“Politics, women, drink, money, ambition. And the lack of politics, women, drink, money, and ambition,” – Hemingway, when asked what harms a writer. (The Green Hills of Africa).
Much as I love the big fellow, I think Papa missed out on an element here: family. And to think Hemingway was a Tolstoy man, too. Where would the Russian great be without the deep intricacies of family life, feudal to royal? But it isn’t until Hem gets old and a little crazy and sentimental over his slipping life that family members start to appear in his fiction. Until then it’s bullfighters, rum-runners, boxers, hunters, and the cunning women that bring them down. Woman as mother, or loving companion? Only the coddling meddling kind, who pamper a boy or man, and thereby hamper his need to get on the trail or the rails and see life. For some reason Hem despised his suburban Chicago upper-middle class upbringing, sensed cowardice in the conventions of it, despite the good vacations into the lake region his father’s income as a doctor afforded them. Family held you back. Much as it gave to you, in comfort and companionship and love and the lessons of life, those things only weighed you down or backbit you in the end. While that may sometimes be true, what possibilities for material! Tennessee Williams and Raymond Carver come to mind right off. Wharton and Austen, of course. But then they’re women, right?
And talk about family stories. . . It was last month when my co-worker El started telling me about the affair he’s been having with his dentist’s assistant. We were up on the scaffolding, just the two of us, rolling out tar-paper and stapling the courses to the sheathed building. The fog had burned off and the trees and gardens of the backyards below sparkled in the sun.
"Nice, huh?” he said, lifting his phone to show me a picture on the screen. “Is my girlfriend."
“Girlfriend? Real nice. What about your wife?”
“She don’ care.”
“Doesn’t care? Or doesn’t know?”
El grinned deviously, his gap tooth showing, the tooth that got him into all of this. He’s a handsome, warm-eyed Guatemalan who goofs around on the job a lot, but he’s a good guy, and I guess that’s why the boss keeps him around. He’s got a rogue’s charm.
“It don’ matter, man,” he explained. “My wife, she like my sister.”
“So your sister doesn’t care if you run around on her?”
“She don’ know — so she don’ care,” he laughed. He then emphasized that the secret is just between us, and I’m not to tell any of his family on the job. Apparently they don’t care either, so long as they don’t know. As we worked he gave me the back-story, how he’d gone to have his teeth fixed and started flirting with the dentist’s assistant. He picked her up when she got off work and the affair took flame from there.
“You’re a fast worker, El.”
“She’s hot, man. You work fast too, you see her.”
Later in the day, when nobody was around, he showed me more photos, these involving the dentist’s office, which had become their meeting place at night.
“But her husband,” he grinned daringly, “he’s a real big fucker. A Tongan.”
“Man, I’d get out of it.”
“Why?”
“I’m telling you. It’s gonna end bad. You should get out while you can.”
“I don’ care.”
“You’ll care when your face is caved in and all that dentist work’s gone to waste.”
“I don’ care,” he flashed his rogue smile. “Is life, man. It go up and down.”
And the story would indeed go up and down for weeks, diving to some pretty ugly lows. Turns out his wife got a hold of his cell phone, and the pictures therein. She didn’t take it like any kind of sister I know. The following night she followed El to the dentist’s office and snuck in after the two. Caught them getting creative in one of the chairs and tore the hell out of the place, breaking equipment and ripping pictures off the walls. El didn’t show up for work the next day. When he did he told me the whole deal. Somehow his brother and old man on the job still didn’t know what was going on, so I wasn’t to spill anything. You’d think the blowup would’ve put an end to the affair. But no. Love, especially the mistaken and infatuated and blood-roiling kind, doesn’t slip away so easily. And nearly each day I receive another saucy update on El’s rollercoaster ride.
So there might be a story there. Certainly there is, but is it a story for me to write about? Is it mine, as a writer, free to take what I find or am told or can imagine, and carve a piece of fiction from it? Anna doesn’t like the idea. When I told her about the affair she thought the whole thing rotten, and hazarded me against exploiting it. What insights could I draw from it? she wanted to know. It’s a fair question. But I’m not so concerned with that, as long as the story is a good one. If there’s a drop of humor in a story, then that’s often all the insight I need. Humor redeems our ugly side. What makes me laugh is, at times, worth examining in itself, even if that means looking darkly into a gash caused by a toilet falling out of the sky.
The nonsense of our lives, funny or peculiar, in some cases maddening or alienating, is what the likes of Sartre and Camus were compelled to examine. What are these bits of life drifting about us, the detritus of our everyday, the anecdotes heard on the street or the job site? And what kind of meaning can be made of them? And if we must construct that meaning, doesn’t it follow that those bits are intrinsically meaningless? What is to be learned, in Sartre’s short story The Wall, from Pablo having lied to his jailers about the location of a fellow soldier, only to be accidentally and absurdly correct about the graveyard hideaway of his comrade, thus dooming him to execution?
(So Anna and I have our differences, on this point, and in our tastes for literature. For instance, I like noir lit quite a lot, Existentialism’s hardboiled American cousin. Anna finds the stuff short on depth and meaning – too stereotyped and cartoony. I concede that’s sometimes the case. Speaking of Hemingway, To Have and Have Not and Men without Women, his most noir works, are arguably his poorest for just those reasons. But still I like them. The Thirties were a rough time in the States and Hem’s stories carry the grit and slang and desperation of the period like bootlegged time capsules. Still again, it’s a woman, Martha Gellhorn, who does a better, a more personal and emotional job, of capturing the human suffering of the Depression in The Trouble I’ve Seen.)
But I’m straying. What’s to be made of a tale like El’s? Maybe it’s nothing more than just another pulp nonfiction overheard in our everyday, a curio to look over before leaving it well alone. Anna wanted to know if I wasn’t just exploiting the story for its scandalous qualities. To a degree, I am. At least as the example that got this entry going: proof of how rich a source of material family life can be. Maybe the moral of the tale is how much safer those stories are, if you’re lucky to be told them, when they come from other people’s families.
As for El, the last I’d heard he was separated from his wife, missing his kids, and trying very hard to cut himself off from the dentist’s assistant, who won’t stop calling him.
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