Silence and the Word (31 page)

When I was younger, “math” didn’t have much
mythical resonance for me. As a kid, it was something I did,
moderately well and without much effort or interest. In high
school, it was pleasant to be in honors math. But mostly, it was
just a school subject, and a word invested with little personal
meaning, and not much more cultural meaning.

Then I flunked calculus in college, and
suddenly “math” became invested with all sorts of personal myths.
The first time I’d clearly and unmistakably failed, and even though
I got an A in probability theory the next semester, fulfilling the
requirement, “math” and “calculus” were painful, loaded words. They
still carry a little of that connotation, a little of the myth of
failure.

And then my junior year I met you, a grad
student mathematician. And before long, when I heard the word
“math”, I also heard the word “love”.
²
As the years went by, more and
more signified meanings were added to the sign of “math”. Failure
had to make room for sexy, and for brilliant, and for socially
inept. And those were perhaps already part of the broader cultural
myth of “math”, as witnessed by
Good Will Hunting
, but they
became inextricably part of my own private signification. Society
may reinvent the mathematician’s image ten times in the next ten
years, adding layers of meaning to the myth, but my own “math” will
never again be the same as theirs.

I don’t know that it was you who put all that
meaning into “math”. I dated four different mathematicians that
year, and it was probably the cumulative effect—you don’t get all
the credit. You can take most of the blame, I’m afraid; since you
were the one who stuck around, you became inextricably enmeshed in
my myth-making; it was you who really added silence and distance
and what seemed like emotional brick walls to “math”. It’s okay,
though—that was a long time ago, and the word seems big enough to
take it. If you ever leave me, I imagine it will be big enough to
absorb all the meanings that come with that as well.

Are some words bigger than other words? Is
there any limit to how much signification you put into a sign, a
myth? Does it just get deeper and richer and stronger—or does it
get muddled and diffused and eventually destroyed?

What does “love” mean again? I’ve
forgotten.

Love means Kevin (some? lots? all?), at this
point, which is more than a little scary. What’s even scarier is
how very many words mean Kevin now.

Flowers mean Kevin.

Tea.

Chicago.

Philadelphia.

California. (You are swallowing up entire
states as well as cities).

Utah.

Coffeeshops.

Sex.

Math, obviously, means Kevin.

Even writing about love means Kevin. Writing
about pain. About family. About work. You’ve permeated some of my
fiction, and most of my poetry. I am getting lost in signs and
significations. Is it that the word “Kevin” is invested with the
signifier of love, or that the word “love” is invested with Kevin?
Does the distinction matter? Can two signs grow so intertwined over
time in one’s personal mythology that it becomes impossible, or
dangerous, to tear them apart? Painful, at the very least.

I am not sure that I can write about love
now, without writing about you. What does that mean for my
fiction?

(Deeper, stronger, richer? Weaker, diffused,
destroyed?)

Children mean Kevin. I cannot think of
children without thinking of you; I cannot see a young human on the
street without thinking the word “child” and I cannot think that
word without thinking of you. Ironic. A word can apparently be
invested with what it
is
not
, as well as what it
is
.

Children and parents are already huge
cultural myths, of course. Mine were invested with some private
signification from my own experiences as a child, and with my
parents. When we vow not to be the type of parents we had, that’s
yet another type of myth-making, taking that old signified and
inverting it—making it into what it
was not
. Or trying to.
Cultural myths, and the fierce yet perhaps insubstantial added
signified meanings of one’s own childhood. I had little more than
that before you, before a few years ago, to be honest. And then, I
somehow transmuted a massive weight of cultural myth, stirred it in
with my personal myths of Kevin, and created a brand-new myth,
custom tailored to fit. Fit me, that is.

It fit pretty well, for a while. And your
refusal to participate in that myth-making just became part of the
myth. The myth of “Kevin-the-father”, perhaps. It changed from a
myth of what-would-be to a myth of what-could-have-been, but stayed
essentially the same in its composition.

That myth has been showing at the seams,
lately. In part because of our conversations, those arbitrary yet
significant words slowly convincing me that there was really very
little supporting that fatherly myth. But far more surprising—I
have been noticing that I am not nearly as certain as I was in my
belief in my own motherly myth. Which was, of course, necessary to
sustain the fatherly one.

That is partly the intrusion of my cousin’s
harsh realities; as she swelled up, took a break from med school,
gave birth, breastfed, and complained like crazy, all of her
specific signs were added to my motherhood myth. They didn’t fit so
well; apparently

there are some significations that contradict
each other so strongly that it is difficult if not impossible for
them to coexist. The myth starts to break down. And my own
slow-growing pleasure in my work, my burgeoning schedule, my
ambition and understanding of what will be needed in order to
fulfill it—those also have trouble fitting inside the myth. Oh,
they can be shoehorned in, if we use the sign of the quietly
competent nanny—but I suspect that sign to also be a myth.

The motherhood myth is still hanging in
there, but it’s looking a little more fragile than it used to. And
yet—I have to wonder, if it’s more than my cousin and schedules and
nannies. Because as we established earlier, love is Kevin and Kevin
is love and the two are inextricable and becoming more and more
pervasive. Over the past nine years, their meanings have been
seeping into every corner of my life. And wouldn’t it be
understandable if motherly love struggled to accomodate being
filled with Kevin love, which is so vast and overwhelming, after
all? There might not be room within motherhood to fit it. There
might be limits on the size of that myth.

An uncomfortable thought—which in itself
appears to be pushing at the Kevin love myth, perhaps showing a few
of its own seams and patches.

Well. We could continue, but this is, after
all, only an assignment, and it is now long enough. What will you
think of this letter, knowing that it is an assignment, knowing
that my classmates will be reading it, wondering how much of it is
an actual letter, and how much of it is the myth of a letter to
Kevin? Perhaps it’s a myth of an assignment, but if you convince
yourself that it’s the myth of a letter, then you may deny
signification entirely to anything I have written here. That would
be your choice, of course. And for all I know, you may be doing it
with every letter I send you, because even if they’re not
assignments, they’re each one made up of words, which are merely
arbitrary, signifying nothing.

love,

M

reading a book of poetry

or maybe short stories, or

both—it’s hard to tell

with this author; rich wet air,

occasional drops falling into

my hair, onto the pages, and I

am purely happy, in a way

that is like riding your bike

down a very steep hill, or

wading in a stony brook—

it is a way that I knew

how to follow once, but

for a long time, I

have been too scared—

to read a book,

under a tree,

in light rain.

Esthely Blue:
Every story is at least
a little bit autobiographical, but this one is as close as I’ve
come to actual autobiography—disappearing toes and all.

And Can This Ever End?
: I originally
wrote this story for the web, my first (and so far only) foray into
hypertext. I’m fascinated by the possibilities of truly non-linear
narrative, but I find it so much more difficult to do well than
traditional fiction (generally because it seems you must write ten
stories in hypertext for every one in traditional narrative) that I
have for the most part avoided the form.

Silence and the Word
: The scariest
piece I’ve ever written. (Scary for me, not necessarily you.) I was
sitting in a coffeeshop with Kevin when I first drafted this, in a
Salt Lake City winter, and even though I hate winter, I had to keep
getting up from my computer and going outside to stomp around in
the snowy park next door, just to catch my breath and get my
courage up again. I am deeply indebted to Lee Damsky, the editor of
Sex and Single Girls
, who forced me through four drafts of
this essay before it found its final form. Every revision,
accompanied by her searching, pertinent questions, made it
better.

Fringes
: Sometimes I do feel lost. But
mostly, not. This one’s for Jed, and David, and Karina, and Alex,
with all my love. Thanks for exploring with me.

Johnny’s Story
: It’s rare that I’ll
take on such an unfamiliar milieu—and with an accent! But there’s
something about Johnny that just makes me smile.

Still
: Sometimes I try to tell the
future. Thankfully, I’m never even close to correct.

At the Gates of the City
: This is one
of my very few spec fic stories, a piece written in
the-year-of-the-breakup, when I was trying to find my way back to
Kev. Perhaps my Mormon ghost girl helped. I grew to strongly
dislike Salt Lake City culture in my three years there, but I do
owe them for reminding me of the place of religion in many people’s
lives. It’s been good for my fiction (and probably good for me,
too).

Spinning Down
: Kevin gave me a candle
tree one Christmas, a silver tree with six blue glass
candleholders. It takes up too much space on our end table, and
both children and dogs tend to knock it over, putting us all in
danger of fiery death, but I refuse to give it up. That’s a pretty
good description of my attitude towards love affairs, come to think
of it. Refusal to give up, despite risk of immolation.

the sock tray
: Update, almost a year
later: the socks do still get folded, but they don’t always make it
into the tray.

Seven Cups of Water:
I wrote the
entire first draft of this in a brutal seven-hour stretch while
sitting in the Borders cafe in Salt Lake City, overlooking Temple
Square. The missionary women in their little white blouses and dark
blue skirts walked peacefully from temple to tabernacle, handing
out fliers. They always walk in pairs, have you noticed? I’m just
saying.

Rice
: Sometimes I think about doing a
pillow book, full of little poems like these, the kind of book you
could pull out and read to your lover late at night.

Minal in Winter
: I wrote this story to
follow “Season of Marriage” (which appears in my first collection,
Torn Shapes of Desire
), and I wrote it primarily so I’d have
an excuse to visit her aunt, Raji, again. But I find myself
desperately fond of Minal—somehow I managed to create someone more
sardonic than I ever have the nerve to be. This story is the seed
of my dissertation novel-in-stories,
Bodies in Motion
, a
book which moves from American in the present day to Sri Lanka in
1947, through several generations and two intertwined
families
.

Listening to My Daughter
:
Daffydowndillies is an old word for daffodils, or at least I think
it is. I have a vague memory of reading that in a book somewhere. I
swear I didn’t make it up, though I wish I had.

A Gentle Man
: Issues of the linkages
between men and violence both trouble and fascinate me. I see many
models for strong, healthy, happy women these days—I think it must
be difficult right now to try to be a similarly strong, sane
man.

Under the Skin: A Survey
: When I
brought this in to workshop in Utah, I was afraid that the class
would have issues with all the racial material. But the strongest
reaction was from a woman who just could not believe that I was
still on such good terms with my exes that I could write them such
a frank e-mail—she didn’t understand why I would want to keep in
touch with them at all! She and I, different planets. Different
galaxies.

The Light at Dawn
: Now you really do
know way too much about me. Thank god eighteen was long ago.

And the sea is shaking…
: I know I
would hate being a fisherman, if I really had to get up in the
insanely early morning and go out into the cold. But I find the
idea romantic. If I could, I’d live by the sea.

And Baby Makes Four
: Yes, this is the
same Shefali from
The Light at Dawn
, years later. I’m
considering writing a novel about this threesome next. I don’t
think I’ve ever read a good literary threesome novel, though
there’s some decent work in the spec fic genre.

Kali
: This is for Heather Shaw, with
all love, and lust.