Coming Through

Vilhelm Hammershøi: The End of Waiting

Every summer I stop reading criticism and return to fiction.

This week I reread Michael Ondaatje’s Coming Through Slaughter, then disappeared into Orwell’s Down and Out in Paris and London. Last night I dreamt I was a plongeur in a filthy Paris hotel, carrying stacks of wet plates through corridors thick with heat and rats. I’ve never wanted to scrub the kitchens of a grand Paris hotel any more than I’ve wanted to become Buddy Bolden. Literature doesn’t require enactment to feel real. I don’t know why it took me so long to wonder whether desire deserved the same kind of reading.

I’ve been sexting a man who moved halfway across the world a few weeks ago. He and I dated briefly before it became obvious that liking each other would only sharpen the pain of his departure. We tried, mostly unsuccessfully, to become friends. On one of his last nights in Brooklyn we clawed at each other with the desperate intensity reserved for endings, and afterwards I assumed distance would do its ordinary work. Instead it produced another form of intimacy.

Much contemporary writing about sexting wants to make it useful. It promises to sustain a long-distance relationship, deepen communication, or spice up a marriage. Sexting is almost always treated as a bridge, a way of carrying desire until bodies can finally resume the real work. That hasn’t been my experience.

The messages are the encounter.

Somewhere between his nights and my late afternoons, we’re building a space that exists only in language. What stays with me are the interruptions: three dots appear, disappear, return; a reply arrives late because work has intervened, or sleep, or a life that continues beyond the limits of my attention. I imagine the sentence he erased before sending another, the word that felt too earnest, too absurd, too exposed, the typo left uncorrected because he was tired or distracted.

Alone in my apartment, I’m discovering desires that don’t ask for anything beyond the punctuation that contains them. I keep reading my own fantasies in a way I never read novels. I ask what they mean, what they predict, what they reveal about me, as though desire were testimony waiting to be decoded. If he were lying next to me, every fantasy would immediately become another question: Do I really want this? Does he? Is this safe? Is this something I want to try, or only something I want to imagine? Language suspends those demands, allowing desire to wander without insisting that it justify itself by becoming real.

Sometimes he says something that lands oddly, too intimate or not intimate enough, and I reread it three or four times without ever deciding what he meant.

Maybe fiction has been teaching me this all along. Nobody reads Down and Out in Paris and London as preparation for becoming a plongeur. Literature lets us inhabit lives without claiming them as our own.

Somehow I’ve reserved that suspicious style of reading for myself.

When the imagination is mine, I become impatient with ambiguity. I wonder why I’ve been so willing to grant literature a freedom that I refuse my own desires.

I’ve always mistaken revelation for honesty, as though saying more necessarily meant understanding more. Fiction seduces by arranging time, by withholding, by allowing one sentence to reverberate inside another long after it disappears from the page. I finish Coming Through Slaughter having inhabited a consciousness that never belonged to me. I don’t know why it’s always been harder to inhabit my own.