She stares at the dress. What am I afraid of, she asks herself. She takes a corner of the dress between two fingers, and suddenly she is possessed by a wild urge to wrench it violently, to tear it to shreds, to rip it from seam to seam. For an instant the dress’s life is imperiled. An instant, as she takes an instinctive step back from the dress. The involuntary movement of her foot startles her. I’m being silly, she tells herself. She even manages to laugh a small laugh. But her hand trembles slightly as she reaches for the hanger again.
She sits in front of her round make-up mirror. In the small circle of glass only her right eye, a fragment of cheek, and a jagged bit of nose can be seen. She lengthens her lashes, and curls them carefully. Then comes a line of eye-shadow, to be artfully blended and gradated. After both eyes are done in turn, one cheek is brushed lightly with blusher, and then the other, before she colors her lips. One feature at a time takes its place in the mirror.
At last she is ready. She stands, and flattens black silk against white body with a firm hand. Slipping on stilettos, she goes to the door. But she pauses there, unable to leave. Slowly, with many self-assurances, she goes again to the closet, and pulls the door open. The full-length mirror swings outwards. She looks at herself in the mirror, in her entirety.
It never ceases to entrance her, this final, finished, product. As always, she feels the essence of herself yielding, dissipating. The remains of herself are turning. This is a vision of loveliness. But this is not she.
She willows along the street, dreading and anticipating. Her heels staccato on concrete. Rounding the corner, she passes through a silent street, and finally comes to the traffic light. As she stands there, waiting, a sheath of onyx sparkling in the sunlight, a rumble throbs through the ground. From the distance a truck roars into focus. In the moment it flashes by her its engines are gunning, but the wolf-whistle pierces through the cacophony. The shrill peal vibrates throughout her body, its echoes skimming every nerve. But you don’t even know me, she thinks reflexively. But you don’t even know me, she thinks every single time.
But you don’t even know me. Richard Rodriguez must have also thought this. In his essay “Late Victorians” he writes of standing by the sidelines, refusing to join any block in San Francisco’s Gay Freedom Day parade. She knows how he must have felt, kind of. There are times she feels driven to be Seductive, complete with her own wolf-whistle. Other times she waffles about being Coy. Once in a while Oblivious blanks her thoughts. But, in the end, she always simply stands there. Like Rodriguez, she shies away from convenient labels. At the back of her mind is always fear.
Labels are like ill-fitting dresses. They draw inappropriate amounts of attention, even to the right parts. They are not easy to remove, and no matter how briefly they are worn, marks are guaranteed to be left.
And then what will happen, she thinks. She always thinks of the next time. That truck driver might see me again, might have expectations. It is better to be a mystery, free and formless, than to be sized up in stereotypes, however close to truth they might approximate.
The red light blinks, and disappears.
As the church nears, she finds herself gradually having to weave through familiar and growing crowds. Here a voice calls out in greeting. There an arm grasps hers, and tugs her towards people she has never seen before. She finds herself modulating, accentuating, adjusting, playing up. She finds herself thinking, with a small and slightly bitter smile, not only of a truck driver, but also of a fellow New York woman who lived and died exactly 200 years ago.
As she patiently answers fretful questions, she thinks of Lily Bart, who is “subservient to Bertha’s anxious predominance”. As she listens sympathetically to an old parishioner’s complains, she thinks of Lily Bart, who is “good-naturedly watchful of Dorset’s moods”. As two young women fall in step beside her, one on each side, excitedly chattering about her new dress, she thinks of Lily Bart, who is “brightly companionable to Silverton and Dacey”. She is perfect to every one. But then she remembers, vaguely. Her mind is racing ahead to how Edith Wharton ends the passage of Lily Bart’s social triumph, and she sees the indistinct words in the distance, like a glimmering warning.
I wish I could fit into that dress, one of the young women says, wistfully. With that sentence her illusion cracks. She has come to the end of the passage: she is “poised on the brink of a chasm”; her graceful foot is advancing on air.
The danger in labels is not only in the limitations of their truths. The danger is also, far more insidiously, in the possibility that one might attempt to live up to them.
In the second that she pauses in answering she sees Rodriguez in his gym, in the “merciless press of body against a standard, perfect mold”. “My club”, she thinks, her voice blending into Rodriguez’s, “I’ve even caught myself calling it.” But intense understanding gives way to intense disgust. She is no “Blakean angel, revolving in an empyrean of mirrors”.
There is no “transcendence” (337). There is only the knowledge of having succumbed to an ideal, which after all is only a nicer word for stereotype.
Really, the other woman says, her voice tinged with defiance. I’d never starve myself to fit into that dress. And just like that her illusion shatters completely.
Is it not also the danger of labels that one might attempt to shy away from them?
She links her arms with both women. Let’s go in, she says.
She does not remember the task of procuring a seat for herself being so difficult. Threading through the crowds in the church, she finally locates one, and settles down in it. All around her are fellow parishioners, and, Rodriguez still on her mind, she imagines them anew. “A lady with a plastic candy cane pinned to her lapel. A Castro clone with a red bandanna exploding from his hip pocket. A perfume-counter lady with an Hermès scarf mantled upon her left shoulder. A black man in a checkered sports coat. The pink-haired punkess with a jewel in her nose. Here, too, is the gay couple in middle age, wearing interchangeable plaid shirts and corduroy pants” (341). They are all here, in their infinite variety. And it is then that she almost begins to laugh hysterically. What a fool I am, she thinks.
How can a person escape conformity, when the world has transmuted even individualism into uniformity? Fighting a stereotype is simply another stereotype itself. Coy is a label, as is Seductive, as is Oblivious. But so is Mysterious. Life is the imposition of generalities, one or another or another. Living is only the heading at the top, under which all humanity is sub-classified.
She shifts her tailbone, like Rodriguez. Even that smallest action becomes a recurring pattern, rippling across and across and across. But what else can they do?
She joins the congregation as it trickles out of the double doors, but when she finally exits the church, she does not leave, not immediately. The multitude of milling crowds sickens her; she wants to escape people, and so she wends her way to the church garden, and finds an empty bench. She sits, and closes her eyes.
A grey and muted darkness descends upon her, here among the brightly lit greens of Grace Church. After a while, a sense of peace pervades her, peace that encroaches ever so gradually over the years of her life. Outside, the frenetic hustle of Manhattan snarls on. Inside, she can feel, slowly, the jangled pulse of her life smoothing out. She can feel herself finally shuffling off the coil of presumptions. She can feel herself becoming free and formless. She can feel herself blinking, about to disappear –
A voice speaks in the distance, and she starts. Her eyes snap open involuntarily, and she winces, momentarily struck by the glaring and competing colors of the world. She feels herself hardening into a shape; she feels identity snaking its tendrils around her, binding, –
Is this why God speaks of Knowledge as the fruit of evil? Except through death, how can a person escape the confines of Knowledge?
– and, instantaneously, she feels a rush of words bubbling to her mouth. An overwhelming need to categorize and delineate overtakes her; if she cannot die, then she has to define every particle of her being; she has to spill the essence of herself into someone’s ear.
This is why we invent words. She is reminded of Dana Perrotti’s essay, “The Fiction Of Function”. “They refuse to remain victim to the label (of Homosexual),” Perrotti writes of the gay population, “And by crafting communities within the larger gay community, their identities are redefined” (32). This is the function of words, then – the endless invention of ever-more specific words is designed to bridge the gaps between person and person. Each word, by its single and shared meaning, says in addition, This is who I am, and now you can understand me. But that is not the only function of words. By saying, Now you can understand me, we are also saying, And therefore I exist. A word that no one else understands is like a tree falling that no one hears – both are devoid of meaning.
But there is no one around. Her closed lips dam the flood of words. As she sits there, on that bench, the words die within her as another realization rises, inexorable, from deep within her core. How can she ever find the right words? How can she ever invent the right words?
Language can only be the promulgation of preconceptions. Living is conditioned to words. How can it be possible to feel what has no name? But how can it be possible to trust what has been named? A word is the point where two bridges meet, but the other ends of the bridges stretch and stretch, fading into the unfathomable darkness of feeling, disappearing…
She looks no different, sitting there on that garden bench. But something has shifted within her. She is trying desperately to grasp onto a lifetime of comfortable constructs. Everything is suddenly horrifically repulsive and false. Everything is dissolving around her. But a second passes, and everything jolts together once again. She coughs suddenly, a hacking cough that ends, and the instant of terror is over.
She stands, a little unsteadily. A shudder vibrates through her body, its tremors shaking every nerve. I don’t know me, she thinks. I don’t even know me.
Will I be conscious, every single moment, of changing, of the infinite processes by which what I can feel is accommodated to what I can think?
She wonders whether she can ever trust herself again. Perhaps this is what Rodriguez felt, she thinks. His conspicuous absence of feeling, his desire for oblivion, his “unwillingness to embrace life” (339) – perhaps they were warnings: Don’t become involved. Stay above and away.
She looks around the garden. How can one unknow what is known? She lingers a moment more, unwilling to leave. But she does leave the garden, in the end. She has to.
The room seems different to her. Sitting in front of the circular mirror, she removes her make-up, one feature at a time. When her face is clean, she slips out of the black silk dress, and goes to the bathroom. But she pauses at the door. After a moment, she goes instead to the closet. Pulling the door open, she waits for herself to swing into sight.
There she is. She looks at herself in the mirror. Stripped of her make-up, stripped of covering clothes, she is bare, exposed. This is she, underneath it all. But she cannot bear to look at herself. She feels herself still yielding, still dissipating. She reaches out a hand, entranced and fearful. She feels the remains of herself turning. But that is I. She slams the door shut.
Standing there, she trembles, but only a little, and only for a moment. She goes and picks up the black silk dress, and slips into it. Immediately she feels better. It does not matter whether the shape of the dress fits her, or whether she fits the shape of the dress, so long as the dress is there. She thinks of Rodriguez, as she calms down. You cannot possibly understand me, his absent words mean, when he recounts the actions of everyone, but not his own, as his lover César wastes to death, struck down by AIDs. You cannot possibly understand my pain, his absence shouts. But you wrote “Late Victorians”, she wanted to shout back at him once. You published it. Once she felt betrayed at his duplicity, at his simultaneous shying from and craving for words. But now she understands his terrible conflict.
The act of using words is not only to make another understand. Even if words can only be fiction, fiction itself protects us from being overwhelmed, from being swallowed by the vastness of our most inscrutable feelings. Grief, Fury, even Happiness – we use these words not only to reach others, but also to locate ourselves. Only in this way does life become manageable. And so this is the function of fiction that we allow ourselves.
The tip of Rodriguez’s pen scrawls across the page, translating something unbearable into grief. Perrotti’s fingers tap away at the keyboard, striving to make out of mere letters something more. Lily Bart dances in “The House Of Mirth”, reaching for forgetfulness.
She sits, in her black silk dress. We can only let time and habit work their magic, she thinks. We can only put on our make-ups and slip on our dresses. We can only try on one identity, after another body, after another life, hoping to understand ourselves, but leaving ourselves the caveat that, if we don’t, those shams, and not the unnameable nature of life, are why we feel ourselves alienated and alienating. But that caveat must not only be unacknowledged; it must also be unknown. Those who know the rigged game can no longer play.
For us, Rodriguez’s voice melds into Perrotti’s into Bart’s into hers, into mine, and now into yours: “Human unhappiness is evidence of our immortality” (330).
__________________________
WORKS CITED
Perrotti, Dana. “The Function Of Fiction.” Mercer Street. Ed. Pat C. Hoy II, Andrea McKenzie, and Darlene A. Forrest. New York: New York University Press, 2005. 27-33.
Rodriguez, Richard. “Late Victorians.” Writing The Essay. Ed. Darlene A. Forrest, Randy Martin, and Pat. C. Hoy II. New York: McGraw-Hill Custom Publishing, 2005. 330-341.
Wharton, Edith. “The House Of Mirth”. Project Gutenberg. 27 Sept. 2005.
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