She flunked
both of the classes! We made love
after a flood of tears. She cried
all afternoon on Friday. She seems
truly scared. She said she might have to return to
Why is sex so important? It isn't, really. But everything has been transformed. Her masks are gone. And her fierceness has become a passion that
awakens in me the need for distance. As
always, I find myself contemplating the flaws.
Not wanting to spend a lifetime with them. The first is her accent and her inability to
respond to the subtleties of my thought.
And she knows nothing about
She is full of guile. It is a kind of reflexive guile that I've never
encountered before. Everything is
secretive and Byzantine.
After
reading over my notes from this summer, I can't believe the mood change.
I can't believe any of this. It's
turning into a drama. And Judy
will return in three weeks! September
12. These last two weeks feel like
an eternity.
I told her I would marry her so that
she could stay in the country! She
said half of her family would disown her if she married an American! And her husband refuses to give her a divorce.
I must have known it already, psychologically.
Because I wasn't surprised or disappointed.
She is... "foreign." I feel like she surrounds me with precious jewels
and fabrics, flowers and perfumes, but things unidentifiable. There is something that I've never encountered
before. Something.... Iranian? Persian?
She said her husband would kill HER
if he found out. I nearly fell
out of bed. Her husband is in
She said that her husband has been
unfaithful since the beginning of their marriage, five years ago. She found out within the first month of the
marriage! Later he claimed it was
because she was infertile and also, that he didn't divorce her only because
he felt sorry for her. She came
to
Life is so much more inventive that
Literature! If I made this up and
tried to present it as fiction it would sound ridiculous. And I could write an entire novel just about
last weekend. Well, a short novel
anyway.
I had better get some books about
Every time Wai
got into my VW bus, she looked at the little travelling
suitcase with flowers on it, the one that was sitting on the back seat. I was using it as a briefcase after the handle
on my regular briefcase broke. I
guess I thought it was funny so I never bothered to get a new briefcase. She never said anything about it but I was convinced
that she suspected that I was living in my van. That I was lying to her and that I didn't really
live with another woman, a woman that I was leaving, a woman who lived
in a big house with a swimming pool, but that I lived in that Volkswagen
bus and that my life's belongings were in that little suitcase with the
flowers on it! It's tiny, about
the size of a briefcase. She never said anything but every time she got
into the van, she noticed it with silent, thoughtful eyes.
I am overwhelmed with details and occurrences.
I stop recording because it becomes futile, impossible to describe
all but a few minutes of a conversation, the sighs and double meanings
and body language. I suppose that's why one must simplify and follow
rigorous forms. But the diary IS
a literary form. I'm going to check
into that. Certainly Werther
was written as a diary. What are
the other ones? Gide's
first novel was basically a diary! But
I've got to find some way to disguise this.
Ironically, people don't even believe the truth. People CERTAINLY don't believe the truth.
They will believe everything EXCEPT the truth.
Confucius says somewhere that if the ordinary people aren't laughing
at what you are saying then it isn't true.
Everyone disputes and argues about
the truth. About everything! What is divorce court if not the legal system's
recognition of the incapacity and unwillingness of two people to report
the truth even about the most basic transactions of life and love?
Well,
I was feeling bad about the probability that I will never become a great
novelist and that this experiment is probably not valuable, or even Literature,
when I came across this quotation from Swann's Way, by Proust.
How often, after that day, in the course
of my walks along the Guermantes way, and with
what intensified melancholy did I reflect on my lack of qualification for
a literary career, and that I must abandon all hope of ever becoming a famous
author. The regret that I felt for
this, while I lingered alone to dream for a little by myself, made me suffer
so acutely that, in order not to feel it, my mind of its own accord, by
a sort of inhibition of the instant pain, ceased entirely to think of verse-making,
of fiction, of the poetic future on which my want of talent precluded me
from counting.
I
haven't written anything since then. I
didn't have time. I was frantic. First, she didn't answer her phone. Then I went to her apartment and a scared Iranian
woman opened the door. She said
she had never heard of Leila Zahra that she didn't know who I was talking
about. But her eyes said she knew,
and said, "get the hell away from the door
as fast as possible and forget. Leila's forever."
Just before the door closed she nodded her head and did something
with her hand that I didn't understand and couldn’t describe. Something that I've never
seen before. When I was
in the car, driving away, I realized that she was pulling an imaginary
veil over her face.
I drove straight to the library.
She wasn't there. The librarian said that she hadn't shown up
for work that day. I was stunned. I'm sitting here looking at a piece of paper
with her phone number on it. The
only connection I have with her. One phone number. Why
would the librarian lie? She is
a woman in her sixties, she certainly...
I
was in the library, reading when she came up behind me and tapped me on
the shoulder! It's been almost a week. She was full of apologies. She said her husband showed up! She gave me another telephone number and a time
to call, but she said, "it is almost certain
that I will return to
I went to the cafeteria, and ran into
Soheila, the other Iranian woman! She felt my sadness and she seemed to take it
as a challenge. I offered to buy
coffee and she accepted. I tried
to make her talk about
I'm totally alone with no work to do
but I haven't got the will to write anything.
I'm immensely tired. Tired in a way that I can fight and conquer but.... not now. I've got until January to do nothing but read
and think and write. Almost four
months.