Trust Exercise(44)

Trust Exercise


“KAREN” STOOD OUTSIDE the Skylight bookstore in Los Angeles, waiting for her old friend, the author. Her old high school classmate, the author. Was it assuming too much, to say “friend”? Was it accepting too much, to say “Karen”? “Karen” is not “Karen’s” name, but “Karen” knew, when she read the name “Karen,” that it was she who was meant. Does it matter to anyone, apart from “Karen,” what “Karen’s” real name is? Not only does it not matter to anyone else, but the fact that it matters to “Karen” will probably reflect badly on “Karen” in the same way that so much about “Karen” reflects badly on “Karen.” So “Karen” won’t insist on providing her real name or anyone else’s, although she’d like to say, for the record, that she can see right through the choice of “Karen” for her designation. With apologies to actual Karens, “Karen” is an unsexy name. It’s too recent to have retro chic and not recent enough to feel fresh. It’s a name without snap. It gives you a plain feeling but not plain enough, like “Jane,” which is such a plain name that the phrase “Plain Jane,” in contradiction of its meaning, has snap, it rhymes and suggests a romantic plainness, the phrase “Plain Jane” makes people smile. “Karen” has no such associations. “Karen” isn’t pretty, or smart, or deceptively plain until she takes off her glasses. “Karen” is a yearbook name, filler, a girl with a hairstyle like everyone else’s and a face you’ve forgotten. My name isn’t and never was Karen, but I’ll be Karen. I’m not petty. See: I’ve taken off the quote marks.

Karen stood outside the Skylight bookstore in Los Angeles, waiting for her old friend, the author.

She wasn’t petty, she has never been petty, has never had enough self-possession, or possessed enough self, to afford pettiness, because petty is a way people are who have something to spare. Still: she’d like to say for the record that the choice of her name, this name Karen to which she’s resigned, is not the only thing she can see through. She can see through a lot of the rest of it too, as easily as drawing a line from a column of things on the left to a column of things on the right, making crisscrosses like suture marks stitching the columns together. Remember, from when you were a kid? The column on the left might be pictures and the column on the right might be words but the matching pairs aren’t side by side, they’re mixed up, and you have to match them. It’s not hard. If you knew me—if you knew Karen—or any of them, you could do it. In fact, the scheme is almost too simple—out of respect for the “truth”? From a failure of imagination? Is it better or worse that the code is so easy to crack? Sarah and David are the people they must obviously be, only their names have been altered, and not even altered that much—the new names are in the right spirit, they’re true to their objects, in fact they’re so apt they’re unnecessary, their divergence from the truth is so inconsequential that they might as well be the same truth they’ve replaced. Mr. Kingsley, too, is the person Mr. Kingsley must obviously be; his new name, too, is in the right spirit. If certain colorful revisions of his character have been undertaken, they don’t serve to disguise the historical person, though they do disguise something. That something, however, isn’t Karen’s to unmask; she’s not here to expose without warning. Pammie, unlike Mr. Kingsley, is not a historical person but the way in which Karen’s Christianity was found laughable. Julietta is the way in which Karen’s Christianity was admired. Joelle is the intimacy between Karen and Sarah, disavowed and relocated onto a historical person very much like Joelle with whom Sarah did not have an actual friendship. Why give the pain of broken friendship to Joelle, why take it away from Karen? The reasons might be psychological. Why make Karen non-Christian, while making her laughable Christianity Pammie, and her admirable Christianity Julietta? The reasons might be artistic. All this is just speculation; Karen isn’t the type to pretend to have superior insight into people she knew as a child and then turned her back on and then used as she wished for her personal gain. Not to finger-point. That would be petty.

Karen stands outside the Skylight bookstore in Los Angeles, waiting for her old friend, the author. Karen is thirty years old, the same age as her old friend the author. She hasn’t seen her old friend the author since both were eighteen. In the dozen years since, much has happened to Karen. Much of what has happened has been therapy, and the rest of what has happened tends to be described in terms drawn from therapy. This is a tendency of which Karen is aware and about which she isn’t apologetic. At least she knows where her language comes from. If, however, Sarah—for example—were to ask what she’s been up to the past dozen years, Karen would avoid therapy-speak in her answer as carefully as she used to avoid Jesus-speak. She would do this to be taken seriously by a person devoid of belief. Despite Karen’s not just disliking but disrespecting this person devoid of belief, that ancient shame would creep over her belief, her need for belief—her belief in belief—like a stain and Karen would, now as in the past, pass herself off as a person who didn’t believe. That much hasn’t changed. Oh, this and that, she would say. I’ve mostly worked as an office manager, personal assistant, personal organizer, stuff like that—you probably never knew it in high school but I’m highly organized [laughter]. It’s kind of a curse, I can’t see something without making it more efficient. I think it’s a reaction to my mother [laughter]. But it’s nice, in terms of making a living. People hire me to organize their stuff, I can pick and choose my clients, I can set my own hours. It pays well. It leaves me lots of time to travel. My brother and I—I don’t know if you remember, I have a brother—just took a trip to Vietnam and Laos. Yeah, it was amazing. Beautiful.