The hole between my ears (2019)
It is after midnight in Manhattan. Twenty-eight years old, almost twenty-nine, I stand at 73rd Street and look north on Lexington Avenue, which is empty. Between the two curbs lies nothing but painted lines and open pavement. I am waiting. Staring up the channels between the broken white lines, I feel like someone waiting beside several long, dry ditches. At 79th Street, the light changes. The lights below turn green in sequence, like a series of rising gates, and now running down the lanes like water is the next release of headlights. They are all cabs. I raise my arm at a roof light. A door opens. The day ends. I sit down in the back of a cab and remember nothing of what I did that morning.
Black pants and a white buttoned-down shirt is how I am dressed—with a dried drop of bouillabaisse on the top of one shoe. Folded in my pocket is $156 in cash. I know the denominations tonight without looking: Seven twenties, a ten, a five, and a dollar bill. I can list which table left how much money. I can describe each customer and what they ordered. Table eleven was a four top first and then a couple at the end of the night. The four top was three men and a woman. Everyone had an appetizer: Carpaccio of black sea bass, Malpeque oysters, a mixed green salad, and the mille-feuille with Roquefort and pear. One of them drank a calvados after the meal. The couple who sat there after them live in the neighborhood and come twice a week, usually late in the evening after their children are in bed. Small, dark-haired, and attractive, they would a balance a hanging scale if they sat on each side. He works in finance and comes still dressed from the bank. She dresses up to go out with him. They taste each other’s food and talk with their heads together across the table. All this I remember. I remember all this at the end of the day, but I can’t recall my purpose or what progress I made.
The lights lie open on Lexington Avenue, and the cab is gaining speed. What are you doing? Why is this how you are spending eight hours a day, six nights a week? As we flow south down Lexington Avenue with the other cabs, farther and farther from the restaurant, I start to remember. A red light dams us up again, all the cabs collecting in a pool again at 59th Street. As we idle in this eddy, the calvados intrudes—from when table eleven was a four top. A large man with curly black hair around a bald spot, he looked like a medieval friar in a suit and tie. Except every third word was “fuck” or “shit.” Across from him sat his much younger wife, who kept her fur coat on the back of her chair, never looked directly at him, and didn’t finish anything she ordered. The gate rises and discharges us again to go hurtling, roiling south again. I sit with my head against the window. I watch the shuttered stores on the passing shores and the double steel doors in the sidewalks and the trash cans on each corner that no one stands beside. As the cab turns right on 29th Street and we start west across the island, my purpose returns to me. Then what progress I have made. And I am ashamed.
Five years have passed since I sat on that low wall in New Haven, my back against that scraggly, leafless boxwood bush, and decided in an instant to start writing—then decided in another instant that I must prepare. A year and a half has passed since I sat hunched over a desk at Oxford, Smyth’s Greek Grammar open on my knees, reading the Iliad and the Odyssey in Greek. I read Plato and Aristotle in the original, as well as Aeschylus, Sophocles, Euripides, and Aristophanes. I read the Aeneid in Latin, other poems by Virgil, and other Roman poets such as Lucretius, Catullus, Horace, Propertius, and Ovid. I also studied modern analytical philosophy. I wrote nothing. In all that time, for all those years, I wrote nothing. When my books were packed in tea chests, on their way back to the United States, and I sat on the bus to Heathrow, I was no closer to writing a book than when I stood up from that wall in New Haven.
I go to work up the west side of Manhattan and come home down the east side. The circle closes when I step to the curb at 29th Street and 10th Avenue, between two enormous, faceless U.S. Post Office buildings. One occupies the city block north of 29th Street. The other occupies the block south of it. Someone told me they are letter sorting buildings, but if mail enters or leaves either one of them, I have never seen it. The cab accelerates away and then slams to a stop at the red light, about ten yards from where it left me. The driver sits holding the wheel and staring up at the light as if I hadn’t just been sitting behind his head. I stand for a moment between those dead letter buildings. Then I cross 10th Avenue and walk back to my apartment, past the prostitutes under the elevated train tracks (“Blow job?” “Hey, blow job?”) to face what failures tomorrow holds.
Who has the courage to find nothing? Because that is when a creative project has truly begun. Believing something would appear, I spent each morning in the hole that occupied the space between my ears. I sat with my back to the warehouses and water tanks in that part of Manhattan, like someone alone in a cave with a flashlight. I would hear a noise. I swung around with the light but revealed only jagged rock and moisture dripping into the sediment on the floor. Off went the light. Another noise. I swung around again, in all directions, wildly. Nothing. Morning after morning, month after month passed like this. To believe in an idea that you already have is hard enough. To believe you will find an idea when you have none—that feels like the onset of mental illness.
The clock ran out on my isolation and my shame at a few minutes before three each afternoon. The time that I carried home in cash the night before was spent. Now I had to earn tomorrow. And so I found my way out of my cave and found myself standing on the landing outside my apartment door, turning my key in my lock. Hands empty, still reflecting on the sounds and shadows in that space between my ears, I walked down three flights of stairs and east to Eighth Avenue. I caught a bus up the West Side to 72nd Street and then walked east through Central Park. I crossed Fifth, cross Madison, crossed Park, reached Lexington Avenue. As I walked the last block to the restaurant if anyone greeted me on the street—another waiter, the owner returning from an appointment, one of the cooks smoking a cigarette—I wouldn’t recognize them.
I worked now in a different restaurant from the one where I met Suzanne. It was a narrow, two-story restaurant in the corner of a building on the corner of a block. From the street, you stepped down into the bar. Looking along the row of stools at the bar, you saw a narrow kitchen. A thin, rectangular window cropped the cooks working there—the heads of the shorter ones, the shoulders and jaws of the taller ones. To your left was a circular stairway that ran upstairs to a dining room with floor-to-ceiling windows that looked out over the street. A night of work involved moving quickly through the narrow spaces between the tightly packed tables and hours of running up and down the stairs.
One regular customer sat by herself in the front of the restaurant, near the top of the circular stairway. She once gave a million dollars to the Metropolitan Museum of Art. A small, elderly woman, she came alone. She ate with her back straight and her feet pressed together. She blinked when she spoke.
“Aluminum foil causes Alzheimer’s disease.” She told me this at the end of every meal, blinking. “They’ve proved it now, those doctors.” She wanted her leftovers wrapped in plastic wrap and then in aluminum foil. She told me this each time. “Understand me? And not the busboy. You do it yourself.” She turned her face upward and stared at me for a moment. “I’ll check when you bring it back.” She paused again, still staring. Then she added, blinking, “I carry two handguns in my purse, you know.”
Here was my bargain. Eight hours of this to earn four, maybe five hours, of writing tomorrow. Except tomorrow I could not expect a different result.
Her purse was small, almost like a clutch, so her guns must have been small. I never saw them. But in my desperation and despair, in all my exhausted self-doubt, I used to imagine leaving the leftovers on her table and turning back as I walked away to see her standing in slow motion, purse falling to the ground, and two rising hands each holding a pistol. I pictured her facing me—legs spread apart inside her light blue dress, high heels braced against the wooden floor, silver hair still tucked tightly in a bun. She blinks no longer. Pearl-handled revolvers leap inside each fist as she fires. Glass shatters, splinters fly, chairs screech and rattle as diners dive from their seats. In the blaze of her gunfire, I stumble back and slump against the bannister above the circular stairway. Then I slide to the floor, holding my stomach and bleeding over my hands like a farmhand who stepped into the wrong saloon.
Suzanne lived north of the restaurant. Many nights before we finished closing, I would call her at home. “Do you want to come meet me? I’ll be done here in fifteen minutes.”
“I just have to put my shoes on.” That’s what she said every time.
Five minutes to put her shoes on and leave her apartment. Five minutes to catch a cab. Five minutes to travel here at that time of night. Forty five minutes later, I would still be standing on the corner, watching each release of cabs roil down Lexington Avenue and waiting for the one that carried her.
“How could it take so long to put your shoes on?” I would ask.
She never answered me.
Graphic designers talk about the dynamics of negative space—the energy in the empty parts of a page or a screen. Suzanne is an artist of negative conversational space. This is especially true when you are first getting to know her. Part of it is her facial expressions. Whether you are laughing or fighting or philosophizing, her silences make you look at her and her face continues talking. Most of the time we talked about people. People in books. People in politics. People we knew. The choices that define people’s lives. How people find value in life when life involves constant change and separation.
An old elevated train track, the High Line, ran past the windows of my apartment. It was still abandoned then. Every week I expected to see wrecking crews start tearing it down. Sitting up in bed each morning, I could see the sun in the sky over the High Line and the top half of a crane in the junkyard beside it. “What a beautiful day!” I would say. Waking up beside me, Suzanne would laugh. It seemed odd to her, so idiosyncratic, that someone could be enthusiastic about morning, and the weather in the morning.
I spent Thanksgiving with my family at the farm without her. I cut a little Christmas tree and brought it back to New York, and we decorated it together with ornaments we made. It had some kind of disease and all the needles fell off it. Within days it was just a skeleton of bare branches, hung with ribbons and cut-out colored paper and popcorn on a string. A few weeks later, and I bought her a rocking chair at an antique store. I brought it to her on the train, setting it down just inside the doors. We still have it in our living room.
During those conversations where I talked so much and she said so much more, I first found an idea that I liked. It became a short story. It became two short stories. Then I discovered I had an idea for a novel. As we enter adulthood there are many directions we can go, but we have to make choices. Once we make a choice, we have to learn to accept it. The book would be about constructing happiness around the course our lives have actually taken. It would be focused on a character who never learns how to do this.
And on one of my trips to the restaurant in the afternoon, either on the bus or walking across Central Park, I realized something. Maybe I realized it gradually, but I articulated it suddenly, the same way I did sitting on that low wall in New Haven. I needed more time. This idea was just a beginning. I had so much else to figure out. Who was in the book. The world they lived in. What happened to them. Developing this idea was a problem I needed more than a few hours a day to solve, and I wasn’t going to get that earning money to pay my rent. I needed to get out of New York. As soon as I thought it, I decided to do it. I would sublet my apartment and go live at the farm.
