Empathy Read online

  I wonder if this meditation could have come from a wish to expand on the enormously effective, yet somehow strangely prescriptive, slogan we then lived by, that “SILENCE = DEATH”? In another passage, Anna reflects that while “SILENCE = DEATH” may be true, “Voice does not necessarily equal Life.”

  Schulman’s other forte is trendspotting. Born in the wrong era, she would have been an excellent practitioner of Mass Observation. “Doc’s focus moved away from the hopeful and on to the fact that more and more people on the street were opting for nonfunction at an increasingly early age. So many men and women stick needles in their arms.” These aren’t facts per se, since they’re reported from Doc’s point of view, but they feel as though they’ve been observed. Anna considers options for success in 1991: HIV counseling, hospice work, teaching English to Russians. Trendspotting is Sarah Schulman’s fingerprint, and you can see it running right through all her work. If, as has been suggested, Jonathan Larson was influenced by People in Trouble while writing his musical Rent, for me the smoking gun is the detail about all the people synchronizing their watches to take their meds all at the same time. Nobody but Sarah Schulman would have commented on this, or even noticed the beautiful heartbreak of it. One might disagree with her social analysis, or marvel at how different life is on the Lower East Side than here in San Francisco, but like most people, I only notice trends when they jump up and kick me in the face. But just because she covers the big picture doesn’t mean she has no eye for the telling human detail, the particulars. Indeed, the tension in her writing derives largely from her ability to sort of play each vision off of the other. Anna mourns the future that never came, the tomorrow promised by yesterday’s futurologists. “The Weekly Reader had said that by 1990 she’d be flying around with jet packs. People would speak Esperanto and wear high-topped sneakers as they suited up for lift-off.” Variants of these predictions do transpire in Empathy, but with significant differences. If not by jet pack, Anna does fly around, most notably on a nightmarish holiday to Djakarta, which she recalls in a soliloquy to Doc halfway through the book; it is Empathy’s single longest setpiece and, I think, the emotional crux of the novel. It’s not just the East Village, or New York, or North America, that our lack of empathy has distorted to the point of madness; the divorce from feeling has infected even the most faraway, nearly “innocent” places. Anna’s journey, accompanied by a thoughtless girlfriend, Lucy, comes in the middle of the book because, in classical epic, that’s where the voyage down to Hell traditionally appears. “At the next table was a fashionable, clean-cut Japanese man dressed exactly like a fashionable clean-cut American man circa 1962. Only now that look has come back. You know, the nerd look. Tortoiseshell eyeglasses, khaki bermuda shorts, and white sneakers.” It’s so hot that sand stings through her shoes. “Kids were following us the whole time and I could smell my own flesh broiling.” And everywhere they go, people tell them that Bali is “baguse,” meaning cool. It’s an Orwellian vision of language turned inward to fertilize a lie. In a world without connection, there’s no in, and no out. There’s no more there, thus there’s no more here.

  “Now we may perhaps to begin?”

  I’ve had the strangest experience re-reading Empathy for the purposes of writing this essay. All kinds of feelings are returning, like the pins and needles feeling you get in your extremities after a long stillness. “Déjà vu” doesn’t cover it. Late in the novel, two of Doc’s patients, Jo and Sam, rehearse their Virginia Woolf neurosis in playlet form. “You’re a hundred percent wrong, a hundred percent wrong, a hundred percent wrong.” Reading this passage, I flashed on an evening fifteen years ago, when I created the part of Jo on stage in a bookstore in San Francisco during an evening of “Poets’ Theater.” This was the very same bookstore that was turned into a swamp by US federal agents in Swamp. Christian Huygen played Sam and I was Jo, and as you’ll see, the play “Failure” begins with us kissing in the last minutes of bliss before a decisive argument. Our kiss lasted long enough for me to feel aroused and heady. We were directed to stay kissing until it became uncomfortable. And when “Sam” laid into me with his repeated, ever more vicious declarations that I was “one hundred percent wrong,” tears stung my eyelids; I felt my face grow red in front of the whole room. I knew I was “acting,” that Christian wasn’t really my boyfriend, that he didn’t hate me, and yet physics reached in and grabbed my ankles, knocking me on my ass. As the play reached its climax, I was shaking with grief, flayed. People in the audience clapped and cheered, but I only caught that on tape, much later; in the heat of the moment I kept quaking and blinking, my whole world torn out beneath me. And thus this little playlet might serve as emblematic of the apparently loose, baggy structure of the novel it wound up in. As you’ll find out sooner or later, Empathy is in portmanteau form and contains everything but the kitchen sink (and in fact it does have a kitchen sink in it too). Is it a miscellany, pure and simple? If so, in this book (and in its equally excellent successor, Rat Bohemia), Schulman found a way to bring life back to the novel, which in effect is the same as bringing life back to, well, life. Now we may perhaps to begin?

  - San Francisco, December 2005

  Empathy is dedicated to David, Gloria,

  Helen, Charlie, Isabel, and in memory of Dora

  Leibling Yevish, born in Tarnopl, Austro-Hungary,

  on Rosh Hashana 1899 - died in New York

  City on February 19, 1982.

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  I am very grateful to all my friends who gave me invaluable support during the development of this novel. In particular, I offer special thanks to Deborah Karpel with love and appreciation and to the following individuals:

  Bettina Berch, Peg Byron, Lesly Gevirtz, Steve Berman, Diane Cleaver, Carl George, Lesly Curtis, Anne Christine D’Adesky, Jackie Woodson, Ruth Karpel, Ochiichi August Moon, Su Friedrich, Jim Hubbard, Kenny Fries (whose observations on the phrase SILENCE = DEATH are incorporated into this manuscript), Cecilia Dougherty, Carla Harryman, Bo Huston, Dan Carmell, Rachel Pollack, Laurie Linton, Betty Tompkins, my brothers and sisters of ACT UP, Jennifer Montgomery, Eileen Myles, Marie Dagata, Amy Scholder, Rachel Pfeffer, Kathy Danger, Beryl Satter, Julia Scher, and, always, Maxine Wolfe.

  I appreciate the careful reading and specific comments that were offered to me by Dorothy Allison, Mark Ameen, Andrea Freud Lowenstein, Sharon Thompson, and Gary Glickman with a precision that was especially helpful.

  For financial and business assistance I thank Tom Hall and the San Francisco Intersection for the Arts, the Cummington Community for the Arts, Sanford Greenburger Associates, Connie Lofton, John Embry and Mario Simon, and Dr. Irving Kittay for leeway in paying my dental bills.

  I am very lucky to have had the opportunity to work with my editor, Carole DeSanti. Over the course of six years and three novels we have developed a resonant communication about writing and daily life that is uniquely meaningful for me. Her professional and imaginative guidance have been inspiring throughout.

  Some of her intellectual attributes could be associated with masculinity; for instance her acuteness of comprehension and her lucid objectivity, insofar as she was not dominated by her passion.… It signified the attainment of the very wish, which, when frustrated, had driven her into homosexuality - namely, the wish to have a child by her father.… Once she had been punished for an over-affectionate overture made to a woman, she realized how she could wound her father and take revenge on him. Henceforth she remained homosexual out of defiance against her father.

  - SIGMUND FREUD

  “A Case of Homosexuality in a Woman”

  1920

  Prologue

  Anna sat in the dark as the radio crackled like one emotion too many. Her passion was like sweat without the sweat. It had no idea. No idea of what clarity is. It was two holes burned in the sheet. It was one long neck from lip to chest, as long as a highway. Hot black tar, even at night. A guy spits in the next apartment. There’s a dog on the roof.


  In Anna’s mind they were two scarves, two straps, two pieces of fresh pine wood. How many body parts can a person have? It’s unfathomable.

  MY SUGGESTION

  ANNA O. and the woman she loves are together in Anna’s stark apartment. The WOMAN, handsome and wicked, is sitting in a simple chair. ANNA is standing coyly within range of her lover’s arms. They refrain from touching. ANNA feels casual and pleasurably feminine.

  ANNA

  I don’t think it affects me, actually. I don’t have any problem with it. Don’t you believe me? Honey?

  WOMAN

  I believe you.

  ANNA

  You’re very sexy to me.

  WOMAN

  Does that make you nervous?

  ANNA

  No, it makes me feel good.

  WOMAN

  Talk some more so I can watch your mouth move.

  ANNA looks at her inquisitively, wondering if that was an order. But she gets so caught up in the woman’s beauty that the question gets lost.

  ANNA

  About?

  WOMAN

  About romance and…a car.

  ANNA

  A car and a lover and a loud radio. The top was down. The sun was bright. I drove with my left hand and got her off with my right. I felt her come in my hand as I was speeding and I remember thinking, This is love. This is fun. Then we pulled over and laughed. I was so comfortable.

  WOMAN

  Happy.

  ANNA

  Yes. Relaxed. More?

  WOMAN

  Tell me about a mistake you made. A big one.

  ANNA

  A mistake?

  She hesitates, surprised.

  ANNA

  Wait.

  WOMAN

  What are you doing?

  ANNA

  I’m looking to see if I can trust you.

  (Looks)

  Yes, I trust you. I met a woman and a man and we got too close. There was the inevitable night of drinking and teasing until we decided to play a game.

  WOMAN

  At whose suggestion?

  ANNA

  My suggestion. We decided that each one would say their fantasy and the other two would fulfill it.

  WOMAN

  Uh-oh. I don’t do that anymore. So, the man went first …

  ANNA

  The man went first and he wanted us to …

  WOMAN

  Make love in front of him.

  ANNA

  No, not so easy. He wanted his dick in our mouths. Then it was Joanie’s turn.

  WOMAN

  And she wanted you to get him off.

  ANNA

  Of course she knew I hadn’t fucked a man in about eight years, but she wanted me to climb on top of him and fuck him. And I did. No problem, like I said. I have no problem with it.

  WOMAN

  Then it was your turn.

  ANNA

  I said I wanted Jack to leave the room and I wanted to make love to her, but she said no.

  WOMAN

  No?

  ANNA

  She refused. Now what do you want me to do?

  WOMAN

  There’s this peach slip that has been under your dress all evening. Let me touch it.

  ANNA O. takes off her dress and stands in front of the WOMAN in her slip. The WOMAN touches it.

  BLACKOUT

  Later there was a whipping in a hotel room. That woman made her pay a dollar before she let her come. There was sex in a telephone booth, on the pier, in a public bathroom. She kissed her with someone else’s pussy on her breath.

  Anna walked to the end of the bedroom and looked out the window through the hot iron gates. She walked through the kitchen, dirty linoleum sludging underneath her feet. The cigarette was burning. She opened the front door to see a different kind of light. Someone was coming up the stairs. It was cooler in the hallway. The moon was red through the staircase window.

  Up close that woman looked very different. She was still a princely beauty but she wore a rough, white, dirty, sleeveless T-shirt like some guy. Her nipples hooked its edges. The hair under her arms was black smoke, wire, a raccoon tail, dry polish.

  “What’s the matter?” Anna said.

  “Remember that fight we had last winter?”

  “Yes.”

  “Well, I was thinking about it,” the woman said. “And then I finally realized something.”

  “What?”

  “I realized that I’m not a lesbian anymore. I realized that women don’t have fun together. I realized that that’s not love. I realized that men are heroes after all.”

  As for Anna, she was caught in a burning apartment. There were flaming rafters and charred beams falling all around her. There was smoke choking her. But it had happened so fast she had not yet decided to flee. She was still, unrealistically, trying to determine which items to take along.

  “What is your definition of a hero?” she asked.

  “A hero is someone you can be proud of,” the woman said. “To be proud of someone he has to be bigger than you so you can look up to him. You can feel safe when he is near you. Especially a man who has soft skin. When a man is near you who has soft skin, soft and sloping like a woman’s, then you can feel safe.”

  “But he’s not a woman?”

  “No.”

  Anna did not want to understand. She knew this word he. She’d heard it before in every circumstance of her life. But what did it mean? What did it really mean?

  “What is your definition of fun?” she asked.

  “Fun,” the woman explained, “is when you get what you’ve always imagined. When you’ve always known what you want and then you get it. With a woman you can’t have this because you’ve never imagined what you’ve wanted. There’s no gratification. No gratification at all.”

  “This is so brutal,” Anna said. “Why is this happening to me?”

  “Don’t give up so easily. You’re too weak.”

  “There’s something very important that I don’t understand. How can I be a woman and still be happy?”

  “Shut up,” the woman said. “Don’t tell me what to do.”

  What are you talking about? Anna thought. What does this mean about me?

  That night and for many nights to come, Anna could not sleep. Months passed and still she could not find peace. Finally one night, tossing and turning, she found herself in bed in the middle of an old-fashioned thunderstorm. Branches howled and scraped against her window. It could have been any lonely night in any storybook with one contemporary exception. Nowadays, when a lightning bolt hits, it sets off car alarms all over the neighborhood. That old reverberating crackle in nature is no more.

  Some nights Anna flies away in bed. That night, awake in the dark, sheets of ice sailed between the stars. They flashed in the moonlight as her covers slid to the floor, as the secret was revealed. Anna’s pudgy white body looked like diamonds between those sheets. Those crystal slabs of shine. But then the lightning flash set off car alarms and so Anna, interrupted, pulled the covers over her demurely supple flesh. Back on earth she lay, dissatisfied, between two pieces of printed cotton. Those sirens droned on all night.

  What happened? she asked herself. What just happened?

  Then a few other questions came to mind.

  What happened to the world that I was promised back in first grade in 1965?

  Not only had she been promised successful middle-class romance, but other treats had been mentioned as well, like the Jetsons, robots, and the metric system. In fact, when Anna was a girl, The Weekly Reader had said that by 1990 she’d be flying around with jet packs. People would speak Esperanto and wear high-topped sneakers as they suited up for lift-off. As a kid she’d bought a roll of aluminum foil and Scotch-taped it on her own chest to make one of those silver suits. Then she jumped up. Flying seemed desirable, something everyone would want to do. Before her lay a universe of neon Ping-Pong balls, as everything imaginable was endless. With a pixie hai
rcut she played with the boys because towheaded American males were birds then. Those guys were rockets, superheroes, untouchable.

  Anna turned over in bed, rain sliding down the window. She remembered the promise of an antiseptic future: domed cities and artificial weather. Somehow this was supposed to be good. Anna O. knew that hers was the last generation to believe the future would be better. Now, she feared the future. With that last thought Anna fell into a troubled sleep.

  Chapter One

  The next morning a doctor awoke from unsettling dreams. He spent a few indulgent moments luxuriating in the warmth of his covers before facing another winter day. This doctor was a young one. He was soft about the face and had clear brown eyes that exhibited a distracted kind of caring. He passed his hands over his small, fleshy body and then stretched his eyes and fingers toward the wall. The world was his this chilly morning. He could be human, inadequate, and still have it all.