ART IS WHAT YOU CAN GET AWAY WITH ELIZABETH ELLEN

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“Oh yeah,” I say. I am typing words into my phone. I am not actually speaking aloud. Saul and I don’t actually talk in person anymore. 

    Saul is nineteen and I am forty-five.

    I began this ‘conversation’ by telling Saul I smoked weed last night, the first time in two or three years. Possibly four. Four years. 

    “I have different drives now,” Saul says. “Different motivations.”

    “I see,” I say. “Harvard? The Young Republican’s Convention?”

    Both Saul’s parents were Ivy Leaguers. 

    I am trying to turn my life around, too. I’m just not sure in which direction. 

    “That’s why I want to see E. again,” Saul is typing. “I want her to see I’m not like that anymore.”

    I cannot keep having this conversation with Saul, re: E. For three years we have been having the same conversation. I don’t have the heart to tell him it’s never going to happen again: him and E. 

    “So you’re not going to smoke weed with me then, Mr. Young Republican,” I say. 

    I was never Saul’s mentor. The time I took the two of them – E. and Saul –to Miami for the weekend was on a whim.  t was just after Christmas, there was another week left of winter break. Saul’s parents didn’t object. We were only there two nights. We were at the beach or pool the vast majority of our time. People put too much value on the sleeping arrangements of people of varied age groups. 

    Have you ever seen The Night of the Iguana? 

    There is some speech Richard Burton gives at the end of that film. I cannot recall the specificities of it now, but I encourage you to watch it. I have the vague memory of it having some relevance to what I am trying to say here.

    But let’s say I was. Saul’s mentor, I mean. 

    Saul was something like a son to me. A prized child. A spoiled boy I could not say no to. (Unlike E. I could always say no to poor E.)

    The romanticised parts of the mentor/student relationship were always the best parts in generations past (and I mean this on both sides of that equation).

    I wouldn’t expect the lot of you to understand any of this. 

    As the serial killer in the TV show I’m watching recently told the detective interrogating him, “You wouldn’t know. You’re a barren spinster.”

    People don’t want to have children anymore, I’ve noticed. The more educated, better off people like you, I mean. Too time consuming. Too discomfiting. You wouldn’t understand anything about watching a child go through puberty, become a man or woman, leave you for a life you will cease to know intimately. So how could you be expected to understand how one comes, at age forty, to share a bed with her teenage child and her teenage child’s best friend of opposite gender?

    You wouldn’t understand it minus the sex so you would feel it necessary to invent or fabricate the sex. It’s what you’ve been taught by films and talk shows and essays written by people with no experience in being a mother or a woman of a certain age or the mother of a child over the age of five. I don’t blame you.

    But it’s so much more interesting. Without the sex, I mean. Just ask Macaulay Culkin. 

“I don’t know,” Saul says. “That is pretty tempting. Might have to make an exception for that.”

    He is referring to the question I posed earlier of smoking weed with me. Perhaps you had forgotten. It’d been a while since I posed it. 

    In case you haven’t gotten this already, I am no longer motivated, let’s say, by ‘morality’ which is, to my mind, a false sense of decency, self-designed by each individual to fit his or her most current lifestyle. I.e. it is basically worthless, as a deterrent for bad behaviour or for anything else. It became worthless the moment it was invented by a mortal. And in that regard it is no different than religion. But people like to have something to cling to, some illusion of right and wrong by which they can judge others.

    My motivations have changed also. I said this earlier. I am reminding you of it now. 

    I am trying to turn my life around also. Just, perhaps, in a different way than Saul.

    “I am leaving E.’s dorm now,” I say. I am an hour from home. I drive up once a week to have lunch, to sit in E.’s dorm room and watch TV with E. and E.’s roommate. 

    “You’re so close,” Saul says. 

    “So close and yet so far – emotionally, I mean,” I say. I am still in my parked car. I can see into E.’s window from my parking spot in front of the dorm. 

    “Ouch,” Saul says.

    Later, at home, I will go upstairs to E.’s bedroom. Lie on the bed. Sleep in her bed…

    But right now I am trying to turn my life around. I am a woman dealing with loss. 

    I can’t tell if being high will make me feel better or worse. 

    It’s hard to tell how anything will make you feel until you’re doing it. 

 

You’re a barren spinster. You wouldn’t understand.

 

    “It’s never too late to turn your life around,” I tell Saul. I am no longer typing words into my phone. I am no longer parked outside E.’s dorm. 

The mentor/student relationship worked best when neither side/party was made to feel guilty about anything he/she was feeling. 

    I was careful not to park my car where E. might see it were E. to walk by on her way to class or the cafeteria. E. has made it clear she has no interest in seeing Saul again and, as her mother, I want to honour her choices. 

    I am a woman dealing with loss.

    I am trying to turn my life around.