“Write about experiences as bodies,” MK suggested. We were getting metaphysical at WXOU Bar over cheap highballs. A walk several blocks up (at least several blocks farther than I’d remembered, having only previously made the journey while many drinks in) from Beckett’s, where we’d entered unseen, unheard (I hope). We missed Cassidy’s play because I’d convinced myself that curtain was at 10 when in REALITY (fickle may she ever remain) it was at 8. I’d not been on my phone for most of the day and hadn’t even thought to double-check the time.
I don’t want to rely on my phone to remind me of things, which is all at once cliché, pretentious, admirable, and simply not a good idea for my brain chemistry. Bit of a chicken or the egg, but I’m not sure if my memory went to shit since becoming a person with a tether to the Internet or if the Internet is the only thing that keeps me functioning because I have the capacity to look things up.
I don’t know how to remember things I need to, so I’ve trained my brain to be really good at finding things online. Earlier the same day, I walked around Flatiron for nearly an hour hunting for a cafe A. had taken me to several weeks ago to no avail. Neither memory nor sleuthing returned any results and by the time I found myself back in the Village, I’d wasted an hour seeking out a place conveniently near my business appointment.
But! What mustn’t be forgotten — none of this (i.e. the writing) would exist without the missteps. A recurring theme…
Wednesday night, skipping the reading, I think to myself, what sort of experiment would it be to write nonfiction in the form of fiction? Well, lots of writers I could ask about that…but God forbid I churn out more autofiction. Everyone I talk to is sick of the confessional form. But what about writing the story of a night and making up every third thing? Fragment from March:
I was reading about Maria Wyeth when she arrived and my heart was still racing from catching the cat that had bolted out the front door while the hired car waited at the curb at the house off the 2. “A shot of Benedictine,” I’d ordered, meaning to order fernet, but betrayed by my too-quick speech. It was mouthwashy and did the trick of settling my nerves before she arrived. In an alternate reality, we meet at her apartment and walk to the bar together. Her lover who she calls her wife is away and she doesn’t do well in the house on her own. It’s too empty and echoes and she whiles away beaucoup hours playing chess with herself.
The hired car between the house in the hills and the bar in the flats was silent save for my shaky breaths, a calming mechanism more than one yogi friend had told me I ought to work to abandon, and the odd habit the driver had of tapping his fingertips on the steering wheel in decrescendo, exhaling sharply through his nostrils every time the car stopped at a light, which unnerved me deeply.
I became self-conscious of my uncleaned fingernails in the few minutes’ space between overturning my glass of Benedictine, a flash gesture I was sure sparked distinct and immediate perceptions of my character from anyone who witnessed it, and the moment she said hello — “Hello,” (like that, blunt) — to me.
She was dressed in Prada loafers, Chanel tights (yes the ones with the double C Argyle), a black wool skirt that may have been her mom’s from the 80s, and a babydoll blouse with a scalloped collar around which she’d tied a black velvet ribbon. She parted her hair neatly, but without severity. You get the picture.
Sliding onto the barstool next to me, she popped open a miniature Altoids tin and crunched down on half a blue pill. Amusement with sunglasses and porrons followed and in the car on the way home, I recognized the voice on the 24 Hour Fitness commercial.
I’ve been thinking about how parties are collective performance. Setting a menu, a theme, making considerations of lighting and music (and for some, even temperature and scent), choosing guests — the host sets the stage for the social performance to play out. As party planners, we cast, we set decorate, we underscore; as partygoers, we costume ourselves, we may even rehearse lines, but everyone’s always off-book.
In her short story “Finishing Touch,” Claire-Louise Bennett anticipates the choreography of a party in one of my favorite opening paragraphs ever:
I think I’m going to throw a little party. A perfectly arranged but low-key soiree. I have so many glasses after all. And it is so nice in here, after all. And there’ll be plenty of places for people to sit now that I’ve brought down the ottoman—and in fact if I came here for a party on the ottoman is exactly where I’d want to sit—I’d want to sit there on the ottoman. But I suppose I’d arrive a little later on and somebody else would already be sitting upon the ottoman very comfortably, holding a full glass most likely and talking to someone standing up, someone also holding a full glass of wine, and so I would stand with my fingertips upright on a table perhaps, which wouldn’t be so bad, and, anyway, people move about, but, all the same, I would not wish to make it very plain just how much I’d like to sit there, on the ottoman…
A good party plays with tension — a period of considerations, ideas, dare I say even obsession, followed by release. At a party Saturday, it became my role as outsider to help the host get to that point of release. The guests were enjoying themselves, the crowning details all there and appreciated. The party was in flow; it had become the collective performance, sublime in its directorless cadence. Vignettes of conversation and dance wove between one another and I in my black turtleneck (playing the Mod?) barely kept up with the demand for grilled cheese.
On Thursday, in the garden aisle of Saifee Hardware, I was visited by an Angel wearing black cashmere and burgundy eyeshadow. I was stuck, rooted, gazing at the displays, clutching potting mix, trying to find something else to buy to meet the $10 credit card minimum. “You’re overthinking it,” she said. It shook me out of my clench-jawed reverie, but by the time my consciousness had kicked into gear to respond to the underlying energetic truth of her, she’d disappeared.
I left without buying the potting mix.
Thank you for reading this dispatch of Exquisite Corpse. I want to continue experimenting with form and content, so curious to hear your feedback. And, reiterating a standing welcome to collaborate.
I’ll leave you with what I think ought to be the Exquisite Corpse theme song — The Exquisite Corpse of Souris — from the totally fascinating compilation album Souris Calle made by the conceptual artist Sophie Calle in honor of her dead cat, Souris. Have a listen…