A few short samples across several genres. Many many more available on request.
All rights reserved.
The first-ever snowfall in Storybrooke is another sign that the Evil Queen's curse might be fading.
Please contact me for a copy of "Winter Wonderland," a spec script for the television drama, Once Upon a Time.
They say you can't go home again. They're not kidding.
Please contact me for a sample of this feature screenplay, StRanger.
Harrison's fear of the Under-the-Bed Monster was strong, but even stronger was his fear that his bossy sister would find out and tease him about it, so he didn't say anything, even when it was obvious the monster was under there. Even when he could hear it snoring. Even when he could see its two furry feet sticking out from underneath the bed.
"I know you're down there," he called out.
"No, I'm not," answered a voice from under the bed. "There's no one down here."
It wasn't very reassuring.
In school they were working on adding numbers, and Harrison practiced to get his mind off the monster. "One plus one is two. Two plus two is four. Four plus four is—." He couldn't remember what four plus four was.
"Twelve," called out the voice from under the bed.
"No it's not," Harrison argued. He counted on his fingers. "It's eight. Just like how many big hairy ugly monster toes you have."
And while Harrison was distracted with the counting, the monster crawled out from under the bed, and ate him.
I lost focus so I went to a fortune teller. I picked the first one within walking distance who took credit cards. She asked me to hold out my hands, and as soon as she touched me, I got a hard-on. Within ten minutes we were fucking on the sofa.
"You've got a really strong love line," she said.
I moved in that night. That was three years ago.
* * *
(Did she see it coming? I always wondered, and I never knew.)
* * *
Her name was Stella Luna, like the children's book. That's what it said on the sign in her parlor. Her real name was Stella DeAngelis, but she changed it. "I thought Luna sounded more mystical," she explained.
"More mystical than, 'From angels'?"
I asked if she came from a long line of psychics, and she laughed. "My daddy was a plumber." But she also had an uncle who made a good living betting on horses, and legend has it that her grandmother predicted the assassination of JFK, in vivid detail, including the phrase "grassy knoll." She claimed she saw the face of the third gunman, and could have picked him out of a police line-up. "But who knows?"
* * *
"You're going to struggle a while," Stella told me, as we lay naked on her sofa, she finally reading my palm. "Because you're a seeker."
"What do I seek?"
She ran her finger along my palm but didn't answer.
"What do I seek?"
"That which you don't have," she said finally, and got up to pull on her clothes.
"That's obvious. That's everyone. That's tautological."
"I don't know what that word means."
* * *
She knew the future but she didn't know that certain truths follow from their atomic propositions.
* * *
"You're going to go home and pack a bag of things and move in with me," she said.
"Is that a prediction? Or just something you want?"
She smiled and kissed me. "It's your destiny."
* * *
I went home, packed a bag, and moved in with her, which was a shitty thing to do, because I'd lived with a woman at the time, a woman who told me often that she loved me.
"I'm moving out."
"What? Why?"
"It's my destiny."
I paid an extra month's rent and let her keep my share of the deposit, and since she was justified in saying all of those bad things about me, I never tried to stop her. I still think about her sometimes.
* * *
Stella and I took a trip to Vermont, after I'd been living with her for a few months. We rented a car and took turns driving up the coast through the rain. Halfway through Connecticut, she said, "Pull over. I want to fuck you."
I stopped the car, and she unbuckled my pants and climbed on top of me, somehow squeezing her lithe body into the space between me and the steering wheel.
"That was great," I said, and she laughed and wiped the fog of our breath off the windows.
Up ahead, a tractor trailer had jack-knifed and killed twenty-two people--the largest single auto accident in Connecticut history.
"Did you know?," I asked her.
"I just wanted to fuck," she answered.
* * *
"Do you believe in predestiny? Are our futures written?"
"Of course." She looked at me like I'd questioned the roundness of the Earth, or gravity. She didn't understand why this idea put me into a three-day sulk and got me wondering about suicide. "Do you ever think of killing yourself?," I asked her.
"That's stupid."
* * *
"What do they say?"
She looked at me impatiently.
"Nothing about sinking ships, right? Nothing about death at sea? I couldn't bear knowing I was going to drown."
"When I read your palm," she explained, "I am reading your palm."
"That's tautological."
"But when I read the cards, I am reading the cards. And the cards are reading you. Do you understand?"
"No. I mean of course, yes, but, no, not at all. Why does a random shuffle of cards offer meaning about my life?"
"Right? Why does a random shuffle of events, or a random shuffle of jobs, or a random shuffle of girlfriends, offer meaning about your life? Exactly."
"So what do the cards say?"
She looked at them quietly for a while. She didn't like telling my fortune. Or maybe she just didn't like my fortune.
"You're going to struggle a while," she finally said.
"That's vague. I want my money back," I told her.
"Then you should have paid me." She kissed me sweetly on the cheek. "Let's go to bed."
* * *
She held a bag in her hand and she told me she was leaving. She gave me an extra month's rent, and said I should keep her share of the deposit.
"What? Why?," I asked. But she didn't answer.
"I've loved you," she said. "I'll always love you."
"Did you see this coming?," I asked.
"Did you see this coming?," I asked. "Because I didn't see this coming."
But I was shouting at the door. She was already gone.
* * *
We were lying on the sofa, and she was kissing my hand. "What am I seeking?," I asked her. We were both so relaxed, the way lovers are. "I don't know," she told me. "What are you seeking?"
"I don't know," I told her. "I don't know."
"I'm going to let you in on a little secret: every day, once a day, give yourself a present. Don't plan it; don't wait for it; just let it happen. It could be a new shirt in a men's store, a catnap in your office chair, or two cups of good, hot, black, coffee."
- Special Agent Dale Cooper, Twin Peaks
"Damn good coffee!" exclaimed the passenger sitting next to me on JetBlue flight #176 from Seattle to New York. "Damn good coffee." He actually said this. I had to bite my tongue to keep from chiming in, "And hot."
This passenger had rung the flight attendant with what seemed to be a very specific, elaborate, whispered coffee order. The cup she brought back looked normal enough. She stood around, as if waiting for his approval, and he sipped it while she watched. That's when the phrase left his lips: "Damn good coffee!" And the phrase nearly left mine: "You've got to be kidding me"—not because I thought the coffee was bad, you understand, but because the passenger sitting next to me was Kyle MacLachlan, who, in the 1990s, as Twin Peaks' Special Agent Dale Cooper, enjoyed nothing more than a good cup of coffee, and maybe a slice of pie.
"And you," the flight attendant asked me. "Anything to drink?"
"I'll have what he's having."
* * *
PASSENGER ON MY LEFT: (nervous) Excuse me, aren't you Kyle MacLachlan?
PASSENGER ON MY RIGHT: (friendly, collected) Yes I am.
Awkward pause. No further conversation.
End of scene.
* * *
Movie stars in public: what a surreal phenomenon. Years of living in Los Angeles and working in (or at least near) the entertainment industry have numbed me to it a little bit; I've gradually chalked up the oddness to this:
Movies and television are alternate (better?) realities from our own. To see someone from that dimension in our world ruptures some kind of fabric; it is no less disconcerting than seeing a person from the future or from a faraway planet. "You are fascinating! You don't belong here!" In its best instances, the celebrity is like an errant cartoon character in our otherwise 3-D world, à la Who Framed Roger Rabbit. In its worst instances, it's as if the celebrity crawled, obnoxious and horrifying, straight out of the television set itself, like Samara from The Ring.
Kyle MacLachlan might have been coming from a mundane visit with his family, or a banal school reunion—but he brought a piece of Dale Cooper with him on to our airplane. Shouldn't he have to pay for two seats, like the woman with the cello, or the man with the pet cat?
* * *
I fiddle furiously with the brightness control on my little 4" JetBlue television, trying to bring it to life. No matter how many times I press the button, the screen will not come on. Typical: 230 seats and I get the one with the broken TV. Just to be sure, I try changing channels a few times and finally punch it in frustration.
Kyle MacLachlan leans over: "Actually, that one's mine. Yours is on your left."
Thanks.
* * *
Last month, while pretending to cast a movie of my own life, I wondered about the "rules" of the game. "If I have blonde hair," I asked, "do I have to cast a blonde actor?" The reason I asked had something to do with Kyle MacLachlan, whom Rolling Stone once described as the "boy next door, if that boy spent lots of time alone in the basement."
He was right: it was damn good coffee. And hot.
"Kafka's sentences often deliver an unexpected impact just before the full stop—that being the finalizing meaning and focus. This is achieved due to the construction of sentences in German that require that the participle be positioned at the end of the sentence; in the above sentence, the equivalent of 'changed' is the final word, 'verwandelt'. Such constructions are not replicable in English, so it is up to the translator to provide the reader with the same effect found in the original text." - from Wikipedia
First, start with a phrase:
One morning, when Gregor Samsa woke from troubled dreams, he found himself transformed in his bed into a horrible vermin.
Use a computer to translate it into Japanese, and then back again:
One morning, one Gregor Samsa suffered from a dream, woke up in bed converted to their destructive himself.
Do it again:
One morning, one suffering from a dream Gregor Samsa, destruction of the bed, woke up in the translation itself.
And again:
Gregor Samsa dream, from the destruction of the bed one morning, suffering a single one, I woke up in the translation itself.
You've come here, to language, to literature, looking for meaning. It's why anyone comes to anything: to make sense and order of otherwise meaningless circumstance.
1 bed one morning, Gregor Samsa one dream of one suffering from the destruction of one, I woke up in the translation itself.
Trying to pin things down with words, you've discovered that meaning moves. It evolves. It flies. It flits. It flutters.
1 bed one morning, Gregor Samsa in my own translation from the burden of 1111111 I woke up one single dream was destroyed.
Instead of meaning, you've stumbled upon the destruction of meaning; and in that, you begin to find the true meaning of meaning: that it's made by looking for it.
I, 1111111, morning, 1111111, destroying the dream of my own translation from the bed, woke the burden of Gregor Samsa.
Destroying the dream of my own translation.
If you watch the trailer to Jean-Pierre Jeunet's A Very Long Engagement, you'll see a sweeping love story set during wartime and shot from some interesting angles. You'll see Audrey Tautou's cute bob haircut and adorable doey eyes.
So it's a bit jarring when the film begins in a muddy trench with a parade of five soldiers about to be executed for self-mutilation. Before the star actress is even introduced, men have been shot in the head, shot in the hand, drowned in mud, bathed in the exploded guts of their comrades, and driven insane. It gets worse — a syringe full of syphilis-infected blood, a hydrogen-filled zeppelin exploding in a hospital ward, a guillotined body perfunctorily dumped into a too-short coffin. And, in the midst of so much brutality, there is a sweeping love story set during wartime and shot from some very interesting angles.
If I could be any filmmaker in the world, I would be Jean-Pierre Jeunet. His career has been as eclectic as it has been erratic: it's hard to say with any sincerity that I wish I'd made Alien Resurrection; and though I describe The City of Lost Children as one of my favorite movies, I then go on to explain that I've never been able to stay awake through the whole thing. My envy of him is misplaced: part of Jeunet's charm is that no one else could have made City of Lost Children; his films are filtered through a lens that is unique to him.
But the larger part of his charm comes from his unabashed love of the sublime. Amélie was an homage to the minute loveliness of life, a lavishing of attention on whimsical details. A Very Long Engagement does the same, though it trades Amélie's bright colors and Parisian accordions for the gray skies and gory mud of the trenches of World War I. But, oh, votre pays a une saleté vraiment charmante!
One wonders why Jeunet would make a lavish war film, bankrolled largely by the United States, at a time when the French and the U.S. are very much at odds about the merit of a certain current war. The project was funded by a "coalition of the willing" — Warner Independent Pictures in the United States, and Warner French and a newly-formed 2003 Production in France. But it was criticized in that nation for not being "French enough", instead seen as another example of America's bullying cultural imperialism. It's a shame, because Jeunet makes France look beautiful at every opportunity. He does not, however, feel the same aesthetic obligation to war. Though the story has its share of bravery and heroism, they come from the places you might least expect — one condemned man carries another on his back to safety; a compassionate German woman helps the story's heroine track down the very soldiers who killed her brother. Conversely, the film is less than inspiring about the glory of war and its "band of brothers": its worst atrocities are performed by the French, upon the French. (The five men condemned to death for treasonous self-mutilation are simply thrown into the "no man's land" between the trenches, and left to fend for themselves against the shelling, strafing and land mines; one of the five gets gunned down by a French sniper who seems annoyed that the man is still alive.)
Steven Spielberg's Saving Private Ryan tries to depict war with so much brutal detail that we can call it "honest," but in the end, it could still be used as an Army recruitment reel: its heroes are heroic, and though war is hell, the Americans give 'em hell, too. The scene in Jeunet's film that most evokes Spielberg has the French storming across the no-man's land toward the German trench, brandishing bayonets against the German machine guns, and getting slaughtered almost to the man. The charge lacks the bald derring-do of Private Ryan: it isn't made for the sake of a rescue, or some larger strategic gain; it doesn't have much purpose at all, except that the commander reasons it's better to die while attacking than while cowering in a hole. Jeunet drives this pointlessness home when he returns to this same hard-fought tract of land a few years later: it is an innocuous field of wildflowers. There's nothing there, no single sign of what should have been indelible carnage. All those lives were spent almost without a trace.
The City of Lost Children is a fantasia about a scientist who is unable to dream and, to make up for the deficiency, kidnaps children to steals theirs. So, too, is A Very Long Engagement. It dresses up as a war movie, but at its heart, it's as full of sweeping allegory and metaphysical wonder, and just as concerned with the stolen dreams of youth. It's easy to see in the long, slow final shot of the film that Jeunet is doing his best to assure that the children get their dreams back. The children are limping and scarred, but they have won the war.
The Darjeeling Limited (like all of Wes Anderson's films, to greater or lesser degrees) is like a dollhouse made of marzipan: it's delicate, sweet, and of questionable substance that's neither fulfilling nor structurally sound. You simultaneously want to protect it, admire its preciousness, and crush it to hear the satisfying thunk of its fragility.
That's to say, then, it's everything we've come to expect of Anderson's films, and everything we love about them, and everything that drives us nuts, too. (No pun intended.)
Critics have been piling on Darjeeling Limited, eager to knock Anderson's hipster specs sideways:
Like his peers Zach Braff, Noah Baumbach (who directed the excellent Squid and the Whale and co-wrote Life Aquatic), and Sofia Coppola (whose brother Roman helped write Darjeeling Limited), Wes Anderson situates his art squarely in a world of whiteness: privileged, bookish, prudish, woebegone, tennis-playing, Kinks-scored, fusty. He's wise enough to make fun of it here and there, but in the end, there's something enamored and uncritical about his attitude toward the gaffes, crises, prejudices, and insularities of those he portrays. In The Darjeeling Limited, he burrows even further into this world, even (especially?) as the story line promises an exotic escape. Hands down, it's his most obnoxious movie yet. (Jonah Weiner for Slate, "Unbearable Whiteness.")
Weiner falls short of calling Anderson racist outright, but I won't shy from the word: parts of Darjeeling made me cringe and try to hide my own white face under my hoodie.
But I have no intention of joining the critical pile-on, either. For obvious (and probably defensive) reasons, I take issue with the implication that privileged, bookish woebegones with white skin don't have stories worth watching. And I absolutely reject his conflation of Anderson's perspectives with the films of Noah Baumbach and Sofia Coppola, which I think, for all their own whiteness, are churning full of blood and guts. Anderson's movie about Americans soul-searching in an "exotic" land becomes an essay on cleverness, true; but Coppola's version of the same story, Lost in Translation, is exquisite and heartful.
Weiner also misses the fact that there's something elusively magical about the worlds of Wes Anderson: for all their preciousness (and "unbearable whiteness"), they induce another feeling that offsets the queasiness: wonder. Anderson's gift is his ability to make us marvel (and laugh) at things that would otherwise be mundane. He reminds us there's life to be found, everywhere, and it's rich and complex—even when it's made of white confection.
I apologize. I don't know a thing about painting.
Monique Prieto is patient.
I look at the four canvases leaning against the walls of her tidy Silverlake studio. Flat, brightly-colored shapes of blue and green twine bend their way up from the floor, sometimes stacking on one another, sometimes reaching free. "They look, er, less anthropomorphic than your earlier work," I try.
She raises her eyebrows. "Less anthropomorphic?"
"Or maybe more." I'm struggling. "Like that wiggly shape there."
She nods supportively.
"Looks like a Schmoo."
It's maybe a less sophisticated critical vocabulary than Prieto's used to. After all, art critic David Pagel has already tagged her "one of the most accomplished and promising artists of her generation." Artforum, in its September issue, puts her at the head of a revival of formalism, comparing her to the likes of Jackson Pollack and Morris Louis. Critic Christopher Knight goes so far as to credit her along with other CalArts alums Laura Owens, Ingrid Calame and Heidi Kidon with a painting boom that is sweeping not only Los Angeles, but the world at large.
"Sorry," I mumble.
She laughs graciously. "Part of what I like about the work is that it's accessible, and that someone can walk in and not feel like they have to know a lot to be with the art, and get something from it. I like the idea that my kids or other kids or anybody could enjoy it and not have to know the history of art."
I don't know the history of art. But I feel, under her tutelage, I might be off to a good start.
* * *
In Monique Prieto's autobiography (written when she was twelve, and growing up in Hollywood), there's a final chapter in which she records her dream of the perfect life: "When I grow up, I want to be a painter who went to CalArts." Her actual experience there from 1990 to 1994, when she received her MFA, was less than dreamy. "I was mostly miserable," she chuckles. "I didn't feel like I fit in. I'm sure everybody feels that way. It was just overwhelming. I was really naive about the pressures of the program."
The art world had been going through some changes. "Traditional artistic practices like painting and sculpture were regarded with extreme wariness," writes Knight in the Los Angeles Times. "Attention shifted away from discrete art objects and toward ephemeral ideas video, performance, conceptual art, earthworks, installation, photo-based art and other fresh new genres."
In other words, painting was out. "I knew there was animosity toward painting at the time, kind of brewing, but I didn't know that CalArts was probably the center of it as I foolishly flew into the center of the storm. Making an object of some sort, and especially a painting, was highest insult, maybe not the best thing to be doing at the time." She remembers her first year, hiding in her studio, working like mad but like a hermit, literally painting in secret. She never did show her work, that first year. "I just laid really low until I found a couple of people I could talk to, and then I had my first show the next year."
She credits Lane Reylea and Charles Gaines for finally giving her the courage to crawl out of her studio. "They would talk to me about painting as if it were a normal thing to do. Once I found a couple people, I felt very encouraged and didn't feel so bad or dated. Tom Lawson became dean the same year I started he also kind of brought the shift back, helped the program be a little more embracing, a little more generous. Each year got a little better..."
By her last year, Prieto was already using some signature techniques to explore color, composition, balance and harmony in abstract ways, without entirely leaving representation behind. Her colorful shapes invite descriptions that are, er, anthropomorphic, partly because the shapes do represent something, a scenario between things or people, or a sentiment. "I'm trying to make a picture of something very poignant going on in the relation between things, so I hope people do make those kinds of connections."
The curators at ACME Gallery in Los Angeles made them, and they showed Prieto's paintings in 1994, not long after her graduation.
ACME's upcoming exhibition of her work, opening April 23, is their fifth in as many years.
She describes her relationship with ACME as coming out of an "extraordinary" set of circumstances. "Before I'd even left school, as far as I could tell, I wasn't going to have a career in art. My husband and I had purposely planned to have a family, so I was pregnant before I graduated. And that was fine with me, a jolly decision on my part. I didn't know I'd always wanted to have kids, but at that time, I started to feel, hey, I've always wanted to have kids.
"So when the show offer came up, since I was already focused on one thing, pregnancy, I didn't let it get to me that much. And especially after having the baby, it was very clear what was important in life, which was my kid and my husband. You can recognize something in your life as an opportunity to gain perspective, and for me, childbearing was it. You get these opportunities to see things differently.
"All kinds of things can change your life in a split second. I was just lucky to recognize this as an opportunity to stop worrying about the 'art world,' and to focus on making art." She laughs again, and wraps up my art history lesson for the day: "Have babies," she says, "and make art."
Monique Prieto is showing at ACME Gallery, 6150 Wilshire Blvd., Los Angeles, from April 23. She's expecting her third child In July.
We were on the train and we were going toward important places, and that is what allowed us to disappear into ourselves, and pass by station stop after station stop, staring into books and newspapers and windows and each other, as if we were nowhere, as if we were people without souls.
The man shuffled onto the train announced by his own stink, a sticky vinegar that attached itself to the inside of the nose. He shuffled his feet and he shuffled his cardboard cup, mostly empty but with a few coins, like a broken toy tambourine.
He spoke too quietly to draw us from our reverie. It was the stink, rather, that drew us, and pushed most of us to inch away from him without looking, nor hearing his mumbled words: "I am Shiva," he said, "Neelkantha of the blue throat, eye of fire, skin of tiger, greatest among gods, destroyer of worlds." He chanted this quietly and made his way among us, while we withdrew from him without looking up.
Not listening to him or even hearing him, we never imagined that his words were true, that he was indeed the great deity incarnate, nor that our failure to love him or care for him was a final act of disastrous consequence: that we had failed so exhaustively, failed in our very humanity, and, undeserving of it, would live to see it stripped from us, while we, unaware, listened to our headphones, read our magazines, and recoiled from the stink of the misfortune we'd helped to create.
Anxiety was the first guest to arrive, as usual. He mumbled a hello and shuffled in the door, without a date, holding out the gift of a bottle of chilled Merlot. "Am I early?"
Anticipation showed up next, a little overdressed. He'd run into Familiarity in the driveway and they seemed to hit it off.
Ambition, Hilarity, and Unexpected came, and carried the conversation, so no one minded much the arrival of Droll. Everyone mingled and snacked and drank, chatting and joking, arguing and assenting, and then sat down for dinner.
Sadness and Futility were late showing up, but eventually took their places at the table. It wouldn't have felt right without them.
Kato Kaelin's been here again today. He broke a window to let himself in, ate some food from my fridge, made a mess of the living room, and was gone before I ever got home.
I think he might have napped in my bed.
I don't know what to do.
We used to be friends and now we're not. But he keeps coming over when I'm gone and it's driving me crazy.
I want to tell him he's got it all wrong: he doesn't have to be so furtive. I want to tell him to help himself to my things. I don't mind if he tries on my clothes; it's nice that we're the same size. I like that he listens to my music and that he watches my movies; I like that we have the same taste.
He'd be a welcome guest.
I'd like to see him, actually.
But he doesn't want that. He prefers this other way, this occasional, unpredictable forced entry. He prefers coming and going, leaving trails of crumbs and greasy fingerprints everywhere. Leaving traces and clues. He prefers leaving. Touching everything, and never being touched.
When God gives you papercuts, don't make lemonade.
Packing is one percent perspiration and ninety-nine percent procrastination.
Wanderlust wears on the sole [sic].
Treading water is only distinguishable from drowning in retrospect.
The danger of being clever is that your heart will choke on your tongue.
Of all the gin joints in all the towns in all the world, she walks into some other one.
Love is just PTSD in a pretty dress.
etc.
Another one of her husband's business functions tonight and it was her job to play the wife. She loathed these things but faked it admirably well for short durations. Mark—her husband's name was Mark—thought she might enjoy this one: "Samson will be there."
Everyone expected she and Samson got along, for obvious reasons.
Introverts, she reminded herself, expend energy in social situations. Whereas extroverts draw energy, ingest it. So it's not that there's anything wrong with me, per se, was her conclusion to herself. Nor does their ingesting of my vital energy automatically mean that extroverts deserve to be treated like sycophantic vampires, was her next thought. She took a deep breath.
"Don't worry so much," Mark counseled her.
"I'm not worried. I just need to get ready." She kissed him on the cheek and disappeared upstairs, settling in front of a vanity mirror.
"Who's the fairest of them all?," Rapunzel said aloud, running her hands through her famous hair.
The hair unfurled around her, spilled out of the bedroom, trailed down the stairs and flowed through the rooms of the house like she was a fountain. It was so lustrous that light hitting it reflected back onto the ceiling and made constellations.
She didn't need much time to tend to her hair. Most days, she didn't even brush it. "Silky locks slip." Every morning, she'd sit up in bed and coil it in armfuls, like a sailor's rope; and through the day, she'd maneuver her home by reeling the hair in and letting it out again with gentle swings of her arm. She left the bulk of it in the center of the house, in an atrium which had not been built expressly for that purpose but which suited it perfectly, a convenience she discovered days after first moving in.
Rapunzel had gotten so adroit at managing her hair that she barely noticed herself doing it. Stirring pots, sipping from her drink, talking on the phone, all the while winding and unwinding the lengths of her golden hair—passing the wooden spoon, the glass, the telephone, back and forth between her hands while unfurling her hair and coiling it back up; the delicate footwork, stepping over and around the masses of it that flowed from room to room: Mark watched her sometimes, the unconscious beauty of this dance, the native grace of her. She was the most beautiful woman in the land; and it was impossible to separate the image of her from that cascading wonder of her hair.
"It's a pain in the ass," she'd say, just before cutting it off. Mark would come home to discover her wearing an angular bob, cut above the shoulders, sharp and sudden across her face, she gleeful with the lightness of it. But sad, too, with loss—sad from the lightness.
No matter, because within days, the hair replaced itself: it grew out of her with unstoppable force, overrunning everything. "Where does it come from?" She'd sigh, but without anger, at the inevitableness of it—like someone who has come to the end of a too-short vacation—and begin again wrapping it into manageable shapes.
"If that hair is your worst burden in life," he'd say, "at least it's a beautiful burden."
"At least it doesn't tangle."
The truth was, she wasn't sure she liked her husband. She loved him—that was easy enough. It's not hard to love someone so known and so close for so long: she loved him, but maybe because what we mean by "love" is sometimes a nice, portable word to describe the shorthand, the easy easiness that we're lucky to experience with a few strangers over a lifetime. Love: a lack of the typical discomfort. Love: that which trickles in through the otherwise impermeable solipsism.
She imagined fairly precisely how the evening would play out among his colleagues and their wives: bravado and laughter and some of both not false. Inevitably, Mark would tell the story of how the two of them had met—the one story everyone knew already. "I was a petty thief!" he'd brag. "I broke into her home to steal from her!" He always ended the story the same way: "But as soon as I laid eyes on her, she robbed me instead: she stole my heart." He said this with a mix of syrupy storyteller's sweetness and also sincerity, such that she couldn't tell how much of it he truly believed. Maybe even he couldn't tell. That's the danger of recycling your best stories rote: habituation numbs everything.
She had an aversion to fruits and vegetables and it embarrassed Mark at these dinners. "She's allergic," he'd explain.
"I'm not allergic. I just don't like vegetables."
But to him this was uncomfortably close to admitting a true character flaw, so he'd confide to anyone: "When she was a baby, her family traded her for a bunch of rapini."
"Not rapini," she'd have to correct. "Rampion."
"Sorry. I knew it was rampion, I just said it wrong."
"Rapini is a broccoli..."
Since her twins Hercules and Tabitha had been born, she'd tried to reconsider her relationship to the produce aisle. It was difficult. Lately, Rapunzel found the simple act of grocery shopping to be stressful to the point of apoplectic paralysis: it offered a multiple choice set with nearly infinite questions and no correct answers. Salted or unsalted peanut butter? Fresh or frozen blueberries? Farmed or wild salmon? Low-fat cream cheese or fat-free cream cheese? NutraSweet or refined sugar? White bread or brown bread? Carbs or fat? She just didn't want to poison her family with whatever happened to be carcinogenic this week.
It occurred to her that so much of life is arranged like a multiple choice test with no correct answers.
She lingered, always, over the lettuce in the produce section, and wondered if the grocer stocked such a wide variety of it just for her, just to mock her. "Is lettuce even a vegetable? It's a leaf. Doesn't it need to have some substance before it's considered a vegetable?"
Too often, she came home with nothing but frozen pizza, red velvet cupcakes, and a case of wine. The pizza tasted like cardboard, but comforting cardboard, at least. Though she was mortified that time a girl in the preschool unpacked a Ziploc bag of fresh cherries and her daughter Tabitha asked "What's that?"; since then, Rapunzel made a point of buying whatever fresh fruit was in season, setting it prominently in a bowl in the kitchen, and then forgetting it there till it rotted and was replaced the following week. "The Bowl Where Fruit Goes to Die," Mark called it.
She pinned up her hair with relative ease. "Product makes perfect!" she'd joke, but in fact, she rarely used any, and the apparent effortless grace with which she managed her coiffure was a result of plain old practice. A few pleats and layers were all she needed to create striking dramatic effects. In general, she avoided ostentation, but for their wedding, she'd sculpted her hair into the shape of a castle, which, set upon her head, floated like it had been built upon a cloud. When her son Hercules first learned to crawl, she began fashioning her hair into elaborate mazes, and they'd make a game of his finding his way out, till one time a structural incident resulted in the collapse of one section of the labyrinth, and Hercules was suddenly buried under an avalanche of it. It scared him as only a child can be scared—no pain, but a deep feeling of betrayal at a world he'd trusted too completely—and that was the end of that particular game.
Lately, she'd taken to draping large sections of her hair up the sides of the walls, to get it out of the way, mostly, though it reminded her nostalgically of the ivy that grew around the tower where she'd spent her childhood. But once birds came and began nesting in it, Mark asked her to take it down.
Her real guilty pleasure, and where she spent her time, was her eyebrows. They grew suddenly, relentlessly, with the fierceness of a desert cactus hungry for its short spiny burst of life. She'd pull up to the mirror to tweeze her eyebrows into neat groomed shapes, plucking at them deliberately one at a time; and by the time she finished, they'd already have begun growing back. So she learned to tend them the way one tends a garden—that is, tending the garden that exists now, and also the garden that will grow in later. Studying the pattern of where they wanted to grow, she anticipated it; and rather than feud with it—it was a force of nature—she plucked in a way that she hoped would be complementary. The precision that this required was such that she could spend literal hours in front of her mirror—not, in the end, out of vanity, exactly, but more because of the calmness it afforded her. Staring so closely at her own reflection, she found she disappeared. Her worries receded into the simple task: tweeze and pluck. Tweeze and pluck. So close to the glass, her face ceased to be hers, and instead became its own landscape—her own face, a faceless alien landscape of pores and follicles; and staring longer, this dissolved further into just shapes, colors, no labels, no words.
She looked at the flush of her cheeks in the mirror and tried to imagine what her brain knew to be true, that it meant blood circulating under the skin in an almost infinite fractal of veins and capillaries: she imagined it like a magical river of lava, flowing underground through miles of unexplored tunnels. She imagined little boats coursing along this river, delivering their payload of globular vitality. "Hemoglobin." Little packets of oxygen. Oxygen, which she needed to live; and which also is a poison that ages and eventually kills us. We oxidize. Blood races through the bloodstream, gives us life and speeds us toward death. Aging is just rusting to death.
She tried controlling the flow by holding her breath, by breathing faster, watched for subtle changes in her complexion's mood, as if her complexion were a friend and they were playing a child's game of hide and seek. "Come, oxygen. Come out come out wherever you are. Come, death."
She breathed deeply. When she let herself be very still, her breath always touched up against some anxious part of her and jolted her out of the stillness, brought her back to the day and its worries: she'd been shopping all day for shoes with her friend Goldilocks—its own special Hell. "Those look nice," Rapunzel had said encouragingly.
Goldilocks wrinkled her button nose. "Too big."
"How about those? They're cute."
"Too small."
It never ended.
Goldilocks had a new lover and wouldn't stop talking about him, but she was fickle with men and everything else, and Rapunzel doubted the poor fellow would last the week. She smiled politely, thinking of all the couples she knew, and wondering if any of them were happy. One by one, she held them in her mind like an imaginary police lineup and tried to imagine which ones were cheating on their spouse. As a game, it helped her to pass the time, but she conceded that without any real information, it was just wistful conjecture, impossible to know, like trying to guess someone's birthday, or how they trim their pubic hair. (Goldilocks waxed regularly. Rapunzel, perhaps in deference to the obvious jokes about her own hair growth, was fastidious about keeping modestly trimmed.)
"Psychiatrist says nannies turn young boys into future adulterers," Goldilocks read aloud from the cover of a fashion magazine.
"The single leading cause of adultery," Rapunzel answered, "is marriage."
Her therapist had asked her once if she'd ever considered cheating. "Well, that depends on your definition of 'cheating'—." She'd found there was little point to being cloying with her therapist, but she kept at it anyway.
"What's your definition of cheating?" he asked.
"Would I ever consider cheating? Is that what you asked? Ever is such a horribly long time...."
"What's your definition of cheating?"
He wouldn't let up. Fine. "There are certain... How do I say it? Our marriage—I mean: any marriage—it's based on certain expectations and assumptions.... some of which aren't spoken. Aloud. So I mean there's a lot of room in marriage—any marriage—for misunderstanding...."
That hung in the air for an extra few moments. The air was thick in her therapist's office.
"Don't you agree?" she asked.
"What do you think are the misunderstandings in your marriage?"
For Christ's sake. "Where to begin? No. I'm joking. I was, you know, speaking generally. There aren't any particular disappointments in my marriage."
"Disappointments?"
"Yeah. No. Wait, what?"
"I asked you about misunderstandings in your marriage, and you said disappointments."
"Did I?"
"Yes."
"Interesting!"
They stared at each other, the perennial overpriced blinking contest.
"Would you like to talk about your disappointments?"
"I don't see the point really. Everyone has disappointments."
"What are some of yours?"
"Me? No. I was speaking generally."
On it went, hour after hour, week after week. Why did she even go?
[When you spend your childhood locked in a tower, when that tower is all you know, you don't consider yourself trapped, particularly. This is the boundary of your world. So when someone breaks into your tower and seduces you with rescue, well, "Rescue from what?" you ask. He says there's a bigger, more enticing world out there, full of possibilities; and you say, "What are possibilities?"
It's not his fault: he goes to some trouble, this liberator-thief: he has mainly good intentions. He even incurs some injuries bringing you into this new world. But being trapped is all you know. It's the only place you feel like yourself. You get a fresh start in a new, expansive garden, and the first thing you'll do, every single time, is build a wall. To make yourself feel more at home.]
Since she'd stopped being able to sleep, she'd been taking long walks in the night. Mark hated it. "Who walks? You look like an indigent person." But too he was worried about her safety, and as a concession to him, she strapped reflective strips to her heels to flash back the lights from oncoming cars. From the distance, she imagined they looked like two very small, very low-flying, very spastic UFOs.
He also bought her a ridiculous can of Mace, which she did not bring with her and which she thought wasn't even legal in their state.
The anxiousness wasn't even background noise. It was the air itself.
The walks got longer.
In the beginning, just looping through her own neighborhood at 4am felt exciting and forbidden. In the low light, even common things looked refreshed: she'd notice pocks in a tree, or a crack in a neighbor's house that she'd never seen before. Imperfections are everywhere, she began to think, but mostly invisible during the bustle of the day. Also, imperfections are where things become unique: the pocks and cracks are the main things that distinguish us from one another. So she'd quest for them, the flaws and subtle breakages, and once she saw them then her perception of that object would be altered; and she'd carry this new knowledge back with her into waking hours, like a secret. "Secrets make us stronger," Goldilocks had said to her once, while gossiping about her lovers. Rapunzel thought: secrets make our autonomy stronger.
Soon, like everything else, her furtive late night wanders fell into the familiar, and lost their excitement; and she found herself investing more time and more risk in her excursions. She'd go farther. She climbed the fence at the edge of their neighborhood and strolled the nearby golf club. By day it was overrun with men in pink shirts. By night, coyotes. Both were dangerous, she laughed, but lately she preferred coyotes.
What terrifies children? Big-clawed monsters so strange and unique that grown-ups don't even have names for them. Drowning. Supernovas. Being left behind.
What terrifies adults? Foreclosure. Being passed over for promotion. A declined credit card. Getting sick from food past its freshness date. The loss of comfort. The chance that we're missing out.
At what age do we become so banal?
"Rapunzel, Rapunzel, let down your hair." To let down your hair is to run wild. Did she ever do that, really?
What excites children? Sugar. Swimming pools. Bunk beds. Eating. New things. Familiar things.
What excites adults? She didn't claim to know. Tomorrow, maybe. Always the sense that tomorrow would be better. She'd do this tomorrow, she'd do it all tomorrow, because tomorrow there'd be sunshine and energy and money and time. When was this tomorrow? Why not anything today? Because today was always filled up:
"Hercules, do you want pasta or edamame? Pasta? Are you sure? You had pasta for lunch."
She loved them so much she could choke on it. She didn't even perceive them as separate from herself. Is this love? If I were to die today, I wouldn't die at all, as long as they continued.
She wondered how long her hair would grow, after she died.
"Tabitha, what are you eating, honey? No, mommy doesn't want a cherry. But you're sweet to offer. Here, spit out the pit, baby-girl."
She entertained the notion that perhaps Medea had killed the children less from rage or despair and more as a way to escape the exhaustion of so much feeling.
Rapunzel realized her children sprang from the same place as her hair: they both arrived, it seemed to her, from the future, from the great void; and they grew like her hair, too—unstoppably, as if the future had already fully imagined them in a realized state, and was sending incremental updates to the present. Oaks hidden inside acorns. This came as some relief to her: if her life was unpredictable and vaguely dissatisfying, then at least it was also preordained, and not her fault.
She could go on pretending it was real, this life, despite whatever evidence to the contrary. She'd keep at the eyebrows—not till they were finished (they never were or would be), but adequately reckoned with. If the eyebrows were an unanswerable question, then she'd keep at them till the question had been asked, at least. She could disappear, the way she'd disappeared tonight, into the mirror, into the rituals of her hair. She could disappear into whatever task was at hand. She'd put on elegant clothes, pin up her hair, wear all her finest charms. Her efforts would become focused, diligent, even aggressive—maintaining and expanding the illusion of her perfect happy life. This was her purpose. No matter that she didn't believe in it: it wasn't for her. "Happily ever after" was never for her. It was for the others, in their moments of feeling small or tired, a hope there's more and it's nearby, reachable, something that can be had and held and kept forever, as if there were such a thing as forever, as if there were such a thing as happy. The stories we tell our children are terrible, but not for the reasons we assume: a fairy tale is a series of small truths used to tell big lies—not the other way around—and people swallow them like sugar. And she was complicit, she knew. It was her highest purpose: to go to her husband and children day after day, and lie to them about love, and joy, and happily ever after—so they could go on living.
"I'm ready," she called.