The Lights Read online

  “Did you focus group that one at Wieden and Kennedy?” I replied.

  “No, I think I used it on the first woman I talked to after my divorce.”

  “I can’t imagine why it didn’t work out.”

  “She got tired of being the big spoon,” said Jason.

  “Do you realize it’s ten million degrees out?” I said. “You may as well be wearing Crock-Pots on your feet.”

  “Gotta pay the cost to be the boss,” he said.

  “How old are you?” I said. “Did you get a reference letter from your pediatrician?”

  This was met with an inevitable banality about receiving one from my mother. They were pleased with themselves, imaginary Norman Mailers and George Plimptons toasting their defiant political incorrectness. I mulled the benefits of shaming them with my mother’s death, but I was not interested in this becoming a real conversation.

  “I’m underwhelmed, guys. I went to an arts college so I’ve seen the thing before where boys act like jerks because they think it makes them less gay. Side note: I know it’s hot out, but I really don’t think it’s healthy for a human being to produce that smell.”

  The smell of Harry’s armpits was almost comically intrusive and rank—“bestial,” I would call it, if I didn’t know what satisfaction he would take in it—if you sat too close to him or if he put his arm around you, as was often the case if you were a female and he’d had more than half a drink.

  Harry lifted an arm and inhaled deeply as if into a bouquet of flowers.

  “You’re right, this is an unhealthy level of virility. But I have smelling salts in case you pass out.”

  “If I pass out of anything it’s going to be boredom, but you probably get that from all the girls. What happened to your ear?”

  “A bar fight,” said Harry.

  “Real people don’t get into bar fights.”

  “They do when it’s a question of dignity.”

  “How many times a day do you say that to Terry Gross inside your head?”

  “I don’t even get around to it, honestly. I’m too busy waving smelling salts under her nose. ‘Damn these pythons, Terry! Why did I have to come in here on a full pump?’”

  He flexed his arms in that way that heavily muscular men are looking for an excuse to do even under the auspices of joking.

  “So what do you and Terry talk about after your first collection of Connecticut divorce fiction?” said Jason.

  I poured my drink down the front of his shirt and left them to find another girl whose pigtails they could pull, but as I was walking out of the room I bumped into the evening’s host, a portly, soft-spoken popular Texas historian. The property was a university-sponsored writers residency and this man was the current occupant. My inner Lisa Simpson could not waste an opportunity to suck up, so soon afterward the three of us were listening to him discuss the biography he was working on of famed Texas Ranger John Coffee “Jack” Hays. It was news to me there was such a thing as a non-athlete “famed Texas Ranger,” but Harry was obviously excited for the opportunity to speak to a real author whose interests he didn’t consider hopelessly effeminate (also, apparently Hays, one of the state’s undisputed tough guys, was short). Harry demanded of the historian what guns he’d brought. The man said the residency had a strict no-gun policy. Harry scoffed, “bureaucrats,” then insisted the man level with him. To Harry, who had once proudly proclaimed that whenever someone began a conversation about “the novel” he started thinking about guns, a person surrounded by this much undisturbed wilderness with no armory was unthinkable. The historian shrugged and adjusted his glasses uncomfortably.

  “Cocksucker!” said Harry. “I knew I should have brought my crossbow. I thought about it, but I didn’t. Goddamn it, any time you think you should bring your crossbow but you leave it at home you end up needing it!”

  The historian agreed in polite bafflement.

  “You can borrow mine if you want,” said Harry. “I could drop it off. And my chainsaw. Think about how much better that view would be if you cleared some of that cocksucking cedar.”

  I fulfilled the obligation of my gender by gently steering the conversation into territory more congenial to our host, who did not suffer confusion as to the difference between his he-man subject matter and himself. I asked if his family missed him, it being such an inconvenient drive to the city.

  “They’d probably be happier if I were in Fort Stockton!” he said with a chuckle.

  Harry looked at me with disdain. He had been discussing matters of masculine interest and I had turned them to the domestic. I did not disagree with him; as much as the he-man act was like nails on a chalkboard for me, it made me feel small and womanly that I had made things more safe. But to annoy him even more I made my voice reedier and upturned and drew out the sylla-bllllles as I asked the historian more questions about his wife’s interior design firm and his daughter’s engagement and other things that the only person who could have cared less about than I did was Harry.

  He tolerated this sullenly, eyes darting around the room in boredom, when uncontainable childlike exuberance overtook his face.

  “Holy shit, do you know what this is?” he said.

  He sprung to the mantle and picked up an object, a rusty old ranching tool that looked a little like a large nutcracker.

  “This is called a Burdizzo tool. You put it around the scrotum and the jaws clamp down on the blood vessels,” he said. “It kills the balls.”

  Harry advanced on Jason, jabbing the tool at his crotch and working the jaws.

  “C’mere! C’mere, bwah!” said Harry.

  Our host chuckled and shook his head in avuncular approval few men can resist of BOYS BEING BOYS.

  “What a character,” he said to me, and once again I coursed with resentment and envy at a man like Harry’s continual ability to get away with being himself.

  Later on, a few of us went out for a walk on one of the various trails. I wanted to pass; at this point I’d had a quite a few mint juleps and would have been far happier lying down for a nap in the shade, but it was too early in the term to be the uncharming drunk girl, and also Mark wanted to go and I knew he would not without me. When I’d rejoined him outside he already had that look of lost-child anxiety that he got when I left him alone too long at social functions. Of course Harry assumed role of scout leader: edifying us on the plant life we passed or the different bird cries, crouching to evaluate the freshness of a wild pig track (and once more cursing himself for not bringing a crossbow). He gestured at an expanse of hills.

  “But this is nothing. There is a valley so wide in west Texas that if you yell ‘git up!’ and go to bed, eight hours later the echo will be your alarm,” he said, mugging.

  Mark smiled, which annoyed me. But it had been years, college, probably, since he’d had male friends, or really any friends other than me. Don’t be that girl, he is allowed to smile at whatever he wants to, I told myself.

  One intriguing takeaway from his lecture was Jason’s lack of participation. His attention drifted, presumably from familiarity with the material but also, I was to learn later, genuine lack of interest. I will unfailingly find the fault line if it exists and was pleased to discover this one: Jason, like the historian, was a product of suburban Texas, and his interest in manly things was entirely theoretical—any hands-on attraction to guns or tools or which berries were poisonous substantially less than reading about it. Jason’s distraction obviously caused Harry paternal disgruntlement, and this pleased me.

  Is it possible Jason emerged so early as strategic terrain between Harry and me that could be manipulated? Maybe the facts that followed are inflecting what actually happened. But it is not impossible.

  We reached a small collection of droppings on the trail. Harry crouched again to determine the species of origin. He took out his pocketknife and shaved off a sliver and with a
n intensely furrowed brow licked the blade.

  I died.

  I lay down on the trail and draped my arm over my eyes, unconcerned now about being the sloppy drunk girl. He was literally eating shit and I literally died.

  “You probably don’t want to lie down there,” said Harry.

  I waved my arm dismissively. “You win at nature. Congratulations. I’m having a nap.”

  “You really need to get up,” said Mark.

  I opened my eyes to glare at him, willing to be that girl in the face of this sedition. But I saw the genuine concern in his eyes before feeling a tingle on my bare legs, which shortly became a fiery stinging as I leapt up, wildly dancing and brushing off dozens of red ants.

  As I write this now years later the sensation is no less vivid, not simply the pain of the stings but also the cool frisson that came just before, the numinous thrill of it.

  two encounters

  Having solidly acquired a reputation as the drunk girl who ended up in the emergency room (which I did not really mind, drama being a quality that far exceeds class in the Galvan hierarchy), my relationship with the two-man mutual appreciation society soon evolved with encounters I had with each individually.

  The first occurred between Harry and me at group drinks after a lit class. His significant other was not in this class. The topic of discussion—domestic novels—had continued to the bar and another classmate proposed that the most ideal subject of this genre was female infidelity, because it combined the maximum amount of conflict and interiority.

  I considered this to be an interesting point, but was troubled by it. “Then why is it that the canonical novels about it are all written by men?” I asked.

  Another classmate offered the simple explanation that the domestic novel achieved its peak in the nineteenth century, at which point female infidelity was such a controversial and threatening subject it could only be addressed by men.

  Harry put his face in his hands, annoyed that we were discussing a fictional mode he was about as interested in as chewing light bulbs, and as long as we were on the subject still getting it wrong.

  “The reason men are the ones who write about women cheating is because women lie about it,” he said.

  “I would have expected you to say the most unbelievably sexist thing in this conversation, and yet that was even more unbelievably sexist than I would have imagined,” I said.

  “It’s not sexist, it’s actually the opposite of sexist,” he said. “You can’t have compassion for something without trying to genuinely understand it.”

  “Please illuminate your superior understanding of my sex,” I said.

  “It’s not that complicated,” he said. “Four billion years of biological hardwiring has made women into lying machines.”

  I threw my hands up inquisitively to the group; was I hallucinating that this walking gland was actually saying these things?

  “See, what you’re doing here is looking at it with a value judgment. Your enlightened liberal brain has been programmed to react in certain ways to certain words, and your reaction is to get offended. Which, by the way, is the least interesting way to respond to any philosophical question.”

  He was lecturing me on the etiquette of philosophical discourse! He was a gland!

  “Because there’s no way a person might be offended on their own account at calling half the human beings on the planet ‘lying machines.’”

  “You really are staggeringly incapable of seeing your own programming right now. Peahens evolved earth-tone colors to hide from predators. This is a lie, camouflage is a lie, it is saying, ‘I am not a thing for you to kill and eat, I am a mound of dirt.’ By contrast, the peacock’s baller coloring is saying A) ‘come and get me bitches,’ and B) ‘the fact that I’m still alive means that you should pass on my pimp-ass seed.’”

  “Great, we’re at peacocks already,” I said. “Was there any other pseudo-scientific theory that unbelievably sexist people use to prove the inferiority of women you wanted to cover?”

  “Jesus Christ, evolution is not ‘pseudo-science,’ it’s the definition of science science.”

  “You know there is no correlation between the length of your penis and the number of times you use the word ‘science’ to support your own argument?”

  “True, though it’s added like a hundred centimeters to the girth. But the subject here is not my powerful-yet-elegant Saxonate manhood—which by the way is a substantially more interesting conversation—it’s why women are liars because of their smaller brains.”

  “Here we go!” I said.

  “Again, I apologize that I didn’t spend four years in a small arts college discussing Victorian-era lesbian poets, but if I can have a second to elaborate without you jumping down my throat with your programmed reaction. The female brain is roughly ten percent smaller than the male brain, but equal mass. This means that there is the same number of neurons but in the female brain there is a denser network of connections, giving men the advantage in compartmentalization and linear reasoning, but women a greater aptitude for multitasking and intuition. And woman, being the physically weaker and less aggressive sex, has to rely on her superior intuitive intelligence in a world where, for the majority of history and pretty much everywhere today below the poverty line, she is dependent on men for resources and protection. This is why, as a survival mechanism, women are genius and instinctive liars; so genius in fact that they have the power to believe their own lies, which is like Jedi level. Your boyfriend Tolstoy himself said he would tell the whole truth about women when he had one foot in the grave, then jump in. Obviously he was referring to the biological fact that it is a gender of little shoppers whose relationship to reality is like Israel and Palestine. Except Israel and Palestine are neighbors.”

  He swept his arm, flexing his tricep. “Look at people. We are a greedy, selfish, deceitful species. The simple explanation for this is sexual selection, because only males capable of getting around female’s inability to be accountable or transparent about their own nature are reproducing! From the perspective of slave morality, that’s a value judgment, but from a scientific perspective, it’s simply an effective adaptation.”

  “Good,” I said. “I’m glad you threw in a Nietzsche reference in case there was any question left about the deluded misogyny of your thinking.”

  “What does that even mean? I don’t know what the word ‘misogyny’ means anymore except that the person you’re talking to has probably stopped listening.”

  “It’s actually a more polite way of calling you an asshole.”

  “Once again confirming your rote ignorance outside the arts, which is why ninety-nine percent of artistic work being produced today is trivial horseshit.”

  “You smell like your argument.”

  By now something had been released, something angry and brittle and in need of proving, lying behind what both of us were saying, fueled by alcohol and a politically volatile subject and the mutual identification that something inside both of us required this fight well before we’d ever met.

  “Lemme ask you something,” he said. We were standing outside on the patio and the physical distance between us had closed and a vein was throbbing in his head and he was aggressively jabbing with his index finger. Others in the party were making helpless attempts to defuse the situation but we ignored them.

  “You ever cheat on anyone?” he said.

  “No. I would never do that.”

  “Good for you,” he said. “Well, I’ve been cheated on. In fact, I was publicly cuckolded by the woman I was married to. So maybe this is a subject I actually do know a thing about, and you don’t, so my personal experience means a little more than your little-girl fantasies.”

  Things got a little red for me after that. There were more heated words and the predictable regression into schoolyard insults before we were successfully separ
ated. At home that night I told Mark what had happened, and that Harry had screamed at me in front of a group of people, leaving out some of the choice things I had said to him.

  “I really oughtta deck that guy,” said Mark, almost convincingly.

  

  The following Saturday there was a revival screening of an old film downtown. Mark was working and I could have tried to get any one of my bright and culturally literate new friends to come with me, but I didn’t. I have a thing about seeing movies by myself. It’s a perverse habit that I formed as a teenager, combining two of my great passions: going to movies and feeling voluptuously lonely. Of course every person with self-destructive tendencies also has a wildly sentimental streak, and even the worst movies hit me where I live. I got downtown early and stopped at a hotel bar before the show. It was the destination hotel of the city, where the wall sconces were pistols and there was art of Indian raids and brochures about the ways it was haunted. I was still in my infatuation phase with Texas and its self-unaware extravagance charmed and fascinated me. Jason was at the bar. He sat marking up a manuscript with a pen. We were in no classes together, and it was the first time I’d seen him outside of a group, much less detached from the love of his life. It came as a surprise to discover him here with an existence all to himself. He did not see me, and I spent a moment pretending to be annoyed at having my loneliness intruded on, before taking the stool next to him.

  “Is it bad Denis Johnson or bad Cormac McCarthy?” I said.

  He gave me a look.

  “All boy writers are either doing bad Denis Johnson or bad Cormac McCarthy,” I said.

  He angled the manuscript toward me. It was a screenplay. I didn’t know he was a screenwriter.

  “I’m gonna be a pretty big thing in Hollywood,” he said.

  I was surprised to find this endearing. If he had made this sort of proclamation around the gland it would have gotten under my skin but, in contrast to the dangerous chip on Harry’s shoulder, one-on-one Jason had a kind of sweet nervousness, a strain of adolescent apologeticism beneath the hubristic self-assertion, as well as an inability to sustain eye contact. It was unclear whether this was an essential difference or if Jason simply hadn’t been living his own legend long enough to blur the distinction.