Geography Note:
GPS At Play
4 May 2015
On Saturday night, we went out to Long Island, to attend a wedding. The ceremony and the reception were held at one of those North Shore mansions that are now elderly curiosities on the campuses that have grown up around them, on what used to be what Americans called “estates.” It is difficult to find these places even without GPS; GPS makes things worse by being assertively incorrect. In our case, it not only directed us to a neighboring property — a lane of hideous neo-Victorian piles culminating in a gate bristling with CCTV cameras — but indicated, with the little pin that tells the driver’s distance in minutes, that that’s where I was when I called for an Uber car to pick us up. The map showed quite clearly the institution where I actually was, so this was not a case of mere mislabeling. The driver managed to find us without much ado, and we were soon home and in bed.
I had decided that it was time to go home. Dinner was over, and dessert would be served in another room, along with dancing. Depending on how long an Uber driver would take to reach us, we might or might not continue the fun. Because of our sojourn down the lane of ugly mansionettes — because that driver had been transfixed by the false assurance of GPS (surely our destination must be here somewhere!) — I was a bit worried about the trouble that this driver might have in finding us. Little did I know that Kathleen was so consumed by anxiety on this point that, behind her gay façade of chatter at the dinner table, she was considering feigning a medical emergency, so that we would be rescued by ambulance. It was only in the nice Uber car that she thanked me, in a tone that surpassed any measure of politeness, for summoning it. She continued to thank me during the drive home, and when we got home, and several times yesterday. She thanked me this morning, before she left for the office. I had done something heroic, but, blast it, I hadn’t known it at the time. I had done no more than press a few buttons on a smartphone, and then fret unheroically (but privately) about those minutes. Even they were misleading. The number stuck, agonizingly, at 25, only to drop at the speed of sound thereafter. Even so, the driver pulled up significantly sooner than the ETA.
I had bought a tuxedo for the occasion. Kathleen urged me to do so. As a result, for the first time in my life, I was the first person to wear what I was wearing. It was all very comfortable, especially the shirt, which was made of a substantial piqué cotton that kept me ventilated even though it didn’t wrinkle. I’d have been grand, if, as we were setting out, the coat button (which wasn’t tight, but which shouldn’t have been buttoned at that particular moment) hadn’t popped off as I climbed into the car. I retrieved the button when we reached our destination, and will take it downstairs to the dry cleaner, along with the rest of my duds, on my way to lunch.
The happy couple take off for Bora Bora tomorrow night. I hope that they enjoy living in a hut in the middle of a lagoon, but, I tell you: the very thought of such arrangements makes me feel that I’m living it up at the Ritz right here in my own apartment.
My own apartment — soon to be festooned with draperies that were put into the mail this morning. In plenty of time for our impending housewarming.
***
It is taking a while to put my hands on a copy of The Long-Winded Lady, the collection of Maeve Brennan’s “Talk” pieces for The New Yorker. I own the book, but cannot find it — no surprise. I have ordered a copy from Amazon (Kindle not available), but the order’s status has been stuck at “Not Yet Shipped” for about a week, which is not promising. I’ve ordered another copy from Alibris. That has shipped. Meanwhile, other books by Brennan are about to pile up alongside it, and one of them has already arrived. It is a collection of “Stories of Dublin,” named after the most famous of the bunch, “The Springs of Affection.”
Kate Bolick writes, in Spinster,
The story itself is fiction — and yet the landscape and characters, houses and rooms, are all pulled directly from real life, meaning Maeve’s relatives experienced the brutal shock of seeing themselves transformed through another’s unforgiving eyes. Everybody knew that Min was none other than Maeve’s beloved spinster aunt, the eight-five-year-old Nan Brennan, and everyone agreed that she didn’t deserve such vicious treatment. After the story appeared, Aunt Nan wrote on the back of a snapshot of Maeve, “Greatly changed for the worse, 1972.”
Addled by this gossipy excitement, I read “The Springs of Affection” first. Later, I came to think that this was a terrible mistake, but now I’m not so sure. “The Springs of Affection” is the last of eight stories about Martin and Delia Bagot, whose romantic marriage is ruined by the death, after three days, of their first child, a son. Delia descends briefly into a grief that permanently repels her husband. The story in which we see this crisis up close is the fifth in the series; we already know the rough outlines. The final story begins with a sentence that dispatches both Delia and Martin from this vale of tears, and proceeds to look at the marriage from the viewpoint of Martin’s twin sister, the spinster Min. Min is a mean old thing, a miser really, who enjoys pinching her pennies. Not to mention curling up in Martin’s reading chair, having hauled off the Bagots’ belongings to her flat in Wexford. (So the tale leaves Dublin behind as well.) From the depths of the empty cave of her loot-accoutered heart, Min cherishes, if that is the word, the recollection of her brother’s wedding day, after which, in Min’s view, nothing was ever the same as it had been. Everything changed for the worse. By marrying out, Martin mauled his own dear family.
The artfulness of the story’s construction is almost stupefying, but I won’t venture further comment until I have read it again, in its proper place at the end of a very sad novel. For that is what these stories constitute: a novel. “The Springs of Affection” is often regarded as a shortish novella, but this is wrongheaded. Like the seven stories that precede it, “The Springs of Affection” is an enchanting read (and I mean that strictly), but, also like them, its full meaning is visible only in the light of the stories that precede (or surround) it. This is not an example of that always disappointing genre, the collection of “linked short stories.” No; it is a novel about a particular marriage, and each story is a chapter in the portrait of that marriage, the sadness of which is finally and brutally framed by Min’s bitterness.
One of the strangest strengths of this novel — I’d be inclined to name it after another story, one that I’ll write about presently, The Sofa — comes from what ought to be a weakness, the redundancy of reintroduced details. In a normal novel, we should probably be told only once that Bennie is a devoted terrier and Rupert a greedy cat. But Brennan manages to present these characters, and the house that they inhabit, with slight differences each time, and the effect, rather than tedium, is a manifestation of the estrangement between Martin and Delia. The surface of their life together is polite and correct. Beneath that surface, Delia rages to be loved and Martin regrets not having remained an unencumbered bachelor. (He sleeps in a little room over the kitchen.) The novel is very much about the house that Delia and Martin share; it, too, is proper and correct, and as well looked-after, wood and brass polished to a luster, as can be. Delia manages to make this house a home to her two daughters, who are little older in every story until the penultimate one. (If they are disposed of in “The Springs of Affection,” I don’t recall it, but then “The Springs of Affection” rivals Joyce’s “The Dead” for the casual display of intense richness.) But the house is not a home to Martin, especially not when Min shows up to take care of him for the six years that follow Delia’s death. It is only right that every familiarity of the Bagot household is properly and formerly greeted at the beginning of each story. Any decision to elide these repetitions in repurposing the collection as a novel overtly would be a terrible mistake. May this novel-manqué continue to masquerade as a collection of short stories punctuated by a rather long one.