• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

By Root 890 0

I didn’t hit her. Because she was pretty. So instead I slept with her, and was always ashamed of that willingness to trade away one of my few principles for sex.] Her ideas of you were very limited. It seems you presented to her a very controlled and managed version of yourself: competent, ambitious, and businesslike, rather dull. Is this what you think of yourself? Well, she and I have spent many happy evenings now in a sort of Arthur reeducation course, in which I tell her stories of how you really are and always have been. I am giving her a more detailed picture of your life abroad than you have given me. I improve upon what little you have written. She is taken with this, but also, I think, sees the twin before her as the painter of the portrait and perhaps the portrait itself. I think this also comforts her.

The stories of our childhood have tickled her, and she is very ticklish. One’s past, you know, is relevant and cannot be so easily erased as you would seem to think right now, judging by your shrieking Venetian rebirth. Dad’s son.

The good part is your decision to take writing seriously. Finally. I am really glad about this. I think you’re right: your flight from your job and New York and all of us back here was necessary so you could begin something over there. That’s great. Don’t let the rest of what I have to say take anything away from that. You are a writer. Write. Come home when you know you can.

But. Really. You are kidding yourself if you think you will blossom out of the damp Venetian soil as some new flower, never before seen, with nothing in you of us, of Minnesota, of Dad and Mom and Sil, and those Family Rooms and Lake Minnetonka and all the rest. You will somehow rise from the ashes without influence or history, entirely original in every way? It is a myth and drives its worshippers to madness or bad writing or both.

Seriously. Your new life is (A) already tainted by the past, and (B) already unoriginal. It comes at the cost of that German fool spending at least a night, if not more, in a London jail, where you left him so you could have his woman. Like King David. Or Uter Pendragon. Unoriginal. And the woman? I agree you have no choice but to cast her as your muse, the free spirit who had no life of her own but only existed to pull you out of your dreary corporate drudgery (which I always thought you liked and were good at), and launched you with a welcoming lay into your spectacular new career before flying off immediately to leave you to your glory and not drear it down with her own needs, family, aging, stomach flu. But that’s because you can’t afford to imagine her as I do: raped, murdered, and sunk tongueless into a canal when she was wandering, lost, looking for the sweet American who’d gone with her on an adventure. Your story is built on many other stories, some of which you know, most of which you will blithely ignore, understandably. It is not built on the imagined lives of old women in Venetian courtyards, though I’m sure those will be good to read. You can’t make “you” without us. And what if we are unoriginal?

Because, really, we are. It’s all been done before, and you claim that you are free of influences? Anxious brother, he shares your birthday. Why do you have to deny him for that? You will somehow reduce him, beat him, ignore him, prove he doesn’t own you? Even if those weren’t contradictory, you miss that he has invented you already. The boy intent on being free of his family? The dreamy artist who roams Italy for inspiration? The Jew in Venice? You learned all this from him, or from people who learned it from him then mushed it into sitcoms and weepy movies for you. We are all his ideas. To be fair, he learned it from someone else, too, but he at least didn’t kid himself, claiming to be unique. He was worried that he was unoriginal, too, you know, just like you:

If there be nothing new, but that which is

Hath been before, how are our brains beguiled,

Which, labouring for invention, bear amiss

The second burden of a former child.

But he got over it. He hung around with