The School of How Can I Live

“Can you hear me?” she says, and i tell her that i can hear her. Her hair is gray and frizzed, one of her eyes is wide and big and brown, the other is covered with a blue eye patch. She sits at a desk cluttered in stacks of paper, i see them at the periphery of the screen; in the doorway behind her a short man stands with his hands on his hips, watching. “I can’t hear you,” she says. i check my settings and they’re normal, my mic is on, i see my face shrunken in the bottom right corner, like it’s been boiled. Do you have your computer volume turned up? i say, but of course she can’t hear it. “What?” she says. “Oh, I can’t hear you at all,” she says. i open the chat function and type in, “Your computer volume, is it turned up?” She stares at the screen with an open mouth and says, “This is so bad.” But it’s not so bad. i point down, but she must think i’m pointing down at my crotch. i’m trying to point down toward the bottom of her screen, toward the chat function. “I’m typing in the chat box,” i type, and i hit the send icon, which is an arrow shape, but ultimately it’s not that intuitive, there’s no reason it should be intuitive to anyone. “I’m sending these messages so you’ll get notifications and see them, the red notifications,” i type, and hit the same send icon. “Turn your computer volume up,” i type, and hit the send icon. “Should I open this Chat thingy?” she says. i nod and i smile. “Oh,” she says, “the volume,” and she buries her head into her laptop, or desktop, or iPad, or whatever it is. Do you hear me now, i say. “Oh wonderful,” she says, “I hear you now.” The man in the faraway doorway turns around and walks away through the doorway, that holds only light and now no one. How are you? i say. “Oh,” she says. Her face is serious, forlorn, intense. Her blue eyepatch is tied around the back of her head by interlocking straps, one that wraps below the ear and one that wraps diagonally across her forehead to the back of her head. She looks like she could be the mother of all pirates, tracking all their locations, knowing she can do nothing but knowing too there is always something to worry about, that their vocation is an illicit and endangering vocation. “Writing is too intense,” she says, “my writing is too intense. I’m always writing. Sometimes I’ll go to the pool and I won’t be writing, I go for rehabilitation because I was in an accident recently, and I drive twenty-five miles away to get there and that’s a relief, but once I’m home I’m still in my bathing suit at my desk writing. I just always have a new idea. My naranja navel . . . I mean, navel. Um,” she says, and i say, Did you say “navel” because it’s a novel and because of navel oranges for the word “naranja”? And she laughs and says, “That must be it!” Her laugh is a beam of light. “My naranja novel,” she says, “I need a break from it, so I’m working on this memoir instead. With this memoir,” she continues, “I want it to be text, paintings I do, and then computer graphics, that little paint bucket symbol you use, you fill color in a shape, I want to use that a lot. For the times I use other authors’ words I want to use the paint bucket to make them beige. That William Carlos Williams poem about the peaches; I think they’re peaches,” she says. The plums? i say. “Yes, they’re plums!” she says. “I want that to be lavender,” she says. “A soft color. Because it’s a poem about being unfaithful. He was unfaithful to her,” she says. “To his wife. To Mrs. Williams,” she says. i reflect on this; i’ve literally never thought this about this poem. And did William Carlos Williams’ wife take William’s last name? That’s too many “William”s between two people, i think. What is her name? i wonder. But my student is right: it’s the entire poem. It’s the point. It’s his act of unfaithfulness, and his desire to draw his unnamed wife into that act so he can make her complicit in his betrayal and so he can enjoy his act of betrayal a second time, in front of her, a kind of flirtatious and unrepentant exhibitionism that masquerades as an apology:

We look at the poem together, although we Google the poem separately and stare at our respective screens separately at the same poem, although if someone else had joined the Zoom call at that moment, it would look to them as if we were looking at each other, as if we were gazing at one another as our faces shaped into awe, then softening, then anger. It would not look as if either of us had betrayed the other, it would look as if both of us felt betrayed by the other. What happened to your eye? i say. “Oh!” she says, and slaps her hand to her non-patched eye, then slowly slides the hand across her nose to her blue eyepatch. “I forgot where it was,” she says. “Isn’t it funny how we see through these things, but can’t always tell where they are? I was looking at myself on the screen and thought if I put my hand here, I’d touch my patch. But I didn’t touch my patch. I touched my eye,” she says, and laughs. “I remember hiking around Rincon, here in Arizona, after moving here to Arizona. I’ve lived here three years now, but it still feels like I moved here three days ago. Not yesterday, but a few more days ago than that, because I’ve done laundry, and I’ve written so much. A man who is my good friend now, I didn’t know him that well then, but he wanted to show me the mountains, and I wanted to see them. He’s my neighbor, Hassan. His children are so sweet and smart: they know Arabic, and French, and Spanish, and of course English. Hassan and I walked through the mountains and we came to a bowl, a gigantic green basin, it was shaped like a bowl, the surface looked like glass. And in one patch you could even see your reflection, and my eyes were so wide in my reflection that I shut one, I winked at myself, but it appeared in my reflection as the opposite eye. I put my hand to the eye I thought was my eye based on what I saw, not on what I felt, and I was misled. I was so confused by it. Then Hassan and I made funny faces in the reflection. Our shared reflection. Hassan is a political exile from Morocco. He’s never told me why, but he told me that that day. I’m sorry,” she says, “that’s not what you were asking. One of my eyes is weaker than the other. I’m recovering from a recent surgery,” she says. “Hassan told me he was a political exile and I told him, ‘I’m sorry.’ I don’t know if that was the right thing to say. It was a very intimate thing to tell me. So I asked Hassan that day to lick my eyeball,” she says. What? i say. “I asked Hassan to lick my eyeball,” she says. “It was a feeling, an urge I had, I didn’t question it. I knew it wasn’t erotic; I had no one to betray. If I’d had someone to betray, then maybe it would have been erotic,” she says. “I just wanted to know myself better. I felt distant from my body,” she says. What did Hassan say? i say. “Hassan said the same thing as you,” she says. “He said, ‘what?’ So I repeated it. And then he said, ‘what?’ And I said the same thing to him that I just said to you. Mostly. I said, ‘I don’t know why. It’s not erotic. It’s just something I want right now. I want to know myself better. I feel far from my body right now,’ I said,” she says. “And Hassan said, ‘No one has ever licked your eyeball before?’ and I said, ‘No.’ And he said, ‘I had a girlfriend who licked my eyeball. I don’t know why I was so scared at the time, but she wanted to, and I liked her, and I wanted to appear brave. So I said, “sure.” So it’s strange you want to do this, because I’ve only ever let a lover do this. And I’m not your lover,’ Hassan said. I think he said it reproachfully,” she says, “but he was still kind. And now he’s my best friend here,” she says. So what did you say next? i say. “I asked him what it felt like, and he said, ‘Nothing. I couldn’t feel it at all. I winced and I blinked but eventually I stopped resisting, or my face stopped resisting. When I was resisting, and wincing, my girlfriend said, “Is it from pain or is it from pressure?” That was the most beautiful question I’d ever been asked. Is it from pain or is it from pressure. I ask myself that question every day now. It’s very orienting,’ Hassan had said. So now I really wanted my eyeball licked,” she says, “more than ever. But I also knew Hassan couldn’t be the one to lick my eye. It would have to be a boyfriend, not a husband. It would have to be intimate, but from someone I would not spend my life with. Because when someone touches the most intimate and vulnerable part of you, but you feel nothing, the relationship ends,” Suzanne says. Her name is Suzanne. Did Hassan tell you that? i say. Is that a rule Hassan came up with? i say. “No,” Suzanne says, “that’s just a rule I came up with a long time ago. But it was verified by Hassan’s story. But now I’m married, so I will never have my eyeball licked,” she says. But wasn’t your husband once your boyfriend? i say. “Yes,” Suzanne says, “but I wanted him forever. I knew soon on that I would want him forever,” she says, “maybe not at first sight, but probably at second sight, and definitely by third. That one’s the charm,” Suzanne says, and laughs. “It wasn’t first sight because I had just had a divorce after a twenty-year marriage and thought I would be alone for the rest of my life, but I met this man and, by our third date, for sure, I knew I wanted him forever. And now I have him,” she says. i think of the man in the doorway; i know things about him now, sort of, from Suzanne’s story, but they are relational, identificatory things. He was a boyfriend until he was a husband. Before, all I knew about him from what i’d seen was that he was in a doorway, that he could wait in a doorway for a long time, and that he could leave. Do you want me to lick the camera? i say. “What?” Suzanne says. Do you want me to lick the camera? i say. Suzanne looks at me; or, that is, she looks at the camera, and it looks like she looks at me. It’s a faint difference in her facial tilt, but the outcome is distinct. The result, the change, is large. To me it is large. “Yes,” she says, “but lick my weak eye, my operated-on eye,” she says. Okay, i say. Suzanne opens her chest by raising her shoulders, then she raises her arms, then she spreads her arms, and then she brings her hands to the back of her head to undo the straps, like a bra. It’s strange, because i am always the one undoing the straps of a bra on another, with one hand, with three fingers, my thumb to anchor, my pointer to unclasp the clip, my ring to marry the efforts of thumb and pointer. The patch falls away, forward toward the screen a little. The area around Suzanne’s eye is pale white, from lack of sun, but the aureola that’s her eye appears darker than her stronger eye. But i know this is a play of contrasts, between her pale skin and her warm chestnut-brown iris. Okay, i say. i move my face slowly to my screen; i don’t change the shape of my lips for most of the way. i see Suzanne’s eyes widen, until i’m too close to see her anymore. Once i cannot see her i start to purse my lips over my mouth, and when my pursed lips reach the camera hole i jut my tongue slowly out my mouth, and i feel my tongue touch the cold computer. i taste dust, and my mouth fills with saliva. i hold my tongue there, and i say Ah ou okay? keeping my tongue out. i don’t hear anything, and i say Ith it throw ain or ith it throm weather? which, with my tongue out, sounds like “weather,” but also somewhat sounds like “pleasure.” But it’s supposed to be “pressure.” But i don’t hear anything. i remove my tongue and slowly return my face to the space above my straightened spine in sitting position. Suzanne has left the meeting. i stare at the screen some more. i stick my tongue out again and try to rub the dust off the tip, but of course i’ve already incorporated the dust into my mouth. But it still feels weird, tingly. i hear a Ding! from my phone. i pick it up and unlock the screen: i have received a Venmo payment.