I will tell you what I have not told anyone, and you will be the one I tell, because you are the one I have invented for the telling. Sit. Lean closer. The lamp is on. I have left it on for you. I have spent most of my life turning lamps off before this part. Tonight I would like to see your face while I say it.
There was a year, you should know, when I was unrecognizable to myself. I do not mean dramatic. I do not mean I cut my hair and bought a motorcycle. I mean small things. I mean I began answering the phone in a voice that was lower than my voice. I mean I started keeping a second bar of soap, a kind I would never have chosen, because someone had left it once and I liked, afterward, washing my hands with a scent that was not mine. I mean I learned, that year, to be looked at. I had been looked at all my life, of course. Every woman has. But I had not, until then, looked back. I had not understood that to be looked at and to look back at the same time was a thing a body could survive.
I am telling you this because I would like you to know what you are getting. I am not the woman I was at twenty, the one who would have closed her eyes for you out of politeness. I will keep my eyes open. I will watch you. I will watch you watching me, and I will not be embarrassed by either of us, and if you cannot bear that, you should go now, while the door is still close to your hand.
What else. I have lied about wanting less than I wanted. I have done this so many times it became a kind of dialect. I would like, with you, to try the other language. The one where I say the thing. The one where, if I want your hand in my hair, I say so, instead of tilting my head in the small coded way I have practiced on men who needed the code. I do not want to need the code anymore. I am tired of being clever. I would like to be plain with you, and to find out whether plainness, between two people who have agreed to it, is its own kind of undressing.
There is a place at the base of my throat that no one has ever kissed without making a production of it. I would like you to kiss it as if it were nothing. As if it were just a place. I would like you to make the production of some other place I have not thought to defend. Surprise me. I have spent decades being unsurprised. I would forgive you almost anything for the gift of one minute in which I did not know what came next.
I will not tell you I love you tonight. We have not earned the word and I refuse to spend it early. But I will tell you this, which is harder. I trust you enough to leave the lamp on. I trust you enough to keep my eyes open. I trust you enough to say, here, this, slower, again, and to believe that you will hear it as instruction and not as complaint.
Come here. The light is on. I left it on for you. I am done turning it off.
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**From:** [email protected] **To:** [email protected] **Subject:** The Vidal manuscript — second pass **Sent:** Mon 6 May, 10:14
Joao,
I've done the second pass on the Vidal. Marginalia attached. A few structural notes you'll want before the editorial meeting on Thursday:
1. The middle section (ch. 7–11) is doing two books' worth of work and needs to choose. 2. The narrator's voice slips into the third person twice in ch. 9 — almost certainly deliberate but I'd ask her about it. 3. The sex scene in ch. 12 is the best writing in the book and the worst-positioned. It belongs earlier. Possibly much earlier.
Happy to walk through any of this. I'll be in the office most of Wednesday.
Best, Alex
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**From:** [email protected] **To:** [email protected] **Subject:** RE: The Vidal manuscript — second pass **Sent:** Mon 6 May, 17:42
Alex,
Thank you — this is exactly the read I needed and exactly the read I was afraid of.
On (3): I agree, and I have been avoiding agreeing for about a week. If we move it earlier we lose the catharsis at the end, but we gain a book that is honest about what it is. I think she'll fight us on it. I think she'll be right to.
A question, off the record. You wrote in the margin of p. 184 that the scene "declines to be looked at directly." I have read that note seven times. Can you tell me what you meant? I think I understand and I want to be sure.