…the epistemological promises of second sight, being psychic, living through out-of-body experiences, of dying, tripping on hallucinogens and all that.
I attended, and this semester I’m currently teaching at, Sarah Lawrence College, a tiny liberal arts school in Westchester County. While at Sarah Lawrence, I took a writing class from the novelist Brian Morton, who was one of the best writing teachers I’ve ever had. It was a class where the personalities of all the students in it just had a way of meshing well together, and I still have some great friends that I met in that class. Brian became a great friend, and a great help to me in many ways later on. When Brian moved from Brooklyn to a house in Westchester near to the Sarah Lawrence campus, I built a lot of bookshelves and furniture for him, and even wound up babysitting his two young kids. So I was pretty close with Brian at Sarah Lawrence.
After Sarah Lawrence I went to the graduate MFA program in creative writing at the University of Iowa in Iowa City, a smallish, cozy college town about three hours west of Chicago. I found I very much enjoyed the quiet, the low cost of living, the friendliness of the Midwest. There used to be a local Iowa Public Radio program called “Live at Prairie Lights.” I don’t think the program runs anymore, but the format was basically this: Julie Englander, a local Iowa Public Radio host, would MC the readings that authors would give at Prairie Lights bookstore. Prairie Lights is a big independent bookstore in Iowa City where writers often give readings—it’s a fantastic bookstore, and one of the major hearts of the vibrant literary culture of Iowa City. It was an hour-long show, and usually the writer would read from whatever book he or she was plugging for about half an hour, and for the next half hour Julie Englander would interview the writer, taking occasional questions from the audience.
In September of 2006, I had only been at the workshop for less than a month, didn’t have that many friends and didn’t really know the ropes of the place yet. Brian Morton had just published his novel Breakable You, and was on a book tour that took him through Iowa City, to read on Live at Prairie Lights. During the interview, Brian started talking about me to Julie in response to some question in the audience. He mentioned me by name—Ben Hale (that becomes important later)—and started talking about me in, well, laudatory terms. It was flattering and (only slightly) embarrassing… There weren’t that many people in the audience, and Julie saw who I was.
At one point (this forwardness is characteristic of her) she suddenly shoved the microphone in my face and asked me to comment on Brian’s compliments. I just blurted, “Aw, shucks,” which was the wittiest thing I could come up with on such short notice. I think I was aiming for a slightly ironic tone that implied both gratitude and humility while still letting people know how cool I am. I don’t think all that quite came across, though, and later I felt a little embarrassed about my “comment.” After the reading, there was a small party for him held at the UI Hillel House (the reading was part of UI’s Jewish Writers Reading Series). We ate cheesecake and drank some wine. There were just six or seven people there. Later, the party dissipated, I walked back with Brian to his hotel and we talked a little more. “Keep in touch,” “Have a good trip,” and then I went home, and the next day continued my relatively uneventful life as an MFA student at Iowa.
Now, everybody at the workshop had office mailboxes at the Dey House, the UI building that houses the offices of the Writers’ Workshop. They’re little wooden cubbyhole-style office mailboxes, I’m sure you know what they look like. Jan and Deb, the secretaries at the Dey House, knew that nobody ever actually got any mail in those things, and hence nobody checked them with any great frequency—and so when we actually did get mail in our office mailboxes, Jan or Deb would do us the gracious favor of calling us to tell us we got mail.
I came home late one Friday afternoon in early March, and there was a message on my voicemail from Jan. (That’s right, I actually did not have a cell phone in the year 2006. I am Luddite, hear me roar.) The message was this: “Hi, Ben, this is Jan at the Dey House. I just wanted to let you know there’s a letter here for your father. Have a nice weekend.”
I thought: Hm. That’s weird. Surely she meant to say, “there’s a letter here from my father.” But then I thought, why in the world would my father mail me a letter to my office mailbox at the Dey House? He would just send it to my apartment. Furthermore, my father, a physicist at Lockheed Martin, is a biggest techie geek you can imagine, and I don’t think he would ever physically send me an old-fashioned letter; he’d just send me an e-mail. In any case, it was Friday afternoon, and the Dey House was closed for the weekend. I figured I’d check my mail next week to find out what all this was about, and promptly forgot about it and went on with my weekend.
I happened to be in the Dey House for some other reason the following Monday morning, remembered Jan’s cryptic voicemail message, and checked my office mailbox.
Inside was a large manila envelope of the brass bending-clasp variety, that had been positively mummified in clear packing tape—whoever sent this clearly did NOT want it getting accidentally opened. On the front of the envelope was an address-label sticker from a Bobbie Kozash at Smith College in Northampton, Massachusetts, addressed to a woman whose name I will withhold at an address in Iowa City. This address was scribbled out, and above it, in shaky, scratchy ink, was written:
Att’n: BEN HALE
WRITERS’S WORKSHOP
Enclosure for MATT HALE
Please deliver
My father’s name, by the way, is Charley.
Now, I am not in the habit of opening other people’s mail, but I figured that the only way I was going to begin to uncover this mystery was to go ahead and open the envelope. Inside was a nine-page long handwritten letter, dated Feb. 28, 2007. But for some reason she had kept the original and mailed a Xerox of the letter. First I flipped to the last page to see if the name she signed was the same as the one in the crossed-out address. It was. This isn’t her real name, but let’s call her Dorothy Henderson.
At this point in the story, when I’m verbally telling it at a party, I will simply summarize the content of the letter. But since I’m writing this, I’ll go ahead and type out the whole thing. It’s a truly fascinating document. I know it’s long, but it’s well worth reading from start to finish. As you read it, imagine how I was feeling as I read the nearly incoherent opening paragraphs (comprising about the first three pages) before finally coming to some information that helped me begin to solve this enigma. I read this in a state of great confusion, yes, but also (from the first paragraph, as you’ll see) with a growing sense of sympathy, interest, and heartbreak.
So, here, in its bittersweet rambling entirety, it is:
This is the second letter I’ve started to you in the past week. I can’t seem to find a beginning and hence 'carrot: “not”' a direction. It doesn’t help that I’ve actually, i.e., as an objective reality, got so many uncommonly difficult things on my plate that any ordinary coping strategy doesn’t cut it. I’m resolved therefore to give myself a time limit, one hour, so as not to write myself into a whirlpool.
I guess I’ll start then with what I’ve posited would be the endpoint here: would you like to meet me somewhere for conversation and a drink? Or maybe that should go, for a drink and conversation. What do you drink? Coffee would suit me fine, in which case Starbucks’s is clean and well lit. I have a feeling that this is not your particular addiction, though, and really I’d prefer to conduct such a conversation over a glass of wine. So you choose, pending of course that you’d like to meet, which you haven’t by any means agreed to do yet.
If your time and obligations permit, I should say (shouldn’t I?), and you are not disinclined by these many sallies… well I’m just kidding. Let’s decide to meet. Say yes. You can come here. I’ll serve wine and finger-food. Bring a friend. I’ll rustle up some coffee or tea or juice or a soft drink, if you like. I don’t do cocktails, except gin and tonic, in summer usually. Or wouldn’t it be most expedient of us (all) just to duck into one of the eateries downtown and take whatever they offer wherever? Then again, how about Gus’s?
I’m not like this. I decide, I act, although not necessarily unilaterally of course. I don’t know what’s got into me. I can’t seem to achieve on the page here a one-clause, unconditional sentence. Usually it’s I who find out indirection, but also I have a taste for irony and metaphor and other forms of double-speak. So I introduce a challenge, I modify, I qualify, I see complexity in simplicity, and so on and on. Then I cannot account for myself—I don’t know what I mean, etc.
To get to the point, I am very glad to know you’re in Iowa City, and I welcome the opportunity to renew our friendship. Indeed, when I was told by whoever answered my phone call at the Writer’s Workshop that yes, there is a Ben Hale there, a kind of circle closed for me at that moment. The circularity had to do with whether, by determining that the name Ben Hale had an assignee, I could discover from its bearer whether he was related to you, and, if so, whether I could get to you by going through him.
How did I come to posit his relation to you? I was waiting for the 'an illegible word that looks to me like “Seats,” with a capital S' bus inside Panera at the Sycamore Mall. I had situated myself at a table alongside one of their plate-glass windows, the better for them 'here the same illegible word (“Seats?”) is carroted into the text' to find me there. But since they not infrequently claim they couldn’t do that, i.e., find me, I took it upon myself to be sure to find them. So I’d glance outside every couple minutes, whatever occupied me at table (I don’t remember). I think it was the Xmas season, which means there was an early dusk; inside the restaurant there were a lot of people milling around as their names were called and they went to pick-up their orders, and went back to sit down. To this commotion inside was added the traffic honking and blinking outside, in the parking lot. Thus to distinguish between the headlights of an approaching bus, say, pulling up outside and the reflected vehicles with their headlights seeming to be headed toward the plate-glass, inside of which I took cover, this was no easy distinction to make (without ducking). In these circumstances, my gaze lost a focus, so when it caught in its orbit a male who looked like a dead-ringer of Matt, I effectively gasped. It was so uncanny.
This, the uncontestable doubling, wasn’t what immediately impressed me. Rather, I knew it was you, for sure. Then I looked again, and then again, wondering whether I shouldn’t do a reality test. The reality test that I did do confirmed my suspicion that this might be a younger man than you, who would’ve had to have grown another 30 years 'carrot: “or more”' older than you were when I’d known you.
Later that week, I was recounting this little scene and the shock of its 'carrot: “main”' vision to an acquaintance. What I said, with a zero-degree of belief or conviction, was, “Well, it could have been his son.” I was too completely dubious about alleging this possibility, not only because I doubted what Matt Hale’s son would be doing there at Panera sitting the next row over, I also doubted that this coincidence, carried by the forceful mysteries of DNA, could have explanatory power. It was too predictable, or to my taste too conventional. I had gasped, hadn’t I? Hadn’t it been uncanny, even hallucinatory? Wasn’t I channeling Matt Hale? With the traffic, the widespread hullabaloo, the frenzy of the Xmas season, I preferred to cling to the unreality of it all, even though I don’t usually accept, much less go in for, the epistemological promises of second sight, being psychic, living through out-of-body experiences, of dying, tripping on hallucinogens and all that. On the other hand, I do subscribe to the idea of powerful intuition and the readings it can yield. So, seeing Matt Hale’s DNA transcribed in the very flesh of this lad I didn’t know and had never seen before, well that set my wheels spinning.
Soon after, like 'insert: “in”' a week or so, another coincidence befalls me. I routinely tune in to the readings that take place evenings at Prairie Lights. You may know about them: writers at various stages of their careers, with various degrees of accomplishment, or promise, read from their own works. These can be poems or various forms of prose, such as biography and history, and the lode of genius can be tapped in things published or not. Many who read are alumni/alumnae of the UI Writer’s Workshop. So I have something to learn by listening, or so I think, but my commitment to the occasion depends on what I’ve eaten for dinner, and other banalities.
On this one night someone was reading whom I didn’t know, whose name I didn’t recognize. I think he had authored some sort of regional history like the event of a blizzard (about which I may have heard another night, as I think of it). Anyway, he interrupted himself as he went along, frequently paying homage to Ben Hale, who finally said “Aw Shucks” from his seat in the audience, evidently. I had to wonder myself what this man thinks he owes Ben Hale? Why, does he think he must 'insert: “he”' repay him repeatedly? But the main thing is that he made Ben Hale famous that night, irreversibly.
And that gave me my 'crossed-out word that I can’t read' a Eureka (!) moment. Ben Hale must be the name of the man whose likeness I found so overwhelming that night at Panera. He definitely is Matt Hale’s son. I put to the side the line of inquiry that this revelation has opened up. I postpone the consequent for a month or more, possibly on the off-chance that I’d receive a visitation by way of an answer. The question was, can DNA lie? Or can this son of Matt, or his heir apparent, get me through to Matt—a phone #, an address, a hint. By this point Matt Hale has become, like Ben before him, a disembodied name, a figment or ephemera prowling the night like Macbeth or like Hamlet’s ghost.
Then finally and at last, I call the Writers’ Workshop on 2/19 to follow the bit of a clue afforded by whoever the writer was with that questionable debt. “Do you have a graduate student, or maybe just a writer, whose name is Ben Hale, begotten by Matt?” They do have Ben Hale (god, I just realized that I’m sounding the name in an incantatory way myself). So it 'insert: “thus”' resoundingly gets me to the end of the game. Incidentally, I cut off my question to the person doing the phone at the WW that day, stopping short of the “begotten by Matt” part.
So what do I do now? Now that it all fits together, that is (or does it)? I’ll write this letter, for one thing. Then I’ll call Ben Hale at the cell-phone number given me by the WW person and ask if I might leave this for him there to give to you. He’ll agree, I assume. And then you will have read it.
I must tell you two things now. In brief: (1) although I didn’t realize it before this past week, I figure I must have encountered you in this present context many times. I could do the citations over a glass of wine and cross-check with you, if you like, if you will. But you never introduced yourself. But also, I do think my wild surmises were denied by me many times over. I always talked myself out of them (the surmises). “Nah,” I’d say to my brain, “that couldn’t be Matt Hale, what would he be in IA City for? You are giving me inexplicable imaginings to deal with. Shut up and go to sleep.” My brain would keep chattering. I’d never expected you to become manifest. I thought I’d placed you in the deep past. Not that I’m not delighted to find you in the present, if find you I do.
One reason I’m uncertain is that I’ve conflated you with two other men (i.e., each of two separately) who like you are tall and lanky and disposed to think and be nice. They each feature in the merry-go-round of life at Coral Ct. I’ve had trouble figuring out which was who frequently, and have taken one to be the other, or so I thought. Now I find there is another 'insert: “third”' factor in the calculus, namely “you” if that is you. Impossible to identify satisfactorily when it’s dark, when he’s in a car, when he’s bundled into a hat, scarf, ear warmers etc., gloves, galoshes etc.
(2) I also confess that when the circle I was mentioning closed, and I knew for sure that there is a Ben Hale and who he is in 'insert: “the”' person, and the likely connection he has to you, there was a landslide in my mind as one memory succeeded another and wheeled by, to be succeeded itself. Mostly these are images — image memories, an image-repertoire, surprising in its vivacity and intensity and warmth.
So, also under the influence of that glass of wine, I could recount a few 'insert: “such memories”' without embarrassment. After a certain point in one’s life, it seems OK to go backward instead of always pressing on to something up ahead. People realize that what they were in youth is still there in them, and that this younger self is still intact waiting to be reactivated. Not lost and gone, not negligible, found, a find.
'The rest is hand-written, not part of the Xeroxed copy'
Something I read in the NY Times a while ago.
Sincerely,
Dot, or Dorothy
anytime ph: 545-7818
" address: 2892 Coral Court # 202
But I also found this letter weirdly touching, sweet. Who in the world was Matt Hale? Who is this woman, Dorothy Henderson? What does she do? How old is she? I could not help but be curious about the passion, the obsessive romantic longing clearly underlying her flowery prose (“What do you drink? Coffee would suit me fine, in which case Starbucks’s is clean and well lit. I have a feeling that this is not your particular addiction, though, and really I’d prefer to conduct such a conversation over a glass of wine. … Let’s decide to meet. Say yes.”).
Being an obsessive creep myself, I spent the day finding out as much information as I could about Dorothy Henderson. First I looked up and drove over to the address she provided in the letter. I didn’t go in, I just hung around and watched her door. Her lights weren’t on. She apparently lived in a cheap, squat, ugly apartment building on the outskirts of town. It was not a pleasant-looking place. I drove home again and searched for her on Google. I turned a few things up. It turned out that Dorothy Henderson is (or was, at any rate) a film theory scholar who had taught at Smith College. This fit nicely with the scribbled-out address label addressed to her from Smith College.
Dorothy Henderson had published widely. At one point, she seemed to have been a fairly successful academic. She contributed an article in the 1986 book Narrative, Apparatus, Ideology: A Film Theory Reader, titled, “Uncoded Images in the Heterogeneous Text.” Her “seminal” article (says the book jacket blurb) is listed in the table of contents right below Roland Barthes. In the journal Film Quarterly she reviewed a book titled Bertolt Brecht and the Theory of Media. I read her article “The Mise-en-Abîme in Hitchcock’s ‘Vertigo’,” published in Vol. 30, No. 4 (Summer, 1991) of Cinema Journal. And I was fascinated by it. It seemed that her main research interests were the semiotics and psychology (she cites Saussure, Barthes, Foucault, Lacan) of American noir and horror movies—particularly Hitchcock. Particularly “Vertigo.”
At the time, I had not seen “Vertigo.” Yes, I know, it’s a classic. And yes, I felt acutely ashamed of this fact. I had probably even pretended to have seen it at some point. Since then, I have seen it. More on this in a moment.
However, I did go to Sarah Lawrence. Sarah Lawrence, for the uninitiated, is a proud bastion of experimental higher education. The great counterculture-beloved crackpot polymath Joseph Campbell taught there for most of his life. There are about one thousand undergrads, no course requirements, no grades and no majors. If any small liberal arts school in the northeast can said to be a glowing ember of the revolutionary influence that midcentury continental critical theory used to have on the American academe, Sarah Lawrence is it.
I took a fair share of classes in critical theory, in film theory, anthropology, aesthetic theory and philosophy, including several courses taught by a locally famous, locally infamous, jittery brilliant madman named Danny Kaiser, who reveled in midcentury continental philosophy like a pig in slop. It was a sort of badge of honor (among my friends, anyway) to survive Danny’s seminars, where you read hundreds of pages of very difficult texts each week and in class endured his rapid-fire, sink-or-swim pedagogy and potentially explosive temper. Danny worshipped at the altar of Adorno. I once heard that someone said Anthony Burgess was so obsessed with James Joyce that he, “couldn’t get a fucking parking ticket without mentioning James Joyce.” Well, that was like Danny with Adorno.
I mention all this only to make it clear that I am not a total layman when it comes to the sort of heady critical analysis Dorothy Henderson trafficked in. This coincidence of the intersection of our interests further compounded my now burning curiosity. I longed to have a conversation with this woman.
I realized that I was feeling vaguely, eerily, in love. That’s not exactly unnatural when one reads a love letter, is it? Even if the woman is clearly at least old enough to have been publishing in scholarly journals in 1986, when I was three years old? Even if the love letter is meant for a stranger? Even if she erroneously thinks that this stranger is my father? Still, I was a little smitten.
At this point I kind of wanted to take her up on that glass of wine. Even the finger foods.
That night, I called the phone number she had penned in on the last Xeroxed page of her letter. I was answered by the sleepy-sounding voice of an older woman, with a lower-register rasp that I think indicated that she was a smoker. At that point I imagined myself enjoying many an evening of conversation with this woman, evenings of drinking wine, watching Hitchcock films and talking about Lacan.
This, as I recall it, is how our conversation began:
I felt terrible. I wished that I had good news for her. I knew she was sad, and lonely, and probably, it seemed, crazy. I honestly wanted her to find this Matt Hale (or someone like him). I wanted her to find her old love.
Then she asked me if there was anyone in my family named Matt. I said no, not to my knowledge. I bumblingly explained that I did have a cousin named Matt, but he was on my mother’s side of the family, so his last name was Earnest, not Hale. That just confused her further, and I immediately regretted having mentioned it.
Finally, after much logistical maneuvering, I was able to convince her (I thought) that the person she saw in the Panera in the mall was not me. I asked her to describe the person she saw. This person (her imagined Ben Hale) was “tall, lanky, blue-eyed, blonde, fair-skinned, athletic, chiseled good looks…” I can only wish that was me. I am: a towering 5’7”; slightly stocky; hazel eyes; brown hair; badly nearsighted (hence glasses); and at the time I had a big bushy beard. Clearly I was not the Adonis-like übermensch she was describing. I asked her if the person she saw had a beard and glasses. No, she said, quizzically, he did not. I thought that would have settled it.
Then DOROTHY gave me another rundown on the succession of “uncanny coincidences” that she described in her letter, and apologized for “wasting my time.” To which I said, “No, no, don’t say that… It wasn’t a waste of time at all!” We did not even touch on the question of why in the world she assumed that my presumptive father, Matt Hale, would also be living in Iowa City just because I—Ben Hale, his presumptive son—was.
I felt the conversation prematurely drawing to a close. At this rate, I was never going to suavely light her cigarettes, we were never going to drink wine and talk about Hitchcock and Lacan. I couldn’t let the conversation end yet. I asked her who this Matt Hale was. She said they met in the summer of 1977 in Crete. (She asked if my father had ever been to Crete—no, of course he has not.) What was she doing there? “Oh… I was teaching, and he was working there. We had a wonderful summer together.” I tried to get her to elaborate. She wouldn’t. So then I asked her about her life. She told me that she had had a guest professorship at the University of Iowa, and then somehow just kind of gotten stuck here. I asked her when she taught at UI. 1996, it turned out. Ten years ago. I asked her what she did on a typical day, hoping that she would tell me she had some sort of job. I wanted Dorothy to get back on her feet. She explained that she slept until about 6 (pm) every day, and then spent the night “thinking.” For ten years she had “just gotten stuck” in this sleepy little Midwestern university town, with no teaching position, no apparent job at all, living a solitary and nocturnal existence in a dismal apartment on the edge of town and imagining the doppelgangers of former lovers in a franchise bakery at the mall.
I told her that I had found online and read one of her scholarly critiques of Hitchcock’s Vertigo. I said I was fascinated by it. I found myself doing something I always do when I’m trying to make a woman like me: try to sound smart. We talked for over an hour. I refused to let her go. I kept trying to engage her in conversation. Finally, she made an excuse, said he had to meet someone for dinner. It was about 7:30 pm. According to her own description of her daily schedule, I suppose she would have only recently woken up. I realized then that in the course of the conversation I had, weirdly, somehow, managed to reverse our respective roles. Now I was the gibberingly insane person that she was trying to get of the phone with. I felt like I was being rejected.
Anyway. At last we said our goodbyes. I had never mustered the courage to simply ask if we could meet. At her place, perhaps? For some wine and “finger-foods”? This woman was clearly very loony and very lonely, I thought, and I wanted her to have a friend … or, possibly, more than a friend? I wouldn’t say I directly articulated that thought in my mind, no. Not in so many words. But still.
At the end of the conversation, right before she hung up, she said this:
“But if I ever see you around town again, I promise I’ll say hello, and introduce myself.”
At that point I realized that I had never actually been able to fully convince her that I was not, in fact, a tall, lanky, athletic, blond man with “fair skin” and “chiseled, handsome features” WHOM SHE HAD SEEN IN THE SYCAMORE MALL PANERA.
So I just let her think that. Knowing, of course, that if she continued to think I looked like that, we would almost certainly never meet.
And we hung up.
I still take it her letter and reread it every now and again, and idly fantasize about calling her up again and asking to meet.
Much later, I finally did get around to watching Vertigo. It is a brilliant--though not my favorite--Hitchcock film; I have more love for North by Northwest and the Jimmy Stuart remake of The Man Who Knew Too Much. The plot is incredibly complicated and operatically absurd. If you haven’t seen it: major spoiler alert. Jimmy Stuart is a detective suddenly forced into early retirement because he is diagnosed with acrophobia—fear of heights—which of course inhibits him from jumping from the roof of one skyscraper to the next, presumably a requirement for the job. Although he’s retired, an old friend asks him to tail his wife—a beautiful blond woman in a smart gray skirt suit, played by Kim Novak.
She appears to be possessed by the ghost of a similar-looking woman who died many years ago in nineteenth-century San Francisco. Jimmy Stuart saves her from drowning in the Bay beneath the Golden Gate Bridge, and takes her back to his place. Gradually, Jimmy Stuart falls in love with her. She keeps saying she’s been having a strange dream about the bell tower of an old Spanish mission. Jimmy Stuart happens to know about a Spanish mission very close to San Francisco. They drive down there to check it out. They kiss for the first time. Then she runs up the stairs of the bell tower to throw herself from the belfry. Jimmy Stuart runs after her, but because of his acrophobia can’t manage to make it up the stairs, which recede beneath him in a trippy special effect when he looks down. We see Kim Novak fall from the bell tower past the window, and then hear her splat. He could have saved her, if only he’d made it up the stairs.
Cut to a courtroom scene, with Jimmy Stuart’s mysterious friend who asked him to tail his wife. It turns out he’s getting some big life insurance payout. Then he explains he’s decided to move to Europe for the rest of his life, farewell, old boy, don’t kick yourself too much about letting my wife kill herself, it’s just that you’re just a useless coward, I completely understand. Then Jimmy Stuart descends into madness: after the famous scene where his head is flying through a flashing spiral of light, we see him as a slack-faced, unblinking vegetable in a convalescent home. Then, I suppose, guess he gets better. Many months later, he’s walking around in San Francisco, and he happens to see a woman on the street who looks—just—like—Kim Novak’s character in the first half of the movie. He knows it couldn’t possibly be her (she’s dead … right?)—but, but … it must be. She’s a brunette instead of blond, and she’s wearing different clothes—but it’s her, alright.
Soon there’s a magnificently creepy sequence in which Jimmy Stuart gives her a total makeover—buying her a smart gray skirt suit, having her hair dyed blond—and when he’s done with her, Kim Novak looks exactly like she did in the beginning of the movie. Eventually it turns out that Jimmy Stuart’s friend hired him for this job specifically because he knew he would never be able to make it up the stairs of the bell tower, on account of his acrophobia. And the woman in the smart gray suit was an actress the friend hired to play his wife. She ran up the stairs of the tower, where the friend was hiding in the belfry, ready to defenestrate his actual wife—also blond and dressed identically in a smart gray skirt suit. The whole rigmarole with Kim Novak being possessed by the sprit of the dead woman was just an elaborate ruse to gaslight Jimmy Stuart into witnessing the wife’s apparent “suicide.” When he finds out that the man’s “wife” is still alive, then he begins to piece the plot together.
And here’s another interesting thing. I was a strange and socially maladroit child. When I was in third grade my teachers became convinced that I was autistic—or something. They weren’t sure what was wrong with me, but they knew I was fucked up—that I had a difficult time socializing with other children, told bizarre lies, had a terrible stutter, and so on. I was put through a battery of psychological tests. I remember a Rorschach inkblot test. I remember word association games. Search me why, but apparently I had child psychologists who still had a penchant for classic midcentury psychotherapeutic techniques—which I’ve since been told, by other psychologists, was probably a weird anomaly. I also remember undergoing an EEG test.
I don’t know if they “found” anything conclusive from any of this. This was before the popularity of the idea of the “autistic spectrum,” i.e., that autism is not a binary thing, not an on/off switch—that, like rhythm, either you got it or you don’t—but rather a human mind may fall somewhere on a very fluid continuum between “normal” and “autistic,” with varying degrees of social functionality. I don’t know if this is related to all this stuff or not, but I’ve always known that I have a terrible memory for people’s faces. In my early adulthood I read about prosopognosia, or faceblindness, and decided to find a psychologist who could test to see if I had it. The psychologist determined that I have a mild and completely functional case of prosopagnosia: a greatly impaired ability to recognize and remember human faces. Some porsopognosiacs are so bad that they can’t even recognize their own face in a mirror, but my own prosopognosia seems to be have VERY little affect on my life.
All it means is that when I recognize people, I can’t go by the face alone. Most people have a natural ability to remember and recognize the gestalt of a particular human face without much difficulty, whereas I have to compile my total recognition of a person out of other information: clothes, hair, bodies, the sound of a voice, a manner of walking, a style of dress. I almost never fail to recognize someone I know, but it DOES happens from time to time. For instance, I once thought I was sitting next to a friend of mine at a coffee shop in Iowa, and was offended when she got up and left without saying anything to me. I had been going by her hair (this friend had very distinct curly blond hair). But when she stood up, I saw that she was wearing shoes of a certain style that I knew my friend Jane would never wear—it simply wasn’t her style—which is how I realized it wasn’t her.
When I mistake someone for someone else, it’s often because that person has somehow thrown me off the scent, by getting a dramatically different haircut, for instance, or by wearing a new coat I’ve never seen that person wear before. But then the person recognizes me, and I realize who she is when I hear the sound of her voice, and now all I have to do is readjust my mental file on that person to include the new haircut or the new coat.
I bring all this up because Hitchcock’s Vertigo is a prosopagnosiac’s nightmare. When I watch that movie, I too fail to realize that the woman in the second half of the film is even being played by the same actress until she puts on the same gray suit and gets her hair dyed blond. Then everything clicks—you could say, a circle closes—and I, the viewer, experience the freakout moment at the same time that Jimmy Stuart does in the movie. In fact, I probably experience the true moment of recognition long after Jimmy Stuart’s character does.
My faceblindness greatly accentuated the atmosphere of confusion and paranoia during the second half of the movie. When I watched Vertigo, I felt like I understood something of what the inside of Dorothy Henderson’s mind must be like. I wondered if this woman had spent so much time thinking about Hitchcock films that she has begun to think of her life as if it were a Hitchcock plot: taking place in a terrifying world twisted up with double agents, psychological manipulation, mysterious doppelgängers and freakish coincidences. Did the influence of Hitchcock in some way have a hand in Dorothy Henderson’s own descent into madness?
I haven’t spoken to Dorothy since our phone conversation several years ago. I hope she’s doing okay.
I attended, and this semester I’m currently teaching at, Sarah Lawrence College, a tiny liberal arts school in Westchester County. While at Sarah Lawrence, I took a writing class from the novelist Brian Morton, who was one of the best writing teachers I’ve ever had. It was a class where the personalities of all the students in it just had a way of meshing well together, and I still have some great friends that I met in that class. Brian became a great friend, and a great help to me in many ways later on. When Brian moved from Brooklyn to a house in Westchester near to the Sarah Lawrence campus, I built a lot of bookshelves and furniture for him, and even wound up babysitting his two young kids. So I was pretty close with Brian at Sarah Lawrence.
After Sarah Lawrence I went to the graduate MFA program in creative writing at the University of Iowa in Iowa City, a smallish, cozy college town about three hours west of Chicago. I found I very much enjoyed the quiet, the low cost of living, the friendliness of the Midwest. There used to be a local Iowa Public Radio program called “Live at Prairie Lights.” I don’t think the program runs anymore, but the format was basically this: Julie Englander, a local Iowa Public Radio host, would MC the readings that authors would give at Prairie Lights bookstore. Prairie Lights is a big independent bookstore in Iowa City where writers often give readings—it’s a fantastic bookstore, and one of the major hearts of the vibrant literary culture of Iowa City. It was an hour-long show, and usually the writer would read from whatever book he or she was plugging for about half an hour, and for the next half hour Julie Englander would interview the writer, taking occasional questions from the audience.
In September of 2006, I had only been at the workshop for less than a month, didn’t have that many friends and didn’t really know the ropes of the place yet. Brian Morton had just published his novel Breakable You, and was on a book tour that took him through Iowa City, to read on Live at Prairie Lights. During the interview, Brian started talking about me to Julie in response to some question in the audience. He mentioned me by name—Ben Hale (that becomes important later)—and started talking about me in, well, laudatory terms. It was flattering and (only slightly) embarrassing… There weren’t that many people in the audience, and Julie saw who I was.
At one point (this forwardness is characteristic of her) she suddenly shoved the microphone in my face and asked me to comment on Brian’s compliments. I just blurted, “Aw, shucks,” which was the wittiest thing I could come up with on such short notice. I think I was aiming for a slightly ironic tone that implied both gratitude and humility while still letting people know how cool I am. I don’t think all that quite came across, though, and later I felt a little embarrassed about my “comment.” After the reading, there was a small party for him held at the UI Hillel House (the reading was part of UI’s Jewish Writers Reading Series). We ate cheesecake and drank some wine. There were just six or seven people there. Later, the party dissipated, I walked back with Brian to his hotel and we talked a little more. “Keep in touch,” “Have a good trip,” and then I went home, and the next day continued my relatively uneventful life as an MFA student at Iowa.
***
Seven months passed.Now, everybody at the workshop had office mailboxes at the Dey House, the UI building that houses the offices of the Writers’ Workshop. They’re little wooden cubbyhole-style office mailboxes, I’m sure you know what they look like. Jan and Deb, the secretaries at the Dey House, knew that nobody ever actually got any mail in those things, and hence nobody checked them with any great frequency—and so when we actually did get mail in our office mailboxes, Jan or Deb would do us the gracious favor of calling us to tell us we got mail.
I came home late one Friday afternoon in early March, and there was a message on my voicemail from Jan. (That’s right, I actually did not have a cell phone in the year 2006. I am Luddite, hear me roar.) The message was this: “Hi, Ben, this is Jan at the Dey House. I just wanted to let you know there’s a letter here for your father. Have a nice weekend.”
I thought: Hm. That’s weird. Surely she meant to say, “there’s a letter here from my father.” But then I thought, why in the world would my father mail me a letter to my office mailbox at the Dey House? He would just send it to my apartment. Furthermore, my father, a physicist at Lockheed Martin, is a biggest techie geek you can imagine, and I don’t think he would ever physically send me an old-fashioned letter; he’d just send me an e-mail. In any case, it was Friday afternoon, and the Dey House was closed for the weekend. I figured I’d check my mail next week to find out what all this was about, and promptly forgot about it and went on with my weekend.
I happened to be in the Dey House for some other reason the following Monday morning, remembered Jan’s cryptic voicemail message, and checked my office mailbox.
Inside was a large manila envelope of the brass bending-clasp variety, that had been positively mummified in clear packing tape—whoever sent this clearly did NOT want it getting accidentally opened. On the front of the envelope was an address-label sticker from a Bobbie Kozash at Smith College in Northampton, Massachusetts, addressed to a woman whose name I will withhold at an address in Iowa City. This address was scribbled out, and above it, in shaky, scratchy ink, was written:
Att’n: BEN HALE
WRITERS’S WORKSHOP
Enclosure for MATT HALE
Please deliver
My father’s name, by the way, is Charley.
Now, I am not in the habit of opening other people’s mail, but I figured that the only way I was going to begin to uncover this mystery was to go ahead and open the envelope. Inside was a nine-page long handwritten letter, dated Feb. 28, 2007. But for some reason she had kept the original and mailed a Xerox of the letter. First I flipped to the last page to see if the name she signed was the same as the one in the crossed-out address. It was. This isn’t her real name, but let’s call her Dorothy Henderson.
At this point in the story, when I’m verbally telling it at a party, I will simply summarize the content of the letter. But since I’m writing this, I’ll go ahead and type out the whole thing. It’s a truly fascinating document. I know it’s long, but it’s well worth reading from start to finish. As you read it, imagine how I was feeling as I read the nearly incoherent opening paragraphs (comprising about the first three pages) before finally coming to some information that helped me begin to solve this enigma. I read this in a state of great confusion, yes, but also (from the first paragraph, as you’ll see) with a growing sense of sympathy, interest, and heartbreak.
So, here, in its bittersweet rambling entirety, it is:
***
Dear Matt —This is the second letter I’ve started to you in the past week. I can’t seem to find a beginning and hence 'carrot: “not”' a direction. It doesn’t help that I’ve actually, i.e., as an objective reality, got so many uncommonly difficult things on my plate that any ordinary coping strategy doesn’t cut it. I’m resolved therefore to give myself a time limit, one hour, so as not to write myself into a whirlpool.
I guess I’ll start then with what I’ve posited would be the endpoint here: would you like to meet me somewhere for conversation and a drink? Or maybe that should go, for a drink and conversation. What do you drink? Coffee would suit me fine, in which case Starbucks’s is clean and well lit. I have a feeling that this is not your particular addiction, though, and really I’d prefer to conduct such a conversation over a glass of wine. So you choose, pending of course that you’d like to meet, which you haven’t by any means agreed to do yet.
If your time and obligations permit, I should say (shouldn’t I?), and you are not disinclined by these many sallies… well I’m just kidding. Let’s decide to meet. Say yes. You can come here. I’ll serve wine and finger-food. Bring a friend. I’ll rustle up some coffee or tea or juice or a soft drink, if you like. I don’t do cocktails, except gin and tonic, in summer usually. Or wouldn’t it be most expedient of us (all) just to duck into one of the eateries downtown and take whatever they offer wherever? Then again, how about Gus’s?
I’m not like this. I decide, I act, although not necessarily unilaterally of course. I don’t know what’s got into me. I can’t seem to achieve on the page here a one-clause, unconditional sentence. Usually it’s I who find out indirection, but also I have a taste for irony and metaphor and other forms of double-speak. So I introduce a challenge, I modify, I qualify, I see complexity in simplicity, and so on and on. Then I cannot account for myself—I don’t know what I mean, etc.
To get to the point, I am very glad to know you’re in Iowa City, and I welcome the opportunity to renew our friendship. Indeed, when I was told by whoever answered my phone call at the Writer’s Workshop that yes, there is a Ben Hale there, a kind of circle closed for me at that moment. The circularity had to do with whether, by determining that the name Ben Hale had an assignee, I could discover from its bearer whether he was related to you, and, if so, whether I could get to you by going through him.
How did I come to posit his relation to you? I was waiting for the 'an illegible word that looks to me like “Seats,” with a capital S' bus inside Panera at the Sycamore Mall. I had situated myself at a table alongside one of their plate-glass windows, the better for them 'here the same illegible word (“Seats?”) is carroted into the text' to find me there. But since they not infrequently claim they couldn’t do that, i.e., find me, I took it upon myself to be sure to find them. So I’d glance outside every couple minutes, whatever occupied me at table (I don’t remember). I think it was the Xmas season, which means there was an early dusk; inside the restaurant there were a lot of people milling around as their names were called and they went to pick-up their orders, and went back to sit down. To this commotion inside was added the traffic honking and blinking outside, in the parking lot. Thus to distinguish between the headlights of an approaching bus, say, pulling up outside and the reflected vehicles with their headlights seeming to be headed toward the plate-glass, inside of which I took cover, this was no easy distinction to make (without ducking). In these circumstances, my gaze lost a focus, so when it caught in its orbit a male who looked like a dead-ringer of Matt, I effectively gasped. It was so uncanny.
This, the uncontestable doubling, wasn’t what immediately impressed me. Rather, I knew it was you, for sure. Then I looked again, and then again, wondering whether I shouldn’t do a reality test. The reality test that I did do confirmed my suspicion that this might be a younger man than you, who would’ve had to have grown another 30 years 'carrot: “or more”' older than you were when I’d known you.
Later that week, I was recounting this little scene and the shock of its 'carrot: “main”' vision to an acquaintance. What I said, with a zero-degree of belief or conviction, was, “Well, it could have been his son.” I was too completely dubious about alleging this possibility, not only because I doubted what Matt Hale’s son would be doing there at Panera sitting the next row over, I also doubted that this coincidence, carried by the forceful mysteries of DNA, could have explanatory power. It was too predictable, or to my taste too conventional. I had gasped, hadn’t I? Hadn’t it been uncanny, even hallucinatory? Wasn’t I channeling Matt Hale? With the traffic, the widespread hullabaloo, the frenzy of the Xmas season, I preferred to cling to the unreality of it all, even though I don’t usually accept, much less go in for, the epistemological promises of second sight, being psychic, living through out-of-body experiences, of dying, tripping on hallucinogens and all that. On the other hand, I do subscribe to the idea of powerful intuition and the readings it can yield. So, seeing Matt Hale’s DNA transcribed in the very flesh of this lad I didn’t know and had never seen before, well that set my wheels spinning.
Soon after, like 'insert: “in”' a week or so, another coincidence befalls me. I routinely tune in to the readings that take place evenings at Prairie Lights. You may know about them: writers at various stages of their careers, with various degrees of accomplishment, or promise, read from their own works. These can be poems or various forms of prose, such as biography and history, and the lode of genius can be tapped in things published or not. Many who read are alumni/alumnae of the UI Writer’s Workshop. So I have something to learn by listening, or so I think, but my commitment to the occasion depends on what I’ve eaten for dinner, and other banalities.
On this one night someone was reading whom I didn’t know, whose name I didn’t recognize. I think he had authored some sort of regional history like the event of a blizzard (about which I may have heard another night, as I think of it). Anyway, he interrupted himself as he went along, frequently paying homage to Ben Hale, who finally said “Aw Shucks” from his seat in the audience, evidently. I had to wonder myself what this man thinks he owes Ben Hale? Why, does he think he must 'insert: “he”' repay him repeatedly? But the main thing is that he made Ben Hale famous that night, irreversibly.
And that gave me my 'crossed-out word that I can’t read' a Eureka (!) moment. Ben Hale must be the name of the man whose likeness I found so overwhelming that night at Panera. He definitely is Matt Hale’s son. I put to the side the line of inquiry that this revelation has opened up. I postpone the consequent for a month or more, possibly on the off-chance that I’d receive a visitation by way of an answer. The question was, can DNA lie? Or can this son of Matt, or his heir apparent, get me through to Matt—a phone #, an address, a hint. By this point Matt Hale has become, like Ben before him, a disembodied name, a figment or ephemera prowling the night like Macbeth or like Hamlet’s ghost.
Then finally and at last, I call the Writers’ Workshop on 2/19 to follow the bit of a clue afforded by whoever the writer was with that questionable debt. “Do you have a graduate student, or maybe just a writer, whose name is Ben Hale, begotten by Matt?” They do have Ben Hale (god, I just realized that I’m sounding the name in an incantatory way myself). So it 'insert: “thus”' resoundingly gets me to the end of the game. Incidentally, I cut off my question to the person doing the phone at the WW that day, stopping short of the “begotten by Matt” part.
So what do I do now? Now that it all fits together, that is (or does it)? I’ll write this letter, for one thing. Then I’ll call Ben Hale at the cell-phone number given me by the WW person and ask if I might leave this for him there to give to you. He’ll agree, I assume. And then you will have read it.
I must tell you two things now. In brief: (1) although I didn’t realize it before this past week, I figure I must have encountered you in this present context many times. I could do the citations over a glass of wine and cross-check with you, if you like, if you will. But you never introduced yourself. But also, I do think my wild surmises were denied by me many times over. I always talked myself out of them (the surmises). “Nah,” I’d say to my brain, “that couldn’t be Matt Hale, what would he be in IA City for? You are giving me inexplicable imaginings to deal with. Shut up and go to sleep.” My brain would keep chattering. I’d never expected you to become manifest. I thought I’d placed you in the deep past. Not that I’m not delighted to find you in the present, if find you I do.
One reason I’m uncertain is that I’ve conflated you with two other men (i.e., each of two separately) who like you are tall and lanky and disposed to think and be nice. They each feature in the merry-go-round of life at Coral Ct. I’ve had trouble figuring out which was who frequently, and have taken one to be the other, or so I thought. Now I find there is another 'insert: “third”' factor in the calculus, namely “you” if that is you. Impossible to identify satisfactorily when it’s dark, when he’s in a car, when he’s bundled into a hat, scarf, ear warmers etc., gloves, galoshes etc.
(2) I also confess that when the circle I was mentioning closed, and I knew for sure that there is a Ben Hale and who he is in 'insert: “the”' person, and the likely connection he has to you, there was a landslide in my mind as one memory succeeded another and wheeled by, to be succeeded itself. Mostly these are images — image memories, an image-repertoire, surprising in its vivacity and intensity and warmth.
So, also under the influence of that glass of wine, I could recount a few 'insert: “such memories”' without embarrassment. After a certain point in one’s life, it seems OK to go backward instead of always pressing on to something up ahead. People realize that what they were in youth is still there in them, and that this younger self is still intact waiting to be reactivated. Not lost and gone, not negligible, found, a find.
'The rest is hand-written, not part of the Xeroxed copy'
Something I read in the NY Times a while ago.
Sincerely,
Dot, or Dorothy
anytime ph: 545-7818
" address: 2892 Coral Court # 202
***
I read this letter about five times successively that day. I was stricken by the combination of the erudite choices of expression, the literary references, the self-consciously heightened diction (“…a disembodied name, a figment or ephemera prowling the night like Macbeth or like Hamlet’s ghost.”—what?) with the scatterbrained grammar that sometimes dissolves or collapses in on itself. And of course there are all those frequent flights of utter outlandishness; my favorites being the oddly anticlimactic dénouement of the last sentence, “Something I read in the NY Times a while ago,” as well as this little gem: “I don’t usually accept, much less go in for, the epistemological promises of second sight, being psychic, living through out-of-body experiences, of dying, tripping on hallucinogens and all that.” … and ah, yes, I admit I kind of like this one: “They do have Ben Hale (god, I just realized that I’m sounding the name in an incantatory way myself).”But I also found this letter weirdly touching, sweet. Who in the world was Matt Hale? Who is this woman, Dorothy Henderson? What does she do? How old is she? I could not help but be curious about the passion, the obsessive romantic longing clearly underlying her flowery prose (“What do you drink? Coffee would suit me fine, in which case Starbucks’s is clean and well lit. I have a feeling that this is not your particular addiction, though, and really I’d prefer to conduct such a conversation over a glass of wine. … Let’s decide to meet. Say yes.”).
Being an obsessive creep myself, I spent the day finding out as much information as I could about Dorothy Henderson. First I looked up and drove over to the address she provided in the letter. I didn’t go in, I just hung around and watched her door. Her lights weren’t on. She apparently lived in a cheap, squat, ugly apartment building on the outskirts of town. It was not a pleasant-looking place. I drove home again and searched for her on Google. I turned a few things up. It turned out that Dorothy Henderson is (or was, at any rate) a film theory scholar who had taught at Smith College. This fit nicely with the scribbled-out address label addressed to her from Smith College.
Dorothy Henderson had published widely. At one point, she seemed to have been a fairly successful academic. She contributed an article in the 1986 book Narrative, Apparatus, Ideology: A Film Theory Reader, titled, “Uncoded Images in the Heterogeneous Text.” Her “seminal” article (says the book jacket blurb) is listed in the table of contents right below Roland Barthes. In the journal Film Quarterly she reviewed a book titled Bertolt Brecht and the Theory of Media. I read her article “The Mise-en-Abîme in Hitchcock’s ‘Vertigo’,” published in Vol. 30, No. 4 (Summer, 1991) of Cinema Journal. And I was fascinated by it. It seemed that her main research interests were the semiotics and psychology (she cites Saussure, Barthes, Foucault, Lacan) of American noir and horror movies—particularly Hitchcock. Particularly “Vertigo.”
At the time, I had not seen “Vertigo.” Yes, I know, it’s a classic. And yes, I felt acutely ashamed of this fact. I had probably even pretended to have seen it at some point. Since then, I have seen it. More on this in a moment.
However, I did go to Sarah Lawrence. Sarah Lawrence, for the uninitiated, is a proud bastion of experimental higher education. The great counterculture-beloved crackpot polymath Joseph Campbell taught there for most of his life. There are about one thousand undergrads, no course requirements, no grades and no majors. If any small liberal arts school in the northeast can said to be a glowing ember of the revolutionary influence that midcentury continental critical theory used to have on the American academe, Sarah Lawrence is it.
I took a fair share of classes in critical theory, in film theory, anthropology, aesthetic theory and philosophy, including several courses taught by a locally famous, locally infamous, jittery brilliant madman named Danny Kaiser, who reveled in midcentury continental philosophy like a pig in slop. It was a sort of badge of honor (among my friends, anyway) to survive Danny’s seminars, where you read hundreds of pages of very difficult texts each week and in class endured his rapid-fire, sink-or-swim pedagogy and potentially explosive temper. Danny worshipped at the altar of Adorno. I once heard that someone said Anthony Burgess was so obsessed with James Joyce that he, “couldn’t get a fucking parking ticket without mentioning James Joyce.” Well, that was like Danny with Adorno.
I mention all this only to make it clear that I am not a total layman when it comes to the sort of heady critical analysis Dorothy Henderson trafficked in. This coincidence of the intersection of our interests further compounded my now burning curiosity. I longed to have a conversation with this woman.
I realized that I was feeling vaguely, eerily, in love. That’s not exactly unnatural when one reads a love letter, is it? Even if the woman is clearly at least old enough to have been publishing in scholarly journals in 1986, when I was three years old? Even if the love letter is meant for a stranger? Even if she erroneously thinks that this stranger is my father? Still, I was a little smitten.
At this point I kind of wanted to take her up on that glass of wine. Even the finger foods.
That night, I called the phone number she had penned in on the last Xeroxed page of her letter. I was answered by the sleepy-sounding voice of an older woman, with a lower-register rasp that I think indicated that she was a smoker. At that point I imagined myself enjoying many an evening of conversation with this woman, evenings of drinking wine, watching Hitchcock films and talking about Lacan.
This, as I recall it, is how our conversation began:
“Hello?” she said.
“Um, hello,” I said. “Is this Dorothy Henderson?”
“Yes, speaking.”
“This is Ben Hale.”
“Oh!” her voice brightening. “Did you give the letter to your father?”
“Well, I, uh—. Look, I’m sorry. I have some bad news. I’m sorry, but my father is not Matt Hale.”
Then she laughed and said: “But you look just like him.”
“I’m sorry, I should have explained. I think you’re mistaken. I’m not the person you saw in Panera.”
“Oh.”
I felt terrible. I wished that I had good news for her. I knew she was sad, and lonely, and probably, it seemed, crazy. I honestly wanted her to find this Matt Hale (or someone like him). I wanted her to find her old love.
Then she asked me if there was anyone in my family named Matt. I said no, not to my knowledge. I bumblingly explained that I did have a cousin named Matt, but he was on my mother’s side of the family, so his last name was Earnest, not Hale. That just confused her further, and I immediately regretted having mentioned it.
Finally, after much logistical maneuvering, I was able to convince her (I thought) that the person she saw in the Panera in the mall was not me. I asked her to describe the person she saw. This person (her imagined Ben Hale) was “tall, lanky, blue-eyed, blonde, fair-skinned, athletic, chiseled good looks…” I can only wish that was me. I am: a towering 5’7”; slightly stocky; hazel eyes; brown hair; badly nearsighted (hence glasses); and at the time I had a big bushy beard. Clearly I was not the Adonis-like übermensch she was describing. I asked her if the person she saw had a beard and glasses. No, she said, quizzically, he did not. I thought that would have settled it.
Then DOROTHY gave me another rundown on the succession of “uncanny coincidences” that she described in her letter, and apologized for “wasting my time.” To which I said, “No, no, don’t say that… It wasn’t a waste of time at all!” We did not even touch on the question of why in the world she assumed that my presumptive father, Matt Hale, would also be living in Iowa City just because I—Ben Hale, his presumptive son—was.
I felt the conversation prematurely drawing to a close. At this rate, I was never going to suavely light her cigarettes, we were never going to drink wine and talk about Hitchcock and Lacan. I couldn’t let the conversation end yet. I asked her who this Matt Hale was. She said they met in the summer of 1977 in Crete. (She asked if my father had ever been to Crete—no, of course he has not.) What was she doing there? “Oh… I was teaching, and he was working there. We had a wonderful summer together.” I tried to get her to elaborate. She wouldn’t. So then I asked her about her life. She told me that she had had a guest professorship at the University of Iowa, and then somehow just kind of gotten stuck here. I asked her when she taught at UI. 1996, it turned out. Ten years ago. I asked her what she did on a typical day, hoping that she would tell me she had some sort of job. I wanted Dorothy to get back on her feet. She explained that she slept until about 6 (pm) every day, and then spent the night “thinking.” For ten years she had “just gotten stuck” in this sleepy little Midwestern university town, with no teaching position, no apparent job at all, living a solitary and nocturnal existence in a dismal apartment on the edge of town and imagining the doppelgangers of former lovers in a franchise bakery at the mall.
I told her that I had found online and read one of her scholarly critiques of Hitchcock’s Vertigo. I said I was fascinated by it. I found myself doing something I always do when I’m trying to make a woman like me: try to sound smart. We talked for over an hour. I refused to let her go. I kept trying to engage her in conversation. Finally, she made an excuse, said he had to meet someone for dinner. It was about 7:30 pm. According to her own description of her daily schedule, I suppose she would have only recently woken up. I realized then that in the course of the conversation I had, weirdly, somehow, managed to reverse our respective roles. Now I was the gibberingly insane person that she was trying to get of the phone with. I felt like I was being rejected.
Anyway. At last we said our goodbyes. I had never mustered the courage to simply ask if we could meet. At her place, perhaps? For some wine and “finger-foods”? This woman was clearly very loony and very lonely, I thought, and I wanted her to have a friend … or, possibly, more than a friend? I wouldn’t say I directly articulated that thought in my mind, no. Not in so many words. But still.
At the end of the conversation, right before she hung up, she said this:
“But if I ever see you around town again, I promise I’ll say hello, and introduce myself.”
At that point I realized that I had never actually been able to fully convince her that I was not, in fact, a tall, lanky, athletic, blond man with “fair skin” and “chiseled, handsome features” WHOM SHE HAD SEEN IN THE SYCAMORE MALL PANERA.
So I just let her think that. Knowing, of course, that if she continued to think I looked like that, we would almost certainly never meet.
And we hung up.
I still take it her letter and reread it every now and again, and idly fantasize about calling her up again and asking to meet.
Much later, I finally did get around to watching Vertigo. It is a brilliant--though not my favorite--Hitchcock film; I have more love for North by Northwest and the Jimmy Stuart remake of The Man Who Knew Too Much. The plot is incredibly complicated and operatically absurd. If you haven’t seen it: major spoiler alert. Jimmy Stuart is a detective suddenly forced into early retirement because he is diagnosed with acrophobia—fear of heights—which of course inhibits him from jumping from the roof of one skyscraper to the next, presumably a requirement for the job. Although he’s retired, an old friend asks him to tail his wife—a beautiful blond woman in a smart gray skirt suit, played by Kim Novak.
She appears to be possessed by the ghost of a similar-looking woman who died many years ago in nineteenth-century San Francisco. Jimmy Stuart saves her from drowning in the Bay beneath the Golden Gate Bridge, and takes her back to his place. Gradually, Jimmy Stuart falls in love with her. She keeps saying she’s been having a strange dream about the bell tower of an old Spanish mission. Jimmy Stuart happens to know about a Spanish mission very close to San Francisco. They drive down there to check it out. They kiss for the first time. Then she runs up the stairs of the bell tower to throw herself from the belfry. Jimmy Stuart runs after her, but because of his acrophobia can’t manage to make it up the stairs, which recede beneath him in a trippy special effect when he looks down. We see Kim Novak fall from the bell tower past the window, and then hear her splat. He could have saved her, if only he’d made it up the stairs.
Cut to a courtroom scene, with Jimmy Stuart’s mysterious friend who asked him to tail his wife. It turns out he’s getting some big life insurance payout. Then he explains he’s decided to move to Europe for the rest of his life, farewell, old boy, don’t kick yourself too much about letting my wife kill herself, it’s just that you’re just a useless coward, I completely understand. Then Jimmy Stuart descends into madness: after the famous scene where his head is flying through a flashing spiral of light, we see him as a slack-faced, unblinking vegetable in a convalescent home. Then, I suppose, guess he gets better. Many months later, he’s walking around in San Francisco, and he happens to see a woman on the street who looks—just—like—Kim Novak’s character in the first half of the movie. He knows it couldn’t possibly be her (she’s dead … right?)—but, but … it must be. She’s a brunette instead of blond, and she’s wearing different clothes—but it’s her, alright.
Soon there’s a magnificently creepy sequence in which Jimmy Stuart gives her a total makeover—buying her a smart gray skirt suit, having her hair dyed blond—and when he’s done with her, Kim Novak looks exactly like she did in the beginning of the movie. Eventually it turns out that Jimmy Stuart’s friend hired him for this job specifically because he knew he would never be able to make it up the stairs of the bell tower, on account of his acrophobia. And the woman in the smart gray suit was an actress the friend hired to play his wife. She ran up the stairs of the tower, where the friend was hiding in the belfry, ready to defenestrate his actual wife—also blond and dressed identically in a smart gray skirt suit. The whole rigmarole with Kim Novak being possessed by the sprit of the dead woman was just an elaborate ruse to gaslight Jimmy Stuart into witnessing the wife’s apparent “suicide.” When he finds out that the man’s “wife” is still alive, then he begins to piece the plot together.
And here’s another interesting thing. I was a strange and socially maladroit child. When I was in third grade my teachers became convinced that I was autistic—or something. They weren’t sure what was wrong with me, but they knew I was fucked up—that I had a difficult time socializing with other children, told bizarre lies, had a terrible stutter, and so on. I was put through a battery of psychological tests. I remember a Rorschach inkblot test. I remember word association games. Search me why, but apparently I had child psychologists who still had a penchant for classic midcentury psychotherapeutic techniques—which I’ve since been told, by other psychologists, was probably a weird anomaly. I also remember undergoing an EEG test.
I don’t know if they “found” anything conclusive from any of this. This was before the popularity of the idea of the “autistic spectrum,” i.e., that autism is not a binary thing, not an on/off switch—that, like rhythm, either you got it or you don’t—but rather a human mind may fall somewhere on a very fluid continuum between “normal” and “autistic,” with varying degrees of social functionality. I don’t know if this is related to all this stuff or not, but I’ve always known that I have a terrible memory for people’s faces. In my early adulthood I read about prosopognosia, or faceblindness, and decided to find a psychologist who could test to see if I had it. The psychologist determined that I have a mild and completely functional case of prosopagnosia: a greatly impaired ability to recognize and remember human faces. Some porsopognosiacs are so bad that they can’t even recognize their own face in a mirror, but my own prosopognosia seems to be have VERY little affect on my life.
All it means is that when I recognize people, I can’t go by the face alone. Most people have a natural ability to remember and recognize the gestalt of a particular human face without much difficulty, whereas I have to compile my total recognition of a person out of other information: clothes, hair, bodies, the sound of a voice, a manner of walking, a style of dress. I almost never fail to recognize someone I know, but it DOES happens from time to time. For instance, I once thought I was sitting next to a friend of mine at a coffee shop in Iowa, and was offended when she got up and left without saying anything to me. I had been going by her hair (this friend had very distinct curly blond hair). But when she stood up, I saw that she was wearing shoes of a certain style that I knew my friend Jane would never wear—it simply wasn’t her style—which is how I realized it wasn’t her.
When I mistake someone for someone else, it’s often because that person has somehow thrown me off the scent, by getting a dramatically different haircut, for instance, or by wearing a new coat I’ve never seen that person wear before. But then the person recognizes me, and I realize who she is when I hear the sound of her voice, and now all I have to do is readjust my mental file on that person to include the new haircut or the new coat.
I bring all this up because Hitchcock’s Vertigo is a prosopagnosiac’s nightmare. When I watch that movie, I too fail to realize that the woman in the second half of the film is even being played by the same actress until she puts on the same gray suit and gets her hair dyed blond. Then everything clicks—you could say, a circle closes—and I, the viewer, experience the freakout moment at the same time that Jimmy Stuart does in the movie. In fact, I probably experience the true moment of recognition long after Jimmy Stuart’s character does.
My faceblindness greatly accentuated the atmosphere of confusion and paranoia during the second half of the movie. When I watched Vertigo, I felt like I understood something of what the inside of Dorothy Henderson’s mind must be like. I wondered if this woman had spent so much time thinking about Hitchcock films that she has begun to think of her life as if it were a Hitchcock plot: taking place in a terrifying world twisted up with double agents, psychological manipulation, mysterious doppelgängers and freakish coincidences. Did the influence of Hitchcock in some way have a hand in Dorothy Henderson’s own descent into madness?
I haven’t spoken to Dorothy since our phone conversation several years ago. I hope she’s doing okay.