Men and Apparitions Read online

  also by lynne tillman

  Haunted Houses

  Absence Makes the Heart (stories)

  Motion Sickness

  The Madame Realism Complex (stories)

  Cast in Doubt

  The Velvet Years: Warhol’s Factory 1965–1967

  The Broad Picture: Essays 1987–1996

  No Lease on Life

  Bookstore: The Life and Times of Jeannette Watson and Books & Co.

  This Is Not It (stories)

  American Genius, A Comedy

  Someday This Will Be Funny (stories)

  What Would Lynne Tillman Do? (essays)

  The Complete Madame Realism and Other Stories

  This is a work of fiction. All of the characters, organizations, and events portrayed in this novel are either products of the author’s imagination or used fictitiously.

  Copyright © 2018 by Lynne Tillman

  All rights reserved

  First Soft Skull printing: March 2018

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Names: Tillman, Lynne, author.

  Title: Men and apparitions / Lynne Tillman.

  Description: First Soft Skull edition. | New York : Soft Skull, 2018.

  Identifiers: LCCN 2017038235 | ISBN 9781593766795 (pbk. : alk.

  paper) | ISBN 9781593766849 (ebook)

  Classification: LCC PS3570.I42 M46 2018 | DDC 813/.54—dc23

  LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2017038235

  Published by Soft Skull Press

  1140 Broadway, Suite 704

  New York, NY 10001

  www.softskull.com

  Soft Skull titles are distributed to the trade by Publishers Group West

  Phone: 866-400-5351

  Printed in the United States of America

  10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

  For Richard Nash

  without whom …

  We must learn to be surprised.

  —rabbi abraham heschel

  Mystery is a great embarrassment to the modern mind.

  —flannery o’connor

  prologue

  The end doesn’t depend on the beginning, it upends beginnings, also provokes new ones. If the end comes, it’s to one person, and could spark beginnings in others.

  The beginning starts in history, not as a single event, though every birth is singular, and every death, also, but death and birth repeat themselves, the way history does, until no one remembers. —Ezekiel H. Stark

  self-narration, or wildness of origin myths

  The universe heaves with laughter, and I’m all about my lopsided, self-defining tale. How I came to be me, not you, how I’m shaping me for you, the way my posse and other native informants do for me, how I’m shape-shifting. I’m telling you that I’m telling you; my self is my field, and habitually I observe, and write field notes.

  Ethnographer, study yourself. Ethnographer, heal yourself.

  There was a no-time, with time outs—a long time ago, Way Before Now. Space and time, on a continuum, bend in relationship, and I imagine that soon I will, in some sense, return to the past. Whenever I want.

  Routine settles, creeps in: I’ve performed the same acts for thirty-eight years, like eating breakfast. You were eating breakfast, you have been eating breakfast, you are conjugating breakfast ever since your mother set food before you, and now you’re feeding yourself only if you shop for it, or maybe you went back to the land to raise it, but not everything, you don’t and can’t raise everything. I was damn fortunate: meals appeared regularly, I’m no ingrate. That was part of “my home.”

  You were spoon-fed, and it landed plop on the floor, or you the baby threw it. Bad boy. Throw a tantrum, make a mess, soon you have to clean it up—break it, buddy, it’s yours, in pieces, because you are responsible; and, true, things go to pieces when not actually broken. Abstractions get broken. Ideas get broken. I have seen the best minds of my gen …

  Me talking ’bout the flawed life, totally.

  Going to sleep, that gets tired, ha, the regularity, and boredom might cause my chronic insomnia, so it’s cool when you don’t know you’re falling asleep, then you wake up and the TV is on. You open your eyes, weird. To dream becomes the best reason to sleep, especially if you do (I do) conscious dreaming, and get to choose: a dream becomes a podcast or movie. Otherwise, nightmares pit REM sleep

  with terror.

  I listened to a podcast of an old TV news program and heard a Soviet and Russian historian, Stephen Cohen, argue with a total jerk. Completely exasperated by the fool, Cohen finally said, “With all due respect, you don’t know what you’re talking about.” I swallowed the moment like a hallucinogen. That’s so fucking rare … it tears up Max Weber’s cage.

  That’s my goal, to tear it up. Me, especially.

  I don’t get high anymore, antidepressants keep me sort of level, and don’t combine well with recreational drugs. Living drug-free is a sort of high, except clarity can get ugly.

  My analyst suggests that I elongated my kid-hood by delaying leaving home. No big deal, really typical.

  I suffer from abulia, which my analyst says is an abnormal lack of ability to act or make decisions. I like the word. So, I say to my analyst, “Abulia … I’m another Hamlet. Look what happened to him.” I dither, weigh both sides, make lists, advantages, disadvantages.

  My mother was a permissive parent, finishing college in the mid-sixties, and didn’t want to parent like her uptight parents who let her know she was on her own. Mother had a small trust fund from her maternal grandmother, and did an M.A. in English, then met a man who became her husband, my father, and started a family, as they put it. Father didn’t drink then, I mean, excessively. They had us, spacing Bro Hart and me, then an accident—Little Sister—she had to have been. Father, I don’t know what his wishes were, but I don’t think he fulfilled something in himself. Anyway, he became a functional drunk; Mother kept loving him, maybe. Takes all kinds. He was absent for me, hooked up to his necessaries, like to a breathing machine. I’d come home after school or tennis lessons, walk over to the couch, and his watery eyes were just pools.

  Staring at photographs of him when he was young, when I was young, comforted and bothered me. Here was evidence of a bright-eyed guy beside the dull living person I knew, and it was discrepant, though I wouldn’t have said it like that then, couldn’t put the two together, it didn’t compute that the boy had turned into this man, my father.

  In childhood, desires and passions are seeded. In adulthood, they flower into interests and manias.

  picture: me in a frame (framed)

  My frame of reference is cultural anthropology. Clifford Geertz says that “doing ethnography is like trying to read (in the sense of ‘construct a reading of’) a manuscript …”; that “culture is public because meaning is.” I do ethnography by working with photographs; also with the human absorption in images, and with the many forms and senses of image, creating an image, loving an image, etc. My specialty—

  family photographs.

  Images don’t mean as words mean, though people (and I) apply words to them.

  Photographs can create images, but they are not images per se, they are things, a physical object. An image doesn’t have to be based on a photograph. It is a mind-picture, or an image is a picture in the mind. A photograph may inspire or foment an image or images. An image is a concoction, often manufactured, meant to create a way to be seen, viewed, understood. It can be aerie faerie, a phantom, phantasm.

  Can an image built out of self-consciousness lie?

  I wear a brimless hat, because it’s cool. Does it tell a lie about me?

  I take a photograph, I don’t take an image.

  (Unless I’m a vampire. Ha
ha. Vampires don’t look like the ones on TV, the living dead are regular people, who suck you dry.)

  A mind is not a brain. Or, a brain is to a mind what a photograph is to an image. And they can be conflated, brains and minds, images and photographs, and sometimes I do

  it too.

  Virginia Woolf—Mother’s fave—says that words also can’t be pinned down: “[Words] do not live in dictionaries …

  they hate anything that stamps them with one meaning or confines them to one attitude, for it is their nature to

  change … It is because the truth they try to catch is many-sided, and they convey it by being themselves many-sided, flashing this way, then that. Thus they mean one thing to one person, another thing to another person.”

  But a photograph doesn’t own even a wayward dictionary, though semioticians work it, finding ways to read one. Even vertiginously, words have definitions, to name and rename objects in a cascade of tautologies. A synonym loops, loop de loops.

  The antique game of telephone: the last to hear, in a string of listeners, will have (hear) an entirely different story from the first.

  Looking can be benign or malevolent; looking entails everything human, and our instinct to look keeps us close to our evolutionary partners and antecedents in crime and development. If a deer spies a human, it will determine its level of threat. A deer runs if an unknown creature gets closer than what it perceives as safe. And deer are stupid, nice to look at but dumb as doors.

  Now, people are stealthier in their observations, but the same principle applies: the need to clock others. A stranger enters a room, a group of familiars note her or him, no one moves, a second, thirty seconds pass until one brave familiar strides across the floor, to the door. The stranger introduces himself, and the familiar brings the stranger into the room, and soon others come closer and sort of sniff him. If no one moves toward the door: stasis, unless the stranger boldly enters and quickly identifies himself—I’m Michael, Donald’s friend. Imagine if the person entered but didn’t identify himself. Discomfort would be fierce.

  Who is a perfect stranger? Is there a “complete stranger”?

  Humans assess others shoddily, errors in judgment they’re called. People can be poor at sniffing out an enemy, lack discernment, even common sense, and fail at comprehending dangers, signs. Supposedly our big brains allow for more choice, for being sensible, and are capable of complex thinking, etc. Other theorists work diligently on this problem; for one, economists, who analyze rational and irrational consumption patterns.

  Just saying, as a person who studies groups: people fall in love with the wrong people, make the wrong friends, trust the wrong bank manager, and associate with hurtful, vengeful people.

  Wolf families have a scapegoat; no wolf picks on any other wolf except an outsider (exogamous) male who tries to pick off the pack’s females or eat its cubs. A fight happens then, often to the death. Otherwise, it’s the scapegoat who’s pushed around. He or she eats last, even when he’s the brother, say, of the alpha who eats first. No mercy for a scapegoat.

  In human groups, scapegoats exist to keep the tribe united.

  Call human scapegoats “victims.”

  Generally, people drop imprecise clues. Unlike other animals that mark territory with piss or rub scent on trees, human displays or signs can mystify, at least be ambiguous. The worst, the most troubled and damaged, might be the best at keeping their worst signs on the down low. Yet an extremely foul-smelling human on a train clears the car. Imagine if untrustworthy lovers gave off a specific odor.

  A traditional sign, the wedding ring, signifies as few contemporary interpersonal and social signs do. But it also has scant weight in some Western circles and might even encourage a “free-ranging” male or female to pounce onto someone’s spouse. No consequences. Haha.

  When I was fifteen, I met a philosopher, ninety years old, and, half-kidding, asked him, “You’re a philosopher, so, what do you think about?” He was kind to a smart-ass high school boy, answered seriously, I thought, with a twinkle in his eye, because I don’t know what else to call it—a glint? The philosopher repeated my question, seemingly asking himself: “What do I think about? Love. I think about love, I always think about love.”

  Love—platonic, romantic, sexual—appears in human–

  animal stories, and mine. A common trope, the love dope. Kidding. The grand passion, l’amour fou, mine is long running and deep, if mad love can run the distance. No kidding.

  People repeat themselves, usually don’t know it, and I hate repeating myself (but if I didn’t, who would? Kidding), but no one is considered herself, himself, without doing it. Consistency = repetitive behavior. A groove grinds itself into the brain, a beat or melody runs the neural pathways. On repeat, repeat, repeat. The most popular songs, the most repetitious: “All about that bass, ’bout that bass.” Can’t stop singing it.

  The mind fuck.

  Does the way you fall in love /

  go the same way /

  love on repeat or replay?

  Similarly, family attitudes, though they aren’t obvious like rhythms and lyrics, get beat into us. Neurosis and Love are grooves, and they get deeper.

  family matters

  I began life, comfortably.

  The family lived in a large 1960s pseudo-architect modernist ranch-style house: five bedrooms, parents on one end (and Mother’s office), children the other side, bedrooms of same size for Bro Hart and me, but Little Sister—hers had more windows, sore point—and walls of picture windows in the living and dining room areas, slate floors, an open kitchen with an island, floor-to-ceiling stone fireplace, and we were sort of in the country. Outside Boston, near Beverly. John Updike territory. Nice family place, if you didn’t know the family. Just kidding.

  Mother—Ellen Hooper Stark—edited manuscripts, histories, political science, biographies and memoirs, of intellectuals, she said. I was about seven when she explained it. Little Sister was one and a half, not yet talking, weird for a girl. (The term then was “delayed talker.”)

  Mother, what’s editing?

  Making writing better, checking information, correcting grammar, and being fair to the text.

  Fair?

  Mother believed she perfectly fit in the great line of judges who never made it to the bench. When she explained critical issues—This is critical, she’d say—like about editing, cleaning up my room, and the man I should be when I grew up, she gazed at me meaningfully; the knowledge imparted was the MOST important thing in the world. Her expectant look bewildered and dazzled me. What if I didn’t get it then—would I ever? Would I succeed in life? Mother worked herself up deciding how often to repeat the same info, and whether repeating it would be counterproductive or what.

  Mater of grammar, fact finder, and syntax investigator labored in abstractions; before I was born she’d been an editor at a press in Boston; then with two little boys, she decided to freelance, edit books at home, in her sacred office.

  We children weren’t allowed to enter if the door was shut, except for emergencies. I grew up believing in the urgency of matters behind that door, out of sight, and when I grew up, I could also shut a door and keep everyone and everything OUT. I could cut you all OUT. Father’s leaving for his law office had less value, because he left, and it was the house, the home, that mattered, Mother’s territory and mine: it had all my things, and hers. That’s an idiomatic comfort phrase: my things. I don’t use it much now, too babyish, greedy, and self-exposing.

  Sometimes Mother drove to Boston to discuss work with a publisher, or get out of the house and away from us, I knew that, then later she toted not-yet-talking Little Sister to another professional, and another—neurologist or psychologist or psychic.

  Some think I became a cultural anthropologist because of them.

  Spiritualists litter (kitty litter, kidding) Mother’s ancestral line, with which, she maintained, she felt mystically connected. More, later.

  face values

&nbs
p; Family photographs were the subject of my dissertation and first book, You’re a Picture, You’re Not a Picture. I analyzed how families picture themselves through their own photographs, what that picturing implies in terms of association, sibling order, gender relations, etc. How does the sociology of the American family—for instance, birth order—affect pictures, and does that “fact” become an image for the family?

  Narratives grow with and in time, the family story about what and who came when. If Little Sister had been the oldest, would she have spoken more? Father was the baby in his family, did him no good. The qualities that make the baby appealing just made him arrogant. Mother, though younger than Clarissa, couldn’t be the baby. Clarissa needed so much care, hot-wired the way she was.

  Whose “I”/“eye” can be trusted? From what I learned in my family, I don’t trust anyone in front of or behind a camera, but I keep my bias out of it. Kidding.

  Is trust an issue in art, and if so why?

  I interviewed over a hundred families across America, and chose pictures from their stacks, or they did the choosing. They told me who was who, and what; what was going on, and weird narratives spilled out. I inferred meanings, as an ethnographer, sorting through the consonances and dissonances, and what the gaps meant, if anything. A picture can actually tell you very little, which is why Thematic Apperception Tests (TAT) invented by psychologists in the 1930s still appeal, at least in research. The open-endedness of pictures has been utilized to study the mystery of perception, emerging from an individual human psyche, as the subject sees into a picture what is not there. One can’t read an expression as a revelation of character or personality; it is just temporal, an affect, often for the camera.

  Behind so many smiles, I see: Eat Shit, Asshole. But then that’s me.

  The concept of family resemblance is reasonable, given genetics, but it’s peculiar, because what makes a resemblance isn’t clear, there’s no feature-by-feature similarity. Most of us in families share a resemblance. Fascination with the “family other”—a neologism I coined in an early pubbed article—is dulled by the other’s being related by blood; yet what’s near can be farther (what’s in the mirror is farther than you think), because up close, we’re less able to see each other. I don’t look like my brother, but everyone says I do. I feared Bro Hart. He wanted to kill me at birth. Reaction formation, correct.