Distracción

There is something freaky going on with my husband's job, and it distresses me. Please don't ask questions, I don't know the answer. Given that the situation is delicate and I don't understand it anyway, I will write about something absolutely unrelated. Our life in Peñasco is mired in confusion, but the Mississippi of fiction is mired in something much juicier.

My husband is a patient and un-jealous soul. He is resigned to the fact that when I pick up a novel that really grabs me he will lose me a little during the reading of it, and nobly fails to feel the least bit threatened when my heart goes adolescently pitter-pat for a man that exists only in the literary ether.

I am currently reading Faulkner’s Absalom, Absalom!, and I am in love. I am in love with the prose, the story, the words, the eloquent half-page run-on sentences, and the flawed people that populate the pages. That, and I have a desperate crush on Charles Bon.

Charles Bon represents the worst of all that has ever made me swoon, long before I matured to associating “sexy” with stability, work ethic, motivation, fidelity, and an absence of relationship drama (all of which is not to say I don’t love my husband’s sexy hair). But I am seduced. In the same way that Jason Compson Sr. tells Quentin how Charles didn’t have to seduce Judith Sutpen because he’d already gotten Henry under his spell and so Henry seduced his sister with the idea of Charles on his behalf, so Faulkner has vicariously seduced me with his description of Charles, and the Frenchman didn’t have to lift a finger. Jason Sr. describes Bon’s apathy (almost ennui), his careless way, and I think it’s kind of sexy. Is it surprising that I find his sentiments toward his bought woman tender and magnanimous? That there is appeal to his pragmatic argument that they, women reared solely to love and be loved, are the last truly chaste women in the Americas? That his laissez-faire approach to life (because who cares about the Adam Smith and a free trade economy?) makes me want to sit under the oaks, smelling the magnolias and watching the river crawl past? It’s that mellow c’est-la-vie that makes Louisiana creole culture so appealing. It would be that way even without the food (and you all know how I feel about food. Oh, pralines, chicory and beignets, bisque and etoufée. . .)

New Orleans, the city itself, is a seducer, and by association are its natives. The sultriness of the air paws at you. A New Orleans drawl pauses to kiss the earlobes before the sound makes its way inside the ear. It is a low, soft voice that obliges the listener to lean in a little closer to the speaker, making even a conversation of virtuous content feel sensual and intimate. Even a low laugh from grey-eyed grandmother calling me "bou" or "chère" is warm and rich like molasses. It is a distinct voice. That is how I hear Charles Bon’s voice. Even without imagining dark creole features and penetrating eyes, the drawl tugs at me. I heard that voice in my head when I read the letter written in stove polish.

The stove-polish-ink-on-pilfered-French-watermark, the un- love letter, drew me in. It is devoid of frilly romance, devoid of compliments (aside from "I will not insult you by saying". . .) and I love yous. Its pragmatism, its fatalism, its honesty, its eloquence make those pretenses superfluous. The fatalistic laissez-faire is infectious, so much so that when Henry kills Charles by the front steps the seduced reader fails to hurt, except for the loss of such a lovely being. The blank tragedy of it is sultry, the kind of emotion experienced in the dusk with the eyes half-closed. Judith understood, and so it is the letter that remains, not what WAS but what IS, passed to Mrs. Compson to safeguard that letter’s moment of stark ironic beauty.
It’s a good thing I was officially sworn off men for a while when I lived in Louisiana, and probably a better thing I didn’t spend much time in New Orleans. Listening to that voice for days uninterrupted would have gotten me sooner or later. Some women may go in for more understandably romantic types like Edward Cullen, and that certainly makes loads more sense (and don’t even ask how I know that name, blame it on mass media because I have not wasted any precious reading time on that book). Leave it to a supernerd like me to get sucked in by a pragmatist, bigamist, French-creole beauty of a man in a decidedly unromantic bit of prose. Grotesquely, I vaguely remember having a hopeless crush Quentin Compson for the intricate, if depraved, inner workings of his brain in that last day before his suicide, when I read The Sound and the Fury in high school. I suspect that was unhealthy, but his mind is so very, very lovely.

Having spent time in the Mississippi of flesh and blood and terra firma, I do not have particularly warm feelings for the place. But Jefferson, Mississippi I may not mind, for all its flaws and the wrecked lives of its inhabitants. From the distance drawn by pages and print and fiction it’s a beautiful place (and right now anything greener than Peñasco is a little bit of heaven). From that same distance Charles Bon is the most beautiful man (not) alive. (Be assured that my husband holds my off-paper equivalent of that esteem).