Freeman's: Love. John Freeman
arc of his right shoulder with its oddly hollow, birdlike blade inches away, the deep furrow that runs down the center of his back, sloping away and disappearing behind the cotton blanket, that landscape that I love so much, I know there will not be a fifth date.
Once again, I have made the same mistake.
For with him as with the others there is not only this landscape, the salty terrain of flesh, the furrows and hills that invite exploration and discovery, there is that other landscape, the one where he cannot join me. As the hours slide through late night to early morning, I feel myself entering this private terrain. First there is the upward slog from the plush dark valley of eleven o’clock, with its dense comfortable underbrush: the magazines piled on the duvet, the whiskey glass gleaming amber on the bedside table, the detritus of the day before, among which I can happily prowl, convincing myself that I am still of the day. But as the little wooden mid-century modern electric alarm clock on the nightstand whirs and clicks and eleven spirals away into twelve I feel myself as if hiking, struggling toward the darkly silhouetted peak of midnight; then, on the other side of that crest, the cautious, icy descent down into the valley of one o’clock—still close enough to midnight to feel connected to the day before and, therefore, to some kind of safety. But as one o’clock creeps toward two and then three and finally three-thirty, it is as if I am skittering across a vast floe of ice: the continent of true insomnia, the white place where the sky is indistinguishable from the horizon and the horizon from the ground, where there are no landmarks, no railings or stanchions, no tracks, not even the scratchy tracks of birds. I know that I am completely alone in this place, and when I finally summon the courage to look down at Jonas (or Bill, or Glen, or Greg, or Jake, or Travis, or Rafaël, whoever it may have been over the decades), it is, I imagine, how someone who finds himself aboard a sinking ship might look down from the juddering deck, as the stern rises toward the moon, at some other passenger who, out of cunning or (more likely) sheer dumb luck, has found safety in a lifeboat and is already curled there at the bottom of the shallow boat in a blanket.
It is like being a ghost and looking at the living.
This is my landscape, the place where I live for seven hours every night of my life. Even when I was a child, I wasn’t able to sleep well. In the crib I would turn over constantly, anxiously; in the narrow wooden bed that my father built for me when I was old enough to have a bed of my own, I would read long after we were supposed to turn off the lights, dreading the moment when I would have to put away my book for good and face the blank night. In the college dormitory room I shared with two other students the deep rising and falling of my roommates’ breathing was like the sound of surf, but even that wouldn’t lull me to sleep; I would count their breaths into the hundreds until, around five-thirty, I would collapse into an hour’s shiftless sleep.
It was at university that I slept with (well) another man for the first time, and I realize now that what I was hoping for more than anything—more than the fulfillment of some adolescent fantasy of perfect like-mindedness, more than the sheer pleasure of sex—that what I was hoping to get more than anything from these lovers was someone to share my sleeplessness with: someone who would, at last, accompany me through the white trackless exile of my insomnia.
And yet, as if by some perfect, cruel asymmetry of the psyche, every youth, every man I was to fall in love with thereafter would be a profound sleeper. One would collapse so totally into an almost coma-like sleep after sex that, the first time we went to bed together, I was afraid he might have had some kind of cerebral embolism, might even have died; another was so hard to wake up that on our first morning together, so as not to miss an important editorial meeting, I had to leave him sleeping there, and wondered as I took the subway downtown just who he was, actually, and whether my apartment would be intact when I returned home. One would softly cry, like a toddler, when I jostled him awake from a nap, so thoroughly did he inhabit his sleep. “It’s like I’m in a beautiful garden and you’re pulling me away from it back onto asphalt,” he once said to me, unforgiving. But whatever their individual habits, they all shared the ability to fall swiftly into sleep, leaving me beside them to watch the wooden clock and begin my awful journey while they remained unconscious through the night. Which is to say, all of them managed to make me feel alone even when I was with them. Unconsciously, instinctively, like water buffalo in a drought that can smell a standing pool twenty miles away and move sluggishly toward the place where they think it is, only to find dried mud where the water was only minutes before, I have managed over the years to find these perfect sleepers, these companions who are not companions, these partners who cannot accompany me where I go each night.
The fact that I continue to make my nightly journey alone suggests to me, at least, that there are never really “lessons” in love; the place in the psyche that is the source of how we love is so deep that our attempts to reach it, to tunnel down to it and bring light and air there, must always fail. I go to a party, a meeting, a bar; I go online. I see a man whom the conscious part of me beholds and begins to desire; whom my conscious self approaches at the party or meeting or bar or the site or the app and talks to and decides is suitable because this man shares my love of swimming or Mahler or gardening; the conscious part of me will do what we all do, will type his number on my iPhone and wait sickeningly for a text or a call and then, when it comes, will grow giddy and anxious until the moment when we go for a drink or dinner and then, when the drink or the dinner leads back to my place or his place, things will unfold as they do. And it is only then, when we go to the bed and get in and he falls soundly asleep, curled in his lifeboat while I scan the familiar horizon, the shrubbery of 23:00 and the silhouetted peak of midnight, the valley of 01:00 and the dread frostbitten plains of 03:30, do I realize that the conscious mind is the fool, the rebellious and ultimately powerless servant of the unconscious mind which wants, in the end, and for whatever mysterious reasons, to be alone.
—Daniel Mendelsohn
LIVES OF THE VISITING LECTURER
Pool
The hotel has a pool. The hotel has no pool. The hotel has a pool but it is three strokes long. The hotel has no pool but there is a university pool. The university pool is closed for a swim meet. The university pool is not closed but requires a keycard. There is no university or university pool but there is an ocean, loch, lake, fjord, river, local spa. These are wildly pounding, freezing cold, rocky, muddy, reedy or crazy-expensive nonetheless all will be well, the visiting lecturer knows as she slides into the water. You too are made of stars, someone is saying later as she passes the breakfast room.
Plato’s Roaring Darkness
Noticing a poster for a talk (by last year’s visiting lecturer) about Plato, she is cast back to the winter as a graduate student she’d fancied herself a demimondaine because her mentor liked to give her suppers at posh restaurants in return for light fondling in his office. He was a large, monumentally ugly man who had written important books on Plato. She was unused to attention. He smelled like dust. She was twenty-two and thought him too old to worry about, anyway that’s how things worked in those days. Together they attended Emeritus Professor George Grube’s “On First Looking into Plato’s Republic.” She remembers now nothing of the lecture except that Professor Grube talked into the microphone and consulted his notes alternately, as he was so nearly blind he had to bring his face right down to the podium to read, thus becoming inaudible. It was later that night or the next day in his office that she and her mentor had a discussion about flesh and to his asking whether or not she “could see her way to being kind to him” she had answered no. Some years later, making notes for a memoir, she will shave the anecdote down. “After dinner I went to hear an old man, nearly blind, who spoke of the frustration and despair he found in the central books of Plato’s Republic.” And she will add, taking things in a different direction, “Men are allowed to decay in public as a woman is not.”
Special Collection
On her free day the visiting lecturer signs up for a tour of the national museum and finds herself in a frigid storage room, not open to the public. The curator situates her at a distance from the paintings stacked around the room, faces to the wall, “each one an insurrection in itself.” The curator gestures. “These, these are insane objects.” The curator has small