65
IN AUGUST of the following year, she wrote from Paris:
Dear Peter,
The persistence of these people! Amazing! They hang on, following me everywhere like a trailing cloud, and sometimes if I stop suddenly, their inertia keeps them drifting on until they’ve caught up with me and they surround me more like fog than a cloud. I talk to some of them, those who are willing to talk to me, and I try to persuade them to give up and go home, to leave me alone. Some of them listen, and the boldest of them answer me, but I’ve overheard the more punctilious among them complaining that I’m trying to undermine their relationship with me by talking to them, trying to bring them into the act and rob them of their status as observers. Having stayed on the job so long, they’ve decided that they are the avant-garde of audiences—they call themselves “The Audience That Won’t Sit Still”—and they’ve made it a point of honor not to let me get away. (Actually, though, a couple of them have already dropped out, a young man and woman who met in the audience at the warehouse about a year ago and were married shortly before I left the stage. On my last night in England, I invited all of my pursuers to have dinner with me, and about half of them accepted. During dinner, when the female of this particular couple trotted off to what she called—I swear that this is true—the “little girls’ room,” I took his hand as if absentmindedly while talking, and placed it on my thigh, where it still rested when the young woman returned. Though she said nothing more during dinner, her eyes were awfully wide, and she flew into a screaming rage while we were crossing the Channel, and they vanished in opposite directions when the boat docked. That’s two down.) While I was standing at the rail, approaching France, I reminded myself that I must lift myself up, ascend, aspire, arise. I must continue to work at this. I spent so long living as if at the bottom of a body of water, at the very bottom, down in the depths, in the muck, while the life I wanted to live, any life worth living, was up on the undulating surface, where the light plays on the wavelets. Up there—if I get there—I will be able to relax and float, but I know that I can’t just float my way through the intervening distance, without having to exert myself, without having to swim toward the light. I know that won’t work. I don’t float well—not for long anyway. I tend to sink. I’m heavy. Some of my weight comes from unnecessary burdens, but some of it is in me, some of it is me. I overcome this heaviness by swimming, simulating lightness. It’s a bit of fakery in a good cause. When I discovered that I was living down where the sediment settles, then and there I knew that I wanted to rise above it. “Get me out of this muck,” I whispered to the dark. I waited. Nothing. “Well, then, let me out of this muck,” I said. I was still begging. I waited—but not as long this time. Nothing happened. Help was not forthcoming. I did not float up. I thought a bit about my lifelong association with muck, beginning with my childhood in a house on stilts driven into the muck of the Bolotomy riverbank, and after I had thought about this intimate relationship I had had with muck, my familiarity with muck, my childhood down by the muck, I said to the dark, “I get it. You’re saying that muck is my element. Muck is me. I am muck, and muck I will be. Is that it?” I waited. No reply. “Well, fuck you, too,” I said. “I’ve got the will. I’ll find the way. I aspire to something higher than the sediment that settles, the grit at the bottom of the chowder pot.” My mother used to say, “Don’t dip the ladle too deep when you’re serving the company,” and from now on I’m serving myself as if I were company.
Love, Ariane
[to be continued]
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