How Literature Saved My Life (6 page)

Delilah
, which is recorded live in Delilah’s home studio in the Seattle area and is broadcast six nights a week between seven and midnight in most markets, has 8 million listeners on more than 200 stations in every state
except Rhode Island, covering 90 percent of the country, even though the show is in only five of the top ten markets. Delilah’s listeners are overwhelmingly female, modestly educated, and politically center-right. She also says that “it seems as if half my callers are single moms.” Unlike, say, Dr. Phil or Dr. Laura (my wife’s name remains
Laurie
), Delilah only occasionally accompanies the sugar pill with harsh-tasting medicine.

Delilah
is a relentless valentine for and about the struggling class, a trump card for those holding an empty hand. Delilah offers the possibility of ordinary American female life redeemed by … by what? The sugar rush of over-the-moon sentiment. In five hours at her house one summer day, I ate pancakes and syrup for breakfast, cookies for lunch, and ice cream for an afternoon pick-me-up. The hungry heart will be cured by sweetness itself. Delilah wants every call to end on an “audio hug” of empathy and recognition, and it does, it does. Inevitably she lifts us up where we belong—where the eagles fly, etc.—even as her own life remains obdurately earthbound.

In 1982, when Delilah, who is white, brought her African American husband home to meet her parents, her father “freaked out, jumped up, and ran to the gun closet, chasing me off with a shotgun.” He disowned her, and when he was dying, he refused to allow her to visit. Most of her children—three biological, nine adopted—have African American, African, or Hispanic ancestry. She’s thrice divorced.

A disproportionately high percentage of callers are raising two or three children without the father, who has left or was never there. Asked what kind of man she’s attracted to, Delilah says, “You’ve got to be quick, bright, funny—and a mass murderer. Ever since I was a teenager, I’d pick out the guy who would break my heart. Because my father was so passionate and so brilliant and so emotionally not available, that, I guess, is what I’m attracted to.” Delilah and the show are father-fixated, redressing the distant or absent or dead father by positing an all-knowing, all-loving God.

(My minirebellion against my journalist parents was to become a fiction writer—and then, later, a writer of wayward nonfiction.)

Delilah embodies the ambivalence her audience feels toward competing definitions of being female. Her voice is half tease, half hug, which is what she looks like: ex-bombshell/Mother of the Year. She wears a low-cut blouse, which emphasizes her décolletage, but she frequently pulls up her blouse and crosses her arms over her chest. She espouses self-esteem to her listeners, but she confides to her executive producer, “My legs are the only part of myself I like.” In most photos, she appears to be an all-American blonde, but she frequently reminds her listeners that her hair color comes from Kmart.

In
Love Someone Today
, Delilah writes, “I had romantic notions playing in my head of a midnight dance under the spectacular sky. I found him”—her last husband, when
they were still married—“sleeping soundly in our bed. I tried to wake him. After several unsuccessful attempts, I gave up and walked out. I felt angry and rejected, my feelings hurt that he wouldn’t jump up and enjoy my romantic fantasy with me. I zipped up my coat and headed out to the backyard again. I stood there, frozen in the beauty of the moment, yet still feeling a bit sorry for myself. I uttered a small prayer of praise, thanking the Almighty for this wonderful scene. And then, in a voice that was so clear it was almost audible, I heard God speak to my heart. ‘I didn’t create this moment for you and Doug,’ He seemed to say. ‘I created it for you and me.’ And together we danced in the moonlight.”

The world is a beautiful place, in other words, but men are oblivious, hopeless. As solace,
Delilah
presents romantic ballads about idealized lovers, narratives about children as cherubim, praise hymns about our Lord, our father.

Mary calls to reminisce: “Mama’s Nativity had a music box in it that played ‘Silent Night,’ but it was very old. I think she bought it before she and my father met. Some of the chimes were broken, so our ‘Silent Night’ was very strange, but we all liked it.”

Delilah laughs and says, “It was nearly silent.”

Mary says, “No, it wasn’t nearly silent. It just was—you missed a lot of the melody and you got a lot of the accompaniment, which made it very unusual. My dad did woodworking as a hobby. One summer he got a catalogue that
had music boxes, so without telling anybody, he ordered a ‘Silent Night.’ He got out the Nativity scene, changed the music box, and threw away the old broken music box.”

Delilah: “And it was never the same.”

Mary: “And it’s still not the same. Every one of us can still sing the old ‘Silent Night’ that played on that music box for so many years. When we wound it up and heard that it was correct, we all just really attacked him. He didn’t know. He thought he was doing us a favor. And we were like, ‘Oh, Daddy! How could you do that to us?’ But we all still can sing that ‘Silent Night,’ that unusual version of it.”

Delilah: “Let me hear it.”

She hums the tune.

Once, a long time ago, something happened. It’s never been the same since. It was Dad’s fault. We’ll sort of forgive him and we’ll sort of not forgive him. What sustains me is the broken music box, which Dad inevitably tries to fix and isn’t fixable and is me.

L
ove and Pain and the Whole Damn Thing
, which my sister—one year older than I am—was obsessed with in high school and now has no recollection of whatsoever, centers on the romance between Walter (Timothy
Bottoms), a depressed American college student, and Lila (Maggie Smith), who is old enough to be his mother and is dying. She possesses an odd beauty—bug-eyed, with a classical look resembling the androgynous-faced female personifications of Dusk and Dawn that Michelangelo sculpted for two tombs in Florence. You can tell how relaxed she’s feeling by whether her hair, bottle-red and somewhat thinning, has been pinned back like a naughty librarian’s or allowed to flow and tickle her shoulders. Rigid and prudish, or perhaps just very British, she wears mostly polyester dresses and tailored skirt suits, which, though modest, showcase her Barbie-doll legs.

One night she completely loses it, drinking hard liquor from a bottle shaped like a flamenco dancer, smoking a cigar in her hotel room, and writing “Adios” in lipstick on the mirror—her hair very much down, yellow and red suicide pills in her khaki lap, red-brown liquid stains on the chest of her blouse. Otherwise, Lila maintains a manicured appearance and modulates her tone of voice. When feeling ill, she recites a couple of (misremembered) lines from
Pirates of Penzance
to soothe herself: “The glass is rising very high/It will be a warm July.”

When Lila wakes up the morning after her suicide attempt, Walter tries to convince her that life is beautiful. During his long speech, he flings open the windows and says, “You see? There’s joy in the world.” The sun shines hard into the small hotel room, but only a moment later, workers unload a black coffin from a hearse parked
in the street directly outside the hotel room. Walter slams the window shut, leaving her chambers as dark as they’d been a few seconds earlier. In another scene, Lila and Walter get in bed together for the first time, and it goes poorly. Lila gets up and tries to make a nonchalant, composed exit from Walter’s hotel room but instead trips and collapses. Maggie Smith plays the scene totally deadpan, getting up from the floor, arranging her hair, and walking out with a pair of proper white underpants caught around her ankles.

She tries to teach herself—and then Walter—Spanish from a little primer. “
Amanece
” and “
oscurece
,” she says, asking him to repeat these sounds back to her. He has an atrocious ear. The first, she explains, means “it lightens”; the second, “it darkens.” Dawn comes, then night. She seems unintentionally to be transmitting to him some deep, basic wisdom.

Throughout the film, their relationship proves herky-jerky. The sun comes out, but then the rain comes. “And what have you learned about me?” Lila asks. “That you can hurt me,” he replies, very much in love. Rain leaks into the road-tripping trailer in which they sleep one angry night together, which turns into many future happy nights. He steps on the gas (of life) and she puts on the brakes (of death). He’s never been happier. The question that haunts the entire movie: How does sex feel for someone on the verge of an early death—what squats in the parentheses, poised next to an orgasm? In the end, she
dumps him via a handwritten letter: “My dear Walter, I know this is cruel …”
Amanece. Oscurece
.

Walter and Lila’s love is both impossible and possible for the same reason: she’s on the verge of dying. The impracticalities that long-term lovers suffer don’t concern this couple, as they do most of us. That is, when finally you’ve grown bored but are stuck with each other, the promise of death feels
too
far away. It becomes the new impossible dream.

What if Romeo and Juliet had lived? Soon enough, at the ripe old age of fourteen, they would have been arguing about whose turn it was to empty the dishwasher.

Movies love to imply that the man and woman held each other all night long, but you can’t do it. You have to roll away …

I
CAN SEE WHY
you’re a Miss Nude USA regional finalist. You have beautiful long silky blue-black hair, a perfect pout, and a gorgeous body. Please send me the color photos you mentioned of yourself in fur, leather, lingerie, garter belt, and heels. Thank you. Payment enclosed.

A
GNÈS
J
AOUI
’
S
The Taste of Others
is the smartest, saddest movie about sex I’ve ever seen. Clara, asked by her student what the most difficult part of acting is, says, “To depend on another’s desire.” Valérie, surprised that she’s going out with Fred, says, “I would have never guessed it. We have nothing in common.” When Clara says about someone who likes her and the play in which she’s starring, “I don’t like his kind,” her friend Manie asks, “Is there anybody you like?” The film, which is also known as
It Takes All Kinds
, knows that what we love and hate about other people is how different they are from us: we’re disgusted by this difference, and we’re excited by it. Jaoui looks at otherness in a multitude of ways: bourgeois/bohemian, misbehavior/obedience, kindness/cruelty, blonde/brunette, actor/audience, teacher/student, brother/sister, sex/love, life/art. A bodyguard spends weeks protecting his client from Iranian kidnappers, but his client is mugged by local French thugs.

It’s myself I must be on guard against, because I always eroticize the person who isn’t in my life. As soon as she’s in my life, she’s as unastonishing to me as she is to herself. The Greek word
eros
denotes “want,” “lack,” “desire for that which is missing.” The lover wants what he doesn’t have. By definition, it’s impossible for him to have what he wants, since as soon as it’s had, it’s no longer wanting.

In the greatest book ever written, child Marcel’s hunger
for Maman is indistinguishable from Swann’s jealousy over Odette, which is indistinguishable from adult Marcel’s desire for Albertine. The human animal never, ever gets what it wants; it can’t.

Before a single image of
The Taste of Others
appears, we hear a clatter of voices, as if a party is occurring in a room just out of sight: all the appeal of the not quite overheard. Throughout the film, the camera swivels away from its ostensible subjects to follow someone new, some new object of attention. In life, in love, otherness is sexy but unbridgeable. Art—literature, theater, visual art, opera, music—provides a framework to contemplate otherness and at least imagine a collapsing of distance.

Pornography is not, in my experience and opinion, a substitute for closeness; it’s a revel in distance.

We are all so afraid. We are all so alone. We all so need from the outside the assurance of our own worthiness to exist.

H
ANDWRITTEN IN PENCIL
on the back page of a library book I checked out:

“I understand your feelings about wanting to continue the relationship. However, my life is going in a different direction. I have other plans, and the motivation
to continue the relationship is not there on my part. You, too, have new things ahead of you. There are nice things to remember from our relationship and I know we’ll remember them. It also scarred us both. I know you have problems to work out from it. I have my problems to work out from it. The bottom line is that it was not a happy relationship. My plan is to work on my problems and move on with my life, and I hope you’ll take on the same attitude. I wish you good luck.”

T
HE MOST DRAMATIC
sexual experience of my life was a yearlong relationship with someone whose entire philosophy, or at least bedroom behavior, was derived from the sex advice columns of racier women’s magazines. She wore extremely tight jeans tucked into catch-me/fuck-me boots, and she applied lipstick and eye shadow in such a way as to create the effect that she was in a perpetual state of arousal. Once, as I walked several paces ahead, she told the couple we were walking with that I had a great ass (I do!—or at least I did). In the missionary position, she would whisper, “Deeper,” and wrap her legs tightly around me. When she was on top, she would rub her breasts together, lick her lips, and run her hands through her hair, encouraging me to pull,
hard, on her gold choker. When being penetrated from behind, she would suck on my thumb and look back at me with googly eyes, as if to prevent herself from losing consciousness.

Before performing fellatio, she’d moan, “Give me that big thing.” Although my equipment is only standard, she called it “porno penis.” (The first time we had sex, I’d just masturbated, imagining her, and I was at half-staff; she nevertheless said I was “the perfect size,” which is
Cosmo
101.) She would kneel, gaze up at me as if with reverence, swallow, and at the end, wink. She’d slurp my semen as if it were maple syrup atop pancakes, which she made one Sunday morning in her underwear. Whenever I went down on her, she’d wrap her fingers—with brightly lacquered nails—around my hair, tug, and pretend to come almost immediately, thanking me profusely afterward. Once, when I licked her from behind, she exclaimed that she’d never been anywhere near this intimate with anyone before. Anal sex, with requisite screams. Her voice occupied a middle register exactly halfway between Baby Doll and Dominatrix. At dinner parties, she would mouth “I love you,” looking at me as if I were the president. I swear I’m not making this stuff up.