🎧 771: “When . . .”

59

“WHEN THE SMOKE CLEARED, so to speak, I said to myself, ‘Ariane, honey, it’s not working out. Your life is out of control.’ What I meant, specifically, was that my life was out of my control. Things had gotten very crowded onstage and noisy and busy, with a shifting crowd of hangers-on and groupies and gurus and lapsed academics and actors-in-training who walked in and out of my place and crashed on the sofa and fucked in the tub and ate everything in the refrigerator—and they all wanted to be heard. And so did the god­damned TV, the anchormen on the news, the witless dads on the situation comedies, the feckless moms in the detergent commercials, and always the government, making a mess of things in my name—they all wanted me to hear them and witness them and countenance them and sanction them. They all wanted to be in the show. Quite a few of them wanted to run the show. For that one awful night, Terrence had succeeded: it had been his show, his life, not mine.”
     “He had taken your life from you.”
     “That’s too strong—but you’re on the right track.”
     “He had taken the narrative thread of your life.”
     “Yeah! That’s right.”
     “He had snipped your thread and spliced in a length of his own, a rough, thick, unwashed hank.”
     “Hemp, probably.”
     “You had expected that Terrence’s thread would merely dangle off the side of yours, nothing more than one of those dead-end side trips, an excursion—”
     “Okay, okay.”
     “—after which you would retrace your steps and pick up your own thread again.”
     “Please—”
     I was unreeling a thread of my own, so I kept on: “When you realized what had happened, how Terrence had tangled your clue, you took a long, hard look at it and saw, in the mismatched bits and pieces of it—the thread, rope, yarn that had been knotted into your line—the history of your loss of control.”
     “Something like that,” she said, and she touched her fingertips to my lips to shut me up.
     “At some places,” I said, speaking right through her silencing fingers, “there were even lengths of string or cord that led off in other directions. Here and there your story had been led astray—you had been led astray—by a rebellious fan—”
     “Enough.”
     I shrugged for the audience. “Explanation by example,” I said. I got a laugh, not a big laugh, but a laugh from the right people. I began to wonder why I hadn’t visited Ariane more often, made myself a regular part of her performance.
     “I loved that boy, in a way,” she said, “but he used me. I agreed with what he thought about the war—about war, period—but he used me. He took a piece of my life and appropriated it for his own purposes. He took a piece of my life and made it part of his. I didn’t offer it. He took it. And he took it violently.”
     She got up and strode across the stage. “Anyway,” she said, “he made me hear it again. In the moment of ignition, I heard the same old warning: you must change your life.” She cocked her hip, put a hand on it, turned a saucy look on the crowd, and spoke as Tootsie Koochikov: “I said to myself, ‘Honey, you’d better find out what this is all about.’ That’s when I began a concentrated, systematic effort to educate myself.”

[to be continued]

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