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Pif Magazine
Pif Magazine |
On Sentimentality : Page 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6 For the first time in the story real emotion (being "glad" earlier hardly counts) explicitly appears on the narrative surface. Not only does it appear, he labels it for us and in so doing acknowledges its appearance. More than that, he confesses that he wonders if he's hearing and seeing things, a deeper admission that what's going on inside him is considerably more turbulent than he's insisted. But even after this initial revelation, the narrator redoubles his determination to assure us — and himself — that his summer isolation and the impending loss of his family are nothing he can't absorb with equanimity. He willfully gives the peeping Tom the sad and unthreatening face of an old man and manages "to think compassionately [of him,] driven, in senescence, to leave his home and wander at night in a strange neighborhood. . ." The steady escalation of the narrator's emotional unraveling leads to two moments that "explode in the reader's face." First, he sees the peeping Tom again the next night and, running to the window, calls out, "She's gone! Rachel's gone! There's nothing to see!" and thus in an inadvertent impromptu shout speaks directly of the preoccupying despair we have sensed from the beginning. Through the following nights he continues to be unable to sleep. He decides one morning, upon seeing a neighbor and his family on the platform of the train station, that he, the neighbor, is the peeping Tom. He dreams of a noose floating in the air. He begins to violate the strict terms of his cure, taking later trains to work, staying longer in the city, drinking more and more. The image of the floating noose continues to haunt him. At a cocktail party, he sees an aging but still beautiful actress of his acquaintance who gives him what he perceives to be a "sad, sad look," and who, on leaving, comes up to him, puts her hand on his arm and says, "You poor boy. You poor boy." Her sympathy, he decides, is inspired by her belief that he will hang himself. Then one afternoon, "anesthetized by gin" after a business lunch, he wanders into Brooks Brothers where he sees a young woman. "Her arms and legs were beautiful, but the look on her face was sensible, humorous, even housewifely, and this sensible air seemed to accentuate the beauty of her arms and legs." He follows her out of the store, walks beside her on the sidewalk. She senses him following her and he knows she does, but he's so lost in the misery which has by now taken hold of him that he flagrantly continues to trail her through the midday crowd, assuring himself that "she was the kind of woman who would not readily call for help." We can't fathom what he will say or do to her because it's rivetingly clear that he has no idea himself. Until while waiting with her at a corner for the light to change, he tells us that —
Among the things that make this a moment of exploding sentiment, rather than sentimentality, I'll point out two. First of all, there's the description of the woman, who has, yes, beautiful arms and legs, but who overall gives off a "sensible" and "housewifely" air. She is not some ravishingly exotic creature of airbrushed perfection who turns grown men weak and stupid and bumping into one another as she walks by. She's attractive in a quiet and ordinary way and it is that very exemplary housewifeliness — that quality, we can infer, which makes her spectrally the wife who's left him — which stirs the narrator and leaves him pitifully at the mercy of his desire. Second, there's the achingly humble and subservient nature of his request. We do not hear some fantasized act of savage sex and conquest building in his mind. I saw me taking her right there, in Brooks Brothers, on the floor beneath a row of 46 extra longs. Instead, we get a more erotically charged, because more tangibly and mutedly strange, image. One that is at the same time somehow almost plausible and yet absolutely impossible. Pitiably timid and yet extremely creepy. A beaten man pleading and ready to pay for an act that is, by the cliched measure of violation, hardly rapacious, but in its excruciating sadness (and comedy) somehow more intimate and so more violating. |
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