road-worthy diagnostics. Ben's a good driver, noticed the wobble and pulled over before the tire blew out. Thank God for Triple A. They got as far as Winnemucca, camped in an RV lot outside the Golden Nugget. "Don't do any gambling," I warned Ben. "You don't sound lucky."

If they get to Salt Lake City without further disaster, they'll be fine. Right now I feel as though most of my consciousness is involved in blowing the protective bubble around them — like staring out the window of a plane and thinking: fuck those guys in the cockpit, it's me who's keeping the plane in the air with my uplifting thoughts.

My house smells like a California mission. In San Diego Abe took me to this Catholic-Christian religious supply store -- spookier by far than any East Harlem botanica -- and I loaded up on frankincense and myrrh. I'm giving my counter offer to Frank today. Then I'm going to pick up with Hatcher and voyeur.com in the parallel, fictive universe.
Meanwhile -- ( Big Bash... Notes for a short story )