Read Online The Summer Without Men by Siri Hustvedt - Free Book Online
Authors: Siri Hustvedt
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penultimate word. She smiled.
“Not at all,” Regina said in her oddly accented voice. “With my leg I must His pens n bright and hopeful. What else can I do? If it bursts, that’s it, straight to my brain or my heart, dead in a second.”
We were sitting in the game room, around the bridge table. The summer light came through the window and I looked out at the clouds, one of which drifted upward like a smoke ring. I heard a dryer flapping clothes somewhere down the hallway and the low sound of a motorized scooter, but that was all.
Four Swans.
Mia,
I have more to show you. Would Thursday be suitable?
Yours,
Abigail
Each word was a tremulous but careful scrawl of letters. I remembered what my mother had once said: “Getting old is fine. The only problem with it is that your body falls apart.”
* * *
“Your poetry’s cracked,” my anonymous tormenter had written. “Nobody can understand it. Nobody wants twisted shit like that. Who do you think you are?!#*
Mr. Nobody.”
* * *
I read the message several times. The more I read it, the more peculiar it became. The repetition of Nobody followed by the pseudonym, Nobody, made it sound as if he, Nobody, did understand it and did, in fact, want twisted shit . Who do you think you are? became another question entirely in that case. Sliding meanings. It seemed unlikely that the phantom was ironic, making some superior joke about the novis dictum for “accessible” poems or playing with the words twisted shit and cracked. Unless it was Leonard, released from South, and annoying me for some preposterous reason of his own. It was true that for years I had been toiling away at work few wanted or understood, that my isolation had become increasingly painful, and that I had harangued Boris with my diatribes about our shallow, debased, virulently anti-intellectual culture that worships mediocrity and despises its poets. Where was Whitman Street in New York City? I had whined about the poets who wrote for the few remaining middlebrow folk in the United States who bothered to glance at a feeble line or two in their copy of the New Yorker and satisfy themselves that they had just nibbled on a morsel of “sophisticated” poetic sentiment or wit about lawns or old watches or wine because, after all, it was in the magazine. Rejection accumulates; lodges itself like black bile in the belly, which, when spewed outecomes a screed, the vain rantings of one redheaded lady poet against the ignoramuses and insiders and culture makers who have failed to recognize her, and poor Boris had lived with her/my bawling ululations, Boris, a man for whom all conflict was anathema, a man for whom the raised voice, the passionate exclamation scraped like sandpaper on his soul. Paranoia chases rejection. During the days of my complete clinical derangement, hadn’t I been paranoid? They plotted against me. Now the words on the screen, the words of Nobody, had taken the place of the accusing voices in my head. Everyone hates you. You’re nothing. No wonder he left you. It was as if Mr. Nobody knew, as if he understood where to strike. I thought of George lying dead on the bathroom floor that same morning, and the future turned suddenly both vast and barren, and doubt, the deforming constant doubts that my poems were shit, a waste, that I had read my way not to knowledge but into an inscrutable oblivion, that I, not Boris, was to blame for the Pause, that my truly great work, Daisy, was behind me seemed all to be true. Now, menopausal, abandoned, bereft, and forgotten, I had nothing left. I put my head on the desk, thinking bitterly that it wasn’t even my own, and wept.
After a couple of minutes of full-throated sobbing, I felt someone’s warm breath on my arm and flinched. Flora and Giraffey were standing very close to me. The child’s eyes were round with attention. A piece of her own light brown hair stuck out from under the wig and the
“Not at all,” Regina said in her oddly accented voice. “With my leg I must His pens n bright and hopeful. What else can I do? If it bursts, that’s it, straight to my brain or my heart, dead in a second.”
We were sitting in the game room, around the bridge table. The summer light came through the window and I looked out at the clouds, one of which drifted upward like a smoke ring. I heard a dryer flapping clothes somewhere down the hallway and the low sound of a motorized scooter, but that was all.
Four Swans.
Mia,
I have more to show you. Would Thursday be suitable?
Yours,
Abigail
Each word was a tremulous but careful scrawl of letters. I remembered what my mother had once said: “Getting old is fine. The only problem with it is that your body falls apart.”
* * *
“Your poetry’s cracked,” my anonymous tormenter had written. “Nobody can understand it. Nobody wants twisted shit like that. Who do you think you are?!#*
Mr. Nobody.”
* * *
I read the message several times. The more I read it, the more peculiar it became. The repetition of Nobody followed by the pseudonym, Nobody, made it sound as if he, Nobody, did understand it and did, in fact, want twisted shit . Who do you think you are? became another question entirely in that case. Sliding meanings. It seemed unlikely that the phantom was ironic, making some superior joke about the novis dictum for “accessible” poems or playing with the words twisted shit and cracked. Unless it was Leonard, released from South, and annoying me for some preposterous reason of his own. It was true that for years I had been toiling away at work few wanted or understood, that my isolation had become increasingly painful, and that I had harangued Boris with my diatribes about our shallow, debased, virulently anti-intellectual culture that worships mediocrity and despises its poets. Where was Whitman Street in New York City? I had whined about the poets who wrote for the few remaining middlebrow folk in the United States who bothered to glance at a feeble line or two in their copy of the New Yorker and satisfy themselves that they had just nibbled on a morsel of “sophisticated” poetic sentiment or wit about lawns or old watches or wine because, after all, it was in the magazine. Rejection accumulates; lodges itself like black bile in the belly, which, when spewed outecomes a screed, the vain rantings of one redheaded lady poet against the ignoramuses and insiders and culture makers who have failed to recognize her, and poor Boris had lived with her/my bawling ululations, Boris, a man for whom all conflict was anathema, a man for whom the raised voice, the passionate exclamation scraped like sandpaper on his soul. Paranoia chases rejection. During the days of my complete clinical derangement, hadn’t I been paranoid? They plotted against me. Now the words on the screen, the words of Nobody, had taken the place of the accusing voices in my head. Everyone hates you. You’re nothing. No wonder he left you. It was as if Mr. Nobody knew, as if he understood where to strike. I thought of George lying dead on the bathroom floor that same morning, and the future turned suddenly both vast and barren, and doubt, the deforming constant doubts that my poems were shit, a waste, that I had read my way not to knowledge but into an inscrutable oblivion, that I, not Boris, was to blame for the Pause, that my truly great work, Daisy, was behind me seemed all to be true. Now, menopausal, abandoned, bereft, and forgotten, I had nothing left. I put my head on the desk, thinking bitterly that it wasn’t even my own, and wept.
After a couple of minutes of full-throated sobbing, I felt someone’s warm breath on my arm and flinched. Flora and Giraffey were standing very close to me. The child’s eyes were round with attention. A piece of her own light brown hair stuck out from under the wig and the
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