By Gene Case
I’ll tell it like it never happened. I think maybe it didn’t, or
hasn’t yet; I think that in telling events as I remember them, sequencing them
into narrative, I am perhaps creating it. I’ll tell it as if I imagined it.
(He wrote to me: unclear antecedent. It has never before
occurred to me that people don’t know what I mean when I say it or this. —I
love the word this, the sweeping gesture of the fricatives, tongue tip tugged
backward under the teeth.— I don’t mean them as pronouns; I don’t know how to explain
what they mean.)
We’re in his office, a spare, gabled attic room. Windows run the
length of the east wall, overlooking the quad. It’s warm. We have talked about
poetry, and now we turn to prose, which both of us prefer.
I say we. There is a girl in my chair. She swivels back and
forth absently, knees crossed, elbows balanced on the armrests. She is holding
an eighth-folded sheet of ruled paper, uncrumpled from the pocket of her jeans.
I wish she were a heroine. She would have the magnetic, artless sensitivity of
an ingénue, if only she were better at being a girl.
We are speaking of prose. She says that a novella, Fantomina,
has shocked her to her core; she says it’s one of the best things she’s ever
read. She was stunned by it.
But she is confused. (How does a girl get a boy’s attention,
other than asking him to explain something to her? I wouldn’t know.) The last
act is obscure to her.
In the story, the unnamed heroine seduces the same man four
times, in a different disguise each time. Each time he grows bored of her. The
fourth time, she takes the name Incognita. Her disguise is self-consciously a
disguise: she only meets him in a mask, and they make love in total darkness.
Previously, her lover has supposed he knew her; this time, he knows he doesn’t.
The story imagines what it would be like to recreate desire
infinitely—to get what you want and then want it again. Every time she yields
to her lover, he grows bored of her, and every time, she takes on a new
disguise, and he desires her once more. But the fourth time is different. She
gives him everything except her face. He is left wanting one thing.
Reading, I had supposed that, because this last piece of his
desire has gone unfulfilled, the fourth time would not end the way the others
did. I thought this time he would hang in her web, suspended by desire, for as
long as she resisted him.
But he loses interest even faster than before, after only one
night together. He is resentful that she won’t show him her face, and rather
petulantly resolves not to see her again. Their love affair ends soon after,
this time for good.
I have an inkling of the explanation the girl will get—the only
one I’ve been able to come up with. Maybe it’s a comment on the expectations
placed on women, the Madonna-whore double bind. The first three times, the
heroine yields to her lover, and having gotten his desire, he tires of her. The
only time she successfully resists him, he is insulted, and his desire is
quenched by bitterness. She is condemned as wanton if she yields, as a
temptress if she resists. I’m unsatisfied by this answer; but then, this girl
has never been imagined as either a Madonna or a whore.
She asks him all this, not giving her hypothesis.
The story surprises her again.
He says that the lover is an incurious person. He seeks
pleasure, not knowledge; if an explanation is not readily provided, he does not
pursue one. The heroine, by contrast, is defined by her curiosity—it is her
curiosity which sets the story in motion. She first takes a disguise because
she wants to find out how she will be treated in it.
This answer surprises the girl. She says that she had not
considered the difference between curiosity and desire, and indeed, before now
they had seemed to her synonymous. She will have to reflect.
We talk of other things. She turns her attention from Fantomina
to his blue-grey eyes; to the dark hair on his arms; to his wide, pink mouth,
almost triangular when he smiles, which is often; to the splotchy redness
spreading over his neck (but not his face) as he talks about sentimental
fiction. I don’t know why she didn’t think to write down the books he
recommends, but I remember nearly all of them, and read most.
We talk for an hour. She mentions leaving, and he says, just a
minute; you’ve asked him questions; now he has some questions for you. In the
end, he only asks one.
I think I was glad after we met—it was the first sunny day in
weeks, or at least it felt that way at the time. I walked to the subway in
bliss. Most of the time my happiness is exhausting, passing through me like a
column of fire, but that day I was amazingly tranquil.
I was happy, but I wrote that expressing how I felt only made me
sad. I liked talking to him so much that I wished I wasn’t infatuated with him.
I tell my roommate that I want him worse than I’ve ever wanted
anyone in my life. As far as I can tell it’s true. I am astonished not by the
intensity but the depth of my feelings. I shouldn’t say I’m in love with him,
but I’m in love with everything about him—everything I know about him. I’m
desperate to learn more.
The week before we meet in his office, he asks, what is desire?
She waits a long time before she answers. She says desire is wanting
what you can’t have. (She says a lot of other things, too; she rambles with him.)
He asks if you can desire something if you possess it.
At first she can’t tell if he’s still talking to her. She says,
I don’t think so; she says that it’s the lack which feeds desire. If you
possess the object of desire, you don’t want it anymore. As she speaks I
picture water seeping out from my cupped fingers, the tub both filled and
running.
He is asking in relation to Fantomina, but afterward, he doesn’t
try to relate our answers to the story. The definition of desire lingers like
perfume. I am dizzy the rest of class, and walk home trembling. When I ask to
meet with him, he responds in under an hour.
I wanted him from the first moment I saw him, when the only
resource available was my imagination. —But that’s not true: almost from the
start he was material, tangible, a real part of the world.
First I saw an acquaintance. She smiled at me across the hall.
(Maybe I should say she smiled at him, being as I am with her indubitably
un-female.) Then she turned to him. When she said hello my ears perked up; I
knew his name. After a few minutes she approached me, thanking me for a favour
I’d done her recently, and asked if I was in his class. This was the first time
he ever looked at me.
She told me I was in good hands. I believed her.
I can’t say I’ve thought much about love at first sight. When
I’ve fallen in love before, it’s been with close friends, and my infatuations
usually have a slow germination. But even as I was sitting down I was thinking,
he’s going to be a problem.
I’m afraid the phrase first sight conjures a static image, but I
love him in motion. That first day, he talked a lot with his hands; at some
point he seemed to realize this, and knit his long, skeletal fingers together,
and then he talked with his elbows, flapping his arms like he was making a
shadow puppet of a bird. His lively eyes darted like a bird’s—all his lanky
body, in fact, is rather theatrically avian, and I wasn’t sure at first that it
wasn’t an affect.
I’ve already mentioned his smile, which is kind and a little
mischievous, and near constant. He casts it extravagantly around the room. If
he ever tries to be solemn, his deep, gouged dimples and flashing eyes give the
lie to that pretense.
I think I love his voice most of all. It is warm, melodious, and
non-resonant. What’s extraordinary about it is how it jumps octaves in the
space of a sentence, moving between a gravelly vocal fry to a breaking high
note far up in his throat—still curiously musical—and back again. Perhaps aware
of this, he often ends questions with a falling tone, and for this reason,
everyone hesitates after he poses them, unsure whether they really are
questions.
This is everything I noticed about him the first day.
For a little while after our meeting, in awe of him, I defer to
his explanation of Fantomina. But as I scrutinize all my memories of him—and
search desperately (and largely fruitlessly) for publicly available
information—I begin to suspect that he’s wrong about curiosity. It’s probably
true that the lover in the story is incurious, and maybe that means he doesn’t
truly desire the heroine. But real desire wants everything available to it,
everything it can hold.
It's important to me that I know everything about him. One
morning I am lying in bed when I recall the glint of a chain peeking out from
beneath his shirt. It’s like he has moved a little in my mind, so that I see
the little sparkle of metal, right there before my eyes. At the time I found it
surprising that he would wear a chain. It reminded me of a necklace my roommate
wears, with a Hebrew letter pendant.
I have been puzzling over his college affiliation for some time,
and in that moment, the silver chain glinting in my soul, it suddenly occurs to
me that he’s Catholic. The notion surprises me. Catholic—I feel very English in
my shock. I absorb it quickly, working it into what I know of him. He had
mentioned Gerard Manley Hopkins, whom I’ve been reading, an intensely devout
poet.
This is desire’s scrupulousness; but is it a function of
imagination or curiosity?
If I were to paint Venus, these would be the names I would give
to her attendants. I haven’t decided whether they’re co-conspirators or
antagonists. They can supplement each other, and I believe they do create a
unified emotion of desire, but surely there’s a difference between a delusional
love and an obsessive one. The great crime ascribed to infatuation is that you
fall in love with an idea of a person. But infatuation which aspires to
accuracy is no less distorted, and likely more dangerous.
In Fantomina, the heroine is born from curiosity, but the great
expression of desire—her many disguises—is fanciful. Her lover, who falls for
every one of her schemes, apparently lacks either. He must desire; only it
isn’t any of the personas that attract him, but rather pleasure itself. Even
so, I marvel at his callousness. Is there no pleasure to be got in the
revelation of a disguise?
Some time after our meeting, I sat for an hour in the quad below
his window, reading a book he had recommended. I trembled with cold and more
than cold. I was sitting there particularly because I wanted to figure out
which window was his. I knew exactly how to get to his office, but I just
couldn’t match it up with the long row of gables piercing the grey roof.
Because I wanted him to see me, I wanted to believe that it was the room with
the open window. His office had been warm. But I just couldn’t quite believe
that it was as grand as that one looked—it was in the stone tower, and I was so
sure that the ceiling had been sloped. I looked up at those windows for as long
as I could take the cold as the sun set behind them. After I left, I wrote for
a long time, recording all the evidence. I retraced the long climb up to the
attic, through the narrow hallways. I became sure that the tower room was at
the end of the hall, and his office was directly to the left of it. The light
in that window had been dark; I’d paid it no attention. I felt mournful.
It is imperative that I take advantage of every opportunity I
have to see him. I become forensic in my attention: I learn to angle my head so
that I can dart my eyes down to where he’s sitting every spare moment. I have
seen him twice a week since we met, with two exceptions.
The first time, I have woken early to get blood drawn. The quiet
melancholy of the clinic, the cold, grey sky, and the bandaged wound in the crook
of my elbow all make me feel tender and vulnerable.
I am getting a coffee. When I enter the café, on my left, there
he is: as bright and incongruous as the sun. Suddenly I’m a girl again. His
eyes widen and so do hers. His wide, smiling mouth says hello.
I have not gone to his office yet. I have not yet learned to
look for him everywhere, to be constantly sensitive to his presence—across the
street, in the quad at twilight, on the way to the library. I am stunned by the
sight of him. I feel like I’m bleeding again. I have not quite convinced myself
that I’m in love with him, but seeing him here, when I so little expected it,
strikes me as an irrefutable omen of our attachment.
It is not a mutual attachment. I wrote, the problem which
lingers is the question of me. Thinking of him, I dissolve, I am subsumed. What
fills me is not myself but the image of him—not even desire, him, all the
pieces I’ve so carefully collected—and I forget even that I exist.
I feel myself tethered to him, and when we meet, I feel part of
an us. But I know it’s one-way adoration. When he looks at me I become a girl,
melting and guileless, but I’m not even sure he likes girls.
But in his office—I do feel sure—I don’t imagine our chemistry.
Chemistry is probably the wrong word. It’s more like camaraderie. He looks at
her, this girl in my chair, and his eyes grow big and round, flashing with
excitement. She asks him to tell her about sentimental fiction, and he asks,
with some emotion, what you want to know.
He talks for a long time, more than she expects. I think he is
too young to have distilled his studies into a brief, detached abstract; he
speaks with the enthusiasm of an undergraduate. He says he loves unabashed
seriousness. These are two of my favourite words in the world.
She asks if he has recommendations, and for a second time, he
turns the question back on her, with that same wrung-out emotion (almost—but
surely not—pleasure), asking, what do you like.
There can be nothing untoward here, but oh, to have those words
ringing in my soul for the rest of time—never mind the fuel of desire, that’s
gratifying in its own right.
It is these things, these tethers of connection, which keep me
suspended in his office for weeks afterward. Time passes as time will, but
desire preserves its glories in amber: when I remember him, it’s always in
present tense. We love beginnings and we love endings, and we forget that it’s
the endless middle—reading backwards and forwards—which is the domain of
desire. Fantomina imagines a world where the story never has to end, where love
is spun out and doubled back on itself. This is the world my memories inhabit.
What does it matter if the meeting is over, if I can revisit it in my mind, if
only I take the care to preserve every detail?
As fanciful as infatuation is by nature, I must admit I feel a
little proud of my attentiveness. I wonder whether it’s possible to create a
perfect love—not to say that I should be the one to do it, and certainly not
with him. But with enough time, proximity, and attention, couldn’t a person
fall in love completely, without that love ever being actualized?
I had been thinking of this, or of something very like it, the
day our mutual acquaintance came into the library. I started, tried to catch
her eye. She never saw me, and though I looked for her, I didn’t see her again,
either.
This interested me. Our library is small; I didn’t think it was
frequented by graduate students. If she had been there—that meant he could
come, too.
And there was another thing. At the library, we could look up
anyone who had a library card, and see every book they had on loan. We were
allowed to do so when people forgot their cards, provided they showed us a
piece of ID.
I am never not looking for him. In every search engine I have
access to, his name appears, although to that point I had never found anything.
When the idea entered my mind I felt it like a bolt of desire—that same
perceptive leap, a curious airborne sensation. And just as startling: the
certainty that I mustn’t do it, however I wanted to. I would be using the only
power I had—never mind how inconsequential—to invade his privacy.
I wish I could say that this resolve meant I wasn’t tempted,
that the moral superiority I took from it scoured me of curiosity. But I
thought of it often. It wasn’t enough to imagine him, as I so often did; I need
to know him.
For some time I have been looking for him in public spaces,
having made note of his coat and bag. I wish I knew his gait better. How big is
the world, I think, that I shouldn’t run into him a second time? I can’t look
straight ahead anymore. I shoot glances at anyone in a grey wool coat, eyes big
as saucers. I trip over pavement often.
I don’t know why, but one day, having parted from friends—after
I’ve spent the entire time looking over the tops of their heads, hoping he will
be there, inexplicably, impossibly—I am seized with a paroxysm of longing.
I am in a sloping, wooded path, dappled with sunlight. Now, though,
all sensory details lead back to him. I feel a terrible pressure in my chest, a
real, physical sensation. It is suddenly inconceivable that I will not see him
today. I can’t bear it. I am so sure that I will see him, that I must.
I don’t, of course, and when I get home, I feel that awful grief
again, missing something I’ve never had.
I dwell on the desire of Fantomina’s lover because it is so
startling in its ambivalence. But a person could just as well ask why—if I am
right (as I rarely am) that desire is defined by its lack—the heroine, having
gotten what she wants (four times over!), continues to pursue her lover,
continues to recreate the present-tense suspension of desire. I think, however,
that I understand her a little better than I do her lover. It is not enough to
have him; she wants to be desired by him in turn.
Desire, I know, is not a straight line, not a single thread
running between the lover and beloved, but a shifting, labyrinthine tapestry.
It is as much a quest for feeling as it is for a single object.
Some time ago, before I knew him, I wrote, It’s like I need
someone to put myself into, an empty vessel to put love—an object of affection
with the emphasis on object. I suppose an infatuation is like any other
passion: gratifying exactly because it takes up our full attention. It
synthesizes creative and academic faculties, the quest for beauty and the
pursuit of knowledge, mobilizing them toward a single end.
My fancy is captivated by supposing him on the subway and the
streets around campus; and I find near endless pleasure in imagining things
which never happened, or which haven’t happened yet. But my curiosity is never
satisfied. I think, if there’s anything, that’s what’s different this time—this
choking, voracious fascination.
The heroine’s disguises are the workings of imagination, but
they are equally a means to acquire knowledge. She is clear-eyed about her
lover: she knows he isn’t true to her (because it’s her—one of many hers—with
whom he’s being untrue). She knows him completely, probably better than he
knows himself.
When I suggested that imagination and curiosity are in tension,
my roommate averred the opposite. He said that they work in tandem, each
elaborating on the other’s product: imagination leaps in where curiosity can’t
stretch itself, and curiosity fulfills the best plans of imagination.
I think he must be right, because I’m starting not to discern
between them.
I’ve imagined a memory. It hasn’t happened yet. It will happen
one day when I’m at the library, with a rare hour alone. It’s quiet; I know I
will not be caught.
I don’t know why I’m going to do it. I suppose I must be sick
with longing, almost crazed. The temptation is too much: my resolve breaks.
This thing, this wanting, hungry creature inside of me, will be
the one to do it, to type his name. All you need is a name.
There will be two pages’ worth of books, around forty in all,
and this thing—this devourer—reads their titles voraciously. But I, at its
shoulder, must look with some delicacy, not too close, as if that lessens the
violation. I will not return to the page, and so I will not remember the list
with any great accuracy.
Four or five editions of Tristram Shandy, but none of Clarissa.
A guide to writing your dissertation. Two copies of the King James
Bible—strange, inexplicable. Surprising, as people are, as knowledge is.
And yet, sated with this new acquisition, I will not be
complete. He will not. There will be still, and always, more to know, more to
imagine.
Afterwards I will walk home, belly empty, remembering a line from
the opening of Fantomina: She was young, a stranger to the world…
I will think how strange it is, to end in the middle—and yet how
fitting. Desire is all middles.
But maybe that’s wrong. I think maybe I’d better tell it again.
I think I’d better confess to it, tell it like it really happened—like it’s
true.
About the author: Gene Case is a second year student at Trinity
College in the University of Toronto, studying English and Literature &
Critical Theory. Their writing has appeared in Blank Spaces, Jelly Bucket, and
Acta Victoriana. They are from Ottawa, Ontario, by way of Sault Ste. Marie.
