from the Edge of Night

by Frank Lentricchia*

 

September 1992

 

Even you don’t know what you meant by you.

—Raging Bull

 

    Christmas season 1987, give or take a year. I can’t remember ex­actly. Hillsborough, North Carolina. A kitchen. Three real people, who must not be called characters, though that’s what they, along with all the other real people, must become. A woman, about seventy; her son, her son-the-author, late forties; his wife, late thirties. The older woman (the mother, the visiting mother-in-law) speaks, di­recting most of it to the non-Italian-American daughter-in-law, but all the time keeping the son in view, occasionally shooting him a challenging glance or remark. Her mood is better than you think; her mood is better than she thinks. She speaks as if the conversation has been rolling for some time. In fact, her words inaugurate it:

    “But what I want to know is why are we so involved, because they’ll never change. Change? With us? Change my ass. I have to ask you something. What kind of a look do you call that on my son’s face? He’s just like his father. And his father is just like his father, that’s where it all comes from, but my husband’s father was the worst. He’s the one who scared me. With their friends they’re different, then they change in a hurry. My father-in-law was so cold you don’t even know what I mean by ‘cold’. I was ashamed to smoke, he never said a word and I was ashamed. You think I don’t notice your husband when you smoke? I notice everything. And what are you looking at? What is he looking at? Naturally your husband is not as bad as my husband, but after all what do you expect me to say? With his friends I bet he’s different, then all of a sudden they’re warm, then they become warm, because their friends, the men especially, make them happy, let’s face it, not us, and not their kids. Don’t look at me like that, you don’t scare me. I changed your diapers. He looks at his mother and his wife with that face. Che faccia brutta! The Lentricchia men, they’re all the same, believe me, except for one of my brother-in-laws who went to the other extreme. At least our husbands didn’t do that, but maybe they should have, maybe they did that, too. Because let’s face it, sex is another joke. What do you want me to say? Why are they like that around us? You went to college, you tell me. To be honest, I don’t think even they know, and I don’t care anymore, because in their own homes they don’t want involvement, they go inside themselves. What are they doing in there? If they didn’t want involvement, who told them to get married in the first place, if they didn’t want involvement. What I want to know is how long are you going to kid yourself? If you have the answer, don’t think I want to hear it, because I don’t want to hear it, but if you have to, you can tell me.”

    I can’t remember the words, I can’t remember the context, maybe there wasn’t one, because she doesn’t need a context, but that’s how I remember it now, five or six years later, my father in another room watching TV, my mother right in front of us, and I don’t have to re­mind you who “us” is. She probably had a context; I just couldn’t see it.

    It should be mentioned that my mother is prone to opera. She talks in arias. Any and all disturbances presage apocalypse. Her enemies ought to croak, the bastards. All wounds are fatal, and anything can cause a wound, even nothing can cause a wound. It should also be men­tioned that I’ve heard it said that I’m nothing like my father, who I’m not saying is what my mother says he is. According to him, I’m very like my mother. We’re the same. “What do you expect? He ex­aggerates. He exaggerates everything. He gets it from his mother. He gets excited, don’t you, Frank?” Arias without discernible context; emotions for which I can find no matching circumstances. Apocalypse twice a week. Wounds that can’t be healed, not even by affection. Af-fection, in fact, makes them much worse, opens them right up again.

 

    About a year ago, in New York, an editor at a major publishing house said to me that I ought, up front, tell my readers who I am. Otherwise readers would have to crawl inside my head. She said “crawl inside.” She felt that in order to understand the chunk she had just read, she would need to crawl inside my head, in order to find out who I am. When she told me that, I felt a strong urge to find out who she was. I wanted to open up her head. I should have said, “If I knew who the fuck I was, do you think I’d be writing this?” Or I should have said, “If I knew what the fuck I was doing, do you think I’d be writing this?” I was about to revise out “fuck,” but if I did you might think that I was talking metaphorically when I said I wanted to open up her head. In order to see what was under the skull, what was actually in there.

    I was talking to the New York editor in my favorite Italian pastry shop, way over on the East side, near the East Village, a place I liked to frequent because any time I went in there I saw an elegantly dressed elderly man, utterly manicured, a shave every four hours, a haircut every five days, who would occasionally walk outside to talk to youngish guys built like bulls in flowered shirts, with envelopes in their hands who kissed him on the cheek when they left. It was a movie, post-Godfather. They knew they were in a movie; they were enjoying themselves in the movie.

    The elegantly dressed elderly man scared me. I had to look at him out of the corner of my eye, which I became very good at, because I didn’t want to be in his movie in the wrong role. I’ve never seen a face that brutal when he thought no one was looking at the face. It was the best brutal face I’d ever seen. I liked to look at it. Maybe a plastic surgeon could give me a duplicate. They say anything can be arranged in New York.

    It would have been nice to call him over, to introduce him to the New York editor at a major house. Then I could have said, “Now say the words ‘crawl inside your head’ to this man.” If only she could have coffee with this man everyday, if only she could, she would be­come more sensitive in her relations with writers, she would become a good woman. Because if she didn’t with his demitasse spoon, and his little pinky sticking way out, he’d eat what was under her skull. I don’t like questions about who I am or what I’m doing. If you wish to know who I am, ask my parents; they know. Or my friends, with whom it is said I’m different.

 

    I’ll tell you what I like about writing. When I’m doing it, there’s only the doing, the movement of my pen across the paper, the shaping of rhythms as I go, myself the rhythm, the surprises that jump up out of the words, from heaven, and I am doing this, and I am this doing, there is no other “I am” except for this doing across the paper, and I never existed except in this doing.

    I’ll tell you what I hate about writing. When I’m finishing it. It comes to an end. You can’t come forever. When I’m finished, I can’t re­member what it was like inside the doing. I can’t remember. When I’m not writing, I want to become the man with the brutal face.

    A sentence, a sentence, my family for a sentence.

 

 

 


*This excerpt from The Edge of Night (New York: Random House, 1994) appears with the author’s permission. © Frank Lentricchia, 1994.