Annie
I was seeing Annie every few nights. She was busy with a daytime job, I forget what, something secretarial. I fell back into my old habits of checking out the libraries and bookshops and reading in coffee shops after each day’s finds.
When September first came around I moved in with Annie. She rented a small, upstairs bedroom in a Victorian era house with four other lodgers, two women, both plain and skinny, quiet and self-effacing, living downstairs. Then there was Zach, the chief renter and household manager, a loud and long-haired hippy who smoked pot constantly and had a distinct resemblance to the Zig-Zag man, and lastly his Hungarian friend, a burly long-hair in his forties who had a heavy accent and a pot farm in the hills somewhere so he was gone most of each week. This was his Berkeley residence and this made up our strange menagerie.
Although I enjoyed Annie’s company and was always glad to sleep in her bed, (a mattress on the floor) I was not in love with her. We could sit and talk for hours like children holding hands. But my thoughts, most of the time, were far too distant and bent on other matters to pay the adoration that one’s sleeping partner deserves. My real love, heart and mind, was sequestered in books, a bookmark in the leaves, always moving about through different volumes each day. No one but I could find it or follow it, or understand me, or the language of the rare volumes I poured all my interest into, and I think she began to see this after a few weeks of cohabitation.
At first she was in love with me. I could see it in the sparkle in her eyes. But it wasn’t me, just the representation of me that Bones and others had painted for her, a pure mirage that slowly vanished as one approached it.
She had a fine, alto voice and a large repertoire of blues and rock songs. She was a private, self-assessing girl with periods of blues and low self-esteem. She wrote long entries into her journals each week, (she must have had twenty of them lined up on a bookshelf next to her bed). I glanced into a few one morning after she left for work. The topic seemed always the same, her mixed up and ever-changing feelings about herself, about how others might see her and rate her at each moment, in a turbulent sea of conflicting and confused emotions, like a vessel buffeted by fickle waves and changing winds. As a diary is a sort of mirror to the soul, I imagined her to be sitting in front of a mirror, applying makeup, but never happy with the results, always wiping it off and trying again, and never satisfied.
If you try to fathom what others think of you, how they rate you and see you, and then attempt to change yourself to please them, you’ve just taken on a futile and never-ending battle. It’s self-destructive as you sap your energy for them and get pennies in return for the dollars you put into it and the time. You mutilate yourself, prostitute your face and soul for someone else’s eyes.
I’ve noticed this in many women with average looks. Those with stunning beauty never need make-up, or only apply it to win all the more, to tease men’s attentions, to overpower them. But women with lesser charms often enter into the fray and try to compete in a competition they've already lost. They primp themselves, dress in costly attire, strut in high-heals and red lipstick and bought jewelry and are repeatedly heart-broken when a natural beauty walks by and steals the show. All the heads turn towards her, all the empty-headed male heads.
The only way to change yourself for the better is to improve yourself for you alone, with inward satisfaction, with no other people’s fickle opinions affecting your self-image. And the only way to enrich yourself is with knowledge. I was blessed in this because most of my mentors were dead authors, tried and true over hundreds of years, not the magazine vogues that might be blasé in a year. And I could partake all their knowledge and chose the parts of them I wanted to imitate and discard the rest. You can’t do this with living people, at least not easily. You can’t throw them down (like you can a book) when they grow boring, put them back on the shelf for months or years. You can’t simply ignore and despise whole troops of people you meet like you can books, like I do whole sections of libraries, without the slightest qualm or apology, walking by with a sneer. You’d be confronted and slapped too often, for the obvious insult. Books have no feelings. You pluck out what you like and throw the rest away. A few times, in heated debates, I’ve treated strangers this way, telling them I liked a few points they made but the rest was ignorant bullshit. It never went over well. Feelings were hurt and remembered. Debating with friends I was always more polite. But I still felt the intellectual restraints, words on the tip of my tongue I never said, out of invisible, loving tenderness.
Annie’s low self-esteem made her look to others for approval, but in a sort of begging way, which never works. They see your weakness and exploit it. I suppose she dreamed of becoming a famous Jazz singer. But that mattress on the floor and her drab housemates and dead-end job didn’t bode well. Before September ended my residency there and my affair with Annie was over.
