Jezebel Parker [2], CC BY 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons
I fell in love with my best friend in high school because he was the first boy who could plausibly love me back. Angsty boys always had a way of catching my itty-bitty shoegaze heart. My love—it was a crush, but my nostalgic instincts want to call this love—blossomed to my awareness only after he came out, the summer before all our friends and I went off to different campuses in the University of California system.
He was cooler than me. He shopped at Hot Topic. He had the look of a tortured artist without having to make any art. He was the first person who introduced me to the Postal Service, in his bedroom; he said it was a new genre called electronic music, which I had never heard of. He adored the Blood Brothers, which I pretended to like but couldn’t stand. The Unicorns was about as far as I could get with the screaming-into-the-mic bit. The Blood Brothers, with their Satanic-sounding band name, were twitchy and manic on the vocals, bringing to mind some skeletal epileptic, screaming as he’s strapped by his wrists and ankles to a gurney before electroshock therapy. Alone, when I listened to the album Crimes, which came out my sophomore year, my mind would just flood with STOP, STOP, STOP. I couldn’t last the two minutes and twenty-three seconds of the opening track.
It’s a good soundtrack if you think that high school was supposed to be the best four years of your life and everything was downhill after senior year. I almost want to say that high school was the worst years of my life, but that isn’t true—those were my Saturn return. When I listen to “Love Rhymes with Hideous Car Wreck” now, it isn’t as intolerable as I remember it. I kind of like it. I seem to remember their songs as being devoid of melody, but this one has some discernable arpeggios amid the glossolalia, a sound that conflates the intensity of high school love with indie glamour. The song still smells like a white crew sock with last night’s dried cum.
—Geoffrey Mak
I have a copy of Through the Looking-Glass that once belonged to my ex. I would like to have read it. But when I finally got around to cracking it open, a photograph slipped out from the pages. The image was of children’s faces and a cake. I recognized a name written in icing on the cake and then my ex’s ex in one of the children’s faces. I don’t remember what I did with the photo. It felt weird to have it but also weird to throw it out.
I saw the woman in the photo a few years ago, sitting a few rows ahead of me at a performance in a SoHo loft. Right before the performance started, someone else trickled in and chose the only empty chair, which was in the first row. Immediately, another smartly dressed woman approached to explain the seat wasn’t available, then sat in it herself. It became apparent that this woman was the author of the work. She seemed to take herself very seriously. She watched the whole thing leaned forward, mouthing the actors’ lines along with them. The performance took itself very seriously. My ex’s ex, who also takes herself very seriously, seemed to enjoy it. My ex, on the other hand, has a sense of humor.
It makes sense to me that Through the Looking-Glass is a book that both a person who takes themselves very seriously and a person with a sense of humor would recommend. But what do I know; I’ve never read it.
—Whitney Mallett
Elizabeth Taylor, the great British novelist and short story writer, well knew the plot that recurs in any life, which is that one had planned on having one’s dignity, but, alas, no. Suddenly, disaster. A great scramble ensues. Shame, failure, illness, pain, regret, death: so much effort expelled to prevent any and all of these from happening, as happen they will. If this isn’t life, what do we mean, then?
Taylor’s last novel (but for the posthumous Blaming) is Mrs. Palfrey at the Claremont. It is the story of Laura Palfrey, recent addition to a small cohort of elderly tenants at London’s Claremont Hotel. My wife—who was also for a very short time my ex-girlfriend—recommended the book to me. I read it for the first time two years ago. At the time, I was getting over norovirus. I had fallen asleep on the couch, and when I woke up, I saw that the book was on the edge of the low coffee table, threatening to topple off. In the novel, Laura’s husband is dead. His memory haunts her the way old lovers sometimes do. Laura often recalls the time they spent together in Myanmar, where they lived as agents of the empire. But now it’s the sixties. When Laura’s grandson, her only relative in London, fails to pay her a visit, she nurses a private shame at being forgotten. “We poor old women have lived too long,” her pal Mrs. Arbuthnot informs her. On a walk one day, Laura falls down and hurts herself, and a young aspiring writer named Ludo Myers comes to her rescue. Ludo works at, not for, Harrods, where he writes all day long in the banking hall. They become true friends. She helps him. He helps her. It’s love and nothing more.
Obviously, Elizabeth Taylor has the same name as the actor Elizabeth Taylor. The writer had one husband. The actor had seven. Who’s to say who was happier? In Mrs. Palfrey at the Claremont, the writer Elizabeth Taylor does something rather mean that makes all the sense in the world. One of the first characters we meet in the novel is a Mrs. Burton (as in the wife of Richard, who married the film star Taylor twice). Mrs. Burton is an old alcoholic (“The drink has really taken its toll,” says Mrs. Arbuthnot). She is also a snob (“Before this I was at the Astor. Do you know the Astor?”). She is a lonely old woman who spends too much money at the hairdresser and sings to herself when she’s drunk. All of that is a bad turn for the writer Elizabeth to give to this movie-Elizabeth stand-in, but in the end, it’s Mrs. Burton who comes to Laura’s aid the last time Laura falls. It must have been hard for Elizabeth to see the other Elizabeth on screens and in magazines and to hear her name dropped everywhere she went. But what could she do about it? People have the right to live and be called what they want.
—Dan Bevacqua
I have an ex who until recently had never met anyone I know. We had only dated long-distance, approximately a hundred years ago. Then, last year, I introduced him to a friend as a setup—for a sublet (she was looking to temporarily fill her apartment; he was hoping to spend some time in New York).
The three of us had lunch together, and there at the restaurant, the friend referred to my ex aloud as that: “Natasha’s ex.” Each of us froze: Is that what he is to me? “Ex” is a useful shorthand for people I’d rather anonymize, like the letter x, an unknown variable. He only has one “ex,” though. He was married, and so he has an ex-wife; the rest of us are women he has known and may continue to know. To me, now, he is a person who encourages me to write and to read, as these activities are basically all he ever does himself.
He and my friend became close straightaway. They were first in touch over the apartment but then got to know each other by talking about the books she has there (and, presumably, me). During one of their phone calls, he recommended a book to her: The Unprofessionals, by Julie Hecht. She read it and, obsessed, proceeded to find every other work by the author.
I read it later and experienced the distinct joy of appreciating both the book itself and the fact that I had introduced such compatible people. Hecht speaks like her, and like him, and so I like her, them, a certain type of person: sometimes manic, demanding sophistication, and fascinated by the behaviors of others as if on safari. He should have recommended The Unprofessionals to me first, of course, but then maybe he did, and I ignored the suggestion because I was in the type of mood that doesn’t respond well to recommendations from an ex.
—Natasha Stagg
