Free The Art of Intimacy by Stacey D'Erasmo Page B

Of Human Bondage, etc.). In the first scenario, he will inevitably trade her in for an even younger, newer model, particularly as his prowess declines. In the second scenario, she will ruin his life and perhaps, one way or another, he will end up dead, either literally or figuratively. If one proceeds from either of these two assumptions, the story writes itself. In the first scenario, he must be powerful, vain, and cold and she must be nothing but her physical beauty. In the second scenario, she must be a dark temptress and he must be repressed, tragic, possibly foolish, definitely balding. Humiliation must be part of the emotional tapestry; secondary characters must offer warnings that go unheeded; the power of illusion and self-delusion must be part of the theme. Comic set pieces can be expected.
    Why bother even writing the rest or, indeed, reading it? We’ve already decided that we know what the intimacy between these two must be, we’re sure of what they say to one another in the dark, we’ve assigned it a low value on the intimacy scale that forecloses on surprise, certainly on any real pleasure or dramatic tension in their union. All that’s left to the writer is coloring in the outlines with more or less wit and with greater or lesser degrees of empathy. But what if the writer allows that she doesn’t necessarily know what goes on between these two? What if she pauses to look closer? What if, for instance, the older man is an eminent artist in a wheelchair and the younger woman found herself, to her own surprise, falling passionately in love with him? What if the older man is white and the younger woman is African American? What if she is still deeply connected to the female lover she lived with for twelve years? What if the older man delights in the younger woman, but also envies her the freedom, on all levels, that is slipping from him every day? What if she’s an aspiring artist, but not a very good one? What if he knows this but doesn’t tell her, out of love? What if she knows that he knows this, too, but doesn’t tell him, also out of love? What are her feelings as she wheels him up over a curb, the heavy wheelchair barking her shin? What are his? What do these two say to one another in the dark?
    And so on. One doesn’t have to ask if this older man and younger woman have produced the ideals of the Enlightenment in each other to be interested in what goes on between them or, possibly, to find meaning, resonance, and unexpected revelations in their story. Nor does one have to champion this pair and hand out narrative rewards in compensation for their cultural suffering—prejudice against the disabled, racism, homophobia. Maybe they live happily ever after, maybe they don’t; maybe the intimacy between them has revelations to offer about love, or maybe it doesn’t bear on love (or hate) at all. The Great Theme here at the end of the day could be art, it could be mortality and the power of time, it could be an inchoate dissonance between human beings that suggests the limits of intimacy, however strongly felt. It could also, as the conventions with which I began suggested, be a story of use. There’s no reason to take that off the table as a possibility. However, it isn’t the only possible story. In life, that isn’t the case; why should it be the case in art?
    It was Oscar Wilde who quipped, “Life imitates Art far more than Art imitates Life.” Or, as Joan Didion put it in a kinder mode, “We tell ourselves stories in order to live.” When we come to the page hoping to reveal something about intimacy, it is all too easy to force the rough, wayward, polyphonous, uncertain nature of this phenomenon into shapes that we already know and then come to foregone conclusions. We are anxious about intimacy, we crave it and fear it, and as a culture we can have a low tolerance for its essentially mercurial nature. One of the quiet implications of Nan Goldin’s work, for instance, is the durational