Loitering: New and Collected Essays Read online

  Mary Kay Letourneau dared to be unclear in public. “I wish,” she said, “there was a story that made sense and could be told right now, but there isn’t.” When she arrived in court for the sentencing she had a frail wispy etiolated look from having spent months in jail but otherwise her in-person face showed the same smudged and incoherent prettiness captured in countless pictures. I’d seen plenty of those photos in the papers and magazines and with each instance I wondered why her features weren’t in focus. But it turns out they were; it’s just that her face, even in real life, appears clouded and dreamy and somewhat removed from the immediate scene. Her lawyer, David Gehrke, characterized her as a woman with “a screw loose” who “doesn’t know how to separate reality and fantasy.” Her husband, Steve Letourneau, for some ulterior reason wanted everybody to know she was not Mary Poppins. In my experience the strategy a lot of frightened women turn to is that of making themselves intangible. Rather than go hard and confrontational the way a man in crisis might, they become ethereal and really remote. Based on no one’s authority but my own, I would say Letourneau showed the mien of a battered woman, of someone in retreat from her own face, whose safe haven is inward, reclusive, solitary, distant, and that what you saw in the pictures, in the photographed face the press captioned variously as belonging in an abstract allegoric uppercase way to a Wife, a Teacher, a Mother, was little more than a mask she’d vacated a long time ago.

  She wasn’t clear. She insisted until she was silenced by lawyer Gehrke and pressured by the public call for a kowtowing show of remorse and civic obedience that her relationship with X was love. She said that “given the nature of this situation—and that includes the charges against me, the media, everything—there isn’t anything within legal bounds that I can say to help make sense of what is happening.” (My italics.) Against the chorus of experts who in one rote voice claimed her relationship with X was “distortion” and “manipulation” and “rationalization,” Letourneau said, “I would not expect people to understand, but it did exist and it was real.” She was never loose or gallionic about the gravity of her situation and her public statements always struck me as honest and unfiltered, a too frank, badly lawyered expression of confusion that rang true, not because she was successful in justifying or rationalizing her actions, but precisely because she was hesitant, uncertain, floundering—precisely because she failed, and failed publicly! She never told us what we wanted to hear. She wasn’t glib, she wasn’t corny, she never once deliberately lied or even delivered a pat, practiced answer. Given the boundaries she’d crossed and the taboos she’d broken and the generally undone state of her life, it’s incredible to me she was even able to speak at all. The story drew prurient attention locally and from around the country, and soon after that the experts moved in with their extra-strength vocabularies, the proficient idioms of the law, of social work, of psychology, but Letourneau alone seemed to have trouble finding words. You could hear in her voice and in the absence of cant that her true feelings, whatever they were, like Cordelia’s love, were more ponderous than her tongue.

  Pretty much the opposite of Letourneau’s hesitance was the insta-commentary offered up by local broadcasters. After the sentencing one Bonnie Hart from KIRO or KOMO—I forget which and don’t believe it really matters—quickly convened a kind of radio Sanhedrin. As far as I know Hart’s only real qualification for commenting on Letourneau is that she holds a job that requires her to say something re: something most every day of the week. Day after day I suppose she’s paid to be fluent in politics, cookbooks, fresh vegetables, fads, open or closed batting stances, menopause, studded tires, whatever. In other words, her authority is mostly occupational, though it seems she’s possessed of omniscience. Her opinions weren’t suasive enough to win me over, not by any of the common measures I developed as a Catholic kid avidly listening for lame moments in hundreds of homilies. No elegance or force of thought, no wit, no keen insight, no revelatory moments that broadened perspectives, that enlivened feelings, no resonance, no self-scrutiny, no risk, no compassion or sympathy or anything close to eloquence. By the strident and aggressive tenor of the talk you couldn’t tell if this Bonnie Hart entertained any doubt, then or ever, she was so careful not to cross herself, so careful to arrange her moral outrage along the lines of least resistance. In a sense the whole program was about Hart rendering the round world flat and endorsing lopsidedness, halfness. This seemed a crude and retrogressive project, since what really distinguishes us from apes is not the opposable thumb but the ability to hold in mind opposing ideas, a distinction we should probably try to preserve.

  But these days you get the impression people think it’s kind of recreant to waver, as if by feeling and expressing, or worst of all admitting, doubt and uncertainty, you’re being disloyal to a guiding idea. In the case of Mary Kay Letourneau it seemed to me that over the previous nine months what you had was the spectacle of this woman who’d been publicly knocked down, disgraced, humiliated, scorned, abandoned, who’d been imprisoned and made destitute, who’d lost everything, her family, her job, her house, her reputation, her freedom, her privacy, and even if I accepted the hardest line of the moral hard-liners, even allowing for the possibility that this “adulterous” and “abusive” woman deserved what she got, that her crimes were staggering and odious and the probationary sentence just handed down by Judge Linda Lau was too lenient, that didn’t stop me from feeling uncomfortable and real lonely as I listened to this brave and pharisaic Bonnie Hart, who from the safe defilade of her radio booth was basically bending over to pick up the first stone.

  In a “situation” like this it’s worth considering why only the authorities, the experts, the credentialed explainers remain articulate. Anyone alive today has at his or her disposal ages of mental experience to draw upon, and yet we seem to trust and accept only the most recent orthodoxies, the latest theories, the newest and freshest ideas in the marketplace. I applaud this reliance on the red-hot and the new when it comes to landing airplanes or doing appendectomies. Elsewhere, however, it seems we’re just skimming the surface to locate the most recently revised version of ourselves—a tentative, experimental understanding. A long backward glance establishes pretty clearly what’s endured over time and also exposes a lot of discredited stuff that was once taken quite seriously. I’m not just talking about the obvious crackpots and charlatans, nor do I mean the briefly credible phrenologists and lobotomists and such, but rather the discarded, the outmoded, the no-longer tenable, like, say, the Ptolemaic astronomers and the reign of geocentrists that lasted a long two millennia. Even Marx and Freud, our last two great systematizers, show signs of wear and exhaustion after just a single century of application. Experts in every field hold holy models and systems, languages, understandings, that are themselves subject to challenge, revamping, innovation, further sectarian squabbles, and so the whole reeling thing bravely wobbles on, even under the administration of people whose intentions are of the highest order. They’re dedicated. They keep up. Offices around this city are right now jammed with journals, trade publications, notes for papers and lectures, a whirlwind schedule of symposia stretching out over the upcoming calendar year, whatever, but it’s not really possible (nor really desirable) to declare finality of understanding within a single discipline.

  And so we improve one prejudice to rest awhile in another, we embrace errors, we correct, reverse earlier decisions, advance again, struggle pitifully, and meantime as we revise and roll on, Letourneau is caught in the amber of our understanding. This sense of understanding as fossil sample occurred throughout the story, and after many readings of just about everything written on the Letourneau case I entered a near-mad state of chicken/egg confusion where habitual priority starts flipping around, and I couldn’t tell anymore if people were trying to understand and describe Letourneau or invent a theoretical prototype. I started being unable to understand the words people were using, I couldn’t make sense of trust and manipulation and adultery and power ba
se and exploitation and teacher, and other than seeing this as ample evidence of why I’m not a judge or a lawyer or a doctor or a cop or for that matter anybody with any meaningful responsibility or position in this world, and getting a real sorrowful glimpse of why that’s probably a very good thing, I also began to believe that of course Letourneau had to be sentenced, that sentencing her was a way of stabilizing the language. She upset accepted meaning (and by the way I have no problem with Judge Lau’s decision. That’s not my concern here). What I wonder about is language, about what gets lost when laypeople concede the control of words to clinicians, scientists, lawyers, etc., which is, scilicet, the rich, supple instrumentation of language that makes it an encounter with reality, that lets it reach into everything, into every little part of life, and how in this case a circle had formed and experts with fixed language were returning Letourneau to a fixed state, and doing so by excluding, again and again, notions that were not naturally a part of their descriptive vocabulary, like love.

  Even though in the following quote I’m cutting a little bit against the grain of her intention, I think Lucy Berliner of Harborview Medical Center framed the problem succinctly when she said, “Even if [Letourneau] does genuinely have feelings for him, there is no context for a relationship like this to be normalized.”

  No context, where? In the language of sociology, law, psychology, victimology, penology, pedagogy? And what’s “a relationship like this”? What’s the omitted word? And why select the evasive, hesitant, nonspecific word “feelings”? And why the qualifier “even if”? And what’s the difference between saying “even if she does genuinely have feelings for him” and saying “even if she has genuine feelings for him”? (Opting for the weak adverb instead of the adjectival form basically cripples Letourneau’s action and in subtle syntactic ways indicates her feelings were never genuine or real in the object-noun world but only in her head, a shift in the direction of subjectivity that feeds right into the psych-soc agenda, the fixing up or at least identifying of errant bad-acting people with defective heads. It’s all very neat and circular, and the system of Berliner’s sentence is well-tuned.)

  But right now this is Einstein’s world and both trains are moving, so I want to go back briefly and look at the idea of the discarded. This is pretty common in the sciences, the abandoning of paradigms and the languages that go with them (see Thomas S. Kuhn, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions). In contrast, we don’t discard the anguish of a father bent over his dead daughter (King Lear), or a man making a Faustian pact with the bitch goddess Success to win back the love of a woman (Gatsby), and so on. Further, we don’t discard the language that creates this stuff either. In the case of King Lear, the language that lets us see his magnificent ruin has outlasted Newtonian optics. Science deals with things, not human beings, and is speechless.

  Fifty years ago Paul Tillich wrote, “It seems that the emphasis on the so-called ‘empirical’ method in theology has not grown out of actual theological demands but has been imposed on theology under the pressure of a ‘methodological imperialism,’ exercised by the pattern of natural sciences.” Basically he says there’s been a corruption of theology by the encroachment of scientific understanding into places where it doesn’t belong. This “methodological monism,” or the idea that a single system can describe everything, spreads out and in imperial fashion colonizes chemistry, theology, the study of literature and history, etc. But, he writes, “reality itself makes demands, and the method must follow; reality offers itself in different ways, and our cognitive intellect must receive it in different ways. An exclusive method applied to everything closes many ways of approach and impoverishes our vision of reality.” You never want to forget that the encounter with life comes first; and an ascendant methodology, foreign to the subject in the first place, shouldn’t stand in the way of that encounter.

  “Our descriptions are better,” Nietzsche wrote of older stages of knowledge and science, “but we do not explain any more than our predecessors.”

  To examine the description/explanation problem, let’s look quickly at a column by Terry McDermott that ran in the Seattle Times on Sunday, November 16, 1997. Prefatorily: I have nothing good to say about this column. It was smug, it was mingy, it was a skimpy eight hundred words (Anna Karenina, in contrast to Letourneau, was given eight hundred pages before Tolstoy pitched her under a train) that hinged on a kind of fallacious reasoning that had by the day of sentencing become a staple of casual analysis, namely that if Letourneau had been a man and X a girl, we’d have no qualms about sentencing her to “four years in the joint.”

  Here’s the song sung in rounds:

  —Karil Klingbeil (director of social work, Harborview Medical Center): “I doubt that had there been a male perpetrator, it would have resulted in the same sentence.”

  —Nancy Grace (Court TV): “And let me guarantee you that if these roles were reversed and a male teacher had had sex with a 12- or 13-year-old student there would be no question that he’d be sent to jail.”

  —Shannon Peddycord (Bothell resident, in a letter to the Times): “Can you imagine had this been Joe-Stud Teacher and the victim a curvy 13-year-old girl?”

  —And McDermott (in his column):

  Mary Letourneau, 35, a schoolteacher, has an affair with a 13-year-old boy, a former student of hers.

  The affair produces a guilty plea to charges of second-degree child rape. It also produces a baby and, last week, a suspended sentence.

  Mark Blilie, 42, a schoolteacher, has an affair with a 15-year-old girl, a former student of his.

  The affair produces a conviction for third-degree child rape and child molestation and four years in the joint for Blilie.

  What’s wrong with this?

  I mean, other than the fact that both these people did horrible things, that they abused children and the hopes and trust of entire communities.

  What’s wrong, of course, is the similarity of the situations and the vastly different outcomes.

  How did this happen?

  The answers are . . .”

  First off, “the joint”—I love that hard-boiled tough-guy lingo. When McDermott uses it the meaning is deceptive and suggests a real familiarity, not with prison or jails or the justice system, but with the genre of film noir and detective fiction, a filtrated and highly stylized knowledge of the underworld. Or maybe it was borrowed from the mouth of Frank Sinatra circa 1955. At any rate, as language the word just kind of hangs there, archaic and referential. The joint—never mind that it’s antique slang, it’s also about the most colorful and decorative word McDermott uses in the column and thus calls attention to itself, asking for examination. In the piece it functions rhetorically by setting up a crusty hardened term to contrast with the softness of Letourneau’s heart and her weak and womanish insistence on love, love being a word presumably not used a whole lot in the mean dark weary bleak Bogey-haunted Sinatra-soundtracked inky black-and-white precincts McDermott inhabits down around Fairview Ave.—except maybe to describe a desperate broad or femme fatale or some other pathetic delusional female type. In the course of his column that softness of the heart, of her tendrilled hair, of a love that “mystifies everyone but her” is roundly dismissed, and McDermott’s manly argot, the inner language of the knowing, is triumphant. Aided by this trope he concludes what everybody else concludes and does so by eliminating the mystifying element, love, from the equation.

  “But when good people do bad things and do them on purpose, we are left without our normal, comforting rationalizations. It’s very scary because in the end we are left to wonder: What about us?”

  Thus ends the flow of rhetoric, on a note of pretend wonder. Tonally this piece took condescension to familiar heights for the Seattle Times. To begin, who exactly does that possessive include? It’s my feeling McDermott’s “our” refers, not to mine or yours, but to his and, by extension, the Times’s “normal, comforting rationalizations,” and that with this statement he’s entered metajou
rnalistic territory, sort of embedding a ghostly self-reflexive footnote to himself about the nature of the newspaper business and its questionable ability to cover anything that isn’t “normal,” etc. What’s “scary” here is the paper’s brief venture outside its objective stance and into the mysterious and confusing moral universe, a place it probably doesn’t belong. Put differently, the Times, with its protectorate sensibility, its wooden prose, and its stolid remove from the fray is really just trying to tidy up the universe in the image of itself. I can’t tell, but it kind of seems to me from many readings of the final paragraph that McDermott’s blaming Letourneau for failing to clarify herself into a cliché à la Veronica Lake, that he’s accusing her of being beyond understanding, of not fitting his story, of eluding his dated language, of monkeying with his sense of the normal, the comforting, the rationalized. Ergo we get “scary.” Withal the entire column is written in the storybook language and syntax of a Junior Scholastic reader, providing a universe of “good people” and “bad people,” a world where things are “very scary” or a fuzzy warmth is evoked by acknowledging that in situations like this “the answers are as simple as human history, and as complicated as the human heart.”

  A sentence like that sounds awfully resonant but you have to wonder if the writer in laying down the words had anything real in mind beyond the creation of sound effects. Read the sentence more than once and the vaguely axiomatic philosophical construction, the balanced but weary knowledge of the world’s ways, the parallel repetition of human, the apposing of heart and history, might give you, as it did me, the sense of a sentence whose meaning probably mystifies everyone but the writer.

  The easy interchangeability of the terms (if Letourneau were a man, X a girl) strikes me as a queer and cruel exercise in abstract thinking that depends on a mistake and a horrible forgetting. The mistake is to confuse what’s merely similar with what’s equal—“nothing is really equal” (Nietzsche)—and then pass it off as logic. On even the superficial level there seem to be plenty of differences between the two situations, but on the existential level there is nothing but difference. Letourneau and Mark Blilie are two different people, not data, not exempla, not variables awaiting quantity or value in a math equation. And this leads to the forgetting. What kind of damage is done to our ability to love or understand and thus fully judge one another when daily we’re encouraged to forget that people are people and view them instead as so much pasteboard, scenery, clutter, generalized instances (of murder, of rape, of embezzlement, etc.)? Here’s a confounding particular: from what I’ve been able to gather, the boy/the child/the victim, X, is actually a couple of inches taller than Letourneau. In terms of physical gifts alone he’s a young man. But this was never brought up in the Times /Post-Intelligencer reportage, although it would, it seems to me, slightly alter or maybe completely redo a reader’s picture of the child/the boy/the victim. Certainly it would affect your understanding.