We Were Connoisseurs of Synonyms, Or: Why I Use Twitter

It is easy to make light of this kind of "writing," and I mention it specifically because I do not make light of it at all: it was at Vogue that I learned a kind of ease with words [...], a way of regarding words not as mirrors of my own inadequacy but as tools, toys, weapons to be deployed strategically on a page. In a caption of, say, eight lines, each line to run no more or less than twenty-seven characters, not only every word but every letter counted. At Vogue one learned fast, or one did not stay, how to play games with words, how to put a couple of unwieldy dependent clauses through the typewriter and roll them out transformed into one simple sentence composed of precisely thirty-nine characters. We were connoisseurs of synonyms. We were collectors of verbs.

(Joan Didion, "Telling Stories," 1978)

Book Haul

Mary Gaitskill - Bad Behavior
Ford Madox Ford - Conrad
Henry James - Selected Short Stories
Louis Bromfield - The Farm (with a postcard from 1961 tucked inside)
Joyce Carol Oates - Telling Stories: An Anthology for Writers
The Norton Anthology of Short Fiction
Christopher Pike - Weekend, Remember Me, Bury Me Deep, Master Murder
Joan Didion - Play It As It Lays, Salvador, A Book Of Common Prayer

I stood amongst the seemingly endless rows of books, a full basket of them at my feet, and sent J a text: "I'm either in heaven or in hell right now."

Just half an hour before, I'd received a message from a friend about the Friends of the Library book sale happening in the next neighborhood over. I raced through the end of my work day and zipped over to the building, a sizable warehouse next to our local hardware store. Room after room of used books, aisles dotted with local browsers. The two women browsing the African American section for biographies, the 20-something boys in skinny jeans discovering Korean pop amongst the foreign records, the teenaged girl considering an Alexander Dumas, the old bearded man in a skull cap clutching a fabric tote and squinting at high shelves. Hunters like me, I thought.

"Can I help you find anything?"

"No, thank you." I reshelved a fiction anthology I'd been flipping through. "But I wish you were here longer than this weekend."

"Oh, we're here every Wednesday!"

My heart skipped a beat. One thing I miss about living in New York is spending hours disappearing into stacks of used books, trying to find that one elusive title that speaks to you. Read me. Own me. I'm cheap. I missed that hunt. I wasn't sure anything I was looking for would be here, but then like a gift there they were: the Christopher Pike books I've been craving as candy comfort. The Didion novel — a 1978 Pocket edition no less — I had wanted to revisit to inspire something I'm trying to write.

The Didion book appeared suddenly like a gold nugget in the bottom of a pan of gravel. I'd already found a trade paperback Play It As It Lays and a hardcover Salvador — books I'd lost to the move or to lending — and wondered to myself why you never see mass market copies of any of her books. And then, just as I was about to leave, there amongst the John Updikes and James Micheners, ragged by thumbs and bent at the spine, she appeared before me. Take me, I'm yours.

One hour and twenty dollars later, I was walking buoyantly to my car with a bag full of books. What was lost had been found. The snows had dusted the streets; my car door cracked with ice as I opened it and called J to tell him I was heading home. "I'm so happy," I said to him, my words collecting in a jolly frost, cheeks flushed from the hunt.

© Zan McQuade. All rights reserved.

Postscript: A Wary Visitor

I forgot, of course, Didion the Younger, afraid of failure, sent to Hawaii, where no one fails:

I went, a wary visitor. I do not believe that the stories told by lovely hula hands merit extensive study. I have never heard a Hawaiian word, including and perhaps most particularly aloha, which accurately expressed anything I had to say. I have neither enough capacity for surprise nor enough heart for twice-told tales to make you listen again to tedious vignettes about Midwesterners in souvenir shirts and touring widows in muumuus and simulated pearls, about the Kodak Hula Show or the Sunday Night Luau or the Schoolteacher and the Beach Boy. And so, now that it is on the line between us that I lack all temperament for paradise, real or facsimile, I am going to find it difficult to tell you precisely how and why Hawaii moves me, touches me, saddens and troubles and engages my imagination, what it is in the air that will linger long after I have forgotten the smell of pikake and pineapple and the way the palms sound in the trade winds.

(Letter From Paradise, 21° 19'N., 157° 52'W.)

Islands

I had better tell you where I am, and why.

We had been to see The Descendants and I still couldn't stop crying.

Afterwards, over an Indian dinner buffet in a booth next to the drooping Christmas lights strung across the windows, my dad questioned the motives of fiction. "Why do people want to make up sad stuff?" As I dabbed my eyes with a paper napkin, I suggested that most fiction exists for us to process our feelings through something other than our own realities. Or even emotions that don't exist in our own reality, but we feel the need to process anyway. 

This lingering sadness, still furrowing my brow: I'm still processing that damned film.

Part of it, I swear, was Hawaii. Kauai in particular. J and I were supposed to go to Kauai almost eleven years ago now, on our honeymoon. But then the realities of finances set in and we never made it. We'd planned the entire trip in our heads, and those places kept showing up in The Descendants. The beach on which George Clooney's character runs barefoot: a few miles from the cabin I'd wanted to rent. The bar where Clooney finds Beau Bridges downing a whiskey: a restaurant we'd listed for a visit. We were meant to be in the background of those shots, learning to surf, consulting a map for a hike along Na Pali.

Hawaii, the great unaccomplished trip, hangs over my head like a misty cloud, once in a while seeding the atmosphere of my mood with tiny raindrops. These raindrops remind me of other things left unfinished. A promise to take up sewing. The accordion. Plans with friends for a group project cast aside into the ethers. The inkling of a novel I had in me once about a family coming to terms with the fact that as you get older, things disintegrate in order to make way for new things, like the erosion of the soil as a river grows wider and deeper.

Not so long ago I'd decided that I might never write a novel, and I was okay with that. But I think I might be changing my mind. 

* * *

To Joan Didion, Hawaii belonged to James Jones. But to me, Hawaii is forever Joan Didion's. By her own criteria:

Certain places seem to exist mainly because someone has written about them. [...] A place belongs forever to whoever claims it hardest, remembers it most obsessively, wrenches it from itself, shapes it, renders it, loves it so radically that he remakes it in his image...

Didion's Hawaii is rendered not with palm trees and luaus but with curtains drawn in hotel rooms. Barracks, smoke fires, and porous volcanic rock. The stench of a marriage falling apart. In her essay "In The Islands," Joan Didion writes about witnessing a couple's public disagreement on a delayed plane, and how as a result the man storms of the plane before it takes off. 

It was not until we had passed Diamond Head and were coming in low over the reef for landing at Honolulu, however, that I realized what I most disliked about this incident: I disliked it because it had the aspect of a short story, one of those "little epiphany" stories in which the main character glimpses a crisis in a stranger's life—a woman weeping in a tearoom, often, or an accident seen from the window of a train, "tearooms" and "trains" still being fixtures of short stories although not of real life—and is moved to see his or her own life in a new light.

And then: 

I was not going to Honolulu because I wanted to see life reduced to a short story. I was going to Honolulu because I wanted to see life expanded to a novel, and still do.

Didion confesses (elsewhere) that she writes in order to experience things. That until she has written something down, she hasn't been able to fully process it. I think that in addition to understanding past experiences, there is something in the intent of writing that forces future experience: where we say WE WILL and I HOPE and SO IF, what we do is born: We will make it to Hawaii. We will make Hawaii our story, a story of our happy marriage; not of death, not of divorce, not an abstract vision on a screen. We will face our fear of flying, our fear of turbulence, of winds and ocean. We will write the book that is our life, it will go on for thousands of pages, we won't let it become a mere short story.

It seems like no accident that The Descendants came out around the same time as Didion's Blue Nights. Both are about the challenges of confronting death, death that is always too soon. Descendants director Alexander Payne's Hawaii matches Didion's: a place where things fall apart at the seams, islands are created from the chaos of volcanos, fossils, resorts. These octoberian portraits of life as a great crescendo followed by the inevitable decrescendo, or worse: the music stopping suddenly altogether. So then what do we take from these fictions (and remembered non-fictions)? If we don't take anything, where are they taking us?

Try this: by expanding life into a novel, or blowing it up large onto a screen, by forcing ourselves to explore emotions we don't even know yet... Maybe this is how to confront the things we're angry at that aren't yet a reality. Learning how to harness the emotion before it even happens.

Maybe we will make it to Hawaii. Maybe, then, we will make it our own.

© Zan McQuade. All rights reserved.

Hummingbirds

The Karate Kid
This is how they look in Los Angeles: bright, tanned. Women in silky shirts with buckles and collars that fall off one shoulder. Shoes not meant for walking and saturated lipstick. Latino men with looping tattoos and mirrored sunglasses, one arm high up on the steering wheel. Goth girls in flourescent pink hair and black lipliner. A pedestrian mohawk in toxic greeny-yellow. I flick through a rack of vintage clothes and find a yellow patterned fifties dress from Universal Studios, a Dan Fogelberg concert tee, and a checkered romper I’ll wear back in New York and realize how out of place it is here. This is the cloth of Los Angeles: costumery, technicolor, period posturing, cyan, periwinkle, coral, something from the credits of Beverly Hills 90210. I forget that this is a city waiting for its closeup.

Headed south on the 405 we pass a muscle man in a red Chevy Beretta, his Raybans perched on a sunburnt nose, dumped onto the freeway from the pages of a Bret Easton Ellis novel or the flickering screen of The Karate Kid. It’s because of The Karate Kid that I always imagine people in LA to live in apartment complexes with inner courtyards and white iron railings. Spanish tiles and palm trees in the backyard. Through an open window, salsa music. A beach fire circled with empty discarded beer cans, someone kicking sand in someone’s face.

An entire city ripped from the pages of a book. Adapted for the screen. Lyrics to a song. Existing somewhere around us and above us, just out of reach. We watch helicopters and planes overhead, a skywriter practicing targets, hummingbirds.

“Los Angeles,” he says, “the city of things flying over your head.” 

Joan and Joni
In California, it’s Joan and Joni I think of most. “Free Man In Paris” runs on a loop through my head as I picture girls in sundresses with long straight blonde hair driving along the freeway, one buttery-tanned arm hanging limp out the window. Then paragraphs of that sharp Didion prose seep into the background, those weighty words of rock and river and place and time; I look at the hills through the windscreen and suddenly feel compelled to write of mountains and deserts and the types of trees that grow well in sandy earth.

I sit by the pool in white linen and denim. We are listening to Django, but I am a lost soul from a Joni Mitchell song. I am Maria Wyeth with her beach towel on rattan furniture and her love of freeways.

Those are the facts, says Joan. He went to California hearing that everything’s warmer there, says Joni. I try not to think of dead things and plumbing, says Joan. I deal in dreamers and telephone screamers, says Joni. I try to live in the now and keep my eye on the hummingbird, says Joan.

A light smog hovers patiently over Downtown, the mountains fold in and out around the city. Birds of prey circle, winds whip palm fronds to and fro. We talk of driving to Malibu, but instead choose to read by the pool, drinking beer from bottles and sweeping bamboo leaves from the water with a netted basket at the end of a heavy pole. I can feel the muscles working again as the net sweeps through the water, stretching forgotten limbs with some light outdoor yardwork. Breaking like the waves at Malibu.

This is Los Angeles. Just out of reach. I am content taking pictures of the sky.

Contrast
When the sun sets in the valley, the bougainvillea growing against houses appears in technicolor. A fuschia so stunning my breath gets trapped just below the throat and it takes a moment to recover. “We’re such gushers,” says my friend. She’s right. Fresh out of the pool, hair soaked in chlorine, we gush about the greens of the leaves, thick with contrast like the pages of an old National Geographic, Kodachrome bright. We gush as the sun bursts out from behind tall palm trees. Everyone faces west, holding palms to foreheads to screen their eyes from the light, we gush and say goodbye to the day. We gush about Los Angeles like a review printed in a paper the day of its release. Stellar. Expansive and encompassing, a true marvel. Will replay in the minds of viewers long after the final scene fades from the screen.

End scene: we fly back east over rifts in the earth, great chasms and gorges and red rock lying exposed like deep wounds across Utah. The flattened earth of Kansas, where a great haze of dust spreads across the sky over wind farms and crop circles. Nighttime Indianapolis, lit like an asterisk in the dark expanse of the quiet midwest. And then I’m back in New York, with awkward sunburnt knees, the air conditioner is broken and leaking coolant and attracting microscopic bugs and the homeless man at 59th street is reading a teenage book about vampires now instead of Murakami. Back to the thick humid air, the smell of garbage, compact roads and people stacked on top of other people.

I felt unfettered and alive, says Joni. My wings flapping so fast you could hardly see them.

© Zan McQuade. All rights reserved.