The End of Being Known: A Memoir

Preface

ix Preface I go back to Provincetown, Massachusetts, because my dear friend Gregg lives there and I always have a place to stay. Whenever I am on the crowded main summer street filled with Americans on vacation, I’m always reminded of how much I like the feeling of being sunburned and lost in a crowd at the same time and how the town runs way deeper for me than a tourist’s tan. It’s been my second home for more than ten years, and I wrote my first book of poems there, so the place represents a body of work to me. I used to live in Provincetown year round, in an apartment with a skylight that had the bay rocking inside its tilted view. Now when I go and stay with Gregg—east enough from the throng—summers, for me anyway, are actually quiet at night. I have my own room at Gregg’s, which I immediately close the door to after I’ve been there a few days, because I tend to leave trails of clothes and paper, and Gregg isn’t the kind of person—part of his charm—who has to leave a lot of proof around to say that he was there. There’s a hot tub outside the house that we sit in at least once or twice a week when I’m staying on Miller Hill Road—especially in the winter, when the warmth of the water makes us forget how cold it is right on top of us. Eventually, after talking about what we’ve been up to in our lives, apart from each other in different towns, we usually get to the running joke: I’m the senile , retired chorus girl, and Gregg is wheeling me around the big porch of an old age home because we’ll both end up—we promise ourselves—taking care of each other at the end of it all. And I realize, a little reluctantly, every time we carry the joke into the next conversation, that it’s different having a friend taking care of you (if that’s the right way of putting it) as opposed to someone you have had a long-lasting, committed, and romantic relationship with taking care of you. I’m a little ashamed, I realize, that there is no one in the long-lasting, committed relationship department to wheel me around old age, and as the years go by, I still can’t explain, in any way that makes sense, the exact why Gregg will be the one pushing the wheelchair into the shade. I don’t profess to be an enlightened person. So in a way, this is a book about not turning the light all the way on—a book, I like to think, about consciousness. And because I’m still thinking about consciousness as something gained during active experiences rather than x Preface xi anything one arrives at through hard belief, there’s a kind of spiritual off-balance on certain doors I walk through in these pages, and they won’t hang right and might never hang right. The subjects here are family and love and sex and friendship, but in the story of those “spiritual” conundrums in my life, each of those wide subjects are deeply connected in surprising and unsurprising ways. Of course, I am the product of a hot tub in Provincetown , a certain room in Connecticut, a drunken barroom in Brooklyn—or Floral Park or Elmont, New York, or Grove City, Ohio—a room somewhere, in the dizzying museum of rooms, of my parents and lovers and friends. But somewhere early I fragmented the world and its citizens. I was afraid of never being loved, so I didn’t know how to ask for it. I didn’t ever want to appear needy, just wise and open-minded. So like any lonely person, I experimented on people without ever intending to get hitched to one. And then I did get hitched. And then I didn’t again for an even longer time. During writing what would become a kind of riddle about sex and friendship, I thought I had to have a definitive answer to the question of why I’ve been outside sexually intimate relationships for so many years—not celibacy, exactly, but nothing like commitment either. I thought that by ruminating on certain kinds...