What to call himself in this letter? The lack of names on the page bothers him. Lack of his name, to be clear. American writer was a good joke for a while but he doesn’t want to overdo it. A simple “he” feels too flat, too sanded off lately. A. feels not quite right either, and despite his love for em-dashes, A— feels wrong too.
What do you call yourself privately? he asks himself, as if some other he might respond and tell him. He remembers a conversation with his friend Garth Greenwell about people arguing about whether people spoke to themselves or not in the way people do in novels. Some writers believed no one had conversations in their head, some knew they did. What a life, he thought, to not give yourself stage directions from offstage all the time. But all those times he never called himself by name.
Within the conventions of autofiction, it should probably be the name his mother and father gave him, Alexander. He’s asked people to call him that after years of people presuming to call him Alex, whether they knew him well or not. Alexander was his American name anyway, why should it be made easier? When did the convenience end?
And does he call himself that? He does not, and those instructions are not for him. A number of his friends call him Chee, which he does like, but it is also not how he talks to himself. The people who’d called him by his Korean name are all dead. If he hears the name he’ll know a ghost is speaking. Or God. And so no, he’s not putting that name here. And besides, he likes keeping it a little secret, like the name a character keeps safe from witches in a fantasy novel.
For those readers catching up, the story thus far: Letters 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8 and 9. And for first timers, perhaps begin with the bibliomancy.
Of the nicknames he’s had, there’s really only a few he’s loved. One was Chinito, which in some contexts was also a slur. The chef and kitchen staff at Morton’s when he was a waiter there in the 1990s all used to call him that with a kind of flirtatious affection. They shouted it as he walked by the line, like he was a baseball player. But that name belonged to that time now, and to them. And then there was Contessa.
He’d arrived in San Francisco in 1989, and had become friends almost immediately with John Orcutt and Justin Vivian Bond. And almost immediately, they had started calling each other Glamoretta (JVB), Miss Betty Pearl (John) and Contessa (himself). The way the story went, Glam was the pretty sister, Betty, the smart one (and a bargain hunter too), and Contessa was the mean sister who broke all their dolls. He had told his friends about how his family was technically aristocratic on the Korean side, something that is less impressive now that he knows more about Korean aristocrats, and either John or Viv had pulled the name out of the air. The name had extended past his time there as those San Francisco friends migrated to New York, one by one, over the ten years that followed. And so it returned during a drink he and Dustin had with their friend Justin Vivian Bond, and V’s new friend, Seanarella. Viv was in London for a few fashion events and to see friends and so they met up at Frenchie’s in Covent Garden, where he found Viv willowy and golden but with a sprained foot after falling off a pair of shoes, an injury he had first learned about in his favorite Golden Palominos song.
In the the beautiful restaurant, oddly a little empty despite the massive throngs outside in Covent Garden, he and Viv reminisced a little about how they’d met in San Francisco and the name was said. “I think I need to bring her back,” he said to Viv, who laughed with enthusiasm.
It couldn’t just be Contessa again though, could it? So much had happened since the first era. This was a wiser, older Contessa returning after all this time. Professor Contessa had a nice ring to it. He could put it on a t-shirt, but a t-shirt just for him.
*
He had arrived last August reading Peter Ackroyd’s London: A Biography on the plane over. It had almost too much information, a baroque lesson but pleasurable all the same. What was this city he couldn’t remember from the first time he visited, and yet found so indelible now? He had always taken the city for granted in a certain way. Hadn’t it always been here? Not always.
From Ackroyd:
There is no doubt that the region has been continually occupied for at least fifteen thousand years. A great gathering of flint tools, excavated in Southwark, is assumed to mark the remains of a Mesolithic manufactory; a hunting camp of the same period has been discovered upon Hampstead Heath; a pottery bowl from the Neolithic period was unearthed in Clapham. On these ancient sites have been found pits and post-holes, together with human remains and evidence of feasting. These early people drank a potion similar to mead or beer. Like their London descendants, they left vast quantities of rubbish everywhere. Like them, too, they met for the purposes of worship. For many thousands of years these ancient peoples treated the great river as a divine being to be placated and surrendered to its depths the bodies of their illustrious dead.
The history of London is the history of the Thames, as his friend F. T. Kola says.
The country as near as he can tell seemed to have been built up by a series of invasions from other countries until it became a country skilled at invasions itself. As if the descendants of the survivors learned the craft until it was all they knew.
He remembers being complimented on how well he spoke English on his first visit back in 1990, a pretty good introduction to the humor here but also, the relationship between the two countries. Growing up, he had always felt like a poor copy of whatever it was someone expected of him, and it started here, at least partly. His life growing up in, uh, New England. In Cape Elizabeth, Maine, named for Elizabeth of Bohemia. His mom’s family, dairy farmers with their deed from King George III for their farm in Central Maine. Wandering the National Portrait Gallery after seeing a Hockney show there, he found himself in one of the other rooms and as an older woman walked by with her husband traling behind, she said to him “There’s George III” as if they’d been looking for him and so he looked up and saw this king at last. So it’s you.
Over a decade ago an English Department colleague at another college he worked at recounted a quick back and forth with that college’s president who has since moved on. The president apparently walked up to him and said, “I mean, what is English? As a field? Is it even a field?” He would tell the story and laugh about it, at both the president, a little in his cups, and also, what were we doing anyway? He can’t remember if the colleague ever gave his answer.
The thing is, it occurred to him, all these years later, it might literally be a field. With grass and flowers, lined with trees. Maybe even more of a chalk plain at times. But certainly a field.
Just looked it up. I will try to find a copy here. That job sounds like a setting for a Muriel Spark novel.
I had a dear friend, now passed, who called me Countess, after the Yeats play.