Trust Exercise(57)
“Do what?” David said.
“You don’t think I can do this,” she said again, just the same way. David clicked.
“I don’t think you can do this,” said David.
“You don’t think I can do this,” said Karen.
“I don’t think you can do this,” said David.
“You don’t think I can do this,” said Karen.
“I don’t think you can do this,” said David.
“You don’t think I can do this.”
“I don’t think you can do this?”
“You don’t think I can do this,” she confirmed, because you don’t fucking listen, you have no audition, you have no sense of hearing at all.
“I don’t think you can do this?” David said angrily.
“You don’t think I can do this!”
“I don’t think you can do this?”
“You don’t think I can do this!”
“What the fuck is going on?” cried David’s assistant director.
“Shut the fuck up, Justin! I don’t think you can do this!”
“You don’t think I can do this?”
“The purpose of repetition,” Mr. Kingsley once said, “is control of context. People cry, scream, grab each other’s crotches, rip their clothes off … repeating the same set of words…”
Karen and David didn’t grab each other’s crotches, or rip off their clothes. They did scream, with increasing gusto. Karen did cry, a bit, but only once she had gotten back home. REpeat/rePEAT weren’t on Karen’s noun-to-verb list, but they ought to have been, since they work the same way: an action, event, or other thing that’s done over again/to say something again one has already said. “You don’t think I can do this,” repeated, also means, “There are things I would like to do over.”
* * *
I’VE SAID THAT David interested me. Not Sarah. Sarah obsessed me. I don’t use the word lightly. Remember that the two words don’t represent differences of degree. The dictionary tells us that to be interested by someone is to feel “attentive, concerned, or curious.” Curiosity is a friendly emotion and even a moral position. Those whom we make the objects of our curiosity we don’t prejudge or condemn. We don’t fear and loathe them. My therapist, in our time together, often urged me to “stay curious” and it was a nice thing for him to try and make me do, unsuccessful as he was, because curious is a nice way to feel.
Being curious toward, interested in, David made me feel like I’d bought into him, made a choice. By contrast, being obsessed by Sarah was a form of enslavement. “Obsess” comes from the Latin obsessus, past participle of obsidere, from ob- (against or in front of) + sedere (to sit) = “sit opposite to” (literal) = “to occupy, frequent, besiege” (figurative). When we say we are obsessed, we say we’re possessed, controlled, haunted by something or somebody else. We are beset, under siege. We can’t choose. I was obsessed with Sarah, meaning obsessed by her, deprived by her very existence of some quality I needed to feel complete and in charge of myself. If you’d asked Sarah, however, she would have said she’d done nothing to me. That’s how it is with the people by whom we’re obsessed. They’ve obsessed us, they’ve transitive-verbed us, but no one could be more surprised than they are.
So who makes it happen—obsession? Unlike the things that I did blame her for, I didn’t blame Sarah for this. I didn’t blame either of us. Obsession is an accidental haunting, by a person not aware she’s a ghost. I knew Sarah was my ghost, but she’d forgotten I even existed.
Karen and Sarah, her old friend the author, went from Skylight Books to an expensive and stylish Mexican restaurant made out of huge white sheets of linen like the caravan of some sultan, if sultans ate Mexican food. The fact that it never rains in Los Angeles is most impressed on visitors by those business establishments that don’t bother having a roof. Potted palms, white banquettes, service kiosks for the staff glittering with stemware and steak knives, all sat out under the orangish night sky with its one or two faint fuzzy stars. Aircraft cable crisscrossed overhead to form a grid from which hung fairy lights and bloated paper lanterns and the vast white linen sheets which were supposed to divide the night air into “private” dining regions so that the feeling, for a person who was sober, was of being surrounded by some giant’s drying laundry. Karen could see Sarah was nervous. Even Karen’s most attentive, private-practice-ready “listening face” couldn’t downshift Sarah into some lower gear. Sarah was almost at the bottom of her daiquiri and Karen, as Sarah talked, gestured to the waiter to bring another daiquiri and another of what Karen was drinking, a fancy nonalcoholic limeade full of what looked like lawnmower mulch. Because the perspective of a nondrinking person seems to be unique, especially among people who read, allow me to break in again and observe that in my experience people who drink never don’t when they find themselves with a nondrinker. In fact, they drink more. Nondrinkers make drinkers uncomfortable. The situation they’re afraid of—getting drunk in the presence of someone who’s sober—is exactly the one they create.
“But enough about me, what about you?” Sarah cried, at the end of a long recitation of unexpected things that had happened to her on her book tour, none of which could have been more unexpected than one of her characters turning up, in the flesh, to invalidate all Sarah’s memories of her. “What have you been up to the past dozen years?”