Modern Prose

 

I was thinking about the impossibility of modern prose and texting a girl called Tiz. She always wore platform heels, she said, to feel powerful. How tall was I? I gave my measurements. “That might suffice,” she said.

 

Another practitioner of modern prose called: would I read his manuscript, three quarters finished, and give pragmatic feedback? No frippery. “But we’re re-enactors,” I said, “like those old fucks at Gettysburg.” Didn’t he sense our paltriness? The phrase modern prose, when I thought it to myself, in words, made me smirk. It was quaint. So was I.

 

Tiz sent me a video of her one eyed cat captioned, “You better not be allergic.” “They puddle my eyes,” I said. My tolerance to cat dander, I assured her, had lately increased, a shift that suggested an inverse relationship between my cat dander tolerance and my modern prose tolerance.

 

Fragments won’t do. Narrators should speak in cogent fibrous paragraphs and have jobs and do things with their mouths and hands. The movement of the prose should itself I told myself embody life under neoliberalism. I have trouble defining neoliberalism, but I deploy the word freely. Modern prose can’t simply make recourse to an alluringly literary past, which was itself, that past, only the dream of another alluringly literary past.

 

On Christmas Eve I snorted cocaine with the other practitioner of modern prose and his girlfriend. A kitchen table, Philadelphia, nowhere else to go. The girlfriend had acquired the cocaine from her hairdresser in New York for one hundred and thirty dollars. “Probably the last baggie in New York ,” she said: a pandemic paucity. “Why did no one tell us this was the way to write a book?” I cried. “You just need to do cocaine and become an emaciated grandiosity!” Clever, I told myself: grandiosity as noun. Modern prose unfurled before my audience as I tingled and discanted. “We’ve known this for ages,” they said. “Everyone’s been saying this all along.” They cited Freud and that Bowie interview, the one with the kitten and the milk. We the prose producers massaged our gums with the last of the New York cocaine, in a Philadelphia kitchen, with nowhere else to go.

 

Cecil, the cat in the kitchen, didn’t make my eyes scream. I told Tiz this, Christmas Day, as I tried to watch a film, French, featuring wayward young Maoists. It was happening before me but not really happening behind my eyes. I paused it when an actor playing an actor lit a cigarette and said, “Why is it intolerable to be American?” I took a picture and made the picture my Story, on Instagram, a word which vandalizes prose. I told Tiz I’d been eating ice cream. “That would destroy my stomach,” she said. 

 

Erections had been wrenching me awake, pre-dawn, making me consider the word member. My penis, I thought to myself, wordedly, is a member of my flesh, perhaps the main member: the chairman of the board. Someone somewhere had probably thought something adjacent to this thought before. Begrudgingly I jerked off and tried to go back to sleep. Modern prose must abandon erections, the consensus seemed to be. And yet modern prose must not, concomitant to this abandonment, fixate on impotence, either; rather it must simply ignore any dialectics of engorgement. Were I to see Tiz in a flesh sense, I knew I would not become engorged, that erections would abandon me.

 

So I sat in my mother’s basement crafting my halfhearted manifesto on modern prose. Day after day, that December, I sat there, contemplating everything it and I were rigorously not doing.

 

Tiz said she had a hole in her leg the size of an M&M. She promised she’d send me a picture of her leg hole, and I decided that, to reciprocate, I’d send her a picture of the new rupture in the elbow of my blue sweater. I drank tea in my mother’s kitchen. I complained, on a WhatsApp call with the other practitioner, about Derrida, about Godard, about the sensuous sterility of Gallic thought broadly construed. Languishing in Zoom Comp Lit, he said he’d send me a lyrical essay that would palliate if not rejuvenate me.

 

The first person starts to dun and grate. My own threadbare pieces of prose devolve into cleanly over-determined essays on their own refusal to describe, render, tell. I—the consciousness from which these sentences pretend to emanate—had a rant prepared, against the very idea of storytelling. I withheld it from myself.

 

I listened to new jangly guitar compositions by affable Australians: ready-made relics. I studied the hole in Tiz’s leg and thought about how I might fail to describe it. I sent her the picture of the hole in the elbow of my sweater. My mother ordered me new sweaters, merino and turtleneck and mock and expensive.

 

Tiz said she hated the Beatles: “I could care less about four men.” A debate from say 1978. Sympathetic as I am to contrarianism—especially in matters aesthetic and musical—this evaluation I could not abide. “I’ll have to vacuum before you come over, though,” she said.

 

One solution to the prose problem is to invent, for myself, a new, seemingly impenetrable idiom. This idiom, thick and swirling and nearly incoherent, will coalesce, I know it will, into a marketable style. I drafted a text to Tiz: “We could be lovers in a time of crisis. Were it not for your cat.”

 

The words will chime and lope, bright and scrappy and free. No characters, impedimenta, or ponderous horticulture. I told Tiz I’d take Zyrtec but she was in a cabin, quarantined, Maine. “Are we communicating?” she said.

 

 

When They Speak They Speak of Eggs

 

“I’m perfecting hard boiled eggs,” she tells him, when they speak. They only speak on the phone now.

 

She poaches chicken, too. “So useful if you want to make chicken salad,” she says.

 

Chicken salad has always unsettled him. He makes mayonnaise himself; he tells her about the different combinations of yolk and albumen, of mustard and vinegar and lemon. He says, “It’s an emulsion.”

 

“My mother makes a good egg salad,” she says. “With green olives.”

 

He doesn’t mention his fungal infection—he suspects his urethra is implicated—and she doesn’t go into her drinking, which has intensified by a minor degree these past few weeks. He figures his penis, now that they are officially separated, is off limits.

 

She talks about her cat. He has never met this cat; it is black and named after a German philosopher. She sends him a picture of the cat; it appears malnourished. Sometimes on the phone—they speak once a week—she will, in the middle of a sentence, say, “Oh, come here, my sweet boy.”

 

She never had a pet name for him; he never had one for her. She would have found it pejorative, he thinks, now, after the fact, when she has a pet, a real pet, of her own.

 

It appeals to him, pethood. When something hurts you make a noise and assuming the human in your life isn’t cruel or distracted that human will comfort you, will investigate what’s wrong and cart you off to a doctor, a vet. You sit there silently in front of the physician and the nurses; they reward your silence and good comportment with treats, and with touches. 

 

He doesn’t share this desire, these insights—doesn’t say, I would like to be a pet sometimes. Perhaps just when life feels fraught.

 

Her life feels: less fraught, she tells herself. As she feeds her cat—her sweet boy—she thinks, But he was like a dog: large and hairy. But he wouldn’t stop, what—stop talking or thinking. Which, too, was part of his charm: the chafe and thrum of his talking and thinking.

 

Their separation was a logical mutual choice, a decision based on months of dialogue with various mental health professionals. Actually, only two professionals were involved—his long term therapist and a counselor she saw one Monday, on a whim. The counselor, wooden and well meaning, was a repository of cliches which at first struck her as entirely insipid and then accrued, perhaps, a gently stunted usefulness.

 

She has lots to say now about where to find the cheapest cat food—hardware stores, who knew?—and also about the farmers market, which is beautiful and accessible by bike. She bikes through fields; her skin burns in splotches. She has intimated to him that she is seeing someone. “A Jungian, online, I mean,” she says.

 

She is convinced he has stopped brushing his teeth regularly. In times of stress he neglects his dental hygiene; his gums erupt with sores. Basically she was happy with him, she thinks, nonetheless, and remembers: a beery trip to Portland, prosecco and cherries in his mother’s lush backyard, that snowstorm they waited out in an empty bar in the Square. Thinking of their excursions is safer than thinking of minutiae like for example how he didn’t spread butter on his toast but just stuck a cold hunk in the center creating a kind of open butter sandwich: the small, stupid-shit details—she calls them—that almost make her cry. They rarely cried.

 

He updates her on the status of his mother’s loneliness, working hard to stifle any verbal stirrings related to his fungal infection or to how, in Chicago, three weeks after their separation, he spent the night in a La Quinta Inn and Suites with another ex-girlfriend.

 

Tacky, she would call that: which it may have been and which it probably was. He thinks these thoughts when they speak; since they are speaking he does not speak of them.

 

She has introduced the character of her roommate, a sculptor: a man six years older than her. Once, in her little white kitchen, she told him how a professor of hers, a lesbian psychology professor, predicted that she’d end up with an older man; accordingly she rations her commentary on the sculptor. “My sweet boy,” she coos.

 

They sketch their schedules for each other. He could never master hers when she was studying emaciated saints but he works to internalize section times, course subjects. His own schedule is slack, easy to wander through.

 

“I scrambled eggs today,” he says. “Lots of butter.” She mentions a parking lot situation, an averted hangover. “And I’ve stopped eating meat, it seems,” she says. His carnivorousness was contagious but she never understood how cooking meat worked: it was either too pink or too white and she never had the right knife. In her little white kitchen they’d sunk their teeth into the same pieces of flesh: a rabbit braised in white wine, a pork shoulder studded with star anise.

 

They agree to speak for the last time for the time being. Still itching, he learns that the sculptor has purchased a pumpkin for her front porch. “My sweet boy,” she says, “come eat your dinner.” She’s roasting chickens now: fifty minutes at four-fifty, a sprig of thyme in the cavity. “One lasts all week,” she says, thrifty and proud. He tells her of his myriad mayonnaises: dijon, sriracha, tarragon. “I dip eggs in it,” he says. “Incestuous,” she tells him. She eats her hard boiled eggs only with salt. Their molten yolks never have a green or grayish rim around them anymore. They peel so easily. Their whites are firm.