News Flash: There are two train stations in NYC

Full fathom five my first date lies

And each one of those train stations has an oyster bar downstairs.

And that is the short version of My Date with Parenthetical Man [http://tinyurl.com/4essevh.]

More re: script meeting and re: oyster hijinks to follow, soon, real soon, but just got home and am wasted and way too behind with grading and class preparation to say more right now.

Except that generally speaking, I'm an idiot.







A warholian reply from my AWOL son

Is it possible to resemble Warhol
in a good way?

To: JF@xxxxx

Subject: Re: Happy belated President’s [Washington’s] Day

Date: February 24, 8:30 PM

From: JF@xxxxx

Hi momma,

No worries. Am fine. Just a case of bad judgment; unplanned road trip with friends to NOLA, car broke down, busted flat in Baton Rouge (hahahaha), food poisoning, alarm clock broken, got behind. Will deal with Kirk. He’ll understand-- was wild himself back in the day from stories he tells.

I DO remember George Washington costume, and I forgot to tell you that I went to art dept Halloween party last semester as Andy Warhol. I’m attaching the pic. Cool, huh?

Wow, weird, I just noticed that in this pic of me dressed up as Warhol, I look a lot like you. Did you ever notice that, except for the hair thing, there’s a resemblance between you and Warhol?

Not in a bad way, I mean.

Will call this weekend. Good luck with script. Have any other plans for while your in new york?

Not a crisis, but any chance I could get advance on some of my second half of semester allowance?

Luv you,

Jamie

PS: what do you think about me changing my name? I mean, going by James instead of Jamie? Jamie feels kinda babyish.







email to my son, Pinocchio

It's not a good likeness
but you get the idea

From: JF@xxxxxx

Subject: Happy belated President’s [Washington’s] Day

Date: February 24, 8:59 AM EST

To: JF@xxxxxxxxxxx

Hello Jamie,

Wanted to wish you happy President’s Day on Tuesday, the 22^nd --the actual  [under the Gregorian calendar] birthday of  George Washington.

You remember him: the I-cannot-tell-a-lie president. (hey, remember when you were 4 and at Peter Pan Preschool how you wanted to go to Halloween Day as a dollar bill and we got a wig and did up your face like GW? And  you won the contest! I I still have that dollar bill costume packed away, btw).

Anyway, I did want to email you but, what with all the political Twittering going on, I had trouble with the internet service in Cairo. Now that I’m back in the land of Washington, Lincoln, and Clinton[Hillary, not Bill], my service is fine.

Seriously, however. What is going on with you? Are you having personal issues I need to know about, can help with? This would worry me; please be forthcoming. Or have you drifted into a period of slackerhood, which would worry and anger me, being that, by my  reckoning, I am paying $2000/week for your tuition, an amount roughly equivalent to what Harper’s is paying me for my enormous work of writing a feature story on political transformation of Egypt.

Call me soon, no later than the weekend, but sooner if you are having difficulties. I am heading to NYC to meet Helen. I have written simply one revision to ending of FFMC. More of a sketch than finished scriptese but been busy. Wish me luck.

Meanwhile, consider how you’re going to untangle the Kirk web you’ve woven [if you don’t know what it is, you’ll need to figure that out and then untangle]. Btw, his words of praise of your work made me very proud. 

So you can add “proud” to “parentally angry” and “potentially worried sick.”

Know your momma loves you. Know too that a university education is a privilege for you and sacrifice for me, and that lies have ways of spiraling out of control.

Xo momma







My narrow escape from Egypt; or, is a propensity for lying congenital?

I had some trouble finding a hijab
that didn't flatten my hair too much

Email: Received today, 9:45 AM

From: Dr Kirk xxxxxxxxxx

Subject:  your safe return

Date: February 22, 2011 9:45 AM EST

To:  JFxxxxxxxxx

Dear  JF,

Just a note to wish you a safe return from Cairo, and 

reassure you that we at the University--and especially 

those of us in the Art Dept, who have adopted him--

are aware of your situation and the stress effects it's been

having on your son, Jamie. We're happy to overlook his

absences these past couple weeks and grant extensions

on his written and studio work. We'll all be looking 

forward to reading your piece when it runs in Harper's. 

And may I take this special opportunity to say how

compelling and bold his work is. We consider him one of our

rising stars.

Safe travels.

Yours,

Kirk 

Well, that apparently would be "Kirk" the studio art prof who so admired Jamie's graphic

novel, "Stick Man: My Spermbank Dad." [see http://tinyurl.com/4jowk4p ].

And I apparently have been on assignment in Egypt, the stress of which has been concocted 

into an excuse for some apparently ongoing non-performance performances on the part of 

my son, Jamie. This has me so distressed me I am holing up in my office and not attending

the department meeting. At least he didn't give me a wasting disease but Egypt? 

"Teenagers lie." That's what Miriam said when I called her in my initial stage of freak 

out. "Especially college-student teenagers. They come up with excuses all the time." Like I 

don't know that.

"Like I don't know that?" I said. "But Christ, this isn't a excuse. It's a mini-series. All he had

to say was 'personal issues' but this is like the first 10 minutes of a Matt Damon movie. God, 

maybe it's some kind of borderline personality disorder. a cry for help. I've been a shitty, 

lying mother and I'm reaping what I sowed." 

Sometimes, I escalate fast.

"Stop it! enough! Come over tonight for dinner. Must go now because I'm due in the 

courthouse in 10 minutes. You are making way too huge a deal over it."

Okay, so maybe I am over-reacting. College students bullshit me all the time, and I guess

 I've swallowed a few whoppers in my time, whoppers that would have been exposed if I 

were the sort of professor who cared enough to contact a parent stranded in a part of the

world undergoing spasms of revolution. Man, I  don't know how to answer this email from

Kirk--do I collude or bust my own kid? me, who has spared scores of college students from

being parent busted? Do I call Jamie out on this one, right when I'm feeling pretty shaky in

 the truth-telling department myself?

And is it such a terrible thing to confess that I admire the inventiveness of Jamie's lie?

Its sheer expansiveness, boldness.  Its considerably greater panache than the generic, "I'm 

having, you know, like, personal issues right now," usually uttered by an utterly forgettable

undergrad slouched across from me at my desk.

There's something to be said for panache, after all. It's hard to be a rising star without it.







What I discovered at the Outsider Art Fair, and why I'm pretty sure life is not going to be same anymore, but whether for better or worse, I cannot yet say

Burne Jones,
Love's Messenger Redux

First off, thank god my producer, Helen, cancelled this weekend's meeting in nyc about my revisions to the script's ending; she's off for a little spontaneous getaway for the long weekend at Canyon Ranch in Tuscon. Inspired by her sponteneous spa jaunt, I've decided I'll head out later this afternoon, after I grade another 13 papers from students in my "Patriarchy and Pre-Raphaelite Paintings and Poems" course for a mani-pedi at the Fabulous New You nail joint out at the Fox Run strip mall for the 5-7 happy hour discount package. Maybe I'll pick up some General Mao Tse Tso's chicken, and come back home and wash it down with a bottle of malbec, while I enjoy watching a bit of human misery in a couple episodes of The Wire. I'm disappointed in Season Two, frankly,  but the program offers me compensatory pleasure in contemplating the fact that, while I live in the northeast North American Gothic flatlands, at least I don't live in crack-vial Baltimore, a city in which--if the show accurately reflects population demographics--about 7 women live. Parenthetical Man [http://tinyurl.com/4essevh ]was gracious about rescheduling our date till next weekend when I told him my producer was off at Canyon Ranch. The concept of "date" feels remote. But whatever.


Oh, I forgot to mention this: Helen offhandedly wrote me that she and her ex fiance--the FWH--were going to Tuscon together. Go figure; maybe he made it through this recent  Fashion Week's festivities without showing up on a website with his hand squeezing the bulimic ass of some D-list fashion model in a pair of dominatrix shoes. I'd stake my second-mortgaged house that he's footing the bill for the jaunt. Fair enough. I can't say what I would  do for a long weekend at Canyon Ranch. Probably: plenty.


Ok, enough JF shtick-stalling. On to the important, life-transforming thing I discovered at the Outsider Art Fair, to which I drove nearly 6 hours in my shabby-chic Volvo, motivated purely by the enigmatic missive I received from London [see http://tinyurl.com/4gky2k9 ].


Prepare yourself. It's big. 


What I discovered still holds mysteries but I can say with certainty that The Pater Unfamilias--the married, paralyzed-for two-years stroke victim, biological father of my son I've lied about for 19 years--is trying to contact me. I don't know why, or what to do about it, or how I feel about it,  and what I want from it. Correction: having sold my silence to him, I want the promised  $200K for our son's college tuition, room and board, and I want the not unvaluable [ah, litotes, mon amour]  Dante Gabriel Rossetti sketch. Beyond that though: don't know.


But I do know he is trying to contact me, that he sent me the envelop with the Fair brochure with a particular  gallery circled, the one I found out his wife's foundation was co-sponsoring for the event.


Because when I went to that gallery--Gallery Angry--I found a sketch of myself. It is a replica of the sketch that Jamie's father drew of me when we were illicit lovers [see http://tinyurl.com/4jowk4p]. Back then, He'd drawn it in the style of DG  Rossetti with me as reclining nude reading a volume of Christina Rossetti's poems. Being a collector and dealer of Pre-Raphaelite art, Jamie's dad was, I suspect, much drawn to my hair. The sketch was a love-making postlude lark, but he was a not half bad draftsman. The reclining nude in the sketch looks like the 30 year old graduate student studying Pre-Raphaelitism in London.  The sketch is stored in a lock box in my attic; the memory's buried in one of the chambers of my heart, the one that needs a stent.


Anyway, the reclining nude in the Gallery Angry rendition cannot be recognized as me, not by any objective standards or leaps of the imagination. But it is incontestably me. Firstly, because it was among a group works of Gallery Angry's "disability artists" [a subgenre of Outsider Art, I guess, like My Left Foot kind of stuff], each of which identified the artist, his/her disability, and his/her representation. Pru, the Pater's wife, represents his work, hence its appearance in the NYC outsider show. The information on the Pater was sparse, so I pumped one of the two men, owners of Gallery Angry. He had a little to offer except that some artists wish not to reveal a great deal of their personal details. I asked about Pru's representation of Pater; he claimed to know little. We negotiated a price: $1850. I now have $479 left in my savings account. I know; he owes me and I paid $1850; you think I haven't castigated myself enough already about this?


But, oh god, mon dieu, I cannot describe the drawing. It's unspeakably sad when I lay it against the past but that sadness belongs to me alone because the Disabled Pater's drawing is, without question,  magnificent and inspired, haunting in its tremors, stripped to raw emotion, with all the fussy and twee preciousness of its ersatz Pre-Raphaelite precursor  burned away. I have not fallen in love with outsider art, but I have become vaguely nauseated by the Pre-Raphaelites--not a easy turn of events, frankly, for a woman 5 weeks into her old chestnut of a course on the Pre-Raphaelites.


As for the rest of it--what to do next, how to interpret this gesture, how not to be angry and sad at the same time? 


So I'm thinking. I've made a career out of thinking. I've got a PhD in Thinkology.







early morning napmare

I dreamed I became this road sign

About to set off to NYC, after a fitful sleep, a 4:19 AM waking then lapsing into one of those early morning naps.  You know, the kind when your dreams seem to float closest to the surface and are usually--or in my case, anyway--the weirdest, because you're half aware of their dream status.

It was one of those dreams that you recognize as a collage of bits of your day. The bits I recognized from yesterday:

1. A news story I heard on NPR about library closings in English villages [budget cuts] and a protesting woman observing that the village library was the only place an 82 year old local woman had the opportunity for human contact.

2. When the world "elderly" was used, I remembered those road signs--see pic above--Jamie and I laughed at so much one time when I rented a car and we drove out to the Cotswolds. I have a photo somewhere in an album of Jamie standing next one of those signs, hunched over, and thought, I must dig it out.

3. An email from my university administration about cutting health benefits of retirees.

4. A glimpse out my office window of a history prof who retired many years ago but eats lunch every day at the faculty dining room since his wife died.

The napmare: fuzzy but I was older--elderly, I'd say--and I knew this because I was wearing the kind of house dress--remember muu muus?--my granny wore. And my hands looked old. I was sitting in the faculty dining room which looked the same but not either: I can't put my finger on it. I was sitting alone. The waitress came over and asked if I knew that this dining facility was for faculty at the university. I said yes, of course. I was a retired faculty member. She looked dubious and went over to a man at a register, whispered and pointed toward me.

Then I woke up.

So I must get on the road--jsut wanted to get that on the page in hopes of getting it out of my head. Feeling unsettled about this trip but just going to push ahead anyway. Almost wish a blizzard had struck and given me no choice but to stay put. But it didn't, so I'm off.

I just packed two particularly au courant outfits, perhaps to counteract the image of myself in a muu-muu.







Alarming, mysterious piece of mail from London arrived today

Outsider Art Wife, Pru?

I don't often go to campus on Mondays, but I had to pop over early this morning to pick up my dog-eared copy of Heart of Darkness for class tomorrow. Why am I always teaching that damn book?  I vowed to stop teaching it in 2001 when one of my students suggested that Kurtz's ideas about "foreign policy" remained "legitimate and instructive" in our own era of complex globalism.  [Jeopardy factoid: it was Kurtz who said, of the Congolese, "exterminate all  the brutes."]


But why am I even writing this?  Teaching Heart of Darkness is not the real horror at hand. It's just me stalling, using my time-tested strategy of wise-assed evasion and deferral.

Because in truth--as in, really, I mean it this time--right now, I'm freaked about what I found in my campus mailbox.

It's an ecru, high rag-content envelop, no indication of sender, and addressed to me, typed on what appears to have been an old, beat up typewriter. It's like the kind of important "clue" that would appear in a pre-CSI era mystery crime tv show. It bore English stamps, London postmark. Contained within was a brochure for the Outsider Art Fair being held this upcoming weekend in NYC. One of the participating galleries was circled in red marker. That's all but enough to add up to a freak out.


Reasons:


London is where my son's biological father lives. Jamie's biological father: the one whose existence I've lied about for 19 years, the one whom I fictionalized into an anonymous sperm donor. See: http://tinyurl.com/6596vjk for  backstory on Jamie's dad, the man I refer to as the Pater Unfamilias [PU], the married man who gave me my son but made me author of the  Big Lie that Haunts My Life[as opposed to the many smaller ones that merely give me acid reflux on occasion].

After opening the envelop, I went and shut myself in my office for about an hour; I didn't feel calm  enough to drive home. I googled the gallery: It's an American gallery, eclectic bordering on incoherent, with a penchant for way-off-the-grid outsider art. Some really ugly shit, if you ask me. Nothing was clicking, and certainly nothing was connecting to Jamie's father, a dealer in 19th century, mostly British, mostly prints and frequently Pre-Raphaelite, art.

I googled deeper, then deeper, and when I felt I'd googled half way to China, I found it. The connection. Or a connection, anyway. The PU's wife, Pru [not her real name but pairs well with PU], sits on the board of a gallery that is collaborating with the circled gallery in the Outsider Art Fair. 


Could Jamie's dad have sent it? The last I heard he was paralyzed from his stroke [see backstory link]. 
Could Pru have sent it? The last I heard she didn't know I existed.


in either case: why?


It's crazy because I can't afford the money or the time but  I'm going to make the very long drive down to NYC Friday, spend a night in a hotel, and go to the Outsider Art Fair.  It's crazy because I have to go down the following weekend and it'll all be exhausting and I"ll slide behind in my classes and trying to revise the script. And I'll have to cancel out of the Friday Women's Center round table on "Single Moms: Choices and Challenges," which is not so crazy because I've been dreading and resenting it, resenting it because every time the phrase "single mother" is uttered, everyone looks my way. 


And it's crazy because it's something a crazy person would do--the kind of person who creates crazy stuff that gets discovered and called "outsider art" after which it sells for a lot of money.


But I just booked a room on Orbitz, because I can't not go to the Fair, if you follow my double negatives. 







I have a date with Parenthetical Man [PM]

(Parenthetical Man (PM--Jack Manning))
[incognito]

Going back to Manhattan for Presidents' Weekend to meet up with Helen, my producer. I'm working hard on drafting  two alternate endings to the script. I wasn't serious about the Thelma-and-Louise-suicide-by-sheep finale [http://tinyurl.com/4vbtdox]. Will have the revisions to her by Valentine's day. I'm not indulging myself in any high-principled academic self-recriminations about modernizing Hardy's novel in this fashion. If I could make enough money to compensate for the financial package I was supposed to get from Jamie's biological father [http://tinyurl.com/6596vjk], I'd end the script with Bathsheba modelling Stella McCartney in 5 inch heels on a runway in Paris. 


Last night made dinner for Miriam, whose offering was a  really fine bottle of cab [ok, she brought a fine cab and a decent tempranillo but two full bottles were not were not entirely consumed]. The great red loosened my tongue, apparently, and I told her the story about meeting Jack Manning--the man with the parentheses smile-- at L'Express after my working dinner with Helen. [http://tinyurl.com/4kprd34]. How we flirted but then how he made a fast exit to call London shortly after a very attractive woman sat across from us at the bar. How I just found his card in my makeup bag, though gosh, I thought I'd tossed that thing out with the Xmas tree. 


"Email him," she said. "You'll be in the city. Ask him out."


I demurred; we went back and forth. I said there seemed to be some "thing" between him and this woman at the bar, and Miriam said, "like what, they're CIA operatives? or she's his wife?" Miriam's strong willed. Her persistence called for strong measures: the truth.


"Confession: I told him my name was Mary Gordon."


"No offense but Mary Gordon's kind of a dull choice. You should have said 'Isabelle Huppert.' Anyway, what's the big deal? Tell him you were being cautious, you enjoyed your conversation, you'll be in the city, and suggest a reprise at L'Express."


"Can't do L'Express. Had a scene with the bartender the next day."


"Whatever. Wait: a scene? Forget it. I don't even want to fucking know. Email Jack Manning, tell him your real, beautiful name, and ask him to suggest a place for drinks."


I promised I would. And  I did email him after she left, and this afternoon I told Miriam I'd done as she suggested and that I  had a date lined up, and this satisfied her greatly. "I told you it would work out. Oh, so excellent!"


I did not tell Miriam that I did not tell Jack Manning my actual name. That kind of admission seemed tonally wrong for a "hi, remember me" email, which, as I experienced it, was hard enough to write at 11:46 PM. So I created a new gmail account, "marygordon" followed by a string of numbers. I think it'll just be easier in person to cop to the initial--albeit now slightly perpetuated--lie. I mean, if this date thing even happens and if it even happens, if we are mutually inclined toward a second date, and so on and so forth with the "if" clause qualifiers. It could end up just as well that he thinks my name's Mary Gordon and we let it go at that, you know?


Oh, and for the record, "Manning" is not Jack's actual last name. "Manning" is a nom de blog to protect his privacy. I chose "Manning" as this man's fictional last name. Not wildly inventive on my part, but it has a kind of a Dickensian flair to it, nonetheless.


I was going to reprint some of the  email exchange between Mary Gordon and Mr. Manning--he emailed me back at 12:07 AM--but it doesn't show me in my best writerly light. It reveals too much of the me that bumbles and fumbles with men [if perchance you haven't figured that out yet]. I'll merely say that we agreed to meet the Friday night of Presidents' Weekend, and he suggested  the oyster bar at Penn Station. I told him I'll be wearing a large, flaming red, raw silk scarf.


He told me he'll be wearing a pale blue sweater. Lambswool.