What you will find below is my first attempt at explaining what it is that makes the kind of male virtue projected by Roger Sterling and Don Draper on Mad Men work. I am not very happy with this essay yet and normally wouldn't have posted it in this state. I will be updating and, I hope, improving, it as the weeks go along.
I love unintended consequences and got a very significant personal dose of it with the series The Singing Detective. I think I completely missed the point that series creator Dennis Potter was trying to make. I say "I think" I missed the point because who knows what the point was supposed to be; I don't think even Potter himself was entirely sure.
It was watching that series that I came to admire a certain kind of style and adopt it as my own. You could call this style a sort of romanticism but I don't want to do that for reasons that are partly impetuous rather than carefully reasoned through. I grew up in an era that admired coolness above all else and I associate this style with liberation from coolness. That is why I call it studiously uncool.
I think "cool" is what Frege would have called a disease in thought. As coolness spread to all aspects of modern life, some people started to react to it and carved out a new way of living.
In any case, The Singing Detective bounced back and forth between this self-pitying jerk named Phillip E. Marlow in a hospital bed and his imaginings of a secret world of 1930s era detective fiction. Every time we moved from the tawdry, style-less world of the hospitalized writer's real life to what he imagined, the screen came alive. Every time we left that world for what were presented as his actual memories of his childhood, the magic of the series died.
The whole thing was dressed in a pseudo-Freudian ethic of repressed or suppressed memories. There was some suggestion that there was some connection between the protagonist's inability to face the truth and his illness. Except Potter didn't mean it. Even guys like Potter knew by 1986 that Freud was Fraud. But the form was irresistible to him. As was the form of the detective story. And so we got two parallel stories full of clues and mystery but no solutions.
This is the kind of thing that inspires some critics to praise about bravely exploring the boundaries between truth and reality. As opposed to producing a shapeless mess with no moral or narrative purpose or direction.
The series was highly watchable, however, because if its style. That is, because of its style whenever it got out of that dingy hospital. And that was what triumphed.
Monday, April 5, 2010
Sunday, April 4, 2010
Easter
A quote from the Penguin Dictionary of Saints* (or as my Serpentine friend likes to say, "The Dictionary of Penguin Saints");
As to high moral quality, what tends to happen is that the high moral quality becomes an end in itself, it just becomes another idol; not just a distraction from our real purpose but a sin against God. That high moral quality that is "now inseparable from such words as saint" should be separated from it.
Have you ever held a knife above a cake and momentarily hesitated because the cake was so beautiful in its untouched state? That is what it is to want to have your cake and eat it too. Be aware of those who would have you treat your life on this earth that way.
Christ is Risen. Go ahead and feel the heat and the sweat of and the life.
* Very highly recommended!
The English word 'saint' is derived from the Latin epithet sanctus, which represents the Greek hagios and the Hebrew qâdosh. These words, sanctus, hagios, qâdosh, were applied to God himself, to people, and to things. When applied to people and to things they meant hallowed, consecrated, set apart for a sacred purpose or office, made 'holy to God'; they did not necessarily connote that high moral quality which is now inseparable from such words as saint or holy when applied to a person.That's what we are dear reader, "set apart for a sacred purpose or office, made 'holy to God'." That's wonderful if you ask me. Only what we are is also what we are supposed to become. That is our goal in life—to become what we really are.
As to high moral quality, what tends to happen is that the high moral quality becomes an end in itself, it just becomes another idol; not just a distraction from our real purpose but a sin against God. That high moral quality that is "now inseparable from such words as saint" should be separated from it.
Have you ever held a knife above a cake and momentarily hesitated because the cake was so beautiful in its untouched state? That is what it is to want to have your cake and eat it too. Be aware of those who would have you treat your life on this earth that way.
"Did you ever see an amusement park?"
"No, Father."
"Well, go and see an amusement park." The priest waved his hand vaguely. "It's like a fair, only much more glittering. Go to one at night and stand a little way off from it in a dark place—under dark trees. You'll see a big wheel made of lights turning in the air, and a long slide shooting boats down into the water. A band playing somewhere, and a smell of peanuts—and everything will twinkle. But it won't remind you of anything you see. It will all just hang out there in the night like a colored balloon—like a big yellow lantern on a pole." Father Schwartz frowned as he suddenly thought of something. "But don't get up close," he warned Rudolph, " because if you do you'll only feel the heat and the sweat and the life."
-F. Scott Fitzgerald, from Absolution
Christ is Risen. Go ahead and feel the heat and the sweat of and the life.
* Very highly recommended!
Friday, April 2, 2010
Virtue (Good) Friday: Ite missa est (9)
Related to the last Lenten reflection, there is "heresy" I call proportionality. I say heresy in scare quotes because I have no authority to declare what is or is not heretical. Although, for all I know, this one may already be on the books somewhere.
You can see hints of proportionality peeking through the cracks in Mel Gibson's Crucifixion movie. It's the notion that Jesus dies not just a horrible, shameful death, that He had to die the most horrible death ever because His suffering had to be proportional to all the sins of humanity. And thus we hear these occasional horror stories of children being told that they are adding to Christ's sufferings every time they sin.
Other people have died deaths as horrid as Christ's. Other people are dying that way even as you read this, and may He comfort them. What makes the Crucifixion the most important event in history is who died that death and why He chose to die it even though He was innocent. That it was a shameful death is important but the degree of horribleness is not the point.
Thinking it has to be is a lot like wanting to be at mass all the time. If I do either, I don't really believe in Jesus so much as have a superstition about Him.
To put another way, suppose we ask if someone else could die that death and have the same result. Could someone else suffer in a way that is proportionate to all the sins committed and thus redeem humanity? This sounds heretical and it is. But Jesus became man, is it any less heretical to imagine that his human body had to endure more pain and suffering than any other human in order to redeem us? He was fully human, therefore it follows that his body did not do things that other human bodies are potentially capable of.
And where does Jesus's life fit into this? If the degree of suffering matches the degree of sin and thereby redeems, did He have to do anything at all in his life other than die? (Again, watching the Mel Gibson movie, you might suspect that Gibson thinks that this death is the only part of Jesus's life that matters.) That would be to make him a scapegoat. A scapegoat exists solely to die—everything else it's persecutors believe about it is a projection of their guilt onto it.
But Jesus lived for the truth.
You can see hints of proportionality peeking through the cracks in Mel Gibson's Crucifixion movie. It's the notion that Jesus dies not just a horrible, shameful death, that He had to die the most horrible death ever because His suffering had to be proportional to all the sins of humanity. And thus we hear these occasional horror stories of children being told that they are adding to Christ's sufferings every time they sin.
Other people have died deaths as horrid as Christ's. Other people are dying that way even as you read this, and may He comfort them. What makes the Crucifixion the most important event in history is who died that death and why He chose to die it even though He was innocent. That it was a shameful death is important but the degree of horribleness is not the point.
Thinking it has to be is a lot like wanting to be at mass all the time. If I do either, I don't really believe in Jesus so much as have a superstition about Him.
To put another way, suppose we ask if someone else could die that death and have the same result. Could someone else suffer in a way that is proportionate to all the sins committed and thus redeem humanity? This sounds heretical and it is. But Jesus became man, is it any less heretical to imagine that his human body had to endure more pain and suffering than any other human in order to redeem us? He was fully human, therefore it follows that his body did not do things that other human bodies are potentially capable of.
And where does Jesus's life fit into this? If the degree of suffering matches the degree of sin and thereby redeems, did He have to do anything at all in his life other than die? (Again, watching the Mel Gibson movie, you might suspect that Gibson thinks that this death is the only part of Jesus's life that matters.) That would be to make him a scapegoat. A scapegoat exists solely to die—everything else it's persecutors believe about it is a projection of their guilt onto it.
But Jesus lived for the truth.
Thursday, April 1, 2010
Gesualdo
Below is the Miserere from Gesualdo's Tennebrae Responses. It is less famous than the Allegri version although equally beautiful.
Gesualdo killed his wife and her lover after discovering them in adultery. Because he was a nobleman he was exempt from legal punishment for doing so. There is no evidence one way or another as to whether he felt any guilt about this. All we know is that he wrote this:
Gesualdo killed his wife and her lover after discovering them in adultery. Because he was a nobleman he was exempt from legal punishment for doing so. There is no evidence one way or another as to whether he felt any guilt about this. All we know is that he wrote this:
Lenten reflection: Ite missa est (8)
Note: All other posting will cease until Easter. Have a good and holy one.
Way back in the beginning I said that the word "mass" derives from "Ite missa est", missa meaning sent.
As does the word "missal" although missals are not intended to be thrown. A long time ago one was thrown at the Cathedral in Saint John, New Brunswick. It happened during Tenebrae, which means darkness, and is celebrated during Holy Week. The one I am familiar with took place on Holy Thursday. In the older rite, there was a moment in Tenebrae when all the lights in the church were extinguished and then, in the darkness, the Bishop, the attending priests and the altar boys in the sanctuary would rustle the pages of their missals and shuffle their feet.
The altar boys at the Cathedral used to sit on rows of pews on opposite sides of the altar. A plan was hatched that one of the boys would throw a missal across to the other side in the darkness. These altar boys assumed that the dark and the other sounds would mask the desecration they were planning. An athletic young lad was selected for the job because he was famous both for the strength and the accuracy of his throwing. He was not, unfortunately, known for his intelligence and he misunderstood the meaning of the phrase "the other pews". When the moment came, he stood and with all the power he was famous for, hurled his missal out into the darkness where the congregation sat.
That this athletic young man could be relied upon was not the only incorrect assumption the altar boys made. It also turned out to be the case that the hurled prayer book made more noise than the combined efforts of those in the sanctuary. It made enough noise that everyone stopped and listened to the sound of that missal hurtling through the air. The thrower had given it lots of height and it traveled in a high trajectory. The altar boys listened with a sense of foreboding doom. And then it hit. That impact was followed by a blood-curdling scream and a long fit of uncontrollable crying from the poor woman it hit.
The reason those on the altar would make all the noise by shuffling and rustling the first place was to symbolize the chaos of a world without God. A chaos the sixteen altar boys present that night got a profound and lasting impression of. For the next while that is where we will live. And our prayer is, "Please be".
Way back in the beginning I said that the word "mass" derives from "Ite missa est", missa meaning sent.
As does the word "missal" although missals are not intended to be thrown. A long time ago one was thrown at the Cathedral in Saint John, New Brunswick. It happened during Tenebrae, which means darkness, and is celebrated during Holy Week. The one I am familiar with took place on Holy Thursday. In the older rite, there was a moment in Tenebrae when all the lights in the church were extinguished and then, in the darkness, the Bishop, the attending priests and the altar boys in the sanctuary would rustle the pages of their missals and shuffle their feet.
The altar boys at the Cathedral used to sit on rows of pews on opposite sides of the altar. A plan was hatched that one of the boys would throw a missal across to the other side in the darkness. These altar boys assumed that the dark and the other sounds would mask the desecration they were planning. An athletic young lad was selected for the job because he was famous both for the strength and the accuracy of his throwing. He was not, unfortunately, known for his intelligence and he misunderstood the meaning of the phrase "the other pews". When the moment came, he stood and with all the power he was famous for, hurled his missal out into the darkness where the congregation sat.
That this athletic young man could be relied upon was not the only incorrect assumption the altar boys made. It also turned out to be the case that the hurled prayer book made more noise than the combined efforts of those in the sanctuary. It made enough noise that everyone stopped and listened to the sound of that missal hurtling through the air. The thrower had given it lots of height and it traveled in a high trajectory. The altar boys listened with a sense of foreboding doom. And then it hit. That impact was followed by a blood-curdling scream and a long fit of uncontrollable crying from the poor woman it hit.
The reason those on the altar would make all the noise by shuffling and rustling the first place was to symbolize the chaos of a world without God. A chaos the sixteen altar boys present that night got a profound and lasting impression of. For the next while that is where we will live. And our prayer is, "Please be".
What does the story of Ted and Marie signify?
My Serpentine Friend recently tripped across a book called Married Love by Marie Stopes. It was one of the earlier sex self help books. Stopes was a first wave feminist and her book is a good example of early "progressive" attitudes to sex.
Like an awful lot of early progressives and even a few current progressives, Stopes was also a fan of eugenics and a racist. I won't be going into that aspect much here but suffice to say, "progressive" movements have a propensity to become hate-driven.
What makes Stopes interesting to me is a tendency we continue to see in current feminism. She tends to blame unsuccessful relations between men and women on men. It's not that women never make choices that cause them to be unhappy but if we look at what she recommends for men and women we will see an significant difference.
Stopes lays down the law for men:
But did you catch the imbalance here? All the responsibility to activate her passion or to refrain if she isn't ready lies with the man. And, elsewhere in the book, Stopes explains that women are ready for sex less often than men and that a man should, therefore, restrain himself until those periods when she is excitable. For Stopes, the optimum period for women is the few days around the top of her cycle when she is ovulating. That is less novel a discovery now than it was when she first published but good stuff as far as it goes. Again, though, it's one sided.
And Stopes also admits something fascinating. Some times, at some particularly romantic or otherwise special occasions, it may happen that a woman becomes stimulated outside of these regular cycles. And there you can see what went wrong with the Marie and Ted of my little story. Because if certain associations can help a woman to become aroused and full of desire when she otherwise isn't driven to be, then it follows that she could consciously call these things to mind to arouse herself in premeditated way.
The point here is simple but probably needs to be spelled out anyway. If you can train yourself to desire less, then you can also train yourself to desire more. If men can learn to train themselves to control their desires to more closely correspond to those of women, so can women then train their desires to have them more often and so meet men halfway. Men didn't figure this out—women did. And once it became obvious to some women, other women were obliged to respond.
Consider Stopes' claims again and notice that what she is saying amounts to a generalization about women. From time to time you will hear some women use this generalization in an argumentative form: "This is what women are like, be a man and adjust to that." And that is very good advice in general. But so is the reverse, "This is what men are like, be a woman and adjust to that." And men don't have to get around very much before they will notice that some women have made that adjustment much more successfully than others.
And, as I've said before, the differences aren't subtle. There is a day, usually quite a ways into a relationship (because the first few months are always the same) when you find yourself quoting Samantha, "Ding, ding, ding, jackpot!"
And life is unfair. It's not just that some women will be better at this than others; some women will be much, much better at it than others.
Love the sexual revolution or hate it, one consequence is that women are now obliged to compete with other women in terms of sexual performance. That is what all the sexual signaling by young women we see now is really about. Why do so many young women seem to dress and act in a slutty way now? They do it because they want to signal that they are willing to put the effort into meeting men half way on the sexual desire spectrum. Like most of the human beings who have lived and like most human beings that ever will live, they want love.
Most of this signaling is pointless in much the same way that male posturing is pointless because, posture as much as you want, at some point you have to perform. That said, I think we can understand what is happening here charitably. Life is always a challenge and today's young women have their challenges.
And whether the posturing is pointless or not, it rests on a deeper truth. Realizing that being able to be aroused for sex more frequently would give them a competitive advantage over other women, some women began cultivate their sexual arousal. And almost every man will have sex over an extended period with at least one such woman in his life. No longer can women say what Stopes says in her book—that women are this way, so get used to it. And that changed everything.
Like an awful lot of early progressives and even a few current progressives, Stopes was also a fan of eugenics and a racist. I won't be going into that aspect much here but suffice to say, "progressive" movements have a propensity to become hate-driven.
What makes Stopes interesting to me is a tendency we continue to see in current feminism. She tends to blame unsuccessful relations between men and women on men. It's not that women never make choices that cause them to be unhappy but if we look at what she recommends for men and women we will see an significant difference.
Stopes lays down the law for men:
The supreme law for husbands is" Remember that each act of union must be tenderly wooed for and won, and that no union should ever take place unless the woman also desires it and is made physically read for it.Yup, absolutely true in every word. As I read that, however, I wondered, Does Stopes have a supreme laws for wives? Sort of:
She may take it as an absolute rule, however, that unless the touch of a man's hand on hers, and the contact of his lips, are sweet and delicious to her, the man can never be a true husband.Also true.
But did you catch the imbalance here? All the responsibility to activate her passion or to refrain if she isn't ready lies with the man. And, elsewhere in the book, Stopes explains that women are ready for sex less often than men and that a man should, therefore, restrain himself until those periods when she is excitable. For Stopes, the optimum period for women is the few days around the top of her cycle when she is ovulating. That is less novel a discovery now than it was when she first published but good stuff as far as it goes. Again, though, it's one sided.
And Stopes also admits something fascinating. Some times, at some particularly romantic or otherwise special occasions, it may happen that a woman becomes stimulated outside of these regular cycles. And there you can see what went wrong with the Marie and Ted of my little story. Because if certain associations can help a woman to become aroused and full of desire when she otherwise isn't driven to be, then it follows that she could consciously call these things to mind to arouse herself in premeditated way.
The point here is simple but probably needs to be spelled out anyway. If you can train yourself to desire less, then you can also train yourself to desire more. If men can learn to train themselves to control their desires to more closely correspond to those of women, so can women then train their desires to have them more often and so meet men halfway. Men didn't figure this out—women did. And once it became obvious to some women, other women were obliged to respond.
Consider Stopes' claims again and notice that what she is saying amounts to a generalization about women. From time to time you will hear some women use this generalization in an argumentative form: "This is what women are like, be a man and adjust to that." And that is very good advice in general. But so is the reverse, "This is what men are like, be a woman and adjust to that." And men don't have to get around very much before they will notice that some women have made that adjustment much more successfully than others.
And, as I've said before, the differences aren't subtle. There is a day, usually quite a ways into a relationship (because the first few months are always the same) when you find yourself quoting Samantha, "Ding, ding, ding, jackpot!"
And life is unfair. It's not just that some women will be better at this than others; some women will be much, much better at it than others.
Love the sexual revolution or hate it, one consequence is that women are now obliged to compete with other women in terms of sexual performance. That is what all the sexual signaling by young women we see now is really about. Why do so many young women seem to dress and act in a slutty way now? They do it because they want to signal that they are willing to put the effort into meeting men half way on the sexual desire spectrum. Like most of the human beings who have lived and like most human beings that ever will live, they want love.
Most of this signaling is pointless in much the same way that male posturing is pointless because, posture as much as you want, at some point you have to perform. That said, I think we can understand what is happening here charitably. Life is always a challenge and today's young women have their challenges.
And whether the posturing is pointless or not, it rests on a deeper truth. Realizing that being able to be aroused for sex more frequently would give them a competitive advantage over other women, some women began cultivate their sexual arousal. And almost every man will have sex over an extended period with at least one such woman in his life. No longer can women say what Stopes says in her book—that women are this way, so get used to it. And that changed everything.
Wednesday, March 31, 2010
What I saw at the (sexual) revolution
This will be the last of the relation-ship based stories, for now anyway. Like all the others, it is based on real events with some veiling to protect identities. I've left one name—Stephanie—unchanged because I feel a certain admiration for her. She and "Ted" are the only ones who could possibly figure out which Stephanie.
There are no turning points in life. There is just a time when things that seemed confused and uncertain suddenly seem no longer to be so. We sometimes call this the turning point when, if such a thing were possible, any actual turning has already happened. If there was a turning point on sexuality, it must have happened in the 1980s. If it happened, I didn't notice it; I don't know anyone else who did either.
But things did turn and I do remember the shock when I realized that things had changed and that people playing by the old rules had been left behind. It was a shock because with a subject like women, men and sex, I'd always assumed that it was the way it was and that it would never change.
There had apparently been a sexual revolution starting before I was born and over before I hit puberty but that seemed to me to be a mostly about things that had always been happening in the shadows coming out into the light. What happened in the 1980s was different and I think far more significant than the sexual revolution. The very basis of sexual relationships between women and men changed.
I noticed it talking to a guy named Ted. We reconnected a few years after university and just a little while before Ted moved to Paris. I'd met Ted in 1980 at university. Ted was a romantic. At the same time he was being so romantic, there was a lot of sex around the university. There were really only two sexually transmitted diseases in those days and both were curable. Besides which, nobody you knew ever got them. That would change, of course—in just two years time herpes would be the Time cover story—and it was our fault it changed. In those days you could walk into the university library and if you caught something in a girl's expression, a girl you had never even met before, you could invite for tea and oatmeal cookies followed by sex on the couch. You wouldn't mention the sex in your invitation, of course. It wasn't reasonable to expect the girl to commit herself that quickly, or, more to the point, that openly, but you both knew where things were likely going.
A lot of us did things like that back in those days. A doctor who worked at the university's health centre once told me that she spent the first two months of every year doing nothing but prescribing the pill to one woman after another: five appointments an hour, seven hours a day, five days a week. And there were a half dozen doctors on staff. "Anyone who showed up with an actual health problem, we'd send to emergency." These women, girls really, were away from home and away from their family doctors for the first time. They'd maybe had one lover in high school and maybe not even that but now they were free to do what they wanted and they meant to make the most it.
In that sort of atmosphere you could almost feel sorry for the poor sods, especially the male sods, who wanted love. Even if you found a girlfriend, she'd cheat on you. It seemed easier and safer to just go with the flow. I did and so did did Ted at first. It never bothered me; it did bother poor Ted. He was a romantic, as I say, and he wanted love.
And he found it when he met Marie. They met around the end of our second-last year and got serious at the start of final year. And for a while they lived in bliss. They'd spend entire weekends in bed together. Ted went to her place at Christmas and they'd snuck down from their separate rooms in the middle of the night after her parents were gone to sleep and had sex in front of tree and ate Santa's cookies afterward.
Ted thought he'd done us all one better. He had all the sex we did and love too.
He had it for six months. Then things got tougher. Ted didn't talk about it with me. He wasn't the type to talk about it. Most men aren't. But I didn't need to be told because I could see it. When Ted and Marie were in the room with me there was a tension that hadn't been there before. And it felt to me like a bond that used to exist between them was now missing.
They went on being boyfriend and girlfriend though. And that cold period was a lot longer than the six months of warmth had been. Ted persisted—he was in love and he wasn't going to abandon love. Neither would Marie. They started to talk about getting married. Then they were engaged. They both were thrilled and things seemed to get back to what they had been for a while.
And then they cooled off again.
University ended that year and I moved back to the town I'd come from and lived with my parents in the suburbs for a while. Ted, romantic that he was, couldn't imagine leaving either Marie or Québec, so he moved into her apartment in a beautiful old house of the kind you dream of living in. Marie had a roommate named Stephanie.
I eventually moved back too. I guess I had some romance in me after all. I worked at a bistro in la vielle capitale and one day I ran into Ted again and we went for a beer together down in the lower town. For some reason I quite clearly remember ordering a Dortmunder. We covered all the old stuff but I didn't mention Marie for a long time. I'd expected an invitation to their wedding and I was hurt I hadn't gotten one. It never occurred to me that there might not have been a wedding.
Finally, I did ask. "How is Marie?" Ted said, "I have no idea." Then he told me they had broken up quite some time before. I said I was sorry to hear that. And then, although I hadn't asked, he told me how they broke up.
One night he and Marie had an argument. They'd gotten so they argued a lot. After it died down, unresolved, Marie fell asleep. Ted was so discouraged that he could not sleep. He got up and watched television but was so unhappy he decided he needed to get out out of the apartment. He got dressed and headed out into the winter cold. It was just before sunrise and he figured he'd find a coffee shop or something.
He was on his way down the street when he heard Stephanie call him in a loud whisper. He turned and saw her on the sidewalk in the snow wearing a flannel nightie and her boots and he rushed back to try and get her to go back in where it was warm. She refused. She wanted to tell him something. The two of them stood there in the cold morning air while she talked.
Stephanie had been listening to their fights for a long time. She'd had no choice in the little apartment. She'd often been waked by the sound of Ted and Marie talking. She knew their argument from start to stop. She knew it so well because, as she told Ted that morning, it was always the same argument. And then she said the words that set Ted free. "It's her body Ted. She's been living with it for 23 years now. If she doesn't know how to make it work, it's not your fault."
Ted didn't know how to respond to that and he was getting quite nervous about Stephanie out in the cold. He got her to go in but it took a while. She kept insisting that he acknowledge what she'd told him. "It isn't going to change Ted—she isn't going to change." He really didn't want to acknowledge it. She really did want him to. He finally said he did but it was more to get Stephanie to go in than anything else.
Then he went and found a coffee shop. It was while he was eating his pain au chocolat that he finally accepted what Stephanie had said. It wasn't easy. He really loved Marie and wanted to marry her. When he thought about the times they were happy together, and they had lots of these, he couldn't imagine anything he wanted more than to be married to Marie.
He didn't leave Marie that day. It took him a few months. He kept imagining what he'd say to her. He always had to do that with difficult issues with Marie. Anytime he'd tried to raise them, he'd always felt tongue-tied and she always seemed to be able to argue circles around him in the subsequent discussion. He had to formulate everything ahead of time or else she'd overwhelm him. This time, he couldn't even make his argument in his imagination. "I kept trying to say it in a way that she wouldn't turn against me and I couldn't."
The problem was that he kept trying—in his imaginary conversations—to convince her that it was best for both of them. And he had no trouble seeing how she would turn that on him. She'd say he was trying to make it sound like it was good for her when it was really what he wanted. He'd gone through a lot of variations on that argument and had come to dread them. The only thing he dreaded more was having the actual argument.
One day, he found an apartment on Cartier. It wasn't at all romantic. It was upstairs from a store and Cartier was a busy street. He took it anyway. Then he took a day off work, rented a van and moved his stuff out. The only big things he owned were his bed and a kitchen table and chairs that he'd promised his parents he'd return to them some day. Everything he could carry himself he took. He left the big furniture behind.
He called Marie that night and told her it was over. He just told her; he didn't explain or try to justify. He called from a payphone because he didn't have one in the apartment yet. The conversation lasted about forty five minutes and most of it was her hating him for what he was doing. He didn't dispute one word she said because he didn't feel any need to anymore. He was going and it didn't matter that much to him if she hated him now. And somewhere in the back of his mind, he knew that Stephanie would quietly tell another story to some of their female friends. That made it easier.
"The only thing that got me thinking about it later was that she'd threatened to leave before. I never had. I was the one who always begged her to stay. Sometimes—more and more often as time went on—she'd interrupt one of our arguments and say, 'I give up,' or 'Let's give up.' That used tear me apart. I'd cry and she'd look at me with these cold eyes. But when I actually did it, I was some sort of monster."
He stood it though. "Because she was right," he laughed as he explained this. I laughed with him and then laughed again for real a few moments later when I realized he meant not the real Marie but the one he'd been having the imaginary arguments with. What she was right about was that he was doing this for himself. "I finally faced it. I couldn't live like that. I couldn't go through that for the rest of my life."
So he left.
After we'd said goodbye, I went back to my place and thought about it. And it hit me that everything had changed. I'd never taken Ted very seriously and I still didn't. But that was what made it so impressive. If Ted had noticed this change, it had to have really happened. Sometimes you see people who seem to be riding some new trend but it fades because it never was a trend; they were just trendy. But not Ted. He was always behind a little. If he'd turned, everything had turned. And he'd needed Stephanie's help to see it. He never could have without her. She was the real heroine of the story the way Ted told it.
Ted never stopped being romantic. It was a little while after that he announced he was going to move to Paris. I don't know if he found love and happiness there. I doubt it somehow.
There are no turning points in life. There is just a time when things that seemed confused and uncertain suddenly seem no longer to be so. We sometimes call this the turning point when, if such a thing were possible, any actual turning has already happened. If there was a turning point on sexuality, it must have happened in the 1980s. If it happened, I didn't notice it; I don't know anyone else who did either.
But things did turn and I do remember the shock when I realized that things had changed and that people playing by the old rules had been left behind. It was a shock because with a subject like women, men and sex, I'd always assumed that it was the way it was and that it would never change.
There had apparently been a sexual revolution starting before I was born and over before I hit puberty but that seemed to me to be a mostly about things that had always been happening in the shadows coming out into the light. What happened in the 1980s was different and I think far more significant than the sexual revolution. The very basis of sexual relationships between women and men changed.
I noticed it talking to a guy named Ted. We reconnected a few years after university and just a little while before Ted moved to Paris. I'd met Ted in 1980 at university. Ted was a romantic. At the same time he was being so romantic, there was a lot of sex around the university. There were really only two sexually transmitted diseases in those days and both were curable. Besides which, nobody you knew ever got them. That would change, of course—in just two years time herpes would be the Time cover story—and it was our fault it changed. In those days you could walk into the university library and if you caught something in a girl's expression, a girl you had never even met before, you could invite for tea and oatmeal cookies followed by sex on the couch. You wouldn't mention the sex in your invitation, of course. It wasn't reasonable to expect the girl to commit herself that quickly, or, more to the point, that openly, but you both knew where things were likely going.
A lot of us did things like that back in those days. A doctor who worked at the university's health centre once told me that she spent the first two months of every year doing nothing but prescribing the pill to one woman after another: five appointments an hour, seven hours a day, five days a week. And there were a half dozen doctors on staff. "Anyone who showed up with an actual health problem, we'd send to emergency." These women, girls really, were away from home and away from their family doctors for the first time. They'd maybe had one lover in high school and maybe not even that but now they were free to do what they wanted and they meant to make the most it.
In that sort of atmosphere you could almost feel sorry for the poor sods, especially the male sods, who wanted love. Even if you found a girlfriend, she'd cheat on you. It seemed easier and safer to just go with the flow. I did and so did did Ted at first. It never bothered me; it did bother poor Ted. He was a romantic, as I say, and he wanted love.
And he found it when he met Marie. They met around the end of our second-last year and got serious at the start of final year. And for a while they lived in bliss. They'd spend entire weekends in bed together. Ted went to her place at Christmas and they'd snuck down from their separate rooms in the middle of the night after her parents were gone to sleep and had sex in front of tree and ate Santa's cookies afterward.
Ted thought he'd done us all one better. He had all the sex we did and love too.
He had it for six months. Then things got tougher. Ted didn't talk about it with me. He wasn't the type to talk about it. Most men aren't. But I didn't need to be told because I could see it. When Ted and Marie were in the room with me there was a tension that hadn't been there before. And it felt to me like a bond that used to exist between them was now missing.
They went on being boyfriend and girlfriend though. And that cold period was a lot longer than the six months of warmth had been. Ted persisted—he was in love and he wasn't going to abandon love. Neither would Marie. They started to talk about getting married. Then they were engaged. They both were thrilled and things seemed to get back to what they had been for a while.
And then they cooled off again.
University ended that year and I moved back to the town I'd come from and lived with my parents in the suburbs for a while. Ted, romantic that he was, couldn't imagine leaving either Marie or Québec, so he moved into her apartment in a beautiful old house of the kind you dream of living in. Marie had a roommate named Stephanie.
I eventually moved back too. I guess I had some romance in me after all. I worked at a bistro in la vielle capitale and one day I ran into Ted again and we went for a beer together down in the lower town. For some reason I quite clearly remember ordering a Dortmunder. We covered all the old stuff but I didn't mention Marie for a long time. I'd expected an invitation to their wedding and I was hurt I hadn't gotten one. It never occurred to me that there might not have been a wedding.
Finally, I did ask. "How is Marie?" Ted said, "I have no idea." Then he told me they had broken up quite some time before. I said I was sorry to hear that. And then, although I hadn't asked, he told me how they broke up.
One night he and Marie had an argument. They'd gotten so they argued a lot. After it died down, unresolved, Marie fell asleep. Ted was so discouraged that he could not sleep. He got up and watched television but was so unhappy he decided he needed to get out out of the apartment. He got dressed and headed out into the winter cold. It was just before sunrise and he figured he'd find a coffee shop or something.
He was on his way down the street when he heard Stephanie call him in a loud whisper. He turned and saw her on the sidewalk in the snow wearing a flannel nightie and her boots and he rushed back to try and get her to go back in where it was warm. She refused. She wanted to tell him something. The two of them stood there in the cold morning air while she talked.
Stephanie had been listening to their fights for a long time. She'd had no choice in the little apartment. She'd often been waked by the sound of Ted and Marie talking. She knew their argument from start to stop. She knew it so well because, as she told Ted that morning, it was always the same argument. And then she said the words that set Ted free. "It's her body Ted. She's been living with it for 23 years now. If she doesn't know how to make it work, it's not your fault."
Ted didn't know how to respond to that and he was getting quite nervous about Stephanie out in the cold. He got her to go in but it took a while. She kept insisting that he acknowledge what she'd told him. "It isn't going to change Ted—she isn't going to change." He really didn't want to acknowledge it. She really did want him to. He finally said he did but it was more to get Stephanie to go in than anything else.
Then he went and found a coffee shop. It was while he was eating his pain au chocolat that he finally accepted what Stephanie had said. It wasn't easy. He really loved Marie and wanted to marry her. When he thought about the times they were happy together, and they had lots of these, he couldn't imagine anything he wanted more than to be married to Marie.
He didn't leave Marie that day. It took him a few months. He kept imagining what he'd say to her. He always had to do that with difficult issues with Marie. Anytime he'd tried to raise them, he'd always felt tongue-tied and she always seemed to be able to argue circles around him in the subsequent discussion. He had to formulate everything ahead of time or else she'd overwhelm him. This time, he couldn't even make his argument in his imagination. "I kept trying to say it in a way that she wouldn't turn against me and I couldn't."
The problem was that he kept trying—in his imaginary conversations—to convince her that it was best for both of them. And he had no trouble seeing how she would turn that on him. She'd say he was trying to make it sound like it was good for her when it was really what he wanted. He'd gone through a lot of variations on that argument and had come to dread them. The only thing he dreaded more was having the actual argument.
One day, he found an apartment on Cartier. It wasn't at all romantic. It was upstairs from a store and Cartier was a busy street. He took it anyway. Then he took a day off work, rented a van and moved his stuff out. The only big things he owned were his bed and a kitchen table and chairs that he'd promised his parents he'd return to them some day. Everything he could carry himself he took. He left the big furniture behind.
He called Marie that night and told her it was over. He just told her; he didn't explain or try to justify. He called from a payphone because he didn't have one in the apartment yet. The conversation lasted about forty five minutes and most of it was her hating him for what he was doing. He didn't dispute one word she said because he didn't feel any need to anymore. He was going and it didn't matter that much to him if she hated him now. And somewhere in the back of his mind, he knew that Stephanie would quietly tell another story to some of their female friends. That made it easier.
"The only thing that got me thinking about it later was that she'd threatened to leave before. I never had. I was the one who always begged her to stay. Sometimes—more and more often as time went on—she'd interrupt one of our arguments and say, 'I give up,' or 'Let's give up.' That used tear me apart. I'd cry and she'd look at me with these cold eyes. But when I actually did it, I was some sort of monster."
He stood it though. "Because she was right," he laughed as he explained this. I laughed with him and then laughed again for real a few moments later when I realized he meant not the real Marie but the one he'd been having the imaginary arguments with. What she was right about was that he was doing this for himself. "I finally faced it. I couldn't live like that. I couldn't go through that for the rest of my life."
So he left.
After we'd said goodbye, I went back to my place and thought about it. And it hit me that everything had changed. I'd never taken Ted very seriously and I still didn't. But that was what made it so impressive. If Ted had noticed this change, it had to have really happened. Sometimes you see people who seem to be riding some new trend but it fades because it never was a trend; they were just trendy. But not Ted. He was always behind a little. If he'd turned, everything had turned. And he'd needed Stephanie's help to see it. He never could have without her. She was the real heroine of the story the way Ted told it.
Ted never stopped being romantic. It was a little while after that he announced he was going to move to Paris. I don't know if he found love and happiness there. I doubt it somehow.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)