Not in writing, anyway.
Corrasable Bond was so easily erasable because the ink of the letters you typed didnât soak into the paper; it floated on some kind of coating and could be rubbed right off. Unfortunately, over time, half the ink floated away into the ether, all on its own.
I shift to the other side of the table, so that the notebook bathes in the bar of light from the slit of a window.
June 20, 1964
I typed the date an hour ago. It is still there, I havenât erased it yet. So it has already survived longer than anything else Iâve typed in the last few weeks. Maybe because itâs the first thing Iâve gotten down on paper that wasnât a lie.
Well, of course Iâve always lied, mine is the liarâs craft. As Martha once said, perhaps not unaffectionately, she lives with a man who spends his days concocting scurrilous stories about people who never existed.
But lately Iâve been writing a different kind of untruth. Pallid, overdetermined: my characters doing things just because I tell them to, not because they need to. My dialogue about as natural as the radio soap operas Martha used to listen to when she thought I was absorbed here in my study.
Farewell to fiction, then! It is incontrovertibly June 20. More irrefutables:
1. Martha and Mickey are off at my brotherâs place on the Cape for the summer, so I have the apartment to myself. I look forward to this all year, like a kid waiting for the last day of school. And, like a kid, by the end of June Iâm ready for normal life to resume.
2. The Senate passed the Civil Rights Act yesterday, after breaking a long filibuster. Now people of every hue can sit knee-to-knee at the lunch counter at Woolworthâs and eat tuna fish sandwiches. Iâm sure I would care more if I had spent my life unable to buy a goddamn sandwich. But of course the law does nothing about the suffocating fact of Woolworthâs.
3. Iâm already running out of underwear and I have no idea how to operate the devices at the laundromat. So Iâll have to take my stuff to those robbers next to St. Anselmâs. I could swear the Mob has stopped running numbers and dope and has started running cleaners.
Is this how itâs done, a journal or diary or whatever that neon date at the top of the page portends? Just writedown whatever comes into my head? Recount my dreams, describe my breakfast? I suppose I will find out what I am doing after Iâve done it for a while.
There: maybe it isnât just fiction I need to free myself from. It is, for a time at least, intention.
There is a lot more of this journal, and four more to come. I assume all these blue binders arenât filled with plaints about his dirty laundry or wisecracks about the headlines in the Times . Someone keeping a diary out of some sense of duty might fill the pages with stuff like that, but Jonathan wasnât a dutiful man. He must eventually have figured out what he was doing.
I catch myself thinking that I would rather he just wrote about laundry, year after year. Then I could be sure I wouldnât learn anything I donât want to know. Not to mention that I am rather beguiled by the idea of this Philip Marks person spending months of his life reading about Jonathanâs underwear.
June 24, 1964
This summer Iâm teaching a couple of evening classes at SLS. I tell people itâs just for a little extra money, and of course the money is nice. Martha has been intimating that, as she embarks on middle age, perhaps she could at last have a sofa that isnât propped up on a couple of volumes of Huxley at the corner where the leg is missing. Or that she would like, just once, to go to a party dressed as someone other than Martha the Match Girl. Or that maybe she could get to Paris while her gams might still turn heads.
So yes, money. But I am doing it, too, to fill in the time. I think I must have known, even before the summer started, that I
Corrasable Bond was so easily erasable because the ink of the letters you typed didnât soak into the paper; it floated on some kind of coating and could be rubbed right off. Unfortunately, over time, half the ink floated away into the ether, all on its own.
I shift to the other side of the table, so that the notebook bathes in the bar of light from the slit of a window.
June 20, 1964
I typed the date an hour ago. It is still there, I havenât erased it yet. So it has already survived longer than anything else Iâve typed in the last few weeks. Maybe because itâs the first thing Iâve gotten down on paper that wasnât a lie.
Well, of course Iâve always lied, mine is the liarâs craft. As Martha once said, perhaps not unaffectionately, she lives with a man who spends his days concocting scurrilous stories about people who never existed.
But lately Iâve been writing a different kind of untruth. Pallid, overdetermined: my characters doing things just because I tell them to, not because they need to. My dialogue about as natural as the radio soap operas Martha used to listen to when she thought I was absorbed here in my study.
Farewell to fiction, then! It is incontrovertibly June 20. More irrefutables:
1. Martha and Mickey are off at my brotherâs place on the Cape for the summer, so I have the apartment to myself. I look forward to this all year, like a kid waiting for the last day of school. And, like a kid, by the end of June Iâm ready for normal life to resume.
2. The Senate passed the Civil Rights Act yesterday, after breaking a long filibuster. Now people of every hue can sit knee-to-knee at the lunch counter at Woolworthâs and eat tuna fish sandwiches. Iâm sure I would care more if I had spent my life unable to buy a goddamn sandwich. But of course the law does nothing about the suffocating fact of Woolworthâs.
3. Iâm already running out of underwear and I have no idea how to operate the devices at the laundromat. So Iâll have to take my stuff to those robbers next to St. Anselmâs. I could swear the Mob has stopped running numbers and dope and has started running cleaners.
Is this how itâs done, a journal or diary or whatever that neon date at the top of the page portends? Just writedown whatever comes into my head? Recount my dreams, describe my breakfast? I suppose I will find out what I am doing after Iâve done it for a while.
There: maybe it isnât just fiction I need to free myself from. It is, for a time at least, intention.
There is a lot more of this journal, and four more to come. I assume all these blue binders arenât filled with plaints about his dirty laundry or wisecracks about the headlines in the Times . Someone keeping a diary out of some sense of duty might fill the pages with stuff like that, but Jonathan wasnât a dutiful man. He must eventually have figured out what he was doing.
I catch myself thinking that I would rather he just wrote about laundry, year after year. Then I could be sure I wouldnât learn anything I donât want to know. Not to mention that I am rather beguiled by the idea of this Philip Marks person spending months of his life reading about Jonathanâs underwear.
June 24, 1964
This summer Iâm teaching a couple of evening classes at SLS. I tell people itâs just for a little extra money, and of course the money is nice. Martha has been intimating that, as she embarks on middle age, perhaps she could at last have a sofa that isnât propped up on a couple of volumes of Huxley at the corner where the leg is missing. Or that she would like, just once, to go to a party dressed as someone other than Martha the Match Girl. Or that maybe she could get to Paris while her gams might still turn heads.
So yes, money. But I am doing it, too, to fill in the time. I think I must have known, even before the summer started, that I
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