I’d never heard ‘Macarthur Park’, the 1968 Richard Harris song, until a few years ago, when my soon-to-be-ex-husband started singing it one day in the kitchen. What the hell, I thought, hearing the lyrics, all the sweet, green icing flowing down, someone left the cake out in the rain, I don’t think that I can take it, it took so long to bake it, and I’ll never have the recipe again. I laughed as he stood there, throwing his arms up, trying to reach the high notes. He’d ham up the big vocal jumps in the song – he had a really nice voice, but no ability to locate himself in a key, so a song like that, with its leaps and bounds, was both the worst choice, and a perfect vehicle behind which to hide. It was very entertaining.
The song appears in Tim Burton’s Beetlejuice Beetlejuice that recently came out – the sequel to the original 1988 film starring Winona Ryder. I’d seen the original again recently, on a long-haul flight, and the other week, after a slightly stressful day, I decided I needed to absorb myself. I thought about dashing down to the Prince Charles to see Paris, Texas or The Man Who Fell To Earth, but I didn’t quite have time; I could make the Burton film locally if I was quick.
The film is a riot. There’s a wonderfully sexy scene, early on, in which a dismembered Monica Bellucci puts herself back together, gathering her limbs up, her face jolting with pleasure every time she re-attaches a part of herself; she then methodically staples herself up. The ‘Macarthur Park’ song appears in a scene near the end which is meant to be Winona Ryder’s wedding to her insufferable, grasping boyfriend, but which turns into her wedding to the nightmarish Beetlejuice himself – this is the price she’s paid for his help in saving her daughter from the underworld. I beamed throughout the scene, delighted to hear the song out in the world – I’d never heard it anywhere but my home, and in my mind, it figured almost as a delusion, an implausible invention of my ex’s.
Beetlejuice’s demonic magic is hard at work in the scene – the characters all lip-synch to the song; they’re inhabited by something that is not themselves; they dance elaborately, stiffly, with stunned, bemused looks on their faces. The wedding scene points to itself as a choreography – movements and words pre-ordained, pre-given. I went to a friend’s bat mitzvah recently (the last one I’d been to was in the late eighties, around the time of the original film, which I probably saw with Claire, whose bat mitzvah it was), and now I was struck and moved by the elaborate busy-ness of the ceremony, all the movement, the chanting, the sense of things being folded into other things – the blessing of a baby, the blessing of two young men about to marry; there was much going up to the bimah and back down; ritualised kissing of the wardens on the threshold. For a moment, I thought of Grand Central Station, of bustling public spaces; perhaps I was in a Wooster Group production of a bat mitzvah? What are these words we’re speaking, what are these movements we’re making? Whose words, whose decisions, are they? If you can live without someone, you probably should – Devorah’s words ring in my ears.
I’ve felt pretty stuck with the writing recently. I always need quite a lot space to find my way, and there’s just not much space. I met with my agent; we talked about everything, my job, the training, the analytic work; it’s a lot, she said, but here – she motioned to a space, demarcating a circle in the air – in the book itself, you have complete freedom. I felt a sudden wave of relief. Within the book itself, I have complete freedom, I repeated to myself as I walked through Russell Square. An agent is sometimes oracular; always be an agent, Allie says. Sam said something on the marshes a few weeks ago; it’s never a smooth ride, but that’s what gives writing its energy. At a party, Jon says: it comes good. I clutch onto words for life.
On the last day of my Faber Academy course a couple of months ago, I talked rapturously, a little trippily, about maintaining a relationship to your writing; your book is a person, I said, feeling almost tearful. That weekend, my fears pour out of me on the living-room floor; it pours with rain, we have brunch with friends; I buy a rice cooker; we bliss out on the Heath. You’re entitled to get divorced, HMCTS Divorce and Dissolution tells me. I get stuck on the threshold, more than once; estate agents call; I crave the green; I need to be in green; I lie on the floor in my study and admire the light.
I go west; everything is watery; in the car, the windows steam up as we wait for the skies to close. We walk along a floodplain, stopping to look at the light. I’m awaiting phone calls, my stomach is in knots. We spend a night in a cabin by a lake, off-grid; in the morning, we watch the sheep outside, and a mist lifts off the water, the sky streaked and milky. I pee in the grass, the dewy damp brushing against me. We walk in the woods, and all the sounds – the skies, the river – merge, indistinguishable. At the restaurant, I change out of my damp clothes and muddy boots; we sit at the bar, the light warm, a halo. We drive home; driving for the feeling; I like G driving; I like G’s drive. Somewhere in Birmingham, a judge grants me a conditional order – formally pronounces it. You are not divorced yet, the email warns. There’s another step; this will end your marriage. Sometimes I dream forward, tripping out on the Heath, but then I get vertigo. On the phone, things scramble, things merge; I’m myself and something else; a glistening pillar slides; their weight is my weight; I’m under and over, inside and out, topsy-turvy; the girl, the boy, the nanny, the toy.
I dream of a boy becoming a girl, she shares my grandmother’s lover’s name. Music blasts; Grandma comes out of her bedroom, groggy, confused. I cradle a baby in my arms, I sing on the grass, my eyes closed. My grandmother wore a leopard-print dress when she got divorced; I wore a leopard-print coat when I got married. I dream of seducing a man out of a men’s club, a wood-panelled library; in a fur coat, I beckon to him and say I wouldn’t want to be a member of a club that would have me as a member; or perhaps I say it’s ‘worse perhaps to be locked in’ -- like Woolf says: locked in the library, locked in the club. We walk down the narrow corridor, the man says I have no cash to pay you. But I wasn’t selling sex, I think. All fur coat and no knickers!
A migraine arrives; it abates, it returns; it’s gradually lifted – the hysteric has an aptitude. It’s my birthday, we talk about costumes, Anouchka gets me a Freud Daddy T-shirt; no cosplay needed, I laugh. Apparently we need thirteen hugs a day, a patient says; so basically we’re all hug-deprived, she concludes. Allie and I stay up late; I think I’ve figured something out; I don’t want to write retrospectively, I say. After Unmastered, I went off the present tense – for years, for over a decade – but now it feels imperative. Everything is lateral; I want my freedom; the present tense of writing. I feel I know what the book wants, I tell Jon, and sometimes it makes me feel sick.
All the sweet green icing flowing down