My mother said that something had to be done about my hair. Over the weekend she took me to her stylist in New York. There was another snowstorm, although immediately after, the sun came out and it was almost sixty degrees, so the snow melted. Nothing was real anymore; everything was over. The hairdresser, Gerard, had sideburns, a pin-striped vest, and a vivacious laugh. He said he liked how my hair didn’t just lie there. “It retaliates, it bounces back. That’s what I like. I bet it’s like the person who wears it. I bet you don’t just lie there.”
I felt so dispirited. What were you supposed to do, other than lie there? What did my hair know that I didn’t? Also, why was a gay man telling me his hypotheses about my sexual performance? None of it made sense. Gerard kept complaining about the music. He said they had really good music, like Santana, but instead they kept playing Chris Isaak. My hair ended up really short.
? ? ?
I went back to school the Saturday before classes resumed. The train was nearly empty. The conductor recited the names of the stops in Connecticut with weary incredulity, as if he couldn’t believe how many there were. “South Saybrook. Saybrook Racetrack. Saybrook. Old Saybrook. North Saybrook. Saybrook Falls.”
When I got back, Ivan still hadn’t written. I called Ralph but there wasn’t any answer. Then Svetlana called. We spent that evening and the whole next day together, walking down Mass Ave and across the bridge to Boston. We stopped at Tower Records, then walked up Newbury Street. We came to a bead store. Svetlana didn’t think there was anything embarrassing about going to a bead store in Beacon Hill and spending almost twenty dollars on beads.
Back in Svetlana’s room, we listened to the CDs she had bought—Joni Mitchell’s Blue and Bach’s St. Matthew Passion—and made necklaces, periodically holding up the strands and comparing them. Svetlana explained how her necklace was characteristic of her and mine was characteristic of me, and I thought about how probably, as long as civilization had existed, women had been threading beads onto strings or reeds or whatever. Then I wondered whether it had always been women. Maybe in ancient times men had been into beads. Today, though, it was hard to imagine boys sitting around on beanbags, listening to Joni Mitchell, holding necklaces against each other’s necks, and talking about Svetlana’s sister. Some part of me worried that this was why women would never amount to anything, that we were somehow holding ourselves back.
Over the break, Svetlana had visited her sister at art school. She had found her sitting cross-legged on her bed in a minuscule dorm room, sipping the same cup of lukewarm coffee she had been reheating in the microwave every two hours, building an artichoke out of tiny sticks. The artichoke was a requirement for all the art school first-years. The previous week everyone had had to make a shoe out of wire.
Sasha, their mother, wanted to send the sister to a Russian healer, a man who painted mystical paintings of the night sky. One of his paintings hung in her, Sasha’s, bedroom. It showed a lone balalaika sailing past a harvest moon.
? ? ?
Back in my room, the only new email was from my mother, and had the subject line: ant invasion.
I had to do a mini extermination. I decided to throw out neighbors’ cake which must have chagrined the ants, but they are no longer either.
? ? ?
In the morning when I saw Ivan’s name in the in-box I almost started to cry. It reminded me of a kind of torture I had read about where afterward the captors returned your senses to you one by one, and you felt so grateful that you told them everything.
? ? ?
The sun, Ivan wrote, was going to rise. Outside his window, a traffic light oscillated between red and green. Occasionally, now, a car would drive by. In Russian you could describe that car, and other cars, with prefixed verbs of motion: what insignificant subtleties! Ivan had just finished grading the homework for my would-have-been classmates; his train to Yale left in an hour. Tomorrow was California. Now the sun was up and he hadn’t gotten anywhere. Fortune presents gifts not according to the book.
I could see it all so clearly—the traffic light changing all night for nobody’s benefit, the first cars passing by as the sky grew light—and I was overcome by the sense of how much more there was in his life than in mine, by the things to do and distances to travel, while I never had done anything or gone anywhere, and never would. All I had ever done was visit my parents all the time—first one parent and then the other, with no sign of it ever stopping. Worse yet, I knew I had no one to blame but myself. If my mother told me not to do something, I didn’t do it. Everyone’s mother told them not to do things, but I was the only one who listened. The eternal pauper in the great marketplace of ideas and of the world, I had nothing to teach anyone. I didn’t have anything anyone wanted. I reread Ivan’s email and looked in the face of this terrible indignity.
? ? ?
Dear Ivan,
My break was bullshit. I don’t know what anything means. I have this book that says LANGUAGE on the cover and it isn’t teaching me anything. I think the problem goes really deep down. The oil-drum is empty, so you throw in a cigarette. The whole thing bursts into flames.
I don’t understand anything that happens, or how. I don’t understand why it will trivialize these letters to say hi, or to actually talk to each other. You say you’re not in the mood for insignificant subtleties. But insignificant subtleties are the only difference between something special, and a huge pile of garbage floating through space. I’m not making that up. People discovered it in the nineteenth century.
I think I’m falling in love with you. Every day it’s harder for me to see the common denominator, to understand what counts as a thing. All the categories that make up a dog—they go blurry and dissolve, I can’t tell what anything is anymore. Chills go up the backs of my arms and songs go around in my head. “[If I Must Be Put to Death, Let It Be] by Your Aristocratic Little Hand.”
Your Sonya
? ? ?
It was late when I sent the email. Afterward I went running by the river. Everything looked fanatically crisp, both more and less real than usual. The ground was there every time. I didn’t ever want to stop running. I didn’t want to go on to the next thing, or the one after that.
Back at the dorm I took a shower, logged onto Unix, and did “finger” to see where Ivan was. He was online, on a server called neptune.caltech.edu.
I got out a book and started to read. The book seemed to involve Spain in some way. Every five minutes I checked to see Ivan’s online status. Sometimes he had been idle for a minute or two; then he became active again. I tried to imagine him there in California, where it was three hours in the past, typing on a computer called Neptune, pausing for a minute or two, and then typing again.
? ? ?
At 2:40 a.m., he sent me an email. I read it through twice. I didn’t understand every word, but my body knew it wasn’t good news. There were individual lines that made my heart soar, but underneath it the base, the floor, was sickening.