Running In The Dark
Tuesday night a man described by university police as a white male in his twenties or early thirties, 5’ 6” with brownish, dirty blonde hair, wearing a grey sweatshirt and blue jeans, entered the women’s restroom on the nineteenth floor of the library and committed a sexual assault.
I have not been able to get this out of my head. A woman was working or studying late and went to the bathroom. Maybe she was getting ready for the walk home; maybe she was planning to work for a while yet.
Two buildings away, I was in a classroom discussing “Black Venus” and “Peter and the Wolf,” Angela Carter’s stories about Baudelaire’s syphilitic paramour and an orphan girl raised as a wolf by the wolves that killed her mother.
The library is a gratuitous skyscraper that, located on a west-facing hillside, creates terrible surrounding downdrafts even on quiet days. Its engineers did not fully account for the weight of the books and there are railings to prevent people from standing too close in case of falling bricks. The outer offices high up have views over the valley to the Holyoke Range and west into the hill towns, but the windows are narrow, like the windows in the World Trade Center. It’s an odd, choking experience to feel enclosed so high up in the air. The library is a warren of stale, low-ceilinged hallways with scratched and scuffed wallboard.
Last night Mary Gaitskill read at University Hall, a few minutes’ walk away. She read a story in which, among other things, a rapist and two victims are on a television talk show. One of the victims is a brash redhead who threatens potential rapists. The audience cheers. The rapist cheers. The other victim is shy, overweight. The rapist says she’d been asking for it. She’d given him a glass of wine. She’d thought he was lonely. The audience and the story’s narrator can imagine her bent over the table.
Gaitskill is a superb reader, with an understated dramatic sense, quiet, assured enough to be self-deprecatory and still intimidatingly smart in Q & A afterwards. I asked what her thoughts were on first versus third-person narration, since she’s used first person so effectively. First person (she said) has an immediacy third can never get, but she warned against using it for stories based on your own experience lest the character be reduced to a retelling of you and have a flatness insufficient for fictional characters. She said she’s had listeners at readings become angered upon learning that the first-person stories they loved were, in fact, made up. As if they felt betrayed. Lied to. Led on. That the stories were somehow less true for being—as advertised—stories.
Critics use words like “urgent” to describe writing that, like Gaitskill’s, concerns itself with subjects that are not necessarily domestic. Fiction is not urgent. Calls from the nineteenth floor are urgent. Fiction is something else. Not an attempt to understand, to make sense. Maybe the opposite. An attempt to shatter what passes for making sense. These fragments have I shored against my ruins, T.S. Eliot said.
Monday night a golden moon was riding full behind a rack of clouds. The early sunset, the second day after the shift to standard time, had come upon me by surprise, and I was running in the dark, past lit kitchens and undergraduates herding themselves to dinner. Between the streetlights the pavement was invisible and it was easy to feel effortless, weightless, everything synced to my feet and my feet synced to the beat on my headphones, while in some nearby town, a white male, 5’ 6” with brownish, dirty blonde hair was eating dinner, working late or going to bed early or watching TV, reading web sites because it was a nice night and why the hell not.
