Living for the plot
A woman lying very still, doing cartography
“As for the couple, well, they have the horns of fauns.
The chains are laid loose over their heads, their bondage is a willing one. They stand beneath the batwings, spread like parasols, to avoid the cold. Who would blame them?
If this is a wheel on which we stand, at a moment not far along the Circle of the Snake, when consciousness cannot merge with consciousness, let what may merge, merge.
Let there be heat if not light.”
– The Devil: Tarot Key XV, Lewis Turco
They’re cutting the cake outside under the bulbs strung from the fig tree to the wall, but Angela and I are huddled inside by the cold grate. “You’ve got no reason not to live for the plot,” she tells me conspiratorially, and I laugh harder than I should.
That’s how I remember it too, even now. I had eleven other things going that summer — work I was good at, tagliatelle every other meal, friends who’d have picked up the phone at 2AM and a hundred red skies I could have written poems about— but I’d have traded the whole thing for a plot with a locked room and a man who knew all the moves to the dance.
Two women whispering by a dead fire. Living for the magic of it, which is to say the memory of it, because to plot is to mark points on a flat surface.
Consider this: story is the last thing the word learned how to do. Before that, to plot was to scheme. Earlier still, a plot was just the piece of earth you were standing on, and what I like about that is that you cannot lose a piece of ground. It’s the least losable object there is — it stays exactly where it is whether or not you’re standing on it, whether you ever came up these 810-year old countryside roads in the first place.
The only thing available to be lost is the story you were telling about it, which is to say that the plot was the lesson, not the man.
In the hall a moth is going at the bulb all night.
Wanting the light.
Getting nowhere.
The plot twist is I felt so alive I could have put my fist through the wall, but I was already standing in the wreck of it.
On the 76th night, I’m lying sprawled out on the floor and counting up all the ways a hand can trace almost. I roll up on my stomach and start up the record player by the open window. It’s a theatre scene, and I was a drama major. I’m living for it.
‘neath the cover of October skies, and all the leaves on the trees are falling / to the sound of the breezes that blow, and I’m trying to please to the calling / of your heartstrings that play soft and low
“I know we’d said we wouldn’t do anything we’ll regret,” he says into the darkness. “But we could still fall asleep here. Like this. Just next to each other.” The pause is doing the real work, and he knows it, because we both know I have never once been able to turn away.
He’s whispering in candlelight. It’s a warm night and I’m shivering. My hip bone is numb against the tile but I don’t move, because the subtlest of shifts would have made it a decision.
That’s what drives the plot forward, isn’t it?
A woman and her bad decisions.
Somewhere at the back of my own head she folds her arms and says oh, sweetheart. I hear her, and I ignore her, which is a thing I want to be honest about: I wasn’t fooled, no matter what I spent the years that followed telling myself.
I looked directly at the deal on the table and I took it. I said, mm. Like a woman half asleep, having rehearsed the vowel, I was the one who moved.
The deal came with the promise of heat and a good story, and I have never once in my life turned down either.
The bells go at midnight. A dog answers them. The moth gives up or dies.
Nobody has ever once said a woman was doing well because her narrative was coherent.
We say she’s got both feet on the ground.
We say she’s found her footing.
We reach, every time, for the dirt.
Living for the plot means treating everything as material, and treating everything as material means you get to be here without being here, which is the most sophisticated method of leaving I have ever found.
But it’s also, in my world, the only thing worth doing.
You get one piece of ground. You build something on it or you spend the season surveying it, and either way it’s once again September in three weeks and one of these days I will learn my lesson, I will, I will, I will.