718: Affecting the voice . . .
What a Piece of Work I Am, Chapter 36 begins
36
AFFECTING THE VOICE of the movies’ idea of what was at the time called a dizzy dame, Ariane said, “Then I got another idea!” The dizzy dame seemed enormously pleased with and quite surprised by herself. “And the discovery that I could have two good ideas eventually led to my recognizing the dual nature of my personality.”
“Wow,” I said, in my own voice.
“Of course,” she said, continuing the act, “you got to understand the idea didn’t come to me right away.” She wiggled her bottom and said, “It took a while to form.”
She was standing at the sink, washing the dishes. I was drying. She handed me a plate. “That’s the way with ideas,” I said. “All that crap about flashes of inspiration is just history, and like all history it’s truth simplified until it’s false.” I was at a stage when I enjoyed making statements like this, grand statements that implied long periods of cloistered contemplation.
“Really?” she asked, wide-eyed.
“Yeah,” I said. Then I got cold feet, so I added, “Maybe.” My feet got colder, and I said, “I think so, anyway.” Finally, I shrugged in the self-deprecating way that I was beginning to use as a way out of the sticky spots that my grand statements seemed always to get me into and said, “Who knows?”
She dropped the dizzy act. “I see,” she said. “Well, in my case, when I realized what this idea was, and that it was my idea, I was amazed by it. I loved it—”
“I know that feeling,” I said. “You wanted to embrace it.”
“Something like that. Or maybe I wanted to embrace myself. I was so proud of myself for thinking of it. But then—”
“You hesitated—”
“Right. I thought better of it.”
“You laughed at yourself, drew back from it.”
“Yes,” she said, surprised that I should know the feeling so well. I gave her a knowing look.
“You’ve been there,” she said.
“Oh, yes.”
“Well, you’re right. I laughed at myself. As if there were one part of me that could laugh at another. I was—not ashamed of myself, but embarrassed by myself, my silly idea, and so I reconsidered. It really was as if there were two of me. One—”
“—quick, clever, confident—”
“—had come up with this idea, but the other—”
“—slow, plodding, hesitant—”
“—kept questioning me about it. Was it really such a good idea? Yes! No! Maybe. Who knew?”
She dried her hands on her towel and turned so that she was leaning against the sink. A faraway look came to her eyes.
“But then I began to feel something else,” she said. “This was something I didn’t quite feel responsible for. It just sort of began to develop within me, part thought, part feeling, maybe without my agency. It was the realization that I wanted to do what I had thought of doing. It had been a long time since I’d felt that. And then I began to feel that I should do it, since it was my idea, and it seemed worth doing—now and then, anyway—and it was the only thing I could think of to do that might help John—”
“You called him John?”
“Yes. What else?”
“Not Jack?”
“No. John.”
“Oh. Sorry—go ahead.”
“And if I didn’t do it, or at least attempt to do it, I would probably regret that, and possibly for a long time, and when I had that thought, I wanted to act on it at once.”
[to be continued]
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