Okay, let’s talk about these delays. This didn’t used to happen. I used to be able to sit myself down even in the doldrums of not wanting to and put out a good hour for the sake of continuity and my mental health. Now, I make all these promises…not even promises, but sort of internal suggestions and casual …what?... intentions to follow through on them, and instead I just end up doing something else, or watching TV, or doing anything that is perceived as more exigent. The funny thing is that I have a lot of stuff that I’m wanting to put down, but when I think about writing to you, it sort of all fizzles away. It’s almost as if I no longer want to write to you, but just to write; to put down those things that are swirling around me, journal-style, like Philip Roth…which I say as a segue to talking about The Counterlife, which I’ve been reading…finished reading…as part of that NYTimes list of the most important, or best, American novels published in the last 25 years. Did I tell you? Of course, being the sucker for lists that I am, I instantly glommed on to it as my next reading list. I’d read 7 of the 27 books mentioned, and I figured that if I could get to the other twenty I could officially call myself “well read.” I would get that distinction, like the heart for the tin man, that I am continually seeking…except then I will seek some other set of criteria for being well read and stress enough to follow that list that I am not in fact well read. [Please forgive that hobbled attempt at a sentence. I think I may have left out a clause somewhere; but the point I’m trying to make is that… Okay. Consider if you will those hierarchical criteria of ‘the good’ that I currently hold. If I should come across any list that appeals sufficiently to those criteria (for reasons of subject matter, pedigree, plausible claim to authority, etc.), I will not… This is not going well. Okay. Consider this factoid: I had been using the MLA list of the 100 best works of fiction of the 20th-century in the English language as a reading list. After I started using it, a couple other groups came out with their own lists – Radcliffe was one, and maybe the MLA published the readers’-responses list that they compiled – and I decided that it would be worth taking those lists into account as well. So I made up a new list of all of the works mentioned in those three lists and sorted them in order of the number of times that they appeared in any list – those works that appeared in all three lists, followed by two-listers, and the lone-listers bringing up the rear as a kind of background noise – and I proposed this to myself as a second reading list to replace the first list that I now supposed to be too ideologically skewed, or at least no longer in concert with whatever values I happened to hold at that point. Before too long, though – and certainly before I had made any real substantial progress reading my way through the other one – this NY Times list came out and more or less replaced that second list, because its sources (a large number of writers and editors) carried more authoritative weight in my eyes. Will my fickleness never end, and will I finally find a list that I can stick to? Or will I first stop caring about what some arbitrary group of bozos thinks I should have read but haven’t? My life is full of this kind of nonsense.] Anyway. So The Counterlife. I’m sure you’ve read Philip Roth. I can’t believe that I have waited so long. I read Portnoy’s Complaint long ago and loved it, but that was mostly because Bill talked about it a lot and quoted that wonderful Yiddish expression. (Pardon my inexact spelling: “Wen der putz stedt, licht der sechel in drerd.” When the dick speaks, the head buries itself in the ground.) Anyway, what’s been peculiar is that I have almost actively avoided reading him since, even though he has been continually acclaimed as one of the best (some would say the best) American novelists out there. So now as a result of my list lust, I pick up (or rent on tape) The Counterlife, which is extraordinary. I was amazed at how much that book spoke to me…as a writer, as a Jew, as a man. I don’t want to launch in to an extended encomium of the novel right here. But I should also…and this is one of the aspects that make me think of me and you…say that it is not surprisingly given Roth’s ongoing themes, steeped in psychoanalytic…what?...theory?...thinking?...perspectives? And the way this man – Nathan Zuckerman – goes through his life thinking… unrestrainedly, obsessively, and the perspectives that he brings to bear on his life…that’s what really speaks to me…although I wish I had his sex life. Anyway, so The Counterlife. The point that I wanted to bring up is that Zuckerman is constantly writing, and the book is very much about writing and its relationship to reality, and especially the relationship of a writer who is extensively and obsessively and unrepentantly mining his personal life for details…perhaps that even is an understatement…mining his personal life for the very fabric of his novels, and often betraying those to whom he is closest in the process. Throughout the book – it is in fact one of its main themes, again – there are discussions and repercussions of Zuckerman having put down nakedly and yet also perhaps distortedly the people in his life as characters in the book, and the people in his life are constantly seen as responding to their…what?...betrayal in print. Remind you of anything? Of course, I began to think of this blog and it’s relationship to the people in my life, and Zuckerman’s compulsion in relationship to mine as a writer to want to put it all down. Anyway, so what I am starting to think is that, while my desire to put it all down is unabated, I find the thought of writing it to you rather limiting. It is as if the…positing of a therapist’s couch actually structures the context of my writing such that…in such a way that I am not actually able to get out what I want to. And yet there’s the problem of who I would be writing to. And what the…format would be. For there is always format, even when format is deliberately discarded, that creates a format. And the very act of writing posits a reader, even if it’s myself, posited as the person who is instantaneously reading what I have written, which is the unavoidable condition of writing intentionally. Intentional writing is writing that already has a reader and that reader is the writer who has in effect already read the writing before it has gone down, who is ostensibly writing, even if in a stream of consciousness, with the same awareness of words that reading is. And that inevitability of the reader … demands the question of who the reader is. Is it just me? Is it the interested party? Is it my family? My friends? Is it some random person who is my intimate by virtue of the fact that he is supposed to have a vested interest in my subject. I don’t know. But the bottom line is that I have grown tired of the constraint of the couch (now a year after I have begun writing to you; I even skipped out on our anniversary) and want to explore some wider landscapes for the con--…context of my confessions, if I may be so pretentious as to call them that. Then there’s the problem of time. I really should be writing more frequently, but I have the ongoing problem of my screenplay, its molasses-like progression forward, and my need to use my weekday time for that. So I am afraid that once a week will have to suffice; perhaps even that will be difficult sometimes…though it was never a problem before. We shall see.

All that said: I now hate my son. He is all over the place, and he is not listening. He is very much two, and the only thing I can think of to do is to take him out and put him in an open field with no other children or hazardous objects around. I find myself saying ‘no’ constantly, and even grabbing things out of his hands and picking him up aggressively just to get him to fucking stop. No real insight on that, except that it makes me feel like a terrible parent, abrogates the intimacy that I have felt with him recently, makes us feel like distant adversaries rather than loving father and son. That makes me sad…and then when I try to follow scolding as quickly as possible with love, even if the scolding involves a time out or a taking away of an annoying object, I feel fickle, and like he will grow up and fault me for being mercurial and unpredictable. And Persis is always back-seat parenting, second guessing me when I get frustrated in a way that I never do with her. She…I am half convinced she is a lesbian. The other night we tried to reinstigate physical intimacy (if not sex…although the intention was, I thought, to have a date for after Burt went to bed to finally have sex again). And it wasn’t that we tried and failed. It was that Persis played the I-need-some-time-to-get-comfortable-being-physical-again card. And sure, I suppose that’s very womanly, but we ended up just cuddling, and it reminded me of the times that Gary and I would be making out at night in the bed and I would make some I’m-tired excuse or just want to cuddle but the real fact was that I was not admitting to myself at the time was that I just did not really go for sex with a man. Or sex with him. Anyway. (I hate that word now.) And call me vain, but I am not one to dislike sex with unless there is some more general principal operating. Anyway (argh!), I was reminded of those times that I made some excuse to just cuddle when what I really wanted to say was that I didn’t ever want to have sex with Gary, and I think Persis is too steeped in denial and trying to do what she imagines she is supposed to to own up to the fact of her sexuality. She says she has given…tried on being a lesbian…which trying on amounted only to discussing the possibility of her being so with her parents. And that suggests to me a desire to ‘already have done,’ to write off a possibility; which itself suggests some more…some deeper fear of actually exploring a possibility, which [possibility] I would consider having sex with a woman. She told me the other night…perhaps the same night, or some proximity thereof, that she wrote a get-back-in-touch email to a woman who was, in Persis’s words, ‘stalking’ her when they were working in the same department long ago. Which woman Persis says now has a stable partner (read: used to represent a threat of sexual…what?...possibility, but does no longer). And maybe it’s just misplaced jealousy, but I really question…and Persis is exactly the kind of person who would push this thing down so far as to be able to deny its existence. And she is so much…I mean I want to say that she is like a lesbian in bed. When we got in bed to cuddle the other night, the first ten minutes was taken up by complaints, which is also characteristic of her; as if what she is most present to when she is in bed with me is all the things in her life that are not going as desired. And when she kisses me, it is with these pursed hairy lips that cry out ‘you shall not pass.’ And it has become something that I am used to…and sometimes I forget that my responsiveness is still there (those moments when I maneuver myself under her and try to make her be more active, I am able to respond to her in a way that I feel is open and inviting…I move slowly, and sigh quietly, gently, but there is no reciprocation). Perhaps I am sounding foolish to you, and like someone who thinks he is good in bed, but isn’t. All I can say is that…and this is well trammeled ground with us…I have never had these problems before, and I can very precisely identify those qualities about Persis’s lovemaking that are…or that occur to me as obstacles, deliberately placed so as to avoid intimacy, to avoid contact, to avoid having to actually go through with the Act. She would say it is because – oh, and another thing she holds up as evidence of her straightness. She talks about a conversation she had with her high school prom date, who had since come out (as gay), and she and he were talking about the possibility that Persis was a lesbian (this must have been some time in college) and he apparently asked her a series of questions about her…I don’t know…feelings, sexual response, and then said, “I hate to tell you Persis, but I think you’re straight.” (Read: I have spoken to an expert, and I am citing his testimony because I myself am unable of saying [to say] so for certain, and that expert has pronounced me straight.”) And I think of her resistance to therapy, the fact that she has never really gotten involved as intensively as I have despite her pedigree of shrink parents (which she is so proud of; you know, one of the things that drives me crazy about her is that whenever we meet new people and she is talking about why Onyx introduced us she says that we were introduced because we were both…oh, I can’t believe I’ve forgotten the beginning of this…



…something like, ”Blah blah blah shrink kids completely obsessed with food.” And she says it as if she really believes that people will understand what ‘shrink kids’ means. And that is one of the things I have always found so offputting, even contemptuous about her: that she so often says things which she says as if her interlocutor is supposed to understand, but which are opaque to anyone who has not already been initiated into her lingo circle. And the effect is that it produces in the interlocutor a feeling of unintelligence, lesserness, outsiderness; which is precisely what I think she herself feels so often. This, I believe, is projective identification. Her speaking that way is designed (unconsciously) to produce that effect in the interlocutor… Oh yes, “…introduced because we were both ‘hyperanalytic shrink kids completely obsessed with food.’” Oh God that is like nails on a chalkboard to me now. And she says it as if she is so proud. And I just sit there sheepishly and decide not to repeatedly make a scene by telling her, disappoint her by telling that her little seven-word routine is probably lost on anyone listening, that nobody knows what she is talking about when she says that. That, of course, slings the projective feeling right back onto her. So I just sit there and leave the interlocutor to his or her own devices, hoping that he or she does not take me for the same alienating conversationalist that my wife is. Smart people will ask for clarification (though I don’t know if I remember anyone doing that.). Perhaps I am wrong, and perhaps everyone does understand. But she also says it so fast. It goes by like a whirlwind. And maybe it is reading too much into it, but the fact that she would want to present the circumstances in which she and I were introduced as a cipher to the interlocutor…does that not suggest a desire to project also her confusion and lack of understanding of our coupling on her part? I don’t know about that.)… But I do think, again, that it is funny that she presents herself as a ‘hyperanalytic shrink kid,’ when she has done (in my opinion, though she would violently object to this characterization) very little analyzing of herself, and has, if anything, reacted against the fact that both of her parents are analytically trained. She would like to think that she has explored her depths, but her copious anxiety is always evidence to me that she has not, and that she is ruled instead by the obscure passions that roil within her, which passions (even when they are as innocuous as requiring that I walk downstairs to get Burt water from the dispenser rather than just padding to the bathroom to get it from the faucet, even though our water (I have been told by one person) is some of the best in the world) are expressed and acted upon and in which she must involve me even though I try to tell her that she is being unreasonable. She always sees it as aggression on my part.

So I haven’t…well I guess I talked about Burt, but I haven’t talked about thinking about real estate (don’t know if I want to), the stretching out in front of me the writing of this script (even though it does progress forward consistently). I have a minute left and I guess I just want to acknowledge that this is some good stuff about my relationship with Persis and it goes a long way toward describing those few big issues that make my relationship with her a big disappointment, and which I kick myself (for they were indeed in evidence before we got married) for ever thinking…you were the one that opened my eyes to the possibility of forgiving myself because in fact I had hope once upon a time…ever thinking that we could have an adequate relationship. I was scared, chicken, to tell you the truth, of getting out of the relationship, too much trouble. And yet I never entirely fell out of love with her is also the truth, and I always had hope that things would get better. Now I am – though in this moment not actually miserable about it – settling into the realization that things are going to be this way for a long, long time, and very slowly, over time, and with full awareness of the (or aspiring to full awareness) of the consequences, trying to decide what, if anything, I should do.

Okay, to begin with, let me just get this out of the way: I hate my wife. I’m in Platte now, close to you, in Orange Grove actually because although the surface excuse is that we had a wedding here and it was just easier to sleep here rather than going back and forth to Wiltshire Park, in reality the reason we have spent two nights here is because Persis could not stand being around my family. And though I concede that she had some legitimate gripes given how lightly she sleeps and how crowded with people my…my mom’s house has been, it pains me to have to sleep away from the family that I regret having left for Ecksville. Burt has spent the night at their house, which is the only demand that I insisted upon. That if we could make it a trial run spending the night away from Burt and letting my parents have him, that that would be worth us going to Orange Grove and staying there, ostensibly to get some time alone, but really to get Persis away from my clan, whom I must say have started to irritate me a little too, mostly my mom and the way she really does play fast and loose with time and the way we would like to parent Burt. I’m not saying that I don’t understand what Persis’s gripes are; I just think she is constitutionally incapable of putting those gripes behind her and making peace. It’s as if she takes every opportunity to find fault with my mom and milks it for all it’s worth. This is not a problem with her relationship with my family; this is a problem with her character, and though I don’t assert here that I have nothing to work on, it is this trait that makes it increasingly likely I think that our marriage such as it is will not last another five years. Or maybe another five, but probably not another ten. I keep thinking about exit strategies, and the reality is that I would like to stay in it until I am on my own feet professionally, relying on her only so long as I have to and then s--…absquatulating. And then there’s the question of Burt. I will not leave him. I will either force Persis out of the house (because after all I am the primary caregiver) or I will find a way to purchase a home on the same cul-de-sac so that Burt can simply experience our separation as an expansion of his territory. Of course it would be best to do this while Burt is still young and doesn’t know any better; that way it would just be like, “Oh, so mommy and daddy, who sleep in separate rooms, are now living in different houses and I can just go from one to the other as I please.” I don’t think he would mind that very much, and I imagine he would still get occasional times with the two of us together. Persis says with pride that she doesn’t want to be in a relationship with someone who is ambivalent being in a relationship with her, that she deserves to have someone…be married to someone who is excited to be with her, and while I have no quarrel with that statement generically, the reality is that I think she is way overestimating her desirability. You know, she says these things, like she wants more foreplay, that I have never respected her sexually, that I have never taken the time to do what she likes to do; but the reality is that these comments are all based on wishful thinking, negative fantasies about my role in the decline and fall of our sexual relationship that exempt her entirely from what has gone wrong. Anyway, for example, she says she likes playing with food and body paints. And, I mean, call me a stick in the mud, but that just doesn’t appeal to me. I mean, why would I want to lick chocolate off someone’s body when what I really want to do is lick, caress someone’s body. It’s the very shirking, avoidance of direct and intimate contact that I think Persis is incapable of leaving behind. What I’m saying, in other words, is that in some sense, Persis would like nothing more than to deal with nothing other than foods and body paints, avoiding entirely the murky, slimy, and invasive, intimate, vulnerable question of the body itself. I don’t know. I don’t know if I would feel so negatively toward those things if they arose in the context of a sexual relationship that was already freeflowing. But anyway, she paints me as this sexual clod, this selfish masturbatory pornographic and objectifying guy and I just don’t think that’s who I am. Anyway.

I don’t know where all this goes. I was having a fine time until she (this is in Platte; I came down last Wednesday, and she came Thursday) came down, and then it all went to hell; and now she’s leaving today and I’m staying on until Tuesday and I expect that I will have a fine time until I go back home to struggle anew with the shrew that she maintains that she is not. She needs therapy. We need therapy.

My cell phone rings. It is my mom or Bill. I’m going over there this afternoon after I deal with stuff at our rental place, starting the process of upgrading the whole thing. I hope I have some good times with Bill. I despair of having good times with my mom beyond simply expressing to her how grateful I am that she is taking care of Burt so much while I am here and telling her that I love her despite my grumpiness. The grumpiness comes from the fact that I cannot talk to her about my problems with Persis (which after all figure very large, loom very large in my emotional life right now) because she is at the root of them. It is hard even to talk to Bill about those problems. And of course I can’t talk to Persis about the things that irritate me about my mom because she will not only agree with me, but she will use those things, especially the specific incidents as fodder for her great pyre of resentment towards her. So the upshot is that I am basically isolated, abandoned with these very painful feelings of anger and sadness about the relationship between my mother and my wife, and I cannot talk to either of them – two people with whom I am more involved emotionally than anyone else in the world – because they are the sources of the conflict and neither can just listen to me as they might be able to if I were, say, griping about a job.

So that’s the nugget of it: that I am alone with these feelings, these terrible feelings, and can only really air them to Reinhardt, who is helpful, but who is not after all anyone who can do anything to alleviate the problem other than just provide a willing ear and to affirm the pain that I feel, and that no one seems to pay attention to, as a result of the conflict between these two women. Why can’t they just get along?

You wouldn’t know it, but a week ago I experienced an epiphany of sorts, that is changing the way I encounter conflict in my life. I was…I’ll tell you the digest version because the whole thing is…well, let me just begin and see where it takes me. I was standing in a Chinese restaurant in Riverdale on Sunday morning, holding Burt, waiting for our number to be called so that Persis and Burt and my sister Laila and I could sit down and have dim sum. And there was a great deal of tension coming to bear on me, because everyone had his or her own agenda, and like this weekend I seemed to be in the middle of it all. Persis who (and get this: that weekend was similar to this in that Burt and I went up to Riverdale early to spend some time with my sister before Persis came up the next day, and sure enough, when she arrived the whole thing went to shit…or perhaps not so extreme because she and my sister get along a little better than she and my mom do. But they next day the tension was thick enough that you could…you know…and we had taken the bus from the hotel to the restaurant at my request, insistence, and Persis all the while was nervous that we would arrive late and not beat the crowds and have an intolerable wait, and so the fact that the bus did not come as quickly as we would have liked was something that Persis brought up again and again and again and again (you cannot imagine this woman’s capacity to beat a dead horse until it looks like ground beef) until eventually I stopped responding to her because my sister was there too and my family hates the kind of endless repetition of regret and blame (and when applicable, physical discomfort) that Persis seems to indulge in as a hobby. And so when we got there there was indeed a line, and of course Persis was both happy (gloating, happy that she could twist the screw in a little deeper at every opportunity) and frustrated that she was not able to sit down and eat and that we had not in fact beaten the rush (though in fact we had, as she herself realized, when five minutes later the line got about three times as long as it was when we arrived). And I was holding Burt in this restaurant and he was watching the food go by on the carts and doubtless wondering why he couldn’t have any, and I was hungry, and Laila was at least being civil about the delay that taking the bus rather than driving created, sitting in a corner reading past New York Times. And I felt a great deal of pressure. I was feeling intensely anxious just waiting there and I was holding Burt and rocking back and forth and I closed my eyes and allowed myself to drift up and away from the situation and I realized as I stood there rocking and feeling this pressure that everything I was responding to was external to me and that I could, in contrast to what I always do in such situations, simply relax my body and view these negative stimuli as outside of me and ultimately powerless to hurt me. This is a little bit of condensation, and not as…well, poetic…as the moment felt, but it really did initiate a change in my response to interpersonal stress that I have been trying to implement in the last week. And it has not always worked: I still get angry, and I still express it in sometimes forceful and…unpleasant ways, but it has actually made me more able to say things that I need to say in order to clear my head. But what I am focusing on in those moments is relaxing my body, and as kooky as it might sound, I am increasingly aware that the reflexive tension that rushes in to my body when I a--…when I encounter conflict or stress…that somehow that is responsible for my outbursts, my letting the situation carry me away, or at least that it is intimately correlated to it, because I find that when… Like last night, Persis and I were having a conversation that involved at numerous points her telling me and my telling her what we were discontented by in the relationship. And as she was talking to me, I was constantly reminding myself to relax my shoulders, my neck, my jaw. And as a result, I began to be able to see the anger, the reaction to her words forming in me and to instead to respond to her from a position of understanding, even while holding my own perspective as valid. So it wasn’t like a war between her perspective and mine. It was her simply articulating her discontent, which of course, involved me, and which was often hard and sad to hear, but which I was not letting get to me and make me angry as it might have two weeks ago. I don’t know if this will ultimately be good for our relationship because it will make me more likely to say those things – to realize when I am tensing up and withholding truth from her – that will not heal things.



But it does make me more able to see, I think, our situation with a greater amount of…I probably shouldn’t say objectivity…but at least understanding and compassion. But that, again, doesn’t mean sacrificing my own perspective, which I think she would like me to do. I think she sees the whole thing as a war, and that she must trump and disarm my perspective with her own. Thus every time I try and tell her what I am feeling about something that is not working out, she counters with, “And I feel that…,” and this makes me feel like she has disregarded what I have said in order to defend herself against it by rolling out her own perspective in which I am not performing properly.




I don’t know. The more I think about, reflect on our relationship, the less hope I have for it to change; and she gets mad at me about my resignation, but I really don’t see in her any willingness to or likelihood of change. Perhaps I need to change too. But one might also say that the guy who is in psychoanalysis four times a week, is trying harder to change that the one who…well than she is.

We went to a wedding, as I said, this last wedding, and I was amazed, distressed by the stultifying conversation that Persis seems very gifted at getting herself into. I have never spent so much time being so bored by someone who is ostensibly having professional conversations with lawyers, and judges. I am generally interested in people’s work, in the nuts and bolts and the conversations that go on, but for Persis, it’s almost as if she doesn’t know how to have a conversation that has a core of humanity, and instead is always talking about these professional things that she’s doing and getting on the radar screen of whomever she’s talking to.


My eyes are closing. I fell asleep twice on the freeway the other day, and when I pulled off for my exit, I pulled over and left the engine on and closed my eyes and unexpectedly drifted off for forty-five minutes. I don’t know why I’m so tired; I seem to be getting enough sleep; more I think then...

How was I going to finish that sentence…?

More sleep I think than I have been getting in Ecksville. But still eleven [a.m.], twelve rolls around and I can’t keep my eyes open. that’s a drag.

(Picking my nose.)

I am conscious, of course, of my laxity with respect to my notes to you. I am still hung up on the…

How was I going to finish that sentence; I drifted off.

I am still hung up on the…

Now I just drifted off and thought of my dentist whom I’m going to see tomorrow.

Uch. I hate this feeling, where after every concerted action, you just drift off.

Anyway. What now?

A big pause as I drift off again. Perhaps I will call it quits.

But I think I can finish that other sentence by saying that I am still hung up on both the fact that my friends are reading and also that you are not, and that I cannot be completely open with what I say. And that on the other hand…you’re probably busy with something, other things, and this is probably what…I drifted off again there…

Anyway…you get the idea…ambivalent about writing [to you]. And right now just about everything else.