The Tooth Fairy: Parents, Lovers, and Other Wayward Deities (A Memoir) by Clifford Chase
Authors: Clifford Chase
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we read through my new short story.
“Chris was sitting with a book in the sun in the living room.
And I am telling you
, he said to himself,
desire is a burden. It is a burden, an arduous journey through spinach fields on a bicycle in the hazy heat of summer. I’m
telling you and don’t you forget it
.”
Elizabeth suggested only minor changes. Later she told my friend Erin, “Cliff Chase is a survivor.”
Since then I’ve often thought about that statement.
Thanksgiving morning, before E.’s arrival, a vivid dream of kissing my mother’s cheek, her face described in my journal as
“overly palpable.”
I cooked the Cornish hens as directed, she arrived from Boston, and we ate them. At some point we had sex. We went to a movie,
sat together in various restaurants and coffee shops. We talked endlessly about the relationship. I continued feeling miserably
trapped.
The strange
rightness
of feeling obliterated.
The weird pleasure of fooling yourself, like performing a magic trick in private, over and over—as if you could be surprised
by your own sleight of hand.
William James: “There is no more miserable human being than one in whom nothing is habitual but indecision.”
She missed her flight home Monday morning and returned to my apartment. I had already gone to work. She sat in hercoat watching TV with Owen for an hour, hesitating to call me to say she had fucked up getting to the airport on time. We
met for lunch. She was looking more and more bedraggled. In the diner she began to cry as she talked of hating library school,
where she felt unappreciated. She said, “No one wants what I have to give.” She cried again when she left for the airport.
That night when she called from Boston, I broke up with her.
To call this decision “coming out” doesn’t begin to describe it—though that’s how I would simplify it later.
For months I agonized over whether we should get back together, and our discussions continued until April, when E. sent all
my letters back to me.
Perhaps wisely, perhaps selfishly, I did not reply.
I sought the lugubrious advice of Tears for Fears.
Journal: “I want a record of it—of the texture of her vagina; of the play of our hips against each other; of my finger running
over her clitoris under the little wet hood …”
I hadn’t left E. because of some greater understanding of myself, but rather because I needed to do
something
.
Even now, some part of me believes I turned away love forever.
My mother was a frugal woman, and similarly I try not to discard any sort of affection that comes my way.
All the hilarious things E. said.
The way she looked in her white shawl, that night she was late to the movie.
“What we have is beautiful,” she said to me, crying, on the phone. “Why do you want to kill it?”
1
S OLDIERS WITH MACHINE guns surrounded the plane as we filed down the tarmac in the balmy floodlit night.
Vast old terrazzo floor of the terminal; find the line for currency, then visas; guidebook warnings of graft; my fear of error;
the brusque yet unhurried little clerk carefully making tiny marks on his forms, as if Arabic were a dream language; released
at last into the balmy night air again and the new perils of dishonest taxi drivers.
For sometime I had been harboring panicky thoughts about John, such as, “We’ve been together four years and I still don’t
have a key to his apartment!”
As the reader may have noticed, I like to mingle love with panic, self-doubt, and conjecture.
Coming out hadn’t solved everything.
The taxi sped noisily along the elevated highway wedged between plaster orange-lit buildings, and though the road was certainly
no worse than, say, the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway, it all felt utterly makeshift, about to collapse, yet not collapsing,maybe suspended mid-collapse, and every window and roof and dark alley appeared in some fundamental way
different
from anything I’d ever seen before, and
“Chris was sitting with a book in the sun in the living room.
And I am telling you
, he said to himself,
desire is a burden. It is a burden, an arduous journey through spinach fields on a bicycle in the hazy heat of summer. I’m
telling you and don’t you forget it
.”
Elizabeth suggested only minor changes. Later she told my friend Erin, “Cliff Chase is a survivor.”
Since then I’ve often thought about that statement.
Thanksgiving morning, before E.’s arrival, a vivid dream of kissing my mother’s cheek, her face described in my journal as
“overly palpable.”
I cooked the Cornish hens as directed, she arrived from Boston, and we ate them. At some point we had sex. We went to a movie,
sat together in various restaurants and coffee shops. We talked endlessly about the relationship. I continued feeling miserably
trapped.
The strange
rightness
of feeling obliterated.
The weird pleasure of fooling yourself, like performing a magic trick in private, over and over—as if you could be surprised
by your own sleight of hand.
William James: “There is no more miserable human being than one in whom nothing is habitual but indecision.”
She missed her flight home Monday morning and returned to my apartment. I had already gone to work. She sat in hercoat watching TV with Owen for an hour, hesitating to call me to say she had fucked up getting to the airport on time. We
met for lunch. She was looking more and more bedraggled. In the diner she began to cry as she talked of hating library school,
where she felt unappreciated. She said, “No one wants what I have to give.” She cried again when she left for the airport.
That night when she called from Boston, I broke up with her.
To call this decision “coming out” doesn’t begin to describe it—though that’s how I would simplify it later.
For months I agonized over whether we should get back together, and our discussions continued until April, when E. sent all
my letters back to me.
Perhaps wisely, perhaps selfishly, I did not reply.
I sought the lugubrious advice of Tears for Fears.
Journal: “I want a record of it—of the texture of her vagina; of the play of our hips against each other; of my finger running
over her clitoris under the little wet hood …”
I hadn’t left E. because of some greater understanding of myself, but rather because I needed to do
something
.
Even now, some part of me believes I turned away love forever.
My mother was a frugal woman, and similarly I try not to discard any sort of affection that comes my way.
All the hilarious things E. said.
The way she looked in her white shawl, that night she was late to the movie.
“What we have is beautiful,” she said to me, crying, on the phone. “Why do you want to kill it?”
1
S OLDIERS WITH MACHINE guns surrounded the plane as we filed down the tarmac in the balmy floodlit night.
Vast old terrazzo floor of the terminal; find the line for currency, then visas; guidebook warnings of graft; my fear of error;
the brusque yet unhurried little clerk carefully making tiny marks on his forms, as if Arabic were a dream language; released
at last into the balmy night air again and the new perils of dishonest taxi drivers.
For sometime I had been harboring panicky thoughts about John, such as, “We’ve been together four years and I still don’t
have a key to his apartment!”
As the reader may have noticed, I like to mingle love with panic, self-doubt, and conjecture.
Coming out hadn’t solved everything.
The taxi sped noisily along the elevated highway wedged between plaster orange-lit buildings, and though the road was certainly
no worse than, say, the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway, it all felt utterly makeshift, about to collapse, yet not collapsing,maybe suspended mid-collapse, and every window and roof and dark alley appeared in some fundamental way
different
from anything I’d ever seen before, and
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