from Uncle Albert's notebook (cahier)
"What does Roz want to know about Kristi for? For that matter," Ted was asking me after she'd left and he'd put his coat and scarf away - he'd come back to sit on the coffee table again, head in his hands, looking up at me: "For that matter," he was asking me, "what is my interest in the Sundstrøm sisters as I am unlikely to meet any of them. I'm not taking the train to Cincinnati; I don't know where in 'the territory' to look for April. True, I might someday get to Froyd County, or Sigrid might leave her hermitage and come up here, though doubtful. But . . . ." He stopped.
"I have a theory about gossip. Do you want to hear it?" I did, I said. "'Theory,'" he qualified, "in the common, not scientific, sense, meaning 'hypothesis' or 'wild guess' but I believe it." I nodded.
"I've been reading John O'Hara, you know." I didn't, but I nodded again. I refrained from asking why. He gets on these kicks. How he comes to them or they come to him I don't know. But he'll fasten on a writer, and he'll read everything he can get his hands on in any used book store in town. He's a bulldozer in a vacant lot. "Quite a number of the stories," he'd read so far. Plus, "Sermons and Soda-Water, which is three long stories. I'm halfway through Butterfield 8.
"O'Hara has a code, incidentally, most obvious in the little story, 'The Moccasins.' Generally, the big stories are better than the little ones, but 'Moccasins' is good for this. O'Hara's code of honor, if I understand it correctly, his ethic. Above all, be true to yourself. It may take a while to discern what that means - both what it means to be true and who you are to be true to. In the meantime, however, don't let anyone seduce you, don't let anything seduce you. It's okay to get sidetracked, but seduction - you know this - is something quite different: it doesn't just get you going the wrong way for a while, it does something to you inside. By the same token, it's wrong to seduce anyone else. It's okay to sidetrack them, but it's wrong, wrong, wrong to try to make them untrue to or keep them from being true to themselves."
"Gossip," I said, meaning "get back to the topic at hand. If you can."
"Right."
"O'Hara's characters, especially the newspapermen, the Jim Malloy characters, are curious about everyone. They want to know where they came from, where they're going, what crowd or crowds they belong to, what crowd or crowds would exclude them if they could, what makes them tick and what makes them ache - with longing or confusion or fear. In sum, where to slot them.
"We do that, too. Or the people we meet for coffee or lunch or at the two Christmas parties we go to. What of the conversation that isn't nostalgia is gossip - it's more gossip than nostalgia, who knows who and how and why. I can't keep up. I have a hard enough keeping up with the people in the room. So - is this wrong? - I find myself uninterested in the possible motives of strangers. True, what are only names to me aren't necessarily strangers to others. But they can't all be friends, can they? Most must be acquaintances at best. Yet, we spend however long it takes locating them, meaning these 'friends' - who were their friends, and who were their friends to the end of six lists of begats?
"With Malloy in the O'Hara stories, I get it, I think. It's the way in a fractured world he gets ahead. Or when he's left behind, it's how he keeps his head above water, by knowing even people he doesn't know and where to slot them. But what's the advantage to Axel or Nils or Roz's Polly, or Roz, for that matter? Aren't they pretty much settled? They're not falling behind or getting ahead, either one. They're not going anywhere. They're here." He stops to catch his breath.
"I suppose they want to stay settled," I say. "Here."
"Yes. I suppose that's it. That's what I'm getting to. Gossip is a way of putting the world in order. Which - maybe this is why it goes right by me - I'm pretty sure can't be done.
"Especially if you start with people and society. You can put rocks in order; at least, geologists can. Birds, for example, are harder: there are more of them and they move faster; and now the climate is chasing them around, they are flying from it and toward it and turning up in places they weren't before. Still, there's an explanation, and you can keep track; or ornithologists can. Birds aren't as dumb as rocks, but they don't operate out of hidden motives.
"But people do, motives they hide from others and motives hidden from themselves. So, when we gossip, I take it, or when people do, we/they are most often talking about why so-and-so and her brother and his fraternity brother from forty years ago must have done what they did. Yet even if we agree on that - and that's the purpose, isn't it? - to come to some sort of agreement about that. Even if we do, we're likely wrong, I'm saying. But then, we do have agreement; it's a comfort. We comfort one another. It may have been as costly, but it's not as confusing, or as messy, as we thought.
"Or not as confusing or messy as we thought . . . until we think of it again, a particular person or group. They come up in another context. Then we have to gossip to straighten it out for the third time, to remember how we'd settled it last time and how this fits in. That's why we tell the same stories about the same people over and over again, or why people do while I sit dumb and still uncomprehending.
"Because it's all speculation, isn't it? Still, people put 'money on it.' 'Yes, that is it,' they say, confidently it sounds like, when they come to an agreement about a story. 'Yes!'
"What do you think?" Ted says to me.
"I try not to," I said.
"Yes. That's wise. I should do that, too - try not to think about it."
01/07/24
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